CT Movies is…
Captain Mark Moring
Peter T. Chattaway
Carolyn Arends
Lisa Ann Cockrel
Camerin Courtney
Todd Hertz
Josh Hurst
Ron Reed
and now…
What a team!
I think I’m going to quit CT Movies just so I can focus my efforts on establishing a fan club for this group.
A few years back, I remember thinking how much I’d like to see my favorite Christian film critics form an “alliance” (to use a favorite term of Dwight Schrute), so we could read all of their reviews in one place. SDG was at the top of the list. And I am absolutely overjoyed to learn that his work will now be introduced to that larger audience through CT.
careful now. remember that dwight shrute turned his back on the alliance for his own sake.
now, let’s hope that the music section of CT gets to that level (i really love farias. he’s at a different level than most ‘christian’ music reviewers outside Paste and the defunct Harvest News Syndicate. no offense to anybody else. it’s just, that’s a different level).
I think it’s horrible. I don’t want to know what a studio thinks of its own movie, I want to know what the critic thinks. Plus, it not only says something about a critic when this happens, but it also says something about the movie being reviewed. If it’s so lackluster that the reviewer needs outside material to help him out, maybe the movie shouldn’t be reviewed at all.
If I was a reviewer who had little worthwhile to say about a movie, I might be inclined to quote from the studio’s promo, but only in a “the studio promotes their film as a {insert quote}… what were they thinking/smoking?” kind of way.
Of the reviewers that I regularly consult, I can hardly recollect the last time that one quoted from promo materials. I imagine that I would stop reading their reviews if they started doing that.
It depends on how much he has quoted. If it’s primarily promotional stuff, then no he cannot. Though if it’s entirely his, yes he does. As a writer I take plagiarism very seriously. Once in a while, to get my creative juices flowing I will take a line from someone elses poem to use it to start my own. But I make sure to give notice to that fact.
Could you point to examples of this being done? I don’t think I’ve ever come across something like this — although if memory serves, I do recall that a USA Today puff piece on The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) began with a paragraph or two lifted straight out of the press kit.
I read films reviews for a critique of the film, not a plot summary or studio promo material (which exists only to get me to see the movie). As such, IMO, a film review should be a discussion of the themes & issues a film contains, the quality of craft that went into the film, & (if applicable – & it usually is) social commentary regarding the film.
I don’t want much, do I?
I agree with Ibrodine, if a reviewer uses such studio-based materials, it should be for a reason & credit should be given. It should never be passed off as that writer’s work.
I actually had this exact problem happen a few times while I was the editor of my student newspaper in college. One of my writers wanted to do a piece on all the holiday movies cominng out. What she submitted was essentially the press kit. When we confronted her on it and asked she rewrite it, the result we got was exactly as happened here: she “rewrote” it using different words but saying the exact same thing in the same way with the same style.
We gave her a C in the course. She didn’t repeat.
And yes, it’s plagariasm.
This was once a BIG argument that cost me a job basically at a well-know Christian mag. I wrote a monthly entertainment column and was expected to pull a lot of material from the promo material that a certain Christian company that markets films to Christians.
Then there was an editorial change and I was accused of plagarism for using anything at all from the promo materials. The truth was if I used promo materials at all – and I tried not to -I never coined the piece as an actall review but more of a coming attraction tidbit with info from the studio.
The bottom line is that I would never lift an entire paragraph from a promo. But at the same time, in my current reviews for Beliefnet, I have once or twice used a line from a summary because it was a neutral sentence and I really felt like there was no incredibly different way to say the same basic fact.
It would never be tolerated to lift a significant chunk of material from anywhere.