Ay me, how recently it seems that I decided to start up this humble repository for thoughts on politics and culture and cinema! But it’s been two years already, politics and culture have ceased entirely to be an active part of my repertoire, and I’ve managed to scrape my readership from a mewling 40 hits per day to a godlike 60 hits per day. And most of those aren’t people looking for rave drugs anymore!
At the end of my second year, I’ve had 43,632 visits; I take great pleasure in the knowledge that the first hit of my third year was someone searching for “Yellow Vendetta Ecstasy.” The more things change, and all that.
My privately-compiled “greatest hits” from the last 12 months:
–Review of Snakes on a Plane: the opening movement of what has since turned into my private specialty, treating perfunctory genre films as significant post-narrative texts.
–Review of Renaissance: the first time I did something that every good film blogger should do reflexively: I used stills from the film in my essay.
–Review of The Double Life of Veronique: I introduce Sunday Early Monday Random Classic Movie blogging with the hardest review I’ve ever written, and one of the best.
–Review of Mr. Arkadin: the raw and practically live notes I took while watching three versions of the same film. Look for something similar this December when the “God, That’s a Lot of Blade Runner” box comes out.
–Review of Flying Down to Rio: the start of a five-day stint of Astaire/Rogers blogging that’s as much about the history of studio starmaking as it about the films themselves.
–Review of Inland Empire: I try to make sense of a nonsensical film, and it was so damn much fun, I can’t tell you.
–Review of Catch and Release: livening up a tedious review of a tedious rom-com by peppering it with phrases from As You Like It.
–Review of Reds: I don’t know why I’m so proud of this one, I just am.
–Review of the Saw trilogy: my other specialty – treating torture flicks like actual movies, and taking it from there.
–Review of Dead Silence: I’m not sure if I actually invented the word “fucktrocious,” but here it is.
–Review of Grindhouse: the best thing I’ve ever written on any topic.
–Review of Next: God I enjoy making fun of Nicolas Cage.
–Review of F13: A New Beginning: for no real reason, this is my favorite Summer of Blood entry. Come on, I had to count one of them!