'Rediculous' Customer & Critic Reviews

[domino harvey]

[zedz]

CD is a much better format than stereo, but jewel case is better than either!

[MichaelB]

Wednesday is much better than hamburgers, but I prefer HTTP.

[cdnchris]

I was giving him the benefit of the doubt that he was just confusing terminologies but if I replace "hdmi" with "streaming" it still doesn't make sense.

[Michael Kerpan]

HDMI == HD streaming? But it is indeed still gibberish.

[MichaelB]

OK, so do we think that this guy...

Now, all of that being said, I see no reason why this one had to be two hours long. It is funny and has some pretty neat scenes to it, but you could have accomplished everything this movie accomplishes without being as long as it ends up being. I don’t know why they let is get dragged out like it does, but it is a good movie that could have been a great movie had they just cut a little of the fat.

...is being brilliantly satirical in dragging this paragraph out to at least three times the necessary length, or merely oblivious?

[Gregory]

All in all, I, personally, try to follow a practice that is one that I think is worthwhile, at least it is in my opinion, which is to avoid whenever possible writing wordy sentences that are filled with redundancies and unnecessary figures of speech, which tend to add pointless elaborations and say the same thing more than once, with results that are wordy, repetitive, hard to read, and don't contribute to writing that is concise and readable—at least that's my view of it; yours may be different, but I hope we can at least agree that this is at least worth considering as a way of writing or, when checking over one's writing, is useful in revising so as to eliminate common bad habits such as the one I'm describing here of tending to ramble when, essentially, the same thing could be said much better in fewer words, more economically as it were, and is anyone still reading this sentence?

Oh and here's a rediculous extreme of the simplistic and ubiquitous "should have been shorter" critique that many apply simply because they wanted something shorter or faster-paced. This is an entire Amazon review of Shoah:

The whole film was 18 hours of boring interviews. It rehashed the SAME old story over and over again. nothing new. A total waste of time and money! A 90 minute documentary would have done the same thing and still have been an hour too long.

I knew that there were people who were that dumb, impatient, or uninterested in the past to the extent that they'd say something like this, that Shoah should have been 30 minutes long, but why are any of them buying this particular film and then trying to comment on its merits?

[jindianajonz]

Oh and here's a rediculous extreme of the simplistic and ubiquitous "should have been shorter" critique that many apply simply because they wanted something shorter or faster-paced. This is an entire Amazon review of Shoah:

The whole film was 18 hours of boring interviews. It rehashed the SAME old story over and over again. nothing new. A total waste of time and money! A 90 minute documentary would have done the same thing and still have been an hour too long.

I knew that there were people who were that dumb, impatient, or uninterested in the past to the extent that they'd say something like this, that Shoah should have been 30 minutes long, but why are any of them buying this particular film and then trying to comment on its merits?

I like to imagine that this viewer didn't know the length of the film going in, and was impatiently checking his watch while stubbornly refusing to leave throughout.

[Lemmy Caution]

An IMDb review of the 1970 Russian film Tchaikovsky.

1 star The Worst Film Ever
4 February 2007 | by gazebo350

That is correct. i deem this film to be the worst I've ever seen in my life. and im not a new comer on the scene. i am also an ardent tchaikovskyite. so i would have been more than glad to give this movie high praise if indeed it was worthy of it. what makes a good movie? ...
...
i don't know where these Russian directors get their training but i can tell you that any American or English director would have done a much better job. in reading some of the other reviews i felt that i was living on another planet. give this movie high praise and extol it to the skies? beats me thats for sure. i relegate this one to the trash bin. a complete and total disappointment.

The amusing thing is that it's a pretty innocuous film. More a depiction of an older more formal world than of the artistic process, though there's plenty of T's music (by top conductors and orchestras) throughout the film, and even some critical appraisal. First-rate costumes, some lovely horse riding through birch forests. Restraint and propriety rule the day, but are on their way out. The film is a bit overlong at 2.5 hours and Part II (the final hour) meanders and has some pacing issues.

But it's hard to believe anyone could be so put off by this earnest costume drama.
And then slagging off an entire national cinema -- one as rich as Russia's -- just because they thought one 1970 film about Tchaikovsky was a dud is the topper.

I'd venture that the reviewer was caught up in his admiration of Tchaikovsky, so that this depiction of the composer as ineffectual in his private life rankled. The reviewer might also want to visit the Shift Key more often.
________________________________________________________________________
Edit: Somehow this anodyne biopic seems to be tremendously polarizing.
Of the 7 user reviews on IMDb, three give it one star, with a second person declaring:
"This was by far the worst movie I have ever seen in my life."
And the third calling it "classic Soviet garbage".
Opposing them are three reviews all giving it 10/10, and filled with comments such as:
"I will remember this movie all my life" "A must see"

I'm really baffled by this divergence. The film seemed to have a fair amount of strengths and weaknesses.

[zedz]

Edit: Somehow this anodyne biopic seems to be tremendously polarizing.
Of the 7 user reviews on IMDb, three give it one star, with a second person declaring:
"This was by far the worst movie I have ever seen in my life."
And the third calling it "classic Soviet garbage".
Opposing them are three reviews all giving it 10/10, and filled with comments such as:
"I will remember this movie all my life" "A must see"

I'm really baffled by this divergence. The film seemed to have a fair amount of strengths and weaknesses.

It could be explained by being a composer biopic that was somehow accessed by music lovers with little prior experience of non-American cinema. I've had the experience of introducing people to non-mainstream cinema (even quite mildly non-mainstream cinema, like, defined purely as 'foreign language') and finding surprisingly polarized responses ranging from far-too-easily-impressed to far-too-easily-alienated.

[MichaelB]

I was always rather amused that it came out at about the same time as The Music Lovers, a film that's far more deserving of a polarised critical response.

(There are many differences between the films, a key one being that the Soviet film doesn't mention Tchaikovsky's sexual orientation at all, whereas Ken Russell originally pitched it to United Artists as "a film about a homosexual who marries a nymphomaniac" and amply delivered on what he'd promised.)

[Lemmy Caution]

Throughout Tchaikovsky there are plenty of hints about his sexual orientation.
Going into the film, I had no idea Tchakovsky was gay and I picked up on it in the first half hour, just from the relationship with Rubinstein.

T is awfully close and happy with Rubinstein, and even allows Rubinstein to thwart a potential romance/marriage with a woman. Then out of the blue, Tchaikovsky marries a young attractive woman, but has no idea how to deal with her, has nothing to say to her, and is miserable. So he attempts suicide and quickly divorces her. Finally when his benefactress professes love for him and actually wants to meet him -- they had corresponded by letter and check for 13 years -- he hurriedly flees in a panic. At the end, he can't imagine why Turgenev is interested in chasing skirts in Paris. Etc.

I actually liked how the film didn't discuss the issue directly, in the spirit of that era, but still made it rather clear what was tormenting Tchaikovsky.

[Orlac]

http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R2RMGCDT ... hisHelpful" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[jindianajonz]

http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R2RMGCDT ... hisHelpful

It seems that all his reviews are either 5 stars or, if the version is supposedly "censored", 1 star. The sole exception to this is a four film box set that includes two cut films, which predictably earns 3 stars.

[mizo]

http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R2RMGCDT ... hisHelpful

It seems that all his reviews are either 5 stars or, if the version is supposedly "censored", 1 star. The sole exception to this is a four film box set that includes two cut films, which predictably earns 3 stars.

I can sympathize with this policy. Is there really any point to writing tepid or unenthusiastic reviews on Amazon? I think people assume rightly that, in a situation where one can purchase something instantly, they'll only be persuaded one way or another by a rave or a ravaging. On top of which, considering they're what this thread is largely devoted to, I think we all agree that the people who take time to try and forcefully dissuade strangers from buying something on the grounds of personal taste are pretty silly. In my view, the only sensible reason to write a seriously negative review on a site like Amazon is to alert another buyer of a serious technical flaw with a disk (like that it's cut).

Now, admittedly, I feel rather ridiculous for spending so much time to defend a person who reviews a disk before it's even released but...I don't know...principles, maybe...or something.

[Forrest Taft]

I brought IT as i had memories watching it as a child, I was disappointed to get half way into the film for it to stop and not include part 2, then to find u don't even sell it was another blow

I'm fairly certain part 2 was on the other side of the disc.

[willoneill]

From Letterboxd:

Minions 2015
sydney sydney 22

when i say i would die for my daughter, it doesn't only mean i would give her a vital organ or make her drink the last of the water in a desert or take her place in front of an oncoming speeding vehicle or pull her out of a burning building. it also means i will die thousands upon thousands of small deaths - i watched the seconds of my life tick slowly away as i endured the mind-numbing boredom of watching an infant attempt a simple puzzle, i took years off my life when i made myself sick with lack of sleep or stress or worry, i feel a pain close to death as i stand and make awkward small talk with other parents at school events, my heart breaks when i put her in time out or angrily send her to bed early. i see her grow older and the parts of her dependent on me begin to disappear, a part of me will die when she says her first teenage "i hate you" and the part of me that lived only to keep her alive will wither away as she waves goodbye to go off to her first apartment. years upon years of putting her needs ahead of myself, hundreds of thousands of dollars to give her everything she could possibly want, thousands of hours wondering how i could ever make it through another day. so what could i do on her one and only 9th birthday but take her to this horrid lazy movie about these monsters sent from some cutesy marketing hell that i can't seem to escape? well, all things considered this wasn't so bad - annoying, boring, baffling but harmless. fine. she laughed, and the light from her beautiful face will lead me through any darkness. i have suffered much worse before and i will continue to suffer, not because i have to, but because she's a treasure and i'm a sucker who can never say no, and as much as it pains me sometimes it's truly a joy to sacrifice for her.
now let us never speak of this again.

[cdnchris]

I don't know, that review is pretty much spot on. I took my son to see it (his first movie to see how he does with it) and it was basically a small death on my part. The enjoyment was more watching him get such a kick out of watching something on the "big TV" (as he calls it) and him laughing here and there. The film was otherwise pure torture, and even he got a little sick of it.

And I obviously don't know the intricacies of voice acting, but I know actors can give memorable voice performances (Jeremy Irons in The Lion King off the top of my head), but Jesus, did Sandra Bullock and Jon Hamm phone it in.

[domino harvey]

There was a forced ten second ad for the Minions when using Comcast On Demand this summer and seeing those yellow things for even just a few seconds was an inexplicable nightmare and completely confusing, as based on what I saw I don't understand why they're so popular or even tolerable or survivable. I do not envy anyone forced to spend seconds, much less minutes, and certainly not hours in their presence. I wouldn't be able to do it.

[Michael Kerpan]

I agree with cdnchris, this review is actually pretty impressive.

[RossyG]

Apart form his aversion to upper case letters, I thought that was a good read.

[Altair]

The enjoyment was more watching him get such a kick out of watching something on the "big TV" (as he calls it) and him laughing here and there..

Maybe Tarantino was right and cinema is truly dead at this point if this is the first connotation the next generation have of going to the movies (imagine once upon a time when television was the "small cinema").

[cdnchris]

Well he's not even 3 yet, so I wouldn't lose all hope just now.

[zedz]

Those earliest cinemagoers apparently thought that cinema was "an indoor train station", so we should really give up all hope for the medium in 1895.

[McCrutchy]

You may think this film is unfinished right now because of IMDb, but a Japanese DVD is coming on November 3, 2015:



I like the use of the phrase "perfectly portraying each others foils". That sounds like something only a Film Enthusiast would say.