Stephanie Zachareck can bite my lilly-white pimpled ass!

[vibrotronica]

I don’t listen to Rush Limbagh or watch Bill O’Riley because, unlike some people, I don’t enjoy pissing myself off. But for some reason, I still read Stephanie Zacharek’s movie reviews in Salon every Friday. I don’t know why I do this, because they suck and she sucks. She’s an arrogant bitch who lets her careerism get in the way of her professional responsibility as a movie reviewer. I’ve never read one of her reviews that I agreed with once I saw the movie for myself.

She’s got that “I’m not going to like it because it’s popular and I don’t want to be mistaken for one of the plebes” thing going on. Perhaps this annoys me because I had that attitude towards music for a long time. I grew out of it, feeling it was dishonest to say I didn’t like REM or U2 when I actually DID like them but I was sick to death of the me-too college boys who thought Green was R.E.M’s first album. Zacuntrek hasn’t, and she’s a “professional” movie critic.

I’ll give her credit for one thing, though. She knows the dirty secret of movie critic sucess: critics don’t get noticed by loving good movies, they get noticed (and get better jobs) by hating movies everybody else loves. Then the rest of the critics (and this is coming from someone who has written a movie review or two in his time) get scared and say “Hey, maybe I was wrong! Stupid ZaCuntCunt over here says it sucks. What do I know?” And the herd thunders on.

View Ms. Zacharcunt’s latest hachet job here: http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2003/04/04/cowboy_bebop/index.html This is a review of the Cowboy Bebop movie, which I, as a fan of the TV show, want to see. Ole Seph Infection says she likes the movie, which scares me. But the real point of her article is not to praise Bebop, but to bury Spirited Away The ho-bag has ten paragraphs to write about Bebop and she uses three of them–including the intro paragraph–to trash this year’s Best Animated Feature. She didn’t draw the assignment of reviewing it the first time so she decided to use another review to trash it now that it has been recognized for what it is: a masterpiece. This is not new to her. Some of you may remember her four page–FOUR PAGE–harridan screed against Adaptation after another Salon critic gave it a great review. In the course of that --I won’t call it a review–she actually had the gall to call John Huston a hack.

Let me say that again for those not reading closely. She called John Huston a hack. This from the feltch-slurping sanitary napkin who gave Undercover Brother a glowing review.

This is not just a matter of “I don’t agree with your opinions.” She an unprofessional, self-important dipwad who isn’t fit to clean the heads of Pauline Kael’s VCR. I don’t even think she LIKES movies any more. Here’s a little sample, from the link above:

But despite the hosannas it received, “Spirited Away” bored me to tears, to the point where I could barely enjoy its lush and admittedly gorgeous images. I felt I was being held hostage by two hours’ worth of a toddler’s rambling narrative: “Then the monster came and then there were some people, but they weren’t people, they were pigs, and then I saw a lady …”

Although I will confess to a fondness for the Radish Spirit, I don’t really want to see the world through the eyes of a child if it means checking my brain at the Candyland entrance. Instead of restoring my sense of awe and wonder, “Spirited Away” made me want to rush out and rent the darkest, grimiest noir I could lay my hands on. And a stiff belt of Scotch wouldn’t have hurt, either.

Man, talk about missing the point! Go back to writing obits, you two-bit, soul-sold, hipper-than-thou hack.

[Duck_Duck_Goose]

I stand in awe. You’re right. She’s a major dimwad with a doctorate in point-missing. Never heard of her before, but I looked her up, read her review of “The Core”, a movie which is rapidly garnering wide acclaim as possibly the dumbest movie of the year, if not the decade, and am suddenly inclined to join you in the OP. Scootch over, there’s room…

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/click/author-228/reviews.php?cats=&letter=&sortby=default&page=2&rid=1122409

There have been, and will be, worse blow-em-up movies than Jon Amiel’s “The Core.” Its tone is patchy, and some sequences that should feel cathartic or thrilling – or should at least just look really cool – push the picture’s mood over too sharp a ledge, like when a flock of pigeons mysteriously go berserk in London’s Trafalgar Square, and the camera fixates on a little boy’s terrified, tearful face.

But there’s a refreshing surefootedness in the way Amiel, his screenwriters Cooper Layne and John Rogers, and most of his actors recognize how preposterous the idea of traveling to the center of the earth in a souped-up Rototiller really is…

Egad. She’s watching the Dumbest Movie of the Decade and she’s looking at the camerawork? She’s evaluating the film’s “mood” and using terms like “cathartic”?

She also totally missed the point of Harry Potter CoS.

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/click/author-228/reviews.php?cats=&letter=&sortby=default&page=9&rid=812615

When a movie is touted, and treated, as an event long before it even reaches the theaters, can it ever become a movie again? In the case of “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets,” the second installment of the film franchise based on the hugely successful (and wonderful) series of books by J.K. Rowling, the answer is no.

By now we’re all used to heavy marketing campaigns for movies. But movies that actually feel like two-hour-plus marketing campaigns are a relatively new phenomenon. Perfunctory, competent, well-oiled and yet still stultifyingly dull, “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” sells itself dutifully minute-by-minute – it’s the hardest-working movie in show business.

All she saw was a marketing campaign?

[Lyllyan]

Wow, she really didn’t like Spirited Away, did she.

Anime is not my first choice in cinematic viewing, and I went to this movie with some trepidation. However, I thought it was absolutely wonderful, even though I had covinced myself that I would hate it.

John Huston a hack!? The John Huston? “The Maltese Falcon” John Huston? I believe she referred to the wrong person when she used this word. She was obviously referring to herself and missed that little error in proof reading.

Do yourself a favor and skip her reviews. She is obviously a drooling fuckwit.

[DrLizardo]

Hey, that’s

“My Lily White Pimpled Ass[sup]TM[/sup]”

You’ll be hearing from my attorneys over this ass infringement!

BTW, yeah, she’s a shitwit.

[Interrobang]

She’s got that “I’m not going to like it because it’s popular and I don’t want to be mistaken for one of the plebes” thing going on.

Then why did she include movies like American Pie, Fellowship of the Ring, About a Boy, Chicago, Almost Famous and O Brother, Where Art Thou? in her recent top ten lists?

She an unprofessional, self-important dipwad who isn’t fit to clean the heads of Pauline Kael’s VCR.

Ironically, her tribute to Kael is one of the best that appeared after Pauline’s death. And as I recall, Kael said in Afterglow that Zacharek was a critic she liked.

Go back to writing obits, you two-bit, soul-sold, hipper-than-thou hack.

She did manage to critique Spirited Away without quoting the title and inserting the word “cunt.” Brownie points for that, at least.

Sorry you don’t care for her writing, but Zacharek’s one of the few things that tempts me to give money to Salon.