The Filthy Critic (person)

"I get people that e-mail me and say, “You’re the only real honest critic out there,” and it’s like no, I’m so dishonest, I’m so full of shit-- but if me being full of shit is the same as what they want to hear, then they think it’s honesty. It’s fine with me."

The Filthy Critic is dead - it says so on his website. In fact, it now says "The Filthy Critic is still dead," presumably because so many people have been emailing bigempire.com asking if Filthy really did die in a bicycle accident or if this is another of his jokes. I was curious about this myself, and the 20 to 30 hits a day I was getting on my blog from people typing "Filthy Critic dead?" into Google spurred me into doing some very rudimentary research.

It turns out that the Filthy Critic is indeed dead. However, the man who created him and wrote all his reviews is alive and well, and has merely decided to bring to an end the artificially prolonged life of a character he dreamed up one day with his friends - the obnoxious, foul-mouthed movie fan who manages to capture the essence of what there is to say about a movie without using any of the normal language of artistic appreciation or criticism.

Filthy's creator's name is (apparently) Matt Weatherford, and he is a writer who has written jokes for, among other shows, The Simpsons, and who also writes fiction and screenplays as well as the occasional piece for magazines, including Rolling Stone. He says that he never expected the Filthy Critic to run for very long, and that he was bored with the concept after the first year of the five he kept it going. He doesn't think he is very funny - somewhat modestly, he says that he thinks he has written maybe five funny reviews. He explains his popularity, therefore, by saying that most people don't know what's funny - they only know what other people think is funny, and laugh along with it.

According to other sources at bigempire.com, there is no chance of the Filthy Critic doing a soap opera-style resurrection, but I'm sure we'll be hearing more from Matt Weatherford in the future.

"Yeah, this guy can write movie reviews. Anyone can write movie reviews. But also, these are the only words that this guy knows to express his opinion. And as conceited as it is for me to say it, the point was that even with that limited lexicon, I can get my point across. Even by being vulgar I can get my point across, and people understand what I’m trying to say. And that’s kind of what the point was."

UPDATE: He's back! No explanation. Let's let the above writeup stand for its historical value.