MOVIE #1,986 • SCORE 7/10 • 09.24.24
SERIES: TWO FOR TUESDAY
I feel relieved as I sit down to write this: my final movie review. It’s as good a place as any to stop. The random-ass wildcard entry on the final TWO FOR TUESDAY before Spooky Month ‘24 is the first Kannada-language film I’ve ever seen and I didn’t even finish it. The only file I could find was a very choppy, lo-res VHS transfer that was missing hard-coded English subtitles for every third or fourth line of dialogue. In some circles (the lone IMDb review being one), this is considered a classic. I think I got the gist.
As I had already planned for some sort of reboot starting on October 1st (I neatly organized this so the first critique of my month-long horror picture spectacular coincided with my 2,000th film logged/reviewed on this site), I knew a change would be coming. I think, in my mind — initially at least — this change would be something bigger, not smaller. A return to video-essays, perhaps? I wasn’t sure. But as I plotted out this overly ambitious project (100 feature-length movie reviews in just 31 days), I realized that I’d never be able to keep up. In fact, the realization that I simply spend too much time on crafting this website was finally beginning to set in. Piss-poor R.O.I. was about to meet the sunk-cost fallacy head-on, as it were. I was at crossroads.
I would drift off to sleep many a night wondering how I could salvage things. Should I just give up? Abandon ship? Should I — GASP — just watch movies for the sake of watching movies? (WHAT A CONCEPT!) Maybe I should try Letterboxd again? I have consistently bemoaned the fact that I started this project before Letterboxd was ever a thing, or that I didn’t fully merge what I was doing here with an account on that platform. Because, at the end of the day, that’s all I really want/need: a place to categorize and log the films I watch. Maintaining a blog like this involves a lot of stupid, unavoidable time spent tweaking rudimentary HTML and updating links. Tack on all the time I spend editing out video clips and making gifs and this became, essentially, an unpaid part-time job pretty fast.
Although, part of me will miss making media for the site — it's a visual medium, after all: there’s a reason that kind of stuff is so popular on YouTube and Twitter, etc. I have a folder on my computer with 100s of soundbytes that I’ve edited out of films, as well. They are so poorly labeled that I don’t even know where most of them are from anymore (and I weirdly enjoy this as well). Going forward, I’ll still be doing this. I’ve incorporated dozens of clips into music I’ve released over the last couple years and I love that they’re somehow connected to this website in a mysterious way. I just won’t be making gifs or videos specifically for movie reviews. I don’t have the time.
But it was more than just the time sink that led me here. I stand here today finally willing to admit that I never found my voice as a film critic writer. Sure, I believe a lot of this had to do with the relentless, dogmatic way in which I watched films. Part of me thought that, by forcing myself to do it at such an insane rate, I would also, magically, get better at it. This strategy proved counterintuitive. I think I’ve written a lot of good pieces on this site. I’ve also written an equal or greater amount of garbage. When I added in a good chunk of short films to my schedule, I started having to post about 75 movie critiques a month. Here’s this current month as an example, which is lighter than average for what I’ve been doing this calendar year…
I started to feel like I’m on an out-of-control train with no sign of stopping recently. I would put off working on the site and then power through six or seven hours of slapdash writing and editing to catch-up. Shocker, but I wouldn’t feel proud about much of this work. There were, and still are, serial projects within the greater project/idea of this site that I’m very proud of (for the most part) and I am extremely torn about ceasing. The main two ongoing concerns are my Nicolas Cage A-Z review series “The Year of Cage,” which is now over 70 movies strong and have primarily been done in a video-heavy plot recap style, and “Albert & Akerman,” my zany, dueling critical contrast of polar-end auteurs, Chantal Akerman and Albert Pyun. The latter is especially difficult to give up because I always envisioned the end-game being a book. And this brings me to my final point.
I enjoy writing. I want to write books. I’ve penned one self-published novella proper and countless other experimental-ish works. This avenue is way more creatively rewarding for me and I’ve been neglecting it in favor of something that, more often than not, feels like a chore. I’m ready to give this another serious go and now I’ll have the time.
My initial idea for this project had nothing to do with written critiques: it was strictly a podcast. In 2015, I recorded a very crude 5-minute review of The Theory of Everything (lol). I was sort of doing it ironically, or at least I was leaning into a kind of dumb-guy character in the mold of Tim Heidecker’s On Cinema. The show greatly evolved over time, got more serious and better polished. Too polished, I’d say, because it directly led to a major (albeit short-lived) overhaul in June of 2023 wherein I shuttered the podcast and focused on writing (ironically, to save time). After a tiny detour to another platform/URL, I came back to blogspot and vowed to never leave this site/stop doing it again. And so while I’m retiring from my job as Bad Movie Critic, I’m once again putting on my Bad Movie Podcaster hat. I’m bringing this shit full circle, folks. Starting with the second film of this TWO FOR TUESDAY pairing, all of the posts will once again be 5-minute voice memos recorded on my phone. Short, sweet, and stupid. This is my final movie review. Long live movie reviews!
CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ MOVIE #1,985 - (YOU ARE HERE) - MOVIE #1,987 ⫸
⫷ MOVIE #1,985 - (YOU ARE HERE) - MOVIE #1,987 ⫸
Ghatashraaddha (transl. The Ritual) is a 1977 Indian Kannada language film directed by Girish Kasaravalli starring Meena Kuttappa, Narayana Bhat and Ajith Kumar in lead roles. It is based on a novella by eminent Kannada writer U. R. Ananthamurthy. The film was Girish Kasaravalli's first feature film as a director, and marked not only the arrival of a promising new filmmaker but also that of Kannada cinema in the India's 'New Cinema' horizon. It was released on April 24, 1977.
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