Feast or famine in holiday review posting

The first Monday-Friday week I was gone from Australia, there were no reviews posted on ReelGood.

The Monday-Friday week ending right now, there will be four.

Yes it did take me a little while to get the hang of both blogging and posting reviews on this tablet, but I've finally got my groove down.

To be sure, there was supposed to be a review posted during that first full week. I didn't get my act together in Dubai to write my review of Eddington, because we were just too damn busy, but I did write it on the plane to London last Tuesday, so I should have been ready to hack my way through a posting of it before the weekend. 

Then the thing writers hate most happened: Only a paragraph-and-a-half of the review was saved.

I don't know why. It might have had something to do with thinking I was saving it locally to the tablet, but somehow only being able to save it to OneDrive, which was obviously offline while I was on the plane. (Not obviously, I guess, but we couldn't figure out how to get free WiFi and never paid for it.) I thought it might have had something to do with the fact that it was saved the Downloads folder. Maybe that folder is only meant for actual downloads. Then I thought there could have been a problem with the fact that I accidentally saved a space into the file name. I saw it as it was happening, but I just couldn't be bothered to fix it. 

In any case, I had to write the review all over again, which writers simply hate to do. Even if what you wrote wasn't that great in the first place -- as was the case with my Eddington review -- devoting even a limited amount of mental energy to writing it again just feels like an incredible hassle. I had something worth posting the first time, and now I have to regurgitate as much of it as I can remember from that previous instance of writing. I'm sure some felicitious turns of phrase were lost, while others were gained.

Anyway, it took me another several days to finally get back to shitting out another Eddington review, which was somehow 150 words shorter, during which I just considered not reviewing it at all. But at that time, I didn't know that a bounty of other reviewing options would be on the horizon, and besides, as you recall from this post, I paid the premium $19.99 rental fee just so I could have something to post in my first week away.

I didn't finally post it until the beginning of the second week, this past Monday. (I don't post on the weekends.) And that was no easy feat. 

I had to fight to figure out how to download images to the tablet, which, as it turns out, involves pressing and holding on the image until you get the option to download it. (Who knew?) I also had to fight to figure out how to get the embed URL from YouTube to include the trailer. (You have to be on the "desktop site," an option I know now and is now easy.) And finally I had to fight to post links of actors, directors and movie titles to IMDB by copying and pasting bits of html. Why did I have to do this? Because when you try to link it using the front end on WordPress, the interface just flashes repeatedly and you can't paste anything into it. Three reviews later, I still don't know why it does this.

So yeah, that was Monday. Then on Wednesday I posted my review of Caught Stealing. Then on Thursday I posted someone else's review of The Roses. Then on Friday I posted my own review again of The Thursday Murder Club. And I'm glad to say I can finally do this fairly quickly and efficiently, though the html bit with the link posting is still incredibly tedious.

With four reviews this week -- which I think equals the most I've ever posted in a single week -- I could easily go another week without posting and it would be okay. (It would likely be "okay" if I went the entire time I was in Europe without posting, but that would not be living up to my own standards.) But I've requested a screener to review for a movie coming out next Thursday, and my writer in Australia, the only other one working consistently for me right now, has four more screenings to attend before my trip is over, one of which is next week. So next week will probably be a modest -- by the standards of this week anyway -- two-review week. Which is good because I think the options on Netflix are drying up for a few weeks.

You'll be glad to know that in among all this activity, I've still managed to enjoy both London and Paris. 

Paying $20 for multiple Eddington gains

Eddington opens in Australian cinemas today. I leave for Europe tomorrow.

You already know where my mind goes on a thing like that. 

But if I thought better of squeezing in Superman the night before our trip to America last month -- yes, that's two international trips in two months if you're counting -- there were reasons we had to do it this way -- then you better bet I didn't even get to the point of needing to think better of seeing Ari Aster's latest on Europe Departure Eve, when we're going away for six weeks rather than one.

So I saw it last night instead.

How did that happen, you ask? Well I rented it through U.S. iTunes, of course, since it's already been out for a couple months in the U.S.

Of course, that meant the steep $19.99 rental fee that I try to avoid paying, and usually only pay at the very end of the year when trying to catch movies I won't otherwise be able to see before my list closes. That's compared to the free admission I would have gotten if I'd gone to my local cinema. 

But seeing Eddington now helped in two important ways as I ready for my trip:

1) It gave me a new release still in the chamber that I can review sometime next week and still have it post in a timely way on the website. Coverage while I'm gone is going to be tricky, as my other writers are not always reliable -- no shade on them, but they're both lawyers and one has a baby who is under two. Anything I can prep myself for later posting is a boon to the continued appearance of normalcy on the site while I'm gone.

2) I can finally listen to the next episode of Filmspotting. I like to listen to my podcasts in sequence if possible, and since I knew my viewing of Eddington was roughly soon, and that episode was the next one up, I haven't listened to an episode of this podcast in about six weeks. I don't like to fall behind on any of my podcasts, and though I can't always see the films they discuss before I listen to the episode, I decided an Aster film, with all its potential surprises, was one where I should. (They don't spoil, but it can be difficult to avoid spoilers entirely.)

And since I do plan to have a review up early next week, I won't give you my extended Eddington thoughts now, especially as I am still trying to sort through them.

To be honest, I'm posting this mostly so you don't have to look at the poster for Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey at the top of my site any longer!