{"id":240,"date":"2005-08-04T14:30:00","date_gmt":"2005-08-04T21:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/?p=240"},"modified":"2005-08-04T14:30:00","modified_gmt":"2005-08-04T21:30:00","slug":"sometimes-the-best-reviews-are-the-worst","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/?p=240","title":{"rendered":"Sometimes, the Best Reviews are the Worst&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&#8230;at least to read.<\/p>\n<p>From <a href=\"http:\/\/www.calendarlive.com\/movies\/reviews\/cl-et-dukes5aug05,0,4394431.story?coll=cl-home-top-blurb-right\" target=\"_blank\">today&#8217;s review by Kenneth Turan of the LA Times<\/a> on &#8220;The Dukes of Hazzard&#8221;: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;The Dukes of Hazzard&#8221; is a film that is not there. It can&#8217;t really be reviewed because it doesn&#8217;t really exist. It is not empty calories, which implies pleasure, but simply empty. It&#8217;s a cosmic void where a movie ought to be.<\/p>\n<p>A collection of promotable elements strung together until it&#8217;s time for the next show, &#8220;Dukes&#8221; is vapid even by the standards of the venerable TV series about Southern boys and their toys \u2014 rarely confused with &#8220;Omnibus&#8221; or &#8220;Masterpiece Theater&#8221; \u2014 it&#8217;s based on. With no plot, character or dialogue worth experiencing, let alone remembering, the film merely occupies space on the screen and hopes for the best. [&#8230;] But even those who remember being amused by the casualness of the small screen version will find that 104 labored minutes of this material stretches it tighter than Daisy Dukes&#8217; celebrated shorts.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>From <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/reviews\/movie\/_\/id\/6823644?pageid=rs.Home&#038;pageregion=double1\" target=\"_blank\">the Rolling Stone<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I have no problems with the jokes being lowbrow and moronic. Hey, it&#8217;s still summer. But the film oozes the desperation of people sweating hard to create the illusion that if you yell &#8220;yee-haw&#8221; long enough you&#8217;ll have a good time. It&#8217;s not happening.<\/p>\n<p>The big news is the casting of pop princess Jessica Simpson as sexpot cousin Daisy Duke (Catherine Bach created the role for TV). Simpson had never acted in a movie before squeezing into Daisy&#8217;s short-shorts. As far as I&#8217;m concerned, her record is clean. Simpson&#8217;s body is unimpeachable, but her thespian talent is still undiscovered country. [&#8230;] At one point, the film&#8217;s narrator says, &#8220;If you have to go to the bathroom, now would be the wrong time.&#8221; I beg to differ. There is no wrong time to flush this turd.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This reminds me of some of the worst reviews in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/tg\/detail\/-\/0028726251\/\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;Opening Nights on Broadway: A Critical Quotebook of the Golden Era of the Musical Theatre&#8221;<\/a>. Don&#8217;t want to see the show, but the review is worth the price of admission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8230;at least to read. From today&#8217;s review by Kenneth Turan of the LA Times on &#8220;The Dukes of Hazzard&#8221;: &#8220;The Dukes of Hazzard&#8221; is a film that is not there. It can&#8217;t really be reviewed because it doesn&#8217;t really exist. It is not empty calories, which implies pleasure, but simply empty. It&#8217;s a cosmic void <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/?p=240\">Read More &#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[116,51,1],"tags":[50],"class_list":["post-240","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movies","category-reviews","category-lj-xfer","tag-reviews-2005"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=240"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}