Hello again. This is my annual "wrap-up" post in which I look back on what I've accomplished with this blog and my various film-related projects. I just read over what I wrote a year ago today and discovered that while a few things have changed, my anxiety about wondering if I will ever manage to pick up the pace significantly enough to catch up with Criterion's new releases remains constant. At least I can say that I increased my output here compared to 2012, and that's in spite of the fact that I took a few extended breaks from blogging over the course of the year. So that's one bit of encouragement. And for the most part, I'm pretty happy with the simple knowledge that I'm keeping it up with this blog, not dropping out or growing weary of the project. With each month that goes by, I'm learning more about cinema and continuing to meet new people (mostly online) who share my appreciation for these great films that the Criterion Collection keeps putting in front of us.
Probably the most exciting thing that's happened over the course of this year is the recent resumption of my Eclipse Viewer podcast. In this column last year, I announced that Rob Nishimura, with whom I started the podcast in the summer of 2012, was retiring from that role in order to adjust his priorities to where he thought they should be. I supported his decision, with regrets, and after spending most of the year poking around at various alternatives (including just giving it up altogether), I made the acquaintance of Trevor Berrett, an attorney who lives in Utah and was one of a number of acquaintances who expressed appreciation of the Eclipse Viewer podcast. We got to talking and eventually developed a plan to have him join me in recording new episodes. We just finished our second full installment of EV this past weekend, now it's edited and my son Brandon is taking over in the artwork department, with Rob's approval - another development that I'm pleased to see and intrigued to discover what the future holds in that regard.
Another highlight was discovering that this blog was nominated for a LAMMY Award in the "Best Classic Film Blog" category. That really took me by surprise, and I'm genuinely grateful for those who nominated my site and cast votes in support of the nod. I didn't win, which is fine because the other blogs that I was in competition with are a lot more "full featured," so in that sense, I think they're more deserving. I'm delighted with the recognition, and with me, just a little bit of that kind of attention is all I need to keep my motivation sufficiently charged up. So thanks very much to all of you who express to me your appreciation of the site, whether its through comments or direct contacts in any of the social media platforms I use to connect with most of you.
Without making any specific announcements or getting too far ahead of myself, I have some other possibilities in the works for the year ahead. Among them are inviting various guests to join Trevor and I on the EV podcast at some point down the road, or being a guest myself on other programs outside the immediate orbit of CriterionCast.com, the website that I must continually thank for helping my thoughts on film to reach a wider audience. And I will continue writing about individual movies for that site, through my continuing Journey Through the Eclipse Series columns (which have become less frequent as the list of titles I have yet to review there is shrinking rapidly, with very few new Eclipse releases in store to replenish the stock) and through more random reviews of new Criterion offerings (I'm going to try around one per month).
Despite all my talk in last year's version of this post, I really didn't do much to change my approach to writing reviews for this blog. So I won't make any bold promises or predictions of some radical new "thing" that I might do with this site. Perhaps the style may have shifted a bit, I'll let people who scrutinize my output more closely and critically decide on that, if any such readers exist, but it still feels like my process is essentially the same as it's been since I started the chronological series in 2009. I still tend to watch the films at least two or three times all the way through before I write them up, along with all the supplements and a few hours of surveying what others have written about each movie online and wherever else I can find such information. I just can't bring myself to provide a quick, on the spot response to most of these movies! So I expect that I'll continue to linger over them long enough to keep my posts in the 3 -5 per month category, especially if I'm contributing to other sites as well. But I do intend to try and keep my take on each film as fresh and authentically my own as I can. I never want to be formulaic or a mere regurgitator of all the conventional wisdom that most informed cinephiles already know about these movies. I'm sure that in the process of my own discovery, much of what I relate about a given film has been said by others before, but I'll keep striving to document those aspects of the title in question that affected me personally, that I hope stir your own thoughts and curiosity as well.
Finally, I'm just glad that all the right circumstances have continued to be in place in my life to allow me to forge ahead on this foolhardy quest to watch all of the Criterion movies in a row! I try to not take any of this for granted - so here's hoping that this great run continues for many more years to come. Thanks again for watching and reading along with me.
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