Movie critic, t.v. critic, food critic, political critic, self-styled critic. The whole world's it's own damn critic, criticizing every possible, imaginable, foreseeable or unforeseeable, beautiful, ugly, good, bad, mad or sad… endless criticisms by infinite critics. Well, this poem's gonna be a critique on the absurdity of criticism...
Read the paper today and saw an ad for a movie I thought I just might enjoy but later on when I turned on the tube this big shot movie critic said that that movie was the very worst so far this year and that it'd be a bloody waste of precious time and money to go see it and therefore he gave it half a star and shot my evening to hell...
Ruling out the planned movie for the night, I decided I might bring a friend to lunch at the new restaurant that opened up yesterday just a couple of blocks from here. I picked up my friend at work and suggested we check out this new restaurant tonight and she said sure, but her coworker overheard and shook her head to say no, so of course I asked her for her opinion and she said that the place stinks because the food's too spicy and they got muzak playing softly rather than some exciting new wave tunes. Oh well...
God knows why, but my friend decided we best skip lunch for today, even though I was starving, ready to eat just about anything, but I guess we do strange things to please people. She got some wild idea and suggested we go dancing which I thought would do me some good too. The club we picked out was the hottest place in town but when we got there the place was surrounded by old folks and parents and teachers with signs and posters demanding the club be shut down because it contributes to immorality...
So, of course I said "to hell with it!", and my friend said "what a crazy world this is!". Seeking out sanity, we decided to take in some theatre and check out a performance of "Romeo and Juliet". Upon entering the front door of the arts center, a fat man with a cigar and smelling heavily of booze grabbed me by the arm in a friendly manner and seriously recommended that I skip this show because Juliet was too old and Romeo looked like a wimp. I smiled and suggested he go to bed considering his apparent state of intoxication when suddenly he stood tall and gave me the third degree for supposedly making fun of him of all people, him, the art critic from our city newspaper. I guess the worst critic is one who believes he's an indisputable authority...
By now I was in a pretty worked up state and ready to punch out anybody who dared to criticize anything, it was simply too much. All this criticism was ruining my evening not to mention my state of mind and therefore I had to do something about it. So grabbing my friend's hand I pulled her out of the lion's den and left the drunkard cold. I figured we still had time to hit the movie theatre and check out that movie I had first thought I'd like to see...
The movie did turn out to be a smash, at least in our opinion. Not quite a five star, but at least a four star, or perhaps a four and a half star depending whether one was sitting near the front or near the back, and in what kind of mood one might be...
Copyright © 1986 Hans Raffelt, All Rights Reserved.
