Michael Medved Is an Idiot

[LiviaOlivia]

Michael Medved Is an Idiot
Posted by James Wolcott

Yes, I know what you're thinking: "Tell me something else I don't already know."

But some things can be reiterated enough.

Such as: Michael Medved is an idiot. He has a wet sock for brain. A thumbless grasp of the issues and a propensity for lachrymose whimpering when he doesn't get his way.

To wit, today's riposte to his critics in the Wall Street Journal's Leisure and Arts page. He blinks like a mole with minor astonishment that the fuss over Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby has "improbably and irrationally focused on...me." Medved being such a shy maiden and all. He also mopes in advance that this controversy may produce big wins for this "sad, undeserving film" at Hollywood's annual feast of the Antichrist, otherwise known as the Academy Awards.

Medved, of course, has been in the whining vanguard of the moral conservative campaign against Million Dollar Baby, deploring what he calls its "sympathetic treatment of assisted suicide.' The movie is much more sophisticated than that, too sophisticated for Medved's reductive, nursery-lesson mind. The movie tells a story, the story deepens and darkens, and the dilemma the characters face is dramatized as a wrenching quandary, a mortal decision; like most tragic stories, it carries the pall of the irrevocable. To vulgarize it as disguised propaganda is to miss its artistry entirely, but then again to Medved, art is something that should carry warning labels so that gullible doofuses (his target audience) won't be lured astray.

He says now that his "main objection" to the movie is its "misleading marketing," which barely hints at its "pitch-dark substance." The man clearly doesn't know how to read images or interpret visual tones. The very sombre, purgatorial look of the film and its ads more than hints at what Medved thinks should have been slapped on the counter like fresh fish.

~snip~

02.17.05 2:40PM
http://jameswolcott.com/archives/2005/02/michael_medved.php

[The_Casual_Observer]

1. Medved started out as the "discoverer" of "Attack of the killer tomatoes"

and other campy 70's junk, bringing bad movies to the attention of the wider public. Somewhere along the line he found a more permanent meaningless voice as a shrill rw shill. I can't stand to look at his ugly mug.

[MaineYooper]

2. For a good, but infuriating, laugh, go Medved's website

http://www.michaelmedved.com/

It's not enough for this guy to just be stupid and annoying, he's aggressively stupid and annoying.