I feel absolutely obliged to direct you here, to perhaps the most impressive online review of a film I’ve seen in quite some time. I found a reference to the site, Red Letter Media, in one of the comments to Mark Kermode’s film about cyber media. In that, Dr. Kermode starts to look at the relatively new field of online film reviews: such reviews seem to be taking over from reviews in traditional media, so we are seeing a sort of democratisation of film criticism. People are trying to take a cue from writers like Roger Ebert ad Kermode and really engaging with film. Thus I thought I’dd google one of te sites mentioned, and what I have already seen is quite staggering.

While it lacks the engagement with discourses such as psychoanalysis, Marxism and feminism one often finds in the cinephilia pioneered by the writers of Cahiers Du Cinema, and thus lacks that philosophical aspect (I was reading Zizek yesterday, so I’m into the Lacanian stuff again), this sort of review shows a highly impressive engagement with film. It is a type of close textual analysis where plot holes and inconsistencies are picked up upon (plot holes being, according to Keathley, one possible basis for cinephiliac moments). It is clear that the creator of this review knows his subject back to front: I’ve seen First Contact hundres of times, and he reveals stuff I have missed but, when pointed out, strike me as obvious. I cannot help but be impressed by his level of understanding and attention to detail. Thus whether this is cinephilia in the acdemic sense I’m not sure, but it is certainly part of a new hybrid discourse, a new type of engagement with film; selfreferential, more than a little sarcastic, a tad crude, but no less engaged with cinema.