Spoiler Alert / Joe Dunphy's Movie Reviews

(First published on Blog.com, around 9:16 am Chicago time, today) 

Miscellanious ramblings … If you’re looking for an essay that holds together, you’re going to be in the wrong place, today, because I’m in no mood to write one. I’ve just gotten done banging my head into the proverbial wall trying to set up a mirror to this blog on the not always so very well documented Tumblr system, and am frustrated, stressed, tired and hungry. But blog.com is determined to keep its servers clean of blogs that haven’t been updated often enough, because at 1/4 of a cent per meg, diskspace is far too expensive to waste.

A meg, for those who don’t know, works out to be about 66 pages of printed text, meaning that if you have written 660 pages of blog posts - the equivalent of a thick, university sized tome’s worth of posting - the service will free up 2.5 cents worth of diskspace by wiping out your work. Think of it. If they did this to a mere 60 users, each of whom would lose a few hundred pages of work, before they knew it, they’d have saved up enough to buy themselves a snicker’s bar. Not just any snicker’s bar, either, but one of those large ones, the kind that can take one back to many happy hours spent in train stations across this great land of ours, waiting for connecting rides. Sure, they’d have to go to Walgreens to get it - in a movie theatre, we’d be looking at something more like 60 or 90 users who’d have to lose a decade or two of posting before the staff could reap the collective fruits of their disk clearing labors, in all of its nougaty goodness - but if you’ve ever been in a computer lab, you know how much those snack foods mean to the programmers. So I’d better get going, whether I’m up to it or not, and if the quality of my writing should suffer as a result?

Dude, we’re talking nougat and peanuts. It’s nothing to be trifled with.

If the reports I’ve heard about Caprica’s ratings are accurate, then this show probably won’t be on for much longer. Does it deserve to be? Should one catch it before it is cancelled, knowing that short running shows don’t tend to find their way into syndication? Maybe. I will say that I find it greatly superior to the vast bulk of what Syfy produces, but then that isn’t very high praise. We are talking about the same channel that brought us “Mansquito” and “Termination Shock”, that movie about the girl who shoots starship destroying fireballs out of her chest. Have they done better, this time? Something that a grown up can watch without hoping that nobody will catch him watching it?

Again … maybe. It’s deeply flawed. At times, the dialog has made no sense.

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You should not read any review or commentary about a movie, video or TV show episode on this blog until after you’ve seen the piece I’m reviewing. Please note the name of this blog. I’m not kidding. I really do give away plot details, and I’d hate to have the experience of seeing something you’d enjoy diminished by that.

There is the kind of review you read before seeing a movie, and I have a companion microblog - miniblog? - on which you’ll see that kind of review. The kind that begs you to ask “who the (bleep) is Joseph Dunphy, and why should I care whether or not he liked the movie”. No reason, really, but if your tastes are like mine, you might find those recommendations helpful.

There is also the kind of review that one reads after a play or movie, one in which the author writes about this shared experience that you and he have both had, sort of a free form ramble about the subject matter of the work, the style of its presentation, and any topics that come up along the way. That’s what you’ll find here.

I’m not giving out plot details because I’m a bad person who wants to ruin your fun, but because doing so is an inescapable part of what I’m trying to do.

You might have noticed that I seem to have given Flixster the heave-ho. That appearance might not be deceptive - I am seriously considering doing just that, as I write this. That site’s hyperaggressive “viral marketing” practices are no secret, and would seem to have been stepped up, recently, I find. On going to my page there, I found that my profile could only be viewed by those who had signed up, facing a signup form that all but demands that one yield one’s password to Yahoo or Google (this can be skipped) and will mass email one’s contacts, in one’s name, if one is so unwise as to violate the TOS at one of those services, and comply.

Not cool. As I’ve said elsewhere, I write to be read, not to help somebody else’s spam campaign, and this didn’t help. I certainly found myself glad that I hadn’t put Spoiler Alert on any rings, yet, because the lockdown effectively snipped my link back to Webring. The two reviews I had posted hadn’t found their way into the Flixster feed, which only accepts “new” reviews - and never mind the fact that the land of the lost review was posted only two months before I set up the Mybloglog community for that Flixster account, which found itself with nothing in the feed. The whole experience had become quite annoying by this afternoon.

So I went looking for a new place to post, and found my annoyance growing, as a series of places I found had signup procedures that, in one way or another, failed to work. Finally, I found blog.com, and saw only one problem with my plan to use it to replace Flixster - to do so would be a waste of a lot of good functionality. To have pages on a blog is a wonderful thing. I decided, instead, to use Blogs.com to replace IGN, and IGN to replace Flixster.

This might be slightly confusing for my subscribers, for about two to three seconds, but I think they’ll understand why I had to do this. As for Flixster - I’m not fond of kicking anybody to the curb, or throwing anything out that is of value. If Flixster chooses to improve its business practices, I’ll be glad to find some use for that old page, but really, that’s up to them. Or would that be “him”?

(originally posted to blog.com, Oct 16, 2009)