Film Critics From The United States

"I got what he was saying. It wasn’t just about crunching numbers. It was about understanding them. It was about seeing the unexpected connections."

"Don’t underestimate the power of nerds with access to Internet search engines."

"College, after all, was a place where one had most of the privileges of adulthood and very few of the responsibilities. Who wouldn’t want to stay there forever if one could?"

"“You’re a theoretician. I’m more at home in applied physics.” He reached for his pipe and tobacco pouch. “Ah yes, the great divide in physics. It’s like the nature versus nurture arguments the biologists and psychologists have.” “I wonder what they argue about in the chemistry department,” I wondered. “Probably who has to pick up the check, if they’re anything like the professors I know. If it doesn’t smell or blow up, they seem more interested in mixing drinks than chemicals.”"

"I now know the answer to the riddle as to which came first, the chicken or the egg? The correct answer is, “Yes.”"

"As a journalist, he was used to being lied to."

"“Let me guess. Las Vegas had time machines as well.” “No,” said Price, “but they had something just as troublesome: the Treasury Department.”"

"You’ve heard of “Rocks for Jocks,” the gimme course that departments of geology often offer? The physics department offering was called—among the faculty, anyway, “Quarks for Dorks.” Lucky me, I got to teach it."

"There are times when you’re incredibly sensitive and insightful. This isn’t one of them."

"I've got a moral quandry about the show. Hayden Panettiere, born August 21, 1989, now 17 (legal in Texas, which is important, because her character is in Odessa, Texas) as the character, Claire Bennett. She's adorably cute, constantly in her cheerleader uniform. Ok - now never mind that she fulfills the underage cheerleading limber blond [sic] virginal demographic. That's pretty delicious. But they gave her the ability to regenerate and resuscitate from any and all injuries. This power has decided to manifest itself before she's lost her virginity. Which means - everytime she has sex, she's a virgin as her hymen will repair itself. Meaning that everytime she's fucked, its like she's being fucked for the very first time. OK - that's WAY WRONG. [sic]"

"Jason Bailey, Slate, The Worst Movie Review Ever Written Is Still Poisoning the Air"

"Ok, maybe I take the metaphor too far… maybe… But I had two girls around me, Patch black and blued my right forearm with slaps and rabbit punches as though Guillermo was pounding the short hairs, and Saffron (not Vegas’) gripping my shoulder from behind like frickin [sic] Spock, leaning up to my ear to say, "You didn’t tell me this was pornography!!!!" [sic] To which I grab her hand, sniffed her fingers and said, "MMMm you’re [sic] fingers are wet… enjoy!""

"David Weddle, Seducing Harry, Washington Post"

"BLADE 2 is the tongue, mouth, fingers and lips of a lover. The Audience is the clit. Watch your audience. This is where Guillermo Del Toro goes down on the audience. It starts with long licks with a nose bump on the joy button slowly. He smiles as he does this… Watching the audience begin to squirm, then he takes the audiences’ clit in his mouth and just licks it like crazy, the audience is ready, on that precipice, then calm. He backs off… long licks again, brings in a finger to massage a bit, licks from the bottom to the top… The audience is cooing… He has them, they want release. He acts like he’s going to give it to you, takes you right to the edge, the audiences’ backs arched, ready to cum…. Backs off pinching the nipples just so, his head bobbing up to say, "You like?" The audience shifts around needing release, he builds again… The pressure at a near boiling point… Each stroke and moment a hypersensitive place… Two fingers to the sweet spot, the audience is there… right there at that point… suddenly he’s relentless taking the audience through a rampage of orgasms… trying to get away, trying to escape… back back back, but he has you, and he’s never going to let you forget this moment, the audience was electric… Frenetically frothing… Guillermo hears them begging no more, when he decides to stop for a moment, there is that relaxed calm… The audience relaxes… labored breathing… a sated smile, WHEN SUDDENLY THE RELENTLESS BASTARD IS AT IT AGAIN!!!! [sic] You begin laughing, trying to push him away, but no… more pleasure, more joy, more fun… You can’t handle it, you start giggling and screaming… And it goes like this for quite some time, till at the end… The credits roll, the theater lights come up… You look at the screen, you realize you want that tongue again… You want that feeling again, and you watch it again and again, because damn he respects the clit!"

"For me to review BLADE 2, it is a major conflict of interest, because Guillermo Del Toro and I are brothers. His father says so. His wife believes this. Guillermo and I are just the best of friends, but when El Gordo calls my father Dad, and I call his Dad "Pops" and we delve into hours of passionate discussion about H.P. Lovecraft, Goya, Steve Ditko action, the movies and pussy… We can lose all track of time on planet Earth."

"I specialize in cool inside movie news. Specifically the news from movies that excite us fans. If you work in the industry feel free to contribute. Your identity will never be revealed."

"A warning: BLADE 2 is an R-rated movie. This is the NC-17 Review of it. You have been warned."

"I was [my parents’] experiment. They unleashed everything on me. I saw porn, all the Universal monster movies, all the Charlie Chan films, all the Sherlock Holmes things, all the Fred and Ginger movies. Film for me became how I related to everything else."

"The bottom line is: As long as you have clout, there is no fallout."

"It's my theory that do to the constant discomfort of virginal sex with men, her character will prefer the kind attention of her fellow sex. MEANING - [sic] she'll be a hot, underage, cheerleading lesbian... for life. ALSO - [sic] she could have sex with ANYONE. [sic] Any disease - unprotected and be perfectly ok. The people behind this show are sick. Either that or they have singlehandedly created the most deviantly awesome fanboy sex object in the history of SUPERHERO FICTION. [sic] And she's from Texas. Claire... you rule!"

"Now, a generation later the media world is radically different. These changes have often been referred to as the “second Gutenberg revolution,” but indeed we’ve gone much farther. Gutenberg’s invention freed readers, encouraging literacy. But production was still controlled by a few. As the American journalist A. J. Liebling aptly put it half a century ago: “Freedom of the Press belongs to those who own one!”"

"Back then, nearly all the film or television that you saw was produced by professionals and distributed only by large, authorized companies and institutions. Yet in the late 1970s, a few amateurs had discovered the new technology of videocassettes, the first personal computers had gone on sale, and the first computer networks were being born. The elements were in place: It was only a matter of time and technology."

"When the book first appeared thirty years ago there were few reliable introductions to the subject of film. My intent was to give people the tools to understand how the language of film operates. Our audience then was mainly viewers of film – consumers, not producers. (After all the English title was How to “Read” a Film, not How to “Make” a Film.) But even then we could see a dramatically more democratic future for the medium."

"Our own media revolution extends that freedom to all: Now, not only can anyone make a film, anyone can publish it, making it available to the world — in seconds, via the internet. Now all of us are producers as well as consumers; film is less a show and more of a conversation among equals."

"But from his opening line, with his back toward us, Brando betrays that he hasn’t even got the man’s voice under control. (Listen to the word “first.” Pure Brando, not Corleone.) Insecurity and assumption streak the job from then on. They have put padding in his cheeks and dirtied his teeth, he speaks hoarsely and moves stiffly, and these combined mechanics are hailed as great acting. ... The Godfather was made from a big best-seller, a lot of money was spent on it, and it runs over three hours. Therefore it’s significant."

"Miss [[Marilyn Monroe|[Marilyn] Monroe]], complete with hushed, monotonous voice and with eye makeup even after a night in the mountains, copes more successfully with the neurotic than with the "elemental" qualities in her part. But at her best we sense that she has been coached and primed in thirty-second segments, which wouldn't matter if we weren't aware of it. Her hysterical scene near the end will seem virtuoso acting to those who are overwhelmed by the fact that she has been induced to shout."

"He stared the assorted meannesses and failed promises of American life straight in the face, and they stared back."

"In the later nineteenth century, the tops of skycrapers often took the shape of domes, surmounted by jaunty gilded lanterns; later came ziggurats, mausoleums, Alexandrian lighthouses, miniatures Parthenons. These charming follies contained neither royal corpses nor effigies of gods and goddesses; rather they contained large wooden tanks filled with water."

"The body, I have often thought, is like a promise. You keep things in it. Those things are covert, immediate, yours. There is something lustrous about them. They emit energy, like radium or appliances. They can be replaced, repaired or simply discarded. The promise of the body is very firm and intact. It's the only promise we can count on, and we can't really count on it very much."

"You know what Christmas means? It means if I love you, I'm going to buy you a whole load of crap. The more I love you, the bigger the load gets. Sometimes, if you can afford it, you can get your loved one literally tons of crap, and then they're really loved. Love, love, love. Ho ho ho. Merry Christmas. Buy some more crap. Come on, line up and buy yourselves a whole lot more crap. Here's something nice. Bought any crap quite like this crap recently? Crap crap crap. Ho ho ho. Like that mechanical Santa Claus in the Montgomery Ward's window display. Ho ho ho. Merry Christmas, everybody. Have yourselves all one fucking hell of a merry little Christmas, all you poor stupid saps. Line up and get taken, that's what I say, that's what Santa says. We take MasterCard cards and Visa cards. Come on, losers. Line up on this side. Get your money taken on that side."

"Sometimes I don't know," Rodney said, wiping his brow with the back of his greasy hand. "Sometimes I don't know if I was born mean, or if the world just made me that way."

"I turned. The schoolground seemed to be glowing. It wasn't like night so much as like night on some high-tech movie set. Invisible machines operated everywhere. Hidden technicians monitored, taped, replayed and edited. Truth could be collapsed and disarranged. Life was not fact, but montage. I might even be an actor playing somebody else's role. My mind might be a stage upon which some cultural drama played."

"He opened another beer, and I warmed some canned chili on the stove. Pedro ate most of it, sponging up the red chili sauce with slices of his doughy Wonderbread. "This is a hard fast world we live in, kiddo—and I'm telling you this as a friend, now. All this teary-eyed feeling sorry for yourself childhood crap just doesn't work—doesn't work for long, anyway. I can promise you that. I mean, your mom wants you to have this idyllic childhood and all. She thinks this is Camelot or something, your childhood. Well, I want you to know, kiddo. I looked up 'idyllic' in the dictionary and I wouldn't hold my breath. I wouldn't lie in bed all day just waiting for some idyllic childhood to come along.""

"We sometimes come to God, not because we love him best, but because we love our possessions best; we ask Christ to "save Western civilization," without asking ourselves whether it is entirely a civilization that Christ could want to save. We pray, too often, not to do God's will, but to enlist God's assistance in maintaining our "continually increasing consumption." And yet, though Christ promised that God would feed us, he never promised that God would stuff us to bursting."

"She is incredibly articulate. She means what she says and she says what she means. Her metaphors are what make her poetry, and they ring true."

"We are in danger of forgetting that God is not only a comfort but a joy. He is the source of all pleasures; he is fun and laughter, and we are meant to enjoy him."

"I just think it’s funny that a couple of logical tweets have made me a “conservative,” such a strong label. I don’t even know what it means to be conservative, or what a conservative is anymore. I feel like the meanings of these labels are changing. I certainly would never have called myself a conservative."

"Capital was kick-started by the rape of the African continent, a phenomenon that is central to neither Gramsci nor Marx. ... Capital was kick-started by approaching a particular body (a black body) with direct relations of force, not by approaching a white body with variable capital. Thus, one could say that slavery is closer to capital’s primal desire than is exploitation. It is a relation of terror as opposed to a relation of hegemony. Second, today, late capital is imposing a renaissance of this original desire, the direct relation of force, the despotism of the unwaged relation. This renaissance of slavery—that is, the reconfiguration of the prison-industrial complex—has once again as its structuring metaphor and primary target the black body."

"We begin to see how Marxism suffers from a kind of conceptual anxiety. There is a desire for socialism on the other side of crisis, a society that does away not with the category of worker but with the imposition that workers suffer under the approach of variable capital. In other words, the mark of its conceptual anxiety is in its desire to democratize work and thus help to keep in place and ensure the coherence of Reformation and Enlightenment foundational values of productivity and progress. This scenario crowds out other postrevolutionary possibilities—that is, idleness."

"The worker calls into question the legitimacy of productive practices, while the slave calls into question the legitimacy of productivity itself."

"In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon makes two moves with respect to civil society. First, he locates its genuine manifestation in Europe—the motherland. Then, with respect to the colony, he locates it only in the zone of the settler. This second move is vital for our understanding of black positionality in America and for understanding the, at best, limitations of radical social movements in America. For if we are to follow Fanon’s analysis and the gestures toward this understanding in some of the work of imprisoned intellectuals, then we have to come to grips with the fact that, for black people, civil society itself—rather than its abuses or shortcomings—is a state of emergency."

"Whiteness, then—and, by extension, civil society cannot be solely “represented” as some monumentalized coherence of phallic signifiers but must first be understood as a social formation of contemporaries who do not magnetize bullets. This is the essence of their construction through an asignifying absence; their signifying presence is manifested by the fact that they are, if only by default, deputized against those who do magnetize bullets. In short, white people are not simply “protected” by the police. They are—in their very corporeality—the police."

"The black subject reveals the inability of social movements grounded in Gramscian discourse to think of white supremacy (rather than capitalism) as the base and thereby calls into question their claim to elaborate a comprehensive and decisive antagonism. Stated another way, Gramscian discourse and coalition politics are indeed able to imagine the subject that transforms itself into a mass of antagonistic identity formations—formations that can precipitate a crisis in wage slavery, exploitation, and hegemony—but they are asleep at the wheel when asked to provide enabling antagonisms toward unwaged slavery, despotism, and terror."

"Perhaps the biggest reason why intellectuals excoriated entertainment was that they understood all too well their own precariousness in a world dominated by it. For whatever the overt content of any particular work, entertainment as a whole promulgated an unmistakable theme, one that took dead aim at the intellectuals’ most cherished values. That theme was the triumph of the senses over the mind, of emotion over reason, of chaos over order, or the id over the superego, of Dionysian abandon of Apollonian harmony. Entertainment was Plato’s worst nightmare. It deposed the rational and enthroned the sensational and in so doing deposed the intellectual minority and enthroned the unrefined majority."

"This is my little disquisition about football: the quarterback, the center, and the towel. p. 116"

"But we do not normally mistake progressions of weakness, the loss of the simple capacity to escape, for the onset of love. p. 17"

"Here, on the other hand, with an ingenuity that should take an entrepreneurial schemer’s breath away, there has evolved the following proposition: that a legal job no sooner comes into existence than it generates, immediately and of necessity, a job for a competitor. p. 118"

"Michael made his debut in John Carpenter's 1978 horror classic, Halloween, possibly the best scare movie to come along in the last twenty-five years. … [W]ith the release of the sixth (and hopefully final) movie to bear the Halloween moniker, we see how far the mighty have fallen. … In the final analysis, The Curse of Michael Myers is a horrific motion picture — just not in the way the film makers intended - Directed By Joe Chappelle."

"I have to report that this motion picture is arguably the worst piece of cinematic crap I have ever experienced theatrically. Hyperbole, you wonder? I looked through my list of zero-star movies and couldn't find one entry (except the immortal Zombie vs. Mardi Gras, which was a straight-to-video release) that ranked as more difficult to endure. Words like abomination and travesty don't do this movie justice. Sitting through Freddy Got Fingered was one of the most depressing experiences in my 10 years of reviewing films. It's not even enjoyable on a campy level. It's just bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad - Directed By Tom Green."

"It's mind-boggling to consider that movies this bad are actually committed to film. The poor quality of The Pest in almost every category — humor, intelligence, creativity, and just plain entertainment value — ranks it somewhere between a bad infomercial and a local cable newscast. Rarely do I consider the act of seeing a movie to be a chore, but this kind of experience is the exception - Directed By Paul Miller."