Welcome to Reel Fixation

Movies have been an obsession of mine for about as long as I can remember. I've been lucky enough to spend a good chunk of my professional life writing about them, but there's always been a difference between writing about something because it's the assignment and writing about it because you can't stop thinking about it.

Reel Fixation is for the second kind.

This is a place for digging a little deeper into movies and television — revisiting favorites, reconsidering movies that didn't work the first time, working through entire franchises, and occasionally spending way too much time thinking about some tiny detail most reasonable people stopped thinking about years ago.

And I already know where I'm starting.

October is almost here, so the first installment of a series I'm calling Franchise Fixation will take on all 13 films in the Halloween franchise. I'll go through them in release order, starting with John Carpenter's 1978 original and ending with Halloween Ends. There are masterpieces, disasters, multiple timelines, remakes, retcons, abandoned ideas, and at least one movie that decided Michael Myers wasn't necessary.

In other words, it's a pretty good franchise for this.

It's also a personal one. The original Halloween (and it will always annoy me that we have to specify "the original Halloween”—thank you, Rob Zombie and David Gordon Green) has been one of my favorite movies for years—long enough that I've been using Samloomis13 as my handle online. So if I'm going to start a series devoted to obsessively working through movie franchises one installment at a time, I really didn't have another choice.

Franchise Fixation won't be the only thing here. Reel Fixation will cover movies and television from pretty much every era and genre. There will be reviews, retrospectives, histories, rankings, recommendations, and longer pieces about whatever sends me down a particular rabbit hole.

I'm also planning something considerably more ambitious: going back to 1966 and watching (in most cases, rewatching) Star Trek from the beginning, starting with The Original Series and eventually working my way through the shows and movies that followed. Considering how much Star Trek exists at this point, I reserve the right to question this decision somewhere around episode 150.

Reel Fixation will include both free articles and additional material for paid subscribers. I'll have more to say about that as everything gets underway, but plenty of what I publish will remain available to everyone. If you'd like to follow along, subscribing for free is the easiest way to make sure new pieces actually reach you instead of hoping an algorithm decides you should see them.

Mostly, though, I want this to be somewhere I can write about movies and television the way I actually talk about them—sometimes seriously, sometimes critically, occasionally obsessively, but always because there's something worth discussing.

Obsessed with movies. Focused on the details.

Welcome to Reel Fixation.