5 MINUTE MOVIE GUY

Well it looks like I’ve really fallen behind schedule here. Also I’d like to apologize for the late weekly update. This week has really flown by for me! All I got uploaded this past week was my review and spoiler talk for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Oddly enough, the day after posting the latter, my dad convinced me to give it another shot before they pulled it out of theaters, and suddenly it’s like I had a complete change of heart about the film. I feel like most of my issues with the movie I had worked out and come to terms with before even writing my review, however I wanted my review score to reflect my initial thoughts after seeing it, which were filled with doubt and confusion. So although I had already decided Tarantino’s handling of the Manson Family was probably the best possible route, I didn’t want to guess on how much this newer understanding would alter my review score, and I stuck with my initial instincts. Since seeing it again, I’ve added updated footnotes at the end of each review detailing how my experience had changed upon my second viewing. It’s the first time I’ve ever done that with one of my reviews (and I desperately need to do the same for my Captain America: The Winter Soldier review sometime in the future, since I no longer agree with my original stance on it).

So far this week, I’ve seen 3 movies in theaters. My re-watch of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Dora and the Lost City of Gold (it’s better than you might think), and Hustlers. I have a backlog of reviews that keeps growing, and I’m going to try to pump those out, and perhaps also try to shorten my review length at the same time, to cut myself some slack. I’m a horribly inefficient review writer, to be honest. Always have been. But I do stand behind the quality of my reviews, so I try not to beat myself up too much over it.

The sharpest eyes among you may have noticed that if you’ve looked at my homepage over the last couple days, I’ve been doing some minor adjustments to the presentation of my site. I figured out how to italicize titles with coding, which is great. However, now the space between italicized words and non-italicized words looks too small and the words nearly touch. I can add as many spaces as I want in the title, but WordPress always auto-corrects it to one space, and I haven’t yet found a way to fix it. That’s just kind of how it goes with working on websites, unfortunately. Every solution tends to open up a whole new problem or set of problems. It’s an endless struggle.

Also, as I mentioned in last week’s Weekly Update, I decided based on Twitter feedback that I would be adding movie details and information (director, writers, cast, etc.) to my reviews. Naturally that information is best placed at the top of the review, however that creates a problem with the auto-generated excerpts on my page since the line breaks don’t show, so it all gets jumbled together. An endless struggle, I tell you! (Look at the excerpt preview for Shazam! in the picture above to see what I mean). However, I never liked these auto-generated excerpts anyway because they tend to be too short, and I have the option to create my own excerpts on WordPress (see The Kitchen above) so I’ll be doing that moving forward. Anyway, as you can see, I’ve still been plenty busy with the site behind the scenes. It’s a slow and tedious process, and I’ll try to limit how much time I invest into these retroactive changes each week.

Coming up next week is the arrival of Rambo: Last Blood, which I’m really excited about. You guys might not know this, but Sylvester Stallone is one of my personal heroes, and I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve never seen very much of the first three Rambo movies. I’ve only seen maybe 30 minutes of the original film, and I saw the fourth film in its entirety. The good news is I own the Blu-Ray set, so this week I’m going to take some time to watch them all (and maybe even review them, fingers crossed) before Last Blood hits theaters.

I apologize for not completing most of the things on my agenda in last week’s update. I was probably overly ambitious with it. Some of those things I’ll still try to do sometime in the future, but I’ve currently got a busy stretch ahead of me. This week is going to be all about playing catch-up with reviews and John Rambo. As always, thanks for reading!

5 Minute Movie Guy
9.14.19