Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Post
  • Reply
R. Guyovich
Dec 25, 1991

most of us went to movies a lot as kids and loved everything we saw because it was flashy lights and loud noises. but what was the movie that made you realize there was whole new world of possibility out there?

mine was sideways, which i saw in theaters at the age of 14. please don't troll.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

DropsySufferer
Nov 9, 2008

Impractical practicality
Birdman because it never cuts to another scene (not sure what technical term for it is). I was starting to get upset and my brain was begging them to cut to the next scene!

Magic Hate Ball
May 6, 2007

ha ha ha!
you've already paid for this
I think Koyaanisqatsi was the first movie to pull me out of the standard lineup of teenager movies. It was so hypnotic and intense, it was like having a UFO land right in front of me, just this total alien apparition. Autumn Sonata and 8 1/2 really sealed the deal.

Spatulater bro!
Aug 19, 2003

Punch! Punch! Punch!

I'm going to give the most trite, obvious answer for males currently around the age of 35. Fight Club. It was the first movie I saw that I appreciated on a formal level. Before it, I never noticed the visual aesthetics of the movie I was watching. It made me realize movies could use their visual style to enhance the story and characters. Fight Club turned me into a cinephile.

exquisite tea
Apr 21, 2007

Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."


I saw 12 Angry Men on VHS when I was twelve years old or so and it was the first time I recognized that a movie could be about ideas expressed through characters, rather than just as a sequence of events. It's also when I started to notice, in a rudimentary way, how camera angles and lighting could convey feelings of tension and conflict all on their own. Back then I just associated everything shot in black & white that wasn't the Twilight Zone with boring, but I was 100% glued to 12 Angry Men every time I saw it.

General Dog
Apr 26, 2008

Everybody's working for the weekend
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSGfcCO_h4I&t=18s

TrixRabbi
Aug 20, 2010

Time for a little robot chauvinism!

Pulp Fiction here. Learning about how Tarantino was an obsessive movie consumer encouraged me to start branching out and turning over stones to watch as much as I could.

Basebf555
Feb 29, 2008

The greatest sensual pleasure there is is to know the desires of another!

Fun Shoe

TrixRabbi posted:

Pulp Fiction here. Learning about how Tarantino was an obsessive movie consumer encouraged me to start branching out and turning over stones to watch as much as I could.

Tarantino was probably the spark for me as well, but I saw Reservoir Dogs first so that was the one that showed me what a little creativity can do for a film. The ideas seem really obvious now, but just the basics of messing around with the chronological order of events and the way you get bits of information over time as the characters gather in the warehouse were totally mind-blowing at to me at the time. I was used to very straightforward narratives.

TrixRabbi
Aug 20, 2010

Time for a little robot chauvinism!

Basebf555 posted:

Tarantino was probably the spark for me as well, but I saw Reservoir Dogs first so that was the one that showed me what a little creativity can do for a film. The ideas seem really obvious now, but just the basics of messing around with the chronological order of events and the way you get bits of information over time as the characters gather in the warehouse were totally mind-blowing at to me at the time. I was used to very straightforward narratives.

Pulp Fiction was just so cool. Like, Tarantino has such a bad rap now for inspiring edgy DudeBros, but the lesson I took away was that if you want to make movies or write about movies you need to be able to draw from every which source and that set me on the path to finding all sorts of films I never would have heard of otherwise. I bought a 20 film Grindhouse movie box set cause it had a quote from him on the cover, sending me into all sorts of divergent directions. I found Sergio Leone, Jim Jarmusch, and Jean-Luc Godard. So many people see Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction and just fall into the cycle of solely emulating the IMDb Top 250 or into Boondocks Saints territory, but Pulp Fiction for me taught me that there was a whole world of cinema that I had never heard of or could even fathom at first.

Netflix when it was still more of a DVD delivery service and the Criterion Collection were also huge doorways for me. As was this forum and it's weird to say but the Shameful thread changed my life. If you dig back to my first posts there I hadn't even seen The Godfather or Casablanca or really even begun to scratch the surface of the canon.

General Dog
Apr 26, 2008

Everybody's working for the weekend
No Country for Old Men is really what got me thinking about movies as an artform. It was definitely what got me on to the Coen Brothers, and I kind of expanded from there.

sean10mm
Jun 29, 2005

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, MAD-2R World
Blade Runner was the first movie that I watched where it didn't feel like I was "just" watching a movie. Between the visuals and the music it was like sharing somebody else's nightmare about the future.

Farg
Nov 19, 2013
man of steel

GoldStandardConure
Jun 11, 2010

I have to kill fast
and mayflies too slow

Pillbug
Collateral. I saw it at the cinemas when it came out, and something about the beginning of the movie before Vincent rocked up just had me hooked, and I could have watched a whole movie of Jamie Foxx driving a taxi like that.

Coaaab
Aug 6, 2006

Wish I was there...
The first time I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey, New Year's Eve (2000 to 2001) on TCM, where I marveled at how the disparate pieces of the story could fit together into one film. The effect was no doubt exacerbated by me alternating between watching that and the scrambled Spice Channel nurse marathon that night, similar to this scene from Ceylan's Distant.

Tarkovsky's Mirror (on DVD at college) was the one that really showed me that a film didn't even have to adhere to a chronological narrative, following instead a sort of emotional logic. It befuddled me the first time around, but a subsequent viewing for a class a couple years later made me appreciate it more. Over ten years on, I really want to watch it again (preferably in a theater) to see how it stacks up to my favorite films.

Cnut the Great
Mar 30, 2014
2001: A Space Odyssey, Eraserhead, Pulp Fiction. Watched all these sometime in middle school and it was when I first started to realize that you can't get everything you're supposed to get out of a movie just by following the plot.

TrixRabbi
Aug 20, 2010

Time for a little robot chauvinism!

Farg posted:

man of steel

batman v superman wa sbetter

Spatulater bro!
Aug 19, 2003

Punch! Punch! Punch!

Coaaab posted:

The first time I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey, New Year's Eve (2000 to 2001) on TCM, where I marveled at how the disparate pieces of the story could fit together into one film. The effect was no doubt exacerbated by me alternating between watching that and the scrambled Spice Channel nurse marathon that night, similar to this scene from Ceylan's Distant.

Tarkovsky's Mirror (on DVD at college) was the one that really showed me that a film didn't even have to adhere to a chronological narrative, following instead a sort of emotional logic. It befuddled me the first time around, but a subsequent viewing for a class a couple years later made me appreciate it more. Over ten years on, I really want to watch it again (preferably in a theater) to see how it stacks up to my favorite films.

I'm still in the "befuddled" phase with Mirror. But I have little doubt a second viewing will make it click.

Hand Knit
Oct 24, 2005

Beer Loses more than a game Sunday ...
We lost our Captain, our Teammate, our Friend Kelly Calabro...
Rest in Peace my friend you will be greatly missed..
I was completely over movies being anything worth my attention until a friend dragged me to Kung Fu Panda and I had a great time.

Amarcarts
Feb 21, 2007

This looks a lot like suffering.
Dredd

WeedlordGoku69
Feb 12, 2015

by Cyrano4747
Honestly, Drive. Drive kind of opened me up to the idea that a movie that feels like eating your veggies can also actually own.

Wheat Loaf
Feb 13, 2012

by FactsAreUseless
There are no doubt several which I'd need to think about but I think the first might actually have been Mary Poppins, when I was very young, because it had real people talking to cartoons and walking around in a cartoon world and I couldn't figure out how it worked, and those bits where they're in the big "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" setpiece captivated me. I just couldn't begin to conceive of how they did it. I suppose I was easily impressed as a child. :shrug:

Tart Kitty
Dec 17, 2016

Oh, well, that's all water under the bridge, as I always say. Water under the bridge!

The Thing. It was the first movie ever saw (at perhaps too young an age) that ever made me wonder how did they do that? But beyond the stellar effects work, the movie is also filled with fantastic performances, an incredible score, beautiful cinematography, and a somber and contemplative mood that separates it from other similar genre films. It’s a movie I’ve been able o appreciate different aspects to upon multiple rewatches over a course of years. Truly a gift that keeps on giving.

Magic Hate Ball
May 6, 2007

ha ha ha!
you've already paid for this

TrixRabbi posted:

As was this forum and it's weird to say but the Shameful thread changed my life. If you dig back to my first posts there I hadn't even seen The Godfather or Casablanca or really even begun to scratch the surface of the canon.

The shame thread has contributed a tremendous amount to my understanding of cinema.

Raxivace
Sep 9, 2014

When I was in high school I took a class where in a few weeks we watched Citizen Kane, Touch of Evil, Shadow of a Doubt, Rear Window, Psycho, and The Birds. That really opened me up to thinking about cinema as more than just entertainment (Not that those movies aren't all entertaining as hell too).

Rear Window, The Birds, and later on Vertigo when I watched it on my own especially helped break me out of that terrible "Movies are bad if the characters aren't making rational decisions or whatever" phase I was in as a teenager too.

Ramrod Hotshot
May 30, 2003

I'm trying to think of something less cliched, but probably also Fight Club

got any sevens
Feb 9, 2013

by Cyrano4747
Star Wars and Akira when i was about 6. Understanding how horrible the destruction of Alderaan was is mindblowing, then Akira sealed the deal of movies being able to be wild. Thank you original science fiction channel

Samovar
Jun 4, 2011

I'm 😤 not a 🦸🏻‍♂️hero...🧜🏻



At the risk of sounding staggeringly uncultured, Fury Road. It was the first time that all the things I had read about film theory and camera work 'clicked'.

Lampsacus
Oct 21, 2008

Waking Life. You can have a movie where people jut go "wtf is life" and sit around buzzing out? And a movie doesn't need a plot? But this is like my imagination! It sounds weird to type out loud but as well as seeing a movie could do stuff like that- it was more that a movie was allowed by the universe/God to do stuff like that. I had this weird block in my mind that stuff I day dream about (life, the universe, etc) was only meant for silly imagination time. I mean, I was 13.

And reality is for what we definitely know and certainty and answers and resolution and being unsure and exploring is for secret shh metime. I blame growing up in a fundamentalist authoritarian situation but yeah. Waking Life really cracked up my mind and gave me the confidence to grow my mind and change and validated much of what I kept deep inside.

Film is allowed.

DLC Inc
Jun 1, 2011

Lars von Trier's Antichrist. Definitely not as good as Melancholia (one of my all-time faves) but that film set me off on the path towards getting into stuff like Dogtooth and The Lobster after that and from there it just really sent me into the spiral of more unique directors and genre films.

Timeless Appeal
May 28, 2006
When I watched Psycho around age ten or so, I think that's when I first became aware of craft and choices in storytelling.

Zogo
Jul 29, 2003

R. Guyovich posted:

but what was the movie that made you realize there was whole new world of possibility out there?

I get this feeling constantly watching things.


Probably the very first one I recall was watching this scene at a young age:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rzg3esJaaU
A film can open with a dream? :vince:

And then shortly later this opening scene:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrAIDtyLlw0
A film can mix so many disparate emotions together at once?

Then a little later:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hH7gkP5Hrk8
A film can show a guy in a hockey mask killing everyone? :eyepop:

Another one would be most of The Entity (1982). That had multiple :eyepop: moments.

Raxivace posted:

Rear Window, The Birds, and later on Vertigo when I watched it on my own especially helped break me out of that terrible "Movies are bad if the characters aren't making rational decisions or whatever" phase I was in as a teenager too.

I used to dislike when a film ended without a resolution or on an off-note. But it doesn't bother me any longer. I think the last one that stuck out was watching The Ice Storm (1997).

MonsieurChoc
Oct 12, 2013

Every species can smell its own extinction.
This film, that my father showe dme when I was a kid:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elmI3vCCQQc

Our family has always been full of cinephiles, so I feel like I kinda cheated at discovering weird and different movies early on.

SomeJazzyRat
Nov 2, 2012

Hmmm...
It's weird because I don't think anyone really thinks about it other than a forgotten footnote, but Seabiscuit. Up until that point, I felt like my lane was children's films, that I was too 'stupid' to understand films for older audiences. After being dragged to a promo screening by my grandparents (because they owned horses, and because they knew the guy who owned the theatre), I was surprised to find that I not only could follow it but be emotionally invested. It's one of those few moments at a young age where I just knew I had grown as a person.

That Dang Dad
Apr 23, 2003

Well I am
over-fucking-whelmed...
Young Orc
I liked a few "art" movies before I knew why, but I think something between Fargo and maybe The Omen were the first films that made me feel like film could contain a multitude of feelings and emotions in a way that elevated it beyond the screen. Pi and Memento were the first that showed me film could be told in a weird way and still make me feel things.

Timby
Dec 23, 2006

Your mother!

It would be a toss-up between Citizen Kane and The Godfather, both of which were part of a Cinema course I took in my senior year of high school in the fall of 2001. The teacher was a complete nerd about film, incredibly passionate about certain directors, and he drilled into us just how much of a collaborative art form film is. With Citizen Kane, that was the first time I genuinely understood what mise en scene could bring to a movie, and with The Godfather, between the luxurious cinematography, the editing (Michael's baptism in blood) and the visual symbolism--even stuff that's totally in your face on repeat viewings, like oranges--just blew me away when I was taught how to notice that stuff.

sponges
Sep 15, 2011

Mine was Clerks. I’d never seen an independent movie before that and it’s dialogue, lack of a real plot and conventional narrative was an eye opener for me.

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.
I don't really have a movie that did this. However, Portrait of a Lady did this for me for books and that carried over to narrative media in general.

Astrochicken
Aug 13, 2007

So you better go back to your bars, your temples
Your massage parlors!

Apocalypse Now or Blade Runner. I was only really interested in plot and plot twists before but those were the first movies I wanted to understand. Turned me into a pretentious insufferable poo poo, too.

Timby
Dec 23, 2006

Your mother!

Tuxedo Catfish posted:

I don't really have a movie that did this. However, Portrait of a Lady did this for me for books and that carried over to narrative media in general.

For a second I thought you were talking about The Property of a Lady and got horribly confused before I remembered the James book. Good stuff, read that in honors English my freshman year of high school.

Astrochicken posted:

Apocalypse Now or Blade Runner. I was only really interested in plot and plot twists before but those were the first movies I wanted to understand. Turned me into a pretentious insufferable poo poo, too.

I wish I had warmed up on Blade Runner sooner than I did; I think the first time I watched it was during my freshman or sophomore year of high school, I remember renting it one night and my best friend coming over to the house to watch it, because I had been told that it was a sci-fi masterpiece (and I was already a Ridley Scott fanboy because of Alien). But neither of us were really familiar with the language of film at that point--at that point, I was just finally entering my phase of realizing that Ghostbusters is a comedy, not an action movie with the coolest car and backpacks ever--and so after it was over, we were like, "... that sucked, it was like two hours long and there was 20 minutes of plot." I eventually revisited it during my freshman year of college and I was like, :worship:

Oh, to be young and stupid again, instead of old and dying.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Joakim Brecht
Aug 20, 2013
It was probably some Ingmar Bergman film, and the revelatory aspect was in how relentlessly truthful and uncensored way his characters spoke of the human experience. Like I didn't know you were even allowed to do that.

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Post
  • Reply