5 Over The Top Reactions To Justified Criticism

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5 Over The Top Reactions To Justified Criticism

When you accept a life in the public eye -- whether that's in entertainment, politics, or just being a woman on the internet -- you open yourself up to critics. You can either take that criticism in stride, attempting to learn from it on the extremely rare occasions when it could be considered constructive, or -- like the folks on this list -- you can fly straight off the rails and burn down everything you see in a righteous fury.

Florida Governor Rick Scott Takes Out Attack Ads On A Random Lady In Starbucks

Rick Scott
Office of the Governor

Former Florida Governor and unwitting Voldemort impressionist Rick Scott is one of the more unpopular politicians in America, thanks to his less-than-progressive views and a smile that looks as if he just unhinged his jaw to swallow an entire infant. Nowhere was this disapproval more apparent than when Scott entered a Gainesville Starbucks and found himself on the dangerous end of Cara Jennings, who scolded the governor about his record on health care and abortion before calling him an "embarrassment to our state" and an asshole, which was sort of implied, but it's always better to be clear.

Cara Jennings
Stephen Bender/YouTube
"You deserve not the noble title of 'Florida man'!"

Because it was 2016, the confrontation made its way to YouTube quicker than Scott and his myriad siblings skittered out of their egg sack, lo, those many centuries ago.

The proper thing for Scott to do in this situation would be to ignore Ms. Jennings for approximately 10 nanoseconds, which is how long it would take for the internet to forget about her. Of course, that would make this a painfully short entry. Behold, ladies and gentlemen, "Latte Liberal Gets an Earful":

That's right: Taking a retaliatory attack ad out against a single, average citizen in a random Starbucks sounds completely crazy, but that's precisely what Scott did. His political action committee dug deep into Jennings's past and ostensibly discovered that she's a "former government official who refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance and calls herself an anarchist," and who spends all her time in coffee shops buying lattes with government assistance and cursing at the occasional governor who strolls in (she was actually at the aforementioned Starbucks working on a freelance job, but that's beside the point).

And that concludes this episode of How To Further Tank Your Approval Rating With Governor Rick Scott. Tune in next week, when Scott consumes the life force of a McDonald's drive-through cashier with a simple caress.

Related: 4 Walking Dead Comic Book Scenes The Show Had To Tone Down

Rob Schneider Flips Out Over Extremely Mild Criticism, Gets Rocked By Ebert

Rob Schneider
Sony Pictures

At first blush, calling out a Rob Schneider flick for its lack of Oscar potential seems like a cheap shot -- Schneider's movies certainly don't strive for the Academy's attention, and there are plenty of other stars who've never even come close to caressing the bare bum of a tiny metallic man. However, that was sort of the point that Patrick Goldstein, staff writer for the Los Angeles Times, was making: In reviewing Schneider's Deuce Bigalow: The Sequel That Literally Everyone Forgot, Goldstein insinuated that churning out crap like that was one reason big Hollywood studios lagged behind independents in Oscar nominations.

DEUCE BIGALOW EUROPEAN GIGOLO
Sony Pictures
But leading in Razzie ones.

If anything, it was more of a shot at the studios than at Schneider himself, but the Igor to Adam Sandler's Frankenstein didn't see it that way. He took out a full-page attack ad against Goldstein in a slew of trade magazines including Variety. In it, he points out the fact that Goldstein hasn't won a Pulitzer Prize or, for that matter, any other awards -- a fact that apparently disqualifies him from critiquing a movie about Rob Schneider's dick. He then signs off with a bona fide physical threat: "Patrick, I can honestly say that if I sat your colleagues at a luncheon, afterwards, they'd say 'You know, that Rob Schneider is a pretty intelligent guy, I hope we can do that again.' Whereas, if you sat with my colleagues, after lunch, you would just be beaten beyond recognition."

Rob Schneider attack letter
Variety
Incidentally, "Rob Schneider is a pretty intelligent guy" is perhaps the least believable line Rob Schneider has ever written.

Roger Ebert, bravely willing to dance with the devil that is Rob Schneider, helpfully pointed out that Goldstein's shelves were actually lined with a plethora of industry awards. He then went on to say, "Schneider is correct, and Patrick Goldstein has not yet won a Pulitzer Prize. Therefore, Goldstein is not qualified to complain that Columbia financed Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo while passing on the opportunity to participate in Million Dollar Baby, Ray, The Aviator, Sideways and Finding Neverland. As chance would have it, I have won the Pulitzer Prize, and so I am qualified. Speaking in my official capacity as a Pulitzer Prize winner, Mr. Schneider, your movie sucks."

Somebody then handed him a microphone, so he could drop it.

Related: Roger Ebert’s Brutal Take On Fan Culture

Jamie Kennedy Makes An Entire Movie Just To Yell At People Who Don't Like His Movies

Jaime Kennedy
Karz Entertainment

Criticizing Jamie Kennedy's work seems almost superfluous, seeing as how it does such a bang-up job of criticizing itself. But that's sort of like saying that sex is unnecessary when masturbation is so much more efficient, and thus plenty of film reviewers textually molested Kennedy's movie Malibu's Most Wanted.

Malibu's Most Wanted cast
Karz Entertainment
The molestation was mutual.

Kennedy decided to retaliate in the most efficient way possible: by producing a feature-length documentary called Heckler, which promised to turn the tables on cowardly hecklers by, you know, heckling them. Despite its name, much of the documentary's runtime is dedicated to Kennedy going after the professional critics who didn't like his movies, in an apparent effort to prove that film critics are the real hecklers. This mostly consists of Kennedy sitting down for awkward interviews, reading reviewers their own reviews of his films aloud (complete with rampant mispronunciation of any word beyond three syllables), and then uncomfortably asking them why they hate him personally.

One critic replies with the obviously correct answer: "I don't hate you, I hated your film," to which Kennedy responds by pantomiming a sloppy blow job. Demonstrating exactly the kind of keen comedic sensibilities that made him so beloved in the first place.

Related: 5 Real People Who Got Screwed by Famous Movies Based on Them

A UK Filmmaker Forces The Censorship Board To Watch Paint Dry For 10 Hours

Film ratings
BBFC

Here in the land of the free and the home of "sex is worse than violence," the MPAA reviews and rates every single movie that gets a wide release, thereby ensuring that little Timmy will never be subjected to the unimaginable horror of seeing a single female nipple floating amidst a sea of simulated carnage. Across the pond, they have a similarly draconian organization called the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), whose review process costs filmmakers the equivalent of $9 per minute of footage. This is a particular problem for independent filmmakers like Charlie Lyne, who doesn't just have $1,300 to toss around when he has to pay his staff in whatever the fancy British equivalent of Monopoly money is.

British Currency
Lensicle
Britty Bucks?

To stand up to this tyranny, Lyne took to Kickstarter. Now, you're probably thinking that he did so in order to raise the funds to get one of his films rated, and in a way you'd be right ... but this was not just any film. See, Lyne promised that for every nine dollars and change he raised, he'd submit footage of another minute of paint drying to the BBFC.

Paint Drying
Charlie Lyne
Its current IMDB rating is 9/10.

He raised enough to force the stuffy British censorship authority to dutifully sit through around 10 goddamned hours of white paint drying on a brick wall. The board assigned the imaginatively titled Paint Drying a U rating (the equivalent of a G here in the States) before notifying Peter Jackson that his record had been broken.

Related: Transcendentally Stupid Movie Censorship

Director Uwe Boll Challenges All Of His Critics To A Fistfight

Uwe Boll
Jeff Hitchcock

Uwe Boll is the German director best known for taking moderately popular video games and adapting them into aggressively terrible movies. You'd think his repeated appearances on "world's worst directors" lists would have progressively thickened his skin, but apparently the thickest skin on Uwe Boll is his knuckles.

Uwe Boll
Uwe Boll/YouTube
He'll have a lot more time to play with that hand now that he's given up on making films.

Back in 2006, Boll decided to fight back, literally: He issued challenges to several of his most vocal critics, urging them to face him in the boxing ring, and four actually took him up on it, thinking it sounded like kind of a fun PR event. It didn't matter that they weren't boxers and couldn't fight -- surely Boll was just down for some playful sparring, right?

Wrong: The bouts, entitled Raging Boll, featured the director pummeling the ever-loving shit out of Richard Kyanka of Something Awful, Jeff Sneider of Ain't It Cool News, and Chris Alexander of Rue Morgue magazine. But Boll didn't stop there. His final victim of the night was Nelson Chance Minter, a 17-year-old blogger who prettily decorated the sidewalk with his stomach contents after Boll flattened him.

Strangely, when a competent fighter and extremely prominent Boll critic -- Cracked's own Seanbaby -- challenged him to a match later that same year, Boll backed out of the fight. Presumably he realized that having one's face still located in the default position is a boon to your movie-making career. According to Boll-logic, this gives Cracked exclusive dominion over criticizing his films, so let's take this opportunity to say that Postal is the movie adaptation of herpes and Uwe Boll smells like hot dog water.

For more people who lost their damn minds, check out 6 Judges Who Went Completely Insane On The Bench and 9 Awesome Directors Who Temporarily Lost Their Mind.

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Related: 6 Spectacularly Embarrassing Celebrity Kickstarter Fails

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