 Heyallright.com is the internet headquarters of composer, guitarist, writer, film critic, and web designer Theo Michelfeld. Theo has studied writing with Kim Bridgeford at Hamilton College, and with Max Zimmer at Max's workshop in Sparta, New Jersey. He also studied guitar at Berklee College of Music. Theo lives in Warwick, NY with his wife, Diane, and his dog, Maddie.
If you need a website or need site maintenance, call me at 845 - 544 - 5484 or email me at theo@heyallright.com. Some of the sites I've built are on the right side of the page. My sites are spiffy and affordable. Check them out. I service Warwick, Orange County, New York State, North Jersey, and beyond. Can't find your webmaster? Call me.
You can hear my music at Squidfighter.com. Squid Fighter plays original songs—rock, country, reggae, and whatever else. You like the tunes? Sign up for the Squid Fighter mailing list. If you're throwing a party and need a band, book us. Also, give me a call if you want guitar lessons, electric or acoustic. 845 - 544 - 5484.
As for writing, yes, I write freelance. Fiction, non-fiction, anything. Click movie reviews to access my writing samples.
Why movie reviews? For one thing, I have always loved movies. I love them because I love stories, but also because movies are, by nature, deeper, broader, and grander than the stories they tell. Because words and sentences and paragraphs and even ideas—mystical and whimsical tools though they may be —are, in the end, just tools. Because drama and poetry and morality and philosophy, engaging as it all has been through the ages, is really only real when we make it so. Movies, by comparison, offer truths that we may, yes, in our cleverest moments, harness or even manipulate, but truths that we can never conjure out of nothing. Truths of physics, truths of color, truths of light. Truths beyond us, like the truest truths are. I love movies because I love stories, and movies are stories raised to a greater power.
And secondly, it seems I am compelled to recommend movies, to "turn people on to" them, to share and discuss a filmgoing experience, to point out what others may not see in a film's tone, its message, its craftsmanship, its cultural context, or simply in its plot. At the same time I have grown weary, in my life, of making these points in conversation. Disagreements (with me) somehow tend to devolve into "win at all costs" ugliness, whereby the other party, perhaps cornered by unassailable logic, resorts to cheap tactics—sarcasm, false pity, accusations without substantiation that I am "over-analytical," that I am "too easy to please," or that I "don't get it." Meanwhile I have no real need to convince anyone of anything, no need to seduce the world to my way of thinking. I am merely ravenous to make myself clear. Writers all know and surely all crave this sweet solace.
And thirdly, I wanted to convert my talents into a means of self-sustenance. Who doesn't? So my plan was to start a website, join the Online Film Critics Association, and rent space to advertisers.
Every weekend, for a year-and-a-half, I drove my battered, leaky, noisy Volkswagon Jetta 25 miles to the nearest movie theater, and took in a new release. I dared not arrive late, lest I miss some brilliant movie's critical opening scene. And so I erred on the side of sitting there waiting for the film to start, subjecting myself to Coca-Cola adds, bad country music, trivia questions about current releases, vapid quotes from teenage movie stars, car commercials and other commercials that also air repeatedly on TV, short films and music videos urging young people to join the military, and repeated coming attractions for the same movies I would eventually see in the theater and then see advertised again in their DVD incarnation—all of it louder than jackhammers, and, in the case of theater 1 at Middletown's Galleria Cineplex, through a busted subwoofer. And yes, there would be a blessed movie (a story raised to a greater power) at last.
I watched them parade by, week after week, whether it was the summer movie season, or "Awards" season, or February, a movie season just as bleak as Hudson Valley Februaries tend to be in every regard. And after each theater experience I would steer my leaking sputtering Jetta those 25 miles home and fire up the keyboard, and try to offer, and perhaps at times succeed in offering, "something original and vital to the field of film criticism," which the O.F.C.S. expressly requires of its applicants. There was still my day job, and there was my freelance web programming, and still the lawn to be mowed, the leaf-raking in autumn, the snow-shoveling in winter. Still the dishes, the laundry, the vacuuming. Still the social functions, and even the occasional vacation around which the filmgoing and critiquing had to be worked. There was the occasional inevitable head cold, and there was the random fatigue that hits us all, now and then, no matter what we do or dare to dream. Lest we forget, there was the steadily rising price in gasoline. And there were those weekly movie tickets at $5, or $7.50, or $9.00 a piece depending on the time of day.
A year-and-a-half of this, and then the O.F.C.S. rejected my application.
For quite some time now, I have been able to craft written sentences. Not to toot my horn. Others can slam dunk a basketball, memorize a book of chess openings, put people at ease, groom cats, play drums, fix cars, make money, control air traffic—all miracles. I, for whatever it's worth (for whatever it COSTS), can make written sentences. I also learned, somewhere along the way, to make paragraphs. And then I started to have ideas, which, theoretically, I should have been able to articulate with my sentences and paragraphs. But it was only when I was promoted to sales support manager at my job at a music publisher, and found myself sending out up to 200 emails a day to customers, to business partners, and to various employees in various divisions of the company, that I finally learned to write. These emails were sometimes feverishly written, and lo, sometimes, awfully well composed. I realized at some point that the writing, if it was good, was good not because of my paragraph- or sentence-making skills, but because I had something to say, and someone out there needed to hear it. This, I realized, was, if not THE KEY, at least a crucial ingredient to good writing. Although writing, as they say, is essentially a one-sided conversation in which you get to do all the talking, it is only good and purposeful if the reader is real, and stands to benefit from your words, your sentences, your paragraphs, your ideas. Whether that reader is attentive or, in the end, convinced, must always be besides the point—a happy side effect and nothing more. The point is to do your part, to be convincing. Only then is lonesomeness bridged, and only then does the writer's particular brand of miracle occur.
Movie reviews seemed a perfect outlet, not so much because I love movies, and not only because I seem to have an endless tolerance for movies (by comparison, I have very little tolerance for, say, Java Chip ice cream, which I also love) but because of that crippling lonesomeness I feel when a quality movie is misapprehended—by friends, relatives, the media, the public. This lonesomeness is not remotely rational, but neither is anything that drives us. I think many people misunderstand the purpose of movies. As with music, there's a notion that only a certain "kind" of film is good. That one flaw brings the whole thing down. That filmmakers are not impassioned artists but talented capitalists. That "Anchorman" is not good because "No Country For Old Men" is. That a movie must somehow stand in for our I.Q. That a movie does not make sense if we do not understand it. I had to counter these notions. It's not the brainwashing of others, but the peace of mind it gives me simply to reach out, to articulate my position, and to know it is there, in writing, for whoever has the time and inclination and reading skills to comprehend my words. We all cling to the well-articulated ideas of others to alleviate our loneliness—the poem, the rock song, the political speech. But it's that moment when we say our own thing, in our own way, that really sends the voltage of life through our bodies and souls, even if all it gets us is a beer in the face, a pink slip, an ass-kicking, a blank stare, or a form rejection email c.c.'d openly to fifteen other wannabe film critics.
Below are the archives.
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