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. 

Something Bri-ish to watch in London

But also something not very good.

My two Great Britain viewings ended up being the aforementioned Caught Stealing, notable for its iconic venue (as discussed yesterday), and The Thursday Murder Club, notable for its British subject matter (and being plastered on the side of every double decker bus in London). 

Only one of them was really worth recommending, but the other was somewhat worth recommending, at least among non-cynics, just because the Netflix algorithm is so dastardly efficient that it usually slops together at least mildly entertaining fare.

The Thursday Murder Club also made the most logical next candidate for something I can review, not knowing when I'll next see a new release in the theater.

And I didn't want to wait until France, where we are headed today, to watch it. It did not seem right.

As you likely know, the film stars Helen Mirren, Ben Kingsley and Pierce Brosnan, three of the most prominent still-living British icons, as well as Celia Imrie, someone I didn't know but now like. You can throw in two more British semi-icons from their same age bracket (Richard E. Grant and Jonathan Pryce), a middle-aged semi-icon who has been Doctor Who (David Tennant) and a new face of potential British icon-hood, in more ways than one, in Naomi Ackie.

Watch in France? I think not.

I did have a couple questions though.

1) Why does this movie need to be nearly two hours long? As a result I had to watch it over two nights in the living room of the flat.

2) Why does the dialogue have to be so frigging on-the-nose? It's undignified coming out of the mouth of someone as dignified as Helen Mirren.

Anyway, I'll keep this one short as we are, indeed, off to France in about an hour.

I will say I did enjoy the British-ness of it, while I was still in Britain. Maybe not the "good" British-ness of something like Masterpiece Theatre, the BBC or any of the countless Shakespeare productions being mounted somewhere in England at this moment -- including at the Globe, which we visited but could not tour due to bored children, which is playing The Merry Wives of Windsor -- but British-ness nonetheless. The titular club are residents of a retirement home that reminded me of Downtown Abbey, and Brosnan's character watches a football match with his son -- something I also did with my sons while here.

Okay, on to the next one.