This Is Not A Review

I love movies. Considering that I went to film school and moved to Los Angeles to earn a living making them, I'd be in a world of hurt if I wasn't a big fan. Just when it began is difficult to say. I remember a select few films from my early youth. Perhaps it was the summer my cousin came to visit, turning me on to everything from making Warhammer 40,000 figurines to gangster rap. It didn't all stick, but movies did. He got me into spaghetti westerns and Kubrick's 2001, and I went from there.

I have developed a reputation as some kind of encylopedia among the people I know here. I find it not uncommon to hear that within a few hours of meeting someone. That being the case, people are often surprised by the movies I haven't seen. You just can't see them all, and I have an affection for the obscure and little-loved. There's just so much time for watching movies, and acquiring a social life has only exacerbated the problem.

I just can't give up those weird titles, so I've never seen Goodfellas, but now have seen the forgotten Western 'Taggart'. I think I was attracted to the audacity which it took to name a feature film after a previously non-established, fictional character. The crazy-sounding synopsis closed the deal, and it didn't hurt that the film boasts the movie debut of personal favorite David Carradine. It was not a good movie, and while I've seen many of the popularly-termed greatest movies of all time, I must confess that I deliberately spent a precious 85 minutes watching it before having made sure I saw 'Raising Arizona'.

Emblematic of how incredible my life has become is that a second human being voluntarily joined in on the viewing in spite of being tired and the viewing being drawn out by technical problems. I'd like to systematically check off all those mandatory films off my list, but that's just not how I operate. When it comes to movies, who does? The business model of Netflix flies in the face of the fact that choosing movies is necessarily an act of whim or caprice.

In the moment you have feelings that, while being fleeting, are the entire basis on which you make your choice. The choice may not make much sense when the moment has passed, but the fact is that 'Taggart' beat out 'Sunset Boulevard', even though I have never seen the latter film and love William Holden. It doesn't add up, but then that's humanity.