Feel the Burn

One of my weird, private internet obsessions is reading really unflattering reviews. When Christmas with the Kranks came out I had a field day. Reviewers REALLY hated that movie. I mean they got poetic -

It's a holiday movie of stunning awfulness that gets even worse when it turns gooey at the end... What is the movie really about? I think it may play as a veiled threat against nonconformists who don't want to go along with the majority opinion in their community. What used to be known as American individualism is now interpreted as ominous. - Roger Ebert

Like the honey-glazed ham around which so much of its story sadly revolves, Christmas with the Kranks is tasty at first but soon congeals into little more than a fatty, gelatinous mess. - filmcritic.com

I could go on an on, but obv you can see that there's a sick and dorky sport to it.
So I decided to make BURN a semi regular feature where we can all make fun of people who try to be creative and make money but can't escape the harsh words of others.

For our 1st installment we'll be reviewing James Frey, of A Million Little Pieces, and Oprah's wrath fame's, new novel.
(There are literally no photo's of him anywhere on Google where he's not giving this wounded bird look. What's up with that,? I thought he used to be a hardened drug addict and criminal. Oh, right.)





Anyway, so this is his first actual novel and it's called Bright Shiny Morning. I haven't read it but I have been amusing myself reading reviews of it, so lets all enjoy!!

Imagine the movie Crash rewritten as a pastiche of Tom Wolfe, Bret Easton Ellis, and Jackie Collins — and you get a sense of the frustrating experience of reading this slack, self-indulgent mess. -Thom Geier for Entertainment weekly

"Bright Shiny Morning" is a terrible book. One of the worst I've ever read...an execrable novel, a literary train wreck without even the good grace to be entertaining...It's just one of the ironies of this new book that his fictionalized memoir is a better novel than "Bright Shiny Morning" could ever hope to be. - David L. Ulin for the LA Times

Janet Maslin actually liked it, and liked it enough to write her review in Frey's totally (to me) annoying and self conscious prose -
He wrote a book but it was bad, liar bad, faker bad, it got him in trouble. A million little pieces. It was the name of the book. It was also how hard he got hit. He had to sit there on the couch. Everybody saw. The television celebrity book club woman got mad, she let him have it. He had to sit there on the couch. He squirmed, he cringed. Everybody watched, everybody blamed him. Then it was over. Then he was gone.

Ugh, just say Oprah! Why say 'television celebrity book club woman' so, so, so, annoying! I urge you not to believe her.