How soon they forget, or Pop Journalism Will Eat Itself

I see the pop culture encyclopedists at Entertainment Weekly have mounted a group of likely candidates for "Worst Movie Dialogue Ever," and the entity's first nominee is that bit from Notting Hill, wherein Julia Roberts, more or less playing herself, pules to Hugh Grant (not at all playing himself), "I'm just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her."

I gotta say I agree—it is, and was, to puke, and the pain was even more potent knowing that this weedy nonsense had sprung from the pen of none other than Richard Curtis, who once upon a time wrote "The Skinhead Hamlet."

And yet, let us recall that Notting Hill was once upon a time ecstatically reviewed in the pages of Entertainment Weekly. Lisa Schwarzbaum described the film in terms that might have made Andre Bazin demur even as he contemplated the work of Jean Renoir: "The camera pulls back and up, up, up. For a moment, it is we, the moviegoers, who are the divinities among the stars in heaven. We are looking down on a love match between stars on earth. And with the great magnanimity of the masses, we gladly bestow our blessing on the unmeek."

Hokey smoke, as they say. But that was then: May 28, 1999. This is now, and that line is fish food. It occurs to me that this, finally, is what pop culture journalism is about; the denial of everything it once praised, the chewing up and spitting out of everything it once pretended to digest, the better to always appear hip, up-to-date, relevant.

Comments

[bill p]

or, in the other direction, look at Idiocracy. The initial review was, I think, a D-plus though it reads as if the reviewer - Joshua Rich - never even saw the movie:
http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,1528246,00.html

But then the DVD review, which isn't online from what i can tell, gave it a B+.

[Griff]

A CRY IN THE DARK's line "The dingo ate my baby" -- which I recall is not only quoted directly from the film's basis, the non-fiction work "Evil Angels" but also is part of the actual Australian trial's transcript -- is not properly part of this motley collection of bad writing. It is what it is.

[Chad Channing]

I was going to give another example of this kind of media douchebaggery, but then I started to write and I felt as if I was exposing a part of my character that need not be exposed, so I stopped. Instead I'd like to talk about a documentary I watched yesterday afternoon called Live Forever, which I rented because I thought it was going to be about Britpop, and it was, but only nominally. What I got instead was another finely crafted piece of work by Film Four. I had never really thought about this before, but, it seems as if Britpop came out of the ashes of Thatcherism, filled the vaccum created by the death of Nirvana (thank god; there was nothing worse as a trend than British Grunge), and paved the way for the New Labour movement of Tony Blair, only to be discarded once Blair and his bespoke cronies moved into 10 Downing Street. I also learned that Liam Gallagher is the dumbest man in England, Noel Gallagher the most deluded, Damon Albarn the most bitter, and Jarvis Cocker one of the most underrated writers. I bring this up only to point out what a brilliant moment it must have been in British Pop Culture, a moment not unsimilar to our own in 1991, and how time, with it's passing, tends to slough off the weakest and most poorly built.

[Christian Toto]

It pains me to type it, but "I gave her my heart, and she gave me a pen" from "Say Anything" isn't really aging well, is it?

[Morticia]

Curtis always had a gooey streak. It was evident in "Four Weddings and a Funeral" and I think "Love Actually" in its entirety is far worse than anything in "Notting Hill," which by contemporary romcom standards is not bad at all.

[Chad Channing]

Nothing that Cameron Crowe has written ages well, save a few choice lines from Fast Times and I think that has more to do with the actors and their delivery of said lines than anything inherently brilliant contained within the words. Crowe writes like he works for an ad agency, always trying to come up with catch phrases and additions to the human lexicon. Elizabethtown has some of the most wince-inducing and flat out cringeworthy writing of any movie in recent memory. Sometimes I wonder if Crowe is even the one writing the words, or, if in fact, he doesn't farm out the scribbling to a typing pool in Osaka that only employs 17 year Japanese girls with English/Japanese dictionaries. His writing is hyper-cute. I would bet his emails don't even date well. Cameron Crowe seems like the type of guy who gets nostalgic for things he said five minutes ago, to paraphrase Noah Baumbach, which probably isn't a very good idea right now, as it makes me look even worse than Cameron Crowe.

[cadavra]

And ten years from now, a similar article will probably include, "I drink your milkshake!" This may be one instance where the EW staff's ignorance of movies made before GHOSTBUSTERS may actually be an asset.