#OneYearLater

One year ago today, I started a Twitter account to accompany my blog.  It was a way to provide instant feedback on the various movies I was watching, meaning early screenings and midnight showings could be evaluated instantaneously, giving me a solid 20 minute head start on my usual means of damning a movie to commercial failure or welcoming it into the (Not That) Exclusive Club of Recommendation.

My tweeting began humbly, as most internet initiatives do.  I started by tweeting about how I was strangely excited for a Tyler Perry movie (the thoroughly mediocre For Colored Girls) and trying to win a commemorative Conan t-shirt.  A handful of friends responded with perfectly unenthused "ohs."

Then, I discovered the community of movie-lovers at my fingertips.  No longer did I need to bore my friends and family with awards predictions, outrage over limited release patterns, or my burning desire to spend outrageous amounts of money on super sexy DVD editions.  Suddenly, I could engage in such conversations with people who cared, or at the very least, understood.  It was a stunning realization, one that made me realize that Twitter was much more than a glorified, stunted Facebook status.  Much more than Facebook, Twitter encourages - some might even say exists for - engaging in dialogue about whatever topic suits your fancy, whether it's the fact that you're having trouble deciding what to make for dinner or trying to decipher the deeper spiritual messages in Season 4 of Lost.  On Twitter, I could find other people who were oddly passionate about the same super-specific things that make me gush.

So by and large, my tweeting has been done happily, even gratefully.  But there is a downside to my hashtagging ways.  The main issue is the downfall of my movie criticism.  For over four years, my main bastion of movie community was Rotten Tomatoes, where I reviewed every movie I saw.  If I need a good laugh, I go back to find out how I expressed my mixture of joy and disgust at Borat or my utter awe for The Fountain when I was but a fledgling film aficionado without the vocabulary or experience to do my emotional and intellectual responses justice (I am still lacking in many ways, which is one of the beautiful things about being a movie fan).

My RT account, which has been inactive since I posted my 50/50 review a few months ago, is something of a ghost town now.  If I were regularly writing thorough, thoughtful reviews here on Such Moving Pictures, I wouldn't mind.  It's a logical step to leave behind an established site for something more personal and controlled, but the sorts of reviews I used to work at delivering are few and far between here.  Instead, my movie reviews are contained in a few 140-character blurbs on Twitter, and the depth of my cultural reservoir is largely untapped.  It's a troubling state of affairs, in my mind.

Thus, I feel somehow crippled by Twitter.  It's too easy to shoot a pithy response to a subpar film rather than grapple with why I found it so damned ineffectual.  But I'm also grateful for the ever-expanding web of film experts and lovers who have enlightened, argued with, and encouraged me over the past year.  Going forward, I hope I can find a better balance of the instantaneous critical purge of Twitter and the more insightful form of reviews I so enjoy providing.