A month ago, I observed that I could either continue to try and finish my big Twin Peaks projects as soon as possible (alongside a grab bag of non-Twin Peaks pieces) - understanding that none of it would be done before my original October 31 deadline - or I could just put all my eggs in the film commentary basket and try to wrap that up that work before November (letting the Twin Peaks projects end whenever they end, hopefully at some point in 2024). Obviously at this point I've chosen the latter path although I do hope to get a few TWIN PEAKS Character Series patron advances and one Lost in Twin Peaks week of episodes up this month, concluding my coverage of season three. Those aside, October will be the month of concluding my original and longstanding focus for this website: written, audio, and (hopefully) video pieces on particular movies. In the future, I plan to reserve that type of work for Patreon, using my public platform to conclude the Peaks podcast and character studies as well as the Journey Through Twin Peaks video series before shifting my focus to less cinema- or television-specific video projects, and maybe even embarking on some filmmaking endeavors.
However, there are definitely some loose ends to tie up first. After some positive if very limited feedback to my Patreon poll question, I'm probably going to keep the "Unseen" series alive over there; the public entries will wrap up with 2009 and 2008's most popular titles on Letterboxd that I haven't seen before. Mostly, I just want to end this public portion with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button which is perfectly suited for this spot - partly because it hails from 2008, the year that my online work began, and partly because like the "Unseen" series itself, the film's main character essentially moves backwards. In addition to these entries appearing back to back on a Wednesday (hopefully next week) I have a couple more pieces I'd like to write: a double review of the Russian World War II films Come and See and The Ascent, by the husband/wife team of Elem Klimov and Larisa Shepitko, and - probably as my last public prose essay - a review of 63 Up, the final film in the Up series by director Michael Apted which both amplifies my Favorites series entry from 2012-16 and fits the general themes of the passage of time, aging, eras, and generations which increasingly preoccupy me.
I'd also hoped to round out last year's Olympic series by covering the official films about the 2021 and 2022 Olympics but Lu Chuan's Beijing 2022 isn't available yet so I'll just leave those entries to be bookended by the broadcasts rather than the documentaries. I'd also love to finally conclude my long-stalled Mirrors of Kane series but with twenty-five days left in October I don't see that happening. Nonetheless, I'm hopeful that I do have one more public video essay up my sleeve, a surreal Brideshead Revisited/Watership Down mashup that I've wanted to create for over a decade. We'll see; that's on the table if everything else goes according to schedule. "Everything else" includes a conversation with Wonders in the Dark's Sam Juliano about his online work and recent novels, the three remaining podcast episodes in my "Sight and Sound" miniseries (including one on Stalker which has not yet been previewed for patrons), packages of clips from my paywalled episodes to place on the Lost in the Movies and Twin Peaks Cinema feeds, and maybe a long-delayed Twin Peaks Conversations episode although this could be postponed since I already plan to release further episodes during the coming months which are otherwise focused on the Peaks project trio.
And, I promise, on Patreon I will finally publish the full Episode 100 for the $1/month tier (its components are currently all available for $5/month patrons). That seven-hour, twelve-film podcast is officially completed at this point but I'm holding off until I can preview the Unseen entries and hopefully a few more character studies, leaving Episode 100 to stand atop the patron page for a while at month's end. Other than all of that, I may pull a few pieces from my backlog on shows like Star Trek and The Clone Wars but I will probably just keep those in reserve for Patreon (where any viewing diaries would continue exclusively going forward). Finally, an announcement: I've spent years hunting for the only missing pieces of my archive - two episodes talking Twin Peaks on the defunct Discourse Collective podcast - and I finally got my hands on a couple audio files last week...only to discover that someone had uploaded the entire feed to the Internet Archive years ago. (Not sure how I missed that given my extensive searches in the past, but oh well - better late than never.) You can listen to those episodes here and here; the second includes Chapo Trap House's Will Menaker as an additional guest.
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