Peter Travers is mad as hell and he won’t take it anymore.
“Can you believe it?,” the film critic rants and raves on Rolling Stone about the now-infamous “Shutter Island” push from Fall 2009 to February 2010. “Why? Why? Because Paramount, who put out two shit storms this year — “Transformers 2” and “G.I. Joe” — says , ‘we don’t have the money!’ Can you believe it? We don’t have the money for [Marty] Scorsese, but we can put out this crap??”
Travers saw “Shutter Island” and says, “It was great, it would have been a major Oscar contender, but because of this stupid lame excuse, we don’t see ‘Shutter Island’ in the year 2009.” But he really doesn’t say anything of substance to back this up.
Travers is a nice guy and gets maligned pretty badly as evinced by one of our contribs who says, “He’s a quote whore and also, he said that the deeply flawed ‘Gangs of New York’ was the best movie of the year.” Good point, ‘Gangs’ wouldn’t even make our Top 20 of that year (2002, a rich year for film). Others point out that he’s sort of friends with Scorsese too…
Either way, some, who were outraged by the 2010 bump — not us, “Shutter Island” read like a B-movie and feel Paramount is smart to angle “Up In The Air” instead for Oscar — will likely glom onto his thoughts to further fuel hate towards the studio’s “questionable” move. We guess this is our preemptive: don’t believe the [Travers] hype (though yes, an avuncular nice dude).