The Times’s restaurant critics Giles Coren:
But English film critics are not red-blooded. And that is why most of them didn’t get Rocky Balboa. They kvetched about believability, sneered at sentimentality and mocked Stallone’s muscular, monosyllabic conception of masculinity. This is because English critics are a snide, whey-faced, nerdy bunch, who at the age when I was grinding out press-ups to Eye of the Tiger, were getting hard-ons for Belle de Jour and pinning another Morrissey poster to the wall.
American critics are not like that. It’s why they have Updike, Roth, Clint Eastwood, Joe DiMaggio and Champion the Wonder Horse while we have Philip Pullman, J. K. Rowling, Hugh Grant, Mark Ramprakash and Muffin the Mule.
And he is supposed to review a restaurant. Who are Morrissey, Updike, Roth, Philip Pullman, and Mark Ramprakash anyway?
kvetch: To complain persistently and whiningly
snide: Derogatory in a malicious, superior way
whey: The watery part of milk that separates from the curds
whey-faced: with a pale face
