Upon consideration, I've decided that my first review didn't really end up as what I meant it to be. This is a free blog, not the New York Times, and there are plenty of paid critics out there to review films and analyse performances from a professional angle. And, it seems kind of unfortunate that these are the responses by which both audiences and filmmakers tend to judge a work...the way I see it, a critic will give a film however many stars, but all that is irrelevant to the kid down the street who bought the DVD and adores every minute of it.
We, the 'target audience', the demographic, are an enormous group of individual people, all with our own lives and experiences; and naturally our individual experiences influence how we each react to a work of art. And we're supposed to react, the parallel onscreen universe connects with our own for a matter of hours, and we get to glimpse our alternate selves; someone else who has also had their heart broken, or risked an adventure, or stuck admirably to their principles. And we can walk away feeling affirmed or indeed challenged by our fictional counterparts. C.S. Lewis said "We read to know that we are not alone", and the same can be said of watching films.
So, henceforth this blog will take a different approach. What I'll be writing is not critical reviews, but personal responses. The kind of thing that's nowhere near analytical enough to be published in a newspaper. But after all, who do filmmakers really create their works for: reviewers with clipboards, or the kind of person who sits down with biscuits and a box of tissues, to glimpse a whole other world from their couch?
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