Post-Break Reflection

Hello. Remember TRB?

Neglection is a terrible thing, and we are sorry to have to impose that on you. The past few months have seen false starts at blogging and constant business at no apparent end but, as promised, The Rater Blog is getting booted back up. Rebooted, that is!

As no real dates have been set for TRB's full comeback - if you can call it that - it proves difficult to promise anything, but we can inform you on things to anticipate for the blog. 

We've come to realise calling the website The Rater Blog was always a bit of a messy term - succinctly, with reasons related to catchiness, we've chosen to trivially rename. Behold: Rater Blog. 

Naturally, with the site being dormant for the best part of a year, everything has got a little bit dull and dusty in terms of RB's look and feel. Conquering, a new logo has already been designed and development for the site's navigation, look and layout is being dived into. More on that in later posts!

Finally, in terms of content, current reviews and articles are slightly cumbersome and counteractive to the direction we'd like RB to go. All current reviews will be deleted very soon, leaving plenty of room for fresh new content in a rebooted site.

To the bright future. Thanks so much for sticking with us!

The Adventures of Tintin - Film Review

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Hitting Europe's cinema screens several months before the USA's as a means of generating interest for a character no American had ever heard of, Steven 'makes amazing movies' Spielberg's 'The Adventures of Tintin' was a risky venture. From what I can gather, the film was in the pipeline for some 20 years, with rather crazy development woes almost as prone to disaster as Tintin himself - distributors dropping out and in; art direction changes; lead actors with bad schedules; consequent delays; it was, without doubt, a horrendously frantic few years for the film's development team. 

Those days past, the film now released and having generated $370million worldwide, it wouldn't be unreasonable to say it all paid off quite handsomely. 'The Adventures of Tintin' is the incredible start of what could be an incredible trilogy.  

Using the new(ish) motion-capture technology seen in films such as 'Polar Express', 'Rise of the Planet of the Apes' and 'Beowulf', lead character Tintin (played by Jamie 'Billy Elliot' Bell) resembles a computer animated ginger teenager; more La Roux than Ron Weasley; with a shark-fin quiff and perfect skin. He lives in a timeless European town, dusted with film noir-ish beauty, and is a reporter for some newspaper or another. He's never quite fully explained, but that's both the beauty of the character and Spielberg's intention - within the mystery of the film is the mystery of Tintin himself. 

A Series of Quick Reviews

Hey everyone, how's your 2012 been so far? I think it's time for an update. 

Looking at The Rater Blog's surprisingly high site traffic rates never fails to amaze me - it is both encouraging and inspiring to know there are still people out there frequently checking in on this dormant website to see if there are any updates. I have every confidence in the site and plan to bring it back, but it will be in several months before any such activity occurs. In the meantime, I thought I would post several 'quick reviews' of films I have seen over the past few months of the site's absence, mainly due to the fact that many of the films are soon hitting home video - here in the UK, at least. Please note that these 'quick reviews' will be on movies only.

For these 'quick reviews', I'm going to employ an 'out of ten' rating system as opposed to the blog's regular 5, just for the sake of detail. Oddly enough, my head's been working in 10s recently...

Thank-you for your continued support and enjoy the quick reviews! I look forward to bringing the site back, in full-force, around Summertime.