Mixed Nutcrackers Wrap-Up!

Heads up: sometime in the next few days, I intend to write some wrap-up posts for the Cult, Comedy, and Queer challenges I run on letterboxd, as a means of introducing such content to the site and prepping for the next year of featuring them more heavily on this space.  For these, I'll probably provide a top ten best and top ten worst from each challenge (perhaps less for the Queer challenge, just because there's fewer films than in the other two, and they never got quite so bad as the others), alongside any stray observations about other notable films or ideas we encountered in the last year's watching.  This post... will not be like that!  While I could easily handle it like I did the wrap-up for the Loft Film Fest and rank all the films in contention, there's not much fun there - I've already given the full extent of my thoughts on everything here, and the rankings seem fairly obvious.  Here, I can burn through em right now:

1: Fantasia (5/5)
2: The Nutcracker 1973 (4/5)
3: Nutcracker Fantasy (3.5/5)
4: Nutcracker: The Motion Picture (3.5/5)
5: The Nutcracker at the Bolshoi Ballet (No rating)
6: Barbie in the Nutcracker (3/5)
7: The Nutcracker 1990 (3/5)
8: The Nutcracker Prince (2.5/5)
9: The Nutcracker and the Four Realms (2/5)
10: The Nutcracker in 3D (2/5)
11: Tom and Jerry: A Nutcracker Tail (2/5)

Fun-ish.  But I believe we can have yet more fun than this!  I believe there are elements to these Nutcracker tales deserving their own ranking, separate from that of the pictures as a whole.  As such, we are going to rank...

The Nutcrackers!

(With respect to both their animate Nutcracker forms, their real human forms, their inanimate forms where applicable, and overall personality!  Obviously Fantasia won't partake in these events, but it has won enough by being wonderful as it is already.)

It's Film Fest Season in Southern Arizona! Borderland Film Fest and The Loft Film Festival!

So hey, guess who's got an opportunity to check out some film festivals in their area?  Lots and lots and lots of people all round the world, but also me!  Over the next week, I'll bring y'all coverage of Tucson's own Loft Cinema as they run their tenth annual film festival, featuring specially curated films from all across the festival circuit!  In specific, I'll be running reviews of the eight films in competition CICAE Award, and offering my take on which one seems best suited for a win.  If there's time left over between the communte, the watching of eight competing films across a week-long period, and providing the write-ups, I'll try to block out a little whiles to watch one or two other films featured.  Can't promise any coverage of Parasite, the Phantasm remaster, The Two Popes, or Son of the White Mare due to the lateness of the hour, or Varda By Agnes or White Snake due to scheduling conflicts, but The Chambermaid, The Cave, Words From a Bear, Cunningham, and And Then We Danced are all definite possibilities!

(And, y'know, anything I can't catch is going into my letterboxd watchlist, so who knows if they'll crop up on this space in the future or not.  S'possible!)

So, for full scheduling of the CICAE competitors, that's:

• Thursday the 7th: Temblores and I Was Home, But
• Friday the 8th: The Heart and Always In Season
• Monday the 11th: The Condor and the Eagle
• Tuesday the 12th: Advocate and Aga
• Wednesday the 13th: Falls Around Her

Now, you may wonder, hey, that link up there shows plenty showings for stuff Saturday and Sunday.  Why aren't you doing any coverage then?  Well, hypothetical reader who missed the full title, Saturday and Sunday are the main events for the Nogales Borderland Film fest!  Simultaneously held in Nogales, Arizona and Nogales, Sonora, the events are currently a little sketchy in terms of timing, but I have every intention of showing up for the selections of films about and filmed in the county border area, and Saturday night's Film at the Fence, 2004's A Day Without A Mexican.  Incidentally, I attended last year's Film at the Fence, 1983's El Norte, and provided a brief write-up on the experience here.

It's gonna be quite a lot to take in, and I intend to run some semblance of my regular programming both her and on letterboxd in the meanwhile, so here's to hoping the whole endeavor doesn't kill me!  I'll see y'all on the flip-side with plenty of southwestern, Arizona-based film coverage!

Business and Programming

Right, new venture, new blog.  Gotta get the transitioning stuff out've the way here...

Hi!  I'm Gilbert Hays.  I'm 25, call Arizona my home, and I write movie reviews for the internet under the name GargusSCP.  To now, I have exclusively published my work on letterboxd, producing hundreds of reviews over the last two years, to... fairly alright results.  87 follows is respectable when you're not producing content that fits a site's popular trends and not playing the follow-back game.  However, I'm currently looking to push my reviews to a wider audience, hopefully through an actual publisher so I can supplement my current income, and I am finding the process of getting my foot in the door difficult.  There's nowhere online a potential employer can click and see my work in full view that actually has my name on it, see.  Not exactly the best situation when you've never been published before and have no strong contacts with anyone in the industry.

Fortunately, we live in modern times, and the magic of the internet lets us prod at folks we've never met who are in the industry for advise.  Someone who publishes their work in a professional capacity advised me that I might do better if I had someplace to wholly call my own, a blog where I can publish my work in a way more strongly associated with me and mine, rather than the cramped hubbub of a film social media site.  So... we're here now!  On my awfully gradiented Blogger blog - because I came here briefly twice before to publish on two equally-quickly burnt-out ventures, and I can't think of anywhere better.

Even if this doesn't lead to any employment, I at least hope it'll lead to an audience of folks I can get to know!

So, housekeeping business.  At present, I pick and choose films to watch and write about through several year-long challenges on letterboxd - the host sets up the weekly themes, me and some friends pick the films, we watch, I write.  As of this writing, I have five active challenges up and running: the Cult Movie Challenge, the Queer Cinema Challenge, the Classic Hollywood Challenge, the Comedy Challenge, and the Letterboxd Season Challenge 2019-2020.  There are also a few challenges waiting in the wings, which I slapped together on a whim to help cope with depressive episodes, those being the Sci-Fi Odyssey Challenge and the Everybody's Into Weirdness Challenge.  These I am saving for when the shorter Queer and Classic challenges are properly wrapped up in a few weeks.  There's also the matter of a few holiday-themed marathons I run with friends, and the wholly odd notion of just watching movies on my own time, of my own volition, without the need for any big overarching structure.

All of these are published as full-length reviews on letterboxd.  Naturally, despite my small audience on the site, I don't want to suddenly convert absolutely everything to blog-exclusive content all at once.  Anyone who's currently following there might not like a big, out've-the-blue shift like that.  To this end, I've determined that for the time being, only certain reviews will appear on this blog, for the sake of a smooth transition and a clean cut.  To writ:

• All four challenges I began at the start of this year will come to their conclusions on letterboxd.  When 2020 roles around and new editions of the Cult and Queer challenges begin, those reviews will appear on this space.  Wrap-up posts for these challenges WILL appear here, however, as I don't really have anywhere else to put them, and have wanted to do something like that for a while.
• The Season challenge will appear here regularly.  At present, it is on a "whenever we have time" schedule, as we are watching three films for each theme, and do not have the time, coordination, or energy to push a full seven films through each week.  Expect to see them whenever they're up.  Reviews for the first six films, already watched and written about, will appear in this space over the next few days, as fodder to make it look busy.  Letterboxd followers will get a single paragraph blurb with a link to the full review.
• When they begin, the Weirdness and Sci-Fi challenges will appear here, also on a "whenever we have time" schedule.  Same principle for letterboxd followers as above.
• Any holiday-themed marathons I run with friends (such as this Made For Halloween list we're gonna start in a few days) will have their reviews run here.  Same principle as the previous two bullet points for letterboxd followers.
• Films I watch on my own time will appear on here and on letterboxd in the same form.

That should cover everything.  Hopefully this venture goes well, and something comes from all've this work on top of a full-time county job!