Wikipedia:Peer review/Meet the Parents/archive1

Meet the Parents

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've already listed this article at WP:GAN#FILM but it may still take a while for it to be reviewed due to backlog. The thought has crossed my mind to remove it from GAN and to nominate it at FAC to get the article to FA status so that it can be listed on the main page on October 6 this year — the tenth anniversary of the film's original release. I wanted to get some feedback to see how close people think this is to FA quality. If judged to be FA quality or close to it, I would make the final push to make it pass. If judged not quite FA worthy, I'll let it go through the GA process and take it from there.

Thanks! Big Bird (talk • contribs) 15:54, 1 April 2010 (UTC)

Comments from Steve ^T • C An interesting piece that covers most of what we should be seeing in film articles. I've a few issues/suggestions, starting with the infobox, lead and plot section:

Infobox

• Roach and De Niro are linked twice; once should be enough.
• DreamWorks is listed as a co-distributor, but no mention of the studio is made in the article body, where it's all about Universal.

Lead

• Is there any need to link to male nurse, remake and situation comedy? They're all common English terms; expect your readers to know what they mean. Only link such terms when you feel they might complement this article in some other way.
• "Meet the Parents is a remake of a 1992 film of the same name that was co-written by Greg Glienna and Mary Ruth Clarke and directed by Glienna who also played the main protagonist."—clunky and snaking. Consider splitting, adding a comma (maybe a semi-colon) or all of the above. For example: "Meet the Parents is a remake of a 1992 film of the same name, directed by Greg Glienna. The film was written by Mary Ruth Clarke and Glienna, who also played the lead role." Not perfect, but you get the idea.
• "After Universal Studios purchased the rights to the original film, Jim Herzfeld expanded the short script but development was halted for some time."—could give the impression that the original was a short film, rather than a short-ish feature-length film.
• "There was initial interest in the film by Steven Spielberg, who wanted to direct the film, and by Jim Carrey to play the lead role. The offer to make the film was not extended to Jay Roach until it had become clear that Spielberg and Carrey would not be able to take on the project."—a little repetetive. It can be made more concise and less clunky by combining some of the ideas. Example: "Steven Spielberg initially wanted to direct the film, and Jim Carey was interested in playing the lead role. The studio only approached Roach after Spielberg and Carey left the project." Much shorter, but doesn't lose any of the intended meaning. That makes room for a sentence about Roach's initial (pre-Spielberg) involvement, should you want it.
• "Released on October 6, 2000 ..."—where? Release dates vary throughout the world, so better to be explicit here.
• "earning over $160 million domestically"—to a UK or Australian reader, the word "domestically" could be ambiguous. Admittedly, that's not likely with such a well-known film. Still, more precise to say "in North America" or similar.
• "Released on October 6, 2000 and distributed by Universal Studios and DreamWorks, the film's initial budget ..."—dangling modifier; reads as if "the film's budget" was released and distributed.
• And again, DreamWorks is credited, but this isn't backed up by anything in the body text.
• Commas recommended before "Meet the Fockers" and "In-Laws".
• "titled ... entitled"—some consistency always looks more professional.
• You say the same thing twice: "well received by film critics ... receiving mostly positive reviews".
• Why single out the People's Choice Awards for mention in the lead, especially when no others are mentioned? I recommend adding at least a comment about its receipt of several other awards and nominations.

Plot

• Some overlinking; for example, the actors who are already linked in the lead. And is there any real need to link nurse, schoolteacher, black eye or sewage?
• I recommend expanding MCAT to the full title, so a reader unfamiliar with the concept doesn't have to hover over the link to see what it is.
• Although the section is below the 700-word maximum recommended by mosfilm, it could be shorter. More because of redundancies in the prose than any coverage of irrelevant plot points. For example, you tell us three times in the opening paragraph that Greg is to propose to Pam. That's fine, but you spell it out each time, when the idea is by this point firmly in the reader's mind and only a brief mention of "the proposal" will cover it. Also avoid commenting on a character's state of mind ("hoping to make the best of the situation"), which are interpretive claims rather than descriptive ones (a no-no per WP:PSTS). Current text:

  Gaylord "Greg" Focker (Ben Stiller) is a nurse living in Chicago. He intends to propose to his girlfriend Pam Byrnes (Teri Polo), a schoolteacher. His plans are disrupted by the news that Pam's sister Debbie (Nicole DeHuff) is getting married and Greg and Pam are invited to the wedding at Pam's parents' house on Long Island. Hoping to make the best of the situation, Greg now plans to propose to Pam in front of her family and brings the engagement ring he bought for Pam with him. After arriving in Long Island, Greg learns that the airline company had lost his luggage along with the engagement ring thereby putting on hold his plans to propose to Pam.

  Example alternative:

  Gaylord "Greg" Focker (Stiller) is a nurse living in Chicago. He intends to propose to his girlfriend, Pam Byrnes (Polo), but the plan is disrupted when he and Pam are invited to the wedding of Pam's sister, Debbie (Nicole DeHuff), at their parents' house on Long Island. Greg instead decides to propose before the family, but has to put the plan on hold when the airline company loses his luggage, which contains the engagement ring.

  Again, I'm sure that could be phrased even better, but you get the idea. None of the intended meaning is lost, even though it's 43 words shorter.
• The redundancy problem persists throughout the section. Spot the difference: "Greg desperately tries to impress Jack but his efforts fail one by one." Greg's desperation is implicit; "one by one" is made unnecessary by the plural "efforts". Look for similar opportunities throughout the section. At American Beauty (film)#Plot, I was able to condense my initial 700-word summary to 476 without losing anything important, and even now I can see things I'd reword. Have a look at Tony1's redundancy exercises for further pointers.

That's it for now; more later! All the best, Steve ^T • C 13:38, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for your input, Steve. I've gone ahead and corrected some issues that you mentioned above. Specifically, the infobox, lead and plot sections have been cleansed of WP:OVERLINK instances. I've removed mention of DreamWorks from the lead and the infobox until I can properly source it in the body. Per your suggestion, I also adjusted several sentences in the lead that you suggested might be awkward. The plot section has also been trimmed of excess fat and is now down to about 470 words. Please review those changes and let me know if you think additional fine-tuning is in order.

I sincerely look forward to any further input from you with regards to bringing this article up to FA quality and I'm very grateful that you've taken the time to do this. Since I filed this request, Talk:Meet the Parents/GA1 has been started and the article is being reviewed against GA criteria. While I want to hold off on making any major changes to the article while the GA review in under process, I still do want to get as much input as possible for improvement so please do keep reviewing and posting here. Once the final decision on the GA status is made by the reviewer, I will improve further with help from your observations. Big Bird (talk • contribs) 16:15, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

No problem. I can see the sense of seeing out the GAN before acting on most of these. I'll just keep dropping in here with further comments now and again. Al the best, Steve ^T • C 21:11, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

OK, so those further comments I mentioned. Themes and the Production subsections (Background, Writing and Casting) follow. I won't focus too much on the prose from now on; to save space, I'll make a more general post at the end about that. Steve ^T • C

Themes

• Nice work on this section; it's expected, necessary even, for films such as American Beauty or Fight Club, but our coverage of lighter fare like this often omits the analysis part.
• Standard question applies: do we need to link male nurse (twice), prayer (twice), pajamas and bagel?
• I'm not 100% convinced that File:Meet the Parents grace.JPG meets policy, specifically NFCC#8, contextual significance. The image, Greg Focker with his hands clasped in prayer, does not give the reader any more understanding of the analysis than a simple description would.
• Any need to repeat the characters' full names throughout the section? "Greg", "Jack" and similar would suffice once they're introduced.
• "Sandy and Harry Summers in the book Saving Lives: Why the Media's Portrayal of Nurses Puts Us All at Risk call postulate that Greg's character ..."

Background

• Is there any particular reason that you've used four references for the simple statement, "Meet the Parents is a remake of a 1992 independent film of the same name"?
• Same question for second and third sentences.
• "Glienna also directed and starred in the 76 minute film which was filmed on 16 mm film in 1991 and released the following year."—"film ... filmed ... film". Any chance of a bit of variation?
• "The 1992 film"—the year is already established in the previous sentence.

Writing

• Same question about the number of cites, really. Two for "Universal approached screenwriter Jim Herzfeld to expand the screenplay"; five for "Universal's reluctance to give the project to Roach was also due to new interest from Steven Spielberg who wanted to direct and produce the film with Jim Carrey playing the role of Greg Focker." Seems like overkill for such uncontroversial statements.
• "Roach admits to have liked the script from the beginning"
• "Universal initially declined to have the relatively inexperienced Roach ..."

Casting

• "Roach cast De Niro in the role of Jack Byrnes due to critical acclaim of De Niro's recent comedy work in films such as Analyze This and in the live-action/animated film The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle."—I thought it odd to say that De Niro received critical acclaim for Bullwinkle (as that wasn't my recollection), so I checked the source. It makes no mention of the former film, and only mentions Bullwinkle in passing (as he was just finishing that up when Universal suggested him). Given that you say later in the section that Universal suggested De Niro, I think the paragraph could stand to lose the sentence entirely (starting at "De Niro's character ...") Oh, and you'll need another caption (alternatively, a cite for the "critical acclaim").
• Per mosdash, interruptions should be indicated by either a spaced en dash – like this – or an unspaced em dash—like this; you have multiple uses of a spaced em dash.
• In the statement, "Roach cast Stiller explaining that Stiller was the best choice for this role because 'nobody plays that kind of material better than Ben'", the implication is that it was Stiller's improvisational ability that caused Roach to go for Stiller (backed up by the adjacent caption, which says it more explicitly). The source says otherwise: "I saw Meet the Parents as an anxiety dream, and in my view nobody plays that kind of material better than Ben." The mention of his improv. skills is more of an aside, not as directly related to his casting as his fit to the material.
• Nurse!

Filming

• I know there isn't a Production subsection with this name, but should there be? To have nothing on principal photography, locations and cinematography seems like a bit of a gap. If the coverage doesn't exist, fair enough. Have you tried American Cinematographer or Creative Screenwriting magazine? No guarantee that they covered the film, but definitely worth a look if they did.

More tomorrow! Best, Steve ^T • C 22:13, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Final batch of comments, looking at the Rating, Theatrical run, Home media, Critical reception and Legacy sections. Steve ^T • C

Rating

• Seems a little short to have its own level two section. Do you think it would work better as the first subsection of Release?
• "Once Meet the Parents was submitted for rating evaluation, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) questioned the surname Focker as a possibly expletive ..."
• "repetitiveness"—would "repetition" work better?
• "according to the Motion Picture Association of America film rating system"—"MPAA film rating system"; you've already defined the acronym, so there's no need to write out the full title.
• Weird mix of tenses: "were asked if they had made up the name or if they can prove that such a name exists"; "which insured that the film retains a PG-13 rating". Also, ensured.
• "submitted to the MPAA".

Theatrical run

• In the absence of a "filming" section, I can see the wisdom of using the budget to give context to the box office returns, but you give the marketing budget in the first sentence and leave mention of the production budget for halfway through the section. Better to have them both together at the beginning?
• Mixed spaced en dashes and em dashes to indicate interruption.
• "It quickly proved to be a financial success"—no-one's disputing it, but I think the statement should be cited, rather than relying on editor interpretation of the results; a film can still debut at #1 and be considered a box office disappointment.
• "domestically"—see above ("in North America"?)

Home media

• "Meet the Parents was released on DVD on March 6, 2001"—where?
• "taking in over $200 million for 2001"—in 2001?
• "Billboard magazine listed the film as having the highest video sales for all weeks from March 31 up to and including April 21"—phrasing is a little clumsy; I had to read it twice before I worked out what it meant. Also, why are there four cites for this sentence? I assume because you're listing separate pages for each of the weeks? In which case, why not merge the cites? e.g. "60+73").
• Any need to link DVD, French language, wallpapers and screensaver?

Critical reception

• "The film received a generally positive response from film critics, being commended on the subtlety of its humor"—cited to five film critic reviews. That's fine for saying several critics "commended the subtlety of its humor", but not for the "generally positive response" part. Again, I'm sure it's true, but you need to avoid even the appearance of selective citing when constructing a section like this. For example, according to Rotten Tomatoes, even Battlefield Earth got three positive reviews. I could easily spin those out to create a positive-looking reception section at our article. I suggest citing the sentence to RT or Metacritic, or an article that has retrospective coverage of the film's reception, if available.
• The wording for your RT and MC bits doesn't entirely explain for the uninitiated how those sites work. Current wording:

  As of February 3, 2010, the aggregate review website Rotten Tomatoes registered an 84% positive response based on reviews from 139 critics and certified the film "Fresh" with an average rating of 6.9/10. As of the same date, Metacritic, another aggregate review website, registered a rating of 73 out of 100, based on 33 reviews, which is classified as "Generally favorable reviews" by the website's rating system.

  "[A] rating of 73 out of 100, based on 33 reviews" doesn’t give enough information; nor does "registered an 84% positive response" and "certified the film 'Fresh'". Especially as the two sites use different methods for calculating their scores. The last statement ("generally favorable") is unnecessary if you use the cite at the beginning of the section, as suggested above. Lastly, you no longer need the "as of" statements, as the film has been out a long time now and those sites aren't being updated on a daily basis. How about something along the lines of:

  :The aggregate review website Rotten Tomatoes reported that 84% of 139 sampled critics gave the film a positive review, with an average rating of 6.9 out of 10. At Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film received an average score of 73 based on 33 reviews.

  Fewer words, yet a clearer explanation, I think.

Legacy

• Do you think situation comedy is a common enough term not to be linked?
• "Universal did not pursue any action against NBC but neither show lasted more than one season."—uncited.
• "domestically"—as before.
• The information about Little Fockers is way out-of-date; see that article for director, writer, production and release details.

American Airlines flight 605

• Do you think this really needs its own subsection? Or quite so much detail about the bomb "threat"?

Notes / References

• Cites to single pages should use "p."; cites to multiple pages should use "pp."
• I'm a little bemused by the way these sections are formatted. Where only one page or one page range of a book or journal is used, that would be better off in the Notes section, to save on click-throughs; the five Billboard mentions could be reduced to the two issues used. Given all that, I think only Billboard, O'Lynn, Brook, Bower and Summers really need to go in "References"; take a look at the "Footnotes" and "Bibliography" at American Beauty (film)#References for my take on it.

General comments

• Before you take this to FAC, I think it will need a reasonably thorough copy-edit; at the moment, there are a few clunky phrases and redundant phrases in each of the sections. I strongly recommend you look at Tony1's exercises I linked to above and those at WP:FILMCOPY; see how those lessons could be applied to this article. 90% of the copy-editing job is catching stuff like this; more concise wording means less opportunity for other mistakes to creep in.
• I also recommend you review the manual of style, with particular emphasis on WP:NBSP, WP:MOSDASH, WP:ELLIPSES and WP:MOSNUM.

Overall, this is a very good article that should have few problems getting through its GAN. However, for any potential FAC nomination, I think most of the above should be addressed. But don't let my comments discourage you; this is nice work. All the best, Steve ^T • C 09:54, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

Thanks again for your efforts, Steve. I think this gives me plenty to work with for the next little while. I'll be back with updates and comments once the GAN is done. Big Bird (talk • contribs) 12:38, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

I'll be happy to do a review, too, but I will let you work with Steve's review first. Erik (talk) 15:01, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

Much appreciated! Big Bird (talk • contribs) 16:46, 8 April 2010 (UTC)