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October 8, 2006

'Putridly Written, Directed, and Acted'

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 The Last King of Scotland, The Guardian, The Departed, and more. This week's Bogus Blurb of the Week comes in an ad for A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints:

Blurb Racket
Paul Antonson
Rob Nelson, The Village Voice: "Like Saturday Night Fever! Beat for beat, the dialogue rivals classic rock."
Actual line: "At least half of Montiel's movie comprises extended flashbacks to the moist summer of '86, when teen Dito (Shia LaBeouf) came of age by carousing with his crew of fellow pubescent hotheads—i.e., ogling girls in tank tops and jean shorts when not engaging in violent ante-upping with "the Puerto Ricans." If this tit-for-tat sounds a lot like Saturday Night Fever (and I didn't mention the half-accidental-death-by-public-transit scene), the borrowing isn't necessarily Montiel's alone: Sampling the greatest hits of Tony Manero's fuck- and fight-fueled white-boy-on-the-rise routine has hardly been unique to budding artists in the outer boroughs for the past 30 years."
Nelson is claiming that the movie is ripping off Saturday Night Fever, not that it's as good as it. For willfully misleading readers (and dragging down one of Travolta's few good movies), this ad wins Gelf's Bogus Blurb of the Week award.







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