Beauty and the Blogger
Just a tiny bit of shameless self-promotion this afternoon: your humble author has been cast as the latter titular role in the upcoming production of Beauty and the Beast at St. Bernadette’s Players in Drexel Hill. Rehearsals start next month; the show goes up in April. Start clearing your calendars now, because if anyone has ever seen the man behind the keyboard, they know that I’m a natural looker for the part.
Actually, We’re Quite Fond of Judaism
Any of the four of you who stopped by Movie Hawk yesterday might have noticed that we were down. That’s because, for something like the fifth time, we got hacked. Anyone who came by early enough saw a particularly offensive splash screen that might have suggested the culprit was a drunken Mel Gibson. For the record, not only do we toleraet (sic) the Jews here, we’re actually big fans of many of them. Specifically Jesus. We’ll be back by the end of the day with a quick hit and back full time tomorrow with a real post.
Feed Me, Seymour
For some reason, I never noticed that the RSS feed for this site, to this point, has been…what’s the word….non-existent. I’m not entirely sure why the default feed never worked, but I was setting up some feeds for my new Norwegians account and used my own site as a test and realized that the feed didn’t really work. I’ve gone ahead and fixed that problem, so now you can subscribe to the RSS of good ol’ Movie Hawk like you do any other blog that you read. Because I’m sure you were clamoring to see some updates.
Back later today with a review.
An Explanation of the Five-Star Scale
“You give too many things three stars,” my brother tells me. I take that to mean “certainly that many things aren’t that good.” I’ve never been able to verbalize what three stars means to me, or what five stars does, for that matter. Then, when I joined blogcritics.org, I came across their scoring system, and I realized that their determinations for star ratings are the same as the ones I’ve been using since I switched from the ten-point scale.
Three stars doesn’t mean something is good; in fact, it means that it’s just barely good enough. Two-and-a-half or three stars means that, if you come across the movie on cable one day, or somebody’s listening to the CD in their car, you should enjoy it. It’s decent. Anything below * * 1/2 isn’t really worth your time. Anything above * * * is recommended. At present, there are 18 movies rated above three stars, and by the time my next two reviews are written, that number will be at 20. Is that too many films rated “above average?” I don’t think so – they were all good enough to recommend. There are no movies ranked at five stars, and I’ll start being more liberal with that. Five stars, after all, doesn’t mean perfection. It just means that it’s a superb film. When the calendar year turns, I’ll change the numbered movie listings into a group according to star rating, taking some of the pressure off of weighing the films against each other.
Spreading My Wings
A bit of exciting news on the Movie Hawk front: I’ve been brought on as a contributing member of the very large, very diverse staff over at Blogcritics.org. Blogcritics is a destination site for commentary on music, movies, sports, television, politics…you name it, they write about it. And with more than 1,500 writers in the “sinister cabal,” you’re likely to see dozens of new articles each day.
Of course, everything I wind up publishing over at Blogcritics will be seen here as well, but I still encourage you to go visit the site and see some of the other interesting writing going on.