A Look Back at 2023 and Ahead at 2024 — It Turns Out the Naming Rights! Membership Option Was For Real and Someone Is Now Five Hundred Bucks Poorer Presents Nat

I began 2023 in a bad place professionally, financially and psychologically. I was broke, deeply depressed, had terrible teeth and was finding it hard to muster up hope when everything that I did seemed to fail.

I’m ending 2023 in a much worse place. I’m broker, the depression lasted all year and I had my terrible teeth removed and replaced with dentures, an obscenely painful, expensive and cumbersome procedure that at least made me feel much older than my forty-seven years.

2023 was, for me, what in sports is euphemistically known as a re-building year. I need to believe that all of the losing and failing that I did this year served a purpose.

I hope to God that all of my hard work in 2023 will pay off in 2024 and that the year ahead will be a comeback year for me.

I’m going to institute some changes here at the Happy Place.

For starters there’s going to be less content!

That’s a good thing. I’ve fought a losing battle with the English language since I began this site in 2017. I try my damnedest but I’m still make typoos, grammetical airs and vaerious fuck-ups on a constant basis. There’s just no excuse for that kind of sloopiness.

That’s not good! I’m hoping that publishing three times a week instead of four will allow me to spend more time with the pieces that I do post.

I worry that outsiders will check out a piece here, be put off by the typos and general messiness and never return. Honestly, at the rate I’m going now I’ll die in my early fifties of a massive heart attack a hundred thousand dollars in debt. I fear that my primary legacy will be unsuccessfully begging strangers for money on the internet.

In the year ahead there will be less sad, desperate self-promotion on the site. You know that big, ungainly block of text at the bottom of every article? I’m giving it the old heave-ho. It’s aesthetically unpleasing and also wildly unsuccessful. They don’t sell books or attract patrons or subscribers. On the contrary, I think people are put off by them. It’s another factor that might lead someone to visit this site once and never come back.

These artless blocks of information just take up space. There will also be less self-pity and depression. I know that seems weird and counter-intuitive, considering the first four paragraphs of this blog but I worry that the site is eighty-five percent fun commentary on pop culture, politics and parenthood and fifteen percent desperate cry for help from someone clearly going through some heavy shit.

In the year ahead Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place will strive to be one hundred percent fun commentary on pop culture, politics and parenthood and zero percentage free-floating despair.

I’ll be blogging on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday and putting up big pieces (like My World of Flops, Control Nathan Rabin 4.0, The Travolta/Cage Project, The Great Catch-Up and the like) on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. So there will be fewer pieces but the quality and professionalism will increase.

Oh, but I have big plans for 2024! My biggest plan is so big and so exciting that I can’t wait to share it with you, but need to wait until the middle of January to do so. I can’t wait! But I have to wait. That’s the hard part.

I have other ideas I can share with you now. I am devoting the ENTIRE YEAR to a long and loving look back at 1994, a magical annum that saw the release of Cabin Boy, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, Reality Bites, Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Hudsucker Proxy, The Ref, Clifford, Red Rock West, Serial Mom, Lion King, PCU, Crooklyn, Fear of a Black Hat, Speed, Wolf, Forrest Gump, True Lies, Fresh, Natural Born Killers, Quiz Show, The Shawshank Redemption, Ed Wood, Hoop Dreams, Pulp Fiction, Clerks, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, Bullets Over Broadway, The Last Seduction, Stargate, Heavenly Creatures, The Professional, Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, Dumb and Dumber, Little Women, Nobody’s Fool, Chungking Express, Color of Night and Timecop.

I’ll be going through the year in chronological order with your help. Each week I’ll have paid subscribers to my Substack, Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas and patrons for this site vote on which movie I should write about that week.

We begin on January 4th, 1994, with a Sophie’s Choice-level conundrum; should I write about the all-time cult classic Cabin Boy or the probably pretty racist basketball comedy The Air Up There? I have a pretty good sense of what you’ll choose.

The next week I’ll ask you to choose between House Party 3 (which, regrettably, is not the sequel with Pajama Jammy Jam) and Iron Will while the 28th of January pits Abel Ferrara’s Body Snatchers (from a screenplay co-written by Stuart Gordon!) against Car 54, Where Are You?, which was a musical at one point.

And books! Oh my goodness. I will be putting out so many books. On April 24th I will be officially releasing The Fractured Mirror, my mammoth book on the history of American films about the film industry. It’s gonna be great! I’ve done SO much work on it. And it’ll all be worth it.

In February I will also begin the Fractured Mirror podcast. That’s right: I’m starting a podcast where I talk to interesting people about an American movie about the film industry of their choice. It’s gonna be great!

In November I will publish Travolta/Cage Presents: The Book of Nicolas Cage and Travolta/Cage Presents: The Book of John Travolta. Which will prove more popular? I’m guessing the one on Nicolas Cage by a large margin.

And this whole year I will be plugging away like a madman at the mysterious project I am teasing extensively here. It will be the most ambitious and time and labor-intensive endeavor of my 27 year professional career.

2023 wasn’t all a loss, however. I’m very proud of much of the work that I’ve done. I felt like I did a terrific job with my Substack projects where I wrote up the Ernest P. Worrell and The Fast and the Furious franchise. Heck, I though I did a pretty swell job with my Substack in general. I went back to reviewing new movies, which was fun, and caught up with movies I’d missed, like the god-awful Rise of Skywalker and Halloween Ends and I wrote some pieces here that I’m super proud of as well, primarily My World of Flops articles.

In conclusion, 2023 fucking sucked but 2024 will be MUCH better.

That’s the Nathan Rabin promise!

Happy holidays one and all! Ho, ho, ho!

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