15 Years of Marshall and the Movies

My heartfelt thanks to you

Jul 28, 2024

“Julia Child began learning to cook because she loved her husband, and she loved food, and she didn't know what else to do with herself. And, in the process, she found joy. I didn't understand this for a long time, but I do now.” — Julie Powell in Julie & Julia, 2009

15 years ago today, I came home from an early screening of Julie & Julia and began writing the first post of what would become Marshall and the Movies, a WordPress blog.

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A post shared by @marshall.shaffer

Over the years, I’ve taken to calling this day my “blogaversary,” a portmanteau of “blog” and “anniversary.” If I’m honest with myself, however, it’s more of a second birthday. As a 16-year-old, I unknowingly began the rest of my life. It’s hard to think of any development in the last 15 years that hasn’t come as a result or byproduct of Marshall and the Movies.

That’s not just direct accomplishments or professional achievements. It’s also you here reading this. You have helped me transform a solitary act into a communal one. Even when I’m physically alone watching a movie, I’m always thinking in the back of my head about how I will translate that experience into something I can share with you. You’ve transformed me into the person I wanted to be at 16 but didn’t have the skills yet to become. Much of the confidence, sociability, and generosity comes from this community of people believing that my passions have value. Thank you.

Marshall and the Movies through the years

While this weird valley of content resulting from the delays of 2023’s strikes feels a bit fallow, I remain as invigorated as ever in my love of movies. I hope I can pass that along to you through Marshall and the Movies.

I’ve loved that this newsletter has grown into a curatorial outlet where I can think about ways to make my many hours of cinema spectatorship useful for you. The pragmatic backbone will always be The Upstream and The Downstream to guide your streaming selections, and I’ve complemented that with other timely offerings like underrated performances from this year’s Oscar nominees and previews of festivals like Sundance and Cannes. (And, of course, there is the yearly awards season viewing checklist.)

But I’ve also tried growing more ambitious in what I’ve programmed for the wide list. I hope you’ve noticed my attempts to expand your lens on the world by bringing in a wider array of global cinema. I hope you’ve felt this perspective shift in posts like Multicultural Motherhood, a look at how different cultures enact maternal storylines, And May It Please the Court, a tour of legal dramas across varying nations, and Offbeat Global Comedy, a review of how quirky humor knows no national boundaries.

I’m proud of the more unique ideas that have come to fruition in the last year like the Rom-Com/Erotic Thriller Double Bills newsletter timed to Valentine’s Day, a curation of “Mid Masterpieces” that stemmed from an errant tweet, or perhaps my magnum opus: Cooking and Criterions.

I’ve loved getting to do some deep dives into very specific corners of moviemaking, be it the canon of poetic social realism, a look into lo-fi sci-fi, or Wim Wenders’ concept of “peace cinema.”

While longer conversations are traditionally more the domain of paid subscribers, I hope you’ve enjoyed getting a taste of them if you’re only a free reader. You can see this reflected in posts like Watch More Short Films!, which incorporated thoughts from my friends who have made shorts of their own, or Animation is For Adults, which brought in the voice of my friend Rafael Motomayor to make the case that it’s a medium rather than a genre.

But if you like those, you should become a paid subscriber to Marshall and the Movies. In addition to what’s in the pipeline, you’ll get access to my interviews with Rafaela Sales Ross about Glauber Rocha and Brazil’s Cinema Novo, Leila Latif about Ousmane Sembène and the birth of African cinema, Lawren Desai about a/perture cinema and the state of film exhibition,

Clint Worthington

about the art of film scoring, Savina Petkova on the work of Yorgos Lanthinos, Jake Cunningham on the glory of Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki, Hoai-Tran Bui about Park Chan-wook and Oldboy, and God’s Country director Julian Higgins on what it takes to make your debut feature. Even more are in the hopper for the year to come!

In the last year, paid subscribers have also gotten a lot of fully elaborated thoughts in the form of full retrospectives rather than just capsule reviews. These have included essays on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Tenet, The Pianist (in conversation with The Zone of Interest), Everything Everywhere All at Once on the occasion of one year since it won Best Picture, Bamboozled (in conversation with American Fiction), as well as The Holiday and Almost Famous with quite a bit of personal lore mixed in for good measure.

Paid subscribers truly get the full gamut, and you never know what you’re going to get in your inbox from me on a weekend. It could be another fun list in the breezier style of the free list, such as my favorite pick-me-up movies or the 10 most powerful tearjerkers, or it could be something as deeply researched as a full research paper on Charlie Chaplin or a full syllabus on the American rom-com after 1989. It could be reports from the road like a day in the life at the Sundance Film Festival or a cinematic travelogue from Europe, or it could be a site-specific New York post like a reflection on the year in cinematically-inspired theater or a video art piece reimagining the ending of Taxi Driver.

Either way, I’m glad you’re along for the ride. There’s so much great cinema to be watched, rewatched, processed, and shared together. Thank you for letting me into your inbox and your life. It’s an honor I don’t take for granted. Though it might feel like a one-way stream of communication, know that each open, each link click, each text that you enjoyed the newsletter only deepens my conviction that I started more than just a blog 15 years ago. I started my truest, most fulfilled self.

In honor of the big milestone — and because you didn’t get enough links to click above — I decided to curate my 15 favorite things I’ve made over the years. Whether you’ve been here since the beginning or joined just this week, you’re part of the journey that encompasses all of this now.