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Thursday, September 29, 2005

Damn you, summaries

I've written to the New York Times three times now to complain about their RSS feed for movie reviews and have yet to receive a reply so I think I'll whine here instead. Why can't they consistently put the TITLE OF THE MOVIE in the summary information for the review?

Born to Consume, No Matter What the Cost
Henry Jaglom's comedy has enough smart, knowing touches to make you wish it added up to more than what it turns out to be: a flighty, motor-mouthed cinematic divertissement.

Sand, Water, Intrigue and a Lot of Suntans
A soggy adventure best suited to DVD-rental desperation.

Escape From the Rough of Poverty to the Green of Fame
This canny piece of feel-good entertainment is the latest movie to reconstruct a real-life sporting event from the past for purposes of present-day sentimental uplift.

Inching Toward Adulthood With a Cheetah for a Friend
This soulful, piercingly beautiful story about a boy and his cheetah marks the welcome return to the screen of the director Carroll Ballard.

Etcetera, etcetera. This week only four of the twelve reviews mention the name of the film in the summary. It annoys the hell out of me. OK, it's out of my system now.

Posted at 11:35 PM

Comments

001. Forest Pines

The problem is that they're smooshing newspaper film reviews into a new format. I don't read the NYT, but I know that most film reviews have a standard paragraph between the headline and the body, with Useful Info like title, director, running time and score-out-of-ten. Because that's there, the reviewer and the sub-ed both know that they don't *have* to mention the film title. The first paragraph often doesn't even mention the *film*, if it's a big review. Of course, when you then try to do an RSS-summary of the same piece, but forget that film reviews have more than just headline and body, the whole thing falls over.

Posted at 03:25AM on Friday, September 30, 2005

002. mattymatt

i like guessing games! it's fun to try to figure out what movie they're talking about. but then, having to play guessing games generally isn't the reason one turns to the paper of record.

Posted at 05:28AM on Friday, September 30, 2005

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