Well I've been away from the blog for about a year. I was reviewing films I saw through streaming and rental service, and in theater, pretty regularly (hopefully steadily improving at it as well). The last two things I wrote were a review of The Homesman and a jokey description of Princess Bubblegum from Adventure Time.
The majority of this blog was written between finishing college and finding my first job, so I had a great deal of free time that made it easy and enjoyable for me to watch, read, and write about a wide variety of films. After I attained gainful employment, it was far harder to find the space to keep up with cinema at the level I was accustomed to. It became a huge drain on my energy having to view so many films, and write about them as well, while going to work every day.
That's one of the main reason my blogging dropped off so precipitously. The other reason is that my interest in film waned. I started to get the sense that I had already seen everything there was to see, and it became rarer and rarer that I got that jolt of recognizing an amazing picture. Looking back, this was a foolish feeling, since just a few months after I stopped I saw Mad Max: Fury Road, which hit me in that way only a good movie can.
As my curiosity about celluloid flagged, I became more engaged with following politics, news, and history. Mainly I was concerned with learning about/keeping up with mass, working class-based social and labor movements. I also became involved in activism around workers' and tenants' rights. This activity was fun for a while, but was extremely stressful and strenuous to engage in. The same burnout I experienced with film culture has hit me with politics, so I'm going to take a break from that area and try my hand at media criticism once again. I would like to think that I'll be able to add a substantive political analysis from a progressive/leftist perspective to my writing now too.
From here on out, I'm mainly going to be focused on doing basic reviews of movies I happen to see. These will be both older and newer, since my main avenue for watching these things is through streaming services, and I plan an drastically increasing the number of theater screenings I attend. Eventually, I hope to do a series on Mark Cousins' The Story of Film: An Oddyssey, where I'll analyze all of the films that appear in the series while also doing an overview of each episode. I've gone through the entirety of the show before, but I would like to check it out again with the additional knowledge of having seen and analyzed all of the flicks that are brought up. I went through the most recent British Film Institute's Top Fifty Greatest Films about two years ago, and luckily, there are many films that appear on both lists, so I'll be able to cannibalize some of my work that was never posted here.
Anyway, cheers, looking forward to getting back into things again.
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