Introducing Saturday Film Club

Ever since Christmas I've been looking for a project to occupy me. I like to keep busy and I've been looking for something to write about that would stretch me a bit.

In recent weeks a vague idea to do a bit of writing about film has come together to become... Saturday Film Club.

This is how it's going to work:

There will be 20 film blog posts

They will be posted on a 1 per week basis

They will be posted on a Saturday morning 

The idea being that anyone who receives alerts whenever I publish a post should have the opportunity to source the film in question, and watch it, either on the Saturday evening or before the next post gets published.

The rules for film selection are as follows:

All 20 films are things I own on DVD.

All 20 films fall into the following, very loose, categories.

1) Really excellent films that I feel haven't been written about enough

2) Well known and well written about films where I either disagree with the consensus or where I agree with the consensus but feel there's more to be said.

3) Flawed films that, nevertheless, have succeeded in drawing me in again and again.

Of those I plan to write about, two were made for UK TV but the rest all received cinema releases. Many aren't English language films and three are Studio Ghibli anime's. There are German, Japanese, Korean, US, UK and Indian films. All of which I intend to do justice to the best of my ability, while also acknowledging that I'm viewing them through a western, UK lens. 

The posts won't be film reviews, but they also won't be film writing. What you'll read will be something between the two; longform film blogging perhaps.

I have written film reviews before, (a selection of which you can view here, should you so wish) and I probably will again, but I'm not A Film Writer (I have trouble convincing myself most of the time that I would qualify as A Music Writer) so it seems only fair to warn you that what you'll be reading won't be an elegant semi academic film theory essay, but that it will also be something more than a straightforward review.

The inspiration for the project came from the fact that I've been devouring every episode of Best Pick podcast since 2019 (I also went back and listened to the older episodes I'd missed). I became especially attached to the podcast during lockdown's one and three in the UK. Devouring all of those episodes has given me a deeper appreciation of film and of film criticism, as well as enhancing my DVD collection. My Best Pick era has also, of late, coincided with my day job as a Teaching Assistant in that I am this year supporting a first year A Level student in his Film Studies class.

My hope is that you will discover films you might not have heard of, and that I will be able to convince you to try them. Similarly, I'm also hoping to convince you to look again at some films you might have dismissed or not seen for a while.