Go to Blogger edit html and find these sentences.Now replace these sentences with your own descriptions.This theme is Bloggerized by NewBloggerThemes.com.
Go to Blogger edit html and find these sentences.Now replace these sentences with your own descriptions.This theme is Bloggerized by NewBloggerThemes.com.
Go to Blogger edit html and find these sentences.Now replace these sentences with your own descriptions.This theme is Bloggerized by NewBloggerThemes.com.
Go to Blogger edit html and find these sentences.Now replace these sentences with your own descriptions.This theme is Bloggerized by NewBloggerThemes.com.
Go to Blogger edit html and find these sentences.Now replace these sentences with your own descriptions.This theme is Bloggerized by NewBloggerThemes.com.
COVID-19’s loss is our VOD gain with the new Scoob! from Warner Bros. I can’t say I was a huge Scooby Doo nut as a kid, but I have seen more enough in my years to know what is the essence of that lovable franchise. That gave me a little fandom leg up on Ian Simmons of the Kicking the Seat podcast, a guy who spent more time in Eternia with He-Man an on Cybertron with the Transformers than hanging out with snacks in the back of the Mystery Machine. We both weigh in on what worked and what didn’t while fighting the urge to say zoinks far more than necessary.
There is nearly always a smirk of veiled anticipation when a plot setup meets a full-stop right after a descriptive peak with the zinger transition of “hi-jinks ensue.” Digging into the meaning and origin of that phrase apparently goes back centuries. In describing movies, using that classic adage is an attempt at “less being more” while completely winking at you that so much more could be said about what happens. The Lovebirds, premiering on Netflix on May 22, is the kind of place where you drop “hi-jinks ensue” and run with it.
Here’s the rub though. For “hi-jinks ensue” to work and live up to its promise, you need strong and effective events to come before and after when that phrase is planted. Have a weak setup and the absurdity of hi-jinks after can feel like a jolting improvement or tail-spinning crash. Have a great setup and the hi-jinks that follow can either evolve or devolve the auspicious start. This “one wild night” romp has about half of each measure in that balance.
LESSON #1: BODY LANGUAGE IS SEXY-- When we meet Issa Rae’s Leilani and Kumail Nanjiani’s Jibran, they are in the throes of initial attraction. They’re on a date they don’t want to end. The seductive pick-up conversations are hot and the embraces are hotter. Every back-and-forth line comes from a smooth voice and oozes with come-hither postures, proximity, and the edges of contact. After the first ten minutes of The Lovebirds you’re going to be auditioning your own “I Want to Kiss You Face” and having it judged. Just you wait.
LESSON #2: PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE WORDS STIFLE PASSION-- Cut to four years later and the co-habitating New Oreleanians are at each other’s throats, nagging and shouting from rooms apart. Their words are filled with frustration and indignation, where any closeness looks distant or uncomfortable compared to earlier in their relationship. Somewhere, selfish pursuits from both of them have replaced adoration. They don’t speak up about what’s really bothering them and nitpick inconsequential BS instead.
LESSON #3: WHAT WOULD IT TAKE TO RATTLE A FAILING RELATIONSHIP?-- If the choices to answer this lesson’s question where on a Wheel of Fortune spinner, “murder” would be like the dreaded “Bankrupt” landing slot. In a flurry of events on the way to a social party moments after agreeing to break up, Jibran and Leilani land on that very dark wedge as unwilling witnesses and borderline participants to a crime. From a very different and far more jovial place than Queen & Slim, they come up with the “best bad idea.” They run.
And, with that, hi-jinks ensue, and this review’s faucet of furtive flow ceases. The less you see coming the better. The Lovebirds puts this frazzled breakup on blast with a dippy concert of calamity. Much like Game Night a few years back, the pratfalls before our central couple can be ingeniously hilarious while others over-stretch the freedom of preposterousness we grant movies like these. Comedy in this realm is a fickle SOB and often depends on what level of insanity and perceived mistakes each viewer is willing to accept.
What smooths the questionable parody of this caper comedy is the people delivering the jokes. Issa Rae and Kumail Nanjiani are a vivid pair of talents to combine. These motormouths turn on a dime. Issa has that enormous smile that mirrors vitriol and vigor. Kumail has those eyes and Eugene Levy-level eyebrows that can dance with dread or delight. Each take turns throughout this punchlined plot being the target of blame or the pure-dumb-luck savior for the duo. Their fascinating dynamics radiate high appeal.
LESSON #4: NO, WHAT WOULD IT REALLY TAKE TO RATTLE A FAILING RELATIONSHIP?-- Somewhere, Leilani and Jibran went from comfortable to miserable. It’s not that they can’t speak their minds. They do that incessantly to each other’s limits. It’s that they don’t speak from their hearts. No matter the madcap swerves and predicaments that tumble before these two, it’s all pushing against the wavering realization towards their connection and a romantic bond that hasn’t completely broken. The reactions of each significant other watching their partners being thrust into a situation of distress is an extreme test of that care level.
Much of their banter, useless information monologues, and competitive cutdowns feel incredibly improvised. Credit editors Vince Filippone (xXx: Return of Xander Cage) and Robert Nassau (The Big Sick) for chopping together their chops with crisp pacing. If their jumpy jabbering isn’t ad-libbed, then kudos to the writing/story team of Hannibal actor Aaron Abrams, The Go-Getters’ Bredan Gall, and Blindspot creator Martin Gero. For example, any three cocktail napkin idea men that can take the clunker self-aware line of “help me come up with something believable” and then spin it for a laugh deserves a dollar in the tip jar.
Beyond the dialogue, those writers and The Big Sick director Michael Showalter assembled a semi-crafty plot course that is far from predictable and does not entirely wear out its freshness or welcome in a tidy 86 minutes. Far less and far worse has been slapped together for date night couch watch. Granted, once someone sees The Lovebirds and the hijinks that ensue, someone will say it shouldn’t take this much, per se, but where’s the fun in less?
It is a delicious irony that James Spader’s character in Steven Shainberg’s movie, Secretary, is called ‘Mr Grey’ just like the protagonist of the hugely popular Fifty Shades of Grey franchise, and that both films give an account of a BDSM relationship. Shainberg’s film, however, manages to be neither exploitative nor prudish, and even occasionally […]
One of the classic catchphrases of the old Scooby Doo franchise is the vocalized signal, often from the eager mouth of their de facto leader Fred, of “looks like we’ve got another mystery on our hands.” The new CGI reboot Scoob! now on VOD platforms answers that rhetorical realization with both possible extremes. The movie doesn’t have one and the canyon-sized narrative hole because of it leaves us more perplexed than satisfied with a shoulder shrug and a chin rub of our own (emoji optional).
Since this new movie wants so badly to modernize the settings and character vernacular for a new generation, it’s fair to lay one of our own fad phrases as viewers and fans. This is a Scooby Doo movie, one that wants to kick-start a new franchise with a new shared Hanna-Barbera universe. So, Scoob!, you had one job. The name on the side of the van says “Mystery Machine.” The name of this curious clique’s entrepreneurial venture is “Mystery Incorporated.” Where is the mystery? Insert your “looking” GIF of choice.
Moving to our present time of smartphones, laptops, and electric cars, the screenwriting team led by Matt Liebermann (The Addams Family, The Christmas Chronicles) crafts a very adorable origin story. A friendless teen Shaggy (Young Sheldon’s Iain Armitage) is listening to, what better for the now then, a motivational podcast between his ears through the sidewalks and sand of Venice Beach, California. When he helps the titular Great Dane stray pup out of a gyro-stealing pickle with a bike cop (Super Troopers nut Kevin Heffernan), they become new friends.
LESSON #1: EVERYONE NEEDS A FRIEND-- Long have audiences loved the inseparable dynamic between Shaggy and Scooby. Seeing a take on their first introduction and flourishing bond for one another other is indelibly charming. Their mannerisms, from every shiver of fear or bite of insatiable appetite, couldn’t be more symbiotic. Go ahead and get every tween a dog or a cat right now. The two really complete each other, but, as always, the more the merrier.
Soon after on a Halloween night jaunt, the two best buds come to meet a knight in shining armor, Wonder Woman, and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the form of a costumed Fred Jones, Daphne Blake, and Velma Dinkley. The five of them squash a fiendish local thief messing with trick-or-treaters and a team is born. And just like that, in the first 15 or so minutes, Scoob! has already spent its reboot concept and signature spookiness.
Fast-forwarding a decade to their adult selves voiced by Frank Welker (the original Fred now playing Scooby), Will Forte, Zac Efron, Amanda Seyfried, and Gina Rodriguez, the quizzical quintet is trying to get sponsorship for their detective business (a bland cameo from Simon Cowell) only to stumble into a much larger plot. Oblivious to the general public, Dick Dastardly (professional movie villain Jason Isaacs) is reeking havoc in the skies and seeks to unite three artifacts to release the mythical Cerberus and “dogpocalypse” upon the world. Standing against Dick is the jet-set social media-obsessed celebrity superhero Blue Falcon (Mark Wahlberg) and his do-all-the-work squad of Dynomutt the Dog Wonder (Ken Jeong) and Dee Dee Sykes (Kiersey Clemons).
LESSON #2: GET YOUR HERO MOMENT-- Dick Dastardly sees Scooby as some kind of ancestral key to unlocking his prophecy. To fight back, the Blue Falcon team switches out Scooby’s special collar for a supersuit of his own to fight back. Thrust into a globe-trotting adventure, things build for all the good guys to need a “hero moment” to validate their confidence and place of success. Staying all 2020 again, insert your “eyeroll” GIF of choice.
LESSON #3: FRIENDSHIP WILL SAVE THE DAY-- When it’s all said and done, there is a pushback to the adversarial burns in the movie that claim “friendship won’t save the day.” To stay hip again, we all know “teamwork makes the dream work.” Having friends is always a big help and the best of them will come to your aid with all the spirit and sacrifice they can muster.
The new computer-powered animated gait of this movie is a busy-bodied approach with fuller perspective than the side-to-side camera antics of the classics. Fitting its inflated comic book-like size, complete with sky energy beams, moping laments, and a zillion other tropes, Scoob! unfortunately becomes more about the battles and endless chases than any subtle games of quirks and clues. Warner Bros. throws a home improvement store’s worth of kitchen sinks at something that only needed a drinking fountain. Sure, we’ve all loved a dreamy Scooby Doo crossover/team-up in our chosen times, but this didn’t need a “go big or go home” injection of Hanna-Barbera extras. Ease into that with more of the tongue-in-cheek and less of the superfluous TNT.
Alas, it’s about the missing essence. Part of the fun of anything Scooby Doo is the low-tech, accidental intuition. Bells and whistles aren’t the same as kicks and can’t substitute for the good, old-fashioned simplicity of surprise. Mystery is the sorely needed trait for this appealing chance to start something fresh, young, and easy.
By having an earmarked villain with zero dramatic irony, all this entertainment exercise becomes, even with classic and archival sound effects sneaking in, is a predictable roller coaster with no wonderment. That couldn’t be farther from what made these Joe Ruby and Ken Spears characters some of the greatest TV creations of all-time. We’re now the ones asking “Where Are You?” instead of enjoying and being challenged by a kitschy cinematic puzzle to solve. It’s a shame because the content and the new origin had ripe and promising potential.
For something like Capone, let’s talk about faculty, which can span natural aptitude all the way up to powers of the mind to function, act, or do. In any film, you have the faculties of the character conveyed through the faculties of the performer. Both have their strengths battling weaknesses and limits challenged by embellishments. That is precisely the dichotomous duel of Josh Trank’s new film with the enigmatic Tom Hardy in the title role of Alphonse Gabriel Capone.
That name brings forth a gusher of overplayed stereotypes and caricatures. If you think you’re going to see the decadence of the historical figure’s prime, you’ve come to the wrong movie. If you think you’re going to see another Ben Gazzara or Bob De Niro gallivanting as the king of his own court, you’ve come to the wrong movie. If anything, Josh Trank intentionally and subversively pushes back against the romanticized urban legend of “Scarface,” “Big Al,” “Big Boy,” “Snorky,” and “Public Enemy No. 1.”
That’s ballsy if you can squeeze something out of it. Warts and all, what you get in Capone is the character and historical figure at his most lost and worst. The past pizzazz has parted. You also have an actor taking that lethargic material and hammering that reduced stature into the ground with all of what he does best through his own well-documented propensities. This film takes ominous creative license to chronicle Al Capone’s final year of prison release “retirement” life.
LESSON #1: FAILING FACULTIES-- Read the encyclopedia entry of his decline and 1941 death. It’s the only research you need for this lesson. By the weathered age of 48, the only cocktail coursing through his veins is a bacterial and biological one made of one part syphilis, one part paresis, two parts stroke, and a highball glass filled with ice made of dementia. He is a nutty old man telling incomplete stories while still trying to look tough and dress sharp. What was gregarious manliness has been reduced to childlike feebleness.
Rightly so, the mess is portrayed as a mess. Tom Hardy adds to his trophy case of odd voices and vast audio library of grunt variations. If you can handle Jeff Bridges talking through red-assed marbles as Rooster Cogburn or Nick Nolte just plain talking, you can handle the characterization of the fellow career-mumbler in Tom. But it’s more than wild vocal trickery. It’s the chosen skin Hardy puts those utterances within. Every wet cough, cigar drag, or shouted spouts of Italian threats spew from a permanent glower and ring a little glimmer of the menace that used to reside in that hulking shell before it was wrapped in a feces-soaked robe.
Under the sun and next to the swamp, “Fonz” is surrounded by many presences at his mansion in Palm Island, Florida (filmed gorgeously in Covington, Louisiana). To his beleaguered wife Mae (Linda Cardelini), his heir son junior (Noel Fisher), and a herd of cluelessly playful grandkids, he’s a dithering embarrassment. To just about everyone else, Capone is a target for whatever residual riches are attainable. No less than his personal physician (Kyle MacLachlan), his former mentor (Matt Dillon), a smattering of surviving in-house lieutenants, and a host of wire-tapping federal agents in the neighboring trees poke and prod the fading felon for spilled secrets to his supposedly hidden millions.
No one will find this invisible treasure because Capone’s mind is a transitory and temperamental fever dream of grandiose visions. With high credit to costume designer Amy Westcott (Black Swan, The Wrestler) and production designer Stephen Altman (Ray, Gosford Park), much of Trank’s lush yet seedy film fleshes out the episodes of imagined former ambience and the mental scars cut from a life of cruel violence. Capone puts you in that cobwebbed head and all its unpleasantness, set to a sparse (too sparse, really) score from rapper El-P. It takes creative courage to emphasize all of this foreboding filth over the flashy flair normally associated with this mythic mobster.
LESSON #2: INDIGNITY AS COMEUPPANCE-- For the title character, there is no blaze of glory or sunset ride. A sawed-off carrot replaces the Cuban cigar in his craw. No legacy awaits as his family avoids him and will soon change their cursed surname whenever he croaks. Short of his slowly sold-off mansion of shrinking amenities, there is barely a silver living for Al Capone’s final year. All that fills his ending existence is the disgusting debilitation of failing health and the mounting regret of lost memories.
Considering the prominent figure, that is a wicked amount of indignity as punishment. Josh Trank (Fantastic Four, Chronicle), unfortunately, knows something about that himself during his own precarious career arc. This is a bold place to assert himself and hitches to the right star to paint this darkness. Tom Hardy sweats, seethes, and pants with a performance of pain that has to be seen to be believed. Once again, there’s no romanticism in this not-so-flippant take on Al Capone and that’s altogether fitting.
Meet Hungarian movie fan Mike Horvath. His hobby is transforming photos of himself into movie characters in Adobe Photoshop. He is also a musician, photo editor, and designer. Every Movie Has a Lesson would like to share a little collection of his work here on the page.
Mike’s hobby started a couple of years ago while attending a sound engineering course. The interesting assignments of sound designing, dubbing, mixing, and more had studies intersect with movies while working as a trainee at a radio station. He began to like the themes of films and took on those characters roles himself as a way to learn and practice photo editing. The resulting tinkering of customization has lead to his fun work. Take a look and you can follow his work on Twitter!
You’d be surprised, but writing a movie review can be a daunting task. Not only you will need to research the movie itself, but you will also have to study the story and the intention behind it. And if a movie is a screen adaptation of a book, you’d also need to analyze the similarities and differences between the two, and whether these differences significantly impacted the plot of the movie.
Just from the looks of it, writing a great movie review can take you hours or even days. Luckily, there are a few steps of writing a movie review that you can get helped with, thanks to the abundance of different online tools. So, without further ado, let’s take a look at 4 tools that can help you in different stages of writing a great movie review.
1. SEO Tools
Your more review can be as great as it’s going to get, but if it’s not optimized for the search engines, it’s likely that it will get lost in the myriad of similar reviews.
That is why it is important to do keyword research before you start writing your movie review, so you could seamlessly incorporate the keywords in your text and make them sound natural.
What are the best free keyword research tools for movie review writers?
WordStream Free Keyword Finder – this tool requires you to enter a keyword or a URL, choose your country, and browse keywords according to the industry.
Ubersuggest – this tool also allows you to search for keywords for your movie review based on the country where your target audience is located. Here, you can also enter your competitor’s domain to find better keywords. However, if you want to add more features and make your keyword research broader, you need to sign up with your email.
KeywordTool.io – with this tool, you can not only search for keywords on Google, but other search engines like Bing, as well as Amazon and different social media platforms, including YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter.
Answer the Public – here you can search for keywords based on the location and language that your target audience speaks. The keywords are visualized in the form of a diagram based on different questions in Google search that involve this keyword.
In the majority of these tools, you’ll get information about keyword competition. Try to aim for keywords with medium or low competition to help Google rank your movie review higher.
2. Headline Generators
How hard could it be?
You just type in “The Pacifier: Movie Review” and you have a ready-to-use headline.
That’s true. However, among the abundance of similar movie reviews with the same title, yours is more likely to get lost.
A great solution here is to use a headline generator, who will provide you with a few ready-to-use headlines, and if not, you’ll get a bunch of good ideas to get you started.
Hubspot Blog Topic Generator – this tool requires you to enter the minimum of 4 nouns to get the idea where your title is heading to. As a result, you get more than a dozen headline ideas for your movie review.
FatJoe Blog Post Headline Generator – this tool also works well for generating headlines for movie reviews. You can add the initial title of your review, and get 10 headline suggestions. For more headline ideas, this tool requires an email subscription.
You can also browse for headline ideas by doing competitor research and websites that do reviews of companies with similar content. There, you may find things that your competitors’ headlines lack and add them to the title of your movie review.
As for the automated headline generators, with the majority of these tools, the more keywords you add, the better. As a result, you can get more precise results. If you don’t see a headline that would fit your movie review well, you can still collect the ideas and use them in your original movie review headline.
3. Proofreading Resources
A great movie review is not complete without thorough proofreading and editing. At the end of the day, how can you call your writing great if it speckles with grammatical and punctuation mistakes?
If earlier you’d need to proofread your text several times or even give someone your review to proofread, today there is an abundance of proofreading tools that can do the job for you in no time.
Here are a few of our suggestions:
Grammarly – with this tool, you can not only proofread your text, but also set the tone, audience, and level of formality before you proofread it. The report is broken down into 4 categories – Correctness and Clarity are for free, but Engagement and Delivery are only available with a Premium subscription.
PaperRater – this free tool works well for proofreading movie reviews as well. You can also pick ‘movie review’ as a category to help the tool proofread your text according to its main purpose. The tool also has free plagiarism checker.
Hemingway App– one of the key aspects of writing a great movie review is its readability. The majority of proofreading tools focus on grammar or style, not paying much attention to the level of readability of the text. Hemingway App will do exactly that, helping you avoid wordiness in your movie review.
We also recommend you to combine several tools. This will help you proofread your text more thoroughly. Reviewing the text several times yourself should also be an important step of your proofreading routine, as the machine won’t always do a good job ad assessing the style of your movie review.
Wrapping Up
A truly great movie review requires a lot of research and analysis. It’s likely that you will spend hours or even days writing it, that’s why you might need some help if you start running out of ideas or losing concentration.
Luckily, in the age of technology, you can delegate some of the tasks in your movie review writing routine to a few online tools.
We selected the most essential tools to help you write a great movie review, optimize it for search engines, catch the reader’s attention with a great headline, and proofread your review to make it look spotless.
Do you have more tools to suggest? Share them with us in the comments!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Daniela McVicker is a freelance writer and blogger. She graduated from Durham University and has an MA in psychological science. Her passion is traveling and finding ways to enrich students’ learning experiences. You can check her last Grabmyessay review.
