Screenhead

MOVIES ARE SERIOUS BUSINESS.

That’s the message Buena Vista apparently wants you to walk away with after looking at the poster for their revamped At The Movies.  Apparently they’ve finally gotten done with their search for new hosts, and apparently also they’ve dumped Roeper once and for all and bring us their new hosts, A.O. Scott and Michael Phillips, two men who, by looking dour enough to suggest someone just told them their dog died, (maybe someone DID–look at these poor schmoes.  They look like they’re about to CRY!) want to clearly project the image that MOVIES ARE SERIOUS  BUSINESS AND THEY ARE SERIOUS MEN.

Seriously.

Meanwhile, your poor old Screenhead critic, who likely won’t be getting a poster any time soon, spent about three minutes laughing himself into a shallow coma over this.

Clearly, the push is on to somehow paint the picture that At The Movies is a better source of film criticism than, say, Screenhead.com.  A lot of people, the second they hear that “dot-com”, automatically revert back to 1997 and say “You can’t believe anything on the internet!” despite the fact that that’s where everybody is now.

I don’t know a whole lot of my audience.  I know you guys come here, but I don’t hear from you very often.  But I bet if I asked if you trusted us to give you solid news and honest review, I bet you’d all answer in the affirmative.

So let At the Movies dress their figureheads up like they’re getting ready for a night of kabuki theatre.  Let them give long and studied rants that successfully use terms no one’s ever heard of like mise-en-scene to try and reinforce some ludicrous belief that you have to be a filmmaker or a film student to be a film critic.

Meanwhile, everyone ELSE can keep coming to places like this, where a guy who worked in a video store for five years before seguing into film criticism can look at you and tell you, honestly, just how bad the newest Hollywood drivel pile stank up the joint.

Because frankly, I don’t need to be a cordon bleu chef to know when someone’s fried up garbage and set it on my plate.

All I have to do is be able to SMELL.

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