My reviews of last weekend’s “Rambo,” “Meet the Spartans,” and “Untraceable” are now posted. Here’s hoping the reviews are more enjoyable to read than the movies were to watch.

In other news, I’m afraid I’m coming down with the Sundance Flu, a bug that started claiming victims near the end of the festival and has continued to wreak havoc on members of the press since then. Cooped up together in the same screening rooms all day, and then sharing each other’s needles and crack pipes at night — that’s a recipe for disaster.

I’ll try to produce at least the minimum amount of work the next couple days, but if I go away for a while you’ll know why. And if the masseuse shows up tomorrow and finds me naked and dead, I hope she calls 911 before she calls anyone else. (People with the Sundance Flu are allowed to make jokes about anything they want.)

My friend Erik Childress runs an ongoing feature at eFilmCritic called CriticWatch, in which he keeps track of the critics’ quotes used in movie ads. When you see all the quotes listed, it becomes apparent which critics are reasonable and which ones are shamelessly praising everything they see just so they can get quoted. We call those people quote whores.

One of 2007’s busiest whores was Pete Hammond, recently fired from Maxim magazine, which decided it didn’t need a film critic since the only reason anyone buys the magazine is to look at pictures of ladies’ boobs. Hammond’s praise was quoted in ads for 88 films in 2007.

He has zero credibility within the film critic community, and probably not much more among movie-goers in general. Yet for some reason Rotten Tomatoes chose to profile him in the latest installment of its “Meet a Critic” feature. Imagine there were a “Meet an Actor” feature somewhere, and they chose Tara Reid. That’s what we’re talking about here.

Continue reading…