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modernwizardSlant magazine provides some of the most pretentious, convoluted, obtuse, overwritten, horribly bad movie "reviews" I have ever read. Here's an example. Basically the author dislikes the movie for being overly sympathetic to all characters and not judgmental enough. But God forbid he come right out and say that. Instead we get Death by Adjectives and phrases like "limning a milieu with extraneous humanism," which sounds like it just came from the keys of someone who has recently discovered the thesaurus [or maybe the Increase Your Word Power! section of Reader's Digest].
As you can see [if you can make any headway in the impenetrable thicket of purple prose], the reviewers make it a point to dislike pretty much everything. Then they expound on their dislike with the grandiloquent bloviation worthy of those self-important people who think that they are too stupendous to crack jokes. To a man [and I think they're all men], they're acutely allergic to clarity of expression and direct communication of ideas. They clearly believe that, the more subordinate clauses their "reviews" have, the better they are.
I like to read stuff like this occasionally, just to roll my eyes at its egregiousness. It reminds me what not to do.
Now, if you'll excuse me, there's a milieu that needs some limning with extraneous humanism. :p
P.S. This also brings up the question -- if you hate movies, both generally as a concept and specifically as individual films, which the writers of Slant apparently do, why write about them in the first place?
As you can see [if you can make any headway in the impenetrable thicket of purple prose], the reviewers make it a point to dislike pretty much everything. Then they expound on their dislike with the grandiloquent bloviation worthy of those self-important people who think that they are too stupendous to crack jokes. To a man [and I think they're all men], they're acutely allergic to clarity of expression and direct communication of ideas. They clearly believe that, the more subordinate clauses their "reviews" have, the better they are.
I like to read stuff like this occasionally, just to roll my eyes at its egregiousness. It reminds me what not to do.
Now, if you'll excuse me, there's a milieu that needs some limning with extraneous humanism. :p
P.S. This also brings up the question -- if you hate movies, both generally as a concept and specifically as individual films, which the writers of Slant apparently do, why write about them in the first place?
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Date: Sep. 4th, 2012 05:10 pm (UTC)Yeah, I find with people who write like that, you can fix a lot of the run-on sentences if you just take out the phrases that repeat the same idea in a slightly different way. They seem to have a rate of approximately three repeated ideas per sentence. And besides, why use one adjective or adverb where four will surely make you sound more erudite. They're basically wannabe-academic hipsters-- or wannabe-hipster academics, I'm not sure which.
They remind me of the people in the writing classes I used to take. The one with the prof who said the more you torture your characters the better a story is, or the one where I gave up on trying to argue that Wuthering Heights isn't a love story after she said "I wish someone would love me enough to hate me that much someday."
Just remember that they hated this cold, shriveled husk of an "every man for himself" dog-eat-dog cutthroat crapsack world (you know, the one they created from having that attitude!) BEFORE it was cool.
AS FOR ME, PLEASE PASS THE HUMANISM. NO NO, A LITTLE MORE, LESS "EXTRANEOUS" AND MORE "SHAMELESS." THERE, THAT'S GOOD. WITH A LEMON TWIST.