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| “My sense of the past is vivid and slow. I hear every sign and see every
shadow." -Barry Hannah |
In the early eighties, when I was a wee lad, there was a place close to our suburban home called Everything Video. You could go there and rent movies and a VCR. (This was way pre-Blockbuster, and way pre-owning-your-own-VCR.) On many a Friday evening my dad and I would head down there and rent VHS’s (they also had Betamax) and a VCR and head back home and dig in for the weekend. This was exciting to me, lazy little shit that I was. Screw fishing! Binge movie-watching was much preferred. You could stay home and you didn’t have to kill anything.
My dad’s taste is eclectic, and he was always
very permissive with my brother and me, so I was exposed to a wide array of
cinema at a very early age. If I were arrogant about such modest matters I might
even say that my viewing was “prodigious.”
By the time I was eleven, I was well on the road to cinephilia. One Flew
Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Marathon Man, Taxi Driver, The Godfather, Monty Python
and the Holy Grail, and on and on. (In
high school I filled in the gaps.)
Those weekends with my dad, staying up late, watching
everything from Fright Night to Fort Apache, were aesthetically formative. I love
movies. I love all kinds of movies. But, mostly, I love the odd, bad and out of the way.
I love The Beastmaster and Krull.
I love Ice Pirates and Time Bandits. I watched Brazil when I was twelve and had no idea what was happening, but
loved every minute of it. In the middle
of the night, sitting next to my dad, I watched Richard Lynch rise out of a
pool of blood in The Sword and the Sorcerer
and nearly shit myself out of pure adolescent fear.
Heavy Metal, which is
practically pornographic, scarred me for life when I saw it for the first time
at the age of ten.
My dad loved to watch old movies, too, especially stuff from
the thirties and forties. The Thin Man, is one of his favorites. Can you imagine a “Millennial” sitting
through The Thin Man? I did.
And, I’d wager, lots of guys my age did.
Gen Exers seem to be an excessively nostalgic lot. I know I was, and still am. (To
this day, by the way, William Powell is, to my mind, about as cool as they
come.)
Monster movies from the fifties are particularly special to
me. Perhaps it’s because my dad grew up watching that stuff, but it’s also the tone of those films. The innocent, playful, heroic mood is captivating. Those movies are
filled with wonder, with a thrilling sense of “make believe.”
And, of course, they’re cheesy and awful, in the best way possible.
Nostalgia. That’s a
big part of this, I suppose. Nostalgia
for the stuff of my childhood. Nostalgia
for the stuff of the past, in general. Also,
a desire to find new-to-me things, not just to uncover the odd, hard-to-find things I've already seen. That’s reason enough, I
guess.
I'd also like to extend an invitation to other nostalgia-haunted nerds. If you find some old, weird, obscure cinema-related something (art, a clip, an essay, an old film review, anything) and think it pertinent, send it our way. In the meantime, we'll watch and look and "fly low," and find some cool stuff to put up.
Most Earnestly & (not ironically) Tongue-in-Cheekedly,
-Basil Rathbone.
I'd also like to extend an invitation to other nostalgia-haunted nerds. If you find some old, weird, obscure cinema-related something (art, a clip, an essay, an old film review, anything) and think it pertinent, send it our way. In the meantime, we'll watch and look and "fly low," and find some cool stuff to put up.
Most Earnestly & (not ironically) Tongue-in-Cheekedly,
-Basil Rathbone.
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