Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Rabbit-man's guide to reviewing

Hello kids it’s me your uncle rabbit-man, and I’m here to lecture you all on the process of writing a review! I know you all are disappointed that I have abandoned my classic blog post structure of a paragraph justifying an insane rant, followed by an insane rant, but just like an insane homeless man without a recent acid trip to describe, I can’t think of a rant today. So instead I am going to discuss the process of writing a review. I promise it will hurt less than being eaten to death by a herd of ravenous puppies.

Alright if you are going to write a review you must make an important choice before you even put pen to paper, or finger to keyboard, or piss to snow, whatever the analogy is these days, and that choice is whether you will write a review with a numeric score, or grade at the end or not. Now both of these methods have their advantages and disadvantages, for example writing a review with a grade will allow you to simply rant about whatever you want as long as it is tangentially related to the subject matter, and you can just put a grade at the end to tell the reader what you meant. This also has a drawback, because most readers are either smart, busy, or illiterate, and will simply skip to your score and ignore the rest of your review. The flipside of this choice is writing a review without attaching a score, when writing one of these you must be careful to make sure that you convey a judgment on the subject that you are reviewing since you don’t have the luxury of just writing a score. Naturally not including a score will force those lazy bastards who read your reviews to actually read your review.

Now that we have gotten that out of the way let’s get to the next most important part of writing a review, coming up with an opening line. In today’s society of fast food, 24 hour news, and instantaneous access to internet porn, people do not have the attention span to read a long review about any subject, and the first line is probably the only thing that many readers will read in your review. In other words take care to write this it will literally make or break your review. Fortunately writing a first line is easy: just make a vague and generic observation about the subject “The conflict of profiting off of war, is explored through the lens of a superhero origin story in the summer’s first true blockbuster Iron Man.” Feel free to describe the plot of what you are reviewing, if there is one, but just make sure that whatever you are saying is vague. The first line has to be vague because you want to confuse the reader into reading more of your writing. Another method of doing this could be to use a question. Normally “who would have thought…” works pretty well, like “Who would have thought that an asshole could be so entertaining to watch?” and then write your review.

Now you get to the meat and potatoes of your review the part where you judge something. Now let me tell you judging stuff is fun, there’s no better way to make yourself feel good than putting something down. Next time you find out that your pet fluffly died make fun of some little kid’s drawing, or next time you find out that your track time doesn’t qualify you for the special Olympics, make fun of a little kid’s sandcastle. Don’t you feel better? It’s pretty much the same thing with reviewing. Think, if you get that much joy out of making fun of a small child how much more joy will you get when you make fun of a $100 million dollar movie? Now I know what you are thinking “Rabbit-man reviews aren’t always negative, critics do write a lot of positive reviews.” Which brings me to my next point: If you are going to write a positive review, write it so that you get your name on the movie poster or DVD cover. Just put in a bunch of sentences that end in exclamation points like “Iron man is a laugh a minute thrill ride of intense pleasure!!!” or “I count two moments in my life as my happiest my marriage, and the birth of my son, and the two hours I spent watching Iron man has surpassed both of them!!” or the classic “Iron man is better than sex!!!” See it’s easy, and if the movie is particularly bad like Uwe Boll’s In the name of a king a dungeon siege tale, then you can write a glowing review and know that your quote will make it on the DVD for sure, seriously there was only like one good review for that movie.

So I have now taught you dear reader everything that I know about reviewing. Be sure to use your powers for good, and never stray from the righteous path I have outlined for you. Oh and I actually wrote this article so I could review Iron man but I got a little bit side tracked. Yeah it was a good movie, but the ending fight kind of sucked, the movie would have been better if it just focused on Tony Stark, and not Iron man. I give it 11331 points.

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