Welcome to CinemaWithGanesh!
Vaanga Vaanga!
Hello Makkals!
I am Ganesh. I love watching, writing and talking about cinema. Being an Indian from Tamil Nadu, I was exposed to fan culture from a very tender age and still remember getting goosebumps from watching Baasha in TV. I did manage to catch it in theatres during one of its re-releases on a Superstar birthday. Forgive me, I forgot which year - but its some time post 2015 ;).
I predominantly watch Tamil and Malayalam Cinema. Occasionally - Telugu, Hindi and English. Rarely - Kannada and Marathi. This is how its been ever since I fell in love with Cinema and become a cinephile. I acknowledge there is more to it and might explore whenever I get time and feel like. And yeah, apart from Friday releases, which I catch in theatres if time and budget allows (provided their trailers/marketing catches my eye!), I pick movies to watch at random feels.
So Who am I a fan of? Nope, neither anil or aamai , but a Vijay Sethupathi fan. (Anil and Aamai are just nicknames for Thalapathy Vijay and Thala Ajith fans).
However, ever since I became a cinephile - I am constantly in admiration of Kamal Haasan (I strongly believe he is an institution in himself), apart from liking a slew of directors, actors, technicians to liking parts of every artiste out there. Good art is meant to be experienced and appreciated.
Why would you subscribe to me? Well, for some reviews and fan theories and fun and frolic! Needless to say, you will see tamil terms/phrases/meme refs here and there but I promise to translate as much as possible.
I am on Letterboxd as well, where I publish reviews, thoughts and maintain film lists along with my film diary. Please do check it out!
For those of you who knew me or my writings earlier - please do read ahead.
Some of you might know me personally, some of you know me from quora or letterboxd (LB) as the Ganesh_reviews guy, some others through the review links I share on twitter and my Whatsapp status.
When you write on both sites, why do you wanna start here afresh man?
LB is a niche site used by cinephiles, so I wanted to and became a regular there. Thus, my frequency on Quora is pretty less compared to LB posting only reviews of movies with big names. However, I noticed that LB, where I post all my reviews, is for a niche audience and not many of my readers are there. OTOH, Quora gives you views but it requires the reader to have an account (which takes many clicks, even to log in!) to interact with the content I post, it doesn’t notify my reader when I post. Also, from a writer POV, it doesn’t help much to gauge what content resonates with your audience (very surface level content tracking available imo).
All these things made me search for an alternative which can suit this fast moving world - where my readers get notified of my content with just a single click (subscribe using email); can interact with my content without an account (at least like it if they like it (ada-daa, alliteration!!)). That’s when I found SUBSTACK!
For comments - one needs email to subscribe to any Substack here. the same email can be used to login (with a login link sent to the email - no password option) and then one can comment by virtue of subscribing to that substack. (I am new to this site, so in case you know a easier way, or understand better on how this works, pls do let me know!)
Will you stop writing on Quora and LB now?
Quora - probably, with time. “reviews” and “reviews_in_detail” are 2 of my most common review categories. I do post year-in-review sort of posts or amplification posts for lesser-known well-made movies. Further, I had written a fan theory for fun, (want to do more of this) and sometimes I think of doing a section like Ganesh_Analyzes (damn my procrastination!).
So, apart from reasons mentioned in the previous question, Substack seems to be better fit for maintaining sections of writing under a newsletter. So, I thought - Why not? Lets explore!
LB - No. My LB audience has little overlap with my audience here as it serves a different purpose. While reviews in LB are also posted here, I had been treating LB as a place to record thoughts of movies too, which are NOT reviews per se. In other words, a personal film diary/journal where I can refer/recollect what I thought of a film when I saw it (Film lists and film diary features are good tools offered by the site for such a purpose I believe). Otherwise, LB doesn’t offer anything for writing standalone posts or image filled meme reviews or having a dialogue with the readers etc.
Therefore, for any thing beyond my personal thoughts on a film, the LB audience can hop on here! I plan to make this the one place stop for anyone who wants to discuss more about Cinema With Ganesh (pun unintended. Salutations to Late Crazy Mohan!)
Mass novv
Vanakkam ji to Substack