Afternoon.
I got the idea to start a blog with my friends during the downward trend of COVID-19 in 2021. I was stuck in my apartment, going to class on Zoom every day and watching reruns of cartoons from my childhood. There was nowhere to go and nothing to do, so I thought, “Why not start writing?”
The idea came to me from an assignment in my Multimedia Reporting class. We had to write a review about something we did over the weekend, and I had watched the first episode of Fate: The Winx Saga, and boy, let me tell you, it was bad. I wrote such a scathing review of the episode that my professor told me it was one of the funniest things he’s ever read in his years of teaching. Combine that with all the media I was consuming and had consumed in the last year due to lockdowns and whatever, and viola, you have a domain and an idea.
I was a sophomore when this went down. I’ve now been out of college for 10 months. In the three years I’ve had this domain, I wrote 10 blog posts and routinely told myself I was too busy to write another one. I kept pushing off doing something that had no adverse effects; if anything, this is possibly one of the most cathartic and relaxing hobbies I could possibly have. I’m not a film critic; I’m just a guy with varied(?) opinions about movies and TV, but I couldn’t get it out of my head that this was something for fun and not for a grade. It didn’t have to be perfect, but years of schooling drilled the idea in my brain that everything I’ve ever written and will write will be graded by my peers. So, eventually, I just stopped.
In the three years since I started this blog and the year since the last post, I’ve become more and more of a movie guy. In 2020, I planned to track the movies I saw in theaters with Letterboxd. COVID happened, and movie theaters were all but shut down, so the few movies I saw that year were recorded in the app. Flash forward to 2023, I figured I could rank the movies I saw that year. In 2023, between streaming and the theaters, I saw 43 movies. This year, it’s October 1st, and I am already up to 34 and still have much more to go in the next two months. I love movies, the experience of watching them, seeing them, you name it. This blog is meant to be a way to show that.
I’m not going to write reviews about every movie I see; I think that’s how I became overwhelmed with this the first time around. But whenever I have an idea or come across something that interests me, I will probably write about it. Who knows, maybe I can make a career out of this.
Above and Beyond the Screen 