1ST 5 Minutes
Welcome to the 1ST 5 Minutes! A bi-weekly deep dive into one particular film, and how you can judge the quality, or lack thereof, in the 1ST 5 Minutes.
Huh? Maybe we should start at the beginning…
When I was younger, I would take it as a point of pride to finish every movie I started, no matter how awful. I felt it was my duty to the filmmakers. After all, making a movie is hard work, years from first conception to audiences actually seeing it. Just to get a film made is in itself a feat, much less a good film.
But as I’ve aged, and options for what to watch have grown exponentially, time is short. I’ve already made peace with the fact I’ll not live long enough to see every film I want to. I maintain a list of movies I still need to watch and it has grown to well over a hundred films. How on Earth can I live life, work, and still get to all those flicks?
In all those years of watching films, something profound began to dawn on me. Well, profound to me anyway. Let’s face it, film is the medium of the common man. For the most part, no matter how good, film is not considered “high art,” whatever the hell that means these days.
I realized all the films I love revealed their greatness within the 1ST 5 Minutes of their runtime. Whether it was a shot, a line of dialogue, a piece of music, hell, even the font used for the credits, something in those 1ST 5 Minutes evinced a greatness that would be further justified and concretized by the rest of the film.
On the flip side, think of all the bad movies you’ve seen over the years, and then sit there and tell me, honestly tell me, you didn’t know it was going to be a terrible movie in those 1ST 5 Minutes. Of course you knew! You hoped it would get better. It didn’t. And it won’t. Ever. If a movie is worth you taking two hours and change out of your day, you will know it right away.
And thus, this site was born, as an exploration of my thesis. On the first and third Friday of each month, I shall endeavor to illustrate, through a deep dive into one film, just what was so good (or bad) in that 1ST 5 Minutes, and why those 1ST 5 Minutes were proof the rest of the movie would be great (or terrible).
Each post will have an intro discussing some aspect of the film/filmmakers, an analysis of the 1ST 5 Minutes, a look at the rest of the flick, including Favorite Scene, Favorite Shot, and Favorite Line, and then wrapping up with a look at the one sheet posters used to market the film.
These are not film reviews, per se. Oftentimes there won’t be plot summaries or anything of the sort you’re used to in regular film writing. But there will be plenty of spoilers, don’t say you weren’t forewarned. This is the… 1ST 5 MINUTES.
