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The Sometimes Terrible Movies that Made Me Love Movies
Films I couldn’t get enough of, even though some of them are trash
There is something about the lessons we learn, the books we read, and the media we consume during our teens and early twenties that locks them into our psyche. And it doesn’t always make a lot of sense.
Events in those years are ‘formative’ in the most literal way, but there is a chicken-and-egg aspect to it: we are drawn to certain stories because they speak to something in our personality. Then, in turn, that story itself becomes part of our personality, and we look back on it with nostalgia.
Naturally, this doesn’t mean that movies don’t affect us in adulthood. But once you begin to watch critically, your relationship with cinema changes. You have expectations. A new movie may move you, but you are less likely to internalise it as a part of your own personal mythology.
As such, these movies are a small part of my formative years, and one or two of them are downright embarrassing. Still, some remain wonderful to this day, and I will go to my grave defending them. All of them are films I have watched over and over (and over) to the point that I know almost every shot and line.
