Okay, it’s true: I haven’t been blogging much lately. But that doesn’t mean I forgot how! Here then, I submit my selection of Prime Day deals. And “deals.”

There are people who are much better at this than I am, and you should go reward their know-how by using their affiliate links. Here’s who they are:

• My pal Ryan Gallagher always finds the best deals. Follow him on Twitter today, and forever.
• The Wirecutter is a site whose daily grind is finding cool stuff to link to on Amazon. They got this. Follow @WirecutterDeals and @sweethomedeals on Twitter.
• Gawker is tearing up the deal-finding too.
• Jason Kottke has a concise rundown.

But I think I bring a certain panache to this game. So without further ado, affiliate links¹ for you to click on:

• Harry Potter 1-7 Audio Collection – All the audio CDs for the US version read by Jim Dale. These babies go for $390 regularly, but come 1:00pm (central time, I guess?) they should cost less.
• The Complete Works of Primo Levi – I’ve never read any Primo Levi, but here’s all of it, complete! Amazon reviewer “She Treads Softly” calls this the “definitive English translation collection.” $60 right now, but at 1:05pm, probably even less money.
• The Harper Lee Collection: To Kill a Mockingbird + Go Set a Watchman (Dual Slipcased Edition) – If you remove the slipcase, you could use these two novels as bookends, much as they bookended Harper Lee’s writing career/life. At 1:05pm, it’s safe to assume these will cost less than the $33 they’re going for regularly.
• 85 Years of the Oscar: The Official History of the Academy Awards – Screw you, 86th, 87th and 88th Academy Awards; get your own book! Uh, actually they will in a few years when 90 Years of the Oscar comes out. I bet you’ll pay full price for that future Robert Osborne tome when it comes out. You’ll be kicking yourself because you could have just bought this one on Prime for less than $48 at 7:30pm.
• The Giver Quartet boxed set – I never read The Giver and only just now learned there’s enough books to make a whole box set. Who knew? It used to be $18.82, now it’s only $16.38!
• Nora The Piano Cat – This seems like the sort of thing you should rightly be able to watch on YouTube for free right now. In fact, you can. But if you must pay for a DVD of it, why not save $2? Today only!

More to come…maybe.

When I saw Yorgos Lanthimos’s breakout film, Dogtooth, I knew two things immediately: that I very much liked it and that I couldn’t find a way to describe it. I pawned the review off to my friend Sunrise Tippeconnie, whose words helped bring some clarity to the film for me.

I still haven’t seen Alps, Lanthimos’s 2011 follow up to Dogtooth, but I did finally head to the theater this weekend to catch the filmmaker’s English-language feature debut, The Lobster. While there are some little pleasures in the film, namely the performances, the film itself is incredibly bleak. Things go from bad to worse for our hero, with nothing learned except the futility of trying to escape your inevitable condition.

The premise is simple, and yet not simple enough. In the world of The Lobster, all humans must be paired off, either in a hetero- or homosexual coupling. If you cannot find a mate in the time allotted, you will be turned into an animal of your choosing. David, played by Colin Farrell, is our window into this world.

Once his marriage is finished, David is sent to a hotel with other single people of all ages. He is given forty-five days to find a new mate. In the hotel, everyone is given the same clothes to wear, the same food to eat. There are instructional assemblies on the benefits of married life. Singles are forced to introduce themselves from a stage, explaining anything unique about them. Pairings most often occur between people who share a physical trait, such as near-sightedness or having a lisp.

Meanwhile, there are revolutionaries who live out in the woods known as “loners.” They prefer to live as single people, shunning any possibility of coupling. In this society, they are criminals. The single people seeking a mate at the hotel hunt them down with tranquilizer darts, dragging them back to be paired off. Each loner you bag gets you an extra day before you are turned into an animal.

And so David goes through every strata of this world. He pairs off with the “Heartless Woman,” Angeliki Papoulia, who earns her title in spades. When their relationship goes south, he escapes to the woods to be with the other loners, where he meets the “Short Sighted Woman,” played by Rachel Weisz. They fall in love despite the dangers around them, all of which come to a head in the film’s final cringing moments.

If there is a moral to The Lobster, I would peg it as “you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” Either you’re forced into a loveless marriage so society will accept you, or you live a life of strict solitude. David says he enjoys being a loner because he can masturbate whenever he wants. It feels like a commentary on our actual world’s stance on those who prefer to stay single or avoid having kids, which is to say such a life is frowned upon in so many cultures. Yet the alternative, living in the woods under the strict gaze of a monomaniacal leader, Léa Seydoux, is no better. Life as a loner may be a step above being forced into marriage (or becoming an animal, for that matter), but it is equally destructive. Which is why this movie plays so bleak. There are no good options.

Colin Farrell’s David feels like the film’s weakest character. He has an almost passive role in this strange world Lanthimos and co-screenwriter Efthymis Filippou have built. Things just sort of happen to him with short bursts of his motives and emotions dripping out. Farrell’s performance fits the bill. There is a quirk to him that’s implacable. Does he see this world as we do? Or is he more calculating. Lanthimos is sure to keep him a cipher. The world rolls over David. Even when he rails against it, some hideous tradeoff is lurking in the corner.

There is something much more authentic about the way Rachel Weisz portrays her Short Sighted Woman. Her whole body, especially her eyes, tell the story of where she comes from, the weight of her burden and her need to break free. It is an excellent performance that just gets better from scene to scene. Mind you, I think I’m reacting to her character, which I much prefer to David.

I thought, upon hearing the film’s premise, there was a chance it would be a work of magical realism. The main conceit, if you don’t find love you turn into an animal, sounds like some sort of wizardry. Far from it. If you don’t find a mate, you undergo a surgical procedure to put your brain into the animal you will become. It is medical, not magical, and yet another factor that keeps the film so dark and unforgiving. It’s dystopic science fiction, emphasis on the dystopic.

Perhaps The Lobster caught me at the wrong time in my life. Maybe I’m biased against it because I’m engaged to be married. Maybe there is so much bleakness in our actual world that I’d prefer to avoid it in realms cinematic. Or maybe there just isn’t that much to The Lobster after all. All of the above can easily be true.

{% youtube izMu4biA828 %}

I didn’t think I’d end up watching the whole thing, but this is mesmerizing and soothing in a way I didn’t think watching some guy drive up a hill could be. And I love the gloves and goggles.

(via The Awesomer.)

Much as I’ve tried over the years, I remain skeptical of Medium. Here’s me, two-and-a-half years ago, on the company’s then custom of paying name freelance writers to publish on the site:

What if I told you you could be published alongside writers from (but not in) The New Yorker for the low low price of free? In a nut, that’s Medium: a slick, magazine-like publishing and reading platform that writers should be so lucky to contribute to.

The paid writers bring their clout to Medium, the platform, in order to convince unwitting writers that they should contribute to Medium, the magazine, for free. The paid authors are thus pied pipers of a sort, luring not the readers but the writers out of the web and into Medium.

Now Medium has gone beyond bringing writers into the fold and has started subsuming whole websites. This week site introduced Medium for Publishers. Sites can bring their own domain, logo and content into Medium. In exchange you get a Medium-themed site built to be fast on mobile and access to “[a]n engaged network of millions of readers,” all for the unbeatable price of free. Not only will you not be charged for hosting the site on Medium, but the company is opening up a few revenue streams as well:

• Promoted Stories (basically a #branded nom de guerre for “Native Advertising”)
• Creative Partnerships (some word salad diarrhea that I think means “Advertorial” but I can’t quite tell)
• Member-Supported Publishing (a paywall made simple)

I dare you to try and make sense of Medium’s explanation of Creative Partnerships. “Medium’s Creative Strategy team works with the brand to set a campaign vision, ideates the content, and coordinates production.” If you can swallow the word “ideates” and keep it down you’ve got a stronger stomach than me. That said, Medium promises “[t]hese opportunities are completely opt-in,” so let’s just pretend they don’t exist.¹

I found out about Medium for Publishers the other day when Neil Miller tweeted a big update about his site, Film School Rejects. They’re moving over to Medium. Here are the reasons Neil gives:

…it breaks down to a few important points:

1. It’s going to be a much nicer experience for our readers.
2. The site will be free of annoying banner ads.
3. We’ll be able to continue to operate independently, pay our writers and grow our audience.
4. The site will be insanely fast.

As he explains the previous Film School Rejects loaded in 15 seconds, but on Medium it loads in a mere 2. I gave the old site a test using Pingdom’s speed tester and got about 5.5 seconds with a whopping 793 requests and 7.4 MB.² Testing the same article on Medium: 1.13 seconds and a mere 40 requests totaling in 820 KB. Definitely a step in the right direction.

I think Neil’s experience and reasoning is what’s going to attract a lot of publishers to Medium. Having a slow-to-load site dependent on disruptive banner ads has long been a mainstay of web publishing, especially for upstart sites like Film School Rejects. To make a living, sites often made a deal with the devil, trading load times (and often good taste) for diminishing returns on ad impressions.

Web advertising has been severely broken for years. There are other ways for a publication to make money, but it’s hard to find something that works at your scale.³ I’m glad Film School Rejects’ banner ads have gone the way of the dodo (and I wish Neil and FSR’s stable of talented, thoughtful writers nothing but success at their new home), but it’s possible they and other publications are making a deal with a different kind of devil: Medium.

My original problem with Medium, that they used the stature of their paid freelancers to lure in writers on whose backs they could build a platform, has now been extended to whole publications. Instead of prominent writers it’s prominent publishers, namely Medium’s game-changing whale, Bill Simmons, that attract others to bring their words inside the Medium tent. Today, anyone can start a publication on Medium, but only some of them will be able to earn revenue from it.

The “Promoted Stories” ads look to be the main way sites, like Film School Rejects, will make their money. I called them “native content” earlier, and they’re by far the most native of content one can imagine. If I understand it: imagine a Medium publication that’s run by a brand. Brands can buy placement in other publications, advertising their newest content.

The initial placement of Promoted Stories will be in the footer of posts in participating publications, who will receive the majority of the associated revenue. As we develop Promoted Stories further we may offer additional placements.

It’s a different kind of banner ad. More discreet and faster loading, yes, but when you land on the brand page it’s going to look…exactly like everything else on Medium. If a reader is confused as to whose site they are reading, it’s working effectively.

As far as I can tell, the only way a publisher ever has to “pay” to be on Medium is when they charge readers for a membership. Over $10 per month, Medium keeps 20% of any subscription revenue.⁴ Otherwise, publications pay nothing except to keep up their domain. I bring this up because it looks like those “Promoted Stories” are Medium’s raison d’être, the company’s main source of revenue. Publications are just the delivery mechanism.

On a very basic level, I find Medium’s design bland, and in fact much more boring since they changed their editor last year. I wouldn’t be able to make something as rich as my “Digging Into The Dissolve’s 50 Best Films of the Decade So Far” anymore. While publications can bring a logo and choose a color scheme (as far as I can tell you get one color, which accents your header and links), the rest of the site is straight Medium style. I feel like whoever came up with the idea that all sites should look alike was in thinking jail.

Diversity of design is part of what makes the web great, but this isn’t just a matter of taste. The oft-repeated Steve Jobs quote, “Design is how it works,” is as true in publishing as it is in any other field. Close your eyes and think of Sports Illustrated or The New York Times, then imagine both with their designs stripped away to nothing, just a pile of black letters on white background. Would they be the same? Would the Financial Times be the same without its light salmon background, or Daring Fireball without John Gruber’s #4a525a? Maybe, maybe not. The design of a site says a lot about what’s on it. Medium asks you to throw all of that away and look like every other publication on it. That’s a big ask.

The question will be how much of the voices of the publications will be able to break through Medium’s own towering identity. Right now if you go to a story on any of the newly announced publications, like The Awl (whose most recent story on Medium is almost a year old), The Bold Italic, Monday Note or Film School Rejects, and scroll a bit down the page, they all look the same. They all look like Medium.

Today it seems like every major tech company wants to eat the web. It’s not enough to have devoted users; you have to be the Internet for people. Medium’s goal here is to become the place where writing on the web exists. They’re off to a great start. I just think publishing can be so much more than what Medium thinks it is. The only way to explore that is off Medium, on the web.

I’ve been thinking a lot about criticism lately. I’ve been practicing it (here, here and here), but I’ve also been reading quite a great deal of it. And not just new stuff.

I recently read A. O. Scott’s excellent new book, Better Living Through Criticism, a (relatively) concise rumination on the nature of art and the importance of approaching it critically. Having been an avid reader of Scott’s for years, I was surprised neither by how much I loved the book nor the author’s ultimate critical outlook. He is one of those critics whose work I read and often want to shout, “That’s exactly what I thought but couldn’t find the words to say!” Which is, I guess, the point, both of criticism and art.

Criticism is almost as ineffable as art, a point Scott continually comes back to, sometimes in conversation with himself. More frequently than I’d ever expected, someone will off-handedly mention, as if it were a given, that criticism couldn’t exist without art (e.g. the film, the song, the book); and I always coyly correct them that the reverse is true. If the critic is a leech, so too is the artist.

Scott, naturally, puts this much better:

It’s the job of art to free our minds, and the task of criticism to figure out what to do with that freedom.

That’s exactly what I thought but couldn’t find the words to say!

Whether you’re a critic, a writer, an artist, there’s quite a bit of value in Better Living Through Criticism. In fact, if you hate criticism, if you’re the type of person who seethes whenever a scribbler cuts down your comic book flavor of the month (or whatever), then this may prove to be vital reading. You could learn a thing or two, or at the very least peer behind the curtain to see what really goes on as the feeble wizard pulls his levers.

Besides that book and the James Agee criticism I was reading for inspiration, I’ve also been working my way through J. Hoberman’s 2012 meta-critical compilation, Film After Film: Or, What Became Of 21st Century Cinema. Almost everything in the book had been written elsewhere (the bulk of which are contemporaneous film reviews, usually for the Village Voice) then expanded and/or heavily annotated for publication. Hoberman effectively draws the reader a map to the cinema after 9/11 and through the Bush years. (I’m three-quarters through the book; later it gets as far as 2011.)

I forget who said it on Twitter years ago (I want to say it was Matt Zoller Seitz), but the following thought has stuck with me: the problem with some film critics is they only know movies. This rang in my head reading Hoberman, who not only knows more than movies but vociferously insists that movies are more than movies. By that I mean that the cinema is much more than escapist shadows on a wall (which, by the way, is usually how those dismissive of criticism like to defend themselves). The seminal example, from a 2008 Voice cover story, is presidential obsession with Fred Zinnemann’s 1952 High Noon:

The weary loner’s brave posture of prescient and courageous certainty in the face of public (or foreign) cowardice is the American politician’s ego ideal—or so the viewing preferences of American presidents would suggest. Eisenhower screened High Noon three times at the White House. According to White House logs, High Noon ranks as the movie subsequent presidents would most request—none more than Bill Clinton, who watched his favorite film some 20 times and told Dan Rather that he’d recommend the western to his successor as a text. Unfortunately.

Movies don’t exist in a vacuum, so criticism of them can’t. This is why any argument for objectivity in criticism is so toothless. The critic is not just writing about film, he or she is writing about everything. Hoberman succinctly pens one of the best defenses of critical churn in the book’s preface:

The 750-word weekly film review is a specific journalistic form: over a period of months and years, these topical short pieces document a writer’s attempt to make sense of the ongoing flux of movies amid the ongoing flux of events.

I’ve never had much stamina when it comes to criticism, to my great regret. I wish I could have a library of reviews of all the films I’ve seen. One of my favorite aspects of the criticism I have written is the ability to look back, to see what I thought, which sometimes isn’t the same as what I think.

I have quite a few reviews that are half-started, mostly from this year’s SXSW. I’d like to get to them all out on the web and read them years down the line and see if they make (or ever made) any sense.

So will reading make me a better critic? Maybe. More than anything I need to write more. And that’s coming. Here it is, as a matter of fact.

What defines you? Is it the language you speak? The religion you practice? The culture that reared you? These are the questions central to Musa Syeed’s excellent new film, A Stray, which had its world premiere here at SXSW.

The film follows Adan (Barkhad Abdirahman), a down on his luck Somali refugee trying to cut his own path in Minneapolis. Adan is pulled in every direction by the characters that occupy his life. There are his friends, forever smoking hookah and shooting the shit together in government housing. (It’s clear from the film’s opening scene: these are Adan’s people, yet he doesn’t fit in with them at all.) There’s the imam who takes him in but can only do so much to set him on the right path. There’s the restaurant owner who gives Adan a job, but has trouble trusting him. There’s the FBI agent trying to turn him into an informant. (Minneapolis’ Somali population is, in the real world, under heavy surveillance.)

And then there’s Laila, a stray dog he finds while running an errand for work. Because of his Muslim faith, Adan is uncomfortable taking the animal in, but when no one else will, the two become companions. The dog makes him a pariah with the other Muslims in his life, yet every time he tries to set Laila free, she comes back to him. And so, even if it means he doesn’t have a home anymore, Adan is stuck with the dog.

A Stray brings to light a world that doesn’t get a lot of time on screen, at least in the films this reviewer watches. It’s a coming of age film but on a scale much bigger than what that term generally means. Adan experiences the growing pains not only of adulthood, but of religiosity and national identity. He wants to be a good Muslim, and yet can’t cast Laila aside. When he’s hungry and living on the streets, he takes the food that’s given to him, but when he finds out it’s pork, it is a huge offense. He’d rather go without than question his faith on that level, even if he’s already questioning it on other levels.

Syeed’s direction is excellent. The streets of Minneapolis look gorgeous, photographed with a muted realism that is sometimes broken by dream-like soliloquies. Throughout, as he wanders the city, Adan is praying, but to whom is sometimes unclear. He could be asking God for help, or he could be asking the audience to see him, hear him. The onus is on us, then, to do so.

This is not the first film about a man living on the streets with an animal while trying to put his life together. (Vittoria De Sica’s Umberto D comes to mind, and it’s strange that, in film history, this is practically a genre.) Yet A Stray proves that there are millions more stories that need to be on the screen. We live in divisive times when people would deny someone like Adan a home in America. Understanding and empathy can begin with seeing a great story play out on screen. I don’t know anyone like Adan. But I do now, thanks to Musa Syeed’s film. I hope more will see it.

This is my seventh SXSW. If I were a wizard I’d be studying for the N.E.W.T.s. So, as a fourth year senior around these parts, some thoughts:

• SXSW is, at this point, the only film festival attend. Back when I lived in New York City, Tribeca and the New York Film Festival were the other biggies on the calendar. Someday maybe I’ll make it back to Deadcenter. There are so many other fests I should check out as well.
• Without taking the time to count up the films, this year’s slate feels really documentary heavy to me. I don’t think there are any more or less than in year’s past. My guess is that documentary publicists have proven the more tenacious bunch, and so the emails I’m most likely to read are for docs.
• The President is speaking at SXSW. That’s bonkers.
• I maintain that, while SXSW is one massive unified fest, complaints of it being a shit show are…not about the film festival. As big and crazy as downtown Austin gets, SXSW Film still feels like, well, a film festival. A bunch of people gathering to appreciate and discover new work. I don’t understand what actually happens at Interactive, although I love checking out the trade show floor and appreciate all the free, like, candy bars and stuff companies give out. And Music…Music is crazy.
• I feel like I should take Mayor Adler’s warnings to stay the hell away from downtown tomorrow more seriously.
• This map takes too long to read so I’m sure it’ll all be fine.
• Aaron Draplin, creator of Field Notes (which I’m nutso about), will be in town. Cool.
• The first film I ever saw at SXSW was Kick-Ass.
• The last film I saw at SXSW was, I think, The Boy.
• I can’t believe I just watched the third episode of the fifth season of Girls. The premiere of Tiny Furniture still feels like yesterday. Also a funny footnote: it was touted as the first feature shot entirely on a DSLR at the time.
• For some reason the only photo from SXSW 2010 on my Flickr page is a of the team behind Annie Goes Boating, a 3D indie short that I said “feels like a painting, one you could get up and walk around in.”
• VR in 2016 reminds me of 3D in 2010.
• They say this is the 30th year of the fest, which means I’m older than SXSW. Ugh.

Anyway, I’m excited to take this fest on once more. I’ll be writing about it here and elsewhere. Don’t worry I’ll remind you.

I never thought the day would come, but it has: Ulysses is on your iPhone. Go buy it.

I’m not going to give a full review here. David Chartier at Macstories and Ben Brooks have you covered there. But let me offer a few thoughts on this huge release. I’ve had a beta for a few weeks and I absolutely love it.

Ulysses Mobile, as the app formerly known as Ulysses for iPad is now called, has been teased for at least five years. I can’t find it now, but I’m quite positive that The Soulmen posted a few videos of semantic markup in action on an iPhone back in 2010 or 2009. Their grand plan in those days was to bring Ulysses 2 to the iPhone. In fact, if you look back at their old homepage, they used to have a placeholder graphic for Ulysses Mobile, which was perpetually “on hold.”

In 2011, with the release of Daedalus Touch for the iPad, the plans for Ulysses changed radically. By 2013 they shipped a ground up rewrite of Ulysses on the Mac, which was influenced by what they had learned from Daedalus. And now the circle is complete, by which I mean feature complete.

Ulysses is now the same on your Mac, your iPhone and your iPad. This. Is. Huge.

No matter what device I’m on, no matter what I’m writing: I know where to put it. Better yet, I know where to find my writing. It’s in Ulysses.

Okay some stuff actually still goes into Vesper, despite my better judgement. But most things will go into Ulysses from here on out. Or that’s the plan.

A few bullet points:

• The extended keyboard is the best designed iOS keyboard I’ve ever seen. It’s minimal but incredibly powerful, and wisely hides its power in palettes for selecting if you’d like to, say, make a heading or a link. This works so much better than scrolling along an extra row of keys.
• I cannot emphasize enough that this is Ulysses on your iPhone. You get all the themes, all the features, all the documents that you have on your Mac. Save for a few minor items, it’s the same app. What you can do in one, you can do in the other.
• You can still load custom fonts into Ulysses, just as you have been able to do for years in Daedalus. But I actually prefer using the System Font, which is Apple’s San Francisco. I’ve loaded Pitch and Courier Prime into Ulysses Mobile. If anyone wants to gift me Operator Mono I bet it looks great in there too. ;)
• The app also has an amazing extension, allowing you to send links, text and other goodies in to Ulysses without even launching it. You can even send an image into it. While you can’t append to a document (as Apple’s own notes allows), you can choose which folder your document will go into.
• Yes, Ulysses has been on iPad for awhile now, but my iPad 2 is so long in the tooth that I rarely use it for much of anything. At this point, my iPhone is basically the computer I use the most, which is why this is such an exciting release for me.

I made a quick little workflow for iOS, so if you have Workflow installed, you can enjoy it. I call it Ulysses Draft, and all it does is launch Ulysses and make a new blank document. You can install it and add it to your home screen.

While it’s not so hard to launch a new document in Ulysses, you do still need to launch it and create a new document: two taps. This workflow mimics launching something like Drafts. One tap and go.

If you use something other than Workflow to launch app URLs, here’s the simple URL that makes this work: ulysses://x-callback-url/new-sheet?text=. Easy.

Ulysses Mobile is $19.99 for a limited time. The price will go up to $24.99 in the near future. Ulysses for Mac is $44.99 and worth every penny. I should mention the Mac app got a shiny new update today too. Go get them and get back to writing.

I’ve been reading a lot lately. “Books, Jerry.” One book I keep plugging away at is Agee on Film, the collection of James Agee’s film writings in The Nation and elsewhere. I checked it out of the library (in this case the Library of America binding which includes much more of his work than the original compendium of his columns) knowing that it was unlikely I would read it cover to cover. As I wrote a month ago: “Instead of sweating what movies Agee is talking about, I’m simply reading to see how he talks about them.”

Two things about Agee’s column stick out to my modern, critical eye:

• He wrote about any film he preferred, whether or not it was new or available to the public
• Limited by column inches, he was careful only to cover just as much as he could fit; if a film deserved more inches, he would tell the reader to come back next week

One example is his column on August 25th, 1945, is devoted to three films, each getting its own paragraph: The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry, Over 21, and Bewitched. The final paragraph is an apology.

I must apologize for postponing even the attempt to review The Story of G.I. Joe; the secondary radiations of the atomic bomb render me still unfit to consider a piece of work I so deeply admire.

Three weeks later he makes up for it, devoting his next column entirely to The Story of G.I. Joe under the headline “A GREAT FILM.”

Now, film releases, publicity and publishing have changed a lot since the 1940s when Agee was writing. But it’s hard, as a modern writer, not to be a bit jealous of the way Agee wrote about cinema. Today we have unlimited space, so we can devote untold “inches” to each and every film. This is more a blessing than a curse, I would say, since we now have available so much amazing writing on each and every film. Yet as a writer it can fast become overwhelming. Unlimited space on the web doesn’t necessarily free up space in my mind.

It’s been a long time since I tried to keep up with reviewing weekly releases. Part of the reason I let myself drift away from it¹ was because sitting down to review a movie stopped interesting me. I had a basic formula, and I had to push myself to work through the full piece. I’d go to edit them and realize I had gone through the motions and delivered X, Y or Z paragraphs, as I had for other films.

My mistake was thinking about movies atomically. Here’s a film I need to review, and so I will do so in a relative vacuum.² Weekly reviews of single films is vital work, both in the moment and for posterity. Contemporaneous reviews of films are vital to our understanding of the state of the art.

And yet, there’s something so alluring about Agee’s method of sharing all that he’d seen. It’s closer to the sort of film writing I’d like to publish here. I’m not going to promise I’ll do it, since my archives are littered with promises never kept for turning this site into something more than it is. But I’d certainly like to try.

I’ve spent some time pondering: what would this sort of writing look like? Would it have a headline? Should I limit the length of the articles? Those are (somewhat) important considerations, but they’re pointless if I don’t just start publishing the writing. In the end it’s no one article that makes a film critic reliable, or have a style; it’s the body of work. People came to Agee’s column because they liked his writing. And maybe they encountered a film they’d like to see because of it.

So far this year I’ve seen (at last count) twenty-seven films, only one of which was actually released this year (Hail, Caesar!). That shouldn’t stop me from writing about what I’ve been watching, but it has. With SXSW upon us, it’s a perfect opportunity for me to crack my knuckles and stretch out the old writing muscles. Check back in the coming days to see if I follow through.

A quick rundown of things that are not movies, as there has been some confusion of late:

• Trailers for movies are not movies
• Posters for movies are not movies
• Promotional materials are not movies
• Exclusive clips are not movies
• Featurettes are not movies
• Tweets are not movies
• Television spots are not movies
• Television shows are not movies

Let us briefly recap what movies are:

• Movies are movies

I like movies.