Junket Whores, Real and Imagined

You may have seen the news yesterday about Sony's fictitious critic ("A judge has finalised a settlement in which film studio Sony will pay $1.5m to film fans after using a fake critic to praise its movies."). But the really sad part is that the movie studios hardly have to resort to imaginary friends, when they already have plenty of junket whores. Check out this long but fascinating interview on Hollywood Bitchslap: Diary Of A Mad Trailer Editor (Part Two - The Quote Whores).

Included are a bunch of apparently real quotes that quote whore Earl Dittman had ready to go in praise of the passable-at-best animated movie "Robots".

"You've never laughed this much at a movie before ... It's absolutely one of the most hysterical and heart-warming comedies ever conceived."

"Although there's still nine months to go in 2005, 'Robots' is such a spectacular animated film that it already deserves the Number One spot on every critic's year-end Top Ten list ..."

"You'll never laugh so much and so hard at a big screen comedy ever again!"

I especially like that last one - claiming that this movie is so funny that there will never be a funnier movie, ever. (That'd actually be pretty bad news for movie critics, wouldn't it?)

Dan Otumba (the interviewee) sums up the cause-and-effect behind this whole phenomenon:

In a perfect world, the quote would be the last resort, the kicker to give smaller films that extra boost. But the reality is that its bad movies that need the most boost, so that's where the demand for quotes comes in, and the demand breeds the supply: the junket whores.

My advice: always ignore every single soundbite and critic quote. Rely on a combination of Metacritic (for the distilled opinion of the "professional" critics) and Hollywood Bitchslap (for no-punches-pulled ratings by regular people who love movies).