One of my favorite snarky movie review posts was back in 2000, on a now-defunct blog called At Swim Two Birds, named after a literary novel. It was a collection of reviews of the truly execrable movie, Battlefield Earth. The blogger had collected a series of reviews from newspaper movie reviewers, and linked and excerpted them.
I remember two bits from those reviews. In the first, Roger Ebert said that the director used a tilted camera in some shots because he had seen that other directors used tilted cameras, but he obviously didn’t know why the other directors had used them.
In the second bit, which was in the final review quoted, and the one that made me fall off the couch in helpless laughter, the reviewer, whose name I don’t recall, opened the review by saying that he had held off for a week after the film’s debut prior to writing his review, and that, in cases like this one, where every review was scathing, it was often tempting to say that the movie wasn’t actually all that bad. He said he couldn’t do that with Battlefield Earth, “because I would be lying.”
This is a restaurant review, not a movie review, but I giggled throughout it, and just had an incredibly wonderful time reading it.
I will not be eating at this restaurant.