The bravest movie review I've ever seen

I enjoy watching movies quite a bit, so, of course, I spend a good deal of time reading movie reviews. Through the powers of the series of tubes I can read hundreds of movie critics from all over the country, but over the years I've narrowed down my "must read" reviews to four sources. All of them present reviews that are mostly free of promotional material filler and almost all of them eschew numbers or star rankings. Read the damn prose review! Numbers are not opinions!

First up is Pajiba: Their tagline is "Snarky reviews for bitchy people." Accordingly, it's perfect for bitchy ol' me. I've been following them for years now, and their ever-growing roster of writers deliver some of the sharpest, funniest, and downright subversive critical reviews of movies, television, and (lately) books out there. All of their writers are extremely capable, but definitely read anything by webmaster Dustin Rowles and lead film critic Daniel Carlson. Rowles' contributes to the arts of hyperbole and snarkiness, whether skewering 27 Dresses or singing the praises of underrated films like Final Destination or Mission Impossible 3. Carlson is generally more thoughtful and does a good job of describing how it can feel to get swept up in a film, even if it ends up somewhat disappointing. See his reviews of Serenity, Spiderman 3, and No Country For Old Men to see what I'm talking about. I agree with Pajiba almost without fail. Call it ninety-eight percent.

Next up is Roger Ebert. Do I have to defend this? Although he's not as tack-sharp as he used to be, he's still quite prickly and comes armed with an encyclopedic knowledge of film culture and history. For the educational opportunities alone, each of his reviews (and his weekly Answer Man columns) are essential reads. I find myself agreeing with Ebert about eighty percent of the time.

For a quick hit, there's always the AV Club. The reviews are short and clever. I also agree with them maybe eighty percent.

Then, there's Stephanie Zacharek over at Salon. I find that I agree with her less often than the others here. Maybe 3 times out of 5, or 3 out of 4. That's splitting hairs. What makes her an essential read every week is how she approaches reviews from angles I never would have expected. In her review of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban she's bold enough to claim it's among the greatest fantasy films of all time; I'm with her there, especially the way she describes the poetry of the film. While other reviewers talked about how faithful it was to the book or whether kids would like it, Zacharek is on a totally different level of appreciation. She always approaches films with refreshingly open eyes.

And the review she posted today might just make her the most essential film critic out there. What review, you ask?

You Don't Mess With the Zohan

You read that right.

Go. Read. I'll still be here.

[taps foot]

I KNOW, RIGHT? How delightfully insane!

Allow me to summarize every other Zohan review you're going to read this weekend:

Idiots and frat boys like Adam Sandler. Adam Sandler seems nice enough, but, god, what a stupid premise for a movie. Rob Schneider is in it. Insert deserved snarky comment about how Rob Schneider owes his career to Adam Sandler. Talk about toilet humor. Talk about how thoroughly stupid this movie is. Maybe I cracked a grin, once, but no belly laughs. 1.5 stars.

There. I saved you the time of reading most reviews. I have another post in me about how most reviews seem to come off an interchangable Model-T assembly line, but that can wait. Back to Zacharek and Zohan.

Zacharek has the stones to... well, just look. Sit down. This goes places:

"You Don't Mess With the Zohan" -- in which Adam Sandler plays an Israeli counterterrorist commando whose big dream is to become a hairdresser -- is the movie "Munich" should have been. At the very least, it's got to be the first picture to use smelly-feet jokes as a means of parsing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

...

... there's nothing more offensive in "Zohan" than the sequence in "Munich" in which Eric Bana -- as a Mossad agent who's trying to escape the violence of his past -- makes love to his wife, as flashbacks of the murders of the Israeli Olympic team in 1972 in Munich run through his head. "Munich" was a fictionalized story set against a real-life backdrop of tragedy: Bana plays an agent assigned to avenge the kidnapping and murder of 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team by the Palestinian terrorist group Black September. In "Munich" -- its first half, at least -- Steven Spielberg attempts to wrestle with some morally ambiguous issues, particularly the question of whether violence is ever morally justified, or necessary. But Spielberg tiptoes up to the complexity of those issues only to pull back from the edge. And his conclusion -- "Violence begets violence" -- isn't particularly enlightening or deep.

"Don't Mess With the Zohan" is the braver movie, for the way Sandler uses throwaway humor in the service of a strong point of view. "Zohan" never even addresses the viability of violence as a solution. It posits, from the start, that the only way to solve this seemingly unsolvable conflict is by forging human connections. You can tsk-tsk Sandler's penchant for dumb, crass humor all you want, but there's some meaning behind his madness. Is there nothing more human, more humbling, than the idea of smelly feet?

Hole. E. Shit.

That, my friends, is what happens when you go into a movie with no preconceptions. That's bold, clever, and I can almost guarantee you you're not going to see any other review of Zohan quite like that.

So am I going to see Zohan? Not likely. I mean, Sandler comedies lost me after the dreck of Little Nicky. But I won't dismiss it immediately, which is what my gut reaction would have been.

So, mission accomplished, Miss Zacharek. I now think you're the single boldest mainstream film critic in America, and easily one of the most essential.

Am I crazy? Am I missing some essential critical voice? Who do you read? Let me know in the comments!

Update 6/6: A.O. Scott of the New York Times went there too in his surprisingly positive review. I may have jumped the gun on this one.

I'd like to think this will bring the lolcats phenomenon to its logical conclusion

The LOLCats must be stopped.

Have no idea what I'm talking about? Slate has an informative slide-show about the phenomenon.

I didn't really laugh at them at all until one of my favorite Pajiba writers submitted a list of phrases that don't hold up to lolcat pidgin.

With that inspiration and the power of the creative commons license (Thank you, Flickr), I present to you my one and only entry into image macros, proof that not all things can be made cuter with poor grammar and kitties:



Phrase courtesy of Dan Carlson and original image courtesy of Homingpigen, via Creative Commons license, on Flickr.

o hai i iz photoshop mastah.

The one where I cave into popular culture

One of my favorite movie and television review sites, Pajiba, weighs in on that whole American Idol Sanjaya brouhaha, with typically scathing and insightful results.

Although I only watch American Idol when there's nothing else on and I'm waiting for House, M.D. to get started, the 10-second-per-contestant wrap-up snippets at the end of the show have given me more than enough (as the article puts it) "17-year-old borderline-retard Sanjaya" than anyone needs, and, yet, he persists. Having hardly watched the show, though, I definitely agreed wholeheartedly with this (big quote... just read the article, it's good):

I’ve never been a fan of the way Simon, the drunk to his immediate right, and the guy from Journey tend to Breakfast Club the contestants — sizing each one up in an instant and branding him or her with one of a handful of generic and recyclable designations. (“The Soulful One,” “The Little One with the Big Voice,” “The Modern One,” “Justin Timberlake,” etc.)

This season, Gina Glocksen was “The Rocker.”

...

As much as I was still fully behind The Sanjaya Agenda and wanted nothing more than to see Stern put on a Guy Fawkes mask and detonate a pound of Semtex under Ryan Seacrest, I was secretly pulling for Gina to at least nab a place in the top four or five — an achievement that would all but guarantee her a record deal somewhere.

Last week, she was eliminated.

...

But as the axe came down on Gina Glocksen, as the stunned crowd began to shout in protest, and as she began to cry uncontrollably, and, in a tragically ironic coup de grace, as she was given the stage one last time and was forced to perform the same song she had sung the previous night, which happened to be Charlie Chaplin’s “Smile,” I found myself shaking my head — amazed at how the entire scene was just so perfect.

It was the perfect object lesson.

It was as if God himself — either as an “Idol” enthusiast or simply in keeping with his longstanding practice of crushing the insignificant for the hell of it — had come down from on high and engineered the ultimate ruthless comeuppance aimed at all those who dared to fuck with the natural order of things.

Having watched the clip of her getting voted off (embedding disabled? Boo!), I can't say I disagree with his assessment of its perfect irony. Keep watching the clip, though, because it gets better:

Once again, in an act of seemingly divine inspiration, the shot of Gina’s tear-streaked face as she toughed her way through the lines, “Smile, though your heart is aching,” and, “Though there are clouds in the sky, I’ll get by,” slowly dissolved to show the face of — him.

And I found myself suddenly filled with rage, and the overwhelming need to rip every fucking ridiculous hair out of Sanjaya Malakar’s stupid little head and shove them down his fucking throat — the one that had failed to produce one decent goddamned note all season.

...

Perhaps the only thing left is to once again invoke the words of H.L. Mencken:

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

Damn you, Pajiba, for applying such grandiose writing to a weepy girl on a shitty reality TV show and making me feel legitimately bad for her. Damn you.

"You are directly responsible for 'Two and a Half Men' winning a People's Choice Award for best comedy."

From Seth Freilich, Pajiba.com's television critic, in their first annual (sh)it list:

You

To be clear, I don’t mean you, the general Pajiba readership. I mean You, the mainstream public, Time’s Person of the Year, the stupid meme subsequently given such other titles as AdAge’s Agency of the Year, Spin’s Artist of the Year, etc., etc., ad nauseam. Despite my previous comments to the contrary, You do not live solely in the middle of the country — You abound throughout this nation of ours, in numbers too great to (unfortunately) be ignored. You are the loud, obnoxious sons of bitches surrounding me in every movie theater, laughing at the inane bits, talking out of turn, loudly chewing your cud, and just generally making moviegoing an almost entirely miserable experience. You are responsible for network television being littered with crappy procedurals, crappier reality shows, and crappiest game shows. You are responsible for Titanic being the all-time number-one box-office hit. You are responsible for Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay. You are responsible for the cancellation of “Freaks and Geeks” and “Arrested Development.” You are responsible for the Santa Clause trilogy. You are directly responsible for “Two and a Half Men” winning a Peoples’ Choice Award for best comedy. You are responsible for movie studios and television networks having increasingly little faith, patience or willingness to stand behind good art. You are responsible for the Hollywood complex choosing to serve to the lowest common denominator. You are responsible for the suck.

I hope You’re proud of Yourself.