For example: In my life, I can tell you that I have never kissed in a movie theater, I've had numerous dates at the movies, I saw The Truman Show at Downtown Disney (not on my first trip, but 1998 when I went twice thanks to a school trip in March and a family vacation that summer), "Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera!"
Take a moment and remember the first time you saw your favorite movie. It didn't necessarily need to be in a movie theater. I've fallen in love with numerous movies on VHS, Betamax, Laserdisc, DVD, Bluray Disc and even TV. For argument sake, like pretend you're remembering it in a theater...
Imagine you're sitting in a relatively-comfortable chair in a theater. There's a chill in the air, not too bad to you but you know there's some poor girl in the audience that's already freezing. The trailers have played and the lights have just gone down. In my case the next thing you hear is a drum roll and a blaring horn line screaming the all-too-familiar fanfare matching the illustrated monolith for 20th Century Fox. As the strings finish the theme and the screen changes to a green glowing stylized production company logo. This logo still doesn't feel right compared to the plain, dull-green san serif font that once stood in it's place. Suddenly, as the music ends, you are met with complete darkness and silence. After a moment, plain blue texts fills the screen...
"A long time ago in a galaxy far,
far away...."
It fades away into the darkness and you are left to ponder. "I thought this was a space movie? This has to be based in the future! And those are humans! This has to be our future!" Questions continue to race through your mind, but before you can begin to formulate any sense of that sentence fragment, the screen lights up and the full symphony orchestra explodes in the theater! Yellow-outlined text races away from you into the vastness of space! The orchestra continues in sweeping phrases as paragraphs flow into the distance explaining what you've gotten yourself into. As the paragraphs draw to a close the music fades, a A lone flute line punctuates the vast loneliness of space. As the camera pans downward and frames on 2 moons and large orange planet, the strings crescendo and a spaceship flies overhead in the midst of a laser fight with something behind it. You assume that it will be another spaceship of equal size, just a little more threatening looking. You couldn't be more wrong as the bright gray triangle in pursuit continues to grow and grow and grow until the point you doubt it will ever end. In a subtle touch of sound effects, the hum of the Star Destroyer and the firing of the lasers is so ridiculously massive, that it completely overwhelms the orchestra playing at a fair loud volume beneath the scene.
This chain of events forever changed my life. And I'm not the only one. I remember the first time I saw Star Wars. There are so many moments in that movie that completely blew me away! In all my years (and there were less than 10 at that point) I had never seen ANYTHING like it. And the first time I saw all three of the "Original Trilogy" was on a VHS tape that copied them off of television! Imagine how I felt the first time I saw it on a good VHS copy! Or in 1997 when the "Special Editions" came out in the theater! Or even in the last 2 years when I saw it for the first time on a HDTV... It was like watching it for the first time all over again!
The long and short of it is that movies shape our lives in more ways than we truly realize. We all have moment movies that stand out in our minds and whether we mean to or not, we've all referenced some sort of pop culture/movie moment before. Hell, I needed a good first blog post and I just talked about one of the greatest first scenes in cinematic history!
Stay tuned for my special little thoughts and feelings on movies and everything that goes along with this subject. I may not review the newest stuff out there, but I hope you'll be entertained nonetheless!
Much love!
-Mark
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