Embarrassing confession time: at one point in my life, Peter Travers of Rolling Stone was my favorite film critic. I think I finally turned on him when I started seeing his four-star review of that middle-brow awards wank Atonement blown up to poster size and placed in theater lobbies. See, he’s become what we call a “quote whore,” a guy who seems to work blurby bits into his reviews in order to see his name in marketing material, to the point of reusing the same mostly-meaningless soundbites over and over again. The site eFilmCritic even named their “Whore of the Year” award after him.
Travers shows up again in this week’s TV spots for David Fincher’s Gone Girl, calling it “the date-night movie of the decade.” Which, I suppose, was his innovative new twist on “the perfect date movie,” a phrase that, again, has its own eFilmCritic page dedicated to its overuse in movie marketing. (“A perfect date movie to critics should be as recognizable as porno to Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart.”)
Though this time, the best part of the pull-quote is actually reading the entire thing. Here’s the Rolling Stone review from whence it came:
Gone Girl is the date-night movie of the decade for couples who dream of destroying one another.
Now, the use of the quote in the trailer comes right after “Amy lost a lot of blood in there,” so it’s clear Gone Girl isn’t actually trying to sell itself as a great date movie. And David Fincher is famously hands-on when it comes to trailers and marketing for his movies. Could it be that Fincher has finally found the perfect use for a Peter Travers pull quote – as satire? Brilliant.