Simone Fary said: <<2) lack of equal opportunity leechery. I used to be bothered by reviewers who were constantly describing the physical attributes of the actresses. A recent reviewer (female, by the way) describe the size of Demi Moore's attributes in the movie Striptease. Upon further reflection, those are probably the main reason that alot of people are going to see that movie, so why not tell people about them? But, believe it or not, many women also go to movies to ogle the actors, and I find little mention of this. I remember hearing a female reviewer on a radio talk show mention that the main appeal of "Last of the Mohicans" was seeing 2 hours of Daniel Day Lewis with his shirt off, to the shock of the male reviewers present.>> The problem would seem to be a lack of female reviewers. Is the field dominated by men, a male perspective (or "gaze" if you prefer)? (And personally I thought Demi's stripteases were really dull. But Ving Rhames and Burt Reynolds made the movie watchable). <<4) Reviewers who deem a movie "not funny" because the humor presented doesn't appeal to them personally. There are many different types of humor - some people can't stand Benny Hill, or Monty Python, but to call them "not funny" seems to me most unhelpful to the people who do like that kind of humor.>> Yet there are many innocuous comedies which are simply *not funny*. They're often full of tired jokes that wore out two or three movies ago. On a related note, I'm not nearly as annoyed by reviews as I am by the use of excerpts (often taken out of context) in trailers and ads. I've begun to wonder if some relatively unknown reviewers praise bad movies just to get their names in those ads. Anybody got thoughts on how the widespread practice of "sound bite reviews" has changed the relationships among the reviewer, the reviewee, and the audience. Chris Pyle U of Ky. ---- To signoff SCREEN-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF SCREEN-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]