By The Butcher
It could be a critical darling, an unrivalled cinematic classic, or a cherished cult favourite…if everyone loves it, The Butcher hates it…and he’ll tell ya! Here is an alphabetically formulated list of all the beloved movies that The Butcher has applied his sharpened cleaver to…
“Amelie represents everything bad and pretentious about French cinema.”
“Argo is just a trumped-up Rambo movie…trying to disguise itself by growing a beard.”
“One of the greatest sneaky acts pulled by France was the 2011 flick The Artist.”
Birdman
“Quack quack, tweet tweet, squawk squawk…seriously, was there a more overrated movie in 2015 than Birdman?”
“If Black Swan wasn’t set in the la di da, high falutin’ world of ballet, wouldn’t we all recognise it for the b-grade junk that it truly is?”
“At the time of its, ahem, release, the fart-tastic Blazing Saddles may have been, ahem, trumpeted as a shocking piece of comic provocation, but those who still sing this silly film’s praises are probably the same types who think that their own rear emissions smell like perfume.”
“Breathless is more like that famous French delicacy, the soufflé: it’s all supposed technique and no substance. Sacre bleu!”
“The Castle did more than any other film to perpetuate the myth that all Aussies are stupid, and for that alone it deserves to be taken out of circulation.”
“It’s a sled? A child’s sled? Are you kidding me? I sat through two hours of that tedious drivel and it’s a goddamn sled?”
“Chopper also gave rise to comedian, Heath Franklin, who has built his career on doing an impersonation of Eric Bana doing an impersonation of Chopper Read, which is just, well, fucked.
“If there’s a sacred cow in the high falutin’ world of cinema, it’s that bearded, under-productive, pretentious, self-indulgent, “reclusive” bore, Stanley Kubrick.”
“If you want the classic hey-it-doesn’t-make-sense-so-it-must-be-cool film, you can’t go past Donnie Darko.”
“Newsflash, people: not every scene in a Fellini flick involves a fucking dwarf!”
“It’s basically a road movie about two coke dealing arseholes…”
“Does anyone else out there think that Cate’s just a massive, haemorrhoidal pain in the arse?”
“The Full Monty has a weak story with holes that you could park a bus in; a damning lack of moral or social enquiry; and an awful, stone-obvious soundtrack. There is just nothing of merit in this film…literally nothing.”
“…dragons swoop from the sky, badly peroxided hair is the order of the day, dwarves speak with bad British accents, brothers hump their sisters, prostitutes get tortured and killed, scheming eunuchs are everywhere, and old dudes get shot with arrows while taking a dump.”
“If ever there was a case to call a film too big for its own good, then Gladiator is it.”
“The most staggeringly, mind-numbingly, bum-deadeningly tedious movie from the alleged “Golden Age Of Hollywood” is undoubtedly Gone With The Wind.”
“The biggest inaccuracy in Gravity that none of the complaining scientists mentioned was that Sandra Bullock and George Clooney were playing astronauts.”
“The Hurt Locker is said by many to create the feeling of “being there”, which begs the obvious question: who wants to be stuck in Iraq with a bunch of macho US soldiers who like to play Russian Roulette with their own lives and those around them?”
“Oh, but it’s not a biopic! That would be way too uncool for wanker director Todd Haynes.”
“That’s right, kids, it’s time to call “Abort mission” on Christopher Nolan’s overlong, pretentious, and incomprehensible outer-space-and-wormholes 2014 extravaganza, Interstellar.”
“Whatever you decide to call it, and even if it’s your favourite film, you have to admit that this is melodrama, pure and simple.”
“The first major “event movie” now looks as dated as any film from that period, and is an utterly disappointing watch.”
“Spielberg is a hack. He’s a bona fide journeyman with nothing to say. He stands for nothing except big box office.”
“Stuffy, bone-dry, and apparently delirious on its own bloated self-importance, this dragged-out snooze-fest actually asks us to feel sorry for King Something-Or-Other…”
“Firstly, what’s with the French title? Yeah, sure, it’s set in France, and all of the characters are French, but they sing and speak in English.”
“I hate Mad Max, I hate Braveheart, I hate Gallipoli, and I even hate Tim. But I especially hate Lethal Weapon.”
“The Magnificent Seven is a dull example of a dull genre, and only idiots would think otherwise.”
“What’s the big deal about a bunch of characters from different movies getting together anyway? This whole “multiverse” thing is totally overrated. Get over it!”
“The feel-good Christmas classic, Miracle On 34th Street, promotes a time of innocence that never existed.”
“Best Picture? One Battle After Another. Fuck me dead…”
“Oh, Ryan Gosling, how do I hate thee, let me count the ways.”
“…a pile of semi-spiritual hokum about a bunch of ditzy schoolgirls who get lost while poncing around in the Australian outback.”
“Pulp Fiction, Tarantino’s bloated sophomore effort, is an exercise in what happens when you put a film obsessive in charge of a production.”
“Big. Fat. Failure. Master Of Suspense? The bloated toff couldn’t suspend me from school.”
“Raging Bull is, quite simply, shithouse.”
“Sure, it might have made bank in a very major way for an Aussie flick, but 2011’s Red Dog still sucks, big time.”
“Astronauts…they don’t even really have to fly the rocket ship, do they?”
“This is a hammed up, utterly unbelievable movie that treats the audience like naive idiots.”
“The Shawshank Redemption is shit. Fact. This cinematic fiasco relies almost entirely on misplaced sentimentality.”
“The Social Network is essentially a boardroom drama (zzzzzz…) focusing on a selfish, arrogant, sexist, socially inept tool’s fight for ownership (read: the fight for money) over a silly website where people can play Scrabble and pfaff on about their boring lives, while reconnecting with people that they never liked in the first place.”
“Here are three words for you: fuck Australian cinema! It’s just as bad as American cinema, British cinema, and Romanian cinema, so why treat it like an endangered species?”
“…the most thickly sliced chunk of ham wrapped in celluloid since Al Pacino hoo-hawed his way across the screen as a blind Vietnam veteran in the utterly execrable The Scent Of A Woman.”
“…if ever there was a subject that we already knew about, it’s slavery.”
“The whole debacle is pseudo-intellectual nonsense and I, for one, can live without it.”
“…nothing but a rattling cacophony of childish storytelling, ham acting, and sub-par singing, with an annoying dog thrown in for good measure.”
“This is the kind of film that people have to pretend to like in order to not look like squares or old fogeys. This flick is “wild” and “daring”, so you better get on board!”
“When it comes to crapping on about a comic book movie’s “deeper themes” and “sense of meaning”, no adaptation sparked more pretentious twaddle than 2000’s X-Men.”
