>Bad move; seeing a new-and-improved 'Zilla tear apart Manhattan with his bare and mighty claws would have been openin' up a whole can of fun!<

You can bet Emmerich did some serious teeth-gnashing when CLOVERFIELD came out...;).

...because it boasts the best example of "The Big-Ass Explosion/Fireball That Fails To Catch Up With The Heroes" scene out there. It's so nice to know that if you are a block away from several-stories-high-and-several-blocks-long Madison Square Garden when it's blown up all to hell, you will escape with nothing more than a few scratches and dusty clothes. :)

>The movie industry is not your special friend. Nobody OWES the movie industry his or her hard earned money.<

And, as in most things in life, if a director does a bad job, the audience has every right to call them on it. As far as the surpassingly-stupid "you don't have the right to criticize until you've created" canard, does that mean that anyone who's never cooked has no right to complain if they are served a lousy meal that they've paid good money for?

Just watched it today. Entertaining but nothing close to the scale and power of a movie like the Lord of the Rings.

I for one have not seen this movie. Nor do I intend to, but that isn't relevant to my response to Stephanie's review. Snarky reviews might indeed be appropriate for some movies. Such reviews however are only successful or enjoyable to read if they are genuinely witty and creative. This review failed at that a few times too often.

Salon is a venue for professional writing. I pay money to read it. Therefore if I am disappointed with some aspect of it, I think I'm entitled to mention it.

By the way, I'm taking a break from painting to write this. No cubicle for me.

I think that people should stop writing

critiques of

comments on

a review of

a movie most of us haven't seen.

Wait, I just wrote a

judgment of

the critiques of

the comments on

the review of

the movie...

BTW, some say you can't judge a book by the cover, but I says sometime you can...

i'd be REALLY curious to know if the people bashing ms. zacharek have seen the film.

i saw it last night and was so overwhelmingly annoyed and fed-up as the credits rolled that i was full of snark as well. a monumentally bad movie created by someone who consistently churns out monumentally bad movies might deserve to be ridiculed.

now, humor is clearly subjective, and if you don't find her funny, that's fine. but why come on here and try and write your own snarky review of HER? it's really just so childish and mean-spirited. something tells me these self-made lit critics are frustrated number crunchers sitting in a cubicle in irvine or something.

or i have an idea. go create a blog or website that reviews movie reviewers. you know, something creative or constructive that might save you from your damned TPS reports.

Some letter writers complain that this review was too flippant, too insubstantial, too lacking in depth. To which I reply: the tone and content of this review were entirely appropriate, given the half-cooked Hot Pocket of a movie that it was covering.

You really aren't that funny. If you want to review movies, even bad ones, please stick to the subject, and skip all the pointless, "humorous" asides.

Sure, the man's movies are pure cheese, but entertaining cheese. More Wisconsin Hard Cheddar than Velveeta. Stargate was much better than "ok", as was Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow. Godzilla was God-awful, basically bungled because - ironically - Emmerich wanted to avoid the cheesy unreality of the Japanese versions. Bad move; seeing a new-and-improved 'Zilla tear apart Manhattan with his bare and mighty claws would have been openin' up a whole can of fun!

Let's just remember this isn't Ed Wood we're talking about.

..which they grill on a giant George Foreman.

I could do without the condescending oh-so-hip slant.

I couldn't agree more, arthurlee66. I'm so sick of cutesy, self-congratulatory movie reviews, I could upchuck my bronto-burger.

meet hyperbole.

Hyperbole, meet Peter Joshua.

Peter, it's a big word, so let me help you out with a definition.

Hyperbole "hy-PER-buh-lee" - a figure of speech in which statements are exaggerated. It may be used to evoke strong feelings or to create a strong impression, and is not meant to be taken literally.

Examples:

1. "I don't think I remember any of their reviewers EVER liking a film that wasn't in a foreign language."

2. "Peter Joshua writes like a drunken chimp, only less coherently."

...as straight and white as those cave people from 12,000 years ago.

I know you were all looking forward to reading Stephanie Zacharek's intellectually engaging review of "10,000 BC" but seriously... This is probably the least significant piece of writing she has ever produced and that includes her "How I spent my summer vacation" piece in second grade.

I've read a couple other reviews of this movie today and it seems like it's impossible to take it seriously. I imagine 90% of the people who actually go and see this movie will have an internal (and possibly external) MST3K dialog going on.

I read Ms. Zacharek's review this morning, but waited until I'd had time to digest both her thoughts and movie itself. Having now seen 10,000 BC, I can see how it's difficult to summarize the monumental badness that is Roland Emmerich's latest picture, but that's still no excuse for what Salon chose to print.

Snark is available in abundance on a wide variety of blogs. Some is laugh-out-loud funny, while most is devoid of real merit. When dealing with Salon, a subscriber-supported online resource, I expect better and usually get it.

As mentioned, boiling 10,000 BC down to basics is a Herculean task, but at least three elements came to mind just while watching the picture: 1) the dodgy geography, 2) the fractured history, and 3) the wildly offensive black/white subtext. Any of one of these or all three would provide fuel for a longer, more substantive review than Ms. Zacharek's.

If reviewing such mass-audience fare is too unpleasant a task for Ms. Zacharek, then it would be better for her to write nothing at all on the subject, or pass such responsibility to another writer.