Because Everybody Else Has One

Here's yet another article, I did for my course: As film budgets soar and creative bankruptcy plunges new depths (yes, I’m looking at you Michael Bay, on both counts), some movie buffs may well be tempted to write off modern cinema as a pale shadow of its former self. Indeed, as Hollywood’s unholy crusade to remake every 1970s horror movie, it’s hard not to look back at that particular decade with rose-tinted glasses. After all, that was the decade of Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and William Friedkin. As for the big Hollywood blockbusters: can you get much more classic than Star Wars and Jaws? Can today’s films possibly hope to measure up to the heady days of the ‘70s? Or, for that matter, to those equally classic decades that surrounded it? Well, yes, of course they can. Oh sure, with the release of every new lame-duck comedy or overly noisy but brain-smashingly dull “blockbuster”, those previous decades can’t help but look like a true Golden Age for...

Here's another quick review that I wrote recently for my course: As I walked out of the mid-afternoon showing of Pixar’s latest sure-fire winner of the Best Animated Film category at next years Oscars, I was left with a slight feeling of, dare I say it, disappointment. The worst part was that I wasn’t entirely sure where that disappointed came from. Up had everything that I have come to expect from Pixar: the lush, at times breathtaking animation; the well rounded characters; the faultless voice actors; jokes that work for people of all ages; the simple but effective plot and, of course, oodles of heart. How could I possibly be left disappointed by so seemingly perfect a piece of filmmaking? A few hours later and after far more time spent dwelling on my feelings about the film than is probably healthy, I came to a surprising conclusion: Up is a wildly uneven affair. Of course, it’s uneven in a way that only a Pixar movie can be. It’s not that the quality of the film fluctuates wild...

OK, so clearly I haven't posted here for a while but then most of my writing has gone towards my actual journalism course. Still, I figure that some of my "day job" writings would make decent blog posts and here's the first of them: a less than favourable review of Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People : Dale Carnegie is a perfectly readable writer. With the good bits out of the way, let’s move onto why Carnegie’s “classic” self-help book, How To Win Friends and Influence People , encapsulates everything that’s so wrong with the so-called self-help genre. First published in 1936, How to Win Friends and Influence People (or Balderdash, for short) is generally accepted to be the first self-improvement book ever written. One could only wish that it was also the last. Nominally, aimed at young business-people, Carnegie’s “insight” into human nature promises, as the title does indeed suggest, a guide to mastering your social domain. It is a b...