“Movies, movies, movies!” my partner K. often exclaims in exasperation.

He thinks I watch too many of them (I have a tiny Netflix addiction), and since he started living with me, he’s been watching a lot more of them, too.

I love good writing, but my work involves reading all the day, so at night my eyes and brain are tired, and I find myself inevitably wanting to watch a movie instead of reading a book.  So I pull something out of the latest red and white envelope to arrive in the mail and off we go to one of my favorite places:  The world inside a movie.

As a child, I don’t know that I loved movies any more than the average kid.  My sibs and I mostly saw them on TV, and occasionally my parents took us to a drive-in.  We’d dress in our PJ’s and pile into the station wagon, the usual protocol being that the drive-in showed a family-friendly movie first and then when the kids were presumed to have fallen asleep in the car (as we had), they would show a movie that adults would like. I remember the process but not one movie I saw that way.

I didn’t start going to regular theaters until I was 12 and my friends and I would get dropped off to see movies on our own (we lived in a small town where this was safe).  Later, once we had our driver’s licenses, we went quite often.  

I had the great good fortune to come of age during perhaps the greatest decade of American moviemaking, the 1970’s, which has forever affected my taste in film, tilting me in favor of the gritty, the confrontational, and the profound instead of the simply entertaining.

Some movies I saw in the 1970’s when they first came out:  Chinatown, Cabaret, Nashville, Cries and Whispers, Dog Day Afternoon, Sounder, Being There, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, The Passenger, Manhattan, Annie Hall, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, Breaking Away, Shampoo, The Man Who Would Be King, Harry and Tonto, Norma Rae.  (I was a bit too sheltered to see some of the other great but violent 1970’s movies, such as The Godfather, Taxi Driver and The French Connection.  I had to catch up on those later.)

Chinatown, Cabaret and Nashville in particular were formative experiences because they made me realize that movies could be not just entertainment, but art.  I hadn’t really understood that before seeing them, and they dazzled me the same way that great books already had at a much younger age.  I still feel angry when people dismiss or settle for movies being “just entertainment,” because even before I was old enough to drive a car, I had learned that they could be much more.

When I went to college at UC Santa Barbara, I was thrilled to discover that you could actually take classes in film (this was like finding out you could get credit for sitting in a classroom eating ice cream).  Already studying English Lit, I soon added a second major in Film.  In the years before video, these classes were the only way to see a lot of older films, which might or might not show up on TV, and if they did, often in butchered form.  And unless you lived in a major city like New York, it was the only way to see almost anything foreign.

Those classes exposed me to so much that I wouldn’t have ever known to seek out on my own, such as French films of the 1930’s like Le Jour Se Leve (in which I fell in love with Jean Gabin, before realizing that he was probably either dead or a very old man) and L’Atalante, perhaps the most dreamy romantic film ever made.  Watching Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin in silent films that I expected to find dated and boring enlightened me as to the amazing artistry (and truly astounding stunts) of the early days of Hollywood.  Watching pre-Code films like Public Enemy and Little Caesar made me realize how whitewashed the films of my childhood were, and their frank references to sex, drugs and other vices made me understand that nothing that we Boomers thought we’d recently invented would have surprised our parents.

I also was able to view films that I’d seen before, such as Hollywood musicals, in a whole new fashion once my professors shed critical light on the psychosexual themes in Busby Berkeley, as well as discovering the charms of their predecessors like Love Me Tonight and Le Million.  

And if I wasn’t sated by what I saw in my film classes, there were regular showings of classic films around campus by student groups, and the little local theater was busy playing those great new films of the 1970’s.  I remember once watching Fellini’s film 8-1/2 twice in one day (because I needed to write a paper on it) before going that night to see a double feature at a local theater with friends – about 10 hours of cinema in one day, with a rough draft of my paper thrown in there somewhere.  And far from exhausting me, it was exhilarating.

Did I mention that I saw all these movies on the big screen?  

Kids, this was before video or DVD.  They actually had film on reels, and we sat in a large auditorium and saw Citizen Kane and The Battleship Potemkin and Singin’ in the Rain and Modern Times as they were meant to be seen – on a screen so large that it takes over your entire vision.  

As most of us know from seeing current movies both ways, if you’ve only seen a film on your home TV or even home theater system, no matter how large it is, you haven’t really seen it.  But people forget this about older films that they’ve only seen at home, and so often miss much of what’s wonderful about them.  

I’d seen my favorite childhood movie, The Wizard of Oz, dozens of times on TV, but seeing it on the big screen first in college and then several years ago when it was restored and re-released, was just a whole other experience.  And let’s not even talk about something like Citizen Kane, which with its groundbreaking deep focus cinematography literally has visual depths to it that only a large screen can show.

Sadly, that’s not where I get to see most films these days, having to be content with our large TV and my DVD’s from Netflix as I try to catch up on all the classic films that I haven’t yet seen.  Lately, K. has been on an Antonioni kick and so I got to see The Passenger again (I understood it better this time around), and Blow Up (so deliciously 60’s) and L’Avventura (K. got bored and left for an hour in the middle, but I found it quite moving).  

Yes, you read that right – K. now has his own Netflix queue and has been stacking up movies to see.  So now I have two great loves of my life together.

Oh, and to answer Kerry’s question, my favorite movie is still The Wizard of Oz.  Some things you never outgrow. 

But that’s a topic for a whole other essay and I don’t have any more time to write -- I’ve got some movies to watch.