Above, via Aaron Hillis at GreenCine Daily, a new york craigslist ad soliciting, um, designer film criticism. This is the indie route, of course. The studios can afford to make up their own blurbs in-house.
Is this what people mean when they say craigslist has made the old newspaper business model obsolete?
This assumes that the posting is not an unfunny joke.
JE: Insert old line about the word "assume" here.
My favorite part is that it is for "someone who calls himself a film critic." You don't even have to actually be one in any sort of literal sense.
That's very open minded of them.
Given the way that studios have used (and misused) critic quotes, we had to see this coming sooner or later. It's obviously sad, but funny at the same time.
I'm actually a little surprised now if I see an ad for any movie out longer than a day which does not include some type of quote. I usually marvel at how this studio couldn't even find one person that had something good to say about their movie. Maybe these studios deserve at least a little credit for honesty.
I hear that Ben and Jeffrey Lyons are in a bidding war.
They should contact Ben Lyons. I'm sure he'd give them a positive quote for free and then include it in his "Three to See".
Eesh.
I recently realized that I immediately assume certain things to be satire, because some lower mechanism in my brain refuses to accept them as sincere.
Ken, that's better than it being the other way around.
I heard on the news about a website on which you can pay a subscription to have a computer running a text-to-speech program read (intone?) prayers for your well being, or for the benefit of sick or troubled family and friends . Who is really praying, and who is actually listening to those prayers?
In light of this, I guess the above advertisement isn't really so surprising. After all, some students use websites to purchase essays to turn into their professors. Some professors use software to grade those essays (and checks them for grammatical errors and plagiarism). Who is writing the essays and what are they really being written for?
I suppose soon enough we could have software that could watch a movie and cobble together a review. When that point is reached, who would the films be made for? Who would watch them?