Lyons: Dude, can we be, like, best friends?Mank: No.
Lyons: But you told the AP that you like talking to me about movies and . . .
Mank: Fine. Casual lunch or after work drinks. You're not taking me to see Twilight.
Lyons: Oh, God, I love that movie!Last week on At the Movies, we had the spectacle of Ben Lyons hailing the movie I Love You, Man as being "quotable". More importantly, this blurb turned out to be quotable itself, as it ended up on the television advertising campaign for the movie. An alert reader even pointed out that The Onion ridiculed this blurb on their Tolerability Index.
The blurb seems to have been removed from the ad and from the show as well. This week, I Love You, Man was reviewed again (just as Watchmen was last week) but this blurb was not repeated.
We did, however, get a treat in the form of Ben's continuing struggles with the English language. In his review of Duplicity he says: "Tony Gilroy, who is one of the more accomplished writers in Hollywood, has finally caught the directing bug." Usually somebody is referred to having caught the "acting bug" as having an addictive love of the craft, not simply having been given the opportunity. You get the sense from Lyons, on the other hand, that Gilroy was sitting around and writing all these years and suddenly decided that he wanted to direct--which is highly unlikely.
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8 comments:
Do you think Ben has had plastic surgery? Every time I see him, I think he's had Botox- at the very least.
The frozen smile, the smooth skin, the stiff face. The fact that he looks almost nothing like Crappy Film Critic Senior. He might really have had work done.
Certainly on his teeth. No one has teeth so even and so white.
And he must have also forgotten the fact that Gilroy has already directed...little film called Michael Clayton, maybe he missed that, and the two Oscar noms Gilroy got for it.
Actually, I just watched it back on my DVR. What Lyons actually says is:
"Tony Gilroy, who is one of the more accomplished writers in Hollywood, has finally caught the directing bug and he did “Michael Clayton” from two years back and with “Duplicity” he’s developing a nice body of work."
Did you know that a paper wrote a story about that veiled smackdown Roger Ebert gave Ben Bubblehead on his blog? And they wanted Roger Ebert's comment for the article and he declined? That's pretty classy. Some idiot not fit to be your intern destroys a show you've had for thirty years and someone wants to give you an opportunity to say your piece and you say no.
Oh big deal Scott, so he got quoted. Ebert has been quoted more than most critics will ever dream of. A lot of critics get quoted in an ad from time to time. Get over it.
Are you Jeffrey Lyons?
Scott....why do you hate Ben Lyons so much? If the your only answer is "he is a moron" or "he has no idea what he is talking about" doesn't justify(in my eyes)to hate someone. Also the comment above me is right, unless your implying he says those JUST to be get his name across.
If you want to know why I "hate" Ben Lyons, or why I think he is a "moron"--and while I sometimes use terms like that, I generally try to avoid them--it is because, yes, he throws out blurbs just so that he can get quoted, rather than offer a more intelligent or even critical view of the movies that he is reviewing. I have tried to make that clear on this blog and you can see that from some of the "Ben Lyons Highlights" links that I have posted on the right column.
He is a symptom of the decline of film criticism and does not deserve to be on the show. There are many other intelligent film critics who are much more capable than Lyons but the producers chose to go with him in the hopes of getting the dimwitted teen demographic (as opposed to the intelligent teen demo).
His presence on At the Movies, the most watched review show on TV, feeds into the concept of the film critic as the lapdog of Hollywood, rather than the astute and independent critic of the industry. This, at a time when film critics around the country are being laid off from their newspaper jobs.
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