Uncyclopedia:Pee Review/UnNews:Charlie Sheen wins Academy Award for Best Actor Meltdown

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UnNews:Charlie Sheen wins Academy Award for Best Actor Meltdown[edit source]

Talk JelloMold Talk 19:35, February 28, 2011 (UTC)

Hi Hyperbole. I realise you're a much more productive and experienced member of uncyclopedia and you make some good points about my article but there's a few things I take issue with, not least because a lot of other people seem to be doing it and they're not getting reviews as low-scoring as this.

Firstly, I don't understand how you can accuse me of editorializing. Surely everyone is editorializing on unnews when they depict celebrities as stupid, vain etc. and exaggerate those characteristics. It wasn't like I said "stupid charlie sheen went up to the stage in his gay hat" I put words in his mouth that he might have said. In the same way most other users get their celebrities to say stupid things on here.

The other thing that annoyed me a bit was your criticisms of the pictures.. I thought the point of unnews was to make funny articles not incredibly accurate ones?

Finally just because the initial concept was possibly abandoned doesn't mean the article is about 'nothing at all', granted I perhaps should have talked a bit more about the ceremony but I read a few articles on Colin Firth and most of them IMMEDIATELY went from the awards ceremony to his past, his plans, his road to the oscar etc. That was the one sentence that really got my goat and it annoyed me because I like your articles and even if they deviated from the title I wouldn't say they were 'about nothing'. Talk JelloMold Talk 16:02, March 16, 2011 (UTC)

Masaru.jpg

PEE REVIEW IN PROGRESS

Hyperbole is engaged in the dual processes
of giving you his opinion and pretending you care.
Humour: 3 Hi, JelloMold! I see you're not particularly new to Uncyclopedia, but you've just recently decided to take a crack at writing articles. Well, welcome aboard!

Unfortunately, I have a lot of problems with this article. They're almost all concept problems, so let's talk about that in the concept box.

Concept: 2 So, it looks like you've decided to satirize Charlie Sheen's high-profile meltdowns with a fake news article. I'm with you so far: that seems like a perfectly legitimate source for satire.

And so I read your headline - that is, the title of your article - and it tells me your concept is "What if they gave out Best Actor Meltdown awards and Charlie Sheen won it?" Okay, good. I'm still with you.

So I get to your first paragraph: "Charlie Sheen has won an Academy Award in the Best Actor Meltdown category." All right! So, that's our concept. So, now I'm looking forward to reading all about this award - what he did when he accepted it, the other nominees, the history of the award, etc.

But I get to the second paragraph and I see three things: 1. A recap of the history of Charlie Sheen's rants, which I already knew, because I read the news (and which you have to assume your audience pretty much already knows, or else they wouldn't find any of this funny anyway); and then 2. A bit that looks like blatant editorializing on the part of the author, saying that Charlie Sheen is worth less in the grand scheme of things than Chuck Lorre; and then 3. The word "Penis." The first part bored me, the second part annoyed me, and none of it has anything to do with Academy Awards. It might as well be a Facebook post that says "Charlie Sheen called Chuck Lorre a 'worm,' but Chuck Lorre works much harder than Charlie Sheen!" Bluntly, this paragraph is a lot closer to naked editorializing than it is to satire.

Well, okay. On to the third paragraph - where we're told that Charlie is going to make a crazy drug-themed show and has offered the lead role to his brother. Well - that just completely switched concepts mid-stream. Now it's a fake news article about Charlie Sheen's new show, not his Academy Award. We're barely three sentences into the article, and the Academy Award stuff seems almost completely forgotten.

The fourth paragraph is still about this fake show, pretty much proving that the original concept of the article was immediately abandoned and now it's pretty much about nothing at all.

And then the last sentence says that Mel Gibson won the award before, which would have been a decent throwaway joke if the article had been about the award, but now it just feels like abruptly changing the subject back at the last minute - or like the article used to be pretty much just the first and last sentence and the author was reaching for some kind of filler that would make it longer than two sentences in total.

Bottom line: this article doesn't hold together. If you want to write a satirical article about an Academy Award win, it really needs to resemble an article about someone who won an Academy Award. If you read articles on Natalie Portman's win for Black Swan - you're simply not going to see an article say "She won" and then immediately dive into talking about her new movie and completely forget that it was talking about Academy Awards.

Finally, maybe this is a bit of a nitpick, but - Two and a Half Men is a TV show. TV actors win Emmys, not Academy Awards.

Prose and formatting: 6 The prose isn't a disaster, but some of these are really, really long sentences. They're so long that they get a little hard to read.

For example, take "Sheen's rant won plaudits for both 'boasting' when including references to his 'smoking hotties' and sufficient bitterness when he called Two and a Half Men creator Chuck Lorre a 'charlatan' and an 'earthworm'."

That's a perfectly good sentence, and about as long as any sentence should be! Stop there! Again, you're satirizing journalism, and journalists simply don't use enormous sentences. In fact, they try to write at about a sixth-grade reading level. That's why "Former award winner Mel Gibson was unavailable for comment" is the most effective part of this article: it actually does look like something you might read in a newspaper.

As for the formatting, well, it's fine.

Images: 5 It bothers me that this very short article has two pictures, and one of the pictures shows a man who's apparently 45 years old, and the other shows a man who's apparently 25 years old. I think you'd do better to just find a recent picture of Charlie Sheen and leave it at that; the tinfoil hat is amusing, but it's being worn by a much, much younger man than the Charlie Sheen who would have won "Best Actor Meltdown."
Miscellaneous: 5 Five.
Final Score: 21 As I said, this concept isn't totally without merit, and it's so short that you don't have that much to rewrite, anyway. So, if you want this to work - tell us about the Academy Award. Tell us about how he took to the stage and gave a ridiculous acceptance speech. Tell us about how fellow nominee Christian Bale was so disappointed he screamed "I'll f---ing kick your f---ing ass!" Tell us about how Sheen took to the podium with a large white powdery smear under his nose. Tell us about how Sheen proceeded to get in a fight with the Oscar statue and level antisemitic slurs at it. Whatever you want - but it's an article about the Academy Awards, right? So... tell us about the Academy Awards!

Good luck...

Reviewer: Tinymasaru.gifpillow talk 01:43, March 4, 2011 (UTC)