Review-tew-tew-tew-tew-tutor games
So yeah, it's pretty much undeniable that all I've done on this LJ this month is write MICF reviews. (And write up D&D sessions a couple of times, but let's gloss over that.) There are two good reasons for that:
1 - I've seen a lot of shows and would like to talk about them.
2 - I don't really have much else to talk about right now.
However, let's take a step back and up into our own arses, and talk about reviewing and critiquing. Because now, more than ever, those who can, do; those who can't, or possibly who can but are too lazy to do it (hmm) are writing reviews of every damn thing they see and putting them on this here internet.
Is that a bad thing? I don't think so, or at least it's not necessarily so. With more and more books, movies, comedy shows and interpretive vivisections competing for our attention, we need some way of filtering out the stuff that probably won't suit our sensibilities and gravitating to the stuff that gives us our jollies. And it lets me justify running my mouth off about what I see, which I enjoy, and that's what's really important.
That said, there are a couple of abject failures of criticism floating around Melbourne this week, and instead of reviewing stuff, I'd like to take a moment to review the reviews of other reviewers and how they've been reviewed. Because it's Good Friday, and Jesus died for these electrons.
I got 99 problems but a funny funny bitch ain't one
The Age has traditionally been the main sponsor of the Comedy Festival (well, for as long as I've been going, which is the only tradition that matters). This year, though, the Herald Sun ninjaed the sponsorship role and got slapped all over the marketing material. Part of their promise was that they'd post reviews of every show, while the Age tended to concentrate on better-known acts. So far, it looks like they're trying to fulfill that promise. But they've had to cut a few corners to do so; some reviews are short, some are a little shallow, and some are written by fucking imbeciles.
Yes, the bottom of the reviewing barrel is getting scraped hard over at the Hun; we're seeing three-sentence reviews of some shows, terrific shows getting one star because they're considered 'too highbrow', writers using ethnic and gender stereotypes to produce some staggeringly ill-conceived statements... the list goes on. Although, to be fair, not every review or reviewer is terrible; some are okay, some are decent, a few are very well-written.
And then there was this one:
Very few female comedians can pull off funny funny
You won't find that line in the Sun's review of Jen Brister, because once the complaints started rolling in it was quickly rewritten. The fact that it was written at all, and then published for however many hours, in a day and age where women are generally considered sentient human beings with the capacity to vote... well, that's a harder act to justify. But apparently some people still think humour can't travel properly through the lining of the vagina, and for those people, perhaps the Herald Sun is the critical source they deserve.
Good thing there are a lot of other review sources this year - The Pun, Chortle, RHUM, Twitter and mouthy bloggers. Hopefully some of them can do better. Fuck, it'd be hard to do worse.
Jim Schembri will kill you with his time control powers
But if comedy isn't your thing, and you don't think it's fair to pick on just one of Melbourne's two major daily newspapers, let's move on to Jim Schembri's one-sided war with Twitter, which mostly resembles the 'war' a senile man has with the ghost of the Kaiser hiding in his radio.
A short summary of the drama (dealt with in more length here) - Age film critic wrote a review of Scream 4 that gave away the identity of the killer in the first sentence, which went live on the Age site. Crikey writer Luke Buckmaster saw this, tweeted about it and complained to the Age, as did a few other people, and the review was rewritten, as you'd expect.
And then Schembri lost his goddamn mind. He stridently claimed that the review had never contained a spoiler, despite the original version of the review being easily accessible on Google Cache. He attacked Buckmaster on Twitter, claiming that the criticism was impossible, the cache didn't exixt and that Buckmaster was accusing him of having a time machine, before a repetitive series of tweets about how he would soon reveal The Truth about the whole affair. It was a bizarre, Sheen-esque tirade, and for days people have wondered what the hell Schembri was talking about.
Well, in a staggeringly self-serving pile of utter bullshit in his Age column today (which I'm not linking to because it's too fucking stupid to validate with your clicks), Schembri 'revealed the truth' (i.e. lied about the whole thing) - he was out to 'punk' Twitter. He claimed that decided to deliberately run two versions of the Scream 4 review - one with the spoiler, one without - for the sole purpose of provoking a response from Twitter users, who he apparently despises for their propensity to talk about the movies they watch without being published by a major newspaper. They spoil movies, so why can't he? Other than that a major newspaper pays him not to? Yes, it was all a grand experiment-prank, designed to infuriate a tiny section of internet users, and not a stupid mistake made by a critic too proud and borderline-insane to apologise for it afterwards.
I'm really interested to see how the Age handles this kind of near-meltdown from a columnist, especially since even if you accept his insane bullshit Twitter-must-be-punished screed, there are a bunch of readers who don't use Twitter who nonetheless read the 'deliberately provocative' spoiler and had their viewing of Scream 4 ruined in advance. You would expect some kind of consequence. Although that doesn't mean there'll be one.
--
Anyway, the point of all this, other than regurgitating infodumps of things many of you could easily find out about if you cared, is to talk about the current level of professional and amateur criticism/reviewing in mainstream and social media. Is it good enough? Does it matter? Do you look at reviews? What's useful to you? What's not? And what are the most egregiously fuckheaded bits of reviewery you've seen lately?
Let's get a web 2.0 dialogue happening. Just so I feel like I'm holding up my corner of the internet. It's not heavy, but by god it oozes a lot of fluids.
1 - I've seen a lot of shows and would like to talk about them.
2 - I don't really have much else to talk about right now.
However, let's take a step back and up into our own arses, and talk about reviewing and critiquing. Because now, more than ever, those who can, do; those who can't, or possibly who can but are too lazy to do it (hmm) are writing reviews of every damn thing they see and putting them on this here internet.
Is that a bad thing? I don't think so, or at least it's not necessarily so. With more and more books, movies, comedy shows and interpretive vivisections competing for our attention, we need some way of filtering out the stuff that probably won't suit our sensibilities and gravitating to the stuff that gives us our jollies. And it lets me justify running my mouth off about what I see, which I enjoy, and that's what's really important.
That said, there are a couple of abject failures of criticism floating around Melbourne this week, and instead of reviewing stuff, I'd like to take a moment to review the reviews of other reviewers and how they've been reviewed. Because it's Good Friday, and Jesus died for these electrons.
I got 99 problems but a funny funny bitch ain't one
The Age has traditionally been the main sponsor of the Comedy Festival (well, for as long as I've been going, which is the only tradition that matters). This year, though, the Herald Sun ninjaed the sponsorship role and got slapped all over the marketing material. Part of their promise was that they'd post reviews of every show, while the Age tended to concentrate on better-known acts. So far, it looks like they're trying to fulfill that promise. But they've had to cut a few corners to do so; some reviews are short, some are a little shallow, and some are written by fucking imbeciles.
Yes, the bottom of the reviewing barrel is getting scraped hard over at the Hun; we're seeing three-sentence reviews of some shows, terrific shows getting one star because they're considered 'too highbrow', writers using ethnic and gender stereotypes to produce some staggeringly ill-conceived statements... the list goes on. Although, to be fair, not every review or reviewer is terrible; some are okay, some are decent, a few are very well-written.
And then there was this one:
Very few female comedians can pull off funny funny
You won't find that line in the Sun's review of Jen Brister, because once the complaints started rolling in it was quickly rewritten. The fact that it was written at all, and then published for however many hours, in a day and age where women are generally considered sentient human beings with the capacity to vote... well, that's a harder act to justify. But apparently some people still think humour can't travel properly through the lining of the vagina, and for those people, perhaps the Herald Sun is the critical source they deserve.
Good thing there are a lot of other review sources this year - The Pun, Chortle, RHUM, Twitter and mouthy bloggers. Hopefully some of them can do better. Fuck, it'd be hard to do worse.
Jim Schembri will kill you with his time control powers
But if comedy isn't your thing, and you don't think it's fair to pick on just one of Melbourne's two major daily newspapers, let's move on to Jim Schembri's one-sided war with Twitter, which mostly resembles the 'war' a senile man has with the ghost of the Kaiser hiding in his radio.
A short summary of the drama (dealt with in more length here) - Age film critic wrote a review of Scream 4 that gave away the identity of the killer in the first sentence, which went live on the Age site. Crikey writer Luke Buckmaster saw this, tweeted about it and complained to the Age, as did a few other people, and the review was rewritten, as you'd expect.
And then Schembri lost his goddamn mind. He stridently claimed that the review had never contained a spoiler, despite the original version of the review being easily accessible on Google Cache. He attacked Buckmaster on Twitter, claiming that the criticism was impossible, the cache didn't exixt and that Buckmaster was accusing him of having a time machine, before a repetitive series of tweets about how he would soon reveal The Truth about the whole affair. It was a bizarre, Sheen-esque tirade, and for days people have wondered what the hell Schembri was talking about.
Well, in a staggeringly self-serving pile of utter bullshit in his Age column today (which I'm not linking to because it's too fucking stupid to validate with your clicks), Schembri 'revealed the truth' (i.e. lied about the whole thing) - he was out to 'punk' Twitter. He claimed that decided to deliberately run two versions of the Scream 4 review - one with the spoiler, one without - for the sole purpose of provoking a response from Twitter users, who he apparently despises for their propensity to talk about the movies they watch without being published by a major newspaper. They spoil movies, so why can't he? Other than that a major newspaper pays him not to? Yes, it was all a grand experiment-prank, designed to infuriate a tiny section of internet users, and not a stupid mistake made by a critic too proud and borderline-insane to apologise for it afterwards.
I'm really interested to see how the Age handles this kind of near-meltdown from a columnist, especially since even if you accept his insane bullshit Twitter-must-be-punished screed, there are a bunch of readers who don't use Twitter who nonetheless read the 'deliberately provocative' spoiler and had their viewing of Scream 4 ruined in advance. You would expect some kind of consequence. Although that doesn't mean there'll be one.
--
Anyway, the point of all this, other than regurgitating infodumps of things many of you could easily find out about if you cared, is to talk about the current level of professional and amateur criticism/reviewing in mainstream and social media. Is it good enough? Does it matter? Do you look at reviews? What's useful to you? What's not? And what are the most egregiously fuckheaded bits of reviewery you've seen lately?
Let's get a web 2.0 dialogue happening. Just so I feel like I'm holding up my corner of the internet. It's not heavy, but by god it oozes a lot of fluids.