As we all know, marketing companies like to include favorable quotes from movie reviews on their posters and DVD box art. And, as we all know, sometimes those quotes are taken out of context to exaggerate their positivity.

My personal favorite comes from the box art for Batman, the 1989 movie. The quote on the cover from Roger Ebert is "A triumph!"

Sounds great, right? Ebert must have really liked the movie.

Here's the whole sentence from Ebert's review:



I might be imagining this, but I am fairly sure this wasn't meant to be taken as a compliment.

What are everybody else's favorite examples?

You guys ever see a DVD cover or a huge billboard that has 4 big ass stars for said movie, then you notice in tiny font underneath the 4th star it says 1/4 or 1/2. I always liked that one.

Well for me nothing can top when Sony invented a critic to blurb their shitty comedies. I also like when exclamation points are shamelessly added, despite the fact that critics almost never use them

I liked the way a quote appeared in an ad for the TV show Dexter.


"an almostPERFECT SHOW!!!!!!"

Check this video blog and the great comments:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/markkermode/ ... words.html

My favorite type of quote-mining is when those quotes are selectively edited. For example, on a horror movie poster, I saw the quote "Hip and happening...in the tradition of Wes Craven's Scream Trilogy!". One then wonders what words were edited out with the dots.

Ooh, there's a good one from Peter Travers when he reviewed Inglourious Basterds. (I can't remember if his overall impression was favorable or not, but it is irrelevant for our purposes.) The sentence began, "Tarantino's power punch comes from..." followed by a handful of stylistic devices that escape me.

Of course, this ended up on the box art as "A Tarantino power punch!"

So not only are they omitting parts of the sentence and adding in exclamation points, they're actually sneaking in words... though I guess limiting it to a single indefinite article is relatively tasteful, as far as fabrications go.

Easily the best I've seen is from the Australian cover of American Psycho II:

"Better than the first!" - IMDB

Granted, 'style over substance' pretty much goes without saying when you're talking about a Burton (or Tarantino) film.

I think Ebert would agree, but I also think he revised his assumptions about the value of "style over substance" when Pulp Fiction came around.

Style over substance is often the perfect tonic.

When I think of this phrase my mind does a dart to the first half of Desperado, which is utterly brilliant. It runs out of fuel quickly after that. Come to think of it, in hindsight it might have been better as part of a split feature in the Grindhouse mould.

Or Baz Luhrmann or Zack Snyder.