Writing decent movie reviews is harder than it looks. I have some favorites among the ones I've written so far on Heroine Content. I feel like they're insightful, but also fun to read. Unfortunately, there are also a few that I find as entertaining as chewing on cardboard. When I'm ranting here about The Dog being a pain, it seems relatively easy to whip out a few funny sentences. When confronted with the task of writing a Serious Review that Raises Important Issues, my writing often comes out stiff and flavorless. And it can be hard not to get a little clumsy when you're trying to introduce character names as well as actor names while describing the plot.
However, I don't think I've written a sentence as bad as this one from Richard Schickel's review of Breach in Time Magazine:
Who knew how entertainingly, if sometimes scarily, bent Hanssen — brilliantly played in director Bully Ray's film by Chris Cooper — was?
How many minutes did it take your brain to put that sentence back together in a reasonable order?
Comments (2)
Only a few seconds, but I've been working on a license agreement with some lawyers lately. No offense to C-Man -- I'm sure his lawyer-substrate is high-quality stuff.
Posted by JPed | March 18, 2007 3:26 PM
Actually, most of C-Man's writing is flaming people on internet discussion boards, so I don't know how good his lawyerly writing turns out.
Posted by The Princess | March 23, 2007 12:31 PM