The Road To My 100th Review, Part II

As hard as it is to believe - and I'm sure I'm not the only blogger who will admit to this - the class I hated most in school was English.

Why? Not because they made us read...they made us WRITE.

Euuuugh....

Not like Calculus and French were pieces of cake in comparison, but all that time you spent having to write a report on something you'd just read or on the life of Geoffrey Chaucer or whatever could have been better spent scarping five-penny nails across a chalkboard for a few hours.

Suffice it to say my senior year English teacher was not impressed with my apparent lack of initiative in the fields of creative writing. No matter the topic (even when I did a report on the Academy Awards, of all things) it was commented on as being underwhelming, badly constructed, poorly plotted out, I always screwed up my references and misspellings were always an issue.

In other words, not too much different than my writing style today.

You know what the difference is from what I wrote then as to what I write now? Simply put, I felt very restricted by what was assigned to me because of the fact that I HAD TO WRITE ABOUT IT. It was homework, man, and homework sucked.

(I know; great attitude, right? Stay in school, kids.)

It wasn't until after I left school that I felt more inspiration to write. It wasn't something that was going to be graded and condemned for being badly written or not being an interesting subject. No one was looking over my shoulder and instituting guidelines, restrictions, deadlines or grade point averages for what I did. That was all me.

I felt it, I wrote it, I tweaked it, I edited it, I rewrote it, and I read it over and over again.

I wrote poems, short stories, movie screenplays, narratives, beatnik recitations (those never turned out well) and mostly-forgotten stories that I hae no idea whatever happened to them.

Funny story: I had an inspiration one day and decided to write what would become an all-encompassing subject for the next three years of my life and created a teenage comedy about three high school geek boys who become involved with hookers running away from their pimp, local government corruption, a city-wide religious crusade against indecency and wrapped everything up in the end with a nice courtroom showdown involving incriminating audio tape evidence, a car chase, spoiled rich kids who dressed out of "Miami Vice" and a teenager who worships Franz Kafka.

The screenplay had over 30 MAIN characters and was over 400 pages long.

It's long gone now but, believe me, it was funny.

So yeah, I love writing and, whenever the muse strikes, I write.

Which explains why this blog is such an important part of me. And also why I love writing about the movies that I write about. What better way to express yourself than through two things that you love?

This should also explain why I am agonizing so much now over what, in fact, my 100th movie review will be. What kind of movie? Who stars in it? Have you even HEARD of it? Have I even heard of it? I plan on doing a lot more agonizing until I make a final decision.

If only my senior class English teacher could see me now.

Dope out.

- TGWD