Five years, seven months and 30 days later, I have added another 400 to that total.
That's right, yesterday's review of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania -- which you can find here -- took me to half millennium's worth of reviews, a much more impressive benchmark.
Spoiler alert: I didn't really care for it.
Four hundred reviews in 2070 days means on average one every 5.175 days.
And during that time it has sometimes just felt like a perfunctory instance of feeding the beast. The beast is hungry. The beast demands more.
Up until very recently, I haven't examined the analytics for ReelGood, and even after doing so I don't really understand half of what they mean. So I don't really know if the beast is also an audience that demands new reviews at such regular intervals.
But I do have a sort of professional commitment to uphold, as I am a member of the Australian Film Critics Association based on a certain frequency of output that I've told them I have been making, which has mostly been true.
I've got other writers for the site, but they are strictly volunteers who write or not at their pleasure. I mean, we're all volunteers in that nobody gets paid, but at least I do get to see movies for free, whereas they only see them for free when I send them to a screening. In any case, I'm not getting the volume from them so my own reviews must make up the substantial difference.
And most of the time I still like this. When I do finally sit down to write a review, I write it quickly and energetically. In extreme examples the writing process can take as little as 20 minutes, which is interesting because I don't actually plan out what I'm going to say before I start. I have a way to open the review in mind, and as I'm writing I pluck loose threads and impressions from my brain to fill out the rest. Of course, knowing that I'm going to synopsize the plot in about three paragraphs about two paragraphs in -- followed by another three to five paragraphs of substantive analysis -- means I can do this all quickly and efficiently in getting to a word count in the neighborhood of 1,000. Having written 500 of anything means you've got the process down pretty well.
And yet I sometimes wonder if reaching a milestone like this should be the occasion for introspection, for reconsidering what you're doing and whether it's all heading somewhere satisfying.
I'll be 50 in October, and I know I won't be writing reviews forever. But right now is a particular time of introspection for a handful of reasons:
1) There's some weird issue going on with trying to transfer the registration of my site to me. It has to do with the fact that I'm a new registrant but I use the same email address as the old registrant. I tried to get the registration transferred something like a year ago, and it obviously didn't work properly, and I made a couple calls to the company that hosts the domain and it was all getting very complicated. The fact that the registration hadn't properly changed hands seemed like it didn't matter for ages, and then for the past couple months they have been sending me a reminder email about every three days that action is required on it. With all else that's been going on in my life, I've been blowing it off and just hoping that one day I don't wake up and have no website.
2) The ReelGood Film Festival has been off for a year but is returning in April, or is it May? There's been some chatter about the fact that my site and this festival nowadays have very little to do with one another, and whether there wasn't some brand confusion resulting from this. I don't actually know where this discussion is going to go at the moment. Could be somewhere positive, could be somewhere not so positive.
3) I'm kind of just tired. It's become increasingly clear that reviewing the latest releases plays a significant role in what movies I watch, when, which may be a rather obvious statement. But it's always been clear -- as in, always since I started writing for ReelGood in 2014 -- that there are certain movies my wife might like to watch with me, only I've already watched them because I had to "feed the beast." In fact, it's very possible that part of the reason she has gravitated toward TV rather than movies is that she doesn't want to be forced to watch a movie when I need to see it, but she would ultimately like to watch it with me, but by then all the good movies are gone because I've already watched them.
So as recently as about 20 reviews ago I thought "What if I just review 20 more movies and then call it quits?" I don't know how seriously I was thinking it, but the thought did cross my mind.
There are two big reasons I don't:
1) If I am no longer writing reviews, I can no longer legitimately renew my membership with AFCA, which means I would go back to paying for all my movies like any other schlub. To be honest, I've gotten used to strolling into a movie theater and only having to pull out my wallet because that's where I keep my critics card.
2) If I stop being a reviewer for ReelGood, I may never review films again.
It's the last one that sends a blast of cold to the pit of my stomach. This thing that has defined me for more than 25 years -- at least in my own mind if not other people's minds -- could be ending, never to resume again.
I'm not ready.
And though I have not yet figured out what my 501st review will be, I did just watch the new Netflix movie Your Place or Mine last night -- also didn't care for that -- and if I put up a review on Monday, it would still be within the two-week window since its release, which is my typical guide for whether a movie is still fresh enough for a review.
There would be a certain beauty to stopping at 500, but certain beauties are overrated. When I wrote my last review for AllMovie after more than a decade of writing for them from 2000 to 2011, it was my 1218th -- not a round number at all. (A lot of that was backfilling their database with reviews of old movies that didn't yet have one, and the reviews were only about 300 words, so it doesn't make for a particularly useful comparison to my current run.)
Of course, AllMovie was the one that told me they could no longer use me when they stopped using freelancers and brought all their reviews in house.
I'd have the chance to go out on my own terms with ReelGood, if I wanted to, and the way things are structured right now, I'm my own boss so nobody can tell me to get lost. There are other potential pressures that could "force" me out, but nothing quite like serving at the pleasure of a higher power that decides whether or not to pay me or publish me. I don't get paid at all so that makes those sorts of factors pretty much moot.
But I guess I'm not ready to go out yet. I'm not even 50. Don't put this film critic out to pasture when he can still write quickly and energetically and tell you that the latest Ant-Man movie isn't very good because the quantum realm is a shitty digital environment that fails to make use of the series' tendency to show small things and big things in opposition to each other.
They'll still be 30 more Marvel movies to review before they have to probably pull the plug on the MCU, and I'd like to be here to tell you whether you should see them or not.
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