Countdown to CLASSICAL CANDOR: Two!

Movie Metropolis was founded in 1997 as the very first dot-com site devoted to home theater news and reviews. And for the past 15 years, even after DVD Town was overhauled and its name changed, John J. Puccio has been there, posting literally thousands of reviews and engaging readers on the old message boards. Sadly, though, John announced that he will retire from Movie Met after posting reviews of two titles still in his queue. 

I'm sure that John, a Tomatometer Critic at Rotten Tomatoes, would have preferred a quiet goodbye, because his style is to put his head down and just do the work. But if Ray Lewis can jog around the stadium to let Baltimore fans cheer him one last time, and if baseball players who retire can be honored in every stadium in which they played, we can at least let our readers know that John is leaving us and publicly thank him for all he did to make DVD Town one of the most respected movie sites on the Internet. For many readers, John was DVD Town.

"My earliest recollection of motion pictures having a profound and moving impact on me was in about 1951 or 52 when my dad took me to see 'All Quiet on the Western Front,' the 1930 film in rerelease," John wrote for his Rotten Tomatoes bio. "I remember the lobby was filled with display memorabilia--World War I uniforms, rifles, a small cannon of some sort--fascinating stuff to an eight-year-old kid. I loved the movie, I loved the action, I loved the main character, and I was totally shocked and shaken when at the end he was killed! This was the hero. Heroes didn't die. Not in the movies. Not anywhere. It wasn't for another day or two that the second revelation sunk in. The hero was a German. Understand, I saw this film only seven or eight years after the Second World War, and the Germans had been our enemies. When my friends and I played army men, the bad guys were always Germans or Japanese. (Never mind that I was Italian; the Italians, as far as I was concerned, had never even been in WWII, let alone fought against us.) Anyway, 'All Quiet's' hero, Paul Baumer, was a German, yet I was totally sympathetic toward him. It wouldn't be for another few years that I would recognize the significance in my life of books and literature in quite the same way as I had by then learned the value of movies. And they were lessons I would never forget."

John retired from teaching English and film at the high school level in 2004 and decided that now is the right time for him to retire from Movie Met, so he can devote all of his time to Classical Candor, his classical music blog. It might surprise Movie Met readers to learn that before John began reviewing movies he was a highly respected music reviewer—still is, in fact—and as an audiophile he wants to devote all of his time to that first love.

Needless to say, we’ll miss him, but wish him well. Thank you, John!

Now, everyone bookmark Classical Candor and visit often!