On the 1 August, my actual four-year blogiversary, I suggested that future celebratory offerings would happen in drips and drabs, which was a gentle way of saying, “probably not at all.” But here I am, with a year-in-review post, less than two weeks late. Forthwith, my twelve favorite posts from the last twelve months!
August, 2008 – “Busting the Dream Factory”, my first-ever Blogathon contribution (to Movies About Movies at Goatdog) sees me re-purposing – and essentially, re-writing – an old college paper to explain why Buster Keaton was the first post-modernist in cinema. See, kids, film school is worthwhile!
September, 2008 – “TSPDT #875: The Ascent“. Not necessarily a strong review (it was an off month for me), but I’ll take any chance I get to plug this movie, one of the most obscure I’ve ever featured on the blog, and a flat-out masterpiece. It is, incidentally, not in the 2009 edition of the They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? Top 1000.
October, 2008 – “The Dog Days of Disney” looks at the filthy lies of the Beverly Hills Chihuahua ad campaign, allows me to sneak in one of my favorite quips – it’s not really a joke – of the year (the bit about Domingo not being Latin American), and kicks off what has become a weird and not at all characteristic secondary career for this blogger as a professional ranter against the flimsy state of modern children’s cinema.
November, 2008 – “TSPDT #163: Don’t Look Now“. Another weakish months (post-Chicago Film Festival always is), but I think I had some damn nice analysis-ising in this one.
December, 2008 – “What if They Threw a Nazi Porno and Nobody Came?” I slag on The Reader in a month surprisingly dense with pans, and come up with my favorite line of the year: “When you’ve got a critic paying more attention to the anachronisms in your mise en scène than the Naked! Kate! Winslet! action, you’ve gone terribly wrong.” Runner-up: “Klaatu Barada Fuck You”, on account of having the best title of anything I’ve ever posted.
January, 2009 – “Lindsay Lohan Works Blue”. Maybe the greatest diss review I’ve written, for the insidious and unendurable and hilarious I Know Who Killed Me. Runner-up, and would have been in first except for its extremely narrow target audience: “B-Fest Survival Guide”, the only one on the internet.
February, 2009 – “Men of Good Cheer” is, I swear to God, a completely honest response to Fired Up! I was not trying to be clever or hip or ironic. I watched it, I saw a tremendously interesting avant-garde anti-movie, and I’d write it again the same way tomorrow.
March, 2009 – “Frak”, an attempt to figure out how I felt about the wildly confounding ending to one of the best television series in history. I still don’t know how much I think the finale to Battlestar Galactica was successful, but once I get a couple hundred dollars to buy that sexy new complete series Blu-Ray, I intend to find out.
April, 2009 – “Legend of the Zombie Crusaders”. In which I wrote that a zombie movie is one of the greatest of all Spanish films from the 1970s, and I believe that to be an uncomfortably revealing statement in numerous ways.
May, 2009 – “Do You Love Lens Flares?” An incredibly long exercise in describing a slightly negative response (6/10) to Star Trek results in my very first death threats. A proud moment for any blogger.
June, 2009 – “Ten For Monday”. The first new series for this blog in nearly two years. And there will, hopefully, be a Ten this very Monday, except the one I had been working on has become rather tasteless in the wake of John Hughes’s passing, so I’ve had to scrabble to put together something new (the weekend was useless for blogging). Runner-up: “Robots in Disgust”, the angriest thing I’ve ever written, here or elsewhere, in 27 years of life.
July, 2009 – “See It with Someone You Don’t Love”. If it’s good enough for Joseph Gordon-Levitt, it’s good enough for me.