Blogging from A to Z (2022)

My aim when I returned to blogging last year was to review films on a Thursday and Friday - films for your weekend! - but you can see from my post list that things have been quiet here for a while.

In fact, my last post was the final post for the A to Z Challenge 2021. Truth is, I had got irritated with reviewing midway through April.

After changing my web domain when returning to reviewing, I had expected a hit on traffic as search engines caught up. Fortunately, by late January, both Google and Bing seemed to have re-indexed all my posts and they were even displaying them as reviews in the search results. My hard work at learning about rich snippets had seemingly paid off.

At the end of March, Google then decided to remove many of my posts from its search results. In many cases these were posts that had been on the internet for 10+ years and contained nothing offensive.

At the start of April, things fluctuated up and down until I thought; what's the point? Why do I care so much about views? I have no intention of being the next Roger Ebert, Mark Kermode or Kim Newman - I just want to chat to like-minded people about film.

The final nail was that my wife was due to give birth to our first child in June (a happy, healthy handful!), and I realised I was sat there panicking about search results on my blog. Clearly, I needed another break to reassess my priorities.

But, I'm back. Sort of. In truth, I'm committing to this year's April's A to Z Challenge and then I'll see where I go from there. Like last year, I'm starting the challenge waaaay back in February to get ahead of the curve so hopefully I have time to visit some of the other participants during April.

I follow the A to Z team on Twitter and, like most in our little community, was saddened to learn of the passing of the late, great Jeremy Hawkins, who had done all the graphics work for challenges of yore. His work will continue to adorn hundreds - if not thousands - of pages across the blogosphere and for that many of us are grateful. Thank you, Jeremy.

This is my fourth year of the A to Z. In 2012 I reviewed 26 films I had wanted to watch. 2013 saw a break from reviewing in order to look at some of comedy's finest characters. Last year was a thoroughly enjoyable trip into the darkest depths of cinema history with films all over 100 years old.

As I was grasping around for a theme in early February, it was suddenly obvious. In a year that contains the dates 2/2/22 and 22/2/22, what better way to celebrate than some of cinema's famous sequels.

The rules are simple. Review sequels from A to Z whose titles contain a pronounceable "two". That means that film titles that don't include a number (e.g. Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets), that aren't numbered two (e.g. Star Wars: Episode V) and that do contain a two but aren't pronounced that way (e.g. Blade Runner 2049) are all not eligible. Fortunately, this does allow for the litany of "Part II" films.

So there we are, back again for another A to Z. Good luck to all doing the challenge, and if you've not been here before, welcome to my blog!

What do you think I've got coming up? Clues in the twos!

• A
• B
• C
• D
• E
• F
• G
• H
• I
• J
• K
• L
• M
• N
• O
• P
• Q
• R
• S
• T
• U
• V
• W
• X
• Y
• Z

Some fun oddities around the rules: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 would be the only Harry Potter film that counts, even though it's the eighth film. Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers would count despite its "two" being unrelated to the film's sequencing. 22 Jump Street would count, as would Pokémon: The Movie 2000, but Oceans 12 would not.