2026 UPDATE: A to Z

…It’s been a while, hasn’t it?

Hello and Happy New Year! Do you remember me? If you’re new to this blog, my name is Charlie Latino, and I run the C.E.L Media Journal, a diary-style review blog that can cover things from Movies, TV, to even Video Games and Albums whenever I get the chance. At least…that’s what it was for a while.

It’s been six months since my last post, largely because I have been juggling a lot of life events and responsibilities. I quit my job, I fully moved into a new house, went to California for a week, was involved in a touring theater show in another state, AND I joined my local community college, where I got a job there as well. So yeah, the last few months were stressful to say the absolute least. But now that life isn’t going to be as big as it was this past year, I figured “why not breathe more life into this project?” It’s not like I haven’t dived deep into media since I stopped writing for the blog, and there have been A TON of movies and TV that I watched this year that I have alot of feelings about, so one of my resolutions for 2026 is to be a bit more consistent with blog posting. Writing helps with figuring out all sorts of feelings, and I want to continue translating my thoughts and opinions about the world with the media I absorb as a baseline.

Now to make things absolutely clear, as of right now, school is top priority. I’m going back to college to get a communications degree, because I don’t want to just write about other people’s stories, I wanna make my own! This first semester has been great at reintroducing my passion for the industry, I’m even in a club dedicated to making short films, and I’m jumping head first into this world and learning so much like video editing, sound design, screenwriting, cinematography, etc. so if I have to take a break it’s more than likely because I’m neck deep into schoolwork. But apart from that, I promise to upload more for this blog, and I have an idea that allows a proper reintroduction to my current followers as well as a new collection of essays that new people can grab onto; The A to Z Challenge.

Followers may have noticed that I deleted a couple of reviews from my channel revolving around an EP by Lil Nas X, I did that because, with albums, I want to release all of the songs one after another, and I can’t really do that until I finished writing for the Tracklist, and in the case of 7 (2019) remixes of the same goddamn song over and over again. So I scrapped it, I’ll probably get to it at some point but it was hard trying to think of something new to say apart from RM from BTS and Young Thug don’t make a lot of sense on Old Town Road. But with the A to Z challenge, I’m not confined to as small a time crunch, so I’m able to drop a couple of essays, write some more, then drop a couple more.

The A to Z Challenge is exactly what you think it is, 26 movies in Alphabetical Order, they can be from anywhere in the world, as long as they aren’t sequels, movies that have album tie-ins, or movie musicals. I want to do this challenge more often but if I’m doing it with TV shows or albums they would have to be spread out a lot more to make room for more variety. I’m not just gonna do album after album or season after season, y’know? But with movies, that’s completely fine. The end goal of this challenge is to expand my film repertoire a lot more and go out of my way to find movies that I’ve never heard of. Here’s hoping I can stick to this challenge throughout January and February!

Thank you so much for reading this, I know I’ve been absent for the rest of this year but that’s only because I’m trying to further pursue the things I love to talk about on here, that’s just the double-edged sword, I guess. But I hope that 2026 will bring new opportunities, new meaningful connections, and new eye-opening possibilities of what you can do with cinema.

Happy New Year

-Charlie Latino