Fasten your seatbelts

Welcome to the Conversation.

Let's deal with the whole anxiety of influence at the top, shall we? At first glance, the Conversation may appear to be a group of film blogger Eve Harringtons, casting a gimlet eye on the year in movies as we ape the print critic Margo Channings over at Slate's Movie Club. Look more carefully and you'll realize we are closer in kind to the original "snake-hipped word-slinger," Addison DeWitt. To wit:

We all come into this world with our little egos equipped with individual horns. If we don't blow them, who else will?

But our patron saint is Harry Caul.

Though our timing may be related to awards season, you should think of the Conversation as a cinephile's Golden Globes-watching party. This Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and next Monday, the sound gets turned down, and everyone raucously argues about what films really mattered in the past year. Which is to say, I expect we'll go off the res soon enough. After all, if Jim Brooks can get away with framing an entire film as a college application essay... but I get ahead of myself.

So who's this we? It's far from royal. We're rank amateurs, and proud of it. There's no obligation to see schlock, no j-school-imposed notions of objectivity, and no guilt if we haven't seen an acclaimed film, either.

David Hudson is the film blogger Doc Ock: No film link on the Internerd is beyond his reach. He covers the world at Daily GreenCine. Based in Berlin, David promises he will tell us who the Hollywood Foreign Press think they are and why we should care. For starters.

Aaron Out of Focus and Filmbrain are like a blogging buddy-movie duo--think Grodin and DeNiro--who've been working their disagreement shtick from the get-go. But even when they seem on the verge of coming to blows [two words: Vincent Gallo], neither one ever mistakes name-calling for criticism.

"Liz Penn writes on film and culture for the High Sign" may be the understatement of the century. She's got a thousand words for each picture.

And me? Well, I'm the cinetrix, and I enjoy being a girl.

Like any blog, this is not a closed system. Please join the Conversation in the comments. David identified 2004 as the Year of Arguing Dangerously. It was. And we will, gloves off.

But let's have a good, clean fight. Come out swinging. And no hits below the belt.

There's the bell.

Comments

[Wiley Wiggins]

I am, as our friends the surfers say, stoked.

[alex]

Yes!