As regular readers know, James DiGiovanna is the Weekly‘s former film critic who won so many awards that he was the consensus pick as the best film critic in an Arizona newspaper.
But a year or two ago, the selfish bastard retired his reviewing pen to focus on his “career.” He wanted to do something that “paid well.” He wanted a “life.”
Pfft.
Anyway, he just wrote a film review, after a bunch of his friends asked him for his thoughts on Prometheus.
It’s loaded with ridiculous bad science like the dumbest of low-brow sci-fi, but it keeps hitting you with high-brow visuals. It’s an incomprehensible amalgam only because it’s such an unprecedented conglomeration of high and low. It’s also, for my money, tremendously entertaining. It’s the rare movie that you laugh at while simultaneously admiring. It’s a, I dunno, horror-comedy-art film-bad movie?
Meanwhile, I will continue my quest to get James to abandon his philosophy career and return to low-wage film freelancing. Wish me luck.
This article appears in Aug 16-22, 2012.
That’s a shame. He should have stayed retired from film criticism. He doesn’t seem to enjoy movies, and he apparently feels that writing a negative review of an otherwise acclaimed movie will set him apart as “perceptive.” Read the last sentence of his Prometheus review: this is man who simply likes to see himself write.
donkiyoti, Prometheus got a 73 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. While that’s pretty good, that’s far from “acclaimed.”
I miss DiGiovanna! While I didn’t always agree with him, I always found his opinions on films insightful and (usually) thought provoking!
Jimmy, I wasn’t referring specifically to Prometheus.
I can’t help but agree with donkiyoti. DiGiovanna usually came across as a pompous ass. He seemed way more interested in how cleverly he could dismiss a film than actually giving honest criticism. I’m glad that when he wrote for TW that Bob Grimm was around(and thankfully still is) to give me a more rounded critique of a film.