The movie in question is a German language movie called **After The Truth.
**
The film is not in the Kids & Family section and the above description is the first thing you see upon clicking on it. Plus, it was in the Foreign Film section. Which might have been a clue that it might not be in English.:smack:
I was recently looking at cuticle removers and found one that comes in a little dropper bottle. There’s a 1 star review from someone that thinks it should be recalled for negligent packaging, writing the review to try to save other people and their families from going through what she did… after she put the cuticle remover in her eyes because she assumed it was her eye drops and she wasn’t smart enough to look at the bottle first. Idiot.
On a lighter note, several years ago I ordered some coin canisters from Amazon for a project I’m still involved with. The reviews included a 1-star, for this reason: “The picture shows money in the canisters, so I ordered them, and when I got them, there was no money in them.”
ONe of my favorite amazon reviews said, “This book was so amazing, everyone should read it, but it is sad.” One star. Because…it was sad?
Not a Platypus I think I have that cuticle remover, and yeah it looks just like my eye drops. I use that stuff with my contacts out, which means* I can’t see*. So I have been very very careful. I don’t even keep it in the bathroom. I don’t know why she thinks they should be sued for negligent packaging though. You can see it before you order it, and once you get it and realize it’s the same size as your eye drops, then you know to watch out. Maybe someone will read the review and take extra precautions.
I used to follow a guy who did book and movie reviews for one of my local newspapers. We had completely opposite tastes, which would already be enough reason to follow him, but the stupid part is that he would ream children’s animated movies or science fiction for reasons such as “there are no such thing as ninja turtles” (are you sure? How often do you check your sewers anyway, hmmm?) or “aliens don’t exist” (again, have you checked every planet out there?).
When I had a toddler, I got really tired of adults who had to go on and on about how much they hated Barney the dinosaur. Guess what? you are not the target audience. An adult writing a review about how stupid Barney is, is as pointless as me writing about how bored my toddler was by A Streetcar Named Desire.
What really bugged me was how numerous and detailed these reviews got-- these adults cared, DEEPLY, that you know how much they despised Barney. It was IMPERATIVE that they make this known.
Adults are free to dislike Barney, but reviewing the videos as though they were the target audience got old really fast.
Our local movie reviewer used to review the movie he would have made, not the one that was on the screen.
Another reviewer wrote, years ago, that Henry Fonda made a big mistake by not taking the role from First Monday in October because he missed his chance to win an Oscar. (Fonda made On Golden Pond instead.) For reference, First Monday in October has a 47% fresh rating on Rottentomatoes, and was critically panned by everyone when it came out.
I was researching large Fresnel-lens page magnifiers on Amazon last year. I found quite a few negative reviews posted complaining that they didn’t work when they were laid flat on the page. Umm, they don’t work like that bozos.
I saw something referring to a movie called The Last King a month or two ago and looked it up on IMDb. At that time there was one “review”: a complete ream job. The complaint? That the movie didn’t have any people of color in it. Umm, the movie is about Norwegian royalty set almost a thousand years ago.
That’s it. The whole screed was about casting. Nothing about the film itself. The “reviewer” probably hadn’t even seen it.
Sure, there might have been the occasional fellow from far off climes in Norway then, but not enough to make a film without them unhistorical.
Thankfully, the “review” seems to have disappeared.
There is a BBC mini-series based on the Zola book Therese Raquin. Alan Rickman has a small role as an acquaintance of one of the main characters. He is listed something like 8th down the list in casting, and his name is not on the cover of the VHS/DVD box. He’s not in the opening credits either. But there’s a review of it giving it just one or two stars, and is nothing but a long complaint that Alan Rickman does not have enough screen time.
It’s very clear on the IMDb page, as well as the Amazon page, that the stars are Kate Nelligan, Brian Cox, and Mona Washbourne. You would know Rickman is in it probably only from looking up Rickman’s list of credits on IMDb. Therese Raquin is his second credit. Few people get tons of screen time in their second credit. :smack:
Years ago a movie reviewer for our city newspaper revealed a major spoiler for a film in the very first sentence of his review (it was for The Ghost and the Darkness - a movie I had been wanting to see for ages having read Patterson’s book). Never even looked at any of his writing again.
Some time back when Googling for reviews of a movie I stumbled across someone’s personal movie review page. She was apparently a big fan of the band Placebo, and mentioned in nearly every review that the movie lost points for not having Placebo singer Brian Molko in it. This was presumably intended more as a joke about the reviewer’s own obsession and not a serious criticism of these movies, so okay, whatever.
But I saw that the site included a review of Velvet Goldmine, a movie that AFAIK features Molko’s only screen appearance. He and the rest of Placebo appear as a fictional 1970s glam rock band, Molko has a line or two, and they play a cover of T-Rex’s “20th Century Boy”. Did this reviewer consider Velvet Goldmine the bestest movie ever because of this? No. Instead she complained that Brian Molko didn’t get enough screen time, and additionally griped that a major character in the movie was named Brian but didn’t “deserve” to have this quite common name.
FWIW, as far as I can tell from Molko’s Wikipedia entry he does not have a background in acting and does not desire a second career as an actor.
We used to get a free paper through the door. I remember its film “critic” gave There Will Be Blood a one star review because it wasn’t the horror movie she’d been expecting from the title. IIRC, she concluded that “you might like it if you’re old”.
I have a fondness for movie reviewers who start a review with “I’m not a science fiction fan…” and then go on to prove in their review for a science fiction movie that they didn’t understand anything about it. Sort of like Nava’s “aliens don’t exist” reviewer, they don’t even get the basic concept.
I think if you aren’t a fan of a genre because you don’t get it, you should have someone ELSE do the review!
I saw a review for Nosferatu, the 1922 silent and seminal vampire move, that complained about the sound quality being poor. It’s might’ve been a “whooosh” but I reported it.
Oh yes. I used to be the “management response” person for on-line hotel reviews.
Some favorites:
1 star. The power went out all over town, and the front desk clerk wouldn’t do anything about it!
1 star. It rained the whole time we were in town.
1 star. There were alligators in the pond on the adjacent property, and management knew that and didn’t do anything about it! Won’t someone think of the children?!
1 star. It was 10 miles from the beach! (Reviewing a downtown property with a website map showing distances from points of interest - airport, beaches, golf courses, etc.)
1 star. The taxi ride from the airport was $20!
Et cetera.
(There were also several times when I was absolutely shocked to receive great reviews. Like the 5 star review from the keynote speaker at a law enforcement conference. While he was in house, the damned hotel flooded - engineering problem with the upstairs pool deck in a brand new property, and a frog-drowning summer thunderstorm. I went off-roading to get back to the hotel at about 11pm, because all of the other managers lived east of town and bridges were closed. When I got there, our VIP guest was downstairs helping the desk agents mop the lobby and position trash cans under the torrents flooding through light fixtures. Two mornings later, this police chief’s wife and son were mugged across the street as they returned from shopping. He left us a glowing review!
Or the grandmother who was in town for a family weekend with the kiddies. When she arrived, the valet department was in the weeds, so the general manager decided to “help.” He backed her brand-new sedan into a pillar in the garage, and then left a note on my desk so I could tell her about it the next morning - didn’t even call me to warn me*! Aaaauuuugh! I made it right, got a big hug and an invitation to visit any time I was in North Carolina, and another 5 star review. People are weird.)
*Same night, the food and beverage director was “helping.” He managed to bash someone’s roof rack luggage carrier to smithereens, and dented the door of someone else’s company car in the garage. I found all three notes on my desk the next morning. After a very fun morning that involved calls to four separate insurance companies, the CFO of our company, the CEO’s assistant, the supervisor of the company car driver, plud a trek to buy a luggage carrier, and soothing 3 guests, I called a conference with the GM and F&B director, plus the head of the valet department. I banned Charlie and Jim from the valet area, and then had a very nice lunch and bottle of wine, on the clock, and put it on Charlie’s tab. Jim did the cooking.
Even worse than the bad reviews are the people that don’t seem to understand the star grading system. I’ll see a one star review and the text consists of, in its entirety, “Loved it.” Well, if you loved it, why did you give it one star, ijiot?
Plus, the people that give it one star because the item was never delivered. How is Citizen Kane a bad movie because the post office lost the package?
Sometimes things going wrong but being well handled is more memorable than things just working right. When I needed a spare bike derailleur from an online small company and the post office just returned it to sender for no good reason the owner of the business went out of his way to make sure it got back to me fast, including spending a lot of time getting it figured out with the post office manager over his lunch break. I had fond things to say about that company. I doubt I’d even remember them if it all worked.
I have to think that even a company staffed by incompetent jerks deliver more things than not without issue. It’s how they conduct themselves when you have to personally deal with them and they have to fix something that tells you more about their character. So perhaps it isn’t an unreasonable perspective. I suspect there is some of this behind your stories, assuming these people saw a sincere and sympathetic effort to make things right.
Because they think they are reviewing the service from the seller and post office.
These are people that don’t seem to think there might be another way of contacting the company. And afterward they’ll complain that “they never even looked at my complaint” (The movie ‘review’ they did.)