Guest Writercize - Nicole, Madlab Post (Movie Review)

Today I welcome Nicole to the writercize guest spot. I met Nicole through the A to Z Challenge this past April, and instantly felt a connection to her through her thoughtful comments and supportive attitude. She runs a blog called The Madlab Post which reviews, evaluates, compares, questions, and more ... anything to do with cinema, from the perspective of an aspiring film maker and writer. Her irreverent style mixed with intelligent commentary is always a pleasure to read, and the questions she poses to her readers are always interesting.


Without further ado, I present to you: Nicole!  (Oh, and PS - you might want to leave a couple of candles and a slice of cake with your comment.  Just saying, today might be a special day for a certain someone.)  


The end of this post does reference sexual content in a movie, so be aware.

Greetings to all Writercize readers on this most glorious day. What makes it so glorious, you ask? Well, because we’re going to have some fun writing movie reviews. Here is a short primer for those of you who are unfamiliar with me and/or my writing: My name is Nicole; I blog about independent films, hot actors, prolific movie directors and Hollywood releases as well as party ideas that help mix cinema into the equation in almost any social gathering, at my blog, The Madlab Post. I am also a filmmaker who has made several short films and plans to bring one of my feature length screenplays to the big (or small) screen.

After reading movie reviews in newspapers, magazines and online, I leave the text feeling like I should have just watched the entire film instead of spending 15-30 minutes reading someone’s critique of the piece. Now, I don’t mind a good review that just happens to be lengthy, but have found many movie reviews to be obnoxiously lengthy for no reason. It usually occurs when the reviewer carefully dissects almost every aspect of a particular film, when some of the readers probably aren’t interested in knowing about all of this information in the first place. This is why I started writing an “In a Nutshell” series on my blog featuring short movie reviews that are often 140 words or less; well, THAT and I wanted to try writing shorter posts more often since mine tend to be on the long-winded side.

Movie reviews are the focus of today’s writercize. It is inspired by my “In a Nutshell” series, which was inspired by the word count limit that Twitter has setup for its users. 

writercize:  In 140 words or less, write a movie review on any one film that you have already seen.

Within the last two weeks or so, I’ve watched several movies including “Shortbus,” “Hostel,” “1408,” “Finding Forrester” and “Funny Games” and since either already used or plan on using most of these films for other online writing duties of mine, here is my review of the movie “Shortbus,” a title that ironically fits in line with the theme of this writercize:

(Nicole's sample writercize response below:)

I thought that this movie was about orgies, shot cinéma vérité style. While watching it, I learned that this was not a movie about orgies. It is a movie about a sexually frustrated “couples counselor” who cannot orgasm, her gay clients who add a third person into their depressing relationship in hopes of fixing problems that they have difficulties addressing, a dominatrix whose job stifles the confidence for pursuing her passions in art photography that she does on the side -- and a singing mistress of ceremonies who spends half of his time “blowing the NYPD” to provide a place for them all to congregate in a brooklyn salon that offers entertainment in a variety of fashions including discussion groups, live art, music, drinks and all of the free heterosexual and LGBT sex that you desire -- with real, full-frontal penetration.

Word count total for my “Shortbus” movie review: 139 words

Boo-ya!

Now, it’s your turn!