Critical Drinking

One of the things I like most about doing Critical Drinking (besides the beer drinking part) is pretending to be critical about movies. I've always loved film, and the more I began to learn about it, the more I wanted to learn about it. This has been the perfect outlet to do that while also making light of the fact that I don't have any credibility to be doing so. The beer drinking and joking around allows me about 15-20 minutes of each 100-ish minute episode to talk seriously about movies while not pretending I should be. And that was enough for a while.

One of the reasons we have done episodes with movies like Salo, or the reason I've seen movies like Irreversible, Funny Games, and Antichrist while doing this, and actually LOVED them, is not because I'm some crazy, perverse lunatic (debatable), but rather because I recognize the larger context in which these movies are made and come to really respect them for what they are. Now that's not saying I'm some sophisticated cinephile who shits on major movies. Far from. I just came out of Pacific Rim (which I'll review in a bit), and really liked it. A lot of fun. But I like to think that seeing, respecting, and loving the afore mentioned movies elevates me above the folks who walk out of complete bullshit and say "that was good!" Movies like Grown Ups come to mind... But the films I mentioned before, the independent, disturbing, cerebral, beautiful flicks you would never catch in a major theater, are some of those where you really get to see a film crew at the top of their game. Strangely as it may be, you see top notch direction, cinematography, style, editing, writing, and all of those things. You see something that couldn't be done by your average Hollywood director. You get something that won't make $100M opening weekend. You see something artistic, something real, something that comes from passion and talent and vision. And sometimes it's fucked up.

Now, all of that braindump is illustrating my larger point here, which is that Critical Drinking has been enough for a while. Has. And my 140 character Twitter reviews have been enough for a while. But I realize I want another outlet to talk about movies a little bit more. Another avenue for getting my thoughts out on paper, even if just for me. So that's what this is going to be. I'm going to start writing movie reviews here, which I will title "... Movie Review" and tag with "Movie Review", and they will all be linked from the CD page as well.

Now, onto Pacific Rim.