Embargo Poker

Yesterday Marshall Fine tapped out a piece about the rules governing movie-review embargos, or at least a description of how the game tends to work. He wrote this because things got a little improv-y during the recent run-up to Oz The Great and Powerful. For a while Disney publicists were telling reviewers they had to hold despite Variety‘s Justin Chang, The Hollywood Reporter‘s Todd McCarthy and several British critics having posted reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. Here‘s our discussion about same. We got into a few other topics besides.

Apologies for hastily posting this last night without including the mp3 file — brilliant.

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  • SlashMC

    Is there a podcast link?

    • pierrot

      pink gambling ad top left corner or

      pink gambling ad top right corner..

      • SlashMC

        Thanks. I knew those ad/links were there but they say “Download on iTunes” and none of the latest podcasts have gone on iTunes. Also the link “rance/russell.mp3″ didn’t indicate a podcast with Marshall Fine.

        • pierrot

          you’re right. they link to slightly old poker. sorry

  • http://www.facebook.com/randy.matthews Randy Matthews

    Hi Jeffrey, could Sasha maybe teach you how to post these on iTunes? Your podcast would show up automatically (depending on the user’s setting), and you’d probably gain more exposure, and eventually more site traffic.

    Also, perhaps someone could set up an online “podcast viewer,” which would list all of the latest podcasts in your site navigation somewhere, allowing the user to listen directly in his or her browser? Once these get buried in your blog, they become difficult to find.

    • MisterQuigley

      Agreeing with Randy here, Jeff. If you’re going to bother doing a podcast, do it right…

  • merton82

    Some interesting comments re: embargoes, but please, spare us the “kids these days” schtick next time. No one would argue that what has happened over the past 30 years, re: attention spans, the commodification of entertainment, internet culture, etc. etc. etc., has been been for the betterment of the next generation. I can be as curmudgeonly and cynical as the next guy, but the argument that “technology is killing our brains” comes across as exhausted and impotent, especially when its articulated as a kind of blanket condemnation of “kids these days”.

    Look – there are probably more film-literate teenagers these days than at any other time in film history. I’m 30, and the kids I know who are younger and interested in film know a hell of a lot more than I did at their age. Are there iPhone thumb suckers who think that John Ford may have built cars? Probably, but then, they existed, sans technology, back in the heyday of the 70s, and forever and ever before then.

    • Stewart Klein

      I don’t know man. Last Friday I was introducing the novel Frankenstein to an HONORS class of High School Seniors and referenced both Prometheus and Alien. No one, I mean NOT ONE, student in the class had seen either one. Believe me, Most kids right now live in a bubble of bullshit. you might call them Jack and Jill popcorn.

      • pierrot

        huh, where was this?

        • Stewart Klein

          Northeast PA. They all saw Twilight and the Avengers though.

      • merton82

        That’s shocking, for lots of reasons. I didn’t think it was possible to pass through the gauntlet of current summer movie advertising ignorant of ANY blockbuster, let alone an Alien prequel. Still, I can’t imagine that’s the norm.

      • Alan Burnett

        Egads, they hadn’t seen ‘Prometheus’? For reals? You must be the first person to suggest that our youth are philistines because they didn’t watch a flat, emotionless, empty, illiterate Ridley Scott film that feels like ten drafts scotch-taped together.