movies?

What's the point of writing about movies? I actually don't know what to say about them most of the time. I'm less interested in talking about them than I was in the past. It's sort of a matter of having a private experience. I feel sorry for film critics sometimes, the really busy ones, because they have to make a judgement and put it out in the world without much time to reflect. That's fine with movies that don't mean much to you, but the really good ones, the ones that really touch you...well, I haven't wanted to write about those.
For example, Once Upon a Time in the West (OUTW) is a movie I first saw in high school, and over the last decade have had an evolving relationship with it. You and a movie together make a dynamic system, and I would hate to have to pin down some definitive opinion about a movie that matters to me. I would actually enjoy writing about OUTW now, after all these years, and craft a nice essay about it, but it would be less of a review and more of a personal reflection on the movie and what it means to me.
In a different way, I would like to write an essay about Breaking Bad, which is a show I absolutely worshiped for the first three seasons, after which it rapidly fell in my favor and never recovered. Because I ended up not liking it I'm much more ready to write about it.

What I want to do on this blog is write about whatever, and yet leave title "Writing About Movies". You know. Whatever. First of all, fuck the way other people write reviews. It's not that it's bad, it's just not what I'm trying to do. I don't do this to impress people (anymore). And maybe I don't give a shit about spoilers.

Now, some brief comments about Gone Girl. It's fantastic. It starts with really shitty, slick dialogue that's typical of the beginning of a thriller where the writer really doesn't care about the way people interact in normal situations but nevertheless needs to write a few normal scenes in order to provide context for when shit gets fucked up. Even so, those scenes are compelling because David Fincher is such a precise, confident filmmaker, you watch the shitty dialogue and be like "what the fuck, it's still good, because David Fincher." But as the story goes on and twists around, it becomes something totally different. I like when that happens. In a typical mystery story someone gets killed and then everyone's like "Who's the murderer?" and then the whole rest of the movie is trying to figure out what happened, and the conclusion is when the murderer is revealed, and that's what the story was about. But if the murderer is revealed in the middle of the story, or the beginning, the story must become about something else, some theme or relationship between characters, and it also provides the opportunity to try and understand the character of a murderer, beyond a stereotypical confession speech at the end.
The ending is very thought-provoking. Amy plays the media so well that all the holes in her story get swept aside because of overwhelming sympathy for her victim story. People outside the mainstream may question the veracity of her story but they'll always be marginalized, like 9/11 truthers, because the story has become so entrenched in the culture. Nick has no chance to tell the truth now, it's too late, she won the public's opinion.
I can't wait to see it again.