Edu-ma-brain-drain

The Cap'n would like to apologize for the sudden lack of Blogorium Reviews. If this week is any indication, there won't be much time to watch entire movies outside of Monday afternoons. I've seen pieces of movies, digested in bite-sized portions: the first thirty minutes of Moon, twenty minutes of Steven Soderbergh and Sasha Grey's The Girlfriend Experience Commentary, the opening of Che. (Did you know that Weeds' Demián Bichir plays Fidel Castro? I missed that somehow...)

I know that much - if any at all - of the appeal of this blog is the promise of new material six days a week, with trailers on Sunday, so I'm really going to try to keep that up. It's going to be very hard though. Whenever possible, I try to keep this blog strictly about film and occasionally television, so I'm going to limit this school update to just tonight. I had what sounded like a reasonable number of classes with a heavy, if oddly split up, work load. And then I went and did a stupid thing, which was to add an extra class. A class I don't need, because I already took it.

The course material was too interesting to pass up. Yes, I'd been in Senior Seminar last year, and slogged through it, but this year was about religion and gender. Three books are on the agenda: The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology, Omnigender, and Judith Butler's Undoing Gender. I wanted to just sit in and read the books, but the ruling came down from high that in order to get the Senior Seminar experience again, I'd have to take the class as an independent study. And do all of the work, again. Facilitate in-class and online discussions, deliver two oral presentations and three written critiques. Again.

Okay, so that's a pain, but worth the price of admission for source material like that. I did not ask to take over the Religious Studies Club. I said I'd help, but I'm not looking to organize field trips, guest lecturers, and help put the next generation of club leadership in place. That's not my bag, kids. I get worn out organizing Horror Fest. I didn't mind having people over every Thursday night to shoot the breeze and wax religiosophically, but responsibility... mrm.

I don't feel quite as horrible because I manage to cram in far more reviews over the holidays than I'd anticipated, and even got the recaps done before 2010 hit. That's good. I still have a half dozen or so movies that need seeing, and I'd really like to catch The Road before it leaves theatres. I just don't know when that's going to happen. Aside from the Coen Brothers class and next week's triple feature, I don't know when I'll be able to provide you with the kind of regular exposure to new movies that dominated most of December and January.

But I'm going to try. It's a tricky thing, walking away from a project I've been adhering to for the last six years. I apologize in advance if the recaps and reaction to news dominates entries. I'll make a concerted effort to get more "Four Reasons" and "Five Movies" out, and there's a chance you'll see a dry run of a Coen brothers paper I'm mulling over. However, it could get bumpy for a little bit, so bear with the Cap'n.