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Rules to live by: floss daily, leave the toilet seat down, spin around in your chair three times before you salt chicken, knock on your car window when you’re passing through a yellow light and/or passing a car with one headlight, and of course, yell “Run, Forrest, run” when you see somebody running.

With a set of rules like that, I can live the rest of my life without any worries whatsoever. But I did forget to mention the most important rule that must never, ever, ever be forgotten.

Never rely on blurbs for deciding whether or not to watch movies.

How many times have you heard “The funniest movie of the year”? Or something about “Edge of your seat excitement!” or some kind of “Thrill ride!” But how often have you looked at the source of the reviews themselves?

Let’s get something straight. The Pacoima Times isn’t a credible source of information. The Solvang Tribune is not the first publication we should go running to to see if a film is worth watching. And contrary to popular belief, the Bellflower Journal, Monrovia Daily, and Rowland Heights Herald aren’t worthy publications either. (For those of you who don’t know, Rowland Heights is a small unincorporated district in California located approximately where the 60 and 57 freeway meet – I’m from there).

But back to my point. When completely random periodicals make such bold statements, the truth is, the movie was so crappy that the studio needed to rely on some lame reporter that it wined and dined in order to get a good quote. They the advertisers plaster said quote on their movie poster so they can make back all the money they dumped into the stupid project.

Do I sound bitter? Oh yeah, like you won’t believe. I guess that’s what happens when you’ve been a film and television editor for a year and you’re completely used to publicists pushing a really crappy movie and trying to get you to every showing of their movie so they can use your review for a blurb. Bah.

And you know what the worst part is? Oftentimes these blurbs are taken totally out of context. Sometimes the blurb will read something along the lines of “The movie was great!” but in actuality, the second part of the sentence says “if I really liked crappy movies!” was omitted. Or sometimes it’ll be something like “I’m going to see it again!” but they forgot to mention that the next part of the sentence said “if I have to choose between watching this or gouging out my eyes with rusty scalpels” (notice the “Oedipus Rex” allusion).

People say “two thumbs up,” but I don’t think a thumb is a good unit of measurement. I guess people are referring to “thumbs up” as being a good thing, but what about the A-okay sign? Might as well give a movie two A-okays or maybe two high-fives or chest bumps for the sports fans who like movies. Besides, the thumb is one of my least favorite evolution-engineered digits. What about prehensile tails? Two prehensile tails up!

Or sometimes movie critics will rate the movie with stars, but they never say how many stars it’s out of! I get so flustered when people give a movie four stars, but I’m constantly wondering what fraction of stars that is worth. If the total is four, that’s super. But think about it; there are like centillions (1.00 * 10^60, for all the math folks) of stars in the universe, so what if it’s four stars out of all existing stars? That would be a horrible movie.

Movie critics are inconsistent, blurbs are unreliable at best, and thumbs are better for biting (Shakespeare, too? Wow, I’m on fire). I think I’m just going to rely on my friends for movie reviews. If they tell me a movie is really good or funny maybe I’ll check it out, or if they give it two prehensile tails, then that would be cool too.