Wednesday, 22 January 2014

What is Your Magazine Review Attempting To Do?

When I write the review I want to attempt to engage the readers:

  • By a quoting the film like in Dirty Dancing a lot of reviewers used the famous quote "No one puts Baby in the corner!"
  • By finding the title and then in italics underneath summarising the film in a few words:
The House I Live In
Eugene Jarecki's devastating doc
  • Comment on the Acting/Voice skills,
  • Comment on the Director,
  • Comment on the Producers/Production Companies,
  • Include Memorable quotes,
  • Include the Release Date
  • Rate it out of 5 stars
  • A short Synopsis that doesn't give away too much of the movie
Outline of a Magazine Review:

  • Title: Includes the movie title
  • Subtitle: optional, but a great way of using the clever slogan like a movie quotation or a play on words
  • Opening Hook: Tease the Reader with a quote, or a question
  • Body: Synopsis, Facts, Opinion (in my case as I'm reviewing my own movie I think it's best to try and write it in the most unbiased way possible but this can be quite hard to do)
  • Conclusion: recommend it or warn against it

Yahoo.com say that these are the top 4 tips on how to write a successful Movie Review:

~Tips on Writing a Successful Movie Review 1. Make it apparent what movie you are reviewing right from the beginning. You don't have to necessarily include this in the opening paragraph, but you need to include it in the title. Online writing makes this step easy, and besides, you want to include the movie title in the article title if you ever want anyone to read your movie review anyway.
2. Try not to immediately say what you thought of the movie if you want the reader to keep reading the whole movie review since your opinion on the movie is the entire reason that the reader is looking for a movie review in the first place.
3. Actually watch the movie first. I know, I know. That sounds like common sense, but it wouldn't surprise me that people would try to write about movies they haven't seen. IMDB might be a great resource for fact-checking, but you actually have to see the movie to develop an actual opinion of the movie, which you need to write a successful movie review.
4. This tip goes back to the mistake I made in writing the movie review: don't use phrase like 'in my opinion'. It doesn't ruin it, but it is totally unnecessary and repetitive to say 'in my opinion' or 'I think'. The reader already knows that you think such-and-such or that it is in your opinion. That's the point of a movie review!~

I think one of the important things to remember when writing the review is to be completely unbiased and to look at a lot of different reviews to see how they've written them.

-CM

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