Obligatory TL;DR Statement of Purpose

 A not-so-brief explanatory note as to how this blog works:

I can't recall a time when movies weren't my passion, my compulsion, my addiction. Ever since my parents took me to see Disney's Bedknobs&Broomsticks, I've been hopeless. Born in 1967, I grew up with free range parents. They took my brother and me to all kinds of movies, often using Hollywood as a babysitter. We saw movies about which many parents today would cluck their tongues (though nothing R-rated until I was 12. My first R-rated movie was MONTY PYTHON'S LIFE OF BRIAN.)

Though my parents were professionals and we grew up affluent, our home saw its share of dysfunction. Dad was in the house, but not often present. Mom, stressed and disappointed at discovering her marriage wasn't an equal partnership, took out her frustrations on me. 

Without getting too far into the weeds, let me just say my adult life has been far from typical middle class stability. I've never had a career. Never finished a 4-year degree (I graduated from a private broadcasting school in 2004.) Never got married, never had kids, never managed to hold onto one place to live until 2015. I've lost music, book, and movie collections repeatedly due to evictions. I never built the kind of movie library to which I aspired. 

Until 2017, when a friend of mine gave me a small flatscreen and a dvd player. As physical media vanishes and streaming ascends, cheap &/or used dvds have proliferated. Thrift shops, antiques malls, dollar-stores, yard sales - they're to be found everywhere. That's all to the good because I live on a fixed income, below the federal poverty guideline, limiting my budget. With an average price of between $1-$5, though, I'm able to bring home as many as 20 used dvds/Blu-Rays each month. 

Hence, Cinema Serendipitous. If you find yourself here, wondering why a writeup of Treasure Planet precedes one of Frozen River, why there appear to be few films from recent years, why you can't find my thoughts on MOONLIGHT or GREENBOOK or PARASITE, it's because I haven't found them in the wild. Yet. I go out a few times a month, scouring my little town for movies. Sometimes, generous friends send me things they find, too. I'm building the movie library I always wanted through luck of the draw and random chance. 

I don't write traditional reviews (except when I do.) CINEMA SERENDIPITOUS functions as memoir as much as movie writing. I try to make sense of/account for my life using movies as a lens.

Readers don't need me to tell them what to think or whether or not to see a film. A movie is a story. It's a point of view. Some points of view make me cringe, some get me to stand up and salute. I let the film tell me its story, show me its point of view, then decide whether it's one I want to experience again. I want readers to see movies. I want them to have their own experience. It's not up to me to tell people to do the opposite. I try to find the compelling reasons to investigate a movie. 

Much of what I love and look for are movies I could not or did not see when I was younger. I'm a man and, too often, still a boy. I watch movies about men. I watch movies about women and kids and anthropomorphized animals, too, but movies that consider how masculinity works - or doesn't - find a home in my heart.

All the above may not be what you're looking for. I completely respect that. I've always been an acquired taste. Some acquired it long ago. Some never have and never will. 

I unapologetically love middle class, middlebrow, mainstream multiplex Oscar-bait dramas. Unlike some cinephiles, I do not fear complexity. I like movies to be about more than one thing. My favorite scifi, fantasy, and horror novels grapple with ideas as much as plot. I want the same in films. Tolkien loathed allegory - I think a little allegory never hurt anyone. Metaphor is my friend. 

You will find plenty of genre here, but movies such as CHINA SYNDROME and BRUBAKER helped radicalize me as a tween. I haven't found those in the wild, but I am as likely to rhapsodize over Michael Apted's AMAZING GRACE as NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. 

TL;DR - my favorite acronym. Here endeth the disclaimer of the original disclaimer.