Favorite Movie Review quotes

As Gaspar Noé taught us, the gates to hell can be found inside raunchy gay clubs. It's to one such disco inferno that the Woman goes to slit her wrists. Was it the popper fumes and the slutty Gaultier tank tops that drove her into the abyss? Nope: "Because I'm a woman" will suffice. Luckily, a concerned Man (Rocco Siffredi) intervenes, helps bandage her up, and chaperones her on a stroll through her murky Walpurgisnacht. Woman thanks Man with a blow job and a job offer. As an "impartial" audience, she'll pay him to spend several nights at her cliffside mansion critiquing her exposed flesh. "Watch me where I'm unwatchable."

The key word here, in more ways than one, is "unwatchable." What follows is a quasi-Sadean scenario spread - and I do mean spread - over three nights. The first night vividly one-ups Gustave Courbet's epochal crotch-canvas, The Origin of the World, and posits a bold companion piece, Finger-banging the Origin of the World. Night two dispenses with dialogue ("Your words are inept reproaches!") before sounding the swampy depths of the Woman's unmentionables with a garden tool-cum-tuning fork. Night three is an extended meditation on the use of bloody tampons as tea bags. We can be thankful, at least, that the Woman doesn't offer "biscuits." Meanwhile, the ocean outside is "roiling like a bitch in heat," and audiences are starting to roll their eyes.

Personally, as a member of the so-called impartial fraternity, I haven't had this much exposure to a vulva since I was born. So let me come clean: the moist, hairy spectacles of Anatomy of Hell made me say, "Ew!" Busted, homo! Breillat's honorable, if cartoonishly executed, idea here may be to deconstruct this "ew" through the Siffredi surrogate, to verbalize the suppressed thoughts of those who find girl-bits a "malevolent frivolity." And these would be what? Rapists? Psychopaths? Bisexuals? Skanky Italian porn stars? Men in general? Maybe beneath our civilized veneer all men have an urge to ring the thing in lipstick, sodomize the brown bunny, revel in the icky compulsion of the female mess. Maybe, ladies, when your gay says, "Cute skirt!" what he really means is, "You have a froglike obscenity between your legs."

http://memegenerator.net/Instances/924/What-Would-Crowley-Do-A-DOUBLE-ROCK-RYE-AND-SEVEN-CARLINGS.jpg

thats a good review of 'anatomy of hell' up there, eric

"It seems sort of pointless at this juncture to keep kicking at Uwe Boll--indeed, there's a minor backlash against all the lash, most of it dedicated to defending the Kraut Ed Wood along the lines of his latest, the excrescent BloodRayne, as being only as bad as ordinary bad films and not as bad as getting your eyelid caught on a nail."

-Walter Chaw

This one KILLED me:

A.O. Scott again, on Mike Myers' "The Love Guru":

"An experience that makes you wonder if you will ever laugh again."

"If the contest was about who can be the dullest, Bale would win hands down. His belligerent, resentful facial expression is that of a stunned ox, or a vexed moose, or a rhino that thinks it's overheard someone calling its mum a slag."

P Bradshaw on Christian Bale's actorly charisma.

Still have to bow to N. Lee's, johnny.

I spent a few minutes last night trying to dig up what I thought was a Dwight Macdonald quote about celebrity cameos in biblical epics. Couldn't find it--might have been Stanley Kauffmann instead, I'll take another look.

surprised to find no john simon so dug up two blurbs about cybill shepherd that came to mind:

(from his at long last love review) - Cybill Shepherd, Mr B's inamorata, plays a poor little snotty rich girl with a notion of sophistication that is underpassed onIy by her acting ability. (I will not even sully my pen by making it describe her singing and dancing.) If it weren't for an asinine superciliousness radiating from her, Miss Shepherd would actually be pitiable, rather like a kid from an orphanage trying to play Noel Coward. In fact, she comes across like one of those inanimate objects, say, a cupboard or a grandfather clock, which is made in certain humorous shorts to act, through trick photography, like people. Well, Bogdanovich is truly in love with Miss Shepherd, so one cannot call his slapping her into the lead of almost every one of his films the casting-couch approach; yet even those crude old-time producers who did have the crassness to use that method at least had the good sense to cast the girl, not the couch.

(from his hilarious taxi driver review)(he hated it) - The fact that she is played by the supremely untalented Cybill Shepherd, who here sinks to new depths of unblinking smugness coupled with prefabricated come-hither inflections, adds further layers of needless obscurity. Her presence is not even a tribute to Scorsese's healthy appetites: having gained weight, most noticeably in the face, she looks like Mussolini in drag.

Armond has some catching up to do.

"If the contest was about who can be the dullest, Bale would win hands down.

otm

I've seen this trailer a few times, and at 1:29 there's what has to be one of my favourite movie-review quotes ever:

"A must watch...for everyone who wears clothes."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fmwd8Nf1lc

"His thrillers pose the question: What is a man? A thief, a cop, an assassin: That might be what he does—but is that what he is? Is he free to choose, or does a man gotta do what a man’s gotta do? One thing that’s clear is that Mann’s gotta do what Mann’s gotta do, and that’s give these pointy-headed conundrums a throbbing backbeat and the moodiest visuals in Hollywood. Men’s fashion magazines have followed this director ever since his Miami Vice days. The way he frames his characters to bring out both their alienation and their glamour makes you think, “That is God’s loneliest man—and where can I get that suit?”"

Using this in place of a "Worst Pull Quote Ever" thread...From the trailer I saw today for The Boy and the Heron: "A tool to heal our collective souls." (No comment intended on the film itself.)

I think Schoolly-D affixed something similar to the shrink-wrap on his first LP.

Obvious pandering to fans of Tool and/or Collective Soul.