When I started my first film blog in 2006, I was 24 years old. I was less than two years removed from finishing a film studies major, and although I had not succeeded in convincing myself to pursue a graduate degree in the subject, I didn’t have any idea what else I might want to do with my life instead. What I did know, or what I thought I knew, was that I was getting rusty: all the critical analysis muscles I had developed in college were atrophying, and unless I started writing about movies again soon, I’d be back where I started in high school, capable of nothing more sophisticated than complaining about how The Mummy wasn’t enough like Raiders of the Lost Ark. And so one evening I came home from a screening of Brokeback Mountain and started a LiveJournal. This turned into a blog, which surprisingly began to attract a growing audience of regular readers and commenters.
Things rolled along smoothly for a year or so, but then it all started to fall apart. I shuttered the blog to focus on an overly ambitious website at a different URL that no one read, and which soon fizzled out. I was awarded a more-prestigious-than-I-realized fellowship and burned a few important bridges when I failed to deliver on expectations that I didn’t even know people had for me until it was too late. I landed a gig as a DVD reviewer for a fairly prominent online publication and quit in a moment of panic when I realized I had bitten off more than I could chew instead of just asking for less assignments. Most significantly, I realized one night just how awful my financial situation was and finally took steps to fix it, which was a great life decision, but bad for my writing, since I suddenly had much less time for it.
I never quite made an affirmative decision to quit blogging, but as the years went by I did less and less of it. Meanwhile, I got a job I loved working with an academic library media collection, which led to my first professional position at McDaniel College in Westminster, Maryland in 2011, which led to another librarian job at the University of Maryland in 2013, where I still work today. I moved to my current hometown of Baltimore in 2012, bought a house and got married in 2014, and became a father in 2015 (a second daughter arrived earlier this year). I even returned to film criticism in the form of regular Blu-Ray/DVD reviews for the publications Library Journal, which I began contributing to in 2011, and Educational Media Reviews Online, which I started writing for a few years later. One day I looked around and realized that I couldn’t see a void in my life that a blog would fill, and that was that.
Except, obviously, that it wasn’t: it turns out that I do have itches that review work can’t scratch. Take my most recent capsule review for Library Journal (which is mostly behind a paywall, alas), of Kino Lorber’s release of Emir Kusturica’s Underground. In order to write it, I read two book-length works on the director and watched about 10 hours of movies by or about him–it feels like I should have more to show for all this effort than 175 words! Or what about Groundhog Day, my favorite movie? I’ve seen it 50 times, easy, and I’ve read just about every word ever written on it, so I know for a fact that I have original insights to add to the conversation. I don’t have a good place to put them, though! Then there are the things I never got around to back in the day, such a series of video essays. The main purpose of this blog is to provide a platform for sharing projects like this with people other than my wife, and in doing so to (hopefully) motivate me to undertake more of them.
My specific goal is to produce six to eight long-form essays each year supplemented by shorter content as the mood strikes me. For the most part, I am planning to write just about movies, but I may occasionally tackle books, music, TV, and other media. Although I added a link to my CV to the “About” page, I likely will only talk about librarianship when it directly intersects with the topics listed above, which, depending on the path my career takes, could be anywhere from never to all the time. I am planning to stay away from posts dedicated to my other interests like food, politics, and sports, except when they clearly relate to the site’s main topic.
More poetically, this blog is intended to chronicle my return to what the film critic Dave Kehr used to call “the lost continent of cinephilia” after many years away, hence the name. Unless you count individual episodes of my older daughter’s favorite animated series Spirit Riding Free, my days of watching 650 movies a year (no joke: that was my tally for 2006, including 120+ films in the theater!) are long gone. Film still plays a major role in my life, though, which is definitely worthy of celebration and interrogation. Ideally, my musings on the importance of a 20th century art form to a 21st century man will be of interest to others, but I will happily settle for something to do after the kids are in bed which helps me organize my thoughts. Either way it feels good to be back!
The Prodigal Cinephile 