Sunday, October 18, 2009

Group Fun

If you've been here for some time you might recall that the Film Experience was once one of the main pushers of the phenom known as the blog-a-thon where multiple sites posted on a specific topic simultaneously. I hosted three of the largest blog-a-thons the web had ever seen at the time (Michelle Pfeiffer 2006, Vampires in Cinema 2006 and Action Heroines 2007) before collapsing from exhaustion / 'thon burnout... that happened pretty much everywhere since the sites that used to keep calendars of such events stopped keeping track, too.

The blog-a-thon has essentially been replaced by the film clubs which come in two forms: one site hosted discussions or formatted like old school 'thons with links to every site discussing the topic. The other 'thon replacement is the monthly event/tradition like, for example, StinkyLulu's awesome Supporting Actress Smackdown series which is about to hit its 34th installment. WOW. That's devotion.


Here are some upcoming gatherings you might want to keep an eye on if you, like me, are beginning to miss the community feel that such gatherings once prompted.

Final Girl Film Club Slaughter High (1986) ~Oct. 19th (hilarious article)
TOERIFC Billy Wilder's Kiss Me, Stupid (1964) ~ Oct 19th (extremely long article and a bajillion comments so jump in)
Hugo Stiglitz... Italian Horror Blog-a-thon ~Oct 19th-31st (just startin')
StinkyLulu Supporting Actress Smackdown (1956) ~Nov 1st
TOERIFC Orson Welles' F For Fake (1974) ~ Nov tba
Frankensteinia The Boris Karloff Blog-a-thon ~Nov 23rd-29th
TOERIFC Akira Kurosawa's Ikiru (1952) ~ Dec tba

As ever... time is the thorn in my side or I'd try to do it all. As for this site's group efforts, another episode of "Best Pictures From the Outside In" is coming up very soon with Unforgiven and Casablanca as the twin subjects.
*

6 comments:

CrazyCris said...

I'm missing your "Musical of the Month" series! It died down around "Swing Time" time... :o(

Crierpo said...

FYC Rachel Weisz in AGORA

Slayton said...

Nat, what did you think of The White Ribbon? I'm surprised by your low grade; I thought it was brilliant.

How did you feel about the cast? Esp. Duran? For me she was the clear standout, followed by Friedel (how adorable is he?), Benesch and Lothar.1

NATHANIEL R said...

crazycris if i thought i could handle it right now i'd totally bring it back. unfortunately i never even seem to have time for the simplest blog posts these days [argh!]

crierpo ????

slayton i liked the movie fine but i didn't think it cohered in the way that say, the great great great Cache did. Still for a three hour drama with no resolution (not necessarily a bad thing) it sure flew by

TAS said...

For the record, I did not say that what I posted was a rough draft (or as you put it, with alpine irony, a "rough draft"), it is no more than pieces of something I had once been working on and have since abandoned.

As for the 'extreme' length of the post, I really don't know what to say. Much as I understand the revision that my fellow cinephiles' standards undergo whenever I enter the picture, I think it's pretty demonstrable that the whatsis I trotted out yesterday was not, at least, significantly longer than what most film bloggers routinely post, and I daresay that, in many instances, it was a good deal shorter.

I would ask why this has all of a sudden become a critical, debilitating flaw when, ordinarily, it is nothing less than Standard Operating Procedure. I would ask it, that is, if I didn't already know the answer.

In any event, I thank you for your substantive critique. Would that others with similar conclusions were as forthcoming.

NATHANIEL R said...

Tom... I apologize if I misunderstood your disclaimer (about it being pieces. that's how i do rough drafts myself so perhaps i was projecting.

it was neither a substantive critique nor a substance-free critique since it wasn't a critique at all. Just a link to your blog.

Normally people enjoy getting links. But to each their own.