ALMOST Kael turned one year old yesterday. I wish I had posted something right on time but a case of life happened. So with a little delay: happy birthday my beloved blog! May I have the time, and strenght to keep on writing you. The passion you can be certain I will always possess. Knowing that I was going to review MY WEEK WITH MARILYN, I wondered if I would have been glad to have Marilyn Monroe sing her famous “happy birthday” for the occasion. I admit it is a peculiar interrogation but bringing up strange things is like a second nature to me.

Anyway, if I had to pick up one dead celebrity to carry a little tune, Monroe would not have been the one. to be perfectly honest, I am not fascinated by Monroe. I do not contest that she was gorgeous as well as a good actress but I never grasped what made her so special.

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As I am about to celebrate the first year of existence of my blog, I find myself hoping that people are not only enjoying and looking forward to reading me but most of all that the profound reason at the origin of its creation is apparent to them. Stressing the importance of serious film criticism and the need to recognize it more as a literary exercise is already one hell of a battle; but my true crusade is against the rampant elitism in cinema. “Vulgarity won’t kill cinema. Elitism will” is a Pauline Kael’s quote that I displayed at the top of this website as if it was as mystical as the Delphic maxim “know thyself”. Out of all the brilliant ideas that she expressed with a brave honesty, it is her daring call-out of the “cultural snobbery” that made me worship her. Her fantastic essay Trash, art and the movies (1969) is not a masturbatory analysis but a manifesto against the disdain some give to films which unique pretension is to entertain.

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I recently devoted an entire weekend to a Lord of the Ring marathon. I revisited the long versions of the trilogy that gave me so much happiness when it first came out in 2001. I was fourteen when The Fellowship of the Ring was released and I went crazy about it like the majority of my schoolmates. I was even offered a limited edition of the ring. There was no doubt in my mind that these films were perfect. But that was then and this is now. Seeing them with the eyes of a twenty-four woman had been a radically different experience. I would not say that the magic was gone as it would somehow mean that when you grow up you are no longer sensitive to enchanted worlds; but it was certainly undermined by the writing and directing problems that I noticed. I came out of this night with a whole changed opinion about the trilogy: it is regrettably bad.

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Life is well-made. Although it has been now two weeks since I had the incommensurable pleasure to finally get to see THIS IS SPINAL TAP for the first time ever – on a cinema screen even! -, it is on April Fools’ day that I happen to review it. I did plan on writing about it today but it is only while I was making my breakfast that I realized it was the first of april. Isn’t it perfect timing? I mean, isn’t it just delicious to talk about one of the funniest cinematic joke/scam ever pulled on such a day? I swear, this makes my day just like catching This is Spinal Tap at last did a couple of weeks ago.

As I have stated it before, I am a bit of a procrastinator when it comes to seeing movies that I really want to watch. This was exactly the case again with This is Spinal Tap. I had decided that I had to see it in extremely good conditions for mainly two reasons.

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