The Movie(s) That Made You a Cinephile

Started by phil marlowe, February 20, 2003, 01:14:04 PM

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squints

fucking dead people....now that's comedy
"The myth by no means finds its adequate objectification in the spoken word. The structure of the scenes and the visible imagery reveal a deeper wisdom than the poet himself is able to put into words and concepts" – Friedrich Nietzsche

Pubrick

under the paving stones.

Garam

My brother recorded the Shining when I was around 8, and I watched it about 20 times over the Summer. Later that year, I saw Full Metal Jacket and was just astounded. Then I set out to see every Kubrick film. I also remember seeing the first 10 minutes of 2001 when I was really young and I was completely enthralled. I kept seeing bits and pieces here and there until I watched it all when I was around 12.

I saw Raising Arizona and the Monty Python films when I was about 10 and I thought they were the greatest things I've ever seen.

First foreign film I saw was Man Bites Dog. It was on channel 4 late one night, and I started watching. I was about 11/12 and I thought it was incredibly cool. I boasted about having watched it to my friends at school the next day.

Others include Die Hard/Back to the Future. I was 'sick' from school one day, and my mum was watching the Seventh Seal. That kept me entertained for a good 25 minutes.

jenkins

it was really the tv in my bedroom and the vcr and hbo. that was it. watched 'em, taped 'em, watched 'em, watched 'em, taped 'em, etc. i guess one might say i became more "serious" during later days, but one mightn't say the focused desire for watching movies that defines a cinephile  began any later than my days of being utterly fascinated by hbo. and i mean utterly fascinated, like it was opening up my ideas about what movies were, who i was, what other places might be like, how important clocks are, what's good, what's fun, what's bad, what's fun. you know. hbo

these are movies i remember being very into during my hbo days:


idk, it interested me. i knew anne rice from interview with the vampire, and being a multiplex hound since my youth i was a fan of rosie o'donnell from the flintstones, now and then, a league of their own, harriet the spy, and dan aykroyd was familiar to me as like "comedy person obviously," but somehow all this packaged together, at this sex island or whatever, made me wonder what the world was like and why things happen. i think there's something with butter and i think there's s&m chain stuff, i can't remember. this movie didn't give me boners or make me a sex addict. this movie made me wonder about all the different types of ways people might exist.
have i seen this movie as an adult: no, i'm afraid to


see that's what i be admitting, all my ideas about what it means to be creative came from hbo. i didn't read movie books or want to be spielberg when i was 10. i wanted to watch red rock west, being familiar with nic cage but not dennis hopper, because i thought this was stuff they didn't talk about in entertainment weekly or in school, i thought it was a perspective on life that wasn't everyday familiar to me, and i could feel it, i liked it, and i wondered how such things were possible.
have i seen this movie as an adult: yes, including once at the new bev with john dahl in person, on a double with kill me again. john dahl is legit -- the last seduction, rounders, joy ride (j.j. abrams screenplay), those are movies


the way her trial went, that gripped me, the way she was so sneaky and clever in a social way, and everyone was impressed. i continued to think the world was bigger than where i lived. and matthew lillard was obsessed with culture in a way that made him for me something like a role model.
have i seen this movie as an adult: no i don't think so, that's odd. fucking john waters, of course i would watch it

next, shows from my personal golden age of tv:


duh
seen it as an adult: own seasons 1-3 on dvd


he was some normal guy with normal problems and he lived in a city and i kept thinking about how there's all this world out there. i'm basically what your parents would fear you'd become if you watched hbo. if your parents forced you to watch hbo less, you can call them now, or text or email or you decide, thank your parents for not letting you watch too much hbo, which distorted my world vision and channeled my emotions into all these layers of personal fantasy.
seen it as an adult: nah and i chill on that


they talked about things that i didn't hear anyone else talk about it, and it was all kinda sickly weird and i didn't feel uncomfortable but i didn't feel comfortable. i don't remember liking this show, but i remember being absorbed by it.
seen it as an adult: nah and i chill on that

unrelated to hbo but i'm mentioning:

i'd been to universal studios and did things there, and hitchcock had this special area that made him more special than anyone else, because other areas weren't described to me as places dedicated to other people. i can't fucking remember universal studios but i know they had other things, yet i was pretty sure this hitchcock guy was the one who figured everything out. that's not even why i liked psycho, i liked psycho because of psycho, but hitchcock's name was the first director name that meant something to me, and i was into psycho in that way where like if someone had a question about psycho, if they had to write a paper about psycho for example, they'd ask me the question, kinda thing.
seen it as an adult: think i last saw it on a double with spellbound at the aero, maybe five years back. i've also seen psycho ii (richard franklin, respek) rather recently, and if i don't still own psycho iii on dvd the trade-in was my bad

polkablues

The Princess Bride taught me to love movies. Evil Dead 2 made me really think about the process of filmmaking for the first time. Magnolia showed me how deeply you can connect with a movie on a personal level. 8 1/2 proved to me that cinema is the one true art form that eclipses all others. John McTiernan's remake of Rollerball made me want slide an icepick into my brain and wiggle it around.
My house, my rules, my coffee

jenkins

xoxo:

Quote from: polkablues on March 06, 2015, 01:24:09 PM
The Princess Bride taught me to love movies. Evil Dead 2 made me really think about the process of filmmaking for the first time. Magnolia showed me how deeply you can connect with a movie on a personal level. 8 1/2 proved to me that cinema is the one true art form that eclipses all others. John McTiernan's remake of Rollerball made me want slide an icepick into my brain and wiggle it around.

as an adult i think the princess bride is stunningly good. saw it within the past year and i still felt like i was learning. the whole team is part of its achievement, but in particular william goldman holds a revered place in my mind as a writer, because of his versatility, his ability to grow wildly different characters from the inside. for example, magic isn't an impressive movie overall, but the part where anthony hopkins is confronted by a perspective of unbelievability, and he sits there on the couch and you can feel him shaking on the inside, getting to that point in a narrative and with a character requires all kinds of proper development. to earn the emotions of that scene, there's gotta be a lot of legwork, and the scene is a funny illustration of how i know there's a relatability between me and crazy people. i never like the little expressions of triumph people make when a "tough person" is forced to cry because i never believe anyone is tough in the first place, i believe we're all a bit like anthony hopkins there on the couch

Alexandro

E.T. (stunningly great, saw it 2 weeks ago and it made me cry, I don't think many films pack the emotional punch of those last 30 minutes). Saw it at 2, changed everything.

Who framed Roger Rabbit? made me realize there's a director.

JFK fucked with my head and made me paranoid at 11.

Husbands & Wives was my first Woody Allen and it blew my mind. I was 12.

I saw Pulp Fiction and Ed Wood in the same week at 14. Months before I had seen Natural Born Killers. Endless new possibilities about cinema suddenly appeared.

A Clockwork Orange and 2001 kept expanding that.

Shortcuts, don't even know how to point exactly how, but it just reconnected me with small human stories on a big scale.

It all kind of started to really make sense with Goodfellas.

Nixon gave me perspective on just how huge a personal vision can be. Casino cemented in me the notion of detail. I watched it compulsively for months; a few times on mute, once with my eyes covered during the three hours running time, to appreciate the sound design.

Persona and 8 1/2 really kind of settled it, I could watch anything and wanted to.




Jeremy Blackman

The first movie that really blew my mind was Titanic. It was a totally epic and immersive theatrical experience unlike anything I had seen before, and I was 14 years old without an ounce of cynicism. Saw it with my dad in the theater, and when the movie ended we just looked at each other like it was the best thing we had ever seen. I had no clue why everyone didn't feel the same way, and I was very excited to watch it sweep the Oscars. I bought the James Horner soundtrack (I was really into movie soundtracks at the time), and then I watched Braveheart (as a James Horner fan? I'm not sure), and that blew my mind too. Wish I could have seen that in the theater.

But the film that really changed my life was, of course, Magnolia. I remember watching the teaser trailer and the theatrical trailer repeatedly, thrilled that I had no idea what this movie had in store for me. After I saw it that first time, I knew that it had completely reshaped my brain. I saw it seven times in the theater, bringing everyone I knew so I could give them this gift. I then evangelized Magnolia to anyone who would listen. When I later worked at Blockbuster for a year (when I was 17), Magnolia was my standard recommendation to literally anyone who asked for one.

Obviously 1999 was a pretty good year to become a cinephile, and this is when I really started watching a ton of movies.

Requiem For A Dream was the third really pivotal movie, coming one year after Magnolia. I watched the trailer obsessively and literally counted the days until its release, because I absolutely knew this movie was for me. I saw it in an enormous theater with very loud speakers. I'll never forget that first title card coming down with the sound of a metal door slamming shut. I knew the movie was supposed to be bleak, but I was giddy through the whole thing.

03

When I was a little kid my dad was still doing med school stuff and there was a little library in the building where you rent vhs tapes for free.


This is when I first saw fantastic planet, nausicca valley of the wind, and the Jan svankmajer version of Alice in wonderland.

I was homeschooled my whole life as some of you know, so for a long time my only friends were vhs and I collected them like crazy. My mom would take me to video stores and says that I would always go for the ones with 'blood dripping off the box'.  They decided reluctantly to let me start watching horror movies and I devoured everything I could get my hands on.

Along with the first three I mentioned, Texas chainsaw massacre and blade runner are the ones I remember earliest having a huge effect on me.

Lottery

03, is it possible that you actually watched Warriors of the Wind? The original dub of Nausicca was apparently a true atrocity- the poster art below is pretty terrible/hilarious as it is. Nausicca was never a favourite of mine but I'm pretty interested in catching WotW, just to see the damage.


03

wow yes. i forgot about that totally. the original vhs dubs for all those studio ghibli stuff usually terrible. i still have my neighbor totoros vhs and the english is so scary.

N

For me it started with Thomas and the Magic Railroad. I was 4 when it came out and it's the first movie I ever saw in a theater. Not sure if anybody else has seen it but at the time that railroad was pretty fucking magical. I haven't watched it since, I don't want to.

After that I think I've always had some sort of obsession. My mom used to drop me off at Blockbuster while she did her shopping, I'd spend an hour+ picking the right movies for the 4/weekly deal they had. Then for years movies stayed as good entertainment, there were a few that made me realize their capacity for more, but with the selection I'd been exposed to (popular movies), I assumed there were very few that had achieved this. Lord of The Rings was one of the first ones that made me feel things.

I remember when I first discovered the world of good movies, I was about 16 and I'd just read The Shining, I'd heard there was a movie of it, and that it was supposedly very good. I watched it expecting to be thrown back into the Overlook Hotel with the Torrance family I'd come to know. Instead I was let down in that respect, but exposed to Penderecki and rivers of blood and a type of fear I'd never thought a movie could make me experience. At that point I went searching through IMDB for movies supposedly influenced by The Shining. Almost instantly came across There Will Be Blood, watched it, didn't get it, PTA's heart had gone over my head.

After a similar experience with Magnolia, I came across Hard Eight. I felt it finally, I cared about the characters, as people. No movie had ever really made me want to be a better person until I saw that. It instantly became my favourite movie and I went on to watch and rewatch all of PTA's other movies with opened eyes. Loved all of them and I eventually found this place. That's when movies really became more than entertainment and actually started influencing my life and decisions. Honestly I think that 90% of any good qualities I have can be attributed to movies. I mean movies are abstracted from the real world, so it's not really the movies as much as it is what they showed me about life. So thanks movies, and xixax for showing me the best ones.

Gold Trumpet

Quote from: Gold Trumpet on February 20, 2003, 05:37:02 PM
Die Hard got me to just love movies when I was 13, even if action movies only at the time. I still love the movie and is the only movie where I have every line, camera angle and shot already in my head. I had to have seen it over 150 times easily.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid came for me when I was 15 to really enjoy older movies since I was still entertainment driven only in my watching movies but my defending of the movie to other people really got me interested in other movies.

2001: A Space Odyssey overwhelmed me completely and drew me to consider movies at a higher degree than just entertainment. After that, my outlook changed so much that the previous two movies were completely off my radar screen though I've come back to admire both greatly. This movie really changed my life.

Walkabout made me believe in myself that I could actually make a living of making movies since I was in belief that it was for people a lot more talented to me. But the simple visual poetry in it very much went to my liking and understanding that it made me believe I could do it and understand how to do it.

That is what I said in 2003. Funny because if I was asked to remember now, I wouldn't have been as bold face in talking about Butch Cassidy or 2001: A Space Odyssey since my opinion on both movies has changed a lot and my memory isn't so clear now as it was, shit, over 12 years ago.

I paused a few times before responding to this post. Die Hard is still the movie that made movies in general so digestible to me. I believer when you're young, you get a gut taste of what appease the senses and it broadens from there. Sometimes the change can go as far as 180 degrees and continually do revolutions later on, and like many, it has. It also hasn't in other ways. Never became fascinated by Star Wars or many other popular movies as a kid so it hasn't held same dig into my heart like it has with others.

Reel

I've attempted two drafts of this post on separate occasions, but always felt like I got lost in the weeds with all the details and wasn't getting my point across. As Polka said, maybe some things are better left for our memoirs. I'm gonna attempt to write it though, because it's been nagging at me for weeks.

It's normal for all kids to watch their favorite movies over and over and I don't consider that cinephilia. The staples for me were Disney's 'Beauty and The Beast', 'The Rescuers Down Under', 'Mrs. Doubtfire', and 'Jurassic Park'. I don't have anything to comment on these films in particular except that I watched them repeatedly on a day to day basis and they provided me with an immense comfort.

At age 5, I snuck 'Friday The 13th Part 5' into our rental stack at blockbuster. I chose it knowing that the inoffensive cover wouldn't startle my mom






I remember coming home that afternoon feeling so lucky about what I got away with. I immediately put it on, making sure to stay extra close to the screen so I could ride the volume or stop it if someone came in the room. Right away, I was transported into this adult world where I had no idea what the codes of conduct were for these characters besides that Jason was going to kill them. All of the profanity and nudity was just icing on the cake for me, and messed me up a lot worse than any of the onscreen violence I saw. There's a scene where Jason decapitates a man riding a motorcycle and as a lad I thought "are movies really allowed to be this cool?" Bear in mind that I also believed I was witnessing actual deaths by volunteers who either wanted to commit suicide, had cancer, or were on death row. It really was a sensory overload and perverted me in a lot of ways , but looking back I know that I wasn't traumatized by it. I loved the entire spectacle of it and just wanted to find more in any way I could.

The next year, my brother and I flew to Florida by ourselves to visit my Grandma. One night, he tricked her into renting 'From Dusk Til Dawn' for us. I don't think she even cared about what we watched as long as she wasn't present for it. I didn't know that I was in for a horror movie or being introduced to who would become one of my all time favorite directors. That movie really kicked it up a notch in terms of my connoisseurship, because it throws you for such a loop thinking it's this heavy crime film at first but then it's so funny and suspenseful and action packed that when the vampires show up you're like "ok, where the am I?" It really solidified the idea in my head that a movie could be so much more than just one thing, like you could just throw everything but the kitchen sink into these motherfuckers.

From then on, I was devouring any horror I could get my hands on, Child's Play, Halloween, A Nightmare On Elm Street. Now I knew that the violence wasn't real, but still didn't understand how it was executed. I became a little more discriminating in my taste, avoiding 'cheesy movies' where the special effects looked fake, acting was lame, or camera work sucked. My parents had caught on by now that this was a fetish of mine and became a little more discriminating about what they'd let me rent by reading the synopsis or checking the ratings. They really just didn't want me to be exposed to any extreme sexual violence or serial killer type stuff at that age and I thank them for that.

At a certain point, when they'd knowingly been renting me R Rated movies for such a long time, my Dad decided to step in and up the ante by recommending 'The Shining'. I was hypnotized by it, and unlike all the schlock I'd seen, actually scared. Like, palpable fear that's bubbling up in your chest and making you start to question your own surroundings. I'd never felt that actual ghostly presence in any of the slasher films I watched. I think it really opened my mind to movies as being beyond just entertainment, because that haunting feeling would stay with me all day long, like I'd been infected by it.

'Carrie', 'The Fly', and 'The Thing' were some other suggestions from my Dad, so by the time I was 12 my head was thoroughly fucked. Then one night at Blockbuster when I was having trouble picking something he shows me the box for 'Taxi Driver', making sure to point out a picture of his mohawk to ensure that 'he goes crazy by the end'. I was underwhelmed by the violence in it, because there was nothing more grotesque than what I'd already seen. What I connected to was the sense of danger throughout, that the city threatened Travis at every turn and made him a monster. As I revisited the film through my teens, I never identified with a protagonist so much or really have since.

12 was a pivotal year for me. All I wanted to watch were Scorsese films after TD. My Dad told me a story about the time him and my Mom hitchhiked to Colorado and caught the Telluride Film Festival where they sat in the same aisle as Marty and Isabella Rossellini for a screening. After reading This passage in Roger Ebert's memoir, I've never thought of that encounter the same. I watched Mean Streets, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, Casino, whatever I could find. They brought my obsession with violence and art of the profane to a new low. Taxi Driver remains my favorite movie to this day, and it introduced to the concept of a 'director's vision' by seeing Scorsese's other work and noticing the same themes throughout. It wasn't until later that year I think I became a true cinephile, though.

One day at the library, I suggest to my mom that she rent 'Magnolia'. I had seen the TV spots and was genuinely interested in it, but since it was a drama that had a flower on the cover, I felt like I needed her stamp of approval. She gave it an attempt, but told me it was 'weird' and couldn't finish it, so I put it on fully knowing I was in for something special. All I can say is that it transformed my idea of what movies could be. By the end, I was so perplexed by it that I stayed up the whole night thinking about what it meant.  I just looked out my window as the sun rose and thought about all the people I knew who weren't having as profound an experience as I was coming off from this movie.

That summer, my cousin visits, and the reason that's important will come in later. One night, we're hanging out at the bonfire in my backyard and my brother and his friends come home drunk from a party. It was the first time that he was 'cool' with letting me hang out with him while they were doing something bad. They get into a conversation about 'Requiem For A Dream' and how fucked up it was. His friend says his brother saw the NC-17 version where the end was even MORE graphic. My mind tries to comprehend what that could be, I've seen the cover and know that the movie is about heroin, does a guy shoot heroin into his eye at the end?

My cousin and I are getting along so well, our parents decide I should go and stay with him in Michigan for a few weeks. It's exciting at first, until I get hooked onto his dull routine and am basically subjected to what he wants to do day after day. This involves an obscene amount of watching movies, to the point where Half Baked, Detroit Rock City, and all of the good 90's Sandler movies mean absolutely nothing to me now because I've seen them so many goddamn times. I didn't think it was possible for me to hate movies as much as he made me then. Towards the end of the trip, I go and stay at my uncle's house to wait for my parents to pick me up. It was such a relief, they had this nice spread out in the country with miles of woods behind it. I'd take walks back there, looking for snakes as I was accustomed to do. Then, for the first time in my life, I had the urge to write. I felt so embarrassed about it that I'd hide the notebook under my shirt and walk a good mile out into the woods before I sat down to do it. The two ideas I got at the time were about a couple of kids who went out looking for snakes and ran into a scraggly hillbilly, and a guy who was obsessed with tracking down coincidental connections in the newspaper. I had been pondering over Magnolia so much that I wanted to look deeper into the meaning behind it, so I used whatever the popular search was at the time to bring me to PTAnderson.com, which I can describe as nothing less than a rabbit hole of information for my young mind.  The only person I can remember from here back then is Pubrick, because he always had the bee and his opinions were the strongest.

While in Michigan, I rent 'Requiem For A Dream' and it's the most devastating cinematic experience of my life. I can't understand how a film could portray such cruelty and be so unredeeming by the end. I realize the scene my brother and his friend were talking about and feel like I've been duped. It leaves me in a funk for days, where all I can do is rewatch it to try and figure out: why would a filmmaker be so punishing to his audience?  It keeps me coming back to mull over these feelings again and again, like a drug of its own. I have to buy it and show it to friends just to try and share those emotions with someone. From then on, I'd seek out more and more disturbing content that would leave me confused, dissatisfied, or offended.

I had no idea what I was in for seeing 'Storytelling' for the first time. I almost felt like Todd Solondz should've been arrested for the places he dared to go. I loved the sharpness of his dialogue, how he could make one line sting so much that it kept you thinking for awhile. It pissed me off, though. I couldn't understand what his stance was on anything or why he even wanted me to watch it. It's one of my favorite films to this day for that very reason, I'm still trying to find out.

jenkins