Wells on Mood Pockets: Who Will Review the Reviewer?™

Imagine you're a writer and someone flies you to another town to appear in a discussion panel. They put you up in a hotel, but the ethernet cable in the room is too short and the connection is not "strong enough." So you inform the organizers of the event that you're upset and don't want to fulfill your obligation...and you leave.

Then you blame them on your web site for not snapping you out of your funk. You also liken the lack of Wi-Fi to "the four horsemen of the apocalypse... circling and going for the kill."

That's the stunt Jeffrey Wells pulled on the Oxford Film Festival this past weekend.

Oh, he had a grand time sight-seeing before the world turned to shit and spit in his face, having visited Graceland and Sun Records on his way to Mississippi. He even stayed overnight in the Internet-challenged Oxford Downtown Inn, knowing full well he was cut off from The Cloud. How he must have tossed and turned that night! He'd heard there was a funny YouTube video of a boy tripping on painkillers, but he couldn't access it without walking all the way down to the lobby! And no way was that gonna happen!

He was, in his words, in a "mood pocket." That's sort of like a Hot Pocket, but with swirling, debilitating emotions instead of rancid lava-meat. He was cut off from his post-1999 safe zone where immediate wireless Internet is a necessity to do one's job and his balls are lovingly massaged by 802.11 digital spectrum fingers at all times.

Reading his responses to comments on that last blog post, everyone's to blame for Wells' hissy fit--including his AT&T broadband card which doesn't always work even though he pays $60 a month for it. Boo hoo hoo. Time to switch to VerizAlltell, Jeffrey?

The last time someone overreacted like this, he had running mascara and was imploring us to "leave Britney alone."

Read the controversial Who Will Review the Reviewer™ debut post here, wherein Rider takes a Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic to task for phoning in a movie review.

Ebert on Cloverfield: Who Will Review the Reviewer?™

I don't get paid to blog. I do it for two reasons: 1) I have time on my hands because I'm unemployed, and 2) I love to write. Truth be told, I love to play with words the way Bryan Cranston loves appearing in his tighty-whities on TV.

If I did get paid to blog, however, the quality of my writing would improve to the point that none of my posts would have a "filler" tag. You don't turn in filler when someone's paying you damn good money to write something with content.*

So what's Roger Ebert's excuse with his review of Cloverfield?

If the point of a movie review is to inform readers with an accurate and fair summary of a film, then Mr. Ebert has failed spectacularly with this effort.

Sure, he devotes the requisite word count to pointing out the shakiness of the camerawork (*yawners*), and manages to work in an amusing colonoscopy joke, but then the review devolves quickly into the worst kind of pap. How bad is it? Imagine Ain't It Cool News posting an email from a twitchy ADHD sufferer with an ax to grind after a preview screening of I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry.

Some highlights:

• Ebert writes that "the statute has run out on the theory that after 9/11 it would be in bad taste to show Manhattan being destroyed"...an obvious point considering actual controversy linking 9/11 and bad taste erupted two years ago following the release of Paul Greengrass' United 93. Plus, scenes of mass destruction in New York have appeared in numerous movies in recent years. I guess Peter Jackson's King Kong didn't count because it took place pre-9/11? That's just lazy writing, dude.
  
• He takes issue with a female character walking for miles and then having "the energy to climb 49 flights of stairs...in her high heels" to rescue someone trapped on a building's 49th floor. Ebert apparently didn't hear the characters say they're trying to rescue someone on the 39th floor. And while the heroes actually climb over 57 flights (long story), Ebert failed to see a close-up of Lily's bare feet on the stairwell. I saw it, and I don't even have a Tarantino-like foot fetish. Then again, they were only 40-feet high and filling a movie screen.
• He points out "the incredible element" of the camcorder's battery lasting "on the evidence of the footage we see, more than six hours, maybe 12." Now, right at the beginning it's established that the "found footage" that makes up the entire movie is shown in real time (depicting exactly what was recorded on a memory card over a seven-hour time-frame). I don't know which hellish director's cut Ebert sat through, but the one I saw was 84 minutes in length.
• My biggest quibble with his review: he spends an entire paragraph (out of eight) explaining something about the nature of the monster...and then dismisses the entire point by including a parenthetical disclaimer that says, in effect, "I just checked online and I was mistaken about that." See, that's where a paid professional would rewrite and not include the reader in the fact-checking process.
  

If I were to rate Cloverfield using Ebert's four-star scale, I'd give it a three-and-a-half. He gave it a three. His unfounded complaints and poor writing make it sound like a two. Considering that Roger Ebert has won a Pulitzer Prize for criticism and there's a bar set for his writing, I give his review a one.

By the way, I wasn't compensated in any way for this review of a review. (Hold on! I just checked on the Interweb and see that feedback from readers and high traffic always fills me with a sense of self-importance.)

* Or, if you turn in filler as a professional, you refuse compensation--or take the money but remove your name.