The revolution will not be criticized

Some years ago I copyedited for a failing online movie-review site. No pay, of course, but after much pushing they did let me try my hand at writing a review. Hell, they didn't care anymore. They'd been paying their reviewers in stale Goobers and Raisinets for months, and one well-known critic had actually threatened to quit over it, so sure, boy, write us a free review!

My assignment: Dead Man on Campus, a sort of Weekend at Bernie's without the existential wordplay. This movie was so bad it made people vomit uncontrollably just recalling it. Unfortunately, so did my review. No shame in that. Even the best writers can make people throw up sometimes.

Dialectical definitions

But I, at least, am always eager to improve. That's why I was happy to run across the Maoist Internationalist Movement's page, How to write a MIM movie, music or book review: MIM's approach to the superstructure. My writing may occasionally make people puke, but it took MIM to show me the secrets of writing sick-making reviews consistently. The MIM page starts, for example, with a glossary of terms I'd never even heard applied to movies before, terms like:

• Fascism, reaction--intolerant violence that can never bring about social harmony.
  
• Right-opportunism--Liberalism practiced by those claiming to be communists, not Liberals.
  
• Subjectivism--celebration of one's own tastes and opinions without consideration how they were produced or are harmful to society in general.
  
• Progressive--characterized by advance toward social harmony, peace and improved humyn capabilities, what tends to abolish class, gender and national oppression.

Improved humyn capabilities, you face-stuffing phonies! This is an auteur theory that'll get you lazy bastards straightened out fast--or else. But reviewers under a MIM government won't actually have much to do anyway:

When MIM disapproves of a movie or song today, even in today's politically backward conditions, it means that that work is especially backward and will only look more so if the political situation advances enough to put MIM in power. Hence, when we disapprove of something we mean to ban it upon seizure of state power.

Short of banning, however, MIM thinks many works simply need a little editing:

The Russians under Lenin had some success with this problem by taking popular songs and changing the lyrics and contexts. We need to change a lot of lyrics in pop music and reissue it as unchanged as possible. Likewise with some movies and theater, we need to reissue/recycle popular works.

Over there

Who will take on this mighty task of redaction for the people? The heroic oversight worker, that's who!

Oversight workers should be altruistic party members willing to go to prison/re-education camp for failure. These oversight workers should also have oversight assistants who are also free from any threat of imprisonment [Huh?]. Hopefully with the combined efforts of good "frontline" workers and oversight assistants, no horribly misogynist, racist or chauvinist work will see the light of day under socialist auspices and no oversight party members will end up in prison or re-education camp.

No prison or re-education camp for oversight workers! Hopefully!

Next week: How it's done: the Maoist Internationalist Movement's review of Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle.