For all those proclaiming The Death of the Newspaper Movie Critic…we give you: Rex Reed’s artful evisceration of Funny People in the current issue of the New York Observer. Bam.
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If that's the best defense of The Newspaper Movie Critic available, you should start working on the obituary. The problem is that the job of a movie critic is not artful evisceration but, well, movie criticism. And however skilled Reed might be at the former, he's pretty lousy at the latter. Even ignoring his frequent factual errors, he often seems almost proud when he exclaims how poorly he understood one of his targets for evisceration, and unfortunately, often proves his exclamations to be accurate.
Oh, and then there's the fact that he began his review of Oldboy with: "For sewage in a cocktail shaker, there is Oldboy, a noxious helping of Korean Grand Guignol as pointless as it is shocking. What else can you expect from a nation weaned on kimchi, a mixture of raw garlic and cabbage buried underground until it rots, dug up from the grave and then served in earthenware pots sold at the Seoul airport as souvenirs?"
Yuck.
#1 Posted by Anon, CJR on Wed 5 Aug 2009 at 02:03 AM
Anon is right. Rex Reed getting in some good zingers after seeing a movie he was guaranteed to hate is no sign that The Newspaper Movie Critic is alive and well. You shouldn't look to the Weekly Standard for challenging, credible commentary on the state of the arts today, and you shouldn't look to Rex Reed for anything resembling vitality or vigor.
#2 Posted by Mollie, CJR on Wed 5 Aug 2009 at 08:31 PM