I think the first movie I watched as a kid was Gus. I don’t remember anything about it. All I know is that it was about a donkey that could kick a football. It was my older sister’s boyfriend who got me into Schwarzenegger and it was my best friend in grade 7 who told me it was cool to watch Arnold. I was always told that watching action movies were dumb and so this validation was a new thing. I got to watch Predator, Aliens, Robocop, Total Recall because my sister was going out on dates and she needed a chaperone.
But eventually I stumbled upon something new. I had borrowed ever single pop laser disc in my disc shop by the time I was around 17 and so I decided to start borrowing the obscure stuff. What was this Seven Samurai? What was this Battleship Potemkin? And Birth of a Nation? In high school we were privileged enough to get the first film appreciation class in our batch. Here we learned about panning left and panning right, fade in, fade out. I saw movies like Stand By Me and what I found incredibly boring back then, The River and Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid. Heck, I still remember the boxes of Betamax tapes my uncle used to have that I used to look at with awe. Superman, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Black Sunday, Coma, Topaz, High Anxiety, I saw all these on Beta.
But I think my defining moment was when I watched this Laser Disc with a turtle on a cover call El Mariachi. Like everyone else who saw this, we marveled about how much could be done with just so little. This had a double impact on me because I realized how much the movie producers here in the Philippines were cheating us with their bad entertainment.
There was another director on the rise named Tarantino. I hated his movies but one of my “cool” friends was into him. And then I realized that my secret geeky obsession had its cool factor.
I had another friend who went ape about this movie called Bad Boys. And it did rock. And it was totally fun to go stir crazy about a movie.
So I started to watch a succession of movies like Clerks and Mallrats, on the high budget movies like ID4 and Starship Troopers, which I found disappointing. I started to “realize” that a lot of these movies sucked. They didn’t have that inner je ne sais quoi that 80’s movies had. I also learned about the critic and how assholic they could be. And how they thought any movie made above the 70’s sucked. I was starting to feel like that about the 80’s and I was afraid I was also becoming a snob.
Eventually I graduated and entered the advertising world and learned how difficult and boring making commercials was and probably also making movies.
I also moved into TV production once.
My next thing was when my mother gave me a basement that she could not rent. It used to be a cafeteria. She told me I could do anything I wanted. (The irony of a Mom’s basement just hit me right now). So I decided, why don’t I show movies? There are no art film theaters in this country, and we are always desperate to watch some. So I went through the amazing DVD collections of my friends and showed them in my basement to whoever wanted to watch. This went on for two years and it was quite fun. I became known as a “critic” though most of the traditional art lovers hated my guts.
Around that time I came across Aintitcool and read Tom Shone’s Blockbuster. I realized I was not a regular kind of critic, but a pop writer. And I was proud of it.
Eventually I came across in Aintitcool, a website called ScreenAnarchy also around the same time I came across a website called monkeypeaches. They liked quirky films and the site became kind of neat. And I guess that’s the story of how I came here.
I don’t know why I told you all this, but hey, editorial privilege, hehehe.