Craig's Capsule Reviews: The Beginninging

I love watching movies. According to my Netflix profile, I've rated 2268 of them to date. That means I've watched 59.7 movies per year since I was born in 1971, and the first 5 years doesn't count because I wasn't old enough to remember them.

And while I love watching movies, I hate wasting my money or time on a bad one. And hence the need for checking reviews in advance.

But back in the late 80s, I decided that reading movie reviews was a waste of my time.

I was fed up with pompous and overly-critical film critics telling me what they thought was good or bad about movies, especially movies that I enjoyed. Film critics tend to pan most commercial and genre films (scifi, action-adventure, fantasy, animation) and then spend paragraphs blathering on about how great some mind-numbingly slow drama or indie art house film is. In my experience, following their suggestions on movies is usually disappointing.

And I always thought it odd and even unnecessary that anyone would need 10 paragraphs and pages even to review any movie...unless you really, really love it, I guess. (And just how often have you heard a film critic say that they "loved" any movie?) I also hate that a lot of film critics are so detailed in their commentary that they spoil the movie and can influence your opinion of the film before you've even seen it.

I just wanted a quick synopsis -- a short and sweet overview -- with no spoilers and preferably from a regular movie fan to tell simply say whether or not a movie is worth watching based on the overall entertainment value.

So I went looking for such a thing and was rather disappointed to not find such a thing. After all, this was long before such helpful sites like metacritic.com, rottentomatoes.com, imdb.com and various movie blogs existed. (In the 80s, if you told someone you had a "blog" they would have told you to see a doctor or therapist.)

And since I couldn't find any resources for capsule reviews like I wanted to see, I decided to start writing them myself. And thus "Craig's Capsule Reviews" was birthed.

I started by posting capsule movie reviews on a few movie fan forums. And even though I've technically been blogging since 1999, it didn't occur to me until 2009 that maybe I should start my own movie review blog. So in addition to the photo blog here, I'm going to be continuing my "legacy" of spoiler-free capsule reviews.

Funny, it took me 9 paragraphs to introduce my capsule movie reviews. Does that make me a hypocrite or simply ironic? And isn't "ironic" just an "iron" with an "ic" at the end? And is it too obvious that I've been up most of the night battling insomnia and an attack of sinus congestion?

Well, that makes 10 paragraphs now. I should stop.