A almost compelling reason to consider getting a Twitter account......nah.

The thrill of a child the first time you took them to the multiplex... of course, James, you're probably old enough to remember when we had actual theaters, rather than multiplexes.

I'm just curious (and more than a little impatient)... which five Best Picture winners have you not seen? If you've seen all of the remaining 78 or so, then that's a truly impressive tally. Especially considering that more than 5 of the BP winners are titles that few people without an intense interest in film history would ever desire to see (The Broadway Melody, Cavalcade, and The Great Ziegfeld quickly come to mind).

Well, it looks like James will be suffering through Terms of Endearment after all.

This topic just reminds me why I love this site. So many movie review/news sites I vist cater to just the "here and now", but James is always willing to look back and study, in depth, what came before.

As someone who grew up in 80's it has been wonderful to re-visit movies of that decade. And what a decade it was! I look forwad to the Best Picture, Bogart and Wayne topics.

Great reviews and great disucssions. Thank God for Reelviews.

What? Twitter but no Facebook? I like Facebook better, you can write whole paragraphs without looking like a fool!

I already subscribe to James' RSS feed so I suppose it doesn't really matter.

I think James has already suffered through Terms of Endearment. I'm more curious if he'll be able to find a copy of Cavalcade on DVD. The last time I looked, it and Wings hadn't had DVDs issued in this country, although Wings will be soon. Fortunately Wings is a good movie.

James should also view Sunrise, which won Best Artistic Production in 1929. It and Wings should really be both be considered Best Pictures, and Sunrise is one of the greatest of silent movies.

I'm pretty sure that JB hasn't reviewed Terms but he bitches about it often enough to make us believe he has.

This is taken from his Reelthoughts entry on 1983:



http://www.reelviews.net/reelthoughts.php?identifier=569

Well he is going to actually write and publish a review for his Best Picture list. If he still has intense hatred for it, why not film the review like The Nostalgia Critic or something like that. I'm sure it will be awesome.

I don't "tweet" myself, but I feel the urge to defend microblogging, which I mainly experience through Facebook status updates. I majored in English with a concentration in creative writing in college, so I think I qualify as someone who loves language and writing.

A large part of writing is word choice- picking exactly the right word to convey the shade of meaning you're after. To have to say something significant in a short phrase like a "tweet" can really exercise word choice skills. Not only that, but it can also help you to recognize "clutter"- words that are doing no work and are thus wasted- as you attempt to boil down what you want to say into the 140 characters that Twitter allows. The results may, of course, be simply dull accounts of what the tweeter had for lunch or something, but it is possible to pack a lot of meaning into and get an emotional response with just a few words.

A good example is the six-word short story allegedly written by Ernest Hemingway: Baby Shoes.

I took a course in college that concentrated on writing flash fiction, or extremely short stories, and it really made me appreciate how difficult it is to say something in a limited number of words, and how easy it is to fall into the trap of babbling on uselessly when you know you can go on for pages.

I know you know all about that since you impose length limits on your reviews, and you've accomplished more as a writer than I probably ever will, but I just wanted to say that I don't think your should dismiss a writing format just because it's extremely short and not used to its fullest potential by most of its writers.

I have to say, that was my first thought when I finished reading the entry...

You're making the faulty assumption that tweeters think about word choice and sentence construction in order to condense. That's true maybe 0.01% of the time. Most of the time, the way tweets are shortened is by eliminating words and replacing others by shorthand notations. I'd argue that about 25% of the tweets I have read are incoherent.

That's not to say it can't be a fun and instructive exercise to give a writer a limited number of words and ask him/her to convey a message or tell a story with those constraints, but that's NOT what's happening on Twitter. Not by a long shot.

Yes, I will be reviewing it.

All I can say is that I hope it looks better in 2010 (which is when I'll get to it) than it did when I watched it in 1996. Maybe age has mellowed me. Or maybe I was in a bad mood when I saw it the first time.

I will not be re-watching THE EVENING STAR.

I'll probably run a contest for people to guess the titles. Four of the five are probably reasonably easy to guess. The fifth may be unexpected.

CAVALCADE is, to the best of my knowledge, only available on DVD in China, and it's a poorly synched dub off the VHS. So I'll be reviewing this from the video tape.

I have the Korean region-free WINGS DVD; decent quality - probably the best one can hope for until/unless it is actually remastered.

Netflix has all of the Best Picture winners available on DVD, except three: WINGS, CAVALCADE, and TOM JONES. I'm at a loss to explain why they don't have TOM JONES - I know it's currently out of print, but it has been released on a Region 1 disc, and it was easy and inexpensive enough to buy (something I did as soon as I realized I wouldn't be able to rent it from them).

Well, James, I'm always up for a challenge... here's my list of guesses for the ones you haven't seen.

The Broadway Melody
Cavalcade
The Great Ziegfeld
Cimarron
Mrs. Miniver

I suspect it's possible that, of the five I just listed, you may have seen The Broadway Melody at some point, just because it's discussed in some circles as though it were an important film... being one of the first (and, in retrospect, one of the worst) movie musicals. Cavalcade is frequently regarded as a respectable old film, albeit one that nobody ever watches. The Great Ziegfeld, although a fairly decent movie, is darn-near forgotten. The BP win for 1931's Cimarron, a film I have not seen, is held to be one the greatest embarrassments to the prestige of the academy. Mrs. Miniver is probably the most well-respected of these five flicks today, so I suppose that guess is a leap in the dark for me.

You got two right.

Sturgeon's Law- 90% of everything is crap. That number may in fact be higher for Twitter posts.

But I'm not assuming anything about what Twitter users are doing. I'm just saying that Twitter could be used effectively to communicate in a meaningful way and, because of that, the format shouldn't be dismissed out of hand.

I'll admit this is all rather theoretical.

I am happy to hear that you are joining the Twitter world.

I understand the apprehension towards the service. I was once the same way.

It really takes a few days of immersion to understand the value of the site and get into the swing of things. If anything, you realize that it is just another direct line of communication you can utilize to engage the public. That is a good thing.

Give it some time and I think you will be able to get more out of it than you expect.