🎞️Welcome to The Re:Cut!

(or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace the Re-edit)

A few things have inspired this blog — the most significant of which I’ll unpack properly in my next post.

But before we get there, a little scene-setting.

As I prepare the set for my fiftieth birthday (half a century — I know, I can’t believe it either), I find myself stepping more fully into my identity as a human being. Which sounds grandiose but really only means you hit that curious age where you’ve stopped caring about what doesn’t matter, and finally have the nerve to focus fully on what does. In 2025 terms: I’ve run clean out of fucks to give.

The last few years have been, to borrow a cinematic cliché, a rough cut. A dip in mental health here, a pandemic there, a slow global descent into fascism playing like a bad dystopian sequel no one asked for — and, somewhere amid it all, the business of untangling my own messy, complicated backstory. Not exactly a golden era for empaths. There were moments I thought the credits were about to roll. I’d lost the plot, and with it, the joyful, absurdly optimistic spark that used to define me.

But, as the tattoo on my wrist declares — and yes, it’s a Trainspotting reference (and probable future post) — Choose Life. And so I did. Because frankly, I’m far too fabulous, and far too bloody stubborn, to quit.

Eat Pray Love… Medicate

And thus begins my midlife montage: yoga mats, therapy sessions, meditation apps, and a catalogue of pharmaceuticals worthy of its own Criterion release. I’m facing my demons, sure, but I’m also doing something that feels properly me: writing about films. This, dear reader, is my digital therapy session — where cinema meets self-reflection, and popcorn meets Prozac.

Cinema Paradiso… and Me

Movies have always been my church, my classroom, and occasionally, my hiding place. From the earliest moments — those core-memory mornings with my Grandma watching movies that you’ll read about in my next post — film has been the one constant. Through turbulence and triumph, heartbreak and hilarity, movies have been there: my joy, my escape, my voice when I couldn’t find one, my window into other worlds, and my mirror when I didn’t recognise my own reflection.

And here’s the thing I’ve realised over time: I adore a rewatch.

Not out of laziness (though I won’t deny a comfort viewing of Jaws beats most therapy sessions), but because revisiting a film is like stepping back into an old photograph — one that develops differently every time you hold it up to the light. We don’t just rewatch the movie; we rewatch ourselves. The same frames, but new eyes.

That’s what fascinates me: how films — those tiny spools of time captured on celluloid — become vessels of cultural and personal memory. Jaws in 1982, age six, on a crackly TV is an entirely different film than Jaws in 2025, age forty-nine, on an IMAX screen that could swallow the Amity shoreline whole. The story hasn’t changed. But I have. That’s the magic of the rewatch.

Imitation of Life

Cinema has always held up a mirror to the world — sometimes a flattering one, sometimes a cracked and brutal one — and the reflections shift with us. Art imitates life, life imitates art, and somewhere in the middle, we learn something true.

In this blog, I’ll be revisiting films old and new through the lens of time: who I was then, who I am now, and who I might be next. Expect deep dives, personal revelations, and social commentary seasoned with sass. From all-time greats to cult curios, from guilty pleasures to cinematic catastrophes, The Re:Cut will splice together life, laughter, politics, nostalgia, and the occasional righteous rant.

Rewatch. Reflect. Reframe.

Born of those childhood mornings, snuggled into Gran watching everything from Bambi to Blade Runner, The Re:Cut is about the collision of life and cinema — and the unexpected perspectives we gain when we revisit what we thought we knew.

So grab your popcorn and a healthy dose of over-analysis. Cue the movie. Let’s Re:Cut!