The Moron Tax

Your average cinemagoer should know that there are several filters through which one should take a potential movie 'experience'. The first, and most brutal, is the mighty Times movie section, which is not merely difficult to locate, buried beneath the full page ads for Rob Schneider vehicles, but also usually rather catty. If you were to start at the other end, one would use the easily available and pointlessly reasonable Neil Rosen.

In between there are several other guiding lights that one can use, ranging from explosion count to whatever Cutesome tells one to watch that night. But the one reliably useless tool, the chocolate fireguard among recommendations, is the poster quote. It's reassuring that they're there, we suppose, but it's a rare moment when one cannot find some half-demented morning show DJ in Kansas to like your movie and thus use his droolings. If you were in a real bind, there are also probably several rather perverse websites around that take a delight in digging bad movies.

So, we're somewhat perplexed by the news that Sony must pay out CASH MONEY to moviegoers that might have been influenced by fake reviews attached to posters for A Knight's Tale, The Animal (Rahb Schneider is.....a staypleurrr!), the Hollow Man, Vertical Limit and The Patriot. Well, perplexed and relieved, since we'd never really planned on seeing any of them. Well maybe The Patriot, but only to cheer on our boys in Red and the Mighty Hessians....

Anyway, read the linked pdf, if you would like to file a claim, which seems to centre on one insisting under pain of perjury that you bought tickets to the said movies rather than just jumping up and down and singing "once, twice....three times a moron!" As the defence probably should have insisted.


Yes, we're sure that one day we will meet at Pacifico. But the movie theater? That's just jive.

P.S. Well, we caved in. Finally. We're not proud.