I didn’t know where to put this question so I put it here as it may have a factual answer.
As we know, movie studios publish positive reviews of their films in advertisements. Back in the day Siskel and Ebert were the gold standard. Two thumbs up was the Holy Grail, only one thumb up was nowhere near half as good, and two thumbs down was the kiss of death.
In the movie Dumb and Dumber Siskel gave the movie thumbs up, Ebert thumbs down.
However, Ebert had stated:
" You heard me not only laughing, I almost had to be hospitalized. There was one moment in this movie that is probably the funniest moment I’ve seen in five years of comedies. Maybe longer."
But ultimately he couldn’t recommend the movie.
But what if New Line Cinema had advertised that quote?
Would that be false advertising?
On one hand, it insinuates that Ebert recommended the film which is not true.
On the other hand he did make that statement which paints at least a portion of the film in a very positive light.
Do studios ever para-quote reviews like that? I’ve never really checked out something like this.
Of course movie marketers engage in deceptive, or at least misleading, partial quoting of critics.
Here’s a classic (and hilarious) example.
Notice anything unusual here?
Look between the two heads of Tom Hardy. The Guardian gave this movie two stars, exactly as shown. But the layout certainly implies that it’s another four-star review, with two stars hidden behind the actors.
And if you look more closely, you’ll see that The Guardian is far and away the most reputable journalistic publication in the batch. So there’s a couple of layers of misdirection here.
I would say this qualifies as, if not flat-out dishonest, then certainly spurious representation of the critical position.
I would say it is a well crafted FU to whoever reviewed it at the Guardian.
IMHO, the Guardian can be counted on to be as miserable as possible on any topic. As movies go, it wasn’t terrible. But there is only so much you can do with the basic story. It wasn’t exactly uplifting. Maybe it wasn’t miserable enough for the Guardian.
Hard to construe a complete quoted sentence as false advertising. Heck, put the quote next to the thumbs down. People will be curious. A reviewer is not going to go after someone taking a quote like that with clear context.
It probably doesn’t make good business sense to overtly misquote reviewers. Not unless you never intend making another movie.
Meanwhile, the word “fun” does not appear at all in two reviews of the film in the Post. The closest it gets is this, in a review by Anne Hornaday: “Garfield is rather unpleasant, and he’s never very funny.”
I don’t know how much, if any, quoting-out-of-context would constitute false advertising, but I very much doubt that a quotation without any misrepresentation of something that a critic did like about a thing could be considered false advertising just because that person also had things they didn’t like about it or wasn’t overall positive about it.
On the back of the paperback edition of Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the edition that came out coincident with the movie’
s release, there’s a collection of extremely brief quotes. One of these read:
“Mind-boggling” – Life
Well, Life magazine did call the film “mind-boggling”, but it was in a feature piece about the film, not a movie review. I checked. I didn’t check the other quotes, but it wouldn’t surprise me if some of them were also taken not from reviews. And that’s pretty much equivalent to what the OP cites – a real quote from the source that is, however, not from a review, and which is cited as if it was.
I recall one critic complaining about some book or movie that had abstracted an out-of-context line from his review that gave the impression that he was praising the work, when he had, in fact, panned it. In a later review he pointed out that he had carefully written the current piece so that no one could do the same with it.
So this is a long-running problem.
Heck, Mad magazine did a parody piece once showing how you could turn a bad review into a good one by judicious cherry-picking.
Movie distributors and book publishers have been lifting quotes out of context and highlighting favorable comments at the expense of overall negative or meh ones since…well, forever.
In 2002, Sony was posting quotes from reviews of its movies by David Manning of The Ridgefield Press. The problem? The Ridgefield Press is or was a real weekly newspaper in Ridgefield, Connecticut but David Manning was not real and the quotes, and reviews, were fictitious.
Years ago there was a minor scandal because they were just making up quotes and attributing them to people who weren’t real. Late 1990s or early 2000s I think. They would also invite “critics” to screenings, but they were really just shills who would say something nice about any movie they watched in exchange for getting to watch movies for free and getting minor swag.
I remember that scandal involving phony critics. And I often laughed about glowing quotes from a critic whose byline appeared in the Paducah Sun-Dismal or some such obscure small town daily. Like, who really cared what that reviewer thought, even if they were legitimate?
One “real critic” who always appeared on posters and advertising was the late Joel Siegel from ABC’s “Good Morning America.” He apparently never saw a movie he didn’t like. No, love!
Since Roger Ebert’s demise, it’s been difficult finding a critic whose opinion I respect. Peter Travers, formerly of Rolling Stone and currently with ABC, is pretty reliable.
I first noticed “Unmissable…a British Classic” thinking that they chopped out something along the lines of “…you won’t believe how these wankers desecrated a…”
