The Old Country's Biggest Blunders

In terms of sheer cluelessness, I'd say the Nirvana and Macklemore ones are tied, though the latter has the edge thanks to the claim that he's stealing poor people's culture. I don't remember the Green Day one- maybe I suppressed it...

What puzzles me about the whole Leonard Pierce issue is, don't the writers get assignments? That is, didn't an editor or some higher-up person tell him to review that book? And if so, was that higher-up person aware that the book didn't exist?

…Was it a trap?

Agreed that nothing Sonia said deserved the ridiculous shit storm that followed her from those Leftovers comments almost until she left. But crazy people will find reasons to be crazy regardless. I just remember reading that line and thinking "Huh, I wonder what Matthew Shepard's family would think about this." It seemed so monumentally tone deaf. Then the asshole brigade arrived.

That sort of gets to what I said in another post about how I think I could sit down and have a conversation with her about certain subjects and enjoy it - I feel like we'd definitely have a lot of common ground in what seems to be our shared love of riot grrrl bands and stuff similar to that, even though I deduct a ton of points for calling Sleater-Kinney's The Woods "just okay."

And then I see the smug my-taste-is-so-refined version of her in something like Hatesong articles and it really puts me off, followed by the nearly uncritically-positive Swift articles, and I just check out completely.

Judkins Moaner See your point about Eakins—she is indeed a good interviewer! But I’m still not fond of her music writing.





Someone pointed out in the comments of the Salman Rushdie review that there’s nothing in the review that’s not in the book’s press release. I would not be surprised if the book went unread.

Amusing New AVC Staff fail today in Great Job, Internet: www.avclub.com/article/read-how-one-contestant-totally-gamed-press-your-l-225374

In the links to other sites that have written up this incident, the staffer omits the in-depth AVC TV Club Roundtable feature on this very thing from only two years ago. It does grate somewhat when you get the sense that the readers know the product better than the people producing it.

I have to agree with Great Job, Internet! As it's been said, it can be good sometimes but not often enough. I also recently stumbled upon the Ghostbusters thing too, that was great. As a newer user it's always enjoyable to stumble upon pieces of AVC history like that.

 Sounds like they went full Pitchfork. Never a good idea.

Ooh, is it time to post the Doktor Sleepless authenticity rant again?

Since I get so many reasons to repost this classic, I've made a blog page for both the text and the comic panels.

StarWipe.

It's all part of the apparent requirement that all newswire posts must be drenched in snark, even though it used to be mainly O'Neal's thing and nobody can do it like he does it.

Now that the newswire is a variety of writers trying to snark at 110% power on most every topic, I find it sometimes a bit exhausting to read.

To be fair, they ditched TV Roundtable almost as soon as I left. I'm not surprised it's slid down the memory hole. There were a lot of TV features I was keeping alive through sheer force of will toward the end there.

The original text for Verhoeven's  The Fourth Man review.  It's like all site editing :cease to exist.


"A gleefully deranged and deviant fantasia of religious and carnal imagery, Paul Verhoeven’s The Fourth Man centers on the psychosexual crisis plaguing a writer played by Jeroen Krabbé. Director Paul Verhoeven’s writer. A man who states, “I lie the truth,” Krabbé is introduceds Krabbé naked and fantasizing about murdering his gay lover—, this after Verhoeven openings the film with the sight of a spider cocooning flies caught in its web, which in turn segues into visions of Christ on the cross. That mixture of perverse violence, predatory danger, and Catholic guilt comes to defines Krabbé’s saga once he journeys to southern Holland for a lecture, and where he meets falls in with icy, androgynous blonde Renée Soutendijk. Covering her breasts in bed to make her look more like a boy, Krabbé Covering her breasts in bed to make her look more like a boy, Krabbé falls in with Soutendijk. but However, he trulyactually pines for Soutendijk’s her hunky boy toy Thom Hoffman, whose sexual shortcomings se lack of stamina in the bedroom Krabbé promises to fix—mainly, it eventually turns out, —by attempting to seduce him in the mausoleum housing the cremated remains of Soutendijk’s three deceased husbands.



Verhoeven and cinematographer Jan de Bont drench the twisted narrative in all manner of symbolic motifs, crafting a dreamlike atmosphere of paranoia, fear, and lust—themes the duo would revisit almost a decade later in Basic Instinct. That twisted narrative is drenched in all manner of symbolic motifs by Verhoeven, who—working with cinematographer Jan dDe Bont, who would go on to direct the Hollywood action movie Speed—crafts a dreamlike atmosphere of paranoia, fear, and lust. Panicked by the idea that Soutendijk is a black widow, and that he’s destined to be who intends to make him her fourth victim, Krabbé navigates a landscape where the where there are no boundaries betweenboundaries between reality and reality and nightmare :cease to exist. Allusions to Samson and Delilah mix freely with Krabbé’s hallucinations about eyeballs popping out of their oozing sockets, a red Speedo-clad Hoffman on the cross, and Soutendijk castrating him in bed with the same scissors she uses at her salon. Coupled with Krabbé’s deliriously over-the-top performance, the director’s and Verhoeven’s in-your-face approach renders the materialmake it all a jet-black comedy.



Meanwhile, the appropriations of stylistic tropes from Buñuel, Hitchcock, and De Palma are merely another example of the film’s overriding prankster-ish humor."

I had completely forgotten about that.  Clicking on that article and reading the insane madness spilling out across the screen was surreal, and one of the funniest things I'd ever stumbled across.

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