Tuesday, April 04, 2017

Movie Anniversaries

So, decades are big for us because we've got ten fingers and so use base ten.

I found out early in the year that there are two films that were big influences on my life that have nice round numbers associated with the time since their first release.  Today I saw that another movie also falls into that category, but it's not going to be quite as hyped as the other two.

I learned about these two movies reaching their 40th and 30th anniversaries from FathomEvents and TCM.

The oldest at 40 years is "Smokey and the Bandit".  This was absolutely my favorite movie as a kid.  It was one of the first movies my parents and I watched when we came to California.  I had a competition with my neighbor on who could see 100 black Trans Ams first.  When the movie came out on Showtime, we taped it on VHS, and I watched it whenever I could.  It became one of the first movies that I could quote along as it played.

The next movie at 30 years is my absolute favorite movie "The Princess Bride".  THis was a movie I watched with my mom at the theater in Sun Valley Mall.  I know playing the soundtrack pissed my first college dorm roommate off to no end.  I wore out two VHS tapes (purchased this time), before DVDs came out, and then my first Blu-Ray was a copy of this movie.  This is another one that I can quote along with the movie.

At 20 years old, "Chasing Amy" was the first Kevin Smith movie I saw in theaters.  It was a whole new perspective on things and shifted much of my views on things.  I've since seen almost all of his other films in theaters.  It's not a TCM classic movie yet, but maybe someday.

There were a lot of cool movies that came out 10 years ago: "Enchanted", "Pirates of the Caribbean", "Stardust", "Across the Universe".  However, none of them left the same mark on me that the previous three did.