Movies you love because of the circumstances you first viewed them in...

Cafe Society
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I love the movie A Few Good Men . Granted, it’s a very god movie, but mostly I love it because I saw it for the first time in basic training while on a field exercise. Our officer had decided we had worked very hard and dragged a TV and VCR out into a meadow and using a generator we all sat silently and watched it after night fell. The memory of the experience of watching this movie with my rifle by my side, cam paint still on my face and surrounded by my troopmates will always brng a smile to my face (not to mention when the genny ran out of gas just as Jack yelled “You can’t handle the truth!” Cue the sound of our instructors thrashing into the bush to re-fuel).

:slight_smile:

Anyone else have a good viewing story?

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Yellow Submarine, but I’m not telling you why. :slight_smile:

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My Basic Training movie is Full-Metal Jacket. I think my drill sergeant also rented Porkchop Hill and a couple other war movies for us that night, but Full-Metal Jacket is the only one I could watch all the way through. I mean, after seven or eight weeks of Army crap, you don’t really want to watch a damn Army film. At least I didn’t. After the movie, I went downstairs and hung out with the guys from another platoon (they had extra pizza!) and got to know the guy who would end up as my “battle buddy” in AIT a week later. He became one of my very best friends–the brother I never had. But I didn’t know that then. He was just a funny guy who was willing to share his pizza with me.

Highlander, because me and my friend watched this movie again and again over the course of our adolescence. Also, I’m a Queen fan and they did the soundtrack. “There can be only one . . .”

Star Wars, because it was the first “grown-up” movie I can remember seeing (before Star Wars, my theater experiences were mostly limited to stuff like Bambi and Snow White.) I guess I like all the Star Wars movies, not just for their various less than evenly distributed merits, but because they, like, reconnect me to a happy aspect of my childhood in some way.

Devil’s Advocate. When this movie came out on video, I had just come back from a less than pleasant “camping trip” with my National Guard unit. Within a day or two of that, I got this new apartment and ended up having to do a lot of work in there. Plus I had some other problems going on. Plus some hard-to-deal-with things at work. Then one night, all at once it seemed, everything in my life came together, I was moved into my new place, most of the stresses in my life were gone, and I had nothing much to do. So I rented this new movie, Devil’s Advocate, watched it on my new TV in my new apartment, and loved just savoring the movie-watching experience in peace and quiet. Ahhhh . . . just me and this groovy movie and no stresses to distract me from Al Pacino’s weirdness. Then I went into the bedroom, fell asleep on the floor (I didn’t have a bed yet), and had strange and creepy but not all-together unpleasant dreams. However, I would love this movie even without the sense of relief and luxury now attached to it for me because well . . . well, you’d just have to know me. I dig angels and demons and the Antichrist and the battles for souls and stuff like that.

I associate all kinds of movies with all kinds of different things and could probably name about forty more, but I think I’ll stop here–I already wrote way more than I intended. Good topic, though. I may add more later (yeah, I heard you groaning back there :slight_smile: )

Think I might go watch Devil’s Advocate for the umpteenth time now . . . see ya!

–M.

4

The Princess Bride

5

“Dream a Little Dream”

But ONLY because of the circumstances:D

Martin

6

Sorry. The Princess Bride. I saw it many times with a woman that I was in love with. It brings back good memories.

7

“Being There.”
I saw it on one of the best nights of my life.

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Star Wars. Because I was seven years old for the 1980 rerelease and I went with my dad. It was the coolest afternoon ever.

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Snow White & Bambie: I don’t remember how old I was. Must have been about four, maybe five because my brother was a toddler and my mother hadn’t remarried yet. She had been working and going to school after she and my father divorced and my grandmother had been taking care of us and I rarely saw Mom when she wasn’t tired and even though my father had been gone a year, I still missed him terribly. So one Saturday Mom bundled me up and we drove to the next town to a double feature at the Rialto, a theater built in the Twenties with a balcony and private boxes with red velvet curtains, and a chandelier in the lobby and the pipe organ they had used during silent movies still there in the theater. I loved that place. We had an obscene amount of buttered popcorn and vanilla coke and I got an absolutely huge Hershey bar all to myself. It was a great afternoon for me.

Grease: My grandmother took my oldest brother and me opening night. The place was packed. It was the last movie my grandmother saw in the theater. After that her health and her eyesight went down hill rather quickly.

Star Wars: First movie I went to by myself. Drove myself there right after I got my first car when the movie first came out. I did that about, oh, 12 more times, I think.

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Don’t laugh.

On December 6, 1980, I saw *Flash Gordon[/I[, with Brian Blessed, Timothy Dalton, Max von Sydow, et al. I’d had a crappy day. I was supposed to go to another town to take the Federal
Civil Service exam, and I woke up too late, alarm clock malfunctioned. I was depressed all day at my stupidity, and that evening went to the movie simply for the sake of distraction. It turned out to be the perfect antidote for what ailed me. Colorful corny costumes and dialogue, over the top acting, I left the theater chuckling when I had entered frowning.

11

I saw Finding Forrester in a “theatre” in Antigua, Guatemala. My then-girlfriend and I walked through an empty pasta restaurant into a back room with a big-screen TV and six or seven sofas. There were about twelve fellow movie-goers, none of them looking particularly Guatemalan. We found out they were all fellow Canadians because when the proprietor of the restaurant turned the TV on, up popped a sports score from that year’s NHL playoffs showing the Maple Leafs losing in seven games to the New Jersey Devils, and everyone in the room went “Noooooo!”

And the popcorn was even tastier than the stuff back home. Very cool evening!

12

Koyaanisqatsi

I saw it at the Arlington Theater in Santa Barbara. If you’ve never been there this old time theater’s seating area is done up as an Old California village, as seen at night. There’s a black sky overhead, tiled roofs along the sides with balconies below them. Terrific place really.

Plus my future brother-in-law got me stoned out of my frickin’ gourd in the parking lot…

I’ve seen the film since on video and it never seems quite as good. Oh well. Bygones…

13

I saw Dog Park on a trip to NYC with my boyfriend of the time. They gave us a free frisbee when we bought the tickets. We really enjoyed the movie, and it was all about sex and relationships. Afterwards we went back to our room and made up (I won’t reveal too much!) - it was really sweet and after that trip our relationship was back on track. I always think of that movie with fond memories. sigh :slight_smile:

14

The Best Years of Our Lives, because my mother and I watched together, just a few weeks before she died.

15

The Samuel L. Jackson movie 187 was panned by Siskel & Ebert as exploitation, and one of the worst movies of 1997. But it was on my Top Ten list for that year, because of what happened when I saw it.

Some gangstas (or wannabes) were sitting in the row in front of me, smoking a blunt and laughing whenever someone in the movie got shot. I’d seen my share of rude movie patrons, but these were the worst. Would I or anyone else stand up to them and ask them to shut the hell up? Or would we be too scared?

So I felt exactly like Sam Jackson’s character: a substitute teacher-turned-vigilante because gangsta kids have pushed him too far.

16

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, at the end of the night in Sydney where I met my other half. I just wanted to watch a video, she had other ideas.

Con Air, since it was the only thing to relax me on the Sunday night before the first of my final exams at university in the summer of 1997.

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I agree that the Arlington has a cool interior, but living in SB, the lack of legroom (at least for those of us over 6’6") kind of negates things. Still a real nice theater, especially for midnight shows (the Star Wars prequels, for instance) or any movie that is an “event” (LOTR)
Anyhow, that is neither here nor there when it comes to the OP…
Star Wars, it’s the first movie I can remember watching, I was probably 5 years old. I can distinctly remember liking Chewbacca, and remembering Obi-Wan’s telling Luke he’s “lucky to be all in one piece” after his run-in with the sand people and the Cantina fight. It’s interesting, my memory of the first time I saw it is almost completely seperate from my memory of every other time I’ve seen it.

18

Um, you’re all going to laugh at me . . . .

Oh, all right. The second Pokemon movie. More than half of my college and just-after-college friends have moved away, and the night we all decided to go and see that, most of them were back in twon for about a week. It was one of the few times since 1997 that I’ve had almost all the non-family I really care about in one theater at once.

19

The Lion King.

Man, did the woman I was watching it with have great knockers!

20

I have a hard time saying anything bad about The Bridges of Madison County just because of how the date I was on went after we left the theater.

Man, I was wearing a big :slight_smile: for a few days after that.