Paff

Yeah, interesting question. I'm gonna divide it into two categories: liking movies, and "Love of Cinema" (capitalization intended).

I mean, everyone likes movies, right? Now, like most of you, I was able to see Star Wars theatrically at an early age (10), and it was an obsession for a while. But in the 80s, I turned to horror, even though I rarely saw the movies talked about in my Fangoria magazines, due to still being a pre-teen with no way of getting to a theater. After freshman year of college, my family finally got a VCR, and I caught up on all those 70s and 80s horrors that summer, coming back from the video store with armloads of movies every day.

But I have to say I wasn't a fan of "Cinema" yet. That freshman year of college, my calculus classes were in an art house multiplex movie theater on campus (the school used it as classrooms during the day), and I always poked fun at the movie that was showing that entire year: Ran. And yes, I pronounced it like the past tense of "run". So no, I wasn't really into Cinema.

Oddly enough, the movie that I think really got me into the art of cinema was Heathers, which I saw after college. It was a movie I watched over and over again, analyzing everything like the lighting and colors of the girls' clothes (which found its way into the dialogue; Heather Chandler to Veronica: "You were a BLUEbird!", the characters' names (Betty and Veronica, Sawyer and Finn), etc. I realized movies were more than something you just watched to see what happened, and then forgot about. There was an art involved.

After that, I began exploring foreign films, classics, etc. So yeah, I'll go with Heathers.

TheAllPurposeNothing

Following on Paff's dividing of between liking movies and love of cinema:

Liking Movies - Hard to pinpoint as I went to see a lot of Disney films with my parents at a young age. However, I do specifically remember The Jungle Book, which we saw at a drive in paired with Dick van Dyke in Never a Dull Moment. I remember liking it enough that my mom felt inclined to later buy us a story record of the film with music which got excessive play.

Love of Cinema - Though I had seen many classic films and movies I loved before then, I think I truly came to appreciate the art of film when I took a film-making class in my first semester of community college in 1985. The very first class was spent watching Citizen Kane. I remember being floored by the sheer beauty of the cinematography, the brilliance of the editing and the incredible performances. I have never looked at film in the same way since.

Mabuse

I posted this years ago:

I also want to add that something that was hugely influential to me was a documentary series that ran on PBS in 1995 when I was 16 years old and a junior in high school. I found this synopsis on TVGuide.com:


The bolded ones were the only episodes I actually watched. The last two were especially influential. I've subsequently seen the whole doc and truthfully its approach is rather simplistic and it covers so much history that its analysis is rather shallow. But at the time it was the perfect introduction for someone like me who had only seen contemporary mainstream films up to that time. It had tons of clips. It made connections in my head that I had never understood before. After seeing The Film School Generation episode I realized that a film I'd heard of but never seen before, Taxi Driver, was directed by the same guy who made Goodfellas which I really enjoyed. Suddenly I realized that the same guy who made the Godfather made Apocalypse now, no one had ever explained that to me.

I'll use a music analogy: Before I saw this doc it was as if I bought my albums based only on their title ("I sure like the Josheua Tree") but after the doc I realized it was the band I needed to be paying attention to not the title ("I sure like U2").


The Edge of Hollywood episode was about the then new independent filmmakers. It had clips of Blood Simple and I flew out to rent it.

Norm de Plume

I actually started out my life as a cinephile strangely, by purchasing for a good buck a few used films on VHS, before I started renting feverishly. I have no idea anymore why I did this, but it might have been because membership cards required a credit card, which I didn't have (my dear dad eventually drove me all across the city to get me memberships at a dozen or more shops). First two horror films I bought were Evil Dead I and II. Of course, Part I blew my mind.


No wonder. It's as hypnotic as it gets.

Actually, now that I think about it, rather than a specific film engendering a love of film in me, what probably did it were film-review books, which opened my eyes to what was out there, what might be worth watching, or worth seeking out (so often the hunt is more exciting than the prize): At first, there were Maltin's annual film guide, Mick Martin's "Video Movie Guide", and Steven Scheuer's "Movies on TV". I bought the first edition of the Time Out Film Guide in 1989, when I was 14, and that must be how I got into foreign and arthouse soon thereafter. And of course there are many others (Aurum's Horror Encyclopedia is still a personal fav), all of which are still on my shelf. RIP to all of the addictive film annuals no longer published. VideoHound is still hanging on somehow, but it was always one of the worst of the film guides.

One last memory: one film that made a massive impression on me early on, to the extent that, as the credits rolled, I felt immediately compelled to go upstairs and tell my parents I had just seen a truly great film, was Patrice Leconte's Monsieur Hire. That was around 1990 or so, and it remains high on my list to this day. I don't know if I have seen a more "perfect" film. Certainly the ending is as flawless as it gets.

Kudos, OldBoy. This is one of the best threads to have come down the pike here at at DT in a long time.

OldBoy

thanks. i figure if you make 100+ inane threads, one is bound to click

The Bus

I always liked going to the movies but remember being most excited about seeing Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend. You know, this movie:



Given I was a child, I really liked it. I'd have to think for a long time to remember a movie from my childhood I didn't like.

The first “event” movie I remember (which I was not taken to see) was Tim Burton's Batman. It was the first time I felt like I was missing out on something cultural.

My parents, to their credit, would take me to the arthouse theater (two hours away) when they wanted to see a film. This would be stuff like Jean de Florette. My grandmother, years later, would record stuff from Bravo back when it aired things like Europa Europa vs. *checks notes* Basically Stassi. By then I would be reading every movie review in the week's paper.

I don't think any one movie sparked anything, it just stoked the fire. I was a voracious reader of EW. I wouldn't watch Siskel & Ebert, but really liked Chris Connelly's Friday show on MTV where they usually covered the big studio release and whatever specialty film was coming out.

DWilson

I'm an old, old man, but as a child I loved "Monster Movies" and there was always a local channel with a daily or weekly Horror movie and I tried to watch them all. At first it was Universal's classic (and not-so-classic) "Monster" films and then it graduated to Corman's Drive-In Movies from the '50s and early '60s. The first Adult Drama (no "Monsters") movie I remember was "The Best Years Of Our Lives", a classic look at the Post-War lives of WWII veterans. After that, my tastes broadened.
But, yeah, my "love of Cinema" was fueled by all those film packages that ran on the "just five" channels of my youth.

Paff

To this day I've never seen Burton's Batman. It's odd, because I was planning to see it with a bunch of friends, we were all jazzed about going on opening night. I came back to our apartment and said "Well, looks like we're not gonna be able to go opening night", because Irish punkers Stiff Little Fingers were doing a short US tour after a six year breakup. This was in the days when band breakups were actually permanent, and we were fans of early punk but were too young to see bands in their heydays. It was literally the first time we'd ever get a chance to see a "first wave" punk band, other than perhaps The Ramones who were still gigging of course.

My friends looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language. "Uh, no, we're going to see Batman". A MOVIE, that would still be showing the next night, and every night that summer vs. a one-time (I thought, at the time....had no way to know the reformation of the band would be permanent) chance to see classic punk rock. And for some reason, my friends' reaction left such a bad taste in my mouth, I never felt the urge to see the movie. And still haven't.

DWilson

For many, many years I was one of those guys who wouldn't watch a Foreign film because "I hate reading subtitles, but I hate dubbing more than that". I went to see "Le Femme Nikita" at the local arthouse because it looked terrific and even with subtitles it just breezed by for me. It really changed my reluctance to see Foreign films.

TomOpus

2001 A Space Odyssey

While most of my junior high friends thought it was boring, I was enthralled. It seemed perfect.

Josh-da-man

Like nearly everyone else of my age group, it was the Star Wars trilogy. This is where a movie just ceased being something you watched for two hours, and then went on with your life. Star Wars, with all of its possibilities and world-building, became an all-consuming passion for a generation of us with toys and comic books and story books.

I think I first noticed the "art" of film-making with Stanley Kubrick and, specifically, Full Metal Jacket. It was with that movie that I realized filmmakers weren't just pointing a camera at actors and filming them. There was a lot of thought put into the way things were presented, the shots were set up and they way the film was put together.

TheAllPurposeNothing

For me, it was Jaws. My parents decided that me and the next older sibling were not old enough to see it, but the two oldest siblings were. So they were sent to see Jaws on one screen of the local duoplex and we were sent to the next theatre to see Woody Allen's Love and Death. While I laughed at a few things in L&D, at 7-3/4 years old, most of the movie just flew over my head. We spent dinner hearing how great Jaws was and had little to add to the conversation.

Eventually saw Jaws years later in an edited-for-TV version and it wasn't until we finally got a VCR in 1982 that I was actually able to see it uncut. Admittedly, it still burns 44 years later that I've never been able to see it on a big screen.

Norm de Plume

Hey, if it weren't for you and your thread-starting, DVD Talk would be even deader than it is.

Hazel Motes

Halloween
Days of Heaven
Lost In Translation

PatD

Back to the Future

I really wasn't exposed to Star Wars as a kid, but I would watch BTTF over and over on VHS. I remember seeing it when I was 7 years old and completely glued to the story. It fired my imagination like no film up to that point could. As an adult I've only grown to appreciate the film's brilliance as a work of art.

mrhan

Spaghetti westerns; nothing really specific. Which in turn made me love Kung fu flicks and then sci -fi. Most of them were all the re-edited cuts of tv versions playing on TV Saturday afternoons. I really liked the Terence Hill western movies.

Nick Danger

I don't know. My parents loved cinema. The family sat together on the couch watching art house movies on PBS in the 1960s and 1970s. I remember The Gold Rush, Witness for the Prosecution, Yojimbo, Ballad of a Soldier, Battleship Potemkin, and more. My dad took me to see 2001 when I was about seven. I watched films at the university from the age of ten or twelve because they were free and it was only half a mile away. Cinema was just part of the environment while I was growing up.

Paul_SD

Maybe the original King Kong, but more than that I pin the year as 1975, as several things happened that first lit my consciousness. That was the year we first got HBO.

As an eight year old, I became a huge fan of several films and watched them multiple times, whenever they were broadcast during the daytime-
Phantom Of The Paradise
The Prisoner Od Second Avenue
Paper Moon

Also that summer was the release of Jaws which I was taken to on opening day by my young, hip aunt.

Also, earlier that year I received a tape recorder for my birthday- which I asked for with the express purpose of taping the audio to King Kong the next time they ran it on the late show.

Prior to all this I remember being a fan of the Planet Of The Apes films, and The Poseidon Adventure- but film as an art form, with different crafts and styles and talent employed that all came together to create something singular, didn't really dawn on me till this point. This was the year I started to seek out novelizations, as well as pictures and information of the films from books and magazines. And I listened to that eventual tape recording of King Kong dozens and dozens of times start to finish. That also kicked off a mini hobby/obsession of audio recording movies which hit it's peak around '79/'80.

Brack

Probably The Wizard of Oz. I’ve loved movies as long as I can remember having memories.

maxfisher

Major League 2. Kind of. I grew up fundamentalist baptist and movies in general were looked upon as evil, with the theater being strictly off limits. As in, to be a member at our church, you had to sign a ‘covenant’ agreeing you would never patronize a movie theater, among other things. When I was 16, one of my buddies’ parents organized a birthday party for him that included seeing Major League 2. I had snuck seeing all kinds of stuff at friends’ houses, but that was the first time I ever went to the theater. I was hooked instantly. There was a stretch from my late teens through around thirty where I probably saw 100 movies per year at the theater. When we bought our current house, I built out my own home theater with stadium seats and a 10-foot screen. Between that and having two young kids, I only get out to a dozen-ish movies a year anymore, but I still love watching them on as big a screen as possible. Honestly, Major League 2 could’ve probably been just about any other movie, but I figure why not give it the credit. It doesn’t have much else going for it.

As for ‘cinema’ in the high art sense of the word, there are plenty of movies I love that are deserving of that classification and just as many or more that aren’t. The majority of my favorites likely fall into the latter.

johnnysd

Planet of the Apes and Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (still easily my favorite movie of all time).

So many people said Star Wars, but it was actually Empire Strikes Back which got me into Star Wars and to be honest to this day it is still the only one of them i love.

MysterioMan007

Back to the Future - it's the first movie I remember seeing in the theater...and it's still my favorite movie to this day.

mike7162

Like many have already stated, it wasn't one movie. As a kid, the classic Universal Monsters is where I started enjoying movies. But as a young man, and as an adult, it was Alfred Hitchcock. His approach, his talent and devotion to Cinema is what turned my love into a religion.

asianxcore

There isn't a single film that I credit for giving me a love of cinema but there is a group of them that I find absolutely responsible

The Lost Boys (1987)
A Nightmare On Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988)
Five Element Ninjas (1982)
Iron Monkey (1993)
Hard Boiled (1992)
Drunken Master II (1994)

To this day, I still feel incredibly fortunate to have been raised around folks that absolutely loved cinema.