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Mondo Irlando
Mondo Irlando is a collection of Film, Music and other ‘stuff’ reviews by Aaron, also known as ‘The Duke’. Graphically the site is rather primitive. The graphics look like they were done in Windows Paint. Creepy. Even creepier is Aaron constantly refering to himself in the third person as the Duke. Cringe. Wasn’t there a beer commercial that says no one can be nicknamed The Duke because ‘everyone’ would want to be called the Duke? Anyway, must focus.
I started clicking around and became a little frustrated. I hit a dead link which took me to a Yahoo page then encountered really slow load times on the content from mondoirlando.com. The website could certainly use some love.
But onwards I went; surely ‘The Duke’ must have something important to say. The content here is easily accessed via the review archive page. A lot of content is linked to his reviews at ‘blogcritics.org’ (which loads fine). The content consists of current movie reviews, cds reviews and a series of editorials in the stuff section. I'll focus on the reviews. (Although the editorials, such as 'The 13 Best Horrors of all-ever' and 'The motherfucking Cinema of Woody Allen' are good reads.)
The writing is at times insightful and creative, at others, offensive and unnecessarily derogatory. I sea-sawed a lot with my opinion on Aaron’s writing. Many reviews were full of f-this f-thats which, IMHO is the quickest route for a reviewer to lose credibility. Not to mention that the effectiveness of the word is lost when it is used so habitually. It is obvious that Aaron has vast media knowledge and great creative potential. His reviews are often very long and deeply insightful. At times perhaps too insightful. To fully appreciate Aaron’s reviews you often require a strong understanding of pop music and pop culture as he makes a lot of rather obscure references. The references are great *if* you get them, if you don’t however, you may miss the point he was trying to make which limits the usefulness of a review.
The MP3 digest is a good idea. Aaron provides a short review of a song and a link to an MP3 of the song. (Legal?) The store has a series of Aaron’s favourite films and CDs which he claims might make you say ‘Man, The Duke is one smart individual when it comes to choosing quality listening material.’ *Cough*
I can’t recommend this collection of reviews for everyone. I think the best audience would be 20 something film or music students, the rest of us could take or leave Mondo Irlando depending on the particular review. Aaron easily has the potential to become a great and influential reviewer *if* he can focus more on who he is writing for than on himself.
This site was reviewed on 2004-09-13 by obz.
They felt this site belonged in the Entertainment category.
obz felt that Mondo Irlando deserved a rating of 3.
Mondo Irlando opens to a rather garish page, with a lot of homemade icons and an annoying flashing Amazon advertisement. The background is black and in three columns we have the headings, Film, Music, and Other Shit. Overall, not an inviting looking place I'm sad to say. I did not run across an explanation of what the title of the site means, although it may be in there somewhere. And I only found one journal entry, so technically, to my way of thinking at least, this is not a blog.
The author writes reviews about film, and music. In the "Other" category you will find articles like "The Duke's Guide to Ireland", and "The Cinema of Woody Allen". The writing style is rambling, tangent filled, and liberally sprinkled with profanity. I must confess, I’m convinced the fellow is fairly intelligent, but his penchant for smart aleck asides gets in the way of some otherwise cogent remarks on his chosen subjects. This is a shame, for he obviously has put an impressive volume of work here.
There were a few links that I tried that were not working for one reason or another... might have just been a bad day on the Web. There is no "About" page that I could find.
I don't think I will be returning to this site any time soon. But it is entirely possible that it might appeal to film and music buffs, who look for a healthy dose of sarcasm and irreverence in their reviewers. It didn't work for me.
This site was reviewed on 2004-09-13 by yetzirah.
They felt this site belonged in the Movies category.
yetzirah felt that Mondo Irlando deserved a rating of 2.25.
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.
This site was reviewed on 2004-09-13 by ODAAT.
They felt this site belonged in the Personal category.
ODAAT felt that Mondo Irlando deserved a rating of 2.
3 reviewers gave Mondo Irlando an average rating of 2.4167
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Reader Rating: 0.0000 based on 1 votes
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