Jason has some fun looking at where the visitors to this blog are coming from

Okay, so a couple of days ago I thanked Indiefest for linking to this blog. I definitely saw a spike in readership for this very new, still pretty obscure corner of the internet, and that was cool.

So I started looking more at where my visitors are coming from. On the day that Indiefest started linking to my site, the jump was definitely coming from there. The interesting thing is, since then the majority of my visitors are actually coming in from e-mail referrals. So thank you everyone who e-mailed your friends about my blog!

And then there are interesting search terms that lead here. A while back there was a visitor from New York who came here by doing a blog search on "Tara Wray" (director/subject of "Manhattan, Kansas") which was cool because I only had nice things to say about her. I still get an occasional visitor from Germany from my recent write-ups about the Berlin and Beyond festival (I'm the top english language google blog search result for "Vier Minuten"!)

And then the really interesting one, is at least for a while yesterday I was near the top of the regular google web search for "substance of things hoped for" "greg morgan" (alas, no longer, other pages have knocked me off the top pages, but I'm still the number one blog search result!)

Shortly after someone found their way here through that route, I got another visitor coming over from this forum. I forgot to tell you that the screening I saw of "Substance of Things Hoped For" was its world premiere! And, in fact, since I sit in the front row, I really saw it before anyone else (everyone else saw it a few nanoseconds after I did!) And apparently the next morning I was the first one to post a review on the web. Their cinematographer Jessica Gallant found it and linked to it. Now I wish I said more nice things about the cinematography (especially the dolphin footage was really cool. I don't know if she shot that or if they used stock footage). Then it got really interesting. The reply on the forum (presumably from whomever clicked on her link to find my review) as you can see, accused the film crew of sleeping with me to get a good review (I assume in jest). So here's the real scoop:

No, nobody on the film slept with me. In fact, the only representatives of the film whom I've met are director Greg Morgan and co-writer Duke Addleman who are both--how can I say this nicely? They're both dudes (not that there's anything wrong with that, I just don't do that). For the record, I did hug both of them, because the ending of their credits told me to ("Have you hugged your independent filmmaker today?"). But it was a manly hug--firm handshake, one arm around the back and a solid pat on the back. A very manly man hug.

But here's the thing, I've never even considered that my opinion could be valuable enough that I could trade it for sexual favors! I'm an idiot, just settling for having a beer with the filmmakers! (although I do like beer, and that reminds me to thank Red Hook for sponsoring Indiefest).

But seriously, I don't want anyone to labor under the false impression that I'm actually a legitimate movie reviewer. I'm certainly not a critic--if you read many of my reviews you can see I have a very hard time being critical of anything. I don't even like calling what I write "reviews", because I don't consider myself qualified to be a reviewr. I'd prefer to call them "write-ups" if that didn't sound kinda clunky. Now, I'm not a shill or a plant, when I write that I love a movie, I genuinely love it. And, in fact, I did love "The Substance of Things Hoped For". In fact, on a side tangent. I'm very shy about asking questions in the Q&A session afterwards, so when I asked them about their sound (which I thought did a great job enhancing the hallucinatory feel of the movie. And then they told me it wasn't actually finished, which tells you something about my qualifications to judge movies) it was the only question I've asked at the festival this year, and is the equivalent of a standing ovation from me.

My point is that I'm not an expert, I'm not part of the film industry at all other than as a fan (for a living, I'm a physicist working in medical imaging). I go into every movie wanting to absolutely love it, and most of the time I'm successful. The problem is, that means I'm not really a good source for gauging whether you or anyone else will like a movie. Which begs the question, then why should anyone read my blog? I can come up with a few reasons.

1. You might learn about some new obscure film that sounds interesting and you might want to check it out.
2. You're a filmmaker who likes to see your name (or at least your movie's title. Sorry for not including the name of every filmmaker) in writing.
3. You're amused by my film obsession and like to follow my adventures.

Yeah, that's about it. This is by far the most rambling, incoherent post I've written yet. It's obviously very late in the festival.