For close to three months, I posted every day, ranging from reviews of specific films to more general essays to fun exercises started by other bloggers (back then, "meme" had a different meaning). Simply writing down my thoughts about film and publicly sharing them on a basic Blogger template was thrill enough; there was a really fresh feel to these early days. The blogosphere was a thriving community at this time and I appreciated the back and forth that developed as we leapfrogged between one another's pages.
Subjects include The Dark Knight (the big blockbuster of this summer), an ideal "dirty dozen" double feature program, my "Hooray for (Hating) Hollywood" series covering cynical fifties films-about-films, a chronological study of D.W. Griffith, and my initial foray into Twin Peaks, which miraculously coincided with the birth of my blog and resulted in a first season episode guide.
This chapter also includes my immediate response to a shocking first viewing of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, my choice for the highlight of this period.
JULY
I kicked off with a dual review that spanned 110 years of cinema, with “handcrafted” films as the subjects on both ends. A good place to start!
Bob Dylans abound in Todd Haynes' multiverse
Contrasting Andrew Dominick and Terence Malick under Western skies
One of my favorite early reviews - a cartoon cult classic considered in the wake of its author's death
Launching my first series, meant to cover numerous directors (I only finished one)
Reviewing a collection of early silent shorts, tracking the development of Griffith's technique
Yasujiro Ozu brilliantly captures kids at play with such dynamic energy that I always remember the film as a talkie
Review of an iconic Robert Bresson film - but also the first (very casual, very offhand) mention of Twin Peaks on the site
AUGUST
Wintry, evocative mystery...plus my reflection on how cinema changed between '98 and '99
Six double features I dreamed up: this was the first post that attracted any real attention and it felt like I was officially joining the movie blogosphere
Examining Erich von Stroheim through a documentary and one of his own films
Pixar's beloved superhero comedy has a surprisingly conservative worldview
Griffith's shorts grow more ambitious as he itches to make an epic feature
Unpacking the inherent aesthetic issues with turning cinema into a wing of the comic book world (and to think, this was almost entirely pre-MCU)
And then there was Twin Peaks. I wrote this brief entry the night I finished David Lynch's series for the very first time
Reviewing Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me immediately after first viewing, I was deeply shaken, with many conflicting reactions to sort through
If I was shocked by Fire Walk With Me, I may have been even more shocked when I discovered how it was received. I'd never seen a greater gap between a work of art and its reaction, and still haven't.
After a three-day Twin Peaks-writing bender, back to another familiar topic (though I'd return to Peaks again before long)
One of several Iraq War documentaries I viewed around this time, this one with a focus on the grunt's-eye-view
The narrative facility and racist ideology of The Birth of a Nation are often treated as distinct phenomena - on this screening, I felt they may be more deeply connected
After watching the Gold Box special features, I returned with a Twin Peaks announcement
Comparing The Dark Knight and The Birth of a Nation - Hollywood has long had a thing for masked vigilantes
A $1 DVD that began life as a TV pilot, bizarrely mixing Nixonian early seventies Dirty Harry with Carteresque late seventies Waltons
Revisiting Blue Velvet in the wake of discovering Twin Peaks
The first time I launched a "meme" (it meant something else back then): twelve hard-to-see films, cinematic holy grails
Cutting across four different historical periods for Griffith's ambitious follow-up to The Birth of a Nation
Settling into the weekly TV environment with episode 1 (first after the pilot)
Maybe my favorite Buster Keaton, a visually rich experience with amazing stunts and gags
One of the most delightful films about film launches my Hooray for (Hating) Hollywood series, which guides us from the wry bemusement of Singin’ in the Rain to the icy cynicism of Sunset Boulevard
The characters seem to be writing this meta stoner comedy themselves
Collecting all the blogs that responded to my "12 hard-to-see films that you want to see" question
Reviewing the Eclipse set from the Japanese master, who was still working without sound (along with the rest of his industry) in the early thirties
Hooray for (Hating) Hollywood continues as the industry offers its own take on the director, star, writer, and especially producer
Reviewing the iconic episode 2 - brie and butter baguettes, Tibetan rock-throwing, and of course the Red Room
Highlighting work from August 2008
SEPTEMBER
Watching this David Lynch film for the first time, I grappled with the slippage between blurry overlapping realities
Comparing two British counterculture films from the late seventies, a couple years apart yet suggesting different if overlapping cultural moments and musical movements
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German Expressionism at its most German Expressionist
Detailed review of the USSR's massive Tolstoy adaptation, shortly after finishing the book and seeing the film on the big screen
The town gathers for Laura Palmer's funeral in episode 3
Episode 4 is very underrated in my opinion (I think it's better than Tim Hunter's more high-profile follow-up)
Hooray for (Hating) Hollywood takes a tragic view of the star system with Judy Garland and James Mason
My first viewing of Lynch's final feature to date left me bewildered but intrigued
Fascinating social portrait of early America via gothic melodrama with Vincent Price and Gene Tierney
The Powell and Pressburger team look back at the big war just a few years later with their study of an alcoholic bomb technician
The angst of the screenwriter in my Hooray for (Hating) Hollywood series - Bogie as an iconic Nick Ray antihero
Visiting the Log Lady and exploring the woods in episode 5 (I'm much more taken with the episode now than I was at the time)
The trouble-in-suburbia film that feels like an ancestor to both Fire Walk With Me and the Breaking Bad pilot
A minor film in their collaboration, but this was my gateway to the Astaire-Rogers kingdom
Another episode I undersold at the time; now episode 6 might be my favorite non-Lynch of the whole series
The Hooray for (Hating) Hollywood series grows even more tragic with the tale of a star told from several different perspectives
Tribute to Paul Newman after he passed away (and yes, the title works as a Seinfeld joke but I think that was coincidental)
The story of how seven-year-old me was fooled into believing in a Universal horror film about a motorcycle-riding monster who killed mice
My first attempt to suss out Mark Frost's perspective within Twin Peaks, reviewing the season 1 finale
Highlights from September 2008
OCTOBER
Paul Newman, David Mamet, and Sidney Lumet craft an iconic Boston drama
Alfred Hitchcock really starts to become an American filmmaker with this cross-country journey
Audrey and Fred (and especially Stan) remind us how modern and cutting-edge the fifties Hollywood looks in comparison to the thirties golden age
In which the New Wave spirit is applied to a literary classic
My Hooray for (Hating) Hollywood series ends where it must, at the decaying mansion on Sunset Boulevard...
Following my review of the Soviet adaptation, here's the Hollywood version of War and Peace (and how it differs)
A B-movie for the nineties, with a Jon Voight performance that might be father's favorite (as well as Voight's own favorite)
Picking my own Best Picture year by year (a much-revised/expanded version of this exercise would go up five years later)
The coming-of-age basketball documentary would be my last review for a month that wasn't part of a larger series
Griffith sets his 1920 hit in backwoods Maine to focus on daring ice floe stunts and close-ups of Lillian Gish
Griffith meets the guillotine in French Revolution tale
(I covered this period on Episode 1 and Episode 2 of my Patreon podcast)
(in which I review political fiction and documentaries related to the 2008 presidential campaign)
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