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Movie reviews by James
Teitelbaum
Introduction...
I don't really watch television at all, but I do love
movies, and always have. I probably watch about two to three
films per
week, as DVDs, downloaded films, old VHS tapes, or
occasionally actually sitting in the theatre.
Having written some movie reviews for my web site and my old sci-fi
'zine, I felt like I wanted to write more
about
cinema. I
decided to write at least one short paragraph about every film
I saw from January
2006 to January 2008, as a way of developing a voice as a film critic,
perhaps in order to get a gig writing about movies for a magazine or
web site.
These reviews are featured on this web site. The long list is here.
Some of these reviews are shorter than they deserve to be, some of them
are longer. I tried to get a balance going between in-depth
writing and capsule reviews, in order to explore both styles. As
far as the
craft of pure film writing is concerned, I am truly proud of perhaps
20% of this material, but am making an effort as more time passes to
improve the depth and quality of every single new review. These
reviews are by no means a comprehensive record of my favorite
films. In fact, a lot of
these
films stink. The reviews are merely my own film diary over two
years.
The raison d'etre of these scribblings was justified when I was
hired to write DVD reviews for www.dvdcompare.net starting in November
of 2007. I had
absolutely no say as to what I was sent for review, and in almost all
cases, I was asked to look at things that I had no interest in.
Contrast this to the reviews here on my own site: be they highbrow art
films or mindless comedies, there is something in each film that drew
me to it, that made me think I might enjoy it (sometimes I did,
sometimes I didn't). This made things interesting. I did
about 130 reviews for dvdcompare over about a year, and then resigned.
This resignation was for three reasons:
1. They required that I catalog every single DVD in its entirety,
providing a description for every included trailer, deleted scene, and
commentary. This became quite tedious, and it also took time away
from actually writing about the films, which was my key interest.
And, I had to write a certain number of words about audio and video
quality for each DVD. Sometimes I had legitimate things to say
about
these topics, but often, in order to make my word-quota, I felt like a
high school student trying to bullshit his science teacher with a bunch
of technobabble just to complete the assignment. Not good.
2. The editors there were uncommunicative, and also did awful things
like changing my proper grammar to bad grammar, and adding whole
paragraphs (badly written ones, at that) without telling me. This
is editorial prerogative, but when it is done so frequently, and so
ham-fistedly, it is time for this writer to move on. They also
added letter-grades for the films (I didn't get to pick the grades)
which I disagree with in concept, and often disagreed with in specific
choice of grade.
3. I got a better offer:
In November 2008, I started writing for Film Threat, and I am thrilled.
Film Threat started life in the 1980s as a very cool, edgy, irreverent
cinema magazine, which I read avidly into the 1990s. Now they are
web-only, but I love writing for a magazine that I read and respected
for many years. Being the new guy at FT, I am still getting the
crappiest movies to review (same thing happened in my early days at
DVDcompare... the veterans get the good stuff... makes sense), but I am
looking forward to good times ahead. No letter grades, no timing
every trailer, no video quality bullshitting - just honest (and
occasionally snarky) comments on the films. Cool.
And now, click here to go to James at the
movies, 2006-2008!
Or click here to go to the
Psychotronic section (and and explanation of what it is!).
Or
click here to go the Rewind / DVD Compare forums
(do a search for my name to get to my reviews)
And finally, here are my Film Threat scribblings
(do a search for my name to get
to my reviews)
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Please click on all text links in the
reviews to go to Amazon.com -
I
get pennies when you order, even
if you order something other than what
you originally
clicked on.
In fact, next time you want to get
something from Amazon, please come here first
and click through one of
my links
or search boxes.
Thanks!.
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