RE: It's Not A Decent Harry Potter Movie

Perhaps your omission of detail was intentional, but it doesn't help your
piece.  And I shouldn't have qualified my earlier comments with the phrase
"review-writing."  I wasn't criticizing it your piece strictly as review
specifically, but as a piece of writing.   It doesn't matter a bit what
you're writing about or whether it's a review or not: not including any
detail about your subject makes for uninteresting prose.  As it stands, all
the reader gets from your piece is that you and your mom hated the Harry
Potter movie.  We have no idea why, other than your general dislike of
british child actors and the lack of any blue lips in the film.  OK, it's
not a review, it's a reaction....what are you reacting to?  How,
specifically, do *you* relate to the *subject* of your piece?  What makes
any piece of writing interesting is hearing, *in detail* another person's
unique point of view about a given subject.  A flat denunciation is boring,
even if we agree.

Perhaps critiquing in excruciating detail *is* pointless.  Critiquing with
no detail whatsoever seems to me even more so.


-----Original Message-----
From: Bijan Parsia [mailto:bparsia-vEoVa6Jh+/J4piUD7e9S/[email protected]]
Sent: Thursday, January 10, 2002 11:19 AM
To: 'bonobos-4GNy1lrxftmrG/[email protected]'
Subject: RE: [Bonobos] 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.

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