Going Live

I must admit, I feel like a bit of a fraud. I haven’t writ­ten any­thing truly comedic and crit­i­cal in well over a year, yet here I sit with the shades half drawn, peer­ing out into a rainy Seat­tle day, ready to push the but­ton on a site which, one would rightly deduce from the name, promises to accom­plish both the afore men­tioned and great­ness well beyond. I find my hand is shak­ing, as well as a lit­tle sweaty. I also find, now that I’m look­ing at it, I need to clip my fingernails.

One would assume it started with an idea: the idea to watch one movie every day of the year. This would be the log­i­cal assump­tion and no one would fault you for mak­ing it, but if you were to make it, you would be incor­rect and were we involved in some sort of live action Choose Your Own Adven­ture novel, you’d likely be at the bot­tom of a pit impaled through with steel spikes. No, it didn’t start with an idea; instead, it started with a name.

My pre­vi­ous movie site was strictly ded­i­cated to movie trailer reviews, not reviews of full movies. This allowed me the lux­ury of watch­ing a two minute trailer and then writ­ing a totally unin­formed opin­ion piece about the upcom­ing flick. I enjoyed a healthy read­er­ship of approx­i­mately twenty five peo­ple, mostly con­sist­ing of my friends and fam­ily and sev­eral peo­ple search­ing for pornog­ra­phy – the result of an unfor­tu­nate review­ing scheme name which, although funny, didn’t exactly bring though the type of search hits I was look­ing for.

Things were good. Every once in a while I’d sit down, watch a few trail­ers and write up an arti­cle. Easy, self indul­gent, and enjoy­able . How­ever, as time went by I began to feel a strange itch, an itch which point­ing out how the lat­est instal­la­tion in The Trans­porter was, in fact, going to suck just as much as the last one, just didn’t quite seem to scratch. I began to think maybe I had a higher call­ing than sim­ply review­ing movie trail­ers; I began to think maybe I should be review­ing actual movies.

So I began the process of rein­vent­ing my site to include movie reviews in addi­tion to trailer reviews, and I decided I needed to change the name in an effort to reduce the num­ber of pornog­ra­phy searches. I spent a lot of time and research – mostly con­sist­ing of three episodes of Lost, a ham sand­wich, and a Coke – and finally came up with a name I felt would be both mem­o­rable and mean­ing­ful: 365 Movies a Year.

Unfor­tu­nately, with the nam­ing of the site came the crush­ing respon­si­bil­ity of watch­ing one movie every sin­gle day of the year. Although a sim­ple sound­ing task at first, the time starts to add up quickly when you take into account things like my ten­dency to pause the movie every five min­utes to look up some ran­dom trivia fact. I became over­whelmed, and all work on my site screeched – or rather, lum­bered – to a stand­still. Par­a­lyzed with the fear of fail­ure, I slipped into a deep depres­sion rid­dled with pain, suf­fer­ing, and choco­late chip cookies.

OK fine, none of that hap­pened. I just got lazy. But I’m back, and ready to deflate your expec­ta­tions by promis­ing to deliver con­tent every day of the year and then totally fail­ing to do so. Maybe some­day I’ll do this full time and make it up to you. Until then, I hope you enjoy the scat­tered morsels I do man­age to produce.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 17th, 2009 at 12:38 am and is filed under News, Previews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.