An example of a movie review. negative.

A: Four best friends young male chauvinist pigs (with the emphasis on pigs) meet weekly at a NYC diner to recount their dating sexploits in this misanthropic and visceral comedy. Peet is the common denominator who dates the three bachelors in the group which leads to conflict and the inevitable "whipping". Although the film's premise has potential and there are some funny moments to be had, overall the flick doesn't work especially in the end where the girls are made to appear no better than the guys which runs contrary to the crux of the story. One of those one-man band flix with a dozen producers, "Whipped" is likely to be enjoyed only by the kind of young males who think "The Man Show" is Emmy material.

An example of a movie review. negative.

A: When an attempt is made to assassinate the Emir of Ohtar, an Arab potentate visiting Washington, D.C., his life is saved by a cocktail waitress named Sunny Davis. Sunny becomes a national heroine and media celebrity and as a reward is offered a job working for the Protocol Section of the United States Department of State. Unknown to her however, the State Department officials who offer her the job have a hidden agenda.

A map we see shows Ohtar lying on the borders of Saudi Arabia and South Yemen, in an area of barren desert known as the Rub al-Khali, or Empty Quarter. In real life a state in this location would have a population of virtually zero, and virtually zero strategic value, but for the purposes of the film we have to accept that Ohtar is of immense strategic importance in the Cold War and that the American government, who are keen to build a military base there, need to do all that they can in order to keep on the good side of its ruler. It transpires that the Emir has taken a fancy to the attractive young woman who saved him and he has reached a deal with the State Department; they can have their base provided that he can have Sunny as the latest addition to his harem. Sunny's new job is just a ruse to ensure that the Emir has further opportunities to meet her.

A plot like this could have been the occasion for some hilarious satire, but in fact the film's satirical content is rather toned down. Possibly in 1984 the American public were not in the mood for trenchant satire on their country's foreign policy; this was, after all, the year in which Ronald Reagan carried forty-nine out of fifty states in the Presidential election and his hard line with the Soviet Union was clearly going down well with the voters. (If the film had been made a couple of years later, in the wake of the Iran/Contra affair, its tone might have been different).

The film is not so much a satire as a vehicle for Goldie Hawn to show off her brand of cuteness and charm. Sunny is a typical Goldie character- pretty, sweet-natured, naive and not too bright. There is, however, a limit to how far you can go with cuteness and charm alone, and you cannot automatically make a bad film a good one just by making the leading character a dumb blonde. (Actually, that sounds more like a recipe for making a good film a bad one). Goldie tries her best to save this one, but never succeeds. Part of the reason is the inconsistent way in which her character is portrayed. On the one hand Sunny is a sweet, innocent country girl from Oregon. On the other hand she is a 35-year-old woman who works in a sleazy bar and wears a revealing costume. The effect is rather like imagining Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm grown up and working as a Bunny Girl.

The more important reason why Goldie is unable to rescue this film is even the best comedian or comedienne is no better than his/her material, and "Protocol" is simply unfunny. Whatever humour exists is tired and strained, relying on offensive stereotypes about Arab men who, apparently, all lust after Western women, particularly if they are blonde and blue-eyed. There was a lot of this sort of thing about in the mid-eighties, as this was the period which also saw the awful Ben Kingsley/ Nastassia Kinski film "Harem", about a lascivious Middle Eastern ruler who kidnaps a young American woman, and the mini-series of the same name which told a virtually identical story with a period setting. The film-makers seem to have realised that their film would not work as a pure comedy, because towards the end it turns into a sort of latter-day "Mr Smith Goes to Washington". Sunny turns from a blonde bimbo into a fount of political wisdom and starts uttering all sorts of platitudes about Democracy and the Constitution and the Citizen's Duty to Vote and We The People and how the Price of Liberty is Eternal Vigilance blah blah blah, but in truth the film is no more successful as a political parable than it is as a comedy.

Goldie Hawn has made a number of good comedies, such as "Cactus Flower", "Overboard" and ""Housesitter", but "Protocol" is not one of them. I have not seen all of her films, but of those I have seen this dire comedy is by far the worst. 3/10

An example of a movie review. negative.

A:
Well, as Goethe once said, there really isn't any point in trying to pass a negative judgement that aspires to be objective on "something that has had a great effect". "La Maman et La Putain" has surely passed into history as an influence on much of what's been done in France and elsewhere in the past thirty years and no one interested in the history of film, certainly, should be dissuaded from watching it. To express a purely subjective judgement, however, I feel compelled to disagree with almost every other review posted here and say to people: "Don't watch it; it's a waste of hours of your time that will just leave you feeling rather sick and angry." And by that I don't mean "sick and angry" about "the human condition" or anything so general and profound as that, because that is exactly the line that most critics have adopted in their fulsome praise of the film - "an ordeal to watch in its ruthless dissection of our emotional cowardice and cruelty" and so on - and, if it really managed to put across a universally or even broadly relevant message of this sort, then the director would have good reason to be satisfied with himself, however pessimistic his conclusions may be. My beef with the film is rather that I don't see this hours-long record of empty vanity and petty treachery as being justified or excused by any GENERALLY relevant message at all. All three main characters are deeply morally unattractive individuals: Alexandre to the greatest degree, of course, because we see by far the most of him and because he seldom shuts up for more than thirty seconds; Marie perhaps to the least degree, because we see the least of her. Alexandre's affected and pretentious monologues have a kind of amusement value, of course, but the amusement wears thin as one comes more and more clearly to realize that Jean-Pierre Leaud is most likely not even acting and that, with absurd remarks like "un homme beau comme un film de Nicholas Ray", he really was just reproducing word-for-word opinions that were accepted as authentic and profound by the milieu in which he, along with the director Eustache, had been living for about ten years by the time of the making of the film. I suppose if the tone of relentless superficiality and triviality had been sustained throughout 100% of the film, it might have worked as a long sardonic comedy about a particularly shallow, worthless and despicable post-'68 milieu. What made, however, this viewer at least extremely angry with the director was his granting of at least one lengthy scene each to Alexandre and Veronika in which we are clearly expected to empathize with and feel for them as if they shared a moral universe with us. If a man can get away with living in the flat of and professing to love one woman, sleeping (mostly in this very flat) with another, and running around Paris proposing marriage to yet a third, well, I suppose I can wish him the best of luck in the dog-eat-dog world he's chosen to create for himself. What I can't, however, in all conscience do is listen even for a moment to maudlin monologues from him in which he speaks about his "anxiety" and his "despair". The same goes double for the even more despicable Veronika, whom we are shown barging drunk into the apartment and even the bed shared by Marie and Alexandre and behaving there with an infantile inconsistency tantamount to the most savage and heartless cruelty. As I say, if "La Maman et La Putain" is intended to be nothing more nor other than a portrait of Alexandre, Veronika and Marie, three individuals whom any even halfway decent person would never admit into their company let alone their home, then I suppose there is a kind of legitimacy in praising the director for being "unflinching" (though why one should even feel like "flinching" once one had consciously opted to create such thoroughly repellent characters to filmically observe I can't imagine). The problem, however, is that the director is clearly convinced - and appears to have succeeded in convincing generations of critics - that Alexander, Veronika and Marie are somehow representative of human beings in general and of the limits of human beings' emotional capabilities. This latter idea, however, is arrant and offensive nonsense. There may indeed be an inherent fallibility and tendency to tragedy in human relations in general and sexual relations in particular. But the nature and degree of this fallibility and tendency to tragedy can only possibly be determined by people who make a sincere and serious effort to make such relations work. It surely needs no cinematic or authorial genius to convey to us the information that a man who behaves like Alexandre is going to end up hated, miserable, and alone, or that women who insist on expecting love from a man like Alexandre are going to end up disappointed and bitter. Watch "La Maman et La Putain" if you're historically interested in what passed for culture and human interaction in a certain post-'68 Parisian milieu which was probably, unfortunately, not restricted to just a few particularly anti-social types like these. But please don't make the mistake of believing that what is recorded here has any general relevance for humanity in the way that a film by Jean Renoir or Martin Scorsese might be argued to have.