Chronicle's Savlov Officially America's Meanest Film Critic

The number nerds at Miller-McCune recently took a stab at crunching all the aggregated film data on Metacritic.com. The result is a series of charts illustrating how movie stars tend to rate with the critics, and, in turn, which of the nation's top 25 most prolific reviewers tend to be more or less favorable when it comes to doling out scores.

At the very bottom of that latter heap is the Austin Chronicle's own Marc Savlov, who's snubbed both The Dark Knight and Clueless. Most recently, Savlov poo-pooed this year's Twitter-trending shockumentary sleeper, Paranormal Activity, which he later told us is easily his "most scathing [review] that all the world loved," and which "maybe rigged the game for me in terms of curmudgeonliness."

Which isn't to say that the guy's a total negative nancy—he gave the Ian Curtis biopic, Control, a near-perfect score, and was one of the few critics who actually enjoyed From Dusk Till Dawn.

"I remember giving **** stars (or thereabouts) to both Romper Stomper and Tokyo Decadence that resulted in scads of letters to the editor," Savlov wrote Austinist. "One of which was so venomous I just had to silkscreen it on the back of the official Chronicle T-shirts. I think it started off 'Dear Editor, I shudder to think of the day when cockroaches such as Marc Savlov can be considered legitimate film critics...'"

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By Allen Y Chen in Arts & Entertainment on November 11, 2009 3:43 PM 0 Comments

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David

Some years ago I went to see Blues Brothers 2000 based on a very positive Savlov review and walked out on it at midpoint thoroughly steamed at his incompetent review. The letter to the editor I wrote was scathing and generated a rebuttal from him when it was printed.

Later I was at a bar downtown for a SXSW event and noted some schmoe tirelessly hitting on my girlfriend. After he'd bought her a few drinks she came back to me and said "hey remember that film critic Savlov you can't stand? He just bought me a bunch of drinks!"

Oh how we laughed.

For future reference, EVERYTHING that Marjorie Baumgarten reviews is always 100% spot-on. I heart her!