David Cronenberg Blog-a-thon: Videodrome

[This post is part of the David Cronenberg Blog-a-thon going on right now at Tony Dayoub's site Cinema Viewfinder. Check out the comments for this piece here]

What is probably one of the most unconventional horror films ever made, David Cronenberg's Videodrome is, perhaps, only matched by David Lynch's Blue Velvet as one of the oddest, most surreal horror experiences I've ever seen. Cronenberg's film is akin to Lynch's in the sense that both films sit on the fringes of horror (using the prototype of the genre to explicate darker, more postmodern themes that society marginalizes and deems taboo) and really ask us to consider what makes a horror film horrifying. It's not just the visceral nature of horror, and it's not just the getting-under-skin ideas at play – it's a mixture of both. On the surface both films seem to be something else entirely: Lynch's film is dark, yes, but it's also comical (mostly ironic in the way a lot of postmodern work is) in the same way Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (another film that stretches the genre) is darkly comical; whereas Videodrome is without laughs. There's nothing remotely comical about Cronenberg's exercise, an odd hybrid (as most of his movies are) of science fiction and horror; however, like Blue Velvet, there are deeper questions about sexuality and violence, and the effects those two things have (especially when combined) on society. Videodrome is as displacing a horror film that I've seen; a film that plunges the viewer into the depths of sexuality and violence to give us an otherworldly, uncomfortable experience that asks us not what we find objectionable about sex and violence, but how we consider platforms for these oft taboo subjects.




The film centers on a small softcore/hardcore channel run by Civic-TV's Max Renn (James Woods). One night his satellite pirate partner intercepts the signal of an odd, almost snuff-film-looking channel where a woman is being electrocuted. Unable to turn away, Max recommends that his partner makes tapes of the show so that they can show it, exploit it, and make a profit on it. However, Max soon learns that the channel is so addictive that he begins to have hallucinations where he's interacting with the program known as Videodrome. As Max begins to investigate the origins of Videodrome he is asked to participate in a talk show panel where he, a woman named Nikki Brand (Deborah Harry), and all-around smart guy Brian O'Blivian (apart from his great name he only agrees to appear on television as long as he himself is being shown on a television) discuss the merits of television and how the depravity of Max's channel and how it contributes to the growing societal desensitization to violence and sex.

Max begins a relationship with Nikki (in a great, sleazy scene, Max is being asked about sex and violence by the host of the television show, when she turns to ask O'Blivian a question, Max turns to Nikki and asks her out on a date), evolving into a kind of weird simulation of Videodrome where Max is living out his sadomasochistic fantasies with Nikki – thoughts aroused by the Videodrome channel. In one bizarre-as-hell scene, Max and Nikki make love on the floor of his living room while he sticks needles through her ears, and proceeds to lick the blood off the needle. This is just the beginning of Max's descent, however, as he begins to follow Nikki to Pennsylvania (where Videodrome is being broadcast, and where Nikki has decided that she wants to be a participant in the sadomasochistic game show they watch on their first date…the same show that Max has been hypnotized by) where he begins to unravel the mystery of Videodrome.

Now, on the surface the film is an interesting science fiction/horror hybrid with some great gross-out moments thanks to Rick Baker's make-up effects; however, as is the case with almost any Cronenberg film (and this is why he's one of my favorite filmmakers), Videodrome can be enjoyed on a whole other level. That level is primarily a postmodern one where Cronenberg challenges the viewer to think about their relationship to emerging technologies – not necessarily the content, but the purveyor of the content. These theories are based in the authoritative writings of Marshall McLuhan; however, before we get into the McLuhanian theories where you have lines in the film that are (this is a summary) essentially saying "you don't need to act on the violence, just think about it", there are other interesting themes and motifs at work in Videodrome. One of the most prevalent of these is the use of doors: a clear metaphor for the mental obstacles that Max must overcome throughout his quest to find the meaning behind Videodrome. In almost all key scenes you have doors – either shut or open depending on what the metaphor calls for – and in addition to these doors as signifiers, you literally have signs throughout the film popping up as representations for Max's journey through his hallucinogenic hell. In one key scene Max – under the mind control of Videodrome – shoots his bosses at the television station. In the scenes that follow (people frantically trying to escape) Max enters and exits many doors until he walks out through a door that leads to the back alley where we see contractors carrying doors and windows to a nearby building. Cronenberg, using a tracking shot, follows the doors and Max until Max turns the corner (both literally and metaphorically) and begins his new quest in revolting against Videodrome in the name of "the new flesh". He has, so to speak, shut the doors behind him, and, like the contractors ready to install the new doors, is ready to replace the pre-existing doors with some new philosophies.

Aside from the imagery of doors and signs, the film just works on the very basic, visceral levels that all horror films strive to work on. The music by Howard Shore is appropriately eerie and ethereal with its odd mix of classical string music and synthesizer; so you're never quite sure if what you're listening to is pure (like strings) or manufactured (synth/Moog). It's as effective a score that I've heard in any horror film, reminding me of the great Keith Emerson/Philip Glass score from Michele Soavi's Italian horror masterpiece The Church. The aforementioned make-up effects (and I'll mention them again later on) are some of the best that Cronenberg featured; Mark Irwin's cinematography evokes an almost H.R. Giger-like aesthetic (the Videodrome prototype "helmet" looks a lot like the Alien head that Giger designed); a kind of techno-noir where Max, an isolated figure, walks nearly empty streets (again, displacing and otherworldly) and feels solitary as a protagonist. The film also has the low-rent, grungy look appropriate for the type of character Max is, the company he keeps, and the type of programming his show produces.

It's clear to me that Cronenberg has always had a penchant for horror films, and in particular the tropes of horror films, and that his films really are about nothing more than what a lot of good horror movies find themselves to be about: fear of harm to the body. Cronenberg is intrigued by the metamorphoses of the mind and body. Perhaps made none clearer than when Max's stomach turns into a gaping vaginal slit; or when the tumors of videodrome escape from the body of Barry Convex. You also have examples from films like eXistenZ and Scanners, the latter with the famous 'exploding-head' scene. Regardless of the example the reoccurring theme in all of Cronenberg's works is clear enough: the body may be diseased and the mind may have a hard time differentiating between reality and fantasy, but the true source of evil is always in the technology, which is the catalyst for these various viral forms to metastasize and do harm to the body. The best example in all of Cronenberg's oeuvre is the character of Seth Brundle in The Fly; a brilliant man who is seduced not by the power of knowledge, but the power of technology; the same technology that eventually turns him into a monster as the disease metastasizes in his body. This theme of, to borrow a word from David Blakesly, of "metastasization" is prevalent throughout Cronenberg's work, too, and it's manifested brilliantly in Videodrome with the help of the aforementioned Rick Baker's bizarre make-up effects, Howard Shore's displacing (and ominous as hell) musical score, and Mark Irwin's seemingly low-rent cinematography that is actually quite brilliant in how unassuming it is.

Cronenberg has an uncanny ability to tap into a different kind of horror, an almost seductive rendition of surgically gruesome violence. It seems that Cronenberg finds that trope as an entry point into the viewers psyche so that he may strike a much deeper, more cerebral chord, all the while displaying the visceral tropes that so many come to expect from the horror genre.

Cronenberg has stated that he doesn't like cerebral movies, but that he also doesn't like films that are merely visceral exercises with no brains; thus, Cronenberg subscribes the theory that a good filmmaker must find a way to balance the two: the visceral and the cerebral. And it's not just about balancing the two in aesthetic, but in theme, too. Throughout Cronenberg's career you can point to countless films that find a way to externalize the eroticization of technology. Max's hand becomes something quite phallic when it turns into a gun; furthermore, he is pulling that phallic gun out of a gaping, vaginal slit in his stomach. Marilyn Chambers in Rabid – whose very casting causes one to think about the eroticism of the imagery – has phallic spores coming out of her body killing people. In Crash you have the literal crashing of metal/technology and the body in an extremely eroticized way. His final examination of this before moving to much smaller (in theme) films was 1999's eXistenZ, a film similar in theme to Videodrome in how humans react and interact with technologies, substituting television with videogames.. Cronenberg seems most comfortable when he's navigating these murky postmodern waters with his horror films, unlike his safer, albeit extremely entertaining, later literary adaptations on films like The Dead Zone. Perhaps Cronenberg's greatest representation of these themes is in Videodrome where he not only crystallizes a lot of what he introduces in films like Shivers and Rabid, but compounds upon his own themes by instituting McLuhanian theory into Videodrome.

Of course, it's hard to talk about Videodrome, and the effect television (and media in general) has on society without talking about Marshal McLuhan, perhaps the authority on such issues. With Videodrome, Cronenberg is explicating the deeper themes of emergent technologies and their power to not just control the mind, but the fear that they will – with their sex and violence (especially in Max's case) – physically alter the person who views material on said technologies. This fear manifested itself in the form of female parliament members picketing the film upon release; forcing Cronenberg to cut the film into three different versions: a butchered TV version, a less-butchered theatrical version, and the version we finally received on DVD thanks to the good people at Criterion.

I digress, though, and want to get back to one of the things that kept popping up in Videodrome: the idea of the destructive capabilities of emerging technologies (in this case television), and how the fear surrounding those mediums and how they may turn society into a horde of mindless monsters; a kind of sex-and-violence-crazed army of the walking dead. This idea coalesces with Marshall McLuhan's arguments that technology is a tool that shapes the individual's – and the community that individual is a part of – conception of self and reality. To invoke Blakesly's essay once again, he claims that:

What's important to notice, I think, is the way that Cronenberg collapses the mind-body dichotomy (and its parallel, culture-nature) into the biological, so that the social psychoses enabled by technology have the unintended by-product of refiguring the very flesh that sought satisfaction through material means. In other words, it is not strictly the case that the body's necessities are the mothers of invention, but that its inventions are the mothers of necessity. Technological "progress" taps into, transforms, the very biological processes that drive it. And thus, as Robert Haas has noted, Cronenberg's genetically and psychically mutated characters represent an alternative to the usual image of the cyborg as superhuman. In Videodrome in particular, Max Renn is a cyborg who, rather than transcending the material optimism that creates him and thereby exposing its destructive potential (e.g., like Frankenstein's monster), becomes the pure embodiment of Marx's idea that life (and materiality) determines consciousness.

McLuhan did not necessarily believe that content was the problem with these emerging technologies, and that the content of these various mediums all had little to no effect on a society as a whole.
This seems to be what Cronenberg is getting at with his over-the-top content in Videodrome, and that it's never about the sex or violence with Max, it's about the mindless nature of it all; it's the mindlessness—what McLuhan called the "massaging" that these technological "extensions" do to our body, senses, and psyche – and the avenue it provides as a means to circumvent life's deeper endeavors, real hands-getting-dirty experiences for projections; for experiences in nothing more than a simulacrum (represented in Videodrome as the prototype headpiece for the Videodrome channel). Blakely's likening to Max as a kind of "cyborg" is seen in the wonderful shot where Cronenberg slowly pulls back as Max sits in a chair with the Videodrome "helmet" on; a shot that makes Max look like the cyborg Blakesly is describing above: a different kind of monster that "transcend[s] material optimism" and becomes the embodiment of something, perhaps, even scarier (again, I like his example of Frankenstein's monster). It's an effective moment where the film slows down enough for us to contemplate the deeper themes at play; themes that Blakesly brilliantly broaches in his essay.

Videodrome is such an interesting entity: on one hand you could recommend it solely on the merits of the film's eerie tone (or if you can tell people: "hey, if you ever want to see the lead singer from Blondie put out a cigarette on herself, then this is the movie for you!") and gross-out effects; however, the film works on a scholarly level, too, urging the viewer to think about the bigger themes at play. It's an unconventional horror film – and again I'll invoke David Lynch – in the vein of something like Blue Velvet in the sense that there is always something more, something deeper and more postmodern lurking beneath the seemingly recognizable genre surface; something that is poking the audience and trying to draw their attention towards a subject matter that is often marginalized (or just not discussed at all) in our society, and these filmmakers are daring us to stare it right in the face, confront it, and think about how it effects our daily lives and the communities we interact with on a daily basis.

Oliver Stone: Salvador and Platoon

Oliver Stone is as interesting a filmmaker we have working today in American cinema. The problem is that he basically made the same film over and over until people grew tired of his shtick. To see an Oliver Stone film is to see something controversial; the filmmaker has always been interested in not creating controversy, but seeking it out and explicating the chaos and greed and corruption of America's infrastructures (Wall Street/greed; Vietnam/war; Washington, D.C./corruption in politics; television/violence in the media). Stone got his start writing screenplays – quite popular screenplays – for big time filmmakers like Brian De Palma (Scarface) and Hal Ashby (8 Million Ways to Die), and wrote screenplays for big budget films like Conan the Barbarian. You got a sense of Stone's writing in one of his first screenplays, Midnight Express, and he would cut his teeth as a director – like so many filmmakers do – in the horror genre with films like Seizure and The Hand. However, after the success of the aforementioned screenplays Stone began working on his first feature that would set the tone for how we view Stone as a filmmaker. That feature was Salvador – a weird hybrid of an adventure film and a film about journalism while trying to be a message film. The film is flawed, but it would be the catalyst for what was Stone's most impressive run of films – a run he's likely never to duplicate.



The period was between 1986 – 1995, and Stone could do no wrong with his controversial films that pushed the envelope, challenging the audience to examine what was fiction or what was fact, or what were crazy, inane conspiracy theories conceived out of thin air by Stone like some kind of Libertarian Merlin. His aesthetic evolved, too, and Stone became associated with schizophrenic editing, employing multiple film stocks and colors to evoke the appropriate tone of uneasiness that Stone felt with subjects he was putting under the microscope. What's interesting about his two films released in 1986, Salvador and Platoon is how you can see a filmmaker, and dare I say an auteur, really coming into his own. Of course, he won the Best Director and Best Picture Oscar's for Platoon, and away we go into a career filled with interesting films; flawed perhaps, but always interesting.

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Stone worked with photojournalist Rick Boyle on Salvador to bring to the screen the injustices of El Salvador and how the American government was funding the wrong side. Of course, the argument for the "other side" is that El Salvador will always be a country of violence, and at least the U.S. can control the brutality if they're funding it. This of course is what pisses Stone off, and you get a sense of that anger throughout Salvador, an uneven film that is really only saved thanks to the performance of James Woods.

In Salvador we have a film that is essentially about a road trip between two buddies, photojournalist Richard Boyle (James Woods) and his DJ buddy played by James Belushi. Belushi is completely out of his element here, and is one of the worst things about the film. Every time he is given screen time it almost lessens the power of the message Stone is trying to convey, and the film goes from being a serious study of the injustices of the American government in a third world country into some kind of adventure lark about to American's in a foreign country. However, Woods as Boyle is phenomenal, and as we follow him as he goes from wanting to get a quick buck by snapping photos of the war in El Salvador to becoming a man with a conscience as he tries to get his girlfriend out of the country.

I don't have much more to add to Salvador, as it's a very basic premise that only sometimes works because of the intensity and immediacy of Woods' performance. Nothing really struck me about the film, and if I were pressed to find something apart from the lead performance it would be that it really feels like Stone is just warming up for Platoon. Salvador is wholly unmemorable, and that's not a good thing when you're making a movie about such injustices; a film like this should stick with you long after you've seen it, but Stone's reliance on rather banal adventure tropes gives the film an odd feeling to it. The film was nominated for two Academy Awards: one for screenplay and the other for Best Actor...

Which brings me back to James Woods: Woods has always been one of my favorite actors. He immediately piques my interest in an film whenever I see him pop up – whether it be in small b-pictures like the grimy, exploitation film Cop, or the flim-flam comedy Diggstown, or the campy John Carpenter horror flick Vampires. He also has a tendency to steal scenes from great actors like Clint Eastwood in True Crime or Robert DeNiro in Casino. He's a fascinating actor who uses odd ticks and timing to give the audience characters that they surely have never seen before. Here he creates a character in Boyle that is as interesting a character as he's ever played (Boyle co-wrote the screenplay). Woods has some great moments where his frustration is palpable, but he does it without ever seeming like he's playing to the back of the room; it's an amazing balancing act. Because of Woods' magnetism the film is watchable without ever being boring, but not to the point where you don't notice how inconsistent the tone is. Is this an adventure film or is this a serious expose of political injustice? It's a question that Stone would be able to hone to a finer point of emphasis with his follow-up film released in the same year, the highly popular Platoon.

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I have to be honest with you here: I was ready to hate on Platoon. I don't know why, really. Maybe it was because it had been over ten years since seeing it, and I was all ready to claim that it was one of those overrated films that took a bunch of Oscars away from a better movie (like the un-nominated Blue Velvet, for example), but I was surprised by how well the film holds up and by how much the I found to be a powerful experience upon a second viewing nearly ten years after I initially saw it. Here's a film that succeeds and holds up well because of its characters and Stone's reliance on those characters (instead of action) to lead us through the story and make Platoon a different kind of war film.

I will probably call Platoon a message movie more than once here, but really, it seems like more than a message movie – and it's definitely different than the kind of message movie Stone made with Salvador – it feels more like Stone remembering what it was like as an infantryman, relaying a kind of truth and unfiltered authenticity about the Vietnam War the same way the photographs of Robert Boyle portrayed an unfiltered message about the horrors and injustices of El Salvador. This time it's Stone's experiences that we see on screen, though, as he doesn't have to try and represent someone else's vision; Stone, you see, fought in Vietnam and brings those experiences to Platoon to create perhaps the first truly anti-war picture that shows combat. In Roger Ebert's 1986 review of the film he opens with this wonderful comment:

It was Francois Truffaut who said that it's not possible to make an anti-war movie, because all war movies, with their energy and sense of adventure, end up making combat look like fun. If Truffaut had lived to see "Platoon," the best film of 1986, he might have wanted to modify his opinion. Here is a movie that regards combat from ground level, from the infantryman's point of view, and it does not make war look like fun.

I agree with Ebert's statement here because the tone of Platoon is much different than Salvador – which is the type of film that Truffaut seems to be speaking to with his sentiments on anti-war films. In Platoon, however, the action is more focused on the confusion of the event, rather than being focused on the warfare being any kind of visceral exhibition. Stone wisely avoids focusing on just the action in certain scenes, instead focusing on making sure the film's tone is consistent with its character-centric approach to the material. Because Stone humanizes the experience (and let's be honest here, he was not the first to humanize the Vietnam experience; that distinction would have to go to Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter or Hal Ashby's Coming Home) it makes the film more powerful and effective when the characters are in peril.

The film is filled with great performances from actors like Tom Berenger and Willem Dafoe, who plays Sergents who represent the polar opposites of war-time philosophies. They're perfect here as the hard ass, violence-seeking war machine Barnes, and the more thoughtful, mentor-like Elias, respectively. You also have interesting cameos from actors like Forrest Whitaker and Johnny Depp, but noteworthy only when he look back on the film in hindsight and realize who these actors became. The real star, oddly enough, is Charlie Sheen who is perfect as the greenhorn, Chris, whose wide-eyed, schoolboy charm is wonderfully juxtaposed with the grisliness of what he's getting himself into. Once he steps foot off the helicopter as he passes by corpses being loaded into trucks and soldiers with cynical grins on their face. It doesn't take long for Chris to become weary of the war once he sees what the day-to-day operations are in Vietnam, and once he sees how his peers feel about the war.

One of the important motifs of the film is how we see Chris mature before eyes. He is the moral compass of the group; screaming at his platoon-mates who rape and pillage villages that the Vietnamese villagers aren't the enemy, but that they're humans, too. The only link outside of the jungle is the voiceover narration of Chris writing letters to his Grandma which gradually decrease the longer Chris stays in Vietnam; Stone is not interested in telling us what's going outside of what the people face on a daily basis: snakes, leeches, monsoon-like rain, countless hiking excursions, meandering missions, red ants, dehydration, diarrhea, and confusing firefights. It's no wonder why a lot of Vietnam veterans had trouble getting re-acclimated to life in the States. Once you go through all of that with the people next you in your platoon, then they're probably the only people who are going to understand where you're coming from; so, writing letters home to Grandma becomes an arbitrary exercise because that link back home has no way of knowing what you're really going through.

Stone employed DP Robert Richardson to shoot Platoon (and some of his later films like Talk Radio) and he gives the viewer the appropriate sense of claustrophobia and confusion that the soldiers, and Stone himself, must have felt in the jungles of Vietnam. Stone's aesthetic has always been an odd mixture of guerrilla documentarian and a more classical approach with a basic understanding of how to frame a shot. What I mean by that is this: in Platoon, Stone keeps his distance. In one of the film's most powerful scenes the platoon make their way through a village, arbitrarily killing people and animals. Instead of getting all hand-held on us, Stone keeps most of the action in medium shot, as if we're observing from the weeds, watching the horror unfold. It's interesting that Stone's aesthetic would become more ADD, but in his 1980's output he was a filmmaker who mostly stayed out of the way of his actors and his message, and I think that's why some people prefer his 80's stuff to his more experimental 90's stuff. We'll get more into this when we cover Talk Radio and Wall Street, but look at the difference between how he edits those films and paces them (he makes talking interesting and intense) versus how he treats similar films in the 90's with lots of talking (but way more points of view) like JFK and Nixon; there's a clear difference in his approach where it seems his vision and ideas (or conspiracy theories) became the stars over the actors. Where once Stone would just shoot and observe his characters and what they have to say, he switched into a more anxious style where you have a character telling a story or relaying some bit of information, and Stone would splice in odd bits of footage meant to give us the visual of what the characters are thinking about or telling us. This is prevalent throughout JFK and Natural Born Killers. Whether that's a good thing or bad thing is a debate best reserved for when I cover those films, but what I'm fascinated about here is how just how different Stone's aesthetic is. It'll be interesting to see why he chose to go from a more conventional, documentary-like aesthetic to the gonzo style he employed in the mid-to-late 90's.

Because of Stone's style in his early films I often call the director a "faux-documentarian" because his films are always seen through a very subjective lens; yet, they're almost always stylized in some fashion. The major difference between Salvador and Platoon is the obvious growth Stone made as a director from his first major film to his second. Where Salvador teeters between not knowing whether it wants to be an adventure film or a message film, Platoon knows exactly what it is. And that's because Stone is speaking from experience here, whereas Salvador is filtered through someone else's vision and experiences. In Platoon you have horrendous acts simply being observed (albeit, again, with Stone's very subjective eye) without a lot of trickery or music to manipulate emotions. Here we see Stone as a filmmaker who also better directs his ensemble cast. In Salvador he didn't much direction, and didn't need to because it was essentially James Woods' movie and he stole it with his tremendously insane performance; in Platoon however, you have a large ensemble, each with their own moral compass, and Stone negotiates each character's ethos perfectly. This isn't a bang-bang war film – it's more of a message film, and it's important that we feel what the characters feel, and perhaps for the only time in Stone's career (with the possible exception of Born on the Fourth of July) he creates a message movie with real emotion because he doesn't interlope with all of the editing trickery that he would litter his later films with (think JFK, Nixon, and Natural Born Killers). Salvador was an interesting jumping-off point for Stone; clearly showing a filmmaker that we should keep our eye on – a filmmaker who made angry message films. With Platoon, though, Stone announced himself to the scene, and the film – a huge success with the public in addition to its Academy Awards – showed us a different kind of director; the kind of filmmaker that hadn't been around since the 1970's. Here was a filmmaker not afraid to get his vision and his message to the screen – no matter how unpopular that vision was. Like him or not, that is what is so refreshing about Oliver Stone's early output.

Next, we'll take a look at how Stone follows up his hugely successful Vietnam War film with a look at different kind of war in a different kind of jungle.

A Brief Sabbatical (Thanks to James Woods)

Okay, so I was all ready to talk about how I love the MGM HD channel because it allows me to revisit movies I haven't seen in years. Films like: Southern Comfort, Coffy, The Burning, and Interiors. And I was all ready to write about how the other night they showed this film called Cop, starring James Woods in one of his best performances, directed by James B. Harris who used to work on Kubrick's films from the 50's and 60's (most notably writing the screenplay and producing Paths of Glory), and how the film was standard serial killer vs. cop fare except for the fact that the film had this alluring, sleazy, Dirty Harry-esque exploitation aesthetic that made it impossible to turn away from (not to mention Woods' amazing performance). I was all ready to talk about a film called Cop, a film from the 80's that seems so insignificant in 2009 (I mean why talk about it?), a film that I'm sure not a lot of people have even seen, or if they have, barely remember; however, as I started writing some notes down I realized...I just don't have the time for this. Follow my jumbled thoughts after the jump...

You see, I love this blog and I put a lot of love into it. It's hard for me not to come to it every morning and try to write something for it...I treat it like a discipline, something I feel I should do every day to keep me practicing at this thing called writing. I realized last night, however, that I can't keep coming to the blog every morning when I have piles and piles of educational journals to read for graduate school. So I think I need to step back from the blog for a moment.

Fellow Olson and all around great guy, Rick is having similar issues with his blog, although here he opines that the blog is more of a daunting task than creative outlet (which he already has every week). For me it's the opposite, although I definitely understand how Rick feels...this blogging community I've come to know, a community full of intelligent cinephiles who have enriched my film-going experiences, can finicky at times. Hell, I'm as guilty as anyone when it comes to actually commenting on someones piece...sometimes I do it and sometimes I don't. I feel like this blog is more for me than anyone else, though, so whenever anyone comments on here it really just leaves me in a state of awe that people care enough to read what have to say and then actually comment on it. Very surreal. But I also know that I deserve it, too. Sure that may sound arrogant, but I put a lot of work into this blog and a lot of love into most of my pieces, so I don't think that the responses I get are unwarranted...I'm still grateful for every single one of them, though.

And I guess that's why it's so hard to walk away from this thing, even for a month or two, because like Rick says in his piece, this whole blogging enterprise feeds the ego. Which I think is okay to admit...it's what keeps me going on days I don't want to talk about anything. So, I'm setting the blog aside for about a month. I'll return in the middle of December when I will be on break from graduate school and on a winter break from work (one of the perks of being a teacher...). I still would like to finish my "Revisiting 1999" project (I have about four movies left to talk about), and I'll have a ton of movies to talk about when I return (It's the end of the year so there's always tons of movies to talk about) to the blog, and of course, I'll do the obligatory ten-best lists (one for this year and one for the decade).

I'll still lurk around on other blogs and continue my daily reading of all the fine blogs out there...hell, I may even break my own sabbatical and return every now and then with a Question of the Day, because those are easy and quick to produce, and wouldn't take my focus away from what I should be doing.

Looking at all the reading and lesson planning and assignments I have to do for school is making my head hurt...it's already making me wish I didn't have to leave the blog...even if it is only for a month. A month doesn't seem that long...and in reality it isn't, but this is something I look forward to every day, so...I'll miss it. I'll see you all around December 10th.