TEDERICK.COM

Everyone has a Substack now

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by

tederick
in

And worse, I’ve started to subscribe.

The internet’s bent back to where it was 20 years ago; longform is in. Ten or fifteen years of “microblogging,” I guess, proved insufficient; proper not-micro blogging is back. Twitter’s aid in fomenting the insurrection probably didn’t help. Hooray for Substack, but there’s just so many of the damn things. And they’re so long.

And with all due deference to pandemic time-fill projects, two years working-from-home/self-isolating/keeping-my-own-counsel has netted out in a couple of substantial ways:

  1. I’ve been spending enough screentime, thank you;
  2. I don’t actually care what most of you think. About anything.

The latter is the kind of thing that really hurts the feelings of the seven or eight narcissists in my life; as a narcissist myself, I get it. I was reflecting yesterday, for example, that there are about four people whose thoughts or words on a film I always want to explore. Not ten; not sixty. Not the entire population of Letterboxd. Four.

Now, implicit in the message (from my understanding of it, anyway, and I wrote it), is the obvious sub-category of people whose opinions (again, in this example, describing movies) I sometimes, or even often, want to explore. My Mom texted me about Power of the Dog the other day — and shit, did I ever want to have that conversation!

But that category of sometimes eludes many readers, if twitter replies (which are the only “comment threads” I ever engage with anymore, if I engage with any at all) are any marker. Which circles back to the original point above: longform is in. I guess, in longform, it’s less and less likely that your 280 self-explanatory characters will be denied another 2800 characters, or 2800 words, or 2800 pages, explaining what the initial 280 self-explanatory characters meant.

Plus, the ability to read something, y’know? To sit and read it. Something that has a metre and a pace. Something long enough that you might miss your next (internally-appointed, not-actually-real, in-home) appointment, in order to finish. Something that requires a mug of something.

I am becoming a convert.

Anyway.

I’ve got writing targets this year, hard ones, and I realized this week that if I tried to perfectly align my Actual Big Writing Project against the need to hit those targets, I’d miss more often than I’d hit.

So, to start, I thought it might be fun to circle back to my 2021 in film, particularly this list; particularly, how or why the fifteen films in the “my 2021 movies” list got there. And for no particular reason I want to start with Godzilla vs. Kong, because I’ve realized, I reviewed that film twice, perfectly.

Here’s one:

https://twitter.com/tederick/status/1379827952322498566?s=20

Here’s the other:

https://boxd.it/1LnKNZ

Believe it or not at some point in the past six months I started trying to actually write, if not “full reviews” on Letterboxd, then at least, more than a pithy line. I even started writing my thoughts down on not Letterboxd — because LB still doesn’t have a “draft” function — to give me more headspace to think through my responses to films before hitting “Post.”

But there’s a Socratic ideal to the LB post — one which I, by no means, fully understand — and I think that particular one above gets closer than most of mine. All due acknowledgment to John Waters, who once said, of Gus Van Sant’s Gerry, “don’t sleep with anyone who doesn’t love this movie.”

Sleeping with anyone is right out the window at this point and I have no idea if I saw, or ever will see, any great percentage of what most people will call the “best” films of 2021. But I will say, that neon-coloured monster smackdown in March felt like the first breath of spring air in not one year, but two. It goes on the list. Marking time in the apocalypse was impossible, so I’ve gone and started marking something else.

Useful right now