Today I wrote my first movie review.

One of the big, ongoing projects at work is development on Spout.com, a movie discovery and discussion website. Several of my friends are regulars, so I finally bowed to peer pressure and created an account for myself. My user name is “Grasshopper”.

The first thing I did was to rate all of the movies I had seen. Simple enough to do — find the movie, and assign it a number between one and five. Before I knew it, I had rated over five hundred movies, and I am now up over a thousand. And that isn’t even counting all of the TV series and individual television episodes which can be rated; those would probably push me into the 2,000 range.

Normally I try not to shill for the projects I work on, but this time something unexpected happened: I had fun. I went through and found movies I hadn’t thought about in twenty years or more. Some of them were good, many more were mediocre or bad. Some of them made me feel quite nostalgic, accompanied by an odd sense of deja-vu wherein I could remember where I was and what I was doing when I watched the movie. Poltergeist with my brother and step-brother in Louisiana. Robocop with my brother, at home laying on the living room floor. The Crow with friends immediately after I returned from Russia. Star Wars with my Mom and brother in a movie theater in Jackson. The Razor’s Edge, sitting home surrounded by stacks of books.

Martial Arts is the only film genre I watch with a seriously critical eye, and I watch a lot of martial arts films. If I post a review of which I am particularly proud I will announce it here. In the meantime, browse around and see if you rediscover any old favorites.