Uncyclopedia:Pee Review/Private Eye

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Private Eye

It's an epic that could have easily been twice as long--    14:05, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

I'm calling this one. IronLung 20:33, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

Humour:	8	Okay. Let me start by saying that I think your article is neat-o. I'm beyond impressed that you had enough time to write this many awful similies in one lifetime, and for the most part they are brilliant. I have never before seen so many non-sequitur pop-culture references gathered together in one location. I want to first tell you which ones didn't work so well, and then cherry-pick a few of my favourites and tell you how awesome they are. "Apparently the lady had a younger sister named Trudy with a wolf problem and the organ grinder who couldn't control his monkey needed a little persuasion to pull up stakes and take the circus to Hoboken." Such a confusing sentence so early in the story has the potential to turn a reader away. I could barely derive a shred of meaning from the sentence -- I assume it means that Margo wants you to get rid of Trudy's boyfriend. But this is not clear, and it is not really explained anywhere else either. EST. 19336. This isn't a humour point, obviously, but the number itself feels like a red herring that is never properly addressed. Becuase you were so specific in giving a number, I thought that this lot of meat would be a key plot element. Now, for the good: "He was eating his dinner like a hungry seal who'd just played chopsticks on the bicycle horns". Oh man this has got to be the greatest line ever. I think you just won the internet. "The bartender looked as useless as a bench warmer at the Special Olympics". One area of humour that falls completely flat is the image captions. The whole running joke about cigarettes really doesn't work for me. I would keep the first and the final ones, which are quite hilarious and make for a great bit of reincorporation, and replace the other captions with more ridiculous similies.
Concept:	8	This article delivered exactly what I expected of it. The words "private eye" conjure first-person monologues, scores of terrible and indecipherable similies, grainy black-and-white photographs, seedy joints and cigarettes. The only reason the score isn't a 10 is because the concept is extremely cliche, and so isn't really deserving of the same score as a truly original concept. That said, the execution was so good that it scarcely matters. The best thing about this article is the fact that you sustained it for so long. This is pretty much an entire movie right here, and it doesn't feel patchy or incomplete at all. Very satisfying. The ending is a problem. Don't get me wrong; it is surprisingly coherent, but it is overlong. I don't think pruning it is the answer, but splitting it into two paragraphs. Margo's long admission could be split off from "The Surprise Ending". Another thing is that "The Surprise Ending" is a terrible title for the final paragraph, after the story had been so coherent up til then. I would call it something like "The Dame Spills" or whatever: just something more in-concept.
Prose and formatting:	7	Prose gets a 4/5 for greatness, formatting gets a 3/5 for goodness. Comes dangerously close to wall-of-text, particularly during the ending. Also, the cigarette mural, while effective, is way too long. When I am viewing the article in my normal browser configuration, there are four lit cigarettes and a stub at the bottom of the page, after all the text has finished. The result is a massive white space. When I open the sidebar, only the stub is clear of the text, but the viewing area is abnormally small. I can understand making the article look satisfying to users with all kinds of configurations, but unless you either habitually use a browser with a narrow display space, or have massive fonts and a desk-mounted magnifying arm just to view pages, then this is not necessary. It would be okay to end the image further up and indent the ending section to make up for the image ending, or to uniformly indent the entire article.
Images:	8	Despite my whining, the cigarette mural looks great, and the film noir photographs are very effective. My problem is with the captions, as I mentioned above.
Miscellaneous:	9	Great article.
Final Score:	40	Needs a tweak, then a feature. Well done on a brilliant piece of work.
Reviewer:	IronLung 03:32, 21 February 2009 (UTC)