GrodsCorp’s favourite documentary director, the lovely J,The (I’m putting these brackets here purely to separate the comma in J,The’s name and the comma that follows it), has written about the yin and the yang of our respective fillum reviewing styles.

Jackie and Ed’s Movie Show

I have the Editor to thank for this insight. He and I did some hard-core film festival attending a couple of years ago, when I lived in Melbourne. We would review the films we had seen to each other afterwards. It was then that The Editor first told me that I review films in a singularly thematic way, skipping all the actual detail. When he pointed that out to me I realised with horror how wanky my film reviews are and I tried for a while to modify them, but despite my good intentions, I’m still a hopelessly abstract movie-reviewer. Ed, you should know better than to ask me by now!

Here’s an example of the kind of phone conversation we might have:

Me: So what was “Lars and the Real Girl” about?

The Editor: About this guy who buys a plastic blow-up doll, and turns it into his girlfriend. And then his brother and sister-in-law take him to the doctor, and the doctor becomes his therapist. And then…(etc). So, what about “No Country for Old Men?”

Me: It was about the amorality of god and how that plays out in a deterministic fashion in every man’s life, and how these lives interact to create the unavoidable chain of causation that makes up the world we live in.

The Editor: Ah-huh. So, but what was it actually about?

So just like you’re either a Margaret or a David, are you a J,The or an Ed?