*tap tap*

*tap tap tap*

*tap tap crick* Aaah...

Now, we just stretch the old arms, kick aside the broken eggshells, and have a look around.

....

My, it's uh, dark. Well, okay. I can deal with that. In fact, I'd call it appropriate, all things considered.

What things would those be then? Well, they would be, well, movies. Films, motion pictures, cinematographs, or, in my preferred terminology, flicks. Hence the title Flicker Shack.

Okay, that all sounds a bit dumb. But, as I doubt anyone (let alone anyone I know) will be reading this, I'm not going to worry about it. But I will expand on it a bit, maybe get a proper mission statement out of it.

Primarily, this is a journal, of sorts. I'm not really the journal keeping type, though. I had one, which I kept pretty religiously back in eleventh grade. It lasted the whole year and read like a 'Gilmore Girls' fan piece. Jesus, it was awful. I filled the last page on the last day of school, wrapped it in a plastic bag, and buried it in the backyard. It's lain there undisturbed for the past, like, twelve years, and hopefully, will continue to do so until long after my earthly passing, at which point I hope that it's unearthed by some curious, alienated, romantic sixteen-year-old desperately in need of companionship and sympathy and a sign that someone, somewhere has felt the things he feels. God, but I hope he has the sense to burn it.

So I'm not much of a journal keeper. But I do flatter myself with the belief that I can write, and I figure that, with regular practice, I can inflate that delusion into a proper mania.

So, what to write? Well, frankly, I think a "journal" of "thoughts" and "feelings" is, in the modern parlance, "gay." So you get none of that. Instead, you get my harshly opinionated views on le cinema, or, in other words, a bunch of movie reviews. I arrived at this decision upon observing that one of my very favorite hobbies is watching movies, and another of my favorite hobbies is going on and on to anyone in earshot about what I think about them. I also think that movies make vastly more sense than real life, so I like to view life through the cinematic lens, as it were. Movie reviews, as I see it, make a nice context for commenting on the rest of my life.

Furthermore, I want to point out a couple more things about this--for lack of a better term--experiment. One, I have no training as a journalist. So no journalistic rules or integrity or fair and balanced reporting here. I read reviews, and I plan to crib from them shamelessly, as well as trailers, interviews, websites, DVD commentary, and anything else I want to. Reviews, I've noticed, seem to want to approach movies as if they existed in a vacuum of unbiased purity, accompanied only by the holy text of a press kit. They don't, for instance, ever make any mention of what they were expecting from, say, the trailer. Well, fuck that. I'm not getting a press kit, and I'm not getting paid, so I have the luxury of not giving a fuck. Flicks exist in the context of the hype surrounding them, and my own integrity requires that I acknowledge that.

Second point: I'm doing this as, as I said, an experiment. Maybe exercise is a better term. See, I'm kinda trying to establish a writing style. And the inspiration I'm drawing on is the collected work of the late, great Joe Bob Briggs. For those of you who don't know of the Great Joe Bob, he is, or rather was, the self-titled Drive-In Theater Critic of Grapevine, Texas. He had a column in the Dallas Observer for several years, and later hosted a show on, as I recall, TNT called Joe Bob's Monstervision. He was a champion of the phenomenon known as the drive-in theater, and a connosieur of the low-budget B-grade trash that seemed to get created specifically for that venue: cheap-o horror, sexploitation flicks, and the like. His columns characteristically ended with a rundown of vital stats for a film: body count, breast count, highlights of the violence depicted (called "fu," as in kung fu, chainsaw fu, meathook fu, paper shredder fu, etc.). And he made a point of sounding like a total hick throughout, which belied the fact that he knew way more about movies that most people. Highlights included his savaging of The English Patient, in which he points out the absurdity of sympathizing with a guy who decides not to save the world from Nazis because he'd rather die in the desert with his girlfriend; and his glorious review of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which he compares favorably and convincingly with Psycho and the films of Luis Bunuel. Monstervision was just as good. He themed his shows, usually showing double features of, say, Jaws and Orca; or the first two Phantasm movies; or Alien and, uh, whatever movie that Alien was a remake of. He'd appear at commercial breaks or whatever and give trivia about the movies and stuff. My personal favorite episode was when he showed Back to the Future I & II and, at the breaks, explained the science behind the time-traveling. Turns out Joe Bob has a pretty good grasp of relativity. Not that I'm surprised, because Joe Bob is THE MAN.

Hmm. Reading over that, I realize that I give the impression that Joe Bob Briggs is dead. That's not true. He's still got a website up, but I don't think he writes columns anymore. He abandoned writing a while ago to (ill-advisedly, I'd say) focus on his acting career. If you're interested, you can see him in Face/Off as the surgeon who does face transplants.

One last thing. I do write already, albeit sporadically. Turns out I'm pretty gifted at two things: poetry and bitchy memos. I'm also working, slowly and badly, on a novel. You've been warned.

At any rate, welcome to the Flicker Shack. I'll be back tomorrow with a review.