Vicky Ward | SpoutBlog

War Inc. Begets Further Critical Backlash

By Karina Longworth posted 1 year ago

Now that War, Inc has topped the specialty box office two weeks in a row, using the unfunny “incendiary political cartoon” (the poster’s words, not mine) as a stick with which to beat the “critics are irrelevant!” dead horse has become the new hotness.

“Despite the negative reviews, I found War Inc. innovative and subversively ironic,” Vicky Ward writes at Vanity Fair.com. Noting that Cusack was able to cull poster quotes from like-minded famous friends such as Arianna Huffington and Diablo Cody (the latter’s a new development, as she apparently hadn’t delivered her blurb as of the taping of this clip), Ward positions the success of the film as an instance of “the audience” rising up against the bullies of the critical establishment:

The encouraging results may be proof of the power of viral marketing, an instance when the subculture becomes the culture…it won’t just be the anti-war message of the movie that is groundbreaking; War Inc. could become a model for a new, grass-roots type of marketing, in which a film’s potential audience (with a little help from the director) may be better able to advertise it than the so-called experts are…if the drum roll is loud enough, the views of critics [can] be overruled by people who will see what they want to see, no matter who tells them not to.

Yeah, I don’t know about that. …Read more

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