Is it still entertaining to mock Harry Knowles, or have we moved on to the point where we view him as just sort of faintly sad? I mean, at this point we all know exactly what Knowles’ flaws are as a film journalist, but is he still relevant enough that we can take deep pleasure in seeing him suffer?
I ask because I found his review of Toy Story 3 while wandering through the site a few weeks back, and it has to be one of the sweetest pieces of schadenfreude I’ve seen in a long time. If you really feel like it’s not worth it to make fun of him, though, just let me know and I’ll give you written permission to skip the rest of the entry. (Please allow 4-6 weeks for processing of your request.) Oh, this would also be where those of you who don’t want spoilers for Toy Story 3 should skip out.
For those of you who do think it’s worth making fun of Harry Knowles, but have sworn a solemn oath never to click on any link that leads back to his website, allow me to sum up: This review is Harry Knowles explaining that while he loved the vast majority of the film, the ending left him so absolutely furious that he is demanding a Toy Story 4 solely to retcon away the final moments that he detests so much. He explains at great, frothing length, of course (Harry Knowles’ writing style reminds me of nothing so much as a quote from Transmetropolitan: “Use shorter sentences. Or just whittle everything down to ‘I’m all fucked up on big red pills.'”) But the short version is that he can’t stand the thought that the movie ends with Andy giving away Woody to some little kid. This is ANDY, after all!!! This is the special toy of his childhood, his closest and dearest friend, and he’s just GIVING HIM AWAY!!! He didn’t even check to find out how much Woody was worth on eBay!!!
Needless to say, Harry would never have given up his favorite toy like that.
For those of you who have unaccountably missed Toy Story 3, the end of the movie is all about Andy realizing that his beloved childhood toys are, in the end, just that. They are toys. They are meant to make a child happy, to bring the light of joy and wonder to their eyes. To be played with. Andy has a moment where he looks down at Woody, his beloved childhood toy, and realizes that although there will always be a special place in his heart for Woody, the most important thing in the world is making a little kid happy with that toy. That to keep it is essentially selfish and petty. His giving the toy to Bonnie, the little girl whose mom works at the local daycare, is an act of the purest altruism.
And Harry Knowles responds to that like a vampire being confronted with a crucifix. He can’t even conceive of the idea that giving Woody to Bonnie is the right thing to do. The notion that people are more important than pieces of inanimate plastic, and that it’s not worth it to hang onto those items just because they may have some sort of totemic significance? It’s not just incomprehensible, it’s anathema and incomprehensible. He acts like he just saw someone having sex with farm animals: He doesn’t understand why they could possibly do it, but he knows it’s wrong and disgusting.
The parallels to Al, the overweight emotionally-stunted manchild who sees toys as “collectibles” and accumulates them without ever really caring about them, are so obvious that they’re almost not worth pointing out…which doesn’t stop nearly a hundred people from doing so in the comments section. (The best part is when he compares his reaction to the end of Citizen Kane. That’s right, the message of Citizen Kane isn’t “don’t let the quest for material things change you and destroy your childlike innocence,” it’s “keep the damn sled!”) But those parallels are lost on Knowles. This movie and the themes that drive it, the idea that toys are to be played with and loved, not just hoarded…he doesn’t even understand why it’s so sad that he doesn’t understand.
Toy Story 3 and the unselfish love it displayed infuriated Harry Knowles to no end. That alone is enough of a reason for me to love it.
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It will always be entertaining to mock Harry Knowles. The perfect storm of scyophancy, misogny, and all-around complete and utter inappropriateness that is his Blade 2 “review” will keep it entertaining until the end of time.
Plus, fun party game: See how many paragraphs you can get into that review until you close the browser tab while screaming obscenities! (Shun anyone who gets through the whole thing, they are diseased.)
It seems so…weird that someone wouldn’t get the end of Toy Story 3. I enjoyed it a lot, I thought the ending was great, but even if you somehow thought it was sappy or overly sentimental, it still made sense.
I think I need to go lie down.
Okay, for someone who knows very, very little of Harry Knowles…can some kind individual elaborate on him?
Okay, I haven’t seen the movie, but your summary made me kind of tear up. I’m pretty confident in my reading comprehension and…
Bonnie’s a little girl, right? And Andy’s the hero of all three movies that goes to college, right?
So Harry Knowles has this sequel in his head about the two shipping? Wait..what?
Pixar knew what they were tapping into when they made Toy Story 3, the primordial nagging that haunts all adults that miss their favorite toys. They not only tapped into it, they mainlined that shit directly into viewers veins and watched the essence of the day they lost their childhood flicker to life and dance about on the big screen, come to haunt them again.
That Harry Knowles dares to not understand that is borderline insanity.
Imagine if Comic Book Guy was a real person, and that Hollywood actually took him sort of seriously. That is Harry Knowles.
I’ve never actually heard of Harry Knowles, and while his Toy Story 3 review is idiotic, the Blade 2 review CapnAndy linked is one of the most terrifying things I’ve ever read. What could have possibly happened to him to make him this way?
Knowles is the movie nerd that Hollywood views all movie nerds as.
Also, I no longer read Knowles reviews just in case he sneaks another “Blade 2” review at me. Good god, that was awful.
That Knowles doesn’t get the ending to “Toy Story 3” isn’t at all surprising, but it is a sad showing on his part.
That Blade 2 review was …was…..I don’t know. I wouldn’t call it misogyny as much as…..some kind of drugs.
Oh why did I click that link to the Blade 2 review? Why??? It was staring at me, daring me to click it and now….it cannot be unclicked!
I have no idea who Harry Knowles is, but that review of his you linked to doesn’t demonstrate behaviour you ascribe to him as a ‘vampire’ or someone who just saw animals having sex or whatever.
He doesn’t “get” TOY STORY 3, that’s true, but he’s hardly being irrational about it. He’s examining his personal feelings and why the ending doesn’t work for him. Yes, he fails to see the immaturity in keeping Woody, but he’s hardly being outrageously terrible in a moral or any other sense.
I think you are reacting to some other pattern of behaviour he exhibits, because while I look at that review and go, “You just don’t get it”, I don’t get riled up because he says nothing outrageously insane.
He’s not Armond White.
If you hate this guy so much (as you clearly do), then just stop reading his bullshit. That’s why I don’t read Armond White’s column.
Sorry, rereading my post, when I say “because while I look at that review and go, “You just don’t get it”” I am referring to Knowles, not yourself. “[Knowles] just [doesn’t] get it”. It’s quite clear John that not only do you get his review, you also get the story of TOY STORY 3. I just wanted to clear that up.
@Zach
Harry Knowles thing was that about 13 or so years ago, he was the first guy on the internet to act as a clearing house for reports from people going to test screenings and so on.
Because the internet was much smaller then, a lot of people who were goo…yahooing? up things came across this stuff, most notably his Godzilla test screening review, which the studio blamed for the failure of the film.
Thus his original infamy.
He is also a relic of back when nerds roamed the internet, scarcely bothered by normal people. And it shows.
“And Harry Knowles responds to that like a vampire being confronted with a crucifix.”
Indeed! Fred Clark has a very interesting post along the lines of that analogy (http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2009/09/vampires-crosses.html). The shock isn’t magical, it’s moral: ‘vampires’ are viscerally repulsed by the very idea of sacrifice.
What Bass said.
.
And what you don’t mention in your column at all is the extra speculation Knowles makes as to what Woody may mean to Andy as a memento of his father. Granted, this is all speculation by Knowles, but it adds contect to his reaction to Andy’s giving Woody away that you ignore.
contectconteXt.
sigh
Back in high school writing class, which was, jeez, like eight or nine years ago now (!..?), my teacher showed us AICN and said, “This is what I DON’T want you to do.” I’m serious.
(No, he didn’t show us the Blade II review.)
Re: that Blade II … “review” … I remember a Penny Arcade strip from a while back that made fun of Harry Knowles. It had a fake review that had terms like “man-jam” and “whale semen”, etc. I had an idea that Knowles was a crap writer, but I had ZERO idea that fake review was in fact based on a true story.
Ew.
Unfortunately Anon, even with the ‘death of the author’ stance of interpretation or criticism, adding details into a story that are not there isn’t context, it’s viewpoint justification.
Harry Knowles? He’s still alive?
Ok, no, I just finished reading the whole thing. It has to be a parody (of himself, I guess). You people are just pretending to be horrified by it, instead of laughing along.
Also (for the last time, I swear), ditto what Anon says up there. Knowles does put forth an interesting idea behind Andy’s absent father (whether dead, divorced, etc). He ends up calling this theory and his feelings attached to it his “his silly personal hang-up.” That’s not bad at all.
He doesn’t ask for a retcon as much as a follow-up.
While I can’t say I liked his review, he seems perfectly aware that his reaction is a personal distaste for putting away childish things rather than a flaw in the movie itself. That kind of review doesn’t bother me–there’s several films which I dislike for purely personal reasons.
Never. Get. Out. Of. The. Boat.
As Gloria notes, Knowles acknowledges his feelings are “his silly personal hang-up” and appears to recognize how they color his feelings about the movie.
Simililarly Seavey seems to have (for understandable reasons) a personal distaste for Knowles, or at least his writing, that colors Seavey’s take on Knowles’ review.
If Knowles is to be criticized for his review because it comes from a personal place, then….
@Anon: Equivocation. In order for the point you’re trying to make to work the way you want it to, you’ll need to use John’s post to illustrate the glaring character flaw that caused him to dislike Harry Knowles.
I get that Knowles was writing this with his “personal hang-up” in mind. But his personal hang-ups make up a huge portion of the review. He spends a decent chunk of time discussing how he always felt Woody belonged to Andy’s Dad first, and that’s part of the problem with Andy giving him to the next child. Well, I always felt that the Matrix was programmed by Neo’s father, which is why I have a problem with him spending so much time trying to destroy it. Now, I know there’s nothing in the film that gives any clue that this was the case, but hey, it’s how I feel,so it’s a perfectly valid argument.
Yeah, personal feelings about something that never happened in the series, but instead took place entirely inside your mind, should not affect your review.
He goes on that giving up childhood toys makes us grow too old too fast. I disagree. When I gave up my childhood toys, I started playing with bigger, better, and more expensive toys. I shudder to use the term, after reading the Blade 2 review, but yes, I found out how to play with Adult Toys. From computers to cars to boats to actual guns instead of the fake nerf type. Yes, putting away childhood toys is a sign of maturity, but maturity doesn’t mean we stop having fun and suddenly grow old. It just means we expand our definition of fun.
He admits at one point that he realizes that Woody wants to go to a new child, to still be played with. But Knowles doesn’t care. Sure, Andy is the kid who is basically a supporting character in the movies. Sure, Woody is the hero we’ve been following for ages. But do we want the main character to have a happy ending (another poor phrase choice, considering Blade 2…)? Hell no! Instead, Knowles wants Woody to end up like his own favority boyhood toy, Vietnam Andy. Sitting on a shelf in his father’s house. Mostly ignored, remembered fondly by the people who probably forget to dust him off on a regular basis.
And then we get the truly creepy sequel. Where a young girl is already in an arranged marriage to a man who will likely be in his early to mid 40’s while she’s in her 20’s…when the last film comes out…eeek.
I’m sorry, defend this review if you must, but this was god-awful.
Oh god, I could only make it to the second paragraph (if that’s what it was) of the Blade 2 review.
Still. Unclean.
While I can’t spite the man for his personal interpretations of the films he reviews…I can gladly and willingly call him an absolutely terrible writer.
I’m conflicted, terribly so.
On the one hand, I really disliked the Toy Story 3 review, and the Blade 2 review was….. really bad. I had another description, but…. it’s really bad.
On the other hand, I write for Ain’t It Cool News as one of the Comic Assholes, and I have a sense of loyalty to Knowles(and he’s a fairly decent guy). Doesn’t mean his reviews are redeemed, I just feel conflicted railing on them, you know?
What I’m trying to say is I agree. But then feel like a git.
So this Blade II review that everyone’s talking about here.
Is there a way to sum up what’s awful about it without me having to go and look it up myself and be scarred for life by this abomination of words?
He inexplicably and explicitly uses cunnilingus as an extended metaphor for what Guillermo Del Toro was doing to the audience with the film, which Knowles seemed to enjoy to a breathtaking degree and in a rather disturbing manner.
He also makes the baldfaced claim that he and Del Toro are blood brothers and bestest friends forever and then goes on to imply that he’s seen Del Toro fuck. It is wrong on so very many levels.
Harry Knowles’ memoir, whose clean and readable style was clearly not his own, reads like a step-by-step recipe for maladjusted manchild au gratin. It’s impossible to overstate how perfectly this review gels with that book.
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