On the 11th of October, 2014, I made my first blog post for Mahan's Media titled “Why didn’t I start this sooner?” I named it that partly because I originally started Mahan’s Media as a holdover while I kept trying to get my old YouTube videos together, which took way too bloody long because, as anyone who has read anything I’ve written before will tell you, I’m not that great at editing. But also because I had been writing mini-reviews for myself for quite a while before that. They weren’t as detailed as the thousand-word-minimum stuff I used to put up on here, but there were a lot of them, along with their accompanying place on a ranked list for 2012, 2013, and 2014.
That was the policy with their listings on here too, until I finally realised that listing them in that arbitrary order made it far more difficult to actually find specific reviews that it should have been. I still keep those lists on my computer, and use them for reference when drafting the year-end lists, but I figure being user-friendly should come first, so I rearranged them alphabetically by year when I did my four-year-long clean-up of the blog. Of course, since I still list everything by year of Australian release, there’s likely to be some further confusion but hey: At least I’m learning.
And indeed, the nine years that have transpired since that first post have indeed been a learning experience for me. I started out as an Angry Critic clone who was fascinated by the art of riffing, but didn’t have any formal training in such things, and quite frankly, I didn’t really know what I was doing. Hell, I’m still not sure if I know. All these reviews and listicles have been as much about figuring myself out as figuring out any film or other piece of media that I’ve come across, and I genuinely think that writing so damn much on here has helped shape me into the man I am today.
What began as an obsessive hobby has grown to the point where my high school dream of becoming a paid writer actually came true thanks to FilmInk bringing me on-board. I may miss one or two screenings due to bad scheduling on my part, but I pride myself on my consistency otherwise with a same-day turnaround for any screening my editor sends me out to. I cut my teeth on watching four films a day at the cinema, and doing mini-reviews for all of them between screenings; I’ve put in my 10,000 hours and then some, and in my case, I have been rewarded for my efforts.
