Just in case anyone is still checking back to read this blog once in a blue moon, first off let me say "thanks", and secondly let me assure you this blog is not dead. My output has been reduced over the last year or so to about a post a month, due to work and other real life stuff. But I've come to realize that these reasons are not the central ones behind the blasted heath this blog has become. I've been trying to do too much, and it has left me unfocused and confused as to what this blog should be about. Ever since I started writing down my thoughts on film, years before this blog even existed, I've always tried to write about every film I'd seen. Back when I was a teenager this was possible because I had no job or any "adult" concerns to get in the way, but now that I'm in my 30s and have been employed for some time, I have less and less time. It also doesn't help that my main focus has been on doing beer reviews on YouTube. Every time I watch a movie now, instead of writing a review, I put it on a list of reviews-to-write in the future. The list, of course, has gotten out of control (there must be over 100 films on it now), and when I finally have the time to write the reviews, most of the films have faded from my memory. It's a waste of my time and even a bigger waste of time for anyone reading my blog if I don't give a review my all.So, in the next couple of months I will be going through my old reviews, keeping the good ones, editing or trashing the bad ones, and relaunching this blog with a new focus. I'm not 100% sure what that focus is going to be right yet, but it will be different and it will be better, and I won't just be posting shitty little blurbs on films I don't really want to talk about in the first place. I'm trashing my reviews-to-write list, and I hope to never have one again. Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to stop reviewing films I think are beneath my attention, or whatever. I'm not going to stop talking about crappy films and trashing the really bad ones if they are worthy of such disdain, but I'm going to try and have more focus. I just can't review everything I see, and I no longer feel the need to.
The Hougly Film Journal will be back this summer.
