The Rocchi Report: What I've Learned.

I went to a café without wireless to write this column, because I'm finding that the communications options offered by the internet have turned my attention span into a twitching, wretched thing. And I wanted to think. This column is going to be all about what I've learned in two months as Cinematical's Editor-in-Chief, and one of the things I've learned is that my column turned out to be bi-weekly. It's verging on tri-weekly. And I try, weakly, to get it in on a regular basis, but who knows and/or cares if that's going to happen? So I retreat to a lead-lined café in a part of the city I don't get to that often before the press screening of Poseidon, trying to run through what I laughingly call my thought process about this job so far. And here are some things I've learned.

1) "Feed Me, Krelborn! Feed Me Now!"

Anyone who runs a blog of any kind will tell you that frequency of updates translates into traffic, visits and comments. And yet, this has taken a while to sink in with me. But the ravenous hunger of the blog essentially devours all sense -- watching update after update come from our news gatherers and commentators, posted to the site by Kim or Martha or rarely myself. I frankly don't know how a reader keeps up with it. But when you slow it down, you see the effect ... and that's, to quote Michael Franti, "as real as rent." So you step back; you look hard, and you start by kicking you own ass to make more news posts, more reviews, more columns, while recognizing that you are but one part of a much larger, spread-out network of busy, busy people, each of whom you owe about eight e-mails. And meanwhile the hunger of the blog -- what ink-and-print people call 'the news hole" -- demands feeding.

2) "Follow the Money."

And then you get into the whole question of what, exactly, is news? Is something as silly as movies (which, while lovely, are not up there in Maslow's Hierarchy with food and shelter) worthy of journalism? Or is it all about what (and occasionally who) famous people are doing? I wound up, wholly by happenstance, as a substitute-substitute-video camera assistant at a Cannes premiere of Troy, and watching the Euro-papparazzi at work was scary. (Imagine you're 20 feet away from someone, and whether or not they make their mortgage payment revolves around if they can get you to make something like eye contact and smile. Now imagine you're 20 feet away from 20 someones like that. The mind recoils.) I have this whole philosophy that while only a fool is drawn in solely by charisma and good looks, only a bigger fool would deny that charisma and good looks exist. By and large, I'm more interested in good work than good cheekbones -- and between a mix of fast-breaking news, real journalism and actual criticism, I'm hoping that Cinematical can be glossy and smart, fun and engaging. One of the things I've seen at Cinematical that's made me proudest was Kim Voynar's refutation of the standard-issue PR line about Brando's screen test for Rebel Without a Cause. You can read that story here, but what it boils down to is a writer reading a story, having a question, working her connections, finding the facts, setting the record straight. It ain't the Lego version of Brokeback Mountain, but its real journalism, and I hope we can bring you more of it.

3) "'E.g.' means 'for example.' What I think you want to say is 'I.e.'."

I am, as our British friends would say, a crap grammarian. I never studied it, or copy-editing, or basic prose style. I have learned it ineptly along the way, and it is now becoming apparent to me that when you're determining the style of a publication, you by-God need to know that stuff. How does title case work? How do you do numbers in AP style? When turning a possessive word into a URL, do you include the apostrophe? The mercurial and fanciful nature of the movie biz doesn't help; I mean, do you realy have to put the upside-down '7' in the title of  Lucky Number Slevin? And does that upside-down '7' explain the mystery of why so many people seemed to like that hunk of crap? Or you find yourself stumbling over the spelling of Gyllenhaal, and making up doggerell like this:

"'I' before 'E,' except after 'C,'
Unless it's an 'A' as in 'neighbor' or 'weigh,'
Or if it's in Poseidon -- I think 'cause it's Greek --
But I can forget that 'bout this time next week."

I can give some reasons for my answers in these matters. At the same time, I feel like I should be informing people of grammar and style rules in the same way I should be informing people of slang names for street narcotics: Only as a last resort, and at a great remove from any actual experience.

4) "I Haven't Eaten Since Later this Afternoon."

In the movie business, time is fluid. I mean, there are films that are completely off my radar -- Brick, United 93, Mission: Impossible III -- that any real human being may be still contemplating seeing, or unimaginably distant from their residence. I mean, as Jeff Anderson points out on a regular basis, many of the best films out there never play on more than 400 screens. I really noticed the fluidity of time this weekend, when sitting on the porch with The New Yorker, I read a review by Anthony Lane that a) was actually about the movie, and not about how clever Anthony Lane is and b) made me want to get up right then, right then and gogogo see that film nownownow. I mean, I was on fire. En fuego. And then I went over to the Interweb to learn that it's not opening in San Francisco for another month. It made me feel ... well, like I feel a lot of the time when I read movie coverage: Acutely aware of a bubble, a loop, a beltway. And if I feel like that after years of doing this stuff, I can only imagine how someone with another job feels.

And this comes down to the big question, not to get too (or, rather, even more) nerdy: What things have I not learned in the past two months? And what do you come here for? And what do you want more of, or less of? And is there a place with free Wi-Fi on Union?

Yours,

James Rocchi.