It's been quite a long time since Trick of Light Reviews has been updated. For a while there, I always meant to write up a new review for the films I had seen, but slowly I stopped thinking about it, and soon it was a thought that didn't occur to me anymore. It's not so much that I didn't want to write reviews that got me to stop; no, it was more that I well and truly have next to no idea of what I'm talking about, at least when it comes to cinema.

     I feel like I know more about film than the average moviegoer. I at least have that. But my knowledge really only boils down to actors and directors. I'm ignorant when it comes to film theory, or narrative structure, or any of the real nitty-gritty that makes a film. I almost feel like when I watch a film, I look to other people to tell me if it was good or bad, and then I take those opinions and spout them as my own. I do not want to do this.

     My only other basis as to whether a film was good or bad is my own personal taste - "Did I like this movie?" or perhaps "How did this movie make me feel?". If the answers to those questions are positive, then it was a "good" movie, and negative answers make it a "bad" one. I'm not saying these purely subjective, personal feelings and opinions don't have weight to them. They're certainly not meaningless. If they were, there would be no joy in watching films at all, and we as cinephiles would have to find something else to spend our lives doing. But these emotional responses seem to just scratch the surface of a film. I want to know how the film made me feel the way that it did. I want to know why the director made this decision or that decision or did things this certain way. I want to be able to look at films like Citizen Kane and understand why they're held as the most highly regarded works of all time and why Transformers is garbage summer fluff. I want to have a deeper understanding and knowledge of cinema.

     I have no aspirations of being a filmmaker. I merely want to learn about what film is all about. The obvious answer would be to seek out a film studies or film theory course, but that isn't an option right now. I'd love to be able to take a course like that, and perhaps I will in the future. For right now I think I'm going to seek out some books on the subject and see what I can learn. I guess that's a logical place to start.

     There's an endless world of movies out there. I just want to be equipped with the proper tools to explore it.