Metacritique

This is not a review review, but:

You know that thing that critics do, where they describe a movie using the vocabulary of the movie’s subject? Hypothetical recent examples:

“Against all odds, you just might fall for The Ugly Truth in the end.”

“G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra runs out of ammunition half way through.”

“Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is pure magic!”

This type of remark makes me want to stab my eyes out with a fork. Does it have a name? If it does, I want to know. In the meantime, I’ll call it a self-simile. It’s interesting to consider the ways that a text performs the thing that it describes - I probably involved this mode of thinking in every paper that I wrote as an English major at Haverford (e.g., the metonymy and zeugma in Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock” conflate subject and object, just as the Baron conflates Belinda with the lock of her hair). I think it’s a valuable interpretive stance, and it often generates real insight.

But, I mean, jesus. The reviewing community is deranged in its pursuit of the simplest, easiest, bluntest self-similes possible.

This is why I didn’t write a review-review for Julie & Julia last weekend. The number of reviews that compared the movie to a delicious meal was simply hard to stomach.