Friday, October 13, 2017

More fun with critics

When I was a kid, I saw promo ads for movies on TV. A lot of the time they would quote critics' rave reviews. I always wondered what the bad movies did, noticing the ellipses that cut the reviews down for blurb length suitable for a 30-second TV spot. I would joke to myself that the ellipses cut out all the bad stuff, so that you could get a blurb reading "This film is ... good!" when the critic really wrote "This film is no good!" That, or showing a critic's four-star rating, not pointing out that the critic rates on a scale of 1-10.

I was reminded of that this morning when somebody elsewhere linked to a possibly apocryphal story in which precisely these sort of shenanigans happened. This one happens to come from the stage, but it would be just as easy to see the same thing happening in the movie industry. From a UK fringe theater:

A fringe theatre company has apologised after misquoting a review of one of its plays in promotional material to make it appear more favourable.

Craft Theatre quoted Andrew Haydon’s review of A Nazi Comparison for theatre news website The Stage as saying: “Spectacular… intellectual rigour… wacky physical humour.”

In fact the original copy reads: “This spectacular lack of intellectual rigour is however dwarfed by the wild unevenness of the production itself, which veers between wacky physical humour to unwatchable overheated melodrama.”

Haydon gave the play one star out of five and declared it “unwatchable”.

I must admit, however, that the makers of a big-budget movie would probably find it much harder to get away with this nonsense, since people would be paying more attention.

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