Critic puts the hurt on ‘Marley & Me’ in verse
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When you have a new movie hitting the multiplex at holiday time, it’s always a bad sign when critics write their reviews in rhyme. No one did it better than Manohla Dargis, who back in 2003, when she was a film critic at the L.A. Times, celebrated Thanksgiving by dismantling Mike Myers’ frenetic rendition of ‘The Cat in the Hat,’ concluding her Seuss-style review by writing:
Critics are paid to suffer bad art, No matter how icky it is from the start, So all we could do was to Sit! Sit! Sit! Sit! And we did not like it, Not one little bit.
Now it’s New York Post critic Kyle Smith’s turn, whose review of ‘Marley & Me,’ which opens Christmas Day, is penned in doggerel verse, which he says (clearly with his tongue in cheek) should be sung to the tune of ‘Some Old Lang Syne,’ Dan Fogelberg’s 1980 hit about two old lovers meeting by chance on Christmas Eve. Calling the film a ‘labra-bore,’ Smith gets to take shots at the actors, the script and--being a N.Y. Post critic--manages to rhyme ‘snooze’ with his tabloid’s arch-rival, writing ‘the movie’s fit for me to pee upon, like the Sunday Daily News.’
He says that he and his date gave the film ‘two paws down,’ ending with a joke about dogs being in heat that you’ll have to read for yourself. All I can say is this: Seeing movies they disdain seems to give critics’ imagination free rein. Or as Smith puts it:
The dog steals Frisbees and at storms he barks, That’s not exactly life on Mars, Between the leads I couldn’t see sparks, They’re less fun than chasing cars.