Tasked with the assignment of finding a “social bookmarking soulmate,” I was pretty apprehensive. I suspected I wouldn’t find somebody with my particular set of film tastes. Normally I wouldn’t think my tastes were that unique, but with all the trouble I had earlier finding good personal blogs that appealed to my interests, I felt a little bit like I might be somewhat alone in my choices of smaller sites. First, I did some searching through delicious.com and happily found some great personal blogspot sites that I could easily see making reference to for choosing subject matter and finding a voice that fits the topic of American cinema.
Unfortunately, I had an incredibly difficult time finding any kind of bookmarking “soulmate” through delicious. For some reason – and maybe it’s the popularity of the bookmarking site itself – almost everyone citing the sites I found most useful were also citing a wide array of topics. Every time I would click through in the hopes of finding a resource, I’d end up with somebody with a minimum of “film, cinema, movies, blog” tags and a large number of tags in some other discipline.
So I went back to diigo.com and found success. For whatever reason the same genre of blogspot resources I found led me quickly to a like-minded individual with similar interests and some great tags. He’s Joel Kropinski and he’s unfortunately not an avid diigo user. He follows no one and no one follows him. A lone island in the Internet Ocean, this Joel Kropinski. I suspect he uses this site for better bookmarking, not better socializing.
Actually, my favorite link of Joel’s (that I’ve explored up until this point) is the second-most recent one he linked: a PopMatters’ Short Ends and Leader blog entry called ReFramed No. 10: Andrei Tarkovski’s Stalker. This film is a personal favorite of mine, so I followed Joel’s link and discovered the “ReFramed” series, an intelligent roundtable discussion on misunderstood films by directors they (and incidentally, I) deem “great.” The piece on Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, which I would argue fits into the category of mainstream American filmmaking despite its awesome idiosyncrasies, is definitely worth checking out. Calum Marsh even manages to articulate the primary reason I love the film and the primary reason I love all Kubrick films:
Kubrick’s going for a very specific tone here, and he sustains it so vividly across two and a half hours that when you’re done you really feel like you’ve lived in the world of this film.
So for me, finding the Short Ends and Leader blog is akin to finding a great read. Good criticism and absolutely a site I will return to for casual reading and ideas for my own blog features, but not any kind of peer-reviewed academic resource.
For full disclosure here, Stanley Kubrick is my favorite filmmaker at the moment. Whenever someone asks what my favorite Kubrick film is, I’m tempted to say a different one. Barry Lyndon is the answer at the moment. Anyway, Joel’s got more Kubrick links, which endears him to me even more. I’ve mentioned my love for Roger Ebert’s criticism before, and here Joel links me to a video roundtable of Ebert (and others, obviously, it's a roundtable) discussing Eyes Wide Shut and the rest of Kubrick’s career.
I’ve written a lot in this whole leading up period about the need for a type of analysis that draws on many different sources of life and culture. This isn’t something I’ve read, really, but it’s something I’d like to see more of. Joel’s tastes basically match the ones I pursue in my personal reading, which is why I’ve chosen him as my bookmarking match. I’m having a great time going through these sites, and I want to emulate them to a certain degree with my blog, but I’d also like to keep mine focused (at least for a time) on a critical analysis of the mainstream American movie of the Present. I think this will mean sacrificing thinkpieces on my favorite Stanley Kubrick movies. But I’m sure in a moment of weakness I’ll find some way to do some auteur name-dropping.
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