Bad Reviews of Good Movies

Ever go on RottenTomatoes.com just to find a bad review of that movie everybody loves? Because there's always a few -- that lonely guy still complaining that The Bourne Ultimatum was too camera-shaky; the whiny chorus complaining about Juno's dialogue; the stragglers who said Lord of the Rings was just about "a silly little ring."

I could cynically say that some of these people are being contrarian for the sake of attention and traffic; after all, when you're browsing through pages of rave reviews, it's the negative one that you're going to want to read. But I'll assume that everybody's only motivated by their passionate opinion as I present to you: bad reviews of otherwise well-reviewed movies that are likely to get Oscar nominations.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

[Brad] Pitt exudes complacency. As Benjamin, whose heavily symbolic malady has something to do with a supernatural clock designed by a grieving father to move in reverse, he gives you no hint what his character makes of the changes. He doesn’t bring out the tension between mind and body; he just stares ahead with sad eyes and lets his makeup do the acting. -NY Magazine

Doubt

"Doubt" is an intentionally fuzzy movie, and those who respond to it will inevitably use its intentional smudginess as a defense, claiming that we're not supposed to walk away from it with any reasonable certainty: We're not supposed to know who's gay and who's not, who may or may not be an abused kid. We're only supposed to know that Sister Aloysius is one superbitch from hell -- on that score, neither Shanley nor the outlandishly one-note Streep leave any doubt. But all of that is just an excuse for the way "Doubt" cheats us. -Salon

(Wow, that's a pissed-off review. And very off-base, in my opinion, about the conclusions we're supposed to draw about Streep's character.)

The Dark Knight

All this ruckus is accompanied by pounding thuds on the soundtrack, with two veteran Hollywood composers (Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard) providing additional bass-heavy stomps in every scene, even when nothing is going on. At times, the movie sounds like two excited mattresses making love in an echo chamber. In brief, Warner Bros. has continued to drain the poetry, fantasy, and comedy out of Tim Burton’s original conception for “Batman” (1989), completing the job of coarsening the material into hyperviolent summer action spectacle. -New Yorker

Frost/Nixon

This wins the "Biggest Backhanded Compliment" award:

Howard has by now become Hollywood's foremost exponent of middlebrow "serious" entertainment, and he stages the run-up to the interviews with great flair. -Boston Globe

Slumdog Millionaire

"Slumdog Millionaire" has a problem in its storytelling. The movie unfolds in a start-and-stop way that kills suspense, leans heavily on flashbacks and robs the movie of most of its velocity. The filmmakers' motives are sincere. The story is interesting enough. Yet the whole construction is tied to a gimmicky narrative strategy that keeps "Slumdog Millionaire" from really hitting its stride until the last 30 minutes. By then, it's just a little too late. -SF Chronicle

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