I was recently given a review copy of Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Seeing Is Believing.
The problem is, I’ve never done an official review of anything before.
I guess the first thing to determine is my unit of measurement. That seems to be the thing that really brands you and makes you popular, ensuring that more people will send you free stuff. I’m pretty sure Siskel & Ebert came up with the thumbs up/thumbs down thing. Rotten Tomatoes uses, um, tomatoes. And I don’t know who came up with the star system (I give this 4 out of five stars!), but I’m sure he must be making a lot of bank these days.
While thumbs, tomatoes and stars are all very good units of measurement, since I specialize in things that are childlike, I’ve decided go with marbles. They’re timeless, and everybody knows that marbles are cool and more is better. My top rating will be five marbles. Not four, because that seems too limiting, but not ten because that seems too nuanced and I sometimes have a hard time making decisions.
Now that I’ve got that cleared up, I’ve got to figure out what exactly am I basing this review on. That’s a big factor, after all. Some of the most entertaining movies of all time (I’m looking at you, Dumb & Dumber), would never be given a shred of critical acclaim or Oscar buzz (mainly because the Academy is stifled by Adultitis).
Again, I feel my area of focus requires me to overlook technical merits, production values, and the sorts of things that would make Strunk & White giddy. Quite simply, you get five marbles if your book/movie/product does an exemplary job of decreasing Adultitis and inviting the inner child out to play.
Finally, on to the review. (This is a lot of work!)
Here’s what I can tell you about Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! Seeing Is Believing…
[Read the rest of this article over at Dad-O-Matic, a cool site for Dads, by Dads.]