Flasz On Film

2023 is officially coming to an end – as of writing these words – in just under four hours. Which means if there ever was an opportunity to write a few words reflecting on the year and perhaps looking into the future, it is now.

Reflections

I’ve had this place for a little while now and almost exactly one year ago I decided to take it a bit more seriously. Now, I didn’t intend for this little meaningless blog to make money and – to be completely honest – I don’t think I’d like to do any of the things I know for a fact I should do to make it generate revenue. In fact, this is probably one of the most important things I realized in 2023. I don’t want to write content or clickbait. I’m not in the business of writing braindead listicles to coincide with the release of a new Marvel movie. I reserve the right to change my mind but I don’t want to quit my nine-to-five to write content I don’t believe in.

I made a conscious decision to commit myself to the process of writing and I think I’m quite happy with where I am now. Over the course of the year I published just over 150 pieces – reviews, essays, and other rambles – which means I think I have developed a more or less sustainable routine. Let’s be honest, it wasn’t easy at times. But, as is the case with going to the gym or establishing any habit, it is all down to discipline. I can’t promise you that, should you decide to take inspiration from my own journey – not that you should – it would somehow get easier over time. It doesn’t. Life gets in the way of things. Sometimes you’re just tired. At other times other pressures overshadow whatever mental clarity you might want to attain in order to produce the two thousand words needed to push something out. Life is just hard at times and writing as a hobby, specifically as a hobby you’d like to see grow over time, is no exception. I think this is the biggest lesson I drew out of the experience of building a stable writing discipline.

Do I want to write every day? Sure. Is it possible? Probably not. I think I’m old enough to start understanding not only my own physical limitations but also to see where my reach is definitely starting to exceed my grasp. I wrote over 150 pieces here. I wrote a few essays I pushed out on Medium. And I’m happy with that volume.

What I also ended up paying more attention to as the year developed was the kind of writing I enjoy. Look, who am I kidding? I’m not a professional critic. I do this for fun. So, it took me a few months to come to a conclusion that I think I’d be happier if I wrote what want and how I want and for that I have two inspirational creatives to thank for – Quentin Tarantino and John Cassavetes.

I had the immense pleasure to read Tarantino’s Cinema Speculation while away on holiday and I think I needed this experience not so much to learn all that I learned about the cinema of the 1970s and everything else Quentin loves. I think I needed to read this to unlock – or perhaps validate – something in me as a writer. I’ve always liked to write conversationally and I have always found it incredibly easy to sit down and just pour my thoughts on the page or the screen. However, I have always been told I should work on my style, depersonalize my writing and try to look more professional. Tarantino as a writer allowed me to ignore all those things. The man writes exactly as he speaks and it’s fine. So, I think I should be fine, too.

In fact, I have begun treating my podcasting journey as complementary to my journey as a hobbyist writer because having to articulate myself verbally – especially as I am not a native English speaker – for extended periods of time has indeed influenced the way I write. Because I write the way I speak so practicing speaking into the microphone must have made an impact on what I do with a keyboard. And this is where a thank-you note to John Cassavetes comes into play because thanks to learning so much about his life and career (as we talked for countless hours about his entire filmography) gave me permission to stop caring about the podcast as a product and focus on podcasting as a process. Which is also a part of my developmental journey as an essayist. And by extension, I somehow gave myself permission to apply the same logic to what this place is. Flasz on Film is not a place of blowhard aspiration to be counted as a critic. It’s a place for me to work on my voice and find myself in my writing.

That’s what I learned this year. I established a disciplined routine I am hoping to carry over into 2024. I gave myself permission to write what I want in my own voice. And I don’t care about killing my darlings. I know where they nest and I love how they chirp. Leave me alone.

Resolutions

I think I’m done trying to please people who don’t know who I am or convince others to publish my work. I have taken much more pleasure out of seeing this little place go from absolute obscurity to seeing a good handful of daily views and I’ll gladly watch it develop further. Now that I have a framework of what I think is roughly 150-180 pieces I can squeeze out in a year, It’s a question of what I would like to write about next year. Is it even possible to plan that?

Well, it is and it isn’t. I could take a critical look at which essays and posts people responded to the most (in fact, here’s a list of stuff I wrote in 2023 that people read the most), but I believe that while feedback should be taken into account when making decisions, it should not drive the process. Based on what I’ve seen, my so-called regular reviews see the least traction and the science indicates I should either do something about the way I write and/or market them or replace them with other forms of writing. And I’ll be perfectly honest – I don’t think I like writing “regular” reviews. Stacking adjectives bores me and I always need a hook to write something about a movie. Therefore, I naturally end up disregarding what critics will never fail to denote because I find it more interesting to lean into how David Fincher thinks he still has it instead of telling you all about Tilda Swinton’s performance in The Killer, or that Saltburn is a movie that gets worse the more you think about it and it is all because it’s a piece of graffiti posing as storytelling with something to say. So, why not embrace it and write these review-adjacent featurette essays? They won’t necessarily tell you why you should go out to watch the movies I write about, but they might enrich your time on this planet for the five minutes it takes to read them. That’s all I can count on.

Hence, I think you might expect more of that kind of writing from me going forward. In addition – and I know this might be a stretch because making promises and making good on those promises are two different things – I still have a bunch of unfinished long-term projects, like my retrospectives I left dangling… which truly bothers me now. So, I’d like to commit to finishing some (if not all) of them in 2024. Don’t take it to the bank. I’ve been known to change my mind. Still, I’d like to write a bunch more essays about the Halloween series (which I started a few years back). I still have a few entries to do to count my Haneke retrospective as complete. And also, I have a handful of ideas for essay series in my back pocket, so I think you can expect my writing to include some of those.

Anyway, thanks for sticking with me this past year. I appreciate everyone who comes around and reads even a single sentence I put together. I’m not Roger Ebert and I know I’ll never come close to what his writing did for the world of cinema. All I can do is look up to his work, commit to the process and work on my voice while ensuring it is still a voice I can recognize.

Happy New Year!