Juweeltjes der afzeikkunst

Ik heb nooit om die man kunnen lachen, kennelijk ben ik niet de enige...

Oh ja, nog enkele:

This tale of a guru who brings joy to all who meet him is the most joy-draining 88 minutes I've ever spent outside a hospital waiting room.

This is the first time we've seen Myers in the flesh since he committed assault and battery on Dr. Seuss, and I wish the cat had stayed in the hat.

Not only does the film stumble badly from one skit to another, the skits themselves have too much dead air.

Charles Shaar Murray's klassieker in NME ergens in de 70s, waarin een album van Yes wordt afgedaan met de kortste recensie aller tijden: No!

Ik ben geen fan van 'alles is k*t' critici en het bovenstaande eerste fragment is een Godwin en dat is natuurlijk een zwaktebod. En je kunt wel zeggen dat de beschaving ten einde komt omdat een bepaalde musical populair is, maar dat slaat helemaal nergens op.

Niettemin een hoogtepunt in het genre: de gevierde Mr. Agreeable, voorheen criticus in Melody Maker:

http://www.mr-agreeable.net/

"Waking up to a breakfast of eggs benedict, wholemeal dry toast, grilled mackerel, low calorie grapefruit juice and a septic tank full of Jamaican overproof rum topped off with a single olive, I lay aside my teak breakfast tray and peruse a selection of periodicals to absorb the latest tidings in the worlds of culture and current affairs. Therein, I read that the classic rock group Led Zeppelin are set to reform.
Insert a f***ing baby shark in me, in what other world but that of “classic rock” could the news that three 60something greying f***ing dried out prunes with f*** all to say or do about anything are going to be trundled back onstage to go through a bunch of self-parodic, geriatric motions that are supposed to remind us of their f***ing former glories? Why don't we just reunite the f***ing Little Rascals, rounded up from their f***ing Florida nursing homes, bathchairs and colostomy bags and all, and get them to re-enact one of their old routines where they go scrumping for apples and wind up getting involved in a f***ing boxcar derby by mistake? The people who put this idea together are stupid c***s, the people onstage are stupider c***s, but the people who are the stupidest c***s of all by far are those who shell out money - actual money, not commemorative, printed up pseudo-money with Robert Plant sitting like f***ing Boadicea on the banknotes to troop along and see these f***ing dessicated arsetwats caterwaul and noodle their way through their bollocktwisting f***ing songs about f***ing elves and shit! God, people were f***ing morons in the f***ing Seventies! The one f***ing evolution forgot! I'm surprised we didn't all end up having f***ing tails again after that f***ing decade!"

"What does it take to shake a movie fan? Whether we are critics or bug-eyed buffs, so many of our evenings are spent in the company of crimes and misdemeanors that we can hardly be blamed for developing the hide of a pachyderm. Just occasionally, something slips through—a thin shudder of monstrosity, enough to remind us of what it means to be afraid. And so it came about, this week, that I gazed at a black screen and saw words so calamitous that they might have been written in my own blood: “Screenplay by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Joel Schumacher.”"

En zo gaat Anthony Lane nog wel even door in The New Yorker. Nog een fragmentje:
"The irony is that, as visual habits go, there is none more threadbare than this brand of subterranean gothic, at once fussy and lumpen, with its frankly unhygienic mixture of lingerie and dungeons. It reminds us that “The Phantom of the Opera” is a period piece, and that the period in question is not 1870 but 1986, when Lloyd Webber first presented his production to the world. We should not be surprised, then, if this bellowing beast of a movie looks and sounds like the extended special-edition remix of a Duran Duran video."

Ik moest destijds vreselijk lachen om de recensie van Vanessa Carlton op "The war against silence". Hij vond "A thousand miles" zo goed (net als ik trouwens):

"I don't know if she picked the distance by deliberately interpolating into the series from the Proclaimers' "I'm Gonna Be" to the Pretenders' "2000 Miles" to Mary Chapin Carpenter's "10,000 Miles", but that's the company into which it enters, for me. [...] Careers have been built on far less; this is, by my calculations, seven times the song Lisa Loeb's "Stay" or Edie Brickell's "What I Am" ever was. I listened to it on a repeat loop several times, back when all I had was the single, and every time it started up again it felt like taking the first bite of another piece of peanut-butter-fudge cheesecake and discovering, against all digestive odds, that I wasn't full yet.[...]

I've also spent the last two months wondering whether Vanessa and/or her handlers really had more than one good idea. Not that, at nineteen or twenty, one song this great isn't already a stunning accomplishment, but this album has ten other songs on it, and if they're all this good, she's a prodigy, but if they aren't she's another should-have-gone-to-college-first tragedy unfolding. Sadly, the other ten are uniformly dreadful. It is not my place to make your judgments for you, obviously, but if you don't trust me, this once, you're going to wish you did. This album is a meticulous demonstration of how you can wreck a perfectly good formula in ten ingeniously different ways."[...]

zie: http://www.furia.com/page.cgi?type=twas&id=twas0379

Essay over Goo goo dolls op dezelfde pagina (over de teloorgang van je eigen hippe smaak) is ook een juweeltje.