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A review by oohsarracuda
My Year of Flops: The A.V. Club Presents One Man's Journey Deep Into the Heart of Cinematic Failure by Nathan Rabin
2.0
I love bad movies. My husband and I watch bad movies every Friday night, and have for over 4 years (and counting). I love reading about bad movies, and about pop culture in general. But I didn't really like this book, because I don't really like Nathan Rabin. Nathan Rabin is very much like so many writers you can find at Gawker/Gizmodo and AV Club - he can kind of write, he's occasionally funny or incisive, but mostly he's just a guy. A guy who gleefully throws himself into sexism, classism, slut-shaming, ageism, sizeism/fatphobia, and so on. Rabin punches down, and often, while being entirely too impressed with his (perceived) cleverness. It's tiresome and, I'll reiterate, unwarranted. I'll keep this book to pad out my list of future bad movie viewings, but I cannot recommend it.
Credit where credit is due, though: "All cinephiles reach a moment in their intellectual development when they realize that Oliver Stone is full of shit" is one of the funniest and truest lines I've ever read. I laughed out loud, hard and for a long time.
Previously: I'm only about halfway through this book so far, but here's pretty much everything you need to know about Nathan Rabin as a writer: his (unwarranted) smugness & self-assurance render him too lazy to so much as glance at Prince's Wikipedia page before describing "Prince" as a "ridiculous, prance-about stage name" when, in fact, it's his actual, birth-given name.
Credit where credit is due, though: "All cinephiles reach a moment in their intellectual development when they realize that Oliver Stone is full of shit" is one of the funniest and truest lines I've ever read. I laughed out loud, hard and for a long time.
Previously: I'm only about halfway through this book so far, but here's pretty much everything you need to know about Nathan Rabin as a writer: his (unwarranted) smugness & self-assurance render him too lazy to so much as glance at Prince's Wikipedia page before describing "Prince" as a "ridiculous, prance-about stage name" when, in fact, it's his actual, birth-given name.