The odds of me ever watching a movie are about the same as having a sex change yet I read film reviews. It’s a curiosity but nearly always they seem to be scathing, doubtless justified.
The Dominion Post’s James Croot is a special delight on this score. Outlining the plot of a recent Russell Crowe effort, he opens with, “…Rachel Flynn (the heroine) might be having a bad morning but her day and the audience’s next 90 minutes are about to get a whole lot worse.”
And further on he describes the film as cliché ridden, and quoting from Hobbes, “nasty, brutish and not short enough.” Croot is a highly amusing wordsmith although given his abuse he’s also a masochist, choosing to sit through watching these efforts. Mind you, that’s not unusual. It’s been my observation, particularly with medical specialists and lawyers, that an awful lot of people are bored witless with their career choice by middle-age, yet soldier on.
The lawyers get grumpy and concentrate on taking it out on the cause of their anger, namely their clients, with imaginative fee creationism. For the medical specialists it’s much happier, they periodically killing their customers in revenge, and who can blame them.
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Not true. You have now been noted wearing those stylish jeans in the back row of Miramar’s Roxy theatre on at least three recent Saturdays, most recently at Mary Poppins.
Many decades ago a Time review concluded, “This is the kind of movie that gives failure a bad name.”
Oh yes how the legal boys can get down to it and they always seem to top their best endeavours with an invoicing line of”printing,stationary ,stamps and consumables (EST)”to which I cheerfully reply to the underlined section please itemise and unsurprisingly this is immediately promoted as an oversight by the office lady and promptly slashed from the account with profuse apologies and the comment we are not trying to nickel and dime you to insolvency.
Further If you knew what those of us with a medical or surgical bent had to put up with on a daily basis a propensity to revenge is understandable.
There is more bullshit put about by arty types than in any other endeavour and although many cant believe you could make some of this guff up It is of course a disguised plea for funding for those unable to fund themselves and their fellow officionardos who often are devoid of real talent
When I was CFO at SPAR Australia we were using a lawyer’s address as our registered office. The lawyer charged us $55 every time they opened a letter for SPAR and sent it to us. He stopped doing that after I sent him a bill for $200 for me to investigate what the cost was for.
I can relate to the enjoyability of well written scathing reviews of an “artform” you aren’t even interested in. I recommend Michael Connor in “Quadrant” Magazine, a regular reviewer of Performance “Theatre” which now is largely a vomit-inducing bastion of woke. Connor’s reviews must surely be some kind of pinnacle of achievement of the art of ridicule. And like you say, an element of masochism must be required to endure the performances he reviews; but he’s probably getting frissons of enjoyment about what he knows he can say about what he’s seeing, for the enjoyment of his readers like me….