About
We, the folks on the inside of this imaginary ivory tower known as Cineblog.us have a minimal set of expectations for the movies and films we watch because we’ve developed a sense of taste as a result of those Lit., Art History and Semiotics courses that we took in college. Sometimes, the stuff on screens big and small deserves discussion, analysis and closer examination, sometimes not.
But that’s not to say that all movies are of equal footing: Sometimes the budgets and the personalities involved in making movies earn a mention when 8-figure play-or-pay deals upset the development of simple, powerful stories.
‘Films’, whether they’re subtitled imports or movie-of-the-week fare, have become so numerous that there’s just no point to wasting ink, electrons or time writing about things that were obviously of no value to the people who made them.
Cineblog.us is a spin-out of Amphetameme.org, where many of the pre-2008 reviews here started out. Many of the reviews were written for Amphy and ported to Spout.com and vice-versa, getting such strong reviews in each community that I was encouraged to set up my own filmblog by usability and design-architect emeritus, Ravi Singh. To help keep the content here fresh and new, I am proud to be joined here by fellow film-addict and writer Anne Dougherty.
We here at Cineblog aren’t located on the West Coast, we’re Mid-Atlantic and all of our sources come from the public record; from the internet, monographs and the thousands of dollars we spent a learnin’ at our fancy schools, getting MFAs and such.
Since the movie-industry has grown into a facsimile of the fast-food industry over the past several years, it’s become necessary to ‘cut the fat’: With a few small exceptions, we review what we like. That’s it.
Victor Sparrow, January 2008