Tuesday, June 30, 2009

A response

The following is a letter I wrote to Mr. Timothy Callahan. Of Comic Book Resources.
The links to his original review, and article that addresses said review can be found here:

http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=21809

And the original review of X-factor 44:

http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=user_review&id=1116



"
To: Timothy Callahan
This is a response to your review of your X-Factor Review. While I appreciate your attempt to either defend yourself/your review or possibly just clarify your sentiments, however I had just a few small problems with it.

I am a type of reader who reads a month worth of books at a time due to a sub-service that I use; this leads me to look at reviews scores for the books that I know I'm getting, and read the review for the ones that I might not necessarily read otherwise. I find it important to get multiple perspectives on a given book so that I'm not simply receiving a single critics opinion but instead am getting a wider range of reviews. So rather than read just what IGN has to say, I also visit CBR and several other blogs whose writers have demonstrated good, well-written, and accurate reviews.

There are elements to your review style that are particularly off-tasting. that is to say that is always sounds like you are trying to be pretentious about your witting. Now it's possible you actually are pretentious in which case I'm sorry you can't see the insulting and condescending nature of it and worse that you fail to see that by phrasing your opinions in that manner that you are turning some potential audience members away. Part of this also comes from your overuse of [sic] to the point where it loses its value of being an indicator of the author, not the transcribers, error and instead sounds like your trying to point out that all of your quotes(or near all of them) have typos in them and that also comes across as rude. But that is simply where I come from.

You also go on to propose that you yourself are objective and can make an objective statement about the quality of book that is produced. This is of course complete and totally nonsense much akin to the idea that someone can be unbiased because what a single person experiences is going to be different than another and thus the way they approach anything is different to the point where even if both parties use the same method and standards, the varying degrees of such a standard(which, yes, defeats the purpose of a standard) that a given person approaches it with are going to vary. Now it's very likely your reading this going SHUT UP KID, I KNOW THIS. Maybe less angrily, but the idea is likely there I hope. I simply wanted to remind you of the concept briefly.

What I truly don't understand is how you can say that the art is good and that the witting is okay and still believe that it is on par with a story whose witting and art are horrible(read:Ultimatum).

Moreso, I found your almost personal attacks on David's sentiments to be in bad taste and imply that you could do better than David. Now I have no reason to believe otherwise on this, but based on the review I read and this article I find this hard to believe. You do a similar attack on another reviewer who wrote a positive review for the same thing. If being objective means you can attack other writters for writting a review, which while can be based on objectivity is more likely to be based on opinion because different opinions do exist.

So no, I don't think you have "the worst taste in comics ever" or any nonsense like that. I simply believe that the way you convey your opinions and your opinions that your opinions are fact or fact based, and not opinions based on facts, leads to a less successful reviewer and will make sure to check who writes the review before I read it and choose to not read your reviews.

Ultimately, what I said here has no barring on you. It won't affect you because what I've said isn't going to change your opinion. Its just me stating an opinion reviewing your opinion that is a review of your own review which is in turn your opinion.
Have a nice day.
"


Why did I choose to post this? Because I felt the need to demonstrate an opinion and also a review of a review. I'll try and post a review online tommarow(or rather later today) that will give you a better idea of how I'm going to be writing comic reviews from now on.


ps: THIS IS AN OPINION.

Sunday, June 28, 2009

Transformers 2...

A review in a sentence. Racist piece of crap, but the explosions are cool.


....Second sentence, Jetfire kicks ass.


Alright so I should probally explain and quallify those statements.

The first thing I should warn is that This, plus Up, plus Gran Torino resulted in my new found theorm that old people are once again(?) cool. Jetfire gets almost all of the good lines and despite bein' a horrible stereotype, complete with cane and beard(yeah somehow the robot has a beard) he's most certainly the coolest character in the film.

Why it's racist you ask? Skid and mudflap. youtube some footage. Any line of dialogue is horrible and sterotyping in addition to that one of them has a gold tooth. there is a character in this meat shop(owned by the Sector seven agent from the first film and his mother) and the worker is black, 40s-50s and has horrible buck teeth, that are clearly fake, and a line about him working for new teeth. Shia's latino roomate from college spends most of the movie just screaming like a woman. This is one of the few movies where nearly every supporting character of a non-white ethnicity is supposed to be comic relief and worse isn't even that funny.

I'm not going to even talk much about the plot, not that theres much to be spoiled, but because it is so incoherent and illogical that after nearly every plot point, they expect you to basicly forget about it because if you think too much about it it ceases to make sense. Example. there is a pretender transformer, a transformer that pretends to be a person(aka a transformenator), but they never explain it. I had to look it up to figure it out because the movie either assumes you know what it is or that your not going to remember it.
The movie has two halves and stops to figure out where they have to go for the second half. This is after a fairly impresive threeway fight with optimus, starscream, and megatron so I assume they expect you to still be on the high from the fight when in reality you feel as if the moment is just lost.
Theres also way too much crude humor.

the good is limited to: Devestator(a transformer made of 5 transformers) who looks awesome but is on screen so little that it doesn't make it beter. Optimus in the last fight. Not going to spoil things but its pretty awesome. The aforementioned fight in the woods. Megatron and Starscream hanging out for the entire movie. and Jetfire.

So I give the movie a 2.1 out of 10 overal.
That said, if you have to see it, rent it when it comes out. I'll likely buy it on blu-ray just so I can watch those awesome fight scenes(If michael bay does one thing good, it's explosions, Honestly I much rather him be a director on action sequences than a number of other directors but everything else he's bad at). I can't blame Bay for some of the mistakes(those go to the writters) but I can blame him on alot of it, so Fuck you Michael Bay. Fuck you.





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Saturday, June 27, 2009

Uhhh, My bad

So It's summer now. I'm bored.
I may have failed in the past, and am likely to fail at this again, but damn it I'm going to try.
So one thing I am for sure doing is converting every months worth of Twitter posts into a blog. Yes pointless, no it won't take away from my other writings(assuming any are done) and then there was a third idea but I forgot it.

Few notes, if you notice typos, as in non usage errors( such as your, you're, or There, Their, they're) then likely it means I've typed it up in IE8 beta, rather than Firefox as I typically do.

Soon I'll add my list of top 100 films and Directors, and will likely make it a weekly(possibly daily if I feel ambition overcome me) Go through one by one explaining my choices. I'll likely start at the top of the list. number one, and work my way down as the higher numbered movies are more likely to shift to spot than the lower ones. I'll be working my way through some films this summer and thusly will be doing some work on the list and then will give an updated list at the end of the summer.

Again, I might be aiming for more than I can chew, but with no permanent job a bunch of free time this was the best I could do.

So I guarantee a review of something tomorrow. Don't know what, might be a napkin but damn it I'm going to do it!