Anthony Lane Has Flarf’s Number…
…though for some reason he keeps calling it “Baron Cohen”:
How efficient, though, is embarrassment as a comic device? It’s a quick hit, and it corrals the audience on the side of smugness; but its victories are Pyrrhic…. To scour the world for little people you can taunt, and then pal up with the hip and rich: that is not an advisable path for any comic to pursue, let alone one as sharp and mercurial as Baron Cohen. All his genius, at present, is going into publicity…But the work itself turns out to be flat and foolish, bereft of…good cheer: wholly unsuitable for children, yet propelled by a nagging puerility that will appeal only to those in the vortex of puberty, or to adults who have failed to progress beyond it.
!!!!
Anthony Lane has always been and will always be a complete fucking disgrace. (I haven’t seen Bruno, so he might be right about that, I’m just mad about his Star Trek review, his dissing Tristram Shandy, and some other stuff. The guy is a waste of space.)
Oh, I don’t know, Matt. There will always be partisans of reviews-as-performance, and they’ll always have his remark, I think it was about the young Winona Ryder, that he still goes to the movies hoping someone will make him spill his Sprite. True, it would seem he spills his Sprite *every time,* but then I root for the other team of reviewers. How *they* feel about flarf remains to be seen.