Early in 2018, I made a vow to do better with my movie blog site. This very site that you are at right now. Most of you probably just wandered through here and have no bearing on how devoted I was to the site at one point in time. I posted a daily review of a movie or television series or some such related material for over two years and multiple entries a week for the 8 years prior to that.
Then, in 2014, my wife gave birth to our fourth child. I somehow made it through the daily entries that first year, but keeping up that pace while remaining available to my family in my role as a father became overwhelming, and the reviews began to peter off until I was going months between entries. My site visits were diminishing to numbers below even my first few years’ of online presence. Then, I fell to only a few entries a year. In 2018, I redoubled my efforts to make regular entries. I did OK for the first few months, and then Avengers: Infinity War happened, and I wasn’t sure what to say about it that wasn’t already being said all over everywhere.
There is now so much input about movies online that it’s easy to say, “What’s the point?” When I started this, the internet was filling up with self-appointed critics who felt they could be critics just because they liked movies, or–with growing intensity–didn’t like movies for the most part but once did. Today, even the fans of certain movie franchises approach them with disdain. The industry itself is increasingly self-critical, falsely claiming of its own output that certain types of movies aren’t being made anymore, despite the fact that those same types of movies dominate the awards circuit, which itself is criticized–both from outside and within the film industry–for ignoring too many popular and mainstream movies. Even great artists have made it common practice to tear down other artists for playing the game of the movie industry despite the fact that without such efforts the industry that everyone fears is losing its future would most certainly collapse all that much faster. The whole business of film criticism and film industry analysis is so full of contradiction and hypocrisy these days that it has become just a cacophony of voices screaming at each other and ignoring the very art of what they do that they all say is so important.
It is exasperating.
And yet, despite the fact that my voice is far too small to be heard above the dissonance, I feel a greater need for saner voices to contribute. And so here, on the final day of 2019, what some feel is the end of the decade, while others argue 2020 is actually the final year of the decade… Do you see how everything always gets tangled up in the din? Here today, I once again am compelled to make an effort to continue my contribution to this ongoing discussion through the A Penny in the Well blog site.
There will be some changes and a few retroactive entries. Since I have posted nothing on this site in 2019, that means I never posted my favorite movies and music of 2018. It’s really silly that I didn’t post the music, because I had the thing nearly finished in January and just never got around the writing my very last section. I may have been reluctant because I changed my format so vastly last year from any of my previous favorites instalments. As far as the favorite movies, well, that was just a mess. I didn’t make any choices, and so the list just grew and grew, so I’m not sure what to do about that one. I’ll probably edit it down a bit and just post it without commentary. Anyway, you’ll be seeing those two entries in the next couple of days, which will probably be confusing since they will be for 2018’s music and movies. My music list for 2019 is pretty much ready to go, so I’ll post that one pretty quick here. I still have a few more movies to watch before I release 2019’s movie list, so that will probably be in a couple of weeks, but I promise to get it out before the Oscars, which are much earlier this year (Feb. 9). That should be a better deadline than putting it off until almost March, as I did last year.
I did try to update formats for my film obsession this year by launching a podcast. Under a version of the moniker A Penny In the Well, it may be too lo-fi for some people, but the nature of capturing impressions of movies while they’re still pretty fresh in our heads makes it kind of necessary to go the lo-fi route. It involves getting my kids impressions of the movies we see together and has been difficult to organize as a result. We still have a couple of eps in the can that haven't been released yet. Probably our best one is the one we did on Rambo: Last Blood. It kind of plays like an episode of How Did This Get Made? I plan to drop that one in a week or so, since it’s now on home video.
The podcast will also be going through a few changes in order to make it a little easier to produce. I won’t restrict it to my kids opinions, since it's so hard to get us all together at the same time to talk. I’ll be posting more solo impressions and other types of film topic discussions. We’ll be dropping the clunky Film Generations portion of the name as well. I will be posting the individual podcast episodes on the blog to provide another trafficked avenue within which it can be found.
So it sounds like A Penny In the Well will have a refreshing new year. Fingers crossed.
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