I thought if I could only live
As you all know, I like to watch movies — I watch up to 2 or 3 a day sometimes, depending on what else I’m doing. One thing I always do after watching a movie I’ve never seen before is visit the IMDb entry for that movie and read a little bit about it. I usually read the trivia section, I skim the goofs section, and then I read some of the reviews.
Now, there are a lot of review links for many of the movies, and most of them suck. The vast majority are broken links, or just one or two paragraph blurbs, or other linkfarms to yet more reviews of the movies, or even just poorly written. So I have a few that I’ve determined to be good that I generally always read. The Salon.com reviews are very quite good, especially those written by Stephanie Zacharek, with whom I nearly always agree. The Onion’s AV Club (which is not, as you may believe, a humor site in any way), also has very good, pointed reviews. I used to read Roger Ebert’s reviews, but I more and more found him to be basically a total moron who, apart from making at LEAST one factual error per review (look at them closely some time, I think you can find one in every single review), he very often misses the point of a film and will just review it based on how it made him feel about his childhood or some bullshit like that. When none of my “regular” folks have reviews (actually fairly common for older movies), then I will generally read some reviews from some of the bigger papers.
The other person whose reviews I generally read is Doug Pratt, the guy who writes for (and runs) DVDLaser.com. The reviews are also pretty short, but they’re mostly focused on the technical aspects of the digital transfer — image quality, color balance, audio fidelity, etc. I like to read them to give me a good point of reference for what people mean when they talk about stuff like that, and for one other reason — when he’s discussing the DVD features, and there are foreign language subtitles, he always includes a sample line from the movie in one of those languages. I can’t entirely say that I know why, but I find these little snippets of translated dialogue to be incredibly funny. So funny that, in fact, I will share some with you. Bonus points to anybody who can identify the movies they’re from:
¿Este es un mojón de ABBA?
Je t’ai amené le dernier bulliten. Devine qui vient diner, maintenant?
¿Hablas conmigo? Entonces, ¿con quién diablos hablas? ¿Hablas conmigo?
yeah. I’ve come to admire Roger Ebert as a complete moron too. I never cease to be amazed at the number of times he completely misses the point. I remember his review of “Pirates of the Caribbean” when his major gripe was how the sailors managed to win the battle when the pirates couldn’t be killed – I can only assume that he had popped out to the bathroom at the point when this was made vlindingly obvious, in the scene that the whole plot of the movie had been driving towards. But he’s old, I guess his bladder can’t last over 2 hours any more
Hi, just came across your journal in my travels…I must heartily agree about Roger Ebert!! Also thanks for the link to IMDb…I also watch lots of movies, at least 2 every day, usually more. Good to know there are others out there.