Movie review

[lumineaux]

In lieu of doing anything remotely constructive (like, writing the brief I need to file tomorrow), I am perusing Roger Ebert's web site.  As I have gotten older, I have grown to appreciate Roger Ebert's movie reviews more and more.

This particular paragraph is from his review of Poseiden, the new remake of the Poseiden Adventure.  It is simply priceless:

"An odd and unexpected word kept nudging its way into my mind as I sat watching "Poseidon." That word was perfunctory. I hoped that other words would replace it. I knew I was not enjoying the movie, but I hoped it would improve or, lacking that, discover an interesting way to fail. But no. It was perfunctory, by which I mean, according to the dictionary that came with my computer: cursory, desultory, hurried, rapid, fleeting, token, casual, superficial, careless, halfhearted, sketchy, mechanical, automatic, routine, and offhand."

And another truly nice bit from his review of the horror flick Silent Hill:
"I had a nice conversation with seven or eight people coming down on the escalator after we all saw "Silent Hill." They wanted me to explain it to them. I said I didn't have a clue. They said, "You're supposed to be a movie critic, aren't you?" I said, "Supposed to be. But we work mostly with movies." "Yeah," said the girl in the Harley t-shirt. "I guess this was like a video game that you like had to play in order to like understand the movie.""

Just a beautiful way with words.  The fine art of subtle yet penetrating snark.