I’ve been working on Man In The
Movie Theater for a little over two years now and have been writing reviews of
all different kinds of media for even longer than that. Unfortunately, my format
isn’t any different from 90% of the infinite amount of wannabe film critics
trying to carve a name for themselves in the overcrowded echo chamber of the Internet,
and I’ve been searching for ways that I can evolve as a writer, as a critic and
as a person.
Believe it or not, my goal
with these reviews isn’t to tell people what and what not to see. My biggest
endeavor with my reviews is to help people think more critically themselves
about the movies they watch and think about why they like or dislike certain
things. Whether or not I’ve been successful at this is highly debatable.
One of the ways I’ve tried to push
myself is by writing the occasional essay. They don’t come out nearly as
frequently as they used to. In fact, if you scroll through my archive, you
could count all the long-form essays on one hand and still have fingers to
spare. The reason they’re so few and far between is because I don’t want to
devote so much energy to a topic unless I have an interesting angle, such as my
essays on adaptations
or film
soundtracks, or I really needed to get something off my chest or strike a
relevant topic while the iron was hot, like when I chronicled the clusterfuck
surrounding the
downfall of Channel Awesome. Hell, I had a Word document full of potential essay
topics, but that died along with my old laptop.
I’m also way more interested
in drawing people’s attention towards the good stuff instead of steering them
away from the bad stuff. See, I don’t get invited to press screenings, and since
movie tickets are expensive and I’m paying for everything out of pocket, I’m
investing my money in things I actually want to see/write about, IE: movies
that I hope are good, or at the very least interesting in some capacity. That’s
one of the benefits of being a free agent: I get to set my own schedule.
For all the reasons above and
then some, this year I will begin working on a new, ongoing essay series called
I
Fucking Love This Movie. Basically, it will be a deep dive film analysis
where I break down some of my all-time favorite movies and explain what makes
them so effective on an artistic, technical or personal level. No two movies
are exactly alike, so the angle I approach it at will depend on the strengths
of the movie itself.
I also want to draw people’s
attention towards movies they might not have seen or thought much about before,
so a lot of the obvious choices for a series like this will be off the table.
As much as I love Pulp Fiction, A Clockwork
Orange, Mad Max: Fury Road and
Jurassic Park, they’ve all been analyzed to death and I don’t think I can
add anything new to the conversation surrounding them.
The first entry in this series
will be the 1984 concert film Stop Making
Sense. Other films I hope to talk about include Nightcrawler, Mary & Max, Seven Samurai, Swiss Army Man, Four
Lions, Her, and The Cook, The Thief,
His Wife and Her Lover. If interest is strong enough, I might even come up
with a system for letting people vote on which movies I write about.
I’ll be working on IFLTM in between my regular reviews, school,
work, and all the other things going on in my life, meaning there’s no set
schedule and they’ll come out when they’re ready. I’m hoping to get the first
entry out within a month.
Hope you’re all looking forward
to it as much as I am.
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