It’s 107°F (42°C) in Vacaville. No breeze. The family is thinking of retreating to the movie theater. See, this is what’ll get the movies out of their “slump” (so they call it; they’re still making billions). It’s not that people actually want to watch the crap they produce; it’s that the theaters have dark rooms and air conditioning.
My family watches a ridiculous amount of TV (really, it just runs in the background) and I’ve seen way too many commercials for Wedding Crashers, which is out today. I don’t care to see it.
I’ve noticed most of the critics’ comments they run in that commercial could easily have been lifted from the one positive thing in the review. “Wilson and Vaughn have great chemistry” could easily be the sole positive comment a reviewer made right after stating, “I would rather have had my eyes pecked out by a caffeine-addled rooster.”
Or they were taken from things that weren’t reviews, or from people who aren’t reviewers. Every once in a while a commercial comments, “Larry King says, ‘It’s great!’ ” Larry King?
Or, less obviously… There’s an entertainment reporter in Sacramento, Mark S. Allen, who’s always part of the press junkets whenever a movie is released and someone has to interview the actors. He (and every other local TV reporter) gets about 5 minutes with each actor to ask them the same questions that every other TV reporter has to ask (and of course the actor is sitting in front of a giant studio-produced poster of the movie) and after the questions are done, they go back to the TV studio, where he adds a few more comments like, “Yeah, that actor was a really nice guy… and the movie looks like it’s gonna be a big summer blockbuster.” That’s not a review. But I have occasionally seen Allen’s statements in national ads to plug movies anyway.
Kerry has expressed an interest in Bewitched, for which you might have to get me that rooster. But we might watch the