Cinema is Life
My first theater experience was 2002’s Ice Age at four years old. I don’t remember much besides being captivated by whatever was presented on the screen. At that age, the film’s content didn’t matter much; the spectacle of going to a theater attracted me. My parents continually took me to the movies to view the various animated releases throughout the 2000s while my love for film developed. Once I was old enough, I shifted to Sci-Fi masterpieces like Alien, Predator, Blade Runner, and The Thing.
I prided myself on being a Sci-Fi dork in middle school and considered it a unique characteristic that differentiated me from the other kids. Corny, I know. Spare me the ridicule and let me fill it with some relatability or whatever people try in a writing medium. Okay?
In High School, with the rise of streaming services, I watched anything that interested me after school. I had a few hours to spare before someone else dictated what went on the television. From my brother’s and parent’s recommendations, I discovered Scorsese, Tarantino, Kubrick, and Spielberg. That eventually bled into the Coen Brothers, Christopher Nolan, Francis Ford Coppola, David Lynch, Wes Anderson, and so many others.
In college, I randomly selected a few film courses as electives every semester, leading to foreign filmmakers like Hiroshi Teshigahara, Vittorio De Sica, Andrei Tarkovsky, and so on. One of my favorite courses compared adaptations to written works. We studied and analyzed Blade Runner and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Watchmen, The Turn of the Screw and The Turning, Dracula, and many other works. It opened my eyes to the magnificence of adaptations and how someone can interpret stories differently from one another. After college, I feverishly viewed as many films as possible, averaging around a little less than a film per day, hitting roughly 250 films a year.
That leads to today, someone who is nothing more than a movie fanatic and understands the importance of films. Without sounding overly irritating with a film critic's superiority, cinema means a lot to me, as it does to so many others. I have a hard time socializing, checking in on friends, and in general, living day-to-day life. It’s an obvious statement you could find scattered throughout a Tumblr profile’s romanticization of an introvert, but who cares. Regardless, here I am as a 25-year-old, two years removed from college, writing about music, movies, and literature on substack. Maybe writing will become my peak or purpose. One can dream.