The Gospel According to:Halyna Barannik (About a Boy)

One particular sub-section of film criticism I've always been fascinated by is critics who write for Christian groups/magazines/etc and I hope to do an ongoing series on some of the terrible reviewers that can be found therein. While I personally don't need a film and its characters match up to my own moral standards, I can understand on some level why people would. I recently stumbled upon the website Christian Spotlight on The Movies, which gives a pretty mixed bag of reviews. They mostly range from the mildly-amusing-and-kinda crazy-but-not-crazy-enough-to-warrant-a-post-on-FLS to a few reviews that are actually very intelligent, well researched and enlightening, specifically Michael Karounos' very impressive review of A Scanner Darkly(http://www.christiananswers.net/spotlight/movies/2006/ascannerdarkly2006.html).

But, then, as if nature saw Karounos' reviews and said "I must correct this", the world birthed critic Halyna Barannik, whose name I have to believe is an anagram of some kind, and man does she take the cake.

I've read through only a handful of Barannik's reviews, but the one that is miles away my favorite is her review of 2002's About a Boy.

http://www.christiananswers.net/spotlight/movies/2002/aboutaboy.html

“About A Boy” is a movie about Willy (Hugh Grant)..."

At no point in About a Boy is Grant's character ever referred to as "Willy", the character is always called Will. This is a minor point, but it's an incredibly weird and distracting thing to put in a review and I get the impression that her high school American history teacher probably reacted similarly when she would refer to the murderer of Abraham Lincoln as "Johnny Wilkes Booth" .

"...a bloke..."

WHAT????

"...(British for 'guy')..."

Ohhhh, thank god we cleared that up. Talk about confusing!

"He is an odd man, charming and witty and somewhat self-effacing, but without any moral scruples at all. Pushing 40, he looks to women for fun only, with no intention of ever marrying. He targets single mothers because they might be easy prey."

For the most part, there's nothing really wrong with this paragraph, though I like that a guy who isn't married, isn't interested in being married and who sleeps around alot strikes Halyna (Who will be henceforth referred to as "Hally", in part because this is easier to write repeatedly, but mostly because it just sounds much less retarded than her full name) as a novelty.

"Along the way he meets Marcus, the son of a depressive/suicidal mother, played deftly by Toni Colette (The Sixth Sense). The boy finds some kind of comfort in visiting Willy, a father figure to whom he has taken a strong liking. At first resistant to the companionship of a child, Will adjusts to Marcus, as the boy, vulnerable and lonely, grows on him and taps into his deeply buried conscience."

Hey, this is actually pretty decent. You know, maybe I was wron-

"...But the theme of a helpful friendship that stimulates deeper feelings in a guy who has always been unabashedly shallow is somehow muddied by other thematic elements, like the bullies at Marcus' school who are inordinately cruel and cutting (are all the British kids like this?)..."

Hahaha what the hell. I'm not even sure where to start with what's insane about this sentence. Theres the idea that a movie having more than one main plotline "muddies" (that is not a word?) things, of course, but then you have Hally completely blindsided by adolescent kids in a movie being mean, which certainly doesn't happen in AMERICA, thank god. I think I was way off in my earlier notion that Hally went to public school, this is the writing of someone who received their formal education in their garage (lest she be exposed to sinful lies of the "theory" of Evolution and that despicable Andrew Carnegie).

"Although I found myself rooting for Will to become a better person, and at the end he seems to have found a sense of responsibility, the many themes made the movie a little too dense, too crowded, and that insufferable British mumbling of words that make you want to ask your neighbor “what did he say?” didn't help."

Hally's problems with the film, in a nutshell:

*There was too much going on.

*There was too much going on.

*As usual, British people were talking like British people. *eyeroll emoticon*

That last part made me smile because she's not just criticizing a movie, she's criticizing an entire people. Part of me gives her credit for having the kind of balls to just casually drop that in there, but another, saner part of me feels that Hally thinks Brits talk the way they do just to annoy people.

"This movie will appeal to movie afficianados..."

Godless liberals.

"...and to those who find Hugh Grant “cute"..."

Homos.

"...which he is, in a snotty and roguish kind of way."

Hally is doing a bad job of covering up her crush on Hugh Grant.

Alternate unused adjectives: Rude, Scoundrally, Piratey, Han Soloish, Nerf-Herded, Millenium Falconesque.

"In terms of Christian values, Marcus and his love for his mother soften the worldly quirkiness of this movie, but at the end, even Marcus becomes worldly, emulating the very bullies who have hurt him so much."

Having been born, raised and educated in a small garage, Hally fears and mistrusts anything foreign, deeming these things "worldly". This includes caesar salad dressing, IKEA furniture, Greek people and National Geographic (see also: "Snotty").

Also, Hally perceiving Marcus growing out of his shell and gaining some confidence at the end of the movie as some kind of Michael Corleone-like downer ending = lols.

"All in all, an enjoyable film, but not exceptional by any means. This latest of Hugh Grant's films has been overall well-reviewed by critics, but my eager anticipation was in the end disappointed."

All in all, Halyna Barannik is a crazy lady with a horrible name who probably celebrated her completion of this review by taking the family out to Bob Evans and eyeing the Korean couple the table over suspiciously.