Dyson's Fear 3.0

Some people just shouldn't be film critics

On a whim, I decided to see if there were any reviews for The Grudge 2 on Metacritic yet. There weren't but there was a link to some of Shimizu's other works, including one of my favorites, Marebito. Metacritic gave it a 50%, which I thought was peculiar seeing as how good the film was. It turns out that the people who gave the film poor reviews just didn't get the film, and in one case, seemed to have reviewed another movie altogether.

Now, I'm not saying this as some fanboy thinking that the film deserved better. I'm saying this as someone who has watched the film, and understood (for the most part) what I was saying. One reviewer goes off on a tangent about Japanese misogyny, another calls the film a gorefest, and another just writes it off as something that Americans just won't understand. The former comes off like the one newspaper round table discussion where people found Attack of the Clones racist by inserting their own presumptions after being told that the movie was considered racist, the second just sounds like somebody who watched the movie on fast-forward, and the third... I just dunno.

For the record, the Austin Chronicle review is probably the most reasonable of the negative reviews. The author actually sounds like they watched the movie with an open mind, and then decided that they didn't like the film. The other negative reviews? Unthinking tripe.

posted by Jason @ 12:48 AM