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."
Riley: Maybe I should just let you rest. Buffy: You sure? I bet if you just lay down with me- Riley: Nothing you are about to say will lead to rest.
'Lessons'
Buffista Movies 5: Development Hell
A place to talk about movies--old and new, good and bad, high art and high cheese. It's the place to place your kittens on the award winners, gossip about upcoming fims and discuss DVD releases and extras. Spoiler policy: White font all plot-related discussion until a movie's been in wide release two weeks, and keep the major HSQ in white font until two weeks after the video/DVD release.
Volans - Mar 17, 2006 9:10:28 pm PST #1042 of 10001
move out and draw fire
Jessica - Mar 18, 2006 5:55:13 am PST #1043 of 10001
And then Ortus came and said "It's Ortin' time" and they all Orted off into the sunset
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.
IAmNotReallyASpring - Mar 18, 2006 7:51:39 am PST #1044 of 10001
I think Freddy Quimby should walk out of here a free hotel
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.
erikaj - Mar 18, 2006 9:27:55 am PST #1045 of 10001
Always Anti-fascist!
Maybe I just blame her for not being funny like Elvis Mitchell.
Betsy HP - Mar 18, 2006 12:06:10 pm PST #1046 of 10001
If I only had a brain...
I blame *everybody* for not being Elvis Mitchell.
Except vintage Pauline Kael.
erikaj - Mar 18, 2006 12:26:37 pm PST #1047 of 10001
Always Anti-fascist!
wrod.
flea - Mar 18, 2006 12:38:07 pm PST #1048 of 10001
information libertarian
Elvis was back on NPR this morning! I'd missed him.
§ ita § - Mar 18, 2006 1:57:31 pm PST #1049 of 10001
Well not canonically, no, but this is transformative fiction.
2046 is not sci-fi. I was expecting it to be, but it's not.
DavidS - Mar 18, 2006 4:17:19 pm PST #1050 of 10001
"Look, son, if it's good enough for Shirley Bassey, it's good enough for you."
2046 is not sci-fi. I was expecting it to be, but it's not.
It's more of a tone poem tribute to Ziyi's updo.
IAmNotReallyASpring - Mar 18, 2006 5:17:22 pm PST #1051 of 10001
I think Freddy Quimby should walk out of here a free hotel
2046 is not sci-fi.
I disagree. While I wouldn't include it as part of my class 'This Is Sci-fi', I'd be much less likely to include it as part of my class 'This Isn't Sci-fi'. It has enough science fiction in it for one to safely group it with sci-fi, even if it isn't primarily sci-fi. Sci-fi, sci-fi.
ETA Rereading, those last two sci-fis make me look like a raving jackass, when they were meant to point up my overuse of the term.