Rules: Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen films you've seen that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall. Then what you were doing when you saw them.
1. E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial--first movie I remember seeing in the theater, in the Krump in Columbus, Indiana, with my grandparents while Mom was off having my brother. Don't remember any of it except for Elliot being about to dissect the frog.
1. E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial--first movie I remember seeing in the theater, in the Krump in Columbus, Indiana, with my grandparents while Mom was off having my brother. Don't remember any of it except for Elliot being about to dissect the frog.
2. Primary Colors--went to see this at the Commons Mall theater in Columbus with Dad. First time I remember thinking that, wow, that was one well-written movie.
3. Gone with the Wind--remember watching this in one sitting one afternoon when I was four. Aunt Nancy had made us a pirated VHS copy. We were in the family room of the old house on Greenview Drive, the one with the ugly orange tile floor. Mom crocheted that entire blue and white stripe afghan that's still in the family room closet in triple crochet stitch while watching this. She tried to teach me how to crochet but I never got the hang of it.
4. A Clockwork Orange--accidentally picked this one out once for the "let's say we're gonna watch a movie but we're really going to make out on the couch only we're not actually going to say that even though we both know what we're gonna do" movie. Twenty seconds in, I realized my mistake. Longest two and a half hours of my life trying not to bust out laughing.
5. Dr. Strangelove, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb--watched this during the millenium New Years on a mattress on the floor of my brother's room in the basement with Jana then-Lecher, her then-boyfriend-now-husband Alexander Scott, and Kirk Roth. Later Jana and Alex hung around the kitchen being all disgusting and lovey-dovey and me and Kirk went out in the backyard and blew shit up with firecrackers.
6. Deadly Discovery--"Why? Do you need your... crops... dusted?" This may be the worst movie ever made, and it was filmed in my hometown by the father of my little brother's junior prom date. Everything about it is howlingly awful, from the acting, to the camerawork, to the script, to the basic premise, to the special effects, to the soundtrack...I first saw this at a speech team party at Becky Hedge's house. Chris Smith or Andy Stuckey brought it. Of all the laughing I've done in my life, this is in the top three times I've laughed the hardest.
7. Last Tango in Paris--I Netflixed this pretentious overrated piece of crap because I'd never seen it and felt like I should. I sort of got the whole point of the movie in the first twenty seconds, when Marlon Brando screams "FUCKING GOD!" at the Parisian sky while a train rumbles overhead, oblivious to his plight. It doesn't get much more subtle than that. My birds did go nuts chirping at the screen during the "no names, just grunts" scene. I rewound it and played it again to see if the birds would do the same thing, and they did. Whatever it was Brando and French chickie were saying, it was in fluent parakeet.
8. Sex and the City, The Movie--saw this in the theater with Ginny Kaczmarek. She liked it. I got cramps in my eyeballs from rolling them so much.
9. Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery--saw this at the Dollar theater in Indy on my 17th birthday with my Mom and Jana Lecher. I think we went to dinner at Chi Chi's afterwards. This was the last time we took Shitty Shitty Bang Bang to Indianapolis. I drove it to Seymour, Indiana, once after that, and kept overheating on me. After that, anything beyond a ten-minute drive was out of the question.
10. The Big Easy--got a DVD of this from Mom for my 23rd birthday on the grounds that "you're moving to New Orleans soon!" and "it was in the $6 bin at the Wal-Mart." During the Dennis Quaid/Ellen Barkin sex scene, Mom felt compelled to tell me, "You know, honey, in real life, they're exactly your father and I's age."
11. American Pie--saw this in the theater in Evansville, Indiana, with my mother. She showed up with no advance warning for parents' weekend sophomore year of college so we could do "girl-bonding." (She picked the movies. We also went to see South Park and went shopping at K-Mart's sidewalk sale that weekend.) During the scene in which Eugene Levy explains pornography to his son, Mom asked me, in a very loud voice, "Honey, do you pronounce it CLIT-or-is or clit-OR-is?" When I told her I wasn't sure, she said, "But you're an English major!"
12. Angel Eyes--Dr. Baer made us watch this piece of crap for screenwriting class so that we'd know what NOT to do when we wrote scripts. Somehow one of the guys in class started talking about the unrealistic nature of the sex scene in that. Dr. Baer said, "I know! It's like in the movies when the girl's always on top, and they're bouncing all over the place (mimes boobs bouncing), and that never happens in the real world!" And the room went dead silent, and Dr. Baer did what Jim Zekis called the "covered in spiders" move (a mannerism of Dr. Baer's when he'll suddenly realize he's talking in front of a group of people, freeze up, and grab at his arms like he's trying to brush spiders off them), and then quickly changed the subject.
13. Proof of Life--despite my pathological fear of Meg Ryan, I own this shitball entirely because it's two hours of Russell Crowe in an undershirt. It was purchased for a party called "The Whiskey and Russell Crowe Thing," in which me, Emily Natsios, and several other girls were going to gather in my dorm room, watch Russell Crowe movies, and drink Jack Daniel's. It sadly never happened, due to scheduling conflicts senior year of college, and I've lost touch with everybody on the guest list.
14. Silent Night, Bloody Night--Bad Movie Night 2008, in Rachel Trujillo's and Ben Steele's apartment just off Elysian Fields. Lots of mosquitoes there. They moved to Chattanooga not long afterwards. I managed to sleep through this movie, and still followed the plot.
15. Attack of the Killer Tomatoes--saw this at a sleepover at my cousin Marysue's when we were about five or so. Mom wouldn't let me watch it and was pissed at Aunt Judy because she let us watch "scary movies" when we slept over. It was about GIANT KILLER TOMATOES, Mom.
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I believe Proof of Life is when Meg dumped her adoring husband and father of her son, Dennis Quaid, to have an affair with her co-star Russell Crowe which lasted approximately 10 minutes before he uncerimoniously dumped her ass. Things have never been the same for her since.
My kids LOVE that movie and have seen it a bazillion times.
Rated.
Titanic. the original with barbara stanwick. I was a little kid. We went to see it as a family. Of course, I cried at the end. I fell asleep when they decided to sit though it again. I woke up at the end, and cried again as they sang "Nearer My God to Thee".
Night of The Living Dead. I was pregnant with my second son. We saw it at the Waverly at the midnight show. It scared me so thoroughly, the lights of oncoming cars across the street on Ocean Parkway gave me goosebumps. No horror movie has ever affected me so deeply as that one did.
Tommy and 2001. Both were seen while I was on acid. Both needed to be seen on acid. In fact, everyone in the theaters where we saw them were tripping too. Those were trippy times and they were the epitome of trippy movies.
Rock Around the Clock. I was a pre teen and I was wearing my favorite brown print dress that had lace on the edges of my cuffs. We were all dancing in the aisles, literally. Doing the lindy in the aisles of the movie theater. Unheard of. THAT movie was the beginning of empowered youth, kids taking over.
Eyes Wide Shut, as bad as it was, I STILL think about. That film spoke worlds to me about sex, mystery, death, love, deceit. I love Kubrick. I wish he had been able to finish it as he wanted to..or maybe I wish he had made it ten years before.
I guess that's it for now. You don't want my entire 15. I'd be typing all night.
Brenda--I'm not sure I've ever seen it all the way through, except that one time in the theater when I was a little past two.
John--I. Just. Didn't. Get. It. The show could be very funny at times (though I couldn't watch more than an episode or two in a row without starting to feel dead inside), but the movie was just a load of crap.
NoFrills--Eyes Wide Shut and Lolita were what I was trying to avoid when I picked "A Clockwork Orange."
GeeBee--Someday I'll have to do a blog post on uncomfortable conversations with my mother. A lot of them are sparked by movies.
Rated for "fluent parakeet" amongst other observations.