Nathan Rabin is a film critic based out of Chicago and former 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 installments, 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 did films as well), thereby offering him a wider range of subject matter to pontificate upon. The feature ended after 36 installments due to his departure from the A.V. Club.
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 was one of several longstanding A.V. Club writers (including editor in chief Keith Phipps and film editor Scott Tobias) to leave the site between late 2012 and Spring 2013, for a film website project which details haven't been announced yet.
Rabin provides page quotes for the following:
Films featured in My Year of Flops include: