'Rediculous' Customer & Critic Reviews

[furbicide]

I'm blaming twwb for sending me down this rabbit hole in the Persona thread...

This used to be called porn.

[…] The movie is boring and predictable. The fine line between abuse and pleasure is so thin it's almost non- existent. Lacks any of the raunch or controversy promised, and is instead tiresome, banal and as thinly plotted as a porn. I haven't read the book.. and I have to say I didn't finish the movie. I don't think i missed much by leaving 20 mins early, but it was just boring. If a man had written the book he would probably have been jailed. Its beyond understanding what people see in the book/movie. Unless all the women I know are telling me lies and secretly want to be tied up and abused by a perverted man.

Spoiler boxing is probably redundant here, but this is no less than the featured review for

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Fifty Shades of Grey

Never change, IMDb.

[Never Cursed]

The way it was filmed was nice and beautiful, but it was trying to normalize cannibalism too much and include young love even though both of them were cannibals. It kept getting stranger and stranger as it went on and the sad scenes weren't really sad because it was just hard to connect to the characters when you've seen them devour people. The ending at that point didnt make me feel anything because it was already established that they were bad people and how

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(spoiler) he was dying and asking her to eat it, it didnt make me feel anything other than disgust and fear as he was screaming in his final moments of "love".

Timothee Chalamet was hot though

[DarkImbecile]

First we normalize it, then we legalize it, and finally we mandate it

[therewillbeblus]

This person would undoubtedly find my press screening's choice to cater with ribs in poor taste (I'll be here all week)

[Mr Sausage]

Social media has made me depressingly aware of just how much we bandy around language we’ve heard without really trying to understand it. I’m no different.

[knives]

did not stan, the doc was super one sided

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For Guzman’s Salvador Allende doc

[The Curious Sofa]

While Dr. Svet is Blu-ray-com's most notorious reviewer, Neil Lumbard may just be the site's village idiot, his writing style has all the sophistication of a 10 year old's "How I spent my summer vacation" essay.

How one can review the "Reichswasserleiche" double feature of Immensee and The Great Sacrifice (Opfergang) without once referring to the regime under which they were made, give some context of what they propagate and uncritically praise Veit Harlan as a great/impeccable director while failing to mention that he also made a vicious antisemitic propaganda film which earned him a crimes against humanity trial, takes some historical blind spots of enormous size. I don't know whether this guy is in line with a general right wing ideology of the site or whether he has been dropped on his head (the way he writes suggests the latter).

[Boosmahn]

The pinned Tweet on his Twitter page advocates for gun control, so I don't think politics are involved. It's more likely he didn't look into the films' or Harlan's history.

Also, I checked a review of his from 2019, and the writing is notably less choppy than it is here. Twenty-five reviews from him have been posted since the 18th -- it's clear he either pumped this review out alongside a slew of others or the site is asking too much of him (or both).

[MichaelB]

It's not really a review, it's just a box-ticking exercise. There's pretty much nothing there that couldn't have been extrapolated from the marketing blurb, which presumably didn't mention Nazis either.

I mean, what does this gushing drivel actually tell us about Friedrich Karl von Puttkamer's approach to the editing?

Edited by Friedrich Karl von Puttkamer (The Great Sacrifice, The Golden City), Immensee is a drama with an excellent pace. The filmmaking unfolds with ample rhythm and there is plenty to appreciate about the production. The editing is spot on and doesn't leave viewers with a film that feels over-long or undercooked. A great effort from Puttkamer.

I suppose it's one way of padding a review so it deceptively looks as though it has a decent word count - work your way through the heads of departments, say something bland and non-committal about them, and, hey presto, you're up to two or three hundred words already.

[Boosmahn]

Oh, absolutely. The site clearly favors quantity over quality, which must work for them if they manage to keep this output up.

I suspect the reviews drive new visitors to the site through search engines, while repeat visitors are mainly there for the price-tracking tools and forum. Maybe that wasn't the intent before, but it sure looks like it now.

[furbicide]

Now that Chat GPT’s on the scene, I wonder if we’re going to see a lot more of these kinds of “reviews” very soon…

Speaking of which, here’s its response to my prompt “Please write a review of Freddy Got Fingered”:

Freddy Got Fingered is a 2001 comedy film written, directed, and starring Tom Green. The film follows the misadventures of a young man named Gord Brody, who quits his job and moves back in with his parents in an attempt to become a professional cartoonist. Along the way, he gets into various absurd and outrageous situations, including being accused of child abuse and animal cruelty.

Overall, Freddy Got Fingered is a highly controversial and polarizing film. Some viewers found it to be hilarious and irreverent, while others found it to be tasteless and offensive. The film's use of gross-out humor and graphic content, including scenes of animal abuse and explicit sexual material, has made it a target of criticism and condemnation.

If you're a fan of Tom Green's brand of humor and don't mind outrageous and controversial material, you may find Freddy Got Fingered to be a humorous and entertaining film. However, if you're easily offended or not a fan of this type of comedy, you may want to skip this one.

[Never Cursed]

Not a review per se, but whoever wrote the IMDb Trivia page for Marie Kreutzer's Corsage has a real chip on their shoulder about the film (and especially its star)

[yoloswegmaster]

My favourite piece of trivia:

When Vicky Krieps shared the Un Certain Regard award for Best Performance for this film with French-Tunisian actor Adam Bessa for Harka (2022) at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, the Anglophone (and especially the American) media gave an uncommonly large amount of coverage and support for the actress while barely mentioning Bessa (and his film), who didn't get any headline with his name on it mentioning that he had won the same award as well, which only happened to Krieps that day and in the following months. Some news outlets even incorrectly reported that Krieps had won the Best Actress award at Cannes, which actually went to Zar Amir-Ebrahimi for Holy Spider (2022). The Un Certain Regard is a sidebar section from the Cannes Film Festival that doesn't even hand out actual trophies for its winners, unlike the awards for the main competition. The Best Performance award from Un Certain Regard is not even an official category - the jury has the option to award it or not to one or more actors regardless of gender. The winners from the Un Certain Regard section normally don't get much media coverage nor critics pushing an early Oscar campaign for them as Krieps received. Krieps' sidebar award tied with another actor received more media coverage and support from the Anglophone media than the official Best Actress and Best Actor winners from Cannes' main competition: Iranian actress Zar Amir-Ebrahimi and South Korean actor Song Kang-ho (for Broker (2022)), respectively, despite both of their films receiving critical acclaim.

[Michael Kerpan]

yoloswegmaster -- That paragraph doesn't sound "ridiculous" to me. Am I missing something?

[yoloswegmaster]

yoloswegmaster -- That paragraph doesn't sound "ridiculous" to me. Am I missing something?

I just thought that it was fairly amusing and a bit ridiculous considering it's from the IMDb trivia page for Corsage, which Never Cursed had posted previously. I thought I quoted their original post but apparently not.

[Never Cursed]

None of the content is literally untrue, but it quite comically overemphasizes the importance of a brief journalistic trend - if you read the other entries, it's clear that the author is using some pretty unfair insinuations to make Krieps and this movie seem sinister

[Michael Kerpan]

Never Cursed -- Based just on this extract, I thought it was more a complaint about critics/entertainment reporters than it was about anything the actress herself was responsible for. Not sure how a (normal) actor or actress could engineer such disparate coverage.

[Never Cursed]

Never Cursed -- Based just on this extract, I thought it was more a complaint about critics/entertainment reporters than it was about anything the actress herself was responsible for. Not sure how a (normal) actor or actress could engineer such disparate coverage.

The rest of the trivia items really give the impression that the writer has some grudge against Krieps, Kreutzer, the film, or all three. How else to explain such gems as these:

This film was partly funded by the Luxembourg Film Fund. The father of lead actress Vicky Krieps, Bob Krieps, was the president of the Luxembourg Film Fund and worked for the country's Ministry of Culture (when this film was being produced), which supervises the Luxembourg Film Fund and decides which films will be funded with taxpayers' money. Several of Krieps' films were funded by the Luxembourg Film Fund, even when they weren't filmed in the country.

The "For Your Consideration" kit sent out by IFC Films to awards voters included two bottles of Austrian Rosé Schlumberger Brut Classic; a box of "Sissi Veilchen" (an Austrian chocolate brand that uses the name and image of the real Empress Elisabeth), and a box of "Gerstner Sisi Torte", an Austrian chocolate cake whose package uses a photo of the real Empress Elisabeth. Director Marie Kreutzer and actress Vicky Krieps have both criticized all the products and merchandising that are sold in Austria with images of Empress Elisabeth before their film's marketing team did the same thing to promote Corsage to awards voters.

Despite saying in interviews during the film's promotion that unlike Elisabeth she is not a smoker, Vicky Krieps has been pictured smoking in real life before and after this film. Krieps also hired the same PR team of several Oscar nominees and winners to work on her Oscar campaign for this film despite calling the Oscar "a poison" months before the film was released.

Vicky Krieps arrived for this film's premiere at the Kinepolis Kirchberg in Luxembourg on September 2, 2022 in a horse-drawn carriage, which is rarely used since the 19th century and is often criticized for animal cruelty.

[tenia]

That's... indeed quite a list of trivias clearly not neutral towards the movie.
I love the "For Your Consideration" one : it seems like the writer discovered such kits exist with the movie, but believe me, I wish I receive some of the ones I saw recently on Twitter.

[MichaelB]

That last one pretty much clinches it; there's no way anybody would have bothered to note that if they weren't proactively considering every imaginable way of making Vicky Krieps look bad. You can imagine them obsessively scanning for pictures or video, spotting the horse and thinking "now, how can I work an animal cruelty angle into this?"

This reminds me of the notorious Johann Hari saga of a dozen years or so ago, in which the former Independent newspaper columnist was found to have not only extensively edited his own Wikipedia page under a pseudonym (removing anything negative and massively accentuating the positive to the point when it was longer than George Orwell's entry) but using the same pseudonym (his fatal mistake) to edit other people's Wikipedia pages - and they overwhelmingly tended to be fellow journalists that he disliked. Some of the edits were flat-out libellous to the point where his victims might well have been able to successfully sue him, but I think the general feeling was that he trashed his own formerly glittering career so comprehensively (these revelations came about in the first place thanks to a plagiarism scandal) that there wasn't much point.

[Michael Kerpan]

Yes. I agree. Those other comments all sound more like "personal grudge".

[MichaelB]

Possibly as a result of the above discussion, the obviously anti-Vicky Krieps elements have been edited out of the IMDB's Corsage trivia section.

For instance, two of the quoted sections above now read:

This film was partly funded by the Luxembourg Film Fund. The father of lead actress Vicky Krieps, Bob Krieps, was the president of the Luxembourg Film Fund and worked for the country's Ministry of Culture (when this film was being produced), which supervises the Luxembourg Film Fund and decides which films will be funded with taxpayers' money.

Vicky Krieps arrived for this film's premiere at the Kinepolis Kirchberg in Luxembourg on September 2, 2022 in a horse-drawn carriage.

And the jibes about the "For Your Consideration" kit and smoking have been deleted wholesale.

[Swift]

This guy's Letterboxd reviews somehow have double digit likes - https://letterboxd.com/joshrowley/films/reviews/

[yoloswegmaster]

I'm more shocked that he's seen over 100+ films in the year already when we haven't even reached the end of the first month!

[DarkImbecile]

He gets likes because he spams all the available reviews with likes of his own, leading people to respond in kind despite the fact that he’s clearly just mining other people’s reviews for adjectives