Closer

Finally! I've read the hype about the movie Closer, which every critic I've read seems to think is some monumental cinematic miracle. I don't get it. We saw the move--four of us--and thought it was the biggest piece of crap we'd seen. So when I read the reviews afterwards, I began to doubt my abilities as a critic.

But now along comes a review in The New Republic, which begins the way I would like to have written the review:

"Flawlessly lucid"; "viciously insightful"; "quietly devastating"; "emotionally honest and psychologically dense"; "dares speak the truth about modern adult relationships." Those are a few of the phrases that were used to describe the movie Closer when it arrived in theaters late last year. Oddly, as best as I can tell, the following terms were absent from discussion of the film: "ridiculous"; "unmoored from reality"; "emotionally preposterous"; "unintentionally hilarious."

I kind of feel it's like The Emperor's New Clothes, with all the reporters praising this piece of crap to the skies and only one having the courage to call it what it really is:

[Closer] is not a bad movie--or rather it is not merely bad. It's flamboyantly bad, bad in a way that can't help but be fascinating and even entertaining. It's well-enough executed, boasting a couple of good performances and one great one, and it's pleasant to look at. But it's also aggressively, irretrievably silly, a potty-mouthed fantasy that somehow mistakes itself for a fearless excavation of the dark recesses of the human soul, American Pie as reimagined by Neil LaBute.

Yay, New Republic!