About Cinema Scene
Cinema-Scene.com began in 1999 as my attempt to review every film in release each week in Nashville. In a weekly newsletter format, Cinema-Scene.com quickly gained a large and dedicated readership and subscriber list. Based on this early success, the site was soon invited into a number of groups for online film criticism, including the Online Film Critics Society in 2000.
The site continued as a major source of reviews of new releases and film festivals until 2004 when backlog and other endeavors made the site untenable. With a plethora of makeshift review sites popping up in every corner of the internet, I chose to retire from reviewing films regularly.
The new revived site comes with the unveiling of my Film Ledger, an 11-year venture to compile and grade every film I’ve ever seen. At this point all films have been graded, I just need to correct any youthful grading indiscretions.
As always, I will continue to do my year-end awards, though dropping the kitschy Golden Brando Awards name.
About the Editor
A lifelong insomniac, David L. Blaylock spent most of his formative years watching Nick at Nite and falling desperately in love with classic Hollywood production values, with particular love for Alfred Hitchcock Presents. With all the episodes of My Three Sons, F-Troop, Get Smart, and The Patty Duke Show exhausted, he turned to his local video store, where the discovery of the Alfred Hitchcock section at age 8 would start a wholly unhealthy obsession. Love for Hitchcock’s works would then turn to interest in and love for the works of his actors and actresses, and then those of their colleagues, and so forth. A decade later, he had two VCRs (12 hours of programming) set to record movies during school hours, the willpower to forgo sleep for the almighty Robert Osborne, and a thankfully speedy metabolism to keep him going.
A regular figure on movie message boards as a youth, David was forced to take a pseudonym, David Perry, by his parents who worried about his well being (they were at the vanguard of the Dateline-online-pedophile scare). As anyone with a head full of film knowledge waiting to be thrown to the world, he took to creating and maintaining Cinema-Scene.com under the pseudonym by which he had already developed a following in ’90s Usenet.
He would continue with Cinema-Scene.com as he attended the University of Tennessee and studied under Christine Holmlund, Charles Maland, and William Larson in the school’s Cinema Studies department. He graduated with Bachelor’s degrees in journalism, cinema studies, and political science in 2004. Immediately, he went to work for the film section of The Village Voice, assisting in the daily operations under then-editor Dennis Lim and reviewing films for the paper as a freelancer. Though he greatly enjoyed working for the Voice for a year, David saw the writing on the wall and, for a number of reasons, decided to turn back to his other great love, politics, and started on a Master’s program in international relations at the George Washington University.
Though his interest in film started with classic Hollywood cinema, he has diversified his concentration on multiple occasions to get a solid grasp of every major national and stylistic film movement to better inform his writing and criticism. To date, his choice for best film is Kieslowski’s The Decalogue, his favorite film is Joel Coen’s Fargo, and his favorite filmmaker remains Alfred Hitchcock.