Gateway Cinephiles

Gateway Cinephiles has relocated to:

http://gatewaycinephile.com/

Please adjust your bookmarks accordingly.

For a little over four years now, I’ve been using the Gateway Cinephiles blog to pour out my thoughts about virtually every film I’ve seen theatrically during that period, and a good chunk of the films I’ve watched in my own home. The motivations to engage in this project have been numerous: the personal gratification of having a self-motivated commitment to fulfill; a desire to hone my writing craft in a forum where it is constantly open to criticism; and a rather egotistical certainty that I had something interesting to say about cinema.

My efforts to make the Gateway Cinephiles blog a space of depth, integrity, and singular perspective haven’t gone unnoticed. Writing for this blog has has allowed me to makes some wonderful connections in the St. Louis film community, and provided a (ahem) gateway to a freelance job with the St. Louis Magazine arts blog, Look/Listen.

That job is going to be demanding more of my time in 2012, as I provide reviews, retrospectives, festival coverage, and other posts at Look/Listen. Given that commitment—not to mention obligations to my family, the demands of my day job, and the other interests I want to pursue—I can no longer provide content to the Gateway Cinephiles blog on a regular basis. To put it simply, something has to give, and unfortunately that something is Gateway Cinephiles. It’s a purely elective pursuit, albeit an enjoyable one.

I’ll still be posting here sporadically, when the mood strikes me or I have something vital to say about the current cinema that isn’t appropriate for Look/Listen. Nothing is forever, so in the event that I have a loosening of commitments elsewhere, I might someday return to blogging on a routine schedule at Gateway Cinephiles.

Thanks to all my readers. I’ll be posting links on Facebook to my Look/Listen pieces and to any future, occasional essays here, so feel free to track me down and friend me if you want to keep track of my future writings.

Andrew Wyatt
January 3, 2012

Posting will be light for the next week or two, for the best possible reason.  This evening, my wife gave birth to our first child, a healthy baby boy. Both mom and the future little cinephile are doing great.

We’re still here. We’re just changing forms a little.

As you may or may not have noticed, the frequency of posts on Gateway Cinephiles has become somewhat lighter in the past couple of months. I obviously would prefer that it be otherwise, but concerns larger than this little ol’ blog have prevailed. The good news is that some changes are on the way for the site, changes that I hope will keep the posts coming more consistently.

The style of the blog is going to be shifting a bit in the coming weeks, so that I can make time for more postings at St. Louis Magazine’s Look/Listen blog (paying gigs, you know) and for the myriad obligations in life that aren’t about cinema, including but not limited to the birth of my first child this June. The upshot is that I generally won’t be posting long-form reviews regularly here any more. I made a personal commitment when I started this site four years ago to review every film I had seen in theatrical release, but that kind of output is no longer possible given my other responsibilities. I will, however, continue to post regularly on films I have seen, including contemporary theatrical and home video releases, as well as older classic, cult, and overlooked films. My hope is that unshackling myself from my rather obsessive desire to provide a steady stream of full-length contemporary reviews will ease some of the pressure and allow me write for this blog in a more routine and relaxed manner.

What you’ll be seeing in the near future–starting tonight, actually–is a regular stream of posts on films I’ve recently seen, as well as less frequent long-form essays on particular films or cinema-related topics. I hope that the handful of readers who come around regularly to check up on this blog will enjoy the new format, and that some new readership might even be encouraged to stick around. Regardless, thanks to all of you out there who have visited and will visit Gateway Cinephiles.

I’ll be on vacation from Saturday, September 11 through Sunday, September 26.  Hopefully, things will go better for me than they did for Peter Hunter when he ventured into the abyss of the West Yorkshire Constabulary.  Posting will resume shortly after I return. My latest piece at Look / Listen should be up next weekend.  Look for it here.

I’m off on a vacation with the lovely wife for the next week, so posting will be non-existent.  My review of Humpday will hopefully be up soon after I get back.  In the meantime, watch some good films, folks.

One year ago today, I resolved to start writing reviews for every film I saw in theatrical release and post them on the Cinephiles site. Now here we are and I have fifty-seven full-length reviews in the tank, as well as seven capsule reviews. (Full archive here.) That’s a little more than one full-length review per week, rain or shine. Not too shabby, I suppose. Thanks to the handful of readers who continue to stop by on a regular basis.

Next week I’ll be launching the biggest feature I’ve ever embarked upon for the Cinephiles site. Stay tuned.

Allow me extend a warm welcome to the members of the Gateway Cinephiles, as well as to any other onlookers that happen to stroll by. It will likely take a few weeks for us to settle into a format for the site, and for it to evolve into a space that is genuinely entertaining and useful. Please bear with us as we go through our birth pangs. Usernames and passwords will eventually be provided to all Cinephiles once things get a bit more lived-in around here. This will ideally be a space for any members to post their own reviews, essays, musings, or anything at all related to film. In the meantime, keep an eye on this site, as it will likely be changing quite a bit in the coming weeks.