That's how long it's been since I last made an entry to this blog. Now that's what you call a delay in the schedule. To be fair, I was never intending to make this blog a regular thing with regular entries. That said, two years and a half years is an awful long time. I'd forgotten I ever even made or posted to this blog until just this week, when I realised I had a film essay that I wanted to post somewhere and didn't know anywhere I could post it... Oh wait, don't I have a film blog? Yes, friend. Yes you do.
And what was I to find upon my triumphant return to this familiar (and yet forever underused) little corner of the internet? Well, once I'd swept away the virtual cobwebs, I was horrified to discover the pretentious, uncultured ramblings of a me from two years ago who had very little idea about anything to do with films or film studies. I'd posted some overly generous reviews of some old films... Given James Cameron's Avatar five stars in a mini review... And made a list of my 'Top Five Films', not a single one of which was released before 1990. You can imagine the cringe that crawled its way onto my face.
Two years later, I'm now reaching the end of a three-year film studies degree course. I have so much more knowledge and experience in both film culture in general and in the critical and analytical reading of film texts. And yet the funny thing is, here I am, still just a film fan. I don't consider myself a critical thinker, really. I certainly don't consider myself any kind of academic. On my course, which I am thoroughly enjoying and have been entirely enlightened by, I nonetheless find myself surrounded by people who are far more intelligent than me. These are people who may well have been film fans at one point, perhaps even when they started the course, just like me. But not anymore. Now they're scholars. Over time, they've undergone some strange, secret transformation that takes place in the dark, air-conditioned spaces of cinema screenings. Don't get me wrong, these are still very lovely people. They're just so damn smart. And they all love these art films and social realist pictures and frown upon people like me, who still go to the pictures to see the latest blockbuster out of Hollywood, who can't get enough of superheroes and fantasy and science-fiction worlds. Suddenly, my preferred culture is of a lower rank. When did that happen?
So, even after so long, I've come back to find that, in some ways, I'm still in the exact same position as I was two years ago. Sure, I may know the fancy vocab. I may know how to string together a bunch of clever ideas and get the (decidedly averagey) grades on my papers. But I'm still just a film fan, same as I always was. Ultimately, my guilty pleasures aren't guilty at all, though. I'm going to carry on loving the big films and the exciting ones, the outlandish and ridiculous and hilarious films - all the movies that made me fall in love with the medium in the first place. Not all the judgement in the world could make me let go of that.
So what about now? Currently I'm in the first semester of my final year of my course. I've started my dissertation, which is on the Development of Childhood Space in the Land of Oz (IE. popular cinema culture, Thank You Very Much). I'm busier than ever, so I'm by no means going to tell you, absent reader, that I'm going to start updating this blog now with a whole lot of reviews and articles and whathaveyou. What I am instead telling you in this post is that I haven't forgotten about this blog, and that I'm not going to bury it and pretend it never happened. I'm not even going to delete those old, awful posts. This is because I believe that in life, unlike with driving, it is more important to remember where you came from than to know where you're going.
That said, I do have a couple of things in mind for the next few days. I intend to post an updated 'Top Five' list, amended to show my new favourite films with a set of five mini-reviews, hopefully in some way making up for the farce of the last one. I also have the aforementioned essay to post. This is a 2,750 word critical essay on the relationship between horror and childhood in the film Let the Right One In (2008), which is a film I really love and was glad to get a chance to write on for a uni essay. Unfortunately I went a bit over the 1,500 word limit for the paper, and so had to pick a half and submit that. I put a lot of thought and care into the points that won't make it into that shortened version, however, and so I plan to post the full sized version in all its self-indulgent glory right here for people (anyone there?) to read at their leisure.
So there it is, film fans. I'm still alive and kicking, and hopefully you are too. I'll still be updating this blog with bits and pieces of film news and reviews and whatever else I like. From now on, it will be better. But don't worry, it'll still be the same old trash.
- J. Boulton
