No need for 20 points of differentiation

I was listening to my fantasy baseball podcast this morning – and apologies for making this my second straight post with a baseball tie-in, though it doesn’t stay there – and they were doing a segment called the “believe-o-meter.” The task among the hosts was to submit an answer on a 1 to 10 scale of how much they believed in what a certain previously fringy player was doing this season.

Simple, right?

Except that one guy gave the answer of a 3 ½ out of 10 on one player. And another, I think sort of as a joke and to indicate his own uncertainty, gave a 4 ¾ on another one.

It reminded me how I am sometimes asked by my writers if it would be possible to introduce halves into our rating system.

ReelGood rates movies on a scale of 1/10. For those accustomed to the sort of five-star system Letterboxd uses, it’s the same thing, you just have to multiply the star rating by two. The previous editor somehow introduced a poop emoji when he wanted to go lower than 1/10, but I don’t know how he did that within the current functions available to me, and I’m not eager to repeat it anyway. 1/10 should be the minimum, just as a half-star on Letterboxd is the minimum. If you try to rate a movie 0/5 on Letterboxd, it just looks like you didn’t give it a star rating at all.

In either system that’s ten points of differentiation in quality. And ten should be enough.

We don’t need 20.

In the extremest of olden days, I think there might have only been four-point rating systems for the quality of things. One to four stars, no halves. I agree that that is too limiting to indicate finer points of quality, and so various systems involving five points (a five-star system) or eight points (four stars but with halves) were introduced. Our current ten-point scale is the best iteration anyone's thought of so far.

But the reality is, when you only regularly use a couple different ratings to indicate movies you like but don’t love – from 3 stars to 4, or from 6/10 to 8/10 – you do sometimes feel the need to indicate more nuance.

So that same former editor will sometimes say to me “I might give it a harsh 7,” or “I might give it a generous 8.” That would be talking about the same movie, but in one case you go a tick above, and sometimes you go a tick below. A rating of 7 ½ would solve the problem.

But are we really so wishy washy that we can’t take care of this problem in just ten different points? Our readers require us to be definitive, while understanding that not every film can be distilled down to a number, and that of course it’s just our opinion anyway, and opinions differ.

The real problem – and this is one I continue to come back to time and again on this blog – is that I am not making full use of the full range of ten ratings. Because I’m a bit of a softie, I give a significant number of films somewhere in that 6 to 8 range, in that I can usually find something about it that’s good enough to give it a 6. But sometimes I even feel bad about a 6, like it’s a slap in the face. And that leaves five whole numbers to indicate small gradations in films that are not very good.

I’m not going to change my rating system overnight to the one my former editor already uses, in which he reserves 8s for films he truly loves and almost never gives out 9s and 10s. That’s too far in the other direction, but it does mean he’s using more of the range, or perhaps at least is less reliant on halves. He might be using the same amount of the range, just shifted more negatively.

And I might not use the rating range as I ideally would, but at least I recognize that halves have no place on a ten-point scale.

The perils of the long-delayed review

Welcome to my second straight post in which I express my anxieties about a film I appreciated less than most people, while also getting at a larger issue within film criticism.

Although I give away many of my advanced screenings to other writers for my site, I make sure to hoard the ones that will serve a purpose for me personally. In the past six weeks I've had a large quantity of those, three in total, which are movies whose Australian debuts are scheduled for much later in the film year and closer to my ranking deadline. That makes three films I don't have to worry about while catching other important end-of-year films, to say nothing of the blockbusters that also get released in late December.

Those three films are Sentimental Value, Nouvelle Vague and No Other Choice, and given how they've done in this week's Golden Globe nominations, they were good films on which to concentrate. Each of those films was nominated as best feature in one of the two best feature categories.

I've already written some about the last two, but it's the first one that I saw longest ago, all the way back on October 29th. And it's the first of these that has succumbed to some of the perils of not writing about it right away.

Normally when I see a film I'm planning to review, I write the review within 24 hours, and that's usually out of necessity. In many cases I'm planning to post the review the very next day, so writing it immediately is essential. In fact, in the review I wrote of Jay Kelly this week -- see here if you want to read it -- I finished the movie at about 1 a.m. on Tuesday night, and had a review up by 10 past 10 on Wednesday morning. That isn't maybe a typical turnaround, and in this case required some finishing touches during my first hour of work. It also helps that I am consistently waking up just after 6 a.m. when the sun rises. But it just gives you some idea of the sort of timeframe I'm usually working with.

In the case of Sentimental Value, which does not release in Australia for another two weeks, my timeframe for writing the review was almost two months. 

Before I get into the particulars of what's happened with it, I want to say I'm not sure I understand why it's a benefit to screen a movie so far in advance of its actual release. Surely the publicists don't want you to post your review until your readers have a chance to go purchase a ticket within the next few days, right? Yes you could write about it early, but that only contributes to the general buzz without having something concrete readers can convert into action. In our short attention span times, you don't want to let the iron cool down for two months. 

On the publicist's side, there are also logistical headaches because they have to remember who they invited to the screening, and check over the course of those two months to see if the critics have written their review -- because hey, they theoretically could post it at any time. 

Because I had a take on Sentimental Value and a clear way to open the review, I wrote my opening few paragraphs almost straight away. In fact, it was one of those reviews where I couldn't wait to get to a computer, because the words were already spilling out in my brain and I wanted to make sure I didn't lose the ideal phrasing I was concocting in my head.

But what then happens that is that in about the third paragraph, I start to give a couple paragraphs of plot synopsis, and this is where the urgency to continue writing dissipates. I usually know how I'm going to start my view, but I don't always know how the final four or five paragraphs of analysis are going to play out. With a movie not coming out for almost two months, I've got plenty of time to work that out.

So it was another ten days? two weeks? before I continued my Sentimental Value review, and then ultimately finished it in that same sitting. 

During that time, I became fuzzy on details. Points I thought I might have wanted to make at the time have gotten hazier. And more to the point, I'm hazier on my defenses for why this film didn't work like gangbusters on me, despite its win of the Grand Prix at Cannes (which is actually the festival's second most prestigious award, contrary to its name). 

So I did finish the review, and thought to myself it was okay I didn't love it, ultimately issuing it a 7/10 in our ReelGood rating system. Although Cannes is often totally in sync with the zeitgeist -- Oscar best picture winner Anora last year also won the festival's Palme d'Or -- there are times when Cannes' top prizes are awarded to very polarizing films, some of which people actually hate. Don't forget, this is the festival where people either give a film a ten-minute standing ovation or walk out. It's okay if I don't love one of the films honored here.

But over the last month in particular, I've learned just how much most people think of Sentimental Value. My first surprise was the realization that it was very likely to get a best picture nomination at the Oscars, which we won't actually find out until the 22nd of January, but which surprised me because foreign language films have historically had a steeper hill to climb on this front. (There's also some English in this movie, considering that Elle Fanning is one of its stars.) The Oscar bias against foreign language films is falling away a bit in recent years with the expansion of nominees from five to ten, and now each year we seem to get at least one foreign film nominated for best picture. I guess I just didn't know Sentimental Value would be this year's example of that. (And while we're at it, Nouvelle Vague and No Other Choice are also primarily in foreign languages, and they also have realistic Oscar ambitions.)

So now I'm looking at what I've written for Sentimental Value and trying to figure out ways of softening my criticisms. Clearly this film came together better for others than it did for me, but am I wrong or are they?

If I had just been writing about and posting my review of Sentimental Value in late October, this wouldn't have been a problem. If history proves me wrong on a movie, so be it -- it's happened plenty of times before. The problem comes when the review is in a state of unpublished limbo, meaning I can have second thoughts, I can tweak it, I could even change the entire thrust of my review if I wanted, contradicting my initial impression of the movie only on the basis of a fear of looking stupid and being wrong.

At least with Sentimental Value, the writing portion is out of the way. Correct or incorrect -- as if you can ever really say that when aesthetic judgments are involved -- at least I have something that is based confidently on things that actually happened in the movie. It's a little different with the other two.

I saw Nouvelle Vague on November 27th, so not nearly as long ago. It comes out on January 8th. As with Sentimental Value, I had a good couple opening paragraphs and I wrote them right away. And as with Sentimental Value, I lost the sense of urgency at the point of doing my plot synopsis. 

I've only just picked up the writing again this morning, and I did force myself to finish it. The last 600 words of my review are reasonable and I'm reasonably proud of them. But there was a delay of 16 days in there and I'm not sure what things I thought I wanted to say were lost in the interim. And though Nouvelle Vague is my favorite of these three, with an 8/10 score, I'm still wondering if my knowledge of its subsequent accolades are informing what I've written in some way.

Then you've got No Other Choice. This I saw only ten days ago, making it relatively fresh. But in this case, I have not even written the opening yet. I have an idea of how I'm going to open it, but maybe knowing that the review before it, Nouvelle Vague, was not even in the can yet prevented me from getting started. This comes out latest on the calendar, January 15th. By which point I will have endured another six weeks of accolades about it since the time that I saw it.

When I start to fret about this a bit, I have to remember that I once had a whole gig reviewing movies where I wrote the review years after both the movie had come out and after I had seen it. How does that even work, you ask?

Well when I was writing for AllMovie in the early part of the 2000s, I was actually trying to make a living at it for a short period of time. They were only paying me $20 for each 300-word review, so this endeavor was always doomed to failure. However, the thing that made it marginally possible was that I could write a review for any film that currently didn't have a review on the site, as long as I was approved to do so. I'd go hunting and I'd send them lists of 20 movies I wanted to review, of which they would usually approve all 20, or sometimes denying me on one or two token films. Oh those blessed times when there was a financial incentive for them to have me do this.

In any case, those reviews have to be considered highly compromised in that a) I had not seen the film in many years in most cases, meaning I was reviewing it based on a general impression and a plausible take, and b) I already knew what everyone else thought of the movie, so I was factoring that in to what I was writing, either leaning into the popular take or defining my thoughts in opposition to it.

So I do suspect there is some imperfection in the way these things go. Critics see movies all the time with huge advanced buzz, and they have to clear that noise out of their heads if they want to write about those movies purely and without bias. And because of the way life works, sometimes you can't write that review straight away, especially if you don't have that deadline.

I guess I'm just glad, at this point, that I am not likely to have any more of these, at least this year. I'm scheduled to see another movie with awards buzz, The Secret Agent, on January 15th, which will also help me get it in before my deadline. But at least in that case the movie comes out only one week later. 

The silent rebellion of trying to thwart the inevitable

I've become contemplative again about firstly the state of film criticism, and secondly my relationship to it.

Very contemplative. And maybe which is first and which is second is the other way around.

Since returning from Europe about seven weeks ago, and this has become a possibly coincidental benchmark for a lot of things I've been thinking about, I've been really going through the motions as a critic. I'm dutifully supplying between one and three reviews a week, and mostly covering the films I feel need to be covered. And it's not taking me any longer to write my reviews, with a notable exception that I'll mention in the next paragraph. I'm just quicker to accept that the tack I've started on is a satisfactory one, and I'll just keep spouting off various disconnected observations until I reach my word count.

But then I also had something that hasn't happened to me in a while: I started to write a review that I just totally abandoned. It was for Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein. I wrote two paragraphs that I decided were a dumb way to start the piece, and instead of starting over again, I just left it unfinished. When I searched my soul, I decided I didn't have a single goddamn thing to say about Frankenstein. 

This isn't usually a problem. I always power through it. There's a core standard of professionalism to which I hold myself, acting as though I were on deadline even if the only deadline is in my own head.

Sometimes there actually is a deadline. For any film where I've gotten a screener or attended a premiere, there's the expectation that you'll deliver your verdict by the opening Thursday, if you have enough time, or at least before the first weekend. I do always meet that deadline, and Frankenstein wasn't an example of that scenario, as I waited until it was available on Netflix.

But the Frankenstein episode did disturb me a little bit and it awakened a fear in me that I wasn't ready to confront, and am only forcing myself to confront in the piece I'm currently writing:

I don't know how long I want to keep on doing this.

There are lots of arguments why I wouldn't keep doing it:

1) It no longer brings me (enough) joy.

2) It is becoming less and less financially viable. I'm paying the monthly bills to run the website, and those costs are basically offset by the free tickets I get with my critics card. I'm not running the numbers right not to figure out if I'm coming out a little ahead or a little behind, but it could just as easily be the latter -- which is one of the reasons I'm not running those numbers, because I don't really want to know that. 

3) It is pretty exhausting. You're always rolling that ball up the hill. You're always trying to figure out when you need to see a movie in order to put up a review at an optimal time so that your theoretical audience -- and I think the audience is also becoming more and more theoretical -- can use your recommendations as a practical consideration in whether or not to see a movie. And you're making some decisions that might disrupt other areas of your life, such as time with family and friends. Last night I was going to go see If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, which came out on Thursday, which means I really want to review it this week before it becomes totally old hat. When my wife heard that was the movie I was going to see, she asked if I could wait until the weekend so she could see it with me. I didn't want to, from a reviewing standpoint, though fortunately, my commitment to my wife won out over my commitment to my work, and I went to see The Running Man instead. 

Sorry, this is becoming a bit stream of conscious. I'll get to my point.

There is one big reason I don't stop. Let's set aside the small reasons, like the fact that I'd have to start paying for movies again. The big reason is:

1) If I stop being a critic now, I will never be a critic again. 

I believe this is true even though it is technically not 100% true. I could worm my way back into something in the future, not likely an actual publication with a history or consistent readership, but my own equivalent of the site I currently run. Heck, by writing this blog I am still technically using the same muscles involved in film criticism. 

The scary thing is: Maybe I don't care if I'm not a critic anymore.

Maybe. I haven't fully worked that one out yet. 

If I think I'm having an existential crisis now, just imagine what it will be once I'm actually not doing the thing that gives me some sense of the validity of that existence. Professionally speaking of course. 

As I've gotten this far into this piece, it occurs to me that I've written pieces like this on this blog before. I think that was likely assumed in my opening, in which I talked about being contemplative "again." 

And indeed, in looking back, I found this post just over three years ago, in which I shared many of these same sentiments. If you want to go there, you can see how similar it is. I'm not checking it now.

There's a difference this time, and maybe a similar optimistic ending, but we have to get a bit darker first. 

On a walk this morning, I listened to the bonus segment of a recent Slate Culture Gabfest, the segment that is only available to subscribers, of which I am one. They were talking about a New York Times article about the death of criticism, broadly, which used the widely publicized elimination of a number of key critics jobs -- including the one held by Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune, which left that paper without a film critic -- as its jumping off point. 

The four podcast panelists came around to end on sort of a high note, as I think you are often compelled to do in such a discussion. You can't leave your audience on a note of pure doom and gloom as it is just too depressing. But before that they each said "Yes this sucks, and I don't know if there is anything that can be done about it." The media paradigm is just changing too much. They know where all the clicks are, and they just aren't on movie reviews. Or other types of review, of course, but the panel's movie bias put the focus there.

They also, though, mentioned the efforts of the secret intellectuals who kept alive Greek philosophy in medieval Christian Europe, when there was every bit the chance that the prevailing forces would snuff it out. Those people were heroes, we can appreciate that now.

There is obviously not a direct correlation with film criticism. Ten years from now, films may not even look like they do today, let alone criticism bearing any resemblance to the current form of criticism. Though I suppose it will bear some resemblance, considering that criticism is already on its way out.

The thing is, people like me -- struggling to decide whether it is even financially worthwhile to keep running a website -- can be the sorts of people who stand in the way of what the prevailing forces are trying to accomplish. Simply by not removing myself from the landscape, I allow that landscape to continue existing, in the same way that every vote counts in an election, and every movie ticket sold is an endorsement to keep making that movie.

I think of it as similar to my most beloved of cinematic entities, the single-screen cinema. I'm sure I've told you it is my dream to run a single-screen cinema in some semi-remote town, just far enough away from the multiplexes to serve the local population usefully, but not so far away that I myself can never get to those multiplexes. 

No one makes money on those cinemas. They are financial losers, pure and simple. You can't sell popcorn for a high enough price to recoup the costs of licensing films, paying your staff, keeping the lights on. Which is why only people who are already rich usually run them, as a labor of love.

If it were only about the financial, they wouldn't do it. But it's about something more than that. It's about the romantic notion of single-screen cinemas continuing to exist in the world, so we can show the young people what their history looked like, and so we can continue to live that history ourselves.

And I think there is a romantic notion to criticism itself that must be preserved. No, it may not be entirely consistent with the modern marketplace for people to come looking for a particular critic to tell them whether they should see a movie or not. But criticism is also a place where intellectual discussions are hosted, either actual discussion (through a comments section) or implied discussion in the form of the debate a reader silently has with the person they're reading. 

And surely there will someday come a time when even the notion of an intellectual discussion is outdated, a reality that AI may be hastening. But I'm not so cynical as to think that day is close.

And movies? There are a shit ton of them. Every time I think this industry might be truly contracting, I then look at my Letterboxd watchlist and am overwhelmed by how many movies from the current year are still out there that I haven't seen, that I want to see before the end of the year. 

While there are still movies, there should still be critics, and to the extent that I play any small role in that being true, I will continue to do it. 

For now ... 

Feast or famine in holiday review posting

The first Monday-Friday week I was gone from Australia, there were no reviews posted on ReelGood.

The Monday-Friday week ending right now, there will be four.

Yes it did take me a little while to get the hang of both blogging and posting reviews on this tablet, but I've finally got my groove down.

To be sure, there was supposed to be a review posted during that first full week. I didn't get my act together in Dubai to write my review of Eddington, because we were just too damn busy, but I did write it on the plane to London last Tuesday, so I should have been ready to hack my way through a posting of it before the weekend. 

Then the thing writers hate most happened: Only a paragraph-and-a-half of the review was saved.

I don't know why. It might have had something to do with thinking I was saving it locally to the tablet, but somehow only being able to save it to OneDrive, which was obviously offline while I was on the plane. (Not obviously, I guess, but we couldn't figure out how to get free WiFi and never paid for it.) I thought it might have had something to do with the fact that it was saved the Downloads folder. Maybe that folder is only meant for actual downloads. Then I thought there could have been a problem with the fact that I accidentally saved a space into the file name. I saw it as it was happening, but I just couldn't be bothered to fix it. 

In any case, I had to write the review all over again, which writers simply hate to do. Even if what you wrote wasn't that great in the first place -- as was the case with my Eddington review -- devoting even a limited amount of mental energy to writing it again just feels like an incredible hassle. I had something worth posting the first time, and now I have to regurgitate as much of it as I can remember from that previous instance of writing. I'm sure some felicitious turns of phrase were lost, while others were gained.

Anyway, it took me another several days to finally get back to shitting out another Eddington review, which was somehow 150 words shorter, during which I just considered not reviewing it at all. But at that time, I didn't know that a bounty of other reviewing options would be on the horizon, and besides, as you recall from this post, I paid the premium $19.99 rental fee just so I could have something to post in my first week away.

I didn't finally post it until the beginning of the second week, this past Monday. (I don't post on the weekends.) And that was no easy feat. 

I had to fight to figure out how to download images to the tablet, which, as it turns out, involves pressing and holding on the image until you get the option to download it. (Who knew?) I also had to fight to figure out how to get the embed URL from YouTube to include the trailer. (You have to be on the "desktop site," an option I know now and is now easy.) And finally I had to fight to post links of actors, directors and movie titles to IMDB by copying and pasting bits of html. Why did I have to do this? Because when you try to link it using the front end on WordPress, the interface just flashes repeatedly and you can't paste anything into it. Three reviews later, I still don't know why it does this.

So yeah, that was Monday. Then on Wednesday I posted my review of Caught Stealing. Then on Thursday I posted someone else's review of The Roses. Then on Friday I posted my own review again of The Thursday Murder Club. And I'm glad to say I can finally do this fairly quickly and efficiently, though the html bit with the link posting is still incredibly tedious.

With four reviews this week -- which I think equals the most I've ever posted in a single week -- I could easily go another week without posting and it would be okay. (It would likely be "okay" if I went the entire time I was in Europe without posting, but that would not be living up to my own standards.) But I've requested a screener to review for a movie coming out next Thursday, and my writer in Australia, the only other one working consistently for me right now, has four more screenings to attend before my trip is over, one of which is next week. So next week will probably be a modest -- by the standards of this week anyway -- two-review week. Which is good because I think the options on Netflix are drying up for a few weeks.

You'll be glad to know that in among all this activity, I've still managed to enjoy both London and Paris. 

The loss of one old friend, the return of another

It's about time I wrote something about the fact that 1134 of my film reviews have recently disappeared from the internet.

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. 

... 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. 

Knee deep in a Maestro takedown before I even knew it

The coverage of prestige end-of-year releases and my access to watch them has been way out of sync this year, such that I've left several episodes of my favorite movie podcast, Filmspotting, unplayed. Usually in this situation I try to "listen loosely," letting the words go by in order to get to the parts of the podcast that don't relate to the movie in question, without really taking in what's being said. But this failed so stupendously when I tried to do this for Anatomy of a Fall -- one of those movies that may slip by me after I missed seeing it at MIFF -- that I gave up the endeavor entirely for the next few that were up.

It's not necessarily that I think the two opinions on these movies will either alter my anticipation of the movies, letting me know in advance whether I should actually be looking forward to them, or even that they will spoil the movie, since Filmspotting in particular takes care to advise us if they are going into spoiler territory -- usually handling such material in its own separate segment at the end of the show. It's that I will potentially be reviewing many of these movies and I don't want them putting ideas into my head about what I might say.

Maestro seemed likely to escape this fate, as it doesn't appear as a discussion topic in any of the waiting Filmspotting podcasts, and releases on Netflix on Wednesday I believe. A good chance for me to pop up a review next week, at a time of year when I'm generally too busy to get out to the theater with any regularity and I need something I can watch at home, my opinions unmolested by outside influence.

Imagine my surprise when another favorite podcast, A Typical Disgusting Display, hit me right up front with a surprise broadside of Bradley Cooper's new movie. 

The podcast bills itself as "a podcast for writers, by writers who hate writing," and true enough, the two co-hosts, Alec Sulkin and Julius Sharpe, are Family Guy writers and former or current showrunners. (I also went to high school with Julius, though that's his stage name.) They do sometimes talk about movies, but they're more likely to talk about something that's been in the culture for years, sometimes giving humorous re-appraisals of the plot's core components.

Alec likes to joke about his big nose (as Julius likes to joke about being bald), so his point of entry was faux outrage about the fake nose Cooper dons to play Leonard Bernstein. But then he proceeded to just rip the movie to shreds, using observations I can now no longer make in my own review. 

I thought of turning it off, but it was into the deep end of the diss so quickly that it hardly seemed worth it at that point. (And his rant was funny.)

It puts me in mind of an issue I'm sure I've discussed here before, which is how to remain unbiased in the wake of a cultural conversation that crops up almost immediately about these entertainment products as they are released. And unfortunately, Maestro is already out for its brief theatrical run, which means I'm not really getting it at its first availability to me if I wait until Netflix to see it.

I guess it's another reminder of how real critics -- I mean, those who write reviews as part of their paid full-time job -- get to the first pre-release screenings, before anyone knows what we will all think about the movie once it comes out. I do sometimes go to these -- I've already seen Ferrari, and I don't think that comes out in any country for a few weeks -- but most of the rest of the time, it's catch as catch can.

I will still review Maestro, I think, but there's no doubt the words of a funny podcaster will be ringing in my ears as I do. 

Review #500

It seems like only five years, seven months and 30 days ago that I was writing this post, which I considered a landmark at the time, in which I notified you that I had reached the august heights of 100 reviews written for ReelGood -- and which remains a repository for all the reviews I had written before or have written since, updated every time a new one publishes. 

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. 

So long Joe ... so long me?

I haven't been keeping up regularly with the KCRW film reviews of Joe Morgenstern, whose reviews appear in print for the Wall Street Journal. The audio form of those reviews are one of the least frequently visited podcasts on my Stitcher app. Although I dearly love this stalwart critic and I sometimes read my own reviews with his voice in my head reading them -- to see if they sound anything like his exceptional version of the craft -- the fact is, most of the time I haven't seen the movie he's reviewed, and if I have, it's only three minutes worth of content. When I'm putting on a podcast to do some chore or to accompany some form of commute, I usually want something in longer form so I can just set it and forget it.

Unfortunately, that means I only just now saw an April 30th piece called "Swan song for now," which I hurriedly put on as soon as I grasped the potential meaning of that title.

True enough, Morgenstern has stepped away from film criticism. 

It's a sad day. Or, it was a sad day seven weeks ago. 

In truth, I thought Morgenstern was more likely to die than to retire. He turns 90 in August, and though he hasn't lost a step in either his writing or his performance of his own words in his on-air reviews, many people have been retired for 25 years by the time they're 90, and many others have been dead for at least ten. 

The saddest part, I think, is that Morgenstern doesn't appear to be quitting -- "for now," he teases us -- because he can't do it anymore. It's not even because he doesn't want to do it anymore. It's because he doesn't recognize the version of the movies he sees today as they slip away from their once-central role in the culture.

And maybe only a little bit because he can't gladly adapt to this new-fangled method of watching movies at home through screener links ... which is more evidence, to him, that movies are no longer the thing that called him to this profession so many years ago.

I hope the podcast doesn't disappear from my app anytime soon, though I don't think it will. I can still go back and listen to all the reviews I neglected over the years ... even the ones for movies I haven't seen.

Morgenstern's retirement comes along at an interesting crossroads for me as well.

I have lately found the task of continuing to feed movie reviews to my site, ReelGood, to be perfunctory at best, arduous at worst. Not that we have tons of devoted readers awaiting each bit of new content, but I feel an obligation to keep posting one or two new reviews a week, to keep up what is increasingly a facade: the notion that the website is a vital entity powered by energetic critics and other film lovers. I do have a couple others who review for me, less frequently than I'd like, but I really need more, and I need those more to be more diverse -- at the moment, we're three privileged white men talking about the latest in movies.

I've known I need to bring in additional writers for the entire two years I've been running the site, a gig I picked up when the former editor got jack of it in a way I'm feeling all too keenly now. But when you are feeling a certain lethargy for the thing you are doing, you also feel a certain lethargy to make it any better. It's sort of easier to keep rolling along with the status quo than try to sell someone what you sort of think is a lie: that now is the time to try to increase the profile of a film review website. 

One issue is that I don't feel like I can really offer them much. I can't pay them, of course, so all I'm really offering is a chance for them to see their work in print, and maybe the occasional advanced screening or screener link, though those have decreased in quantity as well. 

The other is, what really is the future of movie reviews? And who is going to be its shepherd?

Increasingly, it doesn't feel like me. And that's perfectly fine. I would love nothing more than to hand over these reins to a young go-getter, preferably someone who is very different from me demographically, and stay on in a sort of senior film critic role, who writes only when he's really inspired to do so. 

But in order to find this person, first I have to do the legwork, posting in job spaces that are not very familiar to me. Then I have to find a person whose writing is good and who strikes me as a potential heir. And then I have to convince them this is a brand worth preserving and growing in a climate where cinematic attendance is dropping precipitously, and the center of our culture is television more than movies -- though television also faces its own challenges with its mind-boggling number of options and its difficulty in focusing around a single transportive program the whole culture can share. 

Complicating this moment in time is that I have to renew the site's domain, and it's not as simple as charging another year to my credit card. (So yes, I am losing money on this non-profit-generating enterprise as well.) 

The former editor I mentioned earlier had the site linked to his ABN, which stands for Australian Business Number. All Australian businesses must have one, even if that "business" does not generate any profit. I imagine they assume anyone who has an ABN is trying to make money, but that would be an incorrect assumption.

Anyway, when he dropped all things ReelGood he also saw no reason to keep his ABN afloat, and it has lapsed. The site that hosts our domain has recognized this and has sent me emails saying that the ABN needs to be renewed or transferred to a new registrant, and that the latter process could require some kind of bill of sale or letter on company letterhead that legitimizes it and proves that I'm not attaching the site to some rogue business that's going to turn it into a kiddie porn site or something. 

Ha ... as if ReelGood has "company letterhead."

When I first heard about this I thought it might be the thing that breaks me. Not that this is hard as such, but it does require my brain to work things out that are unfamiliar to me, and when I've got so much other house admin to wrangle with, children's school and playdate-related logistics to coordinate, and an upcoming U.S. trip to plan that contains a long-delayed memorial for my mother, who died in 2020, it just feels like it could be the straw that breaks the camel's back. Bye bye ReelGood, bye bye my ability to still describe myself as a professional film critic. 

I was seriously mulling this over. What if I just let this site die? When I agreed to take it on from the former editor, I came to it with the knowledge that I wanted to keep the brand alive to hand on to the next person, doing my duty to maintain it as a permanent entity -- whatever that means in this day and age. But it wasn't because he necessarily seemed to demand it. Sure, he'd prefer if the thing he created didn't disappear from the world. But more than anything, it was clear that he just wanted -- needed -- to get out. Whatever else happened after that point was somebody else's problem.

Well, that's not going to happen. Not yet.

Instead of getting a new ABN -- something that is probably easy but felt incredibly hard to my little brain -- I'm going to be able to use the existing ABN for the ReelGood Film Festival, which operates as a slightly different entity under the same name (and does actually generate profit, fancy that, though its organizers are hanging on by their fingernails as well, and didn't actually hold a festival in 2022 in anticipation of coming back stronger in 2023). 

Then in discussions with the tech staff at the domain hosting site, I found out that the type of domain I have -- I can't even be bothered to remember the term they used -- means that a more informal sort of change of registrant can occur on the site itself, without further documentary evidence like bills of sales or involving company letterheads.

I haven't done that yet, but I still have about 45 more days before the domain expires.

I'm hanging on. For at least a little while longer.

And if I ever have to ask myself why -- why I'm paying something like $150 a year, and maybe twice that considering that I am also paying for a podcast hosting site that I no longer use -- the answer is simple:

I still need to be a critic.

Sure, there's the fringe benefit of continuing to go to movies for free with my critics card, which costs me only $75 per year and returns probably four times that value. But the reality is, they might not even notice if ReelGood disappeared and might continue to renew my membership.

No, it's that I still need to be able to call myself a critic, and I still need it to be true.

You could argue that I stopped being able to call myself a professional film critic when I wrote my last paid review more than ten years ago. Truth is, I could never support myself on the $20 per review I made back then. Believe me, I tried in the year 2001, and it was a financial disaster. 

But the changing face of film criticism inevitably means that we redefine what it means to be a professional critic, and in reality, I can just drop the word "professional" and still be fine with it. Nowadays, so few critics make money doing what they do -- unless they have a outlet that still pays them, or they have a Substack, or they really know how to monetize their blog -- that we all understand we can call each other critics just by appearing in print for some organization that has some minimum level of reputability. 

Heck, I won't deny someone who wants to call themselves a critic even if they just write for their own blog. I'm inclusive like that, even if it does tend to diminish my own accomplishments, my own exclusive right to that particular title.

And the reality is, I still need this. Some part of my soul needs to define itself as a film critic to complete the professional picture of myself. It's the thing that keeps me from being just an IT guy who specializes in a program schools use to pay their creditors and do their attendance. And while I like that job quite a bit, and am good at it, I still need the words "film critic" to feature prominently in my obituary one day.

I also can't discount the possibility that I'll get the love back.

If we look at this blog, we know it goes through peaks and valleys. I'm in a bit of a valley right now. I actually have about three posts I want to write, two of which are actually the posts for my recurring series, but I just haven't found the time to pull up to the desk and write them. 

But that could just be because of all I have going on, the so many things that keep life from feeling like it will ever be simple again, and inevitably dull passions such as this one.

I have to remember that at the start of this year, I was writing so much, and subsequently interfacing so much with movies, that it's no exaggeration to say that I sometimes had six or seven posts already written and in the can, just waiting for a free day to be published. 

When that time comes again, I don't want to have already quit. 

Joe Morgenstern likely wasn't always "feeling it" through all the decades of his long career. But he always got it back. And when he finally, indisputably, determined he wasn't going to get it back, he was 89 years old, a reasonable time to stop doing anything in life that doesn't give you absolute joy.

And even he left the door open to the possibility of a return in some fashion.

Film critics. You can't kill us until you actually kill us. 

I'll try to remember that the next time I think of hanging it up. 

Pushing that Netflix new release up the hill each day

As a critic stuck in lockdown with movie theaters not open, I feel like I'm caught in a devil's bargain with Netflix that may last until I die.

I need to keep posting reviews of new movies on ReelGood for a theoretical audience whose level of engagement with the material is questionable at best, but with nothing new coming out in most Australian cinemas (about half the states are in some form of lockdown), I'm stuck with the streamers.

The other streamers do release new movies, and you better believe I flock to new material on Amazon or Disney+ or AppleTV+ with a sort of unseemly enthusiasm. I'll probably be watching and reviewing that new Amazon Cinderella this weekend.

But most of the time, I'm locked in a battle of wills with Netflix.

On the one hand, I am grateful to Netflix for providing me new grist for the mill. Since this pandemic started 18 months ago, I reckon a full half of the movies I've reviewed, if not more, were Netflix movies.

But that's also part of the problem.

Although film criticism is something that never ends -- until you decide you want it to, I suppose -- there's something especially Sisyphean about Netflix. The new releases come with machine-like regularity. Just when I think I'm on top of what's coming out, I see another new movie on Netflix's screen saver that seems worth throwing into the queue. 

And the thing is they all look promising, at least from a critic's perspective. Either because there's something intriguing about the concept, or because it stars someone famous, or because it's directed by someone famous, or just because it seems like it would be easy to write about.

That last describes He's All That, which I watched on Wednesday night and cranked out a review before bed in order to keep feeding this unquenchable beast.

Given that most of the sarcastic critical responses to this movie present themselves before you even start watching the movie, it's an easy enough review to write in the 30 minutes before you go to bed. Assuming that your preconceived notions of the film were proven correct -- and mine were -- the review basically writes itself. (And whether you think that shows is something you can judge by checking here.) 

But even if watching the movie and writing the review consumed only two hours of my life, which is a pretty good return on investment, it doesn't mean it's still not exhausting on some level. And not all of them come that easily. I think you can see my struggles a lot more clearly in the last Netflix movie I reviewed, Beckett, here. 

Although I liked that film a lot more than He's All That, the review was much harder to write. It's a sign of how burned out I'm getting that the review reads like an attempt to meet a certain word count rather than an insightful attempt to grapple with the film's themes and strengths and weaknesses. 

And in a real sign of how burned out I'm getting, I failed in my attempt to do a quick turnaround on Beckett last week. I had planned to do the same thing I did last night, watch it and crank out a review in the same night, last Thursday, when the film was already more than two weeks old. (I don't usually like posting a review of a new film much later than that.) But I only got the review about a third written by midday on Friday, and then it was just lost to the weekend. I didn't even post it until Tuesday of this week.

What's the cure for this obvious loss of inspiration, this obvious capitulation to a drudgery to my work that I usually never feel?

Well for one, maybe some weeks I just won't write two reviews, or God forbid, the three I sometimes squeeze in. My own standards are really the only ones I'm trying to meet. That theoretical reading audience doesn't give a rat's ass whether I write two or one or zero reviews in a given week. When there's one there, they'll read it if they care to, and won't if they don't.

But Netflix isn't my only problem. At this moment I actually have three pending reviews of movies I haven't watched, which I'm sort of compelled to watch because I asked for screeners for them for PR people. It would be only two, but one of my writers flaked on the third, which doesn't lessen our obligation to review the film if we want to keep a positive relationship -- or any relationship at all -- with the PR people. 

So not only are there the Netflix movies I feel like I should review because they will actually get eyeballs, because my readers can actually watch them right now while they are in lockdown, because they're movies people might be talking about anyway (like a remake of She's All That), but I also have to review these movies that I, in my infinite wisdom, have requested to watch, even though they are much less likely to be seen by our audience.

There's some endpoint to this, but I don't know what it is. Maybe staffing up more, so my writers will flock to these weekly or sometimes twice weekly new Netflix releases, while I can review only the ones I really care about. Or maybe it'll be just taking a little break for myself. My website isn't going to shrivel up and die if I go without updating it for two weeks. 

I don't know.

All I know is that right now I feel like Sisyphus. There's always a new movie to roll up that hill. It's just right now, even as I try to dig in my heels, I feel the gravity of that heavy object pushing me backwards down the hill I just ascended. If I'm not careful it could crush me. 

The role I can play in making things better

The past three weeks have been a time of real contemplation for thinking people. I define "thinking people" as those who realize the world has a problem with racism, and that it's time to do something about it. Oh, the rest of you may have brains that function, technically speaking, but I don't think you are really using them if you want things just to go back to the way they were, or worse yet, actively oppose efforts to raise up people of color and treat them with the kind of respect you would expect for yourself.

The contemplation is not around whether things can change, but how, and more importantly, how I myself can make that change.

Many of us have been guilty for too long of thinking that just by not being racist, we are doing our part. Sure, it's good to vote for candidates who will increase opportunities for minorities rather than limit them, and to walk around the world in a way that makes things better for such people rather than worse. But only doing the bare minimum, and congratulating yourself for doing that, is a type of privilege that we can now all recognize as problematic.

We can and should educate ourselves by reading the articles on social media that our friends post, by attending rallies, by making donations. Those things are all good, and they are all things that we all can do.

But today I want to focus on what I specifically, using the platforms available to me, can do.

Before I get into that, I want to say that I'm sorry I have not written about this earlier on this blog. I did touch on my feelings at the start of the month, when the justified outrage couldn't be contained to only peaceful protests and there were incidences of looting. It already feels like a long time ago that we were getting new video footage of police using heinous methods to control crowds. In fact, I'm almost a bit behind now as trans rights have temporarily taken the majority of headlines. (I'm actually planning to review a documentary that considers depictions of trans people on film, Disclosure, that drops on Netflix later this week.)

If I have not returned to the subject sooner, well, now you have some information on why. You now know that my mom was dying.

Because I'm not ready to return to frivolous posting on this blog quite yet, now is the time to speak up about the change I intend to make in the world. It's a change I have already been making for some time, and will continue to explore.

I need to back up again, though.

I live in Australia, a country that does some things very well (hey! almost no coronavirus!) and some things very poorly (hey! stealing indigenous children from their families to be raised in white families as recently as the 1970s!). Although the legacy of treatment of indigenous people is very bad, at least the government is doing something about it now. Before any public gathering -- I mean, any -- an organizer will give thanks to the traditional owners of the land on which the event occurs. The government has also made various formal apologies over the years.

Of course, that does not mean racism no longer exists in Australia. Ha. As if.

Since this is a film blog, today I want to talk about a form of racism that relates to the movie industry, and sad to say, is borne out of commercial practicality.

Of the films made by and starring people of color in the U.S., only a small percentage of them are released in theaters here. That's maybe 20 percent. So while we do get mainstream movies like What Men Want from last year, as well as most movies that explore the minority experience through an independent lens, I don't think a Madea movie has been released here in ages, if ever. The handful per year of black-focused romantic comedies with lesser known casts never see the light of day either. They may pop up on video, but a theatrical window is almost unheard of.

This has always saddened me. But at the same time, if these movies are not selling tickets, then you can understand why a distributor would not book a theatrical run for them. This is a business, and it hasn't been the position of a distributor -- though I hope this might change -- to book a movie just for the optics of it, knowing it will be a financial loser.

Now, that does not mean that Australian audiences do not want to watch movies about the experience of people with brown-colored skin. Any given year, there are a handful of movies that come out that document the experience of indigenous Australians, and many people I know make it a point to see those movies. Good on them.

But it still saddens me that certain types of American-focused films will play here -- in other words, those starring whites -- while certain others will not.

As a film critic, I'm not having any of it. And I have not been having any of it for years now.

As I now run the site I write for, ReelGood, I am now thinking as an editor as well as a critic. And thinking as an editor means running content that you believe will be relevant to your audience. It's running content that will increase clicks and eyeballs, rather than being content without much social media engagement just because it's the right thing to do or you are making a particular stance.

But that hasn't stopped me from continuing to write reviews of as many African American-centric films as I can. Whether or not my imagined audience of Australian hipsters have grown up on such movies, I have used the space available to me to show them that they should care about them, even if they don't.

Before I go too much further, I should point out that I'm not asking you to give me a medal here. I'm not some civil rights hero. I'm just trying to do my part, within my range of reasonable influence, and posting about it is my way of letting you know, and making you think about these issues too. And I'm not saying I couldn't do it better in the future, because I think I can. We all have room for improvement.

So dating back to when I reviewed movies for AllMovie from 2000 to 2011, I tried to get to as many movies made by and for African-Americans as I could. I guess I've always thought that these movies were a tad under-served by a film-reviewing establishment that was composed largely of white men. Especially in instances where people were fighting to review the movies they thought spoke to them most, movies made by and starring Tyler Perry got the short shrift.

For the better part of 20 years, I have been trying to be the exception to that rule.

Again not looking for a pat on the back. But this year alone I have reviewed a large number of movies aimed at African-American audiences, and in a sense, the pandemic has helped with this. The pandemic has pushed me to Netflix for most of the new movies I've reviewed, where I don't worry about whether these movies are getting released in Australian cinemas. They're getting released on Netflix, which means Netflix is endorsing that their audiences, everywhere, should see these movies. And I'm trying to do that too.

I thought about listing them, but I'm not going to do that. It's like listing all your black friends. Ick.

Now, there is a flip side to this. You still have to be a critic. You still have to say a movie is not good if it is not good. And I will never sacrifice my critical integrity, at least not knowingly. It pained me to admit that All Day and a Night, directed by the co-writer of Black Panther, was only a 5 out of 10. But admit it I did.

The thing is, allowing a movie made by and for African-Americans to be judged as you would judge any other film is the type of equality we need to fight for. It may seem better to follow the childhood wisdom "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all," and just leave the movie unreviewed. But is that really promoting equality? I think not. I think it's the film criticism equivalent of the "magical negro" and other well-meaning but ultimately heinous portrayals of minorities on film.

The key, I've discovered, is that if you do have something bad to say, say it with fairness, not with snark. I can understand any criticism a person has of a movie if they are respectful in that criticism. And though it's sometimes fun to write a snarky review, when the movie really deserves it, maybe that's not as valuable a form of criticism as we might think. Maybe the lesson is to be a bit more fair toward all films, so that your behavior toward minority-made does not stand out as tokenism.

I think some critics are afraid to review black films because they aren't willing to compromise their integrity, but are worried that they will dislike a disproportionate number of those films that they watch. And then, having to admit their feelings, they will look like someone who doesn't understand the black experience at best, or is racist at worst.

But you know what? Maybe we don't understand the black experience as well as we should. I mean, definitely we don't. Maybe watching more of these movies is a first step toward doing that. After all, Roger Ebert called movies a machine for generating empathy. When, if not now, has that been a more important function?

And you know what again? Having watched a good percentage of the movies aimed at African-American audiences over the years, I've learned that I am not significantly more likely to dislike a film made by a black director than one made by a white one. I hope that's obvious, but this is a time where even obvious things need to be said. We may have this perception that the film is not going to be as good because the black creative team does not have the finances or the experience that their privileged white counterparts have, which is of course true and part of the problem to begin with. But by watching and promoting the films when they are good, we can help bring the quality of the work to the collective attention of those who control the purse strings and the opportunities.

And even if you don't like a movie, there are ways to say that tastefully and tactfully, and maybe focus on the things you do like. Again, it's about respect. We don't have to focus on the failures of a particular film. We can focus on the promise the artist shows for the next one.

Reviewing Da 5 Bloods is not one of those instances of going out on a limb for an unknown black director whose work should be seen. Spike Lee has been directing for nearly four decades and is universally acknowledged to be an important voice in cinema, whether you gravitate toward his films or not.

But I include the poster for Da 5 Bloods because it is yet another film in this weird 2020 that has come out just at a time where its themes speak to our current moment, and need to be heard. I reviewed it just as I reviewed Prentice Penny's film Uncorked a couple months ago, and just as I will review the work of the next black director whose film hits Netflix or, God willing, maybe even an Australian theater.

Black lives matter, black voices need to be heard, and I'm going to continue trying to do right by both of them.

For a critic, the show must go on

I have taken, and continue to take, all the coronavirus changes in stride.

But one I didn't realize until it was quite late in the game was that I wouldn't be able to review new movies anymore.

Not so fast.

There are still new movies coming out, they just aren't coming to your local cineplex. Nothing is coming to your local cineplex, in fact, other than maybe a couple stray tumbleweeds.

But Netflix? That's a different story.

I've only reviewed a select few Netflix movies for ReelGood. It's not that I don't consider Netflix movies legitimate. I didn't once, but I gave that up some time ago.

Rather, it's that I don't usually notice exactly when something is dropping on Netflix, and I maintain the editor's old-school notion of having a "news peg" for a piece of writing. Although standards on this front have relaxed in recent years, I still consider movie reviews to consist of a first look at a hot new item -- or at least a first look in the country where I'm currently located. (Movies sometimes release here a full six months after they release in the U.S.)

But that's going to change. It's going to have to.

Not the reviewing a hot new item part, but the knowing when movies first release on Netflix part.

And so it was that last week I googled that article that'll tell you exactly what's releasing on the streaming service during a particular seven-day period. That's how I found The Platform, the Spanish language sci-fi horror satire whose poster you see above. You can read my review here.

And what a great find, as it turned out. I waited until its Friday night release to watch it, and gobbled that thing up right then and there. It's a cousin of the movies Cube and Circle, so if you liked those movies, here's another geometrically themed movie title for your consideration.

Anything else that came out last week? It's already ancient history. (I didn't really like the other choices, anyway.)

No one says I have to sacrifice my principles as a journalist just because it's coronavirus. Sure, I could go back and review Spenser Confidential or A Fall From Grace or Horse Girl, but those titles are already stale.

And that's okay, because if nothing else, Netflix will keep giving me the new and the fresh.

Films themselves are a bit like a virus, fighting to stay alive despite attempts to extinguish them. They want to be seen. And seen they will be. And reviewed they will be. By me.

No, I won't be able to see Mulan, or Wonder Woman 1984, or probably even Tenet, which is not scheduled to come out until July.

But the next Platform?

I'll be ready, my pen poised over the paper.

Metaphorically speaking, anyway.