drfreex.com

“Freeman Williams is a madman who produces local interest stories for Stafford Municipal & Educational TV, acts, and writes. He has written the scripts for three educational video games, two children’s plays, and one movie. Those are the ones that have been produced. Let us not speak of the ones that have never seen the light of day.”

So that’s been my standard “About” for the last few years. Not much has changed, really. The count on educational video game scripts will soon go up to four, maybe five, and I co-wrote a novel being used to teach medical ethics. Really.

The real change, at least so far as informs this blog, is that in the year of 2012 I decided that if I was going to keep describing myself as a movie buff, I needed to start acting like it. There were very large, definite gaps in my film education, and I had to start addressing that.

There’s no real science as to how I’m going about this. I have a large backlog of discs that need viewing, and I can’t help picking up more as Criterion and Warner Archive sales proliferate (curse them!). It’s more a case of “What sounds good tonight?”

I actually managed to do that for a while. The thing is – with apologies for repetition to anyone who’s followed me for a while – I made what pitiful amount of notoriety I may possess in the rarefied atmosphere of the Internet on the backs of the Cinema of Diminished Expectations, or what the hoi polloi call “bad movies”. Hell, it was right there in the title of my first blog, The Bad Movie Report. (You might have noticed I don’t have a flair for flashy or clever titles) I eventually chafed under the limitations of that title. Occasional reviews were greeted by “Why did you do this? (Name of movie) isn’t bad!” Hence the new digs. Yet somehow I wound up back at that trough, despite my best intentions. To be sure, people asking when I was getting back to crap cinema helped push me back to said trough.

As I rewrite this version of the About page, it’s January of 2019, and I’m going to try to get a better mix of movies going this year. We all know how New Year’s Resolutions usually end up. Because the problem is, actually, that I genuinely love those poor little, damaged, usually money-starved movies. As I said as my last blog, the worst movie you’ll ever see is going to be merely boring.

I have a very simple approach to movies. The movie presumes to entertain me, and I agree to be entertained. I don’t necessarily need to be edified, or educated, or uplifted; if those happen, that’s gravy, I appreciate that. But honestly, that’s all I ask: to be entertained. To be taken somewhere else for a while. That’s all. It’s not hard. Even then, some movies can’t even manage that.

It’s not that I’m incapable of nit-picking, oh heavens no. Reading over my reviews will present the most astounding collections of nits ever, rivaling the great collections of the Crowned Heads of Europe. But those don’t usually get in the way of my enjoying a movie. I’m frequently amazed by film discussions with my friends, because their reactions seem to be litanies of complaint; it almost seems like they’re incapable of simply enjoying movies anymore.

I hope I go beyond “I like it” in my little corner of the Internet. If I don’t, there’s no reason to do this anymore. Outside of categorizing nits, of course.

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