Discussing books on movies … almost as good as watching them, and without the sticky floors!
A few days ago I was on my way out of BOOKGASM’s HQ when I heard a voice calling out my name. “Mott!” cried the voice. “Get your butt over here! I need to talk to you!” I turned and saw that I was being addressed by Ryun Patterson, whose cheekily amusing WEEKEND REGASM column is a highlight of all of our Sundays.
“What can I do for you, Ryun?” I asked as I made my way into his cramped and cluttered office, which was filled with a surprising amount of Hello Kitty merchandise.
“I want to talk about your columns,” he told me. “They’re pretty damn good — hell, the last one made me weep — but I think they could be better!”
“Really? How so?”
“What you have to understand is that people don’t visit our site because they care about books. They come here because they’re fascinated by the glamorous lives of our reviewers. They could care less about what you have to say about the autobiography of some floozy actress they’ve never heard of — they want to know all about you!”
“Are you sure?” I asked, wondering if maybe he was having fun at my expense.
“I’m positive,” he insisted as he picked up a nearby Beanie Baby and began stroking it slowly against his cheek.
At that point, I found myself becoming vaguely creeped out by the encounter and decided it was time to go. But as I walked out of the site’s Frank Gehry-designed building, I decided that Ryun was right and that I should include even more personal anecdotes in my columns than I had before.
To that end I would like to tell you about my reaction to a reader review recently posted on Amazon for my book GOTHIC GHOST STORIES (Note: The awful cover you see on that page is not the cover that the book was eventually released with, thank Jebus). Of all my books, that particular title remains one of my top five personal favorites, so you could imagine my disappointment when the reviewer deigned to give it only two stars out of five and labeled it as being “Pretty Mediocre.”
But as I read the short review, my disappointment quickly turned into stunned amazement, caused by this sudden metamorphosis: “Without really knowing anything about the author beyond reading the book (including the dedication and foreword), I would have to say that Mott is in love with Goth Girls, and with being one herself, and that conceit weakens every story line, turning downright smug in ‘The Girl in the Water.’”
Spot the error in this conclusion? While I admit that I am indeed quite fond of ladies of the Gothic persuasion, I myself have never been one, owing to the facts that: a) I was born with a penis, and b) I’ve never possessed the kind of figure that would allow me to get away with wearing a black lace corset.
The reason I bring this up is not just because it allows me to discuss my favorite subject — me, me, wonderful ME — but because it illustrates a key problem with the art of criticism in the age of the Internet: Stupid people have opinions, too, and this damn technology allows the dumbfucks to express them as if they actually meant something.
Wait, that sounded kinda bitter and mean-spirited. Maybe I should start talking about a book now. Gimme a second while I try and find one that is a propos. Ah, here’s one. In his 2000 book entitled I HATED, HATED, HATED THIS MOVIE, the most famous film critic of our time, Roger Ebert, assembled together the reviews of (what he felt were) the worst movies he had been paid to sit through during the course of his career. The result is a book that will have you alternately laughing out loud with pleasure as he eviscerates a well-deserving cinematic monstrosity and then screaming with a white-hot furious rage as he does the same to your own particular favorite misunderstood masterpiece.
The problem is that there’s a lot of filler in between these emotional passages, since the book features the critic’s takes on as many forgotten films of the “meh” variety as it does reviews of infamous Hollywood disasters and/or truly brilliant films that Ebert lacked the vision to properly appreciate at the time he saw them. And while it is certainly fun reading his dissection of the expository absurdities of Peter Hyams’ Arnold Schwarzenegger Armageddon-fest END OF DAYS, you’re far more likely to remember his horribly misguided review for Paul Bartel’s DEATH RACE 2000 — one of the best and most prescient science fiction satires the ’70s ever produced — in which he barely deigns to discuss the film, after giving it zero stars, so that he instead could lament the fact that young children were in attendance at the screening of the R-rated film.
The book also includes the famous review he wrote for Meir Zarchi’s controversial 1978 revenge drama I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE. For many years, this was the title he named when he was asked on talk shows what the worst film he had ever seen was. While I have to respect his feelings about the movie, as much as I may disagree with them, it is troubling to read the review and discover that — like he did with DEATH RACE — he chooses not to review the film itself, but rather the uncomfortably vocal audience with whom he saw it.
I, too, would be disturbed if I heard men shout words of encouragement to a quartet of rapists onscreen as they brutalized a female character, but I doubt I would go so far as to assume that this was the response the filmmakers actually intended. But since the film is a low-budget B-movie and not, say, THE ACCUSED (which, his website just informed me, he gave three stars upon its release), Ebert assumes its intentions deliberately must be misogynistic.
And it is this obvious disdain for B-movie/exploitation/low-budget genre films that ultimately saps much of the fun out of what should be an entertaining book. While his occasional championing of such classics as THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, EVIL DEAD II: DEAD BY DAWN and THE DEVIL’S REJECTS would suggest a broader mind, the bulk of HATED ultimately suggests that his tastes are little different than those of the stereotypical foreign-film-lovin’, grindhouse-hatin’ movie critics so many of us have come to loathe over the years.
Now, having just reread the paragraphs above, I realize that I’ve written a bad review for a book of bad reviews that I chose to review after complaining about receiving a bad review. I really hope a lot of you are high right now, because if you are, I just totally blew your minds.
You’re welcome. –Allan Mott
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