TKretts3 said:
The reason I find it hard to take Bob seriously as a critic, or even just as a person, is when he does something like say that Les Miserables and The Amazing Spiderman were worse thanmovies The Expendables and American Reunion. Having seen Les Miserables on New Year's Eve I can say with no doubt that it's position, and it's participation on the list, is flat out wrong. And as for Spiderman it really does just seem like he has some personal grudge against it.
In Defense of Bob: Being a critic means that your here to hear his opinion and insights. You really can't be a "bad" critic other than to have an opinion nobody agrees with, or perhaps more accuratly having an opinion that nobody agrees with that you can't convey in a fairly entertaining fashion. For the most part I agree with Bob, if not his reasoning, more than I disagree with him in an overall sense, it usually being a few of his points, usually politically motivated, that I wind up disagreeing with.
Overall Bob would be a terrible reviewer, most people would, which is why you generally don't see many, and everyone once thought of or claiming to be a reviewer has been re-branding themself as a critic. To his credit, I don't think Bob ever made any pretensions of any degree of neutral analysis.
Not in Defense Of Bob: I think his politics have largely come out in his list selections more so than they do in some of his videos. If you follow Bob a lot, you can pretty much guess why some of these are placed where they are on the list.
The movies at the top tend to be those that are just genuinely awful beyond defense on their own merits, Branded for example is a stinker no matter what you think of the point, that said te fact that it's a slam on Corperate America it's important to understand it's also a slam on a lot of things Bob agrees with in value probably just increased his vitriol. When it comes to Les Miserabes, that one seems to mostly get praise because of the people in it and how much pull they have in Hollywood right now. The thing is with famous, well known, works is that your pretty much competing with every other version of the same work done, including ones where there have been casts that nailed every role on every account. Not only is Ruseel Crowe's performance generally terrible by all accounts (not just Bob's) people can watch this and totally miss the meaning of the film, Bob who is good with understanding meaning usually could not figure out WHY there was a shift in focus, someone else in these responses pointed it out, but the point is that the work should speak for itself and make that point without someone needing to tell the average viewer, never mind a professional critic why it sucks.
A lot of the movies on this list however are generally average and happen to be ones that just got Bob's goat for one reason or another. Bob prides himself on his tortured past as an outcast, even having called movies about social rejects "Bob The Movie" or whatever in the past. As a result you can see why movies that pretty much glorify the values of those on the opposite side from him get his goat. For example you can see why he'd like the "Toby Maguire" version of Spider Man, better than the most recent one, because of the simple level of social adjustment, this despite the fact that I think the "new" Spider Man is a heck of a lot closer to the comics than the Toby Macguire version, ranging from Peter's Genius rather than just having web shooters, to the fact that he wasn't ever quite that much of a loser. Sure beating up Flash was pushing it, but consider that in the comics this is a guy who probably could have boinked Flash's girlfriend any time he wanted (she later became "The Black Cat" and "what if" the two of them seriously got together has been a popular alternate universe concept). The biggest problem I have with Spider Man movies (both) is the idiot directors keep having to find excuses for Spidey to take his mask off around people, largely so they can show the actor, I can understand the reasons for this, but it doesn't fit the character who has generally had one of the more enduring secret identities in comics... some like "Battleship" are not just totally counter to his point of view. "Battleship" was honestly a very average movie, they tried to rip off "Top Gun" a bit too much, and made the protaganist into a bit too much of a douche, even leading you to believe he might have started an interstellar war (which he didn't, you find out later the aliens were bad anyway). That said "Battleship" could be considered US military wank material, and if your generally anti-military, well your not going to appreciate this movie anywhere near as much as someone whose really into the military and war machines. The "Expendables" franchise features exactly the kind of guys that probably picked on Bob as a kid, guys who generally look like they could do the kind of thing they pull off in the movies, as opposed to say some pretty boy actor playing a wimp who doees these things anyway which is a bit closer to the whole outcast fantasy (a Peter Parker type). It also tends to echo an era that was pretty much anti-thetical to what people like Bob politically stand for, being both more nationalistic, less politically correct, and thinking of society's negative elements as being something to push back as opposed to embrace (and ask questions like "who says they're negative!"). Like "Battleship" it can be said that "The Expendables" is pretty much a pretty average movie, to be honest I think it's biggest problem was that it had too many stars, all of whom needed to get time to "do their thing", with a couple of them (like Couture) largely acting as scene dressing because there were just so many big name, vintage, dudes. It's hard to write a movie under those circumstances... and it's actually pretty amazing how well they pulled it off considering the egos involved. I find it kind of odd that Bob would suggest Rodriguez direct, but then again I suppose his sensibilities are more in Bob's direction, especially if he's involved with the script, truthfully though I think his brand of "over the top" style is wrong for what they are setting out to do here, it's a differant kind of "over the top".
That said a few of Bob's selections would definatly be on my own list "The Lorax" for example struck me as being truely awful. I'm not a big enviromentalist to begin with (surprise, surprise), but this movie didn't inspire any feeling in me, in either direction, except "wow, this needs to end". Not to mention that when it was released I seem to remember some of the promotions using "the Lorax" struck me as being exactly the kinds of things this story was supposed to be anti-thetical to. I half suspect this was the problem, the movie simply couldn't go full tilt into the message it was supposed to promote without angering the sponsors.
Of course maybe it's not Bob's politics and personal agenda, so much as there just weren't that many truely terrible movies released to theaters this year, so mediocre ones hit the list. I'd personally have ranked some things like "Woman In Black" on this list... which I kind of suspect is going to be part of Daniel Radcliffe's career suicide (to be honest as an adult he's creepier than the ghosts). As much as I personally liked it as a series fan, I also have to say that the "Silent Hill" movie was objectively pretty bad. Also speaking for myself I'd have to give "The Hobbit" a space on this list, though mostly for reasons of technical inepitude, it was a good movie ruined by the 3D, where it seems they pretty much wrote the entire movie around how many differant ways they could contrieve to have the dwarves be dangling off of things, I have expect this trilogy is going to be at least 50% filler, with story elements changed and modified simply so they can create situations to showcase 3D FX. I kind of expect that when the 3d fad fades, people are going to look back at this in 2D and go "WTF kind of cinematography is that" turning what could otherwise be another classic series of movies, into an oddity.
