The first steps to this blog.

I've enjoyed movies for my whole life. The movies I remember seeing most in my youth were the Eddie Murphy movies from the end of the 80's and beginning of the 90's. I think that the first movie considered as calssic that I saw was E.T. and I didn't and still don't like it really. When I grew a bit older I started to appreciate other, more serious movies too, like The Shawshank Redemption and Forrest Gump. But still I considered movies to be a bit silly entertainment, not something that could or should be considered as art or even very seriously.

I did like pointless information though and non-fiction books that had chunks of information about all kinds of things. I didn't really like to read books about one single subject. I found it a bit boring. One day someone wondered who played Tess in the Roman Polanski movie of 1979. So I googled Tess and found the information on IMDB, a site that was until then unknown to me. By the way, Tess was played by Nastassja Kinski. Well IMDB is a site full of pointless information about movies. I searched around for actors and actresses, the oscars and the imdb top 250 movies. I mostly forgot the information I found, but I was perplexed that a lot of the movies I liked hadn't won important awards or weren't in the to 250. There seemed to be a lot of movies that were considered better then my favorites.
I believe that somewhere around this time I went to a bookstore where I found a book named "The best movies of the 80's" It was a book that had chunks of information about a lot of movies from the 80's. So I bought it. I enjoyed the book and more importantly realized that one could tell a lot more about movies, then merely that the movie was fun, thrilling or had nice actors in it. Even about Beverly Hills Cop! This book though, didn't spark me to go and see the movies depicted in it, but to read the books "best movies of the 90's" and "best movies of the 70's" of the same series. Anyway, these movies seemed more interesting and now I started to rent these movies or watch them when they were on tv. It were two movies though that made me realize that movies could be more than simple entertainment and that filmmaking might really be considered an art. This were Good Will Hunting and Pulp Fiction.

The first movie showed that a movie could have a really great story and it could be about real human beings with real problems they could overcome. It showed that we could really care about and feel for the characters. The second one showed that a movie doesn't need to be made in only one way, that it could be incredbly original and that even violence could be fun and didn't need to be punished in the movies. And both movies of course had great dialogue and great scenes. I still didn't know much about other things like cinematography and editing, but for then it was enough. I started to really love the movies. Now, I've seen them both a couple of more times, I see they have some flaws. The 'not your fault' scene between Will and his psychiatrist is not on the same level as the rest of the movie and I don't really like Uma Thurman's story in Pulp Fiction. But their virtues still far outweigh their flaws and these will probably always be among my favourite movies, together with Inglourious Basterds and Annie Hall, while Tarantino and Woody Allen are my favorite directors.

This post was inspired by something I found out when I was strolling past these years Oscar-nominations. Someone named Lawrence Bender is nominated for producing Ing. Basterds. I found out he was also nominated for producing Pulp Fiction and Good Will Hunting. I've never heard about him, but he surely spends his money well.