Everyone’s Got a Blog These Days, and This One is Mine

My friend, Jim, at Movie Brain Rot (dot-com), and I have a long filmic history. The Orlando scene is incestuous, everybody running into everybody after a while, and one day Jim and I crossed paths at the house of Before You Submit’s mastermind, Brian Quain. We all talked/gushed/argued movies, TV, pop culture, and were lucky enough to work on all sorts of movie-oriented projects. We had some hits and misses, and I had a few foul balls that might have hit little kids in the crowd, but it was always fun.

When Jim asked me if I wanted to write a blog for his site, I had to review my qualifications to do such a thing as pontificate about the cinematic arts: “professional writer, quasi-professional/mostly-amateur filmmaker, film festival programming experience, and double English/Humanities B.A. degree with a concentration in film” (anyone hiring?). The concentration in film was a dozen classes relating to film, ie. Literature and Film, Screenwriting, Writing Film Reviews…

But, this is the internet. I’ve written blogs religiously since 2003, after joining some website for “writers” that rewarded (robot-voice) “consumer-generated content receiving maximum hits from end-users.” It became a fucked-up community of people trying to grab headlines, with writing that weren’t even grammatically nor typogriphically corrct. Moviebrainrot.com is a better place for my particular, hopefully grammatically and tupographically correct, brand of ranting. And, being a movie site, I’ll stop gibbering about me, and start yammering about me and my recent relationship with the movies.

I stopped going to the movies on May 19, 1999. Movie geeks probably know the importance of this date without any additional elaboration, but it was to be the last time I went to the movies. I was done. I was Jar-Jarred.

I avoided the theaters for the next four years, but never stopped watching movies voraciously at home, witnessing the final transition from tracking-sensitive VHS pan-and-scan versions of The Karate Kid to DVD widescreen director’s commentary versions of The Karate Kid. Where have you gone, Ralph “Di” Macchio?

Trying to get laid one time in 2003, I went with a girl to see the John Cusack/Ray Liotta opus, Identity, breaking my silent boycott of movie theaters. I never blamed the movie for blowing my chances that night, but has a Pruitt Taylor Vance movie ever helped anyone get laid?

I somewhat reluctantly started to go out to the movies again, though never again with the enthusiasm I had when I was a kid. No more E.T. experiences. No longer moved, save for the intellectual and/or artistic appreciation. The stories are plots, and the people on the screen, actors. So cynical. So subjectively young.

But, that is not to say that intellectual, artistic, and cultural contributions made in film are any less real. The power of cinema is undeniable; anyone that knows me understands my stance: cinema is the most relevant art form today. What that means, I guess, is really up to you. Keep reading and I’ll try to explain it in words.