Twenty-five Words, More or Less
I seem to have stopped doing movie reviews, of whatever word quantity. This was not a conscious choice, but now that I think about it — and look at the backlog awaiting treatment, which currently includes Broken Flowers, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, L.A. Confidential, The Constant Gardener, Dodgeball, Fargo, The French Connection, Serenity, Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, and Crash — perhaps it should be retroactively made into one.
Here's the "If For No Other Reason" reason, lifted directly from Spit Up and Shut Down:
[T]he more trashy film reviews I write the more neurotic I get that I'm going to get caught talking shit about a prospective employer.There are other reasons, both pro and con. These probably include but are not limited to the fact that it's a useful personal record of what I've seen and what I thought at the time, the fact that out of all jefftidball.com blog entries they're generally the weakest and least interesting, and the fact that writing them usually seems more like homework than hobby.
I'm still undecided on this.
Comments
Hmmm. fascinating question. I just caught up with a bit of a backlog now on my own reviews, actually, which I'll be posting shortly. I think that the main "pros" for me - and the reasons I glommed on your clever idea in the first place - is that they force me to process the essence of how I felt about the movie I just saw, and distill the experience into a compact opinion. Plus people seem to enjoy reading them, or at least pretend they do, when I post (and I know I enjoy reading yours). But the point about not wanting to say bad things about future employers makes much sense to me, as does the one about it feeling like a chore.
Me, I say it all comes down to whether you enjoy doing them. Maybe you should just do the ones you feel like doing, and not the ones you don't. After all, blogging isn't all about self-discipline.
;)
1. Writing film reviews shows that you think critically about film. This is what a reader takes away about you, moreso than what you critically thought.
2. Reviewing two or more movies in a single article makes each new review dynamic and unpredictable. Let the circumstances dictate what movies get lumped together. Thus you review more movies in less time.
3. Write subjectively. Be shameless about it. This makes the review about you, recognizes that one's reaction to a movie is often altered by happenstance and gives you a certain buffer of bias that tells potential employers that though you didn't enjoy the movie, you're not pretending to be the final determiner of its quality.
4. Paring down a review to 25 words gives the review a sense of lean authority and accuracy. You want room to waffle a bit. It's enough that your reviews are simply "very short," rather than a pre-determined word count.
5. Harry Knowles is featured on movie posters and is becoming a producer. He doesn't understand how punctuation or capital letters work. Your reviews are not so likely to ruin your career.
6. Your movie reviews make me reevaluate my own opinions of films. When a new one is posted, I say "Ah! At last!" We like your reviews.