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Brett

Sunday, August 15, 2010

Geeks Vs the World

I am a geek. I don't read comics, I don't role-play, and the closest I've come to being a gamer is owning an Atari 2600 and watching my mother fall off the couch with hysterical laughter every time the little guy in Circus Atari fell splat! and his head went all flat. But I am still a geek. Most of my reading material is scifi or fantasy. I am still disappointed that Firefly got canceled, think that now is the time for a Pern movie (we have the technology, dammit!), and Big Bang Theory is one of my favorite shows. Both of my husbands have been geeks. I feel I'm part of the geek audience, even if I don't fall squarely into the current technology based definition of the word.


I have not seen Scott Pilgrim VS the World. I don't ever leave the house, so it will have to wait until DVD, though I posted the trailer some time ago because I thought it was cute and looked fun. I also don't let reviews decide me on which movies to see, and generally don't read reviews of any kind at all, unless I am definitely not planning on seeing the movie. But I quite enjoyed this article by Linda Holmes on NPR, regarding how Scott Pilgrim is being reviewed:
I also think it's so heavily stylized that it's bound not to be everyone's favorite film. It's not aiming to be liked by all; it's aiming to be adored by many. If director Edgar Wright weren't okay with the film's being polarizing, he'd have backed off from some of its delightful little quirks.
But I have to say to those reviewing it: what's completely unnecessary is being hostile and condescending about the target audience — and I can say that, because I'm emphatically not part of it.
Emphasis mine. I think anyone who reviews anything should read her article. I stopped reading comic book reviews a long time ago, when they stopped being about the comic itself and started being more about how much snark the reviewer could pile on the creators. For some reason, certain people are incapable of separating "I don't like it" from "It's incompetent/horrible/shouldn't have been made/etc." They've become incapable of stating why they don't like something without being insulting. Hostile and condescending are the right words. Read the whole thing.

5 comments:

MadPowerBomber said...

My review of it: IT. WAS. AWESOME.

:B!!

MadPowerBomber said...

Post Script! 'cause I don't know where else to mention it.

Jess! I remember conversing with you on your guys' old message board about MEG by Steve Alten and you said it was chalk full of inaccuracies and all that.

Welllll! I stumbled upon Richard Ellis' review of the book tonight, written in... 1996 and thought you might get a kick out of it. I did. Haha.

Jess said...

Ah, Meg. (You know we have a dog now named Meg, for Megara.) I have never read Jaws, but I LOVED the movie, it's very good, good story, well-directed, good characters. I am perfectly willing to suspend my disbelief (this is FICTION, after all) if the story is good and the characters are good. But Meg, oh dear, the literary equivalent of a SyFy Saturday movie. Shark Attack III: Megaladon, was more entertaining than Meg. Bad story + boring characters + scientific inacuracies that do not actually serve to make the story more entertaining = bleah. Meg.

MileHighGayGuy said...

I agree with Dameyon - saw it at the drive-in and it was AWESOME!

Cactus Smasher said...

Being that I run a blog where I review movies (click on my name! check it out! Love the art btw), I felt like I had to comment on this. I feel that being snarky and hostile is okay as long as it's humorous and you can back it up with a good reason why, as you mentioned. If the reviewer is simply attacking the creator because it wasn't to their taste, then I have a problem with it. Didn't mean to barge in like this, just felt like adding my own spin on things, from the perspective of a reviewer. By the way, I AM a geek, in all the ways you mentioned, ha ha!