I just wanted to welcome you all to this newly formed Substack, which I’m thinking about more as a long term project. For the past several years, I’ve been a compulsive film viewer. This sometimes means I watch over 500 new, old, foreign, rare, boring, bad, and brilliant movies a year.
I’ve been asked how I have the time, and I’ve found myself justifying my wild viewing habits as “research,” or “part of the process,” or – to a select few - “avoidance of real life and real-world problems.” But in reality, I can’t write without consuming, which is to say I am a more productive, empathic, and ambitious writer when I am moved by something.
This mostly lends itself to my dramatic projects, but as of late I’ve wanted to get back in touch with criticism, wanted to find a place where I can express how something I watch does or doesn’t hit. Friends and acquaintances and hot guys on Instagram often ask for advice on what to watch, and this has always felt like an enormous, loaded question. I think everyone should aspire to watch everything, but because you can’t, because you don’t have a potentially unhealthy relationship to visual media, I’ve taken it upon myself to select a few movies a month, based on what I am watching in real-time, and write. These won’t be formal reviews, or, like, robust pieces of academic analysis. I will keep things informal, voicy, and horny sometimes.
Anyway, please enjoy. Please subscribe. I will update every Thursday.
With love and mania,
Eric Eidelstein