“I don’t like my mind right now. Stacking up problems that are so unnecessary. I wish that I could slow things down. I wanna let go, but there’s comfort in the panic.”
– Chester Bennington
First of all, I wanted to thank my readers for sticking with this website for as long as you have. Since 2013, I’ve been writing reviews on this website because I love talking about the movies and sharing my experiences with others. It has never been easy for me to connect with people on a personal level, and the movies have always helped me break through some of those social barriers I’ve always had. So from the bottom of my heart, thank you for following me and for always being interested in my opinions on the movies. Your support is what has kept me going all of these years.
Secondly, I want to apologize for all of the inactivity you’ve seen on my website for the past year. Since the pandemic hit in March last year (God, it feels so good to refer to 2020 as “last year”), I was under the impression that I would be able to publish content on my website like never before. For once in a rare occasion, I was not bound by the release schedules of new movies coming out or the cycling of unwanted sequels, remakes, and reboots pouring into movie theaters. I had even more freedom to watch and review whatever I wanted from home. A smarter critic, or a more stable one, would have leapt at the opportunity to invest in themself and their portfolio.
I began with a decent-ish start. I reviewed one of the best movies released last decade, a Spanish film by Alfonso Cuaron called Roma, revisited The Invisible Man and Sonic The Hedgehog, finally got to review the emotionally-stirring Spike Lee epic Malcolm X, and even got to follow up on his newest release Da 5 Bloods. And just last month, I got to write a spoiler-filled review of Zack Snyder’s Justice League. Man, that was fun.
I reviewed a few films throughout the year, but nowhere near as many as I wanted to. There were way more films I watched last year that I couldn’t review, among them including Onward, The King of Staten Island, The Devil All The Time, Tenet, The Outpost, The Social Dilemma, John Lewis: Good Trouble, and The Trial Of The Chicago 7, which I labeled my favorite film of 2020.
And when I say that I couldn’t review them, I really do mean that I couldn’t review them. I’ve struggled with writer’s block in the past, whether I’m writing for my own website or for publications outside of it, but 2020 delivered writer’s block like I’ve never dealt with before. I don’t even know what caused it. Maybe I wasn’t feeling inspired. Maybe I felt intimidated by the blank page in front of me. Or maybe I was just tired. God knows 2020 gave me more than a few reasons to feel that way.
This is a strange sensation I feel, and it makes me feel trapped in a way I have never experienced before. In past years, no matter what I was going through, I could always turn to the movies to help me escape from my own reality and immerse myself into another’s. No matter whether I was dealing with issues in my academics or jobs, a dramatic breakup, anxiety attacks, or the death of my grandmother, the movies were always there to help me break away from my own experiences and empathize with someone else’s. Having the privilege to experience that and share that with others is easily one of the greatest gifts I have ever had. No feeling comes close to connecting to someone else through your words and your shared experience in the theater together.
2020 sullied that experience for me for a number of reasons. For one thing, the shut down of movie theaters affected me much more than I expected it to. Whenever theaters closed and everyone stayed cooped up at home, I thought the movie-watching experience would just be a change of scenery. I was grossly mistaken. The theater has another level of immersion to it — the lights dimming, the stereo sound swelling up around you, the screen lighting up in bright and vivid colors as the music crescendoed into its first dramatic note. Whenever you’re in the movie theater, you’re genuinely immersed into the film, its characters, and the story that they go through. It doesn’t become just a movie at that point: it unfolds with a life of its own.
But at home on my couch, you notice that life, that vibrancy, is diminished. Not gone by any means, but diluted into a smaller experience. You notice how the TV screen captures fewer details of the film on it, the sound on the speakers not popping with the same impact, the plumbing and the pipes making sounds around you, your neighbors yelling next door, and the kids shouting outside while they’re playing. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m abundantly grateful we were even able to stream movies at all from home this year. If I had to pick between streaming and not having movies, I’m picking streaming no questions asked. Regardless, there’s no denying that streaming is a different experience from watching movies in a theater. It’s like going from an amazing four-course meal at a luxurious steakhouse to eating at Red Lobster.
Also, different platforms limit access to some of these movies for families that have one streaming service or another. For instance, Soul and the live-action Mulan remake streamed exclusively on Disney+, while Wonder Woman 1984 is on HBO Max. Da 5 Bloods, The Outpost, and The Devil All The Time, meanwhile, were all streaming exclusively on Netflix, and subscription cancellations surged eight times since that whole Cuties fiasco earlier last year. Can you imagine how pointless it would have been to review The Trial of the Chicago 7 a month after several hundred people canceled their subscriptions and can’t even watch the damn thing?
That’s not even getting into the myriad of other horrible, horrible issues the nation was dealing with, including thousands dying from the dreaded pandemic, record unemployment numbers, an economic recession, millions of evictions, food banks under crisis, ongoing cases of police brutality, the resulting protests and riots, and a hotly-contested presidential election where people to this day still refuse to acknowledge that Donald Trump lost and would rather believe in illogical conspiracy theories alleging the election was rigged. Seriously, out of the thousands of issues plaguing this year, who honestly gives a rat’s ass what score a snobby movie critic gave a film on RottenTomatoes?
I guess what I’m trying to say is that 2020 discouraged me in a way I had not experienced before — in a way to where it froze my muscles, wiped my mind blank, and erased the words I was ready to pour out onto the page. That hurts. More than anything else from that crummy, crummy year, being unable to express myself through my reviews was a loss I’ve experienced unlike no other this year. It’s robbed me in ways I didn’t even think I could be robbed.
Now please don’t get me wrong — I understand just how much of a first-world problem this is, especially during a pandemic. If I had to pick between being sick with COVID-19, being unemployed, evicted, homeless, or hit a creative dead zone, I would pick the situation I currently am in now. I’m not a fool. I know without a doubt that circumstances could be worse, and indeed, they may even be down the road. But nevertheless, I’ve lost an important piece of myself in 2020. Coming to that realization is a pain I hope few have to experience.
What does this mean for me and my website going forward? I’m not quite sure. With movie theaters reopening and more and more people getting vaccinated, some people are letting their guard down thinking life is returning back to normal. I for one am not as confident. Although I am fully vaccinated, 60% of the country is still unvaccinated, while in Texas it’s 65%. I’d feel terrible if someone caught COVID-19 from going to see a movie I recommended, or even worse, died from it. Either way, I don’t feel comfortable resuming my movie reviewing like everything is all normal again, because the truth is it isn’t. Not even close.
Besides, I feel like 2021 needs to be more about myself than it needs to be about my portfolio. I need to re-discover my love of writing, invest in my physical and mental health, and re-learn to appreciate movies on their own terms rather than trying to hyper-analyze them all the time. Writing is not my job: it is my passion, and it needs to stay that way. Because of this, I feel like the healthiest thing for me to do at this point is to step away from my website and focus on more urgent priorities that require my attention at the moment.
Understand that this doesn’t mean I am quitting publishing altogether. You’ll still see my byline in Southlake Style magazine and The Waxahachie Sun, and maybe even a video or two on my YouTube page. And a few months down the road if everything truly does go back to normal, maybe I’ll start regularly posting on this website again. Until then, I feel like I need to take the pressure off of posting on here and prioritize myself and my emotional health. It’s something I’ve put off for a long time now and I’ve finally reached a point to where I can no longer ignore it.
Thank you so much for understanding dear reader, and thank you as always for keeping up with me and supporting my website. I’ll be back as soon as I am able, and whenever that happens, I look forward to sharing the cinematic experience with you as I always have.
See you all at the movies.
– David
DAVID DUNN 