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| "Johnny Betts is a rude 'abnoxious' jerk who needs to be 'punced' in the face."- A grammatically-challenged non-fan |
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WWWP - What's Wrong with Critics?
Those of you who have read this site for long know that one of the reasons I decided to become a movie reviewer was
because I was tired of reading reviews by critics who seem to think their job is to attempt to impress people with
their deft usage of a thesaurus. Either that or they have an old English professor they are trying to show off
for. These guys are a never-ending source of frustration and entertainment, so I might make this a regular column.
Let's take Thomas Peyser from "Style Weekly" for example.Mr. Peyser didn't like Batman Begins. I disagree with his assessment, but it's his opinion and he's welcome to it. My problem is with his abuse of words containing four or more syllables. Let's look at the following paragraph: "Egregiously handsome, Bale nevertheless exudes an air of indefinable menace, as if he were cloaking an imperfectly controlled combustibility with all the dissembled nonchalance at his disposal." Huh? Does anybody else picture Mr. Peyser excitedly flipping through his thesaurus, looking for an adverb for every adjective and an adjective for every noun? What he's trying to say is, "Bale is a handsome guy who does a good job of hiding his inner rage." Come on, if somebody approached Mr. Peyser on the street and asked him what he thought of the movie, would he start talking about "dissembled nonchalance" and about how "egregiously handsome" Bale is? Of course not! Nobody talks like that in real life, and if they do, they know what it's like for people to roll their eyes at them. I also doubt that Mr. Peyser uses words such as "tableaux" or "sclerotic" in every day life, so why use them in a movie review about BATMAN? The average moviegoer wants to see Batman for some good ol' comic book movie fun. Most people are not going to read a review and think, "Maaaaan, I was wondering how good of a job Bale would do at cloaking an imperfectly controlled combustibility, so I'm glad it appears that he was able to pull it off! Awesome! Oops, I mean portentous!" Now I could say, "Given to bouts of nettling verbosity, Thomas Peyser casts his cinematic dissections with a pall of overwrought exercises in self-admiration." But isn't it a little less pretentious to just say, "Dude's too wordy"? Another thing that annoys me is when critics try to invent parallels that simply aren't there. Mr. Peyser says, "After much unnecessary padding and delay, the film settles down to its central story line, which turns out to be a thinly veiled and thoroughly trivialized reworking of 9/11." Any word yet on if Christopher Nolan has shown up at Mr. Peyser's office and congratulated him on deciphering the code? Why can't a movie just be a movie? Why does everything have to be a "thinly veiled" representation of some other event? Why must some critics insist on finding hidden meanings that simply don't exist? I asked around, and nobody I talked to ever once thought about any correlation to 9/11 within Batman Begins. I sure hope Mr. Peyser's back is feeling all right because he sure had to reach to come up with that comparison. I guess I could try to draw some juxtaposition between The Incredibles and the problems with illegal child labor, but that'd just be stupid. And you'd all have permission to team together and throw a beatin' on me. WHAT'S WRONG WITH CRITICS?!?!?! |
HOME PAGE  Journey to the Center of the Earth Hancock Get Smart The Incredible Hulk The Strangers Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull Young at Heart Iron Man Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed  Weekend Results: 1. The Dark Knight($158,411,483) 2. Mamma Mia!($27,751,240) 3. Hancock($14,040,178) 4. Journey to the Center of the Earth($12,340,435) 5. Hellboy 2($10,117,815) |
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