I am English but I live in the Netherlands, I moved here not long after we cut off our E to spite our U. It’s very nice, we have a railway system that doesn’t have you reaching for the vodka and sleeping tablets every time you catch a train, you get money for recycling your beer bottles and libraries are open past 11:30. You get to channel your inner Attenborough and observe stoner’s in the wild. You can get Vegan hot chocolate anywhere.

But life in Amsterdam is not all draped in a shimmering orange glow. We have the most cretinous tourists the low-airfare universe has ever created. I mean, do they not have bikes anywhere else in the world? Have you really flown three thousand miles to be jaw-dropped by a fucking bike? That’s all they do when there here, stand on canal bridges and take pictures of bikes. And eat poorly made waffles at outrageous mark-ups. Get out of the fucking road, honestly. The very worst of humanity in a bobble hat covered in weed leaves.

Anyway, the greatest achievement of the Netherlands is not turning a country sized bog into well, a country. Or Christmas bread, which is bread you eat on Christmas Day and it has chocolate in it. It’s literally pure joy with butter on top. No, the greatest achievement of the Netherlands is something called Cineville. Cineville is where you pay €17.50 a month and you get to watch any film in any cinema for free. Genius. And yes, I can hear you at the back shouting: ‘What about that Odeon thing mate?’ Well, the Odeon thing only counts for watching films in the Odeon, which is a bit like watching a film surrounded by H&M dummies that have come to life eating food designed to give you tinnitus. The difference with Cineville is that you get to go to any cinema, even the small ones that show films with subtitles and long boring ones that people like me pretend to like.

This is where the blog comes in. I have decided to get Cineville for a few months and record the findings of my bioscoop adventures in blog form, because that’s what we avocado humping millennials do. As we watch the world collapse into Neo-fascism, climate disaster and the blood-soaked ravages of antibiotic resistant drugs, it seems the perfect time to start a rather frivolous film blog.  

I aim to see 2-3 films a week, as I live somewhere my rent is so cheap that I can afford to work only three days. I can literally feel the throbbing hatred of any Londoner reading that. I will review all the films, both new and old, I see during this period and hopefully I’ll be able to make some interesting observations about the medium of cinema, storytelling and the nature of art. Or at least write something entertaining enough to stop you slashing your own throat open before you finish reading. And that my friends, is surely the dream of every writer.

Welcome to A Temporary Film Blog.