Reviews on this site

I don’t believe what Wallace Martin wrote in Recent Theories of Narrative (1986):

Those who talk or write about narratives contribute to the total dialogic context of literature, where the production of words entails the creation of value, through the work and pleasure of understanding.

There is work and pleasure in understanding, and the pleasure is greater than the work. However, I am no Fred L. Stockford. I have reviews on this website, but many contain no words. Very few adequately introduce their subjects to a new audience. The majority are just opinion, and many others are random notes.

Subject media

The medium of a reviewed work is identifiable from its tags: “moving picture”, “sequential art”, and “text”. I do not review performances of plays, but I do review audiobooks and I refer to the experience of audiobooks as reading without systematic categorical distinction from printed matter.

Other media are not reviewed, so there are no apps, albums, concerts, operas, exhibitions, restaurants, podcasts, virtual reality scenes, bikes, buildings, birds or lint.

Other criteria

Except where otherwise noted, I review complete works that I have experienced unadulterated and in full.

I do not review my own work.

I do not review games in any medium, not even printed books for wargames and role-playing games, regardless of fluff content. Any opinions on games go into non-review articles like The pulping of Delta Green and Thoughts on Earthdawn. Similarly, I do not review laws, such as the US Constitution.

I review advertisements if people pay to see them, such as The Lego Movie (2014), and if they’re directed by people I like, such as Anno Hideaki, Norman McLaren or Terry Gilliam, but not otherwise.

I try to avoid a hard line on notability, but under the completion criterion I very rarely review individual essays or videos produced in series for sites like Youtube, and never anything more fragmentary, like news articles or home video.

History

Since 2002, I rate movies I’ve seen. Since 2016, I also rate books. In the early years I studied the stuff and had proper reviews published in Spionen.

In 2013, I began to note when I had first experienced each work. With the addition of books, and gradual improvements to my tool set, I relaxed my criteria on notability, including more short documentaries and such. In late July, 2020, I added tracking of the date of writing the first version of each review, as opposed to the year of first experiencing the work. This development enabled a news feed requested by readers.

More and more rarely, I refresh my memory of something I experienced before 2013 and add a review backdated to the dawn of the site.

Structure of a review

Except on the news page, titles are indexed primarily by time of release, then alphabetically. Associated works—“franchises” in broad interpretation—are clustered except on indices dedicated to rating or length.

Site-wide features such as back references and tags are not discussed here. The following are the visible properties of an individual review as such.

Title

I favour official English-language release titles. I eschew typographic stylizations, as in the “poster” titles of Alien³, Se7en, Blame!, BlacKkKlansman etc.

I generally include long-ish subtitles, but not attributions like “John Carpenter’s” Vampires (1998) or Buddha in Africa’s “A Film by Nicole Schafer”, as shown on the title card of the latter film. There is a related fashion in US TV where the host will have their name appended to a title even when there is no plan to franchise the show. When a network does replace the host, there’s usually a shakeup in the rest of the staff, but I am happy to find the host’s name in the credits along with everyone else’s.

To spare you the pain of my quirks, some alternative titles are registered and will affect search results, but they are not displayed.

Year of release

Reviewed works are dated in the following order of descending preference:

1. Antemortem release, e.g. publication, recorded public performance etc. Where a work was serialized in publication, as on television or in a literary journal, the date of the first release (launch) is used in preference to any subsequent final issue or revised, consolidated novel.
2. Finalization, where a record or guess exists that is more credible than the date of a posthumous release. These dates are often approximate, particularly for ancient works.
3. Posthumous release. While releases are usually relatively well recorded and fixed as points of reference, they get ridiculous when they’re far removed from any possible modification the author might have made, hence the low priority.

For example, Dickinson’s poems go from “Awake Ye Muses Nine, Sing Me a Strain Divine” (1850) to “The Saddest Noise, the Sweetest Noise” (1955). Very few were published in her lifetime and some are so difficult to date by other means that I’ve used the first publication of them, long after the poet’s death.

Some works have a detailed release date (the month, sometimes the day) registered in the back end. This will affect the order in which works are listed (see above), but the full date is not displayed, because it is sometimes speculative.

Rating

I rate the subjective value of an experience. This is essentially entertainment value, though I deny the existence of pure entertainment. I am entertained by learning, even about bad ideas and harmful influence, as is the case with Exodus.

The scale is explained in the index.

Creators

Creator credits appear right under the rating. I developed them as an extension of the tagging system on this site mainly for reviews of written works, since author names are traditionally favoured over release dates for references to literature.

Cast and crew credits for films etc. are a by-product. They are deliberately very spotty. Please do not use them as a source on who really did what on a production. I add them only when I have some personal interest in one of the creators, and then only for the most influential role he or she played in each production. Other people in the same role are then added for context, so as not to create the impression that the person of interest did all the work in that department.

The role of “writer-director” is applied even where someone other than the director wrote an original novel etc. as long as the director has sole credit for the screenplay as such. By contrast, where a director co-wrote the screenplay with someone else, I will default to give credit for direction only and ignore the writing.

Running text

The main body of a review may contain zero or more of the following sections. Like the list of creators, these section have no headings of their own.

Extent of experience

Under the criterion of completion noted above, when I start a novel and do not finish it, I typically don’t review it. By the same token, the source films used on Mystery Science Theater 3000 (1988) appear separately only when I have seen them on their own terms.

Any exceptions are noted before the subject of the work is described. For example, if I have seen only some seasons of a TV series but not all, or heard only translated narration to a documentary instead of the original narration, that goes in here.

I read Swedish and English fluently and will only mention translation into those languages if it’s from one into the other, e.g. reading an English-language book in Swedish translation. For languages where I am not fluent but can make do (e.g. Norwegian, Danish, French, Japanese) at the time of experience, I tend to mention the perceived impact.

The lead-in to a review will also include the year of my first experience of the work. This is omitted only when the experience fell earlier than 2013 for movies, 2016 for books. It is not updated upon renewed acquaintance, but it is updated upon seeing a more complete version of the work, such as another season of a TV series.

Subject of the work

Some works are introduced by means of a summary or sample of their subject matter.

For works of fiction, a summary of the plot is occasionally phrased with value judgements. I don’t attribute much importance to foreknowledge of plot but as a courtesy, I hide “spoilers”, which looks like this: Rosebud was a ghost the whole time. You can hover your cursor over that to show text, or click/touch it to toggle the special styling.

Any text following the marked subject section is my analysis and general commentary.