And now... A Torrent of Unabashed Love for Spout.com

You should know the score by now, O' Loyal Readers of the Pylon. First I try something out, then I bitch about it for a score of days or so, and then I make nice with the former target of my distress. Like if I am looking for a screwdriver in the tool drawer, but I can't find it, and so I punch the kitchen cabinets in testosterone-fueled stupidity, and then maybe throw a cup across the room. Invariably, just as I let loose with a burst of sinful profanity, I will spy the screwdriver peeking out from behind a towel on the counter. And then, as John Prine once sang, "Everything's OK, everything is cool."

So it went with Spout.com. It intrigued me for a while, and I finally checked it out. When I did, it ran far too slow, even on the pair of relatively speedy computers with which I am affiliated, and it took me forever to add movies to my profile. I wasn't happy with the cover for King Kong that popped up, and I groused about that in the previous post a couple of days ago. I snagged the shiny widget that claimed to show my favorite movies, but after a cameo appearance as a featured page element on the Pylon for a handful of days, I took it down out of a weariness with its limited range. And I bitched about the site some more.

But, then I fell in love with it. Honestly, it was completely by accident, this revitalization of my interest in Spout. I was actually going to close shop, but when I tried to log in over the weekend, I found that I couldn't. The Spouters claimed they were making positive changes to the site, and so I stayed away for a couple of hours. When I came back, the site seemed a bit speedier, though not much. But, I had cooled down considerably in the meantime, and I started to poke around a bit to see some of the features in a more in-depth way. I accepted invitations to a couple of groups, neither of which really enthralls me all that much, but it did allow me the opportunity to see how the place was run. I checked out numerous profiles, and discovered some very interesting people, along with a couple of rather scary ones. (This was mainly due to their abhorrent spelling and grammar. It's one thing to get on a teenybopper board and use "w00t" and "WTF" and all that other slang; but, if you are going to join a specialized site built around criticism and film writing, take some time and brush up your language. At the very least, use some goddamn punctuation from time to time...)

Next, and to my great joy, I discovered a procedure for rating movies in a relatively swift manner. I won't go into the details, but the main obstacle in proceeding with the plan, apart from site speed, was in my finding some sort of peace with Spout's five-star rating system. From five to one, the choices are: "I loved it"; "I liked it"; "I am neutral about it"; "I lost interest"; and "I disliked it." The struggle for me was to stop thinking of a five-star movie as a top-shelf classic film and instead merely proclaim my outright love for certain films, despite a possible lack of quality. I was able to do this for the most part, but even though I have seen Plan 9 a zillion times, I still could not affix a fistful of stars to the sweet, sweet damnable thing. The nearest I could get was four stars, but this is a shame, since it means I only "liked" it. This is a clear-cut case of utter personal deceit, as I probably adore the film far more than others to which I am blatantly unashamed to marry my kiss of overly earnest approval.

Soon enough, though, I found the peace for which I was searching. I not only rated Plan 9 those mere four stars for likability, but just under 5200 films found themselves with ratings over the next four days. I started numerous fun lists on my profile page -- some of which I shall go into with some detail in a future post -- and then I sought to contain the final looming section on Spout which posed as my chief interest in the site initially: the FilmBlog section. If you are on Spout reading this particular post right now, then I have configured it correctly. The plans for now are to post selected past articles of my choosing, as I reset them on Pylon to link over to Spout. As opposed to merely catering to the smattering of friends and family, devoted as they are, who read it currently, the goal now is to get my writing closer to an audience which might be interested in perusing it.

Hopefully, this includes you who are reading it right now. Welcome to The Cinema 4 Pylon...