Why should you listen to me and how will this work?

It seems that every Tom, Dick and Harry has a movie review blog on the Internet. I don't blame you for not being any more interested in reading what I have to say than anyone else. And I certainly don't blame you for reading someone famous instead of reading what I have to say.

Still, I'd like you to know where I'm coming from and how "On the Movie" will work.

I have been a movie addict my whole life. I'm not going to blather on with nostalgic stories here, but you can ask me some time why whenever I see a hockey game, it takes me back to seeing "Youngblood" in a marijuana-soaked, $2 movie theatre. Or how my memory of my sister standing on her chair and crying, "Goodbye, E.T.!" is as special to me as the time when I saw "Disclosure" in Times Square in college and watched a woman throw a stiletto heel at the screen, yelling "you lying bitch!" at a Demi Moore that could not hear her. I love movies.

In college, I covered film for the North Central Chronicle. I was consistent about it and made a bit of a name for myself doing it. I found myself attending press screenings of films with Roger Ebert, Gene Siskel, and other Chicago-area critics. I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. It just didn't work out that way. When I did land a professional, regular paper job at the Naperville Sun, the closest I came to movie reviews was local theatre reviews. Now don't get me wrong. I love theatre. But I saw myself a movie critic. They didn't need one of those. Nobody did.

Nobody needs all of the critics we have today, either. You don't need me. But I need to write about movies. So whether you read or not, I will do that here.

I should qualify that I have been teaching film studies at Naperville Central High School since 2000. I took a number of undergrad and graduate courses in film and have studied the art form in addition to watching so many movies. I have obsessively followed Oscar season since before I took an interest in the Super Bowl. I know what I'm doing.

How films will be rated

When I started puting my film reviews on Facebook, I struggled with their five-star system. I am used to a four-star scale, having grown up reading reviews in newspapers. My first exposure to a five-star system was Rolling Stone, and on many occasions, I've attempted to define each star and half-star and even create a conversion chart for myself between the two scales. I feel no more confident about it now than I ever did.

Therefore, I will probably go with the tried and true four-star scale here. I figure that, in a basic sense, you add about a half-star to most four-star scale reviews anyway if you're using five. But who cares. You know what I'm doing. You'll figure it out.

Time to do what I'm here to do...review movies!