Mondo Irlando is an odd site, to say the least and full of contradictions. When I first entered it, I was hit by a site that was busy. A flashing Amazon sign was the first thing I noticed, (and much use is made of the Amazon referrals scheme throughout the rest of the site too) followed by some rather basic links and title bars. Lots of reds and greens on a background that is made up of the numbers 1 – 9 sprawled across the screen. I was also a little confused as to where the blog was, being confronted with three main titles – “film”, “music” and “other shit”. I had a bit of a root around though and settled on the “Article Archive”, which seemed as good a place as any to start reading.
Now, firstly I am going to completely slate this blog. You have been warned. But before I dive headlong in to the vitriol, I also want to say that there is light of the end of the tunnel – this blog is not all bad. Just mostly. Firstly, the writing style.
The thing which bothered me the most about the blog is the amount of unnecessary swearing. Not just casual swearing either – it is pretty blatant and pretty full on throughout the blog. For example, one post is titled “The motherfucking cinema of Woody Allen”. Now don’t get me wrong, I am all for swearing. Swearing is big and it is clever, but I really think it works so much better when it is used APPROPRIATELY and not just for its own sake. That title, for example would have worked so much better without the m-word included – it did not improve it in any way. The same principle applies to the rest of the blog too – it is absolutely full of superfluous swearing. Far from being impressed, it quite frankly just made me feel ill. The rest of the writing style is not much better. It is very pretentious and full of grammatical errors. It wouldn’t be so bad but the errors are generally put in intentionally to try and sound cool, or authentic, or something. I know we all like to add our own “voice” or idiom to our weblogs but this goes way too far. It just sounds forced, is difficult to read and occasionally doesn’t even make sense. The author also likes to include his own made-up imagery and metaphors, but he is no Shakespeare in this regard either. He also talks about himself in the third person, similar to the way Craig David does. By now, you may have picked up that I didn’t enjoy reading it.
Ok, rant over. The sad fact of the matter is that once you get past the appalling writing style, the dubious site design and the jarring profanities, there are actually some interesting, well researched articles to be found. They are mostly along the lines of popular culture (music/ films/ books/ computer games) but they are often extensive and full of information about each subject. The musical references and album reviews clearly show an in-depth knowledge of the subject and he even offers MP3’s to download. He is also not afraid to interview people about areas he likes to investigate further- book authors or filmmakers for example. This would all be very impressive if it wasn’t posted on to his site in that “unique” style, which tends to spoil it rather a lot.
So whilst the score of 2 is low overall, the actual content is actually quite good in places. It is just the whole package and form it is wrapped up in which I intensely dislike. If the author chose to write like an adult instead of a 13 year old teenager, I would probably come back more often.Mondo Irlando