Worst. Movie. Reviewer. Stupidity. Ever.

[Radio_Lady]

Plagiarism = bad. And f***ing embarrassing if you get caught.

Dawn Taylor, who reviews movies on the Internet and locally for the Portland (OR) Tribune, posted this recently on her journal site at http://dtaylor.livejournal.com :

Over the last week or so I've been chatting with local reviewer and all-around peachy fellow Eric Snider about an incident at www.Hollywood Bitchslap.com in which it was discovered that a college newspaper had been running plagiarized reviews by HB and eFilmCritic authors.

Well, now he's gone public with the whole story. And it's a beaut.

See, it turns out that the film critic for the University of Missouri-Kansas City paper has been stealing portions of reviews off the Internet and inserting them wholesale into his own copy. Which is illegal, unethical and just plain amateur-night behavior. 38 reviews in the past 13 months were found to have been "wholly or mostly plagiarized from a total of 97 other reviews."

But this writer, Samir Patel, isn't just some stupid, lazy kid who doesn't know better. After a call to the university, the HB folks discovered that he's a 27-year-old grad student who teaches a writing class at the college. And was, until yesterday, the paper's ombudsman -- you know, the person who handles problems at the paper.

Patel has resigned from the newspaper. But Snider and his colleagues have also contacted his faculty adviser, the college dean, the university provost and the English department chair -- as well as Poynter, Editor & Publisher magazine, and local news outlets in Kansas City.

Mr. Patel's little world is about to go to complete shit, all because he couldn't be bothered to write his own reviews. Eee-diot.

[blondeatlast]

1. To his credit, Mr. Patel DIDN'T shill for the major studios as some online

critics do.

And that, my friends, is faint praise indeed.

On the 5 star credit scale, Mr. Patel earns a 1/2 star.

Major studio shilling online critics get one star for their efforts at originality from studio press releases.

These internet(s)--creating a whole new world of dishonesty.

[Radio_Lady]

2. Well stated, BlondeatLast. (Love that screen name! )

There have been quite a few articles recently about critics who are bought and paid for -- and even phantom critics who don't even exist!

PLEASE! This is hurting our reputations!

http://www.popcultmag.com/passingfancies/bottomfive/moviecritics/moviecritics1.html

[blondeatlast]

4. I read book and movie reviews as part of my job.

I buy library materials.

Believe me, I can tell the shills from the legits.

For instance, if there's a line in the review I can picture being nicked for an ad blurb, a little bell goes off in my head!

It makes me ill that this happens--if it's any consolation, I see it in book reviews too.

Keep up the good work. And the integrity!

[Monkey see Monkey Do]

3. The British film critic Mark Kermode has said a couple of times

that there's been British critics who've reviewed a film without even seeing it, by basically recycling studio bollocks and not sticking their necks out.

I'm glad this guy got caught plagarising though - I don't know why people think they can get away with nicking from online articles, especially if people found them through google. But then you've got the bloody UK govnerment doing it with the infamous "dodgy dossier", so there's standards for you.