James BerardiPOLLi

Appropriate that a berardinelli thread would be all plot summary

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voted for Piscataway

Totally off on a tangent, but what happened to Ain't It Cool News? I was on the internet in the 1990s and I remember James Berardinelli's reviews were perfectly fine - bland but professionally written, and he had a relentless work ethic, so I can see why he became a success while his contemporaries (all of those "bad movies" websites) faded away. Furthermore, and unlike the bad movies websites, he didn't try to hide beneath the "it's a pile of crap anyway" defence.

However I remember utterly loathing Ain't It Cool News, because it was badly-written and felt like the personal diary of someone who attended advance screenings. A look at Google reveals that it still exists, but I haven't seen its name in the media for years. The earliest capture on the Internet Archive gives me this, a review of U-571 that spends the first few paragraphs talking about the fact it was an advance screening at a college:
https://web.archive.org/web/20000622091544/http://www.aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=5694

"If at all possible, go see U-571 with two ladies on either side of you. Because this is the type of movie where if you leave and don't have bloody fingernail marks around your wrists, you had the wrong people sitting next to you."

In fact it doesn't really say anything about the film. It's just brainless, as if the author hadn't fully developed consciousness yet and was not self-aware.

For the record I did see U-571 in the cinema, and the only bloody marks I developed were stigmata that appeared whenever Jon Bon Jovi was on-screen, which fortunately wasn't all that often. The film was a minor cause celebre I'll put in the accents later here in the UK on account of its wonky grasp of history. Célèbre, I'll move some of the letters around.

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