When reviewers get lazy...

philt · 05 May, 2005, 07:59:07 PM

my SFX fav - "it's a +insert blank+ Buffy"

fecking tools.....

House of Usher · 05 May, 2005, 08:11:37 PM

As in:

"It's a World War II Buffy"
"It's a Sci-fi Buffy - in space"
"It's a cartoon Buffy"
"It's a Wild West Buffy"

etc?

House of Usher · 05 May, 2005, 08:13:33 PM

Personally, I think the formula "it's Lord of The Rings meets Muriel's Wedding... on ice" can be quite creative, just so long as you can see exactly what they mean, and they're not just grabbing handy pegs on which to hang their rubbish comparisons.

Adrian Bamforth · 05 May, 2005, 10:13:21 PM

I have to admit I was quite amused by the description of Spielberg's AI as "Pinnochio on ice"

ADE

House of Usher · 05 May, 2005, 10:34:06 PM

As an overused adjective, how about 'Kafka-esque' ?

Even better: 'Kafka-esque nightmare'

or 'trapped in a Kafka-esque nightmare'.

Tiplodocus · 05 May, 2005, 11:28:08 PM

Another personal bugbear is where a Magazine reviews something that isn't really its scene.

COSMOPOLITAN or SFX doing game reviews and stuff like that. All they do is recycle the press release and give it a mark based on the amount of hype the game has rather than actually playing it.

Film reviews in women's magazines (I admit, I glance through them occassionally - they can be really dirty!) are particularly bad - any ROM-COM automatically gets three marks out of five and then they add a mark for each of Hugh Grant, Colin Firth, Nicole Kidman, Liz Hurley etc that it stars.

And internet reviews/comments/opinions that consist solely of "it **cking rocks, man!"
as of May 19th, I think we'll be seeing quite a few of those...

Richmond Clements · 05 May, 2005, 11:38:25 PM

Oh man, those press releases...

I get them with stuff I review, and it does my tits in. Some of them even provide a helpful 70 word and 40 word synopsis, so depending on the mength of review your supposed to write, you can add a couple of lines with general shite in them.
I hate them!

Adrian Bamforth · 07 May, 2005, 06:59:37 AM

Not exactly reviews but about once a year I actually pick up a copy of The Sun in a waiting room, it always has the same - well I can hardly call it a joke...where they have a picture of some busty celeb and unable to think of any puns that actually work they write: Melinda tells us che "chest" can't get enough / Babs "chest" loves The Sun / Daisy says she's "chest" had enough - so you see "chest" sounds almost exactly like "just", yet alludes to tits. It's hard to explain how depressed it makes me, how can anyone think it could still be funny day after day? In fact I actually remember seeing it a a copy of The Sun, shuddering, turning a couple of pages and seeing it used again!

Cunts.

ADE

KingPhone · 07 May, 2005, 07:46:15 AM

Harry Harrison, giving a convention talk in Perth, complained about lazy reviews on the back covers of sf books. He mentioned Harlan Ellison as being a real review slut, willing to provide a nice quote for anything.
Harrison said he'd done two such reviews for money (I mean, nice comments about books he didn't care for for the money). One was for a Robert Silverberg book in which he just said "typical Sylverberg", the other was for 2010 in which he said something like "readers who have been craving a sequel to 2001 will not be disapointed"

Floyd, who once drove across Australia (melb to Perth) to see Harrison talk