(Filmmaker, Film Critic, Warrior, Dancer, Lover, Jerseyite, Nietzschean Hipster)
Born in the barbaric land of New Jersey the calendar year The Godfather won Best Picture, this humble-but-talented multi-hyphenate credits JAWS (1975) as his earliest movie-going experience. It was a religious experience that was again repeated in 1977, when the original Star Wars graced those first 32 screens.
After earning a B.A., Media Arts degree at New Jersey City University—with a comfy stopover at NYU to soak up their Film & Video Production curriculum—Youssef somehow ambled his way into Home Box Office and spent a decade reviewing movies for both HBO & CINEMAX (as well as their respective plex channels). Yes, the opportunity to watch thousands of free movies was too great to pass up...even for the budding filmmaker on the cusp of the digital revolution.
Fast-forward to the mid-2000s: after being downsized by HBO, Youssef put his talents into developing & launching his multimedia production firm The MoonStar Film Odyssey (www.moonstarfilmodyssey.com)—as stronghold of production & creativity that has transcended the recent difficult years into new and exciting endeavors.
The year 2006 saw the launch of the MFO subsidiary MoonStar Film Reviews (www.moonstarfilmreviews.com)—a website dedicated to publishing film reviews that are objective, entertaining, analytical & educational. An updated version of MFR is currently under construction and will launch in 2014. The blog version of MFR was launched in 2012 so as to continually bring cinematic truth, justice & the Cinema Way to the world at large!
From 2007-09, Youssef embarked on another odyssey through academia and earned an MFA (Motion Pictures & TV) degree at San Francisco's prestigious Academy Of Art University—where his screenwriting theses The Legacy Of Passion (www.thelegacyofpassion.com) & Oasis Of The Dead (www.oasisofthedead.com) have become the basis for the MFO's first two creative endeavors into the higher echelons of the motion picture industry.
On the bucket list—beside someday winning an Oscar® (or several) and forging a powerful multimedia empire in the process—is the goal to once again venture into academia one last time to pursue a PhD in Cinema Studies... where Youssef hopes to publish his doctoral thesis on why Road House (1989) is the quintessential American movie. For a primer, feel free to read Youssef's movie review over at the MFR.com website…just watch out for that flying chair!
Stay tuned for more updates...
Youssef Kdiry, c. 2001
