geocities rescue

Ma Histoire de Film

At the risk of sounding like a character from ‘The Fast Show’ some hobbies are with you a short time and others are with you your whole life – something like a first love. It all started one day I was sitting in The Hyde Park Picture House in Leeds watching ‘Ba wang bie je’ (Farewell My Concubine) in a sold out screening getting excited by the machinations of Chinese opera. Where else could a subject like this create such an emotion but in the cinema? The following week, when someone shushed me during ‘Como agua para chocolate’ (Like Water For Chocolate) because I was getting into the story, I knew what my first hobby/love/interest was.

My first film (at the cinema I think) was ‘Pete’s Dragon’ of all things. From there I couldn’t say. My first conscious 18 film was ‘Robocop’ which I saw on video when I was 13 or 14. I saw ‘Empire Strikes Back’ before ‘Star Wars’ (and wondered why Luke was trying to kill his Dad); my first film star crush was Virginia Madsen in ‘Electric Dreams’ or possibly Elizabeth Shue in ‘Adventures in Babysitting’; The first film I recorded from the TV was ‘Starcrossed’ the early James Spader classic; My first DVD was ‘The Opposite of Sex’. The second was ‘Pleasantville’. The first film I walked out of was ‘Batman and Robin’, which is probably the worst film I’ve ever seen (or at least it was -- the older version of me).