Welcome to "Reel Life!"

So, you folks all know me from , which appears each Wednesday. That column will continue as a family-focused parenting column. This blog will have a different focus.

I am a major film enthusiast, which is why I went back to school in Fall, 2010 at Chatham University as a Film and Digital Technology Major. My great-grandmother’s sister was Zelma O’Neal, the 1930’s movie star who popularized “Button Up Your Overcoat” (released in 1929 on Brunswick Records) in the original Broadway production of “Follow Through,” and then went on to make the film version, and 9 more pictures for Paramount. Movies are in my blood.

My blog will be about my adventures in film school and the Pittsburgh film community, but will also include movies currently in theaters, movies playing at the Regent Square Theater, and general movie-based chatter. I watch an average of one movie a day. The problem for me isn’t figuring out what to write about films – it’s getting me to shut up about them.

Once in a while, you can expect a gaming post thrown in for good measure. My term paper for Media Literacy was about how the lines between cinema and video games are blurring; games now often include cinematics, and machinima is a new genre that allows gamers to record their gameplay and create videos from their gaming. You have movies based on video games, and video games based on movies. And I’m not too proud to identify myself as a gamer chick.

I am a nationally award-winning Oscar guesser who won USA Today’s national guessing contest in 2008. This does not change the fact that this past February marked my worst guessing year, ever. I miscalculated. I thought they were going to laud “Social Network” as “a statement of our time on a decade year” when in fact it was “The Year of the Disability.” My bad.

My guessing can pretty much ONLY get better after a year like this. And if they bring back Billy Crystal, a rumor I’ve been reading about, I’ll be enjoying the Oscars way too much to care if my guessing is way off again.

Right now, just for fun, I’m about a week into blogging my way through the American Film Institute’s Top 100 Films of All Time. Someone was sending around a FaceBook survey a couple weeks ago about how many Top 100 films we’ve each seen, and as a film student, it embarrassed me that I’d only seen 57. So, as an intellectual exercise I decided to watch what I haven’t seen and post about those films. Those 57 I’ve already seen, I saw before I was a film student, so I will be taking another look to see whether I have any new insights. The main goals are to make sure I’ve seen all 100 films, and to decide whether I understand the AFI’s logic in the inclusion and placement of those films.

I will warn you from the outset that while I am not automatically enamored of every movie Johnny Depp is in, he is absolutely my weak spot; in my eyes, he can do no wrong, and I’ll try to keep the gush factor to a minimum. My brother-in-law the LA producer thinks I’m a clueless hack, which may or may not be true, but anyone who loves film is a student of film, and it’s a subject I love to study. So, we’ll all just improve our knowledge together, OK? Cool.

I hope to have some engaging discussions with you about films and sometimes, games. I welcome other perspectives and opinions. Audiences do, after all, negotiate their own meaning to art.