… but a review of an album. That I immediately had to buy (was not disappointed), but the review is intriguing on its own. I can’t find the original (Andreas Trolf reviewed for a skateboard magazine in the 90s), but I saved the text of it:
The Flying Club Cup, an LP by Beirut
I’ll level with you: I’m afraid of dying. I guess that’s not really newsworthy, because I suppose we’re all afraid. But why? Why are we so scared? Is it because we don’t know what will happen? Is it the same reason we’re afraid of dark basements and murky lake depths? Just because we simply do not know what is down there, what is in that muck, what happens when our eyes close that one last time? It’s just mute fear of unknowns, and when you parse that inarticulable fear into its most basic components you get what? Nothing. That’s right—we’re all afraid of a big bunch of nothing.
I will do this:
Put on a Beirut album and close my eyes. I will wander through labyrinthine and shadowy streets, into Parisian cafes and Turkish opium dens. I will accuse a man of cheating at backgammon and we will fight to the death with long curving knives. If I die, I die. But if not, I will grab a chorus girl by her waist and yell for the band to play louder and faster. And we will dance like the night will never end.
Beirut is lovely. Accordion, violin, mandolin, and a blue haze of smoke.
It contains no characters of any interest, no dialogue worth hearing, no originality of conception, no ambition other than to pocket the dollars of anyone unlucky enough to go to a movie named “I Still Know What You Did Last Summer.” When a movie begins, I imagine an empty room in my mind that is about to be filled. This movie left the room furnished only with dust and a few dead flies.
I am tempted to say that this Cat should be tied up in a sack and drowned, but I wouldn’t want to condone cruelty to animals, even metaphorically. Cruelty to classic works of children’s literature is bad enough.
The New York Times, years ago, used to have a TV page and had mini-reviews of the movies being shown on the indie channels.
My favorite was for “Land of the Pharaohs” - It sphinx.
My favorite review was of a Robert Ludlum book (not a movie) that appeared in the Wall Street Journal in the late 1980s. I don’t recall which novel, or who reviewed it, but it was hilarious. (Might have been by Walter Monheit).
The reviewer went through and counted the number of exclamation points on every page, then listed the top three totals. Then he said “They look like this:” and put in an unbroken row of twenty seven exclamation points (or however many there were). There was a lot more to it, all fantastically funny.
Famous humorist Robert Benchley also reviewed plays. He was at at the play The Squall when one actress delivered the immortal line “Me Nubi. Nubi good girl. Nubi stay.” Benchley stood up and muttered “Me Benchley. Benchley bad boy. Benchley go.”
Benchley (and others) also had a running feud with the play Abie’s Wild Irish Rose.
Yeah, probably not. This is not a thread about what makes a good or useful review, but about what makes an entertaining or memorable review. It’s more about the art form of reviews than about the service of reviews.
From the late Agony Booth site, the opening statement of their “DS9: Profit and Lace” snark recap:
Summary: Ugh.
Okay, okay. It totally would have been awesome to just leave it at that, but I can’t have my readers left totally in the dark. So here’s the real summary…
A movie like this falls outside ordinary critical language. Is it good or bad? Is there too much melodrama? I don’t have any idea. It triggered too many thoughts of my own for me to have much attention left over for footnotes. I realize, for example, that the movie doesn’t deal in any substantial way with the racial situation in Mississippi in 1942, and I know that Willie’s dad undergoes a rather miraculous transformation, and that Dink seems less like a neighbor than like a symbol of lost innocence. I know those things, but they don’t seem relevant to the actual experience of this movie. If there was ever a day or even a minute when your dog was not your best but your only friend, you’ll see what I mean.
Author and movie critic Leonard Maltin awarded the film one-and-a-half out of four stars, writing that, “As walking-tree movies go, this is at the top of the list.”
Whenever I quote this, someone objects that Lord of the Rings is far better. I must point out that Maltin’s review was written long before Lord of the Rings was filmed.