RAGEFACE: THOUGHTS ON "MOVIE" BOB

Seriously though I have to wonder how this guy keeps his job with the shit that he pulls.

If you're not familiar he is the house movie critic over at The Escapist.

Now I enjoyed his review on The Watchmen, and whole-heartedly agreed with it.

And I hated his review on Avatar and disagreed with pretty much everything he said (not to mention his smug little intro calling out people for stealing South Park's criticism of the movie as if it's really that hard to reach such a conclusion on your own).

No real problem there; to each his own and all that and I had to respect the guy for giving Watchmen a thumbs up after the harsh backlash it received from most critics.

Where I DO have a problem is that he criticizes Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland FOR THE EXACT SAME REASONS HE TOLD US NOT TO HATE AVATAR.

His defense of Avatar was that it was an "experience" and visually enticing and to not pay too much mind to the recycled story.

His thoughts on Alice? That it's a recycled story with nice visuals as its only redeeming quality.

Umm...WTF?!?

This would bother me less if it weren't for his smugass introductions to every review and his little side notes to inform audiences of things such as Martin Scorsese's background in Hollywood as one of the Movie Brats or Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

Does your audience REALLY need to know about these things in order to understand what the movie is about, Bob?

Or do you REALLY just need them to realize how S-M-R-T you are by reading the summary of any related Wikipedia page?

His Shutter Island review only pisses me off further after the bottom line he gave us to check the movie out was "it's Scorsese" while failing to realize that its obviously one of his weakest films, especially compared to his previous three.

He noted that the movie's visuals and tone were enough to make up for the obvious twist and lack of depth while also failing to realize the choppy editing and horrendously bad special effects (and normally special effects don't mean much to me but we're in the year 2010 here and Shutter honestly looks like its trapped about a decade behind).

Yet all he can tell us is "it's Scorsese".

Now I liked Shutter Island a lot, but it's a textbook psych thriller with enough flaws to put it beneath classics like Fight Club, American Psycho, and Memento, and Scorsese or not, there's enough reason for the average moviegoer to not see it, let alone their only motivation being a critic's insistence that the director is incapable of making a bad film (see: Avatar).

Normally I don't let things like this get to me, but this really is just too much. The thing that makes it most unbearable is that I have a slight feeling that Robert thinks he can get away with all this because he's on The Escapist, home of the popular "Zero Punctuation" game review series. What he fails to realize this time is that Yahtzee can get away with being smug and unfairly cruel to the releases he reviews because HE'S FUCKING HILARIOUS AND INGENIOUSLY CLEVER, two things Bob is most certainly not.

So please Robby, for the love of all things cinema do us all a favor and keep your half-assed bullshit reviews to yourself and find a job you're actually good at.

Like James Cameron's personal fluffer.

I hear he's always looking for more of those.

-Brien

By the way I do realize that it's the dopes at The Escapist I should be blaming for hiring a guy like this in the first place, but this is a rant, and the last thing I want in my rant is accurate blame.