Roger Ebert’s review of North is a fairly famous example:
I wrote often scathing
“reviews” of my third-year med school rotations for my web site, The J Train. It was therapeutic.
Dr. J
From Rolling Stone:
Michael Bolton needs to learn that singing soul does not require sounding like you’ve herniated yourself.
Apparently there was a play in the 60s entitled Bang!.
One reviewer wrote, simply:
Ouch!
On Practical Magic, a loathesome romantic comedy starring Nicole Kiddman and Sandra Bullock as two witches:
May I humbly nominate my own Battlefield Earth review.
Bloom County’s Opus reviewing Francis Ford Coppola’s One From the Gut:
“Did for cinema what Jonestown did for Kool-Aid.”
A lot of those negative reviews feel forced; as if instead of reviewing honestly, the critic went for a cheap laugh. Like the Blow example, for instance: The movie wasn’t great, but it wasn’t that bad either. The reviewer sacrificed his honesty for a cheap pun. In a word, lame.