It’s that time of year when the journalistic community comes together to rate things in order of how good they are / which ones we could remember when someone sent around the email / edgy choices we haven’t actually seen but make us look good to our editor.
Of course, not everyone agrees with the results of end-of-year lists, so today we honour those people by publishing one-star reviews (all [sic]) of the otherwise most critically acclaimed things of the year.
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ANOMALISA
Still: Hanway Pictures
Let’s begin with Anomalisa, Charlie Kauffman’s first feature-length animation, a stop-motion film The Guardian decided was the film of the year, saying:
“It is a masterpiece that inhabits its own spectrum of strangeness… Michael and Lisa have one of the most stunningly real sex scenes I have ever seen on film; the fact that they are puppets makes them more uninhibited participants than flesh-and-blood actors could have been. “
A rave review that celebrates the stop-motion wonder. On Amazon, though, people weren’t so sure:
A tough and confused crowd. But what of that tender animated sex scene? Did that not make some impact on the one-star crowd at IMDB ?
One of the site’s users, danielkeough, gave his take on both the film and IMDB’s minimum review length:
“It was a perverted film about a filanderous robot-doll-man and watching him pee, shower, have sex and buy a ‘toy’ for his 7?yo son at a porn shop. For the FIRST TIME EVER, I really wanted to walk out of the movie 15 minutes in–and regret staying. There was no point to this movie just some rich old white perverted chain-smoking dude hanging out in a hotel room who bangs a young naive lady planning to attend his conference. I wish had left 15 minutes in so I didn’t have to witness the rest of it. I didn’t even want money back, I’m just sorry I saw the rest of it. They require me to write another line, but I think I wrote enough already, I’m not sure what they want for me to write yet an additional line of text. I told my piece. This is the last line that I will need to author today, thankfully.”
He certainly did tell his piece.
FRANK OCEAN’S BLONDE
Our sister site NOISEY named Blonde, Frank’s long-awaited follow-up to Channel Orange, their album of the year, saying:
“This is a record that screams for those moments in which you find yourself standing on the edge of the universe, yelling at the top of your lungs into the unimaginable distance, terrified of the answers you might find but wanting nothing more than to know the questions you asked to get there. “
Over on iTunes, where Blonde received 60 one-star reviews it was a different story.
“15thadam” entitles his review “where are the beats???” He writes:
“Oh lordy, someone has forgotten to write any proper songs. It’s a case of hype/sheeple. Dreadful.”
“thisemotion”, meanwhile, preferred a more comparative critique:
“FRANK OCEAN IS GARBAGE, WHY WOULD YOU WASTE YOUR MONEY ON HIS TRASH WHEN YOU COULD SPEND IT ON GLORY BY BRITNEY SPEARS WHICH IS OUT RIGHT NOW”
For the good stuff, though, you’ve got to go rateyourmusic.com, an odd corner of the internet where obscenely flowery writers – who presumably go to sleep each night hoping to wake up to a letter from Pitchfork commissioning them to write 29,000 words on their favourite Sonic Youth album – really let rip.
Here’s a short excerpt of one of their 83 reviews of Blonde:
“Blonde only concerns himself. It concerns inward drug use, inward expressions of love, inward worthwhileness. I need vehicles. I need the metaphors and half-truths. I don’t need being frank with Frank. Technically good isn’t good. Teenage dreams so hard to beat, admit the edge blatantly and a wink…What is queer in mid-2016? When a counter-culture is becoming mainstream? I would never want to go backwards towards more discrimination, violence, hatred. But something is lost in the individual whose mere existence once prompted defiance, transgression, transformation, and ascension. 40 years after the Sex Pistols corporally attacked Lizzy she commemorates with a state-sponsored ‘Happy Birthday Punk’. Well…The cycle’ll inform some new man whose vision is above while his view is low.
Really makes you think.
LE COQ RICO
Antoine Westerman, via Wikicommons
To the New York Times now, where they are counting down their top 10 restaurants of the year. They give a special mention to Le Coq Rico, a rotisserie chicken brunch spot, saying:
“a poultry-focused bistro that’s more compelling and carnally satisfying than any modern steakhouse… the meat has a depth of flavour you rarely encounter”
Over on Yelp , it was more the depths of despair. Sleezy J writes, in his two-star review:
“Took ma Boo out for Bday dinner. Unfortunately, it was not a perfect evening and nobody wanna point out bad shieet then cuz you just wanna enjoy yourselves…The veloute of chicken was a gigantic salt bomb. I guess they thought it be Aprils Fool day by dumping a cup of salt in the soup or croutons. It was a shame cuz the soup started off ok and got saltier and saltier towards the bottom the more I stirred it. I forced myself to finish it and my stomach regretted it the next day. They never brought the seared foie gras and it was not on the check at the end so the waiter forgot. WTH. Lost revenue for you son.”
SKEPTA’S KONNICHIWA
Earlier this year, Skepta’s latest album won the Mercury Music Prize, awarded annually to the best British album. NOISEY described Skepta’s win as “a rare glimmer of light in a year steeped in shit”, but how do internet commenters view his landmark record?
VICE:
ATLANTA
FX
Finally to Vulture, and their number one TV show of the year: Atlanta, Donald Glover’s homage to the city he loves. In their round-up they wrote:
The first season of Atlanta was such a profound, personal refinement of that sensibility that it shrugged off all reference points and became its own marvellous thing. No live-action TV series was as comfortable with deadpan discomfort, stoner ellipses, startling moments of surrealism and beauty for its own sake.
Of course, the one-star guys on IMDB are not very focused on surrealism. Questionyourreality writes :
To hell with series like this, Ballers, and Power which cast whites as antagonists, timid, weak, minor character roles only; you’ll just drive every white person away from the show. Self respecting whites anyway…
It goes on like that for a while. Not everyone who hated it was an old racist, though:
You tell ’em, Banana.
