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How Not to Write a Movie Review

October 22, 2007 4:17 AM

think I've mentioned before that I love reading good reviews for bad movies. A good bad-movie review can be really funny and entertaining. Like everything else, though, there are bad bad-movie reviews. And, of course, there are stupid bad-movie reviews. I found this example of a stupid bad-movie review, written by Armond White, the other day while looking on Rotten Tomatoes at the reviews of Tyler Perry's Why Did I Get Married?. Mr. White's review would border on offensive if it wasn't so stupid. So it promopted me to come up with a few general guidelines for writing a successful movie review:


  1. Review the movie. For a large portion of the review, Mr. White's not so much reviewing the movie as he is talking about how awesome Mr. Perry is and how stupid white people are. He also spends a lot of time irrationally insulting other movies that most people consider to be really, really good.

  2. Don't spend a lot of time irrationally insulting other movies that most people consider to be really, really good. Mr. White takes not one but two cheap--and completely nonsensical--shots at Knocked Up. First, he says that Why Did I Get Married tackles "issues of trust, infidelity, career envy and classic chauvinism" which "are basic male/female truths, unlike Knocked Up whose crass jokes are lies that the white middle-class tells itself." What the fuck does that even mean? Seriously, what meaning does that particular combination of words hold? It means nothing--it's a fucking worthless insult that Mr. White thinks is clever and insightful. Well, fuck him. He goes on:
    Nothing in Knocked Up is as meaningful as Perry's spectacle of men who must restrain their anger physically or his politically incorrect fashion show of women proudly, luxuriously wearing furs as signs of pleasure and achievement.
    I haven't seen the movie in question, so I have no idea how "meaningful" these scenes are, but I do think that it's unfair to say that absolutely nothing in Knocked Up is as meaningful as some stupid-sounding scenes from this movie. Finally, he apparently hates Judd Apatow, since he's got this to say about Superbad:
    [W]hat could be less sophisticated or more vulgar than the R&B-grooving nerds in Superbad?
    Can you really not imagine anything less sophisticated or more vulgar than the kids in that movie? How about your mom with a pink sock. Sounds pretty unsophisticated and vulgar to me. And one of the main things that makes Superbad so awesome is that it's not just another raunchy teen-sex comedy, it's got heart. There are actual characters. No, they're not as well-developed as in some other films, but their also significantly deeper than your standard action hero, for example. The movie is sophisticated. And, although it has plenty of dick jokes--and plenty of hilarious dick drawings--it doesn't have any scenes on the order of the frank-and-beans scene from There's Something About Mary. In short, there are plenty of movies that are less sophisticated and more vulgar. Asshole.

  3. At least attempt to maintain credibility. Ultimately, the job of a movie critic is to give me the broad strokes about whether a movie sucks or is worth my time and money. Therefore, a huge part of being a movie critic is maintaining your credibility. I'm not going to take your word on Transformers if you gave Pearl Harbor four and a half stars out of five. That clearly makes you a tool who works for the studios. There are any number of ways to build and maintain credibility. There's also one surefire way to destroy any credibility you might have built up over the years: call R. Kelly's horrendous "Trapped in the Closet" series "a work of true genius." Yup. That's what Mr. White thinks. Here's the whole passage:
    Married? isn't an Oprah sermon; much of its humor and punch comes from Perry's expose of domestic secrets. This happens to be the basis of R. Kelly's extraordinary music-video opera, Trapped in the Closet--a work of true genius that the media has also underrated and ridiculed. The media mocks R. Kelly's vernacular (calling it "crazy" is the easiest way to avoid its daring and brilliance) just as Perry's comedy and Eddie Murphy's in Norbit are disdained as unsophisticated or vulgar.
    As if calling "a true work of genius" wasn't enough, Mr. White thinks that the words "extraordinary," "underrated," "daring," and brilliant are other words that describe "Trapped in the Closet." I don't think he's being ironic, either. Wow. Just wow.


So there you have it. Follow those rules and you should be good. Like Jesus did with the Ten Commandments, though, I think you can boil these down to their basic spirit. In general, in order to write a decent bad-movie review, you have to be not a biased asshat. Mr. White has failed, but I have faith that, with my help, others will succeed.



4 Comments


tRJ said:

"Interesting" is the adjective I would give "Trapped in the Closet." I actually really enjoyed the first couple of parts/acts/whatever, and in a totally non-ironic way. The whole thing is very much like a stage musical, which I suppose does make it somewhat "daring." But it doesn't take a genius to name one of the principle character Chuck, simply so you can routinely rhyme it with a choice expletive.

October 22, 2007 1:07 PM



kristin said:

On some level, I wanted to give White the benefit of the doubt. Since I haven't seen the latest Tyler Perry abomination and am completely immune to the charms of his usual black man in drag/a fat suit/both M.O., I searched that site for White's reviews of movies I have seen. Based on my research, I can only conclude that the man is a complete asshat.

For example, his review of Stardust. He didn't like it - and I can live with that. I loved it but I can also at least comprehend that it might not be someone else's cup of tea. However, he made his point by comparing Stardust to Shrek, which he calls "insufferable," and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which he called idiotic, interminable, and conceptually banal. He also dislikes Children of Men ("ludicrous and sophomoric"), V for Vendetta ("already forgotten" and cartoon-joky"), and The Last King of Scotland, a phenomenal movie about Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, which White calls a "boogie man movie" about "another scary black man stereotype," and for which he implies Forrest Whitaker received an Oscar nomination because he played "a stereotype that comes from white fear and ignorance."

Instead of watching these "overrated" abominations, he suggests that we watch Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, which he claims is the "least painful" of the summer action blockbusters, or Norbit, in which Eddie Murphy's "virtuousity" surpasses Sacha Baron Cohen's "one-note" Borat and Peter-fucking-Sellers. I couldn't even make this shit up. Who the fuck is this person?

October 22, 2007 2:27 PM



Ismael Tapia II said:

tRJ,
You're entitled to your opinion, of course, but I'm shocked that you enjoyed it in a nonironic way. The first time I saw it, I kept wondering when the punchline was gonna come.

Kristin,
It never even occurred to me to read other reviews by him, so, clued in by your comment, I went and read his review of The Two Towers. He lost me in the first paragraph when he references "the nearly half-hour battle sequence in which 10,000 computer-animated troops storm the fortress at Barad-dur." Peter Jackson's movies never included a battle at Barad-dur, Sauron's stronghold. The battle in The Two Towers occurred at Helm's Deep. If you're going to tear a movie a new one, at least get the obvious details correct.

He goes on to criticize the movie--admittedly my least favorite of the trilogy--by saying that it's not about anything. Well fuck you, of course it's about something. It's about Frodo's quest to destroy the One Ring. But, on a deeper level, it's about heroism, perseverance in the face of near-certain failure, the notion that one man can make a difference, the corrupting effects of power, and, of course, the whole struggle between good and evil thing. It's not a direct alegory for anything because--and Mr. White should have known this before he opened his big mouth--Tolkien went out of his way to make sure it wasn't.

He also says that it's a video-game movie. No, it's not, actually, because the characters are fucking deeper than any video-game movie I've ever seen.

And here's the "'Trapped in the Closet' was a work of pure genius" moment of this review:Last year your average review of Lord of the Rings never discussed what it was about because it’s about nothing. That’s why critical enthusiasm was reduced to the level of teenage gawking. Here, a narrator intones, "[There] are the stories that meant something, that stayed with you because they were holding on to something. There’s some goodness in the world and it’s worth fighting for." But that’s so generic it can be a decal on The Two Towers DVD box as well as the Grand Theft Auto: Vice City videogame.In fact, you're wrong. While Sam's dialogue is pretty generic and could apply to a large number of different movies and video games, there is exactly one video game I can think of that does not contain the message that "there's some goodness in the world and it's worth fighting for." That video game is Grand Motherfucking Theft Auto, you stupid, worthless piece of shit.

God. It's like he's so wrapped up in name-dropping that he doesn't even think about what he's saying. What a tool.

October 22, 2007 5:03 PM



TheExpat said:

I have to stop in and express my love for the pure genius that is R.Kelly's "Trapped in the Closet", a necessary triumph of tour-de-force-esque eloquence and not-to-be-missed spectacularity.

What other song could make me feel the heartbreak of discovering undocumented prophylactics in a lover's bedroom, and then drive it home with the insistant repetition of "A Ruuuuberrrrr", as if Kelly himself was crying the lyrics from some deep cave of sadness and pee-sex frustration that - The Lord knows - is the burden of every grammy award winning artist of such magnitudinal promanentiality.

October 23, 2007 1:33 AM



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