Cinemuck
These are, I don’t know, between fifty and ninety movie-type reviews I wrote back in 1999 or so. Pretty much the exact same few months I was first writing DEMON THEORY, yeah. Anyway, I only messed up on a couple. Stigmata’s one of them, I think. But I got a couple right as well, maybe: Fight Club, American Beauty, and Unbreakable and American Pie 3 made me happy with what I’d written for American Pie and Sixth Sense, respectively. Anyway, I’d still be doing this, except that it uses the exact same part of my brain that writing fiction uses. And I like to write fiction more, I think.
These all look to be over at IMDb as well (or through Rotten Tomatoes).
Anyway, hope one or two of these work for you. And, I don’t have it rigged where you can comment on each one, I don’t think, so, if you do want to say anything, just say it under this post, just please be sure to note which movie/review you’re referring to, I guess? Thanks.
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Too, was just rebuilding this database and found this lost in this table of reviews, from 2000, looks like (note how I’m still using numerals in my prose, like a loser) :
In the beginning, this was cinemuck.com (which still resolves here), and I ran banners on it and posted 2 sometimes 3 reviews a week and played all the proper games to get listed with the search engines and traded backlinks with various other movie sites etc. This went on for nearly 6 months, at which point–one week–there simply wasn’t even one movie I wanted to see, much less write about. So I didn’t. And it became easy. And I found I could make more money writing for other sites/people. Which is why I archived Cinemuck.
And no, I’ve yet to go back in and un-dump all the comments people\‘d left with the reviews. Maybe soon.
Meanwhile, here\‘s all the reviews I wrote during that six-month period, with the more recent ones on top. My main interest, as with all stories, was the semiotics of narrative — how things mean. Which kept coming back to structure for me, which made it easy to generalize about conventions then use those conventions to critique the genre, which then involved comparison, which no good formalist would go for in any big way. It’s so easy to get distracted, though. People’s faces are 30
feet wide up there; the explosions quite simply thrill. And maybe that’s what movies are about–a placebo for absentee religious experience. Involvement with something bigger than yourself, something stirring, magic, all that. You feel things in the theater you rarely feel elsewhere, anyway, and no matter how the critics take the experience apart, it remains. The autopsy fails to reveal the magic each time, and soon becomes a preoccupation with tools. Go to church.