Lost in the Movies: Working on videos + The Unseen, Mad Men & Movie Reviews: a fall update

Working on videos + The Unseen, Mad Men & Movie Reviews: a fall update


For the next few months, I will publish Mad Men viewing diaries on Mondays and movie reviews, updates, and other content on Wednesdays - including the launch of a monthly “Unseen” film series - as I work on Journey Through Twin Peaks and other video essays behind the scenes.

When I introduced my Path to Journey Through Twin Peaks work schedule this spring, I was careful not to set a hard premiere date for the new video series. I’d made this mistake before; everything always takes longer than expected. Sure enough, although the very specific tasks of creating six months of podcasts and writing a viewing diary for Veronica Mars were completed in the time I hoped, the next two stepping stones to Journey - researching Mark Frost and re-designing my site - ended up swallowing the entire summer. Frost’s books ended up being consigned to a small window in the evening (they’re now accompaniments rather than prerequisites to creating the series). And the re-design ended up taking everything over, although it was worth it (I’m still checking everything and making tweaks here and there but the work is essentially done as you can see).

My not-so-secret hope was to launch a new fleet of video essays (two Montages, two Cinepoems, a 3 1/2 Minute Review, and two Side by Sides) on Labor Day, leading up to the premiere of Journey season 3 around my birthday, the first weekend in November. This would wrap the decade up with a nice bow, although Journey videos would have continued into the new year, and gotten this project out of the way before the craziness of an election year (and specifically what promises to be the most intense, divisive, decisive, and perhaps disastrous election year in a century and a half). Obviously that’s off the table now: Journey, preceded by the other videos, will simply appear when ready - probably some time in early 2020. Perhaps this is for the best but it does leave some open space on the site this autumn.

Throughout 2018 and 2019, I created a decent-sized backlog of work which I sometimes previewed for patrons. Now is the time to make some of that public, twice a week at 8am (except for today's late posting!). I’ve covered the second and third seasons of Mad Men without publishing any of my write-ups until a couple days ago, so now Mondays will be reserved for the Sterling Cooper crew, at least through season two, likely season three as well. On Wednesdays, I will publish some of the many film reviews I’ve written, probably including Lady Bird, The Cabinet or Dr. Caligari, and the Mary Shelley biopic among many others.

And finally, to bookend this update with the picture used above, on a monthly basis I will be unveiling the first few years of my “Unseen” series. This is a project in which I watch the top user-ranked movie (via Letterboxd) from a given year that I haven’t seen before, moving back in time. Although I’ll certainly be sharing my own impressions, the series as going to be at least as much about surveying the historical context of these movies - ranging from franchise juggernauts to quiet sleepers that stood the test of time. Next month I'll publish the directory page where all the entries will be gathered and the series officially announced, but for September I'm just going to jump right in next week with the first entry: Black Panther, for 2018.


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