Finding a New Tail for Winter is a movie review full of negative connotations that actively shows the writers opinions of the film. The author writes to their fellow adult audience and shows that the movie is just like any other children’s movie. Their purpose is to show that this movie is predictable, lacks a true plot, and will leave adult watchers bored and un-amused. The structure of this review makes the intended audience and purpose obvious. The piece starts off immediately by saying that the movie is not aimed towards those reading this article. They continually pound the movie throughout their writing by selecting diction such as “awfully wrong” and “manufactured drama”. They also use an oceanic metaphor to relate back to Dolphin Tale itself by saying “sizable dose of schmaltz with their fish milkshakes” and “larded”. The author continues their review by giving a brief synopsis of the movie. They use hyphens and semicolons to make the whole plot into two sentences. This is done so the reader understands the emphasis being presented that everything within the movie is typical, boring, and uninteresting. Describing the parallels between the dolphin and the injured war veteran is also proof to show how inauthentic the movie’s story really is. The review almost comes to a close when they offer one part of the movie the adults will like – footage of the dolphin’s real rescue and rehabilitation. This is strategically placed at the end of the review, like the footage is at the end of the movie, to further express the idea that the whole movie is near unbearable, and the only interesting part isn’t shown until the end. In the review’s conclusion, the general information such as running time, actors, and director is given. Structurally, Finding a New Tail for Winter fully helps demonstrate the writer’s original purpose to tell their adult audience that this children’s movie will feel like a waste of time to go see.
Meredith, I believe you have said this in the best possible way! You accurately seem to portray the author’s purpose and audience to the readers of your blog. AS you said in your post, the author clearly feels that this movie was a terrible failure and is not worth the time to go and see. I also agree with how you pointed out that the author uses specific diction to refer to how awful the movie was in his eyes. I love the examples of diction you chose to present in your post but I also feel that another good one would be “choke down” because this is another great way the author uses diction to make the older audience understand how hard and miserable it would be to sit through this film. I also think you could have addressed how subtle the author is when actually giving a summary of the movie. In these parts of summary it is very noticeable that the author loses all of his diction which could be done in order to condition the audience to feel as if this movie is incredibly boring. Other than those two things, I feel as though you wrote a great post! It was Marvelous!
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