As movies critics go, A O Scott at NYT is among the best.
For one thing, I can understand what he writes.
There are others I need a dictionary and a degree in film making to decipher.
For another, his reviews are consistently well written.
Here he explains why a new movie, Date Night, isn't funny.
It struck me that the reason he says this movie isn't funny is exactly why almost all advertising in the US is no longer funny.
(I'm in advertising—well, sort of—hence my anxiety about the state it's in.)
...But let me just say that “Date Night,” like so many other films of its type, too often relies on words, catchphrases and inflections that signify a generally accepted notion of funniness rather than being, you know, actually funny.
For example: the word vagina has no intrinsically humorous properties, but it’s uttered here as if believing that it did were sufficient to make it so. Same thing with the sarcastic rhetorical question — “Seriously?” “Really?” — that has become an almost universal lazy substitute for the traditional double take. And then there is the habit of trying to make a line retroactively uproarious by admitting that it really wasn’t funny to begin with.
As in: “I have no idea what I just said.” Ha ha. But I know just what I’m trying to say.
For one thing, I can understand what he writes.
There are others I need a dictionary and a degree in film making to decipher.
For another, his reviews are consistently well written.
Here he explains why a new movie, Date Night, isn't funny.
It struck me that the reason he says this movie isn't funny is exactly why almost all advertising in the US is no longer funny.
(I'm in advertising—well, sort of—hence my anxiety about the state it's in.)
...But let me just say that “Date Night,” like so many other films of its type, too often relies on words, catchphrases and inflections that signify a generally accepted notion of funniness rather than being, you know, actually funny.
For example: the word vagina has no intrinsically humorous properties, but it’s uttered here as if believing that it did were sufficient to make it so. Same thing with the sarcastic rhetorical question — “Seriously?” “Really?” — that has become an almost universal lazy substitute for the traditional double take. And then there is the habit of trying to make a line retroactively uproarious by admitting that it really wasn’t funny to begin with.
As in: “I have no idea what I just said.” Ha ha. But I know just what I’m trying to say.
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