Your favourite bad reviews

[Plumdaff]

Taylor Parkes reviews Lovejoy on Football in When Saturday Comes

Chopped into “chapters” that barely fill a page, in a font size usually associated with books for the partially sighted, Lovejoy on Football is part autobiography, part witless musing, and one more triumph for the crass stupidity rapidly replacing culture in this country. Hopelessly banal and nauseatingly self-assured, smirkingly unfunny, it’s a £300 T-shirt, a piss-you-off ringtone, a YouTube clip of someone drinking their mate’s vomit. Its smugness is a corollary of its vacuity. I hope it makes you sick.

 

[Dr. Furface]

I remember one review I read of Pharrell's last album 'GIRL', which simply said "Wine bar shit." (I think it was in the free music paper Crack)

 

[Dr. Furface]

Taylor Parkes reviews Lovejoy on Football in When Saturday Comes

'beamingly positive, thrilled by wealth, too pleased with himself to ask awkward questions, Tim Lovejoy is the football fan Sepp Blatter has been waiting for.'

 

[ringo]

28 January 1936, Pravda

Muddle instead of Music

What a miserable bastard. A decent editor would have knocked most of that into the bin. There's only one point, made 16 times.

 

[Dr. Furface]

Here's another one from the new edition of When Saturday Comes, in which a reviewer, er, savages Robbie Savage's latest book 'I'll Tell You What...'
I can't link to it online but it begins like so...
'Apparently you either love Robbie Savage or you hate him. He is, in his own words, "Mr Marmite": someone who divides opinion "like Moses divided the Red Sea". It is an interesting choice of simile, suggesting a finely balanced reservoir of people on each side of the debate. In reality, on one hand there are the people who love him: his close friends and family, perhaps his agent, and on the other there are all the people you've ever met with an interest in football.'
When Saturday Comes - WSC 352 out now ~ Euro 2016 special!

 

[Shippou-Sensei]

 

[The Boy]

I appreciate he may not be popular with many, but Jay Raynor's restaurant reviews often amuse me. His visit to Beast, in particular:

Beast: restaurant review | Jay Rayner

 

[Favelado]

Pitchfork once reviewed an album by shit indie group Jet by simply posting a video of a chimpanzee pissing into its own mouth.

 

[Shippou-Sensei]

 

[Shippou-Sensei]

 

[Winot]

What a miserable bastard. A decent editor would have knocked most of that into the bin. There's only one point, made 16 times.

It was allegedly dictated to the editor by Stalin himself. I guess that makes you less inclined to pull out the red pen.

 

[Storm Fox]

Walk the Line. Simon Cowell's later offering.

Walk the Line: has Simon Cowell finally created the cruellest reality show ever?

This tedious X-Factor follow-up bins off most singers into oblivion. Even its winners can walk away with nothing

www.theguardian.com

While this was supposed to be his [Cowell's] big television comeback, he decided recently to remain offscreen and cede his spot to everyone’s favourite sub-Cowell fun-sponge, Gary Barlow. Barlow now heads a judging panel consisting of Craig David (aggressively anonymous), Dawn French (reliably lovely) and Alesha Dixon (hired because if she goes more than eight months without judging something on TV, her kidneys will explode).

... one woman did something so bland I wouldn’t even be able to describe it to you under hypnosis. They were, by and large, the musical equivalent of pre-chewed food.

 

[T & P]

This needs a bit of an introduction for maximum enjoyment. The review website below is a Christian fundamentalist ‘service‘ to parents that became a bit of a very early internet meme. It judges films solely on any breaches of the Bible, and developed a frankly quite impressive and elaborate scoring system based on it. Anything south of Mary Poppins including countless U-rated children films get an amber warning, let alone anything else.

Without further ado, I give you their review of South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut…

SOUTH PARK: BIGGER, LONGER & UNCUT (1999) WARNING!: ChildCare Action Project (CAP) Media Analysis Report MAR08299

Dedicated to investigating and reporting on the impact of the American culture on the integrity, self respect, and coping skills of youth, and inherently on family unity and values. The CAP Model uses the teachings of our Lord Jesus Christ as the standards for conducting investigations

www.capalert.com

 

[Epona]

This needs a bit of an introduction for maximum enjoyment. The review website below is a Christian fundamentalist ‘service‘ to parents that became a bit of a very early internet meme. It judges films solely on any breaches of the Bible, and developed a frankly quite impressive and elaborate scoring system based on it. Anything south of Mary Poppins including countless U-rated children films get an amber warning, let alone anything else.

Without further ado, I give you their review of South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut…

SOUTH PARK: BIGGER, LONGER & UNCUT (1999) WARNING!: ChildCare Action Project (CAP) Media Analysis Report MAR08299

Dedicated to investigating and reporting on the impact of the American culture on the integrity, self respect, and coping skills of youth, and inherently on family unity and values. The CAP Model uses the teachings of our Lord Jesus Christ as the standards for conducting investigations

www.capalert.com

OMG - I am not honestly that into South Park, but that review made the film sound brilliant

I have a tip for them - masturbation releases a lot of tension, just go for it, you'll feel less stressed about potential sinning on TV if you occasionally rub one out (I wanted to say "for Jesus" at the end of that sentence then realised that didn't sound great and would likely put people off).

 

[AverageJoe]

Just went to look for it on tv. It's 23 years old and you still have to pay to watch it.

Now that's a film that delivers.

And you can shut your fucking face Uncle. And blame Canada too

 

[T & P]

I’ve been tempted to write to them and contest their claim that the word fuck is the ‘most foul of foul words’. But perhaps the word cunt didn’t even make an appearance in the US, or at least not back in the early 2000s when they were most actively reviewing films.

You might be unsurprised to hear they didn’t give Dogma a particularly high score either. In fact there are two reviews of it, as the first guy lasted a few minutes in the cinema.

 

[Ming]

Just went to look for it on tv. It's 23 years old and you still have to pay to watch it.

Now that's a film that delivers.

And you can shut your fucking face Uncle. And blame Canada too

HEY BUDDY! (head wobble)

 

[Epona]

I’ve been tempted to write to them and contest their claim that the word fuck is the ‘most foul of foul words’. But perhaps the word cunt didn’t even make an appearance in the US, or at least not back in the early 2000s when they were most actively reviewing films.

You might be unsurprised to hear they didn’t give Dogma a particularly high score either. In fact there are two reviews of it, as the first guy lasted a few minutes in the cinema.

When you say "the first guy lasted a few minutes in the cinema" that sums up a picture I didn't want in my head, but I can't imagine getting that excited over the first few minutes of a film - just saying.

Sorry, I am a bad person and have a filthy mind.

 

[ATOMIC SUPLEX]

How very weird. I pulled out the soundtrack lp to that yesterday. Have not played it since its release.

 

[Chz]

How very weird. I pulled out the soundtrack lp to that yesterday. Have not played it since its release.

Great, and now Uncle Fucker is stuck in my head for the rest of the day... Especially that little ditty that leads into it, straight out of a Golden Age musical.

I saw that film at least six times. I love it.

 

[ATOMIC SUPLEX]

Great, and now Uncle Fucker is stuck in my head for the rest of the day... Especially that little ditty that leads into it, straight out of a Golden Age musical.

I saw that film at least six times. I love it.

I saw it at the cinema but my DVD copy still has the shrink wrap on it.

 

[Chz]

TBF, five of those are when I went to visit a friend who ran a drive-in theatre for a week and happened to be showing it.

 

[Storm Fox]

Frieze London art fair review – a graveyard of creativity for tasteless one percenters

This corporate gathering full of artists’ drab, desperate attempts to get bought by clueless rich collectors has domesticated contemporary art and thus killed it

www.theguardian.com

There is an unutterable sadness to seeing Damien Hirst’s new paintings at Frieze. These big pictures of gardens, their blurry photorealism besmirched with Pollockesque drips in a desperate attempt to bring such duds to life

The misery of The Secret Gardens, as Hirst calls his snores, is not just that they are confirmation of his decline. It is also the fact these works are far from the dullest things here. Even in his dotage, Hirst has a bad-taste boldness that reminds you, vaguely, of what it’s like to see unexpected, exhilarating contemporary art. But there is precious little of that here.

He's apparently not a fan.

 

[Chilli.s]

Love this line:

And now, with the London art world stripped of the income stream from Russian oligarchs, Frieze looks about as creative as a shopping mall.

 

[story]

I know someone who is very very successful at that end of the art world. He describes it as a ponzi scheme, he is hilarious and scathing in a way that’s very entertaining and also infuriating and horrible.

I asked if he speaks this way in interviews or in public about the art he and his peers make and the people who buy it. “Of course not! Would I shit on the golden goose!?”

 

[T & P]

I love the story about the opening night of the infamous Anne Frank stage adaptation so bloody much, I have decided to believe Snopes has got it wrong on this occasion

She's in the Attic!

Actress' performance as Anne Frank is so bad that audience members yell 'She's in the attic!

www.snopes.com

 

[Orang Utan]

Yes, like that story about Kirk Douglas’ son at The Comedy Store - just too good to check

 

[Orang Utan]

Not a review, but I couldn’t find a thread on bitching/vituperative comments from famous people about other famous people.
This is in the opening page of Brian Cox’s memoir (the actor, not the spaceweirdo):

 

[Orang Utan]

I was listening to a podcast in which Russell Howard was idiotically and wrongly interviewing Alan De Botton. I have always loathed de Botton and his outrageous grifting, so thought I’d look him up to see if anyone else agreed, and perhaps I was being unfair. I wasn’t.

Why does Alain de Botton want us to kill our young?

Philosophy means asking difficult questions. Not the questions that actually make up philosophical enquiry – those tend to be quite simple, which is why they can be so easily worked into summ…

samkriss.com

 

[Lotte]

I always used to love reading the bad reviews in Q, smug though its house style was.