Just what the world needs - another blog.
You may have found your way here from one my other blogs, Houston Ramblings or my Joe Henry blog, or from somewhere else entirely. In any case, thanks for stopping by.
A little background... After six years of blogging about music, I find myself wanting to explore a new area. Music has become highly segmented, and worse yet, I feel like my own tastes have increasingly rigid. Not that I mind -- it's simply the byproduct of spending most of my life as a pretty serious music hound. I still regard myself as such, but there's a certain preaching-to-the-choir quality to my blogging over the past year that really leaves me with little else to say generally.
Film is what's been occupying my attention lately. A move to hi-def this past fall ('bout time, I guess) has me revisiting my favorite movies with renewed vigor, and I find that I spend more time mulling over films in my mind than I generally have with music recently. The thing I enjoy most about studying cinema is I just feel there's so much more to explore than I've found in music for a while. That being said, it's not my ambition to present myself as a film critic, even in any small way. I look at film as a subject that still holds a great deal of mystery for me, and if I'm going to spend time writing about something, it might as well be something that I haven't entirely worked out for myself.
But I should acknowledge some pretty significant biases on my part. Here's a short list:
- Like everyone else born in 1972, I was brought up with Star Wars as my cinematic framework - for better and for worse.
- I love French cinema, am learning to love Italian films and still struggle with a lot of classic Asian films.
- Goodfellas > The Godfather.
- Sandra Bullock is the antichrist.
- Daniel Day-Lewis is the shit.
- Ingmar Bergman is kinda like Mt. Everest for cinephiles - you really gotta get in shape for that climb.
- The Age of Innnocence > Gangs of New York.
- Gone With The Wind is okay.
- Up > Wall*E.
- I buy a LOT of Criterion discs.
- The modern masters:
- Quentin Tarantino
- Paul Thomas Anderson
- Wes Anderson
- Richard Linklater
- Steven Soderbergh
- Todd Haynes
- Joss Whedon
- Butch Cassidy > The Sundance Kid (but just by a hair).
- The aging masters:
- Martin Scorsese
- David Lynch
- Terence Malick
- The Coen Brothers
- Raiders of the Lost Ark is the Casablanca of my generation.
- Listening to Director's Commentary is my idea of fun.
- The Rolling Stones > The Beatles.
- I really like The Clone Wars on Cartoon Network. There - I said it.
I'll warn you also that I rarely head to the movie theater to see current releases. There's plenty in my video library and Netflix queue to keep me busy. I've spent enough time in empty theaters to appreciate watching a good movie by myself. My wife's tastes overlap mine on occasion, but she's generally happy to read a book while a watch something for the fourth or fifth time. She really loves Boogie Nights though, and that's plenty to keep the spark alive.
The target audience for this blog is pretty much me. I'm more interested in working out what draws me to certain films and directors than I am in checking the hottest indie flick. If you're looking for the broadest possible survey of the cinema universe, you probably won't find much here to interest you. But if you read something you like - or even better, something you completely disagree with - by all means, drop me a comment or an email. I do like a good debate.
BTW, if you are a reader of my other blogs, this isn't the end of those endeavors by any means. After all, the world is still full of people who've never heard of Joe Henry.
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