Walter Monheit Lives!

In fondly remembering the late lamented Spy Magazine (I intend to do for the "late lamented" epithet what Spy did for "short-fingered vulgarian") for my Blogrolling post, I also remembered another feature called Blurb-o-Mat: Capsule Movie Reviews by Walter Monheit™, the Movie Publicist’s Friend. In it, a fictitious dandified monocled movie reviewer gave alarmingly gushy reviews to extremely bad movies. Two of the trademark bits were that everyone deserved an Oscar® (Walter's keen nose would "smell Oscar®" on about anything) and the horrendous adjectives that he would coin using "-iscious" and "-abulous" rather unsparingly. Every movie got 4 monocles and Walter Moheit became industry short-hand for the amazingly large swarm of fawning small market movie reviewers willing to plug anything for a few free movie tickets.

It seems there were turkeys that even these hip-pocket reviewers wouldn't praise, so Sony invented David Manning of the Ridgefield Press, a real newpaper, but a fake reviewer. An industrious ambulance chaser recently won a class-action lawsuit on behalf of the befuddled moviegoers that went to see The Animal starring Rob Schneider on David Manning's advice. Having made a quick thirteen bucks on the recent CD price fixing class-action settlement, I wanted my share.

Supposedly the form to claim you money is at the lawyers' website but all I could find was the class action notice. It seems that in order to collect, you have to swear you saw either “The Animal,” “Vertical Limit,” “A Knight's Tale,” or “The Patriot” in theaters. I've only seen one of these even on video, and I won't confess to which one. Something's just aren't worth the money.