Cinescopes

by Risa Williams, Ezra Werb

Lights! Camera! Psychoanalysis!
 
Discovering something new about your personality is as easy as making a list of your ten favorite movies.
 
In Cinescopes, you’ll learn about your strengths, weaknesses, and innermost secrets, all based on the movies you most enjoy. This unique form of personality assessment blends psychology and cinematic analysis to reveal sixteen core personality types and how they relate to one another. Your Cinescope profile identifies your best (and worst) relationship matches and even helps you understand just what your friends and colleagues think of you.
 
Cinescopes will forever change the way you look at yourself and the way you see your favorite films.

Genres: Nonfiction, Film, Humor

176 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2007

About the author

Risa Williams is a LMFT (Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist).

Reviews

[D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like everyone said, this really isn't a book you sit down and read cover to cover, but fun for those who love personality assessments, not to mention movie recommendations like I do. How it works is that you write down your top ten favorite films of all time, then look in the back of the book for them and write down the code(s) for each movie. Each code corresponds with a movie personality type, and the code that appears the most often on your list is your cinescope (I was both a Charismatic Performer and a Magical Creator, but I think I'm more of an MC than a CP).

There's only one edition of this, published in 2008, and many of my favorite films weren't on the list, so it is already slightly outdated. Nevertheless, it's a great conversation piece and a great way to get to know your friends a little bit more.

[Harris · Rating 2 out of 5]

Silly, inconsequential nonsense, Cinescope kind of represents a weird time when you could have a (now long defunct) website to calculate your personality type based on your top ten favorite movies, but the real fun was in tediously noting down sixteen different codes in an exhaustive movie list (circa 2007) in a physical book.

Nowadays, of course, such quizzes are all over the internet and it seems strangely retro to have it in an entire book, so when this book came across the reference desk the other day, I thought it’d be worth a laugh. Promising something a little more in-depth than the typical Buzzfeed quiz, would it, as the blurb on the back proclaimed, “forever change the way you look at yourself and the way you see your favorite films?”

Well, not really. There’s not too much here, just some standard pop psychology based on common movie tropes, sprinkled with film quotes and references with a more arbitrary than average methodology. In the end, I’m not sure that your favorite films really have that much bearing on your personality- I mean, I ended up with one of almost every type code based on my rather eclectic choices.

[Nikki Vachon]

Admittedly not a book designed to be read from start to finish, but a fun movies-and-psychology choose-your-own-adventure book for sure.

[CrystalIsReading on StoryGraph · Rating 2 out of 5]

amusing, and yet fluffier than I somehow expected. I guess I should have known any personality type theory based on your taste in movies would pay more attention to movies than to realistic personality type descriptions. Still, a fun read, if nothing else, just for the movie suggestions and quotations.

[Erin · Rating 2 out of 5]

This isn't really a book you read, but I looked at most of it. I thought it would be cuter than it was.