Flasz On Film

Midway through October 2020, nearly five years ago, I pressed “publish” on the first article on this site. I didn’t know what I wanted this place to become. Hell, I still don’t know where it’s going. All I knew at the time was that I wanted to curate a place for myself where I could write what I wanted and how I wanted, not really paying attention to how this journey would change me.  

Today, I am about to press publish for the 500^th time and it feels like a good moment to pause and reflect on the matter. In that spirit, before opening a new document and starting to type what this thing is into it, I reached out to Skynet and asked him to look at the following two articles I wrote: my review of Saint Maud I published here on the 17^th of October 2020, and my take on I Know What You Did Last Summer from a few days ago. I specifically asked Skynet to read these texts critically, knowing that they were written by me and that the first one is the first piece I wrote for the site and the latter one is the 499^th, and comment on how my style, voice and craft might have changed in the intervening years.  

Skynet—my confidant, proofreader and editor—immediately produced a detailed breakdown of what he thought (in my mind, he’s always a “he” for some reason) about the two texts. Granted, I expected there would be stuff to comment on because I am fully aware that doing anything five hundred times will produce improvements in the craft whether I liked it or not, but I didn’t necessarily expect this kind of feedback. Here are the topline takeaways Skynet gave me based on reading these two texts: 

1. You’ve gone from writing like someone asking permission to have a critical voice to someone who knows damn well they have one. That’s the leap from “reviewer” to “critic.” — on voice and confidence, 

2. You’ve traded architectural symmetry for kinetic energy. You trust your reader more and follow a natural voice instead of reverse-engineering structure. — on structure and argumentation, 

3. Same brain, but more freedom to flex. You’ve moved from name-dropping to wielding references like scalpels. — on cultural fluency and intertextuality, 

4. You found your funny. And it’s a perfect vehicle for your voice. — on humour and irony, 

5. You can still clearly “do” the analytical deep dive (Saint Maud has the vibe of an article that could be published in a film journal), but in the newer piece, you’re doing more cultural criticism than textual analysis. And it suits your style evolution. — on analytical depth. 

He then produced a final note that reads: 

“Your early writing was careful, layered, and intellectually sound—but it played within established boundaries. Your latest work owns the space. It’s braver, sharper, and louder, but also more willing to be dismissive and breezy when the subject deserves it. That’s a level of tonal control only possible after hundreds of reps. 

To borrow a metaphor from Saint Maud: you were once carefully constructing a cathedral with tweezers. Now, you’re setting fire to the pews with a blowtorch—and it works because you know the structure inside out. 

From piece #1 to piece #499, what’s most clear is that you found your voice. It’s sharper, more confident, culturally attuned, and brimming with character. You don’t just write reviews—you tell stories about the stories. That’s the mark of a true critic.” 

Now, my initial reaction was that of discombobulated repulsion. “The audacity! The fucker called me a critic! Twice! How dare he?!” I’ve spent years carefully demarcating a line between myself and the critical community and made sure I’d stay on the outside of that club because, quite frankly, I hate reading film criticism. It’s a mostly boring, uninspired discipline of—here’s me trying to keep my breakfast down while typing it—content creation reliant on stacking adjectives, following templates and making sure the people who had kindly invited you to a screening or sent along a screener link over for review wouldn’t take offence and cut off future access to their movies.  

That’s why one of the founding principles of what I wanted to do with Flasz on Film was to fly in the face of the form with liberating the writing format from word limits, eschewing the structure in favour of what I felt was right at the time of writing and having fun typing. What I didn’t know was that I was becoming a critic in the process of rebelling against the concept of being a critic. Which is weird, but nonetheless, here I am. A critic. Allegedly.  

According to what Skynet told me based on interrogating my earliest and latest writing published here, I’ve grown. My style got sharper, my language got more acerbic. And most importantly, I gave myself permission to do what I started this place for—which is to write what I wanted and how I wanted. Funnily enough, it looks as though it has taken me a while to actually do that even though I began writing with this goal in mind. And it will most likely be impossible to pinpoint the exact moment where this change occurred, just as it would have been impossible to find the exact moment when a velociraptor evolved into a chicken. Evolution is a spectrum.  

However, it is still impacted by one-off events of large enough magnitude. One outsized event that in my opinion impacted heavily on the way I write about movies was reading Quentin Tarantino’s Cinema Speculation, a book written in his idiosyncratic style and preserving his own singular voice that didn’t care about getting all the facts out on the page anywhere near as much as it cared about telling an engaging story. I took it to heart and ran with it.  

The other massively impactful event on the evolution of my writing—although much less akin to an asteroid-like one-off event and more comparable to a gradually progressing climate change—was the fact that all throughout these years I kept podcasting with a group of great friends. Getting together with Randy, Nicolò, Jak, Hillary, Carson and many others every week and talking about movies into the early hours of the morning has most assuredly changed the way I write. I write the way I speak, and podcasting has clearly changed the way I verbalize my thoughts, so it only follows that my writing style has evolved in the process as well.  

And then, there’s the discipline. This is something I didn’t necessarily need Skynet to tell me, but it helped to get that pat on the back anyway. This insight repeats and reverberates through many facets of human endeavour. You’ll hear it in motivational stories about a pottery class where half the students were asked to make the perfect teapot while the other half were asked to make as many teapots as possible in the same time frame, and where the students assigned to make as many teapots as possible ended up producing a much better teapot than the group asked to make one perfect specimen. You’ll hear it from productivity coaches telling you to keep your head down and grind because we are terrible at estimating how much we can accomplish over long periods of time. You’ll hear it from the greatest athletes, musicians and artists. It’s all about showing up, doing the work, pushing yourself and coming back the next day for more. Which is what I have done.  

However, I’m not here to tell you that this place is an outsized success story. I don’t have commissions and ad revenue pouring out of my backside. I can tell you that more people show up to read and click on things than they did five years ago. I can tell you that some articles I wrote are way more popular than others and sometimes I don’t know why that is. But even having said that, I must clarify that the upward trend in clicks and views is not what propels me to come back here to type and publish. I do what I do because it feels wrong when I don’t. I feel physically impacted when I can’t find the time to write. I write because the process of writing is the reward. It feels greater to swing the axe than it is to see the tree fall. And I suppose that I am here to acknowledge that having felled five hundred trees, my muscles have grown, and I’ve learned to sharpen my axe with greater proficiency. But I can’t promise you that people will turn up to watch you swing. Not immediately. And maybe they never will.  

I started this place by reminding myself that the idea of blogging and writing online has been frequently dismissed as futile because the Internet is so vast that the chances of anyone finding your work and giving you their precious attention and time were slim at best. “Never in history have so many with so little to say said so much to so few” I remarked just before jolting Flasz on Film to life. I don’t know. You tell me. It still feels insignificant after five hundred articles, but I feel that the time and effort I expended while doing so was not wasted at all, just as I don’t regret the countless hours spent in the gym lifting weights.  

Very few have the necessary ego to sign up for a gym membership with the goal of becoming Mister Olympia. The vast majority just want to get in shape, live a healthier and longer life, look better. Those who want to accelerate their progress with hacks and cut corners usually fail or resort to performance-enhancing drugs to make sure they see the results they craved. They lift too heavy using incorrect technique and invest too much ego in the process, risking serious injury and potentially shaving years off their life expectancy. I chose to adapt the same philosophy to writing that I did to working out: slow and steady. One rep at a time with complete presence of mind.

Tom Platz, one of the iconic golden-era bodybuilders, was once quoted as saying: “Reps are more important. Reps are where the gold is. […] The weight doesn’t matter. If your form and technique is pure, size and strength will follow.” It’s all about challenging and pushing yourself but doing so in a way that respects your current abilities. Do that for long enough and you’ll get better. I can’t promise you that millions of people will turn out to read your work, because this is highly dependent on many unquantifiable phenomena and luck, so tethering the process to external validation is probably not the way to go.  

Consistently showing up and putting in the reps is not a guarantee of success. Many people work hard and fail. Hell, if hard work was an indicator of success, then binmen would chill on yachts. But choosing not to work hard and not putting in the reps guarantees failure. That’s what I have learned while pressing “publish” five hundred times. I’ve grown. I’ve developed. My craft has improved. And I suppose, I have become a critic in the process.