Movies started out as a novelty item that didn't even qualify for 1st Amendment protection. After 15 years of earnings, people started to change their minds and movies have changed our lives in the ways great literature used to. While literature still does to a limited degree, movies can do it long before we acquire the education to appreciate the former. This can change people's lives in profound ways, either better or worse (my sister saw The Shining in theaters back in 1980 and hasn't watched a Jack Nicholson movie since), but the effects can last forever.
Slacker inspired Kevin Smith to make Clerks; 2001: A Space Odyssey solidified Spielberg's filmmaking career; Guillermo Del Toro says that he walked out of Blade Runner a completely different person than the one who walked in; Jaws prompted a massive influx in shark research and was instrumental in the interests of nature preservation; Italian Neo-Realism did for film what the Blues & Jazz did for music as a whole, affecting people beyond Hollywood; and Star Wars?...sheeeeeeeeeeit.
So what film changed your life forever? If there's more than one, go ahead and list them, but try to keep film with the BIGGEST influence at the top and why.
For me, there is no one single film with a eureka moment, but PULP FICTION is pretty damn close. It was the Holy Grail of the film culture in the 90s and I wanted to see it so badly for so long that when i did see it, I had never seen anything so cool and slick in my life. While it didn't prompt me to be a filmmaker, it's a movie that has extremely totemic power over me, and I refuse to watch it on TV; I must watch it at a certain time of year in a certain type of weather at a certain time of day in order to fully experience what it did to me.
THE SHINING finally prompted me to be a filmmaker; the precision of the imagery, camera movements, and unbridled intensity of the performances made it seem something attractive to my detail-oriented brain.
LOST HIGHWAY was the film that made realize that film was so much more than entertainment. I didn't understand it, but it was my first introduction to Lynch, and later on, provided a through-line to the Lynch library at film school. Watching LH makes me connected to the budding artist-wannabe that I was between 1999 and 2001. To this day, it's my favorite Lynch movie (although I will admit, not his best).
RIGHT TO KILL? I had forgotten about this one, but it was one of the many melodramatic made-for-TV movies of the 1980s, this one about the murder of Richard Jahnke Sr. by his two teenaged children after a lifetime of abuse. I was young when I saw it, and I'm sure it emphasized things in a Lifetime movie sort of way that went over my head, but Frederic Forrester was so unbelievably compelling as a truly monstrous abusive husband and father that it permanently solidified by homicidal hatred of abusive personalities.
Slacker inspired Kevin Smith to make Clerks; 2001: A Space Odyssey solidified Spielberg's filmmaking career; Guillermo Del Toro says that he walked out of Blade Runner a completely different person than the one who walked in; Jaws prompted a massive influx in shark research and was instrumental in the interests of nature preservation; Italian Neo-Realism did for film what the Blues & Jazz did for music as a whole, affecting people beyond Hollywood; and Star Wars?...sheeeeeeeeeeit.
So what film changed your life forever? If there's more than one, go ahead and list them, but try to keep film with the BIGGEST influence at the top and why.
For me, there is no one single film with a eureka moment, but PULP FICTION is pretty damn close. It was the Holy Grail of the film culture in the 90s and I wanted to see it so badly for so long that when i did see it, I had never seen anything so cool and slick in my life. While it didn't prompt me to be a filmmaker, it's a movie that has extremely totemic power over me, and I refuse to watch it on TV; I must watch it at a certain time of year in a certain type of weather at a certain time of day in order to fully experience what it did to me.
THE SHINING finally prompted me to be a filmmaker; the precision of the imagery, camera movements, and unbridled intensity of the performances made it seem something attractive to my detail-oriented brain.
LOST HIGHWAY was the film that made realize that film was so much more than entertainment. I didn't understand it, but it was my first introduction to Lynch, and later on, provided a through-line to the Lynch library at film school. Watching LH makes me connected to the budding artist-wannabe that I was between 1999 and 2001. To this day, it's my favorite Lynch movie (although I will admit, not his best).
RIGHT TO KILL? I had forgotten about this one, but it was one of the many melodramatic made-for-TV movies of the 1980s, this one about the murder of Richard Jahnke Sr. by his two teenaged children after a lifetime of abuse. I was young when I saw it, and I'm sure it emphasized things in a Lifetime movie sort of way that went over my head, but Frederic Forrester was so unbelievably compelling as a truly monstrous abusive husband and father that it permanently solidified by homicidal hatred of abusive personalities.
