Most everybody these days watches quite a few movies. Whether they’re going to the local theater, tuning in to a television broadcast, playing from a disc, or even, *gasp*, streaming over the Inter-tubes on one of these new-fangled whiz-bang computer gadgets, movies have become part of modern culture. It’s one of the most popular ways we tell stories. Communicating ideas, expressing feelings, and even pure popcorn-munching entertainment: movies have been all this and more. We relate to each other through them as touchstones of shared experience, asking our friends “Have you seen ‘X?’ I love it when character A does thing B.” Graduate theses have probably been written about this cultural phenomenon and its history and implications. But I’m not here to do that.
We all have these experiences. And as with all creative forms, some movies become more culturally significant than others. “Citizen Kane.” “Star Wars.” “Gone with the Wind.” “The Princess Bride.” All different kinds of movies that have stood the test of time for all kinds of reasons. I’m not necessarily writing here to reflect on those reasons or their quality either, but I’m getting closer. Bear with me for just a bit longer.
What I am here to do is to display my own ignorance for your reading pleasure. We all watch plenty of movies, some of us more than others, but nobody has seen everything. With some frequency I am reminded of some famous or important movie or another that, for whatever reason, I have not seen even once. As Andrew and I have opted to invest more of our time and effort toward our love of movies in the form of what you see here on the site, I thought it important to spend some of that effort filling in some of the particularly embarrassing gaps in my experience. This is the start of a new recurring piece which I’m calling “Skeletons in my Movie Closet.”
Starting this month, and hopefully with some regular frequency going forward, I’m going to be watching these new-to-me movies and writing about my thoughts and opinions. It’s kind of what we do with movies around here anyway. So, feel free to point and laugh at my cinematic shame and wonder “How had he not seen THAT?” Just keep reading, and I’ll try to be both honest and entertaining about the whole thing. The first proper entry is a real doozy, so fire up your twitters and facebooks and instagrams. This particular skeleton has an eyepatch and is draped in rich stuff.
Stay tuned...
-Tim