....and it was a glorious way to wake up.

And now, I'm sitting here and I'm pondering my future as a cultural critic. I haven't seen as many movies as I would have liked the year and now I have to make up for lost time. I started this year with a lot of hope and energy but I think I burned myself out sometime in February and March and, since then, it's been a struggle to get back to being myself. It's hard to explain why. Perhaps I just pushed myself too hard last year and the year before that it all caught up with me at once.

I've been reading Make My Day by J. Hoberman, which is an examination of the films of the 80s and how they both mirrored and commented on the culture of the decade. It's a fascinating book, even if Hoberman is, at times, rather dreary in his predictably liberal outlook. Reading it has made me reconsider the way that I look at and review films. What do the films that are released today say about the Obama/Trump era? And can we really make a judgment as long as the era is still ongoing? For all the talk about "the right side of history," history is typically not understood until at least a decade after. In 2030, I can guarantee that we'll feel very differently about today's world than we do in 2019. How we'll feel, I won't venture to guest. However, history is only truly understood with the benefit of hindsight.

That's one good thing about having a blog like this one. Years from now, I or someone else can look back and say that, on August 3rd, Lisa Marie Bowman woke up to the sound of rain falling outside.

And it was glorious.