In this week's edition of Blurb Racket—the Gelf feature in which we take a close look at those critic blurbs that are a fixture of ads for movies—see breakdowns of blurbs for Snakes on a Plane, Idlewild, Material Girls, and more. This week's Bogus Blurb of the Week comes in an ad for Factotum:

Paul Antonson

David Fear, Time Out New York: "Dry-vermouth wit…
A fine match for Bukowski's prose!"
Actual line: "Deadpan doesn't quite describe the tone; from the way Norwegian director Bent Hamer (Kitchen Stories) and Dillon savor each display of the author's dry-vermouth wit, you'd think the jokes were being delivered in a hearse. Like its hero, the film has no forward momentum and just stumbles from one sad-sack vignette to the next, lost in its own hungover haze. But the po-faced absurdism is a fine match for Bukowski's prose, distilling the whimsy without losing the author's gutter poetry."

Manohla Dargis, The New York Times: "Boozy, beautiful…
Mr. Dillon's phrasing carries the weight of feeling!"
Actual line: "For years the boozy, beautiful world of Charles Bukowski has proved catnip to European filmmakers and a few American actors happy to go along for the rough ride…
There are intimations of soul amid this film's bloody grins and barstool gargoyles, but what it lacks is an appreciation for Bukowski's tenderness, for those sighs of feeling that rise up when life is this hard, but the soul enduring it has not hardened in turn. Mr. Dillon's phrasing carries the weight of such feeling, as does the hypnotically slowed gestures that give him the aspect of a man sitting at the bottom of a pool and thinking about drowning."
Both blurbs take raves for Bukowski's writing and turn them into raves for the movie. For the willful (and unnecessary, as most reviewers liked the film) manipulation of quotes, the entire ad wins Gelf's Bogus Blurb of the Week award.
Advertising manipulation for this film extends to its original Wikipedia page (now in Google cache), which was obviously written by someone with a rooting interest. It includes several blurbs; Gelf wasn't able to verify all of them. The current, neutral Wikipedia page for the movie says, "The Wikipedia page for the film, in keeping with an increased number of viral marketing incursions, was edited together in a manner that suggested a subjective take on the film, including favorable snippets from reviews usually reserved for movie posters and a traditional press kit blurb for Charles Bukowski."

Email this entry to:

Your email address:

Message (optional):