Saturday, July 21, 2007

James Berardinelli

I found a bio of Berardinelli on the Rotten Tomatoes site. I've taken the liberty of quoting it here, almost in full:

...born in September 1967...New Jersey (USA). I started writing when I was about 9 years old.... However, although my "first love" was writing, too many tales of starving authors scared me off that path, so I decided to become an engineer instead. ...Putting my education to use, I went to work for a company called Bellcore, which pays well enough for me to keep up the mortgage, maintain a home theater, finance film festival trips, and buy the 25-30 gallons of gasoline I need each week to attend screenings. As for my "film history"... As a child, I did not attend many movies. In fact, the first one I remember going to was JAWS, at a drive-in. During my junior high and high school years, I rarely ventured into a theater, but my interest in movies escalated while I was at college. In 1991, the year before I started reviewing, I saw about 30 films. The number jumped up to 180 in 1992, when I wrote capsule reviews for my own use. Starting in 1993, the year I "went public" on the Usenet newsgroups, I began seeing between 220 and 250 theatrical releases per year.
By my reckoning that makes Mr Berardinelli a mere forty years old; I was watching movies for around seventeen years before he was born, and used to go regularly with my mother (my father having long departed the scene by that stage) and my friends. We went to everything, though I became rather more discriminating as time went on. Nevertheless, since Mr B started watching movies so late in life I've probably watched as many movies as he has over the years. It's only in the last few years that I've seen fewer movies at theatres, though we watch plenty on tv and dvd.




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