The Movie Wizard

The focus of this website will be to provide useful, insightful, and unapologetic reviews of movies past, present, and future. I have made a semi-academic, totally informal, and (nearly) completely self-guided study of a wide variety of films, but my "Previously Viewed" movies list is not as extensive as I think it should be - and never will be. It's one of those "the more you know, the more you realize what you don't know" kind of things - as I follow the strands that connect one movie to another, following new paths on the great spider web of film history, I discover new pathways that seem to stretch into infinity.

When a movie is submitted to the MPAA for rating, that organization also assigns it a number. Watch the credits of a movie - when it gets to the end of the credits and they have all those official looking logos, one of them is the oval-shaped logo, with latitude and longitude lines on it, looking like one of those maps of the globe. That's the MPAA logo, and the movie's number is listed right there. I have found out that the MPAA does not provide a comprehensive list of these numbers and the movies they are assigned to, but if I were really ambitious I would set out to make my own list. I've signed up for Netflix, I could conceivably watch basically every movie ever put on DVD. The numbers are currently in the 40,000 range, and no I don't know which one is number 1.

Why do I call this blog the Movie Wizard? Because I have developed a fairly reliable sense of prediction - I can tell from the previews whether a movie will be one that I will really enjoy, one that is really worth my time, or a commercialized piece of crap. I set my standards based on the articist value of the movie. Cinema, like literature, music, visual art (and video games!) should be created to certain standards, should spring from a valid motivation (making money != valid motivation), and should be new and unique to the extent that anything can be (see Ecclesiastes). It is simple to see from a preview whether or not a movie meets those criteria (most of the time). So I will help you predict the future, as it were, as your Movie Wizard. Post comments with your requests for movie reviews and I will respond - you will never have to see a bad movie again! (though you may miss out on some mediocre/good ones).