Hooray, it’s the two year anniversary of my movie journal. I have now covered 807 films in 531 journal posts. Contemplation time!
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Some Things Change:
– I discovered keyword tagging! All the posts now have clickable keywords, and if you click on the title of a post, it will use these keywords to calculate which posts/movies are the most similar. Therefore I now know that The Fury is similar to The Savages and Sukiyaki Western Django is similar to Zazie dans le metro. I never could’ve drawn those connections on my own.
– I have three sometime-readers (up from last year’s one). That’s three more than I ever intended to have, but I’m still gonna leave the sucker online and searchable instead of taking it private, because I like the idea that if someone’s googling something obscure like Red Garters or Gran Casino or that episode of a cop show that Joe Dante directed, there’ll be something written online about it, even if it’s something snarky and uninformative and poorly written.
– People whose articles I quote can also find me on google and make me feel bad for having attacked their writing style, so I’m going with the first-initial last-name approach in my credits these days to avoid further embarrassment. I’m not obscuring the names of directors however, so I’m sure the filmmakers of yesterday’s experimental shorts entry will find and rebuke me soon enough.
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…And Some Stay The Same:
– I’m still way behind on all my viewing goals, but that’s because my viewing goals are still unachievable. I guess they’re technically achievable if I were to stop watching new releases and anything arbitrary, methodically viewing only films on my current must-see list. But that’d take all the fun out of everything, wouldn’t it?
– My writing hasn’t gotten any better, any more rigorous, any funnier. I haven’t improved at analyzing films or even analyzing my own reactions to films. As a “movie memory”, I am doing a fine job, blandly marking my reactions to every single movie I watch (except for Mystery Science Theater movies, which do not count). Since I never really intended to be a Famous Film Critic or a brilliant writer, I guess that’ll do fine.
– Still haven’t learned any French. Didn’t I mean to begin learning French two years ago?
– I am currently working through my thoughts on the “Finding Forrester effect”, especially after having just wasted my time on some Atlanta Film Festival screenings. Can’t eliminate risk entirely and only watch critically-proven films, but there must’ve been some way I could’ve known to avoid Fugitive Pieces.
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My most enjoyable posts from the past year:
There’s little record in the posts themselves of my week-long mailing-list argument over Charlie Wilson’s War vs. Twilight’s Last Gleaming, but it made a deep impression on me. I enjoyed watching The Story of Marie and Julien, writing about it, then reading some articles and having my whole perspective on the film change. My illustrated interpretation of Glory to the Filmmaker! was fun to assemble. Three
different shorts programs were a blast to do, but time-consuming to get all the screenshots. Histoire(s) du cinema was a baffling adventure. Recently I had fun writing about Southland Tales than watching it. Also pleased with posts about Werckmeister Harmonies, Dog’s Dialogue and, since they are so exciting to watch and learn more about, the latest string of movies by Marker and Resnais.