More pointless noodling, as I cast a look back at some posts from my first blogging year. Film and TV remain my big categories, after posting MP3s. I try to diversify, but I keep being pulled back in.
The first substantial thing I wrote was this analysis of The Magnificent Ambersons. In this round-up of films, I spoke of Shattered Glass and followed up with a reaction from Adam Penenberg; Glass is not a huge obsession for me, but he is an old one.
After seeing the Kill Bill films, I got around to seeing Lady Snowblood and wrote about it. I’ve also written about other Asian films over the last year, such as this post comparing the remake of The Grudge to the original Japanese version and this post which profiled four Asian flicks.
Speaking of Asian cinema, there’s this guy who has cornered the market on securing American remakes of Asian horror films and I was struck at how a profile of him sounded so much like Sammy Glick.
One of my favorite features are my long-running dialogues with my friend film blogger Dan Dorman. We discussed great films that some people hate (plus his list of crap films that you love anyway); we watched a forgotten Exorcist sequel on the two competing prequels; we had a vigorous debate on which Hitchcock films suck and which ones rock; and that same week, he trashed C.S. Lewis (author of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) and offered a passionate defense of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.
I had enough problems with the Oscar-winning Crash that I wrote about it three times: here, here and here. I liked Brokeback Mountain enough that I wrote about it multiple times as well: here, here and here.
In the world of television, I vented at Les Moonves and his ideas on what audiences want. I praised Veronica Mars and The Closer; since that post, the second season of Mars was a little soft in the middle, but turned out to be just as good by the end, and The Closer‘s second season is also looking great. One of my most popular posts turned out to be this critique of the opening titles of Grey’s Anatomy (and praise of those for Lost); it turned out that they didn’t use those titles for most of this past season, for reasons of time. And I finally got around to watching American Idol.
Tags: The Magnificent Ambersons, Orson Welles, Shattered Glass, Stephen Glass, Adam Penenberg, Kill Bill, Lady Snowblood, The Exorcist, Alfred Hitchcock, C.S. Lewis, Crash, Brokeback Mountain, Veronica Mars, The Closer, Grey’s Anatomy, Lost, American Idol