Sometimes a film, gig or sex-positive puppet show is so excruciating that awarding it one star just isn’t damning enough. How do writers who’ve written zero-star reviews feel about the worst shows they’ve ever seen now?
t’s harder to write about something you love than something you hate. But what is often forgotten is that the axiom can loop back on itself. Trying to write about something that leaves you bewildered, wondering how you sat through something with no redeeming features, can mean staring at a blank page for quite some time. It is under such conditions that the zero-star review is born.
The challenge is to stop it becoming a torrent of fury about the waste of your time and the talents of the people involved . It’s best to get that out of the way in a first draft or a WhatsApp screed to a patient friend, family member or spouse. Then you can try to create a piece that is worthwhile – even if its subject is not.It took me a minute to remember this programme. Clearly, some mental safety mechanism had removed it from the easy-access memory vaults.
hate almost everything about Buying London, the British version of Netflix’s highly successful Selling Sunset, in which grotesquely wealthy people buy property in Los Angeles from glamorous real estate agents whose personalities are plucked from the reality TV presets menu. I hate that it bases all of its dramatic tension on pitting women against each other. I hate that it makes Richard Curtis’s film Notting Hill look like a gritty documentary about the mean streets of London.
The first was an openly cynical exercise in parting people from their cash that couldn’t be bothered to pretend to be anything else. The second was effectively a visual artist sneering smugly at what he evidently thought was a vastly inferior art form to his regular gig – and he couldn’t be bothered to do it wittily. I couldn’t even give them marks for effort – they had put none in, thus deserved nothing back. I suspect I would do exactly the same thing today.
Of course, I’m not blind to the irony inherent in the zero-star review. For a film like The Greasy Strangler, which sets out to be as disgusting as possible, zero stars means mission accomplished. So congratulations to the film-makers, I guess, on a shoddy schlock-fest that left me with the rare double whammy of boredom and fury.
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