... and then some weeks I just review five movies

In recent months, my movie reviewing has become, shall we say, nominal.

Sometimes you just aren't into something you've been doing for more than 25 years (closer to 30 in fact). Sometimes it feels like more of a drag than others. That's probably especially the case with a sisyphean task like reviewing movies. 

Consider my recent output.

I tend to think of reviewing movies as a week-to-week thing, as in, how many movies am I giving my readers this week? And since I follow what I believe is considered to be general internet wisdom by not posting on the weekends, the week is defined as Monday to Friday.

Ideally, I would review two movies in that period, maybe three on a busy week. One is considered an absolute minimum, without which I am falling down on the job.

Well, it's been a long time since I've reviewed two movies with any regularity. In fact, some weeks, even one was a struggle.

Let's look back:

July 1st to 5th: Reviewed one film, A Quiet Place: Day One, on Tuesday the 2nd.

June 24th to 28th: No reviews.

June 17th to 21st: Reviewed one film, Ultraman: Rising, on Friday the 21st.

June 10th to 14th: Reviewed one film, Hit Man, on Wednesday the 12th, though at least I did post reviews from two other writers on the Thursday and Friday.

June 3rd to 7th: Reviewed one film, The Watchers, on Friday the 7th. 

May 27th to 31st: Reviewed one film, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, on Wednesday the 29th. 

May 20th to 24th: Reviewed one film, IF, on Monday the 20th. 

May 13th to 17th: Reviewed one film, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, on Monday the 13th.

May 6th to 10th: Reviewed one film, The Idea of You, on Monday the 6th.

April 29th to May 3rd: Reviewed one film, The Fall Guy, on Thursday the 2nd.

April 22nd to 26th: Reviewed two films, Rebel Moon - Part 2: The Scargiver on Monday the 22nd and Challengers on Thursday the 25th.

I'll stop there. I had gone ten weeks without reviewing what I consider to be the correct number of movies in a week. That obviously tells you something.

Well I must have surprised the hell out of my readers this week, because I posted a review every single day. And since I never post more than one in a day, that was the maximum. 

That's right, with each linked for your perusal, on Monday I reviewed Space Cadet, on Tuesday I reviewed Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, on Wednesday I reviewed The Bikeriders, on Thursday I reviewed Fly Me to the Moon and today I reviewed Twisters.

The ratings were all over the spectrum: one 9/10, one 7/10, two 5/10s and one 2/10.

Now of course, this is necessarily an ebb and flow thing, based in part on what's going on in your life. Some weeks I have a hard time getting out to the movie theater, in part because it doesn't seem like they've released anything new, or at least not anything new that I would ever plan to review. (I'm sorry, I'm not going to review the latest Garfield movie.) Then you have travel and other things that can interfere. 

But I think as this summer season has gone on, it has gained clear momentum. This may be an oddity of the Australian release schedule specifically, but yesterday saw the release of four movies that a person might be interested in prioritizing, albeit for different reasons: Twisters, Fly Me to the Moon, MaXXXine and Kinds of Kindness. In fact, I chose Twisters as my second film on Thursday, after my family finally got out to see Inside Out 2, because my wife claimed interest in both MaXXXine and Kinds of Kindness, and none in Twisters. (I'd already seen Fly Me to the Moon at an advanced screening on Monday, which she was supposed to attend but couldn't.)

The number of four new releases in a given week is a couple standard deviations away from the mean. Most weeks it seems there is one new release, or maybe one movie for the adults and one for the kids. Obviously it increases in intensity at different points of the year, but even what should be a busy summer movie season has felt quiet this year, allowing me to slip down to just one review a week, and sometimes needing the streamers even to accomplish that.

So this probably also means next week will be busy, as I'll want to see at least one of MaXXXine or Kinds of Kindness to review it in a timely way for my readers.

Of course this busy week was not just a function of increased new releases in theaters. Three of my five reviews were recent theatrical releases, but the latest Beverly Hills Cop movie, released to Netflix, seemed something my readers would want to hear my take on, and then the movie I actually got to first, Amazon's Space Cadet, was something that hadn't even been on my radar, but beat Axel F to press after I watched it on Sunday and disliked it so much that I essentially started writing a vitriolic review immediately afterward.

I guess the larger takeaway on this is, I'm not burnt out yet. This week has reminded me that I can still write a large quantity of critical content in a short period of time, and it's not merely out of obligation. With so much on my plate, clearly I could have just not written one or even more than one of the reviews. In fact, the only review I had to write was Fly Me to the Moon because it was fulfilling my obligation by attending the free screening.

Twisters was the 599th review I've written for ReelGood, meaning I'm on the precipice of another milestone. When I reached the last milestone at 500 -- which was Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, so early 2023 -- I wondered if I should use the round number to just close up shop. Yes, I considered, however briefly, just quitting this whole thing as recently as 16 months ago.

A hundred reviews later, I've just written five in one week.

I guess I'm here for a bit longer. 

When $1 movies are a price hike

I had always wondered what the local movie theaters were getting out of allowing us critics, albeit a tiny number of us in terms of percentage of total ticket "sales," to see movies for free. There had to be some sort of compensation, but that compensation isn't represented in the nominal fee we pay each year to renew our annual membership in the Australian Film Critics Association.

In the past few years, I've started to see they are wondering about it, too, the latest example coming last night. 

There are a few chains who used to allow us to use our card, who just don't anymore, and then there was what happened last night, which was more comical than it really was frustrating.

I used to go to the Village Cinemas at Crown Casino a lot more often when I lived a lot closer to the city. It was as convenient as any other theater, and I liked that they had later start times -- perhaps due to this affiliation with the casino. Whereas most other theaters aren't starting any movies after about 9:15, you'll sometimes see post 10 p.m. start times at Crown, which is useful for me especially on nights like Monday night. 

I had stayed in the city after work for an advanced screening of Fly Me to the Moon at 6:30, but its over-two-hour length (a discussion for another time) meant I couldn't catch the 8:45 showing of The Bikeriders at my usual city theater, the one that's downstairs from where I used to work. The 9:40 Bikeriders at Crown came in very handy, and also allowed me to renew my acquaintance with Crown, where I only go to a movie a couple times a year these days.

Unfortunately, something had changed in the time since I last went. Now instead of just filling out a few little details like my name and critics card number on the paper that prints from the ticket machine, I also had to pay exactly one dollar.

I stifled the inclination to chuckle.

One dollar is nothing. The Australian dollar is worth even less than the U.S. dollar, so that's more like 63 cents U.S. I would pay $1 AUD for literally almost anything without giving it a second thought.

But though I managed to stifle the inclination to chuckle, I couldn't stifle the inclination to protest.

The guy was a guy I had never seen before, which wouldn't be saying much except that there was this one guy who used to work there, maybe still does, who struck up a short conversation with me every time I went, so fascinated was he by my status as a critic. It wasn't always welcome but I did appreciate being thought of as a low-level rock star.

Anyway, I have no idea if this new guy was just pressing the wrong buttons or if this were a recent change in theater policy, but I didn't really have time to argue because I'd miscalculated the amount of time it would take to walk there and was already deep into the trailers. (Or so I thought. When I got to my seat, having also foregone a trip to the bathroom, there were at least another 12 minutes of trailers and ads.) 

I gave a token protest, but when he couldn't verify his procedure in a short enough time or wouldn't override it in order to waive my fee, I just paid it, not wanting to put the opening minutes of Jeff Nichols' movie in jeopardy.

Another reason I didn't press the issue? My general sense that this new $1 fee for critics was probably correct. Because there is no other button he could press that would allow another class of theatergoer to be paying only $1. The greatest other discount is something like a $16 ticket for seniors.

Like I said, I don't care about paying $1 to see a movie. It's still a discount of at least $22 on what everyone else is paying. (I actually don't know what they're charging in a place like Crown nowadays because I never pay it.) 

But the principle. Would that guy who used to fanboy me think I was such a rock star if I were shelling out money to review a film? Even a nominal pittance like $1?

If I have to do my bit to help keep the Australian theater chains afloat, especially if it is merely symbolic like this is, I will, and I suppose I'll do it gladly enough if you take it out to the macro level.

But on the micro level, on the level of that exact moment that I'm holding my phone up to the reader to make the payment, I'm inclined enough to grumble that I'll go and write a whole blog post about it here.

As for The Bikeriders, I'll be reviewing it soon, so if you want to check to the right (depending on when you read this) you may see my full thoughts linked. As a tease for now, it was one of my favorites so far this year, and I thought Jodie Comer's Chicago accent was adorable. (Also, one bit of false advertising in that poster -- Comer never once dresses like that in this movie. She's a square and generally proud of it.)