There is probably nothing more enjoyable on the internet today than to contrast the movie I saw with the reviews of said movie by the only other people in America who saw it: the hardcore Tucker Max fans who frequent his message boards. Never let it be said that we don't provide space for differing opinions.

1. "The comedic value isn't what sets the movie apart to me, it's the fact that it actually has a soul. When I walked out of the theater I wasn't really thinking about how funny it was, I was thinking about friendships I've had in the past that I screwed up or have lost - it made me introspective."

2. "Much in the same way 'fratire' became a new genre, Tucker made this movie from a completely different mold. And, he deserves to be evaluated on that basis."

3. "Tucker and Nils could make 10 sequels to IHTSBIH and they'd still be funny so long as the dialogue didn't repeat. Because that's where the humor was derived: the fucking English language. Crazy concept, right?"

4. "I think you infused the right amount of slapstick, physical comedy (the shit scene, Dan pissing on the cops) into the movie. I like it when you can laugh at two very different levels of humor in the same flick."

5. "I've seen Tucker on camera many times, but it was weird to see him in a movie about him...with him not playing...him. And was it me or was he overacting that role like a motherfucker in the background of those scenes? Haha, nah, you were good dude."

6. "Expected more laugh out loud moments in the movie, but that was mostly from my high expectations. I rarely laugh out loud in movies, but I remember I did during the shit scene and the scene with Drew strangling Lara. A few of the one liners like 'You smell like you got buttfucked by a garbage truck.'"

7. "Take Drew. Not a single person who's criticized the Drew/Lara relationship has mentioned a characteristic of his other than that he "hates women," a fact that shows a deep misunderstanding of the character and relationship. Drew is bitter because he's fucking hurting. He is a very deeply moral character. He clearly puts a lot of weight on trust: he won't lie for his friends because Dan's fiancée trusts him and he will not undermine that. To not have that same trust reciprocated in a relationship as involved as the one he just got out of is fucking devastating.
To give someone your all, to buy them his and hers chairs to play video games in, to so let them into your life, only to catch them sucking off a fucking rapper on your couch? The damage that does to his emotional health is so palpable it's ridiculous. Some of the shots of Jesse reacting to Lara and the kid back at their house are priceless. Bradford does such a good job letting that pain and longing simmer. Chills."

8. "I loved the fact that even though I didn't find it funny, I was only bored during one scene."

9. "We've been so conditioned to see people dodging wrenches to practice dodging a ball, Asian gangsters in car trunks, and Jason Biggs sliding to home plate with a pie that when we see flaming Dr. Peppers we probably expected someone or something to catch fire for some cheap laugh. Instead we heard "So who's the slutty one?" said to a bachelorette party. The line – like the entire tone of the movie – is in your face and that artistic choice is so different the combination is unsettling to some people, but funny to nearly everyone."

10. "In a few years, when critics look at the IHTSBIH franchise as a whole, they're going to be eating a lot of crow. Not because they wrote bad reviews (this movie, like every other movie, has its flaws), but because they failed to miss the "experience" aspect all together. In the same way that George Lucas generated long-term success for Star Wars with cutting-edge movie-making technology, IHTSBIH will ultimately succeed as a franchise and a brand because it completely redefined what it means to "experience" a movie. That's why it's unfair to compare this to any other film. It isn't like them."

Box Office Mojo sez: It opened on 120 screens and raked in a total of $369K, for an opening weekend average of $3,075 per screen. That puts Tucker's movie eighth in per-screen revenue out of the nine movies that opened last weekend. Although he came close to matching the $3,100 per screen average of Blind Date (2009).

But sometimes critically acclaimed films don't have boffo box offices. It's just the nature of high art. Let's go to the reviews:

• Reuters: "the film is unfunny from first minute to last, and its half-hearted attempts at emotion merely underscore its general loathsomeness."
• USA Today: "This unfunny, über-misogynistic adaptation of Tucker Max's audacious best-seller of the same name is unlikely to please anyone."
• Chicago Tribune: "The result just might be the most hypocritical feature in the history of film as well as the history of hypocrisy, and along with serving beer, I hope they show 'I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell' in hell."
• San Francisco Chronicle: "That was epic, bro. You should make a movie ...No, you shouldn't! Put down the digital camera, step away from Robert McKee's guide to screenplays, and get back to ramming your head through Sheetrock during spring break."
• New York Times: "a mediocre gross-out movie that barely pushes the envelope."
• Boston Globe: "Ridiculously cheap-looking, smug, scurrilous, but fairly evolved for a project so fundamentally unevolved."

It was bad. It was really bad. It was not bad in the good way. It was not bad ironically. It was not bad in the "Let's go see it because we like to watch bad movies like Knowing, and laugh at them" way. I do not want to say the wrong thing here, that might convince anyone that this movie is worth paying to see, even for train wreck purposes.

This is the movie that happens when a narcissist—not an interesting one, though—writes an entire movie about how cool he is, and is given full creative control over that movie. Imagine someone you know who is an asshole. Now imagine that person being able to write and produce a movie about themselves, and how awesome they are. There you have it.

The plot of this film: Tucker Max and two of his bros go to a bachelor party, meeting various cum sluts along the way. Whore bitches can't get enough of Tucker Max's bad boy personality, which is probably why so many of these twats want him inside of their vaginas. Tucker fucks a midget stripper and the world loves him for it, the end. Other highlights:

• Close-ups of poop, coming out of someone's butt, a lot.
• There's a wedding scene in the end where the guests are all white and the servers are all black. There's not a joke to go with that.
• The best character in the film is Tucker's friend Drew, because he looks like he was just dropped in from another movie, and can't wait to get back. Drew is a misanthropic video game nerd who goes to strip club and meets a hot stripper who is also a video game nerd and falls for him and they rush home and sleep together and Drew instantly bonds with her son and they become a couple immediately. This is as close to a plausible male-female interaction sequence as this movie gets.

This movie is not, in fact, hilarious.
[Pic: Flickr]

In his astutely worded takedown of the movie, Liel Leibovitz says that Tarantino's revisionist history—where Jewish soldiers kill Nazis and burn Hitler alive—robs history of its shades of gray, and, thereby, this "bit of shallow propaganda" ruins the lessons we were taught by WWII.

It is a failure not only of imagination, but also of morality. The desire to turn film into a literal, blunt instrument of revenge drains it of the terrific power it has as a sharp and precise tool with which to cut through myopia, forgetfulness, ignorance, and denial. When in the hands of intelligent and sensitive directors, the results are shocking, evocative, world-changing.

Of course, all the filmmakers he goes on to name who do this well—Jean-Pierre Melville, Marcel Ophüls, and Claude Lanzmann—are Jewish.

Theirs is the Jewish way. Rather than burn film, they develop it into art. They are talmudic, offering endless interpretations to the fundamental question of our species, the question of our seemingly endless capacity for evil. Tarantino, however, is not interested in such trifles. He doesn't see cinema as a way to look at reality, but-ever the child abandoned in front of the television set, ever the video-store geek-as an alternative to reality, a magical and Manichean world where we needn't worry about the complexities of morality, where violence solves everything, and where the Third Reich is always just a film reel and a lit match away from cartoonish defeat.

So, add to the heaps of criticism of the movie that Tarantino isn't Jewish enough to make a good movie about Nazis. We don't agree with that. We believe that no matter the race, creed, or color, people have the ability to make shitty movies in about equal degree.

By far the best of the 11 Star Trek movies, it must rank as the outstanding prequel of all time...

The picture moves at a terrific pace, and is a satisfying tale of good versus evil, with Eric Bana a highly hissable villain...

This movie really does promise a creative re-birth of science fiction adventure.

In retrospect, perhaps the quality of the film was foreshadowed when Paramount decided to re-up with Abrams a few weeks ago.

Or maybe it's all just advance hype, and the end product will leave us feeling a bit let down, but also intrigued against all reason by hype for the next chapter of the story. But who expect that sort of plot-suspense roller coaster from the creator of Lost??

(Paramount publicity still via)

A.O. Scott at the New York Times think it's about time devotees of the dystopian tale grew the F up:

And the dramatic conflict revealed, at long last, in the film's climactic arguments is between a wholesale, idealistic approach to mass death and one that is more cynical and individualistic. This idea is sickening but also, finally, unpersuasive, because it is rooted in a view of human behavior that is fundamentally immature, self-pitying and sentimental. Perhaps there is some pleasure to be found in regressing into this belligerent, adolescent state of mind. But maybe it's better to grow up.

Owen Gleiberman at Entertainment Weekly, in a B- review, found the material a bit dated:

A no-future nihilism bled from the very grain of Moore and Gibbons' pop vision of the 20th century. But that's a real problem for the movie, since the Cold War nuclear fears of the '80s never did come to pass. Watchmen isn't boring, but as a fragmented sci-fi doomsday noir, it remains as detached from the viewer as it is from the zeitgeist.

A bored Philip Kennicott of the Washington Post, wonders if anyone should have bothered in the first place:

And yet as this continues, for 162 minutes, the usual question arises: Has the film added anything? Which forces one to confront the book, after more than two decades, with a little more critical distance. For years, people have wondered if it is filmable. But the real issue is whether the novel is worth filming at all.

Ol' Kenny Turan at the Los Angeles Times finds value in the book, but not in the film:

To be fair, on the other hand, "Watchmen's" plot is in no way chopped liver, and reverentially sticking to the source material, as the first "Harry Potter" films did, is the only thing that gives this film what watchability it has. Even if you haven't read the book, even if your first exposure to the story is in this denatured form, you can at least sense the power of the original, and that's what will stay in your mind, not what's on the screen.

Richard Corliss at Time lurves the opening sequence, which provides backstory to the tune of Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are a Changin'". He doesn't like all that much else:

Maybe there's no way the rest of the film could match this opening, and for sure it doesn't. Snyder spends much of the movie's 2 hours and 40 minutes on the splatter of crushed limbs, the chatter of Strangelovean science fiction and the nattering of the obligatory romance. He also encourages a little festival of tone-deaf acting. Yet Watchmen has moments of greatness. It proves again that the action movie is where the best young Hollywood brains have gone to bring flesh to their fantasies.

Devin Gordon at Newsweek finds moments of the supposedly-heavy-duty film quite silly:

Snyder's attention wanders when it comes to meat-and-potatoes storytelling, perhaps because he's never really had to tell one before. He draws performances that range from sublime (Jackie Earle Haley as a bitter antihero named Rorschach) to ridiculous (Malin Akerman, who has a sweet onscreen disposition but is nonetheless the Jar Jar Binks of "Watchmen"). ... Snyder also makes gross errors in tone, giving his flimsy villain a rinky-dink costume with nipples on its chest plate. He has said in interviews that he did it on purpose to preserve Moore's sendup of superhero self-seriousness, but that kind of subtlety isn't Snyder's strong suit, which is obvious the first time we see Dr. Manhattan wander across the screen in the nude, with his giant blue junk flapping in the apocalyptic breeze-another misguided sop to the novel and its R-rated sensibility.

Peter Travers at Rolling Stone, as always, boils it down to its silver-lining essence:

At its best, Snyder's movie gets at the symbolism of that smile button splashed with blood on the first Watchmen cover.

So not so good from some of the bigger critics in the land. But does it matter? Probably not initially. The film opened big in midnight screenings early this morning, and it ought to outpace Snyder's previous blockbuster effort, 300. But on the plane of pride and prestige and long-term, Titanic style longevity? Yes it does matter. In the new superhero world of a critically-adored smash like the The Dark Knight—which had a raft of strong reviews behind it (plus far more recognizable characters and a famous death) that helped it juggernaut all through the summer—people are beginning to expect a little awardsy grit with their blood and explosions. Too bad Watchmen didn't quite get there. Many non-believers will probably be reluctant to fork over increasingly-harder-earned doughlars for a long, turgid movie that's just OK.

Once again, Batman foils another plot.

Matt Selman insists he hasn't breached Warner Bros.' review embargo on the film, which opens March 6 and is review-proof anyway. But even so, where hormonal sister publication EW yelped with awe for months over Twilight, the Time blogger has claimed ownership of the geek vanguard with Monday's rather fulsome introspection:

I'm not allowed to talk details, but let's just say it is astounding how much of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' graphic novel is in this movie. [...]

Sitting in that screening room and watching the visual world of the Watchmen movie unfold was one of the most powerful experiences I've ever had. Not film experiences. Just EXPERIENCES. I don't think I realized how close I was to the original book until I saw such a loving, detail-rich, almost obsessive recreation of that universe. It had my heart pounding and head swimming. I barely slept that night. Someone took the most special personal thing of my adolescence and put it on a movie screen. That doesn't happen every day.

Thank God; "most special personal things" of our own adolescence would probably never even clear the ratings board.

• My Own Private 'Watchmen' [Time]

· "Hancock can offer only an A-list headliner in a D-list project." — Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune

· "Squanders potential greatness with lame humor and a half-baked hero." — Robert Wilonsky, Village Voice

· "It's a strange feeling to see the summer's most promising premise self-destruct into something bizarre and unsatisfying, but that is the Hancock experience." — Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times

· "It has a big sag in the middle that nothing could have fixed." — Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle

· "This movie fails so spectacularly - and on so many levels - that it's like watching a train plummet off a bridge." — Lou Lumenick, New York Post

Harsh! Has the king of the 4th of July weekend finally been dethroned? Probably not, because, critics be damned, I'm still gonna see it. Seems like the American thing to do. But perhaps Will Smith should spend less time founding robot-building Scientology schools and pay more attention to the scripts he chooses.

• Hancock [Rotten Tomatoes]

• My Rambo Review [YouTube via BWE]

· Many vows were broken to make this 'comedy' [SFGate.com]
· Say `I Don't' to `License to Wed' [WaPo.com]
· In 'License to Wed,' they all should have vowed to disengage [Newsday]

· Wedded miss: flick filled with tired shtick [Orlando Sentinel]
· Somebody should have pulled this "License to Wed" [Denver Post]
· Revoke that 'License to Wed' [Balt Sun]
· Williams deserves to have comic 'License' revoked [Daily Herald]
· As comedic clergyman, Williams' 'License' should be lifted [NJ.com]
· Leave 'License to Wed' at the altar [USA Today]
· 'Wed' gives Robin Williams license to annul his movie career [InsideBayArea.com]

And, mercifully, a dissenter!

· Robin Williams gives us license to laugh [ProJo.com]

• Review: Divorce yourself from 'License to Wed' [CNN.com]
• Previously: Annals Of Subliminal Advertising: The 'License To Wed' Poster [Defamer]

· 'Poseidon' sinks of its own weight [Boston Globe]
· 'Poseidon' sinks under its own weight [USA Today]
· 'Poseidon' sinks quickly to the bottom [MSNBC.com]
· 'Poseidon' Remake Sinks Slowly [OhMyNews International]
· Despite cast, loose script sinks ship [Portland Tribune]
· "Poseidon" sinks again in pointless remake [Reuters/THR]

On the other hand...
· 'Poseidon' avoids that sinking feeling [Christian Science Monitor]

Those Christian Scientists are so positive!

· Come Early Morning (written and directed by Joey Lauren Adams, Zellweger doppleganger and onetime Kevin Smith muse): [SPOILER ALERT] "A girl has relationship problems, gets over them."

· Kinky Boots: "The Full Monty with, um, boots."

We welcome other festival attendees to tap out their movie reviews on their Blackberries, Sidekicks, and Treos, preferably while a little tipsy. Send them to mark[AT]defamer.com and we'll work in the best ones.

• Complete Sundance Coverage [Defamer]