Getting It Wrong

I once considered turning this blog into a review of reviewers. Because their words are in print, I think they get more respect than they deserve. Often, they even get basic plot points wrong.

A couple recent examples:

In LA City Beat, during a questionable discussion of Sarah Silverman and her Comedy Central show, Mick Farren writes it's

one of those Seinfeld-inspired concepts in which a throwaway stand-up line is inflated into a full half-hour plot. As in, Sarah is so bored (titter) [once someone writes "(titter)" you can pretty much stop there, so I apologize for taking Farren seriously], she gets an AIDS test.

Let's ignore that he's wrong about the plots of both Seinfeld and the Silveman show. He misses the point of the AIDS episode. First, this isn't merely boredom--Sarah's activities place her at high risk. The joke of the show is not about the AIDS test, but how Sarah is so self-involved she starts a huge crusade against AIDS--not because she cares, but because it's a great self-promotion. (Once she gets the negative results, the whole crusade falls apart.)

Then there's Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer. His states The Game, starring Michael Douglas and Sean Penn, is "a real-life cat-and-mouse game involving two brothers—one of whom torments the other." Not really. Douglas is tormented, but neither during the movie, nor at the end when everything is revealed, would you claim it's mostly Senn Penn doing it.