It seems that every Tom, Dick and Harry has a movie review blog on the Internet. I don't blame you for not being any more interested in reading what I have to say than anyone else. And I certainly don't blame you for reading someone famous instead of reading what I have to say.
Still, I'd like you to know where I'm coming from and how "On the Movie" will work.
I have been a movie addict my whole life. I'm not going to blather on with nostalgic stories here, but you can ask me some time why whenever I see a hockey game, it takes me back to seeing "Youngblood" in a marijuana-soaked, $2 movie theatre. Or how my memory of my sister standing on her chair and crying, "Goodbye, E.T.!" is as special to me as the time when I saw "Disclosure" in Times Square in college and watched a woman throw a stiletto heel at the screen, yelling "you lying bitch!" at a Demi Moore that could not hear her. I love movies.
In college, I covered film for the North Central Chronicle. I was consistent about it and made a bit of a name for myself doing it. I found myself attending press screenings of films with Roger Ebert, Gene Siskel, and other Chicago-area critics. I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. It just didn't work out that way. When I did land a professional, regular paper job at the Naperville Sun, the closest I came to movie reviews was local theatre reviews. Now don't get me wrong. I love theatre. But I saw myself a movie critic. They didn't need one of those. Nobody did.
Nobody needs all of the critics we have today, either. You don't need me. But I need to write about movies. So whether you read or not, I will do that here.
I should qualify that I have been teaching film studies at Naperville Central High School since 2000. I took a number of undergrad and graduate courses in film and have studied the art form in addition to watching so many movies. I have obsessively followed Oscar season since before I took an interest in the Super Bowl. I know what I'm doing.
How films will be rated
When I started puting my film reviews on Facebook, I struggled with their five-star system. I am used to a four-star scale, having grown up reading reviews in newspapers. My first exposure to a five-star system was Rolling Stone, and on many occasions, I've attempted to define each star and half-star and even create a conversion chart for myself between the two scales. I feel no more confident about it now than I ever did.
Therefore, I will probably go with the tried and true four-star scale here. I figure that, in a basic sense, you add about a half-star to most four-star scale reviews anyway if you're using five. But who cares. You know what I'm doing. You'll figure it out.
Time to do what I'm here to do...review movies!
No comments:
Post a Comment