You know the only reason I complain so much is because I’m not confident with my ability to write interesting things about the stuff I love. I love plenty of things, you know. It’s just, you know, what can I say about them that would be at all interesting? I have plenty of theory about the things that have been able to engage me in my head, but that doesn’t necessary mean (a) I can translate those ideas into a non-awkward essay, and (b) those theories are all that interesting.

I read The Filth recently, and I could talk about what a great, disturbing piece of fleshy dystopia it is. How Morrison can design all this horrible imagery (all brought brilliantly to vomitous life by Chris Weston), create a protagonist so pathetic, and tie it all into such a bleak world, yet still allow some semblance of hope to remain, because that guy just loves his fucking cat so much. But who wants to hear that from boring ol’ me? there’s much more interesting takes on it out there. I’m just the guy in the back going “Hey, cool!”.

I bought Nathan Rabin’s My Year of Flops a month or so back, partially because I knew it would be the kind of light thing I could read on the plane heading for Toronto. You know what? Rabin is pretty much what all of us nerds who like to write about entertainment in a jokey manner, speak in Simpsons, and hope that mockery will bring out our inner genius want to be. In the early days of the decade, when we could finally figure out this Internet thing, we then began to fill it with our spew about pop culture detritus. Oh, we are so clever, we thought, and we hyperbole’d and pointed out every piece of illogic in whatever wounded animal of a movie/cartoon/food product we could find. This is what attracted us to the ‘My Year of Flops’ column in the first place; we simply wanted to read Rabin viciously disembowel Howard the Duck or Waterworld or what have you, just like we did. Except he has a genuine love of film and all the trappings of the industry, so that no matter how absolutely abysmal some of these movies are, there’s a genuine interest in figuring out how they tick, and exactly why they were rejected. That is what separates the real minds from the simple hecklers. That is why I keep reading the column.

But who wants to hear that from me? I’m just an idiot on the Internet.