Welcome to Tommy's Holiday... I mean, the Cinetarium!

Hello out there,

I'm at heart just a movie-goer, but it's from a passion for movies/films/cinema that have branched me out into other things, such as film criticism and filmmaking (as writer/director/sometimes editor and camera operator). This isn't a passing thing but something that is part of my livelihood. That it can also be a career is nice too, but it's the work of it, seeing movies, writing about them, making movies and showing them, and just figuring out what this medium is all about, that keeps exciting me ever since I started in my early teens.

The purpose of this blog will be to chart things that go on for me with movies. This isn't the first time that I've made a blog, per-say, however it's the first time it's been this organized, and I hope to keep with it and not fall out and lose interest.

The 'per-say' refers to what my side-hobby has been, or one of them at any rate. Since... damn, it's been eleven years come September 26th, I've been writing "comments" on IMDb.com. On IMDb, for any movie, TV show, documentary, video game, short film, whatever, you can leave a comment. I started when I was fifteen with only minor interest, mostly as a side-bar to writing movie reviews for the Teaneck High School paper.

Here's the first review I wrote, for American Beauty. It is amateurishly written, and I think I probably wrote it as soon as I got home from seeing it around the time it first came out. To be sure if I wrote a review of the same film today it would be much different, a little more in-depth and with some detail. But I kept this review, as well as several others I wrote in 1999 and 2000, for more sentimental reasons. Some reviews I have double-backed on and re-edited (and, for convenience sake, you can see THE WHOLE BLOODY LIST HERE of movies I've reviewed on the site, currently the number is 3,746), while others are kept in-tact.

One of the reasons I've started this blog is because of finally, after so many years as something of a kind of personal compulsion of writing these 'comments', more for myself, perhaps, than anyone else, is that I've a) grown tired of it, it takes a movie that I feel super passionate about either way (i.e. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World or The Room) to immediately rush to write a review for on the site, other films I procrastinate on writing about, and b) the site has some limitations for writers, such as no expletives (with all fucking due respect, I don't give a goddamn about the "cussing" laws on the site), and a 1,000 word limit. Sometimes this limit is helpful, but other times I like to write for a while on a movie.

This should go without saying that IMDb is not my only outlet for movie writing. Indeed this is my non-professional quarter, which will be now transferring over to this blog (I may write a review now and then there, but for the most part I'll focus my attention on this). But I also write "real" reviews for a website, Film-Forward, which is a site based in New York City and is mostly concerned with independent, foreign and "art-house" movies, though there are some mainstream movies reviewed from time to time (i.e. Shutter Island). For convenience sake I'll link to just the site when I have a new review up - such as, today, a new review for Casey Affleck's warped documentary on Joaquin Phoenix, I'm Still Here - as it's difficult to find reviews written by me unless directly linked (you have to kind of search around, as it's only movie titles, not on author).

I'll also be writing here about other things movie-related, or just some topics or lists or things about festivals that look interesting. In the past I've written blogs on the website spill.com, and for convenience sake I'll start a) posting previous articles here for easier perusing, and b) post on here more than on spill.

Lastly, as I am a filmmaker, currently with a LLC production company cum website (www.whiplashfilm.com), I'll post about adventures in filmmaking and film-festival going, production diaries, script thoughts, etc etc.

So yes, this may be at times self-indulgent blog (that is, I indulge in things I find interesting, or sometimes not interesting but want to write about anyway), but I also hope that I can talk about things from time to time non-movie related. Politics is an interest, as are on occasion sports (NY Yankees!) and music and video games and all other assortments of ill-shit. There may be posts that just have a video, or something related to it. Not to mention as a current grad student at the Academy of Art University, if I have some (good) work to share I may do so too.

But at the end of the day, I hope that whoever comes here can take away something, anything, or at least be mildly entertained by my corresponding spieling. The name points to this kind of distinction for my blog: it can be like Cinetarium like a Sanitarium (stuck with the crazy), or a Planetarium (or as they might say on South Park, Plane-arium), or a urinarium (which is... all about pee, hopefully I'm not doing that on you wonderful readers). It is what it is. My blog, my rules, I make it up as I got along. Waddle-doodle.


So anyway, one last thing...

This is a video for a song taken from the first number from Nirvana's infamous Unplugged appearance (or just famous, it was their last live performance I believe). While the song is ostensibly about its title, when I hear it I can only think about moviegoing. Not all of it should apply; "I'll take advantage while you hang me out to dry" shouldn't apply to a great film since I'm not taking advantage, it's a great film, so there. But a lot of the song seems, to me, to apply to what I love to do most. One of these days I'd also love to put it in the opening credits of a movie, if only to piss off those people that love to clap at the start of movies: