Shinola

I started this blog five years ago as a way of looking back at a pivotal year in my life as a movie lover: 1982, that amazing year that brought us The Thing, E.T., Poltergeist, Blade Runner, and the remake of Cat People (a movie I loved above all others for a long time).

This post explains why I decided to do it, and the 2012 archives are about the movies I saw in 1982. Well, almost all of them. I stopped when I got a new job that didn't really facilitate the time needed to write both this blog and my reviews of new movies. About a year later, that job ended, I got another one, and continued to write movie reviews for the San Francisco Appeal, and then SFist.

Last week, the owner of the Gothamist network of sites, which included SFist, decided to shut the whole business down after the New York writers voted to unionize.

The Lord does NOT love a working man.

I've decided to take those bitter lemons and try and make some sweet, sweet lemonade by revamping this blog and using it as a place to write about both new movies, (until I, hopefully, get another gig for those reviews), and old movies, (whenever the fancy strikes me).

I'm a lot luckier than some of my fellow SFist writers in that writing for the site was always a perk for me, and not my career. They've lost their jobs; I just lost the fun of contributing.

So I'm going to try and continue to have some of that fun here for a little while. I'm sure quality will take a hit since I won't have the amazing Eve Batey editing my work anymore; there will probably be a lot more swearing and bad grammar. You've been warned.

Finally, if you've stumbled upon this site and would like to read more of my previous reviews, I'm on Rotten Tomatoes, my San Francisco Appeal archives are here, and my SFist archives are currently available here, (for now...)

Stay tuned...

Birth of a Movie Muller

I've always loved movies, but I can pinpoint exactly when that love became a bit of an obsession down to the date: January 1st, 1982.

It was on the beginning of that new year that I decided to start writing down the titles of all the movies I'd seen, when I'd seen them, and rate them. I had an old ledger book, something I believe I found in a dumpster across the street from our apartment, (a tale for another time), and it seemed a good enough journal for my obsession. (See image of page one above.)

I decided my ratings would be based on a scale of one through five, with one being "Poor" and five being "Great!" Since I was a 12-year-old, my cinematic tastes weren't exactly refined, and I think I ended up giving out a lot more fives than I would (and do) today, but hey. I was a lot more easily entertained then.

Along with the ledger book, I also started to keep a scrap book I called the "Genre Book," in which I'd paste in movie reviews and newspaper ads from what I considered genre films--those being anything that would be categorized as horror, fantasy, or science fiction.

That book fell by the wayside after about two years, but it is with some equal bits pride and embarrassment that I can tell you I kept track of the movies I saw, and rated them in that same ledger book, for 30 years. Including this year, as a matter of fact.

I'm not giving up the practice, mind you. I've just run out of pages in that book, and I figure it's time to move that bit of anal-retentiveness to the computer, most likely in the form of a boring spreadsheet. (I wish there was some kind of template that could duplicate the pages of my beloved ledger book.)

I felt the closing of that ledger book deserved some kind of recognition, and hence, this blog was born.

For the next year I am going to look back at those movies I saw and rated 30 years ago in 1982, and write about them. I'll do my best to remember the experience of those first viewings as best I can--I often have great recall about just what theater I went to see these things in--but I know for others the memory is going to be a bit muddled, and my mullings vague.

But I'm looking forward to this looking backwards, and I hope anyone who stumbles upon this blog will join in on the mullings, since that level of interactivity is something my 12-year-old brain would have only deemed possible in the movies.