I like him thus far. I generally don't pay attention to critics unless they have all the faculties you listed. He seems pretty cool. Criticism is so cheap these days that anything that gets me interested in something I know little about I will come back. He has a lot of Charlie Brooker in him without the level of couch angst and cynicism. He genuinely takes criticism seriously in a Roger Ebert\Pauline Kael kinda way.

I pretty much ignore critics and don't pay much attention to contemporary movies so I just never ran across him but I'm really liking what I'm seeing.

He defends the theatrical and DVD releases of Prometheus on the grounds that we were all high on pre-opening night hype and that a potential director's cut, in the future, will likely redeem the film. This makes my beard itch. I don't expect critics to have their opinions line up with mine 100%, but there is just no defending Prometheus. Especially using "a future bug fix will make it awesome, so nevermind it being shit right now" logic.

Otherwise, I'm having fun listening to his rants.

Dunno anything about him, but yesterday I saw a hilarious quote by him where he equates the Fred Figglehorn movie with A Serbian Film in terms of unpleasantness.

Seems almost no critic could accept the fact that Prometheus is a terrible movie, everybody was in full denial when it came out.

I'll bet he didn't like Fargo either, because those characters were bad except for the police officer lady but she didn't rescue the victim in time. 0 stars.

Seriously if Martin Scorcese decided to do a Sun Gym Gang biopic instead of Jordan Belfort, Pain and Gain probably would've been up for some Academy Awards. The two films share the exact same style. But oh no it's Michael Bay so it must suck.

I haven't seen Pain and Gain, but if it's like "Wolf" then both movies pretty much celebrate the Jackass-type of antics of stupid people. The Wolf of Wall Street is a 3 hour sketch of "lol these guys are high" with the same quality as that weed sketch Andy Kauffman sabotages in Fridays.

I liked both movies, but yeah. Just replace the quaaludes and coke with steroids and, well coke, and Belfort's circle with Three Stooges-esque pumped up bros who fuck up every step of the way. Both were looking for the same thing, and it's sad but also fun to watch them fall.

Guys in Wall Street cheered the Wolf of Wall Street as it was going on in theaters downtown.

They didn't fail. They're doing just fine. That's why it's a fucking shitty movie.

good point.. Wolf's a morality tale but he got off pretty easy whereas 2 of the 3 in Pain and Gain were sentenced to death

I have never seen Pain and Gain and have no clue how apt his criticism is, but he is British, and popping your monocle over "catalogues of pornographic horrors" is an intrinsically British thing to do.

It is a cold, wet, joyless country, and the people it produces are the same.

I am British, we ruled the world with an empire where the sun never sets. The only cold, wet and joyless place you've ever been was your mother's rotten pussy.

Don't you EVER talk shit about a place where people currently live that I am genetically related to through no choice of my own. Cause that's MY country, motherfucko.

Tell me I'm wrong. That's my country, too, you son of a Frenchman, only I can bring myself to admit that humorless fuddy-duddys are as English as bad teeth, CCTV, and week-old chicken korma.

You know why we ruled the world? First, because we're genetically superior. Yeah, that much is a given. But second, because shit weather and even shitter food meant we HAD to leave and go conquering somewhere else.

So, you're Welsh?

(for the record, I rather *like* shit English weather, and for me there's nothing quite like gray skies, blustering wind, and a steady misty drizzle all weekend long. But that's because, like all Britons, I am a dour, miserable bastard)

Meme - Welsh and a bit of Scottish on my mom's side, English on my father's. My dad's family traces our surname lineage back to the Danelaw, so that's another shit weather culture, too.

I too love the weather since I enjoy being pale and sunlight gives me headaches.

I'm Norwegian, so.. no comment? :)

I'm a mix of scottish and norwegian, everything in this thread is accurate.

Yeah this is kind of by the book: an Adam sander romantic comedy is hardly fodder anymore; you know it's going to suck but you might see it if you're 15 years old and on a date. They exist for a reason. Having worked at "independent" theaters for a long time, I've seen much worse. Whether you like them or not, a Little Miss Sunshine, Sunshine, a Scanner Darkly and Pans Labyrinth to name a few sucked bags of dick IMO but they're under the shield of independent so they get a pass I guess?

Well, most of the films you mention, I believe, would get a pass for not having been released in 2013.

But if I was making a "ten worst list", I'd go after the major releases. It's more entertaining, and there's usually something identifiably human in an independant film, someone taking a risk, or showing some ambition. Also, it's more fun to go after the major releases, it's a more entertaining list. Of course, there are independent films that are too loathesome to be excluded. MEGAN IS MISSING comes to mind, also from another year.

That was redundant.

I thought you liked Megan is Missing?

yeah.. I was just saying movies in general, specifically ones when I worked there (I'd see every movie we had over the course of 5 years, ending in 2008.)

Watch/listen to his original reviews if you want a substantial discourse on why he feels these films are terrible. This is just an end-of-year summing up.

Also, I'd never trust the critical faculties of someone who calls themselves 'Nostalgia Chick'. Then again, I'd never take advice from someone with my name either, so...

If you liked the first one, it's really more of the same. Hit Girl tries to fit in and be "normal" so there's more high school movie drama, while Kickass joins up with a gang of Superheroes run by Colonel Stars & Stripes (Jim Carrey.) If you haven't seen the first one I won't get into more detail but it's a fun and bloody continuation, and it's cool seeing Kickass transform from the skinny geek in a suit he was through most of the first one into a pretty badass kickass.

I saw the first one; it was pretty good. It wasn't quite what I expected, though. When it was first hyped, it looked like it was going to be a really fun, irreverent subversion of the superhero genre... like a less pretentious "Watchmen". From the previews and from what everyone was saying, it sounded like KickAss was going to be about superhero wannabes, regular people who WEREN'T super, nevertheless trying to act as such, and exploring what the consequences might be. And that's sort of what it was... for the first fifteen minutes. But then KickAss had a training montage and it turned into just another generic superhero movie, albeit with a hipper sensibility. I loved Hit Girl - she's on my desert island list of superheroes, right alongside Lobo, Deadpool, and Banzai Girl - and I certainly didn't think the first one was a horrible movie... but, as Mr Kermode says, part of what makes a film "bad" is the dashing of expectations, and KickAss certainly dashed mine.

So it was Mystery Men with more CGI.

It's still about real people with real problems, and it could've just as easily been a teen comedy where they dress up the nerd for prom queen as a joke or something but then all the dudes find her hot (can't remember the movie but I know I've seen it..)

Kickass 1 was basically Superbad but with crime fighting. A better example, poorly marketed because it came out at the same time, was James Gunn's Super (Gunn is doing Guardians of the Galaxy which I'm currently boners to see.) Without giving anything away Super handles the transition from "zero to hero" in a much more realistic way, but that often takes the fun out of it: it's literally 2 movies: a shaky-cam indie love story and a hyper-violent superhero movie.

I'm a fan of Mark Millar in general. Civil War and Wanted were excellent and Kickass was just plain fun: the comics captured a lot more of the nerdy sick side of being a superhero than a 2-hour movie can provide. Kickass 2 does share some similarities with Mystery Men, comedy-wise. The superheroes mostly work in a soup kitchen. One of them is based off Seattle's own real-life superhero Phoenix Jones, who pops up on this site now and again. The other two are parents who mourn the death of their son by wearing masks and shirts with their son's picture on them and the mom beating up people with her purse scolding them in a midwestern accent. The villains on the Motherfucker's side also get hilariously semi-unintentionally racist monikers.

I haven't read the new Kickass yet (waiting for it to finish next month so I can read them all at once) but in the words of so many fans of comics/books whose expectations were not met with the film adaptations, I was.. amuuuused.