A brief, albeit messy attempt to reflect on where I am, where I want be, how to do it, if I can, and why movies will always be the answer.
It’s been a while since I’ve written anything that wasn’t a review, or a line of dialogue in my next script. With the Christmas season behind us, my mental health is holding strong, but work is taking a toll on me. I'm struggling to come to terms with why I can’t latch onto anything and write about it. My last major piece on Denis Villeneuve was a big hit, and my review for No Way Home got plenty of eyes on it (and is quite good if I say so myself), but I haven’t been able to work on an outline, or work towards a writing goal. I’ve been watching plenty of movies, I’ve cleared 2,000 films at this point, and I’m continuing to expand my horizons with exciting films throughout history. La Haine and All That Jazz are spectacular achievements, HBO’s Succession is becoming an all-time favorite show, and Squid Game was plenty enjoyable, but I don’t have the passion to write about any of it. Not that I necessarily have to, but writing has always been the most freeing part of my days, and I haven’t felt as free recently. Income is down, sales is mentally taxing, I’m having fun and had a great Christmas, but I’m missing something, and writing might be that piece. It’s not so much as watching movies that patches that hole, because I’m generally watching something every night. Whether it’s a movie, the next episode in a series, or a sporting event, my evenings are typically dedicated to enjoying something that eases my mind after a long day. Even if they can be a little stressful, nothing feels better than the sigh of relief that comes after being emotionally wound up. Being able to pour my thoughts onto a document in a cohesive manner allows me to reach some semblance of peace within myself, because I know that I emotionally reacted to something on such a level that warranted me to write about it. Nothing else does that for me besides movies, and I still tend to ponder why they do.
Why do I yearn to watch? Why do I plan my day around watching movies? What am I really getting from them? Am I getting anything at all? Do I really want to do this for the rest of my life? Is it viable? Am I good enough? I’m waging war with myself often, and finding pockets of time to convince myself it’s not worth the years of effort I’ve already put in to no results. Then, I watch a movie. I forget that I nearly convinced myself to let it go and move my sightlines elsewhere. I emotionally connect in a positive or negative way, and I feel myself growing eager to share with everyone, even if they might not care. Bottling up my thoughts and selfishly holding them, wastes the art of human expression. It’s fascinating how one response to a movie can unravel various spools of conversation that allows us to understand each other a little bit better. One second we might be talking about the performances, the next we might take a deep dive on how the production designers use space to visualize social class or the wage gap, and how we relate to that through current events and our personalized perspective. I don’t believe there is anything else on the planet that can do that as well as movies do, at the levels it does, on a consistent basis. Even if something is notably terrible, it teaches us about what we love, and why we will continue to love them. It’s imperative that we go out of our way to find anything to watch, because all movies are a teaching tool that allows us to uncover more about ourselves. It can grant us the opportunity to emotionally release from something that’s anchored us, or to see someone go through something you did, and know that you’re not the only one suffering the same pain. Movies help everything make more sense than they did before.
Why? Why do we return to our favorites? Why do we drone through streaming services for half an hour as we try to land on the right movie to match our mood? Why do I feel like I’m creatively flatlining despite the abundance of half-written ideas and unfinished scripts backlogging my Google Docs? Do I have too many ideas? Too many courses of action? Is there such a thing? After car sales I’d love my life to take off in a career surrounded by film and all of its teachings throughout history. Ideally, I’d love to be a critic, but one day I’d like to direct a feature length movie and tell a story about someone we’ve never met, and hope we can emotionally connect with them in a cathartic way. Sometimes I talk myself out of it because of my incapabilities; or is it just a lack of effort? Anyone with a camera can film anything and call it a story these days, but I’m scared of failure. I’ve spent so long giving myself to a critical form of art, with nothing to show besides my evolution of craft, a so-so blog, a couple spontaneous short films, and I find myself being apathetic towards finishing a script and filming it. Perhaps these seven years of criticism are making me become too critical of myself, and I should film no matter what I think. I can’t be great if I don’t try at all. Right?
As cohesive as I normally am, this exercise in grappling with movies and the shadow they cast over me this day in age has my creative juices flowing for the first time in a while. Movies, the existence of them, what I learn from them, what we share with each other because of them, are my passion. The subjectivity of the critical form is expansive and never ending. There are so many channels of emotion to exert in a personal way, that the nature of movies seems unbelievably impossible. How can a single form house the center cut frames of Wes Anderon? The undying energy of Martin Scorsese? The scope and inspiration of Akira Kurosawa? The mixture of tone in a Bong Joon-Ho picture? How is it humanly possible to achieve something so unbelievable? That’s probably because movies aren’t human. They’re magical and unreal. Inspiring and impossible.
These last few weeks, months even, are a mixed bag of hazy horizons and aching uncertainty about the future. Not even so much my own, but the climate of movies, the industry, and how the hell I’m going to form into the artist I desperately desire to be. The only way I feel as if I’m going to get there is if I keep verbalizing how I feel about the craft of the masters, to help me find my own voice, and the stamp(s) that I can make. The passion is raging, but the effort feels like it’s fading until I lay my eyes on a movie that reminds me how intense of a feeling loving a movie is. Even when I don’t love it, being able to unearth a part of myself and share it with people I’ve never met is uplifting and exciting. Movies are an extension of life’s perspectives, and being able to empathize with that on a level that can only be visualized, is something I deeply value. I couldn’t imagine a life without the movies and all of the knowledge and hope they can grant us.
Why Movies?