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the amazon review game

Robyn emails in response to my post about reviews with a link to waxy.org's approach to amazon reviews:

Here's a fun game... First, look up the most popular and critically-acclaimed books, movies, and music on Amazon. Click on "Customer Reviews," and sort them by "Lowest Rating First." Hilarity ensues! It's the Amazon.com Knee-Jerk Contrarian Game!

Waxy provides examples of one star reviews of books, movies, and music he loves, and they really are funny. Then his readers get in the game and post their examples of funny one-star reviews. Walt provides this one star review of the DVD release of Lawrence of Arabia:

I bought this DVD as a way to show off my new DVD player to my family. I had seen the movie several times in the theater, and knew its bright colors would be beautiful on my TV screen.
To my horror, I saw that Columbia had seen fit to alter a masterpiece. Yes, the film came complete with those horrific black bars at the top and bottom of my screen, which obscured about half of the picture. I've seen those bars on the "artsy" videos on TV, and I sometimes enjoy them. But this is a classic work of art! You don't try to make it "hip" and "relevant" with modern touches. It would be like adding a moustache to the Mona Lisa.
Until Columbia drops the act and releases "Lawrence of Arabia" without those bars, letting us see all of the picture, stay away.

Waxy also provides a link to Justine Larbalestier's weblog entry on how to turn bad Amazon reviews into an entertaining afternoon's reading, but before you go off reading that, here's the one star review of Ann Patchett's The Magician's Assistant (one of my very favorite novels) that made me snort and then, yes, laugh.

I wanted to like this novel, but I just couldn't. Like all of Patchett's other works, this one is boring and hard to read. After I bought the book and read it, I felt like I had been tricked by an evil magician. I felt like an unwilling participant at a magic show--the lady who gets sawed in half. The plot is jerky and lackluster; it's predictable and rather dull. The characters are slippery and distant. There is no energy, no rabbit out of the hat. It's a one woman show where the magic is missing. It deserves a zero but the marks don't go quite that low.

July 14, 2004 09:18 PM

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Posted by: Justine Larbalestier at July 15, 2004 02:01 PM