Monday, June 12, 2006

The opposite opinion

Sometimes the best way to decide if you want to see a movie is too see what the worst critic thinks of the film and do the opposite.

Kyle Smith, a Yalie reviewing for the New York Post, is becoming that critic. This seems most explicit on political films, where he can be clueless and make a total ass of himself.

He is not the perfect contra-predictor that the Houston Press had long ago, a psycho art chick, but he has a good start. I wonder if it is worthwhile going through the Rotten Tomatoes database and seeing if there is someone usually totally wrong?

Good movies I have seen fairly recently in no particular order:
Mystic Pizza (very young Julie Roberts and other excellent cast)
Collateral - (surprisingly good)
An Inconvenient Truth - (fantastic)
The Big Buy - How Tom DeLay Stole Congress - (good)
Outland (holds up very well)
What the Bleep Do I Know (good)
X-Men 3 - (Like the finale in a good comic book series - suspend your logic, but the preceding movies are a bit better.)
The Incredibles - (right mixture of fun and excitement)
March of the Penguins - (I wanted to like it more than I did but it about put me to sleep)
Serenity - (very good stand alone, get the Firefly series as well)
True Romance - (Tarantino's version of a love story)

Not recommended
The BreakUp (I didn't think it was as bad as Pat did but it was an unromantic mildly-comic romantic comedy. It held my interest but seemed more like a made-for-TV movie that couldn't decide to lean toward comedy or to drama. I couldn't decide what made this movie so popular, at least its first week, considering other somewhat similar movies that have bombed. Aniston looked pretty good in this film but gave only an adequate performance.)
Four Rooms (Supposed to be a director's showcase with bad direction. inspired by a Jerry Lewis movie.)

So bad it's good
Core
Battlefield Earth
Bubba Ho-tep (might not belong in this category)
Emmanuelle in Space (soft porn series collection with nice looking scenery and people and a computer voice-over in key scenes "The captain's higher brain functions down 40%")

Here is Joe Bob Briggs, Drive In Movie Critic of Grapevine, Texas, review of the World of Desire set and a history of Emanuelle and Emmanuelle movies. There is a 7 DVD set of the series. The star of the European Emmanuelle series, Krista Allen, appeared on the HBO series unscripted.


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1 comment:

Gary said...

I forgot V for Vendetta (fantastic) and probably some others.