Monday 31 December 2018

#FilmReview Hiatus


Short version:

I'm done with reviewing everything I see at the cinema. For the foreseeable future, at any rate. It's become too time-consuming to try and find interesting things to write about things which are largely uninteresting, especially given that I'm sitting through the films in the first place.
But I've covered a fair old few over the years, so now's the time to knock it on the head.

Cinema visits will continue and I'll be compiling some manner of micro-review over on the Twitter and the Facebook. Film-talk will carry on in those same places (mostly Twitter, to be honest), and I'd love for you to come over and say hello (if you haven't already).

This won't be the final blog post at World Of Blackout, but at this point I'm not planning anything in terms of frequency, tone or content. Stuff will appear as it appears.

So long and thanks for all the clicks!

…mañana!



Long version:
Disclaimer: I'll apologise now for the repetition of the words "film" and "movie" that follow. I generally try and minimise and balance the count of those out across an article, but in a block of text such as this, it becomes self-defeating. Whatever.

Ah, you kept going down the page. Lovely.
Take a seat, dear reader, and pour yourself something from the bar.
Ice is in the bottom.

And so. It arose, properly, from a conversation I had with a close friend, in a London hotel bar in December 2010. After a day's catching up and general carousing, the conversation strayed onto the creative arts, media and our own respective online presences, such as they were. At that point I'd had World Of Blackout on the go for a couple of years, but there was no real form or direction to it, just amateurish whimsy posted at irregular intervals. This wasn't a film-review blog.

Yet there were a handful of film reviews in there. I'd had a Cineworld Unlimited card since mid-2007, and would occasionally post observations about what I'd seen - again with no real form or direction. I'd even done a brief stint through Facebook of watching twelve movies in twelve days and writing about them (later ported to the blog as a point of reference), which seemed like an outlandish feat at the time. Film was something which interested me, but certainly wasn't a main focus. This wasn't a film-review blog.

Anyway, I mentioned in passing how I liked writing, but often struggled waiting for inspiration to strike. A blog needs a broad subject after all, it can't just be a stream of consciousness or an online diary of inane events no-one but the author will care about. My companion remarked how he'd enjoyed the few film reviews I'd posted sporadically through the year. He said I should do more of those, in that loose way you encourage a friend while in casual, semi-drunk conversation.

And with that, reader, a light went on. Challenge accepted. As those who know me well will attest, I'm not one for half-measures. I decided at that point to rate and review everything I watched at the cinema, from January 1st onwards. All things. Any cinema. Plus some home-viewings as well, probably, but they wouldn't be the focus. The idea was that this would a) provide me with a regular stream of consistently themed, yet tonally varied, source content, and b) help me focus my hobby and appreciate film more clearly. After all, why have an Unlimited card if you're going to see movies while they're brand new, without any sort of analysis or evaluation? You might as well be watching them later on television and saving yourself £16 a month. This was all before Letterboxd.

So, everything would be picked apart. Those I liked, those I didn't, even multiple visits to re-watch the same thing. Because if you're not getting something new in seeing a movie more than once, then why are you doing it? Even if it's the repetition which makes it better, think about why that applies to some movies and not others.

But this still wasn't a film-review blog. Other people did those, I reasoned, and they were far more focused with greater knowledge and deeper appreciation than me. I was just a guy trying to really hammer the Unlimited card and have something to show for it other than knowing the cinema staff to chat to.

And so it began. 2011 saw me go to the pictures 93 times. 2012 was a neat 100 times, 2013 was 137, and onto 2014 (145), 2015 (157), 2016 (158) and 2017 (142). As I write, it's September 2018 and we stand at 95. That's a lot of words written. Reader, it became a film-review blog. Slowly, the header-structure of articles took shape, social media feeds were introduced, the 'branding' morphed into something more theatrical, and the amount of non-review content all but disappeared. No news, little opinion, mainly just reviews. No firm structure or word-count to aim for, just a broadly consistent level of summary and readability (although some of you would question this, I know). I quickly settled into my preferred discussion format of too many superfluous adjectives*1 and sentences which are slightly too long to comfortably read (and let's not forget my love of parentheses*2).

As well as spending too much time sitting in the dark at my local, World Of Blackout became 'my thing'. It was what I did, in fact it still is. "Hi, I'm Ian, I spend too much time analysing movies you'll probably never watch". I've met some fantastic and amazing people, online and in The Meatspace, as a result of writing online. I'm proud to call them friends directly as a result of 'my thing'. And that's fine, we all get a thing. But this is a time-consuming thing. And who among us has time to spare, in the 21st century?

The problem is that while I type quickly, I write slowly. Over all the years I've been doing this, I still haven't developed a method of sitting down and banging out a review in twenty minutes. Even with taking notes in the cinema (yeah, I'm that guy), by the time I've translated my scrawl, formed my bullet-points into coherent sentences, formed those into a roughly linear breakdown of the piece, assembled the header and footer information and typed the whole thing up in hard HTML (my own decision for greater format-control, and not one which slows me down that much to be honest) while constantly tweaking and self-editing, the average review takes longer to publish than the film did to watch.

And frankly, many of them aren't worth that (although a warning not to see Pixels will always be worth any amount of time taken to create it). The moment a backlog starts to build up (like when I watch four things back to back on a #FilmDay), it becomes less of a hobby and more an obligation. One which I imposed upon myself out of curiosity and boredom.

When I started (or committed to) the film-review blog, I didn't have an end-point in sight (because why would I?). I just wanted to get more out of movies. That's definitely happened, as I can't watch anything now without half of my brain forming soundbites for the pull-quote I'll use in the social media link. But life never remains static and I have less time these days to be repeatedly analysing Mark Wahlberg's inability to emote. Yet on he continues, almost as if he's not reading. Probably too busy getting up in the middle of the night for happy-time, or something.

Well, I've had enough. I'm not flouncing out of the internet, closing or even abandoning my accounts, it's just that for an OCD-angled brain like mine, this seems like a good time to hit Pause.

As of Sept 13th 2018, I have rated and reviewed one thousand titles.

That's not 1,000 blog posts, and it's not 1,000 review posts when you include rewatches. It doesn't even count anthology-season roundups or cramming weekends. It's one thousand times where I've sat down to take a look at the specific thing I've just watched.

This seems like a good time to hit Pause.

So, as noted up top, this won't be the final post at World Of Blackout. And there will, in all likelihood, be some movie reviews at some point in the future. I'm still writing at Set The Tape, general film chatter continues on the Twitter and the Facebook, and I'm currently compiling a template for quick-and-dirty micro-reviews (because we all know I can't just switch it off completely), which will be posted to both. And I'll probably continue to link to those from the Review Index page, for those of you who check the site first and the socials second.

This is not farewell, it's just let's see what happens next.

Always in motion, is the future.

…te veo, chico!




*1 Yes, that is the joke. Thank you. [ BACK ]

*2 Oh and the footnotes! Where would I be without the footnotes? [ BACK ]


DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.

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