Best movie of the year? How about one of the worst.

Well, it looks like me, 78% of the critics and most of the IMDB users who have rated the movie all disagree with you.

I enjoyed the film but of course respect your right to your own opinion, I would just mention 1 thing about these review aggregator sites like RT and Metacritic. Both of those sites can at times provide wildly (or mildly) skewed assessments of the reception to a film - especially the ones which are neither univerally acclaimed or universally loathed - so the huge majority.

It's because each traffic in a certain selection process - RT often including not really "professional" critics or at least not very important ones and Metacritic being very selective in who they sample to the point of being exclusonary to some extent.

I recently watched a film, a documentary named Cropsey which is 90% on RT, 73% Metacritic and 6.4 on IMDB - wildly divergent ratings that are affected by the type of film it is (documentaries often get a free pass), the available sample of reviews (not every media outlet would review a documentary), the cross section of the two (larger media outlets may hold such a film to the standard of other documentaries rather than its own merits).

Just wanted to mention that, I think people often use RT or Metacritic as a sort of shorthand "guide" which it sometimes can be, but each can be deceptive too.

I haven't read your review yet, as I can't open the link on this computer, but I agree - it's a dreadful, lousy flick, one of the worst I've seen in my life.

In the interests of fairness, I saw it in a cinema with a very poor sound system - it was almost drowned out by While We're Young from next door, which we had seen the night before and had complained about the low volume!

But even allowing for that, this struck me as a music movie made by people who knew nothing about music (and very little about movies). The unrealistic gig/"crowd" scenes, the fading star with only ONE song (like Kris Kristofferson in A Star Is Born, and the only song he seems to perform, Watch Closely Now!), the actual confusion over who is he exactly supposed to be like? A Sixties protest-type singer who ends up as a Barry Manilow lounge act (albeit playing enormodomes)? Maybe, we opined, Neil Diamond, but Diamond in the main has stayed true to his "rock" roots and never went as "cabaret" as Collins does in this movie. Whoever it was, would EVERYONE recognise him, from the valet parker to the middle-aged hotel manager? I bet an awful lot of people under 25 wouldn't recognise Neil Diamond or Road Stewart if they bumped into them.

Which megastar plays his biggest (and, it would appear, only) song as his opening number every night? And if Collins is as self-obsessed an a-hole as we're led to believe, would a couple of catcalls put him off unveiling his new magnum opus and cause him to revert to his Greatest Hit so quickly? Any singer I know, were they showing us their "New Direction" (thank you Spinal Tap) would just say "OK, shut up now, we'll get to those songs later, I want you to hear this new song" - and the audience WOULD shut up (not that they'd be shouting for Baby Doll during the first song just because he was opening with a number they didn't recognise!) It was a bar with a couple of dozen people, he wasn't being shouted down by a 10,000 crowd!

The music aside (and Pacino didn't convince as a performer, much as I love him), it ticked every clichéd box - doting, pregnant wife, terminal illness, estranged family healing the wounds, annoyingly cute kid, will they/won't they romance, loyal servant/friend (Gielgud in Arthur, anyone?) - if you enjoyed it, great, I'm honestly not judging anyone and can see how a lot of people might see it as sentimental, entertaining fare, but as a music fanatic, gig-goer and movie lover, to me it was like hearing nails on a blackboard.




I'm a Prick With a Fork.

"Just read my review"...at which point I stopped reading your post.

These days every amateur blogger seem to think they are big time movie critics.. I read your review, what a yawner - to use one of your phrases.. Your lazy half-baked complaints include Plummers hat and that Pacino didn't act like a mobster... Great film criticism indeed.Yawn..

You sound like pretentious prick, the movie is okay, nothing groundbreaking, no garbage neither.