With those five words, the enigmatically stupid Jeffrey Wells (yeah, I said it) begins his excoriation of Hairspray. Is that an exaggeration? No more so than bolding the words"suffering a major migraine."
I'm writing and posting my own review of Hairspray later this week, and while I don't make a habit of disparaging people simply because our opinions disagree on films (hell, if that were the case, Filmbrain and I would have beaten each other to a pulp years ago, and instead, I rather respect him), when certain "critics" manage to spew such nonsense with such ease, writing sentences such as, "The fact that Hairspray is a mildly amusing one-note crock isn't bothering the critics so far," it gets my ire up a wee bit. All this from someone who praised the overrated and tremendously thin Capote ad nauseum. Of course, his biggest problem with Hairspray seems to be John Travolta, and the only thing worth watching in Capote was Philip Seymour Hoffman, so maybe Wells has a basic movie-watching dysfunction: that of being unable to see beyond the biggest (figuratively, literally ... however) in a film. Who knows? It's possible.
I stopped reading Wells' Hollywood Elsewhere some time ago when I realized the only thing it was good for would involve printing it out to have backup for whenever I might run out of toilet paper. But see, just when I need blogging inspiration, GreenCine Daily comes to my rescue.