Jake Can Watch This All Day

As a companion to my How I Review Media post, I’ve thought about how I can cure my dilemma regarding finding balance between examining things critically while also retaining the joy I have for it. I think the best way to do that is to assess how the media makes me feel. It’s my personal philosophy that the best kind of media should make you feel something, anything, on a deeply personal level. And with this, I hope to assess just that. I will assess how I feel using the following criteria:

Joy

Frustration

Empathy

Sympathy

Surprise

I will examine how I feel about media by rating each of these out of 20. It may defeat the purpose of what I’m trying to do with this, but whereas the review component will assess the technical elements of media, this will address my own personal feelings towards it. I think a blend of objectivity and subjectivity is needed to make things feel more meaningful and less like a chore. Looking forward to seeing how this goes!

So my biggest passion is talking about media. I really just love talking about these works and sharing what’s so great about them. To that end, I always gravitated towards reviews, as it always interesting to examine works of media and see what works & what doesn’t. That being said, it also does, at a certain point, get to a limit where it begins to zap the joy out of just experiencing media, because how can you enjoy something when you’re also looking to examine what could’ve made it better?

Well, while I don’t think I fully cracked the code on finding the proper balance yet, I do believe I have a valuable system on providing a fair, balanced critique. The simple method of doing so is to take 10 integral elements of media and grade each element out of 10, all of which adds up to an overall grade out of 100, which will translate to a letter grade. The elements I have decided to use are as follows:

1. Plot
2. Characters
3. Themes
4. Acting
5. Directing
6. Cinematography
7. Editing
8. Sound
9. Music
10. Production Design

While I can’t say I’m an expert on each of these elements, I think through what I know and a good amount of research, I will be able to offer an honest critique. And that to me is exciting! Hopefully everyone who follows this blog will think the same!