A preface to my short reviews of the movies I've seen this summer

Which would be, thus far, X-Men: Days of Future Past, Edge of Tomorrow, 22 Jump Street, and Boyhood.

But first, a preface...

This has been an atypical summer for me. If you've been following this blog for the past 5 years, you'd remember my summer hiatuses in previous years. In particular, back in 2011 when I moved from Central Pennsylvania to New York City. This summer, I moved from NYC to Los Angeles. Thanks to that move, I have not been able to get to the movies much in the months of June or July. Furthermore, I haven't had time to really sit down and think about what I saw. And considering I saw Days of Future Past in early June, these reviews will be pretty short and based on what I remember. I'll add personal context and revisit the climate in which these movies originally came out in.

Really though, I'm just trying to get back in the swing of things. For awhile there, it was hard to find the motivation to write. When you have so much else going on and you sit down to relax and think, "now I have write??" That's not a good thing. Plus, I wanted to try to enjoy movies again without having to think about them for a little while. There had been times earlier this year when I didn't know where to begin on some of these movies. Films like "Noah" and "Enemy" were difficult to process and I was starting to realize that I was going through some growing pains as a writer. Once my reviews started getting published elsewhere, I started to wonder if they really stacked up compared to other writers. I started to care too much about the perception of my writing, when for so long, I was able to write with reckless abandon. I read something on twitter (of all places) and it was a quote that said something about self-doubt being detrimental to creativity. I've definitely felt that these last few months. Thing is, you can't really try to be a better writer. You just have to keep writing. And writing. And writing. That's what I've figured out over the course of the summer.

Because the less I write, the more pointless things seem to me. I like being able to put a perspective on things. I write about movies so that I can understand them better.

I don't know if I'll be writing for other sites in the near future. For now, I'm just going to focus on Kenoncinema while I embark on this crazy life of mine. I hope to have more essays on top of the reviews that I already write. I have a lot of interesting topic ideas and hopefully it'll be fun to write again. Most of all, I hope you'll have fun reading this blog again too.

And since this preface has gone on a little long, I'll do the reviews in my next post.