So, you're one of those people who can't sit quietly and bathe in the glow of the credits scrolling after a movie. You start reviewing it before you even leave the theater. Maybe you should get paid to do it, know-it-all. In September, mb held a seminar called "How to Write and Publish Music, Book, and Movie Reviews" with critic Troy Patterson. Find a snippet from the transcript below:

If you have no published writing, then I think that it is important to have a very persuasive pitch letter and to send some kind of writing—better than no kind of writing at all. I don't like to advocate the idea of people writing for free but, sometimes it's necessary to write for free or for very cheap if that's what it takes to get a clip from your neighborhood newspaper. Write from any place that will have you. With this, I am more a print and paper guy than an electronic guy. But it can increasingly mean writing from your website as an entry way into a job. There are a number of people who run blogs who've parlayed that into doing reviews for very fancy places.

Mike D'Angelo still does the website called the Man Who Viewed Too Much. And at the same time that I was at Entertainment Weekly, the video section editor took note of it. At the time Mike was an undergraduate at NYU studying dramatic writing. But he was a movie addict. He has this passion for movies. He had his website, it got noticed by the video section editor at Entertainment Weekly. The editor started giving him video assignments. And he did that for two or three years and became a film critic, started doing stuff for Time Out, eventually became the lead film critic for Time Out. Now he's got a monthly column in Esquire and also reviews for NewYork.com and elsewhere.