What Is This?

Like many Americans, I’ve watched movies since I was a little kid. Animated Disney movies, The Sandlot, that sort of thing. But I didn’t really start thinking about movies until high school. It was in the aisles of my local Blockbuster where I fell in love with the work of Darren Aronofsky and Charlie Kaufman. I obsessed over every little detail in psychological thrillers like Fight Club and Donnie Darko. I’d stop and watch Dogma and Death To Smoochy whenever they were on TV. And I always dug sci-fi, from The Chronicles of Riddick to The Matrix to Dark City to V For Vendetta.

Despite all that, it was a slow journey to becoming a cinefile. I’d watch the occasional film, but rarely made the effort to go to the theater. I’d go off friends’ recommendations, but paid little attention to new releases, never mind foreign cinema or the classics. I probably saw a couple dozen movies a year, many of them rewatches.

I don’t know exactly what flipped that switch in my brain. Maybe it was Personal Shopper, in which Kristen Stewart finally got the recognition she deserved, and whose ending provoked deep thought before its meaning revealed itself and blew me away. Maybe it was The Party’s Just Beginning, which devastated me in the best possible way with an unexpected but appreciated rawness from an actress I knew from a silly sci-fi TV show. Maybe it was all the well-deserved buzz around Parasite, incidentally the first movie I saw at my local indie cinema.

Whatever it was, it’s never let up. I now endeavor to see as many movies as I can, and my watchlist is ever growing. By the nature of growing up in the US in the past 30 years or so, the vast majority of what I’ve seen comes from American cinema of that time period, although I’m slowly trying to expand it, both in time and geography. I’ve also been learning more about the technical aspects of filmmaking and training myself to better pick up on it, by reading and listening to podcasts and generally paying attention to those whose knowledge runs deeper than my own.

Regardless of the film or its origin, I love film analysis. I’ll write up reviews of what I watch on my Letterboxd when I have the time, pulling them apart and trying to isolate what works and what doesn’t. I have fun making lists to further analyze my own taste and force myself to make hard decisions. And of course I love listening to other, more experienced critics talk about movies, namely on Battleship Pretension, Critically Acclaimed, and Blank Check.

And that’s what I intend to bring to this blog. Primarily, I intend to write full fledged reviews of the new releases I see, as my goal this year is to catch significantly more than in the past. Periodically, I’ll fill the gaps with other movie stuff: thoughts on older films and the industry, or more frequently, interesting lists to help you get to know what I look for in a movie.

So my last order of business is giving you some sense of my taste. There is no such thing as objective truth in art; we all bring our own lived experience into it, no matter how much we try to evaluate purely by what’s in front of us. And so part of my job is to make my own biases and preferences clear so you can put my thoughts into the proper context, and determine what they mean for you. We will not have the same reactions to the same movies, and that’s fine! How boring a world it would be without diversity of opinions.

But defining one’s taste is a complicated thing. I can name directors, genres, some general descriptions. I can tell you which movies I’ve seen the most, or think about every day. I can tell you what I’m anticipating, even what I look for in trailers. And I will do all that. But no one is completely consistent, and besides, you don’t want me to just endlessly scream names and titles at you. I prefer a middle-ground: lists! Some criteria or category for which I’ll compile my picks, and then go through one-by-one justifying why I made the choices I did. That should paint a picture of how I think about these things, and do so faster than reviewing single movies could. Additionally, we just got the latest Sight & Sound poll, awards season is upon us, and it’s just past time for end of year lists. So I have many jumping off points over the coming months.

I’ll leave you with a small picture of the type of movies I like, before my reviews of current films start to appear. I find myself drawn to intense personal dramas, thrillers, and the weird and surreal. To that end, in addition to Kaufman and Aronofsky, I also adore Mia Hansen-Løve, Lynne Ramsay, Park Chan-wook, Pedro Almodóvar, and Brandon Cronenberg. As for my recent favorite movies, I’ll hold off on talking about 2022, as I intend to write a whole piece about them soon. But my top five from 2021 were Pig, Titane, Drive My Car, The Worst Person in the World, and Bergman Island, all of which I was fortunate enough to see in the theater.

Thank you so much for reading, and I look forward to hearing from you!