Your Movie Story and How Your Tastes Were Formed

Cafe Society
1

Before 17, I liked movies just like the next person, but when I got my license, I got a Blockbuster membership (video store) and they had a good deal. $10/month enabled me to “Rent One, Get One Free” from Tue-Saturday… I remember my mom always mentioning “The Godfather”, and I’d see advertisements so I always had it in mind, and finally rented it… I LOVED It! I figured I’d check out something else by Marlon Brando (who is still my favorite actor). I borrowed my mom’s car to go to the mall and buy “On The Waterfront”, and minutes after leaving, I got into a car accident - totaled, so it was a little while before I got home and settled. My neighbor and (then) best friend came over, and I asked if he wanted to watch this movie. I remember him not being interested, and also saying how he preferred watching movies alone, since we’d talk (which I adopted shortly after except in a couple of circumstances).

I loved “On The Waterfront” so much I saw it back to back. 20 years later, there are only about two other movies I have done that with (The Swimmer, La Dolce Vita, although the former is a favorite)…

I also kept hearing about Stanley Kubrick, especially in 1999, when he died. I rented “A Clockwork Orange” and that became a favorite, along with “Taxi Driver”, and so I’d rent movies by directors and actors I liked… After a while, I wanted to expand my tastes, and would rent movies without reading the title, only knowing the category (usually Drama). I once rented “The Battle of Algiers” and that became a favorite (still is a Top 5) and then started blindly checking out movies in the Foreign section…

As open-minded as I was, I think about 5-10 years ago, I noticed that although I was born in the 80s, I loved mostly the movies made before, which is where I’m at, 20 years later… I was on a slump, but happy to have seen Rohmer’s first movie (I’ve seen more than a handful, but by recommendation), “The Sign of the Leo”…

2

I posted about this in another thread about how two Chinese movies completely influenced/changed my movie and TV viewing preferences to almost completely Asian.

Throughout the 70’s and early 80’s, I was heavily into horror movies, looking for the “ultimate” horror movie and used to love Euro horror movies from directors like Mario Bava and Jess Franco. In the early 80’s, splatter movies became popular and as I got bored with increasingly obvious fake effects, I ventured into Asian horror films like the Chinese Black Magic series. This in turn lead to me what I consider the ultimate horror movie A Chinese Ghost Story, which was my introduction to my 27+ year crush, Joey Wong Jyo Yin / Wang Tsu Hsien and perfectly combined, horror, fantasy, kung fu and romance like no other movie.

My other favorite genre was action movies and I was completely enthralled by the mini-gun scene in Terminator 2. Then sometime in 1991-1992, read about Chinese ‘heroic blookshed’ movies like John Woo’s The Killer and once I saw it, never watched *Terminator 2 * again. Yes, Butt-Head/Har tau/Ah Jong was an unrealistic uberman, but he had real emotions and motives. This lead to Woo’s other pre-hollywood debut movies, the A Better Tomorrow series and Hardboiled, which in turn lead to other Asian action movies.

On the drama/comedy/romance front, these two movies lead to other Asian movies, with ties into the goes Kung Fu era of the 70’s :confused: I used to watch kung fu movies with my friend in the 70’s and he told me one of the great things about them was that “You never know who will live or die, or if anyone survives at the end!”. Asian (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) movies are like a box of chocolates, “You never know what you’re going to get”. A dramatic movie may suddenly turn into a comedy and a comedic romance movie may suddenly take a turn into a dramatic ending, where the boy doesn’t get the girl he chased all through the movie.

Straying off into TV, unlike American series which drags on for years without any proper end, Asian dramas are usually limited to 8-16 episodes with a definitive end. If the story is deemed worthy of continuing, an additional season or seasons are added, sometimes using a time-slip or a completely different cast with a similar story.

Edit: Then there’s Versus, Ryuhei Kitamura’s over the top zombie yakuza gorefest. When I first got the DVD, I watched it at least twice every day for two weeks straight. No one, even Kitamura has been able to make another movie like it!

3

I posted about this in another thread about how two Chinese movies completely changed my movie and TV viewing preferences to almost completely Asian.

Throughout the 70’s and early 80’s, I was heavily into horror movies, looking for the “ultimate” horror movie and used to love Euro horror movies from directors like Mario Bava and Jess Franco. In the early 80’s, splatter movies became popular and as I got bored with increasingly obvious fake effects, I ventured into Asian horror films like the Chinese Black Magic series. This in turn lead to me what I consider the ultimate horror movie A Chinese Ghost Story, which was my introduction to my 27+ year crush, Joey Wong Jyo Yin / Wang Tsu Hsien and perfectly combined, horror, fantasy, kung fu and romance like no other movie.

My other favorite genre was action movies and I was completely enthralled by the mini-gun scene in Terminator 2. Then sometime in 1991-1992, read about Chinese ‘heroic blookshed’ movies like John Woo’s The Killer and once I saw it, never watched *Terminator 2 * again. Yes, Butt-Head/Har tau/Ah Jong was an unrealistic uberman, but he had real emotions and motives. This lead to Woo’s other pre-hollywood debut movies, the A Better Tomorrow series and Hardboiled, which in turn lead to other Asian action movies.

On the drama/comedy/romance front, that ties into the goes Kung Fu era of the 70’s :confused: I used to watch kung fu movies with my friend in the 70’s and he told me one of the great things about them was that “You never know who will live or die, or if anyone survives at the end!”. Asian (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) movies are like a box of chocolates, “You never know what you’re going to get”. A dramatic movie may suddenly turn into a comedy and a comedic romance movie may suddenly take a turn into a dramatic ending, where the boy doesn’t get the girl he chased all through the movie.

Straying off into TV, unlike American series which drags on for years without any proper end, Asian dramas are usually limited to 8-16 episodes with a definitive end. If the story is deemed worthy of continuing, an additional season or seasons are added, sometimes using a time-slip or a completely different cast with a similar story.

4

If you want a great American TV show, check out “The Larry Sanders Show”

When it comes to Asian film, I first got into Kurosawa after watching “Ikiru”, and then others. Most of Ozu films are sooo similar, with the exception of one of his latter movies, “Boy”. I really like Teshigahara, from “A Woman in the Dunes” (great for the imagination), “Pitfall”, and the great “The Face of Another”… I’ve only seen one Chinese movie (Lost in Beijing), but will eventually become more familiar.

5

A big influence, although not an early one, was the class at MSU taught by Jim Cash. I don’t recall the exact name but then I never registered for it…I just went to almost every class one term. Cash had some big writing credits, by box office numbers at least, like Top Gun and Turner and Hootch. He loved movies. The class was once a week, late on Friday afternoon. He’d lecture for a bit about theory from the weekly readings and how this week’s movie highlighted some of those points. Then we’d watch a movie. The selections were all the kinds of movies that make top 100 films of all time lists. They were all film projected on a big screen, not VHS. The sound system wasn’t theater quality but ISTR the speakers were an upgrade from the normal speakers for a lecture. My best friend (now ex-wife) and I were not the only ones drinking. He was almost certainly aware but never “noticed.”

My tastes were kind of eclectic before that class. It still opened my eyes and helped me both enjoy a wider range of movies and enjoy ones I’d seen in different ways. Musicals I still hate though. I already knew to skip Singing in the Rain week.

Best class I never took.

6

I was so completely burned by the cancellation/final episode of Crime Story in 1988, that I swore off getting into any series without a set number of episodes.

As for Asian movies, with a few exceptions, currently Korean directors Hong Sang Soo (primarily because of his paramour Kim Min Hee) and Kim Ki Duk, I rarely feel a need to see everything they’ve done. Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai is my #1 desert island film, but I don’t find any of his other films as compelling. Same with Woman in the Dunes. Absolutely brilliant, and I have Teshigahara’s other films in my queue, but they’re for a serious viewing time.

As I stated, I’m currently more taken with movies that take me to places and takes on subjects that would never be done in mainstream or even artistic Western cinema. At one extreme, there’s Kim Ki Duk’s independent films like Moebius and Pieta that wouldn’t even be done by anyone else in South Korea and on the other extreme are films that take taboo topics and do them very well and tastefully, but could never be done in the West.

Hagiuda Koji’s Child by Children is the story of a 10 year old girl who becomes pregnant by her same age classmate putting their ‘parts’ together and shown from the perspective of them and their classmates in a world of clueless adults. And Ando Hiroshi’s My Sister, My Love is the story of a twin brother and sister struggling with falling in love with someone outside their possibly physically incestuous relationship. I can hear the collective gasp of the readers here, but I came across these films by chance and watched them out of interest for the unexpected nature of Asian cinema. As I stated, while the topics are taboo even in Asia, the treatment in the films is never exploitative or sensationalized in any way. In fact the films are beautifully touching.

Over the past 25+ years, I’ve amassed a huge collection of Asian movies and series that I’ll never completely view in my remaining lifetime, but as Garfield said: “It’s not the having, it’s the getting” that counts, as I’ll often queue up a movie without being 100% sure what its genre or even language is and sometimes I’m completely disappointed and other times utterly satisfied. IMHO, still better than spending $20 and two hours on some nonsense superhero film! :wink:

7

Back in the late 60s, maybe early 70s our PBS station had a foreign film show. So I saw stuff like Jules et Jim, Knife in the Water, etc. All uncensored.

So I started going to “art houses” to see non-Hollywood films.

Of course in college there would be showings of all sorts of stuff. Watching Pink Flamingos sort of changes a person.

With streaming and such I actively seek out non-blockbuster studio films. The variety is amazing and sometimes the quality is great.

I also love those campy, crap films that are just bad enough to be good.

8

Oh, Knife in the Water. Yes! I first saw that on PBS too along with Andrzeja Wajdy’s Kanal and that started me on a period of exploring more of Polanski’s films. I saw Rosemary’s baby prior, but was surprised at his prolific prior and post.Knife in the Water and Replusion are two of the dozen or so Western movies I have in my collection. In the early 80’s, I had some friends over to watch The Tenant and while I thought it was brilliant, they were like WTF???

It was a rough time being a fan of his after his 1978 conviction, but I stuck with him until the 90’s when I got into Asian cinema.

9

As a child in the mid 1970s, I’d enjoyed my (admittedly fairly limited) exposure to science fiction. I watched a lot of reruns of Star Trek, and read a few young-adult sci-fi novels, but it was hard to find much else in the way of science fiction on TV or in the movies, because it wasn’t a popular genre.

And, then, in the late spring of 1977, I saw and read about the incredible fan reaction to this new film, Star Wars. There were lines around the block to see this movie! I’d seen the TV ads, which looked cool (but said very little about the actual film), and I really wanted to see it, as did my cousin, who was my age (12).

A few weeks after it started showing in Green Bay, we were on summer break, and my cousin and I convinced my aunt to take us to see it. “There are huge lines for it! We have to go early!” Well, yes, in Los Angeles or New York, but not in Green Bay, and not for a Tuesday matinee. We got there an hour before showtime, and the box office wasn’t even open yet. :smiley:

After we waited, we finally went in, and got to see the movie. For my little 12-year-old brain, it was a mindblowing movie. Swashbuckling adventure, spaceships, the Force, droids, and a super-cool villain. It was the first time I could remember seeing a movie, and wanting to see it again. :slight_smile: I bought the novelization, I bought the comic books and the trading cards, I bought lots of issues of Starlog magazine to glean every bit of Star Wars info that I could.

41 years later, I’m still a Star Wars nerd, but that moment, walking out of the Vic Theater after seeing it for the first time, is still indelibly imprinted in my mind.

10

My movie changes forever changed after watching “Up in the Air” with George Clooney.

I won’t delve into specific spoilers other than to say that was a popular movie, a “good” move and an Oscar movie that had the perfect opportunity to have the main character show growth and have an arc…only to pull the rug out from that ending and go “lolz! Life is horrible!”

I hated that ending so much that it’s a very, very rare thing for me to watch Oscar movies anymore. They’re just sad/horrible for the sake of being sad/horrible because that’s what makes a “good” movie nowadays. No, I don’t want all movies to be sunshine and rainbows, but there are so many instances where a movie is just shitty to be shitty and it gets awarded for it and it drives me nuts.

Life is really quite terrible and I don’t like watching movies to remind me of that.

11

I’m not a musicals fan either but if you’re adventureous, give these movies a try. They’re (especially The Happiness of the Kataguris) unlike anything you’ll see from the West. Maybe Rocky Horror Picture Show?

The Happiness of the Kataguris https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuM9_esGqX4
This was remade in a non-musical version as the Korean The Quiet Family

The Midnight Ghost Theater https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAJ6IiYxp74

The Fox Family https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-bq9St9j8o

12

I’m not a musicals fan either but if you’re adventureous, give these movies a try. They’re (especially The Happiness of the Kataguris unlikely anything you’ll see from the West. Maybe Rocky Horror Picture Show?

The Happiness of the Kataguris https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIXyiJqMLJI
This was remade in a non-musical version as the Korean The Quiet Family
The Midnight Ghost Theater https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAJ6IiYxp74

The Fox Family https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-bq9St9j8o