Zacherek seems to hate enough movies (and whole genres) that I want to e-mail her that there are other jobs.

Wrod, erika.

I disagree with y'all about Zacherek. Her tastes in movies seem very eclectic, but she has a pronounced tendency to cut banal Hollywood movies (of the type that I'll never see) a lot a slack as long as they're about basic human relationships. In fact, that's her thing: she likes Altman and she goes easy on romantic comedies. She almost always hates sci fi and/or other movies more about ideas than interpersonal stuff.

I'm sort of heartened that the negative reviews of V are pretty much all "it's boring" rather than "it's not anything like the book" or "it has a happy ending."

she goes easy on romantic comedies. She almost always hates sci fi

Yep. And the above is exactly why her reviews are so useless to me.

I disagree with y'all about Zacherek.

As do I. She has problems and all, she's complacent about her own politics and she can lapse into unbearable purple prose, but she has an aesthetic and seems to have thought about the world enough to criticize filmmakers who haven't. She's keen to films that load the deck unfairly, to films that are a mish-mash of ideas that add up to nothing and to films that pretend to be About Something but have all the depth of a stretched piece of paper.

she goes easy on romantic comedies. She almost always hates sci fi

Yep. And the above is exactly why her reviews are so useless to me.

I'd agree that she'd probably prefer a great romantic comedy to a great sci-fi film but that's not to say that she can't recommend Failure To Launch enough. I think she finds what's at the core of a romantic comedy, a romantic relationship, to be more immediate than what's at the core of sci-fi films, which are generally more ponderous.

She's shown she likes sci-fi. She liked Serenity. She liked 2046. She liked Alphaville. Like Corwood pointed out, she can give the impression that she doesn't care about idea films but, I mean, she's a fan of Godard, how allergic could she be? She doesn't care about Idea Films with Capitals because Idea Films with Capitals overwhelmingly tend to be desiccated and forgetful when it comes to that whole emotional connection thing.

Also, she liked Sin City and the first X-Men. And while she's a idiosyncratic grouch, she's never struck me as relishing the role of idiosyncratic grouch. And... I'm sounding like I like her more than I do.

Maybe I just blame her for not being funny like Elvis Mitchell.

I blame *everybody* for not being Elvis Mitchell.

Except vintage Pauline Kael.

wrod.

Elvis was back on NPR this morning! I'd missed him.