One of my great sidelines and distractions in the past has been film reviewing and publicising. I've always had an interest in movies, as you'll probably have noticed from my blog posts in the past. Even before my fascination with gaming I was enjoying the thrill of Bond movies, the spectacle of the first Star Wars, and a wealth of TV scifi and action.I took my love of movies through to my academic years, studying film, film language, and even writing my dissertation on the differences of film language and rules compared to another medium - comics.
Taking this interest in film to the internet was an obvious choice, and I ended up blogging for the SyFy Channel UK (though they removed all their blog posts so I can't link to them), for the Tor Books UK site, and more recently for the Geekologists.
I've gone to premieres, the press conferences for things like The Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy, Thor and Ant-Man.
I've interviewed amazing people like the Soska Sisters about their careers and awesome movies.
Hell, I've sat within feet of Robert Downey Jr. and Scarlett Johansson!
But now I've found myself without a site to write movie / TV stuff for. I kinda thought about doing it here, on this blog, but I know that most of the time I write about tabletop RPG stuff.
But is it really that different? A lot of the time, my movie / TV experiences can be connected to gaming. The last time I tried this, I was sent a link about the remake of Carrie by the lovely people at the various film companies that ask me to review things, and I promoted the trailer and talked about my experiences meeting the legendary Stephen King. (Yes, I know the trailer is missing now... the internet is only so big, they probably had to delete it to make room for another trailer or something*).
Most of the time when the publicity people send me stuff, it's links to trailers and things that - by the time you've gone to the effort to post something about - someone has usually beaten you to it. And by someone, I mean people who actually do this sort of thing for a living and get paid for it.
I got sent a link to the new Ghostbusters trailer today, the new international (and improved) trailer. I was thinking about posting it, and what I thought about it (for the record, I didn't hate it and will reserve judgment until the film comes out - I just hope there's some sort of acknowledgement of the original movies in there) and my love of the original Ghostbusters (and especially the West End Games RPG). I've discussed my Ghostbusters history before, how I tried to get into game writing with an old electric typewriter and a head full of bad ideas for Ghostbusters adventures.
Part of me really wants to keep writing and reporting on geek news, movies and TV - it's a good way to keep writing when otherwise the gears get rusty and I don't feel like tapping the keyboard. But I'm also thinking "should I bother?" - shouldn't I be writing the games? And there are so many other things I have circling my head - a podcast of a dramatisation of the WILD novels, a webseries of the Role Your Own Life blog entries...
All of these things are a distraction. But without those distractions, I would never have had such fantastic encounters with the movie world.
What to do? I don't know... but the future's already around the corner.
* Yes, I know that's not how the internet works.
