Welcome!

Hi everybody. Welcome to my blog. Here, I'll mostly be talking about film, because I find it incredibly interesting, and incredibly important to contemporary culture. The plan is to write something at least once a week, and if I get out of the habit, please feel free to harass me to get back to work. Feedback in general is appreciated, and yes, I do take requests--if you would like to hear my take on any given film, I would be more than happy to give it.
Basically, there are three basic things I want to write about: (1) popular genre movies, their conventions, and how I tell a good one from a bad one; (2) what I read into certain movies I like or find interesting; and (3) whatever's big in the theater this weekend. These categories are, of course, arbitrary and interchangeable, but they're as good a starting point as any.
I already have a few ideas bouncing around that will likely make it up here in relatively short order. So, appropriately, here's a preview of coming attractions:

1. A genre piece on the coming of age comedy: I've seen more of these than I care to admit, and they're almost always pretty bad. What's interesting about them, though is that amid self-consciously juvenile humor and convoluted sexual tension, they almost uniformly offer a dead serious moral message: be yourself. Playing this message against the predominant stereotypes featured in these movies, I want to look at what, exactly, these movies have been telling me and my friends to be. You can think of this one as "Sartre watches American Pie."
2. An "interesting movie" piece on Eli Roth's Hostel: This movie gets a bad rap (and, no doubt, deserves it) for being unnecessarily graphic--tourists trekking through Europe spend half the movie in brothels, the other half getting tortured--and the camera spares no detail. In itself, the movie doesn't do much for me. In the context of the reactions the movie generated and the responses of the filmmakers, the movie has a rather sophisticated rebuttal to those who fund such films objectionable. I'm not sure if I agree or not, but I want to work through the arguments nonetheless.
   
3. A "current movie" piece on Up: Truth be told, I'm a bit of a curmudgeon when it comes to animation. I like good old fashioned 2-D, and mourn its slide into obscurity so much so that, up until Wall-E, I boycotted the newfangled CG films entirely. But I'm coming around. Up looks too good to pass on, and, if the early reviews are any indication, it lives up to the hype. I'm trying to go into this one as tabula rasa as possible, so no promises as to content, but I'll try not to write this one as a movie review--I'll leave that to the critics.

In any case, that's the plan, and I hope everybody enjoys reading!

Nick