It’s almost hard to believe I’ve actually been doing this a whole year. And not because I’ve done a great and important or hard and necessary work. It’s surprising, that I’ve actually kept this up for so long. It is because I usually soon lose interest in things and other than writing about movies there’s almost nothing that keeps me doing this.
I have not gotten popular, my writing has barely improved, there’s nothing about my blog that stands out on the vast array of movie review blogs on the internet. But in a way it’s not the point, you have to be delusional to go on the internet today, write some opinions and think that surely you’re going to be the next Roger Ebert or Armond White.
Every movie I’ve written about has at least a dozen other reviews floating around the internet for the interested to find, so the chance that someone might be interested in a particular movie enough to go read reviews on it and to keep at it long enough to stumble upon mine, well, the chance is slim.
For me this blog has been more about documenting my musings on various genre films. If someone reads some of them and find them enjoyable, I’ll admit, it warms my heart, but I’m not desperate. I have no intention to say my opinions are right, my criteria consistent or criticism actually something you’d call „film criticism”, but I like to share my own stupid little world of thoughts with the world.
In the last few years movies and TV have become the largest part of my life. Even an obsession. It might sound sad to some people, but these aren’t the people who would read my reviews or would know enough about movies for their opinion to matter to me. What can I say? Fun is subjective. For me it’s movies, for someone else it’s going to nightclubs and for someone else it’s killing babies. To each his own.
Return to this obsession deal, it has become important to recommend a movie to people if I really liked it or ruthlessly make fun of shitty movies. It’s cathartic to me, I get that stuff out of my system and can move on. It doesn’t really matter if someone reads it or not. I’ve written a review and it’s done, I can forget about it. And I do, then after some time I read an older review and don’t even remember some of the jokes and I enjoy them myself. So yeah, I’m not trying to be pretentious when I say that I write for myself.
But please don’t get me wrong. I absolutely love getting feedback. Instantly, when someone comments on a post, the review pops back in my memory as if I’ve just finished writing it and I find great pleasure in replying. I like getting „likes” as well, because it gives me some weird sense of being appreciated. Why weird? Well because someone has just clicked a button at the bottom of the page, I actually have no way of knowing whether the person actually read the post and liked it.
This is just some of my free-form thoughts on internet movie criticism, similar to my pointless reviews and less a real, constructive looking back at a year of work. It’s nice to know that I have about 130+ reviews on here, just waiting for the end of the internet or a reader. During this one year I’ve, of course, seen more than 130 movies, probably closer to around 400 and with every seen movie I believe I know a little bit more about cinema and with every review I feel more sure of my writing and the form of my reviews have changed slightly.
So the real looking back is going to start now. I am now going to go through all my reviews starting with the first one, while still writing new reviews and I will add additional information, correct typos, categorise and tag my reviews and update the writing the best I can.
With looking back, I look forward to another year of movie reviews.