{"id":486,"date":"2011-04-07T07:41:12","date_gmt":"2011-04-07T12:41:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=486"},"modified":"2011-04-07T07:41:12","modified_gmt":"2011-04-07T12:41:12","slug":"not-awesome","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2011\/04\/07\/not-awesome\/","title":{"rendered":"Not Awesome."},"content":{"rendered":"

I am not a film critic. That simple fact is one of two reasons I will not be reviewing Anywhere, <\/em>U.S.A.<\/em> a movie now out on DVD. (The other reason is that, having viewed this locally-produced film featuring local talent, I can\u2019t come up with a single positive thing to say about it. And I have to live<\/em> in this town.)<\/p>\n

Anyway, I\u2019m not a film critic. But I know enough about how the industry works to understand that when I learn that a new film has not been made available to critics for pre-screening, there\u2019s often a simple reason: it sucks. That\u2019s just how things work.<\/p>\n

Now, on a wholly different subject (wink, wink), Green Day<\/strong> has a new album. Brattily titled Awesome as F**k<\/em>, this live album is to be issued in multiple formats, including vinyl. Cool, right? Yeah, I thought so too. So, when I got a press release trumpeting this upcoming album, I asked to be added to the list for promo copies.<\/p>\n

Eventually I heard back that physical copies wouldn\u2019t be available to reviewers. While disappointing, that\u2019s an increasingly-common fact of life in 2011. So, would a download be available to critics? Nope, I was told. Only a stream. So I could log into a private page and listen to the whole album in lo-fi. Right?<\/p>\n

Wrong again. In their infinite wisdom, Green Day has deigned to make but five of the album\u2019s seventeen tracks available for review. \u201cBut I hope you can still review it,\u201d the publicist told me. (It\u2019s important to point out that said publicist had to work with what he was given; it certainly wasn\u2019t his<\/em> idea to provide a mere glimpse of this album he\u2019s trying to promote.)<\/p>\n

Well, I won\u2019t be reviewing Awesome as F**k<\/em> here. Expecting a review based on hearing less than one-third of the album is unreasonable. It\u2019s akin to asking an art critic for her thoughts on a painting, but only letting her see the bottom half of the artwork. Or asking a film critic to weigh in on a film\u2019s merits after viewing only the second reel.<\/p>\n

When a new film is not made available to critics ahead of its release, quite often it\u2019s because the studio knows it\u2019ll get savaged; they hope that the advertising campaign will get enough asses in seats on opening night to recoup their investment. That way they can cash in before word-of-mouth gets around that, well, this movie ain\u2019t too good. Just sayin\u2019.<\/p>\n

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I am not a film critic. That simple fact is one of two reasons I will not be reviewing Anywhere, U.S.A. a movie now out on DVD. (The other reason […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[65,73],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-review","category-vinyl","cat-65-id","cat-73-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=486"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}