Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Criticwatch - A full hour of At the Movies

Erik Childress from Criticwatch found that avoiding At the Movies has unintended consequences--you just have to watch a full hour of the show later. I can definitely sympathize--I try to avoid taping the show out of fear that I'll waste my life away watching it multiple times just to get the quotes right.

First, Erik catches another name-drop that I missed. On Cadillac Records, Ben says, "I thought Columbus Short was very authentic as the harmonica player, Little Walter, in a really breakout performance . . .”

Would you believe that Ben and Columbus are buddies in real life! Of course you would . . .


Erik continues:

Another new regular to watch out on the show is breaking bad on the trailers they hyped weeks earlier. This may never happen again considering all the criticism they’ve received for the Twilight “3 to see” debacle. But this week they came down hard on Oscilloscope’s Wendy and Lucy.

That's correct--after recommending we watch the trailer for Twilight, they actually showed the trailer for Wendy and Lucy, only to tell us later that the movie sucked. Thanks guys, way to make good use of the time on your show.

Finally, Erik quotes Ben on Doubt:

“You know what’s frustrating in the film though, Mank? You don’t get to hear the little boy’s side of the story at all and I felt like he was kinda pushed to the side and was almost an afterthought even though he’s the subject of the film.”

Erik responds:

We don’t get to hear the little boy’s side of the story? The subject of the film? . . . Did you feel cheated when JFK didn’t tell you who the killer was? I don’t believe the movie’s title was Spelled Out. The whole point of the film is that we don’t know what happened. If we heard it from the boy’s mouth, then the film has no point . . . This may go down in 2008 as the dumbest specific thing you have ever said about a singular film.


I have to say, I think it is hard to beat saying that Goldeneye is his favorite Bond movie because he liked the video game. But it's a good point--it sounds to me more like a bad excuse to dislike the movie than anything else. And on that point--we don't need it spelled out for us! The boy's feelings are written all over his face and it still doesn't tell us what really happened. That is what is so deceptive and painful about the whole thing.

Read the full article here

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Whenever I see Benny Boy and that enormous dumb grin of his, I want to smack something. Something like Ben Lyons' face. That picture makes me want to puke.

Do you think he's had plastic aurgery? I'd lay money down that he has. Something about his face just does not seem natural.

Anonymous said...

"Something about his face just does not seem natural."

Maybe it's because he's the child of Jeffrey Lyons and a jackal?