Monday, March 9, 2009

At the Movies - B-list film critic

Lyons: Why would I save film criticism when I no longer have any stake in it?
Mank: Do it for me.

After a pretty bad run this calendar year, Ben Lyons seemed to avoid making a complete fool of himself this week on At the Movies, although to his benefit there were no tweeny-bopper concert movies premiering for him to gush over. But he still found a way to act like a jerk in his description of the lead character in The Great Buck Howard:

Lyons: He carries himself like a high maintenance A-list Hollywood star, a lot like Mank. The problem is, he's not. A lot like Mank.

What a charmer. For a guy who desperately wants to be accepted by the A-List crowd to say this about a guy who is an admitted grumpy old man who doesn't like going out and partying, this comes off as less than endearing. Little did he realize that he seemed to be talking about his own show later in the segment:

Lyons: I just love seeing a buddy film between two guys you would never pair together, this aging entertainer and this young guy at a crossroads in his life.

Not unlike Ben's introverted comments about Frost/Nixon.

Another oddity--for the second week in a row, Mank's 3 To See included a film that the show has yet to review. Is this a way to squeeze in an extra movie when they do not have time? If so, they could have avoided a second review of Watchmen this week. But it seems more consistent with the show's ignoring lesser known independent and foreign films like Waltz with Bashir.

Not that it was all bad, though. This week, they finally cleaned up the DVD segment by calling it 'DVD Out Now' rather than the awkwardly worded and punctuated 'DVD "Out Now" List'.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

That photoshop is scarier than seeing Dr. Manhattan's blue junk.

Anonymous said...

Scott, I hope you were being ironic when calling Mank a grumpy old man. He's older than you, yeah, but someone in his early 40s is not an "old man".

Except to Ben Lyons.

Scott said...

I was referring to Mank calling himself a grumpy old man in his review of the Jonas Brothers movie. Also, he said he does not like going out (ie partying) in the AP article.

By the way, many of my friends have called me a grumpy old man since I was in my early 20s, so I don't necessarily think of it as a horrible insult and found it endearing when Mank called himself that.