About

The tag line pretty much says it all.

I am a fan of film who happens to have an advanced degree in cinema studies and this blog is an extension of some of the things I learned in my graduate and undergraduate programs and a place for thoughts that didn’t find a place in either.

I don’t know exactly what shape this blog will take, but I can promise you two things it will never be. The first is cynical. Far too often critics and commentators on film treat the medium with a certain degree of cynical dismissal, knowingly laughing at its apparent artistic pretensions barely concealed beneath its commercial aspirations. I write about film because I love it, because it endlessly fascinates me, not to prove my own intelligence or cultural caché. As the Globe and Mail’s film critic Geoff Pevere wrote of his own approach to cinema, “I may be a professional movie watcher, but I’m not a detached one and never have been.” Cinema will always fascinate me for its ability to draw me in, to tell stories that get under my skin and make a permanent home for themselves in my mind and heart. So despite the endless series of theoretical frameworks drilled into my head, this blog will also never treat film like a low cultural object or apologize for its place in popular or commercial culture. My education has given me the tools to more deeply understand film and the hold it has on me and that is how I will use it.