Leonard Maltin has been publishing his Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide under various different titles (The Movie and Video Guide, TV Movies, etc.) since 1969, although he didn’t start putting out annual updated editions until 1987. In 2005 he started publishing Leonard Maltin’s Classic Movie Guide, which only covers movies released in 1960 and before, mostly so he could save space in the annual editions. Either way, the standard annual edition is a pretty fat book, chock full of capsulized movie reviews that are about two or three sentences long, at most.
This past September at Fantastic Fest, Tim and Karrie League of the Alamo Drafthouse introduced me to the wonder of the Leonard Maltin Movie Game. If Maltin has any moxie, he might want to put out his own edition of this, complete with his smiling mug branded all over the box. Although chances are that you already have everything you need to play, right in your own home. Read on to find out how you can entertain friends, and poke fun at Maltin’s writing style, all in one evening.
What you need:
- Pens or pencils
- Paper or note cards
- One copy of any edition of Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide. Honestly, the pre-2005 editions are best because they’re stuffed with movies, and the reviews are tiny. If you don’t have one, you can usually find them for under a buck at any good used bookstore, or on the internet.
That’s it. No fancy dice or colored pawns or a funky playing board. Gather your friends around, hand out the paper and the writing utensils, and you’re good to go.
How to play:
Make sure everyone gets a minute or two to glance through the Guide if they aren’t familiar with it. You’ll want to read a couple of the reviews out loud (ignoring the actor and director name listings), just so everyone can get a sense of Maltin’s style. Here’s an example: “Abraham Lincoln, 1930: Huston is excellent in this sincere but static biography of Lincoln; can’t match Griffith’s silent masterpieces.” The key is to pick movies that no one in the group has heard of, and there are enough titles in this book to insure that’s true for years to come.
So, once everyone is fairly familiar, start the game. Arbitrarily decide who is going to be the first person to read from the book, and everyone else will play. The reader flips to a random page, and starts naming titles until you can find one that nobody is familiar with. Let’s say you end up choosing 1957’s Abandon Ship. Read the title out loud, not the description. Everyone then has to write down their own Maltin-esque review on a piece of paper and hand them in face down. While this is going on, the reader writes down the actual review, and shuffles it in with the rest of the answers.
After everyone has handed in an answer, the reader reads back all of the reviews in random order. Someone may have written something like this: “Slapstick comedy aboard an aging battleship struggling to pass inspection doesn’t hold water. Stunning performance from Donald O’Connor gets washed away with the rest of the film. ” And so on. The goal here is to ape Maltin’s style as closely as possible. Oddly enough, you’ll naturally fall into it after a round or two. The actual review in the guide for that movie is this, “Tyrone Power is officer suddenly in command of lifeboat holding survivors from sunken luxury liner. Tense, exciting study of people fighting to stay alive while exposed to savage seas and each other.”
After they’ve all of the reviews been read, everyone else has to individually vote on their favorite. Tally up all the votes at the end, and score it like this: Every time someone voted on your review, that’s a point, and if you voted on the correct Maltin review, that’s a point. Whoever scores the most points wins that round. Play for as many rounds as you like, or until you just can’t take it anymore.
It will quickly devolve into an effort to try and crack people up by writing extremely wacky reviews, or else someone will try to get ultra-serious and write the best Maltinized reviews ever. Board game nuts will recognize it as a variation of Balderdash, but for movie lovers it can’t be beat. Try it out over the upcoming holidays, and you’ll be spreading the word as well.
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