CAE practice: movie review
In online years, 6 are fucken many. Hazy memories is all that I’m left with from my CAE exam – took it in a rather heated July of 2006, more than 5 years ago. When was I at that level, again?
With that in mind, turns out a good challenge is not necessarily going forward, striving to attain higher ground. Sometimes it is challenging to simply hold your ground, fighting your laziness, going against your natural tendency of forgetting things. So, without further ado, I’ll try to do an exam task, just like I used to in the good old days. Corrections are welcome.
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Task:
You see the following announcement on a website that sells books and film videos:
Submit a review of one of our books or film videos that you have enjoyed recently, and get 10% off your next purchase!
Tell our website users what it’s about and what type of person it would most appeal to.Write your review for the website users (Around 220-260 words).
(not even sure anymore if the review title counts towards the word limit; do I even need a title?)
Fight Club [1999]
A title that needs no presentation. For the recent moviegoer’s sake, a kick-start: an unnamed narator (Edward Norton), dissatisfied with his excrutiatingly boring life, simply snaps. He creates the fictional alter-ego of Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) to represent his “true self”, and embarks on a project to restore manliness to its real glory.
Fight Club is the prelude to a brilliant idea of Mr. Durden. A series of underground boxing clubs, men-only. Clubs where they rediscover their identity through barehanded fighting, in an escape from dreary lives. Tyler simply fulfills the role of an Alpha Male – setting tasks, denouncing modern advertising, crafting in secret the downfall of civilisation. For Fight Club soon evolves, leaving the basement – in the open it becomes Project Mayhem, an intricate ploy to crash the banking history of America and (down the road) return people to a natural lifestyle. All done with real warriors, weeded out with the Club. An army ready to follow its leader without question.
One could watch this simply for the face entertainment value; there’s action, and plenty of it. One might also keep an eye open for small ideology and philosophy gems, for instance the belief and explanation that no-one is special. There is romance too, though on a rather twisted, carnal level; Helena Bonham Carter does a convincing role in portraying Marla Singer, the derailed, off-the-matrix woman our narattor falls in love with. Of course, given the sex and a couple intense action episodes, a more matura audience is targeted.
Although I personally found the ending a bit bland, the movie delivers.
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Just a few technical details:
- took me roughly 30 minutes to write the initial draft ; just like it did back then, in 2006 ; not sure if I should be happy or sad about it ..
- took 10 more minutes of cutting and rewording, for I went close to 300 in the first version ; even now it’s a bit over the limit, with 266
- I’m quite sure the tone and chosen phrasing are not even close to what a real review should be like ; really wondering how much this would get in an actual exam
Well, that’s quite it. A checklist for what should actually be included in a review can be found here, though I’m at a loss whether or not anyone could fit everything listed there in 250 words.
Fire at will.
Long fucking story
This post is different from the last 3 or 4 ones. Simply because the last ones are still lingering as ‘drafts’, while this one gets published no matter what. I’m a bit tired of letting things half-done around here.
But first of all let me re-introduce myself. I’m Alex. I’m 23 years old, I’m Romanian (born, raised, living there). I keep a blog in my native tongue, easy to find if you visit the domain root. Not sure why anyone would do that, though. This (second) blog was born out of a curiosity, the challenge to see if I could actually write in English as easily and fluently as I wanted. Not having published at least 10 posts in a long time does tell something about my desire to use this language, huh.
The really stupid side of having a secondary blog is deciding what to write on it. Most of the important stuff goes to the main one, seeing that there are native readers who connect with me much better than a foreigner can. To translate every piece I write is something that I find to be both boring and pointless. To only write here quickies or stupid ideas is something that I don’t fancy either. ‘Nuff details.
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To be honest, living in this day and age is probably the best option for me. Historically speaking, Eastern-European countries were rather poor (materially) and rather fringe culturally. However, the last 20 years, following the fall of the Iron Curtain, we have seen some improvment in our lives. Not much, of course, but quite visible.
One of the most prominent thing here in Romania is the cheapness of the internet connection; for only $9 per month, the local behemoth RDS offers unlimited traffic at blinding speeds (about 50 mb/s). Of course, the service is not reliable in some parts of the country and the support is fucking frustrating – though, still, $9 is affordable for almost anyone not living off unemployment pay. One of the reasons piracy is rampant around here, and TBH I love the status quo. I can’t begin to even describe the vast amount of movies, music and others content that gets passed around here; one only needs look on a few private trackers and get an idea of the phenomenon’s magnitude.
Also with the proliferation of cheap domain names and hosting plans, literally anyone with a capable Visa card can start running his own website. I joined the bandwagon in 2007 via a free service (Blogspot), but moved on in 2009. To have my own domain and hosting to tinker with is an opportunity I wouldn’t have dreamed about a mere 5 years ago. This way I learned about alot of the building blocks of today’s internet – DNS, servers, apache, linux security, php, mysql, CMS options and so much more. Actually on my Romanian blog I’ve tinkered a bit with the theme, removing features and adding some logic to make it looks cleaner – had I wanted to learn PHP without a specific goal in mind I would’ve never done it.
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tl; dr
Am glad to be online. I hope to stick around longer this time via this blog. Until then .. goodbye.