I haven’t been reviewing often anymore just because...well, I haven’t felt like it. It’s been a turbulent last year or so and I’ve been feeling consistently off-kilter in the most derailing way possible. It’s not that my love for cinema has diminished - if anything, it’s stronger now than it’s ever been - but it’s more I don’t feel the need to constantly give my input on everything I watch just to have some kind of input. If I feel like it, I’ll jot some thoughts down, but forcing myself to write something after every movie made it feel more like a chore, and it’s been sort of liberating not doing it in awhile unless I really feel the urge. It also gives me more motivation to write my portfolio reviews which, understandably, take more time, energy, and thought. 

My semester just started, and it’s probably my last semester of junior college before I move up to a university, and I’m exited and nervous and stressed down to my sinews. I’m taking two college-level film courses for the first time in my “career” as a cinephile, something I haven’t done since that one time in high school before I even cared much about movies. Now I’m getting to apply all of my “useless” film knowledge in an academic environment, and goddamn if I’d mercifully forgotten how little most people care about movies and how little thought they put into watching them, but these discussion boards (they’re all online courses) make me remember how ignorant I used to be about cinema, and on one hand it makes me smirk self-righteously and on another it makes me extremely envious of all the first-time watch experiences they’ll get to have of amazing films that blew me away the first time I watched them and shaped my love for the art of film, because I’ll never get to have those first-time watch experiences again. 

One class is a general film class and the other is a pre-1950s film class, and both contain many films in the syllabus that I’ve never seen, so I’m very excited to dive into them. These may also be the only classes that I’ve ever actually read the textbooks throughly for in my entire academic career, and not because they’re meaty subjects, but because the information is so mesmerizing and engrossing to me. This is the first film I had to watch for the general film class, and it was on my re-watchlist anyway, so no complaints there. The school is actually located about 20 minutes away from Sacramento itself, so of course I should have expected this to be in the curriculum. On the first watch, I talked more about how surreal it was to see places I go often in a film, and the deeper messages of the movie either were lost to me or I was too focused on the former, but now I see it as an exceptionally self-relatable movie. I too moved across the country for college with an intense desire to create a new life and identity out from under the thumbs of my family, and found that being someone else didn’t make me any happier, it just made me more frustrated, lonely, and depressed. I had lost myself in trying to find myself, but the “self” I was trying to find wasn’t actually me at all. Lady Bird calls Sacramento the “Midwest of California,” which is funny and ironic to me since I moved from the actual Midwest (Michigan) to California to escape that whole Midwest mentality. 

I’m sorry if not posting frequent reviews has incited you to unfollow me, I’ve noticed my follower list dwindling, but I just don’t have the same self-conscious desire to maintain and attain followers that I did when I first started on Letterboxd. I figure those that actually care about me and/or my opinions on films will stick around, and that’s what matters most to me. I love you guys that have been there for me over the last few years, and appreciate all the silent followers that still give occasional likes and put up with my self-depreciating, depressed, drunk rants. 🖤