Breitbart Self-Parody Watch
By As Sadly, No! and Mr. Bogg have already documented, Ben Shapiro’s latest entry at Andrew Breitbart’s Aesthetic Stalinism for Dummies is a classic. It actually starts out a little frighteningly by identifying two actually decdent candidates for such a list, but instantly removes any credibility from his Ridley Scott pick by IDing Gladiator as his best film. After that, though…wow. I particularly enjoyed:
3. Woody Allen. He’s pretentious and unbearable. His movies are like nails screeching on a chalkboard, only with less humor. He is as nerdy as Peter Orszag, but he acts out his fantasies and illuminates his insecurities in film and expects us all to watch.
Haha, Peter Orszag, nails on a chalkboard — I hope Woody calls up Shapiro for some advice on comic writing!
Raging Bull is gross. Mean Streets is gross and soporific. Taxi Driver is perhaps the most overrated film in Hollywood history — dreary, grungy, and subzero.
See, if Scorsese was a good director, his portrait of 70s Manhattan would have been clean enough to get one of those Film Advisory Board ribbons (indeed, their sense of what makes a good movie would seem to track Shapiro’s almost exactly.) And it would definitely be above zero!
Awful stuff. If Big Hollywood insists on staying in business, it should at least stick to the creatively insane, like Ben Stone’s thoughtful assessment of that well-known piece of Communist propaganda, Casablanca. Now that’s more like it! (via Edroso.)