Category: Terrible Reviews

I’m not an expert in film, TV, or writing. But sometimes I like to pretend I am.

Opinions are Okay, Nonsense Bigoted Politically Insane Opinions Are Not

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Want to give yourself an aneurysm?  Want to feel a blind, all-consuming urge to destroy another human being with your bare hands boil through your veins?  Cruise over to this article by Stephen Webb, entitled “Why Soccer is Un-American”, and give it a read.  I’ll wait.

Okay, disclaimers first.  I don’t know Stephen Webb’s background, but given what I read in this article I’m going to go out on a limb and say he’s one of these more-or-less-lunatic-fringe right wingers that LOVES AMURIKA and wouldn’t piss on the rest of the world if it was on fire.  Seriously, there is so much anti-everything-but-America in this article that I actually vomited a little bit of red, white, and blue after reading it.  Just a little bit.  I also don’t know what an article about soccer is doing in a magazine like Politico, which I don’t read regularly, or in fact ever, but I imagine it’s just one of those topical pieces to fill space in a periodical — hey, we have some space to fill, the World Cup is going on, let’s write about that!  Not that I would know ANYTHING about that on this blarg.  Ahem.

So, in this article, Webb lists a litany of reasons why soccer hasn’t caught on in the US, arguing from the standpoint that sports are “a reflection of national character and aspirations,” which I’ll grant is in a lot of ways true.  But basically, after that first sentence, he deconstructs soccer and our nationalism (the way he sees it) in ways which are frankly bordering on certifiable.  When I first read it, I thought the whole thing was a gag piece, until I read the disclaimer that he himself printed at the bottom which states that the entire article is “non-ironic” except for the ADHD study that he completely made up.  Let’s just start there.  You can’t write a serious piece, one meant to be taken seriously and read intellectually and, presumably, to have a discourse had over it, and then just invent a fake study as one of your supporting points.  Okay?  You just can’t.  But we’ll come to that in time.

Here, then, is a summation his arguments as to why soccer isn’t taking off in the US, and why they are so ridiculous, so insane, so bat-sharknado, poop-flinging crazy that if you read Politico unironically, you should rethink your life decisions which have led you to this point.

  1. There is not enough violence and aggression in soccer to satiate our national bloodlust.  Okay, bloodlust was my word, but it’s certainly implied.  In short, he claims that we love sports like (American) football for the innate violence and aggression that the sport demands.  Two things.  First of all, uh, that’s insane.  We love sports because they’re violent?  Sure, (American) football has its share of warlike, pound-your-neighbor-into-a-pulp-for-no-good-reason behavior, but baseball?  Basketball?  I’d argue that soccer is at least as violent, with the potential for injuries as significant if not more so.  Which is the second point.  These guys (soccer players) are running around a field at top speed with feet flying everywhere wearing virtually no protective gear.  Watching the game, I don’t know how any of the players escape without at least a rolled ankle; compound fractures of the shinbone seem more likely.  How is this not violent enough for us? STUPID x1.
  2. The game is about preventing goals rather than scoring them.  Sorry, but no.  American sports are just the same.  In (American) football, it’s oft-stated that the best offense is a good defense.  There’s a huge premium put on preventing the other team’s scores.  Heck, look at this year’s Super Bowl, where the #1 offense (Denver) met the #1 defense (Seattle).  It wasn’t even close; Seattle embarrassed Denver through superior defense.  And baseball?  Yeah, sorry.  Who’s the most important person on the field during a baseball game?  If you said anybody besides the pitcher, hook up some jumper cables to your nipples and try again.  What’s the pitcher’s job, again?  Oh, that’s right, TO KEEP THE OTHER TEAM FROM SCORING.  Saying that soccer is a defense-oriented sport and that’s why Americans don’t like it is as idiotic as saying that fat-free potato chips are better for you than the regular kind.  You’re fooling yourself.  STUPID x2.
  3. Soccer minimalizes the performance of the individual.  This is getting a bit broken-record here, but let’s look again at American sports.  Football.  Is one man responsible for the victory or defeat of his team?  No.  Baseball?  Ehhhhh… maybe you could say the pitcher is, but it’s a stretch.  Basketball?  I don’t care how good LeBron is, if he doesn’t have competent teammates he’s not winning anything.  They’re all team sports, and typically the best team wins.  Sharknado, look at my hometown Atlanta Falcons.  We’ve got some excellent players, but last season, we were one of the worst teams in the league.  Individual performances do not success make.  THAT SAID, shut up.  Soccer teams have stars.  Pele?  Ronaldinho?  I didn’t even follow soccer and I knew those names.  STUPID x3.
  4. Kicking a ball is not as precise as hitting or throwing it.  Oh my god.  It’s getting really bad now.  Seriously?  Okay, deep breath.  AMERICAN FOOTBALL.  Kicking the ball is a major goldfingered part of the game, precisely because you lose control when you kick it.  You know what you gain?  RAW FARGOING POWER (see #1).  They offer points for a field goal because it’s not easy to kick a ball with control through a set of uprights thirty or forty yards away.  And hitting?  Uh, nope, wrong again. If hitting were precise the scores for baseball games would be in the double digits every game.  And has Webb been watching these World Cup matches, or any professional soccer matches ever?  Tell me there’s no precision in the way those guys can kick.  Are they perfect?  Of course not.  Does luck play a role?  YES, JUST LIKE IN EVERY OTHER SPORT EVER.  STUPID x4.
  5. He made up a study about why soccer is basically only appealing to people with ADHD.  Because watching the ball bounce back and forth stimulates the “lesser humans” in a way that “sophisticated sports” doesn’t.  Seriously.  He said that.  It’s so idiotic I can’t even dissect it.  STUPID x5.

Sorry, Stephe.  Five strikes and you’re out.

There’s more, of course.  He talks about how the sport is “socialist” because of the low scores and the way that nobody really stands out.  About how scoring is an accident rather than by design.  And okay, okay, I get that this is an opinion piece, and just like buttholes, everybody has opinions.  Also, this is the internet, so everybody (even me!) can share his opinion just as easily as the next guy, no matter how stupid it is.  The problem I really have with this article is not that Webb (obviously) hates soccer: hates it so passionately that it’s not enough for him not to watch it, he wants you not to watch it either (narcissist).  The problem I have is that he takes all this, all his idiotic mouth-foaming ill-informed illogical hate and then goes and makes it political.

Don’t like soccer?  That’s fine.  But it’s no less American than any other sport, certainly not for any of the reasons he’s listed.  And it’s not a lesser sport, no matter how you slice it.  It’s just not popular in America, and do you know why?  Because we’re not exposed to it.  Check the statistics.  Viewership for this World Cup is through the roof and breaking records left and right because the sport is compelling to watch.  Why have we not been exposed, then?  BECAUSE ADVERTISERS CAN’T PUT ENOUGH OF THEIR BRIGHTLY-COLORED PSYCHO-VOMIT INTO YOUR FACE DURING A MATCH.  Seriously.  That’s it.  There are no breaks during a match except for halftime, and that means no ads.  No ads means no money, and no money means the networks aren’t showing it.

The only way soccer is Un-American is that it isn’t peppered with two-minute breaks for you to get off your donk and go get another beer or tray of chips or buffalo wing.  You know, during the time-out or the pitcher substitution or the instant replay review or the inning change or the scoring time-out or the offense/defense changeover or the injury time-out or the rain delay.

On YA Lit: Should Adults Be Embarrassed to Read It?

Pavowski4 Comments

There’s apparently been a bit of a stir lately over this article on Slate condemning adult consumers of Young Adult Literature.  To condense, the author over there, one Ruth Graham, feels (rather strongly) that YA lit is strictly for YAs and if you’re not a YA then you shouldn’t be reading YA lit.

Okay, that’s perhaps an intentional oversimplification, but the argument is simple.  As an author, you must know your audience.  (An interesting comment for me to make given my schizophrenia lately over exactly who my audience for AI might be.)  And an author writing for young adults presumably makes different choices in their stories than an author writing for adults, whether it’s simplifying plots and making characters’ choices more transparent, using saucier or more elevated language, or even the entire subject matter of the story.  So the author is writing for a specific group of people (though that group might itself be incredibly diverse).

Let’s just take that on its face.  Say you’re an accomplished author, and you write your book about robot-fighting tree-farmers in post-carbon-emissions formerly-known-as-America.  (Don’t steal that, it’s MINE.)  But you write it specifically from the point of view of, and full of the lingo of, and bulging with references to, let’s say, south Floridian retirees.  Why would you make such a choice?  This is the strange and wonderful land of Hypothetica, just keep your hands and feet inside the chopper.Read More »

8 Reasons Why Vibrams are Awesome, No Matter What the Lawsuit Says

Pavowski8 Comments

I wrote yesterday about Vibrams and why I’m not going to apply for my portion of the class-action suit against them (and why you shouldn’t either, for that matter).  But I got so angry and sidetracked thinking about how dumb the whole situation is that I didn’t have the time left over to talk about why the VFFs are awesome.  Nope, not just awesome, why the VFFs are my favorite shoe that isn’t a shoe.

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Follow Me Over This Cliff (Or, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon’s Fading Star)

PavowskiLeave a comment

Last time I did this was fun.  Let’s have another terrible review of a terrible entertainment option.  Today’s target?

The Following.

Spoiler Alert, etc, etc.  Here I’ll be talking about the show, its characters, its plotlines, up through the current episode.  If that’s troubling to you, this is the point at which you should turn off your computer and rethink your life, because if you’re able to be significantly upset by prematurely learning some vague details about a show that you’re watching after the party, perhaps the decisions that brought you to this point were not the best ones.  (Though if you’re still watching the show, I doubt if there’s much I could spoil for you, as the show spoils itself by virtue of running headlong into virtually every cliche in the suspense/crime procedural/gritty hero/criminal mastermind genre simultaneously.)  That said, if you don’t watch The Following, there probably isn’t very much here for you.

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Anchorman? More Like Stankorman, Am I Right?

PavowskiLeave a comment

Apparently, even though I’m going to be writing about a movie that hit theaters months ago, I should still write SPOILER ALERT because I’ll be talking about a film that some of you out there may not yet have seen and may yet be planning to see, so that I do not ruin your cinematic experience.  So here you are: in the following post, I will be writing about Anchorman 2, and I mention some things that happen in it.  If this damages your enjoyment in any way, I assure you, it will only be in that I kept the film from disappointing you in its own right.

I should say outright that with only a few exceptions, I do not get mired in brands when it comes to celebrities.  Meaning, I have very little loyalty to one star or another.  Movie stars, larger than life though they may be, are at the end of the day simple human beings like the rest of us, and are therefore prone to making the same errors in judgment that the rest of us make.  What I do have is movie star brand disloyalty, which makes me avoid certain personalities like the plague (I’m looking at you, Seth Rogen.  Do you ever play a role that is in any way unlike every other role you have ever played ever?  Are they even roles?  Fie!).  That, however, is another blarg for another day.

So, no brand loyalty with a few notable exceptions.  I tend to be willing to try out anything featuring Leonardo DiCaprio.  (He’s just so dreamy.)  Sandra Bullock I find to be another safe bet.  See, I think this, and then I start to write about it, and then I start to actually analyze it, and I realize that these are stars which tend toward drama.  Comedy is a fickle beesting (more gouda there, use your imagination).  I don’t have any comedy loyalties.  I WISH I DID.  I really do.  I read a great quote a few years back from my Spirit Guide, Douglas Adams, about how comedy used to be like a delightful spring rainshower – rare, refreshing, and awesome – but recently it’s just everywhere, pooling in muddy puddles and just generally making you damp.  I mangled the words but I think I preserved the feeling.  Everybody does comedy now.  Even I am trying to do comedy of a sort here at the blarg.  You can find it anywhere, which means it’s no longer surprising, which takes away one of the critical elements of comedy.  If you expect something to be funny, you dramatically decrease the chance that it actually will be.

One of the reasons I specifically try to avoid Movie Star Brand Loyalty (MSBL) is that it leads to Crappy Sequels You Didn’t Really Need (CSYDRNs).   Hey, we made this movie featuring this movie star and it was hugely successful, let’s make another one to capitalize on it, HEY for that to work we need the original movie star back again, even if that doesn’t make terrific sense for the world of the story, but who cares because MONEY.

Which brings me to the point.  Wife and I saw Anchorman 2 this weekend past.

Allow me to clarify that I like (but do not love) the original Anchorman.  It’s absurd, satirical, nonsensical and, often, funny, but above all else it’s telling a story that’s worth telling.  You’ve got the idiotic Ron Burgundy, whose character flaws get him first into trouble, then fired, and his journey to atone for his mistakes drives the story forward until at the end he’s on top of the world again.  A nice, neat little Rags-to-Riches ride.  It’s got its bizarre moments – I’m thinking back to the scene where Ron and Veronica (?) hallucinate and go riding around on cartoon unicorns – but they are sprinkled in like raisins in a good raisin bread.  You don’t get one in every bite, so you appreciate it when you do get one (what a horrible simile; I mean, who likes raisin bread?  EW.).  The story holds the film together, and the absurd bits add flavor.  Not a great film, but a good one.  It works.  It meets commercial success.

So they make another one.

In this one, the co-star (and now, wife) gets promoted and Ron gets fired (again).  He breaks up with her over it (again).  He rounds up his crew and comes up with an all new way of doing the news (again).  There’s a brawl in a public park with rival news crews (again.  Granted, this bit is still funny, but only because of the sheer scope of actors they got to cameo in it).  There is absolutely nothing new in the story, which is the first stroke of the hammer.

Then, the absurdist moments that added flavor and texture to the first film are the backbone of this film, which is to say that the film moves from one nonsensical moment to the next without giving the audience time to catch its breath or figure out how (or in many cases if) the events they just saw connect to the whole.  Spoiler alert: they don’t.  Ron racially and sexually harasses the new black lady boss?  Nothing comes of it.  She gets mad and the story goes on.  Ron and his friends forget who’s driving the car and wreck it on the way across country?  Yep, next scene, there they are at work, no further mention of the car accident, no ill effects for any of the characters.  Ron loses his sight in a freak ice-skating accident (no, he didn’t put his eye out, he’s just magically blind now) and, while blind and in exile, rescues and raises a shark to maturity.  Do you think the shark ends up saving his life or playing any role in the story?  Perhaps saving him from a rampaging murderous squid-demon?  Spoiler Alert: it doesn’t.

Anyway, we watched this travesty of a film and then looked at each other and sighed a mutual disappointed sigh.  I honestly wonder if the film was made, not as a money-making venture (though it certainly made money, apparently it’s pulled in over $110 million now, per Forbes, which is significantly more than the original), but as a sociological experiment.  The premise of this experiment would be: How Bad Can We Make This Movie And Still Have People Come To See It?

The story writing is atrocious.  The character development and growth is nonexistent.  The humor is tepid.  (The funniest moment in the film, the cameo-laden park brawl, is freeze-dried and repackaged from the first with fancier celebrities — how they got Will Smith in there is beyond me.)  There’s a bit in there that’s almost clever wherein the film lampoons 24-hour news networks, but it’s over before it gets rolling.  It is, in short, a terrible movie on virtually every level that movies should be concerned with.

And it still made money.  Like, a lot of money.

I am of two minds about this.

First of all, Hollywood doesn’t give a steaming sharknado about its audience’s intelligence.  They will make what sells, which means pander to MSBL and make a movie we already recognize and don’t, DON’T, push the boundaries.  (How many Fast & Furious movies are there now?  Eighteen, right?  And aren’t we on Saw Forty-Seven?)

The second mind, however, is hopeful.

Because if a pile of fetid donkey turds like Anchorman 2 can be commercially successful, then maybe there’s hope for a schlub like me.