News

Anna Nicole Smith is dead. I predict this will be the shortest mourning period of any celebrity since Method Man.

In other news, Norbit finally hits the big screen. Here's hoping that it's a big failure so I don't have to see its commercials, and nothing but its commericals, for the next two weeks. Still, I can't help but sharing with you selections from my favorite reviews of it.

Walter Chaw, of Film Freak Festival writes:

"It's a thoughtless, cancerous, viral, irresponsible pollution whose existence speaks ill of the society that produced it and of any society that would endorse or defend it."

Jon Popick, of Planet Sick Boy:

"Usually, it takes six or so months for an actor to parlay a Best Supporting Actor nomination into a cringe-worthy career-derailing performance in an unbelievably awful picture."

Mark Pfeiffer of Reel Time: Reflections on Cinema, uses considerably more tact in proclaiming:

"If Norbit doesn't kill cinema, nothing will."

I think critics actually liked this movie. Every once in a while, a movie like Norbit comes around that is so repellently bad that critics can turn to their superlative-ary and let 'er rip. "Finally, I can use 'otalgic' in a sentence!" and that sort of thing. So let me give it a rip:

"Norbit is the double anal of movies."

Promising beginning, no? But where do I go from there? How about:

"It takes a speculum to your brain, spreads it wide open, and pisses on your corpus callosum."

So far, all I'm going for is vivid imagery, rather than big words or social commentary. So let's see...

"Murphy is obviously trying to show himself to be a polymath, but reveals that he is a mere abecedarian."

Good, that's using my thesaurus! Now on to the social commentary:

"Eddie Murphy shucks and jives all the way to the bank. But what's the name of that bank? Tuskegee and Lynch. Tuskegee and Lynch bank. And who's it run by? Frank Middle Passage."

It's easy to be a freaking film critic, man. At least for Norbit.