“TEN YEARS, MAN! TEN YEA... TEN YEARS! Ten years. TEN! TEN YEEEEAARS! TEN YEARS!” – Paul Spericki (Jeremy Piven) upon seeing his high school classmate, Martin Blank (John Cusack), for the first time in, well, ten years in Grosse Pointe Blank.
*****
“How long we been riding together, Charlie?”
“Nigh on… ten years.”
“You know what they call that? Call it a decade. Long time. Been a lot of change since then.” – Boss Spearman (Robert Duvall) and Charley Waite (Kevin Costner) in Open Range.
*****
When my then-partner (now-wife) Rae was finally able to convince me in late 2014 to put aside my doubt and self-consciousness about my skill and talent (or lack thereof) as a writer, it proved to be the end of my self-imposed cinematic dark period. This month marks the tenth anniversary of publishing my very first review here in my quiet little corner of the internet.
What a wild, wonderful, fulfilling decade it’s been.
Over the course of the last ten years, I’ve had the opportunity to see and wrestle with more than 450 movies in proper reviews. I’ve been able to interview a few people directly involved in what I consider to be the best art form ever created. I’m a member of two film critics organizations. And, in what I consider to be the most improbable and gratifying result of keeping this website going, I’ve been credentialed with press passes to cover nine different film festivals (with hopefully many more to come!).
Looking back over the last decade of publications to my site transports me not only to the particular movie I reviewed, but also to the circumstances surrounding the screening as well as the general feeling of the era. On a lark, the movie I chose for the very first review I ever published was David Byrne’s charmingly idiosyncratic 1986 indie True Stories. (You’ll note that I didn’t link to that review; I don’t want to encourage anyone to read it because, as my first effort, it’s fairly terrible.) It was the result of a repertory screening at Alamo Drafthouse. I think it perfectly represents the slightly oddball nature of what I seek out to review.
In the first few months of me hanging out my film criticism shingle at the only outlet that will likely ever have me, the internet, I was treated to: a fairly rare (and therefore much anticipated) cinematic event, a new Christopher Nolan movie (Interstellar); Richard Linklater’s cinematic experiment that took over a dozen years to bring to fruition (Boyhood); the knock-you-out-of-your-seat beauty and brains of Alex Garland’s Ex Machina; and what is widely regarded as the best action film of the 21st century so far, George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road, the director’s glorious and bonkers return to his cinematic opus.
Alongside reviews of mostly new releases, I’ve also covered, well, any damned thing I wanted to cover. That is the magic and power of not having anyone but me doling out assignments. In the first few months of my website’s existence, I wanted to write about my experience seeing Sergio Leoni’s complete Dollars Trilogy back-to-back-to-back – including all-you-could-eat spaghetti! – that Alamo Drafthouse presented as a celebration of Clint Eastwood’s 85th birthday. I didn’t have to pitch to or convince a single editor for approval. I simply did it.
If there’s nothing in theaters, or – as has become increasingly prevalent in the last decade – nothing premiering on streaming services that strikes my fancy, I’ll take a dip into film history for a review. Hence my “100 Essential Films” and “Revisited” series, where I’ve gone on the record with classic films like Intolerance, City Lights, and Citizen Kane, as well as personal favorites from my past, like Brazil, Airplane! (a midnight screening of which served as the first date for me and Rae), and The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension!.
Some would probably call it a fool’s errand to invest too much in the Oscars, what is ultimately a vanity project for Hollywood and props up an idea that is antithetical to true art, the idea that pieces of artistic expression should be pitted against each other in competition. Still, I’ve been proud to dedicate the time to reviewing each and every Oscar Best Picture nominee for the last decade. It’s a highly contested metric of quality, but covering the Best Picture nominees allows me to be engaged with the dialog of what the wider film community considers important and worthy of conversation. That’s vitally important to me, even if, by comparison, the reach of my website makes my contribution to that conversation barely noticeable. (“If you please, I am Dorothy, the small and meek.”)
My membership in two critics organizations – locally, the North Texas Film Critics Association, and, globally, the Online Film Critics Society, the world’s oldest organization of online film critics – and the press screenings and For-Your-Consideration screener discs and links that membership in those groups have unlocked for me have been invaluable in expanding the breadth and depth of my cinema landscape.
I realize that, because I don’t earn any sort of paycheck from my film writing, I’m looked down on by many professional critics who consider people like me – who do it for pure love of the game – as, at best, an amateur dilettante and, at worst, a wannabe influencer. (At the risk of sounding like a 1990s Ethan Hawke character, and as an anti-capitalist and Marxist, I rather enjoy the fact that money has zero influence in anything I write or do in the sphere of movies. As one of Hawke’s characters might say, I’m happy that I’ve kept it pure.)
Still, I somewhat understand where those professional critics are coming from. The internet is littered with “critics” who, to paraphrase the late, great Roger Ebert, think that film history begins and ends with Star Wars: A New Hope. (Ebert expressed that view decades ago, so it might now be more appropriate to frame it as critics who think that film history begins and ends with the MCU.) It’s been shocking to me how many critics – who are, let’s be honest, overwhelmingly cis/het white bro-dudes – want to solely focus on comic book movies and blockbusters.
I’ve had the opportunity to write for someone else’s outlet exactly once, and, as much as I enjoyed the experience and validation that came with it, I was disappointed when I was told to tone down the politics in my reviews. The outlet was primarily focused on pop culture nerds, and the owner let me know that the site avoided anything too political, in order to expand their audience and to make sure not to upset anyone.
With all due respect, that strategy is complete bullshit. First, everything, and I mean everything, is political. Second, by only focusing on the MCU and blockbusters drenched in CGI, you are turning your back on the transformative and political power of cinema. Film has the power to put you in someone else’s shoes, to make you see the world from a perspective completely foreign to your own.
That is a critical component in fostering empathy towards all human beings. Cinema also has the power to fundamentally change the culture and upend harmful and bigoted social norms. In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, The Battle of Algiers, The Grapes of Wrath, Selma, Milk: that is all political cinema!
Why would you ignore such a powerful and meaningful tool for social change in order to obsess over the ever-increasingly stultifying action sequences – what one of my favorite critics dubbed “punch-plosions” – of the MCU? (To be fair, I like MCU entries, too, but only so far as they have something to say. Black Panther is a great example of a well-made comic book movie that’s also political as all hell.)
These past ten years spent seeing and wrestling with cinema from all over the world have, without a doubt, made me a better, more compassionate, smarter human being. Movies like A Fantastic Woman, Neptune Frost, Promising Young Woman, Is That Black Enough for You?!?, Desire Lines, Moonlight, The People’s Joker, and this year’s phenomenal The Seed of the Sacred Fig gave me insight and understanding into people, places, and ideas that transformed my understanding of lived experiences other than my own. There is nothing more powerful than that.
Aside from the transformative power of film, the last decade has also clarified for me how fun the movies can be, and I’ve also learned that, uh, I’m kind of a freak for radical, on-the-edge cinema. All of the film festivals I’ve covered while maintaining this site have exposed me to hundreds of titles I never would have encountered if I stuck to the multiplex, many of which were simply plain bonkers. She Is Conann, Climax, Give Me Pity!, Crumb Catcher, After Blue (Dirty Paradise), and Fantasy A Gets a Mattress provided screening experiences filled with pure joy and WTFery that I’ll never forget.
It's been a hell of a decade, and, while I’ve been struggling to feel the passion lately, because of the undeniable catastrophic state of both our country and the world, I’m doing my best to pick myself up, dust myself off and keep going. In fact, there’s a film event happening in a few months that will take me, for the very first time, to the great American city of Chicago. It will provide me with the ability to check off a few movie bucket list items, like when I was able to attend and write about Ebert Interruptus in 2022 in Colorado. I promise you’ll read more about this upcoming event in its wake.
For now, cheers to ten years of The Forgetful Film Critic, and here’s to (at least) ten more!