Send a Happy Thought to Mainly Movies

Everybody knows that January is the hardest month to be an academic, right? If I weren't jump-starting my new classes and filing requests for courses to teach next year and attending job talks and reading admissions files and helping to organize a conference and writing a paper, I would be voicing my Oscar predictions and getting my Best-Of lists going. Please show up, even when the party inevitably starts late! (Those Oscar predix will up soon — necessarily, since the cat's out of the bag as of Tuesday morning.)

But for now: be thankful for Mainly Movies, an erratic blogger just like yours truly, but incomparably quick and incisive, and still my favorite mass-market print reviewer. (If you aren't keeping up with his real-job reviews every Friday at the Daily Telegraph, I can't understand why not.) In addition to posting his Best & Worst picks in the acting and Original Score categories for this year (and they're wonderful picks, especially the runts), today is Mainly Movies' birthday. So what better time to reiterate how we love him? Or to get caught up on his back catalogue of blog entries and lists, if you haven't been following along already?

Many happy returns, MM!