New Site

We're making a change to the way that we release work for our classes. The main lessons (the things that we'll do in class each day) will now be found at the site "Optimal Beneficial Moreover Detrimental: Classroom." We're keeping this site, with a slightly different name, in order to release a reading a day for students to practice their reading at home. Each post will contain a link to a reading, along with a list of assignments that can be completed for that reading.

Monday, December 17, 2012

15.1. Reviewing the Reviewers - Metacritic.com RI9.


A great way to find a movie reviewer that you like is to check out a review that they have written for a movie that you've already seen. I do this a great deal, too, read reviews of movie's I have already seen. I like comparing what I thought with the reviewer, and having a fight in my mind about the movie.

One of the million great things about the internet has been that it lets you choose a reviewer that you like from hundreds. When I was a kid, the Newark Star-Ledger had two film reviewers, one I really liked and one I thought was a total idiot and a bad writer, but I had no other options - it was the only paper that came to our house. New sites called "review aggregators" have sprung to gather many, many reviews and average them into a consensus. While the website "Rotten Tomatoes" is the most famous one, because of its funny name, I use another well-known one, Metacritic, to check out what many critics think of the same movie. These sites have gained power in the movie industry itself, as this article  (I found the link on Wikipedia) explains pretty well.

Directions
During class today:

 1. Visit Metacritic and choose a movie that you've already seen.
2. Read three of the reviews - the most positive, the most negative, and any one in the middle.
3. Write a logical (SEE) paragraph - which of the three reviews best matched your own assessment of the movie?

 For tonight (if you don't have internet access right now, make sure to print a hard copy before you go):

1. Read a different review by the same reviewer with whom you most agreed. You can read another review for a movie that you've already seen or choose something that you are trying to decide whether to invest time and money in.
2. Answer the following in complete sentences in a Google Drive file:

  • What was the author's central thesis about this movie?
  • What was their best explanation for why they loved/liked/disliked/hated the movie?
  • What was their best example from the movie that they used to try and prove that it was great/good/bad/terrible?
  • Did the review persuade you to see/avoid the film? Why (or why not)?



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