Reception
The film received mostly negative reviews from critics; as of April 2007, it has a 42/100 rating on Metacritic and a 31% on Rotten Tomatoes, with an 11% rating from their "Cream of the Crop" critics. Notably, Roger Ebert rated the film with one star out of four, and despised it so much that his review took the form of a sarcastic tribute to Allan Sherman's Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh.
In contrast, Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman awarded the film an "A" and named it as one of the ten best films of the year. Newsweek's David Ansen also lauded it, calling it a "gloriously silly romp" that "made me laugh harder than any other movie this summer. Make that this year." Numerous other critics have praised the film as a witty pop satire and it has gone on to achieve a cult following.
The film has been much more popular with the general public than critics, currently holding a favorable user rating on fansites such as IMDb and the Rotten Tomatoes community, with an average rating of 84% based on over 34,000 user ratings.
Kristen Bell stated, on NPR on September 2, 2012, that this was her favorite film of all time, having watched it " . . . hundreds of times."
Read more about this topic: Wet Hot American Summer
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
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“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)