{"id":250,"date":"2001-12-30T16:35:47","date_gmt":"2001-12-31T00:35:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2001\/12\/30\/250.html"},"modified":"2001-12-30T16:35:47","modified_gmt":"2001-12-31T00:35:47","slug":"reviews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2001\/12\/30\/reviews\/","title":{"rendered":"Reviews"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

(If you haven't read my review<\/a> of The Fellowship of the Ring<\/cite> yet, go do that before reading this entry.)<\/p>\n

I've been seeing a lot of reviews like that recently. Part of the peeved and self-righteous tone is borrowed from Evelyn Lewes' TV reviews<\/a> in Interzone;<\/cite> but my more general point was that I keep seeing reviews in which the reviewer didn't know some fundamental fact that's crucial to understanding the work in question. I don't mean to be mean-spirited about this phenomenon; sometimes such fundamental facts are hard to come by if you don't happen to come from the right direction, and I very much sympathize with well-meaning reviewers who just happen to not have the necessary key to unlocking the work.<\/p>\n

Wish I had the nerve to post that review to rec.arts.sf-reviews. But trolling is mean; I meant it to be funny, but I'm sure I would get dozens of letters from people who took it seriously (which is kind of a meta version of my point: those readers would essentially be reviewers who weren't clued in to the key information that the review is tongue-in-cheek).<\/p>\n

As for Fellowship,<\/cite> which I just saw this afternoon, I largely enjoyed it. I do wish my brain would shut up, though; I had a hard time getting completely immersed in the movie. The ironic, distanced stance of someone afraid to be caught being too wide-eyed or naive about something? Perhaps.<\/p>\n

I think I'll hold off on writing a real review of the movie for now. For now, I'll just throw in a completely different note: Hollywood appears to be yet again making an action-blockbuster film out of a Philip K. Dick story. I've been seeing print ads for the upcoming Tom Cruise movie Minority Report<\/cite> for a while, but didn't know ('til the credits in the preview flashed by today) that it's based on a Dick story. Directed by Steven Spielberg; ~oh, joy.~ But one of the credited writers has previous writing credits for Dead Again,<\/cite> Get Shorty,<\/cite> and Out of Sight,<\/cite> so perhaps it won't be a total disaster.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(If you haven’t read my review of The Fellowship of the Ring yet, go do that before reading this entry.)…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=250"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}