Apparently, today is the 8th anniversary of the start of this blog.

This seems as good a time as any to address something: Misantropey has been an increasingly difficult endeavor for me as of late. Though, I’m not sure if that is a bad thing.

When I started putting diligent effort into this beast back in 2014, it admittedly wasn’t entirely fueled by passion. It was propelled as much by loneliness and isolation as any positive resonance I felt from the regular accomplishment of writing and posting.

During my time covering the IMDb Bottom 100, I had a job that was time-consuming, emotionally-taxing, and required a significant amount of travel. I can’t recall how many of those entries were written in dingy hotel rooms in remote towns in Georgia or Arkansas or North Carolina, so often adorned with shoddily duct-taped windows that did little to shield me from wafts of diesel vapors and the faint aromas of the distant tacos of strangers.

This blog was a surrogate for human interaction and companionship, and a pretty bad one. It consumed time, but provided no caloric content in return. It made days and nights pass quicker in the same way magicians make planes and buildings disappear – it didn’t. I just really wanted to believe it did.

I came up with a formula for posts that, once you know what it is, should be pretty transparent. I have always used the same skeletal outline, with very little variation:

Title

Brief Introduction

Trailer

Director

Writer

Cast

Cinematographer

Editor

Music

Other Crew

Trivia

Box Office

Reception

Criticism

Overall

Recommendation

I was able to crank out “reviews” like clockwork by hanging flesh loosely on those bones. I put “reviews” in quotations, because they have never really been that. For the most part, these posts were opportunities for me to research productions, and coalesce the information into a brief, digestible form. The “review,” insomuch as I provided them, was usually only a fraction of a given post (“Criticism” in the outline above). A few salient thoughts, at most.

This has not been a creative endeavor at its core. This has been, for most of its existence, a mechanism. Quasi-therapeutic avoidance and distraction from a life that was, for a significant time, very empty. I set my own deadlines and timetables to round out an illusion of meaningful productivity. There was a time where I was doing an original post, 750-1000 words, every day. I would block out my weekends around what movies I needed to cover for the week.

Things are different now, though. As my life has gotten better, the blog has gotten harder. Since starting graduate school and getting married, there have been so many other, wonderful things to take up my time, and I haven’t felt the need for this mechanism of depression prestidigitation by way of amateur film criticism. I’ve also taken up academic writing, and have a handful of journal publications coming in the next few months. I’ll even be starting PhD work in the fall, which is deeply exciting.

I’m been working on adapting this blog into something more fulfilling, and a little different. Ivy On Celluloid has given me some new life for this work – I’ve only done it when it felt right, and have tried to capture a sense of fun with it that has never really been part of the formula here. So, that is something I am certainly going to continue. However, it is also far more time consuming than the formulaic work I’ve relied on in the past.

I think that is where the future of this blog lies – an embracing of infrequency, and a reclaiming of this platform into something positive and internally fulfilling. To that end, I think I’m done with “bad movies.” I like doing my year-end analyses on the publicly perceived worst films of the year, but unless I see something that actually catches my attention, fascination, or curiosity, I’m not going to write about it. I’m not sure what that means for content just yet – but I think I’m shattering the old skeleton structure for good.

So, this blog is going to be different going forward. It will certainly be quieter, but it will also be better – I’m only going to write when there is something motivating behind it. I’m not going to let this be a burden or a coping mechanism – it is going to be an outlet for my thoughts about movies. That’s what it always should have been.