Movies and Watching

I fell in love with movies when I was young…drive-ins, dancing hotdogs, swings? What’s not to love? Then later I was able to go to the “big” Odeon and Paramount theatres downtown for shows like The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams. Star Wars. Indiana Jones.

When I was in my teens, a multi-plex (Cineplex) opened at the South end of our city, and my friends and I went almost every week for cheap night on Tuesdays. Sometimes we didn’t even look to see what was playing, we just went.

Long before I had a website, one of the first things I ever wrote and shared by email was a movie review. When I eventually started my blog, I thought that movie reviews would be the major content element for me, and I was even posting my reviews on local review sites often enough that I was starting to get free review passes. The first time I went to a theatre and sat in seats marked “reserved for the press”, I thought I had died and gone to heaven.

I even took a film appreciation class to help me improve my vocabulary for some of the elements I was reviewing. I wasn’t looking to write epic reviews, literary masterpieces, or film snobbery by pixel. I basically wanted to review movies the way I review books — simple elements of enjoyability and within genres (it makes little sense to try to compare an Adam Sandler comedy to Schindler’s List, for example).

But as I got older and life intervened, I started going to the movie theatre less and less frequently and instead watched more shows on video, DVD or TV. Even now, I tend to watch more serialized TV storytelling than movies, yet I’m restarting my movie-watching in more earnest and have rebooted a review list from scratch.