Why this site exists

I have had the same conversation about six hundred times. It happens in a parking lot, or in a group chat at eleven at night, or standing in somebody’s kitchen holding a drink, and it always opens the same way: so what did you think? Then I talk for four minutes, land on something I actually believe, and lose every word of it. Nothing written down, nothing checkable. By the following spring I’ll swear I loved a movie I walked out of.

So this is the fix. Everything I see goes here, in order, with the date and where I was sitting — the Cinematheque when the programming is worth the drive, the couch when it isn’t or when I’m tired. It’s closer to a ledger than a magazine.

Two rules, both of them mostly for me. No scores. A number is a way of ending the conversation before it starts, and I’d rather be stuck defending an actual sentence. And no pretending to an authority I don’t have: I didn’t study film, nobody sends me screeners, I have a regular job and a high tolerance for driving across town on a weeknight to see a print of something from 1974.

What I want out of this is a record that can embarrass me later. If I write that a movie is going to stay with me and then never mention it again, the archive will notice, and that seems like the honest version of having opinions in public — not being right, just being on the record and reachable.

Nothing here is the last word. Half of it isn’t even the first.