Year in Review: 2020

January 1st, 2020 was one of the most stressful days of my life.

For weeks, January 2nd had been marked in red ink as the premiere date for this weird new project. My first three essays for my new blog were all spruced and pruned and ready for exhibition. I had spent months eyeing this date from a comfortable, hypothetical distance. Hanging over the precipice was giving me vertigo.

It's not like I wasn't used to writing about film. This is more or less what I did for three years working for a film degree. Goodness, I have notebooks as far back as 5^th grade full of writings about favorite films--I've technically been doing this for a long time. But this is the first time I’ve shared my work with the public. And when you're writing for an audience, you feel transparent. Naked.

But I took a step into the oblivion anyway, and this blog has been a labor of love for me over the last year. Easily one of the best decisions I've ever made.

If you're interested

Some interesting statistics about this year: Counting this piece, I have a total of 32 posts on my blog thus far. Two of these are Professors Picks, eleven of these are film reviews, and eighteen of these are essays (sixteen if you count all three segments of my Pixar series as one essay). My most popular essay is currently “We Killed Judy Garland” while my most popular overall piece is my review of this year’s Onward, which outperforms the next most popular post by nearly double and still gets regular views to this day.

So where do I go from here?

Film essays have always been the meat and bread of my workload, and they will continue to be my priority. I've marked a few films and subjects that I'd like to get around to this year, but I try not to commit to anything too far an advance. Some of my favorite projects this year have been surprises, and I want to leave room for more of those if I can. The first essays for the year, however, are already well into production. The first of these, I will promise here and now, you can expect on January 19th.

Professor's Picks have been a very recent addition to the menu. I was originally starkly reluctant to do any kind of listicle. I go to titanic lengths to not fall into clickbait antics with this blog and, full confession, I wrote off that entire genre of writing as far too lowbrow to ever have a place on this blog. It took some convincing from my editing team, but I saw an opportunity to use this mode of writing as another opportunity to creatively write about film. I'm happy to have add Professor's Picks to my business model. I don't know exactly how often I'll put out a new one, but expect to more of them in the future.

Actual notes for my review of Onward

Film reviews are going to be an interesting game this upcoming year. Given any non-pandemic year, my media diet is usually overwhelmingly composed of films released theatrically. But the last day I was in the theater was March 13, and even now as the lights appear on the horizon we still don't quite know how long until theatergoing becomes a regular activity again.

There’s no question about whether or not I will continue reviewing movies, or whether or not I will be back in the cinemas once the coast is clear. What I don’t know quite yet know is how much attention I will give to streaming movies once theaters are back on the table. I try to support the cinema as the beating heart of modern entertainment, but I also don’t want to be a purist and ignore the plethora of quality entertainment available to streaming. I'm just as curious as you to see how it all plays out.

When you’re writing for an audience, you feel more responsibility to write quality content. You want to write something that will not only be worth your reader’s time but will also maybe change him or her for the better. (Have you become a better person since reading about why we all just need to give Russell Crowe’s singing a break? Let me know in the comments.) I take this platform very seriously and hope that you guys find it half as rewarding as I do.

Thanks everyone who has followed me this far. I plan on doing this for a long time.

--The Professor

Hugo (2011)

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