Hello!

When I traveled through Utah six years ago, I couldn't help but feel like I'd suddenly found myself in a John Ford movie. Funny how art colors our perceptions of things...

This is the story of a new chapter in my life. For the last ten years, I've been a reader with a capital R. I've always loved movies, but I've loved thinking about written stories even more. I've gotten degrees on, written about, recorded myself talking about many, many books. Two years ago I left the doctorate in English I was pursuing, largely because I felt exhausted and like I needed to get my life back. And since then I've had a child and launched into my career, and needless to say life has been very different.
I just don't have the mental energy I need to read anymore. And, I think perhaps more crucially, I can't immerse myself in a novel anymore the way I used to. Taking pleasure in works of literature involves isolation and careful attention and imagination at levels that aren't feasible for many of us, in fact, not just for me. Enter movies. Movies don't demand as much. Although they are so much about spectacle and show, they are modest and humble presences in our lives. They draw us in without asking much in return. I say this not to repeat the well-worn cliche that movies are the lowbrow answer to literature, which seems to be reductive and essentially untrue, especially since novels were themselves considered lowbrow entertainment for much of the first 200 years of their existence - actually, until movies took their place in the popular imagination as the supreme time-wasters and fomenters
of fantasy, indigence, and vice.
Movies just function differently. They rely on the image and sound as much as on plot and dialogue. Where the novel uses the texture and tone of its prose to create so much of its atmosphere and those oh-so-difficult-to-pinpoint aesthetic pleasures that draw readers to particular works, film has at its disposal visual and aural effects as well as those of language. And that makes film much easier for me to process and enjoy in my current sleep-deprived state, perhaps because it evenly distributes the experience of aesthetic enjoyment to multiple senses so that I don't end up overtaxing that one all-important organ that's running on very little juice as it is.
So, in the last two weeks I've become a woman with a mission. I am going to watch as many movies as I can in the next year, mostly with the help of Filmstruck, every serious movie lover's best friend. I used to average a movie a day as a young person, mostly thanks to the OG Filmstruck - Turner Classic Movies. I have loved classic films since I was a preteen with outsized longings for glamour and excitement. I watch films for different reasons now (although not necessarily opposite ones, of course - we can all use more glamour and excitement in our lives). I watch films because they help me see our world with new eyes. It's so easy not to notice what a strange, marvelous, frequently beautiful, often repulsive world we live in, but filmmakers notice it, and then I can't help but notice it too. I watch them because they help me ponder the mysteries of human nature, of events like war and natural disaster that are bigger than all of us and therefore difficult to comprehend, and of the special human capacity for storytelling, for taking a series of events and making it interesting and appealing and ultimately so much more real than life. And I watch them because there are few ways I would rather spend a couple of hours than immersed in their tantalizing images. Spend a few hours with me as I chronicle my realizations, discoveries, and deepening appreciation for this most modern of art forms.