'Rediculous' Customer & Critic Reviews

[Zot!]

I'm not going to say what one student while I was doing my English degree suggested Jane Austen needed, but it began "a good..."

editor? Ha ha....I'll see myself out.

[colinr0380]

This reminds me of that great 2003 satirical comedy series Radio 9 which had a sketch in which Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath were pressed into service as football commentators:

Announcer: You join us here at Highbury for this Champion's League quarter final between Arsenal and Inter Milan, both teams greats of the European stage and what a feast of football we have in store. I am joined here by our special guests for the evening, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. This looks like becoming quite a game. How do you see it going Ted?

Ted Hughes: Thanks, Hugh. One, two; one, two. Dipping, curving, bucking. Centre Forward glides... Captain! Does he? Can he? Forward! Onwards! Is it?... No. No goal today. Not today, not... today.

Announcer: Well, I would be very surprised if 90 minutes from these two wonderfully creative sides doesn't bring us a goal or two. Sylvia?

Sylvia Plath: Daddy... I hate my Daddy. For he could never play like these unbroken men, warriors of turf. At 'em again. One Man breaks from his foes, yet strange and inexplicable. He defiled me... with a clock.

Announcer: Thanks, Sylvia. And Henri kicks off immediately, pushing the ball wide on the right for Freddie Ljunberg to chase... [fades out]

(The next week did Harold Pinter and Joan Bakewell, with Pinter philosophising existentially whilst Bakewell eyes up all the footballers!)

[spectre]

One of the worst developments of the post-print era of film criticism has been all the websites that seemingly publish with little to no editorial intervention. I came across this recent piece from a site that has actually published decent writing in the past; in this case, the headline offers fair warning that we're in an editor-free zone ("The Repressive Sex Lives of Bourgeoisie Dullards"), and it only gets worse with this book report-style intro, complete with malapropism:

Luis Buñuel didn’t think much of the Joseph Kessel novel that was the source material for his 1967 adaptation of Belle de Jour and mostly took on the project because he wanted to make it into something he liked. He didn’t have a good time making the film under the occasionally interfering hands of the Hakim brothers, and found star Catherine Deneuve to be a prude who didn’t want to fully take her clothes off and a performer who’d been hoisted upon him against his will.

Some other choice excerpts, including the passage the title is taken from:

A film about the repressive sex lives of bourgeoisie dullards found its way to precisely the people it was intended for: the ones on the screen.

I kind of get what that might be trying to say – that the film was popular with bourgeois audiences – but the sentence doesn't work at all and there's no other reference to it in the piece.

Then there's this particularly tortured passage:

She’s physically healthy, but the mind doesn’t play by logical rules when you’ve got nothing else to preoccupy yourself with, and her fantasies and darker memories of a childhood touching incident bleed into her life right from the start of the film, as indistinguishable from reality as any of our own reveries of memory.

The problem isn't limited to malapropisms, weird phrasing and half-baked claims (all of "our own reveries of memory" are "indistinguishable from reality"!?) – I've read the whole piece and have no idea what the bolded section below is even supposed to mean:

At once both aggressively modern and a classical throwback, the film is about, and features, two versions of high-class tastefulness unable to totally reconcile with one another even when they’ve potentially got the great uniter in front of them.

The article isn't totally without merit and perhaps could have been okay with a firmer editorial hand. But it's obvious that some of these websites either don't have competent editors, are waving through pieces half-read (if at all) or are just expecting writers to do all the work themselves; no doubt whoever's in that role at the website isn't being paid well enough to make any actual intervention worth their while.

I'm not trying to punch down, but I really don't know what hope there is for well-written, carefully edited film analysis surviving on the internet if work of this quality sails by without comment – particularly when the people in charge of online publications with higher standards are constantly looking for cost-cutting opportunities and treating editing as more of a nice-to-have than an essential.

[MichaelB]

Part of the problem is that amateur writers generally have no experience of being professionally edited, and clearly aren’t going to get it via sites like this, so they think that it’s perfectly normal to go straight from first draft to actual publication with nothing in between.

When I was working on BFI Screenonline in the century’s first decade, we made a point of commissioning work from new writers, and there was a particular type who’d only ever written for self-edited online publications like this—and consequently would consider it a personal affront if I had the temerity to even so much as tweak a comma.

These people were exhausting to deal with, not least because they invariably needed a lot more than just a comma being tweaked. I remember one guy who basically ignored our word-count stipulation (and sent in over 800 words when we’d set a cap of 400. I pointed this out, and he said that he couldn’t say everything that he wanted to say within just 400.

So I replied that the commission was for 400, that we’d be paying for 400, and that if he wasn’t prepared to cut it to 400 I’d have to do it instead, since the alternative was scrapping the piece altogether and not paying him. He insisted that the piece was impossible to cut, so I did it myself and not only reduced it to 400 but I genuinely don’t think that I lost anything significant aside from some needless repetition and flowery circumlocution that presumably sounded better in his head.

Oh, and I didn’t commission anything from him again, although I daresay he wouldn’t have wanted this to happen, what with me ruining his work before.

And don’t get me started on people who flagrantly ignore the clearly specified house style! Which is pointless, because it means that their work is inevitably going to be… well, in some cases rewritten wholesale (much to their horror), so it would have been much easier if they’d respected the rules first time.

I suspect it’s partly because it’s been so devalued as a profession in recent years that many people just don’t realise that writing to commission isn’t that different from, say, engineering or architecture: there’ll be a specification, and you’ll be expected to stick to that specification on pain of having your work altered against your will.

Whereas doing it to spec generates emails like this lovely one last month from an editor that I hadn’t previously dealt with:

Just taken a quick glance, and this looks very good indeed. I'll write you again once I've had a chance to read it through properly, but I suspect this will be my easiest editing job of the whole issue.

(Although, in fairness, it probably helps that I’ve been on both sides of this particular fence, so am pretty good at second-guessing what my various editors actually want.)

[Michael Kerpan]

My one interaction with an editor at BFI was wonderful. I didn't take issue with a single thing she had done. My essay was much better after her intervention. I was very grateful.

[domino harvey]

So this isn’t a review but the brief summary of this movie is killing me. This kind of sounds like one of those fake movies from Seinfeld

A group of random individuals get stranded on a bridge that begins collapsing at both ends. Not only that, but there's a gun-wielding bank robber using the bridge as his means of escape refusing to let any of the rescuers draw near the survivors. Time is running out ...

[TechnicolorAcid]

So this isn’t a review but the brief summary of this movie is killing me. This kind of sounds like one of those fake movies from Seinfeld

A group of random individuals get stranded on a bridge that begins collapsing at both ends. Not only that, but there's a gun-wielding bank robber using the bridge as his means of escape refusing to let any of the rescuers draw near the survivors. Time is running out ...

The Lovers on the Bridge?

[domino harvey]

Even the title sounds like a Seinfeld title

Spoiler

the Night the Bridge Fell Down

Dying at the claim in a Letterboxd review that this sat on a shelf for four years before burning off by airing against the MASH series finale. There’s no part of this that I don’t love (unless there’s a part that requires me to actually watch it)

[brundlefly]

Reminded me of a trailer I'd recently seen (Sly Stallone, Jason Patric, a 3.6 imdb rating), but I guess I had just been wishing the bridge was collapsing in that one.

[spectre]

(You can probably already guess which much-talked-about new-release film this is referring to; either way, approach the spoiler box with caution if you haven't seen it!)

Spoiler

Really enjoyed the movie… don’t really like the way it glorifies school shootings? Or makes a joke of it? Or that it’s ok? Idk extremely mixed emotions.

It's easy to make fun of stuff like this and assume that this Letterboxd reviewer is the exact kind of person the film is satirising, but to their credit at least they're admitting to having "extremely mixed emotions" – or, to put it in other words, grasping at independent thoughts about what they saw. It's extremely depressing to think that a lot of contemporary viewers might not even get to that stage.

[Mr Sausage]

I don’t understand why we keep making this thread into an odd guessing game, but the above is spoiling The Drama

[The Curious Sofa]

I agree and I certainly can't be bothered to google these because someone feels their genius find deserves you investing the time in it. It makes this already small online community even more closed off and cliquey to newcomers and casual visitors.

[MichaelB]

I don’t understand why we keep making this thread into an odd guessing game, but the above is spoiling The Drama

What on earth is the point of posting a spoiler without explicitly spelling out what the film that’s potentially being spoiled is? This shouldn’t need a public service follow-up on someone else’s part.

[spectre]

Sorry all – I thought it was a convention of this thread for some reason and was attempting to adhere to it. Personally, I do enjoy the guessing game of trying to work out what is being reviewed and often will google to find out; I understand that might not be for everyone.

Ironically, I think in this case the identity of the film doesn’t really matter all that much – the review is merely reflective of a cultural tendency in how any subject matter deemed as “difficult” is received – but it would probably have made more sense for me to spoiler tag the actual spoiler in the review as opposed to the whole thing (unfortunately it messes up the formatting of the post if you do that).

[MichaelB]

I think the problem here is that you're dealing with a title so new that it hasn't even opened in some places yet, whereas guessing-game spoilers about much older titles are clearly less of an issue.

[The Curious Sofa]

Sorry all – I thought it was a convention of this thread for some reason and was attempting to adhere to it. Personally, I do enjoy the guessing game of trying to work out what is being reviewed and often will google to find out; I understand that might not be for everyone.

Ironically, I think in this case the identity of the film doesn’t really matter all that much – the review is merely reflective of a cultural tendency in how any subject matter deemed as “difficult” is received – but it would probably have made more sense for me to spoiler tag the actual spoiler in the review as opposed to the whole thing (unfortunately it messes up the formatting of the post if you do that).

For me fun lies in the frequently absurd takes, removing the context kills the comedy and turns these reviews into a meaningless word salad. After long being a funny thread for posting wacky reviews, professional or not, one person started turning their posts into a quiz and eventually others fell in line. As the reviews are often so absurd as to be unguessable, finding out would require a search and honestly, life's too short.

[colinr0380]

Even the title sounds like a Seinfeld title

Spoiler

the Night the Bridge Fell Down

Dying at the claim in a Letterboxd review that this sat on a shelf for four years before burning off by airing against the MASH series finale. There’s no part of this that I don’t love (unless there’s a part that requires me to actually watch it)

Oh gosh, I think I actually have this trapped in my 'to watch' pile, as it got released a couple of years ago in the US in the "Irwin Allen: Master of Disaster" collection with his other two part TV movies Cave-In, Fire! and Flood, plus the one Irwin Allen theatrical production, the Paul Newman volcano disaster movie When Time Ran Out (which I remember being rather terrible, but I have only ever seen in its pan-and-scanned TV version).

What can I say, I'm a sucker for disaster movies especially of the Irwin Allen variety (I can sit through hours of soap opera style relationship dramatics if there is the likely chance that one or other of the members of the couple are going to be imperiled or potentially are going to die horribly in the final section of the film! That's where The Bridges of Madison County was lacking! ), and that set presented the opportunity to plug a few gaps in my collection! And if I could make it through The Concorde: Airport '79 in this subgenre, I can probably make it through anything. Plus I ordered it together with Allen's killer bee epic The Swarm on Blu-ray, which may be an even more egregious crime against cinema! At least Leslie Nielsen appears in The Night the Bridge Fell Down, so I hold out a small hope that he ends up wrestling a grizzly bear shirtless in a thunderstorm again on top of that bridge, just as he did in Day of the Animals!

[Gregory]

Rather than a review, this is a rediculous Wikipedia claim: their article on Scarface (1983) says that "it is now considered to be one of the greatest films ever made." The source of this claim is an AFI list of the best gangster movies everr, which unsurprisingly is just a list of the most famous American gangster flicks. I guess the Wikipedia editors could have also cited MTV Cribs (which is considered one of the greatest television shows of all time).

[Zot!]

Not a film review, but the phrasing of this YouTube comment for a George Harrison song made me snort: "Started ovulating immediately , otherwise good song"

[MichaelB]

I don't think that's the least bit 'rediculous'; it's genuinely witty.