I Need to Write About More Good Movies for This Site
I have a feature at my Substack, Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place, called The Joy of Positivity. It’s a paid subscriber-only thrice-weekly column where I recommend a movie, television show, album, book, or haiku I love and want to share with my readers.
It’s a fair amount of working putting out three of those pieces a week and I have an unfortunate tendency towards procrastination/disorganization rooted in my ADHD. So I figured that I could make the job more manageable by adapting old Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place pieces for it.
I would feel guilty if my old articles aren’t unread by nearly everyone and the few people who do read this site regularly will have forgotten the pieces by the time they’re rerun.
I was looking for pieces to adapt for The Joy of Positivity in the Analytics for this website and made an unfortunate if unsurprising discovery. A list of the top-performing articles on this site is overwhelmingly slanted towards the negative.
I have made an exceedingly modest, fragile, almost-living from writing about the very worst life and pop culture have to offer. I’m so committed to my craft and my brand that somewhere along the line I must accidentally have committed to also experiencing the very worst life and pop culture have to offer.
I’’ve been writing a column about famous failures, My World of Flops, for seventeen years here at the Happy Place and The A.V. Club.
Bad movies are my brand. Bad movies are the cornerstone of my career. Bad movies are my thing. Bad movies are my life. So it makes sense that my website would be dominated by articles about bad movies, trash pop culture, and trash people.
I wasn’t surprised, but I was a little disappointed because I love movies. They’re fucking great. They’ve been a life-saving escape since I was a little boy, dreaming in the dark.
I’m steeped in movie history. I stayed at Robert Evans’ house. Roger Ebert compared my memoir to Dostoyevsky. I had a spiritual epiphany watching Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure that made me realize that I wanted to make movies my life.
I love watching bad movies, writing about bad movies, and sharing bad movies with an audience that shares my affection for cinematic garbage.
But I also love great movies. I love Martin Scorsese as well as Tommy Wiseau. I would even go so far as to say that Scorsese is, in some ways, a greater and more important filmmaker. I’m obsessed with Billy Jack director Tom Laughlin but also Preston Sturges.
Writing The Fractured Mirror, my soon to be published book on American movies about filmmaking, reignited my love affair with film. Over the course of researching the book, I fell back in love with some of my favorite movies of all time, like The Muppet Movie Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, Singing in the Rain, Sullivan’s Travels, and Sunset Boulevard. Writing and researching that book reignited my passion for quality cinema and film history.
Watching and writing about nearly four hundred and fifty movies released over a century made me feel like I was, on some level, experiencing film history as a whole, that movies about movies are a useful shorthand for the whole art form.
I need to write about more good movies. I need to watch more good movies. I need more good movies in my life.
That’s why I started the Great Catch-Up column here. The idea is to give me an excuse to write about all the great movies that have come out since I started this site in 2017 and that I have, inexplicably, never gotten around to writing about.
The column got off to a good start, in part because readers enjoyed having a chance to read about popular entertainment that they were already familiar with instead of random bullshit they’ve never even heard of, which is the core of this inexplicably unpopular endeavor.
I wrote some pieces that got a big response, but, me being me, they were for My World of Flops-style eviscerations of Halloween Ends and Rise of Skywalker. Earnest appreciations of good movies got much less attention and fewer page views.
It’s much harder to get people interested in raves, but life and publishing are all about finding a balance, and this site has leaned too heavily in one direction for too long.
It’s up to me to correct that in order to bring a fuller, deeper, and more satisfying experience for you, a reader I adore but do not understand. I specifically do not know what you want from me or the site, but gosh darn it, I’m going to keep experimenting and trying new things in an attempt to find out.
Nathan needs teeth that work, and his dental plan doesn’t cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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