Stoking the hate engine

It's no great secret that I hate things. A lot of things. And by hate I don't mean dislike, I mean hate. Dislike has no passion in it. Hatred has quite a lot. One of the things I hate is reviewers. Books, movies, music, doesn't matter. So many professional reviewers are so full of shit and either so ignorant, snobbish or both that they make me want to strangle them so they can never inflict their bullshit on any more innocent fans. The only thing worse than listening to a professional reviewer do their job is listening to, say, a student taking their first high level literature class and then deciding to talk down to you about it like you're some kind of illiterate trog. I imagine these same students grow up to be reviewers. I got to thinking about this today (Taco's fault) and then got to thinking about my most hated reviewer and then got angry so now I'm sharing it with you lot.

Lisa Scharzbaum is her name and getting on my fucking nerves is her game. She writes movie reviews for Entertainment Weekly, a magazine that I enjoy otherwise. She's not always entirely wrong mind you, it's hard to be wrong literally all the time, but she rubs me the wrong way in such an aggressive manner 98% of the time that if I want an excuse to get furious all I have to do is read a review by her and BOOM, instant anger.

Firstly, she always seems to be the one to review the geek movies and she NEVER lets an opportunity slide to let us know that she is not a geek and that she looks down her nose at those of us that are. She tends to begin these reviews by letting us know that she has no knowledge of the source material and then tells us that makes her perfect to do the review because she won't act like a drooling fanboy about it. We're all drooling idiots, y'see. She will then not be able to resist getting through the review without taking shots at the source material which she claims no knowledge of and the writer of that material. She spent most of her review of Sin City telling us why the comics were shit and why Frank Miller is a hack comic book writer and should never ever be confused with Jane Austin and why we all suck for liking it and why the movie sucked because it was made to be like the source material. Apparently if you don't go out of your way to alienate the fans of the original work, you don't deserve to make movies. Even when she raves about the movie like, for example, The Lord of the Rings movies, she still can't resist taking shots at Tolkien fans. What the fuck, man?

She's also one of these women that measure things with large female roles by what they do to advance the cause of feminism. That's fine if that's what the movie is about but to end your review of Juno by saying that there should have been this that and the other about all manner of hard fought battles that took place so that a person like Juno could exist in the first place is just fucking stupid. Perhaps you'd like a personal apology from Diablo Cody (the writer and *gasp* a woman) for not personally thanking you for blazing the trail that allowed her to write a movie. Sorry Lisa, not every woman measures her sense of self worth by her personal contributions toward the advancement of the universal vagina. How about you crawl down out of your own cervix and join us out here in the real world where not everything that includes women has to have a message about girlpowerempowermentvaginayaydownwiththepenis blahblahblah.

Then of course there are the reviews where she just says things so fucking ignorant that my brain forces my eyes to go blurry so that I won't read any more and risk possible brain damage. The review for Lars and the Real Girl, one of my favorites from last year, went on and on about how it was stupid because the town people were enabling him and were acting "bonkers." I'm sorry, were you looking for realism in a movie about a guy who is so emotionally damaged that he starts a relationship with a sex doll that he believes is a real woman? Way to miss the fucking point.

She shouldn't be allowed to review action movies either. She compared the original Matrix (you know, the one that was flat out fucking amazing) unfavorably to Face/Off (you know the American John Woo movie that was exactly what you'd expect an American John Woo movie to be, a John Woo movie with all the cool shit taken out and replaced with boring old shit you've seen a hundred times and an ending so fucking terrible that it makes you wish you'd died before you had to see it.) .

Ugh, I'm going to stop now before this devolves into a novelette. She just pisses me off so bad that I had to get it out.