About the Blog

The best way for me to explain my hopes for this blog is to answer a series of questions.

Why should I listen to your opinion about film?

I don’t have a good answer to that. I don’t have a degree in film, I’m not involved in the film industry, and I have never written for a major, or minor, newspaper or website. However, I do have a passion for film, have been watching around a movie per day for the past two years, and frequently devour film writing. I also recently completed a project watching, reading about, and writing about every film in the most recent BFI Top 50 Greatest Films list. That project has given me a solid critical base on which to discuss other films, so I feel like I am ready to actually get involved in the online film criticism community.

What will you not write about?

Hopefully, I don’t come off as snobby here, but everything I’m about to mention is already done on every major website, by people more knowledgeable in those areas than me, so don’t expect to see much of the following here:

•  Film news: This includes box office reports, casting and directing rumors, and announcements of movie release dates. Plenty of websites cover that information and I don’t have much to add to the discussion.
• Lists: I won’t be doing any lists like “5 X movies you’ve never heard of!” or “10 underrated/overrated X”. Again, it’s done much better elsewhere, and I wouldn’t be able to say anything meaningful about a film in the space of a typical list blurb.
•  Grades/Scores: I won’t be attaching grades, numbers, or stars to any of my pieces. I’m not vilifying the practice entirely, but I find that scores can shift focus away from the actual content of reviews and allow people to make weird arguments like: “X movie got a B and Y movie got an A? This is an outrage!”
• Coverage of Recent Blockbusters: I’m not an official film critic, which means I won’t be invited to press screenings, which means I’m paying for whatever I review, which means I have to be highly selective about which movies I discuss (especially for films currently in theaters). I’ve had my fill of blockbusters at the moment, and if I see another CGI city get destroyed I’ll go insane.

What will you write about?

This question is harder for me to answer. I’ll give an overview of the starting series I have in mind:

• Soviet Bloc(Busters): An overview and discussion of films from Eastern Europe (mainly Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Ukraine, and Romania). Outside of a few select directors, this area has been underserved by popular criticism. I hope to correct that and fill in some of my own gaps. I know the name implies this category will be limited to films released between the end of WWII and the fall of communism, but it’s simply the cleverest name I could come up with. I’ll be talking about everything from silents to contemporary films.
• New Horizons: In the spirit of Scott Tobias’ excellent series The New Cult Canon, here I’ll be covering the cult, the oddities, the underappreciated, and the just plain weird. I’ll mainly stick to films released from 2010 and beyond, because the latest entries in Tobias’ series are from 2009 and I want to delve into uncharted territory. However, I’ll probably dip into the aughts and the nineties if I find my limitation to the current decade too restrictive. Also, if I stumble across bizarre, older films, and they haven’t been extensively discussed already, I’ll consider reviewing them as well.
• Personal Odyssey: I watched film historian Mark Cousins’ documentary The Story of Film: An Odyssey about a year ago. The series has received some criticism for being too broad, drawing a line between commercial and artistic filmmaking, and for Cousins’ voice, which I find charming. However, the series does an admirable job of shifting the focus of film history away from America, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, and Italy. Cousins brings up multiple films I’d never heard of, sometimes from countries I stupidly didn’t realize had a film industry. This series will be a chance to catch up with those films, and will give me an excuse to cannibalize some of the reviews I wrote for my BFI project, which are currently too scattered to post as is.  
• Interactive Cinema: Comparing films to similarly-themed videogames and working out how the two art forms accomplish the same tasks with different tools. Example: Gravity vs. Faster than Light: How Tension is created in Film and Video Games.
• Silence is Golden: I highly enjoyed all of the silent films I watched as part of my BFI project. I want to continue discovering silent cinema here. 

Outside of those series, I’ll be doing basic reviews for films currently in theaters and recent stuff that has just popped up on Netflix or been released on home video. I’m relying on other critics to decide what is worth my time, so my reviews will mainly be focused on arthouse and foreign films with the occasional documentary, comedy, or blockbuster thrown in for variety. For basic reviews, I won’t be spoiling anything, but expect spoilers in longer pieces.

What kinds of films do you like?

That’s difficult for me to answer. I could say I don’t like horror films, musicals, or rom-coms, but some of my favorite films belong to those genres (Eraserhead, Singin’ in the Rain, Before Sunset). I know it sounds like I am unfairly harsh towards mainstream releases and I apologize for coming off that way. It’s just that one of the main reasons I watch movies is to experience something different. That’s not limited to plot or surprise twists. Through film I want to encounter different places, times, realities, characters, stories, styles, and images. I’m attracted to strong, unique visions.* In other words, I want to see the world through a new set of eyes. I hate to be mean to the mainstream, but commercial filmmaking, and blockbusters in particular, have been offering me that experience less and less.**

What’s with the name?

There’s an okay Japanese Yakuza film from the 60’s with some great moments called A Colt Is My Passport. That is clearly one of the best film titles in all of cinema history (matched only by Twitch of the Death Nerve and Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key). I slapped the word “film” onto the front of that title and was happy to discover the parallels between how passports allow us to travel to different countries and how films allow us to travel to different places, times, and realities.

Finally, I’ll end with a few thoughts on general areas of film.

•  Due to the domination of narrative film, there is sometimes confusion over what exactly film is and how it is different from other art forms. Film does not technically need dialogue, characters, extensive stories, or even sound. Films create emotions and inspire thought through the construction (lighting, framing, camera movement, placement of objects and people) and juxtaposition (editing) of images. As silent and experimental films such as Man with a Movie Camera, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, Koyaanisqatsi, and La Jeteé prove a memorable experience can be created without the use of the elements mentioned earlier. This is why the old Hollywood maxim is “Show, don’t tell.” and not the other way around.
•  It’s okay to be confused. Films that are ambiguous, distant and observational, or slow often get pinged for being boring or pretentious.  That’s unfair and leads to certain types of films being ignored commercially. Ambiguity can lead to more active viewing and allow for interesting post-viewing discussion. Slow, distant, or mundane films can often induce trance-like states or cause introspection, which is great, not every film needs to be hyperactive or easily digestible after a single viewing.
• Representation is not endorsement. Meaning when a film shows a person committing a crime or behaving badly, it does not mean the people behind the film endorse such behavior. Also, it can be cathartic to confront taboo or controversial issues through film. It doesn't mean a film is bad just because it deals with tough or depressing issues. 
• Subjectivity vs. objectivity in film criticism. Because everyone comes to a film with a different set of experiences, it means that all film criticism is at some level subjective. However, it is not okay to just simply post opinions. The ideal form of film criticism uses evidence within the film to to explain why a particular emotional or intellectual response was generated.

* Note, this doesn’t mean that I’m willing to give every auteur vision a pass. Michael Bay’s films have some of the strongest directorial personalities out there, and I’m repelled by them. This also doesn’t mean that a journeyman director isn’t capable of creating a strong vision. Ted Kotcheff, a journeyman director if there ever was one, created one of the most dark, twisted visions of a place I’ve ever seen in Wake in Fright

**Other note, this doesn’t mean that I like every indie and foreign film I see. If you read any website that does regular reviews, you know that three or four middling, unremarkable indie relationship dramas or horror films are released every week. If anything, I’m more upset with the state of indie filmmaking than I am with the commercial side. Indie filmmakers are usually free from corporate-restraints and are often too eager to do nothing with that freedom. Also, I really hate how I’ve used “foreign” here. When most people conjure up what foreign film means to them, they probably think of something in the social realist mode. That is false. Every type of film that exists in America exists in almost every other country. It’s just that similar films get brought over here.