Just as Hollywood once used the dog days of August to dump movies that no one wanted to see (now they do that all summer long) so magazines seem to try new “advertising synergies” in this bleak month, possibly because they hope no one is looking. The New Yorker just published its first single-sponsor issue with Target and though reps for the magazine claimed no one would care, I for one find the effect of nothing but red-and-white-target themed adverts surprisingly monochormatic. I feel like I’m reading something sponsored by the Soviet state.

More suspicious to me is the special pull-out section in the September Vanity Fair (which hit newssstand about a week ago) listing the 50 Greatest Films of All Time. First, there is only one sponsor, Turner Classic Movies, but that could possibly mean that it was just a neat little advertising coup for someone at Conde Nast. (If it had happened at Entertainment Weekly, a Time Warner publication, it would raise no more suspicion than the usual business-as-usual synergistic hand jobs.) But then there is the list itself. Much of it is pedestrian stuff that any freshman film school student would automatically cough up: Amarcord, Casablanca, Grand Illusion… you know. Then there are the exclusions: nothing directed by Truffaut, Scorsese, Huston — and the only Germans mentioned are the ones who came to Hollywood. But most egregious of all are the let us say controversial choices that made the list. Die Hard. Animal House. Old fucking School.

In fairness to VF, the cover of this insert reads “VF Presents the 50 Greatest Films of All Time, Plus Old School,” the latter separated with an asterisk. But something about the whole production stinks. The text seems to have been written by a summer intern (“film critics have been speculating about Blowup’s meaning for decades”); did VF film critic Bruce Handy really sign off on this? Did Graydon Carter? It looks and smells like a piece of advertorial, a kind of smash-and-grab that a magazine like VF, that likes to think of itself as serious about film, should be ashamed of. Instead they plugged the thing on the cover (no one noticed, what with Jennifer Aniston trying on one Brad’s old shirts there) — which is against ASME rules if it’s actually advertiser sponsored editorial. You could look it up.