| Quotables |
"Only I wasn't steering anything, not even myself. I just bumped from my hotel to work and to parties and from parties to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolleybus. ... I felt
very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo."
-- Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar |
| |
"On the surface, it sounds irresponsible, but to flourish in a rapidly changing world, you actually need to make more mistakes. Fail quickly. Fail often. If you do something and it
doesn't work, just recover in a hurry and try something else. ... Help develop a culture that is willing to fail its way to the future."
-- Price Pritchett, Culture Shift |
|
"There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room. It's like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction -- every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it's really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and that excitement at about a million miles an hour."
-- Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar |
|
| |
| |
| |
|
| mythbusters |
| Sunday, June 21, 2009 |
So I'm sitting here s-l-o-w-l-y working on my review of The Proposal for Movie-Popcorn, and several things occur to me, not the least of which is that it's getting more and more difficult to write movie reviews every week. That's why I can't always do it. I need to get back in the swing, though.
When you announce yourself as a movie critic on the Internet -- a position, by the way, which requires no formal training or education whatsoever, but which benefits from a strong writing background, if not one in broadcasting and film -- a number of misconceptions immediately pop into everyone's heads. I will take a few moments to debunk the most common ones.
Myth #1: You've seen everything.
"WHAT?! You mean you've never seen [ title goes here ]?! And you call yourself a movie critic?!"
Because as I was saying before, reviewing movies on the Internet requires no particular background. And somehow, it's easy for people to forget that even though you are a "critic" now, you haven't always been one, just like your preacher wasn't always a preacher, if you know what I mean. No, I haven't seen everything, and I don't care to. That's not what it's about.
Myth #2: You will see everything that comes out.
Now that would be a neat trick. This coming week alone, there are two movies opening in wide release and six in limited release; God only knows how many indie films are hitting one screen in New York, two screens in L.A., etc. Do you have the money to see all that shit? Do you have the time to track down theaters showing the ones in limited release? Then, do you have the time to write up all the reviews? You see where I'm going with this. Even Roger Ebert doesn't see everything; poke around on his web site and you'll see what I mean.
Myth #3: You automatically get advance screenings.
You mean putting together your own web site doesn't guarantee you'll see stuff before everyone else? And you have to pay for 'em too, what kinda deal is that? I've never looked into it, but I have a feeling you would need some pretty serious credentials to persuade a theater chain to let you screen things before they're released. More often, movie critics attend press screenings, and although the credential requirement isn't usually as stiff, such screenings don't go on much around here, at least that I'm aware of. No, we here at Movie-Popcorn are subject to the same release dates you are.
Understandable misconceptions, all... at least, until you actually think about them. What we try to do is figure out which movies are going to be the biggest draws of the weekend and hit those reviews as early as we can. We don't always succeed; sometimes we miss the mark on what's popular, and other times, life just gets in the way. That's been happening a lot lately, but going forward, I hope to make the rest of 2009 a pretty solid review year for Movie-Popcorn. Like blogging, there's no better way to build an audience than by consistently writing.
|
posted by N.T. @ 6:35 PM  |
|
|
|
|
|
