An Origin Story & Why I Review

Every now and then I have these moments where I become really self-aware, like REALLY self-aware to the extent that I marvel at the fact that I exist and am really aware of my existence. As deep and philosophical as recognizing one's own existence can be, this is not the purpose of this article. But self-awareness is and every now and then I ask myself, "Why the hell do I review?". For starters, I'm not getting any money for this so unlike the unfortunates on Youtube who have to deal with the adpocalypse, my livelihood is not dependent on it, nor have I ever seen a dime from it so it's not like I'm gaining anything from doing so, nor do I have multitudes of fan clamoring for my opinion on various topics, hell, I can barely boast at having a moderate readership. So by all accounts I should basically quit. Review is a time consuming and costly hobby that I am reaping literally no rewards from, so why do it? Here's why.

Allow me to go back in time the long forgotten past of 2003, I was a sophomore in high school (and an idiot) and I remember going to see a movie titled "Identity". The trailers for it looked good and it was the kind of movie that was right up my alley. At this point in time in my life I had already decided I wanted to be a movie director/screenwriter and had a few (admitting godawful!) screenplays under my belt. Anyway, I had seen "Identity" and I remember leaving the theater is absolute shock, why? The movie was terrible, absolutely terrible but much to my dismay I couldn't explain exactly why "Identity" was an awful movie. But I knew down in my brain's heart that this movie was bad. Fast forward, after watching movies and studying movies, screenplays and the like, I slowly started to realize what made a movie objectively good and objectively bad (merely from a story-telling stand-point, not a technical one).

I realized some movie I didn't like for completely subjective reasons, as an example the vast majority of comedies don't make me laugh at all and "Animal House" sucked in my opinion, but those were just my opinions, but a movie like "Battlefield: Earth" was an objectively bad movie for several reasons. Anyway, after I saw "Southland Tales" I decided to post a video on Youtube explaining it because I believed that "Southland Tales" was a movie hated for all the wrong reasons. I'll admit, I went just a touch more in depth with the movie than necessary but ultimately I felt like the movie was overall enjoyable IF given the attention. Anyway, I posted that video to a multitude of comments thanking me and agreeing with or understanding my explanation. To this day that's easily my favorite video. Granted, thanks to Youtube and their copyright notices that video can no longer be found on Youtube but the fact remains.

That being said the reason why I review movies are 2 fold, for starters, I want to be a voice for someone who saw a movie and thought it was either good or bad but yet couldn't explain it and when they read my reviews go "Oh yeah, that's totally the reason." or "I totally agree with that.". Likewise, I want to bring attention to things that maybe people aren't aware of or that people might be looking for. As an example, I noticed that nearly no one was reviewing "The Following" so I decided to. No one was talking about the shows or movies I wanted to talk about and if I want to talk about it I'm 100% sure there are other people who want to talk about it. That's why I do this, that's why I review. It's not to make jokes or to pat myself on the back on how much smarter I am than everyone else (I'm not). I'm just a guy who like talking about movies and TV shows and writing and when I see some really excellent writing (like in the case of "Hannibal") I'm gonna talk about it and when I see some really awful writing (like in the case of "American Horror Story", still trying to recover brain cells, any and all donations are appreciated) I'm gonna talk about it.

Sorry for the long and personal rant but every now and then one has to rededicate one's self to one's cause. I'm hoping that in the future there are people like me writing blogs and articles about stuff that I've written, but alas, we'll see. All in all, I don't review for money or popularity, I review because I'm a geek, I review because I like talking about it and I'll review until the day I die. Done and done...oh and in case you're wondering "Identity" sucks because there aren't any stakes in the movie, every character death was completely fictional and John Cusack's character (easily the most interesting) had this amazing backstory of why he quit being a police officer only for that story to be revealed to have never happened. So the only aspect of the film that does matter is this serial killer with multiple personality disorder is killing off his alternate personalities, therefore the characters you invested interest in don't exist and the things that make them interesting are completely fictitious and don't factor in to the overall story. Long story short, everything that made the story interesting never happened and doesn't matter.