MY OWN MOVIE EXPERIENCE

An Introduction

It matters not what your passion in life may be, be it extreme sports, travelling the world, building models, reading books, collecting comics, flying kites, or visiting museums. A passion should be shared among like-minded people, otherwise it serves little purpose other than to oneself. Things that bring great joy to oneself should be shared to keep that passion alive and inspire others to also become passionate about something positive that they can nurture. Life is meaningless if it is not shared with others. My passion is movies. And seeing that IMDb is the place where millions of people congregate because they are passionate about movies, and IMDb allows people to share their love of movies through user-created lists, I think this is the perfect place to put forth...

My Own Movie Experience

Ever since I can remember I loved movies. How this came to be I cannot truly pinpoint, exactly. All I know is, it was a process.

My father was an avid movie-buff and he had a library of books about movies which fascinated me, and I loved to read them. And in doing so, reading not only about the movies themselves but, the people behind the movies, and the process in making movies, and what movies meant to people from around the world, I realized there was so much more to movies that meets the eye.

My Mom used to take me to so-called matinee house-wives shows at the local cinema. And I remember being a total pain in the butt by constantly asking questions about what was happening on screen, to the irritation of others sitting in the theater.

I remember the joy of my Dad taking me to the movies after he had come home after a hard day at work and still found the time to take me to the cinema.

I remember in junior school, my favorite teacher was a movie-fanatic who would regularly project movies after school. I remember begging my parents to stay late to watch those movies, and having to get special permission from my parents when my teacher was showing scary films such as Frankenstein (1931), The Birds (1963), and Psycho (1960) - which scared the bejesus out of me at the time, but loved it in equal measure and wanted to see more. And round about the same time, I started to realize the great impact something manufactured by a collective of artists and craftsman could have on the individual. And also about the same time I developed a great liking for horror-movies, and being fascinated by the gory make-up effects and monster make-up on display. I remember buying every issue of Fangoria and being fascinated by the likes of Jack Pierce, Lon Chaney, Dick Smith, Tom Savini, Rob Bottin, Rick Baker, Stan Winston, Chris Walas, and many other make-up artists who became my heroes. And I remember my friends and I trying to emulate the gory effects we had seen. Making blood mixtures and squibs using firecrackers to create gun-shot splatters, and using tissue with spirit-gum to make burn-wounds. And making casts of our hands to create severed hands and fingers, and knives with hidden tubes that would squirt blood, and so forth. And I remember testing out our handiwork on my unsuspecting Mom and neighbors, who would sometimes scream in horror. And the more reaction we got, the more proud we were of ourselves for a job well done.

In high school, all my friends came about through a common love of movies and I started to appreciate others' likes and dislikes. And how we would discuss those films, and sometimes change each others opinions why we thought a particular film was great, or not great. I remember loaning out videotapes to associates at school, who would later become my closest friends. And I remember those friends and I skipping school, hopping on a train to the big city and sitting in our favorite flea-ridden, low-budget movie-house that showed three individual movies in a loop throughout the day and night (usually a kung-fu movie, a western, and a horror, in that order). I remember that it was such a dive that the rats would occasionally run over your feet in search of snacks dropped on the floor. And I remember the back of the theater was allocated by street-gangsters as, 'their turf', and would smoke so much marijuana that a massive cloud would engulf the top half of the theater, and many of the other patrons smoking cigarettes also helped in that regard. How the place never burnt down, I will never know. I remember leaving the movie-house, when it was time to go home, where my friends and I would all have splitting-headaches, but we would just laugh it off. After all, that was a small price to pay for a great outing to the movies, and on a school day to match.

I also remember lying to my parents about sleeping at a friends house on weekends, and where my friends would tell the exact same lie to their parents, and we would buy cheap liquor and snacks and climb over the fence at the back of the local Drive-In theater. Laying the speakers meant for car windows on the ground facing us, putting blankets down, and drinking our cheap liquor in plastic cups (which almost always ended in us barfing our lungs out). I even remember on a few occasions, the manager of the Drive-In with a few of his co-workers in tow angrily chasing us away with a baseball-bat in hand and us scaling the fence to safety like panicked monkeys.

And then in my late teens, I joined the military. I remember when on leave, while hitchhiking many 100s of miles to home and back, along the way back I would always stop in a town if it had a cinema showing a movie I wanted to see. I'll never forget sitting man-alone in a huge cinema in a town I'd never been to before in my life, watching Die Hard (1988) for the very first time, absolutely loving-it, and wishing my friends and army-buddies were there to enjoy it with me. And I remember us lowly grunts finishing our basic-training, and after passing our subsequent courses were given the privilege of being allowed to watch movies in our barracks on a Sunday. Action movies, especially those featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Jean-Claude van Damme, and Steven Seagal were the big favorites. I also distinctly remember our company, Alpha Company, having to put on a grueling obstacle-course demonstration for foreign dignitaries that so impressed the battalion commander, he announced he would reward us by taking us to a theater in town that would host a fashion-show followed by a movie titled Blue Velvet (1986). The fashion-show turned out to be a total disaster. Think about it, hundreds of guys cooped up for months in an army-camp suddenly exposed to beautiful under-dressed girls cat-walking on stage and up the aisles. If you've seen Apocalypse Now (1979), think of the scene with the Playboy Bunnies giving a show to entertain the troops and you'll have a basic idea of what I mean. The fashion-show was abruptly called off. Luckily, Blue Velvet (1986) went off without a hitch and I can honestly state, I loved it, and till today I still watch it a number of times per year, and the movie still resonates just as much as it did the first time I saw it.

After leaving the military and coming home, my good friend and his brothers were already busy exhibiting themed movie-retrospectives in art-house cinemas in my city. And wow! I cannot even express what it was like to watch many of my favorite cult movies as intended on the big screen and with the added bonus of a large audience to boot. For me, and others, it was nothing short of heaven on earth. And round about the same time, we joined a casting agency and appeared as extras in numerous ads and movie productions. We even produced and starred in our own irreverent no-holds-barred short-films and exhibited them. And then the inevitable happens. We move on from our carefree bliss, finding steady work, and settling down with our partners. I met a nice girl and went to work in my Dad's small business. However, with work comes money, and I got myself the biggest television I could afford, a DVD player, and a sound-system to compliment the whole set-up. And almost every weekend my best friends and their partners would come to my house and we would hold what we called, 'Movie-Fests'. How it worked; each group of people chose a movie to view on DVD. And nobody could know what the other chose, with all movies placed in a pillow-case so nobody could see. And then one person from each group got a turn to stick his or her arm into the pillow-case and blindly choose a film not knowing what it will be. Man it was great to watch movies in that manner, only knowing the one movie you yourself had placed and not the others. It was like opening a present at Christmas time when you were a kid and not knowing what lay in store for you behind the packaging.

Then tragedy. Sadly my Dad passed away at a too young age. My Mom decided to go back to her side of the family in the country of her birth, and my brother and his family followed soon after. I stayed, sold the family house, gave my entire collection of DVDs, and my prized Fangoria Magazines from my childhood to my best friend, and eventually left as well. Since then I've met a wonderful lady who is now my partner, moved into a nice modern apartment in a quiet neighborhood, bought the biggest Oled TV I could afford, a 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray player, and a cool surround-sound system to match. And because you cannot keep a true movie-fanatic down, I started collecting all the movies I lost, and more.

However, the story does not end here, movies continue to intrigue me even more so now than back in my youth, with a continuous flow of new insights and appreciation as I grow older. Not only has film played an integral part in my life but, has helped shape who I am today. Ultimately, film is my life, and my life is film.

In "direct" relation to this essay, here is a document of 500 live-action movies that left an edible impression on me over the years.