All the cool kids are pointing at Ben Shapiro and laughing, and for good reason, since he has published what could possibly be the most dunder-headed piece of writing ever published at the prodigiously dunder-headed right-wing movie blog, Big Hollywood. Young Ben, ever the iconoclast, has put crayon to keyboard to bang out a mighty treatise entitled “The Ten Most Overrated Directors of All Time.” And his list is a doozy: Ridley Scott, Michael Mann, David Lean, Darren Aronofsky, Mike Nichols, David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino, Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, and, wait for it, Alfred Hitchcock. From which list we can assume that Ben has never heard of Kurosawa, Truffaut, Bergman, or Kubrick, because otherwise they would be on the list as well.
Now you would think that a young buck making such a bold statement would have the filmic chops to back up his, what’s the word?, idiosyncratic choices (and some of these are very arguable candidates for the distinction [not Scorsese or Hitchcock or David Lean, but, hey, feel free to take your best shot at Tarantino or Aronofsky or David Lynch]), but his argument essentially boils down to: waahhhh, I didn’t like (or understand) their movies, therefore they suck!!
You think I exaggerate? On Hitchcock: “Rear Window makes one reach for the fast-forward button. Vertigo makes one reach for the cyanide.” On Scorsese: “His films are entirely devoid of anything resembling likable characters.” (What? You didn’t like Jake LaMotta?! I thought he was a great big cuddly teddy bear). There’s so much more stupid to be plundered from this piece, but I’ll leave you with this three word gem from his section on Ridley Scott, because it should be carved as an epitaph into the tombstone of Ben Shapiro’s no-doubt short career as a film critic:
“Alien is slow.”
[Props=Sadly, No! via TBogg]
