I'm wondering what I'll do for movie reviews now that the Filthy Critic is dead. Even though some of his reviews were a little gratuitous, they always seemed to be right-on. If he disliked something, then I typically disliked it. If he liked something, more often than not, I thought it was pretty good too. And his reviews were pretty amusing. He certainly had a refreshingly original concept of telling it like it was. When something sucks, it sucks. (Take a look at the "Quote Whore of the Week" sidebar in the lower right of his site for a quick comparison between Filthy and a "normal" movie critic.) He said over and over again that Hollywood makes crappy movies because they have no incentive to do anything besides make money. I never thought about that until he brought it up. I always thought quality automatically meant success, but I guess not. He felt that everyone (Hollywood as well as critics) kept this not-so-secret arrangement alive with smarmy insincerity, or outrigth deception. So when he reviewed a movie which sucked, it got one honest finger. I can respect that.

Is Filthy really dead? Yes. And no. I did a little searching during lunch. The main thing I found was this interview with Matt Weatherford, Filthy's normal alter ego. It was apparently given on , 5 days after Filthy died wobbling down the slow lane.

I never knew Filthy's real name until I read that interview. It's nowhere on his web site. So was Matt dead? A little more searching leads to Ben Garvey's web site (which also links to the interview above; I would have rather been to Ben's site first and gotten it all out of the way in one shot). Ben emailed Filthy's cronies at bigempire.com about Matt. Turns out that Filthy is indeed dead, Matt not so much.

I'm glad that no non-virtual people got hurt, but I'm also sad that I won't get to see what Filthy thinks about the latest movies.