what film or films may have made you into the fan/fanatic you are

I grew up with two of my uncles taking to movies very often. and my love of them started with those trips around town on a Saturday hitting this or that theatre.

But it wasn’t until i saw Legend when i was 17 that it hit me that there was more going on than just the actors playing a role and telling a story.

That film visually blew me away. That got me turned on to NEEDING to see other Ridley Scott films. And then similar films and on and on.

I am interested in hearing what film or films may have made you into the fan/fanatic you are.

When I saw John Woo’s The Killer, I had never seen an action movie that had such a compelling story, being a child of the 80’s I was surrounded by Arnold, Jean-Claude, Sly, and Dolph. Also the level of choreography was something I had never seen before. This movie opened me up to Hong Kong cinema which then opened the door to more international films.

Great film !! It did the same for me. I remember being amazed by the action.

First time I watched Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. I didn’t even know who Robert De Niro or Martin Scorsese were. My dad just liked these movies and I thought they were going to be boring.

A Streetcar Named Desire was probably the first film I saw that made me take film seriously, but seeing 8 1/2 was what made me a confirmed cinemaniac. Funnily enough, I didn’t think I cared for it at first: I couldn’t get into the plot, I got lost in the transitions from fantasy to reality, I found it technically stunning, but emotionally unengaging. However, I dreamed about it the entire night after my first viewing, and images and snatches of music and dialogue infected my consciousness for weeks. When I saw it the second time, I found it fascinating, thrilling, hilarious, and couldn’t believe that I could ever have found it boring! Now, I have seen it at least five times, I imagine, and consider it to be one of my favorite films.

“Band of Outsiders” — which I saw in 1964 when it played the Second New York Film Festival. Loved many films before but Godard made me want to actually live in them.

Pulp Fiction

Innocence by Lucile Hadzihalilovic

or possibly Jurassic Park

David: What a great way to experience Band of Outsiders! With such interesting things happening in film at that time, that festival must have been very exciting.

The Little Mermaid

The Swimmer

Something by Lynch, maybe Blue Velvet.

Definitely The Killer and Hard Boiled were big starters for me. I was an impressionable 13-year-old that was amazed by the slow motion and ultra violence.

But to be frank, the film that really did it for me was The Replacement Killers (yes, the really terrible movie)….. the first time i saw that opening scene with Chow Yun-Fat walking in slow motion with the Crystal Method playing.. and that 180 turn he does with the suit jacket whipping about… i was done.

The Royal Tenenbaums and Dazed and Confused

Casablanca. My dad and and his brother are huge fans of the film (as I am now too), and I would always hear them talk about it, so I decided to watch it. Since then I’ve been hooked.

Ruby in Paradise was the first film that really got me thinking what I like about films.

Not one specific film for the beginning, but a love of films of any kind from the time I was very young. I would watch any movie that came on TV and stay up as late as I could to see it. Then, discretion started to take over, and I became more discerning and critical. Not until I stated to watch a movie program on Sunday nights with British and foreign language films, which I started in my early teens, did I become more of a connoisseur. By this time, I had seen most of the Hollywood classics at least once, and was starting to develope a taste for all things Guinnness (as in Sir Alec). By mid-teens, I was watching French and Italian films when I could, but didn’t really become a bonafide cinephile until I moved into a large metropolitan area (Toronto) when I was about 20, and started doing things like attending a Bergman festival, watching Blow-up, Marat/Sade, etc., and doing a ton of reading on film. Blow-up was the first film I watched three times in a row at the cinema, and started to concoct an elaborate theory about what it all meant. That’s when my serious interest began.

2001 a space odyssey lit a fire in me

I was always a big movie fan as a youngster but films such as Vivre sa vie and Chungking Express made a deep impression on me and started a quick progression into fanaticism and recognizing film as an art form. I’d say 1995 at age 13 was when my head exploded. I started collecting a massive amount of obscure music at the same time, and of course it was when I first got on the internet.. up until then, living in a midwest town with a population under 1000, it wasn’t exactly easy to pursue my artistic curiosities.

No one specific film, but Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, and Being There were two specific things I saw at a fairly young age that sent me into very specific kinds of films. Later on, seeing Blue Velvet on the night of my high school graduation was quite memorable; and a few months earlier seeing True Stories (I will always love Talking Heads) with a group of friends also left a strong impression. The first international films roundabout the same time; I think Truffaut’s Small Change and Kurosawa’s Dodes ka’den definitely clued me in to that fact that I should look far and wide.

My closest friend in college was a phenomenal film geek – the walls of the dorm room were lined with VHS tapes, and it was all something interesting. We were going to school in a town where the winters were long and bleak, and you might not see bare ground from Thanksgiving to St Pat’s Day, so there was a lot of holing up in a dorm room with a bunch of people and staging an impromptu film festival…Kubrick and Kurosawa and Waters and Scorsese marathons…there I first saw Yellow Submarine and Eraserhead, among other intriguing things.

Well even as a kid I prefered Spielberg films to stupid kids movies but what really made my film watching explode was Alfred Hitchcock and Martin Scorsese. When I was like 10 I was in a whole I’m manly so I want to see scary movies phase so I saw Psycho. I loved it and saw a lot more of his films. I feel Hitchcock is a great place for kids to start because his movies are very entertaining but also great films. I got into Martin Scorsese with a bang. Over a 6 month period I probably saw 3 of his films, and then finally just decided to see them all and did very quickly. I then listened to his suggestions on what films to see getting me into silent and foreign films. I owe my love of film greatly to Scorsese.

“Mirror” by Andrei Tarkovsky. I chose to do a project about it for a Russian film class (the first film class I took…I had basically no familiarity with art films before that point) because someone I knew recommended it. I was totally baffled at first but after watching it several times, I begun to realize the kinds of things film is capable of that no other art is.

There are several I’ve seen since then that have been just as moving, but those have only affirmed what Mirror showed me for the first time.

If I had to pick a single film that changed my entire perspective on film as a whole, it would have to be Werner Herzog’s “Aguirre”.
I saw it at the TLA on South Street in Philadelphia in 1975 or 1976. I was 15 or 16 at the time, and had never seen anything like it.
It opened my eyes and my mind to the possibility of Cinema not being formulaic, not forcing a happy ending where it needn’t be or didn’t belong, and looking into the core of people, even if those people were mad. It was in my head for weeks, and parts of it are still there today, thousands of films later.

I realized what was a mere ‘movie’ and what was a “film” – they both have their own merits, but one seemes far more important and worthwhile; far more memorable and intentional. I still love a cheesy 50s scifi flick as much as or more than anyone, but give me Wong Kar-Wai or Woody Allen or Federico Fellini or Rainer Werner Fassbinder [thank heavens for the restoration of Berlin Alexanderplatz!] and I am a happy camper. But it was surely Aguirre that started it all for me, and I will always be thankfull for that.

SHELLEY : Ditto…. 8 1/2 was the movie that opened my eyes to the possibilities of cinema. It was the first film I’d seen that reflected reality in a way that wasn’t trying to be realistic but was so honest and yet fantastic at the same time. I like to watch it after a late night out…. something about it lends itself to that tired but awake state?

its also the first Criterion release I bought :)

I’ve loved movies for as long as I remember, but one memory really sticks out in my mind. I’m seven years old and in tears at The Video Shop (anyone remember this chain?) because I can’t pick a movie. My father keeps recommending a Bond but I do not accept. After like 20 minutes of crying, we move towards the exit and Dad just picks something off the shelf kind of randomly. It was Cool Hand Luke and it really changed my life.

Jeffery, I like your post but a mere movie is always a film.

Alex: It was my first, as well! I received that and The Seventh Seal for Christmas, and my money has been slowly dwindling away ever since…

I’ve always loved film. I remember 2 situations in which I was duly impressed. In the mid 60’s the local PBS station ran a Japanese film every sunday-mostly Kurosawa. I hate to think now what the quality of those prints were. The second was seeing The Conformist in a theater on it’s initial release. I had to go back the next night to see it again. The current DVD release does scant justice to the look of the film.

L’Avventura. I saw it when it came out in the US. It felt so slow and teasing and relentlessly uneventful until the very end when Monica Vitti silently forgives her lover. The emotion of that ending was overwhelming and a complete surprise. I went to see it again the next day to repeat the experience.

Hidden Fortress. I saw it on an old VHS from the library when I was ten, and it blew my mind.