Saying goodbye is hard to do

Why I’m saying so-long to movie reviewing.

I’ve been toying with this for a while now.

In fact, while on vacation, it was what I spent most of my free time thinking about. It’s why I stopped posting to the blog for a bit. It’s because I knew that the following posts didn’t have to be number four and five in the “From Our Table to Yours” series. I wanted the next post to say, “I’m done with movie reviews. I don’t think I can talk about them on air anymore.”

But part of me wasn’t ready to say goodbye, and it’s been hard. So, I forced myself to review Blade Runner: 2049 (which I truly and honestly did not enjoy as much as I had wanted, so that review still stands), but just found my heart wasn’t in it.

There were a few reasons why I started reviewing movies: I love storytelling, and I love getting better with my own writing and visualizations by taking a look at other people’s work. Also, movie reviews (back when I was at BCIT) didn’t pay half bad. The word count was good enough that if I wrote two or three a month, I had a decent amount of extra spending money.

I also can’t deny what it did for my writing, particularly since I enjoyed what I was doing. Some of my best and favourite long-form stuff has been in other works talking about all kinds of films.

But most importantly, I was going through a very, very lonely period in my life where I needed something to do. This was it. Reviewing movies made me feel awesome, like I had purpose in life. I had very few friends I could reach out to about anything, and the ones that had been in my life for so long had gone through huge changes in their own lives when they moved away – or we’d just drift apart. I’m still working on trying to be more social, but having Jon – and a few other people in my life around has really made me make an effort to step out of my comfort zone and try to get to know people. And it’s been good.

Six years and hundreds of screenings, and probably nearly a thousand bags of popcorn later, I’m realizing it’s not for me anymore. I’ve grown up a lot over these past three years, and have realized there are other things I like doing, or that I’ve missed doing: drawing, travelling, cooking, working out, and so on. In no way though does that mean reviewing movies is childish or silly. It’s just that I’ve decided to move on. Will I go back to it? I don’t know. Hard to say. For now I think ‘maybe’ is the appropriate answer.

As for what I’ll be doing with the Close Encounters podcast…I’m not sure. That will be something to think about over the next few weeks, when Jon and I are away again. Jon and I actually have another podcast that we truly enjoy doing (Just the Tip) and I’m pretty confident that’s where we’ll be flexing our creative muscles outside of CKNW.

But for now — whether it’s reviewing movies on-air, on the blog or otherwise, it’s time to say, “so long, farewell.”