Thursday night, just hours after posting my review of Amanda Bynes’ gut-punchingly bad new comedy “She’s the Man,” I received this e-mail from one Robert Mackey:
What the hell are you supposed to be, a film critic or Don Rickles? [Do I have to choose?!]
Your review of “She’s the Man” was very discouraging to read. [If you mean I discouraged you from seeing it, then good.] I am sure you will be happy to know that you will be one of the five most hateful critics of the movie, as will be chronicled in the March 19 Weekly Column at Amanda Bynes NOW! com, America’s leading Amanda Bynes fansite. [The fact that yours is the “leading” Amanda Bynes fansite, thus implying that there are MULTIPLE Amanda Bynes fansites, disturbs me.]
The link to this page will be up so Amanda fans — who visit my site on the order of about 7500 a day — can get into your grill as well.
Happy eating, you jerk. [I don’t get the reference. What will I be “eating”? Crow? My hat? My crow hat? Something else?]
In other words: “I run an Amanda Bynes fansite. I haven’t even seen this movie yet — this is Thursday night, and it doesn’t open until Friday — but I can tell it’s a great film because it has Amanda Bynes in it. I’m going to tell all my readers to e-mail you and tell you what a jerk you are for not liking the movie. Once you’ve gotten enough passionate, illiterate letters from 14-year-old girls, maybe then you’ll rethink your position and write a positive review of the movie.”
This sort of nonsense is common enough, of course. But it turns out this goes deeper than I thought. Friends, I urge you to visit the site this man runs — Amanda Bynes NOW! [no longer available, tragically] — and see firsthand what kind of madness we’re dealing with.
Robert Mackey (who goes by the name Robair on his site) writes a weekly column devoted to all things Amanda Bynes. I direct you to his column of March 3, in which he finally gets to meet his idol IN PERSON at a public appearance in Philadelphia. He took a photo of the happy event, and it’s on the page I just linked. Go look.
Did you notice what I noticed? THIS MAN IS AT LEAST 40 YEARS OLD. Yet he has run Amanda Bynes NOW! since 2001, when Amanda herself was only 15. And still he has the gall to criticize a magazine’s “Aquamarine” feature for including “a creepy makeup pictorial featuring the three non-legal stars of the tweeny-bop mermaid film.” Sure, Amanda Bynes is legal NOW. But she wasn’t legal when you started your site, you creepy, creepy man!
Hilariously, he writes reviews of current teen-oriented magazines based on the sole criterion of how well they cover Amanda Bynes and her new movie “She’s the Man.” If a magazine has the nerve to not put Amanda on the cover, it gets marked down. If it has the chutzpah to put some OTHER teen queen (like Lindsay Lohan) on the cover instead, that’s just salt in the wound. Surely any magazine worth the paper it’s printed on knows it should be all Amanda all the time this month, what with her new movie coming out. Don’t they realize this is the first new Amanda Bynes live-action film in 154 weeks?! (I learned that statistic from AmandaBynesNOW.com.)
Robair demonstrates a catty bitterness toward all teen-girl-oriented movies that don’t have Amanda Bynes in them, as well as toward all young actresses who aren’t Amanda. (On this week’s Entertainment Weekly: “Their failure to do an Amanda Bynes piece, much less have her on the cover, easily cost the film $5M in opening weekend box office. Two Reese Witherspoon covers and two ‘V for Vendetta’ cover blurbs in the last month? W for Weak.”) Again, read through some of the columns and news updates and be alarmed at the unbalanced mind that created them.
True to his word, Robert included me in his list of “most hateful critics” (i.e., critics who didn’t like “She’s the Man”). You may read it here, near the bottom of the page. Critics who disliked “She’s the Man” are rated low, and if they gave “V for Vendetta” a higher grade than Amanda’s film, they are rated even lower. (Why? Because “V for Vendetta” came out the same day as “She’s the Man” and is thus the film’s primary competition at the box office.) In fact, that’s all he has to say in my entry:
#7. ERIC D. SNIDER, ERICDSNIDER.COM (F vs. B) Do the alphabet. All we have to say.
In other words: “He gave ‘She’s the Man’ an F and ‘V for Vendetta’ a B. WHAT ELSE DO YOU NEED TO KNOW?!?”
I’m a little hurt that I only ranked seventh. I mean, I REALLY didn’t like this movie. Could there possibly be six people in the world who hated it more than I did? Doubtful. First place went to Pam Grady of Reel.com. Of her, Robert writes, with Corky St. Clair-esque invective:
The only reviewer with the balls to give this movie not one star. Not even a half of one, despite liking [supporting actors] Channing Tatum and Emily Perkins. From Pam’s review, we can tell a number of things. One, she called the movie “a piece of crap”, and “horrible”. Two, she totally hated Amanda Bynes, is probably jealous, and pretty much dragged her name in the dirt. Three, she’s a b****. And four, her mother quite obviously drank drain cleaner during her pregnancy.
Um, excuse me? Pam Grady was the ONLY critic to give the film zero stars? I believe I gave the movie an F, and if that doesn’t translate to zero stars, what does?
He doesn’t provide links to any of the most hateful reviews. He does provide the critics’ e-mail addresses, though, and urges his readers — 7,500 a day, remember — to write to them and express their displeasure. Why not include links to the reviews, too? Because those 7,500 Amanda Bynes fans don’t need to actually read the reviews. All they need to know is that Robair, administrator of “the world’s greatest Amanda Bynes fansite,” has dubbed the critics worthy of scorn.
If any Amanda Bynes fans do Robair’s bidding and send me e-mails, I will of course post them here. In the meantime, enjoy AmandaBynesNOW.com, and go out and see her movie this weekend. I’m told it’s really funny.
