Friday roundup
Best thing opening today is the Broadway's re-release of "The Conformist," Bernardo Bertolucci's 1970 classic tale of an intellectual (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who falls in line with Mussolini's Fascists.
Of the new movies, go to "Thank You for Smoking," Jason Reitman's satire of Washington double-talk, featuring a great performance by BYU's own Aaron Eckhart as a tobacco-industry lobbyist.
Also good this week: The kicky gangster thriller "Lucky Number Slevin," and (according to my colleague Christy Karras) the documentary "The Boys of Baraka."
The only major studio opening screened for critics was "Take the Lead," a cliche-fest on the dance floor starring Antonio Banderas. Two movies were not screened for critics - "The Benchwarmers" and "Phat Girlz."
------
I'm starting to warm to the notion that the extreme "no critics" strategy on "The Benchwarmers," with Sony going as far as trying to discredit the Orlando Sentinel's Roger Moore after he got into a screening (recounted here), may be the most brilliant marketing ploy of all time.
Jim Emerson, editor of RogerEbert.com, suggested as much in his blog:
My pal Eric D. Snider, formerly the movie critic for Provo's Daily Herald, is now writing for the web sites HollywoodBitchslap.com and EFilmCritic.com - and, until recently, for the newspaper at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Though he didn't know it.
Snider reports that he and his colleagues discovered that someone named Samir Patel plagiarized 58 reviews from the two web sites in just over a year. Read the details, and Snider's really angry letter to the UMKC paper, here.
Of the new movies, go to "Thank You for Smoking," Jason Reitman's satire of Washington double-talk, featuring a great performance by BYU's own Aaron Eckhart as a tobacco-industry lobbyist.
Also good this week: The kicky gangster thriller "Lucky Number Slevin," and (according to my colleague Christy Karras) the documentary "The Boys of Baraka."
The only major studio opening screened for critics was "Take the Lead," a cliche-fest on the dance floor starring Antonio Banderas. Two movies were not screened for critics - "The Benchwarmers" and "Phat Girlz."
------
I'm starting to warm to the notion that the extreme "no critics" strategy on "The Benchwarmers," with Sony going as far as trying to discredit the Orlando Sentinel's Roger Moore after he got into a screening (recounted here), may be the most brilliant marketing ploy of all time.
Jim Emerson, editor of RogerEbert.com, suggested as much in his blog:
Would an instantly disposable and forgettable thing like "Benchwarmers," which the studios churn out like the Charmin factory spews tp, ever have gotten this much attention if it weren't for the cancelled critics' screenings? I mean, nobody's complaining about not seeing Mo'Nique's "Phat Girlz."------
My pal Eric D. Snider, formerly the movie critic for Provo's Daily Herald, is now writing for the web sites HollywoodBitchslap.com and EFilmCritic.com - and, until recently, for the newspaper at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Though he didn't know it.
Snider reports that he and his colleagues discovered that someone named Samir Patel plagiarized 58 reviews from the two web sites in just over a year. Read the details, and Snider's really angry letter to the UMKC paper, here.
10:07 AM
| 
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home