The AV Club’s GPA Takes A Significant Curve

Scott Tobias of The Onion’s AV Club managed to rouse the ire of the comment section with his dubious C+ rating for “Scott Pilgrim vs. The World”. AV Club staffers have often made the case that “letter grades don’t matter” (yet if they matter so little, why employ them at all?) Even so, Scott Pilgrim’s unjust maligning was followed up soon after with Robert Rodriguez’s hotly anticipated “Machete” receiving the same paltry brand and once again sending the comment section flying into a whirling dervish . This led many commenters to joke that there must be some sort of significance to the rating on Mr. Tobias’ part, who of course responded that the grade doesn’t matter at all. To paraphrase; “It’s just to get you interested in the in-depth article to follow”. Yea sure, blah-blah-blah, bullshit.

Perhaps he was sent to bed without supper for receiving the report card equivalent of “meh” one too many times in gym class. Undoubtedly The Masons are also involved. Whatever the case, I was intrigued, and in the AV Club’s grand(alright, fair enough, venti) tradition of taking “Inventory” I did one of my own for every “C+” Mr. Tobias has doled out. Here were the results in reverse order by date:

• Machete, Centurion, The Karate Kid, Hideaway (Le refuge), John Rabe, The Joneses, Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever, Dear John, From Paris With Love, District B13: Ultimatum, North Face, Brothers, The Missing Person, Women In Trouble, Whip It, More Than A Game, American Casino, My One And Only, Spread, 24 City, The Limits of Control, American Violet, Back to Normandy, Donkey Punch, My Bloody Valentine 3-D, Seven Pounds, Spin City: The Complete First Season, Splinter, High School Musical 3: Senior Year, W. , Blindness, The Rocker, Son of Rambow, Street Kings, The Grand, The Bank Job, Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day, Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins, Cassandra’s Dream, Youth Without Youth, Martian Child, In The Shadow Of The Moon, Death Sentence, Delirious, Descent, Live Free Or Die Hard, Crazy Love, Bamako, From Other Worlds, We Are Marshall, Déjà Vu, Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest , Poseidon, Lucky Number Slevin, ATL, The Pink Panther, Nanny McPhee, When The Sea Rises.

Sifting through every review Tobias ever contributed to the site, two things are immediately clear; 1)Tobias is the “artsy-fartsy” one over there. He’s apparently happy to sit on a folding chair in a dank pit of a theater the size of a broom closet while offering apple segments to the three other people there who even cared the movie in front of them existed. And 2) Scott Pilgrim most definitely does NOT fit on this list. End of story. These movies “feel like” C+’s, much the same way the alternate universe in a box “just felt like a ‘B’, you know?” to Phillip J. Fry. They’re extremely apt despite how much they “don’t matter”.

This Inventory makes Scott Pilgrim’s review seem all the more an aberration. Maybe he stepped in dog shit on the way to the theater? Or maybe, despite all its originality, creative spark and all around pizzazz, Pilgrim was just too bourgeois and mainstream for him. It’s not like some silly bullshit letter grade (which they apparently abhor yet continue to use) from The AV Club would have saved the poor thing on opening weekend, but it sure didn’t help.


P.S. I tried to refrain from hostility or insults but this motherfucker almost got two films on the list that simply cannot stand: “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” with a C and “Wall Street” with a B-. Good LORD, man, I was kidding in the comments section but you really ARE in fact a shit-for-brains.