Carleton film studies alumnus Christopher Redmond’s review website began with a daunting task: the mission to watch 500 films in one year.
There’s nothing quite like settling down in the evening and watching a film you’ve never seen before. Placing yourself in the hands of a new director, trusting them to take you on a cinematic experience. For most people, this may happen a few times a month – if that.
Redmond, who works as a full-time film and TV director, vowed to make it a daily routine. One film a day proved to be a non-issue for him, and as he was breezing through the quota, he set his eyes on a new goal.
“I started by just trying to watch a film a day for a year that I had never seen before,” he said, “but after a few months, when I did the math, I realized I could probably hit 500 if I stayed on pace.”
Initially, watching 500 films was just a personal challenge for Christopher, but he said it ended up being so much more than that. Christopher’s friends encouraged him to blog his experience, and with that film500 was born.
With film500, Christopher would write a short capsule review for every film he watched both for the sake of reviewing the film, and to prove to himself that he was actually paying attention. Publicity quickly took off for him when he attended the Toronto International Film Festival that year.
“I was reviewing film basically while I was in line to see the next one, so my reviews were some of the first ever for these films, which got me a lot of traffic,” he said.
With this new traffic, Christopher began being invited to press screenings, reviews over radio, and given media clearance at film festivals. This energy, of course, couldn’t last forever, and around November, Christopher began to burn out. He couldn’t keep up 500 a year, but he still wanted a reason to watch film and write about it.
“I also wanted it to grow and bring in more people, so I roped in a bunch of film nerd friends who liked film500 and we came up with a different hook to help us stand out, which was to write all our reviews like a letter to someone who worked on the film.”
This collaboration spawned Dear Cast and Crew, a review site made up entirely of letter-style reviews addressed to different parts of—you guessed it—the cast and crew.
This style of review is a nuanced way to give attention to different parts of the industry. On the website, you’ll find “letters” to almost every person that is involved in making a film from the director, to the actors, to the editors. The reviews shed light into every corner of the filmmaking process.
“At this point, we have over 1,000 articles by over 20 writers, all of them peer-reviewed and on theme,” he said.
He finds being a critic helpful. Being someone who actively consumes films gives him an understanding of films with a much stronger context.
“My reason for doing it was just because I wanted something like that to exist,” he said, “which I guess is the same reason we all keep the site going, and the only reason worth doing anything like this that doesn’t pay the bills.”
Image by Bridget Redmond
