James looks at movie review blurbs, and how they kind of suck.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Several months ago I lent my copy of Grandma\u2019s Boy to a friend. After much pestering, he just returned to me this week. As a Nick Swardson fan, it was nice to have the movie back and on the walk back home, with little else to do, I read the case again. It has two reviews on it. Well, I guess more accurately, \u201cblurbs\u201d. Because of limited time and space in movie advertising, critics\u2019 reviews and shortened down to concise blurbs. Below are the two blurbs for Grandma\u2019s Boy used on the DVD case:<\/p>\n

\u201cfish-out-of-bongwater comedy\u201d \u2013Playboy<\/p>\n

\u201cGrandma\u2019s boy has it all- bong hits, topless women\u2026and Shirley Jones talking dirty.\u201d -Los Angeles Times.<\/p>\n

To me, neither of these are very positive reviews. The blurb from Playboy simply tells us that the movie is a stoner comedy. This is accurate but not exactly complimentary. The nicest part of that was when they called it a comedy but that\u2019s more about genre than quality. I\u2019d still call Little Nicky a comedy because that was its intention, despite it ending up a pretty laughless piece of shit. I was unable to find the entire Playboy review but this brief and qualitatively-neutral blurb leads me to believe there aren\u2019t a lot of extremely positive words to be found in it. I did manage to find the full review from the Los Angeles Times. It was rather enlightening about the nature of blurbs.<\/p>\n

First of all, the LA Times quote they use doesn\u2019t do much to convince me it\u2019s a great film. Tits, weed jokes and post-menopausal women seducing younger men isn\u2019t \u201call\u201d that I\u2019m looking for in a movie. However, a look at the entire review reveals that was by far the most positive phrase up for the cherry picking. I won\u2019t reprint the whole review but the quote below, which is the final line of the review, is a proper indication of the general tone:<\/p>\n

\u201cBut the best thing going for this stoner comedy is that its target audience won’t remember it. And unlike the sober set, they won’t mind.\u201d<\/p>\n

I like Grandma\u2019s Boy. Allen Covert, frequent second to eighth fiddle to Adam Sandler in other Happy Madison films, finally gets the lead role and while it doesn\u2019t seem like too much of a departure from his real personality, does it well enough. The adorable Linda Cardellini isn\u2019t really tested put undoubtedly passes and Nick Swardson and Joel Moore steal the show with relatively little screentime. But my point isn\u2019t that the Los Angeles Times was wrong, simply misrepresented. What I learned investigating this is that this behaviour is not uncommon.<\/p>\n

Welcome to the seedy world of movie blurbs. It\u2019s where criticism meets commerce. When millions have been spent on production and ad campaigns, the last thing to do is sell the tickets. The best way to do that is to take the words said by someone who has seen the movie, pick out the good ones and show them to the people who haven\u2019t, by any means necessary. It\u2019s actually a lot more like a 50s detective movie than I ever suspected. Crooked businessmen, betrayal, ambiguous messages, twisting words, questionable trust, pay-offs, complete fabrications and fake identities.<\/p>\n

If you read the whole LA Times review, you will see that the quote selected was to be read sarcastically. The reviewer, Roger Moore (not that one), was insincerely suggesting that the ganja, gigglebags and GMILFs would be enough to reduce Chronicles of Narnia\u2019s ticket sales. There is no way that anyone who read that review would be at all confused about whether Mr. Moore enjoyed the movie but he did say something that, when isolated, may at least get the attention of the target audience of Grandma\u2019s Boy.<\/p>\n

The blurb world can be a deceptive place and with your money at stake, you must be careful. I would suggest a few things to navigate this dark labyrinth beneath Hollywood\u2019s promotion machine.<\/p>\n

1) Watch out for short blurbs<\/strong>. As we saw in the LA Times\/Grandma\u2019s Boy example, reading the entire review can shine light on the true sentiment of blurb. For example, Kevin Turan of Entertainment Weekly had a one-word blurb in the advertising for the movie Hoodlum: \u201cirresistable.\u201d A look at his full quotes sheds a bit of light on how this box office flop garnered this positive review.<\/p>\n

\u201cEven Laurence Fishburne\u2019s incendiary performance can\u2019t ignite Hoodlum, a would-be gangster epic that generates less heat than a nickel cigar. Fishburne\u2019s \u2018Bumpy\u2019 is fierce, magnetic, irresistible even\u2026 But even this actor can only do so much.\u201d<\/p>\n

While Turan certainly seemed to enjoy one aspect of the film, it\u2019s clear he could resist watching the entire film again. In this case, the ad copy was vague about what Turan enjoyed but sometimes vague words, like \u201cbiggest\u201d, \u201cloudest\u201d and \u201cCGI spectacle aren\u2019t necesarrily good things.\u201cRelentless\u201d and \u201cnon-stop\u201d might<\/em> be compliments for an action movie but they are also words that could be found in the testimony of a rape victim, so take such terms with a grain of salt.<\/p>\n

2)<\/strong> Ellipsis aren\u2019t your friends. <\/strong>Similar to short blurbs, ellipsis (\u2026) are great for taking things out of context by connecting two sentence fragments. Those little dots mean \u201cwords used to be here\u201d and allow anyone to make a new, unintended meaning for someone else\u2019s words. Here\u2019s how the ads for Live Free or Die Hard\u00a0quoted the New York Daily News: “hysterically\u2026entertaining.\u201d He is that part of the review as originally printed: “The action in this fast-paced, hysterically overproduced and surprisingly entertaining film is as realistic as a Road Runner cartoon.” You can see how easy it is to twist statements when you don\u2019t feel attached to the idea of conveying their desired meaning. It\u2019s so easy you can do at home. Here\u2019s one I did in just minutes! \u201cJews\u2026are great.\u201d \u2013 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf.<\/p>\n

3) Know your critics.<\/strong> Just because someone is quoted, doesn\u2019t mean they are a smart person or even a movie critic. Think of how many small town papers and local news reports all across North America have an entertainment section or segment. That alone gives advertisers literally thousands of opinions to choose from and when enough people are asked, someone\u2019s going to be dumb enough to like anything. Many of these people are more concerned about making a good pun than retaining credibility as a critic or trying to save you money. This is why Neil Rosen of NY-1 News would say, of Kangaroo Jack, \u201cKids will have a hopping good time!” Lots of people quoted aren\u2019t actual movie critics, and lots of actual movie critics, like Peter Travers, are dumb whores. But people with poor taste, like Travers, aren\u2019t what makes the world of movie blurbs a cold, soulless place. It\u2019s cases like that of film critic David Manning. This man, who wrote for a small weekly paper in Connecticut called The Ridgefield Press, carries some infamy in critic\u2019s circle because of a stretch of recommendations he made in 2000-2001. After giving positive reviews to several films made by Colombia Pictures (a subsidiary of Sony) he attracted plenty of attention to himself for the good things he had to say about Rob Schneider\u2019s latest film, The Animal. This was a red flag and a journalist at Newsweek\u00a0 decided to track down Manning, determined to discover who could refer to that cinematic disaster as \u201canother winner.\u201d The Ridgefield Press had never heard of David Manning and after a bit more digging, it became clear that a marketing executive at Sony made the guy up<\/a>. There was no David Manning, just like there was no critic who ever liked The Animal, so one needed to be made up, and that\u2019s what they did. This marketing executive created Manning, named him after his friend and had him sell movies no one wanted to see. To make things better, this came to light around the same time Sony was caught using its employees to act as moviegoers to give reviews for The Patrot in commercials. After a litigation battle, Sony was forced to pay $5 to anyone who saw Hollow Man, The Animal, The Patriot, Vertical Limit or A Knight’s Tale\u00a0because of non-existent Manning’s blurbs.<\/p>\n

4) Use common sense.<\/strong> There are hundreds of cases of reviews being taken out of context, rearranged, truncated, packed full of exclamation marks and otherwise disingenuously manipulated. A large majority of the time, critics aren\u2019t asked for their approval on how their blurbs appear. So please, keep in mind, just because you heard something that sounded good about movie, it might not actually have been a compliment, or it may have been said about a different movie, or said by someone who doesn\u2019t really exist. And really, even if your clone or future self tells you it\u2019s good, you know, deep down in your heart, where things are pure and true, you shouldn\u2019t actually go see \u201cThe Animal\u201d with Rob fucking Schneider.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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