Schlock Value: Hollywood at Its Worst

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Summary: Learning how to dismiss - not love - movies
Review: Richard Roeper is the worst thing to happen to movies since the corporate take-over of the studios in the 1980's. He cares far more about celebrities, his own image, and behind the scenes gossip than he does for any film. Whereas a good critic would find ways to help people love movies (or any artform) more, Roeper almost never does this, choosing instead to focus on the most negative elements of many of the films he writes about. Even the descriptions above, by the publisher, highlight this fact: he writes about "Reviews of Hollywood finance." (Rather than encouraging people to care more about the story than the budget.)
"Actors who appear in television commercials." Does Roeper want us to focus on who does commercials, or focus on each movie, and decide whether its story is told well or not? Citing two unsuccessful films, Roeper proposes a "moratorium on pet projects." But Roeper wants to oversimplify films so he can snarkily make his point, when he ignores the reality that many, many successful films are "pet projects." Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, for example. But Roeper just wants to dumb everything down (including the movies and movie audience) for his jokey complaints. I do believe that this very shallow man loves movies, but he uses a tremendous amount of power and energy encouraging and teaching people to utterly dismiss entire movies because of one or two irrelevant elements. A quick example: When the film "Chicago" was in theatres, Roeper nearly bent himself double complaining fiercely about the fact that the movie wasn't filmed in Chicago - EVEN THOUGH THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH WHAT IS ON THE SCREEN. I heard him being interviewed on a radio show, and the host was scoffing at "Chicago," saying that he wouldn't go see a musical. Rather than stepping into the role of film critic and defending the film as sexy and fun
(Roeper gave a thumbs up to it), Roeper merely complained about the location of the shoot again, and never said another word about it. Disgraceful. This book is NOT, "a love letter to film." It is a course in learning how to diminish and dismiss film, our greatest artform.