In a review full of great lines, here is perhaps the best from Jim Emerson’s pan of the Great and Powerful and Self-Absorbed M. Night’s The Lady in the Water:
“They live in water and are desperate to communicate warnings to Man, but Man has forgotten how to listen. They are sort of like amphibious Al Gores.”
Another choice bit:
“But then, who am I to knock the work of the man who, in his own film, casts himself as a writer whose ideas will inspire a future leader who will save the world — an artist whose work will not be fully understood in his own time, but only many years later, and who is willing to sacrifice his own life for the sake of all Mankind?”
And then there’s this little nugget that seemed vaguely familiar:
“Mr. Farber represents ... well, nothing so much as the filmmaker’s preemptive strike against the bad reviews he expects to receive for making this poorly written, stiffly directed, audience-insulting story-without-a-cause.”
In 1998, I wrote the following in a review of Godzilla:
“That Emmerich and Devlin think having a portly, thumbs-up Mayor Ebert and pairing him with balding assistant Gene constitutes comic relief shows that they’re not only incompetent filmmakers, but they don’t care. Preemptive strikes on movie critics unfailingly say, ‘We know you’ll hate our movie.’”
This review makes me hope that Emerson, who is pinch-hitting for the ailing/recovering Roger Ebert, gets more opportunities from the Chicago Sun-Times outside of his excellent Scanners blog.
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