eFilmCritic has compiled their annual Criticwatch list, designed to shame the most offensive quote whores in film criticism, and they’ve given top honors for “an incredible amount of supercilious douchebaggery” to Pete Hammond, the MAXIM critic whose reliably, absurdly positive blurbs appeared on a whopping 88 film campaigns in 2007. Hammond, a Criticwatch veteran from way back, has long been considered to have few peers in the quote whoring game. As Erik Childress writes:

Hammond is more than just a cancer on the film critic profession. He’s the poster boy for everything that’s wrong with an American media preaching to the lowest common denominator and a vocation that receives its most vocal criticism from outsiders when it’s actually doing its job of criticizing…

We have announced in the past that we have no plans to give Pete Hammond his own award name – because that will take away his pre-determined advantage to winning it each year. If he can aspire for 88 quotes in 2007, who knows how far he can go in 2008 & beyond. I will amend that statement though. The day Hammond is eliminated from our discussion; such a day when we no longer see his name on a film ad – I promise, here and now, to offer him his own memorial award.

That day might arrive sooner than later. Towards the end of the post (which also includes a full Top Ten countdown of the year’s biggest blurb whores and minute calculations on the emptiest/most overused blurb language of the year and is basically a sterling example of the kind of inside baseball nerdiness that I can get lost in for an entire afternoon), Childress notes that while the gang at eFilmCritic were compiling this document, they got word that Hammond has been fired.

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• If it’s a labor dispute that finally gets The Rum Diary off the ground, then so be it. “The latest statistics for filming in L.A. confirm what everybody already knows,” writes Dave McNary for Variety. “The studios and networks have revved up production, stockpiling projects as strike fever engulfs Los Angeles.”
• After at least a decade of producing softcore for teenage boys, Maxim’s getting in the business of … producing softcore for teenage boys! The men’s mag will slap their name on a Screen Gems teen comedy called Virginity Rocks!, which will tell the story of “a gorgeous transfer student who clings to her virginity and gets all the promiscuous girls in school to abstain from sex; in response, the popular guys ask the school stud to try to bed the poster girl and ending her ‘virginity rocks’ campaign.”
• IMAX has announced a plan to release Shine a Light, Martin Scorsese’s upcoming Rolling Stones documentary, on their massive screens simultaneous to the film’s September 21 premiere in “real” theaters. Insert “do we really need to see those walking corpses on a such a scale?” joke here.