Today I spent my entire day watching movies, I skipped school, I missed a final and didn't turn in an essay to watch movies. Yeah it is reckless but I couldn't care less because there is nothing in the world I love more than movies and/or Zooey. Seriously people.
My love of movies started at a very young age; every summer I'd spend three months at Grandma's house. Since we didn't have TV at home, I would use those three months to catch up, but did I watch Television programming? No damn way, I watched nothing but movies. NOTHING!
How Old was I at the time? like 3 years old. And is not that I remember, but is the fact that almost every friend and relative of my grandmother remembers me for that. "Oh yeah, I remember you, you are the baby who watched movies all day" they say to me now.
At the time, being a kid in a third world country, we didn't have much option, but I remember my grandmother's collection of movies in Betamax, movies she'd tape from the TV and keep in a large closet in the living room. "Betamax" you ask? well yeah, before VHS there was Betamax, a small and shitty tape format. Betamax, or Beta as we who are close to it know call it was a homevideo system released by Sony in the 70s. 6.14 x 3.77 inches, small and powerful the Beta is now a thing of the past known only to older generations and geeks like me. Praise the Beta for it brought me hours and hours of cinematic pleasure in my childhood.
One of my earlies memories, (and that's pushing it since I can barely remember anything in my childhood) was the day my mom took me to watch Aladdin at the movie theater. And I really cant remember the first time I went to a movie theater but I can still remember that sensation I felt when I found myself watching the cave of wonders rise from sand, it was larger than anything I had ever experienced, larger than life.
Another memory comes from the time I accompanied my grandparents to watch Bravehart at the movies. I was only ten years at the time, and I was going to watch Braveheart at the movies. My mom in her absolute wisdom would have flipped if she knew, but grandma didn't care, she said it would be our secret. And there I was watching the 3-hour movie that no ten year old anywhere else could see, sex, blood, gore, violence, nudity, what a fucking dream come true. I gotta say that I can recall feeling a bit awkward anytime a sex scene came up, I probably didn't fully understand sex at the time, but I sure could follow the issues of injustice and the search for revenge and the liberation of the Scottish people. School never taught me where Scotland was, Braveheart did, movies did.
I gotta say that all I know I learned from movies, by the time my dad tried to have "The Talk" I knew more about sex than him.
By the time I reached junior high I had little or no friends, you wonder why? because I had no time for them, and because no junior high kid could understand the complexities and implications of that final goodbye scene from Casablanca like I did, they just wanted to play power rangers. At the time, all of my fashion sense was just but a copy of the movie I was obsessed with at the time. My first year of Junior high I was all about Jurassic Park, I got a T-shirt from my uncle and even though it was an adult XL shirt, I wore it day and night. One of my teachers said I looked like a priest with such long black shirt on all the time, I didn't care, what did she know about dinosaur DNA, nothing, she was surprised I knew how the DNA strands work, and even more surprised when I showed up with a model of the molecular structure. How did I know it? thanks to Jurassic Park my friends. FUCK YEAH, I had all the damn toys too!
At some point, my mom and dad did one of the greatest things possible and got a membership to a video rental place...Oh sweet lord, thousands of options in a plastic membership card, whatever allowance I used to save to buy videos was now directed towards renting them, ten movies instead of one, and I didn't have to like the movie, I could always return it and not have to explain to my parents why I wasted my money on awful flicks. The video store also carried magazines about movies; when the allowance wasn't enough to rent, I could always buy (and sometimes steal) those precious full color pages that talked about what came and what is to come in the industry of Hollywood I collected those serials like any other kid would have baseball cards, even to the date, whenever I go home, I see the big plastic storage boxes filled with movie magazines.
High School came. By then I had seen more movies than the average American, and I was only 14 at the time. My favorite movies included "The Mission", "The Piano", "Blade Runner" amongst others, movies that any high schooler in their right mind would avoid, Blade runner's effects were shit compared to "The Matrix" Kids wanted to learn to fly and stop bullets while I asked myself if all of it was a dream, and if I was a Replicant after all. 90% of my CD collection was comprised of soundtracks and movie scores (now is only 78%) I knew all the cool bands through soundtracks, and I could always put together a song with a scene of a movie where it was played.
In high school you find lots of couples, the hormones pull you back and forth and you end up finding that high school sweetheart that you will always remember. I didn't care much, I pretended to know all about love just because I knew every story and outcome thanks to the movies. I remember watching "Rules of Attraction" at least once every week for an entire year. (I have witnesses) I knew that high school love was just a snack compared to the complexity of College Relationships, the best stories happened in college, rarely in high schools. I wanted a romance worthy of Hollywood (I still do) And it was around that time when my fascination with beautiful Zooey Deschanel Started. Sometimes I think it begun with that Offspring Video "Girl''s got issues" and other times I think it might have been Anita Miller's eyes in Almost Famous, you know the scene..."One day, you will be cool"
I guess that celebrity crushes come with loving movies like I do, just by telling you that my first crush was Ariel from the little mermaid. I didn't even know what a crush was, but I knew there was something about Ariel that made my innards twist in pleasure whenever I thought of her.
It was by the end of high school where I had lost my fascination with everyday movies and started to expand my horizons towards independent and foreign movies, WHOA! a whole new world (thas right Aladdin) a whole new fucking world opened up, and is not like I hadn't looked into foreign movies before, I just took em for granted until then. I remember the first time I read about Takashi Miike's work, It was in a movie magazine that I read the words "Banned from theaters" how could anyone stop a movie from being shown? too much sex? too much gore? I wasn't even aware that too much gore was possible, silly boy. So I found me a copy of Audition, by then it hadn't been released in America, so I had to buy a badly subtitled bootleg copy in Chinatown, holy crap, was this possible? could they get away with showing this on a screen? what perversion had I just watched...whatever it was, it just wasn't enough, so I spent dollar after dollar in foreign flicks, thank god for the magic of ebay where used movies go for a dollar and you can find pretty much anything that video stores are afraid to carry.
Graduation came and I didn't know what to do with my life. I wanted so much to study film and become the director that I had promised my grandmother I would become. I would make movies, there was absolutely no other option for me. But them came the realization...if I was to become a director, I would have to learn all there is about a movie, dissect, open up, analyze a movie, cameras, queues, dialogue, cinematography. Of course I could learn it, but at what price? At the price that I would never again enjoy a movie the way I do now, whenever I would watch a movie I would be busy worrying about lighting and noticing details, dialogue, direction, UNACCEPTABLE!! I'd rather die than not be able to immerse myself in a movie like I do. I will stay scared and amazed at the wizard rather than see what is behind the curtain. Movies make me laugh, love, suffer, hate, worry, I would never give that up, EVER! So becoming a director or finding a career in movies was out of the question.
And I know that I would have made incredible movies, movies better than anything out there, I would have amazed the world and won countless awards, but I'm gonna have to be a selfish bastard here and do what is best for me.
So I stick to watching movies now, I spend more than half of the money I make in movies, I can watch over fourteen hours of movies, back to back sometimes, I know the secrets to watch four movies in the theater with only one ticket, I cry watching trailers, I will often choose to watch a movie instead of hanging with friends or going to a party. Buy them, rent em, give em, loan em, but above all, love em. And dont you fucking dare question
My love of movies started at a very young age; every summer I'd spend three months at Grandma's house. Since we didn't have TV at home, I would use those three months to catch up, but did I watch Television programming? No damn way, I watched nothing but movies. NOTHING!
How Old was I at the time? like 3 years old. And is not that I remember, but is the fact that almost every friend and relative of my grandmother remembers me for that. "Oh yeah, I remember you, you are the baby who watched movies all day" they say to me now.
At the time, being a kid in a third world country, we didn't have much option, but I remember my grandmother's collection of movies in Betamax, movies she'd tape from the TV and keep in a large closet in the living room. "Betamax" you ask? well yeah, before VHS there was Betamax, a small and shitty tape format. Betamax, or Beta as we who are close to it know call it was a homevideo system released by Sony in the 70s. 6.14 x 3.77 inches, small and powerful the Beta is now a thing of the past known only to older generations and geeks like me. Praise the Beta for it brought me hours and hours of cinematic pleasure in my childhood.
One of my earlies memories, (and that's pushing it since I can barely remember anything in my childhood) was the day my mom took me to watch Aladdin at the movie theater. And I really cant remember the first time I went to a movie theater but I can still remember that sensation I felt when I found myself watching the cave of wonders rise from sand, it was larger than anything I had ever experienced, larger than life.
Another memory comes from the time I accompanied my grandparents to watch Bravehart at the movies. I was only ten years at the time, and I was going to watch Braveheart at the movies. My mom in her absolute wisdom would have flipped if she knew, but grandma didn't care, she said it would be our secret. And there I was watching the 3-hour movie that no ten year old anywhere else could see, sex, blood, gore, violence, nudity, what a fucking dream come true. I gotta say that I can recall feeling a bit awkward anytime a sex scene came up, I probably didn't fully understand sex at the time, but I sure could follow the issues of injustice and the search for revenge and the liberation of the Scottish people. School never taught me where Scotland was, Braveheart did, movies did.
I gotta say that all I know I learned from movies, by the time my dad tried to have "The Talk" I knew more about sex than him.
By the time I reached junior high I had little or no friends, you wonder why? because I had no time for them, and because no junior high kid could understand the complexities and implications of that final goodbye scene from Casablanca like I did, they just wanted to play power rangers. At the time, all of my fashion sense was just but a copy of the movie I was obsessed with at the time. My first year of Junior high I was all about Jurassic Park, I got a T-shirt from my uncle and even though it was an adult XL shirt, I wore it day and night. One of my teachers said I looked like a priest with such long black shirt on all the time, I didn't care, what did she know about dinosaur DNA, nothing, she was surprised I knew how the DNA strands work, and even more surprised when I showed up with a model of the molecular structure. How did I know it? thanks to Jurassic Park my friends. FUCK YEAH, I had all the damn toys too!
At some point, my mom and dad did one of the greatest things possible and got a membership to a video rental place...Oh sweet lord, thousands of options in a plastic membership card, whatever allowance I used to save to buy videos was now directed towards renting them, ten movies instead of one, and I didn't have to like the movie, I could always return it and not have to explain to my parents why I wasted my money on awful flicks. The video store also carried magazines about movies; when the allowance wasn't enough to rent, I could always buy (and sometimes steal) those precious full color pages that talked about what came and what is to come in the industry of Hollywood I collected those serials like any other kid would have baseball cards, even to the date, whenever I go home, I see the big plastic storage boxes filled with movie magazines.
High School came. By then I had seen more movies than the average American, and I was only 14 at the time. My favorite movies included "The Mission", "The Piano", "Blade Runner" amongst others, movies that any high schooler in their right mind would avoid, Blade runner's effects were shit compared to "The Matrix" Kids wanted to learn to fly and stop bullets while I asked myself if all of it was a dream, and if I was a Replicant after all. 90% of my CD collection was comprised of soundtracks and movie scores (now is only 78%) I knew all the cool bands through soundtracks, and I could always put together a song with a scene of a movie where it was played.
In high school you find lots of couples, the hormones pull you back and forth and you end up finding that high school sweetheart that you will always remember. I didn't care much, I pretended to know all about love just because I knew every story and outcome thanks to the movies. I remember watching "Rules of Attraction" at least once every week for an entire year. (I have witnesses) I knew that high school love was just a snack compared to the complexity of College Relationships, the best stories happened in college, rarely in high schools. I wanted a romance worthy of Hollywood (I still do) And it was around that time when my fascination with beautiful Zooey Deschanel Started. Sometimes I think it begun with that Offspring Video "Girl''s got issues" and other times I think it might have been Anita Miller's eyes in Almost Famous, you know the scene..."One day, you will be cool"
I guess that celebrity crushes come with loving movies like I do, just by telling you that my first crush was Ariel from the little mermaid. I didn't even know what a crush was, but I knew there was something about Ariel that made my innards twist in pleasure whenever I thought of her.
It was by the end of high school where I had lost my fascination with everyday movies and started to expand my horizons towards independent and foreign movies, WHOA! a whole new world (thas right Aladdin) a whole new fucking world opened up, and is not like I hadn't looked into foreign movies before, I just took em for granted until then. I remember the first time I read about Takashi Miike's work, It was in a movie magazine that I read the words "Banned from theaters" how could anyone stop a movie from being shown? too much sex? too much gore? I wasn't even aware that too much gore was possible, silly boy. So I found me a copy of Audition, by then it hadn't been released in America, so I had to buy a badly subtitled bootleg copy in Chinatown, holy crap, was this possible? could they get away with showing this on a screen? what perversion had I just watched...whatever it was, it just wasn't enough, so I spent dollar after dollar in foreign flicks, thank god for the magic of ebay where used movies go for a dollar and you can find pretty much anything that video stores are afraid to carry.
Graduation came and I didn't know what to do with my life. I wanted so much to study film and become the director that I had promised my grandmother I would become. I would make movies, there was absolutely no other option for me. But them came the realization...if I was to become a director, I would have to learn all there is about a movie, dissect, open up, analyze a movie, cameras, queues, dialogue, cinematography. Of course I could learn it, but at what price? At the price that I would never again enjoy a movie the way I do now, whenever I would watch a movie I would be busy worrying about lighting and noticing details, dialogue, direction, UNACCEPTABLE!! I'd rather die than not be able to immerse myself in a movie like I do. I will stay scared and amazed at the wizard rather than see what is behind the curtain. Movies make me laugh, love, suffer, hate, worry, I would never give that up, EVER! So becoming a director or finding a career in movies was out of the question.
And I know that I would have made incredible movies, movies better than anything out there, I would have amazed the world and won countless awards, but I'm gonna have to be a selfish bastard here and do what is best for me.
So I stick to watching movies now, I spend more than half of the money I make in movies, I can watch over fourteen hours of movies, back to back sometimes, I know the secrets to watch four movies in the theater with only one ticket, I cry watching trailers, I will often choose to watch a movie instead of hanging with friends or going to a party. Buy them, rent em, give em, loan em, but above all, love em. And dont you fucking dare question
VIEW 3 of 3 COMMENTS
at least not 100%. it just comes natural.