State of the Substack address
Some thoughts on where this Substack has been and where it is headed.
Hey you beautiful people!
I hope this Substack post finds you well! So I have been doing this for about two and a half months now and I think it’s going really well!
We’re still in our infancy, however, and that entails a lot of seeing what works and what doesn’t, as well as what is manageable and sustainable.
I set out to write up two new movies in the theater every week, along with writing up all of the Ernest movies, the complete filmography of James Belushi and all of the Saturday Night Live movies, in addition to neat outliers like the Shrek rave and Pauly Shore live.
What I have discovered is that two new movies in the theater every week is way too ambitious.
My biggest and most important job is being a dad to two wonderful neurodivergent children. Everything comes second to that and I’m having a devil of a time leaving my family twice every weekend to the movie theater. It’s just not proving feasible.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m having a blast going to the movies regularly again and am very proud of reviews I’ve written for this Substack.
My goal was to have the reviews be longer, meatier and less typo-ridden than my pieces for Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place. I think I’ve succeeded but I think a saner and more sustainable pace would be one new movie in the theaters every week.
Because as much as I dig doing this, it’s just one part of a career that, as stated earlier, takes a backseat to my role as a dad.
So from here on out I am going to write up one new movie in the theater that YOU beautiful people determine through polls and, once my Ernest series is over (I just wrote the final piece, which will run in a week and a half), I will begin my Saturday Night Live movies and James Belushi filmography projects simultaneously.
The nice thing about them is that I can work ahead and stockpile entries so that I am not forever racing to meet deadlines, the way I am with the current two new movie template.
I hope y’all don’t mind! I promise to give y’all lots of fun stuff to read but I also have a family to raise, and an incredibly exhausting website (Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place) to run, a podcast (Travolta/Cage) to cohost, and a book due in just a few months (The Fractured Mirror) that will require me to watch and write about 365 movies about the film industry.
That’s a lot of movies! And a lot of work! I’ve been making great progress on that by watching a movie every night after my wife goes to sleep and writing it up in the morning, but it’s still a lot, considering it’s probably still only about twenty percent of my all-over workload.
I hope y’all understand and I have a surprise for y’all on Monday that will hopefully blow your minds.
Thanks for the support and the patience. Please continue along this journey with me. You won’t regret it.
That’s the Nathan Rabin promise.
As parent of two teenage monsters, me promise you will be able to go to movies again in few years. After several years of only seeing movies in theater put out by some division of Disney corporation, eventually they will want to go see movies with friends and no one will want to see movies with you... which is great. One of greatest joys middle-aged monster can experience is spending two hours alone in dark with pile of snacks in your lap and no one asking you for anything.
While I miss you writing about recent movies, I get it - hiring a babysitter who can handle your sons, an Uber/Lyft to drive you to and from a theater, a ticket and some concessions (because Kermode and Mayo aside most of us like our crunchy popcorn or nachos, and buying from the Concessions Stand is what keeps the theater alive!), just to see a recent movie that's probably hot garbage anyway twice a week isn't a productive use of your time and money.
For the record, aside from a spate of movies I saw last year? I've barely set foot inside a theater since my ex-wife moved us upstate so she could have a house and a yard.