Reel Reviews

Saving Mr. Banks -- I’m uncertain here. The positive sign could just as easily be a so-so mark. It’s hard to get a handle on whether this is a really good movie or not. This film features fine performances from a lot of really good actors; then again, in at least one case (Emma Thompson in the P.L. Travers role), that good performance makes for a rather unlikeable character. Some of the backstory scenes take way too long to tell their tale--we get the drift long before that curtain closes--and the film drags in those sequences. But those are forgivable lapses, given the overall quality of the thing. I’ll stick with the positive, but I won’t argue very hard against anyone who says otherwise.

Graphic Enhancement

Faithful readers of this blog--as if--have by now gotten used to my long-standing ratings system for movies and books: the + for a positive review, a ~ for a "so-so" review, and a -- for a negative review.

Using those characters for symbols never quite worked. They disappear into the text, and the tilde for a "so-so" character--it's supposed to represent that hand wiggle you do when you somatically describe something as "so-so"--is almost non-existent in some fonts, and is particularly so in MM's preferred font, Raleway.

Thankfully, I've been learning a thing or two about this web stuff, and that includes the wonderful thing called FontAwesome. It's a web-based symbol font that anyone--which includes me--can use to add some easy graphic elements to his website. And now I've done so: you will notice in new reviews that the ratings will feature new icons, as indicated in the reviews summary at the right. The positive and negative reviews still feature plus and minus signs, they're just now more visible icons in a square background. The problem was the "so-so" tilde; no such character exists in FontAwesome at this time. So I had to compromise and choose a new character; from now on, "so-so" reviews will feature a question mark symbol in a circle (oddly, FA features no squared question mark icon). I think this is a good choice, as the question mark represents just as well as the squiggle the indeterminate nature of the "so-so" review.

Old reviews will eventually be updated with the new icons look, as I get time and gumption to do so. (It can be a tedious process going through all those reviews--particularly in really long posts, like the 'S' Reel Reviews.)

That goes for movies. For Recently Read (book) reviews, I'm still trying to figure out whether or not I want to keep the symbol system or not. Most recently book reviews have not included any symbol, as I thought it was better to let the narraitive review speak for itself. But I'm still undecided on that. And of course, it may not matter anyway, as I almost never read any books anymore (the curse of being too busy).

So that's the scoop on what's the latest with Malchats Matters. Now maybe I can get moving and actually post something meaningful soon. There's always hope, I guess.