Weekly Reel #50: Why I Write About Film
A system update to keep everything in order, celebrate the 50th iteration of the Weekly Reel, and a chance to get personal.
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I’ve been slow at posting lately because of life changes and, frankly, being unmotivated to write during an uncertain time in my life. Also, since moving two months ago, my viewing habits have changed considerably, and I haven’t been able to watch many of the latest theatrical releases. But I’ve been reading more books, walking the streets of Berlin, and developing more ideas on directions to take this blog.
I’m not sure how this will play out, but I plan on writing a new column called the Berlin Dispatch, which will be a creative nonfiction outlet for content similar to my film festival write-ups. They’re my favorite writing form and I look forward to getting back into it with the new motivation that Berlin supplies. (This is all contingent on whether I stay in Berlin or not, which, right now, is fifty-fifty. I might become ambitious at some point and write film reviews in German. Weiß der Geier.)
Now back to the regular post, which is quite different from the standard Weekly Reel. I discuss the brief history of the Weekly Reel itself, why I got into writing about film, an interlude on the blog’s name, and finally a personal take/review of the film that kicked off my film obsession.]
Wow I’ve done fifty of these! (It would be 109 if this was actually weekly…it’ll get there one day, maybe.) Followers since the beginning will have seen many versions of the Weekly Reel, which originally started out with simple titles including the name followed by a date (as seen above). I intended to use this format to insert a couple of film reviews alongside an essay commentary or two, every week. Over several months, I developed a news section to provide some industry quick hits to distill a relevant amount of media news consumption I was snorting.
After doing this for a year, I realized that putting the date in the title without the year would lead to repetitive titles each year—a big no-no for SEO. I then used overly long titles that included everything in the post (for fear that people wouldn’t understand what the “Weekly Reel” was), with the [Weekly Reel + date] as the subtitle. This was also an SEO no-no, which demands sixty character titles and 160 character sub-titles. For the following few months, I did a hybrid of both to find the more replicable formula.
The breakthrough came when I realized that I should be numbering the Weekly Reels. Luckily I was only at the twenty-fifth one. This proved effective for drafting creative, centered titles that kept the Weekly Reel name in an integral position. I also created an internal format of ranked film recommendations (Watch Now, Save for Later, and Pass) to better catalogue what I thought others should know about—especially in the current “too-much-choice” dilemma of going to theaters v. streaming v. renting, where we’re all the loser.
The biggest problem I had for this format was dropping the commentary section, which was the longest chunk but introduced other (much more qualified) writer’s opinions on the industry. Since then, I’ve been debating several ways of re-introducing it. I might try a monthly commentary/essay review, where I critique others and offer my own views on the industry more generally beyond the confines of weekly film recommendations.
The Weekly Reel was always meant to be my consistent and updated account on films, classics or contemporaries; but I’ve never really enjoyed writing film reviews as such, with their re-wording of Wikipedia plot summaries and thumps up or thumbs down observations. Not all reviewers do this—check out David Ehrlich, who’s the most consistently creative and interesting film reviewer currently alive.
I try, and hope it comes off that way, to write reviews that make you want to either watch the film immediately, put in your watchlist, or avoid at all costs. This has been the most persistent response to what the Weekly Reel is valuable for, and about, and I’ll continue to do so diligently. I think in the present era of “you-really-need-to-watch-this” and My Lists growing to dozens of titles, film recommendations via word-of-mouth (or weekly emails) is a valuable tool to cut through the noise. That’s still the best marketing for books, which have existed for four hundred years.
(I recommend you avoid tv viewing entirely, which is and always has been a tool for attention and advertising than art.)
The way I came to write about films on the internet was through my need to explore the distinct aspects of films from a more (for lack of a better word) artistic perspective. For example, in my primitive pre-Substack essays, I looked at the form and subjectivity of Shame and the making of Interstellar. They were the more random aspects of cinema that drew me into films but also doubled as film school essays. I never blogged before film school, but in that swirl of media theory readings and exploration of different movements and genres, writing about film and throwing them into the digital void became a necessity I couldn’t not do.
I was initially quite slow to write and release these posts—Blogger first and then WordPress—because I was a complete nerd at university and went above and beyond to an unnecessary extent in my studies. This strained me even further when I did a concurrent English literature minor and attempted to complete it in the same amount of time. Nonetheless, I remained at the library every night in order to improve my reading and writing skills so that I could one day be a writer—English was always my lowest performing subject in school, therefore I had to make up for years of negligence.
Not content with just a B.A., I did a graduate program in American Studies in Munich to take advantage of Germany’s kostenlos Uni tuition. I rinsed and repeated my unnecessarily extensive studying in areas dealing with media and culture, culminating in a (best M.A. thesis nominated) master’s thesis on Disney’s film production under Iger and how the studios over time, more generally, got to that culminating inflection point of 2019.
When I graduated during the lockdown era, I was directionless but had a lot more free time. With the support of those closest to me, I decided to switch over to Substack, which was then mostly known as the home of a few famous journalists, and dedicate dozens of hours per week to blogging about film. Substack, a newsletter-focused site, would manage the more banal (to me) website building duties and I would pump out post after post, eventually creating a fee-based subscription model that I could use to support myself, which would in turn allow me to focus exclusively on writing. I would then quickly gain thousands of subscribers, hundreds and hundreds paying a few bucks per month, and the rest would have been history.
But it didn’t work that way.
It turns out that being relatively lax on SEO, not posting regularly, and, most importantly, arriving without an audience, isn’t a good model for growth. I would love to increase the visibility of this blog to paid-regular status, but that will take more time.
Interlude: What, or Who, is Stanley Nolan?
Most can easily guess, but it’s Stanley Kubrick and Christopher Nolan smushed together. Because my name is Christopher Rhine, I couldn’t do Christopher Kubrick, and the names Stanopher Kubolan and Chrisley Nolbrick sound too much like P. G. Wodehouse characters.
Kubrick and Nolan were my two favorite filmmakers when I was nineteen, that’s all. If I were to rename the blog today, it would be something like P. Stanley-Luc Nolan, which just doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Glory (1989, Edward Zwick, USA) was the film that first kicked my brain into cinema mode. I watched it in eighth grade history class, which is enough to condemn any film to the gutter. But instead, I was instantly hooked, moreso than any previous “favorite films” we all re-watch in our pre-teen era. What gripped me the most was its soundtrack, composed by James Horner, who also scored Titanic and Avatar, and its usefulness in pushing certain beats forward emotionally, which I hadn’t realized was a thing until that moment on a conscious, theoretical level. It was the first soundtrack on cd that I bought, and I still play (stream) it today.
It's the first film that taught me how we all approach the motion picture medium: personal revelation. At no point does someone fall into film writing if they don’t have that critical moment which flips their brain into cinema mode. It’s an irrational attachment that people (correctly most of the time) dismiss as a hobby, that nothing can come of it. To a certain extent we’re all dreamers, that cheesy abstraction (exemplified well in the audition scene in La La Land) which best illustrates the mode of films—dreaming. One can read most films as fever dreams filled with unconscious concepts taken from a communal pool. Poetry and music reach this pool most accurately while cinema and literature reach it more systematically. The best artists, according to my own theory, are the ones that render the closest possible representations taken from these undercurrents without truly knowing how or why they did so. (You can see this in answers from artists on why they chose to do this or that; the honest ones won’t have an easy or simple answer and the dishonest reek of bloated pretentiousness.) But sometimes an artist, in this case a filmmaker leading a group of other filmmakers, crafts a localized product that appeals undeniably and without reason to a certain subset of people. Films, like music, induce immediate physical responses that are an effective measure of appeal. The moment in Glory when the regiment is marching towards their final battle and the surrounding regiments yell “Give ‘em Hell, 54th” was that localized moment where a hand from the unconscious, communal pool seized me, and I’ve been in awe of that power ever since.
(For many others, Glory resonated in completely different ways; for instance, Denzel’s son, John David Washington, who is himself now a movie star, said this was his favorite film growing up, which I can imagine for two substantial reasons entirely unrelated to my story + music reason.)
In short, Glory is about the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, an all-black enlisted infantry unit for the Union Army. It consisted of around 1,000 men, all newly freed via the Emancipation Proclamation, which was heavily promoted by Frederick Douglas and other Boston abolitionists. Their historical acclaim arrived in South Carolina when they led an assault on the heavily fortified Fort Wagner and suffered a forty percent casualty rate, including their commanding officer. The recruitment of the unit is the first act of the film, their training is the second act, and their trial by combat is the climax. Denzel Washington (who won the best supporting Oscar for this role and was then launched into stardom), Morgan Freeman, Andre Braugher, and Jihmi Kenned play the main enlisted men while Matthew Broderick and Cary Elwes play the regiment’s commanding officers. Freddie Francis won the cinematography Oscar and Donald O. Mitchell, Gregg Rudloff, Elliot Tyson, and Russell Williams II won the sound Oscar.
I recently viewed this film, still in my top four of all time, at the Babylon theater in Berlin as part of its US Black Cinema program. The theater was sparse, a good thing for this occasion, in one of the smaller rooms. Watching it for the first time on a giant screen, it became clear that if not for several fight scenes and Denzel’s screen presence, it would look like a tv movie. It could’ve easily been the historical drama that would bore everyone to tears in, say, an eighth grade history class.
Horner’s score, which repeats the same motif multiple times using different instruments, shows how a simple orchestral arrangement can elevate the importance of what’s happening on screen. In this case, it’s the formation and fight for independence on multiple levels for a group previously denied human rights for a couple hundred years. A lot of other films have grander scores for much less important stories (as either thematic compensation or composers wanting to show off.)
The earworm Horner created made me spiral into how soundtracks worked for films, which led to other career interests like visual effects, then editing, then, because of Inception, screenwriting, then, because of film school, writing about films, which is how I got here.
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