Odds & Ends
Friday, May 16, 2008
Return of the Spielberg Guy
I really, really, don't want to be typecast as the guy who's always banging on about Spielberg... but it's going to be a difficult couple of weeks on that front. Obviously Indiana Jones is one of those things that I'm just compelled to write about, just as I am always compelled to write about new Star Wars. So obviously there will be material here covering Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in the next week or so. However, the Spielberg-centrism increases, as my review of two Spielberg-related books has just gone up at Senses of Cinema; you can read it here. The books they asked me to review were Lester Freidman's Citizen Spielberg and Andrew M. Gordon's Empire of Dreams; I liked Friedman's but thought Gordon's was made somewhat silly by its over-enthusiastic adoption of various dubious theoretical models. The article therefore ended up becoming something of a sequel to my previous complaint about silly theory, Is Film Theory Bullshit? I was glad to be able to discuss the books in some sort of wider context though.
As an aside - and here I am starting to speak mainly to any academic or uni student readers I might have - I used the review as a chance to try out Zotero and its associated Word plugins ahead of hopefully using them in my Masters. Count me as very impressed. Zotero is a plug-in for Firefox; you use it to gather, store and annotate research sources into a reference database, and then use the Word plug-in to have it automatically manage your citations. The beauty of it is that it can automatically capture the details of each source out of online resources such as Amazon or library catalogues. I've never got deeply into EndNote, so I can't do a detailed comparison, but I was very taken by the kinds of things Zotero can do, and the ease with which it did it (I was wary of the learning curve with EndNote). I've been doing some Masters research since writing the review and it has been seamlessly grabbing information from academic search indices; it also has very nifty website capturing, storage and cataloging capabilities. If you regularly do research on the web, or write anything that uses formal referencing, I suggest you have a look at it.  Labels: book reviews, research, spielberg, theory Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 16.5.08 - 0 comments  
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This page is for assorted musings and editorialising that don't fit elsewhere on Cinephobia. The Something of Boris MIFFarama Worth Your Attention My MIFF Touch of Evil! Touch of Evil! Touch of Evil! Coolest Movie News Since.... Ever? Quantum of Solace Trailer Stan Winston and the Monsters that You Can See Hit and MIFF December 2003 May 2004 December 2004 January 2005 February 2005 March 2005 April 2005 May 2005 June 2005 July 2005 August 2005 September 2005 October 2005 November 2005 December 2005 January 2006 February 2006 March 2006 April 2006 May 2006 June 2006 August 2006 September 2006 October 2006 December 2006 January 2007 February 2007 March 2007 April 2007 May 2007 June 2007 July 2007 August 2007 September 2007 October 2007 December 2007 January 2008 February 2008 March 2008 April 2008 May 2008 June 2008 July 2008 August 2008 Want to contact me? 
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