Criticwatch - The Lyons Experience

Erik Childress at Criticwatch gives us the Ben Lyons quote of the week from At the Movies:

Lyons: And you really do lose yourself in these characters and yes it jumps around and the narrative can be a little difficult to follow. But when it does come together, there’s a sense of ahhhh, this is interesting. I see why now how it connects and I’m ready to move forward with the story.

Then Erik continues:

After finally running his positive/negative batting average to .500 on the year, it was a five “see it” show for Ben Lyons this week. Four of those “see it”s I’ve seen for myself and three of them are definite “skip it”s. I don’t play the “rent it” game. The only one worth anyone’s adult time is Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience, which I’m actually shocked Lyons recommended after his fervent panning of last year’s Synecdoche, New York . . . He spends half his allotted time going through Soderbergh’s IMDB page and the other half-heartedly responding to Mank’s assertion that the fractured timeline hurt the film for him. Nothing to say about Sasha Grey’s performance. Nothing about it being set during the last Presidential election. Nothing to say about it’s a thinly-veiled guise for the world of art and film criticism. Those elements probably flew right over his head. He left it to Mank to get in talk about the film’s economical ironies. When people ask why we continue to give Lyons such a hard time, it’s for reasons like this. He doesn’t have the critical faculties necessary to discuss film. Even on the films that should be right up his little hypeboy alley – like Terminator Salvation.


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