Erik Childress, at efilmcritic.com, has a nice takedown on ultrahack Peter Travers, Rolling Stone’s utterly useless film critic.

Childress zooms in on one of any lame critic’s most annoying tics: Using a bland assertion of contemporary mediocrity to overly praise a new piece of corporate product.

The evidence is this blurb, taken from Travers’ review of The Dark Knight, in the current ads for the film:

“A thunderbolt is about to rip into the blanket of bland we call summer movies. FEVERISH ACTION? Check. DAZZLING SPECTACLE? Check. DEVILISH FUN? Check. Just hang on for a shock to the system. Every actor brings his “A” game to show the lure of the dark side. The haunting and visionary Dark Knight soars on the wings of untamed imagination.”

I suppose it’s a minor thing, but it’s not a bland summer of movies. Last year, it was all sequels, threequells, fourquells. This year, there’ve been a lot of relatively novel entrants, from Iron Man to Speed Racer to The Incredibile Hulk to SATC to Wanted to Hellboy II.

Childress then goes back and notes that Travers own reviews of that summer of bland have been … pretty darn enthusiastic.