Well, I have. And I’ve been hanging out at Flixster rating those films. Now, the wife and I seem to be engaged in a ratings competition. She’ll eventually beat me because she has actually seen more films than I have. In the meantime, I have more free time than she has, so the total number of ratings seems to be going to me.
At just under 1300 films rated that I can reasonably state “I’ve seen that”, I can’t think of a single film that’s missing (and yet I just changed the number from 1100 to 1300. Two hundred films that I went, “Oh yeah, that one!” Either the senior moments are increasing, or the films just aren’t that memorable, I guess) On the other hand, She’s rated a few hundred films less than I have, has a list of films shes seen that tops out at over 1500, and is complaining that a large section of films that she remembers seeing aren’t listed on the site.
…and here I thought I’d spent way too much time in front of a movie screen, myself. My hats off to you babe.
When I first started building a list of films that I’d seen over at IMDB, one of my co-workers was incredulous that I could have wasted that much money on watching movies. At the time the list was around 600 films, and I didn’t have the heart to tell him that it was composed of just those films I remembered seeing well enough that I went looking for them. It didn’t even begin to address the even larger number of films that I watched while half asleep in front of the boob tube at home; or had seen in a theater but didn’t remember because I was more interested in my date than the movie.
Part of the reason that the Wife has seen more films than I have can be credited to the fact that she had a movie theater in her hometown, while I had to travel at least a half hour to the next town in Kansas (that would have been the thriving metropolis of Tribune, Kansas; for any of you who care) in order to watch a film that wasn’t “edited for television” .
Edited for Television. Even today those words are enough to make me turn the TV off and go find the real version of a film. I will never understand the need to take a film that really isn’t made for children, and then attempt to make it safe for children by removing all the sex, some of the violence (and most ludicrously) a specific set of “bad words” from a film.
George Carlin said it best, there aren’t any bad words. And the unintended consequences of removing the “objectionable material” from the film is generally to make the antagonist in the film appear less objectionable. The Terminator doesn’t empty entire clips into already dead bodies, or mow down entire bars full of people in order to take out his target, thereby making his ruthless pursuit of a specific goal, the death of Sarah Connor, almost acceptable, in the edited for TV version of the film. And 48 Hours becomes a spoof of itself as the dialog becomes not just juvenile, but truly lame, and the violence in the film becomes totally inconsequential.
Why more directors don’t put their feet down and insist on not allowing chances to their product by middlemen is beyond me. I’m sure it’s a contractual thing, but I think I’d insist on modifying those contracts. I certainly wouldn’t want anyone to see the modified versions of my films for the first time, and falsely believe that was the way I intended it to be seen.
Don’t even get me started on Pan and Scan versus Widescreen. Just don’t go there.
There were only two channels on the TV anyway, both fuzzy, and neither of them was PBS. What about cable, I here you say? Cable was unheard of until the year we moved away, and even then we couldn’t afford to pay for it. The cable guy would occasionally be invited over for dinner, and we would mysteriously have more channels to watch on the TV that night, but they would just as mysteriously be gone the next day.
There had been theaters in Leoti (my hometown till the age of 14) at some point in the past. My Grandfather, who had one of the longest running businesses in town, would point out the buildings that had been constructed as theaters originally, but had been converted to some other use after the newness of theater going wore off. One of them was a block away from my house, but it had been turned into an IGA grocery by the time I rolled around town on my bike (did my only bit of shoplifting, ever, there. Mom made me take the gum back and apologize) and it had burned down by the time I left there (one in a series of mysterious fires in businesses owned by the same businessman. He was cordially invited to leave town, if I remember correctly) It would have been cool to be able to walk down the street and see a movie. But it didn’t happen. Instead, it was 30 minutes to Tribune, or we could have driven to Garden City (an hour away) and watched a movie there. They even had a zoo. So film watching wasn’t something I got to do a lot of until we moved away from rural Kansas.
Because I saw so few films, most of them were memorable though. I couldn’t sit through the Poseidon Adventure the first time I saw it (I was 9) and spent a good portion of the film sitting out on the curb waiting for my older brother to come back out with his date and take us all back home (we ran out of gas that time, I think. I remember sitting in the back of the car waiting for them to get back with the gasoline) One of my most vivid memories. I missed the first Star Wars film, but watched the first Star Trek film, with a date (so much for trekkies being unable to get dates, by the way) in the same theater that I watched several films from my childhood, the State Theater in downtown Garden City. I managed to catch the first and Second Star Wars films (Empire Strikes Back remains my favorite to this day. I made the mistake of reading Lucas’ own novelization of the first Star Wars script. The movie was a bit of a let down after that) back to back at the brand new Twin Theater (two screens? who has heard of such a thing?) also in Garden.
I wonder if the owners of such grand old movie houses as the State would have imagined that they would soon be put out of business by the smaller screen multiplexes that appeared over the next decade or so. The only theater listed for Garden City these days is a 9 screen multiplex on the outskirts of town.
Drive-in theaters. There was one just down the street from our house in Garden City. I used to drive my dates there while I was in High School. I don’t recall a single film I saw there specifically, and don’t ask me why that was. I actually passed a drive-in a months back, while on a road trip from Oklahoma. I had thought them as dead as the downtown single screen movie houses. Or at least they were dead until Alamo Drafthouse came into existence.
I have saved most of the ticket stubs from the movies (and concerts) I’ve seen. I don’t even remember when or why I started doing it, but it has turned into a rather large collection of torn paper. The thing I like least about Alamo Drafthouse is their heat sensitive paper ticket stubs that fade inside of a week. Pointless to save any of those.
The point of this long and rambling post? I love movies, I guess. But it’s a bit more than that, too. I love going to the movies. Finding just the right seat. Getting the right supplements for the film (will I need alcohol, or not?) bringing the right group of people along to enjoy the film with me. When everything clicks, it’s just a joyful experience. Watching movies at home, even with pay-per-view and DVD movies, doesn’t even compare with the real movie house experience.
