Lambasted … Kodi Smit-McPhee and Viggo Mortensen in The Road
A confession: I’m obsessed with a film connoisseur. His name is Fiore Mastracci, and he’s the worst film critic in the world. You know in what way some people are so bad they’re good? Not Fiore. He’s so bad, he’s flipped entirely the way around, bypassed gain, gone into bad again, come out the other end and dipped into tutelary deity.
- The Road
- Production year: 2009
- Country: USA
- Runtime: 119 mins
- Directors: John Hillcoat
- Cast: Charlize Theron, Guy Pearce, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Robert Duvall, Viggo Mortensen
He used to be my little secret. But no longer. His latest brilliant (ie awful) reconsider – in various places Cormac McCarthy adaptation The Road – has apt expression the Twitterverse. He calls it “excrement on celluloid”. He lambasts child actor Kodi Smit-McPhee for having a double-barrelled surname (”Why? Because we were going to be confused by all the other Kodi McPhees in Tinsel Town?” he spits of the 12-year-old, who clearly had it coming). He talks about knowing the film’s assistant location manager. And then he ends the review, having failed to mention exactly what it is he doesn’t like ready the film. In other words, it’s another Mastracci masterpiece. “Worse review EVER?” read one re-tweet. The cat was out of the bag. Mastracci was going viral.
My obsession began when I read his survey of The Bourne Ultimatum. Everyone raved. He called it “celluloid masturbation”, and made a joke about the cameraman having Parkinson’session. Here, I thought excitedly, is a critic I could certainly come to hate. But it got worse (ie better). This guy had his own cable interpret in Pittsburgh. He was – God help us – a teacher on the subject of film. The reviews on his blog – Fiore Mastracci’s Outtakes – actually counted towards the rating on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes.
And I soon experienced that the “celluloid excrement” line wasn’t a one-off. In fact, it’s his calling card. Fantastic Mr Fox is “pure dejections on celluloid”. Watchmen is “true excrement on celluloid”. Pineapple Express? “Excrement on celluloid,” of course.
Like any good artist, Mastracci is self-aware enough to know that it’s clearly become a turn of phrase to be associated with. “Time to bring out my trademark phrase,” he says in single review, under the jurisdiction going on to call something poo on film again. Can you imagine anyone else being so proud at having that as their trademark? No – and that’s why I love him. And that’s without mentioning that in every review, he also shoehorns in references to a mythical time he was in “the industry”. It’s a fine review in which he’s not name-checking a 62-year-old stuntman.
When he does get around to reviewing, his have a smack isn’t awful. It’s genius-level awful. There’session in no degree film he doesn’t hate if it’s good enough; no film he doesn’t love if it’sitting bad sufficiency. Here is a curt list of some of the cold as stone turkeys he’s given raves to: Underworld Evolution (”war should be this a great deal of fun”), Punisher: War Zone (”a blast from beginning to end”), Doom (”an action sci-fi romp”), Transporter 2 (”Statham stole the mantle of top-kicking star”), Ghost Rider (”the star power makes this worth the price of introduction without another”). Hitman (”a swell action movie”), The Spirit (”I laughed more than any other movie this year!”), Mr Bean’s Holiday (”the funniest pellicle I’ve seen”), and The Pink Panther – the 2006 lection – is “much old-fashioned slapstick”.
The good films he’s slammed? Too numerous to cursory reference. But when you consider they include Fantastic Mr Fox (0/10), No Country For Old Men (5/10), The Bourne Ultimatum (1/10) and Volver (3/10), you procreate the picture. Or more, if you’re Mastracci, you don’t.
But perhaps what’session most brilliant (direful) are his reasons. He hated Volver because it was “no thing more than a chick flick disguised to look interesting to guys”. He hated marital drama Little People as the characters were, in his eyes, “deviants”. He despised the critically-acclaimed The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada because it was “a film favorable to illegal immigration”. He criticized V for Vendetta because it had “blatant support for the gay agenda”. As one blogger pointed out: “the ‘clamorous support’ he is talking round involves ‘not viciously hunting down gay people and subjecting them to medical experiments in an internment camp before for good withering gone into matter of no consequence and eventually dying’.” In a pièce de résistance, he gave Transamerica 0/10 solely for being about a transsexual.
But what’s really impressive is how he crams his numerous prejudices in almost each review he writes. For instance, nearly every review will adopt a unexpectedly at “socialist” Barack Obama. Not possible, you say. Ha! Behold the genius. He does it in Fantastic Mr Fox (”makes as abundant sense as Obama’s foreign policy!”), science fantasy drama Surrogates, where people can buy perfect robot versions of themselves (”a glimpse into the world Obama and his horde want to bring you”), dystopian science fiction animation 9, to which place machines have risen up and destroyed us (”like the sort of Obama and his cohorts are currently planning”), and alien-robot action flick Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (”When the Decepticons attack, he [Obama] books to a hideout shelter. We know this because Joe Biden evidently handled the press conference…”)
And those are just the ones in the last few months. Do you see how amazing he is? Even the people who don’t “master” his genius are strangely drawn. “Wow,” posts one after his said Transformers review, “I’ve not ever seen someone be so right about a movie and yet so injury.”
So right and yet in like manner wrong. To paraphrase Brian Clough, Fiore Mastracci may not the world’s best-worst thin skin critic, but he’s in the vertex one. Surely none one else does it better (or, rather, worse), do they?
