#wed1030

[lotsafilms]

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada

Really enjoyed this, reminded me of other contemporary western like No country For Old Men. Fascinating story and tale of redemption. TLJ does a great job a the good guy doing bad things and Barry Pepper does an excellent wimp. Wonderful setting. The nonlinear narrative and different viewpoints worked very well. Just a really good neo-western movie.

Image source: http://img268.imageshack.us/img268/1467/threeburialsver2.jpg

[lotsafilms]

Everything is Illuminated

This film seems to be split into two parts, it starts off all funny and quirky which is all too reminiscent of Borat with it's take on the Central European stereotype, but then the tone shifts dramatically with a heartfelt trip to the past when they meet the old woman. What didn't help my experience with this film was the lack of subtitles, which make it slightly harder to understand Russian, which was basically the main language in the film. Not understanding what was going on was very confusing, but it made me appreciate with what Elijah Wood's character was going through. I really like Eugene Hutz and all the other kooky characters and cinematography looked cool. Protip: watch with english subtitles to enjoy it more than I did.

Image source: http://www.mun.ca/cinema/image/2006w/everything-is-illuminated.jpg

[lotsafilms]

Jack Goes Boating

Very emotional film with amazing character depth. Uses the actors abilities greatly. PSH is just great as lead, and also does a superb job directing this as well. Just very character driven, well it was adapted from a play I spose. Really really good soundtrack, adds even more emotion to movie. Yeah just good all round, would like to see what he could do if he wasn't so focused on his acting, let his directorial skills shine through.

Image source: http://www.comingsoon.net/gallery/48068/Jack_Goes_Boating_4.jpg

[lotsafilms]

Nil By Mouth

Nasty nasty film. So much swearing, pretty much every single sentence. Ray Winstone does his part perfectly, so brutal to his pregnant wife. Didn't seem to have much of a story to start off with, but it worked out later on. Lots of stuff seems to happen off screen. Hard to follow what's happening sometimes. Don't really like the ending, she forgives him after all the shit he puts on her? Handheld camera makes this film so realistic. Such a dirty film, but pretty compelling.

Image source: http://i170.photobucket.com/albums/u260/LordNinja2007/Nil%20by%20Mouth/Capa.jpg

[lotsafilms]

Ocean's Eleven

Fairly different to the new ones (apart from the Danny Ocean character) so that's pretty cool. And damn what a cool film, with the ensemble Rat Pack breezing through this film effortlessly in their suits just being as slick as possible. Great story and heist plot and ideas. I just love horrible endings to movies and these guys majorly stuff up after being so perfect for the entire film. Damn cool cool stuff, I probably enjoyed the 2001 version more though. 

Image source: http://img707.imageshack.us/img707/1059/s111960p2.jpg

[lotsafilms]

On reflection...

So this here is my final reflective blog metapost for Networked Media Production and this blog for reviewing a film a day. Really enjoyed writing all of these, sharing my love of movies to everyone. Learnt a bunch about CSS and HTML, which I was only had slight basic knowledge in before, which is pretty helpful to make my site look pretty. This was probably my favourite unit this semester.

All about the blog

There seemed to be lots of movie blogs for this unit, but while mine may not have been as long posts, I had the most consistent posting and format every day of the unit. I also think that as a topic, movies are just damn cool. Every single one of my posts is the poster, followed by a short review, then a star rating out of 5 and ending with the trailer, with each post having 10-11 tags attached. I tried to keep to a series of films, which were Terrence Malick, Superman, Dirty Harry, David Lynch, Peter Jackson, Star Trek, Marvel comics (which renamed the blog, because it took up more than a third of the posts) and then a bunch of randoms. I ended up with 87 posts all up, more posts than the majority of the other blogs. They covered a fairly broad range of subjects, ranged from the year 1971 to now, 1 to 4.5 star rating, arthouse film to blockbuster movies, though they mostly came from the USA, or were co-productions with other countries.

Technical stuff and other websites

My design is not anything that fancy, just the basic theme jazzed up a little bit. I am kinda proud of my About page, which I made the HTML and CSS from scratch by using W3Schools Online Web Tutorials, and it says pretty much everything about the website with pretty pictures and links for everyone. Recently added a normal looking one, so look at that for the difference (I prefer my hand-made one). When we learnt to do something extra in the tutes or lectures I noted it in a blog-post. I didn't make a Facebook, Google Plus or Twitter page especially for my blog and instead directed them to my personal pages, the buttons on the right do look pretty fancy, along with a Rotten Tomatoes search and Twitter feed. Though, by directing my blog posts to my personal pages, I got an audience which I already had and plenty of my friends told me they had looked at my blog in real life. I updated my website every week from the lecture content, if you have spare time, i've said on a lot on posts when i've updated the blog with something new. All the posters were stolen off random websites through Google Images (all painfully attributed), by using posters from IMP Awards (which didn't like being embedded), the star ratings are off Wikipedia and trailers are from YouTube. Any picture made by me on the site was probably done using my adequate basic skills at Photoshop, or just MS Paint, and uploaded to Imageshack. Didn't think about Creative Commons much, but if I did, I'd probably make it Attribution (CC BY) so people can do anything with it basically. Number one complaint was the Macs in the lab taking about 50 tries to log into Tumblr.

Analytics

Thanks to Google Analytics, here are some stats (from February 29 to May 4, they're probably slightly different to as of the time you are reading this right now):

That's 723 visits from 164 unique visitors, with 2,734 pageviews, with the average person looking a 3.78 pages a visit for about 7 minutes and 3 seconds, with a bounce rate of 51.18%, and the percentage of new visits being 21.85%. I think that's better than most of the other blogs. Update: 200 people visited 807 times with 3,041 :)

97.23% of people spoke English (8 other languages make up the rest), 91.84% came from Australia (5.67% from US, then 11 other countries), 57.95% from Canberra (only other significant results from Sydney and Newcastle with 19.78% and 10.93% respectively, then 65 other cities), Chrome is the most popular browser at 68.19% (followed by Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, Mozilla Compatible Agent? and Opera), Windows is the most popular OS at 87.97% (followed by Macintosh, iPod and iPad), the average page loading time was 4.78 seconds.

The most popular keyword was "tumblr" (with 6 others), 9 people found me through searching Google, 47.96% of my traffic came through my Twitter feed compared to 39.06% from Tumblr (other sites included Formspring, Facebook and 2 other Tumblrs from this unit).

There's a bunch of different sections on Google Analytics dealing with my most popular pages, but the general gist was the homepage at number one followed by my About page, then each section (probably dealing with different factors) saying The Punisher, Keeping the Faith (also had the most notes), X-Men: The Last Stand, Men In Black, Braindead (Dead Alive) and The Hunger Games were the next popular. After the first few weeks of not much, my blog got about 3 or so likes or reblogs every week, when I changed it to just Marvel comics, I got a lot less notes on my posts. My most popular day with 22 visits was April 12 (Fantastic Four). Also, the Google code is missing more than a fortnight's worth of material when this began.

Having a quick look through my archives, there's more than 30 notes, so more than a third of posts have a note on them. Plus I have 28 followers, about 7 or so aren't from this unit.

Posts for submission

These here are reflective of all of my blog posts. They're pretty cool.

Inland Empire (bad rating)

The Lovely Bones (average rating)

The Avengers (excellent rating, and a Marvel film)

The future?...

I will keep watching plenty of movies every day for the rest of my life probably. I don't think I'll keep this blog going, as fun as it was to do, it did take up some time, time where I could be watching more films! There a couple of movies I reviewed before deciding to change to Marvel so they'll be up after this post has been marked probably. It'd be the best thing in the world to work in the industry, but I have about 3 years till I get there guh. I'd like to say thanks to all the followers! Catch ya on the flip side.

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Image sources: Community (altered) http://collider.com/wp-content/uploads/Community-slice3.jpg

Google Analytics is just a screenshot

end [fin] http://24.media.tumblr.com/2m8BXUfrigwxydzhShLD63Jmo1_500.gif

[nbcsthursday-blog]

MetaPost NMP2012

My metapost is officially available here: 

http://nbcsthursday.tumblr.com/MetaPost 

or as a separate page on the left nav bar! 

[thingsthatwecanrelateto-blog]

Metapost

This is my final post that I will make for this blog. It's been great bloging and I hope you have enjoyed reading it. if you want to read the metapost then click the link here or click the Metapost link at the top of the page next to the about page.