August-10-2014

Morning folks! Hope you’re enjoying your weekend, and have caught up with all the new films out this weekend!

It’s been a while since I touched base with you all, so I figured now might be an opportune time. Why now? No reason, just felt like it.

The American summer of 2014 is now slowly fading out, with the last of the big tentpole films being released and winding down. We can now look forward to the latter part of the year, with some major event films – like the final Hobbit film! – coming out towards Christmas and the holiday season. As usual, we’ll continue to review all the big films as we can get to them (not always on cinema release – I have a family and work, you know!), and we’ll also continue with our ongoing series of Hitchcock films.

Keen eyed observers will have noticed a lot of new pingbacks coming into sites from some of our older reviews in the last few months. In an effort to streamline our branding, we’re gradually going back and updating all our older reviews with new logos and formatting, including changing all our old links to external content to the Zemanta system. If you’re a blogger and have noticed some new links coming in on your site, this is why. Hopefully it will drive more eyeballs your way – and vice versa, naturally. What we’re trying to accomplish is to give all our reviews a particular “look” for visitors to the site, consistent with our numbering system which began back in May 2012, with Contagion (#489). In doing this, we can also go back and correct grammar and spelling errors and inconsistencies (there’s more than a few of those!) and tidy things up a bit, freshen up the ragged edges (so to speak). It’s a time consuming process as we work through the 488 unnumbered reviews, but we hope to have it all done by the end of 2015.

As we rush towards the holiday period, and time starts to slip away, we hope you all take the time to occasionally check out films you might have otherwise missed or skipped in the months and years past. While keeping up with the current releases no doubt keeps most of you horribly busy anyway, we’ve found this year that revisiting an older film we haven’t seen in ages (or ever) actually enhances the film-watching process. Recent viewings of stuff we haven’t seen in a decade, like the Daredevil and Elektra movies, have given us a better appreciation of these forgotten films in the years since, so we urge you to take the time to occasionally stick an old DVD on of a film you might not have seen in a while, or don’t remember (like Bad Boys II, a film we watched not long ago and will be reviewing this week) to give yourself a break from the current schedule. Add some perspective. Watching film is a journey, not a race. It’s an experience to savor, like a good wine, not scoff quickly like a hamburger.

 Before we go, we should mention that this week is going to see a flurry of reviews published – a couple of Pixar films, and the aforementioned Bad Boys II – to clear out a bit of a backlog of material we’re waiting to publish. Thursday will see us check out Jason Bateman’s directorial debut, Bad Words, while Friday’s review will be the Johnny Depp starring Transcendence. Then we’re back to normal next week. As always, happy watching, and happy reading!

Rodney T – EIC, Fernby Films.

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