Eat Our Shorts and Read About

• fake quotes
• fake Crows
• real bad writing
• Groening!

Thanks to Ruck Cohlchez for contributing this week. Send articles throughout the next week to ploughmanplods [at] gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion, and Have a Happy Friday!

At Vulture, Bilge Ebiri asks why the new Megalopolis trailer uses fake quotes attributed to real critics that trash Francis Ford Coppola’s previous work:

Pauline Kael, for one, totally adored both The Godfather and The Godfather Part II. She lavished praise on the adaptation, the direction, and the performances, and said of the whole epic, “This is a bicentennial picture that doesn’t insult the intelligence. It’s an epic vision of the corruption of America.” The alleged quote attributed to her in this trailer — that The Godfather is “diminished by its artsiness” — is nowhere to be found in either of her (glowing) reviews of the first two films. […] What’s the intention here? Did the people who wrote and cut this trailer just assume that nobody would pay attention to the truthfulness of these quotes, since we live in a made-up digital world where showing any curiosity about anything from the past is seen as a character flaw? Did they do it to see which outlets would just accept these quotes at face value? Or maybe they did it on purpose to prompt us to look back at these past reviews and discover what good criticism can be? If so, then it worked, in my case. I’ve read a lot of Pauline Kael reviews in my life, but I’d never read her review of The Godfather. I encourage you to do so as well.

The Ringer‘s Miles Surrey has some reservations about the upcoming reboot of The Crow:

Let’s cut to the chase: The vibes are off here. As the eponymous vigilante, Bill Skarsgard—coincidentally a John Wick alum—looks like a composite of Jared Leto’s Joker and every white SoundCloud rapper hounding you to check out their mixtape. The director is Rupert Sanders, whose previous credits (Snow White and the Huntsman, Ghost in the Shell) aren’t nearly as memorable as his old tabloid fodder. But the biggest problem with the Crow reboot is that it exists in the first place, coming out 30 years after the original film became a somber, atmospheric cult hit steeped in real-life tragedy. For anyone who appreciates The Crow’s grungy idiosyncrasies and the lead performance from the late Brandon Lee, the modern update feels less like a revival than a desecration of its predecessor’s legacy.

Eneko Ruiz Jiménez at El País talks to Matt Groening about never retiring, Spanish, and predicting the future:

The pandemic, of course, was also predicted by The Simpsons in the fourth season episode titled Marge in Chains. This position as the oracle of Delphi has become a recurring joke on the internet, where various similarities between the show and real life are falsified or exaggerated. This month, an image of Kamala Harris in a purple suit circulated on the web next to a futuristic President Lisa in similar clothing (the character replaced Trump on the show in his fictional term). “When you do animation for decades, you’re eventually going to get something right. We try to come up with the most absurd jokes… and it turns out that the world is getting more and more absurd, so these things come true.”

Behold! The winners of this year’s Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest which challenge writers to come up with the worst opening line for a novel in several genres:

“She had a body that reached out and slapped my face like a five-pound ham-hock tossed from a speeding truck.” […] “Magnus was in a tough spot…the Icelandic Police were pressing him to cough up the name of the top capo in each of the 3 main cities in which the Mafia operated—Reykjavik, Akureyri, and Middelf—threatening to lock him away for life if he didn’t, but he knew that if he ratted out the Reykjavikingur or the Akureyringur the Mob would kill him for sure—so he just gave them the Middelfingur.”