Posted on December 21st, 2017 by Adam-Troy Castro
Look, I know this may be as surprising to you as it is to me.
But Rex Reed does not quite scrape the bottom of the barrel.
Not since the creation of the internet, at least.
Since then, every yutz who has ever been within fifty meters of a movie can start a review blog, and, let’s face it, a few of them, not many, but a few, are so bad at the job that they ennoble him by establishing that he is not quite as terrible as it’s possible to be.
You have folks who rate movies by the size of the lead actress’s boobs, who get so excited when they are sufficient volume that they will exclaim, BOOBIES!, all in capitals.
You have folks so upset at the appearance of a non-white character as anything but a porter that they will accuse the filmmakers of fighting a jihad against white people.
You have folks creating listicles of the most (adjective) movies of all time who imply by example that no movies were made before, oh, 1995.
Rex Reed is guilty of none of those things.
It may astonish you to contemplate that there are movie reviewing sins Rex Reed is not guilty of, but no, he is not guilty of any of those.
So he does not scrape the bottom of the barrel.
He is just very near the bottom of the planet, still part of the sediment, not any of the stuff you’ll need steel wool to scrape off, if you’re into cleaning barrels.
He is not the worst movie reviewer on the planet.
Merely the worst among the prominent.
And let us say something else.
A movie reviewer does not “suck” merely by loving movies you hate and hating movies you love.
It is not a reviewer’s job, it cannot be a reviewer’s job, to duplicate and anticipate the exact reaction of every member of the theatre audience. That is not only an impossible goal, it is also likely an unworthy goal. It is the critic’s job to write entertainingly, and informatively, with wit and perception. Roger Ebert hated The Godfather Part II. He had his head up his ass on that one and on many others, and so what? He wrote entertainingly, and informatively, with wit and perception. There are likely any number of times when his verdict on a given movie was identical to Rex Reed’s, when they were likely shouting in unison, and it just as inevitable that on those occasions Ebert wrote entertainingly, and informatively, with wit and perception, and Rex Reed, saying the same things, was just a contemptible jackass.
These thoughts are prompted by a brouhaha over Reed’s review for Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water. It is a negative review, of course, a given because Reed does not understand and does not like any films with fantastic elements, ever. But those are minor sins compared to reporting that the unrelated Benicio del Toro was the director, and that the character played by Sally Yates is mentally disabled, when in fact she’s just mute.
Let us forgive the del Toro confusion as a simple brain fart.
Of course, if you excused every error of fact in a Rex Reed review as a brain fart you would have to assume that he thought about nothing but baked beans all day.
But let us be kind and assume that. That could have been predictive typing.
The fact of the matter is this would be a minor sin in Rex Reed’s catalogue.
The man has been known to hallucinate plot points that never take place in the movies he’s written about.
He attacks lead actresses for being fat, even if, like Melissa McCarthy, who he did it to, the actresses know damn well that they’re fat and have incorporated that feature into their art.
He doesn’t understand anything not written down to him.
He doesn’t understand anything out of formula.
He said of Barfly, a film about skid-row alcoholics, “Nobody could possibly care about these people!”
He further whined about that film that movies are supposed to be about glamour, which to me says that he had difficulty processing a story with characters who did not look like they’d just gotten off a sound-stage.
But these things don’t make him the worst movie reviewer on the planet.
These are things that make him the enemy of art, in general.
As a movie reviewer, he would make a good pumper of septic tanks, but that doesn’t literally make him the worst on the planet. Certainly not while the internet exists.
Even the single stupidest thing he’s ever said about any movie, which is a difficult and remarkable distinction given how many stupid and objectionable things he’s written, doesn’t do that.
That was when, giving a TV review, he said of David Lynch’s Dune, a movie that it is indeed very possible for an intelligent and perceptive person to loathe, that he had never read the “drugged-out sci-fi novel” it was based on, but after seeing the movie, snort, chuckle, snort, wouldn’t read it on a bet! Ha, ha!
Frank Herbert’s Dune is of course a novel that has garnered mixed critical reactions since its publication more than fifty years ago, and it is indeed very possible for an intelligent and perceptive person to loathe it.
Rex Reed’s sin in that case was of course somehow managing to have been a paid movie critic for many years at that point without ever encountering the premise that a bad movie can be made of a good book, or that it’s ignorant to warn people off a book he hadn’t read simply because he hated the movie made from it.
That was a pretty spectacular demonstration of recklessness and bone-stupid idiocy, and though it stuck in this writer’s memory, one must be fair: it is nowhere near uncharacteristic of the recklessness and bone-stupid idiocy he is known for.
So, yeah, one of the worst movie reviewers on the planet, yes.
Maybe the worst who has ever consistently earned money — and fame! — from that profession.
The very worst?
For that you have to read all the way through the work of unpaid assholes, including your cousin’s blog, Freddie’s Fractured Flickers, the one that he writes all in caps, with multiple exclamation points at the end of every sentence, excoriating every movie that isn’t Die Hard.
Freddie might be worse.
Or that might be being unfair to Freddie.
Tags: Assholes, Bad Movies, Barfly, David Lynch, Die Hard, Dune, Fantasy, Frank Herbert, Movies, Rex Reed, Roger Ebert, Science Fiction, The Godfather, The Shape of Water | Category Humor, Movies
