So here’s what happened. This is the short version.

I think it’s funny when people post angry comments on one-sentence excerpts from reviews on Rotten Tomatoes without reading the actual reviews. What could be more useless than a response not to a review but to a one-line quote from a review? I also think it’s funny when people get worked up over a movie’s Tomatometer score, becoming increasingly despondent or outraged as each new negative review pulls the score lower. All of this is especially funny when it pertains to a movie that the angry people haven’t even seen yet.

To exploit this, I posted a fake negative review of “The Dark Knight Rises” — and clearly labeled it as fake — on my website, then posted a link to it on Rotten Tomatoes. I wanted to see how many people would post angry comments on Rotten Tomatoes without reading the “review.” It would be obvious, since anyone who was angry clearly hadn’t read the “review.”

Here is what the fake review said:

“The Dark Knight Rises” is easily the most disappointing Batman film so far — and I’m including Schumacher’s “Batman & Robin” in that statement. Nolan has finally lost his touch.

Just kidding! I haven’t seen “The Dark Knight Rises” yet. It’s probably very good! I just wanted to post a negative quote on Rotten Tomatoes and see how many idiots would type angry words at me without actually clicking the link to read the whole review. Given that Rotten Tomatoes commenters are the worst human beings on the planet, I suspect the number will be large.

Also: It doesn’t matter if a movie you love doesn’t get a 100% RT score. It affects you and the movie in no way whatsoever. “You ruined this movie’s RT score!” is the dumbest complaint a person can possibly make.

Also: If you get angry about a review of a movie that you haven’t even seen yet, the terrorists win.

Real review to come!

The first sentence is what I used as the Rotten Tomatoes quote.

The fake review was up for a couple hours. I never intended to keep it up forever, just long enough to get some responses, and then the joke would be over. The Rotten Tomatoes staff, quite understandably, doesn’t like people pranking their system. Like many critics, I had a log-in that allowed me to post links to my reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. (RT staffers add other links manually, and I believe there’s an automated system that periodically checks certain critics’ sites for new reviews.) Since I abused this back-end privilege, Rotten Tomatoes took it away — which is perfectly fair. Your kid gets a speeding ticket, you take away his car keys.

Rotten Tomatoes also decided that my reviews will no longer count toward the Tomatometer. I hope they’ll reconsider, but that’s their decision to make. I can understand where they’re coming from. With the nonsense that was happening with the actual negative reviews, they were in no mood for shenanigans this week.

Here is what Rotten Tomatoes editor Matt Atchity said about it in an article explaining why RT had temporarily suspended commenting on “Dark Knight Rises” reviews:

Which leads me to Eric D. Snider. He thought [correctly] it would be funny to post a negative review link on Rotten Tomatoes that links to his own site. He misrepresented his review link. (In case you didn’t know, some critics post their own reviews, and my staff posts some — it’s about 50/50). By attributing the link to Film.com, he misrepresented that organization. This is not the first time he’s done this. [It is the second.] In our opinion, by knowingly posting a link that isn’t a review (and he hadn’t seen the movie), Snider has abused our trust, and therefore, his reviews will no longer apply to the Tomatometer.

Please understand that I have no argument with Matt. He and I have been in contact via email. We’re still discussing all of this. I understand where he’s coming from, and I think he understands where I was coming from.

My point was to make fun of blind, mindless fandom. It had nothing to do with Rotten Tomatoes itself, which is a useful site that I refer to every day, but with the freaks who post comments there, and who have turned Rotten Tomatoes, IMDB, and just about every other movie website into cesspools.

I made no attempt to deceive anyone. My fake review was clearly labeled as such. The only people who were deceived were the ones who just read the one-sentence excerpt from it. They got what they deserved: fooled. I’m responsible for exploiting their foolishness, and for giving them a venue to demonstrate it. But I am not responsible for their foolishness.

And the people who realized it was a joke and were STILL upset because I had tampered with the Tomatometer — well, I don’t even know what to say about those people. A movie’s Tomato score has no bearing on your ability to see and enjoy the movie, especially a huge movie like this. It doesn’t matter. If you are angered by negative reviews and/or by a diminishing Tomato score, you should be made fun of. I stand by that.

The only people who are justified in taking the Tomatometer seriously are the Rotten Tomatoes staff. It’s their business. The Tomatometer might be trivial in the grand scheme of things, but it’s what Rotten Tomatoes does, and so it’s reasonable for them to be upset when someone tampers with it. I am sorry — really — for any extra work I caused the RT staff during a week that was already busy and stressful for them. RT was the venue of the prank, not the target of it. I have no beef with Rotten Tomatoes.

I’m also sorry for indirectly dragging Film.com into it. I do write for them, but of course my fake review was posted on my own site, not theirs. My reasoning was simply that the joke would be funnier if my super-negative quote were attributed to a higher-profile site, regardless of where the link was actually going. “This is even worse than ‘Batman & Robin’ — Eric D. Snider, Film.com” is better than “This is even worse than ‘Batman & Robin’ — Eric D. Snider, EricDSnider.com.”

When you post links to your reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, there’s a little drop-down menu that has all the outlets you write for, and you choose the appropriate one. About 10 percent of the time, I accidentally click the wrong one anyway, and mark a review as EricDSnider.com when it’s actually Movies.com or whatever. I’m not saying this time was an accident — this time was on purpose — just that one shouldn’t read too much into it. I take full responsibility for the prank, and I apologize to my Film.com bosses for besmirching that site in the process.

Did I pull this prank to drive traffic to my site? No. I did it for the reasons already stated: as an experiment to see how unhinged people would get over a negative review. People tend to assume that traffic is the only reason anyone does anything on the Internet, but that wasn’t what I was thinking. The best-case scenario for my joke would have been that I got NO traffic, because EVERYONE would have just read the quote on Rotten Tomatoes and not the whole review. The link was only up for a couple hours. I did get some extra traffic in that time, and have continued to get some this week, but my site isn’t monetized very well. The extra clicks on Google Adsense have earned me maybe two dollars. I will gladly donate it to whichever charity is handling outreach and counseling for people who have been traumatized by negative “Dark Knight Rises” reviews.

Some news reports have asserted that Rotten Tomatoes BANNED a critic for posting a FAKE REVIEW of a MOVIE HE HADN’T EVEN SEEN!!! There’s nothing factually wrong with that sentence, yet it completely misses the point. It makes it sound like I tried to pass off a fake review as legitimate, and then sometime later was found to be lying. That’s not what I did at all. The review was clearly labeled as a fake from the very beginning, and my reasons for posting it were clearly described. I had no intention of deceiving anyone for longer than the two seconds it took to click the link at Rotten Tomatoes and see the punchline.

I don’t mind if you didn’t like the joke. But please at least acknowledge that it was a joke, not an earnest attempt to lie about a movie I hadn’t seen.

I’ve been a movie critic for 13 years. I’ve written close to 3,000 reviews in that time, and the links are all still cataloged at Rotten Tomatoes. (The count there says 3,150. There are duplicates because some reviews were posted at more than one site and RT’s automated system counted them twice.) I’ve done some “trolling” in my day — it’s worth noting that I did basically the same thing with “The Dark Knight” four years ago — but where movies are concerned, the instances of regular old reviewing and dissecting and snarking outnumber the instances of prankery and hijinkery.

Anyway, “The Dark Knight Rises” is pretty good. “Iron Man 3″ is terrible, though, worse than “Daredevil.”

Michele Schalin is a forty-something woman who lives in or near Austin, Texas, where she owns a web-design company, hosts a weekly Internet TV show (this you gotta see), and writes film reviews for her website, The Movie Junkies.

Well, that’s misleading. For one thing, The Movie Junkies seems to be gone now. For another thing, Michele Schalin didn’t write the reviews she posted there — she mostly plagiarized them from real writers, like some kind of craven word-thief.

Nobody knew who Michele Schalin was until Wednesday, when my colleague Mike McGranahan of The Aisle Seat discovered that she’d stolen significant portions of several of his reviews. Mike poked around and discovered that she’d also pilfered from Will Goss, MaryAnn Johanson, Jeffrey Overstreet, and — aw, hells no! — Eric D. Snider. That’s meeee!

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Do you like lists of things? Then here is one! It is a list of the 141 movies that 1) opened in the United States in 2011 and 2) played on at least 600 screens. Movies that opened smaller but eventually got to 600 screens are included, as long as their first release was in 2011. Re-releases of older movies don’t count, even if they were converted to 3D and called “The Lion King.”

I saw 113 of the 141 movies. The ones I missed have asterisks. Links are to my reviews. Sometimes I saw a movie but didn’t review it. That’s how life is sometimes. Dates are when the film opened, not necessarily when it went wide.

How many did you see? It is a contest.

1/7 Season of the Witch
1/14 The Dilemma
1/14 The Green Hornet
*1/21 No Strings Attached
*1/28 The Rite
1/28 The Mechanic
2/4 Sanctum
2/4 The Roommate
2/11 Just Go with It
*2/11 Justin Bieber: Never Say Never
*2/11 Gnomeo and Juliet
2/11 The Eagle
2/18 Unknown
2/18 I Am Number Four
2/18 Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son
2/25 Hall Pass
2/25 Drive Angry
3/4 Rango
3/4 The Adjustment Bureau
3/4 Beastly
3/4 Take Me Home Tonight
3/11 Battle Los Angeles
3/11 Red Riding Hood
3/11 Mars Needs Moms
3/18 Limitless
*3/18 The Lincoln Lawyer
3/18 Paul
3/25 Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules
3/25 Sucker Punch

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For people who like lists of things, here is a list of the 137 movies that opened in wide release in the United States in 2010. “Wide release” means it played in at least 1,000 theaters. Some movies started much smaller than that and expanded; this list includes those, as long as they eventually made it to 1,000. Missing are the 300+ movies that opened this year but didn’t go into wide release. That isn’t a judgment against those movies, just a way of sorting them. Information is according to Box Office Mojo. Links are to my reviews.

I saw 117 of them. How many did you see?

1/8 Daybreakers
1/8 Leap Year
1/8 Youth in Revolt
1/15 The Book of Eli
1/15 The Spy Next Door
1/22 Tooth Fairy
1/22 Extraordinary Measures
1/22 Legion
1/29 Edge of Darkness
1/29 When in Rome

2/5 From Paris with Love
2/5 Dear John
2/12 Valentine’s Day
2/12 Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief
2/12 The Wolfman
2/19 Shutter Island
2/26 Cop Out
2/26 The Crazies

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A while back someone suggested the first “Teenage Mutant Ninjas Turtles” for Eric’s Bad Movies, and I thought, “Didn’t I already do that one? I distinctly remember doing that one.” But I looked through the EBM archives and found no sign of it. Turns out what I had written was a “review,” but it was one of those “reviews” that was really more like an Eric’s Bad Movies column.

Then I remembered that I did a whole batch of those “reviews” of bad movies several years ago. It’s when I was writing for eFilmCritic, and we had a contest among the critics to see who could write the best review, as judged by our readers. We had to choose from a pre-selected list of films, and I went for the ones I knew would be terrible, since those were most likely to yield reviews that would entertain the readers. I don’t remember the outcome of the contest — it was done as a tournament — but I remember making it to the finals, at least.

Here are the reviews I wrote at that time. They’re all precursors to Eric’s Bad Movies and could be considered honorary entries in the EBM canon.

“Child’s Play”
“Cop and a Half”
“Krippendorf’s Tribe”
“Mortal Kombat”
“Richie Rich”
“Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles”

It was around the same time that I took it upon myself to watch and review all of the “Friday the 13th” and “Halloween” movies. My friend Smacky assisted me in this. It became a tradition for us. When a new “Friday the 13th” movie came out in 2002, we had just finished watching the previous ones and were able to see it together. A year later, when “Freddy vs. Jason” was released, we went to EXTRAORDINARY lengths to make sure Smacky could attend the press screening with me. It was unthinkable that I should watch a “Friday the 13th” or “Halloween” film without him.

Here are those reviews. Like the others, they tend toward the funny and less toward the fair review-style appraisal.

“Halloween”
“Halloween II”
“Halloween III: Season of the Witch”
“Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers”
“Halloween 5″
“Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers”
“Halloween H20: 20 Years Later”

“Friday the 13th”
“Friday the 13th Part 2″
“Friday the 13th Part III”
“Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter”
“Friday the 13th: A New Beginning”
“Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI”
“Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood”
“Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan”
“Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday”

(P.S. We talked about doing the “Nightmare on Elm Street” series, too, but then we got busy with other things, and I moved away, and he got married, and you know how it goes.)

Hey, Portlanders! And people near Portland! Do you want to see a documentary about the history of film criticism, followed by a panel discussion featuring several prominent local film critics and also me? And do you also have nothing else to do on Valentine’s Day? Then I have just the thing!

On Sunday, the Portland International Film Festival will screen the film “For the Love of Movies” at 4:45 p.m. in the Whitsell Auditorium at the Portland Art Museum downtown. Immediately afterward, the filmmaker, Gerald Peary, will join me, Shawn Levy, Aaron Mesh, Erik Henriksen, and D.K. Holm for a panel discussion and Q&A about, I dunno, movie reviewing or something. Individual tickets to the screening/panel are $10, and you can buy them at the door. If you come, be sure to say hi afterward. I’ll be the one with the beard. No, three of us have beards. I’ll be the kind of round-shaped one. No, that’s most of us, too. I’ll be the one named Eric D. Snider.

Here is what’s happening at Eric D. Snider Enterprises these days!

As you may recall, I’m on the Governing Committee of the Online Film Critics Society, and we’re trying to increase the group’s relevance in the lives of people who aren’t film critics. To that end, we have a blog in which items of interest to movie lovers everywhere are recapped, and a Twitter feed that will link to some of the same things. May I humbly insist that you follow @OFCS on Twitter and also politely demand that you bookmark our blog, or subscribe to its RSS feed, or whatever it is you kids do with your websites nowadays? Thank you very much indeed.

While you’re at the Twitter, remember that I can be found @EricDSnider thereat.

My good friend Dawn Taylor (@DawnTaylor666) recently launched a new weekly podcast, called Ham-Fisted Radio, in which all manner of topics are addressed, but mostly movies. She has a guest each week; so far, of the nine episodes she’s done, I’ve been the guest on five of them. I’m practically a co-host!

If you want to hear me and Dawn talk about stuff — and why wouldn’t you? — all the podcasts are archived at her site, where you’ll also find a link to where you can subscribe at iTunes. The podcasts have the “Explicit” tag on them, but that’s really just a precaution, in case somebody uses a salty word or two. The episodes I’ve been on have stayed at the PG-13 level. And in the most recent one, we performed a scene from “The Golden Girls” in which I played both Blanche and Sophia.

Alert readers may have noticed that it is January, and that January is when the Sundance Film Festival is, and that I usually go to the Sundance Film Festival. Sure enough, it starts Thursday night and runs through next week, and I will be there again, for the 11th year, writing reviews and commentary for Film.com and Cinematical.

Ever since 2003, I’ve also written a daily Sundance diary for your amusement (or, if you were not visiting my site in 2003, for the amusement of those who were). It is my intention, as of this moment, to continue the tradition. However, you should be aware that Sundance is exhausting enough by itself, and that writing a daily diary only increases the exhaustion factor, and that I have recently been trying to divest myself of things that add undue mental stress. It might turn out that the daily diary is one of those things, in which case I reserve the right to not do it. Either way, I’ll keep you apprised here at the blog.

I’m a member of the Online Film Critics Society, and am currently serving on the three-person Governing Committee, which obligates you to refer to me as Governor Snider. But that is beside the point. The point is that our 143 members have voted on the 13th annual OFCS Awards, and the winners are as follows (links are to my reviews):

Best Picture: “The Hurt Locker”
Best Director: Kathryn Bigelow, “The Hurt Locker”
Best Actor: Jeremy Renner, “The Hurt Locker”
Best Actress: Melanie Laurent, “Inglourious Basterds”
Best Supporting Actor: Christoph Waltz, “Inglourious Basterds”
Best Supporting Actress: Mo’Nique, “Precious”
Best Original Screenplay: Quentin Tarantino, “Inglourious Basterds”
Best Adapted Screenplay: Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach, “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” based on a book by Roald Dahl
Best Documentary: “Anvil!: The Story of Anvil”
Best Picture Not in the English Language: “The White Ribbon”
Best Animated Feature: “Up”
Best Cinematography: Robert Richardson, “Inglourious Basterds”
Best Score: Michael Giacchino, “Up”
Best Editing: Chris Innis and Bob Murawski, “The Hurt Locker”

(If you want to see the nominees that were previously selected, the list is here.)

In several cases the films I voted for didn’t win, but I’m not disappointed by any of the results. They’re all very solid choices. I note with some interest that “Avatar,” though nominated in three categories, didn’t win anything — but James Cameron’s ex-wife, Kathryn Bigelow, won Best Director. There’s a pretty good chance it will go that way at the Oscars, too.

More OFCS stuff can be found at our blog.

Last week I posted an angry letter I’d gotten from someone who has presumably found me via Rotten Tomatoes, and in the comments a couple readers asked questions about the Rotten Tomatoes thing. Namely: Do I choose the quote they use, or do they? And how come for a while I was designated a “Top Critic”? What’s up with that? (I am paraphrasing the questions.)

The requirements for becoming a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic and getting on the Tomatometer have changed over time. The current rules are here. Until very recently, simply being a member of one of the critics groups listed there (including the Online Film Critics Society, of which I’m a member) was enough to get you into RT. But now they’ve started vetting critics individually, so joining one of those groups is a good start but not a guarantee.

I don’t remember exactly what the process was when I got on RT, but I believe it happened in late 2000. I wasn’t a member of the OFCS yet then, so apparently I met whatever the other criteria were at the time. Just general awesomeness, probably.

As for the quotes used for each review, I choose those myself. Every RT-approved critic has an RT login that allows him or her to post a link to a new review, select “Fresh” or “Rotten,” and choose a quote to use. However, RT also has some kind of automated system that goes looking for new reviews at members’ sites, so if I neglect to do it myself, after several days a link will show up anyway, with no quote. (It will just say “Click here to read article.”) Then an RT staffer will eventually go in and find a quote manually, or I can do it myself.

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The Twitters were twitting fervently Monday in response to the Federal Trade Commission’s new guidelines requiring online writers to disclose when they have received freebies in exchange for reviewing a product. But much of the uproar and indignation expressed by bloggers was unfounded, demonstrating a misunderstanding not just of the FTC’s new guidelines but of the underlying ethical principles, too.

Here is the relevant portion of the FTC’s press release on these new guidelines, which take effect Dec. 1:

The revised Guides also add new examples to illustrate the long standing principle that “material connections” (sometimes payments or free products) between advertisers and endorsers — connections that consumers would not expect — must be disclosed. These examples address what constitutes an endorsement when the message is conveyed by bloggers or other “word-of-mouth” marketers. The revised Guides specify that while decisions will be reached on a case-by-case basis, the post of a blogger who receives cash or in-kind payment to review a product is considered an endorsement. Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service.

That’s from the press release about the guidelines. You can read the actual guidelines in PDF format here. On page 75, at section 255.5, “Disclosure of material connections,” is this:

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