As a huge movie buff I could always give quick opinion on a movie, a subject which tends to come up quite often in conversation. It occurred to me that, although since I’ve finalized my home theater setup I’ve been watching dozens if not hundreds of movies with my girlfriend, the sheer volume makes it impossible to review the lot of them in blog posts. Then the idea struck me that Twitter is the perfect platform for quick-and-dirty movie reviews:

• Reviews have to be succinct; each review consists of up to 140 characters, a hard limit inherent in the platform. Subtract from those characters the movie length, final grade (more on that later) and (being as obsessive as I am about language) no skimping on spelling or punctuation marks either. Condensing my thoughts on a movie to such a limited medium means I have to focus on either one point with some elaboration, or at most two with no embellishment of any sort.
• It’s non-committal. I spend a minute or two thinking up a few angles on which I can go, then another 2-5 minutes refining the text until I’m satisfied. It’s much easier and much more pleasant to spend five minutes after a movie writing up a message on Twitter than to spend a couple hours each week summing up movies days after I’ve seen them; if I wanted to keep this in blog form I would have had to write up summaries in the same manner anyway, why not just publish them directly?
• Low overhead. Having a blog means I beat myself whenever I slack on posting, and I’m committed to keeping it up and running, indexed and technologically relevant (if only so I can move hosts freely and avoid spam). Twitter is a managed platform, means I don’t have to worry about storage, bandwidth, backup or crappy web hosts.

With the rationale out of the way, I give you movies à la mode: 140-character movie reviews!

The grade scale I use is my own, and while I believe it to be consistent I make no guarantees. To give you some sort of reference point, I consider the original Matrix a genre-redefining action movie, and as such would give it an 8; Reloaded, on the other hand, not only pales compared to the first, it’s also horribly overblown and would rate a 2 (for the effects and nostalgia).

There are a few reviews up already, go read them and please do comment!