Nathan Rabin
Nathan Rabin is a film critic based out of Chicago and head writer for The A.V. Club, the pop-culture sister site of The Onion. Rabin famously coined the term Manic Pixie Dream Girl in his review of Elizabethtown.
Rabin's main contribution to the site, beyond criticism, is his long-running My Year of Flops feature, which he describes as "a leisurely stroll of cinema's biggest commercial and critical disasters, with an eye towards singling out unfairly maligned winners (like, say, Joe Versus the Volcano or Ishtar) and great scenes in otherwise middling movies." After 199 instalments, My Year of Flops ended and was repurposed as My World of Flops, allowing Rabin to delve into notable failures in other non-film media (though he still does films as well), thereby offering him a wider range of subject matter to pontificate upon.
More recently, he has taken to music criticism, applying the My Year of Flops formula to the NOW! series of bestselling Nothing but Hits pop compilations in a series called THEN That's What They Called Music.
Rabin's autobiography, The Big Rewind, was published in 2009. A book based on My Year of Flops (which has long since passed the single year that Rabin planned for the feature to last) was released in 2010. Through The A.V. Club, he is one of many co-writers of Inventory, which compiles over 100 lists.
Rabin provides page quotes for the following:
Films featured in My Year of Flops include:
- Elizabethtown
- North
- The Fountain
- Battlefield Earth
- Batman and Robin
- Southland Tales
- Rent
- Gus Van Sant's 1998 remake of Psycho
- Walk Hard
- Howard the Duck
- Catwoman
- The remake of The Wicker Man
- Waterworld