A Fresh Start

Well, hello world.

So this is actually my second attempt at starting a film blog. My freshman year, I started a humorous blog based on a fictional character that I invented while completing an essay question on a Russian language exam – Putin, a chain-smoking, womanizing, lovably obnoxious platypus (don’t ask). That blog, Gates and Putin, can still be found over at LiveJournal if you have any interest; I like to think that my misadventures with Putin were fairly entertaining.

Ultimately, though, updating Gates and Putin just got to be too much work. It wasn’t really a film blog; it was a comedy blog revolving around movies, and I ended up spending more time trying to think up funny one-liners than I did talking about the movies I’d seen, which defeated my original goals behind writing a blog. See, my dream is to become a professional movie critic. You know what? It probably won’t happen. These just aren’t the right times if you want to get paid to blab on about movies. We already get plenty of that on the Internet.

But while film criticism might be dying as an occupation, it is still very much alive as a diversion. That is, intelligent, engaging debate is very much available for those who enjoy it. Look at Roger Ebert’s blog at the Sun-Times. Look at Sasha Stone’s blog (Awards Daily), or read indieWIRE’s great film coverage from Anne Thompson and Todd McCarthy. Steve Pond at The Wrap. Jeff Wells of Hollywood Elsewhere may fall slightly short of intelligent, but he certainly sparks up some intriguing discussions. I could keep going, but I think you get the point. Will this blog ever live up to those sites? Again, that probably won’t happen. But I’d like to get my voice out there in any case.

I’ll hopefully be posting at least a little something every time I watch a film, whether it’s something in the theater, on DVD, revisiting an old favorite, whatever. But really I just hope to dump all of my film-related thoughts on here, whether it’s upcoming projects that I’m excited about, new trailers, meditations on certain actors/directors/writers, or a random list that I’ve been wasting time drawing up. The big list is a 500-item doozy that I’ve compiled from the Top Films lists of various critics; I call it the Must-See 500. The list is meant to be the most essential films of all time – see all 500, and you’ve basically seen every movie, ever. Far from the truth, of course, but watching through the list should give me, or anyone else, a firm grasp of film history from which to branch out. I’ll post the complete Must-See 500 sometime in the near future, and make a special note whenever I review something from the list.

So that’s my introduction. Not much content for the moment, but this was just to get me started. I’ll be starting things off for real tomorrow, by blatantly stealing a column device from In Contention’s Kris Tapley and running down my Top 10 Shots of 2009: the best images from the full year in cinema. Yeah, I know it’s late. I didn’t have this blog at the beginning of 2010, arright? It’s a good excuse to look at pretty pictures and make some important-sounding pronunciations on composition.

For now, I’ll leave you with my favorite trailer of 2010 so far, for my second-most-highly-anticipated film of the year, after Chris Nolan’s Inception, of course.

(Hmmm…Inception and Machete…do I seem like a fanboy? I probably seem like a fanboy. Uhhh…hey, Mike Leigh’s new film sounds pretty tight, too. Let’s put that at #3.)