Note: If you hate or totally disregard movie reviews this thread may not be for you.
I love this review of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang by Tom Lorenzo, Musical Monday: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang - Tom + Lorenzo (tomandlorenzo.com)
" Yes, it’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang! That wholesome family tale of child slavery, Eastern European despots, bloody revolution – and also a flying, haunted hell car! Starring Dick Van Dyke and a robot simulation of Julie Andrews!"
This gem from Ebert (RIP) slapping down Rob Schneider’s awful movie is a classic:
Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo movie review (2005) | Roger Ebert
Probably apocryphal, but supposedly a trade publication (the only medium that would waste ink on a film like this) gave a one-line review to the 1957 drive-in horror flick From Hell It Came.
AND TO HELL IT CAN GO
For some insane reason, I know this one word for word for better than thirty years (From a movie review book by [I think it was] Steven Scheuer):
Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man – It was only natural these two should meet and when they do, the countryside is crowded with corpses. Pretty lively film.
This was around the same time that the local newspaper ads for “Joe Dirt” said “ZERO Academy Award nominations!”
Here’s what Ebert had to say about “Pink Flamingos.” And yes, I have seen it.
In the DVD extras, there was some professionally-shot footage of Waters making this movie, and I had long wondered where it came from. I found out in the meantime that Waters had a friend who worked for the local PBS station in Baltimore, and had proposed a show featuring, ahem, interesting local characters. (The show never launched.)
I first heard of it about 10 years after it came out, specifically in a book about cult movies that described it this way: “John Waters must have gotten the bright idea to make movies so bizarre, the critics would look like perverts for having sat through them.” Yep, that’s a good description of “Pink Flamingos.”
From Joe Bob Briggs’ review of Frankenhooker:
“This is the kind of film that will get a lot of laughs at the Nevada Institute for the Criminally Insane.
And that, as you know, is the highest praise I ever give to a movie.”
I believe this was a play rather than a movie, but a classic review of I Am A Camera said in full:
“Me no Leica”.
From the Philadlephia Inquirer’s tv guide (I remember this from almost thirty years ago. But, I’m unsure what I had for breakfast), Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed- Sure. You do it.
Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
222 minutes of desert studies. Peter O’Toole, Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, Claude Rains, Arthur Kennedy, Jose Ferrer et al help out with the foreground composition. - Probably paraphrased from a review in The Reader
Isadora (1968)
This long, but tiny film…. - Stanley Kauffmann
Isn’t It Romantic? (1948 film)
“No.” - Leonard Maltin
Not a movie, but Damon Knight had the best one for a book:
“'‘This eloquent novel’ says the jacket of Taylor Caldwell’s The Devil’s Advocate, making two errors in three words…”
Roger Ebert re: Freddy Got Fingered:
This movie doesn’t scrape the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn’t the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn’t below the bottom of the barrel. This movie doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels.
Ninja’d!
Note: This thread may not be for me.
Two problems I often have with movie reviews.
First, the reviewer thought of a good line and included it in his review. This always makes me wonder if the reviewer tilted his opinion of the movie so he could use the good line.
I might be entertained by a good line but it’s not a review.
Second, the reviewer is speaking for himself. Obviously any reviewer is giving his personal opinion of the movie. But why should I care what his opinion of the movie is?
Roger Ebert, for example, didn’t like Deuce Bigelow and Pink Flamingos. Okay. But Roger Ebert didn’t like Beetlejuice, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, A Clockwork Orange, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Gladiator, Napoleon Dynamite, The Professional, and The Usual Suspects. But he did like The Adventures Of Rocky And Bullwinkle, Anaconda, Cars 2, Garfield, Home Alone 3, Land of the Lost, The Phantom Menace, and Speed 2. So what can I conclude? That Roger Ebert and I have different tastes in movie and that me knowing whether or not he liked a movie does not tell me whether or not I will like that movie.
What do I want from a review? The reviewer telling me what the movie is like. I want enough information about the movie so I can then decide if it’s something I want to see. I don’t need information about the reviewer.
I think it was “And to hell it should go.” I am 100% certain I saw that in one of those fat paperbacks with tiny capsule reviews of supposedly every movie ever. Most likely it was in Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide, 1978 edition (this one). Ticked me to no end, as a child.
This is definitely straying from the OP but in Dan Savage’s column he once used Starship Troopers as a metaphor for all of his advice, critiquing the movie along the way.
Warning: NSFW language.
I think it was from Ed Naha’s book “Horrors From Screen To Scream” (1975).
Speaking of TV listings, there’s this classic summary: “Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to kill again."
Classic! See also: “Alien is a movie where nobody listens to the smart woman, and then they all die except for the smart woman and her cat. Four stars.”
This is the greatest, funniest thing I have ever read!