Hi Jeffrey,
You have a good template and you have a lot of good things going for you. Your unique content will help a ton, what we do need to focus on however is usability. No matter how well you rank or how good your content is, that won't help you if uers can't navigate.
The main thing that stood out to me was that there was so much going on. There are articles with titles, tags, links and in text links and then the sidebars are pretty dense as well.
Take a look at this site
The Movie Blog it has the same sort of functionality that you are going for, but is much cleaner and easier to navigate. If you could simplify a few of the sidebar elements or even make them more visual and less text based, I think it would help users a lot.