Films and Feelings

     So, I guess I’ll start out by saying that … I wasn’t kidding last year when I said I was gonna do better with reviews, folks.       This is the first time in three years that my review count landed in the double digits, and I reached that benchmark barely past the year’s halfway point. My total this year landed at 19. This breaks my previous record of 17 from 2021 and also outpaces the total haul from 2024 and 2023 combined.       Once again, " WICKED " pulled through as the biggest contributor this year, and I wouldn't have had that any other way. These last two years of active anticipation have been some of the most gratifying I've ever had as a person who feels investment in moving pictures. I'm even more excited, though, for this duology to be folded into film history: that thing I really love writing about.   I will always regret not reviewing The Holdovers (2023)      In the past, I have let m...

    Let me start this party by admitting ...  I really dropped the ball on reviews this year, folks. Not counting my Percy Jackson response , which in practice plays more like one of my essays anyways, there was a six-month gap between reviews with Wish last November and The Fall Guy this May.       More than once during that drought, I took my notebook to the theater and came back with a page full of notes, but for various reasons I was unable to piece together anything. It didn't help also that deliveries this year were comparatively sparse, what with the strikes strangling the production line ...  I will try to do better this year. (For those curious, I am also going to try to review the final season of  Stranger Things , like I did with the 4th season, when it drops sometime this year. That will all depend on a lot of things, including the method by which Netflix chooses to release these episodes.)      My reviews di...

    Confession: I spend all year waiting specifically to design the annual collage for my "Year in Review." What can I say? I really like commemorating things.       And there was a lot to commemorate this year for Films and Feelings because, even if my overall post count was slightly lower than usual, I did on occasion experience that fleeting sensation of being proud of the work I put out.     My lower review count is probably the biggest reason for my desert of posts.  I only put out nine reviews in 2023, and only three in the last half of the year. This is only barely over half of what I pulled off two years ago. (I was going to review The Color Purple to get me into the double digits, but Christmas day ended up being a busy one for me.) This year's top-performing review was for this summer's live-action remake of The Little Mermaid , as it should have been--I doubt whether I have ever subjected a film to more intense scrutiny before, or...

    Well, this was my Return of the Jedi/King year, but unfortunately, I'm probably going to franchise this thing until I die ...       Every year that I'm still putting stuff out is a banner year for me, but I don't want to undersell the effort I put into Films and Feelings during 2022. Arguably my biggest milestone this year was putting out my 100th post , commemorated as a list of my favorite movie each year for 100 years, but this was also a big year for essays. My essay round-up this year:      -" My Crush on Sarah Conner is Hard to Explain " A summary of all the flagship and subtle ways that Sarah Conner of the "Terminator" franchise advanced female representation in action films.     -" The Belle Complex " A study of how the mania surrounding Disney's Belle as a pillar of righteousness contributed to the incoherency of the 2017 remake of Beauty and the Beast .     -" Meet in St. Louis: The Melancholy Window of Nosta...

            I recently came across  a clip from a lecture  that filmmaker extraordinaire, Orson Welles, gave to a class of aspiring filmmakers. The relevant bit has Welles advising his students to  not  watch so many movies and to allow one's storytelling to be informed by one's own experiences.      What a time for me to stumble across this bit of counsel ...       I wonder if this advice, should we choose to accept it at all, is applicable more to film makers  than to film  critics . My incentive for exposing myself to as many films as possible, even during times when I'm not literally watching a new film a day, is because I want to have a wide base of knowledge for the subject I claim to be an expert in.      That said, I have come to observe the limitations of inhaling too much media ...      If you haven't heard, I set a goal this year to accelerate my s...