Alas, I had a pretty busy weekend, and because I still haven’t seen Part 1 of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, I couldn’t exactly go and see Part 2. So for anybody  who’s really become a fan of my movie reviews so far, we’re all just going to have to wait. Perhaps I’ll review both of them together. That should be pretty fun. I loved the book of Deathly Hallows, so I’m looking forward to the movie. I reviewed Half-Blood Prince for my newspaper. Maybe I’ll be able to dig up that old review.

But just so I don’t leave everybody without something to look at, my girlfriend Alyssa discovered a fun new web comic that had a Harry Potter joke: Head Trip.

I used to go to midnight showings back when I was movie reviewer for my newspaper, The Daily Sentinel in Rome, NY. If you check out the Awards page of my blog, you can see that I won third place in a statewide journalism competition for my movie reviews. I don’t remember which three I submitted though. I did Transformers 1 and 2, Dark Knight, Avatar, Watchmen, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and…a few others, I think. It was a blast. I’d attend the midnight showing but still have to go to work at 7 a.m. the next day. But they not only reimbursed my ticket, but I got overtime pay for watching the movie!

Fun story how that all came about, actually.

Way back for Spider-Man 3, my friend Shannon David and I got together to go see the midnight premiere. Shannon is an old friend from high school, and he still lived in my hometown of Auburn, NY. He was going to the premiere in costume as Spider-Man, and I couldn’t pass up an invite like that! So I whipped up a very crappy, homemade Venom costume to wear!

Grrrrrr!

We had a blast, even if it involved me driving the hour+ back home, attending the midnight premiere, driving the hour+ back to Rome and then waking up to be at work at 7 a.m.  That day was really…not awesome, let me tell you.

Anyway, my boss/editor overheard me talking about going to a midnight showing of a movie. That gave her the idea that I could do that for the paper, and write movie reviews. I think it was all an effort to get more young people to read a newspaper, which is fine by me. She picked the first Transformers as the first movie to review. That was the big tent-pole movie of that summer. For some insane reason, I didn’t immediately jump on this outlet. I waited until next summer and picked another movie. Then I finally started doing more and more movies.

Then my editor retired at the end of 2009 and took her interest in my movie reviews with her.

The editor that was left has zero interest in my movie reviews as a cultural piece. He’s a fan of the classics. He told me I could keep doing it, but not just for any movie. They had to be significant movies, like Avatar was a big deal at the time. But I realized I wasn’t really following the cultural zeitgeist of movies and had no real way to decide between a movie worth reviewing or a movie I just wanted to see on my own. So, alas, I abandoned the movie reviews. I just didn’t have it in me to argue with him why he should pay me to go see the likes of Thor or X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

But now I have this blog! So it’s all worked out in the end.