Celebrating One Year of The Reveal

With the first year under our belt, we're forging ahead and continuing to expand the newsletter. A thank you to our subscribers and a sample of some of our favorite pieces so far.

Happy anniversary, Revealers! 

One year ago, we launched The Reveal, an effort to continue a collaboration between the two of us that has lasted about 25 years in multiple outlets—The A.V. Club, The Dissolve, and The Next Picture Show, our ongoing podcast with two other longtime collaborators, Genevieve Koski and Tasha Robinson. The Reveal has given us an opportunity to do the sort of work we’re most passionate about and to share it with a community that has turned the comments into an oasis of smart, funny, respectful film discussion. 

To that end, we want to take this opportunity to thank our subscribers. For years, we worked at free publications that made money through ad sales based around the shady voodoo of circulation numbers and page views. We were grateful that the money trickled down to us, but its sources always seemed vague. To have subscribers pay us directly for our writing has been a humbling and gratifying experience beyond compare, and we hope that our hard work on the newsletter has made the investment worthwhile. In the weeks and months ahead, we will be working to increase subscriber benefits and bring this community closer together. 

We’re also anxious to continue our steady growth. So if you like The Reveal, please consider recommending it to other film fanatics, who can always sample the free version of the newsletter first. We’re happy to have the chance to earn your subscription dollars. 

Below we’ve each assembled a list of five pieces we’ve written in the last year that best represent what we do here. The common thread: Few of them could find a home in any other publication. 

But first, once again, thanks for helping us to carve out a space to do meaningful work. Your appreciation is what keeps us going.

-Scott and Keith 

Scott 

A Conversation with John Hodgman about Dune, Pt. 1 (Pt. 2 here): When Denis Villeneuve’s Dune arrived in theaters (and HBO Max) shortly after we started The Reveal, I knew there was no one better to talk about all things Dune than Hodgman, who’d long treasured Frank Herbert’s book and David Lynch’s misbegotten adaptation. He offered a window into his tortured adolescence, his love of the Third Stage guild navigator and an airport tarmac discussion with Peter Berg. 

The New Cult Canon: ‘Speed Racer’: Reviving a cult movies column at The A.V. Club that I retired back in 2013 with The Rapture, I had the opportunity to revisit and reassess the Wachowskis’ 2008 sensory assault. Clearly, I wasn’t ready for the future at the time. 

‘Fly Away Home’: How to Talk to Children About Death (and Life): One of my favorite children’s film, Carroll Ballard’s Fly Away Home opens with a daughter losing her mother in a car crash. The way her grief is transformed into her own motherly treatment of orphaned geese is astonishingly beautiful—and a rare, precious example of a family film willing to square up to death. 

Tomb of the Unknown Video Store: A reflection on my time in the mid-1990s as a purveyor of art and porn at Video Library, the best video store in Athens, Georgia. What it was like to work at a place that was loved. 

Against Empathy: On the Righteous Anti-Humanity of Lars Von Trier’s ‘Dogville’: What if humankind— and America specifically— is beyond redemption? That seemed to many critics like a typically cruel and sadistic question for Lars Von Trier to be asking when Dogville came out, but as the young people might say, it “hits different” now. 

Keith 

Minding the Gaps: ‘Walking Tall Part 2’ (1975): “My children are motherless because of the man at the top”: I’ve launched two ongoing columns since we started The Reveal. With Minding the Gaps, I try to plug some holes in my cinematic knowledge and justify a Blu-ray and DVD collection amassed over the years by watching a movie chosen at random by the app I use to catalog my discs. Sometimes that means going deep on peculiar topics, like this entry, which revisits the (much-burnished) legend of ’70s folk hero Buford Pusser.

An Insider’s Guide to the Oslo of ‘The Worst Person in the World’: I enjoyed Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World, but I kept feeling like I was missing some of the local references. So I sought out Karsten Meinich, a film editor and critic based in Oslo, to explain them to me. In the process, I learned more about the movie, the city in which it’s set, and Norwegian film culture.

The ’80s in 40: ‘Little Darlings’ (March 21, 1980): My second ongoing column, The ‘80s in 40, is slowly making its way through the 1980s by revisiting a culturally significant film from each quarter of every year. I kicked it off with this latchkey kid-era movie in which two edging-into-adulthood child stars play campers competing to be the first to lose their virginity.

Best to Worst: Countries That Serve as Stand-Ins for the American West: I like lists. You like lists. Everyone likes lists. From The A.V. Club days on, I’ve tried to use lists to tell stories and to get into some niche subjects and I’ve attempted to continue that at The Reveal. I thought this would be an easy one to knock out, but research took me on some strange byways that included German westerns shot in Croatia and a thriller set in a “California” that looks a lot like Israel.

1991: A Summer at the Movies, the Best Job I Ever Had, and What Came After: I’ve mostly stayed away from autobiographical pieces when writing elsewhere, but one of the nice things about The Reveal is it’s not elsewhere. Here I wrote about a summer job, vanished theaters, absent friends, and a transplant-gone-awry movie starring Jeff Fahey.