For those of you who follow my twitter or facebook accounts, this is mostly old news. But to the rest of you…
A new project is on the horizon! Lately, I’ve been spending an inordinate amount of time watching movies from the hot tub. Quick synopsis: I recently bought a hot tub and put it on the other side of our large kitchen window. On the inside we’ve put the TV and rigged up a speaker that we can easily take outside. Recently I added this canopy/gazebo thing which let us watch during a heavy rainstorm yesterday and a surprise snowstorm today. Throw in some beer and the towel rack and it makes an incredible movie watching experience. Next paycheck I’ll be adding a 50″ plasma TV and some permanent outdoor speakers to make it truly ridiculous.
Now, for a couple years I’ve been wanting to create a casual movie review site that addressed some of the issues I have with most of the other review sites out there. My main problems with the other sites is that they are usually either an amalgamation of community reviews with no rhyme or reason, or they are the opinion of a single critic (or worse, the site is a collection of reviews by a few reviewers, but each item is reviewed by a single person). In my opinion, this is not an accurate or effective way to gauge the quality of anything.
So, to address this, I’ve been wanting to make a site where a few regular reviewers post intelligent reviews for each movie. Viewing a movie’s page shows you what each reviewer thinks about it, with both a blurb and some numerical rating systems. Naturally, each reviewer will have differing opinions, which is what makes this work; the value comes from the users’ ability to identify with a certain reviewer’s point of view, either wholly or on a category by category basis. As you read reviews, the site will track whose opinions your own views line up with, and can recommend movies to you based on that. It’s like having a friend who knows your tastes suggest movies to you because they know what kind of things you like.
I want to take this deeper than just an overall score and drill all the way down to a category level. For example: One thing I value more than most other people is that a story ‘plays by its own rules’. This is different than a story’s plausibility in our reality. Let me explain in detail. Part of every story told is the setting — in its broadest form it is the universe in which a story takes place. Every universe has a set of rules; for example, star wars is set in a universe powered by ‘the force’ where things like swords made of light are possible. I’m 100% fine with this. Where I start to get upset is when the characters do things (or don’t do things) that don’t fit the universe in which they live. Why oh why has no jedi just turned off his lightsaber in the middle of a fight, swung past the other jedi’s block, and turned it back on somewhere inside his opponent’s chest? Remember X-Men 3, when Magneto carries the golden gate bridge to alcatraz to land his army? I’m fine with magneto being able to do that; what frosts my balls is that he takes an army of mutants and sacrifices them on the marines there, instead of SMASHING THE ENTIRE ISLAND OVER AND OVER WITH THE GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE. They didn’t need anything there; all they wanted was to kill the kid inside. He just wouldn’t do it the way it happened in the movie - they simply put it there to make a fight scene happen. I see this as very sloppy and lazy writing. So, if you feel the same way I do about this kind of thing, the site can learn that maybe you identify with a reviewer X’s general movie ratings, but agree with my reviews specifically when it comes to continuity/plausibility (there is probably a great word for this that I don’t know).
That brings us back to the new project — I’ve been thinking about such a review site for a while, and I’m starting to watch tons of movies with a semi-regular crew of hot tub goers (hottubbers?). I’m already sharing my opinion of each flick with anyone within earshot, so I figure I might as well put it to good use and rope as friends in as I can. So I bought up diveinmoviereview.com and away we go.
I’ll be building the site one of these days, but for now I need two things: suggestions on what things are important in a movie review, and regular/semi-regular reviewers excited to watch a bunch of movies. It isn’t even critical that you watch them from the actual hot tub, but c’mon, if you have the opportunity, why wouldn’t you?
1 response so far ↓
1 leorockway // Apr 16, 2009 at 5:05 pm
I agree 100% with you on the “play by its own rules” thing. Sometimes a thing like that can ruin what otherwise could be a somewhat entertaining story.
The example I always use is: why do Harry Potter and friends go back in time to save the life of an animal but not to save the life of a friend or a relative?
I remember that once I had to read a novel for my English Literature class and I told my teacher that I thought the ending of the novel was not believable. My teacher said she didn’t understand how I could say that, considering I was always reading SciFi and Fantasy. I told her something like “I’m okay with Christine being a possessed murderous car, but I’m not okay with a character that in a single page at the end of the novel goes against its own character and denies the other 300 pages I had to read”. The bad thing is that she still couldn’t understand what I meant.
About your site, I would like to review movies but unfortunately I’ll have to rain check the hot tub offer. If you ever decide to set up a hot tub / movie theater on this side of the equator you let me know
You must log in to post a comment.