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The Movie Review Essay /Casablanca Movie Review Retrospective.pdf

The lessons of Casablanca still apply as

time goes by

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Nicolaus Mills: "Casablanca" turns 70; film had backstory, resonance that mirrored reality

• He says Operation Torch had just resulted in Allies' capture of Casablanca; gave film currency

• He says Bogart character had version of patriotism that was heroic, accepted ambiguity

• Mills: Bogart's cool may no longer resonate, but Rick's complexity does

Editor's note: Nicolaus Mills is professor of American studies at Sarah Lawrence College and author of "Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and

America's Coming of Age as a Superpower."

(CNN) -- This year marks the 70th anniversary of "Casablanca," and although we are a long way from 1942, watching the film's romantic leads, Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, sacrifice their wartime love still touches us.

The backstory on "Casablanca" is a good one, offering complex lessons in patriotism even today.

Few films have benefited as much from the real-world geopolitics surrounding them as "Casablanca," which opened on Thanksgiving 1942, when the nation was well into World War II, at New York's Hollywood Theater. Just 18 days earlier in Operation Torch, the Allies had invaded North Africa with a force of 65,000; among the cities they quickly captured was Casablanca.

A film that had finished production on August 3 suddenly became inseparable from actual events, as Jack Warner, whose studio produced "Casablanca," acknowledged in a November 10 memo, observing that the "entire industry envies us with picture having title 'Casablanca' ready to release, and feel we should take advantage of this great scoop."

(Editor's note: Warner Bros., like CNN, is a subsidiary of Time Warner).

"Casablanca" was helped even further by the politics surrounding Operation Torch, which at its outset involved getting French Vichy forces in North

Africa to accept a ceasefire through a deal with Adm. Jean-Francois Darlan, who had collaborated with the Nazis after the defeat of the French army in 1940. The intrigue of "Casablanca" thus had its real-life counterpart in intrigue Americans had read about in their papers.

"Casablanca" reminded Americans of how completely their thinking had changed in the months since Pearl Harbor. Prewar America had much to apologize for in its international affairs. In 1939 the United States government failed to aid the Jewish passengers on the German ocean liner St. Louis when they were denied entry into Cuba and forced to return to Europe, and two years later the country was still not anxious to face facts about the wars raging in Europe and Asia.

In August 1941, the House of Representatives only reluctantly voted to renew the peacetime draft, passing it by a single vote, 203-202.

Humphrey Bogart's Rick Blaine is the embodiment of an America that has finally grasped the threat of fascism. On the surface, Rick is little more than the owner of a café in French Morocco, who insists, "I'm the only cause I'm interested in." But as his personal history emerges, Rick turns out to be anything but the cynic he pretends to be.

Before arriving in Casablanca, Rick fought on the Loyalist side in the Spanish Civil War and ran guns for Ethiopia in its fight against Mussolini. At his café he has made a point of hiring European refugees. He has a Dutch pastry chef, a German refugee headwaiter, and a bartender from the Soviet Union. When a young Bulgarian woman asks for his help in getting her and her husband to America, Rick comes to their rescue by allowing them to win the money they need for papers at his gambling table.

The turning point in "Casablanca" occurs when Rick's former lover, Ilsa Lund, played by Ingrid Bergman, shows up at his café with the Czech resistance leader, Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid), her husband. Rick faces a dilemma. He still loves Ilsa, who acknowledges that she also loves him, but if he wants to help Laszlo escape from the Nazis, he cannot resume his relationship with Ilsa, who is Laszlo's main support.

Rick's solution to his dilemma comes when he tells Ilsa that she should stay with Laszlo, then supplies the two of them with stolen letters of transit that will get them safely to Lisbon.

Rick's refusal to put his own needs before those of Laszlo -- and by extension the war effort -- reflects his priorities and his patriotism, but what

makes Rick's sacrifice so powerful is that it is unaccompanied by chest pounding or sentimentality.

"I'm no good at being noble," he tells Ilsa, "but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world."

To help Ilsa and Laszlo escape, Rick must shoot the ranking German officer in Casablanca and reach an arrangement with the corrupt French chief of police. Neither decision bothers Rick, who at the end of "Casablanca" heads off to a free French garrison with the police chief while telling him, "Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."

The remark is filled with irony and humor, but remains serious. It reflects Rick's refusal to let the ambiguity of his choices get in the way of his waging war to the best of his ability.

Today, "Casablanca" speaks to audiences very differently from how it did in 1942 or even when it was part of the Bogart revival that began in the late 1950s at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge. "Casablanca's" call to arms and Bogart's cool no longer resonate as they once did. But what does resonate in our post-9/11 world is Rick's complexity. Rick is a loner who won't let his idealism get the better of his pragmatism. He will not give in to the Germans, who are the real power in Casablanca, but he refuses to do anything that needlessly exposes him to arrest. He walks a moral tightrope with understated brilliance.

These days it is easy to imagine Rick applauding America's decision to aid Libya's rebels, worrying about our ongoing war in Afghanistan, and wondering what we might do to get other countries to help us stop the bloodshed in Syria.

Given Rick's choice of friends, it is clear that he would not be overly fastidious about choosing allies -- if he believed their cooperation could save lives.

Production Shots (stills):

Review By Nicolaus Mills updated 7 July 2012

URL: http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/07/opinion/mills-

casablanca/index.html?hpt=hp_c2

__MACOSX/The Movie Review Essay /._Casablanca Movie Review Retrospective.pdf

The Movie Review Essay /How To Write A Movie Review.pdf

How To Write A Movie Review http://www.rottentomatoes.com/

Writing a movie review is a great way of expressing your opinion of a movie. The purpose of most movie reviews is to help the reader in determining whether they want to watch, rent or buy the movie. The

review should give enough details about the movie that the reader can make an informed decision, without giving anyway any essentials such as the plot

or any surprises. Below are our guidelines and tips for writing a good movie

review.

1. Watch the movie

The first step in writing the review is to watch the movie. Watch the movie in a relaxed environment you are familiar with. You do not want to be distracted by an unfamiliar room. Watching the movie a second time will

help you absorb a lot more detail about the movie. Most movie reviewers take notes as they watch the movie review.

2. Give your opinion

Most movie reviewers will give their opinion of the movie. This is

important as the reviewer can express the elements of the movie they enjoyed or disliked. However, as in all good journalism, the reviewer should

also give impartial details, and allow the reader to make their own mind over an issue the reader liked or disliked. Opinions should be explained to

allow the reader to determine whether they would agree with your opinion .

Many regular movie reviewers will develop a following. If one can find a reviewer who shares a similar taste in films, one can confidently follow the

reviewers recommendations.

3. Who is your audience?

You need to consider who your likely readers are. Writing a movie review for children requires a different approach than if writing for a movie

club. Ensure you report on the factors that matter to your likely audience.

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/

4. Give an outline

Give the outline of the movie, but don't give away essential details such as the end or any surprises. If there is a big surprise you want to entice

readers by telling them something special happens, just don't say what.

5. Actors

If the movie contains actors, as most do, detail who is starring in the movie and how well you think they acted.

6. Structure

Did the movie follow a regular predictable story line, or did it get you thinking like a Quentin Tarantino movie?

7.Cinematography and lighting

Give details about how well the movie was shot and directed. Was the lighting good in the moody scenes?

8. Music

Did the movie have its own original score like A Beautiful Mind, Schindler’s List or ET, or did it feature songs from popular artists?

9. Read, read and read

Read and check your review thoroughly. It can be embarrassing to find errors in your work after it has been published. This is especially important

for reviews that will be published on the Internet, as search engines are

always looking for the correct spellings of key words

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How To Write a Movie Review: Another Perspective!

People always want to know what someone else thinks about the film they want to see and they scour the web to look for these opinions. You could syndicate another

site’s reviews, but why do that? You want your readers to be loyal to you and your reviews and honestly, they want

to hear what you have to say and what you think. Below

there are some tips how to write a great film review.

1. Actively Watch the Film – Yes, movie watching is a passive activity. Watching a film isn’t something you do,

it is something that happens to you. However, if you want to write good reviews you have to learn to look at movies with a critical

eye. This means you need to pay attention to EVERYTHING. Notice how the actors are placed in each shot, the setting, the camera angles, even the

music. All of these elements play a role in the story that is trying to be told and are important to talk about if you want to write the compelling sort of

reviews that your readers will like to read.

2. Take Copious Notes – No, you do not need to sit in a theatre with pen

and pad or laptop in hand, but take solid mental notes. Information such as the actor’s names or who the director was is easy to come across, but

information like camera shots, or plot devices is not, so you need to train yourself not only to watch for that type of information but also to remember

it.

3. Summarize. Don’t Spoil. – This is important. Nothing is worse than

reading a review that tells the whole film from beginning to end and leaves nothing for you to see. People want your opinion, not for you to spoil the

film. A basic summation of the plot is all that is necessary. From there you can talk about whether or not the plot worked well or was the plot even a

plot at all. Let the details of the film be revealed when your readers see the film, not when they read your review.

4. Critical Analysis is Key – The difference between a review anyone can

write and a review people will clamor to read is in how well you analyze the

film. Think about those papers you had to write for lit class in college. The professor didn’t want you to just tell him what the book was about but

wanted you to break down the themes in the book and how they related to the plot, the characters, etc. Well the same is true for a film review. No one

http://atagira.com/en/categ-Reviews-265.html

http://atagira.com/en/categ-Actors_and_Actresses-280.html

http://atagira.com/en/search-Film_Reviews.html

wants a summary of events or the plot. A good review will examine the

themes or ideas the movie raises and talk about how well or not so well the film executed those themes and ideas.

5. Point Out the Pros and the Cons – No film is perfect and rarely is any

film all bad, so take the time to talk about what the film does well and what it does not so well.

6. Be Original – For some folk it is two thumbs up, for others it is rotten tomatoes. Whatever you decide you want your rating system to be, be

original. Try to find a hook that works for you. Just don’t do something that closely resembles someone else or you’ll just seem like a bad copy of the

original.

Follow these steps and you’ll be writing the best reviews and your readers will constantly come back for more week in and week out. Happy writing.

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http://atagira.com/en/categ-Ratings_and_Top_Lists-340.html

__MACOSX/The Movie Review Essay /._How To Write A Movie Review.pdf

The Movie Review Essay /instructions.pdf

THE MOVIE REVIEW ESSAY

WR 121 Extra Credit Assignment

This is an opportunity and invitation to try your hand as a movie review critic! Since most people like movies and also have (strong) opinions on what they like

or don’t like in cinema—this should be a fun writing activity for extra credit! You

must select a film pertinent to the course theme (Science, Technology, and Society). There should be some form of structure to your review, but there are as

many correct ways of writing a movie review (critique) as there are movie watchers! The documents in the Movie Review Extra Credit assignment folder

will be helpful in proposing different ways of approaching your writing, so you are apt to find one that works for you (or feel free to adapt/design your own!).

There are a variety of sample reviews included, and you are encouraged to visit websites like www.rottentomatoes.com and www.MovieFilmReview.com where

you can read all the movie reviews you like. There is also information about film terms you may wish to include/incorporate into your writing to add a level of

sophistication and detail into your analysis, critique, and overall review essay.

Basic Task Objectives

Students will learn to:

1. Analyze a narrative story structure of one or more feature films.

2. Identify terms and concepts that serve the basis for descriptive, analytical, and “argumentative” (i.e., “opinionated”) movie reviews

3. Synthesize literary/visual concepts into a coherent, interesting, compelling (i.e., persuasive) structured essay that informs the reader

4. Evaluate (and recommend “thumbs up” or “thumbs down”) a single film in-depth/detail looking at various film components such as actors, script

lines, special effects, and the overall meaning of the film 5. Optional essay focus: Do a comparative/contrast review of a couple,

several, or a full set of films, or an analysis of an entire genre of films related to the main theme of this course

6. Have fun writing about something they feel stimulated/engaged about but ARE NOT REQUIRED TO DO as this assignment is completely optional

and will be scored for “extra credit” only: Enjoy!

7. Submit a spellchecked, word-checked, grammar-checked, punctuation- checked, edited, revised, and polished movie critique essay (not a casual,

colloquial review). Note that names of films are italicized in-text such as: Enemy of the State, Nineteen Eighty-Four, etc.

WORD LENGTH REQUIREMENT: The extra credit review essay must be at least 1000+ words minimum.

These are things you need to include in your movie review essay:

1. A title (headline for your review); make it a clever/witty play on words

(pun)

2. The names of the main actors and the names of their characters [the

protagonist(s) and main antagonist(s)]; you should include top 2+ actors/characters minimum

3. A summary of the plot of the story, and its appropriateness to the main course theme (which is quite broad/extensive and inclusive)

4. A possible theme (or moral) of this story

5. Give the “audience demographic” or who would like this movie

6. Your opinion of the movie as a whole (include details you thought were interesting or awful)

7. A score/rating system (e.g., “two thumbs up” or “four tomatoes out of 5,” etc.). Write this review as if you were trying to convince someone

who has not seen the movie to either see it or avoid it.

8. Include a very short biography of yourself at the end (as the “movie critic”)

HOW-TO WRITE A MOVIE REVIEW: Since there are a wide variety of ways to approach and organize your review, any of the suggested examples seen within

this assignment folder (or elsewhere for that matter) are completely acceptable: your only core requirements are that the final draft essay is presented in full

prose/narrative form (not a Q/A or outline format), and meet or exceed the required threshold of 1000+ words. You’ll have just about everything you need

in this folder, but you may also consult outside resources, submit your draft to your group blog for peer review, ask your instructor for feedback, suggestions,

etc.

REQUIRED FORMATTING: Essays must be typed, double-spaced, include either a student “ID Block” or APA title page (i.e., your full name, the name of

this writing task, WR 121, instructor name, date completed, and total word

count) with complete identifying information and be submitted with a full, unique filename and in an acceptable.doc/.docx file.

Total possible score: up to 10 pts. {max}

__MACOSX/The Movie Review Essay /._instructions.pdf

The Movie Review Essay /Movie Review Masters Thesis (in APA Style).pdf

COMMON FEATURES OF ACTION MOVIE REVIEW WRITING ON

WWW.IMDB.COM

A MASTER’S PROJECT

SUKUMAL SUKHUM

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the

Master of Arts Degree in English

at Srinakharinwirot University

October 2009

COMMON FEATURES OF ACTION MOVIE REVIEW WRITING ON

WWW.IMDB.COM

A MASTER’S PROJECT

SUKUMAL SUKHUM

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the

Master of Arts Degree in English

at Srinakharinwirot University

October 2009

COMMON FEATURES OF ACTION MOVIE REVIEW WRITING ON

WWW.IMDB.COM

AN ABSTRACT

SUKUMAL SUKHUM

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the

Master of Arts Degree in English

at Srinakharinwirot University

October 2009

Sukumal Sukhum. (2009). Common Features of Action Movie Review Writing on

www.imbd.com. Master’s Project, M.A. (English). Bangkok: Graduate School,

Srinakharinwirot University. Project Advisor: Dr. Walaiporn Chaya.

This study investigated the common features of action movie review writing in

terms of the writing pattern and organizational formats. It also examined types of writing

as well as their purposes, sentence structures, and word choices used in writing action

movie reviews. The data used for analysis were the content of ten action movie reviews

from the year 2007 to 2008 on the website www.imdb.com. The criteria for analyzing the

features of writing were based on Rudeen’s organizational formats (2000) and Garbis et

al.,’s (2001) movie review guidelines. The results of the study revealed four main

patterns: Pattern 1: Providing a Board Overview; Pattern 2: Comparison with the Previous

Episodes; Pattern 3: Describing the Movie’s Storyline; and Pattern 4: Providing

Reviewer’s Comments or Concluding the Review. According to types of writing, three

types of writing were used (informative writing, persuasive writing, and narrative

writing), but in different parts of the movie reviews depending on the purpose of writing;

while, simple sentence was the most frequently used (39.38%) followed by complex

sentence (25.23 %) and compound sentence (23.38%). For word choice, concrete words

were used most to convey the intended meaning, and three kinds of emotional words were

found. First, emotional words of fun aimed to present an amusing tone of the writer’s

feeling to readers. Second, emotional words of violence were intended to show a violent

or an exciting tone. Finally, emotional words of disappointment were aimed to present

the writer’s disappointed feeling toward those action movies to readers. The findings

suggested that the movie review writing can be used to develop types of writing,

particularly informative writing. Also, the movie reviews can be used as reading materials

to enhance the ability to read for pleasure and critical reading.

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The master’s project advisor, chair of the English program, and oral defense

committee have approved this master’s project Common Features of Action Movie

Review Writing on www.imdb.com by Sukumal Sukhum as partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the Master of Arts degree in English of Srinakharinwirot University.

Master’s Project Advisor

………………………………………………

(Dr. Walaiporn Chaya)

Chair of the English Program

………………………………………………

(Dr. Walaiporn Chaya)

Oral Defense Committee

……………………………………………… Chair

(Dr. Walaiporn Chaya)

……………………………………………… Committee

(Assistant Professor Dr. Nitaya Suksaeresup)

……………………………………………… Committee

(Dr. Somsak Kaewnuch)

This master’s project has been approved as partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the Master of Arts degree in English of Srinakharinwirot University.

……………………………… Dean of the Faculty of Humanities

(Associate Professor Chaleosri Pibulchol)

October………, 2009

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This research work would not have been possible without the dedication and good

valuable suggestions of Dr. Walaiporn Chaya, my master’s project advisor. I would like

to take this opportunity to express my sincere gratitude for her great patience in reading,

editing, and encouragement me throughout this study.

I also would like to extend my thanks to Assistant Professor Dr. Nitaya

Suksaeresup, for her professional instructions and thoughtful advice. My appreciation

extended to Dr. Prapaipan Aimchoo, for her valuable comments.

In addition, my deepest special thanks are extended to Dr. Somsak Kaewnuch who

devoted his time with great patience in reading and gave me valuable advice and careful

proof-reading. Without his kindness, this master’s project could not have been

accomplished.

Finally, I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to my beloved family: father,

mother and brother, who always give me all their love, care, and stay with me.

Sukumal Sukhum

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter Page

1 INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………… 1

Background of the Study…………………………………………………….. 1

Purposes of the Study………………………………………………………... 7

Research Questions…………………………………………………………... 7

Significance of the Study…………………………………………………….. 7

Scope of the Study………..………………………………………………….. 8

Definition of Terms………………………………………………………….. 9

2 REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE……………………………………… 11

Writing Review……………….……………………………………...………. 11

Movie Review Writing…………………….………………………………… 13

An Overview of the IMDB Domain…………………….…………………… 15

Action Movie…………………………..……………….……………………. 16

Writing Styles……..………………………………………………………..... 19

Types of Writing………………..…………………………………………..... 20

Types of Sentence Structures…...…………………………………………..... 23

Types of Word Choices in Movie Reviews….……………………...……….. 25

Related Studies……………………………………………………………….. 27

TABLE OF CONTENTS (continued)

Chapter Page

3 METHODOLOGY…………..…………………………………………………. 31

Research Procedure………..……………………………………………..... 31

Data Analysis...............……..……………………………………………... 33

4 FINDINGS............…………..…………………………………………………. 35

Common Features in Action Movie Reviews Writing .................................35

Organizational Formats of Action Movie Review Writing...........................41

Types of Writing, Sentence Structures, and Word Choices in Action

Movie Reviews Writing................................................................................77

5 CONCLUSION AND DISCUSSION.....................……………………………. 88

Conclusion.......……………..……………………………………………... 88

Discussion....................……..……………………………………………... 91

Limitation.......……………..……………………………………………..... 92

Recommendation for Further Study..……..…………………………..........93

REFERENCES………...………………………….....…………………………......…...94

VATAE......…….……......………………………………………………………….......100

LIST OF TABLES

Table Page

1 Overall Patterns of Action Movie Reviews Writing............................................36

2 Organizational Formats and Guideline of Movie Review Writing:

Movie Title: Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End…………………........41

3 Organizational Formats and Guideline of Movie Review Writing:

Movie Title: Spider-Man 3…………………....………...................................44

4 Organizational Formats and Guideline of Movie Review Writing:

Movie Title: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull..................47

5 Organizational Formats and Guideline of Movie Review Writing:

Movie Title: Transformers...............................................................................50

6 Organizational Formats and Guideline of Movie Review Writing:

Movie Title: Iron Man.....................................................................................54

7 Organizational Formats and Guideline of Movie Review Writing:

Movie Title: Quantum of Solace.....................................................................58

8 Organizational Formats and Guideline of Movie Review Writing:

Movie Title: National Treasure: Book of Secrets ...........................................62

9 Organizational Formats and Guideline of Movie Review Writing:

Movie Title: The Bourne Ultimatum...............................................................65

10 Organizational Formats and Guideline of Movie Review Writing:

Movie Title: Live Free or Die Hard................................................................69

11 Organizational Formats and Guideline of Movie Review Writing:

Movie Title: The Incredible Hulk...................................................................73

LIST OF TABLES (continued)

Table Page

12 Types of Writing in Action Movie Reviews........................................................78

13 Frequency of Sentence Structures in Ten Action Movie Reviews......................81

14 Concrete Nouns and Descriptive Words Typically Found in Action Movie

Reviews............................................................................................................83

15 Emotional Words Typically Found in Action Movie Reviews...........................85

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure Page

1 Review Format......................................................................................................12

2 The Titles of Action Movie Reviews and Their Grossed Income.........................32

3 Percentage of Sentence Structures Used in Action Movie Reviews.....................82

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Background of the Study

Language is an essential device for communication. Humans use language to

communicate their ideas, thoughts, feelings or even the point of views with other people

in the society. Therefore, it becomes an important tool which helps people in the society

to understand each other through listening, speaking, reading and writing. Language is

also used to organize the content of communication, what human beings want to

communicate into the sounds that are heard, or the written symbols that are read. In this

way, humans can communicate with one another by speaking and writing. By speaking,

it is easy for both communicators to understand each other because they can use the body

language and interact through face-to-face communication. However, communicating by

written language appears to be more complicated than spoken language since the writers

cannot convey their ideas or thoughts using face-to-face communication. Thus, the writer

needs to make the reader understand his/her ideas by writing effectively and clearly.

Communicative writing would be effective when a reader can understand or perceive the

same ideas as those that the writer intends to communicate.

Currently, due to the globalization phenomenon, people can communicate with

other peoples all over the world through communication technology. Also, the fast-

growing resources of information can be accessed conveniently and globally through the

Internet. This results in the worldwide use of online written materials available in many

foreign languages, particularly in English, with a variety of purposes. For example, the

information on the Internet can be the resource of input for thousands of users in the field

of English language. Researchers can also search for research studies in many fields such

as the scientific research, technology development, geography, history and so on. The

Internet can also be digital video libraries. For people who want to further their studies,

they can study in a distance education system through online connections. In addition,

the online international business is very popular, and it is a fast and cheap way for

business people. They can create many business sections on the Internet such as

advertisement or entertainment sections to persuade consumers. It is then necessary for

website creators or writers, of any languages, who deliver online messages to write as

clearly as they can so that their audience or Internet users can decipher their information

correctly. Since there are various kinds of materials on websites, Internet users can

search for any kind of information to meet their needs. However, in this competitive

globalized world, a huge number of people do not have much time to relax because they

have to work hard for their survival. Entertainment sections on websites appear to be

valuable information for them.

Under the entertainment sections, one of the most frequently used by Internet

users is a movie review. A movie review is a way in which the writer expresses his/her

opinion of a movie with a short summary of its plot and characters as well as comments

on the movie. The purpose of most movie reviews is to help the audience to determine

whether they want to rent, buy, or see the movie (Eliashberg & Shugan, 1999). In

addition, from a review the audience can get roughly movie’s content and other

information about the movie. Moreover, the readers can search for the description of a

movie that they want to see by selecting types of the movies on the websites, so they can

get the useful information of the movie from movie reviews. Movie reviews on the

websites also allow a reader to quickly examine the main content of a movie, and help

them decide whether the movie worth seeing. Online movie reviews have also rated

those movies. Therefore, an online movie review is considered a powerful marketing

tool, or word-of-mouth information that has the impact on the Internet users’ decision

(Duan, Gu & Whinston, 2008). In addition, the message conveys brief content of the

movies and some ideas that a reviewer has attempted to persuade and attract a reader to

see the movies. The effective online movie reviews can have the persuasive effect on the

moviegoers, so movie producers use them as marketing strategies in the competitive

entertainment business. Therefore, professional movie review writing should give

sufficient details, with the essentials such as the basic plot, and the major events with or

without the important turning point so that the audience can make a decision whether to

see the film. The movie reviews, particularly the online movie reviews are important

because of the high competition among the producers, and there are many online movie

reviews on various websites to choose from.

Since there are many professional movie review websites such as

www.movies.yahoo.com, www.depreview.com, www.consumerreview.com

www.imdb.com , www.thefridayflyer.com and so forth, to persuade the audience to read

the reviews is challenging, and movie review writing is a complicated task

(Charoenchasri, 2007). In fact, writing a movie review is similar to writing on any topic.

That is, the writer needs to choose a topic, generating ideas, craft a thesis or focus,

research and structure an argument, and find the tone. Bowen & Cali (2008) states five

features of effective writing including focus, organization, support and elaboration, styles

and convention. However, writing a movie review is slightly different from writing on a

given topic in that the writer needs to perform some tasks that are related to any of those

movies he/she wants to review. In addition, the purpose of a movie review is to persuade

and convince the online consumers. A movie review is one of the most powerful channels

to generate word-of-mouth information. Style of writing and word choices are considered

the most essential features to attract reader’s interest (Zhang, Dellarocas, and Awad,

2004). Moreover, there are different kinds of movies including action, adventure,

comedy, drama, romance, horror and thriller, musicals, science fiction, and war movies.

One style of writing may be suitable for one kind of movies but not for another.

Furthermore, each type of a movie also serves different needs of the audiences.

Therefore, the movie reviewer can help the consumers to completely understand the

movie’s content and some other important information of each movie (Kungwanpradit,

2004). Kunwanpradit also states that since a movie review is a kind of writing a

summary, the use of different style from the original can mislead readers in understanding

the content of original movie. Since there are various kinds of movie reviews and the

styles of writing, writing styles are very important in persuading the reader to read those

reviews. The movie review writing which lacks of consideration for the reader’s

comprehension ability is then going to be unread because it may confuse the readers;

most of the audiences prefer to read the writing that is easy to understand.

Coffey (1987) suggests that writing is the process. Syntax, grammar, and

vocabulary are composed to make a sentence. If verbs are weak, grammar is poor, and

syntax is rickety, sentences will fall apart. Coffey also states that readers should learn

three important steps in the writing process: the careful and deliberate formulation,

organization of the information before writing, and the editing of information once it has

been written. A movie review is the analysis and evaluation of movies (Jergensen, 1998).

For instance, a humorous writing style would work well for a comedy; whereas, a more

serious tone would be appropriate for writing a drama review. Thus, writing movie

review has the impact on films, mainly in a new release of each movie. Particularly, the

plot summary and description of a movie that makes up the majority of any movie

reviews can have an important influence on whether people decide to see a film. Poor

reviews will often doom a film to obscurity and financial loss.

Mencher (1996) also suggests that “a review has two parts: basic information

about a work (straight reporting) and the reviewer’s assessment (the criticism)” (p.30). In

a movie review, the reviewer can give opinions on the movie to persuade whether the

audience should see the movie. There are both negative and positive movie reviews,

which depends on the purpose of movie reviewers. A reviewer has to make a case. A

solid case is made through the reviewer’s knowledge of the field, clear, authoritative

writing and proof in the review that the critic’s standards are valid (Chaovalit & Zhou,

2005). It can be said that reviewers consumer reports. They tell us whether we should

spend our time and money on a product. Thus, the use of writing styles and word choices

in the movie reviews are essential for writers.

Moreover, Baker (1992) points out that the smallest unit which the readers would

expect to possess individual meaning is the word. Then, using of word choice is also

important because movie reviews have strong effects on reader’s interest. Therefore, the

words must be interesting and meaningful.

Since the purposes of most the movie review are to help the moviegoers in

determining whether they want to see the movies, whether on DVD, CDs, or at the

cinemas, a number of prior research studies on online movie reviews have been

conducted to examine the influence of online word-to-mouth communication, the impact

of online product recommendations on consumers’ online choice (Duan, Gu, & Whinston,

2008). Most of online movie reviews abroad has also focused on investigating the

relationship between consumers’ generated content and product sales (Narayan &

Dellarocas, 2006). The results of these studies are mixed, and these studies are mostly in

the field of economics or business.

In Thailand, like in most parts of the world in which the utilization of the Internet

for an entertainment purpose has gained more popularity. However, the previous research

studies on online movie reviews are very rare. One study by Charoenchasri (2007)

conducted the genre analysis of newsgroup movie reviews. This study examined steps in

the schematic description of rhetorical pattern of movie review genre in professional

movie reviews written by newsgroup on the website www.imdb.com. Kungwanpradit

(2004)’s study investigated writing style used in movie overviews on website “Yahoo!

Movies” http://movies.yahoo.com. The study aimed to examine the general

characteristics of movie overviews on website “Yahoo! Movies,” and the language

characteristics and styles including the use of sentence structure, the use of word choice

and the tone the in different kinds of movie review writing. Meeprom (2005) analyzed

language styles of film synopses on the Internet, at the website http://movies.yahoo.com.

This case study investigated three aspects of language usage: typical characteristics of the

film synopses, distribution of words categories used, and grammatical structures of

sentences.

Since there are few previous studies on online movie reviews, the other aspects of

common features of movie review writing yet have been uninvestigated, particularly in

action movie reviews. For this reason, this present study attempts to extend the

knowledge in this area. Then, in this study common features of action movie review

writing including types of writing, sentence structures and word choices will be explored

and classified. The results will reveal how writing styles and word choices are used to

gain the readers’ attention and successfully persuade the Internet users to read their

reviews particularly in action movie reviews. Ten online action movie reviews have been

selected from the Internet website “www.imdb.com” as data.

Purposes of the Study

The main purpose of this study was to find out the common features of movie

review writing in terms of main pattern, organizational formats, types of writing, sentence

structure, and word choices of action movie review writing on www.imdb.com.

The purposes of the study are presented as follows:

1. To examine common features of movie review writing in action movie review.

2. To investigate types of writing, sentence structures and word choices that can

be commonly found in action movie reviews.

3. To examine the frequencies of types of writing, sentence structures and word

choices commonly found in action movie reviews.

Research Questions

This study addresses three main research questions as in the following.

1. What are the common features of action movie review writing?

2. What are the common types of writing, sentence structures, and word choices

used in action movie reviews?

3. What are the frequencies of types of writing, sentence structure, and word

choices used in action movie reviews?

Significance of the Study

It is certain that movie reviews have an important impact on moviegoers or

consumers in many ways, and each type of movie review has different writing styles. For

example, a humorous writing style would work well for a comedy review, a serious tone

would be good for a drama review, and a mysterious tone would be suitable for a thriller

review. Besides, movie reviews are written to help readers to make their decisions

whether or not to see a film. The findings of the study will be directly beneficial for the

following reasons:

Firstly, the results will benefit the readers to understand the content of movie

reviews and clearly understand what the movie review writer wants to present through

written language.

Secondly, the study will benefit the writer to see the essentials of movie reviews;

therefore, he/she can use techniques of movie review writing to persuade the reader’s

interest.

Thirdly, the results will help learners of English to practice reading and writing

skills, so they can write a movie review professionally.

Finally, the findings will be the sources of information for anyone working in

language education, movie industry, advertising, and marketing.

Scope of the Study

This study investigated common features of action movie reviews in

www.Imdb.com. The purpose is to find out the common features of movie review

writing in terms of types of writing, sentence structure, and word choices including the

frequencies used. Top 250 worldwide Box Office from all types of movie which each

movie has grossed over US$200,000,000 at the box office during their theatrical runs

were collected. Because of the different of quantities in each type of movies were

released in each year, some types of movie may be released more or less. However,

action movie review is one types of movie to release in less quantity in each year. Then,

ten action movie reviews during the year 2007 – 2008 were used as samples from

www.imdb.com. Furthermore, this study does not focus on examining any preferable

types of reviews positive and negative review writing in order to avoid biases in picking

up the data.

Definition of Terms

Terms used in this study need definitions. The lists of terms are as follows:

1. Movie reviews refers to pieces of movie review writing which the movie

reviewer aims at informing, persuading, and narrating t in order to convey his/her feeling

through the message so that the reader can make a decision whether or not to see a

movie.

2. Action movie refers to a type of movies which is full of physical stunts and

activities like battles, flights, car chases, or races etc.

3. Writing style refers to types of writing, types of sentence structure, and word

choices used in action movie reviews which the style of writing shows the writer ideas

and feeling to the reader.

4. Common features refers to the writing style used in movie review writing on the

website to suit the specific content and to persuade audience including purposes of

writing.

5. Types of writing refer to kind of writing which this study emphasizes three

types of writing: informative writing, persuasive writing, and narrative writing.

6. Types of sentence structure refer to the kind of sentences which are classified

into four types: simple sentence, compound sentence, complex sentence, and compound-

complex sentence.

7. Word choice refers to the kind of word choices used in action movie review

writing which are classified to two types: concrete words, and emotional words.

Summary of the Chapter

This chapter provided the background information and rationale for this study. In

addition, the chapter first discussed the important role of compute technology,

particularly the websites which provide a lot of useful information for people in the

globalization phenomenon. Then it described the contribution of online movie review

writing. It also described the purposes of the study, research questions, significance of

the study, scope of the study and definition of terms. The next chapter reviews the

theoretical foundation and the concepts of the movie review writing.

CHAPTER II

REVIEW OF RELATED LITERTURE

This study aimed to investigate the common features of action movie review

writing on the websites. It also examined the writing styles including types of writing,

sentence structure and word choice the movie reviewer used in movie reviews. In order

for readers to understand the overall concept of the study, this chapter will elaborate on

the following. First, some background knowledge about writing reviews and movie

reviews will be given. Second, overviews of the IMDB domain and action movies will

be presented. Third, some styles as well as genres commonly used in movie review

writing, which are classified as informative, narrative, and persuasive, will be

discussed. Then, a short overview of types of sentence structures and word choices will

be given for the purpose of exploring words and sentence types that movie review

writers normally choose in their writing. Finally, related research conducted abroad

and in Thailand context will be discussed.

Writing a Review

Writing a review, the writer considers the relationship between the work and the

audience, or the relationship between the writer and his/her audience. Thus, a review is

a critical evaluation of a text, event, object, or phenomenon. The important element of

review is a commentary, not only a summary. It means that a review makes an

argument. A review can offer agreement or disagreement and identify the points where

writer find the work exemplary or deficient in its knowledge, judgments, or

organization. Reviews can be found in many forms such as books, articles, art,

policies, exhibitions, performances and films (Drewry, 1974). Normally, reviews are

succinct; from a review, a reader knows the overall perspectives, arguments, and

purposes inside the work that has been reviewed. Kamerman (1978) suggests that

“reviewers should be as fair as possible in saying how well the author has carried out

his or her intent in the book being reviewed, and they should judge the book that has

been written, not the book they wish the author had written” (p. 7).

Furthermore, a review has to focus on opinions, not facts or details. Summary

should be kept to a minimum, and specific details should serve to illustrate arguments.

Palmer (1993) also claims that a review is an essay that draws attention to and passes

comment on a topical matter – the publication of a book, the release of a record, the

opening of a stage play or film, and so on.

Hutchison (1996) states that, “Reviews do not really lend themselves to formats

or patterns. Let’s look at how critics review works when they know their subject

matter, when they have prepared themselves to be critics through education, reading,

and viewing, and mastering books, music, cinema and theater” (p. 333). Hutchison’s

(2001) standard review format is described as follows:

Figure 1. Review Format

Appraisal of the work

Intent of the artist

Synopsis of the work,

performance exhibit

Evidence supporting your

appraisal

Artist’s intent

accomplished, not

accomplished.

Suggestions to the readers

Movie Review Writing

A movie review is a critical writing that examines why and how a movie works.

It provides the reader with a basic idea of what the film is about. Moreover, it provides

the writer’s critical assessment of the success/failure or effectiveness/ineffectiveness of

the film supported by the evidence the writer gathers from the film (The Writing

Center, 2009). Furthermore, it is one kind of review writing which is written to help

readers decide whether or not to see a movie. Movie reviews are written to give a

commentary, not only a summary. It offers the writer’s opinions on the qualities of a

particular movie. It also tells a little about the storyline to catch readers’ interest and

encourage readers to venture to the theatres to see the movies for themselves. Thus, the

critique is an opportunity to exhibit a critical awareness of the elements of the film to

share the delight and pleasure the film offers the viewer. Moreover, Juergensen (1998)

claims that the purpose of a movie review is not to merely summarize the plot, but to

evaluate its worth.

A movie review is a way in which writers expresses their idea of a movie with a

short summary of its plot and characters as well as comments on the movie. In

contrast, summary writing is a piece of writing in a short version which conveys an

objective condensation of the main ideas of the writing. It is written to help writers

convey an effective communication to readers because readers can get the main idea of

the writing quickly and do not have to waste their time reading every word from the

original source (Aropoff, 1970). Furthermore, when writing a summary, the following

parts should be omitted: background discussions, personal comments, digressions,

conjectures, introductions, explanations, examples, and definitions. Besides, some

materials are not printed materials such as film, play, or the events in a story, so it is

useful for readers to get a brief content from the summary. However, a good movie

review is not a summary of a film, but a critical analysis that examines why and how a

movie works. When writing a movie review, reviewers always consider who the

intended audience is for the film. In addition, a good movie review usually uses scenes

and dialogues from the film to support writers’ arguments (Essay-Paper.net, 2006).

According to Rudeen (2000), a movie review can be organized as the following.

Title and deck

The title of the review and the deck (a sentence in special print

above the review) suggest the reviewers opinion-whether her or she

thinks the movie is worth seeing or not

Where

At the top of the review, is the name the movie and the places

where it can be seen.

Introduction

Here the reviewer tells us why he or she thinks the movie is good or

not. There is also often a brief summary of what the movie is

about, the story line and what kind of movie it is-adventure, horror,

romance, for example

Actors’ Roles

This part gives a short description of the main characters and names

the actors who play the parts. Reviews refer to roles the actors have

played in other movies.

Story line

In this part you find out more about the story line and also where

and when the movie takes place and what the setting or mood is.

There may be more information about the roles as the reviewer talks

about the story line

Conclusion

The reviewer may conclude with an interesting or thought-

provoking question or statement to tempt you to see the movie for

yourself. Our local reviewer sometimes makes a ling with a local

situation or social attitude.

Source: “Reading Movie Reviews” by Bangkok Post Educational Services (2000),

from http://www.bangkokpost.com/education/movies.htm

Additionally, Garbis et al. (2001) propose a guideline of movie review writing

to keep readers’ interest as follows.

Paragraph 1

Offers overall impression of the movie while mentioning the movie’s

title, directors, producers, writers, main actors or supporting actors of

the movie.

Paragraph 2

Offers a brief summary of what the movie is about.

Paragraph 3

Offers actors’ roles aim to gives a short description of the key actors.

Paragraph 4

Offers movie techniques used in scenes. There may be more

information about the roles, the soundtrack, or explain the idea that a

movie is really interesting.

Paragraph 5

Address how well the movie represents the novel or play.

Paragraph 6

Offers the reader in reviewer opinion. It is the last opportunity to

guide the reader to attend the movie.

Source: “Film Analysis Terms” by M. Garbis and C. Adams, Baltimore, 2001, from

http://www.studyguide.org/filmterms.htm

An Overview of the IMDB Domain

The name of IMDB stands for the Internet Movie Database. This site was

launched in the year 1990, and in 1998 was acquired by Amazon.com. The IMDB

website consists of information about films, television programs, and games products.

The IMDB is aimed at entertainment professionals. It provides a variety of services

including production and box office details. IMDB has 57 million visitors, 17 million

of whom are registered (Wikipedia, 2009).

According to Chaovalit and Zhou (2005), there are many product reviews that

exist in various forms across different websites, for instance, complementary reviews

sites such as www.amazon.com; professional reviews sites such as

www.dpreview.com, www.cnet.com, www.zdnet.com and www.imdb.com; opinion

sites of consumers such as www.concumerreview.com, www.epinions.com, and

www.bizrate.com; and news or magazines with feature reviews such as

www.rollingstone.com. For movie reviews, however, the IMDB is a data source to

select because it is the one professional reviews site well-known as the largest

accumulation of data about films. It can be said that IMDB gives chances to customers

to present their opinions towards movies they want to criticize.

Furthermore, Kats et al. (2002) and Melville et al. (2002) mention that the

IMDB is a movie database which contains information about movie products,

recommendations and movie reviews written by members in the Usenet newsgroup.

They are professional in writing movie reviews which are officially stored in the

database of IMDB.

Action Movie

Action movies are movies which have a lot of physical stunts and activities,

possibly extended chase scenes, races, rescues, battles, fights, escapes, and destructive

disasters (floods, explosions, natural disasters, fires, and so on). The main focus in

action movies is usually on a male hero. Action movies always have a resourceful hero

struggling against incredible odds, life threatening circumstances, or an evil villain.

Moreover, the actors always plays in scenes of trapping or chasing each other in various

modes of transportation such as buses, ships, trains, planes, horsebacks, and so on

(Dirks, 2007). The following is an example of action movie reviews from website

www.imdb.com.

Title and deck

SPIER-MAN 3

A film review by Steve Rhodes

RATING (0 TO****): ***

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: AT WORLD'S END A film

Butterworth

** (out of ****)

Live Free Or Die Hard

2007

126 minutes

Rated PG-13

By Scott Mendelson

Where -

Introduction /

Paragraph 1-2

In SPIDER-MAN 3, Spidey gets in touch with his inner evil twin,

which turns out to be a lot of fun for him and for us. Even if the

movie isn't nearly as good as SPIDER-MAN 2, it's not a

GODFATHER 3 sort of disaster of a third picture in a series.

About the worst that can be said of SPIDER-MAN 3 is that it's

overstuffed with villains and it's at least twenty minutes too long.

(Spiderman3)

The reinvention of James Bond films continues with QUANTUM

OF SOLACE. The old James Bond had incredible luck and nearly

always did the right thing. This Bond bungles his way into

situations and is as likely to foul up someone else's plan as he is to

fix it. The tension between M and Bond always seemed a little

disingenuous since Bond was clearly MI6's super-weapon. The

new Bond as of the last two films is more of a loose cannon and is

dangerous to both sides. (Quantum of Solace)

Actor’s Role /

Paragraph 3

Depp's more subdued this go around. At least he's not reduced to

clown status, as he was last time, but he was key to the first film's

success and his savvy "savvy?" is neither here nor there. Instead,

Pirates 3 spreads the witty asides around. It's not quite the same.

(Pirate of the Caribbean: At World’s End)

The "3" in the title could also refer to the number of villains. This

time we get three villains for the price of one movie ticket. James

Franco plays "Goblin Junior," as the son of The Great Goblin is

derisively called. Thomas Haden Church plays the Sandman, a

character created out of some great special effects. And, Topher

Grace plays Venom, a character with somewhat similar skills to

Spider-Man. (Spiderman3)

Story Line /

Paragraph 4

However, for those who are old enough to attend middle school or

drive a car, this is a surprisingly effective large-scale adventure

picture. The plot involves Timothy Olyphant as a rogue ex-

government agent attempting to shut down the country by hacking

into our electrical systems. Ironically, the story progression in the

first act often resembles Willis's terrific 16 Blocks from last year,

albeit with emotional heft traded in for elaborate shootouts and

fights. The action scenes are set-up in a way to mirror the

claustrophobia and vulnerability of the original film. With the

exception of a third act True Lies rip-off, the action bits are

relatively creative and the filmmakers were smart to fill the villain

roster with notable sidekicks and thugs. Maggie Q does king-fu

and District B-13's Cyril Raffaelli does his 'parkour' wall-bouncing

thing, alas all too briefly. (Live Free or Die Hard)

The film opens in 1947 in the Nevada desert, where a nuclear test -

- complete with a fake, picture postcard slice of suburbia -- is

underway. Indy and George "Mac" McHale (Ray Winstone) get

themselves captured there by KGB agents, led by Irina Spalko. As

Spalko, Cate Blanchett is a hoot, giving one of the best bad

Russian accents on record. Her villain is so deliciously over the top

that Blanchett steals every scene she is in. (Indiana Jones and the

Kingdom of the Crystal Skull)

Conclusion /

Paragraph 5-6

There are lots of characters, and each one gets a good 15-minute's

worth, although as a whole, it never develops very much

dramatically. And it's heavy on special effects. If you consider all

the stuff that happening on screen, including: smoke rising, people

running around, robots transforming, combat, and things getting

destroyed (all in one shot), you could easily find this experience

chaotic. But the project knows what it wants to accomplish, and it

does. While not a great film, "Transformers" holds your attention

and is what the summer moviegoing experience is all about.

(Transformers)

Plumbing the art decorator's depths with characters and situations

we've come to enjoy, the atmospheric "Pirates of the Caribbean: At

World's End" winds up evening the series out. Would I see it

again? If appropriately compensated, maybe. Would I watch

Pirates 2 again? "I'm disinclined to acquiesce to [that] request.

Means 'no.'" (Pirate of the Caribbean: At World’s End)

This "Hulk" film is a dull disaster with an unconvincing love story,

non-threatening villains, lots of amped-up explosions, and a lead

character who hardly seems to be the same person that becomes

the Hulk. For a fully developed and humanistic take on a raging

Hulk and a complex Bruce Banner who wishes for the beast to be

expunged, check out the TV series or the 2003 Hulk. This droning

Hulk of a movie is for the birds. (The Incredible Hulk)

Writing Styles

According to Gould, DiYanni, and Smith (1989), style is the verbal identity of a

writer, as unmistakable as his or her face or voice. All the habitual choices a writer

makes––of word and phrase, of sentence pattern and length, of structure and

organization, of voice and tone––all these and more constitute style. A writer’s style

reflects an individual way of seeing the world, and as such is something far greater than

the sum of the identifiable parts within a sentence or a paragraph. Furthermore, “when

our style is effective, it offers our readers consistency in vocabulary, tone, and voice as

well as clarity in thought,” (Gould, DiYanni, and Smith, 1989, p. 280). Thus, each

writer has a different style of writing to convey to readers. Writers achieve effective

styles when their words, phrases, and sentences clearly convey their ideas and their

feelings about those ideas to their readers. In short, a writing style is a taste, and there

are no two identical writing styles, but, of course, writing styles create different effects

on readers.

Types of Writing

Narration, description, argument, and analysis are four major approaches in

writing. However, many writing experts give them different names and divide them up

differently. Thus, it is important to note that these methods can overlap, that more than

one can be used in any piece of writing, and that more than one can be used even at the

same time (Kelsch L. M. & Kelsch T., 1981). Moreover, in Rhetorical Modes in Essay

Writing (2008), it is stated that there are four rhetorical modes of discourse, namely,

narrative, descriptive, expository, and persuasive/argumentative writing. A narrative

writing tells a story. It is to recount a personal or fictional experience or to tell a story

based on a real or imagined event. A descriptive writing is used to create a vivid image

of a person, place, or thing. It is to enable the reader to share the writer’s sensory

experience of the subject. An expository writing is used to tell how to make or do

something, report on an experience, or explore an idea. It is to inform, clarify, explain,

define or instruct by giving information. A persuasive writing is used to state an

opinion and support it convincingly. It is to convince the reader to accept a point of

view or to take a specific action. However, in movie reviews, there are three types of

writing commonly used: informative, persuasive and narrative.

Informative Writing

An informative writing is designed to convey facts and data. This writing is to

make it clear and coherent. An informative writing is mostly facts but can contain

opinion if it is a personal text. Informative texts use words that are descriptive, precise,

and to the point. The texts are related to the subject, and present tense is used

informative movie reviews. A good informative writing should clearly explain or

inform. An informative writing is not writing expressing opinions but facts. More

importantly, informative pieces should be clear and precise.

Moreover, Winterowd (1981) claims that “to be informative, a piece of writing

must give the reader information, the two characteristics of information are that it has

surprise value and content” (p. 191).

Example:

The film is still brutally violent [Present tense], with an on screen body count

that nearly exceeds the combined totals of parts 1 and 3 (part 2, with its two

passenger airplane crashes, is still the record holder). There are point-blank

executions galore, and many vicious fight scenes, gruesome explosions, and

fatal car wrecks. [Present tense] Point being, fans of the series should know that

this is still a rough, profane, and violent adult action film. [Clearly

explain/inform]

Persuasive Writing

The most important factor of persuasion is the ability to give reasons as well as

the effective use of language. Persuasive writing is aimed to change opinions, modify

values, or encourage an action by the reader. However, the purposes of persuasive

messages are different from the aims of expressive and expository writing. People use

persuasion to convince others to agree with the proposed decision or action, which

should be the best solution. Without an action or feeling or emotion, there will be no

persuasion. Coffey (1987) said that persuasion is a writing to convince readers to

accept our point of view on a given subject. The goal of persuasive writing is to have

reader come to agree with our opinions by carefully building strong and convincing

arguments for our side while tearing down or weakening the opposing sides.

Gould, DiYanni, and Smith (1989) claim that “when we try to persuade

someone of something, we try to prove a point and at the same time we try to get the

reader or listener to see things the way we do” (p. 195).

Example:

Will you enjoy this movie? As long as you’ve managed to maintain a child’s

ability to wonder, and your heart isn’t made of stone, you will love it!

[Convince readers to accept in point of view]

Narrative Writing

A narration develops a subject or idea by explaining what happened, how it

happened, or why it happened. Normally, a narrative writing tells related events in a

sequence of time. A narrative writing functions as an action creator; the movement of

each event has an important role; therefore, a writer has to manipulate well on the

sequence of related events that lead to the climax of story. Usually, the narrative writer

creates a story with a point or purpose. Moreover, the writer’s work is to present that

point or purpose clearly by concentrating on a significant event in great detail by

emphasizing what happened, and omitting the rest of unnecessary events. Coffey

(1987) describes narration as a story about a series of events or actions. Narrative

details are ordered in a logical sequence of time. Moreover, Coffey states that verbs

create the action in a story. Generally speaking, verbs should be in the active voice

rather than in the passive voice. Active verbs help keep the story moving and make the

events seem more alive to readers. Narration also has three important qualities. First, it

tells a story. Second, it generally describes events in chronological order. Finally, it

makes a point.

Example:

Edward Norton initially makes a convincingly scrawny Bruce Banner, living in

Brazil and working at a soda factory. He has maintained communication with a

genetic scientist who may know how to cure Bruce's Green Giant anger

problem. Unfortunately, a drop of Bruce's blood that accidentally falls into an

open soda bottle is all that is needed to raise awareness from the government

and the sour, unemotional General Ross (William Hurt). The military arrives

armed and ready to shoot Bruce Banner, though there is a new foe, a Marine

named Emil Blonsky (Tim Roth), who is interested in acquiring a sample of that

genetic Hulk pool. [Tells a story related events in a sequence of time]

Types of Sentence Structures

Klammer (1997) suggests that a sentence is an independent unit of expression

and adds that a simple sentence follows the pattern of subject plus predicate. In

addition, a sentence is a group of words containing a subject and a predicate and

expressing a complete thought.

Winterowd (1981) claims that language gives us many ways to put ideas

together into sentences, and the writer who cannot use sentence combining devices will

have major problems. Writers must automatically and unconsciously be able to use the

sentence structures of their language to put their ideas down in a fluid, coherent way.

In general, sentences are classified as simple, compound, complex, and compound-

complex.

Simple sentence

A simple sentence contains one clause with a subject and a predicate (Klammer,

1977). It has to have a subject (something or someone that is performing the verb) and

a verb (an action or a state). It can stand alone as a complete simple sentence, also

called an independent clause. Moreover, a simple sentence can have a compound

subject (e.g. Jack and Jim) and a compound verb (e.g. worked and walked). However,

there are no commas separating these elements. Thus, simple sentences are useful for

creating an emphasis because they present ideas clearly.

Examples:

This film hits you with all the immediacy of a fist to the gut. [a simple subject,

film, and a simple verb, hits]

Elliott and Rossio can’t possibly service them all satisfactorily. [a compound

subject, Elliott and Rossio, and a simple verb, can’t service]

Compound sentence

A compound sentence contains two or more independent clauses joined in

conventional ways (Klammer, 1977). The clauses are joined by a coordinating

conjunction (with or without a comma). Coordinating conjunctions include and, but,

nor, or, and so. Moreover, the clauses are also joined by a correlative conjunction (with

or without a comma), or a semicolon alone. Correlative conjunctions are such as

both… and and not only…but also. A compound sentence presents a balanced

relationship between the clauses that are joined. Thus, it is emphasized that the ideas in

the sentence are of equal importance.

Example:

Gems mined for this purpose are called conflict diamonds [independent], and

they are the currency of Danny Archer [independent].

Complex sentence

A complex sentence contains at least two clauses: one independent and one or

more subordinate clauses (Klammer, 1977). The dependent clause is introduced by

either a subordinate conjunction such as although, because, since, while, and when, or a

relative pronoun such as that, who, what, and which. One clause (the main clause) is

emphasized over the others (the subordinate clauses). Thus, a complex sentence

expresses a interrelationship of the ideas in the sentences.

Examples:

The case commences at Christmastime in 1968 [independent], when a couple is

shot to death on a remote lover’s lane in Solano County [dependent].

Although he is on his way home for the night [dependent], McClane is called

upon to bring in Matt Farrell for questioning [independent].

Compound-complex sentence

A compound-complex sentence contains three or more clauses, at least two of

which are independent clauses, and at least one of which is a subordinate clause

(Klammer, 1977). Thus, a compound-complex sentence establishes a complicated

relationship among a series of ideas.

Examples:

The origin plot of the Incredible Hulk since its inception in the late 60’s never

made a lot of sense [independent] – what is the point of using a genetically

[independent] – engineered Hulk as a secret weapon when his animal instincts

cause him to destroy everything in his path [dependent]?

Susie was sick [independent], but she could not stop working [independent]

because she had to finish the report for the meeting the next day [dependent].

Types of Word Choices in Movie Reviews

Lannon (1983) suggests that word choice ultimately determines the quality of

your writing. After all, any sentence is only as effective as the words it contains.

Jacobs (1992) explains that word choice refers to a writer’s selection of word. The

selection should be accurate and explicit, so that all actions and ideas are clear. If a

passage is effective, if it conveys an idea well or gets at the essence of an action vividly

and powerfully, we may confidently say that the words are right.

Moreover, Winterowd (1981) also suggests that “words are symbols that convey

concepts and, therefore, are basic to the thought process. In fact, words and their

functions in sentences are topics that ought to interest the intellectually curious, and

some knowledge of words is necessary to the writer” (p. 399).

Concrete Words

Concrete refers to objects and things that people perceive through senses.

Sherman (1966) claims that concrete/specific language makes a writer’s style more

vigorous and colorful. In technical writing it is especially desirable because it not only

increases liveliness but also gives information more effectively and reduces the

likelihood of vagueness. On the other hand, abstract/general words are vague. The

significant point is that in offering the interpretation a writer would be providing

additional objective facts rather than omitting them in favor of vague expressions or

unsubstantiated interpretation.

All writers know what to say to their readers but some do not have exact words

to convey the intended meaning. In order to convey the intended meaning, writers must

select concrete words which can convey the exact meaning. Concrete words are

subsets of abstract words. They give clear meaning for abstract words. Thus, writers

should select concrete words to be clear in the meaning that they want to express

(Sherman, 1966).

Examples:

Abstract/General Words

major incident response unit

Concrete/Specific Words

ambulance, police car

several factors safety, cost

bad weather hurricane

receptacle jar, beaker, can, box

obtain buy, rent, requisition

We are taking precautions

against fire.

We are installing fire doors and an

automatic sprinkler system.

Emotional Words

An emotional reaction is a kind of human behavior; all human beings have

needs and must try to fulfill their needs. Therefore, writers should know how to

motivate needs through emotions so that their messages motivate the readers and thus

fulfill their interests. Writers should realize that emotional words are important, and

thus they should be careful about picking up a word for the writing. Mortensen (2007)

suggests that if we want to create emotion, choose words that will trigger feelings.

There are many words that are emotionally loaded with and represent different values

of different people. Moreover, words, because of their various lengths, can convey

emotional colors. Generally, short words are more blunt, direct, and harsh. Longer

words are drawn out to evoke colors of melancholy or suffering.

Examples:

Unemotional Words Emotional Words

cheap thrifty

traditional old-fashioned

fun merriment

sad painful

strange eccentric

Related Studies

There are few research studies on online movie review writing. Some studies

investigated writing styles in movie synopses, while other studies analyzed the

persuasive styles used in movie handbills or the persuasive influence of movie reviews

on online consumers.

Kungwanpradit (2004) conducted a study on writing style used in movie

overviews on the website “Yahoo! Movies.” The study investigated the general

characteristics of movie overviews, the use of sentence structure, the use of word

choice, and the use of tone in movie overviews. The findings revealed that there are

three general characteristics of movie overviews: number of sentences used in movie

overviews, the identifying actor’s and actress’s names, and the content of movie

overviews. In the part of grammatical structures, the most frequent structures used in

movie overviews are complex sentences, then compound-complex sentences, simple

sentences, compound sentences and fragments respectively. Simple sentences and

compound sentences are mostly used in comedies. Complex sentences are used most in

dramas, compound-complex sentences in romances. Besides, similes are frequently

used in dramas. Metaphors are most frequently used in romance. Metonymy and

hyperbole are mostly used by comedies. Furthermore, the findings about word choice

revealed that concrete words are used less than abstract words. Finally, the study found

that most movie overviews convey a purposive tone or an emotional tone.

Charoenchasri (2007) conducted a study on genre analysis of Newsgroup movie

reviews on www.imdb.com. This study was undertaken to analyze the particular

aspects of moves, sub-moves, and steps seen in the schematic description of rhetorical

pattern of movie review genre on the Imbd domain and the use of lexical features. The

findings showed that movie reviews on the Imdb domain follow the five moves in the

corpus of movie reviews: introducing the movie, describing the movie’s storyline,

providing comments, concluding the review, and offering other information. Also, the

study pointed out that the organization of ideas to establish moves and to reflectively

indicate the intentional rationale behind moves and steps is underlined by means of

utilizing discourse markers that help to convey the communicatively functional

statement under the entire rhetorical arrangement of the text.

Meeprom (2005) conducted a case study on language styles of online film

synopses at Yahoo! Movies. The case study investigated three aspects of language

style: characteristics typical of the film synopses, distribution of word categories, and

grammatical structures of sentences. The findings showed that the film synopses in the

sample ranged widely in style and included 35 typical characteristics. Also, the

findings revealed the patterns of “main characters plus conflict” and “main characters

plus conflict and climax” were most frequently used. Moreover, the study found that

nouns were the most frequent used, followed by verbs and prepositions. As for the

grammatical structure analysis, complex sentences were the most frequently found and

the relative clause was the predominant method of combining sentences. The active

voice and the present tense were usually used. The style, analyzed by the computer

programme Right-Writer3.0, was defined as weak and mostly difficult to read.

In another study, Eliashberg & Shugan (1999) investigated an important factor

of film critics. This study considered the relationship between the market performance

of entertainment services and the role of critics. The objective of this study was to

examine the potential role that critics may play in predicting and influencing the

commercial box office. The findings showed that critical reviews correlate with late

and cumulative box office receipts, but do not have a significant correlation with early

box office receipts. These findings suggested that critics, at least from an aggregate

level perspective, appear to act more as leading indicators than as opinion leaders.

Besides, Bozilovic (1998) conducted a study on factors of film

communicability. This study aimed to show that film critiques have an inevitable role

in the communication. The findings of this study showed that a critique is an important

mediator in the communication of the film and the audience so it should be made in

such a way as to provoke and enhance communication. The influence of film criticism

is proved by the number of empirical researches. The study showed that with the age of

the examinees knowledge develops and the comments on the critique in the newspapers

are used as the basis for film selection.

Summary of the Chapter

This chapter presented the literature as the theoretical framework for this study.

The first section described the concept of writing a movie review and then the overview

of the IMDB domain and action movies were discussed. The third section highlighted

the writing style and writing genre as well as types of sentence structure and word

choices. The previous studies contributed to the study both abroad and in Thailand

were presented in the final section.

CHAPTER III

METHODOLOGY

This present study aimed to find out common features of action movie reviews on

the website www.imdb.com. Writing style, specifically common types of writing,

sentence structures and word choices in action movie reviews were also investigated.

This chapter then presents the research methodology beginning with a description of

research procedure including research design, sources of data, and the procedure for data

collection and analysis.

Research Procedure

Research Design

This study is a qualitative study by nature. To be more specific, the qualitative data,

the content of movie reviews, were collected and analyzed using the framework of

Rudeen (2000) and Grabris et al. (2001). The source of the data was www.imdb.com.

which the movie reviews were posted, and the content in the movie reviews were

analyzed to find out the common features of movie review writing.

Data Collection

The data of this study were collected from Internet Websites “www.Imdb.com”.

The reason to select Internet Websites to be the main source of data because at present the

Internet is quickly search engines for people to get information of movies. The IMDB is

the professional reviews site and well known for containing the largest accumulation of

data about films. Moreover, Wikipedia (2009), Kats et al. (2002), and Melville et al.

(2002) mention that IMDB is popular in terms of entertainment professionals. This site

gives information about movies and good source of movie reviews written by members in

the Usenet newsgroup who are professional in writing movie reviews. Customers have a

chance to present their opinions towards movies they want to criticize. Besides, the data

of this study were selected from action movie review writing. Everybody loves to see

movies and each has a different choice to watch movies of their interest. A few love

comedy movies, a few might prefer drama movies others might love horror movies and

quite a lot of people love to see action movies (Hanson, 2009). Additionally, people need

excitement. Action movies are a simple and effective out, allowing people to experience

a heightened state with no risk in a convenient form. Then, the reason to select this action

movie was that action movies are loved by all age groups such as children, youngsters

and older generation.

Sampling procedure

According to the selection, all selected action movie reviews are randomly

collecting from top 250 Worldwide Box Office which each movie has grossed over

US$200,000,000 at the box office during their theatrical runs. All selected data were

collected during the year 2007 – 2008 on www.imdb.com. Figure 2 presents the detailed

information of the ten action movie reviews of this present study.

Action Movie: Year 2007 - 2008 Worldwide Box Office

1. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (2007) 2. Spider-Man 3 (2007) 3. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) 4. Transformers (2007) 5. Iron Man (2008) 6. Quantum of Solace (2008) 7. National Treasure: Book of Secrets (2007) 8. The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) 9. Live Free or Die Hard (2007)

10. The Incredible Hulk (2008)

US$958,404,152 US$885,430,303 US$783,400,000 US$700,759,914 US$571,827,600 US$569,968,427 US$453,961,501 US$440,725,045 US$377,520,804 US$254,218,390

Figure 2. The Titles of Action Movie Reviews and Their Grossed Income

Data Analysis

This study used content analysis method to find out the common features of action

movie review writing. A personal computer with Internet access and compact disc

recordable (CD-R) was used in collecting data from online sources. The collected files,

the texts of action movie review from the website www.imdb.com were copied. Then the

data were manually analyzed in the following steps:

To answer the first research question: What are the common features of action

movie review writing? The common features of writing used in action movie reviews

were analyzed in terms of the common features of movie review writing that typically

found in action movie reviews based on Rudeen’s organizational formats (2000) and

Garbis et al.,’s (2001) movie review guidelines.

The results revealed the common features in terms of the main pattern and the

organizational formats used in ten action movie reviews.

To answer the second research question: What are the common types of writing,

sentence structures, and word choices used in action movie reviews? First, the data were

analyzed based on three types of writing: informative, persuasive, and narrative. Next,

four types of sentence structures: simple, compound, complex and compound-complex

sentences used in the movie content were analyzed. The results showed the types of

writing and the types of sentence structure used most in the ten action movie reviews.

Finally, to answer the third research question: What are the frequencies of types of

writing, sentence structure, and word choices used in action movie reviews. The

researcher analyzed the most frequency of types of writing, sentence structures, and word

choices both quantitatively and qualitatively by presenting in percentage.

Summary of the Chapter

This chapter discussed the research methodology including research design,

sources of data, sampling procedure, data collection and analysis. The sources of data for

the study were the action movie reviews on the website www.imdb.com. The data were

the content of the movie reviews, and the data were analyzed using the content analysis

based on the framework and the guidelines of movie review writing. Chapter four

presents the results of the study.

CHAPTER IV

FINDINGS

This study investigated common features of action movie review writing. This

chapter presents the results of the study which are divided into two main sections.

The first section presents the results of the common features of movie review writing

that typically found in action movie reviews based on Rudeen’s organizational

formats (2000) and Garbis et al.,’s (2001) movie review guidelines. The second

section discusses types of writing, sentence structures, and word choices in action

movie review writing.

Common Features in Action Movie Reviews Writing

This study aimed at investigating common features of action movie review

writing. The content of each part of the texts as well as its purposes was analyzed to

find out the common features of action movie reviews. The findings revealed four

overall patterns of writing in action movie reviews: a broad overview of the movie, a

comparison with the previous episode of the film, description of the movie’s storyline,

and making comments. The first pattern was aimed to provide a broad overview of

the movie including the actors’ role and the background information related to the

movie for the readers. The second pattern was intended to compare the present movie

with the previous episodes while the third pattern was the description of the movie’s

storyline and the last pattern is the provision of the reviewer’s comments on the

movie, both positive and negative or the conclusion of the review. The description of

overall patterns in action movie review writing was summarized in Table 1.

Table 1

Overall Patterns of Action Movie Reviews Writing

Patterns of Action Movie Review

Writing

Intents

1. Providing a Broad Overview

Intent 1: Giving the general description of the

movie

Intent 2: Giving the background knowledge

related to the movie

2. Comparison with the Previous

Episodes (i.e. Spiderman 1, 2,

& 3)

Intent 1: Comparison with the previous episode

Intent 2: Comparison with all previous episodes

3. Describing the Movie’s

Storyline

Intent 1: Describing the impression events in the

movie

4. Providing Reviewer’s

Comments or Concluding the

Review

Intent 1: Giving reviewer’s comments or making

an entire judgment in positive and negative or

evaluate the movie

Intent 2: Giving suggestions in the movie or

offering other information such as other special

comments or contact information of the reviewer

Table 1 shows each pattern of action movie reviews with its intents in each

part of the text. The following section is then the explanation of four patterns of the

movie reviews as well as the sample review content to help the readers have a

profound understanding.

Pattern 1: Providing a Broad Overview

This pattern focuses on giving information, general description, or background

of the movie to the readers. The reviewers provide general information or description

of actor’s roles, scenes, highlight, or spotlight events of the movie. This pattern

consists of 2 intents as follows.

Intent 1: Giving the general description/information of the movie. This part

mainly focuses on scenes or actors’ role which the reviewers consider that it is

important to help the readers to get some general information so that they can make a

decision whether to see the movie. Below is the example of Intent 1.

Example

Director: Paul Greengrass, Screenplay: Tony Gilroy, Scott Z. Burns, George

Nolfi (based on the novel by Robert Ludlum) Cast: Matt Damon, Joan Allen,

David Strathairn MPAA Classification: PG-13 (The Bourne Ultimatum)

This part illustrates that the reviewer gives the information about the names of

the film director (Paul Greengrass) movie stars (Matt Damon), and movie

classification rating which parent have to suggest their children (parental guidance

suggested: PG-13).

Intent 2: Giving the background knowledge related to the movie. This part of

the review mainly presents the general background knowledge of the movie such as

the information about the previous movie and the income.

Example

For the last two months, the story around Live Free or Die Hard (Die Hard IV)

has been Fox's decision to rework the film for the sake of getting a PG-13

rating. Of course, the original three Die Hard films were hard-R, with graphic

violence, pervasive profanity, and a general rough-and-tumble quality that

were (along with the Lethal Weapon films) the standard bearers of adult action

entertainment for about a decade. (Live Free or Die Hard)

This part shows that the reviewer wants to present the background knowledge

about the movie classification. As the example, the reviewer tells the reader about the

movie classification of all the original three Die Hard films which were classified as

hard-R, with graphic violence.

Pattern 2: Comparison with the Previous Episode

This pattern aims to compare the present episode of the movie with the

previous one and explain the difference between the two versions and interesting

things in the movies.

Intent 1: Comparison with the previous episode. This option uses only one

previous episode to explain what interests towards the movies are.

Example

The first National Treasure canoodled the American Revolution into a mildly

entertaining The Da Vinci code spoof. Book of Secrets schlumps the Civil

War into dreck. (National Treasure: Book of Secrets)

This part shows that the reviewer wants to explain the useful information

between the present and previous episode of the movie. The reviewer tells the main

these of the previous episode of National Treasure that involves the Da Vinci code

spoof; while, the present movie is about the Civil War.

Intent 2: Comparison with all previous episodes

In Intent 2, the reviewer gives the information for all previous episodes and

explains the main interests in the movies or explains the difference among those

previous episodes.

Example

Compared to "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl"

(hereafter referred to as Pirates 1), its sequel, "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead

Man's Chest" (hereafter referred to as Pirates 2), was a complete and utter

waste of everyone's time, a sorry state of affairs that robbed those colorful

pirate rogues we had come to know and love of their ineffable charm.

Three's supposed to be a charm of course but you won't find much of that in

Gore Verbinski's continuation (current thinking: culmination) of his silly yet

spectacular swashbuckling saga starring Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Keira

Knightley, and Geoffrey "them's more what you'd call guidelines than actual

rules" Rush.

Compared to Pirates 2, "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End" (hereafter

referred to as Pirates 3) often feels like Pirates 1, which is a bit unfair since it's

nowhere near that good. But it's better than Pirates 2. Keep telling yourself

that and you'll likely make it through to the (world's) end.

What you will find in Pirates 3 is a lot of the same. And I mean a *lot* of the

same. Save from an opening sequence in Singapore (with Chow Yun-Fat) and

a brief, much ballyhooed cameo by Keith Richards as Captain Jack's

paterfamilias (Depp often cited the Rolling Stones guitarist as his inspiration

for Sparrow's body language and vocal deliveries) there's little here we haven't

seen before. This time it's longer, noisier, more spectacular, perhaps, in terms

of its set pieces--the battle scenes, especially--but bigger isn't necessarily

better (although it *is* better than Pirates 2). (Pirate of the Caribbean: At

World’s End)

This examples above shows that the reviewer’s intent to make readers

understand the content of the present movie by comparing with all the previous

episodes. Moreover, the reviewer points out the main important points between the

previous and the present movie to help readers to understand what the present movie

presents.

Pattern 3: Describing the Movie’s Storyline

This pattern aims to focus on explaining scenes, detailed events, and situations

in the movie. There is the only one intent found in action movie reviews.

Intent 1: Describing the impressive events in the movie. This option explains

the impressive events that occur in the movie and gives some examples or situations

of storylines.

Example

Director Paul Greengrass (The Bourne Supremacy, United 93) wastes zero

time in mining the action from this storyline. As a filmmaker, his edit points

are quick, his camera shaky, and his close-ups constant. He wants realism and

he wants his action to appear in real-time. The pseudo-documentary style he's

becoming known for is at its best here, muting the spectacle of his stunts to

make room for believability in the play-pretend realism. And since it appears

many of his stunts were actually coordinated on set-and not in front of a

computer monitor-the realism is certainly accepted as, well, real.

For this reason, The Bourne Ultimatum sprints as a missile for the moon. It's

fast and sometimes infuriatingly so, as it rounds plot corners at double-time,

leaving us confused and choking on its dust. But all is forgiven when a clever

foot-chase is launched, when Bourne kicks down the clutch of a motorcycle,

as he hijacks an NYPD squad car, as he leaps from a roof, etc, etc. Luckily his

stunts are as loud as they are intelligent. And since Bourne stays generally

low-tech with his tricks, he becomes a sort of spy-version of MacGyver. (The

Bourne Ultimatum)

As shown in the example above, the reviewer explains the impressive events

in the movie, the action of this movie by giving credit to the director that many of

stunts were actually coordinated on set-and not in front of a computer monitor, so the

realism is certainly accepted.

Pattern 4: Providing Reviewer’s Comments or Concluding the Review

For this pattern the reviewer expresses his/her point of view, comments,

evaluate and make judgments for the movie in both a positive and negative way. The

reviewers’ expression can help readers to decide whether or not to see the movie.

Intent 1: Giving reviewer’s comments or making an entire judgment in

positive and negative or evaluate the movie.

Example

QUANTUM OF SOLACE has one of the more complex and satisfying of the

Bond film plots. The character of Bond has more depth than he does in some

of the more pulpy entries in the series. It is one of the rare Bond films that can

be appreciated on an adult level. I rate it a +2 on the -4 to +4 scale or 7/10.

(Quantum of Solace)

The extract shows that the reviewer males comments on the plot of the movie

and the characters of the actors. Moreover, the reviewer gives the rating scale (7/10).

Intent 2: Giving suggestions in the movie or offering other information such

as special comments or contact information of the reviewer. This intent aims to make

suggestion or recommendation about the movie.

Example

SPIDER-MAN 3 runs 2:20. It is rated PG-13 for "sequences of intense action

violence" and would be acceptable for kids around 6 and up.

My son Jeffrey, age 18, gave it *** 1/2, although he didn't like it as much as

the second and he thought this one was too predictable. He really liked the

action, the story and the multiple villains. He especially like the way they did

more with humor. His girlfriend Yasmin, age 17, wanted to give it "five

million trillion stars," but I refused to let her go above my scale's maximum of

****. She loved the movie's great twists and turns and the way it scared her.

But, most of all, she loved Spider-Man. (Spider-Man3)

This example demonstrates that the reviewer presents special comments to

make the content of movie review reasonable. As the example, the reviewer also

gives his son and his son’s girlfriend to comment the movie.

Organizational Formats of Action Movie Review Writing

The further analysis of the content of the texts in the movie reviews was

investigated to find out the common features of the movie review writing in terms of

organizational formats based on Rudeen’s (2000) and the guidelines of movie review

by Garbis et al. (2001). The following tables demonstrate the organizational formats

in then action movie reviews.

Table 2

Organizational Formats and Guideline of Movie Review Writing

Movie Title: Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End

Organizational

Formats

(Rudeen, 2000)

Text

Guidelines of

Movie Review

Writing

(Garbis et al.,

2001)

Title and deck

Introduction

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: AT

WORLD'S END A film review by David N.

Butterworth

** (out of ****)

Compared to "Pirates of the Caribbean: The

Curse of the Black Pearl" (hereafter referred to

as Pirates 1), its sequel, "Pirates of the

Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest" (hereafter

referred to as Pirates 2), was a complete and

utter waste of everyone's time, a sorry state of

affairs that robbed those colorful pirate rogues

we had come to know and love of their

ineffable charm.

None

Table 2

Continued

Organizational

Formats

(Rudeen, 2000)

Text

Guidelines of

Movie Review

Writing

(Garbis et al.,

2001)

Three's supposed to be a charm of course but

you won't find much of that in Gore Verbinski's

continuation (current thinking: culmination) of

his silly yet spectacular swashbuckling saga

starring Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Keira

Knightley, and Geoffrey "them's more what

you'd call guidelines than actual rules" Rush.

Compared to Pirates 2, "Pirates of the

Caribbean: At World's End" (hereafter referred

to as Pirates 3) often feels like Pirates 1, which

is a bit unfair since it's nowhere near that good.

But it's better than Pirates 2. Keep telling

yourself that and you'll likely make it through to

the (world's) end.

Actors’ roles

What you will find in Pirates 3 is a lot of the

same. And I mean a *lot* of the same. Save

from an opening sequence in Singapore (with

Chow Yun-Fat) and a brief, much ballyhooed

cameo by Keith Richards as Captain Jack's

paterfamilias (Depp often cited the Rolling

Stones guitarist as his inspiration for Sparrow's

body language and vocal deliveries) there's little

here we haven't seen before. This time it's

longer, noisier, more spectacular, perhaps, in

terms of its set pieces--the battle scenes,

especially--but bigger isn't necessarily better

(although it *is* better than Pirates 2).

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Not only are Cap'n Jack, Will Turner, Elizabeth

Swann, Barbossa, that flamin' monkey, and

those two funny pirates (one with the wooden

eye?) all back in fine fighting form but so too

are the entire cast of Pirates 2, pretty much,

including locker room attendant Davy Jones

(Bill Nighy) and his fleet of fishy followers, the

Jamaican high priestess Tia Dalma (Naomie

Harris), "Bootstrap" Bill Turner (Stellan

Skarsgard), and Lord Cutler Beckett (Tom

Hollander).

Storyline

Beckett rises to a position of prominence in

Pirates 3, forming an unhealthy alliance with

old tentacle face in a bid to rid the Seven Seas

of Sparrow and his motley crew of brigands and

ruffians (Beckett's keeping Jones's heart on ice

in the cooler, so to speak, so he has the upper

hand). Fortunately for the good guys Ms.

Swann also puts in a bid for more screen time

and wins, elevating her pulchritudinous position

to King of the Pirate Lords! Which doesn’t

leave much room for Jack...?

Offers a brief

summary

Conclusion Depp's more subdued this go around. At least

he's not reduced to clown status, as he was last

time, but he was key to the first film's success

and his savvy "savvy?" is neither here nor there.

Instead, Pirates 3 spreads the witty asides

around. It's not quite the same.

Plumbing the art decorator's depths with

characters and situations we've come to enjoy,

the atmospheric "Pirates of the Caribbean: At

World's End" winds up evening the series out.

Would I see it again? If appropriately

compensated, maybe. Would I watch Pirates 2

again? "I'm disinclined to acquiesce to [that]

request. Means 'no.'"

Address how

well the movie

Offers the

reader in

reviewer

opinion

As shown in Table 2, the results revealed that this reviewer wrote the movie

review “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End” using according to Rudeen’s

(2000) organizational formats. However, the reviewer did not inform the reader

where they could see the movie. Furthermore, base on Garbis et al.,’s (2001) movie

review guidelines, the findings revealed that part of writing which offers overall

impression of the movie was not found.

Table 3

Organizational Formats and Guideline of Movie Review Writing

Movie Title: Spider-Man 3

Organizational

Formats

(Rudeen, 2000)

Text

Guidelines of

Movie Review

Writing

(Garbis et al.,

2001)

Title and deck

Introduction

SPIDER-MAN 3

A film review by Steve Rhodes

RATING (0 TO ****): ***

In SPIDER-MAN 3, Spidey gets in touch with

his inner evil twin, which turns out to be a lot of

fun for him and for us. Even if the movie isn't

nearly as good as SPIDER-MAN 2, it's not a

GODFATHER 3 sort of disaster of a third

picture in a series. About the worst that can be

said of SPIDER-MAN 3 is that it's overstuffed

with villains and it's at least twenty minutes too

long.

But as a wildly expensive popcorn movie, it

delivers the goods nicely enough. Best of all,

it's quite funny. Returning as story's eponymous

lead, Tobey Maguire is never better than when

he's finally allowed to be mean.

None

Offers overall

impression of

the movie

Table 3

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Storyline

Actor’s role

One of the movies many storylines has a

meteorite crashing into earth, leaving behind a

substance that turns good men bad. This icky

and spidery black goo attaches itself to Peter

Parker, a.k.a. Spider-Man, our All-American

superhero. When it does, Spider-Man turns into

a killer who wants to seek revenge. Later, he'll

renounce his devils and learn the true power of

forgiveness in a rather sappy yet satisfying

ending.

Peter also turns into a real lady killer. He's a

player who struts his stuff with pride. By far the

film's funniest scene comes when Maguire does

an homage to John Travolta's Tony Manero in

SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER, as Maguire

disco dances down the streets of New York.

Another delicious moment comes as he does a

Gene Kelly-type dance number in a club as his

date, Gwen Stacy (Bryce Dallas Howard), looks

on in amazement. The whole date is intended as

a big show-off for his old squeeze, Mary Jane

Watson (Kirsten Dunst). This is the movie,

however, where Peter wants badly to pop the

question to Mary Jane, but circumstances keep

conspiring to stop his proposal from happening.

The "3" in the title could also refer to the

number of villains. This time we get three

villains for the price of one movie ticket. James

Franco plays "Goblin Junior," as the son of The

Great Goblin is derisively called. Thomas

Haden Church plays the Sandman, a character

created out of some great special effects. And,

Topher Grace plays Venom, a character with

somewhat similar skills to Spider-Man. Of

course, all three of the bad guys have

sympathetic good guy alter egos.

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roles

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Conclusion

Even though I wished it had been shorter, and

hence more focused, I had a good time. I've

heard it called the most expensive movie ever

made. If that's anywhere near true, they

significantly overspent since, although it looks

fine, it's certainly no LORD OF THE RINGS.

SPIDER-MAN 3 runs 2:20. It is rated PG-13

for "sequences of intense action violence" and

would be acceptable for kids around 6 and up.

My son Jeffrey, age 18, gave it *** 1/2,

although he didn't like it as much as the second

and he thought this one was too predictable. He

really liked the action, the story and the

multiple villains. He especially like the way

they did more with humor. His girlfriend

Yasmin, age 17, wanted to give it "five million

trillion stars," but I refused to let her go above

my scale's maximum of ****. She loved the

movie's great twists and turns and the way it

scared her. But, most of all, she loved Spider-

Man.

Offers the

reader in

reviewer

opinion

According to Table 3, the findings revealed that based on Rudeen’s

organizational formats (2000) the movie theater and cinema in which the movie was

shown was not found. Moreover, this movie review has written based on Garbis et

al.,’s (2001) movie review guidelines

Table 4

Organizational Formats and Guideline of Movie Review Writing

Movie Title: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Organizational

Formats

(Rudeen, 2000)

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Guidelines of

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Writing

(Garbis et al.,

2001)

Title and deck

Introduction

INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF

THE CRYSTAL SKULL A film review by

RATING (0 TO ****): *** 1/2

The magic is back!

Can Harrison Ford at his age really pull off the

role of action hero Indiana Jones again? I'm

here to tell you that he can and does it with

great comedic gusto to boot. The long wait for

the next Indiana Jones movie is over, and it was

well worth the wait.

You've probably already been talked out of

loving this movie by all of the other reviewers

whose mantra is that the latest Indy film is good

but nothing special. Don't listen to them.

INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF

THE CRYSTAL SKULL is absolutely terrific.

In my packed audience, everyone was clearly

very attentive and on the edge of their seats

throughout this rip-roaring adventure. And, in a

time when the studios are releasing one long

movie after another whose two hour plus

running times feel twice that long, the latest

Indiana Jones manages to make its two hours

fly by. You'll swear the movie was less than

ninety minutes long.

None

Offers overall

impression of

the movie

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Storyline

Actor’s roles

Director Steven Spielberg knows how to dazzle

us, and he certainly does it here. One of the

reasons why this Indy film works is the script,

full of snappy dialog. After reportedly rejecting

other screenwriters and scripts, Spielberg went

with writer David Koepp, whose wide-ranging

talents can be seen in a whole host of

wonderful, magical -- and sometimes

frightening -- movies, including ZATHURA: A

SPACE ADVENTURE, WAR OF THE

WORLDS, SPIDER-MAN and PANIC ROOM.

The film opens in 1947 in the Nevada desert,

where a nuclear test -- complete with a fake,

picture postcard slice of suburbia -- is

underway. Indy and George "Mac" McHale

(Ray Winstone) get themselves captured there

by KGB agents, led by Irina Spalko. As Spalko,

Cate Blanchett is a hoot, giving one of the best

bad Russian accents on record. Her villain is so

deliciously over the top that Blanchett steals

every scene she is in.

Since Mac is a double agent, a double, double

agent, or who knows what, he doesn't stay

teamed up with Indy for long. But INDIANA

JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE

CRYSTAL SKULL is a buddy comedy. Indy

sidekick Mutt Williams is played by Shia

LaBeouf (the young lead in

TRANSFORMERS). With a switchblade knife,

a big head of greasy hair that requires constant

combing, a leather jacket and a noisy

motorcycle, Mutt is a cross between James

Dean and a young Marlon Brando. He is also

every bit Indy's equal, with "Get on, Gramps"

being one of his first putdowns of Indy.

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Conclusion

Mutt says that as they speed away on his

motorcycle, eventually riding right through the

library at the college where Indy is currently

teaching.

The quest this time involves a highly magnetic

box with "Roswell, N. M." on the side and a

strangely shaped crystal skull located deep in

the Peruvian jungle. While never taking itself

too seriously, the movie miraculously makes all

of its shenanigans and mysteries appear

genuine, even if far-fetched.

This rollicking good adventure is a good-

spirited family film that will entertain young

and old alike. It's also a very handsome picture

as well. Every shot has a warm glow to it that

makes it all very inviting. But I've got to

confess that my favorite parts are when the old

Indy theme is played again and again.

Be ready to laugh loud and often. Personally, I

had a smile on my face throughout the whole

movie since it is such a treat. Some of the

classic lines ("I've got a bad feeling about

this.") are also a lot of fun.

This charmer has other potential as well.

Besides being a movie that should and will

make a mint at the box office, it could also be

used as the basis for a completely new

Disneyland ride. The old ride is great, but one

based on this latest film could be even more

exciting.

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INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF

THE CRYSTAL SKULL runs what proves to

be a blazingly fast 2:02. It is rated PG-13 for

"adventure violence and scary images" and

would be acceptable for kids around 9 and up.

According to Rudeen’s organizational formats (2000), the findings revealed

that part of the place where it can be seen is not found. Moreover, this movie review

was written based on Rudeen’s organizational formats (2000).

Table 5

Organizational Formats and Guideline of Movie Review Writing

Movie Title: Transformers

Organizational

Formats

(Rudeen, 2000)

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Guidelines of

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Writing

(Garbis et al.,

2001)

Title and deck

"Transfomers" - More than Meets the Eye

by Homer Yen

None

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Storyline

Introduction

In the mid-1980s, Hasbro Inc. launched a set of

unique toys that, when twisted and turned,

transformed into alien robots. The Transformers

lore told of good aliens called Autobots, led by

wise Optimus Prime (voice of Peter Cullen who

was the original voice in all of the Transformers

cartoons from the 80s), who battled against evil

Decepticons, led by the malicious Megatron

(voiced here by Hugo Weaving). Like all

cataclysmic wars, theirs eventually ripped their

home planet apart, and the reason for the war,

an amazing energy cube, was lost to the stars.

This seemed to happen many eons ago. From

various seemingly unrelated scenes that happen

early in the film, we can surmise that the cube

found its way to our planet and the power-

hungry Megatron was not far behind.

For some like me, the Transformers was as

synonymous to my childhood as baseball is to

American sports. And watching a film with

blockbuster ambitions replete with special

effects that boggle the mind, I was reminded of

my younger years when I was just thrilled to

have a Matchbox car where the doors and the

engine hood would open. But with the

exponential improvement in digital technology

as well as the increasing expertise of today's

filmmakers, three-story tall alien robots can

convincingly share space with six-foot-tall

human counterparts.

Offers a brief

summary

Offers overall

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Table 5

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Actors’ Roles

The special effects wizards at Industrial Light

& Magic have taken it to a whole new level as

they use computer magic to transform these

aliens with 10,000+ moving parts into all sorts

of vehicles. Frankly, I marvel at the genius that

goes into how a simple piece of corrugated

cardboard can be folded into a fully enclosed

box. Here, we have robots that leap into the air

and then start transforming into vehicles. We

have airplanes that plummet towards the ground

and then transform into robots before hitting the

asphalt. That means, oh man, I'm in boyhood

heaven.

The Autobots befriend a not-quite-ready-for-

prime-time teenager, Sam Witwicky (Shia

LeBeouf) who can aide the good guys in

finding the energy cube. Sam, unaware of his

mythical responsibilities, is instead trying to

catch the attention of schoolmate hottie,

Mickaela Banes (Megan Fox) and trying to

dodge around his overly inquisitive parents.

Sam's growth as a friend to the Autobots, as a

love interest to Mickaela, and as a responsible

son to his parents goes above and beyond what

we'd expect from a film like this. The romantic

and comedic elements are oddly appealing.

And yet, there is also a fair amount of action

and suspense that one would expect from a July

4th release. Outside of this summer's final

"Pirates of the Caribbean" installment,

"Transformers" has some of the most eye-

popping action sequences this year. Autobots

want to live peacefully and will protect humans,

but Decepticons want to destroy Autobots and

consider loss of human life as collateral

damage.

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Conclusion

There are lots of characters, and each one gets a

good 15-minute's worth, although as a whole, it

never develops very much dramatically. And

it's heavy on special effects. If you consider all

the stuff that happening on screen, including:

smoke rising, people running around, robots

transforming, combat, and things getting

destroyed (all in one shot), you could easily

find this experience chaotic. But the project

knows what it wants to accomplish, and it does.

While not a great film, "Transformers" holds

your attention and is what the summer

moviegoing experience is all about.

Offers the

reader in

reviewer

opinion

An analysis of the movie review “Tranformers” revealed that the content of

this movie review was written based on a combination of Rudeen’s organizational

formats (2000) and Garbis et al.,’s (2001) movie review guidelines. However, the

reviewer did not provide the information of the theater or cinema that the movie was

shown.

Table 6

Organizational Formats and Guideline of Movie Review Writing

Movie Title: Iron Man

Organizational

Formats

(Rudeen, 2000)

Text

Guidelines of

Movie Review

Writing

(Garbis et al.,

2001)

Title and deck

Introduction

IRON MAN

A film review by Steve Rhodes

RATING (0 TO ****): ** 1/2

As popcorn flicks go, IRON MAN has enough

action and goofy moments to mostly keep your

attention throughout its bloated two hour plus

running time. (There is probably a sizzling

ninety-minute movie buried within its one-

hundred-and-twenty-six minutes.) But its thin

script suggests that the movie is more interested

in setting up a franchise than entertaining us,

which it does do sporadically.

Don't get me wrong. When the movie clicks,

which isn't nearly often enough, you'll have a

good time. The best moments in the picture are

the silliest, as when Tony Stark (Robert

Downey Jr.) fails spectacularly in perfecting his

Iron Man suit, which is a wearable killing

machine.

The film's central premise is based on a heavy-

handed political message that is ridiculous and

inconsistent. Hollywood has been churning out

anti-war movies with reckless abandon for the

past several years, while audiences have been

avoiding them like the plague.

None

Over overall

impression of

the movie

Table 6

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Storyline

In IRON MAN, Hollywood attempts to sneak

its anti-war sentiments into an action film. Tony

Stark, a billionaire playboy who has made his

riches off of his armaments company, decides

that war and the weapons of war are immoral.

So, he orders his company to stop building

them, which are their only products. What does

he do then? He wages a one-man war with his

own personal weapon of mass destruction. So,

the message becomes -- I guess -- that wars and

weapons are okay so long as the wager of the

wars is a superhero and not our military.

But I digress. Most people, predominately teens

and young adults, going to see IRON MAN just

want to know if Iron Man is going to blow up a

lot of stuff. Trust me -- the body count will be

high and the explosions will be loud enough to

shake the walls of the theater. Get a big bag of

popcorn and be ready for plenty of death and

destruction. You won't be disappointed in that

regard.

When we first meet Tony, he has temporarily

left his buxom playmates behind so that he can

venture to Afghanistan in order to demonstrate

his latest innovation in firepower to some

military brass. Along the way he quotes his

father, who firmly believed that "Peace means

having a bigger stick than the other guy."

Address how

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Offers a brief

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After being captured by the enemy, Tony

converts to a peacenik but one with a really

lethal weapon in the form of an invincible iron

suit -- it's actually titanium, but it looks like

iron. What causes Tony's conversion? He finds

out that his weapons have the potential for

inflicting collateral damage. His faux-sentiment

will undoubtedly remind you of Claude Rains's

character in Casablanca, when he said "I'm

shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going

on in here!"

But in no time, Tony is back alone in his private

laboratory in California, aided only by his

personal secretary, Pepper Potts (Gwyneth

Paltrow). Pepper books the charitable events

that he rarely attends and does icky things like

reaching into Tony's chest in order to insert a

new device to protect his heart from the

shrapnel in his body.

We then hear more about how troubled the

wealthy Tony is. With no family and friends,

save possibly Pepper, he is said to be "a man

who has everything and nothing." Don't worry

about him too much, since he'll eventually be

earning everyone's accolades as he takes on the

bad guys. Most of this part of the story,

however, is conveniently left for the next

episodes in what I'm sure the studio is hoping

will be a long running franchise. This film ends

in a single and very predictable fight. I'm sure

that IRON MAN 2 will juice up the villain

count and concentrate even less on the minimal

storyline.

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Conclusion

IRON MAN runs way too long at 2:06. It is

rated PG-13 for "some intense sequences of

sci-fi action and violence, and brief suggestive

content" and would be acceptable for kids

around 7 and up.

The film is playing in nationwide release now

in the United States. In the Silicon Valley, it is

showing at the AMC theaters, the Century

theaters and the Camera Cinemas.

Offers the

reader in

reviewer

opinion

According to Rudeen’s organizational formats (2000) and Garbis et al.,’s

(2001) movie review guidelines, the findings revealed that the content of this movie

review was written base on both of guidelines. However, part of the place where it

can be seen is not found base on Rudeen’s (2000). Moreover part of actor’s roles base

on Rudeen’s (2000) and Garbis et al.,’s (2001) were omitted.

Table 7

Organizational Formats and Guideline of Movie Review Writing

Movie Title: Quantum of Solace

Organizational

Formats

(Rudeen, 2000)

Text

Guidelines of

Movie Review

Writing

(Garbis et al.,

2001)

Title and deck

Introduction

Actors’ roles

QUANTUM OF SOLACE

(a film review by Mark R. Leeper)

CAPSULE: Picking up just after where

CASINO ROYALE left off, James Bond is

involved in trying to find the people behind the

death of his beloved Vesper. This is a decent

spy thriller on an adult level. The tone is

downbeat, but it is still one of the best in the

series. Marc Forster's action scenes could be

more coherent, but he is better with the

dramatic material. Rating: +2 (-4 to +4) or 7/10

The reinvention of James Bond films continues

with QUANTUM OF SOLACE. The old James

Bond had incredible luck and nearly always did

the right thing. This Bond bungles his way into

situations and is as likely to foul up someone

else's plan as he is to fix it. The tension between

M and Bond always seemed a little

disingenuous since Bond was clearly MI6's

super-weapon. The new Bond as of the last two

films is more of a loose cannon and is

dangerous to both sides. This makes for a much

more believable story. Bond super- villains

used to have nonsensical goals like starting

World War III or otherwise wiping out

humanity. Dominic Greene (played by Mathieu

Amalric of THE DIVING BELL AND THE

BUTTERFLY) has a rather nasty plot in the

current film, but it is not very different from

plots that have been hatched in the real world.

None

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the movie

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Storyline

The new Bond no longer has the incredible luck

at gambling the old one did, that kind of luck

would have severely damaged the story of

CASINO ROYALE, but he does have some

unaccountable skills like the old one did. In the

new film Bond seems to know how to pilot a

1950s vintage cargo plane. But the new Bond is

no longer the guy every schoolboy wanted to

be. The old Bond, when he loses the love of his

life, drowned the man responsible in a mud

bath. The new Bond drinks, and mourns, and

strikes out only sometimes at the people

responsible. Most of the glamour is gone. So

are the gadget-weapons (with the exception of

one in CASINO ROYALE). And the insistence

that his drinks be shaken and not stirred is a

relic of the past. Just about everything that

made the series childish have been done away

with. Rather than the romantic setting of

previous films like Istanbul, this Bond is not

afraid to spend much of the film in a Bolivian

slum. The film's colors are subdued and faded

to give the film a downbeat feel.

The new film starts uncharacteristically without

the usual gun- barrel and blood logo. Never

fear, fans, the trademark logo has been

relocated to the end of the film. Instead the film

starts with three long and mindless chases as

well as the worst Bond title sequence in recent

memory over the worst title sequence song.

With those out of the way to placate the wrong

kind of Bond fans the film settles down to a

reasonable pace and a more acceptable--even

complex--story.

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Vesper it seems had gotten involved with a

highly secret yet ubiquitous international

criminal organization, a sort of a latter-day

S.P.E.C.T.R.E. Daniel Craig as very probably

the best of the Bonds rushes in to find the new

organization and get revenge. He is not quite

equipped with all of the facts. Bond follows the

trail to Haiti. There his masquerade as someone

else brings him into contact with Camille (Olga

Kurylenko) who is on her own mission of

vengeance. Greene, a member of this secret

organization--it is called Quantum--is working

a deal with a Bolivian general involving

politics, power, and a stretch of worthless

desert. (By the way, calling the organization

Quantum is an insult to the viewer. The title

would have made perfect sense if the word

"quantum" was never used in the film. It was

like putting the mine in ENEMY MINE rather

than explain the title.)

Director Marc Forster has had a very mixed bag

of films to his credit. He directed MONSTER'S

BALL, FINDING NEVERLAND,

STRANGER THAN FICTION, and THE KITE

RUNNER. That is a very mismatched set of

films. While this film has one of the worst title

songs of the whole Bond series, it also has some

of the best music. Sadly it was not music

written for the film, but rather for Giacomo

Puccini's opera TOSCA. One of the film's few

funny moments had the leaders of Quantum

hashing out their plans electronically at a

performance of TOSCA. This bit of extreme

boorishness, talking over the transcendent

music, had to be a new low point for Bond

villains.

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Conclusion

The film takes some swipes at the United States

(as they did in previous films like YOU ONLY

LIVE TWICE) and for the first time in my

memory took a little swipe at Israel (claiming

one of the villains is ex-Mossad). Also the evil

Dominic Greene masquerades as an ecology

advocate spouting cliches.

QUANTUM OF SOLACE has one of the more

complex and satisfying of the Bond film plots.

The character of Bond has more depth than he

does in some of the more pulpy entries in the

series. It is one of the rare Bond films that can

be appreciated on an adult level. I rate it a +2 on

the -4 to +4 scale or 7/10.

Offers the

reader in

reviewer

comment

According to Rudeen’s organizational formats (2000) and Garbis et al.,’s

(2001) movie review guidelines, the findings revealed that the content of this movie

review was written base on both of guidelines. However, based on Rudeen’s (2000),

part of the place where it can be seen was omitted.

Table 8

Organizational Formats and Guideline of Movie Review Writing

Movie Title: National Treasure: Book of Secrets

Organizational

Formats

(Rudeen, 2000)

Text

Guidelines of

Movie Review

Writing

(Garbis et al.,

2001)

Title and deck

Introduction

Storyline

National Treasure: Book of Secrets

A Movie Review by Jonathan Moya

Rating: C+ or 2.5 out of 5

The Review:

National treasure: Book of Secrets at least gets

the history right before its treasure turns out to

be a watered-down piece of booty. The same

cast from the first movie plus the addition of

Helen Mirren as Benjamin Gates mom

(Nicholas Cage returns either laughing his way

through the role or laughing all the way to the

bank depending on your half-glass philosophy)

goes through practically the same adventure. In

true Santayana fashion "those who can not learn

from history are doomed to repeat it" forever in

the sequels.

The first National Treasure canoodled the

American Revolution into a mildly entertaining

The Da Vinci code spoof. Book of Secrets

schlumps the Civil War into dreck.

The conspiracy this time around involves the

Lincoln Assassination, a lost city of gold, what

looks like ancient Native American dildos

misinterpreted as treasure locations, two desks

on different sides of the world and the real

reason Mt. Rushmore was commissioned. And

that great MacGuffin, The Book of Secrets

which reveals the truth about the Kennedy

assassination, the missing eighteen minutes of

the Nixon tapes, the moon landing, Area 51 and

all the other time holes of presidential history--

all this to redeem the good name of great

granddaddy Gates from the muddiness of

misattribution.

None

Offer overall

impression of

the movie

Offer a brief

summary

Table 8

Continued

Organizational

Formats

(Rudeen, 2000)

Text

Guidelines of

Movie Review

Writing

(Garbis et al.,

2001)

Actors’ roles

Conclusion

This is a serious spoof of a spoof which means

the facts and plot turns don't connect in any

coherent or logical way, and the action except

for one good car chase in London (this is a Jerry

Bruckheimer extravaganza after all) mainly

grinds together in anticlimactic jolts. Yes, the

cast looks happy- they trapeze around the world

and got well paid for it (hopefully, in

confederate notes).

When half the cast start mysteriously slipping

in and out of American and British and German

accents there is a sense that a little too much

self-medication at the complimentary set wet

bar was taking place. Nicolas Cage does the

lamest cockney accent ever put on film in one

scene in a mock argument between his on and

off again ex played by Diane Kreuger only half-

disguising her German heritage. Even Helen

Mirren frequently reverts to uttering the

Queen's English.

We haven't seen method from Nicolas Cage in

many a moon. He has been too busy being these

lame action idiots (Ghost Rider and Wicker

Man). It may not even be in his genes anymore.

Does he really like the look of himself as an

action figure that much?

America never tires of conspiracy theories and

treasure hunts, so National Treasure: Book of

Secrets should be a big hit.

For me, however, it gets a lost in time grade of

C+.

Offer movie

techniques used

Offer actors’

roles

Address how

well the movie

Offers the

reader in

reviewer

opinion

Table 8

Continued

Organizational

Formats

(Rudeen, 2000)

Text

Guidelines of

Movie Review

Writing

(Garbis et al.,

2001)

The Credits: Directed by Jon Turteltaub; written

by Marianne and Cormac Wibberley, based on

a story by the Wibberleys, Greg Poirier, Ted

Elliott and Terry Rossio, based on characters

created by Jim Kouf, Oren Aviv and Charles

Segars; directors of photography, John

Schwartzman and Amir Mokri; edited by

William Goldenberg and David Rennie; music

by Trevor Rabin; production designer, Dominic

Watkins; produced by Mr. Turteltaub and Jerry

Bruckheimer; released by Walt Disney Pictures

and Jerry Bruckheimer Films. Running time: 2

hours 4 minutes.

WITH: Nicolas Cage (Ben Franklin Gates), Jon

Voight (Patrick Gates), Harvey Keitel (Agent

Sadusky), Ed Harris (Mitch Wilkinson), Diane

Kruger (Abigail Chase), Justin Bartha (Riley

Poole), Helen Mirren (Emily Appleton) and

Bruce Greenwood (the President). "National

Treasure: Book of Secrets" is rated PG

(Parental guidance suggested) for bloodless

violence and mild innuendo.

The findings revealed that the content of this movie review was written base

on According to Rudeen’s organizational formats (2000) and Garbis et al.,’s (2001)

movie review guidelines. Besides, part of the place where it can be seen base on

Rudeen’s (2000) was omitted.

Table 9

Organizational Formats and Guideline of Movie Review Writing

Movie Title: The Bourne Ultimatum

Organizational

Formats

(Rudeen, 2000)

Text

Guidelines of

Movie Review

Writing

(Garbis et al.,

2001)

Title and deck

Introduction

Actors’ roles

The Bourne Ultimatum

reviewed by Samuel Osborn

Director: Paul Greengrass Screenplay: Tony

Gilroy, Scott Z. Burns, George Nolfi (based on

the novel by Robert Ludlum) Cast: Matt

Damon, Joan Allen, David Strathairn MPAA

Classification: PG-13

The auditorium in which I screened The Bourne

Ultimatum was filled to capacity and humming

comfortably with the floating refreshment of air

conditioning when I took my seat. By the film's

end, the theatre was still full to capacity but the

room's temperature had risen several

uncomfortable degrees. The air conditioning

was furiously rattling, expelling refrigerated air

as efficiently as possible, but it couldn't keep up

with the perspiration-inducing intensity that the

film had caused our heart-rates to rise to. The

film had indirectly made the room hotter. Talk

about global warming.

Stoic, solemn, and robotic, Jason Bourne

returns for his trilogy capper, The Bourne

Ultimatum. Less of a continuation and more of

an upgrade from The Bourne Supremacy, this

third installment, working off of Robert

Ludlum's source material again, invents new

memories for the amnesiac hero to remember.

What used to be Operation Treadstone has now

been upgraded to Operation Blackbriar and Mr.

Bourne was (of course) involved with it in some

corner of his blurry past.

None

Offers overall

impression of

the movie

Offers actors’

roles

Table 9

Continued

Organizational

Formats

(Rudeen, 2000)

Text

Guidelines of

Movie Review

Writing

(Garbis et al.,

2001)

Storyline

As Ultimatum picks up almost immediately

after Supremacy left off, Jason Bourne is still

on the run, hurdling cops like leapfrog and

outrunning the CIA like they were a pack of

blind, one-legged cats. Falling in beside the

defensive, calculating Pamela Landy (Joan

Allen) as the CIA's resident Bourne expert is

Noah Vosen (David Strathairn). Vosen heads

up the Blackbriar gang and has hooked a

reporter, Simon Ross (Paddy Considine), whose

exposure stories on Bourne have uncovered

confidential information. Because the

information concerns Bourne's past and because

it's a matter of national security, Ms. Landy,

Mr. Vosen, and Mr. Bourne are all on his trail.

Director Paul Greengrass (The Bourne

Supremacy, United 93) wastes zero time in

mining the action from this storyline. As a

filmmaker, his edit points are quick, his camera

shaky, and his close-ups constant. He wants

realism and he wants his action to appear in

real-time. The pseudo-documentary style he's

becoming known for is at its best here, muting

the spectacle of his stunts to make room for

believability in the play-pretend realism. And

since it appears many of his stunts were actually

coordinated on set-and not in front of a

computer monitor-the realism is certainly

accepted as, well, real.

For this reason, The Bourne Ultimatum sprints

as a missile for the moon. It's fast and

sometimes infuriatingly so, as it rounds plot

corners at double-time, leaving us confused and

choking on its dust.

Offers a brief

summary

Offers movie

techniques used

Address how

well the movie

Table 9

Continued

Organizational

Formats

(Rudeen, 2000)

Text

Guidelines of

Movie Review

Writing

(Garbis et al.,

2001)

Conclusion

But all is forgiven when a clever foot-chase is

launched, when Bourne kicks down the clutch

of a motorcycle, as he hijacks an NYPD squad

car, as he leaps from a roof, etc, etc. Luckily his

stunts are as loud as they are intelligent. And

since Bourne stays generally low-tech with his

tricks, he becomes a sort of spy-version of

MacGyver.

Though I'm not positive as to how essential this

installment is to the Bourne legacy. CIA

Director Ezra Kramer is discussing the Bourne

subject with Ms. Landy early on in the story.

Both are unsure of Bourne's importance to the

agency, weighing out the possibility of giving

up the search altogether. Landy mentions that

maybe he's not involved with this particular

quarrel at all; that this isn't Bourne's fight.

Kramer shrugs, frowns, and says, "Well, let's

keep looking." It seems even the fictional

players are stretching their connection to

Bourne to keep this story chugging. And it's

true; the Bourne legacy doesn't require this

story to be told. This becomes apparent when

the same good joke from the second film is

repeated twice more in the third; and also when

the action set-pieces are nearly the same, if not

extended to a more satisfying length. Like I

said, this is more of an upgrade than a sequel.

But don't think I'm complaining. The

intelligence of the screenplay is a damned

marvel. To craft the delicate logic of such a

complex CIA tale deserves a merit on its own.

And so what if it's a formula their running

through the Hollywood factory for another go-

round? The last film was the best spy film in

ages.

Offer the reader

in reviewer

opinion

Table 9

Continued

Organizational

Formats

(Rudeen, 2000)

Text

Guidelines of

Movie Review

Writing

(Garbis et al.,

2001)

Just imagine how good this upgraded version is.

And technically The Bourne Ultimatum does

have its own (very valid) storyline that jet-sets

Jason from Morocco to Paris to London to

Madrid and finally to good ole' Manhattan. And

though what character building that's continued

here may not be required viewing for any

Bourne enthusiast, the power that David

Strathairn most certainly is. Skeletal and sever,

Strathairn's Noah Vosen is a formidable needle

of a villain. He's human, as all CIA leaders

claim to be, but that trait is buried beneath a

permafrost mounted by his overwhelming

coldness. Strathairn drives this storyline into a

realm of quasi-originality, making The Bourne

Ultimatum relevant enough for us to enjoy it

unabashedly. Because of him we swallow again

the tired conceit of Bourne's lost memory and

his lingering guilt. We admit that, yeah, this

truly is a magnificent flick. Samuel Osborn

After observing, the findings revealed that the content of this movie review

was written base on Rudeen’s organizational formats (2000) and Garbis et al.,’s

(2001) movie review guidelines. However, part of the place where it can be seen base

on Rudeen’s (2000) was not found.

Table 10

Organizational Formats and Guideline of Movie Review Writing

Movie Title: Live Free or Die Hard

Organizational

Formats

(Rudeen, 2000)

Text

Guidelines of

Movie Review

Writing

(Garbis et al.,

2001)

Title and deck

Introduction

Live Free Or Die Hard

2007

126 minutes

Rated PG-13

By Scott Mendelson

For the last two months, the story around Live

Free Or Die Hard (aka Die Hard IV) has been

Fox's decision to rework the film for the sake of

getting a PG-13 rating. Of course, the original

three Die Hard films were hard-R, with graphic

violence, pervasive profanity, and a general

rough-and-tumble quality that were (along with

the Lethal Weapon films) the standard bearers

of adult action entertainment for about a

decade. Having now seen the film, I now ask

Fox what exactly it was thinking, but not for the

reason you think.

The film is still brutally violent, with an on

screen body count that nearly exceeds the

combined totals of parts 1 and 3 (part 2, with its

two passenger airplane crashes, is still the

record holder). There are point-blank

executions galore, and many vicious fight

scenes, gruesome explosions, and fatal car

wrecks. Point being, fans of the series should

know that this is still a rough, profane, and

violent adult action film. On the other hand, it's

a sorry state for the MPAA when this is

considered more appropriate for children than

the previous entries just because there is less

blood and no one says the 'f' word (the way they

work in McClane's catchphrase within these

confines is surprisingly effective).

None

Table 10

Continued

Organizational

Formats

(Rudeen, 2000)

Text

Guidelines of

Movie Review

Writing

(Garbis et al.,

2001)

Actors’ roles

Storyline

However, for those who are old enough to

attend middle school or drive a car, this is a

surprisingly effective large-scale adventure

picture. The plot involves Timothy Olyphant as

a rogue ex-government agent attempting to shut

down the country by hacking into our electrical

systems. Ironically, the story progression in the

first act often resembles Willis's terrific 16

Blocks from last year, albeit with emotional

heft traded in for elaborate shootouts and fights.

The action scenes are set-up in a way to mirror

the claustrophobia and vulnerability of the

original film. With the exception of a third act

True Lies rip-off, the action bits are relatively

creative and the filmmakers were smart to fill

the villain roster with notable sidekicks and

thugs. Maggie Q does king-fu and District B-

13's Cyril Raffaelli does his 'parkour' wall-

bouncing thing, alas all too briefly.

As for our star, a bald Bruce Willis slides back

into his signature role with a minimum of fuss.

The main qualms come with the heavy-handed

treatment of the generation gap between

McClane and the villain, as well as Willis's

accidental sidekick (Justin Long plays a

computer geek who's apparently too young to

have heard of the classic song 'Fortunate Son').

Also, the screenplay goes a little

overboard in re-establishing McClane as a bitter

pill who only reluctantly saves the day (the

opening scene is also a little creepy as McClane

is shown basically stalking his college-aged

daughter). Justin Long comes off better than

expected, thanks to a subplot that deals with his

guilt for having inadvertently helped cause the

chaos that unfolds.

Offers actors’

roles

Offers a brief

summary

Table 10

Continued

Organizational

Formats

(Rudeen, 2000)

Text

Guidelines of

Movie Review

Writing

(Garbis et al.,

2001)

Conclusion

For most of the film, he is not hip or cool, but

scared and slightly ashamed.

Speaking of that college-aged daughter, the

third act stumbles by allowing Lucy McClane

to be abducted by the villains, which is

unfortunate, as the character has been

kidnapped in at least two Die Hard videogames.

Since the conflict between McClane and the

evil Gabriel is established and Long spends

much of the film in mortal peril, there is no

reason to pull out this most tired of chicks.

Regardless of past whiffs (the Underworld

films), director Len Wiseman proves capable of

pulling together a solid, crowd-pleasing action

vehicle that showcases authentic top-notch stunt

work and quality fight choreography. As a

bonus, the supporting cast is filled with reliable

character actors. Cliff Curtis is solid as the head

government agent dealing with the mess,

although Zeljko Ivanek is so wasted that I was

sure he was going to be revealed as a traitor in

the third act.

I still question Fox's decision to dub out the f-

words in order to get that PG-13 (the bad

dubbing is pretty funny at times), since they've

now created a film that is still inappropriate for

younger children but whose rating may scare

off or offend hard-action junkies. And, if Fox

wants the family audience, why are they

opening this against Pixar's Ratatouille?

Offer the reader

in reviewer

opinion

Table 10

Continued

Organizational

Formats

(Rudeen, 2000)

Text

Guidelines of

Movie Review

Writing

(Garbis et al.,

2001)

Studio politics aside, Live Free Or Die Hard is a

fun, well- crafted adult action film. So far, with

this and Rocky Balboa, we're 2 for 2 in 80s

nostalgia revamps. This gives me hope for

Rambo IV (which will be a hard-R), to say

nothing of the much anticipated (and somewhat

feared) fourth Indiana Jones film. It's not a

patch on the original, or the underrated Die

Harder, but it is about as good as Die Hard

With A Vengeance. It doesn't Die Hardest, but

it doesn't Die Hardly either.

The findings revealed that part of the place where it can be seen based on

Rudeen’s (2000) was omitted. In addition, there are three parts base on Garbis et

al.,’s (2001) movie review guidelines omitted: offers overall impression of the movie,

offers movie techniques used, and address how well the movie.

Table 11

Organizational Formats and Guideline of Movie Review Writing

Movie Title: The Incredible Hulk

Organizational

Formats

(Rudeen, 2000)

Text

Guidelines of

Movie Review

Writing

(Garbis et al.,

2001)

Title and deck

Introduction

Storyline

Actors’ roles

THE INCREDIBLE HULK (2008)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

RATING: One star and a half

Why on earth did Edward Norton make a

boring Hulk movie? Why do moviegoers hate

Ang Lee's "Hulk" so much? Why even bother

with essentially reimagining or remaking, or

whatever you want to call it these days, the

2003 box-office bust that was "Hulk"? These

questions plagued me while watching "The

Incredible Hulk," which is a mediocre and

completely flat, superficial superhero movie

that tries to do too much and accomplishes too

little.

Edward Norton initially makes a convincingly

scrawny Bruce Banner, living in Brazil and

working at a soda factory. He has maintained

communication with a genetic scientist who

may know how to cure Bruce's Green Giant

anger problem. Unfortunately, a drop of Bruce's

blood that accidentally falls into an open soda

bottle is all that is needed to raise awareness

from the government and the sour, unemotional

General Ross (William Hurt). The military

arrives armed and ready to shoot Bruce Banner,

though there is a new foe, a Marine named Emil

Blonsky (Tim Roth), who is interested in

acquiring a sample of that genetic Hulk pool.

Most plaguing question: if General Ross only

wants to capture the Hulk and use him as a

weapon, how is killing Bruce Banner going

make that possible? The answer may be that the

General will use Blonsky as his new guinea pig,

though the script never quite makes that clear.

None

Offers a brief

summary

Offers actors’

role

Table 11

Continued

Organizational

Formats

(Rudeen, 2000)

Text

Guidelines of

Movie Review

Writing

(Garbis et al.,

2001)

Nevertheless, Betty Ross (the pallid Liv Tyler)

is waiting in the wings for Bruce to show up,

despite being lovey-dovey with a new beau.

How can anyone compete with the Green

Giant? Oh, well, he has one deficiency - he

can't get too excited and have sex.

The origin plot of the Incredible Hulk since its

inception in the late 60's never made a lot of

sense - what is the point of using a genetically-

engineered Hulk as a secret weapon when his

animal instincts cause him to destroy everything

in his path? Does that not defeat the purpose,

General Ross? Yes, I am asking you, Mr. Ross.

Of course, that would not matter if the film was

entertaining and thrilling. Face it: the sight of

an enormous Hulk wrecking havoc is always

fun to watch. And the scenes where Hulk

destroys a few vehicles on a college campus is

exciting and nifty...and just as dispiriting. The

lack of spirit can be attributed to director Louis

Letterier ("Transporter") and star Edward

Norton who seem to go through the motions.

Numerous action-filled moments of Hulk

throwing a car or a tank in the air or causing the

ground beneath him to break become

monotonous. So does Edward Norton, who

never quite infuses Bruce Banner or the Hulk

with any personality or any depth to his anger

issues. Norton never becomes convincingly

angry either, and how can Edward Norton of

"American History X" never come across as

convincingly angry? It just seems like a

disservice to have a weakling still come across

as a tall green-skinned weakling with muscles -

there is no real sense of transformation or

urgency. The theme seems to be this: Hulk

loves to smash.

Offers movie

techniques used

Table 11

Continued

Organizational

Formats

(Rudeen, 2000)

Text

Guidelines of

Movie Review

Writing

(Garbis et al.,

2001)

Conclusion

A big mistake is the casting of Tim Roth, who

comes across as evil, mean and most certainly

angry, though it is such a one-dimensional

character that it is hard to care whether he lives

or dies - he is just a mean prick from the

beginning. Perhaps Tim Roth should've played

Bruce Banner - he might have come closer to

tapping into that inner rage that is the Hulk in

all of us. Eric Bana came close but the late Bill

Bixby fully accomplished that goal. This is

where a good screenplay is needed, folks. The

cast of characters are limp and underwritten.

William Hurt delivers no zeal or emotion as the

angry General Ross. Compare Hurt's take to

Sam Elliott's in the 2003 Hulk and you see a

world of difference. Ditto for Liv Tyler who is

uncharismatic and lifeless that I can't believe

this is the same actress from "Lord of the

Rings" or even "Heavy." And she scores a -15

on any chemistry with Norton. Check out

Jennifer Connelly from, once again, the 2003

Hulk for a more well- rounded character.

This "Hulk" film is a dull disaster with an

unconvincing love story, non-threatening

villains, lots of amped-up explosions, and a lead

character who hardly seems to be the same

person that becomes the Hulk. For a fully

developed and humanistic take on a raging

Hulk and a complex Bruce Banner who wishes

for the beast to be expunged, check out the TV

series or the 2003 Hulk. This droning Hulk of a

movie is for the birds.

Offers the

reader in

reviewer

opinion

As shown in Table 11, the findings revealed that the content of this movie

review was written based on Rudeen’s organizational formats (2000) and Garbis et

al.,’s (2001) movie review guidelines. However, the information about the cinemas

and theaters based on Rudeen’s (2000) were omitted and parts of the content that

address how good the movies based on Garbis et al.,’s (2001) was also omitted.

To summarize, the organizational formats of ten action movie reviews were

written based on by using both Rudeen’s organizational formats (2000) and Garbis et

al.,’s (2001) movie review guidelines. Of all the ten action movie reviews, three

movie reviews were written using Rudeen’s organizational formats (2000), and

another three reviews used Garbis et al.,’s (2001) movie review guidelines. In

addition, four movie reviews used both Rudeen’s organizational formats (2000) and

Garbis et al.,’s (2001). However, some parts of formats and guidelines were omitted

depending on reviewers. Moreover, some parts of writing was mentioned may be

used to present the first step or last step in movie review writing. The parts of writing

are the steps arranged depending on the purpose of movie reviewers to present or to

persuade their readers. It can be concluded that the steps of writing are flexible; they

were used to convey ideas in the movies in accordance with the aims of movie

reviewers. It means that reviewers can indicate the movie review by offering their

intention through writing independently.

Types of Writing, Sentence Structures, and Word Choices in Action

Movie Review Writing

To find out the writing style of action movie review writing, the content of the

movie reviews was analyzed in accordance with types of writing, sentence structure

and word choice. First, three types of writing frequently used in writing a movie

review including informative writing, persuasive writing and narrative writing were

used as the basis for analyzing the content of action movie reviews. In addition, four

types of sentence structure: simple sentence, compound sentence, complex sentence

and compound-complex sentence were investigated. To indicate word choice, the

researcher examined three types of word choice: concrete nouns, descriptive words

and emotional words that frequently occurred in action movie reviews.

Types of Writing

According the purposes of writing, the reviewers used informative writing to

give information and general description about movies, and they presented the

information using facts; whereas, the native writing was used to present the storyline,

plot, or showing outstanding parts of the movies. To provide comments, make

suggestions, and persuade reader’s interest, the reviews wrote using the persuasive

writing. The analysis of texts of ten action movie reviews in terms of types of writing

with their purposes was illustrated in Table 12.

Table 12

Types of Writing in Action Movie Reviews

Types of Writing Description

1. Informative

Writing

To give information and general description about movie

which the reviewers present this information in fact.

Example

For the last two months, the story around Live Free Or Die

Hard (aka Die Hard IV) has been Fox's decision to rework

the film for the sake of getting a PG-13 rating. Of course,

the original three Die Hard films were hard-R, with graphic

violence, pervasive profanity, and a general rough-and-

tumble quality that were (along with the Lethal Weapon

films) the standard bearers of adult action entertainment for

about a decade. Having now seen the film, I now ask Fox

what exactly it was thinking, but not for the reason you

think. The film is still brutally violent, with an on screen

body count that nearly exceeds the combined totals of parts

1 and 3 (part 2, with its two passenger airplane crashes, is

still the record holder). (Live Free or Die Hard)

This example shows that the reviewer wants to tell

the readers that the movie was brutally violent.

2. Narrative Writing

To present the storyline, plot, or showing outstanding parts

of the movie.

Example

The film opens in 1947 in the Nevada desert, where a

nuclear test -- complete with a fake, picture postcard slice of

suburbia -- is underway. Indy and George "Mac" McHale

(Ray Winstone) get themselves captured there by KGB

agents, led by Irina Spalko. As Spalko, Cate Blanchett is a

hoot, giving one of the best bad Russian accents on record.

Her villain is so deliciously over the top that Blanchett steals

every scene she is in. (Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the

Crystal Skull)

This example shows that the reviewer present the

storyline to readers which involved a sequence of time.

Table 12

Continued

Types of Writing Description

3. Persuasive Writing

To provide comments, to give suggestions, and to persuade

reader’s interest.

Example

Be ready to laugh loud and often. Personally, I had a smile

on my face throughout the whole movie since it is such a

treat. Some of the classic lines ("I've got a bad feeling about

this.") are also a lot of fun.

This charmer has other potential as well. Besides being a

movie that should and will make a mint at the box office, it

could also be used as the basis for a completely new

Disneyland ride. The old ride is great, but one based on this

latest film could be even more exciting. (Indiana Jones and

The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull)

As the example, the finding revealed that the

reviewer tried to convince readers to agree in his point of

view since the goal of persuasive writing is to persuade the

readers to accept the reviewer’s opinions.

As shown in Table 12, three types of writing: informative, narrative and

persuasive writing were used respectively in six movie reviews. The reviewers started

the reviews by using informative writing, followed by narrative writing and

persuasive writing. In one movie review, the reviewer started the review by narrating,

and in three movie reviews, the reviewers started the review by using persuasive

writing, followed by informative writing, and narrative writing. In the last part of the

texts, the reviewer tried to persuade the readers using persuasive writing again.

According to the types of writing, it appeared that six movie reviews (60%)

started with informative writing followed by narrative writing and persuasive writing

respectively. Only one movie review (10%) uses narrative writing in the beginning of

the review then informative writing, and persuades writing while three movie reviews

(30%) begin with persuasive writing followed by informative writing, and then

narrative writing, and end with persuasive writing.

Types of Sentence Structures

The further analysis was based on four types of sentence structure: simple

sentence, compound sentence, complex sentence, and compound-complex sentence.

The researcher also counted the frequency of each type of sentence structure used.

Furthermore, fragmentary or non-sentence was also examined. The results revealed

that of four types of sentence structure in ten action movie reviews, simple sentence

was most frequently used (128); while the compound-complex sentence was used

least. The findings are illustrated in Table 13 and Figure 3.

Table 13

Frequency of Sentence Structures in Ten Action Movie Reviews

Movie Title Simple

Sentence

Compound

Sentence

Complex

Sentence

Compound-

complex

Sentence

Fragment /

Non-

Sentence

Pirates of the

Caribbean: At

World’s End

14 2 1 3 2

Spider-Man 3 14 6 9 4 0

Indiana Jones

and the Kingdom

of the Crystal

Skull

17 7 8 4 0

Transformers 5 10 8 2 0

Iron Man 14 5 14 3 0

Quantum of

Solace 25 9 9 1 0

National

Treasure: Book

of Secrets

9 3 1 4 0

The Bourne

Ultimatum 12 8 18 4 1

Live Free or Die

Hard 5 14 6 5 0

The Incredible

Hulk 13 12 8 6 0

Total 128 76 82 36 3

As Table 13, there are five types of sentence structures used in the collected

data of ten action movie reviews. However, percentage of sentence structures in ten

action movie reviews can be found in Figure 3.

Fragment / Non-

Sentence

0.92%

Compound-complex

Sentence

11.08%

Complex Sentence

25.23%

Compound Sentence

23.38%

Simple Sentence

39.38%

Figure 3. Percentages of Sentence Structures in Ten Action Movie Reviews

According to Table 13 and Figure 3, the use of sentence structure of action

movie review shows that the simple sentence is the most frequently used in action

movie reviews writing. There are 128 simple sentences used in action movie review

(39.38%), followed by complex sentences (82 sentences, 25.23%), compound

sentences (76 sentences, 23.38%), compound-complex sentences (36 sentences,

11.08%), respectively. As for fragment or non-sentence, they constitute three

sentences (0.92%) of the entire sentence.

As the findings, simple sentences were the most frequently sentences used in

the action movie review, because of writing a review is a kind of writing to link

between the writers and the readers. In general of action movie review writing,

writers prefer to present the fact of information. Then, writing with simple sentence is

the most basic type to express writer’s ideas. It can be said that simple sentence can

be very effective for grabbing a reader’s attention. Although the simple sentence is

the most natural structure, too many simple sentences can make the writing seem

childish.

Word Choices

The results revealed three types of word choices: concrete nouns, descriptive

words, and emotional words.

Concrete Nouns and Descriptive Words

Concrete nouns were used to convey the intended meaning. Moreover,

concrete noun is classified by its ability to reach the senses. Concrete nouns are

something physical that can taste, touch, hear, smell or see an item the word is a

concrete noun. For descriptive words, they can make the writing clearer and more

interesting. Writers select both of concrete nouns and descriptive words to make

readers create a picture which the word refers to. The findings of the study revealed

that word choices used in the movie reviews were concrete nouns and descriptive

words as shown in Table 14.

Table 14

Concrete Nouns and Descriptive Words Typically Found in Action Movie Reviews

Concrete Nouns Descriptive Words

popcorn room hotter

vintage cargo plane smoke rising

leather jacket laugh loud

switchblade knife hard action

the classic song greasy hair

soda bottle wooden eye

masquerade noisy motorcycle

the auditorium long wait

schoolboy completely flat

Moreover, after reading a concrete noun and descriptive word, readers can

understand and perceive the meaning easily by recalling a thing in their real life as the

examples below.

As popcorn flicks go, IRON MAN has enough action and goofy moments to

mostly keep your attention throughout its bloated two hour plus running time.

(Iron Man)

Can Harrison Ford at his age really pull off the role of action hero Indiana

Jones again? I'm here to tell you that he can and does it with great comedic

gusto to boot. The long wait for the next (Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of

the Crystal Skull)

The new Bond no longer has the incredible luck at gambling the old one did,

that kind of luck would have severely damaged the story of CASINO

ROYALE, but he does have some unaccountable skills like the old one did. In

the new film Bond seems to know how to pilot a 1950s vintage cargo plane.

But the new Bond is no longer the guy every schoolboy wanted to be.

(Quantum of Solace)

If you consider all the stuff that happening on screen, including: smoke rising,

people running around, robots transforming, combat, and things getting

destroyed (all in one shot), you could easily find this experience chaotic.

(Transformer)

The above example shows that concrete nouns and descriptive words are

useful for writers to express the writer’s intention. However, most of concrete nouns

in action movie reviews are names of place, persons, or things that can be seen,

touched or felt. Besides, most of descriptive words in action movie reviews used

vivid verbs to make the reviews more interesting, so that the readers will read the

reviews and draw a picture which word refers to.

Emotional Words

An emotional word is used to trigger feelings. There are many words that are

emotionally loaded and represented different values to different people. Action

movies are a kind of movies which have lots of physical stunts and activity, possibly

extended chase scenes, races, rescues, battles, fights, escapes, and destructive

disasters. The contents action movie reviews involve the feeling that writers express

to his/her reviews. Then, the emotional words that writers express through reviews

can be classified into three main kinds. There are emotional words about “fun”,

followed by emotional words about “violence” and emotional words about

“disappointment”. However, the examples of emotional words typically found in

investigated action movie reviews can be seen in the following table.

Table 15

Emotional Words Typically Found in Action Movie Reviews

Emotional Words

Fun Violence Disappointment

a lot of fun disaster a lot of the same

funniest boggle the mind disincline to acquiesce

to be a charm the most popping action lame action idiots

come to enjoy to shake the walls become monotonous

great comedic gusto heart-rates to rise dull disaster

well worth the wait brutally violent non threatening villains

absolutely terrific many vicious fight a big mistake

The following examples are emotional words used to express the feeling of

fun-exciting, violence, and disappointment.

Fun

Emotional words of fun are mostly found in action movie reviews; writers aim

to present an amusing tone to readers.

In SPIDER-MAN 3, Spidey gets in touch with his inner evil twin, which turns

out to be a lot of fun for him and for us. (Spider-Man 3)

Another delicious moment comes as he does a Gene Kelly-type dance number

in a club as his date, Gwen Stacy (Bryce Dallas Howard), looks on in

amazement. (Spider-Man 3)

I'm here to tell you that he can and does it with great comedic gusto to boot.

The long wait for the next Indiana Jones movie is over, and it was well worth

the wait…INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL

SKULL is absolutely terrific…And, in a time when the studios are releasing

one long movie after another whose two hour plus running times feel twice

that long, the latest Indiana Jones manages to make its two hours fly by.

You'll swear the movie was less than ninety minutes long… This rollicking

good adventure is a good-spirited family film that will entertain young and old

alike. It's also a very handsome picture as well… Be ready to laugh loud

and often. Personally, I had a smile on my face throughout the whole movie

since it is such a treat. (Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull)

As popcorn flicks go, IRON MAN has enough action and goofy moments to

mostly keep your attention throughout its bloated two hour plus running time.

(Iron Man)

Violence

Emotional words of violent were also mostly found in action movie reviews;

writers aim to show a violent or an exciting tone of writer’s feeling in action movie to

reader.

And watching a film with blockbuster ambitions replete with special effects

that boggle the mind, I was reminded of my younger years when I was just

thrilled to have a Matchbox car where the doors and the engine hood would

open. (Transformer)

Trust me -- the body count will be high and the explosions will be loud

enough to shake the walls of the theater. (Iron Man)

The air conditioning was furiously rattling, expelling refrigerated air as

efficiently as possible, but it couldn't keep up with the perspiration-inducing

intensity that the film had caused our heart-rates to rise to. (Bourne

Ultimatum)

The film is still brutally violent, with an on screen body count that nearly

exceeds the combined totals of parts 1 and 3… There are point-blank

executions galore, and many vicious fight scenes, gruesome explosions, and

fatal car wrecks. (Live Free or Die Hard)

Disappointment

Emotional words of disappointment are the third types of common words

found in action movie reviews; writers aim to present writer’s feeling of

disappointment in action movie to readers.

What you will find in Pirates 3 is a lot of the same. And I mean a *lot* of the

same…Would I watch Pirates 2 again? "I'm disinclined to acquiesce to [that]

request. Means 'no.'" (Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End)

He has been too busy being these lame action idiots (Ghost Rider and Wicker

Man). It may not even be in his genes anymore. (National Treasure: Book of

Secrets)

The lack of spirit can be attributed to director Louis Letterier ("Transporter")

and star Edward Norton who seem to go through the motions. Numerous

action-filled moments of Hulk throwing a car or a tank in the air or causing the

ground beneath him to break become monotonous… A big mistake is the

casting of Tim Roth, who comes across as evil, mean and most certainly

angry, though it is such a one-dimensional character… This "Hulk" film is a

dull disaster with an unconvincing love story, non-threatening villains, lots of

amped-up explosions, and a lead character who hardly seems to be the same

person that becomes the Hulk. (The Incredible Hulk)

To sum up, there are many words that were emotionally loaded. According to

the findings, three main emotional words were found: fun, violence, and

disappointment words. These words can make readers to pay attention and encourage

them to know the significance of the message that communicate to them. The above

examples, words that convey an emotional color depended on how long or short they

were. Generally, shorter words are more blunt, direct, harsh, or sharp. Longer words

are drawn out to evoke colors of melancholy or suffering. However, emotional words

are also depend on the content of writing that writers present.

CHAPTER V

CONCLUSION AND DISCUSSION

The purpose of this study was to examine common features of action movie

review writing, particularly common patterns and organizational formats used in

writing online action movie reviews. The study also investigated types of writing,

sentence structure, and word choices in ten online movie reviews. This chapter then

presents a conclusion of the study together with discussions of the findings. Also, the

limitation of the study and recommendations for further studies are presented.

Conclusion

Regarding the first research question of what the common features of action

movie review writing are, the findings revealed four overall patterns of writing in

action movie reviews from www.imdb.com: a broad overview of the movie, to offer a

comparison with the previous episode of the film, to give description of the movie’s

storyline, and the last pattern intended to make comments on the movie. The first

pattern was aimed to provide a broad overview of the movie including the actors’ role

and the background information related to the movie for the readers. The second

pattern was intended to compare the present movie with the previous episodes while

the third pattern was the description of the movie’s storyline and the last pattern is the

provision of the reviewer’s comments on the movie, both positive and negative or the

conclusion of the review. To answer the first research question, the findings of this

study are consistent with Rudeen’s organizational formats (2000) and Garbis et al.,’s

(2001) movie review guidelines because movie review writing’s purpose is to express

reviewers’ idea of a movie with a short summary of plots and characters as well as

comments on the movie, then both of theoretical framework and the findings are

corroborated. To elaborate this point, Rudeen’s organizational formats (2000) and

Garbis et al.,’s (2001) movie review guidelines provide techniques in writing a movie

review and give guidelines of movie review writing. After observing ten action

movie reviews from www.imdb.com, the findings of the current study were consistent

with them. That is, movie reviewers try to express their ideas to readers by presenting

a broad overview of the movie, a comparison with the previous version of the film,

description of the movie’s storyline, and making comments.

With regard to the second and third research questions asking about the

writing styles in terms of types of writing, sentence structures, and word choices

commonly used in action movie reviews as well as the frequencies of sentence

structure, and word choices occurred in action movie reviews. The first type of

writing, informative writing was used in all ten movie reviews. Winterowd (1981)

claimed that informative writing has to give the reader information. The importance

thing to be concerned in writing informative pieces is writers have to write with

clarity and precision. Narrative writing was used in the next part of writing in a

movie review. That is, the reviewers aimed to tell the storyline, plot, or outstanding

part of the movie to make the reader know the brief content of the movie by using

narrative writing. Finally, persuasive writing was used in order to make comments or

give a conclusion of the movie to persuade the reader’s interest. This style of writing

was found in 6 movie reviews (60%).

According to types of sentence structure used, simple sentence is the most

frequently used in action movie review writing. First all reviewers like to offer

information of the movie to make the reader know the general of movie. There are

128 simple sentences in action movie review (39.38%), followed by complex

sentence (25.23%), compound sentence (23.38%), compound-complex sentence

(11.08%). For fragment (non-sentences), they constituted 0.92% of all of the

sentences. Reviewers used simple sentence most because this type of sentence

structure is easy to read and understand. Movie review is a piece of writing that

writers convey their ideas through the words. This supported the finding that the

writers mostly use simple sentence to present their writer’s idea in movie reviews.

Besides, reviewers used concrete word to convey the intended meaning.

According to Sherman (1966) writers should select the concrete words to give clear

meaning that they want to express. In action movie reviews writing, the concrete

nouns and descriptive words were frequently used because the writers needed the

readers to portray a significant event clearly. Furthermore, movie review writing is

written to help the readers make a decision whether or not to see a movie. It offers

writer’s opinions on the qualities of a particular movie. It also tells a little about the

story line to catch readers’ interest and encourage them to venture to the theatres to

see the movies by themselves. Then, writers must select concrete nouns and

descriptive words to convey the exact meaning.

The use of emotional words attacked the readers’ interest because writing a

review is a kind of writing that links between the reviewers and the readers. The

message conveys brief content of the movies and some ideas that a reviewer has

attempted to persuade and attract a reader to see the movies. Then, the findings of

action movie reviews writing revealed three main types of emotional words. The

emotional words about fun evoke readers to interest or participate in movie. The

emotional words about violence reflect the cruel events in the movie. The emotional

words about disappointment reflect the writer’s feelings which readers can judge

whether or not to see the movie.

Discussion

The results of the study revealed that there were four patterns found in action

movie reviews writing which there were consistent with Rudeen’s organizational

formats (2000) and Garbis et al.,’s (2001) movie review guidelines. It can be said that

a good movie review were provided writers opinions on the qualities of a movie, tells

a little about the storyline to catch readers interest and encourage readers to see the

movie.

According to the previous study, Charoenchasri (2007) investigated on genre

analysis of newsgroup movie reviews on www.imdb.com. The finding showed that

movie reviews on the Imdb domain follow the five moves in the corpus of movie

reviews: introducing the movie, emphasizing on describing the movie’s storyline,

providing comments, concluding the review, and offering other information. The

results in this study were in line with the previous study. There were only four

patterns found in this study: providing a board overview, comparison with the

previous episodes, describing the movie’s storyline, and providing reviewer’s

comments or concluding the review. This study focused on action movie reviews, but

the previous study focused on all kinds of movie reviews.

However, some patterns or moves as mentioned in the previous study may be

used to present the first step or last step in movie review writing. The patterns or

moves of movie review writing are steps arranged depending on the purpose of movie

reviewers to present or to persuade their readers. It can be concluded that the steps of

patterns or moves are freely conveyed according to the aims of movie reviewers.

That is, reviewers can indicate patterns or moves of movie reviews by offering their

intention through writing independently.

Moreover, Kungwanpradit (2004) investigated writing style used in movie

overviews on web site “Yahoo! Movies”. The findings of the previous study showed

that simple sentence and compound sentence were mostly used in comedies. The

complex sentence was used most in drama, compound-complex sentence in romance.

The results were different from this present study because the data of this study were

only action movie reviews. The findings of this study found that simple sentence

were mostly used. However, concrete words were mostly used in writing to help

readers form a picture that words refer to. It was consistent with this study which

writers selected concrete words to convey the exact meaning through his/her action

movie reviews.

Limitations

The limitations in this study were as in the following. Firstly, the data

collected in this study were small. There were only ten action movie reviews.

Therefore, the data were limited by kinds of movies. The action movie has a few

quantities to release in each year. Secondly, the data were collected data from only

one website the IMBD domain. Therefore, this site is the one professional review

site. Thirdly, the data selected in this study was limited by gross of box office which

each movie has grossed over US$200,000,000 at the box office during their theatrical

runs. Finally, there were few previous studies on online movie reviews; the other

aspects of common features of movie review writing yet have been uninvestigated,

particularly in action movie reviews. Then, some aspects like grammatical or

rhetorical writing were not explored in this study.

Recommendations for Further Study

Due to language is an essential device for communication which can convey

messages, ideas, or feelings to the readers. This study investigated common features

of action movie review writing on www.imdb.com. The findings of this study can

offer benefits the readers, writers, and other interested to understand and see the

essentials of action movie review writing.

However, this is the one study to research in action movie reviews from an

online source. In the globalization, especially the areas involved movie reviews, there

are many online sources like www.movies.yahoo.com, www.depreview.com,

www.consumerreview.com, and other online sources. Any further study about

common features of movie reviews may consider to investigating other types of

movie reviews such as comedy, romance, fantasy, thriller, and so on. It can be

concluded that other interesting topics related to common features of movie reviews

writing, the researchers can collect the data from other different types of movie

reviews and websites.

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VITAE

101

VITAE

Name: Ms. Sukumal Sukhum

Date of Birth: November 09, 1973

Place of Birth: Bangkok

Address: 877 Sukhumvit 49-14, Soi Prasertsit, Klong-Ton,

Wattana, Bangkok, 10110

Education Background:

1994 Bachelor of Arts (English)

Ramkhamhaeng University, Bangkok

2009 Master of Arts (English)

Srinakharinwirot University, Bangkok

Cover
Abstract
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Bibliography
Vitae

__MACOSX/The Movie Review Essay /._Movie Review Masters Thesis (in APA Style).pdf

The Movie Review Essay /Supplemental Information About Movie Terms and Reviews .pdf

Supplemental Information About Movies, Movie Reviewing and The Grammar of Film

This document contains a nice assortment of important terminology (vocabulary) related

to movie reviews and the ―grammar of film‖. There is also: (a) a ―movie review worksheet‖ to assist you in your pre-writing movie-watching activity; (b) a possible outline of a structured movie review (this is only a suggested paragraph by paragraph

approach; you do not have to write yours this way!; (c) a short movie review writing sample. Your extra credit review must be 1000 words or more (best to try to keep it

under 1500 for this project, as much fun you will have writing it!).

A FEW BASIC FILM GRAMMAR TERMS (from Dr. V)

Title sequence Introduction of film title, main actors, producer and director,

and key production personnel (e.g., cinematographer, score composer), usually (but not always) shown at the beginning of the film

End credits sequence Comprehensive listing of all personnel involved with the film, usually shown at the end of the film.

Establishing shot The principal shot showing the opening location and beginning (general) context of a scene.

Wide shot A type of panoramic establishing shot often displaying a large geographical landscape or full environmental context of a scene

One-shot Shot framed with only a single actor shown

Two-shot Shot framed with two actors being shown

Close-up Shot zoomed into a single object; often of one or two actors fully

zoomed in showing only ―heads‖ or even smaller sections (eyes, lips)

Dissolve A smooth transitional effect visually fading out from one scene and

fading into the next—used to change between scenes

Quick cut A rapid transition (usually of one or only a couple of frames) between

one shot and the next—used to change within scenes, often back and forth between principal actors/events/objects in the scene

Fade out An end-of-scene transitional effect that dissolves (usually) from the current scene into total black

Fade-in A beginning of scene transitional effect that dissolves (usually) from total black into the new scene

Pan A sweeping visual effect usually (but not always) moving horizontally

smoothly from one side of a shot to the other

Zoom Moving the focal point of the lens from ―out to in‖, visually producing

a close-up zoom to a specific object/person

Dream sequence A specialized scene within a film that usually dissolves

from an actor close-up into a self-contained scene that explores the subconscious as if the actor were dreaming (not flashback or flashforward scenes showing

actual events), and where the state of reality is mystical, subjective, imagined and not bound by conventional thoughts or behaviors; may or may not have any

dialogue.

Flashback A specialized scene within a film that usually dissolves from an actor

close-up into a self-contained scene that explores actual, objective events in the past history of the subject; the previous connected scene occurs in the present

(or future) and so the flashback is used to bring the viewer into the past/previous time period; generally bound by conventional thoughts and behaviors; may or

may not have any dialogue

Flashforward A specialized scene within a film that usually dissolves from an actor close-up into a self-contained scene that explores actual, objective events

in the current (future) history of the subject; the previous connected scene occurs in the past, and so the fastforward is used to bring the viewer into the

present; generally bound by conventional thoughts and behaviors; may or may not have any dialogue

Film score The original music composed and written specifically for the film

Film script The written dialogue, acting and scenes, often produced as a working

(subject to change) or comprehensive final document, much like a play but intended for film media production.

Film plot The central key source(s) of conflict within the film which ostensibly requires some resolution or outcome; subplots are often interwoven underlying,

adjacent to, or within a central plot. The script must tell the story using the plot.

Total running time The complete running time of a film, including both the

title sequence and end credits sequence, usually measured in minutes

Special effects These are the various video (visual special effects = VFX) from computer-generated imagery (CGI) and a variety of other complex production

techniques (e.g., stop-motion animation, 3D imagery, etc.) that contribute to a film. In many films, there is little ―plot‖, acting or dialogue of merit, but many

spectacular VFX and SFX. Audio special effects (unique, technical production techniques like Foley and computer-generated sounds) are also included as

―sound effects‖ or SFX.

MOVIE REVIEW TERMS

Blurbs – When a quote from a review is used in a commercial/advertisement

(e.g., – ―Better than the Matrix! I would see it again and again!‖)

Critic – A professional who publishes his opinion on a particular movie/play/book

(e.g., – Roger Ebert, Richard Roeper, Leonard Maltin, Pauline Kael)

Mediocre – Competent but not especially outstanding

(e.g., – ―The film wasn‘t bad and it wasn‘t good either, it was just mediocre‖

Cliché – Something that‘s been used so many times that it no longer surprises or interests the audience; overexposure

(e.g., – In a scary movie, a black cat jumps out and scares the character, but the real danger is RIGHT BEHIND HIM/HER!)

Character Driven – When the characters in a fictional work develop over the

course of the story into people you care about

(e.g., – ―Twilight‖ is about vampires, but more importantly, it‘s the relationship

between the characters that makes us care about the story)

High-Concept – When the idea behind the story is interesting enough to get people to see the movie without knowing anything else about it

(e.g., – A young clownfish gets kidnapped and put into an aquarium and it‘s up to his father and a misfit group of fish to save him {―Finding Nemo‖})

Plot – What the story is about

(e.g., – ―Kung Fu Panda‖ is about a clumsy, overweight panda bear who dreams

of becoming the ultimate kung fu warrior, etc… {note that a plot summary is about a paragraph long})

Hype – Using different techniques to get the audience excited about the story

(e.g., – ―Come see ‗Coraline‘ in amazing 3-D! It‘s like nothing you‘ve ever seen before!‖)

Out of Context – When quotes are mixed up and changed around to give the words a different meaning (e.g., – The commercial says: ―Roger Ebert calls ‗The

Big Crazy Movie‘ BRILLIANT!‖ What Roger Ebert really said in his review was, ―The Big Crazy movie could have been BRILLIANT if the acting wasn‘t so terrible.‖

Puns – A clever play on words; (examples – ―Waiting to Exhale‖ will take your

breath away!); (―Run to the theater to see ―Running Scared!‖)

Editorial rights – When handing over a review to a publication, the editor has the power to create a title and cut things out of the review; (e.g., – YOU

WROTE: ―This movie stunk.‖ The editor changes it to: ―This movie wasn‘t so good.‖)

Syndication – When the same article is published in more than one newspaper

or publication. (e.g., – The Associated Press takes one article and sells it to 300

newspapers and 1000 websites across the country)

Ratings system – When the critic uses a scale to show the degree of how much they recommend the movie. (e.g., – ―thumbs up‖ or ―four stars‖)

Audience demographics – When the critic recommends that only a certain

group of people should see, or not see, the film

(e.g., – ―Kids will like ‗Madagascar,‘ but adults will get bored.‖

Critical bias – When the critic cannot review the film fairly due to a personal

problem with something in the film.

(e.g., – I hated ―Jaws‖ because I‘m afraid of sharks.)

Spoilers –When a critic reveals secrets and plot points that could ruin the

surprise for the audience and lessen their enjoyment of the movie.

(e.g., – In the end of ―The Big Crazy Movie,‖ John the main character dies) Note: DON‘T TELL SPOILERS!!!

MOVIE REVIEW WORKSHEET Fill out the following information about the movie:

DURING THE MOVIE:

1. Who are the 3 most important characters in the film? Also list the names

of the actors playing these characters.

2. What is this story about? Be very detailed!

3. What group of people would like this movie (demographics)?

AFTER THE MOVIE:

4. Did you like this movie? Why or why not?

5. What rating would you give this movie?

6. What spoilers might ruin the movie for viewers if you told them about it?

7. All movies teach a lesson (theme/moral). What did you learn from this one?

8. What title would you give your review (and can you think of a pun that might work for it)?

WRITING A MOVIE REVIEW (Template Outline) Note: DON‘T FORGET movie titles are written in italics like: Lord of the Rings

HEADLINE: Include the title of the movie (try to use a pun!)

PARAGRAPH #1: Introduce the movie by stating that you‘ve just seen this movie and would like to give an opinion about it. Mention a couple of details that

might help the reader understand what type of movie you are talking about.

PARAGRAPH #2: Summarize the plot (story). Where and when did it take place? Who are the main characters? What is the story about? Remember, do

NOT include spoilers and do not tell how the story ends!

PARAGRAPH #3: Talk about the actors/actresses and discuss who did a good

job and who didn‘t.

PARAGRAPH #4: Talk about what you liked about the movie and what you didn‘t like. Be sure to include specific details and scenes.

PARAGRAPH #5: What lessons did you learn from this story (theme/moral)?

What do you think others will learn from it?

PARAGRAPH #6: What group of people would like this movie? Who would you recommend it to? Who would you not recommend it to? What‘s the MPAA rating

of the movie (G, PG, PG-13, R, etc…)? What is your final word on the film: Is it good or bad?

RATING SYSTEM: Give the movie a score. You can do grades (A,B,C,D,F+ or -

), stars (*** out of *****), numbers (3 out of 5) or something totally original…

just don‘t use ―thumbs up‖ or ―thumbs down.‖

SHORT BIOGRAPHY: Explain who you are, what your school level is (freshman, junior, etc.), your job (if you have one), sports you play and

interesting things you like to do. Talk about yourself in the ―3 rd person,‖ that is;

pretend someone else is writing the bio about you.

MOVIE REVIEW WRITING SAMPLE

NOTE: This is a “very short” movie review example of only 658 words

(movie reviews submitted for extra credit in WR 121/122 must be 1000+ words)

REVIEW TITLE: “My Dog Skip” will have you skipping to the theater

By Coop Cooper, A.K.A. ―The Small Town Critic‖

REVIEW: Everyone remembers their childhood dogs and the impact they‘ve had

on their life. Perhaps one dog in particular sticks out in your mind… a special dog that was there for you in the toughest or best years of your life. That is what this

screen adaptation of Willie Morris‘ ―My Dog Skip‖ conveys in a fun, nostalgic and

heartbreaking kind of way. Morris recounts the autobiographical memoir of his childhood in Yazoo City, Mississippi and the four-legged friend that accompanied

him on his journey into manhood.

Set in the backdrop of the war-torn world of the 1940‘s, young Willie (Frankie Muniz) is on the verge of his ninth birthday. His only real friend, neighbor and

high school sports hero Dink Jenkins (Luke Wilson) goes off and fight in WWII, leaving Willie feeling alone in the world. To lift Willie‘s spirits, his mother (Diane

Lane) decides to defy the wishes of his stern father (Kevin Bacon) and buy Willie a Jack Russell terrier puppy. The unusually smart and charismatic dog Skip

quickly becomes a local institution and helps Willie gain respect, make friends and even win over his first girlfriend.

The young Morris is outstandingly played by Frankie Muniz, now a household

name due to his success on TV‘s ―Malcolm in the Middle.‖ His acting is very

mature and shows shades of emotions very effectively. Both Kevin Bacon and Diane Lane do decent jobs of portraying caring and concerned parents. Luke

Wilson exceeds his normal comedy boundaries and pulls off the disgraced town hero with surprising effectiveness. However it‘s the dog that steals the show…

or should I say dogs. ―Moose‖ (Eddie from TV‘s Frasier) and his son ―Enzo‖ play the older and younger Skip respectively. Look for them in more movies,

commercials and TV shows to come. I guarantee you‘ll see them.

Kevin Bacon and Diane Lane‘s characters were strong, but didn‘t get enough screen time to fully develop. Willie‘s friendship with a young black boy was never

given a chance to develop either, probably in an effort by the filmmakers to avoid focusing on the segregation issues of the time period. The issue is addressed,

but I feel that the African-American characters should have had bigger, more substantial parts. Also, I didn‘t get the whole subplot with the evil moonshine

dealers and why they tormented little Willie and Skip. It seemed like a fictional

part that was slapped on to cause more conflict. Despite these objections, the

entire production was shot so effectively that it seemed that it genuinely

conveyed feeling of growing up in rural Mississippi. The attention to detail and the accuracy of the time period are phenomenal. I felt completely immersed in

this world and felt the full effect of this moving story. Even the southern accents were much better than average.

The message of this film is very clear and invokes plenty of nostalgia to anyone

who can identify growing up in a rural town. It‘s about passing into adulthood, remembering old friends long gone, and the desire to remember or relive happy

moments in our lives that may be fading from our memory. Morris is certainly a master at preserving his own memories by writing it down for others to enjoy. I

truly believe that this story is his gift, not only to the people of Mississippi, but to all who want to remember their past, and the friends they left behind.

This movie is PG, a rating which might run off some of the older crowd, but it‘s truly a movie for everyone. Most films geared for children these days depend on

lame, pop-culture references and gas-passing jokes in a patronizing attempt to

entertain the younger masses. This movie rises above all of that to become one of the most watchable non-Disney film for children since 1993‘s ―Searching for

Bobby Fischer.‖ Your date might resist going, but try to talk them into it. They won‘t regret it and neither will you.

Scale of 1-5: MY SCORE: 4 ½

Coop Cooper is an independently syndicated film critic, living in Los Angeles. He

is originally from Clarksdale, Mississippi and a Southerner at heart. He graduated from Southern Methodist University with a B.F.A in Cinema, and received his

Masters in Screenwriting from the American Film Institute in Hollywood. You can read his past reviews at http://www.thesmalltowncritic.com/.

http://www.thesmalltowncritic.com/

__MACOSX/The Movie Review Essay /._Supplemental Information About Movie Terms and Reviews .pdf

The Movie Review Essay /Think Of Yourself As A Writer!.pdf

Think of Yourself as a Writer

By Rachel Toor

Last summer I was asked by the Text and Academic Authors Association, a group

under the umbrella of the Authors Coalition, to develop a workshop on publishing for academics from the perspective of a former editor. The organization would

pay my expenses to any university that wanted to hear my talk. I was flattered, but not tempted.

It's not like me to be untempted by an opportunity. But I felt that there were

plenty of other people who could give the same presentation, and I wasn't looking to travel to out-of-the-way and possibly cold places. (I live in a cold and

out-of-the-way place.) When I talked it over with my friends, however, they were

shocked. This was the perfect thing for me, a chance to spread my proselytizing message.

I have a message?

Yes, they said, you surely do. I knew what academics wanted to hear about

publishing. What did I think they needed to hear?

Then I had an epiphany that made the gig irresistible. In Stephen King's On

Writing, a bad memoir but a surprisingly useful book about writing, he describes the impetus for his project. He mentions a conversation with the novelist Amy

Tan in which, after discussing the boring, predictable, and idiotic questions novelists are always asked ("Where do you get your ideas?" "When do you

write?"), he wanted to know what question she most wanted to answer. Amy Tan said, "They never ask about the language."

That's when I realized that my strange career—acquisitions editor to college-

admissions officer to author to columnist to teacher of creative writing—had come together to bring me to this point. When I thought about my time in academic

publishing, I realized that no one ever talked about the writing. And that, I realized, was a problem.

As a cub editor at Oxford University Press, I worked for a powerful and often

scary man, Sheldon Meyer, who did much to shape the scholarship of American history. He was loved by his authors and feared by his colleagues—all except

Leona Capeless, a copy editor who worked only on his books, a white-bunned, belle-of-Amherst type who smelled like roses and could make Sheldon sputter

and look at his feet. She was always yelling at him, usually for the same reason:

He gave her manuscripts to edit that were terrible, just terrible. How could he expect her to clean up these messes? Why couldn't he give contracts to authors

who could write? Why didn't he even notice how bad the writing was?

Sheldon would let Leona berate him, and then she would, indeed, clean up the messes. I'm not sure if the authors ever knew the extent of her distress over

their prose, although surely some of them could hear it through her clenched- teeth phone calls. Nearly all of them thanked her in print, though hardly any of

them mentioned her when their books won prizes and awards. Which they did. The books published by Sheldon and edited by Leona were nearly always

successful.

Like many editors and most academics, Sheldon, a man with refined intellectual

tastes and genuine curiosity, read for content. He read right over bad sentences to extract ideas, information, and arguments. That served him well in identifying

books that had something new to say.

But when manuscripts rounded the corner to the marketing department, and

later to the sales reps, bad writing would again become an issue. Even if Leona had made the sentences grammatically correct, she couldn't make the writing

good—she couldn't revive dead prose or give the author a compelling voice. The marketing people would complain and the sales reps would either have hissy fits

or simply not get excited about the book. If they weren't excited, it would be hard to ask bookstores to stock it. Sure, if the argument was important enough,

the book would eventually find an audience. But it would be small and consist mostly of academics.

Before the manuscript could get to Sheldon, though, it had to pass through me,

or someone like me, a brazen young entry into the editing work force with a love

of books and no in-depth knowledge of anything. I would read as much of the work as I needed to be able to write a report to answer two questions: What is

the book about? Should we publish it?

Sometimes I would sit at my desk and reread the same paragraph, sometimes

the same sentence, until I decided I that needed glasses. Or that I had stayed out too late the night before and it was messing with my ability to concentrate.

At times I believed I was just getting stupider as I reached my mid-20s. I had been able to read complex and arcane books in college; were these unpublished

authors that much smarter than me—or anything I'd ever encountered—that I couldn't hope to understand them? I spent years in publishing thinking that I

wasn't bright enough and had to work harder than anyone else to be able to suss out the gist of an author's argument.

Over the years, I've learned that many of us feel that way when we encounter

academic prose. Our default is to assume that it's us, not them—the reader's

problem, not the writer's. It must be because we haven't been trained well enough, or we can't follow complicated thoughts as readily as we would hope.

Readers are often quick to doubt themselves in the face of headache-inducing pages.

It's taken me 25 years to figure out something so basic it's embarrassing: The

difference was often in the prose. At Oxford Press, we never talked about the writing. The only person who ever mentioned sentences was Leona.

There were plenty of manuscripts that had rich scholarly potential but didn't make it from my office to Sheldon's because I couldn't figure out what the author

was trying to say. With so many manuscripts submitted, it's easier to say no than yes.

Authors need to understand the process by which their manuscript will be

evaluated and take that into account when they submit. If a smart recent college graduate can't decode what your book is about, you're in trouble.

I would stand over the credenza to choose which of the many long-ago-submitted manuscripts I was going to tackle next. I liked manuscripts with subheads that

helped to signpost the argument. Some looked inviting—they got me interested at the first sentence, and I kept reading while I walked back to my office.

However, the ones with paragraphs that went on forever, their page-long sentences cobbled together with semicolons, told me the authors didn't give a

hoot about my experience as a reader. Giant blocks of quoted material suggested the author was unwilling or unable to think independently. If the first few

sentences contained heaps of words that no one ever spoke out loud, I knew I'd need a cup of coffee. Those were the manuscripts I left for later. Sometimes it

would be months before I would get to them. Many months.

Do yourself a favor before you submit your next manuscript to a publisher.

Shrink it by 50 percent and scroll down the text on your computer screen. What does the visual presentation tell readers before they even start to read? Does it

look like midtown Manhattan, all tall buildings and packed sidewalks with no

breathing space? Does it look like a suburb, every paragraph exactly the same?

Does it look like the plains, arid and vast? What are you conveying by the way you've chosen to structure your prose? Are you aware, even, that you're making

such choices?

You have fewer than 50 pages to get the editors' attention. Your job is to make their job easier. What are you arguing? Why should anyone care? The editor is

going to have to write copy to convince others at the press that it's worth publishing. Ideally, in doing so, he or she should be able to lift sentences and

paragraphs from the manuscript. Your sentences and paragraphs. The introduction is where you bring the readers in; you have to entice them to come

with you for the next 400 pages. (If your manuscript is 800 pages, I'm sorry, but

you need to cut it.) Do you start with a declarative sentence, as if pronouncing from Mount Olympus, but say something obvious and bland? Do you make

reference to complicated ideas in shorthand and cant? Is it clear to the reader, from the outset, why your topic warrants a book?

There are a zillion good ways to start a book well, and even more ways to do it

badly. There are no rules, no secrets, no standard formats. What you have to do is make sure that no matter who picks up your manuscript for a first read, the

importance of its argument will be clear. And remember, the argument is not the same as the topic. A book that is purely descriptive is unlikely to be published.

Someone has to need to read it. Pointing out what is "interesting"—to you—is

never enough.

Given the economics of publishing, lots of people will need to read your book. No one can afford to publish monographs for tiny scholarly niches. Increasingly,

books have to reach across disciplines to warrant publication. Make sure your prose is not shutting out readers.

We don't talk about the writing unless it's surprisingly good or shockingly bad. Until recently it never occurred to me that a manuscript could be rejected on first

pass simply because the prose wasn't good enough—even though I did exactly that thousands of times.

Everyone knows that you have to have a good argument, do solid research, make

an important contribution to one or more fields. But you also have to think about the writing. So my big insight of late is that I never thought of my authors as

writers, because most of them didn't present themselves that way. That's a problem. If you are writing a book, you should think of yourself as a writer, and

write accordingly.

Rachel Toor is an assistant professor of creative writing at Eastern Washington

University, in Spokane. Her Web site is http://www.racheltoor.com. She welcomes comments and questions directed to [email protected].

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

the comments are what we learned in writing 101 or composition courses in freshmen years. And I bet many of the authors rejected by you for not writing

well are teaching freshmen compositions and providing the same advice to their young students. So, is it lack of knowledge on writing or lack of self-reflection as

a writer?

Too many substantive authors don't think of themselves as "writers" and most likely don't teach composition courses - they are too busy having big big ideas.

As regards your question, my guess is that the answer is that the problem authors lack knowledge on writing and self-reflection.

I think there might be a reason that so much of the prose is awful--deliberately

offputting. I hate to tell you but many in the academy have a bias against

readability. Often, readability--an argument that is easy to follow, that leads you inevitably to a conclusion that seems reasonable--seems to indicate to reviewers

that the ideas must thus be simplistic, the thesis obvious. Because it wasn't hard for them to understand.

__MACOSX/The Movie Review Essay /._Think Of Yourself As A Writer!.pdf

The Movie Review Essay /Very Scholarly Movie Review- Professional Grade.pdf

Cinema Journal 40, No. 1, Fall 2000 79

“The Purest Knight of All”: Nation, History, and Representation in El Cid (1960) by Mark Jancovich

This article examines the Samuel Bronston production of El Cid (1960) and ana- lyzes the process of cultural hybridization through which various myths of the Spanish national hero are stitched together and, in the process, reinterpreted to produce an epic movie for an international market.

Within academic film criticism, the historical epic has become the focus of a small but growing body of literature. Much of this work focuses on the function of the epic as cinematic spectacle. These films were frequently sold with the promise that these spectacles not only represented history but themselves were historically momentous achievements. It was claimed that they provided sights never seen before or, at least, never since ancient times.

Further, a number of critics have claimed that these films were part of the Hollywood system’s self-promotion. Like musicals, they were spectacles that only Hollywood could achieve and therefore established the American film industry’s prestige and power as a unique cultural institution. In other words, these films did not simply commodify the past and reproduce a consumerist discourse around materialist spectacle; they also were vehicles for cinematic exhibitionism that en- abled Hollywood to promote itself by reproducing or recreating the scale of by- gone civilizations.1

This preoccupation with spectacle has made for some very dull films. The repeated complaint is that they are overly long or that the focus on spectacle al- most freezes the action. The camera lingers too long on the details of the past that the studios have so lovingly or lavishly recreated, or the films present endlessly long shots of crowds and pageants. Often forgotten is that other critics have com- plained about the focus in Hollywood cinema on narrative and have seen the focus on spectacle as a potentially subversive force that threatens to disrupt its ideologi- cal logic.2 Nonetheless, some critics have addressed the relationship between spec- tacle and narrative in these films. Stephen Neale, for example, compares the historical epic to the musical and its organization around numbers and routines.3

This is not to suggest that these films lack a narrative, simply that the focus on “narrative drive” in much scholarship on film narrative may underestimate the

Mark Jancovich is a senior lecturer and director of the Institute of Film Studies at the Uni- versity of Nottingham. He is the author of several books: Horror (1992), The Cultural Poli- tics of the New Criticism (1993), Approaches to Popular Film (edited with Joanne Hollows, 1995), and Rational Fears: American Horror in the 1950s (1996). He is currently the director of a research project on film consumption in Nottingham, funded by the Arts and Humani- ties Research Board.

80 Cinema Journal 40, No. 1, Fall 2000

extent to which all film stories are built around the interrelationship between a series of elements, from individual shots, through specific sequences, to scenes and even longer passages.4 Many epics, for example, have long sections made up of a series of scenes that operate as distinct subsections of the overall narrative. These films may at times lack the strong narrative drive that distinguishes other Hollywood products, but this may simply be because their narratives seem rather to unfold, often because they rely on the retelling of already-familiar story lines. There is no enigma to solve in the Christ story, for instance, only a process to be confirmed. Even in tales such as Dr. Zhivago (David Lean, 1965) or Orphans of the Storm (D. W Griffith, 1922), the narrative is told against a historical backdrop with which the spectator is presumed to be familiar. The emphasis in many of these films, therefore, is not on the drive toward resolution, which the spectator can probably guess, but on the process of narrative exposition.

The preoccupation in historical epics with spectacle has also been related to issues of sexuality and violence, particularly as they relate to the representation of masculinity and the masculine body. Neale, for example, suggests that epics oper- ate as displays of power and submission that negotiate the function of the spec- tacular male. The male body is supposed to be a problem in these films because it operates as an object of both adoration and repulsion.

The historical epic has received a great deal of academic interest recently precisely because of its handling of the male body as an object of the gaze.5 The debate basically relates to the assumption that in a patriarchal culture the appro- priate object of the gaze is defined as feminine and, as a result, the image of the male body always raises the problem of homoerotic desires that must be disavowed and repressed. Several strategies, it is claimed, can be used to accomplish this process. First, the gaze can be deflected onto a female body so that the male body becomes a point of identification rather than objectification. The male body is therefore defined as merely one stage in a relay of gazes, the ultimate object of which is defined as female. Second, the male body can defuse anxieties through self-irony. This technique has been noted in research on the James Bond films6

and in relation to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s star image,7 but in both cases, it is argued, humor is used to undercut the idealizations of the male body on which these films are based. Third, and perhaps most significantly, historical epics have relied on sadism, in which desire for the male body is disavowed by making its display conditional on its punishment. In this way, acts of sexual display are both permitted and disassociated from homoeroticism in that the male body is con- structed as an object of hatred rather than desire. Alternatively, objectification is narratively defined as an unnatural state from which the heroic male body must extricate itself.8 In short, the male hero must be positioned as a point of identifica- tion not objectification.

Indeed, these depictions of the male body have often been tied to a fascistic obsession with the idealized, classical body. Indeed, the male classical body is often presented as a disciplined body whose materiality and excesses have been contained by form.9 It is a body in which the head dominates, controls its bodily functions, and so permits the construction of a clear distinction between internal and external.

Cinema Journal 40, No. 1, Fall 2000 81

Furthermore, this body is not only implicitly male but the feminine is everything that must be disavowed and excluded. In contrast to the classical male body, the female body is corporeal and carnal and refuses to respect distinctions between internal and external. The classical male body is a body that fears femininity in par- ticular and otherness in general and is founded on repressed homoeroticism.10

This association between the historical epic and fascistic spectacle is found in Angela Dalle Vacche’s work. To some extent, this association is an inevitable result of her specific object of analysis, the Italian historical epics made under Mussolini; however, her discussion of the features of historical epics is similar to other ac- counts of these films. They are described as “kitsch,” that is, defined as “fascism’s pseudo-democratic answer, an anti-democratic ideology using a popular form of address while simulating the authority of high art.”11 This description is similar to Clement Greenberg’s description of kitsch,12 or what Dwight Macdonald would call midcult, that “peculiar hybrid bred from [high culture’s] unnatural intercourse with [mass culture].”13 Indeed, while some critics have associated these films with conservative Cold War presentations of Communism as Otherness,14 for many Cold War intellectuals, these films were themselves totalitarian in nature and hence hardly different from the totalitarianism of Communism. So virulent is Macdonald’s attack on these films that he devotes a whole section of On Movies to “The Biblical Spectacular,” a subgenre of historical epic.15

Despite the political rhetoric, many critics object to these films largely based on taste. For both Dalle Vacche and Macdonald, it is their status as middlebrow culture that ultimately damns them. Indeed, in his study of French culture, Pierre Bourdieu found that these blockbusters appealed to middlebrow tastes. He makes special mention of the collaboration between Samuel Bronston and Charlton Heston that followed the success of El Cid (Anthony Mann, 1960), namely, 55 Days at Peking (Nicholas Ray, 1963).16

As Macdonald emphasizes, the cultural bourgeoisie displayed its greatest hos- tility to the middlebrow, exactly because the latter leads to a “blurring of the line” between high and low and therefore threatens to “absorb” them into itself.17 In other words, middlebrow culture poses a threat to the authority of intellectuals, albeit entirely unintentionally. Rather than attempting to deconstruct this distinc- tion, the petite bourgeoisie, whose tastes are represented by the middlebrow, pose a threat precisely because of their reverence for legitimate culture, a reverence based on their feelings of exclusion from that culture. If the petite bourgeoisie threaten to blur distinctions between high and low and so undermine the authority of the cultural bourgeoisie, it is due to their desire to obtain legitimate culture. As Bourdieu puts it, “This petite bourgeoisie of consumers [is one] which means to acquire on credit, i.e., before its due time, the attributes of the legitimate life-style.”18

The sense of horror with which many critics discuss the historical epic is often a result of these films’ “pretensions,” their “misguided” notions of quality, and their reverence for a legitimate culture that they try to emulate. Indeed, in Macdonald’s discussion of Ben Hur (William Wyler, 1959), it is not the film’s low- culture status that is at issue. Quite the reverse. He recounts with dismay the “bellows of approval” with which the film was greeted by reviewers and presents

82 Cinema Journal 40, No. 1, Fall 2000

his own analysis as a corrective.19 Indeed, these films were prestige pictures and frequently received the industry’s highest awards.20

The purpose of this article, however, is not to provide a full and detailed sur- vey of the historical epic but rather to analyze one film, El Cid. Like many epics, El Cid was a product of a particular stage in the development of the blockbuster. Not only was it made for an international market but it was filmed in Spain and drew on transnational resources and talent. These conditions shaped the film in a number of ways. The first section of this article therefore examines the production context of the film so as to establish the particular play of national and transnational concerns in its production. It should be emphasized, however, that this is not in- tended to be an analysis of the film’s production history. It is intended, simply, to provide a context for the information that follows.

The second section explores problems in defining national cinemas. This sec- tion takes issue with those who present El Cid as simply an American bastardization of an “authentic” Spanish national myth; however, it does not do so to claim that the film is really an authentic product of Spanish culture. On the contrary, it is these very definitions of “authenticity” that this article seeks to question. The point is that an authentic national essence can never be either expressed or corrupted by film texts, but rather, because of the relation between film and national identity, movies (and the discourses that surround them) are involved in the production of different senses of that identity. In other words, the question should not be whether El Cid is really a Spanish film or not but what is at stake in such definitions and distinctions.

As a result, the third section examines the ways in which the text of a historical epic is a hybridization of different materials from different national and historical contexts. However, if earlier accounts of the historical epic privileged the issue of spectacle at the expense of narrative, this and the following sections focus prima- rily on the narrative organization of the film. While the film concerns a narrative of unification, in which disparate fragments come together to produce an integrated subject—Spain, the focus here is the unification of the narrative—the process by which fragments of the Cid myth, from different national sources and historical periods, are brought together and reinterpreted in the process.

Because this process is largely expressed from an American perspective, the primary interest is how a Spanish national myth was reinterpreted within the terms of American Cold War discourses. What I have not been able to do is examine how the film was understood within the Spanish context. An examina- tion of the reviews, for example, would have provided a fascinating and valuable counterperspective, even though, because of the political situation in Spain at the time, these reviews would have been even more suspect than usual.21 Unfor- tunately, as someone who lacks competence in Spanish, I am unequipped to un- dertake that project.

The fourth section returns to the concerns discussed earlier in an attempt to provide a more historicized view of both the representation of masculinity in El Cid and particularly the way in which its sadomasochistic dynamics were related to specific American uses of the Oedipal narrative during the Cold War period.22

In short, this section looks at the ways in which the Cid story is reinscribed as a

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conflict between feudal despotism and bourgeois rights, a conflict that is itself reinscribed as one between liberalism and totalitarianism. Despite its reading of El Cid as a Cold War text, this essay does not suggest that it is simply a conserva- tive text. On the contrary, it attempts to illustrate the ways in which the film em- phasizes the problems, costs, and contradictions of bourgeois masculinity, as well as the racial politics of various Cid narratives that not only challenged Francoist versions of the Cid but also clearly articulated its support for the civil rights move- ment in the United States.

The fifth and final section therefore examines the problem of naming and rep- resentation in the film. If the Cid becomes a figure of exemplary masculinity, it is not through his construction as an “ego-ideal,” an image of presence, unity, and omnipotence.23 Rather, his function as an exemplary figure is presented as leading to self-division and internal conflict. He is fraught with contradiction and self-doubt, and it is in this sense that he is presented as heroic. Without his internal struggle, his moral integrity becomes indistinguishable from that of the conformist who unthink- ingly obeys a rigid ideological code,24 the Other of American Cold War discourse. In other words, his struggle with his internally divided nature is what distinguishes him from the subject of feudal despotism and modern totalitarianism.

An American in Madrid. El Cid was made in Spain in 1960 by American film producer Samuel Bronston. Bronston had come to Spain some years earlier to make John Paul Jones (John Farrow, 1959) and stayed to produce the biblical epic, The King of Kings (Nicholas Ray, 1961). Much debate surrounds Bronston. Derek Elley clearly identifies him as one of the “two great names” that the epic has given to cinema history, Cecil B. De Mille being the other.25 Heston claims that Bronston had “that rarest of all things, a new idea.”26

Bronston went to Spain, along with other American filmmakers, for primarily financial reasons. United Artists, for example, shot Alexander the Great (Robert Rossen, 1956) there as a way of spending profits that could not be exported. As Peter Besas puts it, the logic of using Spain as a location was that “the dollars [made there] couldn’t be taken out, but a film negative that might be worth mil- lions could.”27 Bronston’s innovation was not his choice of Spain as a location, but rather his scheme to build a film empire there. Most significantly, he is attributed with being the first producer to presell distribution rights for films on a territory- by-territory basis as a way of funding his projects, a scheme that became central to the activities of later independent producers.

But even Bronston’s independents were not small-scale projects. The epics he produced were for an international market, and, as Thomas Schatz has pointed out, were all “big all-star projects, most of them shot on location.”28 Further, of the five top-grossing movies of the 1950s, three were epics—Ben Hur, The Robe (Henry Koster, 1953), and The Ten Commandments (Cecil B. De Mille, 1956)—and two starred Charlton Heston, who played Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, the Cid, in Bronston’s Super Technirama-70 production through MGM.29

Heston’s presence is not the only sign that El Cid was intended for an interna- tional market; the film also features Italian-born performers Sophia Loren and

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Raf Vallone, French-born actress Genevieve Page, and other international play- ers, many of whom were British. Moreover, while the majority of the film was filmed in Spain, Bronston created the illusion that at least some of it was filmed in Italy. The credits make this claim, and in his autobiography Heston mentions that Bronston kept offering his star a holiday in Italy. As it later transpired, the offer was simply an attempt to get Heston on Italian soil so that it would look as if he had been filming there.30 Bronston’s aim was to present the film as partly Italian so that it would receive preferential treatment in the territory. The film even lists an alter- native screenwriter for the “Italian Version,” suggesting that an alternative release may have been produced for the Italian market, possibly with expanded roles for the Italian players. However, Loren was not chosen simply with the Italian market in mind. International audiences were also familiar with her. As Heston observes, Loren was by this time not simply a star in Italy but “one of maybe half a dozen women who’d become honest-to-God international stars.”31

Nonetheless, the Spanish context of its production is not irrelevant to El Cid. Indeed, the choice of subject had more to do with production issues than its con- sumption. Bronston hoped to build his own film studio in Spain and wanted to involve the Spanish government in nurturing this project.32

Figure 1. Roderigo (Charlton Heston) and his beloved, Chimène (Sophia Loren), in opulent surroundings in El Cid (Anthony Mann, 1960). Loren’s presence in the cast was designed to enhance the international appeal of the production. Courtesy of Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research.

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However, he did not want his scheme to appear to offer simply economic ad- vantages. Although he knew a studio would provide jobs, attract foreign capital, and make money, Bronston also wanted it to appear to be more than an American studio abroad. He chose the Cid as the subject for his film to ensure that it looked as though the studio would not just be employing Spanish personnel but also handling “Spanish” subject matter. In this endeavor, Bronston was well aware that, in 1960, Franco’s Spain was beginning to emerge from the extended period of austerity that followed the Civil War and that even though the economy was beginning to flourish, the government was worried about its international image.33 Bronston hoped that the Franco government would welcome a film about a Spanish national hero and that, given the centrality of the tourist trade to the revival of the Spanish economy, images of the Spanish landscape would also prove attractive to those in power.34

Bronston even went so far as to set up a Spanish company, Samuel Bronston Espanola, not only to raise money in Spain but also to identify his productions more clearly as Spanish productions rather than simply as American productions filmed in Spain.

Mythology, Authenticity, and National Cinema. El Cid raises a whole series of questions about cinema and nation. Nonetheless, most English-language books on Spanish cinema, Peter Besas’s Behind the Spanish Lens being the notable ex- ception,35 almost completely fail to mention Bronston’s productions.36 For example, Virginia Higginbotham’s only reference to Bronston or El Cid identifies it not as a Spanish film but as one of a series of “American super productions [that] were made in Spain with little concern with quality or co-operation.”37 She not only ignores Bronston’s concern with identifying his film as Spanish and his frequently discussed obsession with producing “quality” pictures, but also defines El Cid as a “cultural humiliation,” in which “Spain’s national epic poem” was bastardized by Hollywood. Higginbotham even quotes Marta Hernandez, who claimed that El Cid was little more than “a medieval western.”38

Higginbotham’s reference runs the gamut of definitions of national cinema identified by Andrew Higson,39 and, as usually happens, she slips between defini- tions to elide the problems and contradictions inherent in each of them. Thus, she starts with issues of funding and finance, which then slip into issues of coopera- tion, given the problems of defining a film’s national origin on that basis. After all, that much of Bronston’s funding came from French investors is not normally seen as sufficient to define the films as French, and despite the fact that Japanese cor- porations now own several Hollywood studios, the films these studios produce are rarely identified as Japanese.

Cooperation is also an imprecise term. Besas argues that Bronston tried to in- volve the Spanish government but that his productions were also central to the training of “a whole generation of Spanish film technicians, who for the first time had an opportunity to work on a continuous basis in the style of films made in Hol- lywood.”40 Films are often excluded from inclusion in national cinemas because of the absence of government involvement but are not necessarily included simply because of its presence. Indeed, the question is rarely involvement or absence per

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se but the “right kind” of involvement. As is often pointed out, although the Star Wars, Superman, Alien, and Indiana Jones series, along with a host of other films, were made in Britain with largely British production crews, they are rarely identi- fied as examples of British national cinema.41

Higginbotham then turns to the question of audiences to suggest that the “right kind” of involvement was lacking in El Cid. She suggests that as “a medieval western,” the film betrayed its Spanish subject matter and therefore did not really address a Spanish audience but an American one. However, Hollywood films were often more commercially successful in Spain than other films with supposedly more authentically Spanish subject. As a result, this definition is also problematic. Higginbotham therefore finds it necessary to support her claim with the quote from Marta Hernandez, which introduces what Higson refers to as the “critical definition” of a national cinema. It shifts the issue from one of actual audiences to a question of “quality,” so that the national cinema is identified not with popular viewing habits but with a “selective tradition” or “legitimate culture” whose com- position and boundaries are defined by an authoritative elite of government, me- dia, and academic institutions.

This opposition between legitimate culture and the illegitimate “foreign” film is policed by Higginbotham’s reference and by the suggestion that although the film was “based on Spain’s national epic poem,” it was a perversion of that source. Indeed, the claim that the film was based on the Poema de Mio Cid is a common one, which even Charlton Heston repeated in his account of the film.42 However, the film uses almost nothing of the poem. It does cover the exiling of the Cid by Alfonso and the battles for Valencia, but these two elements are presented very differently as to both their causes and their effects. For example, the film ends with the defense of Valencia, where the Cid’s dead body leads his men into victory against Ben Yussuf’s Islamic forces, but this episode is taken from a myth that was developed some centuries after the writing of the Poema.43 Furthermore, in the Poema, the battles for Valencia are merely one stage in the Cid’s rise to power, and this epic ends not with his death but with a dispute over the dishonor done to his two daughters by their husbands. At the close of the film, these daughters are still young children. It is hardly surprising that both the poem and the film include the exile and the battles for Valencia as these are the two most commonly recounted aspects of the Cid’s mythic and historic narratives and hardly unique to the Poema.

Alternatively, Richard Fletcher has seen “the overall interpretation” in the film as, “in its main lines,” that of the distinguished Spanish historian and scholar Ramon Menendez Pidal.44 Again, Heston’s autobiography lends his authority to this claim. He says he sought out the elderly historian and discussed the project with him.45

However, although the film does draw on a series of incidents that Pidal attributes to the life of the Cid, the film makes important revisions and additions to Pidal’s account, most significantly concerning the Cid’s relationship to the Islamic king of Saragossa, Moutamin, and the film’s use of the entirely mythological ending. The major similarity to Pidal’s classic work, The Cid and His Spain, is that, while Fletcher defines this “history” as an attempt to “lovingly and reverently . . . resurrect as much of the legend as was consistent with what he took to be existing scholarly criticism,”46

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the film can be said to resurrect lovingly and reverently as much of the history as was consistent with its own interpretations of the myths.

Rather than seeing the film as an accurate presentation of either the real his- torical character or the authentic Spanish myth, or, conversely, as an inaccurate betrayal of either one, it is perhaps more useful to examine the ways in which the film negotiates its way through a series of historical and mythological narratives centered around the figure of the Cid and attempts to construct a coherent narra- tive out of a reinterpretation of these elements, a reinterpretation that was also conditioned by its own historical period. As a result, it is important to emphasize, as Marsha Kinder does, that no national cinema is ever simply produced or de- fined according to features purely unique, internal, and authentic to itself but al- ways involves “transcultural reinscription” or “the ideological reinscription of conventions that are borrowed from other cultures and set in conflict with each other, a process of hybridization that is capable of carving out a new aesthetic language.”47 To put it another way, it is perhaps less important to see El Cid as either a Hollywood bastardization of the “authentic” Spanish myth or an authentic example of Spanish national cinema than to examine the text as a hybrid consisting of different elements.

Figure 2. The Cid (Charlton Heston) and a bearded ally on horseback in El Cid (1960). The film’s battle scenes add to the epic spectacle. Courtesy of Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research.

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It would be misleading to view the Cid as an exclusively Spanish myth. First, the myth started to develop before there was an actual political or cultural entity called “Spain,” and the Poema is concerned with the Cid as a Castilian or a Chris- tian hero rather than as a national one. Second, the Cid myth has always been subject to narrativization beyond the bounds of the area politically or culturally defined as the nation “Spain” and was disseminated most widely by the French dramatist Corneille, whose play Le Cid was first produced in Paris in 1637 and was “enormously influential in the history of French drama and of European theatre in general.”48 Third, El Cid (from the Arabic al-Said) was a very Moorish Spaniard, just as Alexander the Great, born in Macedonia, was not fully Greek from birth and Napoleon, born in Corsica, was a very Italian Frenchman.

Further, even within the confines of Spain, it is not possible to talk of the myth of the Cid but only myths of the Cid. Just as with the figures of Robin Hood and King Arthur in Britain, the stories surrounding the Cid have changed over time and have been the subject of intense struggle even within a particular period. As a result, as Fletcher has pointed out, while the Franco government made much of the Cid as a national hero and remade him as a predecessor of Franco, with whom he was often directly compared, and even while Pidal’s The Cid and His Spain “became and long remained a set book for cadets at Spanish military academies,” Pidal himself was persecuted by the government as a suspected dissident.49 The meaning of the Cid was therefore never singular even during a particular period but was itself a source of constant conflict and renegotiation as different groups reappropriated the myth for their own ends. In short, there was no authentic myth for the film to degrade, only a series of myths to be reworked and reinterpreted.

Fragmentation and Unification in El Cid. If, at a narrative level, El Cid is concerned with building a coherent narrative out of a series of fragments, the narrative that it constructs is concerned with similar processes. The film, unlike the epic poem, is concerned with the Cid as a national, not a Castilian, hero who works for the good of “all Spain.” But while he acts in the name of Spain, this nation is presented as an entity that is as much a product of his act of naming it as it is an entity that preexists that act of naming. As the film makes clear, the “Spain” that exists prior to Rodrigo’s intervention is a “war-torn and unhappy land: half Christian and half Moor.” It is not a nation in either political or cultural terms but a series of small warring kingdoms that are divided by differences of politics, cul- ture, and religion. However, as the contextualizing opening speech goes on to claim, the Cid was a figure of unity who rose above “religious hatreds” and so enabled different political, religious, and racial groups to come together in opposition to a common enemy: the Almoravide invaders, an Islamic force from Morocco. In this way, the film takes as its central narrative the forging of a sense of collective pur- pose in relation to an external other in a manner that is clearly developed as an analogy for the Cold War.

This process is more complex than it might at first appear and involves a major transformation in myths of the Cid, even contemporary versions associated with the Franco government. Immediately after the opening speech, even before

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Rodrigo is introduced, the film introduces Ben Yussuf, the leader of the Almoravide invaders. Ben Yussuf castigates the various Moorish kings of Spain, whom he has gathered before him in preparation for his invasion, and accuses them of weak- ness—of producing poets and scientists, rather than warriors. Then, in a manner

Figure 3. The mythic hero the Cid, depicted in a low-angle shot on an armored horse. The Franco government valorized the Cid as a national icon and remade him as a predecessor of Franco. Courtesy of Wisconsin Center for Film and The- ater Research.

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that clearly evokes the domino theory of Russian expansion that was so prevalent in the period, Yussuf asserts that the prophet has ordered them to rule the world and declares that they will first sweep across Spain, then Europe, and finally the world. This association with the Cold War is reinforced shortly afterward when Moutamin tells Rodrigo of his fears for the future. He evokes the imagery and anxieties surrounding nuclear warfare in the period: what is coming is “war, death, and destruction: blood and fire more terrible than has been seen by living man.”

However, Islam is not simply posed against Christianity but rather liberalism is pitted against totalitarianism. Indeed, completely recasting Rodrigo’s story, for which I can find no historical precedent, he is cast as a liberal warrior whose fight for Spain is clearly defined as a battle for religious and racial tolerance.

This is made clear in the very next sequence, in which Rodrigo as a character is introduced. He has been interrupted on his way to marry his love, Chimène (Sophia Loren), and has been forced to do battle with some Moorish raiders. He has been victorious in battle, and he returns to his father’s estate with two Moorish kings as prisoners. He is met by both his father and his later rival, Count Ordonez, an emissary from the king who orders Rodrigo to hand over his prisoners for ex- ecution. Rodrigo refuses and decides that mercy rather than execution may be a better way of dealing with the Moors. He has his prisoners swear not to attack the lands of King Ferdinand of Castile, then releases them, an act that earns Rodrigo the eternal friendship of one king, Moutamin of Saragossa; the name of the Cid that Moutamin bestows upon him; and an accusation of treason against the crown.

This sequence sets the scene for the story that occupies most of the first half of the film, in which Rodrigo kills Chimène’s father to defend his family honor and thus alienates the woman whom he loves. This story does not appear in ei- ther the histories or the epic poem but rather is a feature of Corneille’s play, which was itself derived from Spanish ballads from around the sixteenth century, which were themselves based on the Mocedades de Rodrigo, which was com- posed sometime about 1300.

The significance of the conflict and its motivations are completely different in the play and the film. In Corneille’s play, for example, Rodrigo’s father, Don Di- ego, clashes with Chimène’s father, Don Gormaz, over an honor bestowed upon the former by the king, and Rodrigo is drawn into a foolish squabble between the arrogant and boastful Don Gormaz and the doddering and ineffectual Don Diego. In the film, Rodrigo “asks nothing for himself” in his conflict with Don Gormaz and is still motivated by a desire to defend his father’s honor. However, the role played by his father is fundamentally different. As played by Michael Horden, Don Diego is a wise liberal who trusts his son’s moral integrity (“Rodrigo knows what he must do,” he informs Don Ordonez) and defends his son’s decision to release the Moorish kings as an act of moral conviction rather than treason.

Thus, the central conflict in the film is not between Christianity and Islam but between tolerance and intolerance—between acceptance of difference and desire to impose conformity and obedience on others. In the film, Rodrigo finds Moutamin a far more trustworthy ally than any other Christian, and they later declare that both sides “have so much to give to each other and to Spain.” Leon Hunt has

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rightly commented on the way in which the masculinity embodied by the Cid is presented not as known and familiar but as distinctly exceptional, mysterious, and even uncanny. He has also noted the frequency with which the Cid is asked, usu- ally by Alfonso, “What kind of a man are you?”50 Moutamin is the only figure who is able to comprehend and understand the Cid and is even able to name him: “Among our people we have a word for a warrior with the vision to be just and the courage to be merciful. We call such a man El Cid.”

The film undermines the central aspect of the Francoist version of the Cid legend, that Rodrigo is an unambiguous crusader against Islam. Indeed, Franco clearly identified himself with the reconquest of Spain or the expulsion of the Moors and likened this struggle to his own war against the forces of “anti-Spain,” which he identified as socialism, Communism, and anti-Catholicism. What is more, by presenting Spain as a country created out of an alliance between Moor and Christian rather than out of a conflict between them (even though both fought against a common Islamic enemy), the film also contested the Francoist emphasis on the Spanish as a unique race and a people who were preoccupied with matters of racial purity. These issues were made clear from the title of a prominent Span- ish film based on a novel by Franco himself, Raza, or Race.

The contradiction is that in defending tolerance, the film not only presents its own image of otherness—of that which cannot be tolerated (intolerance)—but also associates tolerance with Christian symbolism. However, not just the Islamic tyrant Ben Yussuf threatens Spain with his intolerance. Alfonso, the Christian king of Castile, also is defeated by Ben Yussuf later in the film because he refuses to make alliances with Moslems: “We are a Christian kingdom; we deal only with Christians.”

The freeing of the Moorish kings and the conflict with Chimène’s father also raises another theme: the Cid as a figure of moral integrity who is driven to do the right thing despite the problems it causes him, most significantly in his relation- ship with King Alfonso. Notably, once Rodrigo has killed Chimène’s father, the film moves on to the conflict between Sancho and Alfonso, the sons of the Castillian king, Ferdinand. On his death, Ferdinand divides the kingdom between his sons, but they are unhappy with this arrangement and go to war with each other in an attempt to gain possession of the whole kingdom. In actuality, Ferdinand had three sons and two daughters, not, as in the film, two sons and one daughter.

In the poems, as in history, Rodrigo supported Sancho; in the film, he is above the conflict. When Sancho sentences Alfonso to imprisonment, the Cid rescues Alfonso and claims that Sancho is acting against “God’s law.” But when Alfonso asks the Cid to take his side, Rodrigo claims that he cannot side with either brother without losing faith with the other. He sees the dispute as divisive and therefore dangerous, and he calls for reconciliation instead.

As in both history and legend, Sancho is murdered, thus allowing Alfonso to assume the position of king of Leon and Castile. At this point, the film does utilize Pidal’s history by accepting a story found in the ballads in which the Cid forces Alfonso to swear that he had no part in his brother’s killing. However, the story also suggests that it was this act of defiance that alienated him from the king and brought about his exile.

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Fletcher considers the story of the oath to be “fantastic,” and even in Pidal’s account, it is not the cause of the Cid’s exile.51 More usually it is attributed to political wrangles within Alfonso’s court in which courtiers such as Don Ordonez were supposed to have poisoned the king against Rodrigo, who was accused of withholding tribute from the king. In the film, the Cid is exiled for insisting that Alfonso give his oath, and the struggle is converted from one of political intrigue to yet another presentation of the Cid as a figure of moral integrity who stands up to an immoral, willful, and despotic monarch. Rodrigo insists on the oath because, he claims, without it Alfonso’s kingdom will be fragmented by doubt and suspicion. Rodrigo is therefore once again shown to be the force for cohesion against the dangerously divisive power of a king who rules tyrannically rather than by assert- ing moral leadership.

The moral courage the Cid displays is also seen as repairing the rift between himself and Chimène, who follows him into exile. Her faith is further confirmed when she watches him tend to and bless a leper who identifies himself as Lazarus. This scene not only presents the Cid as an almost Christlike figure of purity, char- ity, and self-sacrifice, a recurring motif in the film, it also draws on the ballads in which Rodrigo encounters a leper who is revealed to be St Lazarus.

The reconciliation with Chimène is presented as a brief moment of peace when, finally, through the loss of their previous duties, they are able to consummate their love for one another. However, this moment is almost immediately interrupted. As Chimène and Rodrigo dream of finding a “hidden place” where they can live to- gether in peace, tranquility, and anonymity, Rodrigo’s men are gathering outside. If Alfonso is unable to establish himself as a moral leader, Rodrigo does. If, however, they are willing to fight for the Cid, the Cid invokes a higher cause: “Spain.”

Historians generally agree that the Cid’s years in exile were spent mostly as a mercenary in the service of Moutamin of Saragossa, who was his employer, not his lifelong friend. The film conveniently skips over this period in Rodrigo’s life and when it resumes, the movie suggests that Rodrigo spent the intervening years cam- paigning against the Moroccan invaders, allied with non-Christian kings.

Monarch and Subject: Oedipal Tensions and Cold War Discourse. The second half of the film opens with the Cid arriving with these non-Christian kings at the Catalan court, to which he has been recalled by Alfonso, who wants Rodrigo to join him in a battle against Ben Yussuf to take place at Sagrajas. This sequence operates on several levels. It is at this moment that Alfonso displays his bigotry and intolerance toward the non-Christian kings, but it is also the point when the func- tion of Valencia changes within the narratives of the Cid, hence altering the Cid’s motivation to conquer it. In the poems and other accounts, the battle for Valencia is about either power and wealth or the expansion of Christianity. In the film, the battle is of strategic significance in the war against Ben Yussuf, and it becomes the equivalent of Thermopylae in 300 Spartans,52 a site that must be taken and held at any cost so as to prevent Ben Yussuf from landing his armada and overrunning the whole of Spain. In fact, the Cid turned to Valencia only after he had both recon- ciled with the king and once again fallen out of favor after failing to rendezvous

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with Alfonso prior to another battle (this misdeed seems to have been a mistake rather than a principled stand).

Fletcher convincingly argues that not only was the battle for Valencia fought for wealth and power, rather than as a strategic move against the Almoravide inva- sion, but that it resulted in a territorial conflict with Alfonso. In the film, the Cid takes Valencia in Alfonso’s name, even though the king has imprisoned Alfonso’s wife and daughters and threatened to kill them. This story comes primarily from Pidal’s history, although the claim that the Cid captured Valencia for Alfonso is in a range of texts, including the Poema. Unfortunately, as Fletcher has shown, not only did the Cid seem to have approved references in which he was described as the prince of Valencia, but he also fought Alfonso and his allies in order to keep hold of his title.53

The film ends with the siege of Valencia and Alfonso’s final conversion, when he receives the crown of Valencia from the Cid and is humbled by the Cid’s faith- fulness. Throughout the film, Alfonso is played much as Pidal described him, as a spoiled and decadent monarch, but the film adds that he is virtually a troubled teenager. Again and again, he is shown trying to prove his manhood, and, as a result, his relationship to the Cid is presented as one of Oedipal tension. To Alfonso, the Cid is an ideal of masculinity that Alfonso cannot comprehend and against which he feels inadequate. In response, Alfonso develops a hatred for the Cid, which he uses sadistically to assert his legal authority and superiority in an attempt to undermine Rodrigo. This is borne out by the fact that the Cid challenges Alfonso’s “childish” desires for omnipotence. In this way, the relationship between the men involves the classic sadomasochistic dynamics of the epic in which men often slip between identification (the will to be like the other), desire (the will to possess the other and/or to be possessed by him), and hatred (the will to distance oneself from the other through his degradation or destruction).

However, the film also reinterprets this conflict. The Poema, for example, has been read as a complex meditation on the reciprocal duties of lord and vassal, but in the film the conflict is instead presented as between despotism and the moral bourgeois individual. Again and again, the Cid’s conflict develops out of his refusal to surrender his own moral integrity and judgment to the dictates of the monarch, a theme that was highly popular in historical dramas of the period. Indeed, while Heston was shooting the Valencia sections of the film, Lawrence Olivier phoned to ask Heston if he would appear on stage with him in Beckett. This play focuses on a similarly defined conflict between Henry II and the “troublesome priest,” Thomas à Becket, and became the basis for a film starring Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole, released a few years after El Cid, in 1964. However, El Cid was made in the same year as another play based on this theme, Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons. The play, which centers on the refusal of Thomas More to surren- der his moral integrity and judgment to the will of King Henry VIII, is one that has practically obsessed Heston. As the actor himself admitted: “Robert Bolt’s explo- ration of the heroic resistance and tragic fall of Thomas More was the best play I’d seen in years. Now, thirty years later, I’ve done the play five times and filmed it once; I still don’t know any play written in the period that’s as good.”54

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The significance of this narrative in the period is perhaps best clarified through a comparison with yet another play, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Miller’s play is usually read as a critique of McCarthyism and the anti-Communist witch-hunts of the 1950s, but it developed this critique through the opposition between liberal- ism and totalitarianism—individual moral autonomy and collective conformity— which was so much a part of the rhetoric of the political left, right, and center in the Cold War period.

Beckett, El Cid, and A Man for All Seasons (Fred Zinnemann, 1966) all repeat this central conflict but shift the threat from the conformist collective in Miller’s play to that of the feudal despot. Both narratives associate the threat with a histori- cal past from which bourgeois democracy is presented as a break and, in the pro- cess, present contemporary totalitarianism not as a product of modernity, but as the resurrection of archaic and outmoded forms to which bourgeois democracy not only offers a solution but is inherently superior. Hence, the Oedipal narrative is not the product of an ahistorical patriarchal unconscious but a product of Cold War discourses that, although not exclusively American, did enable America to cast itself in the central role.55 In the context of the Cold War, America was often presented as an ideal, even universal, subject whose national origins and identity were formed through a rejection of the feudal and despotic rule of the British crown. This presentation also cast the Soviet Union as an archaic and moribund hangover of an earlier stage of development.56 As a result, America was able to cast itself much like the film’s version of the Cid, as a universal subject able to unify the warring and divided peoples of the world and so contain a common enemy.

The use of these rhetorics and discourses should not, however, be taken to imply that El Cid was innately conservative. It should be remembered that the po- litical left, right, and center used these discourses to different ends. Indeed, as has already been argued, the cause of liberalism is carefully constructed in the film as a call for racial equality at a time when civil rights was not yet fashionable in white America. Bronston picked up this cause even more forcefully and directly in his collaboration with director Anthony Mann on The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964).

In El Cid, the hero does not displace the despotic monarch or even win a moral victory over him, as does Spartacus in the film of the same name. Instead, he succeeds in reforming the monarch. But, although the Cid refuses to surrender his moral integrity or judgment to the monarch, he is nonetheless a faithful de- fender of the crown and always acts in his best interests, even if he acts against Alfonso’s wishes. As a result, when the Cid finally refuses to accept the crown of Valencia for himself and instead has it presented to Alfonso, Alfonso finds that he has run out of options. He realizes that he will never prove himself superior to the Cid by trying to degrade and destroy him. He will only succeed in further confirm- ing the Cid’s moral superiority. Alfonso decides to “make [him]self a king” by emu- lating the Cid and travels to Valencia to humble himself before his hero and declare his support for him. But the Cid will have none of this—”My King kneels before no man!” he states emphatically—and, at any rate, the Cid is also dying. Alfonso is therefore positioned as the Cid’s successor. Despotism is associated with immatu- rity57 or even juvenile delinquency and Alfonso is presented as a despot who has

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finally grown up and achieved manhood. As the Cid puts it, “It is not easy for a man to conquer himself. You have done that.” Rodrigo clearly presents Alfonso’s conversion as an Oedipal rite of passage: “I have not failed; Spain has a king!”

Naming, Representation, and the Contradictions of Masculinity. Alfonso becomes not only both an adult and a “good” king but also the king of Spain. As such, he replaces the Cid as the representative of national unity. This presents distinct problems for the film, however, which it never quite manages to reconcile. If the Cid became the figure of unity who brought various political, religious, and racial groups together and so created a unity in difference, in making Alfonso the king of Spain, the movie changes the nature of that unity and implicitly displaces the non-Christian kings who have declared allegiance to the Cid. As Moutamin almost prophetically says earlier in the film when he tries to persuade Rodrigo to declare himself the ruler of Valencia, “We have given up everything for you; we implore you to take the crown.” By the end of the film, Alfonso may have become a good king, but by naming him the king, the Cid has implicitly shifted the terms of Spanish unity. No longer is the emphasis on unity in difference but on the domi- nance of the Castillian state.

As Alfonso leads his troops into battle the following morning with the dead body of the Cid by his side, he alters the Cid’s cry of “for God, Alfonso, and Spain” to “for God, the Cid, and Spain.” As a result, while, at one level, the film seems to be an Oedipal rite of passage for Alfonso with the Cid as a representative father figure, on another level it tells of the Cid’s Oedipal rite of passage in which Alfonso finally validates and endorses the Cid’s actions as representative of a father figure. Alfonso’s last words to Chimène are “I want you and my children to remember me riding with my King . . . tomorrow.” Of course, he knows that tomorrow he will be dead, although he may attain mythic status in the process.

Indeed, the ending of the film directly addresses the process of mythologization, in which the Cid rides “out of history and into legend.” In so doing, it focuses on one of the central tensions in the film, the problem of naming and representa- tion whereby the living Rodrigo becomes the mythic hero, the Cid, and the warring and divided series of kingdoms become a nation, Spain. Talking of the film later in life, director Anthony Mann emphasized the significance and cen- trality of this ending: “I started with the final scene. This lifeless knight who is strapped into the saddle of his horse . . . It’s an inspirational scene. The film flowed from this source.”58

Leon Hunt also comments upon the significance of this scene and the ways in which the conversion of Rodrigo into the Cid “is only made possible by the death of the human subject.”59 Thus, while Rodrigo is presented as a figure of moral integrity, he is also presented as split or divided, unable to resolve the conflict between his public responsibilities and his private desires. From the start, his need to defend his “name” forces him to kill Don Gormaz and so destroys his hope of domestic happiness, a theme that is repeated as different public responsibilities conspire to separate him from the love for which he yearns. After killing Don Gormaz, Rodrigo even acknowledges the shape of his future dilemmas when he

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and Chimène admit their inability to “kill” their desires for one another, even when these desires contradict their public duties:

RODRIGO: I told my love that it had no right to live. But my love won’t die. CHIMÈNE: Kill it! RODRIGO: You kill it: tell me that you don’t love me. CHIMÈNE: I cannot—not yet. But I will make myself worthy of you, Rodrigo: I will learn to hate you.

Later, when Rodrigo and Chimène are reconciled, other duties and responsibili- ties intrude and they fantasize a “hidden place” where they will be anonymous— without names—able to live in peace and tranquility together. But this can only be a fantasy, as Chimène points out, for there can be no place where they will also be able to hide from themselves.

This contradiction reaches crisis point during the siege on Valencia when the Cid receives word that Alfonso has captured Chimène and the children. This news places him in an intolerable position. If the Cid continues to fight to defend Spain and takes Valencia, he endangers his family, but if he marches on Alfonso, he leaves Spain vulnerable to invasion. Caught in an impossible dilemma, the film presents him riding around and around in circles, asking repeatedly, “May I not sometimes think of my wife and children? What must I do?” If this sequence casts him in a traditional patriarchal role in relation to both the public and the private spheres, it also reveals the painful and destructive contradictions of this division for its mascu- line subjects. The film is able to resolve this dilemma only through external interven- tion: Don Ordonez decides to rescue Chimène himself and joins with the Cid.

However, Rodrigo is not just required to live up to the name of the Cid. He is frequently split by the act of standing in for or representing other names. Again and again, he acts “for his father,” “for Spain,” “for Alfonso,” or “for God.” He is there- fore not permitted to be “himself” (whatever that might be) but is frequently present in place of an absent other, frequently a nonexistent entity that he hopes to con- struct through representation: the act of naming and embodying. For example, the names of both Spain and Alfonso that Rodrigo invokes are ideals, the first having no concrete existence but simply being something to be named and constructed, the second, having no relation to the living person of the king but simply being a posi- tion that Rodrigo hopes to construct by standing in place of that which is absent, embodying its values, and hence providing an example in the process.

Rodrigo even has to literally stand in for God. Not only is he frequently iden- tified as God’s representative—”God sent you to us,” he is told by a priest near the beginning of the film—but after Don Ordonez allies himself with the Cid and is captured by Ben Yussuf, he claims that the Cid is “not like other men” and that he will therefore “never die.” Ben Yussuf, of course, sees the significance of this claim and asks, “You dare to think of him the way we think of the prophet . . . . Then this will be more than a battle; it will be our God against yours.” Through Ben Yussuf’s comparison with the prophet Muhammad, the Cid is therefore presented not only as God’s representative on earth but, more literally, as Jesus Christ himself. He even has to go through the act of dying and resurrection to achieve his mission.

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If, earlier, the Cid had been a unifying factor through the example of his own moral integrity, by the end only his physical presence as an image is necessary. Wounded by an arrow (much like the statue of Jesus that he saves at the opening of the film and even straps to a horse), he knows that he must lead his men into battle the next morning if he is to defeat Ben Yussuf and that only his physical presence as an image will bring his men together and inspire them to victory. How- ever, his wound makes him unable to perform this role as a living being and he decides to give up his life so that the image of his corpse can fulfill this function. Furthermore, the image of his dead body not only inspires his men to victory but also almost single-handedly destroys the opposition by inspiring fear in them. The very presence of his physical image routs the Almoravide forces and reduces Ben Yussuf to immobility as his fanaticism is converted into disbelief and his inert body is literally trampled to death under the hooves of the Cid’s advancing forces.

The Cid’s divided nature is essential to his function as a hero. While it is com- mon to see male heroes as “ego ideals” who exist as images of presence, unity, and omnipotence,60 the Cid, like many male heroes, is heroic exactly because of the struggle that he embodies. Without the sense of contradiction, agony, and self- doubt, the male subject becomes not a heroic agent but a mindless robotic func- tionary, the conformist zombie whom the bourgeois democratic imagination, particularly in the period of the Cold War, identified as the subject of feudal des- potism and modern totalitarianism.

As such, El Cid can be seen both as a product of Cold War discourses and as demonstrating the complexities and contradictions of these discourses. The film ultimately offers both a heroic image of nationalism and democratic masculinity and emphasizes the contradictions and costs on which they depend.

Conclusion. This article has tried to demonstrate that El Cid is the product of hybridization in which different cultural materials, from different national con- texts, have been integrated with one another and transformed in the process. This is particularly clear because of El Cid’s specific conditions of production, but it is, arguably, also true of all cultural texts. No text is ever simply the product of an authentic, coherent, and unique national culture. On the contrary, films are part of the process through which struggles over the definition of national cultures are fought. In other words, the inclusion or exclusion of certain films with respect to specific definitions of national cinema tells us more about the power relations within which these definitions operate than they do about some inherent feature of these films’ production, their formal features, or their consumption. Further- more, as we have also seen, texts are also involved in the production of certain notions of nationhood. El Cid not only tells a story of the formation of a nation but it also constructs that history in specific ways. It presents a teleological history of nationhood in which liberal democracies, and specific constructions of masculine subjectivity associated with them, are privileged over other alternatives. This is not to say that the film is inherently conservative. Liberal democracy is not a mono- lith object but is itself a site of struggle between violently opposed groups. If the film does privilege liberal constructions of politics and masculinity, this does not

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mean that it is uncritical of alternative appropriations of liberalism or is unaware of the contradictions and costs of liberalism as an ideology.

Notes

The author wishes to thank Dorinda Hartmann, one of Cinema Journal’s fine photo edi- tors, for locating and selecting the illustrations that accompany this essay.

1. See, for example, Angela Dalle Vacche, The Body in the Mirror: Shapes of History in Italian Cinema (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992); Sumiko Higashi, “Antimodernism as Historical Representation in a Consumer Culture: Cecil B. De Mille’s The Ten Commandments, 1923, 1956, 1993,” in Vivian Sobchack, ed., The Per- sistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event (New York: Routledge, 1996), 91–125; Alan Nadel, “God’s Law and the Widescreen: The Ten Commandments as Cold War ‘Epic,’” in Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 90–116; Stephen Neale, Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1980); Vivian Sobchack, “‘Surge and Splendor’: A Phenomenology of the Hollywood Historical Epic,” in Barry K. Grant, ed., The Film Genre Reader II (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995); Michael Wood, America in the Movies, or “Santa Maria, It Had Slipped My Mind” (London: Secker and Warburg, 1975); and Maria Wyke, Projecting the Past: Ancient Rome, Cinema, and History (London: Routledge, 1997).

2. Much of this work draws on ideas developed by Laura Mulvey in her classic article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Bill Nichols, ed., Movies and Methods, vol. 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 303–15.

3. Neale, Genre. 4. These ideas draw upon David Bordwell’s work in Narration and the Fiction Film (Lon-

don: Routledge, 1988). 5. See, for example, Steve Cohan, Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998); Ina Rae Hark, “Animals or Romans: Looking at Masculinity in Spartacus,” in Steve Cohan and Ina Rae Hark, eds., Screen- ing the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema (London Routledge, 1992), 151–72; Leon Hunt, “‘What Are Big Boys Made Of?’: Spartacus, El Cid, and the Male Epic,” in Pat Kirkham and Janet Tumin, eds., Me Tarzan: Men, Movies, and Masculin- ity (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1993); 65–83; Mark Jancovich, “‘Charlton Heston Is an Axiom’: Spectacle and Performance in the Development of the Blockbuster,” in Andy Willis, ed., Film Stars: Hollywood and Beyond (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, forthcoming); and Yvonne Tasker, Spectacular Bodies: Genre, Gen- der, and the Action Cinema, (London: Routledge, 1992).

6. Tony Bennett and Janet Woolacott, Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popu- lar Hero (London: Macmillan, 1987).

7. Tasker, Spectacular Bodies. 8. See, for example, Hark, “Animals or Romans.” 9. Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity, and Sexuality (London: Routledge,

1992), and Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen, 1986).

10. This kind of analysis often draws on Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, vol. 1, Women, Floods, Bodies, History (Cambridge: Polity, 1987), and Male Fantasies, vol. 2, Male Bodies (Cambridge: Polity, 1988). It has been more clearly developed in relation to contemporary spectacles of the male body on film. See, for example, Claudia Springer,

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Electronic Eros: Bodies and Desire in the Postindustrial Age (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), and Susan Jeffords, Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994).

11. Dalle Vacche, The Body in the Mirror, 24. 12. Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsche,” in Bernard Rosenberg and David

Manning White, eds., Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America (New York: Free Press, 1957).

13. Dwight Macdonald, “Masscult and Midcult,” in Against the American Grain (London: Victor Gollanczs, 1963), 37.

14. Although they are very different, see Peter Biskind, Seeing Is Believing: How Holly- wood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties (London: Pluto, 1983); Cohan, Masked Men; and Nadel, Containment Culture.

15. Dwight Macdonald, Dwight Macdonald on Movies (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice- Hall, 1969).

16. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (London: Routledge, 1984), 271.

17. Macdonald, “Masscult and Midcult,” 54. 18. Bourdieu, Distinction, 365. 19. Macdonald, Dwight Macdonald on Movies, 424. 20. As Bruce Babbington and Peter Evans argue, “We should not forget—leaving aside

the genre’s many nominations in most fields—that Ben Hur and Spartacus won Best Picture Awards, that Charlton Heston and Hugh Griffith gained acting awards for their roles in Ben Hur and Spartacus and Peter Ustinov for his in Quo Vadis, and that Wyler was given Best Director award for Ben Hur.” Babbington and Evans, Biblical Epics: Sacred Narrative in Hollywood Cinema (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester Uni- versity Press, 1993), 7.

21. For a discussion of the problematic status of published materials on reception, see Mark Jancovich, “Genre and the Audience: Genre Classifications and Cultural Distinctions in the Mediation of The Silence of the Lambs,” in Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby, eds., Hollywood and Cultural Identity (London: British Film Institute, forthcoming).

22. This concern with Oedipal narratives in the Cold War period does not necessarily assume that these narratives are a fundamental structure of all patriarchal societies. On the contrary, as Robert J. Corber has emphasized, one of the problems with many forms of psychoanalytic film theory is that they were developed in relation to films of the Cold War epoch, when psychoanalysis was being put to specific ideological uses. Corber, In the Name of National Security: Hitchcock, Homophobia, and the Political Construction of Gender in Postwar America (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993). In other words, this article is more concerned with the functioning of Oedipal narratives in American culture during a specific era than with reproducing the as- sumption that Oedipal narratives are a metadiscourse that can be used to make all films intelligible. See my critique of Screen theory in Joanne Hollows and Mark Jancovich, eds., Approaches to Popular Film (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester Univer- sity Press, 1995).

It is particularly interesting in this regard to consider Marsha Kinder’s work on the Spanish Oedipal narrative. See her Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Iden- tity in Spain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). While she accepts that “the Oedipal drama” is “reenacted in every generation because it is the primary means of transforming the small animal into a human gendered subject,” she emphasizes the need to pay attention to “its distinctive cultural reinscription” within the context of

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Spanish culture (197). Indeed, her claims may explain elements of the film that are marginalized by my account and that might lead us to conclude that the film had a substantially different resonance in Spanish culture.

Kinder notes, for example, that the father is often absent or idealized and that the patriarchal mother comes to function as both the figure of repression and the target of the children’s hostility. She also notes that patricide, if attempted, “is usually performed by the daughter” rather than by the son (198). It is therefore interesting that, in El Cid, Alfonso’s Oedipal problems are rooted in his probably incestuous relationship with his sister, Uracca. Furthermore, she is presented as a sadist who not only controls her brother but clearly desires the Cid and wants to destroy him because this desire is unre- quited. In this way, she operates both as the patricidal daughter and as the repressive material figure that takes the father’s place in the Spanish Oedipal narrative. These elements might suggest that the film bears the trace of its multiple cultural contexts and that elements in the film might have very different meanings in the Spanish context.

As I have argued elsewhere, we need to be aware that not only does any reading of a text at best only identify certain preferred meanings, but also that the meanings of texts as specific historically produced utterances exceed these particular readings and are subject to continual reinterpretation as these texts pass into new historical and cultural contexts. See, for example, Mark Jancovich, “David Morley, The Nationwide Studies,” in Martin Barker and Anne Beezer, eds., Reading into Cultural Studies (Lon- don: Routledge, 1992), 134–47; Mark Jancovich, Horror (London: Batsford, 1992); Mark Jancovich, The Cultural Politics of the New Criticism (London: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 1993); Hollows and Jancovich, Approaches to Popular Film; and Jancovich, “Genre and the Audience.”

23. See, for example, Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” and Stephen Neale, “Masculinity as Spectacle,” in Cohan and Hark, Screening the Male, 9–20.

24. As I have argued elsewhere, however, this Other was as internal as it was external. See, for example, Mark Jancovich, Rational Fears: American Horror in the 1950s (Manches- ter, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1996), and “Othering Conformity in Post-War America: Intellectuals, the New Middle Classes, and the Problem of Cultural Distinc- tions,” in Nathan Abrams and Julie Hughes, eds., Containing America (Birmingham, U.K.: Birmingham University Press, forthcoming).

See also Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988); Daniel Bell, ed., The New Ameri- can Right (New York: Criterion, 1955); Daniel Boorstin, The Image: Or What Happened to the American Dream (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1962); Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Dell, 1964); John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Soci- ety (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1958); Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society (New York: Vintage, 1956); Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsche”; Michael Harrington, The Other America (New York: Macmillan, 1962); Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage, 1962); Dwight Macdonald, Against the American Grain; Norman Mailer, “The White Negro,” in Advertisements for Myself (London: Andre Deutsch, 1959), 281–302; C Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951); C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956); C. Wright Mills, “On the New Left,” in Paul Jacobs and Saul Landau, eds., The New Radicals (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1966), 107–20; Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1957); Vance Packard, The Status Seekers: An Exploration of Class Behavior in America (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1959);

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David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961); Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1949); Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Politics of Hope (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1964); William Whyte, The Organiza- tion Man (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1956); Philip Wylie, Generation of Vipers (New York: Rinehart, 1942); Philip Wylie, “The Abdicating Male . . . and How the Gray Flan- nel Mind Exploits Him through His Women,” Playboy, November 1956, 23–24, 50, 79; and Philip Wylie, “The Womanization of America: An Embattled Male Takes a Look at What Was Once a Man’s World,” Playboy, September 1958, 51–52, 77–79.

Studies of this period that I have found particularly useful include Alison J. Clarke, “Tupperware: Suburbia, Sociality and Mass Consumption,” in Roger Silverstone, ed., Visions of Suburbia (London: Routledge, 1997), 132–60; Cohan, Masked Men; Bar- bara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commit- ment (London: Pluto, 1983); Barbara Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (New York: Pantheon, 1989); Kenneth Jackson, The Crabgrass Fron- tier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Barbara Klinger, Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture, and the Films of Douglas Sirk (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); Karal Ann Marling, As Seen on TV: The Visual Culture of Everyday Life in the 1950s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991); Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988); Joanne Meyerowitz, Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–1960 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994); Richard Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intel- lectuals in the 1940s and 1950s (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1988); Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989); and Lynne Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Post- war America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

Other studies include, Biskind, Seeing Is Believing; Paul Boyer, By the Bombs’ Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pan- theon, 1985); Jackie Byars, All That Hollywood Allows: Re-reading Gender in 1950s Melodrama (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Corber, In the Name of National Security; Carl Degler, Affluence and Anxiety: America since 1945 (Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman, 1975); John Patrick Diggins, The Proud Decades: America in War and Peace, 1941–1960 (New York: Norton, 1989); James Gilbert, Another Chance: Post- war America, 1945–1985 (Chicago: Dorsey Press, 1986); David Halberstam, The Fifties (New York: Villard, 1993); William Leuchtenberg, A Troubled Feast: American Society since 1945 (Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman, 1983); George Lipsitz, Rainbow at Mid- night: Labor and Culture in the 1940s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Lary May, ed., Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Alan Nadel, Containment Culture: American Nar- ratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995); William O’Neill, American High: The Years of Confidence, 1945–1960 (New York: Free Press, 1986); Ronald J. Oakley, God’s Country: America in the Fifties (New York: Dembner, 1990); Richard Polenberg, One Nation Divisible: Class, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States since 1938 (New York: Penguin, 1980); Janice Radway, “On Gender of the Middlebrow Consumer and the Threat of the Culturally Fraudulent Female,” South Atlantic Quarterly 93, no. 4 (fall 1994): 871–94; Michael Rogin, Ronald Reagan, the Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkeley: University of Califor- nia Press, 1987); Nora Sayre, Running Time: Films of the Cold War (New York: Dial,

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1982); Ed Sikov, Laughing Hysterically: American Screen Comedy of the 1950s (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Stephen Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); and Lawrence S. Wittner, Cold War America: From Hiroshima to Watergate (New York: Rinehart and Winston, 1978).

25. Derek Elley, The Epic Film: Myth and History (London: Routledge, 1984), 6. 26. Charlton Heston, In the Arena: The Biography (London: HarperCollins, 1996), 239. 27. Peter Besas, Behind the Spanish Lens (Denver: Arden, 1985), 54. 28. Thomas Schatz, “The New Hollywood,” in Jim Collins et al., eds., Film Theory Goes to

the Movies (New York: Routledge, 1993), 13. 29. See Nadel, Containment Culture. 30. Heston, In the Arena. 31. Ibid., 249. 32. Besas, Behind the Spanish Lens. 33. For studies of Spanish history and culture, see, for example, Raymond Carr, Modern

Spain 1875–1980 (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1980); and Helen Graham and Jo Labanyi, eds., Spanish Cultural Studies: An Introduction. The Struggle for Modernity (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1995).

34. Of course, Bronston’s earlier films had also used the Spanish landscape, but these scenes had been attributed to other places. For example, in King of Kings, Spain doubled for Israel.

35. Besas, Behind the Spanish Lens. 36. See, for example, Virginia Higginbotham, Spanish Film under Franco (Austin: Univer-

sity of Texas Press); John Hopewell, Out of the Past: Spanish Cinema after Franco (Lon- don: British Film Institute, 1986); and Marsha Kinder, Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

37. Higginbotham, Spanish Film under Franco, 16. 38. Marta Hernandez, quoted in Higginbotham, Spanish Film under Franco, 16. 39. Andrew Higson, “The Concept of National Cinema,” Screen 30, no. 4 (autumn 1989):

36–46. 40. Besas, Behind the Spanish Lens, 53. 41. However, these films are sometimes defined as British, but this only further illustrates

that definitions of national cinema are more about the inevitably contradictory pro- cesses through which films are classified, rather than some internal feature of the films themselves. For more on the contradictory ways in which these films have been de- fined, see Martyn Auty, “If the United States Spoke Spanish, We Would Have a Film Industry . . . ,” in Martyn Auty and Nick Roddick, eds., British Cinema Now (London: British Film Institute, 1985), 6, 11.

42. Heston, In the Arena. 43. For scholarship on the Poema and other Cid narratives, see “Introduction,” in Corneille,

Le Cid (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1975); Fletcher, The Quest for El Cid; J. Y. Gibson, trans., The Cid Ballads (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Truber, 1898); Gra- ham and Labanyi, Spanish Cultural Studies; W. D. Howarth, Le Cid (London: Grant and Cutler, 1988); Ian Michael, The Poem of the Cid (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1975); Ramon Mendendez Pidal, The Cid and His Spain (London: John Murray, 1934); Colin Smith, ed., Spanish Ballads (Oxford, U.K.: Pergamon, 1964); Colin Smith, ed., El Poema de Mio Cid (Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon, 1972); Pe- ter Such and John Hodgkinson, “Introduction,” The Poem of My Cid (Warminster, U.K.: Aris and Phillips, 1987); and Roger Wright, Spanish Ballads (London: Grant and Culliver, 1991).

Cinema Journal 40, No. 1, Fall 2000 103

44. Richard Fletcher, The Quest for El Cid (London: Hutchinson, 1989), 5. 45. Heston, In the Arena. 46. Fletcher, The Quest for El Cid, 201. 47. Kinder, Blood Cinema, 11. 48. Such and Hodgkinson, “Introduction,” in The Poem of My Cid, 34. 49. Fletcher, The Quest for El Cid, 204–5. 50. Hunt, “‘What Are Big Boys Made of?’” 65. 51. Fletcher, The Quest for El Cid, 118. 52. In fact, a series of films emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s that revolved around

similar conflicts: 300 Spartans (1962), The Alamo (1960), Khartoum (1966), and even Zulu (1964). In each, a small force is compelled to hold a strategic location against im- possible odds, and usually sacrifices itself so that victory may be achieved at a later point.

53. Fletcher, The Quest for El Cid. 54. Heston, In the Arena, 358. 55. It is worth pointing out that Beckett was written by the French writer, Jean Anouilh,

and that Robert Bolt, who wrote A Man for All Seasons, was English. 56. See, for example, Daniel Bell, “America as a Mass Society: A Critique,” in The End of

Ideology, and W. W. Rostow, The Stages of Development: A Non-Communist Manifesto (London: Cambridge University Press, 1960).

57. See, for example, Barbara Ehrenreich’s discussion of “maturity” in The Hearts of Men and my use of it in Rational Fears.

58. “Conversation with Anthony Mann,” Framework 15/16/17 (summer 1981): 19. 59. Hunt, “‘What Are Big Boys Made Of?’” 74. 60. See, for example, Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” and Neale, “Mas-

culinity as Spectacle.”

__MACOSX/The Movie Review Essay /._Very Scholarly Movie Review- Professional Grade.pdf

The Movie Review Essay /Writing For Aspiring Movie Critics.pdf

How To Write A Movie Review For Aspiring Movie Critics - MovieFilmReview.com

You don’t need a degree in English to be a good movie reviewer, and that everyone is invited to rate & critique a movie here. However, as you step into reviewing movies professionally, there are certain quality and guidelines

that your critiques should possess. You should not use generalized opinions such as “oh, it was a great movie” or “the acting was horrible”, but rather

give specific reasons and the whys.

If you feel like you are ready, you can start writing your reviews and get

them published here on MovieFilmReview.com

Be sure to read up on tips for the actual write-up of a review - Here is a good guide to read up on. While we don’t limit you to a certain style of

writing, the number of words you must have in your review, and what you must (or must not) write about, we do provide the following guideline to

help you get started in writing a review.

Title of the movie

Paragraph 1

You will need to include the following: name of the film, prominent stars of the film, basic setting ( time and place), and type of film ( comedy,

adventure, drama, etc.)

Paragraph 2

You will need to write a plot summary for the movie. Do not reveal the ending. Discuss at least 5 events and be sure to cover the entire scope of

the movie, except the very end.

Paragraph 3

Discuss one aspect of filmmaking. You may choose from acting, direction, editing, costume design, set design, photography, background music, or

anything else you may think of. Be sure that you are specific and cite examples from the movie.

Paragraph 4

Discuss another aspect of filmmaking. You may choose from acting, direction, editing, costume design, set design, photography, background

music, or anything else you may think of, but obviously choose something different from what you discussed in the previous paragraph. Be sure that

you are specific and cite examples from the movie.

http://www.moviefilmreview.com/mcw

http://www.spiritofbaraka.com/how-to-write-a-movie-review.aspx

Paragraph 5

Give your overall reaction to the film as well as your opinion on the quality of the film. also include your recommendations for potential viewers.

Remember, the guideline above is just what it is. It’s just a guideline, so

throw in your own spin and develop your own format if you want to. Take a look at a sample movie critique for “Forrest Gump”:

++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Win One for the Gumper: A Short Review of Forrest Gump

“Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.” However, when you watch Forrest Gump starring Tom Hanks as Forrest and

Robin Wright as Jenny, you know you are going to get a lot of laughs and

even a few tears. The screenplay for the 1994 movie was written by Eric Roth, based on the novel by Winston Groom. The story follows Forrest

through 30 years of trials and tribulations, placing Forrest within historical moments of history, and in pursuit of his one dream–his “most special

friend,” Jenny. According to the Washington Post, Forrest Gump won Oscar awards for Best Picture, Best Actor (Hanks), Best Director (Robert

Zemeckis), Film Editing, Visual Effects and Adapted Screenplay. The movie was well deserving of these awards since the acting and the visual effects

were extraordinary.

The films’ actors success in portraying their characters is a major factor in

the film’s awards. Tom Hanks and Robin Wright worked well together, just like “peas and carrots.” The on-screen chemistry between the two was

phenomenal. I felt a real connection between the two, finding myself mad at Jenny when she blew Forrest off and in tears when he told her that he was

heading to Vietnam. Mokui’s Movie Review states “Tom Hanks IS Forrest Gump…He breathes life into the guy and you will feel what Forrest feels”

(1994, par 1). James Berardinelli states, “Robin Wright gives the best performance of her career, surpassing what she accomplished in The

Playboys” (1994, par2). Another performance that stands out is that of Gary Sinise. Sinise plays the part of Lieutenant Dan Taylor, whose life is saved by

Forrest during the Vietnam War. James Berardinelli writes, “In this movie, his Lieutenant Dan Taylor is riveting” (1994, par 3). I thought that Sinise

was quite convincing with his emotions throughout the movie, as if he was really a disabled vet who had lost both legs in the war.

Just as good as the actors were those working behind the scenes with the special effects. Throughout Forrest Gump the special effects were incredible.

During Lieutenant Taylor’s scenes, I was convinced that he really didn’t have

legs. I was studying the scenes, looking for any signs of legs, trying to figure

out how it was done. It turns out that each and every frame was painted over to give it the true to life values that it holds. Also bringing the movie

more credibility was the ability to place Forrest in history making events. These events ranged from Forrest teaching Elvis how to swing his hips to

meeting Presidents for various accomplishments. These television clips of Forrest were done with such finesse that they look real. Critic Brian Webster

(2003) states, “This is handled virtually flawlessly; if you didn’t know better, you’d believe that a fellow named Gump really did tell President Lyndon

Johnson that he had been shot in the rump while acting heroically in Vietnam” (par 2). Rolling Stone (2003) states, “The effects dazzle, though

never at the expense of the story” (Travers, par 2).

This story, complete with the Oscar winning performances in both acting and

special effects is perfect for those in need of a dose of goodness. My family enjoys watching Forrest Gump together for rejuvenation, to view someone

with true values of honesty, friendship and family. Forrest, with his heart of gold and his low IQ, never gives up. He always looks for the best in every

scenario. The movie opens with a feather floating down over the city, landing at Forrest’s feet. Near the end of the story, Forrest questions, “Do

we each have a destiny - or do we just float around accidental, like on a breeze?” As you are contemplating this question, the feather reappears and

floats through the countryside right up into the ending credits.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Now, let’s look at what you need to do BEFORE you even start writing a

single word:

Steps

1. Watch a movie, and during the movie, think about what you like and

don’t like about it. Try to remember these things, because you will need them during the writing part.

2. Go home, and write down all the information that you gathered during the movie. Let all the information sit for up to a day because you need

time to think over the movie. But, don’t let yourself take more than a day, because if you wait too long, you tend to lose interest and forget

important things that you felt. 3. Write all the information down in a format that is readable for others.

Remember to include a basic summary for people who haven’t heard

of the movie, but remember to not give away the ending, or any other part that they wouldn’t want to have ruined for them.

4. Remember to aim for about 600-700 words for the entire review.

5. Hand out copies of your review to other people, so they can have the

chance to read your opinion, and after time, you may start to get people wanting more and more reviews.

Tips

 Remember to try reviewing every movie you see, because when you

get into the habit, it will become easier.

 Once you gain more confidence in your reviews, try to match the tone of each with the style of the movie. For example, a humorous writing

style would work well for a comedy, whereas a more serious tone would be good for writing a drama review.

Warning

 Try not to slam actors too much, because if it gets too out of hand, they may consider legal action against you. Just be careful.

Again, as mentioned, we are not very strict in terms of the format and

minimal word length. We do encourage you to have your own writing style that you are most comfortable with instead of going with the norm. You will

continue to grow your readership as more people appreciates your style and agree with your reviews.

Get started by visiting the following website: http://www.moviefilmreview.com/mcw

http://www.moviefilmreview.com/mcw

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