The movies in my life

I can vaguely recall E.T being my first movie going experience, which should be impossible because I was 2 years old at the time. My mom does not believe that I really remember it, but I remember E.T scaring me and crying and being taken out of the theater and then bugging my mother to take me back over and over. I swear I remember, unless my mother has just told me the story so much that I think I remember. I guess that is possible, but whether the memory is real or not, the fact remains that even though it scared me and even though I had to be taken out, I wanted to go back! I wanted to see it over and over again.

I played sports growing up, which account for most of my pre-Woodland memories and my childhood was full of seeing every band in concert I could ever dream of seeing. I was blessed with a father and mother who wanted me to have everything I could want. Yet, the thing that has seemed to stick the most is movies. Our family has a pretty typical tradition for Thanksgiving and Christmas of going to see a movie, but our tradition always begins a month in advance as we all decide which movie to see. This is an important decision. Our Christmas movie has become such a big deal that two toher families come with us and a family friend always comes with us whenever he is in town; it is ingrained in all of us to go on Christmas day. At various points in my life, my entire family has spent one night a week watching a movie from Blockbuster, my parents frequently go on dates to movies and my father and I will often to go catch movies together.

Growing up Mormon, Sundays were family days. Therefore Sundays became the one day a week my brothers and I got along. Our Sunday activities varied over the years, but from the time we were 11 until we were about 14, Travis and I would create entire worlds of movies. We did not have cameras, so they were not shot, but we mapped our characters, plots and then went loose and acted them out. Of course, they were mostly action movies, but we had some straight up comedies and some adventure flicks. It got to the point where we created fictional actors that would show up in our movies and every so often we create our own Movie Awards. We were not joking around. My favorite actor was Kenny Anderson. I played him, and he was like what Will Smith is now, yes I even played him as a black man. During the summer when we were getting along Travis and I would get dropped off at the movie theater and take in a double feature.

The movies of my childhood were more than just ways for my parents to keep me busy. I wanted to go home and re-create these stories with a Kyle twist. Bill and Ted's Excellent adventure became a way for me to pull The Ninja Turtles, Ghostbusters and Dick Tracy into the same story in my room with the action figures. We spent hours setting up all our action figures to create the story and then we would spend hours playing out our movies. I did not really know it at the time, but those Sundays would be the foundation of my criticism of film. Anyone can tell a story; hell we all love telling stories, so it became about how we told the story. It was about how we made our Dick Tracy different from the Warren Beaty film. Or how our Goonies like story included not pirates, but gangsters, or whatever. My entire experience growing up was readying me for a lifetime of loving movies.

Sports, especially baseball, have always been my first love, but the love I have for movies has become what defines me. It does not take people long after meeting me to see that movies figure prominently into my every day life. Get me going on the camera work in Children of Men or the story telling of The Lord of the Rings, or even the comedy in Tommy Boy and it becomes clear that movies are ingrained in me. I am not technical about movies and I am still learning terms and still learning the process of movie making, but that is what is exciting to me. I feel like I can never learn everything there is to learn. I can watch a movie 50 times and then on the 51 time find something completely new that I did not see before.

I recently finished Robert Rodriguez's amazing book Rebel without a Crew and it filled me with the desire to go back and watch all of the movies that made me fall in love in the first place and then go watch the movies that keep me falling in love with movies. I am not sure if it will turn into anything for the blog, but starting next week I am going to start watching all these movies I have loved my whole life and then the movies I have fallen in love with recently. The wonderful thing about this is that every year I see 2 or 3 movies that remind me why I love movies and I have already seen like 4 or 5 this year and the year still has 5 and a half months left!