Writing under the pseudonym 'Allan Smithee' (the false name used by directors who don't want to be associated with a terrible movie), a British film publicist has launched an attack on the world's movie critics - or "leeches" as he referes to them in an introduction which jumps schizophrenically between "I" and "we"- by publishing a blog-standard list of flicks he deems to be particularly unpraiseworthy.
He then proceeds to criticise the films himself, which is hypocritical in itself, but hiding behind that droll nom-de-plume is even more two-faced. At least film critics put their own names to their opinions.
So let's begin our dissection of this ugly animal with a look at the selections, many of which don't even fulfil the book's raison d'etre.
On which planet have the following movies been "overrated": Marie Antoinette, The Cider House Rules, Close My Eyes, the Gwyneth Paltrow version of Proof, Nine and a Half Weeks, In The Cut, The Village, The King... and the most bewildering inclusion, Bean? A more accurate title would be "101 Movies I Don't Like... Most of Which I Saw Quite Recently To Get This Book Finished So I Can Make A Few Quid Before Xmas".
On to the criticism. According to 'Smithee', Alexander Payne's Election shrinks by comparison against "seriously intelligent high school comedies... particularly 10 Things I Hate About You", The Constant Gardener is "inconsequential" and The Matrix is "unremarkable"; the action in it being "not that special" (which may come as a surprise to the hordes of special effects technicians who have both copied and lauded it to the gills).
Now consider these head-scratching statements:
[from Beetlejuice]: "Even Winona Ryder failed to steal any scenes."
[Gone With The Wind]: "The Technicolor is funny in a historical sort of way".
"Some even tried to make Withnail & I cultish."
The author is a master at making himself look stupid. On Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins, he unironically asks "why name your son Dick Van? There must be a reason". He opens his pop at Match Point with "Some things are so remarkable to become unbelievable... Cliff Richard still being single". And - as the still alive-and-kicking David Helfgott in Shine - "Geoffrey Rush is okay, although it's much harder to be a real person."
Wearing his un-PC attitude like a medal, Smithee's ignorance is boundless. "Have you notice [sic] how similar "artistic" and "autistic" are?" he asks. House of Flying Daggers (neither beautiful nor haunting) prompts the Duke of Edinburgh-style observation that "these are people who read their books back to front" (do they really?), while in Good Morning Vietnam, Forest Whitaker "does little else than laugh and be black" and his assessment of the critical success of She's Gotta Have It is that "it helps that the director and cast are all black".
There's also room for homophobia (a problem with Billy Elliot - "maybe ballet dancing is a little bit gay"; Gods and Monsters is "the story of an aging poof") and his comments on old people (see, for example, Calendar Girls and Ladies In Lavender) are gobsmackingly offensive.
He also dishes up a huge, slimy dollop of sexism - Thora Birch's "unbalanced" teenage breasts are a distraction in American Beauty; he admits to seeing Close My Eyes only "to see Saskia Reeves naked"; Tilda Swinton elicits an "Urgh!" for her sex scene in The Beach, and "the less said about [The English Patient's] Kristin Scott Thomas in the bath the better". Angelina Jolie, Anna Friel, Rene Russo and Meg Ryan are also sexually dismissed, though he does have a thing for Kirsten Dunst in a tennis skirt.
Opinions aside, so rushed a job is this that Mr Smithee (his real name's Pete; integrity prevents me from revealing his surname) can't even be bothered checking the information he's clearly lifted from the IMDB to fill every other page. In Smithee's world, M Night Shyamalan is a "Knight".
He's not too worried about consistency either. His tagged on list of top ten UNDERRATED films includes George Of The Jungle (!)... which he previously slagged off in his piece on Gods And Monsters. Oops!
As Dirty Harry so memorably put it: "Opinions are like a**holes. Everybody has one." Fortunately - and unlike certain authors who will remain anonymous - not everybody is one. Avoid this book.
Elliott Noble
Mr Miniver, the Oscar-saturated World War II weepie, is credited with encouraging the Americans to join the war and help send the Hun packing. Top Gun didn't persuade anyone into global fisticuffs...but it did produce Berlin's Take My Breath Away, a Euro-pop ditty without whose dulcet tones no break en continent is complete. 
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