cover image The Good, the Bad, and the Godawful: 21st-Century Movie Reviews

The Good, the Bad, and the Godawful: 21st-Century Movie Reviews

Kurt Loder. St. Martin’s/Griffin, $19.99 trade paper (560p) ISBN 978-0-312-64163-4

Loder, a former writer and editor for Rolling Stone in the 1980s and the “news” face of MTV’s “The Week in Rock” during the 1990s, shifted in 2004 to writing weekly movie reviews for MTV.com, and in this volume he selects the best of those reviews. As Loder admits up-front: “I wish I could say I’m a ‘film critic,’ but I’m not really. I’m a movie reviewer.” But the charm and success of the book is that Loder brings his substantial writing skills—and his keen understanding of pop culture and how it works—to discussing both serious and zombie movies in a way that sounds like your best friend intelligently ranting to you about a film in a bar. As such, he is free to comment about the execrable Hannibal Rising that “If this picture were a little more ludicrous, just a shade more inane, it might be fun to watch.” Or about Guy Richie’s “incomprehensible” mob movie Rockn­Rolla (“How bad can the world economy be if people are still giving Guy Richie money to make movies?”) or Loder’s take on the Twilight franchise (“You could count the minutes [Taylor] Lautner doesn’t spend topless in this picture on the hands of a cartoon character”). (Nov.)