Hey, I’m a guy in San Jose with a Moviepass and a wife who loves going to movies as much as I do. When I was a kid, my parents used to take us to Blockbuster (shout out!) at the end of every week to find a game to crush in 48 hours on Super Nintendo and a movie to watch. With two brothers, the rotation meant you could only pick every two weeks or so, unless you corralled popular support for your film, and I like to think this is where my superior taste in films was first fostered.
As we got older, our parents saw it fit to take us out of school only three times in our lives as students, for the opening nights of the Star Wars reboots. I grew up in the nineties with all the pop culture references of a boy whose unofficial babysitters (after the grandparents across the road) were TV and Gameboy: Pokemon, Powderpuff Girls, Nick at Night with Stick Stickley, Johnny Tsunami, and the renaissance of animated Disney films.
My dad was a workaholic growing up and seeing movies was our way of bonding. We had made the whole experience an exact science: we could leave forty minutes early with time to stop by the bookstore next to our apartment, bring two $20s, one for the tickets and another for the hotdogs, frozen Cokes, and popcorn. I saw the X-Men movies with him back when they were new and shiny (and I kept watching super hero movies into their weirdest iteration because they remind me of seeing those first few with him). My mom and my dad made movies a central part of our family time. We’d watch Star Wars on VHS a couple times a month. We’d skip out on family gatherings early by going to the local theater on New Years. And as we got older, movies became even more important.
Living far away from my family, movies were one way of connecting to a single shared experience. My big brother went to school to learn about films and film-making and worked in the industry for a decade. I really ramped up my movie-viewing just to keep up with him and his wife. When I went to grad school in Vancouver a few years back, I went to movies on the weekend. With four or five theaters to pick from, it was the first time in my adult life when I had the ability and a wide range of choices for which movie to watch. My favorite bank in the world, Scotiabank(!), has an amazing program that helped fund my addiction to movies by giving me free tickets for buying groceries and paying my rent, which essentially made two movies a month free.
Some weeks, I’d go to the movies twice, once on the cheap Tuesday showing. In 2014, I’d successfully logged something like 105 movies in theaters. I went to James Bond festivals with girlfriends and Marvel movie marathons, indies, blockbusters, anything and everything. Fell in love with a girl from my program who liked seeing movies with me and then I had a partner in crime who broadened what I wanted to see even more. We drew up Excel spreadsheets and ranked all our favorites from the year, tried to predict the Oscars, and used them to pick movies to watch at home when we were in the mood to rewatch something.
When I moved to San Jose, I picked my apartment in part based on how close it was to two movie theaters on my walk home from work. I’ve gone to the Cinequest festival every year I’ve lived here, and all the while we’ve kept making spreadsheets, recording our favorite films from the year. We decided it was high time to post reviews in a more public place for the good of humanity. I hope this introduction gives you a little perspective on where I’m coming from when I write and why I write and I can’t wait to see where this goes!
