How I Became a Film Snob, part 1
Anybody who has ever read one of my movie year in review posts knows that I keep a list of all the movies I've seen in the theater. 2010 is the thirteenth consecutive year that I've done this. I also go to far more foreign and art films than the even the most movie obsessed of my friends. So when did I become the sort of film afficianado who actually needed to make a list to keep track of all the movies I had seen?
My descent into the sordid world of film snobbery began in 1998. In May of that year I moved down to Lexington, Kentucky, to start a co-op with Lexmark Printers. I lived with my aunt and uncle, who also worked at Lexmark and who I strongly suspect dropped a word in the ear of the HR person in charge of hiring interns. Let's hear it for nepotism. In any event, the job was a standard nine to five, which meant that I had a lot of free time in a strange city where I didn't know anybody but my aunt and uncle. On top of that I had just lost my scholarship due to poor grades (2.99 GPA, needed a 3.0, dammit) and I was acutely aware that I had to save as much of the princely sum of $11/hour I was earning for school expenses when I returned in January. Even if I could have afforded to go out, I wasn't 21 yet and the bars in Kentucky carded very carefully. Besides, I've never been very good at meeting people. 13 years later I would have just hopped on the internet and found several dozen people worth meeting, but this was still in the relatively early days of the internet, and I didn't have internet access at my aunt's house anyway.
I joined a gym and went four times a week. I got a library card and caught up on all the leisure reading I'd missed out on during my first two years of college. I played some softball in the Lexmark co-op league before it collapsed from lack of interest. I played some video games on my computer (Descent figured prominently) and once a month of so I drove up to Cleveland to visit people. It was all very relaxing, and my stress levels dropped a lot. Given that my sophomore year was a disaster socially, academically and in pretty much every other way, this was not a bad thing. The horrible stress related insomnia I had for most of that time went away, and I generally felt a lot better, but I was still pretty bored on weekends.
Then one day my uncle asked if I'd been to the dollar theater yet. I had not. It turned out that there was a movie theater that had decided that it couldn't compete with the state of the art stadium seating movie theaters that had just started to open up in the area. In order to survive, they decided to show second run movies for $1 a ticket on weekends. They essentially stopped pretending that they got any of the gate receipts and pushed the concessions hard to make their money. They had, if I recall correctly, at least 8 different screens so they had a reasonably wide selection of movies. $1 was well within my budget, so I went to at least one movie every weekend for the rest of the time I was in Lexington.
I had always liked movies, but my tastes up to that point were pretty pedestrian. As you'd probably guess, my home state of North Dakota didn't exactly have a burgeoning cinema culture. In fact, it was not uncommon for the Oscars to roll around without a single one of the Best Picture nominees having opened in town, and this was in a city with a major university. Things improved once I moved to Cleveland, but by the end of my sophomore year of college I'd been to the Cedar Lee once or twice, and I hadn't been to the Cinematheque even though I lived literally a three minute walk away from it. I was already a regular at CWRUFilm, but I mostly stuck to the mainstream movies. In short, my movie tastes were pretty mundane.
The catalyst was my limited supply of entertainment options. With less else to do in Lexington I quickly exhausted the $1 theater's supply of action movies and comedies, so I decided that I might as well try out some movies that I normally wouldn't have bothered with. After all, in a worst case scenario I was out a $1 and a few hours. I'm not going to claim that I became a film snob overnight, but this was definitely the first tentative steps. By the end of 1998 I had seen 28 films covering pretty much the full spectrum of commercial films and a few mainstream art films. I was addicted and had already realized that mainstream movies weren't doing it for me like they had used to. I was ready for the hard stuff.
It's no exaggeration to say that without those eight months in Lexington I would not be a Cinematheque member, or a repeat attendee of the Cleveland International Film Festival, or the kind of person who writes long posts about his love of Kurosawa films. It was the gateway drug to a life of film snobdom. Heck, you could plausibly argue that I hadn't become fully obsessed with movies back then, katspaw156 wouldn't have invited me to hang out at the movies with them on Mondays, and I wouldn't have met theferrett and zoethe, which means I probably wouldn't have become friends with yuki_onna, zodarzone or about 1/4 of my current friends list. So if those eight months in Lexington did nothing else, they did that.
That's all well and good, but what about the lists? And what is this 13yl tag I've used for the first time? I'll talk all about that in Tuesday's post.
My descent into the sordid world of film snobbery began in 1998. In May of that year I moved down to Lexington, Kentucky, to start a co-op with Lexmark Printers. I lived with my aunt and uncle, who also worked at Lexmark and who I strongly suspect dropped a word in the ear of the HR person in charge of hiring interns. Let's hear it for nepotism. In any event, the job was a standard nine to five, which meant that I had a lot of free time in a strange city where I didn't know anybody but my aunt and uncle. On top of that I had just lost my scholarship due to poor grades (2.99 GPA, needed a 3.0, dammit) and I was acutely aware that I had to save as much of the princely sum of $11/hour I was earning for school expenses when I returned in January. Even if I could have afforded to go out, I wasn't 21 yet and the bars in Kentucky carded very carefully. Besides, I've never been very good at meeting people. 13 years later I would have just hopped on the internet and found several dozen people worth meeting, but this was still in the relatively early days of the internet, and I didn't have internet access at my aunt's house anyway.
I joined a gym and went four times a week. I got a library card and caught up on all the leisure reading I'd missed out on during my first two years of college. I played some softball in the Lexmark co-op league before it collapsed from lack of interest. I played some video games on my computer (Descent figured prominently) and once a month of so I drove up to Cleveland to visit people. It was all very relaxing, and my stress levels dropped a lot. Given that my sophomore year was a disaster socially, academically and in pretty much every other way, this was not a bad thing. The horrible stress related insomnia I had for most of that time went away, and I generally felt a lot better, but I was still pretty bored on weekends.
Then one day my uncle asked if I'd been to the dollar theater yet. I had not. It turned out that there was a movie theater that had decided that it couldn't compete with the state of the art stadium seating movie theaters that had just started to open up in the area. In order to survive, they decided to show second run movies for $1 a ticket on weekends. They essentially stopped pretending that they got any of the gate receipts and pushed the concessions hard to make their money. They had, if I recall correctly, at least 8 different screens so they had a reasonably wide selection of movies. $1 was well within my budget, so I went to at least one movie every weekend for the rest of the time I was in Lexington.
I had always liked movies, but my tastes up to that point were pretty pedestrian. As you'd probably guess, my home state of North Dakota didn't exactly have a burgeoning cinema culture. In fact, it was not uncommon for the Oscars to roll around without a single one of the Best Picture nominees having opened in town, and this was in a city with a major university. Things improved once I moved to Cleveland, but by the end of my sophomore year of college I'd been to the Cedar Lee once or twice, and I hadn't been to the Cinematheque even though I lived literally a three minute walk away from it. I was already a regular at CWRUFilm, but I mostly stuck to the mainstream movies. In short, my movie tastes were pretty mundane.
The catalyst was my limited supply of entertainment options. With less else to do in Lexington I quickly exhausted the $1 theater's supply of action movies and comedies, so I decided that I might as well try out some movies that I normally wouldn't have bothered with. After all, in a worst case scenario I was out a $1 and a few hours. I'm not going to claim that I became a film snob overnight, but this was definitely the first tentative steps. By the end of 1998 I had seen 28 films covering pretty much the full spectrum of commercial films and a few mainstream art films. I was addicted and had already realized that mainstream movies weren't doing it for me like they had used to. I was ready for the hard stuff.
It's no exaggeration to say that without those eight months in Lexington I would not be a Cinematheque member, or a repeat attendee of the Cleveland International Film Festival, or the kind of person who writes long posts about his love of Kurosawa films. It was the gateway drug to a life of film snobdom. Heck, you could plausibly argue that I hadn't become fully obsessed with movies back then, katspaw156 wouldn't have invited me to hang out at the movies with them on Mondays, and I wouldn't have met theferrett and zoethe, which means I probably wouldn't have become friends with yuki_onna, zodarzone or about 1/4 of my current friends list. So if those eight months in Lexington did nothing else, they did that.
That's all well and good, but what about the lists? And what is this 13yl tag I've used for the first time? I'll talk all about that in Tuesday's post.