When critics think alike
Wednesday, April 16th, 2008It’s common enough for the majority of critics to have the same general opinion of a movie. But what about when they use the exact same words to express that opinion? That’s what we call a freaky coincidence. And readers have alerted me to three examples where my description of a film was echoed by other reviewers (or, if you prefer, where other reviewers’ descriptions were echoed by me).
I neglected to make a note of who brought this to my attention (sorry!), but I wrote:
“The screenplay is attributed to three writers. That means if the film’s funny parts were divided evenly among them, they each wrote zero.”
Kyle Smith of the New York Post wrote:
“The movie has five writers, so the number of funny jokes they each came up with, on average, is exactly … let’s see if I can do the division in my head … oh yeah, zero.”
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