Growing up, I always had specific days in which I would scour the reviews of upcoming movie releases. Wednesday was usually when Roger Ebert’s review came out, while Thursday and Friday were reserved for my local paper’s film critic. It was my first foray into the film industry, and I soaked every part up. Every Monday, I would tell my grade school friends the movie I saw that weekend. My personality became synonymous with going to the movies. Any time a movie was mentioned, I became a part of the conversation.
This led to high school, in which I took it even further and acted (*gasp!*) onstage for the first time. I fell even more in love with entertainment. You are telling me that I can recite lines in a specific way and that could bring out emotion in someone else? I strayed a bit away from the writing side of it and became more involved with how these productions are actually made. This led me to Penn State University one summer, going to film camp and becoming even more mesmerized by the process of making movies and how you can elicit certain emotions from one shot to another.
I graduated from Penn State in 2017 and have continued acting and some writing post-graduation while also working in SEO/Digital Marketing. That has led me to NYC, where I can both participate in and be a patron of some of the best performing arts productions in the world.
As I thought about how I can lend my voice to this landscape, I kept thinking back on the excitement I would feel when pulling up a new Ebert review. He was so good at pulling the crux of a film in a way that was artistic and mainstream. Every word seemed to come from a place of love for film. Even if a movie was bad, the reviews never felt like a rant against movies, but rather a continuation of emphasizing why entertainment even matters in the first place.
I think that’s why I am here. The COVID pandemic brought the movie-going experience to a halt, while the at-home movie experience saw a boom like never before. There is a large chunk of the population (at least in America) who will not step foot in a movie theater because of current events and political temperatures. There has always been an attitude of “they don’t make movies like they used to” in every generation, but recently it seems much more vivid. Then when you ask them what movies they have seen recently, crickets start to fill in the silence where their response was supposed to be. And when people have feelings, they REALLY have feelings. People feel like they can’t just go in and enjoy something anymore, and that’s a problem.
Ideally, I would love to have someone read a review of mine for a movie they may have never heard of, take a chance on that movie, and have opinions on it. Maybe you will learn something about yourself in the process. Heck, maybe I will even learn something from you. Wouldn’t that be something?
Really Tall Guy 