This blog started as my movie marathon — watching a movie a day for a whole year — and has continued as a place for me to write reviews about movies, TV, and various other items.
This is still a work in progress as I migrate from my old platform at Tumblr. For now, you can still access the whole backlog of posts there at http://reelmatt.tumblr.com
Another year has now gone by and it has been over 1,000 days since I started this site back in July 2012 with a goal of watching a movie per day for an entire year. I’ve watched and reviewed 535 films over these last three years (including many others not reviewed for this site) for a total of 1,063 hours of moving pictures — that’s a lot of moving pictures! Year three brought with it some amazing new films in addition to a small batch of alright films and some downright unwatchable films.
This year also brought some changes and new additions to the site. I reviewed my first TV show, wrote about the Star Wars: The Force Awakens teaser trailer, and finally got around to talking about the 2014 Boston 48 Hour Film Project. Between all the television shows I reviewed, that added an additional 155 hours (or roughly 77 two-hour movies). After almost a month hiatus back in March, I started writing shorter and more concise reviews tagged as [Brief]. Doing this actually reinvigorated my interest in watching/reviewing movies at a time when it started to feel like a chore.
Within the past year some pretty major life events occurred as well including graduating from college, getting a full-time job, signing my first lease, and making a successful first batch of homebrew. While I don’t often delve into my personal life on this site explicitly, I have found that over these last three years it serves not just as a good repository and database of films, but also a good reference to how I felt or what was at the forefront of my mind on a particular day. Little breadcrumbs that I include in my writing to spark memories when I go back and reread my posts.
Despite losing some momentum over the past year, things have picked up as of late and my interest has been renewed. Going forward, I think my focus will be more on shorter excerpts like the [Brief] reviews I’ve been writing. My new target is coming up with a good elevator-pitch summary of my thoughts rather than delving deep into a 1000+ word review that can often ramble at times and be repetitive at others. I might drop the [Brief] tag and append a [Feature] tag on longer reviews — which I’ll most likely reserve for new releases in theaters — but for now, I’ll see where things take me.
I already have a new Topic post planned on my experience with the two-week trial of Movie Pass (a theater subscription service) and my Best Of list for the second half of this year will be out soon as well, so be on the lookout for those. Until then, I look forward to watching more movies, posting my thoughts here, and hopefully hear from you whether you agree or disagree with my take. Thank you, dear readers, for a wonderful three years of this Movie Marathon. I hope you continue to stick around and read, even if it’s only sporadically.