Film and Me: A Personal Essay By Winston

[Winston*]

I was only four years old when the film bug first bit me but I remember it like it was like yesterday. Sitting down in front of that silver screen, popcorn in hand, little could I guess the magic that awaited me. The film started and it hit me like a ton of bricks. From the start I was enchanted. It was everything. The acting. The cinematography. The music. The editing. The sound design. The art direction. The supporting acting. The makeup. It was then that I knew my cinematic journey had begun.

From there my appetite for cinema only increased. I watched many films, both animated and live-action. Each one acted as a new piece of the puzzle that was film. From there I moved on to the classics, experiencing the 'Golden Age' of Hollywood. From there I moved on to foreign films, which challenged my naive preconceptions of what film could be. I had come a long way, but my journey was far from complete.

And now here I am. Many films watched, but many films richer. I'm eager to see what new cinematic adventures this journey brings.

[transmogrifier]

Just wait until you discover porn!

[Winston*]

Just wait until you discover porn!

My essay "Porn and Me" is on different site.

[Winston*]

Feel free to post your own cinematic journeys.

[Boner M]

I was an unpopular kid in high school. Then I discovered the auteur theory, and you better believe everything changed from there!

[Dukefrukem]

I wish I could remember the first movie I ever saw. The earliest movies I remember seeing in theaters are Aladdin and Fantasia . I also remember Die Hard with a Vengence as my first rated R movie in theaters that my father took me to.

[transmogrifier]

Mine:

I started off with five stars, no halves, because my favourite magazine (Empire Magazine) used that system, and I so badly wanted to be part of their worldview. But after a while we drifted apart, as they started to act irrationally (four stars for The Phantom Menace!) and I started to question the logic behind five stars, no halves. What did I do with the films that were truly middle of the pack and not deserving of the embarrassment of a paltry two stars, but at the same time not reaching the lofty standards of tolerable adequacy that three stars implied?

So I introduced halves. It was an exciting, hedonistic time, and I think I may have let the two-fold increase in rating power go to my head a bit. Beloved five star classics were downgraded to four and a half just because I could. Who knows where I would have ended up if someone hadn't pointed out that five stars, with halves, was pretty much the same as rating out of ten.

I started to have doubts. Why stars anyway? Are celestial objects a valid measure of artistic worth? And what exactly is half a star? A star that is half the size would still be a full star, just smaller! Or if it was a star cut in two, what would happen to its rotation, and where would the equator be? Too many questions, man. Too many questions.

So I caved to peer pressure (well, that one guy's comment, but he smoked and liked Hal Ashby movies, so he had sway) and went to the ten point system for a little while. That was when the fun really began....

Coming up: stars make a stunning comeback, this time in packs of four! The perky assets of the 100-point scale make an entrance, all cleavage and petty differentiation of subjective artistic decisions from a passive vantage point. And the dismal letter grading system remains justifiably ignored....

[transmogrifier]

I was an unpopular kid in high school. Then I discovered the auteur theory, and you better believe everything changed from there!

You remained unpopular, but were now able to kill all the free time that being ostracized affords you by engaging in semantic arguments on the internet? Me too!

[Izzy Black]

My marriage with film began when I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey the first time at age 12.

[NickGlass]

My father and I were catching a matinee; Heartbreakers was sold out, so we saw the only other film showing roughly at the same time: Traffic. From there, curiosity bloomed.

[Raiders]

At 11 months of age, I said my first word: "Dada." Hearing this, my father was elated and asked me to repeat. Instead, I said only this:

art is not a reflection of reality but the reality of reflection.

From there, a love of cinema was born. In my first two years of life, I saw great works by Spielberg, Lumet, Scorsese, and so on... I had such great adventures at the theatre. By age three however, I could only repeat over and over again this phrase:

cinema is dead.

It was only then, ripened at the age of four, that I was able to truly embrace the wonderful gospel of the Cahiers du Cinema and that great polemic, "Une certaine tendance du cinéma français" holding up the notion of "la politique des Auteurs." I was instantly made a new man. I stood up on my twin bed with Batman sheets and proclaimed:

Film is like a battleground. Love. Hate. Action. Violence. Death. In one word . . . emotion.

I had conquered mainstream, commercial tripe. The world of subtitles laid before me. I watched the masterworks of Godard, Renoir, Kurosawa, and many more. And when I did watch an English film, it was not called Raiders of the Lost Ark but Les aventuriers de l'arche perdue. The gloriousness of this discovery has lived with me all the way to today. I can proudly declare the years of my cinematic wisdom and the mantra with which I hold so dear:

Fuck plot.

[Watashi]

When I first masturbated to Jasmine in Aladdin at age 12.

Just kidding!

It was actually Ariel.

[Pop Trash]

I certainly watched lots of VHS tapes in the 80s and that's what got me started. Modern Times and Psycho were the first two classic films I really liked (most of them I considered boring when I was a kid). My parents (esp. my dad) were big movie buffs so we would go see movies nearly every weekend. I believe Spielberg and (oddly) Stephen King were the first two non-actors involved with movies that I was consciously aware of. When I was a kid, I would see King's name on a VHS tape and think he worked on the movie in some way (I didn't know what the specific differences were between director/producer/writer/etc. at that age). So I wound up watching things like Carrie, The Dead Zone, and esp. The Shining...which led me to watch 2001, so after Spielberg, Kubrick became the next director I sought out.

Tarantino was the next huge influence. Seeing Pulp Fiction in 1994 lit up a lightbulb and really made me a huge cinephile. I got into Scorsese because of interviews with QT. It also made me seek out other independent films of the late 80s and 90s: sex, lies, and videotape, Blue Velvet, Res. Dogs of course, Slacker, Clerks, Breaking the Waves, Sling Blade, etc. Actually anything with the Miramax label (that wasn't too costume drama-y, though I did really like The Piano) I would tend to watch, and most of it I liked at that time (and still do).

Someone also bought me one of Roger Ebert's annual movie books for Christmas in the early 90s and that had a big impact on me. His books at that time would contain recent reviews, but they also had a lot of older reviews and essays, interviews, lists, and such, which led me to seek out random movies. I remember renting River's Edge and Drugstore Cowboy because of his reviews in that.

[Watashi]

But seriously, I didn't really get into film until after high school. I joined Rotten Tomatoes my senior year, so I got all my recommendations from the forums. The summer of 2002 led to me "discovering" films like Memento, Mulholland Dr., Donnie Darko, The Royal Tenenbaums, and many others. I was hooked from then on.

[MadMan]

When I was still in elementary school, my grandma bought me a VHS copy of Casablanca because I wanted to see it. After that, I realized that I loved movies and I really wanted to get into them more. I spent my earlier years viewing Jurassic Park, Bond movies, Clint Eastwood and John Wayne westerns, and just about anything else I could get my hands on. My family finally getting cable before I entered middle school pretty much changed everything-I can remember when AMC actually stood for American Movie Classics, and before everyone realized just how amazing TCM really is. I wrote my first review in high school, and every though all of my earlier reviews were mostly terrible I still have somewhere a hand written essay I penned my senior year about The Big Lebowski, which I wish I could find.

Joining RT in 2003 after 2 and a half years of lurking resulted in me becoming one of the founding members of FDT, and well it led me to you wonderful people. I'm actually really thankful for the Internet, as its resulted in me enjoying cinema far more. I've tried to expand my viewing horizons, not to mention I now watch way too many horror movies too (you can thank the Axis of Evil for that). Although the side effect of all this is that I have two shelves full of movies, books, and CDs that I should probably get rid of but can't because I love all them too much.

[Raiders]

Yeah, to be serious as well, it was a film workshop between my senior year in high school and freshman year of college where they showed some Fellini, Kurosawa, Hitchcock and a little neo-realism (highlighting American, "Eastern" and European film styles) where I really created the appreciation. I have said it before, but Fellini's 8½ and likely Hitch's Rear Window sealed the deal for me. I joined RT shortly after that (sometime late 2002... I changed accounts to the great RaidersOfTheFoundArk sometime mid-2003).

[Sven]

Late night, grandma's house, free week of premium cable. Midnite double feature of Dr. Strangelove and A Clockwork Orange. Snuck out to watch and was quietly, effectively obliterated for a solid four hours.

[Qrazy]

One time I saw a film and rated it B-. The rest as they say, was history.

[number8]

As far back as I can remember, I've always wanted to be a filmmaker. To me, being a filmmaker was better than being the President of the United States. Even before I first wandered into the local strip mall for a pirated Reservoir Dogs DVD, I knew I wanted to be a part of film. It was when Michael Madsen danced to "Stuck in the Middle with You" that I knew that I belonged.

[D_Davis]

Three things informed my youth:

1. Star Wars
2. Black Belt Theater (old martial arts films on TV)
3. Action Theater (old SF and horror films on TV)


Three things shaped my serious admiration for cinema:

1. Reservoir Dogs
2. Hard Boiled
3. Once Upon a Time in China

I guess you can tell in which decade I entered my twenties. :)

[StanleyK]

There are three films which are milestones for me.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is the film that made me realize just how much potential there is for greatness in cinema. I'd never seen anything quite like it before. This is when I first seriously fell in love with an art form.

2001: A Space Odyssey made me look at cinema beyond the surface aspects and into the thematic depths that can be reached. It helped me realize that intellectual stimulation is just as, sometimes more rewarding, than visceral impact.

Then for a while there I was too stuck in theme and missing the rest. While it was probably Bordwell's and Emerson's sites that mostly got me to where I am now, it coalesced with The Mirror that the aesthetics are crucial, but most importantly, that movies are a whole and that you have to consider every aspect of it.

The interesting part is that none of these hit me as soon as I watched them. I first saw GBU in December 2005, but it wasn't until the end of '06 that I actually started watching movies with more frequency. And the first time I watched 2001, I hated it, dismissing it as pretentious nonsense. Most of my changes in opinion occur over long periods of time and slow realizations.

[Spaceman Spiff]

Raiders of the Lost Ark when I was 6 or 7 or so. I decided then and there to become an archeologist. Then I discovered that archeologists don't get to beat up Nazis, travel the world and sleep with women, so cinema/filmmaking is probably the next best thing.

[Thirdmango]

My parents weren't as big into movies as a lot of other parents I have come to find out. My mother is a professional violinist and my father comes from a long line of sculptors so for me I was going to orchestras and art galleries as a kid. A lot of the movies which really impacted a lot of film buffs I didn't see until later. Those include:

The Original Star Wars Trilogy: Which I didn't see until High School and last year watched for the second time ever.

The Indiana Jones Trilogy: I watched the first movie for the first time two weeks ago, I have Temple of Doom in my room from Netflix and will watch it soonish and then hit the third after that.

The ones I did watch however were The Back To The Futures and Ghostbusters. Both of which floored me as a kid. But the other movie that as a kid I look at with extreme enthusiasm is the Tom Hanks and Dan Aykroyd film Dragnet. Basically the only way I would watch movies was when my aunt would send us VHS tapes of movies that she taped off of HBO. My favorites to watch over and over were Dragnet, the 10 or so episodes of Fraggle Rock and what started my love for bad movies: You Can't Stop The Music. I have watched Dragnet probably around 30-40 times in my life. It's not a standard for most people, but for me it was the ultimate comedy.

The other big moment in regards to film came in high school with my high school group of friends. Two moments in particular are very memorable. The first of those came from the Al Pacino movie The Insider. The reason why this was so memorable was that it was my first R rated film in the theater, Sven and I went to see it together and we were two of about 4-6 people in the theater. Breaking my R rated cherry in the theater was good enough to get me to be fine with going to see R rated films past that moment. (As an aside my first R rated film I watched also came from Sven, it was when I visited his house in the 7th grade. I think the movie was The Long Kiss Goodnight. But I don't really remember.) The second moment was when my family had a friend who worked for David Letterman, and she would send us pre-screens on VHS. One such movie was the film Life is Beautiful. A movie which before I watched I had no idea what it was going to be about. I didn't see the second half of the movie coming what so ever. Because I didn't see it coming it was one of the biggest hits I've ever had.

[Kiusagi]

I had no interest in films for most of my life. I went to the movies maybe three or four times as a kid. I went every so often with friends in high school, but I never liked going and usually wished I was doing something else. I did see some good movies, but a lot of shitty ones too, so I always said I just didn't like movies.

Then a couple years after graduating high school, I was looking for a job but couldn't get one. I had a couple friends who helped get me hired at a movie theater (where I still work to this day). My reaction to this new ability to watch movies for free was "meh", but I gradually started going more often and began to develop an appreciation for them. I kept going on IMDb and looking up actors and what else they were in and found a ton that I wanted to see.

So I signed up for Netflix and immediately began watching some great movies. One of the first movies I rented was Se7en, which completely blew me away and is now my favorite movie. Other movies that sealed the deal for me were The Fellowship of the Ring, The Departed, Pulp Fiction, and L.A. Confidential.

So it's been about five years now and I'm still watching all the movies I can get my hands on and going to the theater multiple times a week. I'm still too far behind to call myself a true film buff, but I'm eager to learn and it's probably the first thing I've ever felt a real passion for. It's pretty much what gets me through life.

[Boner M]

OK cos everyone's doin' it:

1993: Jurassic Park. Sparked an interest in dinosaurs more than film, but Spielberg entered my consciousness and seeing E.T. shortly afterward gave me an inkling about of the role of a director. Jeff Goldblum became my hero, esp. after finding we share the same birthday.

1995: Jumanji usurps JP as the Best Movie Ever, I write a lot of fanfiction about it (mostly involving stampedes destroying department stores).

1998: The major turning point. First year of high school, hung around skaters, we spent the weekends getting high and watching horror films. The Shining was one of 'em, and its artistry hit like a ton of bricks. Gave up skating shortly after (couldn't even kickflip after one year :sad: ), investigated more Kubrick and Jack Nicholson, resorted to the library for film guides (was bad at the internet then), taste splintered in all kinds of directions.

1999-2001: Posted on the IMDb forums, had many guiding lights (including match-cut's own Jesse). Not a lot of good stuff was available on Aussie DVD at this time so I'd have to resort to awful, awful VHS copies of a bunch of canonical titles (classic Hollywood, FNW, Bergman, Kurosawa, Melville, Clouzot) and American indie cinema (Jarmusch, Hartley, Soderbergh, Linklater et al). Wrote little capsule reviews for Australia's Filmink for three issues ('Rat Race is a tour-de-force!' et al).

2002: Started attending inner city cinematheque on the weekends. Discovering older films on decent prints, and esp. rediscovering films watched on VHS really drove home that whole 'power of cinema' thing. Started thinking about pursuing film in some form as a career path.

2003-2009: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-xmg76V0E_vY/T33wrQwAQ7I/AAAAAAAABG0/Ziv-nEOCnl8/s1600/sceneMissing.jpg

2010-12: Writing reviews for local alt-weekly, working in a suburban Blockbuster, bugging festivals for work. Could be worse, I guess.

[Winston*]

OK cos everyone's doin' it:

1993: Jurassic Park. Sparked an interest in dinosaurs more than film, but Spielberg entered my consciousness

Hey, me too. Wanted to be a paleontologist then a film director as a kid, both probably because of that film.

Weird turn into sincerity this thread took.

[Boner M]

Weird turn into sincerity this thread took.
Is this acceptable?

[B-side]

When I was a little girl growing up in the streets of Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, my father -- missing his left leg and right arm from the ongoing rebel war -- used to pick out a B movie for us to watch once a month. Afterward, we'd go to the local ice cream shop/infirmary and have one of the serial rapists make us each an ice cream cone in exchange for three cigarettes. He was later killed for those three cigarettes, but only one cigarette survived the scuffle. Such a shame.

My mother, of course, had died when I was 10 from radiation poisoning during her religious exodus to Ukraine. She and I used to stage boxing matches between bears and bet dinner on who'd win. That dinner would consist of four lima beans and a small, stale piece of bread a local shopkeeper would throw to the various neighborhood stray dogs that I would quickly steal and run home before the dogs tore away any more of my clothing. We eventually adopted one of those stray dogs, but it had to be put down after it ate my little brother in his sleep.

As I grew older, and my father kept losing limbs, our trips to the cinema began slowing down. I found I missed those movies more and more. Eventually I took up a job prostituting myself to the local factory workers and used that money to fund my new obsession with film. Once my father had been reduced to nothing but a torso and a bearded head, I began carrying him with me to the cinema in a makeshift backpack comprised of hay, sheep's wool and feces. He would pretend to be excited and grin through his seven remaining corn kernel teeth as my eyes would light up with jubilation at the barely discernible images being projected by a Parkinson's riddled 90 year old man. It wasn't often I'd actually get to see the entire film, but when I did, I felt like nothing else mattered. Not the syphilitic factory workers, not my dead relatives, and not my father who was beginning to resemble a Pez dispenser due to lack of nutrition.

[Pop Trash]

2003-2009: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-xmg76V0E_vY/T33wrQwAQ7I/AAAAAAAABG0/Ziv-nEOCnl8/s1600/sceneMissing.jpg


Curious about this. I mean...I do remember you posting here some of those years so you didn't drop off the face of the earth. Since we all know posting on match-cut is synonymous with "not dropping off the face of the earth."

[Boner M]

Curious about this. I mean...I do remember you posting here some of those years so you didn't drop off the face of the earth. Since we all know posting on match-cut is synonymous with "not dropping off the face of the earth."
It's just that my tastes and enthusiasm for cinema didn't really change significantly during those years. My uni degree was in Screen Production but all that confirmed was that I'd rather be involved with film in different ways (it was a bad experience all round).

I suppose the most significant development was that I started travelling to worldwide festivals out of my own pocket.

[Spaceman Spiff]

Hey, me too. Wanted to be a paleontologist then a film director as a kid, both probably because of that film.

Spielberg has that effect on people.

[Ivan Drago]

1994: Watched Batman (1989) for the first time. From there, would go on a movie-watching binge which included Jurassic Park to Disney movies to even Jaws, but I would also watch the original Batman a hundred more times and wear out two VHS copies of it over the next 10 years.

1995: Go to the movie theater for the first time to see Batman Forever. Would love the movie, but also love the movie-going experience.

1998: Watched my first episode of Siskel & Ebert as they reviewed Small Soldiers. Because I was young, I really only watched it for the movie clips, but from 2003 to until Ebert left I would watch it for recommendations and understand some basics of film criticism.

1999-2003: This was a major turning point because in this period, I would find myself more emotionally involved in the stories of all the movies and cartoons I watched than ever before, and officially realized that I wanted to tell stories through the medium of film. I also joined Rotten Tomatoes in late 2002, and from there met a group of posters that pointed me in the right direction with their recommendations on films to watch, and how to express myself in reviews/discussions. And I'm still associated with this group today! (Thanks, guys!)

Fall 2006: Got accepted into Southern Illinois University Carbondale's Cinema program.

2009-2011: Made a variety of student films for various film production classes. Learned so much about filmmaking that I wouldn't have learned anywhere else, (since my hometown was in Podunkville, Illinois, school was the only option). My film tastes also expanded to feature-length documentaries and even avant garde cinema.

Summer 2011 to Summer 2012: After graduating college and moving to Nashville (because I'm too poor for LA), I ended up having to hang out with an asshole who, in a nutshell, forced his closed-minded, cynical view of film down my throat, and led me to believe that everything I learned about film throughout my life was wrong and pointless, and that I couldn't speak my opinions about the films I like. My confidence and desire to watch new films is hindered somewhat.

Present Day: The asshole mentioned above moves to California and away from me, so while I'm still trying to regain the confidence to speak my mind, my love for all things film and media has been restored.