If You Think I’m Going to Give Your ^$&*#! Movie a Good Review, Then *%#@! You!

    There's a reason why writers hate Amazon. Oh, trust me, overall we think it's fantastic with the selling of the books and the mathematically improbable sales ranking list that many a greenhorn scribe has lost their freaking mind trying to track their own work on. But if you want to find on topic to make your typical cozie matron shrill up and spit fire, talk about reader reviews. At times, Amazon resembles a shopping mall during Xmas- one in which the security guards have been given pink slips and where roving gangs of twelve-year-olds spray paint graffiti on the nearest Banana Republic before dropping their trousers in the Foto Friends kiosk.

    The problem specifically are people who live to give bad reviews to a product for imbecilic reasons such as:

1. I hate the author.
   
2. I only like genre X, so any work that is not genre X has made a major failing of not living to my expectations.
   
3. I really hate the author.
   
4. So-called "book" required me to "read." Not available in easy "osmosis" form.
   
5. I really liked the book; truly a literary feat that will stand the test of time. But the cover art sucked.
   
6. Did I mention I hate the author?
   

The curious thing is that many a writer, at least the ones who don't frolic in vaults full of money like Stephen King or Nicholas Sparks, actually spends time wondering why this is- why when people read a good book they often have to be prompted to saying anything positive on an online forum, while they'll stay in a burning building just a few moments longer to drop a few more metaphorical and superlative stink bombs ("Your book sucks only slightly less than Osama bin Laden. And that's on a good day."). This shouldn't be a mystery- particularly to people who write. We're writers- we like mixing up drama. We enjoy taking the hopes and dreams of people and loading them into a blender with a banana and ice and making an ennui smoothie. It's what we do.

For a period of a couple of years I regularly posted movie reviews on my website. Regular has now become few and far between, but there was one force of nature I was, and still am, aware of: it was a lot more fun to a bad review than a good one. Seriously. I look at some of the movies I lauded "A" or "A+" grades onto and I look at some of the most difficult reviews I ever had to spew out. I look at some of the movies I handed, decapitated, on an "F" silver platter and I see where I was in the zone. Trust me, like the Merchant of Venice we want our pound of flesh when we've been insulted, robbed, and bludgeoned on the head, which anyone who has seen it knows Catwoman is very effective at doing. We want to praise great work, but have trouble finding the words, but there's no limit to the words ascribed to the dog poo pile in the corner.

In that vein, when it comes to movies it feels like all of 2008 I've been walking behind a St. Bernard who was recently fed chili. I can think of, and probably count on one hand, the number of great movies I've seen this year. The smattering of good-to-OK ones gets lost in the fog.

But the bad ones? They've been hanging around like the Ghost of Christmas Past whose home just got foreclosed.

For example, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Steven Spielberg, the bit-empty showman who finally grew up to make masterworks like Schindler's List and Munich reminded us that while there might be one great story in each and every one of us, the black hole from which we pull the stinkers is limitless. To be honest, I had to grow to like the Indiana Jones movies- Raiders of the Lost Ark is still on my list as one of the Most Overrated Movies of All Time (repeat this again with your voice in a cool echo). But Kingdom acted less like an Indiana Jones movie and more like one of its knock-offs, probably indistinguishable from any future Friedberg and Seltzer-inspired spoof named Adventure Movie. We know Mr. Get Off My Plane! Harrison Ford hasn't been into playing the lovable type lately, but the crotchety hum-drumness was only one step from having Indiana Jones shouting at kids to get off his lawn.

Then there were the strange bedfellows; this was the year that got me thinking about everything Nicholas Sparks and the Saw movies have in common. This year brought us Saw V, although it might make for less work for Lionsgate typesetters if they just called every sequel from now on Saw X (the X not standing for the Roman numeral ten, but the algebraic variable, since any number can be placed in it without changing the result). I was never into the series- the first two were curious but mediocre shock flicks, but I threw up my hands (along with my lunch) around the time of Saw III. It wasn't as much that I had a problem with the quality of the movie (although I did), but along with the unrepentant gore and really twisted morality message, it became obvious that you couldn't watch another movie in the franchise and expect anything but the same set-up and execution as in the others. It was the same kind of reaction I had watching Nights in Rodanthe, a movie that was originally on my list as one of the year's worst, but to be perfectly fair I couldn't talk about it in terms except the universal adjectives that attach themselves to Sparks' work (pat, saccharine, cloying, etc…). It just became obvious that, The Notebook aside, I couldn't expect anything more in a Sparks adaptation beyond what I got in Message in a Bottle… woman on the outs with love meets impossibly sensitive and caring man. They make love, pretend to hurt each other's feelings, then nature takes over because nothing says romance like someone buying the farm, right? Sparks seems to pull his characters out of a farm where they got all those red-shirted crewmembers in Star Trek, the nameless members of the landing party who you knew were never going to see the Enterprise again.

Proving that box office business is more about the marathon than the sprint was Twilight, based on tweeny novels by Stephanie Meyer. The predictions of monster business opening weekend came true, only for this Titanic for the iCarly set to get buried in following weeks by John Travolta and an animated dog. To be fair, Twilight wasn't "bad" in the same way a lot of the movies I'm mentioning are, but I can't think of a better example since Pirates of the Caribbean of a film that was concocted and guided by marketing analysts in suits who added scenes for no other reason than to bow to a demographic. The irony is that the movie's score, by Coen Brothers' favorite Carter Burwell, is one of the year's best and is unusual and clever in every way the movie safe and non-threatening. No wonder Burwell almost got fired from the picture.

A note to video game publishers: if you want to stop giving credibility to Roger Ebert's "games are not art" theory, then stop selling the rights to them to hacks- or at least sell them to people who actually get it. Comic book movies went through this period before actually grown-up fans got their hands on them to make Spider-Man and Iron Man. The only notable (or notorious) game example is Max Payne, Mark Wahlberg's hey-I-can-be-even-more-wooden-than-that follow-up to The Happening. Directed by Omen mangler John Moore, Payne committed so many sins holy water seemed more appropriate than a review. It looked great, but it didn't even try to emulate the game's own emulation and take on Dashell and Chandler detective noir, subsisting instead on a diet of bored looks, tired dialogue, and no soul.

If all of this is the turd pile, what would be its K2? Let's just say I've seen remakes that veered off from the original. But it's a rare moon when a remake veers off, then circles back around to spit in the original's face. There are a lot of things about The Day the Earth Stood Still that could be fuel for complaint- Keanu Reeves, the injection of an environmental message rather than one of world peace, Keanu Reeves again. I didn't worry too much about these things because this movie is the kind of disaster in which the smaller errors actually make everything seem relevant, like we might feel better if those were the worst things that could be seen.

I have no special knowledge or insight, but I could almost picture how this went down. A greenhorn director like Scott Derrickson gets approached by a studio to direct this year's I Am Legend. New directors aren't quite ready for this kind major release, but they're also easier to bully, too. Derrickson, who made the respectable if utterly confused The Exorcism of Emily Rose, takes and takes from the original and giving nothing back in return. Day alternates wildly between its half-hearted message (war bad, environment good) and its completely f&#*ed up moral compass. It isn't that the movie has none, but it freely, and with abandon, alternates between a self-serving "do no harm" banner to then killing of millions of people to justify an inflated FX budget to service a story that, at its heart, could be adapted to a stage production by a particularly shrewd director. Derrickson may or may not prove himself later, but he sold his soul on this one, resulting in the film's insulting evangelizing and almost criminal product placement. And by the time the mega robot Gort proved to be something other than a robot, I wondered if anyone connected to this had any emotional ties to the original beyond a Netflix rental.

And on and on (notice I didn't even get to Speed Racer). I could have written a blog fawning over Frost/Nixon and The Dark Knight, but as the Joker would have said, "What would be the fun of that?" I'll admit- I like writing bad reviews, and I don't think I'm the only one. Maybe, as writers, we're really that cruel at heart. Or maybe, as writers, we're our own worst critic 95% of the time, and we like talking about that other 5% that makes us feel just a little bit superior.