Well, the difference seems to be that as a film scholar, you reserve the right to pinpoint the bad amongst the good. The Medveds hardly qualify as film scholars since the only books that focus on film scholarship (and I’m not counting Medved’s larger cultural screed) have been books designed specifically to mock “bad” movies. I use the quotes because some of the films they ridicule are Griffith’s Intolerance, Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, and Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible–movies that any genuine critic can have issues with, but which the Medveds clearly do not get.
The point being that anyone can write a book talking about how bad one movie or another is. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel (especially if you’re going out of your way to watch movies for that intent and purpose). But in terms of larger film scholarship, they have absolutely nothing to show for themselves, so it’s very different than a critic/scholar like Warren (or Ebert, et al.) who has proven himself in the field as having something useful to say. Smug, merciless, and belittling seems to sum up Medved pretty nicely, though one adjective is missing: Dumb.
Well, Warren does call him “ignorant” in another place in the book. Maybe that’s close enough.
Actually, you’ve answered my question about hypocrisy pretty well. I suppose I never thought about it that way, but your post makes a lot of sense. I admit I’m somewhat ambivalent about books like Golden Turkey Awards. I never really found the Medveds’ writing terribly funny, and like you, I’ve noticed the occasional inclusion of films and actors that clearly aren’t “bad.” Still, the sheer depth of Warren’s apparent hatred leaves me a little cold. I often wonder if the Medveds are aware of Bill Warren, and if they’ve ever responded to him in any way.
HIM is definitely the fake film. It would be impossible to have kept this film under wraps undiscovered by the Christian watchdogs of the media; look at the trouble Terrance McNally had with his (mediocre, BTW) play CORPUS CHRISTI. Something like HIM would have been held up as an example of Hollywood decadence by every newspaper in the country; even the ones who didn’t think it was bad would have cited it as the sort of movie the wacky Christians think is bad.
HIM may be a fake film, but apparently it wasn’t “created” by the Medveds. It seems they believed it to be a real movie at the time they wrote the book.
From what others have pointed out in previous posts, Dog of Norway seems to be THE Medved-invention.
A little while after the book came out, I read an interview with Harry in which he said a clue to the hoax is the photo of the brothers in the book. They are with the same dog that is in the DOG OF NORWAY image. In the first book, he had mentioned Muki in the acknowledgments. Also no biographies of filmographies of Gabby Hayes mention DOG OF NORWAY.
[The pasted link cuts off the closing parenthesis, if the link doesn’t work please add it or copy and past the whole line]
I was about 12 or 13 when the book came out and I thought it was THE DAY THE CLOWN CRIED. I thought I knew my Jerry Lewis. Now of course I know I was wrong.
Also, since it was specifically mentioned, to avoid this, use the link button or code to create the link, instead of just letting the software parse the plaintext URL.
I had this book when I was a kid. I loved it. I wish I had seen this thread when it was first around because I knew it was the dog movie.
When I was in college, years after I first read the book, it somehow came up in conversation with a friend of mine. He actually looked up the phone number of the Medveds when he was a kid and called it. It ended up being their mother’s house. She apparently got regular calls asking that and told my friend the answer.
Danny Peary in “Cult Movies 2” says that the Medveds hadn’t seen Herschell Gordon Lewis’s “Blood Feast,” based on their inaccurate description of the film’s villain.
