Before yesterday, few of us had heard of film critic Michael Calleri or the Niagara Falls Reporter, a weekly rag with a circulation of 22,000 around Buffalo. But that was before Roger Ebert published Calleri’s 3,200-word screed about why Calleri was leaving that paper in the SunTimes’ foreign correspondents section (which in turn made it to Jezebel, Indiewire, MaryJane, etc…). Turns out Calleri, who might be the longest-winded man alive, had an editor who was basically a Drew Barrymore-movie straw man come to life. Calleri takes about 2800 words explaining that when he started, the Niagara Falls Reporter was an alt-weekly whose founder moved to LA, and was subsequently taken over by a nutjob, Frank Parlato. The money shot of the story is an email from Parlato about why he didn’t want Calleri reviewing Snow White and the Huntsman, which Parlato apparently thought was a dangerous film counter to traditional notions of manhood.

Michael; I know you are committed to writing your reviews, and put a lot of effort into them. it is important for you to have the right publisher. i may not be it. i have a deep moral objection to publishing reviews of films that offend me. snow white and the huntsman is such a film. when my boys were young i would never have allowed them to go to such a film for i believe it would injure their developing manhood. if i would not let my own sons see it, why would i want to publish anything about it?

snow white and the huntsman is trash. moral garbage. a lot of fuzzy feminist thinking and pandering to creepy hollywood mores produced by metrosexual imbeciles.

I don’t want to publish reviews of films where women are alpha and men are beta.

where women are heroes and villains and men are just lesser versions or shadows of females.

i believe in manliness.

not even on the web would i want to attach my name to snow white and the huntsman except to deconstruct its moral rot and its appeal to unmanly perfidious creeps.

i’m not sure what headhunter has to offer either but of what I read about it it sounds kind of creepy and morally repugnant.

with all the publications in the world who glorify what i find offensive, it should not be hard for you to publish your reviews with any number of these.

they seem to like critiques from an artistic standpoint without a word about the moral turpitude seeping into the consciousness of young people who go to watch such things as snow white and get indoctrinated to the hollywood agenda of glorifying degenerate power women and promoting as natural the weakling, hyena -like men, cum eunuchs.

He didn’t type “men-cum-eunuchs,” so I have to imagine that he has created an entirely new, oxymoronic archetype, the cum eunuch. Cousin to the scab hemophiliac.

the male as lesser in courage strength and power than the female.

it may be ok for some but it is not my kind of manliness.

If you care to write reviews where men act like good strong men and have a heroic inspiring influence on young people to build up their character (if there are such movies being made) i will be glad to publish these.

i am not interested in supporting the reversing of traditional gender roles.

i don’t want to associate the Niagara Falls Reporter with the trash of Hollywood and their ilk.

it is my opinion that hollywood has robbed america of its manliness and made us a nation of eunuchs who lacking all manliness welcome in the coming police state.

AND DON’T USE CAPITAL LETTERS, THAT’S HOW THE ILLUMINATI TRACKS YOU!

now i realize that you have a relationship with the studios etc. and i would have been glad to have discussed this in person with you to help you segue into another relationship with a publication but inasmuch as we spent 50 minutes on the phone from paris i did not want to take up more of your time.

In short i don’t care to publish reviews of films that offend me.

if you care to condemn the filmmakers as the pandering weasels that they are…. true hyenas.

i would be interested in that….

Frank

Calleri’s post, which is just as entertainingly psychotic in its own right that I can’t resist a sample passage…

In April and May of this year, I was in Paris enjoying that city’s culture, seeing movies with a good Parisian friend in that movie-mad place, enjoying that friend’s hospitality with his family in their hometown in the south of France, and also taking my nephew around Paris when he arrived to visit his college friend who was studying in the French capital for a semester. It was an idyll of wonderful delights.

Meanwhile, a dark cloud was descending.

…finishes up by telling us where we’ll be able to find his reviews going forward, along with:

And by the way, I liked “Headhunters” and “Snow White And The Huntsman.”

The worst part about this idiot Parlato’s email was that it justifies these other idiots’ notion that Snow White and the Huntsman was some kind of feminist statement. And now Calleri gets to look like the good guy for praising a sh*t movie. Because some wingnut tinfoil-hat type was dumb enough to buy into some self-described feminist’s false assertion about it in the first place. And if that simplistic, men-bad, women-good movie did exist, it’d only be because someone wanted to stick it to guys like Frank Parlato. It’s just troll, counter troll, troll – BURN THEM, BURN THEM ALL!

And this is why we all need to say no to those flimsy, Devil’s Advocate movie columns about how BLANK is really a monument to BLANK storytelling, where you cobble together 10 BS reasons why some movie fits into some unrelated political agenda. Because pretty soon, someone else comes along and uses that same movie in his vicious attack on that agenda, and now we’re choosing sides between two equally-preposterous extremes and whoops, everyone’s an idiot now.