The Reel Bits turns turns 10 years old today, marking its aluminium anniversary in the midst of one of the weirdest times in cinema history.
Anniversaries are a funny thing. They tend to mark how many years we’ve been doing, or in some cases not doing, a thing.
The Reel Bits is a thing I’ve been doing since 2010. For most of that time, it’s a thing I’ve thoroughly enjoyed, even when leaving it in benign neglect to pursue other interests, be they literary or romantic.
Some history
As some of you may know, it started as an offshoot of the now defunct DVD Bits and was aptly called The DVD Bits Blog. At the time, I was asking all the studios who were sending me lots of DVDs and Blu-rays to review if I could possibly attend some of those secret media screenings I’d read about on social media. One distributor promptly told me we weren’t really a film site so much as a home media site. So, I made one.
It was a slow start at first, cracking straight into such contemporary classics as 1922’s Haxan. You see, I’d briefly entertained the idea of doing all 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, but ultimately realised that death was not such a great goal. Plus, I never wanted to feel like film was homework, even if my natural instincts are to make every list into a mini project.
Secret worlds, something something
When the media invites came not long afterwards, it was actually kind of weird. They were often in hidden screening rooms around the Sydney CBD – in office towers, underneath iconic theatres, or in bloody hard to get to waterfront locales – and sometimes came with surprise freebies.
One of the earlier screenings I went to was The Tourist, an Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp film I said had “no chemistry between the leads, [and] a core MacGuffin that makes less sense as the film goes on.” The gift we got was a faux airline travel kit full of toiletries. I like to think it was a film so bad they literally gave us a blindfold and earplugs to get through it.
It’s been a wild ride though. There’s been some amazing experiences I wouldn’t trade for all the slippers at Qantas. Seeing Star Wars: The Force Awakens at the Sydney premiere, surrounded by life-size props and an excited crowd, was something money could buy. Getting to see Guardians of the Galaxy weeks early, mouth agape at its wondrousness, would be impossible to recreate – but I tried at least another four times at the cinema.
More than that, I’ve met some amazing people from other sites that I happily call my closest friends, including Alex Doenau (Batrock.net) and David McVay (Geek Actually), both of whom I will have messaged multiple times by the time I finish writing this. When I got super depressed on at least two major occasions and almost chucked it in, they were amongst the people who kept me sane and in touch with the things I loved. (I dare not mention more people for fear of forgetting someone).
A life in film in numbers
2,203. That’s how many movies I’ve watched over the last 10 years. That’s an average of about 220 films a year. It’s less than one a day, slacker that I am, but it does mean that some years were significantly more.
I’ve posted to the site 3,831 times, including about 1,150 reviews (or around 115 a year) for the ‘Bits alone. That’s in addition to the 261 podcast episodes on David McVay’s Geek Actually network, 815 comic book reviews for Behind the Panels and Newsarama, dozens of radio appearances, articles and essay contributions, a masters degree and a book. While working full time as a librarian. (No wonder I had a few burnouts).
Other people have contributed to the site, and I need to thank Bruce Munro, Paul Ryan, Chris Elena, Ben Harlum, Blake Howard, Paul Grose, Jennifer Verzuh, Sean Riley, Alex Doenau and many others for their reviews, articles or interviews delivered in a pinch.
Best Bits
Running this site has been a pain at times, and I’ve quit more than once, but never for long. It’s probably because it’s opened up so many doors for me as well. I’ve had the opportunity to attend the Sydney Film Festival, MIFF, and the Japanese Film Festival as accredited media. I even became a marketing assistant at KOFFIA one year, and was a guest judge on their short film competition too.
I’ve been privileged enough to interview so many people I’ve enjoyed the work of or come to admire. My very first interview was in 2011 with Tom Hiddleston and Jaimie Alexander for Thor, which was the same day I met my friend David. Since then, I’ve had the distinct honour to speak with J.J. Abrams, Jason Bateman, Charlie Day, Jason Sudeikis, directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, Steve Carrell, the lovely Tran Anh Hung, the insanely nice Hugh Jackman, Salma Hayek, Antonio Banderas, Brad Bird, Simon Pegg, Joe Cornish, Hugh Grant, Tony Gilroy, and Edgar Wright.
A highlight must be speaking with Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum together in a Sydney hotel room, and I’ll happily admit to getting starstruck there. Similarly, Jason Segal asked me at the start of my interview with him whether I wanted to do it sitting down or hop into the nearby bed with him. It’s to my eternal regret that I choose the former.
What I’ve really loved is chatting with people on the cusp of new projects and seeing them come to fruition years later, like Benh Zeitlin or Colin Trevorrow. There was Australian legend Ivan Sen, for example, who described his then-upcoming “genre film” with “a big shoot-out in the film at the end.” It was Mystery Road, which ultimately spawned the sublime sequel Goldstone and an award-winning TV series.
Is this a humblebrag? Very much so, but it also comes from a place of immense pride and gratitude. I make these lists to remind me of why I do this.
There’s an unpublished Wreck-It Ralph interview on a hard drive somewhere with Sarah Silverman, John C. Reilly and Rich Moore that was one of the most fun things I ever did, but a brief personal folly sent me off the rails immediately after recording it. For six months. One day it will see the light. One day.
Favourites films
So, I couldn’t sign off this celebration of Bits without answering the thing I get asked the most: what are the favourite films you’ve seen?
In the last decade, I’ve given out the coveted 5-stars (which I dub Certified Bitstastic) just over 20 new-release films, which – if you’ve been paying attention – is about 1% of my total viewing. Each year, writing the best of lists gets a little harder.
Instead of trying to find a Top 10 from the whole list, I’ve chosen a favourite film from each year.
2010 – Meek’s Cutoff
It’s unsurprising that my favourite film at the start of the decade was a western, as I spent a fair chunk of 2011 writing about them and still am slightly obsessed. Over the years, I’ve come to appreciate Kelly Reichardt’s brand of measured cinema even more, and her celebration of women, gender roles and experiential view of history. Plus, this missed out on being in both my 2010 and 2011 lists due to the timing of its release in Australia, so placing it at the top of the list here feels like justice served.
Runners up: True Grit, Solanin, Biutiful
2011 – The Tree of Life
The night I first saw Terrence Malick’s masterpiece was at the Sydney Film Festival in June 2011. It was my fourth film of the day and not even my last that night. Yet almost a decade later it remains one of the most powerful films I’ve ever seen. As I said at the time, “Beautiful and haunting, [it’s] what cinema was created for.”
Runners up: Melancholia, The Muppets, Super 8
2012 – Holy Motors
In a year that I very nearly quit the site for good, partly due to burnout and partly due to other reasons, I loftily proclaimed that is was “one of the most original films of the century” and that it was “equal parts magic and insanity, and a reminder of all the things that cinema has to offer.” The distributor seemed to agree with me because they slapped it along the top of the bloody poster. I’ll admit I’ve not watched it since, so I have no idea if my declaration stands.
Runners up: Wolf Children, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Like Someone in Love
2013 – Frozen
While I don’t have kids, the words to Frozen are still in my head and in my heart. According to my records, I saw this a couple of days after the North America release and a few weeks before the Australian debut. It was a brief period of time between Frozen becoming FROZEN™. Now it’s a Disney film as iconic as any of their classics, but all I know is that I’m currently humming “Let It Go” – and you are too.
Runners up: Jodorowsky’s Dune, Like Father Like Son, Only Lovers Left Alive
2014 – Guardians of the Galaxy
My records are patchy throughout a turbulent 2014, but one thing brought me more joy than anything else: the tenth film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I remember sitting next to my friend Dave Longo at a media preview and wanting to get up and applaud during the title drop, something we did emphatically by the end. It was with Dave that I saw it back-to-back twice at IMAX a few weekends later – but also with McVay at least one other time in between.
Runners up: Chef, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Captain America: The Winter Soldier
2015 – Mad Max: Fury Road
The Sydney premiere of George Miller’s long awaited follow-up was an event almost as memorable as the film. The distributor didn’t anticipate how many people would show up, and they were continuing to open up cinemas to make room for all the ticket holders (and a few who didn’t). A good 90 minutes after we were originally supposed to go in, the opening scenes rolled – and it was worth every second of lining up. A true Australian genre masterpiece.
Runners up: The Revenant, The Hateful Eight, The Boy and the Beast
2016 – The Neon Demon
This is a film I travelled to see. Well, sort of. Debuting in Australia at MIFF 2016, I saw this with a willing audience and have no sense of how it translates outside of that rarefied air. At the time, I said that it was “Showgirls if it was conceived by David Lynch” because it sounded good in a tweet. It’s still a good line and I stand by it so much that I’ve used it again here. So there.
Runners up: Lovesong, Moonlight, Nocturnal Animals, Goldstone, American Honey, The Handmaiden (what a year).
2017 – A Ghost Story
Before seeing this film, a fellow blogger vividly described the walkouts on the first session of David Lowry’s film, accompanied by an almost onomatopoeic description of the Pie Scene. It only heightened my anticipation. ‘Slow cinema’ was never so engaging – and that’s saying something in a year when The Florida Project very nearly took this slot.
Runners up: The Florida Project, Mother!, Sweet Country
2018 – Shoplifters
You see that Asia in Focus logo in the top right corner of the site? I take that pretty seriously. So when Kore-eda Hirokazu’s latest film became one of the most highly acclaimed of the year, it was the recognition for something I’d always known: he is one of the greatest Japanese filmmakers since Ozu.
Runners up: We the Animals, BlacKkKlansman, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
2019 – Portrait of a Lady on Fire
The most recent of these was a very close call. In a year when luminaries like Martin Scorsese pondered what ‘real’ cinema was, Céline Sciamma – the first woman to win the Queer Palm at Cannes – delivered a staggeringly powerful and evocative romance. It sent me down a path of discovering more Sciamma this year and that has been a joy as well.
Runners up: Pain & Glory, Avengers: Endgame, Parasite
2020 – TBA!
As we enter the second decade of The Reel Bits, cinema is slowly coming back to life in the middle of a pandemic. Yet it hasn’t stopped some new releases coming out that have blown my little socks off: Da 5 Bloods, The Man Standing Next, Wendy and Hamilton are already contenders for my favourites of 2020.
Here’s hoping the world heals a little more so we all come together again in a cinema and enjoy those collective moments. I’m looking forward to the next decade, the return of cinema in 2020 and whatever treats are waiting between now and 2030.
A final note: The Logo
The Reel Bits has undergone many changes over the years, both stylistically and in its content. One of the more prominent changes was the introduction of the current logo.
Designed by my friend Nima Afshar in 2011, he took at look at what I was trying to do with pictures of popcorn, ticket stubs and film reels and boiled it down to the essentials. It evokes a five sprocket film reel while maintaining a clean Helvetica font. It’s served me well over the years, and it’s appeared on business cards, banners, programs, and even on the cinema screen when I’ve been a media partner at a festival.
For the first time, here’s a look at the original design concepts and colours. I think you’ll agree that the blue was a good choice.
