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Filmsuck, USA
A collection of film reviews with an introductory essay. B00B138U70
- GenresFilmNonfiction
ebook
First published January 14, 2013
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March 6, 2013A friend sent me a link to Eileen Jones' online review of Prometheus, which I thought was funny, and the website promoted a "book" of her reviews which cost only $1.99, so I said what the hell, and bought it. At that price, this doesn't disappoint.
This is a barely-edited collection of online rants -- basically blog posts -- and it shows: her diction is often slack, the spelling questionable, and every review could be cut by at least a third (this is apparently the legacy of the infinitely scrolling screen: when people are limited only by the notion of stopping either when they feel like it or their fingers give out, even talented writers give the impression of just going on and on and on). The book really doesn't "explain" why American films now suck worse than ever (if they do), and her film history is often shaky: when trying to refute the idea that Bridesmaids is the first raunchy female comedy, she disses Bette Midler and has to wind up going all the way back to Mae West for an example. She also has the blogger's habit of taking potshots at the easy targets (Roger Ebert, Manohla Dargis) of established writers who review, often not very well, for pay, which after a while seems driven by envy at the idea of a regular paying gig as much as anything else.
But Jones can be very, very, very funny, and this book is certainly worth $1.99 as it saves you the labour of having to download and cut and paste all those reviews into a readable document yourself (altho then at least a spell-check program would provide marginal proofreading, catching errors like "Adrien Brody" being misspelled as "Adrian" for an entire, long review, for example. Then again, spell-check programs don't usually see that kind of mistake as a problem, and criticizing someone's online spelling is apparently even more antediluvian than the idea of writing to a word limit).
This is a barely-edited collection of online rants -- basically blog posts -- and it shows: her diction is often slack, the spelling questionable, and every review could be cut by at least a third (this is apparently the legacy of the infinitely scrolling screen: when people are limited only by the notion of stopping either when they feel like it or their fingers give out, even talented writers give the impression of just going on and on and on). The book really doesn't "explain" why American films now suck worse than ever (if they do), and her film history is often shaky: when trying to refute the idea that Bridesmaids is the first raunchy female comedy, she disses Bette Midler and has to wind up going all the way back to Mae West for an example. She also has the blogger's habit of taking potshots at the easy targets (Roger Ebert, Manohla Dargis) of established writers who review, often not very well, for pay, which after a while seems driven by envy at the idea of a regular paying gig as much as anything else.
But Jones can be very, very, very funny, and this book is certainly worth $1.99 as it saves you the labour of having to download and cut and paste all those reviews into a readable document yourself (altho then at least a spell-check program would provide marginal proofreading, catching errors like "Adrien Brody" being misspelled as "Adrian" for an entire, long review, for example. Then again, spell-check programs don't usually see that kind of mistake as a problem, and criticizing someone's online spelling is apparently even more antediluvian than the idea of writing to a word limit).
January 30, 2013
Suffering the grievous twin misfortunes of having joined The eXile well after its glory years, and covering a beat of American film and TV that's less exotic to Americans than Moscow nightclubs, war porn, or the Loans-for-shares scandal, Eileen Jones probably won't go down in history as that esteemed publication's most memorable writer. I agree with that judgment, but her writing is excellent on its own terms and will most likely ruin mainstream professional film criticism for you entirely, assuming you're one of the few people who actually read film critics.
What's the point of film criticism? A recommendation from a friend will always be a film's best marketing tool, far more than whatever the local paper's critics churn out. Does an IMDB average score really mean anything to anyone? On the other end of the scale, does anyone actually read high-powered "serious" pieces with anything other than a mix of amusement and bafflement, assuming they read them at all? (For example, if you enjoy phrases like "communicational electro-smog", check out Bernd Herzogenrath's "On the Lost Highway: Lynch and Lacan, Cinema and Cultural Pathology", it's rad). Especially in this current era of film, with its spate of sequels and remakes, it seems almost unnecessary to write more than a few sentences about a movie like the latest Transformers. Yeah, it's got robots that blow stuff up; what more do you need to know?
Jones' reviews, which are really Exiled blog posts repurposed for the book, are fairly refreshing, because her opinions are typically strong, original, and insightful, which are three qualities tough to find in a newspaper that has to appeal to a broader audience than the half-dozen or so people who still read the Exiled. Many of them veer off of the main point to discuss other things, like the history of the genre the film is in, or interesting connections between the work and another, or sometimes just to vent about the kind of world that allows a particular wretched piece of cinema to exist, but the tangents are usually worth it. Even when she doesn't like the film she's writing about, which is often since a lot of movies these days are terrible, she's usually pretty spot-on about why a film sucks, and how another film went for the same effect and succeeded.
Something notable is that her opinions often don't seem to line up neatly into pro/con stances. Obviously this is really the more truthful way to approach movies, which will have qualities that can strike you as positive in some contexts and negative in others, good at some times and bad at another. About the only thing to dislike is that she's pretty negative about a lot of these films, to the extent that it's often hard to tell if she actually likes many directors or films beyond the Coen Brothers and their works. I'd have liked for her to have written more about good movies. However, since we genuinely are in a notably uncreative period in cinema history, her bile seems fair, and hopefully movies do get better again, both for her sake and ours.
What's the point of film criticism? A recommendation from a friend will always be a film's best marketing tool, far more than whatever the local paper's critics churn out. Does an IMDB average score really mean anything to anyone? On the other end of the scale, does anyone actually read high-powered "serious" pieces with anything other than a mix of amusement and bafflement, assuming they read them at all? (For example, if you enjoy phrases like "communicational electro-smog", check out Bernd Herzogenrath's "On the Lost Highway: Lynch and Lacan, Cinema and Cultural Pathology", it's rad). Especially in this current era of film, with its spate of sequels and remakes, it seems almost unnecessary to write more than a few sentences about a movie like the latest Transformers. Yeah, it's got robots that blow stuff up; what more do you need to know?
Jones' reviews, which are really Exiled blog posts repurposed for the book, are fairly refreshing, because her opinions are typically strong, original, and insightful, which are three qualities tough to find in a newspaper that has to appeal to a broader audience than the half-dozen or so people who still read the Exiled. Many of them veer off of the main point to discuss other things, like the history of the genre the film is in, or interesting connections between the work and another, or sometimes just to vent about the kind of world that allows a particular wretched piece of cinema to exist, but the tangents are usually worth it. Even when she doesn't like the film she's writing about, which is often since a lot of movies these days are terrible, she's usually pretty spot-on about why a film sucks, and how another film went for the same effect and succeeded.
Something notable is that her opinions often don't seem to line up neatly into pro/con stances. Obviously this is really the more truthful way to approach movies, which will have qualities that can strike you as positive in some contexts and negative in others, good at some times and bad at another. About the only thing to dislike is that she's pretty negative about a lot of these films, to the extent that it's often hard to tell if she actually likes many directors or films beyond the Coen Brothers and their works. I'd have liked for her to have written more about good movies. However, since we genuinely are in a notably uncreative period in cinema history, her bile seems fair, and hopefully movies do get better again, both for her sake and ours.
June 27, 2013
Eileen Jones wrote movie reviews for The Exile for a couple of years. I used to fuxwit The Exile heavy. This corresponded with a period of my life when I had to stop going to see movies on the reg, because I didn't have any money, and I only had one eye. I used to all about going to the movies, from when I was in my late teens until about my late 20s.
It just so happens that the reviews in Filmsuck, USA more or less pick up where I left off. I was kinda glad to see that, because even though I hadn't seen the vast majority of them, to be able to know whether or not I agreed with her reviews, I was still interested to know what they were like and what people think of them. As I writer in the pop culture sphere, I should know this shit.
Mostly what I took from Filmsuck, USA is that I didn't miss a whole lot. All of the action these days is in TV. Note that by action I don't mean literal action like in movies for dumb people. All of the resources these days are pumped into making blockbusters -- comic book movies, action movies, sequels and what have you -- and kids movies, to the extent that those two categories don't overlap, and even if they're good, which sometimes they are, that just doesn't interest me as much.
Jones is crazy about both the Coen brothers and Quentin Tarantino, to the point where I'd feel weird about it if I were them and I read this. So are tastes are pretty closely aligned, for the most part. I found her populist stance, against the kind of mid-brow art house films I grew up on back in the '90s and in favor of film in its historical role as cheap entertainment for semi-literates to be overstated, in part due to the structure of this book as a collection of blog posts, and more true in theory than in reality. Which would you rather see, any given film at a Landmark theater or any given film at a multiplex? I rest on your face.
As a collection of blog posts that have been copied and pasted into an ebook document, this is way long (it seemed at least twice as long as Amazon said it was, maybe 500+ pages) and super repetitive. I don't even have shit to do, and I found it to be a slog at times, though I enjoyed it for the most part. I would have liked it even better if it had been condensed and supplemented with original material. It's cheap enough to cop and just flip through, if you think you might be interested. I'd suggest only reading the reviews you find most interesting, rather than plowing through it cover to cover, like I did.
It just so happens that the reviews in Filmsuck, USA more or less pick up where I left off. I was kinda glad to see that, because even though I hadn't seen the vast majority of them, to be able to know whether or not I agreed with her reviews, I was still interested to know what they were like and what people think of them. As I writer in the pop culture sphere, I should know this shit.
Mostly what I took from Filmsuck, USA is that I didn't miss a whole lot. All of the action these days is in TV. Note that by action I don't mean literal action like in movies for dumb people. All of the resources these days are pumped into making blockbusters -- comic book movies, action movies, sequels and what have you -- and kids movies, to the extent that those two categories don't overlap, and even if they're good, which sometimes they are, that just doesn't interest me as much.
Jones is crazy about both the Coen brothers and Quentin Tarantino, to the point where I'd feel weird about it if I were them and I read this. So are tastes are pretty closely aligned, for the most part. I found her populist stance, against the kind of mid-brow art house films I grew up on back in the '90s and in favor of film in its historical role as cheap entertainment for semi-literates to be overstated, in part due to the structure of this book as a collection of blog posts, and more true in theory than in reality. Which would you rather see, any given film at a Landmark theater or any given film at a multiplex? I rest on your face.
As a collection of blog posts that have been copied and pasted into an ebook document, this is way long (it seemed at least twice as long as Amazon said it was, maybe 500+ pages) and super repetitive. I don't even have shit to do, and I found it to be a slog at times, though I enjoyed it for the most part. I would have liked it even better if it had been condensed and supplemented with original material. It's cheap enough to cop and just flip through, if you think you might be interested. I'd suggest only reading the reviews you find most interesting, rather than plowing through it cover to cover, like I did.
December 29, 2018
Note that is a collection of movie reviews that can all probably be tracked down online. I'm an Eileen Jones fan so I've already read a lot of the stuff here. However, reading them one after the other really shows you how funny she is. The way she ridicules fat-headed actors, directors, and celebrities is glorious. And she's not some mean-spirited critic who hates everything - the movies she praises are worth tracking down and this book made me add quite a bit to my Stuff I Will Watch Someday list. If you like movies and clever, funny, and well-informed writing about movies, then this book is for you.
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