Image description: A GIF of comedian Bo Burnham dancing half-naked, singing about turning 30, in his latest Netflix special “Inside.”
Hello everyone! It’s been a while. Almost seven months to the day, in fact. But fear not, because if you missed seeing me in your inbox, you’re about to see a lot more of me this month.
I turn 30 on September 26, roughly 31 days from now. This milestone has brought with it the usual retrospection, introspection and pondering one would expect.
By many doctors’ accounts, I shouldn’t have made it this far in life. I’m very thankful to be here, even in these interesting times when it seems like everything’s changing by the minute. Once I started thinking about it, I realized I owe a lot of my existence to movies. I started out watching them as a way to occupy myself in hospital waiting rooms and at home when I had to sit still for medical tests. I soon became hooked — so hooked that my mom tells me she had to put me on a token system when I was 4 so that I would only watch two movies a day.
First I was hooked on the visuals, the moving pictures going back and forth on the screen. Later, with the advent of bonus features on DVDs, I became fascinated with learning just how my favorite filmmakers made those special effects and performed those stunts. And then I became more interested in how films can become an “empathy machine,” as Roger Ebert put it — vessels with which one can learn what it’s like to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes if the vessel is crafted right.
Movies were, are and always will be a huge part of my life.
I started thinking about how fun it would be to have a virtual film festival for my 30th birthday, something I could do as a way to talk about some of the movies that have had the biggest impact on me. This newsletter seems like the best outlet for that, given that I don’t have a movie theater to screen films (I’m looking to change that one day, though!).
This leads me to The 30 for 30 Birthday Project. I gave myself three rules:
I have to watch and then write about one movie a day for 30 days until my birthday.
Since it would take too long to pick just 30 films that have had a lasting impact on me, I limited myself to one movie per year from 1991-2021. Now, that’s not the movie that I think was the best from that year (as you’ll soon see), but the one that I come back to most often. And yes, this eliminates everything from before I was born, but if I didn’t do that, this would get real overwhelming real quick.
I'm only giving myself 30 minutes to write about each movie.
I’ll also include a Letter of Recommendation in each email. I figure this will be a fun way to celebrate and it will be a nice way for me to get back to writing consistently every day. So, expect another email from me tomorrow, and every day after that, through Sept. 26.
If you’d like to follow along, the first movie I’m writing about is 1991’s “Point Break.” The bank robbers are surfers!
Letter of Recommendation
If you’re curious about just what, exactly, is happening over at “Jeopardy!” and its debacle with finding a host, I highly recommend this exhaustively reported and well-written article by Claire McNear over at The Ringer. McNear also wrote a book about the history of the hit game show, called “Answers in the Form of Questions” that I just started reading as well, and it’s great, too.
That’s all, folks. If you liked what you saw here, click that subscribe button (promise I won’t send any annoying emails) and tell all your friends!
This newsletter is written by me and edited by my favorite person, Taylor Tompkins. Views expressed here are my own and don’t reflect the opinions of my employer, yadda yadda yadda.
If there’s anything you want to see covered in a future newsletter, let me know!
You can find me in other corners of the internet as well, if you so choose. There’s my personal website (which focuses on pop culture, faith and my journalism clips), a Twitter account and a Letterboxd account. Subscribe away.