My name is Laurie, aka Celluloid Dame, and I love movies! I love to watch movies, talk about movies, analyze movies, learn about how movies are made, and keep track of the movie industry. I have two degrees in English literature (lucrative!), so I am especially interested the ways books and plays are adapted for the screen.

The main thing I love about film is that it is a medium made of mediums. It’s an amalgam of writing, photography, acting, music, fashion, and technology (just to name a few) melded into a product that exists as its own entity. The complex and collaborative nature of filmmaking, the way each part is codependent on the other, makes film production and the movies themselves (the best ones, anyway) a style of art unlike any other.

I’m particularly interested in the roles of women in film, both on- and off-screen; the use of scenery and design; and the use of music. And of course, because I studied writing, and because writing is the form in which every film exists in its infancy, I’m fascinated by the process of translating a word into an image.

I am not a film scholar. I took a few film courses in college, and I read about film and watch movies for pleasure. But essentially, I just really love The Movies. There are movies so brilliant that my way of thinking about something changed, and there are movies so god-awful that I kind of took it personally. I love films in both of these categories, and I hope to write about them here. This blog exists for me to love movies out loud.

Disclaimer: I enjoy both genuine, (hopefully) intelligent movie criticism and affectionate shit-talking. It is very likely that there will be both here.