Why I'm a film blogger now
I have written more words about film in 2026 than I have about technology and business. This has not escaped your attention — so much so that real-life and internet friends alike have requested that I create an RSS feed excluding my film reviews. (By the way, I did that.) I don't think I've actually written anywhere about why I've gotten so into movies, or why I write about them, and this seems as good a time as any.
First: a rule I set for myself a few years ago was that if I was going to consume anything — any media at all — I would have to write myself a little book report at the end of it, to avoid consumption for consumption's sake. This has been a great habit, and I highly encourage it. I write these for no one but myself; my readership is still overwhelmingly dominated by entrepreneurs and engineers, and I harbor no fantasy nor illusion of that ever changing.
But it feels both important and virtuous — and frankly, fun — to spend so much of my time critically writing about something that isn't what I do for work. Which is to say: the act of thinking carefully about art, of forcing yourself to articulate why something moved you or didn't, is a different muscle entirely from the one I exercise when writing about Django or pricing strategy or whatever else. It's good for you. It's good for me.
But that applies to all art. Why movies in particular? Two reasons.
One is that the form factor of a movie is very appealing to me right now. I am not a huge fan of the current state of prestige television — series are long and poorly produced, and the best ones require a commitment that frankly demands too much of me. Movies, in comparison, have a very simple value proposition: give us two hours of your time. No more, no less. There's something deeply respectful about that contract. You sit down, you surrender your attention, and in return you get a gestalt, and do with that what you will.
The second reason is the act of direction, and how interested I am lately with direction as a form of authorship. Unlike an author, a director oversees a work without being the sole individual responsible for every last piece of it: a director is a curator, an orchestrator, someone who synthesizes the work of cinematographers and actors and editors and composers into something coherent and singular. It rhymes, more than a little, with the work I do every day at Buttondown.
I'm going to keep inflicting my opinions about mid-period Mamet and Noah Baumbach and whatever else on you. If that's not your thing, the essays-only feed is right there. But I suspect some of you might find, as I have, that the best way to get better at thinking is to think carefully about something you like, and there is no better way to think carefully than to write.