Introduction

Welcome to all friends, family members, fans, colleagues, cinephiles, and confused amateur web browsers who have stumbled upon this movie-review-blog experiment. (Sure, calling it an "experiment" is a tad lofty, but I figured the phrase "movie-review-apalooza" would come off as even less humble.)

My name is Brett Buckalew, and I've worked as a freelance film journalist in Los Angeles for nearly a decade now. My movie reviews and features have been published at Metromix (http://www.metromix.com/), Film Stew (http://www.filmstew.com/), hollywood.com (http://www.hollywood.com/), and in Premiere Magazine. For two of my four years as an undergradauate at USC, I wrote the film column "Rambllings of a Movie Nerd" for the school's paper, the Daily Trojan.

I'm creating this blog, "Loves of a Blonde," as essentially part of a multi-pronged effort to beef up the ol' resume. I believe that while searching for more film-writing gigs, it will be healthy for me to do work worthy of being published with no immediate hope of a paycheck. This way, I can regularly exercise my writing muscles and visibly remain within my chosen career field. Best-case scenario: an editor or two peruses these pages and enlists my services. Worst-case scenario: I come off like a quixotic, desperate fool. I don't know about you, but I like them odds!

The blog will mostly follow a standard daily-viewing-journal format, containing reviews of the film(s) I watch each day. The reviews will vary in size based on factors like time constraints and level of personal passion, but the hope is that they will be genuinely professional-level and worth reading. There will be a more casual tone and more uses of first person in these reviews than in most published reviews, because, well, this is a blog; it comes with the territory. Reviews will include each film's year of release, director, and an indication if I'm writing the review based on a repeat viewing of the film in question, but no additional gratuitous details. Occasionally, I will break the format to write a more ambitious essay on a certain topic that tickles my fancy. Reader feedback is greatly encouraged. If you think there's a particular film that demands a rewatch/review, or have an essay topic in mind, please let me know.

Onward!