A Contagious Cinephile

I guess I don't really have to explain why I wanted to start a movie blog.  If you've talked to me for more than thirty seconds, it's pretty self-evident.  I guess beginning this blog was inevitable.  I watch more movies per week than most of  you watch in a month.  If someone is talking about wanting to go see the newest release in theaters, good chance is I've already seen it.  I have the biggest library of DVD/Blu Rays I've ever seen in person and it was once told to me by a South African exchange student that if I hadn't spent all that money buying movies I'd have enough money to feed a South African family for the rest of their lives.  Oops.

However, much to the dismay of the person watching me wander around the movie section of a department store just waiting for me to piss away more money I don't have on more movies I don't need... I'm still going to love movies.  For my friends who think that we're going to go do something on a Friday night other than sit in a theater... it's probably not going to happen (save for those weeks when only the new Tyler Perry movie is released).

When I was a kid I had a very over-active imagination, but that imagination had almost no originality to it.  Every dream-job fantasy I ever acted out as a child was always, strangely, grounded in reality.  I never wanted to be a wizard flying on the back of a Pegasus delivering babies to infertile panda bears.  Whenever it was playtime I always strapped on the ol' sidebag and played mailman.  Yep.  Mailman.  I put old letters in a satchel, walked the street length of my house, put the mail in the box and walked on.  From there, I'd ditch the satchel, run inside, calmly walk back out as if I had just noticed out the window that my long-awaited mail had been delivered, open the mailbox and voila! I had new and exciting mail!  This was me at playtime.  A mailman.

When I was even younger I got really in to license plates and thought making them for a living would be nothing short of badass.  When I was informed that only prisoners make license plates... the dream was dead.

Once I passed my mailman phase, I got into teacher phase.  When playtime hit at home, I wanted to play teacher.  I'd make tests, quizzes, homework, busy work (all of which were recycled papers from when I was in school earlier) and my family would be my students.  Now, most kids who actively participate in such role-playing fantasies usually only want the facade to go on for an hour - hour and a half at most.  Not me.  I was the teacher and my family was in school... and the last time I checked school lasted six hours.  And damn it, that's how long I wanted my class to last.  After awhile, my parents didn't want to play anymore.  Sitting in my tiny, plastic Fisher Price desk for six hours listening to me teach them simple facts they already knew, giving them spelling tests, making them do art projects, and sending them to detention for bad attitudes just wasn't getting fun anymore.  Eventually, the school fantasy was over.

The teacher phase lasted a few years.  This is what I thought my calling was going to be.  That is, until my father became a teacher and I discovered how much I genuinely dislike other people's kids.  That's when I really got in to movies and they became my life.  I wanted to star in my own films.  I wanted to write the films, direct them, produce them, key grip them (whatever that is).  My parents, and myself, all thought this was just another phase until the next one.  But it wasn't.  Film became my passion and has remained such to this day.  Granted, I'm not as eclectic as I thought I was once going to be, but I still love film.  And I'm confident that one day I will make a living writing them.

But until that day...

You just have to sit there and read my blog.