Saturday, April 11, 2015

What's the Movie That Made You Love Movies?

You always remember your first.

There is a moment in all of our lives when a switch is flipped and movies change from being something we simply watch to being the thing for which we live. When did it happen for you? And what was the movie? Maybe it was in your childhood. Maybe it was much more recent than that. Whatever the answer might be, is it a movie you still love? Or was it more a case of right place, right time?

54 comments:

  1. Star Wars (1977)

    I loved it then, I love it now. So now that it's available digitally (even if it is the damn "special" edition), the question is: iTunes? Amazon Instant Video? Google Play? Is there some way I'll be able to avoid getting it twice? Not a chance?

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  2. Superman

    It still makes me believe a man can fly. It may not be perfect, but to me it's magic.

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    1. Technically this is also my answer, but I saw it so young (five years old) I bought it hook, line and sinker as reality happening somewhere else on Planet Earth. It wasn't until I saw "The Fly" that it dawned on me that someone made decisions about how to frame a shot, when to insert a musical cue and what line of dialogue to give an actor to make his/her actions seem to have a meaning beyond the scene. It basically made me realize movies could be art, just as much as all the paintings, statues, written masterpieces (my first love until it gradually was replaced by movies) and theater plays society in general is biased toward labeling as art over the more pop culture mainstream concept of projected images.

      So, yeah, "Superman" rocked my five-year old world back in '78... but it wasn't a movie that made me appreciate the craft as much as the coolest thing I'd ever seen. Had I seen "Star Wars" for the first time then instead of 19 years later, who knows, I might be Mike Pomaro before Evangeline Lilly signed "Hobbit" autographs for his daughters. ;-)

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  3. I'm pretty sure it was both The Matrix and Fight Club. I was 17 when they came out and they both blew my mind.

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    1. Matrix has a perfect ending, love it

      Note

      I only realized Neo is a anagram of One later. Neo is the One, im slow sometimes ;(

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  4. Blade Runner, Big Trouble In Little China, Escape From New York, Commando and Transformers the movie! All equal and why i loved growing up in the 80s...

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  5. I'll admit that I didn't particularly like Blade Runner when I first saw it -- it was around 1984-85, and I was about 11 years old. It was slow-moving and didn't really have much of a happy ending. However, I did recognize that there was something going on beyond it being just a piece of entertainment, and it was probably the first movie to really cause me to think about the art of filmmaking.

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  6. I always enjoyed movies when I was younger, but I was never fascinated with them. Going to the theater always excited me more then the movie we were going to see. This changed when I saw Raiders of the lost ark. I was probably 6 or 7 years old and was blown completely away. Ever since it has always been my favorite pastime, and hopefully someday it will be my career.

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  7. So everyone is putting all time greats up here, and of course you should because they are the all time greats, but mine is Ocean's Eleven. It played constantly on TNT, and I watched it every time. It was the first dvd I owned and I watched the hell out of that too. I still really love that movie and it is absolutely the one that really got the ball rolling for me.

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  8. 2001: A Space Odyssey. I was just trying to explain this to a couple of friends the other day, but they didn't understand.

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    1. We've covered this before elsewhere; it's the greatest movie ever made. I was tempted to list it as well, but honestly I never really thought about it beyond a pure entertainment level until much later. Of course, with what I know now about film in mind, it's even more impressive than when I was 9.

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    2. I have said how this movie changed my life at LEAST ten times on this site, and elsewhere...damn, that's like trying to figure out how many times I've seen the greatness. It'd be fun to try, I guess -- it's always fun to watch the flick, I know.

      We've covered this elsewhere too: you, good sir, possess stellar taste!

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  10. It was either E.T, or Star Wars - New Hope where Darth Vader walks through the door for the first time.

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  11. Jaws, Raiders..., the Back to the Future films, Ghostbusters, Big Trouble in Little China and Terminator 2 all had something to do with it. But I remember watching The Big Lebowski as a teenager; something changed in the way I felt about films, it wasn't just about watching films anymore but wanting to know how they were made, who was making them and wanting to learn if I could make them myself.
    The amazing thing about film (in my opinion) is how you can never fall out of love with it once you're in deep; I'll never forget watching Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Apocalypse Now, Shaun of the Dead etc for the first time and having my mind blown...it's a feeling that I always hope to feel everytime I sit down to watch a new film.

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  12. Can't say it was one movie or moment, but I remember Terminator 2 being the first movie that I couldn't wait to talk to my friends about. Unfortunately, I was in second grade, and no one else was allowed to watch R movies.

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  13. The Dark Knight. I know it has issues, but when I first saw it (when I was 10) I was instantly mesmerized. From the opening shot of the camera moving toward the building with Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard's score, I was hooked. Since then, I slowly started seeing as many movies as I could, taking classes, reading books. I even turn all of my friends into movie lovers, including one who didn't even know who Spielberg was until I met him.

    (Also, after seeing Samsara and loving it, I watched Koyaanisqatsi today and loved it too. I'm curious what you thought of it, because my mom walked in, watched five minutes of it, and hated it. Just wondering.)

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    1. I've never seen it but know I should! Have you seen Baraka - it's the predecessor to Samsara and just as mesmerizingly good I think.

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    2. I love the non-verbal films of Godfrey Reggio ("Koyaanisqatsi") and his desciple, Ron Fricke ("Samsara," "Baraka"). Their main influence has been in making pop culture and media in general (usually advertising) embrace time-elapsed photography as a tool to convey emotion, usually in TV spots, TV show openings and industrial videos. I gravitate toward Fricke's visuals first, message later mise-en-scene versus Reggio's politics. The latter's most recent films ("Visitors," etc.) tend to really crawl up their own ass and get deeply pretentious. BTW, "Samsara" is on Netflix Instant right now.

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    3. Baraka is the best of his in my opinion.

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    4. Baraka is the only one out the the big three (Koyaanisqatsi, Baraka, Samsara) that I haven't seen. I'm considering blind buying it though just because of how much I loved Samsara and Koyaanisqatsi.

      The worst thing about liking movies like these though, is that you (or maybe it's just me and other people my age) can't really share them with others. No matter how much I like them, I know that pretty much no matter who I show them to will dislike them. I just want people to appreciate how amazing and meaningful they are, rather then hearing that there's no dialogue or plot and instantly hating them.

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  14. For me it was the Star Wars but of course, specifically the first one A New Hope. I used to watch the original trilogy every single weekend for a couple years. If you had told me when I was a kid that we were going to get tons more movies and TV shows based on the Star Wars I would have been flabbergasted and ecstatic beyond belief.
    Is it wrong that I may have learned more life lessons from Master Yoda then I did from my own parents?

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  15. Stand by me

    A movie that's more than just the collection of its parts, Even now I still connect with all the Characters and there own history, a film about growing up with every single emotion happening at some point in the movie, a film about finding a dead body though that has nothing at all to do with why I love it or nothing at all to do with the film if you think about it

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    1. Stand by Me is amazing. It's packed full of emotion, and I honestly think it hits harder on multiple viewings. Some of the dialogue is corny, but that's the whole point. I love that movie.

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    2. That's a fantastic answer, I gotta say. I'd totally party with you, dude.

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  16. I'd break it down to three phases of movie love:

    Childhood: Jaws
    Adolescence: Pulp Fiction
    Adulthood(?)/Current: The Godfather

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    1. That's a good answer. Stand by me transcends all phases, I have loved it at each stage and for different reasons, when your young you connect with the kids, now I connect with the dad, its very clever to work for all ages

      I watched both Jaws and Pulp fiction on bluray recently. There still both great

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    2. Stand By Me was a childhood favourite and still a movie I love for sure. All three of the movies I listed I still love and have continued to work for me in different ways.

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  17. Pee Wee's Big Adventure. The slightly meta finale and all the quirks along the way absolutely blew my mind.

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  18. I like the way Sol put the stages as I think that is how I see it. Silence of the Lambs for me was where I became obsessed with so many choices such as sound and editing. But I also have the films I watched a million times when younger like Beauty and the Beast and Mary Poppins. I am trying to think of a new to me movie that has done that to me this year, hmm I need to find one!

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  19. A new-to-me movie that did that for me in 2014 was Magnolia. I was already way into movies, but it sort of reinvigorated my passion, as it were.

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  20. Sneaking into Fast Times at Ridgemont High was fun. Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan was impactful in terms of story, characters, script; and also the theater experience and talking about a movie with friends afterwards. This was reinforced with Aliens a few years later.

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  21. Return of the Jedi. My parents recorded it off Showtime in the mid 80s, and I wore that tape out. That movie amazed me every time, especially the gigantic space battles, and I still look for that amazement quality when watching movies

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  22. I think I always loved them. Movies were the thing we watched in my house, we rarely watched TV shows, we watched Showtime and The Movie Channel.

    I think it must have been Raiders of the Lost Ark though. That's the movie that I can always come back to. That's the thing I can always watch and go back to being a kid again.

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  23. Probably Terminator 2. I bought the ultimate edition DVD back in 2001 when I was just 15. I found all the supplemental material fascinating.

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  24. The Mask. I remember when I first saw it on TV when I was 8. My dad did not let me finish it after he came in and saw the weird stuff Jim Carrey did when he became the Mask. Anyway, it stuck in my head and I felt so overwhelmed by it's awesomeness. That was how I came to love movies.

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