RE: It's Not A Decent Harry Potter Movie

On Thu, 10 Jan 2002, John Hannon wrote:

> If I may offer just a bit of adivce, writing-wise (and this IS intended in a
> helpful way),

I appreciate the attempt.

> you seem to have reviewed a movie without offering a single
> concrete example as to what you don't like about it.

Er...the "british child actors" bit seems pretty concrete. So there's a
*single* concrete example.

And to put the point I made to Paul a bit more concretely, my omitting
detail was intentional. I *could* go on and on in great detail (HP has a
wealth of awfulness from the most general to the tiniest detail.) I just
didn't feel like it :)

I linked to rottontomatoes for all the movies I mentioned, I
believe. Which should give folks a chance to get more detail (albeit, I
admit, mostly positively slanted in the cast of HP and LotR).

>  Good review-writing on
> any subject ought to describe in *some* detail the object the author is
> reacting to.

Well, maybe. Even if a hard and fast rule, hard and fast rules are
*sometimes* fruitfully broken (not saying that this is a case, but it's
not enough, imho, to point to a rule).

I didn't really think of it as a review, but as a reactioin. Monkeyfist
metadata isn't fine grained enough to make these distinctions.

I thought our reactions were at least mildly amusing, although I'm
perfectly willing to believe that this draft wasn't tight enough to milk
it for all its worth.

I think I may be suffering from crapical overload. It's like George
Bush...critiquing him in detail just seems so *pointless*. No one cares,
no one is listening, and the problems are so grotesquely *obvious* that
they shouldn't have to be pointed out!

(Just take his recent use of an ethnic slur to refer to Pakistanis in his
alledged attempt to *head off an nuke exchange* betweeen Pakistan and
India. I know Kendall's going to write this up, but I'm finding it hard to
get motivated about it.)

Thanks for the advice, though. I'm afraid it really boils down to
Paul's: rewrite the whole thing from scratch (almost) :)

FWIW, the orginal piece was a bit of fiction describing the extremely
counterfactual world where there is a good HP movie. Nader also won, there
;)

It was also intended merely as a palate cleanser to get me back into the
flow of writing for MF. I'm not convinced it's *so* bad as to be not worth
pubbing *at all* :)

Cheers,
Bijan.