the m0vie blog

Sorry, I couldn’t resist posting on this. Apparently the reviews for Inception are good… even from those who haven’t seen it. ExBerliner, a German magazine, published a review of the film before its first ever press screening (giving it three out of four). When confronted, the author confessed it was a fake, and acted as if there was nothing wrong:

I went into the theatre and sat down. A moment later, Ms. Troester came in and, as fate would have it, took a seat directly in front of me. I leaned forward and asked if she was from ExBerliner. She said that she was. Our conversation thereafter went like this:

“I’m just wondering, how did you get to see ‘Inception’? Friends of mine in L.A. only got to see that the other day. And I didn’t think there were any long-lead previews.”

For just a moment, it seemed to me, she looked slightly surprised. Then her composure recovered. She smiled. She seemed very agreeable. “We didn’t,” she replied.

“I’m sorry?”

“We didn’t see the movie. With our deadline…there was no time.”

“So why did you run a review on it?”

“We didn’t. We just did a piece.”

“But you gave it three stars.”

“Well, hearts,” she demurred. “Three hearts out of four.”

“Hearts or stars, lady – you reviewed the film.”

She shrugged. Her expression remained blandly serene; I might have been asking to borrow a cigarette.

I tried again: “What I don’t get is, if you hadn’t seen it, and you had no time to see it before you went to print, why do a review at all? You could have just previewed it…‘Oh, this looks pretty cool, it’s by the guy who did “The Dark Knight”…’”

Troester: “But that’s what we did.”

“No, you didn’t. You offered an opinion on the worth of the movie. You said, ‘here, Nolan’s not as original as he can be.’ You gave it stars, or hearts, or whatever. I’m sorry, but that’s a review.”

“If you’re unhappy, you should talk to the editor,” she said.

“But you’re the film editor. It’s your decision, surely?”

She hesitated. “I’m not sure why this matters to you.”

“If you hadn’t said that line about originality – if you hadn’t offered an opinion on the actual worth of the film – I mightn’t have so much trouble with this. But there’s no way you could have known whether Nolan was ‘as original as he can be’ this time around, or not. Or if it was a three-star movie and not a four-star one. Because you hadn’t seen it.”

It’s a great piece. I’ll spare you a rant about responsible journalism and all that sort of nonsense (if you want that, you can read my opinion of Variety’s decision to sell advertising space in its review section), but it’s just a crazy story about how fast and loose some publications can be. I won’t be seeing Inception until next Friday, and I won’t be writing a review before that.

Stay tuned for my upcoming review of Peter Jackson's version of The Hobbit...

Filed under: Movies | Tagged: Christopher Nolan, ethics, exberliner, film, film journalism, films, Inception, journalism, journalism ethics, journalistic ethics, Movies, preview, print media, responsible journalism, reviews | 23 Comments »