How recently, I can't say. I only just recently discovered it, and didn't get an exact timing when I asked a guy who might know, because he does what most people do and answered some but not all of my questions -- out of a deficit of reading comprehension more than a desire to withhold.
These reviews were written for AllMovie.com, the website that employed me -- yes, actually paid me, the princely sum of $25 per review -- on and off from late 2000 to late 2011. There was an "off" period of about two years starting in 2003, but then I was invited back after another change in the company's finances and their desire to resume paying freelancers to write reviews.
In total, I wrote 1134 reviews for AllMovie during that period. You know I'd have a list.
They were not the length of reviews I write now, which tend to be in the 900-word to 1100-word range. These were capsule reviews that were closer to 300 words, all in one paragraph, but for a time, they were the only way I knew how to review. Not that I didn't "know how" to write a longer review, which I had done before that and returned to doing after. Just that the experience became so foreign to me during those 11 years that I had to retrain my brain when, in 2014, it was time to start writing that sort of review again.
Recently, I discovered that these reviews no longer appear on AllMovie. Not just mine, but everyone's. (If it were just mine, I'd be feeling personally attacked, in addition to the vague sort of emptiness I feel.)
According to my former editor at that site, who had also moved on within a few years of 2011, "The relationship the now (sic) owners had with the group that owned and operated the database became to (sic) expense for them. That's the best way I can explain." (I probably should have just fixed up the errors that typing quickly caused him to make, but I have always liked the old-school journalism term "sic," which means you are quoting the person exactly and not cleaning up their grammar.)
To give you an idea how much of a sea change this is for them, at least since the time I was writing, they sometimes paid two different people to write the same review. That's right, I also had a list of my own reviews that had been replaced by someone else's review, which was somewhere around 20. In some cases that was because someone had a higher opinion of the movie than I did, but sometimes, I think it was just because someone else felt a burning desire to review that movie. Quite a philosophical change, you will agree -- even if the move just now was dictated by financial considerations.
These reviews likely still exist somewhere out there on the internet, but they will be much harder to find.
The reason they likely still exist was that part of AllMovie's business model was to sell their content to other sites that needed movie reviews but did not have someone on staff who could generate that content originally. That's how it was that my reviews might pop up anywhere, even The New York Times.
I should explain that one.
Obviously if I were to say that The New York Times did not have a film critic on staff, you'd know I was lying, and Manohla Dargis would be very offended. But The New York Times did, for a time, have some part of their site in which video releases were being promoted -- I believe I'm characterizing this correctly -- that needed capsule reviews rather than the full-length reviews someone like Dargis would write. And that is how it is that my work appeared in an obscure corner of the New York Times website, for a time.
That time is now likely over.
Many of the sites that once bought content from AllMovie would have subsequently shuttered (I believe Blockbuster was also one of them). For those that do still exist, the value they place on reviews of old movies would likely be low, so the content would be really relegated, if it did still appear at all. In fact, I did some slight googling the other day just to see what came up, and the results were bleak.
The issue is not that I can't see or read these reviews anymore. You won't be surprised to know that not only do I still have all the original files I wrote on Microsoft Word during those 11 years, but I also printed out online versions of every review, which I have collected alphabetically in two large binders, the reviews themselves protected by glossy three-ring plastic sleeves that allow the two reviews to go back to back and each appear from one side of the sleeve.
No, the issue is that a significant percentage of my film writing has basically just been obliterated from existence, in terms of future generations' ability to find it.
We tend to think of the internet as this infinite space whose old corners do not get cleaned out very often, allowing you to continue to find content that has not been actively upkept. But there's upkeep in terms of fees associated with keeping sites in service, as well as things like the relationship with a company that upkeeps the database, which seems to have been the part where AllMovie fell down. In fact, I'm not even sure why AllMovie still exists, because I can't identify the service they're providing. In the space where our reviews used to appear, there is now an area for subscribers to type their own reviews. Which is certainly in keeping with the way people use competitors like IMDB and Letterboxd, but AllMovie cannot compete with those services in any other way, and it does not appear many people are even using this area set aside for their own reviews.
Anything that is an existential threat to our lives as critics is a bit scary. We are reminded at times like this that it's all very ephemeral. If I stop paying the hosting fees for ReelGood, for example, all the content on that site could be snuffed out of existence as well. It's one reason I'm still paying a company to host the ReelGood podcasts, even though we have not made a new one of those since 2020.
Then of course, things like this just cause you to ponder what you have to show for your career, or your life in general. That sounds a bit heavy, and actually, it's also a bit of a straw man argument because this has not, really, had the impact on me I thought it might. It's been nearly a month since I discovered my AllMovie reviews were gone, and I have not been prompted to write about it before now. And to be certain, that work did have practical in addition to personal aesthetic importance to me, from an actual career standpoint, in terms of the money I received for those reviews, which was rarely a difference maker but did supplement me in ways without which my life would have been at least a little bit lesser.
There's good news here, though. Because now, I can start updating my big movie Excel spreadsheet again.
You know -- from reading this blog before, but even from this very post -- that I keep lots of lists. You may not know that there's one I have not been keeping up, which is the Excel version of my big movie list, which I do continue to keep up in Microsoft Word.
The Excel version allows me to compute totals and keep track of other sortable information in a way that is very useful to me, but it became laborious to maintain because of a stupid tradition I started a long time ago.
Namely, when I entered a new title in the spreadsheet, I would also read who had reviewed it on AllMovie and include the name of the author in its own column. It was this information that allowed me to say, only somewhat jokingly, that I was likely one of the most published film critics on the internet, given the way the content I produced was sold to umpteen other sites on the web at its height.
And what allowed me to distinguish myself from other AllMovie writers was just how much more I had written than they had. This spreadsheet tells me that if you want to find the person who had written the second most number of reviews of movies I had seen, you drop all the way from my 1134 to his 500 -- the coincidentally even number that he had when I stopped updating this spreadsheet in 2022. (And sure, he could have reviewed some significant quantity of films I haven't seen, but given my general coverage of popular movies, I'm sure it was not more than 600.)
This tradition of reading the other writer's review explains why it became too much of a pain to keep up. Any time I would get behind in updating this spreadsheet, I'd know there were maybe a couple dozen reviews I "needed" to read in order to fulfill the obligation I had created for myself.
The trouble with that was, the writers who succeeded my former editor and me were not very good. Also, they did not write capsule reviews. The site had shifted to reviews more in the vicinity of the word count I currently write for ReelGood. So any time I thought of having to wade through all those poorly written reviews, instead I decided to spend my time another way. Then eventually I just gave up maintaining this spreadsheet altogether, to the point that the last 800 movies I've seen are not recorded here.
Well, reading other writers' bad reviews is no longer a problem.
And so it is recently that I started the project to catch back up on this spreadsheet, filling in all of what was missing, and keeping only the other stats this spreadsheet allowed me to keep: director, release year, length, venue in which I saw the film (separated only into "theater" and "video"), and whether I gave it a thumbs up or thumbs down.
I've played catch-up on this spreadsheet before, as I've been in a near constant state of arrears. I would get the total matching the total from my Microsoft Word version thereof, but then I would almost immediately fail to continue keeping it up, and would be a hundred titles behind again in no time. In 2022, I just gave up altogether.
Now, within a few weeks of working on this periodically, I should be back to a point where all my movies are recorded. And without the daunting task of having to read some new review in whatever finite amount of time I had to update the list, I can probably keep it maintained going forward and will never have to play catch-up again. (Actually, one clear disappointment I have about this is that there were some AllMovie writers who were excellent, and I even had favorite reviews of theirs I would go back and read on occasion. Now that seems to be lost to me forever.)
Of course, a normal person probably would have said, ages ago, that it was not worth still reading and recording the reviews from a website that has not employed me since 2011. But once I start doing something, I usually doggedly see it through, in spite of any diminishing returns. Besides, I have always found it interesting to read another critic's review of a movie after I've finished watching it for the first time, and this just gave me a formalized way of doing that -- as well as an ego boost, lately, as I told myself how much better I was at this than they were.
I more than most have a tie to my own previous writing. Some people will say they never re-read their old reviews, just as some people who make movies say they never watch their own movies. I don't think it's a great look if you, like, watch your old movies all the time. But to never watch them again is, I think, a bit weird.
Me, I do re-read my own reviews. In fact, ReelGood has a useful feature that I cannot claim any responsibility for instituting, which is a random article feature. If you click on this, it brings up any post that was once posted to the site, and if I'm trying to kill a few minutes, I sometimes do click through until I find one of my own reviews. I sometimes have to wade through a variety of ways this site used to be used -- such as posting trailers for upcoming movies -- but because I have now written so much for ReelGood (more than 600 reviews), I always get to one of mine within a few clicks. And I do value having these right at my fingertips. (There's actually a practical value to this too, as I sometimes notice little typos that I can go back and correct. This is, after all, a document that's out there for eternity for anyone to discover -- or so I thought.)
Reading my old reviews is just a secret between me and my phone, and, I guess, now you. But I'm not ashamed. I have pride in the work I've done, the work that has defined this part of my career, the one outside my day job. Reading some turn of phrase that I thought was particularly clever gives me a reminder of that pride, which, let's be honest, we all sometimes need in our daily lives.
AllMovie never had such a feature, as I would have needed to specifically seek out a particular review in order to read it. Now, however, I can't do even that. And unless, at some point in the future, the company again re-envisions the way they plan to use or monetize their site, I'll never be able to do that again.
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