Week 4

Progress Is Picking Up

Wow. Writing a movie review is very tough and more time consuming than I realized. It took me the whole week to do one movie, working on it about three hours a day. I was expecting for the movies to take less time to watch and the review part to take more time, but it was the other way around. While watching Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, after every scene I would have to stop and write my notes on the different components of that part, like music, color scheme, and analysis. It was so slow that I watched twenty-thirty minutes of the movie in a 2-3 hour time frame. By the end, I had taken a little more than 10 pages of notes. Here is my review on Pee Wee's Big Adventure

If you can't access this video through Blogger, click here.

Looking back at this review, I have come up with some things that I want to improve for my next movie reviews:

• First, I want to have more personality. I felt that I completely lacked it in this movie review. Having personality will make my movie reviews more interesting and they would represent me the best.
• Second, I want to have better transitions. I thought that my review was really choppy due to a lack of transitional words and ideas.
• Third, as I was looking more into the two greatest movie reviewers, Siskel and Ebert, I noticed that their reviews had a split of around 30% analysis and 70% criticism. I did not mean to do this, but in my movie review, it was about 50-50. So for my next movie review, I am going to make sure that I focus more on the critical part of movie reviewing than the analytical.
• The three bullets above are general improvements that I need to make on all of my movie reviews. But I want to specialize in different components in each movie review, then in my last movie review, compile them all. For my next few reviews, I want to focus on:
• Quality of Acting- Acting performance is a huge part in what makes movies great. A bad cast can lead to a movie that is awkward, boring, and/or a movie so bad that it is hilarious (Sharknado...). Siskel and Ebert seem to talk about if the actor/actress fit their role in the movie.
  

  

  How is this a movie

  
  

And for the few reviews after that, I want to focus on:

• Comedy Aspect- One of the main focuses in this project is to focus on comedy movies. The big question is, does the movie fit its genre? I want to focus on what makes good and true comedy, which is more than if it is funny or not.

I believe that by focusing on these two key components in a movie review, I can become advanced in detecting how they come into play in movies. Focusing on a specific aspect of a movie will help me improve at writing reviews more than trying to do them all at once in each movie. It will be like...what’s that idiom? Something with having too many eggs in a basket? Ya, well, all in all, I don’t want to be juggling too many things at once.

I am now on a roll with movie reviews. I went into reviewing Pee Wee’s Big Adventure with just research and no experience but now, I will be able to review more movies in less time so I can get back on track with my goal. With my method of having one component to focus on, I can learn faster, and in less time. Time is money, and I am frugal.
(Click here to see the notes that I took for Pee Wee's Big Adventure. THERE ARE SPOILERS)