When I write something more personal, or something I think go beyond the formula, there tends to be a deafening silence. Not always, but a lot.

I’m not quite ready to give it up, however. I really like the interaction between my online friends, and the occasional (decreasing in frequency) discussion of substance on a blog.

Not to say that my Hughes/This Is England piece didn’t get a reaction. It did. But a lot of the comments were from people I had never heard from before which was strange.

I appreciate your piece a lot since it expresses some of my own frustration with blogging. But I’ve come to realize that if I really want to write, blogging isn’t the platform for it.

I have noticed two other blogging trends that are becoming really tired (in my eyes anyway) and they are:

1) The fluid, glorified and over confident pieces examining (to a ridiculous degree) the barely noticeable virtues of a highly overrated film that doesn’t deserve it. Usually written by college grads who have attended a lot of writing classes and they know how to make something out of nothing. Lots of adjectives and purple prose seem to make a lot of folks blind.

2) The would-be comedy writers. These people see every film as some long running joke and use film writing as a way to express their frustrations about how a film didn’t meet their limited expectations. Jokes are the main goal so they’re often willing to twist the truth or proclaim their ignorance (aka limited film knowledge) in the hopes that other like-minded folks will find common ground with them.

I guess film blogging has become a dog eat dog world where blog traffic and comments rule all. Lately I’ve even seen bloggers commenting about “branding” which is a term I’d never heard until about a week ago and frankly, it made me nauseous. I naively assumed people started blogging because they loved to write and share things – like me. Now I know better.

God, I think I even have that book somewhere.