This morning, critic Karina Longworth tweeted about a rather honest passage in THR’s Venice lineup piece, she wrote:
There’s some really weird commentary in this story about Ava DuVernay and her film which feels like an old text message that accidentally got published?
Describing DuVernay’s upcoming “Origin,” THR wrote that the film …
Sounds like another preachy sermon from DuVernay, who has really decided to completely destroy the promising filmmaking of "Middle of Nowhere" and "Selma" with rather bland projects.
Trades aren’t usually supposed to be opinionated when they report the news, so this obviously caused a few red flags and people started emailing THR — they eventually edited the article up to their standards.
Writer Ali Arikan then pointed out that this passage was stolen from a piece written by … yours truly, Jordan Ruimy! So, I gather, THR probably used my piece about the DuVernay film as a blueprint for their article, but accidentally forgot to delete the passage where I criticized DuVernay. Hilarious.
I couldn’t care less about THR stealing from me, but this had me spitting out my coffee this morning. I couldn’t stop chuckling.
Or course, then you had some idiots on Twitter claiming that THR and myself just used A.I. to write our pieces, which is absolute fake news. Do you really believe ChatGPT’s algorithm is designed to hate on Ava DuVernay?
This is actually the same article that had DuVernay sending me an email asking why I was hating so much on her filmmaking. I’m not kidding you. She was very polite about it, but was clearly irked by my criticism of her films.