The Viewer's Commentary

For my first two reviews, I’m going to do a bit of cheating, but hear me out!

These reviews are special, as they were what set me in the direction of being an aspiring film critic in the first place.  See, my third year of college was a bit of a turning point for me, academically. I had spent a good portion of my time at Arizona State University as a Creative Writing major who secretly couldn’t make up his mind. When I discovered that the Department of English required their majors to take not one, but two years of foreign language, I knew I had to bail. Korean was a hard language to learn in the first year alone, and a second year would’ve likely wrecked my GPA. After a bit of exploration, I discovered the Bachelor’s of Interdisciplinary Studies degree, and chose to transition into that, with concentrations in Writing and Communication (a subject I chose based on prior electives and, mostly ,just to fulfill that second concentration, I admit).

What a horrible, horrible costume for a horrible, horrible movie!

One of the upper division classes I was encouraged to take was ENG 494 – Review Writing. The class ended up being one of, if not my absolute favorites in college, and the professor, Dr. Sarah Duerden, was definitely my favorite professor, and she gets good marks on Rate My Professor, too!

The review I post here is unedited from the paper I turned in, with appropriate modifications to the format to duplicate it on this page. The assignment for this was to choose a “specialty” review, meaning one of our favorites and one that we thought we were especially good at. Naturally, after my review of The Simpsons Movie, I went with the film review again.

This review in particular was instrumental in Dr. Duerden encouraging me to continue on this path, so it’s particularly special — at least to me! For the review formatting, I chose to emulate the style of a print publication’s site, The Boston Globe. I chose it because their longer form reviews and semi-casual tone allowed me both the space and restraints to rant against one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen, Catwoman! As with my previous college review, this is an unedited copy of the final draft:

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