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Nutshell Kingdom: Movies
2005
High school: at 16, my knowledge of film extended to Caddyshack, Ghostbusters, Stripes, Up the Creek, Fletchetc. Until...I read somewhere in Rolling Stone that 'Blue Velvet' was good. I had never heard of it and so rented it and watched with my family in our living room. Really funny in retrospect. I don't think I really had a clue what the hell was going on, only that I shouldn't be watching it with my parents. We never discussed it.
After that, I went to the Studio in downtown Raleigh and watched movies. The one I remember best was 'Housekeeping' with Christine Lahti. There was 'Sherman's March' at the NC Museum of Art. Ross McElwee was there and it may have been the first time I realized that movies were made by real people. Also, rented 'Wings of Desire' and loved it/fell asleep. I might add a Saturday afternoon when I watched 'Out of Africa' with my mom and we both loved it.
College: mostly I remember seeing 'Do The Right Thing' at a campus NAACP meeting. Marca, Christine, and I were the only white people there and we stayed fo the discussion and many questions were aimed at us. I saw 'Reservoir Dogs' with no advance warning in a theater in Greensboro and that shook me up some. 'Women On the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown' was fun. 'Paris, Texas' and 'Until the End of the World' still break my heart. I saw 'Badlands' by accident on TV one day and boy, did that freak me out in an enormously gleeful way.
It was Woody Allen who really changed me. I adopted personality tics from those movies. I learned a whole new way of talking and thinking. I guess Woody Allen and Elvis Costello infected my college years. And I do mean "infected."
Later, I worked in a video store for years and discovered scores of great movies. There isn't much point in listing those. Not enough space anyway.
