I've Discovered My Love of Films
I’ve discovered I have a real love of film over the last few months. Whenever someone asked me if I liked movies, I told them I’ve watched maybe five in as many years. Then they’d awkwardly nod and say “oh” before slowly backing away.
That’s not even much of an exaggeration. Well, this hypothetical person asking random people if they liked movies was, believe it or not. But honestly, before May when I decided to quit my YouTube channel, I think that probably was true. I saw the last Spider-Man movie, whatever that was called, I think I saw Coco a couple of years ago, I watched Die Hard in December as is tradition, obviously. There was a Korean movie in there somewhere, Space Sweepers I think it was? Wikipedia tells me that movie came out on Netflix in February 2021. Oh, I’m looking at my DVD/Blu-ray shelf and I think I picked up Buy Bust two or three years ago at Big Lots on clearance.
There are probably more than five movies I’ve seen since 2020, but after a couple of hours of thinking, those are the only ones that come to mind.
Since I quit my YouTube channel and stopped obsessing over video games so much, I’ve spent more time on other things. I’ve gotten back into reading as I previously wrote about somewhere on this blog, and I’ve been writing fiction again, too. I took up gardening during the summer, we don’t need to talk about how that went. And I’m cooking more than I have in a long time.
Its my love of film that’s surprised me the most. For so long I never really cared much for film. I couldn’t really say why, I think I didn’t like not being in control. You control games, obviously, and writing, and even when you’re reading you have to actively engage with the story to visualize and understand it. I always saw movies (and TV shows) as a thing you put on and turn your brain off to, a passive medium. But that’s not really the case, is it? Well, maybe a little true.
Maybe that’s why I like subtitled foreign films so much. Most of the movies I watched this year are foreign, all of those subtitled. I enjoy reading subtitle while watching a film, it gives my brain something to chew on. What a great description, Josh. I get to read the subtitles as my brain puts the symbols to the sounds the characters say when they speak and you can hear the actors voice saying words in English. I’m knocking these descriptions out of the park.
Anyway, I watched Ne Zha earlier this year based on a recommendation from the YouTube channel Accented Cinema, and I loved it. From there, I watched a lot of movies he recommended, and then found my own. I discovered Wong Kar-wai and Sammo Hung. I watched some great stuff from Vietnam, the Philippines, Thailand, and Malaysia, as well as the usual East Asian countries of China, Japan, and South Korea.
I’ll have a blog later in December going over my favorite movies I watched this year, but there was a lot of good stuff. A lot of junk too, of course, and I did watch some good old fashioned American films, but those from East and Southeast Asia were the real standouts. Maybe this is less a love of film in general and more about films from that region? I’ve got some movies on my watch list from other places – Cuba, Uganda, Nigeria, Chile, the Netherlands, Norway, and Ukraine. For the first time in my life I’m really excited about watching a bunch of movies. Does that sound weird? Please don’t run away, hypothetical person reading this!
