I have long had a curious love/ hate relationship with the movies. I saw very few of them as a child, because my family couldn't afford to go to the theater and video rentals were decided on by a committee of seven chaired by the member who wasn't afraid to throw a tantrum in the store.
Nevertheless, as a preteen I got a wild hair up my ass which told me that I wanted to be a film director. I wrote a not-inconsiderable number* of tragically bad scripts, but was ultimately hampered by the fact that my parents could no more afford a video camera than they could afford popcorn and soda for nine at mall prices. In the best ass-sucking tradition, I tried to get around this by offering parts to the rich kids in my class, but it didn't work out. Eventually, I gave up and concentrated on perfecting my suicidal depression instead.
Flashforward to my junior year of high school, when a film and drama course was offered to us hick town brats for the first time. Among the course requirements were three short feature films. Two were group projects with fairly constrained limitations, and though I must say I acquitted myself nobly in them, my real talent as an auteur didn't come into play until my final project: The Making of the Horror That Is Alden**
I wish I could share this masterpiece with you in its original form, but your bandwidth wouldn't stand for it. To picture it, you really need to imagine the Carl Reiner movie Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid. Now imagine that Carl Reiner had been forced to use the cutting tactics he did, not because of artistic or even comedic considerations, but because on the day before filming was scheduled to start on The Horror That Is Alden (the week before the project was due) his leading man dumped him and his chemistry teacher refused him permission to use a key set. So he filmed his original material in an hour with a cheap borrowed camcorder and spliced it on a pair of jerry-rigged VCRs with whatever bootleg videos he happened to have laying around the house. Yeah, you got it. Reiner meets Ed Wood. It was conceptualized as basically a video excuse for not turning in the original project, and ended up as a poor excuse for a video. But I passed the class.
I passed all my classes, actually, and graduated, and escaped. Got away to Cornell, which has a campus cinema among other lovely features. Became very up on movies. Saw a lot of them.
Right now I'm down on movies again, because Todd insists on watching them all the time and we rarely agree on a film and almost always end up arguing loudly about it. But in the expectation that something will come along eventually and pique my interest again someday, here's my lists:
| My Favorites | Abominations | OK but Overrated |
|---|---|---|
*2.5
**Yes, the name of my real-life high school is Alden High. No, that was not very subtle of me.