Is This Trailer Accepted Behavior?

Sometimes, even in the middle of the night, when the smoke hasn't yet cleared, when the beer is almost through, and when the girls have nearly stopped giggling, you still are capable of spotting bullshit.

This morning LAist was watching The Miss Teen USA pageant on TiVo. Don't ask. Even though the incredibly cheesy and wrong telecast didn't hold our attention for very long, for some reason a commercial during the broadcast for the new comedy "Accepted" did.

And even though our television is old and blurry and due to get hauled out of here, when the part of the commercial came where the critics start raving "Brilliant" or "Mind-blowing" for some reason, we leaned in to see who the hell was going on about "Accepted" because the word on the street is it's a snoozer and the rightful sacrificial lamb to go up against "Snakes on the Plane", which also opens on Friday.

We looked closely and lo and behold but every quote was coming from the same source and the same film reviewer. And no, it wasn't Gene Shalit or anyone you've ever heard of.

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It was a man named Paul Fischer, who a few years ago was roundly dissed by a fellow Aussie film critic for being a hack, who clearly wrote certain parts of reviews simply to be quoted in trailers, and pretty much loves every movie he sees.

Nothing wrong with any of that really. And now that Mr. Fischer has moved here to America, where a man has the choice to enjoy all the slop that gets thrown at him, he probably doesn't mind at all when people like the Filthy Critic name him Quote Whore of the Week, as he was awarded this week. It's called freedom.

The problem that we saw was that typically in a big time movie trailer, the quotes come from different sources. And when they quote those sources there really is a column or a review attached to those raves. The problem with Mr. Fischer's quotes ("Total Triumph", "Raucously Funny", "Deliciously Subversive", "One of the Best films of the Summer") is that they're advertised as being from a review from DarkHorizons.com -- but Dark Horizons, while showcasing some of Fischer's work, doesn't have this review, nor does Rotten Tomatoes, which also hosts many of his reviews, most of which, you guessed it, were swooningly positive.

In fact, after much scouring of the Internet, the only place where these quotes lie is on movie critic threads denouncing certain critics for being whores, like Hollywood Bitchslap and eFilmCritic.

Apparently these three sentences were so laughable and transparent to actual critics that the review was red-flagged as bullshit way back in February:

Which makes you wonder how terrible this film must be if the only positive quotes that a huge studio like Universal can get are by a thoroughly denounced hack who can't even get his review put up on the last site that will be associated with him.