Anthony Lane Is A Dumbass or Who Morons The Moronmen?

Anthony Lane is a dumbass. Well, that was easiest post I ever wrote. Guess I'll go watch some Doctor Who DVDs. Oh wait, you probably want me to prove that.

Anthony Lane is a film critic for The New Yorker, a magazine famous for giving English teachers something to show their classrooms when they're trying to teach the definition of the word "pompous". I'm not sure if I've ever read Anthony Lane before since the only times I have ever picked up a copy of The New Yorker was when I was in the dentist's office and that's only so I can read the talking animal cartoons, turn up my nose and say, "Gary Larson does those so much better," before I snap the cover shut in a huff of superiority and pick up a copy of Cosmopolitan to find out how I can again fit into my jeans after childbirth. So my life has been Anthony Lane free up till this point until a Variety article linked to his review of Watchmen. Normally, writing for a highbrow publication like The New Yorker automatically makes you a smartass but it's this review that makes him a dumbass.

Mind you, I'm not calling him a dumbass because he trashed the movie. While I loved the original Watchmen series, I'm hardly some rabid fanboy who refuses to accept the idea that the movie may turn out to be as entertaining as a urinary infection. I haven't even seen it yet but even if I thought it was the BESTEST AWESOMEST MOVIEST MOVIE EVER I still would be able to accept the idea that taste differs for various reasons and I wouldn't think someone was a dumbass just because we had different opinions.

Also, I'm not calling him a dumbass for what I will politely refer to as his more entertaining observations like when he describes the background music being played during a scene set in the 1960s.

But must we have “The Times They Are A-Changin’ ” in the background? How long did it take the producers to arrive at that imaginative choice? And was Dylan happy to lend his name to a project from which all tenderness has been excised, and which prefers to paint mankind as a bevy of brutes?

While it would be nice to have a 60s scene that wasn't host to "The Times They Are A-Changin" or "All Along The Watchtower", the only thing I can imagine upsetting Bob Dylan would be if his royalty check from the movie's production company didn't clear. Another favorite Lane quote of mine is when he wrote this:

The problem is that Snyder, following Moore, is so insanely aroused by the look of vengeance, and by the stylized application of physical power, that the film ends up twice as fascistic as the forces it wishes to lampoon.

I'm assuming that "twice as fascistic" means that there is a scene where we see a swastika with eight points instead of four. Also, a movie about superheroes that didn't have "the look of vengeance" or "the stylized application of physical power" would be the worst superhero movie ever. There's also this stupid quote:

Incoherent, overblown, and grimy with misogyny, “Watchmen” marks the final demolition of the comic strip, and it leaves you wondering: where did the comedy go?

Uh, yeah. First off, Watchmen was never a comic "strip". It could fairly be described as a comic book or a graphic novel. A comic strip is where Sarge catches Beetle Bailey sleeping on guard duty and makes him wash dishes. Also, neither comic strips nor comic books necessarily have to have comedy in them. This makes me think Anthony Lane once read Maus, Art Spiegelman's famous comic book series about the Holocaust and wondered why it wasn't a laugh riot.

But none of that is why I call him a dumbass.

I call him a dumbass for the same reason I didn't provide a hyperlink to his review. I call him a dumbass because he did something that all save the stupidest IMDB commenters know not to do. I call him a dumbass because he's a dumbass and to call him anything else would be dishonest.

Anthony Lane is a dumbass because, in his review, he blew the movie's ending. Twice. This happens in the third paragraph but he makes sure to do it again at the end just in case someone's cat got sick just when they were reading the third paragraph and that person missed it when he REVEALED THE FUCKING ENDING. Luckily for me, I had read the original comic books so I knew the ending. Nothing got spoiled for me. Maybe Anthony Lane figured that everyone in the country attended the same critic screening he did and already knew the ending. If that's true, he not a dumbass, he's a completely insane dumbass. But no, I suspect that Lane is the type of writer who masturbates to his own work and that revealing the ending turned him on like nothing else.

Jokes aside, I call Anthony Lane a dumbass because I can't figure out why a professional film critic for a major publication with over 15 years of experience under his belt would reveal the ending of an upcoming motion picture and the only possible reasons that make any sense are that he hates all humanity and is basically trolling the entire planet by putting major spoilers into his review without even a hint of warning that he was going to do so or that he's a dumbass. Anthony Lane, I chose to go with Option Two and declare to the world that you pee on electric fences, drink paint, cut your nails with a cheese grater and think that Two And A Half Men is the funniest thing that ever was and the funniest thing that ever will be.

In other words, to end where I began, Anthony Lane is a dumbass.