I've promised I'd be back before on this blog and I've gone back on that promise. The main problem has been the combination of having two children and a full-time job. That means there's just not much time for many more hobbies. Even right now, I've had more time than usual to write in this blog because I took a few days off from work. But this time, something feels different. I really do feel a need to "return to my roots", so-to-speak. I do still love movies, but that love had been dormant for awhile, particularly during COVID. But now I'm feeling more comfortable returning to the cinema. Just in the last month or so, I've seen Asteroid City, Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning: Part One (mouthful of a title), Barbie, and Oppenheimer. Understand - between March 2020 and May 2023, I think I went to the cinema a total of 5 times. I didn't even get to see Licorice Pizza in theaters. I'd seen every PTA movie in theaters dating back to There Will Be Blood in January 2008. On my way back to Penn State, I made a stop at Princeton University and saw TWBB at the Princeton Garden Theater. It's crazy, there were two movies showing there, TWBB and No Country For Old Men. Man, I wish I just saw both films there. I ended up seeing No Country months later on DVD. Love the movie, but it's not the same experience, as you know.
And that's kinda been the problem these last few years. The cinema is my hub. Going to the cinema is the heart of my movie fandom. I go to the movies and it makes me want to watch more movies at home. But if I can ONLY watch movies at home, I... kinda lose interest? I don't know, maybe my TV isn't big enough. Maybe I don't have a nice enough setup. There's something about ONLY seeing movies at home that just kinda stales the whole experience for me. I need the ability to go to the movie theater. I need that full experience. I talk about it in my Oppenheimer review, but the experience of being totally rapt in a movie is unlike anything else for me. I don't get quite the same experience watching one at home. There's just something too casual about watching movies at home. I'm still able to enjoy it, but it's always going to be a better experience at the theater. That's just how I feel about it. I don't need to see a movie in the theater ALL the time. Just enough to fuel my love for it. So then when I'm home, I want to carry that experience with me by watching more movies. But the longer I go without watching a movie in theaters, the less inclined I feel to pop on a movie at home. It doesn't help that there are a plethora of viewing choices at home that I can make. Too often, these last few years, I'd opt to watch a bunch of dumb Youtube videos instead of watching a movie. Something about committing to something for 90-120 minutes at the end of a long work day... just doesn't feel worth it. But that lackadaisical feeling isn't there if I'm attending the cinema on, at least, a somewhat regular amount. My overall enthusiasm for the art of cinema cuts through any exhaustion I might feel after a long work day.
So, the fact I've been going to the movies more often is one thing. but I was going to the movies pretty regularly from 2016-2019 and I still wasn't updating the blog. Grad school and starting my 9-5 job played a big part in that. Particularly from 2017 to 2019, I was commuting to work every day and it'd often take 90 minutes to get there and back. So a 9-5 job with a total of three hours commuting. That's 11 hours of my day everyday! I still went to the movies to unwind, but I sure as hell didn't have the energy to write about those movies.
Do I have the energy back? Right now I do. I think I'm getting there. There's a simple pleasure that I'm missing by not updating the blog. I write for a living, but sometimes it's nice to just... write for myself. To say whatever I want however I want. Don't have that kind of power at work, but I would with this blog. I don't think I'll be the kind of reviewer I was in 2010 to 2015. Back then, I think I was trying to be "professional". There's going to be a heavy use of first person in my movie reviews and I want to share more thoughts on the industry and other stray thoughts here and there.
That brings me to my plans. The title of this blog post is "KenonCinema plans" - so what does that entail?
- I want to review new releases, like I used to.
- I also need to catch up on a bunch of movies that I missed between 2020 - the first half of 2023. So I'm gonna go back and watch releases from the last three years and write reviews on them.
- BTW: no grades on new releases. I don't like grading movies anymore. I'll rank them at the end of the year just to have some perspective on the year in film, but I don't want my entire review to be about the grade I give it. I feel like it diminishes the whole point of writing a review in the first place. Did I like the movie? Read and find out!
- That said: I also wanna do an overview on notable directors from the last several years. I didn't review any movies from 2016 to 2019 and a way to cover that is to go back and do an overview of directors like Fincher, PTA, Greta Gerwig, etc... Now the onus is gonna be on me to go back and watch these directors older movies. I also want to catch up on some newer directors like Ari Aster. I only saw Midsommar from him, which I liked a lot. I'd also love to watch all of Bong Joon-ho's films and, for some reason, I've never watched a single Hirokazu Kore-eda film. There's a few directors like that where I really wanna dive into their filmography and write about them, so I definitely want to do a regular feature like that on this blog. And, when I do these overviews, I will grade those films since I'll have a bit more perspective on a lot of their movies and I can rank their movies and determine which of their movies I liked best. A director, like Kore-eda, maybe I'd refrain from grading since I haven't seen any of his films, but others, like Wes Anderson? I actually did a blog post on Wes Anderson ten years ago or so, it'd be nice to revisit that topic.
- ...should I get into video content? Podcasting? I briefly had a podcast from 2014 to 2016 called The Long Take Movie Podcast, I don't know if I'd revive that, but I may start making videos on Youtube. I have no audience for this blog. Like, none. Zip. Nada. It'd be nice to have, at least, a small following. I'm basically writing this long blog post to myself. When I debated about coming back to kenoncinema, one thought I had was... there are a lot of shitty "film critics" who have big platforms. Why not me? I actually studied film in college, I have a Master's in screenwriting, I've reviewed hundreds of movies, I've contributed for The Playlist for several years, I've written screenplays, I made a no-budget feature film and a few more short films. I feel like I have a pretty solid-ass background and I'm older and wiser now that I'm in my mid-30s. This is starting to sound like a bit snobby, but that's another thing: I'm totally not that guy. I generally hate myself! Ok, not really, but... generally speaking, I have self-loathing tendencies. I've curbed those tendencies as soon as I became a dad, but there's still there, deep down. I don't take myself all that seriously, but that's been kinda the problem. There's a balance. For too long, I haven't taken myself seriously enough (which is why I stopped writing all together: a crippling sense of self-doubt). So, I'm trying to reach that balance of making well-written reviews and engaging video content, while also not making it seem like I know more than anyone else. Anyway, I got off-track. I think I wanna make video content. I may start a Youtube channel in the hopes that people will visit this site. Maybe podcasting will soon follow, we'll see, but for now, I'm just trying to gain some semblance of a following. If it's ten people, that's enough. I'm getting too old to be writing and not getting any eyeballs on what I wrote. I'm also confident enough to know that I'm at least a decent writer.
I'm thinking of making a video component to the "director overview" segment I want to do. I think I want to call it "Director Progress Report" or something, where I talk about a director's filmography and give them a grade. Another idea I have is called "Was that bait?" Basically, I talk about a movie released in the last 15-20 years and debate whether the movie was pure Oscar bait. I'll get into that idea at a later date, I've had that idea for like 2 years and have done nothing with it. Lastly, for the youtube page - brief, instant-reaction reviews. Like 1 minute reviews designed for Youtube shorts. It'd just be a plain ol' shot of my face giving my opinion.
I'm a bit nervous about doing a youtube page. It feels late in the game for me, right? Like, it's 2023, can I really get a following going that route? I don't know, but right now I have 0 followers so, gotta start somewhere.
One last idea: I kinda want to dive into my ol' blu-ray/DVD collection. Some of those movies I haven't even watched yet, somehow. Some I haven't watched in over a decade. I wanna break out the ol' collection and give my thoughts on the movie and maybe the blu-ray/DVD and the features. I don't know... everyone streams these days and it'd be nice to make some content on the giant collection I have that's just sitting on the top shelf of my closet gathering dust.
These are a lot of ideas. I'm gonna start slow for now, but that's just where my thought process is for now. I'll keep trying to update this blog on a regular basis and implement some of the above ideas along the way. That's all for now! Good night.
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