Unreadable
I was going to do a little collection of some of the best nasty reviews I’d even encountered, but the internet is not being cooperative. Which is a good lesson for me… I tend to forget that while almost everything has existed in both print and digital form for the past ten years and that lots of antiquities are being added as digital archives, that there is a plentiful amount of stuff that exists only in the temporal print form in which is originated.
So while I would like to link to some of these marvelous, cutting dismissals, I cannot. Instead, I link to their placeholders for the digital future, or the place where they would be if you were a paid subscriber.
Review of: Wilson, by David Mamet
Reviewer: Rebecca Pidgeon, aka “Mrs. Mamet”
Substance of review: “Impenetrable.“
Review of review: Why wasn’t this pithy quote plastered all over the book jacket? If I had read that even the wife of the celebrated author found the book to be almost unreadable, I would have been perversely moved to take a crack at it! Much more so than whatever standard one-word superlatives normally grace a given dust cover. What a missed opportunity!
Review of: “The Fugitive” soundtrack by James Newton Howard
Reviewer: Anthony Lane, of The New Yorker
Substance of review: “The only thing that [Howard] seems to think is more suspenseful than banging a drum is banging a drum more loudly.”
Review of review: The above is a paraphrase of a dearly cherished memory of the moment that I realized I wanted to be a film reviewer. That is fantastically mean. I want more! I want in! But, there is the possibility that I have remembered the line wrong, as the article doesn’t exist online yet. However, I feel it must be close, because in his one-paragraph summary, he still takes the time to typify Howard’s score as a “rude horror“. Ouch.
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Chris McLaren said,
28 April, 2008 at 1:37 pm
You have read No Turn Unstoned, yes?I read it primarily because it was composed by my lifelong TV crush, but boy there’s some good nastiness in there.