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My History With Film
I have always liked movies and have enjoyed watching them. But I haven’t always loved them the way that I do now. That has changed over the years.
The Lord of the Rings movies have been my favorites for years, and I’ve re-watched movies like Star Wars, Napoleon Dynamite, and The Dark Knight more times than I can count. For me, those movies were either just fun, funny, or otherwise entertaining. For a long time, I couldn’t go into the reasons why I loved them.
I would go to see all the superhero movies and anything else that looked entertaining, but I would never consider seeing something like Eighth Grade. Even after I took a film class during my sophomore year of college (I’m currently in my fifth year), the power of film still wasn’t apparent for me. To wit, I watched Citizen Kane for that class and thought it was boring!
But in November, 2017, the trailer for Avengers: Infinity War was released, and I had some thoughts I wanted to share. So I started this blog to get my thoughts out to the world. Since then, my love and appreciation for film has just grown and grown.
If you go back and read older posts on the blog, you’ll see that for one thing, I have a post about baseball. The blog was originally intended to be about whatever I was thinking about at the time. But as I got more into film and movies, Robert’s Thoughts quickly transitioned to a blog only devoted to visual entertainment like movies and television.
Also, I was only writing about movies I was already familiar with. But then even that changed once I realized I needed more context to understand some of the movies I wanted to write about. For instance, I wanted to write a review for Mission: Impossible – Fallout, but the only other M:I I had seen was Ghost Protocol. So I went back and watched the entire series to become acclimated with it and have background knowledge before watching Fallout.
The same thing happened with Jurassic World and a good number of other posts as well. Though, this gave me the chance to watch films that were classics and often referred to that I probably wouldn’t have watched otherwise. It gave me more context and a new lens with which I could view the medium of film as a whole.
One specific example of me gaining a new perspective on a movie came very recently. Interstellar is one of my favorite movies, and when it first came out, I remember seeing comparisons to 2001: A Space Odyssey, which I had never seen. So now, with the upcoming release of the steelbook for 2001, I was seeing a lot of buzz about the film itself. I finally got around to watching it, and the homages paid to it in Interstellar became so apparent to me. It made me appreciate both films even more, thanks to my new way to view film.
But even with this new understanding, I still have my own opinions that sometimes are largely unpopular. I hated Gravity and absolutely love at least one of the Star Wars prequels. But this lens has helped me love films I wouldn’t have previously.
10 months ago, even, I would never have predicted that something like Inside Llewyn Davis would become a top-5 all-time favorite movie for me. But when I watched it, I so loved the structure and appreciated the message it was sending. And seeing themes and messages in movies has become important for me as well.
Currently, I’m still working towards seeing all the classics, but I’m getting there. You would probably tell me to stop writing about movies if you knew all of the influential films I haven’t seen. Though, I have been working my way through many of the biggest movies from this century recently. But I don’t think that should take away from what I have to say or what I get out of the movies that I watch.
Because that is the beauty of film. Two people could watch the same exact movie at the same exact time, but because of personal differences, they could have polar opposite reactions. It is entirely subjective, and there is a simply beauty in this sentiment that should never be diminished.
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