Memorable Film Experiences

I saw this movie at an IMAX theatre on October 17, 2008. The reason I even know the date is because I wrote a journal entry for it in a book called "Diary of a Wimpy Kid Do-It Yourself Book" which I still have with me. It's very poorly written and my writing skills aren't as good as they are today, but I'll write it out the same way I wrote it.

"I finally went to see The Dark Knight last night. It was awesome that I would give it 100 stars. It was that good."

I'll also post a picture of it just for evidence:

Yeah, I wasn't very good at saying what I liked/didn't like about a movie back then as I can still vaguely remember my short movie reviews on RottenTomatoes and they were horrendous. I definitely wouldn't give it 100 stars to this day as I don't go by that scoring system, but I can still understand what I meant by that. I was 11 and three quarters by that time and I had not seen very many movies like this and I think at the time it was one of those few movies that really blew me away. Before I saw this movie there was a lot of hype with people saying how great it was and I felt a little left out as I didn't get a chance to see it in theatres yet. Fortunately it was still playing at a IMAX theatre in Victoria and since I was already visiting relatives there I finally got the chance to see it.

I remember when it started with criminals telling everyone who the Joker is and when the heist started with the bad guys firing their guns I noticed how loud the noise was compared to other theatres, but it wasn't too long before I got used to it. I remembered enjoying every passing minute of this movie and when it ended I talked about how much I enjoyed it with my family. Also I did see this movie again back in 2012 in anticipation for the new Dark Knight movie and I still stand by my opinion on it.

From my Movies that you either love or hate list:

"Well to be fair, I saw this movie when I was 13 so my rating is pretty much what I thought of it when I first saw it. I haven't watched it again since, but I still remember the great experience of watching this movie and enjoying it for the exact reasons listed on why it's loved. I really couldn't care less if the story has been done before because it was new to me when I first saw it."

This may be an odd choice, but this movie will always have a special place in my heart because this is the first movie I saw in theatres at least earliest I can remember. I'm pretty sure this was the first movie I saw in theatres, but if there was one before that then I can't remember it. I do remember though that I was told what it was going to be like inside there and gave me a heads-up that all the lights would be off, so this means I'm 99% sure that this is the first one.

I really loved this movie back then and when it came out on VHS (Which was before I even had a DVD player.) and I would watch it constantly. I actually always preferred this movie over the original and looking back I can definitely see why. While I did like the first one, it was a little too dark at times and one thing I really didn't like about it was that there was a scene where Stuart's "father" hits his wife. There's domestic abuse in a kid's movie! How the hell were they able to get away with that? This one was more light-hearted and adventurous which was what appealed to me more and the tone of this movie makes it different from the original. Maybe all of this is just my nostalgia talking or something, but I'd take kids watching this over the live-action Smurfs movies any day. I guess this is just one of those movies where I can still see the flaws especially after seeing it so many times, but can still enjoy it for what it is because I grew up with it.

This is a tough one as it really isn't a particular memorable movie viewing as I've seen this movie so many times that it's hard to remember what happened on my first viewing or not. I will say this though, this was probably the first movie that I was hyped for. Even though the internet still wasn't what it is today back then, I would still watch every clip and preview for this movie on the official Disney website and I just couldn't wait for this movie. Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to see it in theatres, but I did see it when it came out on either VHS/DVD back when they still released VHS and DVD at the same time. Man, I feel much older than I should. Well, I would say "So, did it live up to the hype?", but I'll just answer it by saying that I watched this movie nearly 100 times by now and I can still see myself watching it again someday. That's how great of a movie it is.

This one I saw during the Christmas season with my dad and I loved that movie at the time. Unfortunately I missed a small chunk of the movie as the moment which was likely due to having to walk to the theatre as my dad didn't have a car at the time and we just didn't leave the house early enough. It wasn't a huge problem though as I was still able to understand the overall plot, but I just a little peeved that I missed part of the movie.

I remember getting all excited when King Kong showed up and loving the scenes where King Kong ripped off a dinosaur's jaw, but I was also emotionally connected to the story as I really felt bad for him near the end of the movie. After I saw it I had dinner at a friend's house and they had quite a few movies and I felt like watching Elf. Then dad said to me "You just watched a 3 hour movie, yet you still want to watch another movie?" and I was all like "What? That movie was three hours?". I didn't have a problem with the time length for some reason and that's coming from someone who had a weak attention span back then. I guess it just goes to show how good this movie really was. My rating is possibly inaccurate as I just rated this movie by memory and I should watch it again because the last time I seen it besides in theatres was when I rented it on DVD. I'll wait until I see the 1933 version (Which I unfortunately haven't seen.) and the 1976 version just so I can compare them.

If I can recall correctly, this was the first PG-13 movie I saw. I remember seeing it in theatres and I remember just loving the hell out of it and this movie was the beginning of what started my fascination for superheroes. I remember after I saw it I kept quoting this one line from the movie that Jonah Jameson said... I think it was "I want Spiderman!!!" and I revisited it a few years later and I still loved it just as much as I did back then. I haven't seen it since, but I think it's time for a re-watch as I always thought this was a vast improvement over the first one.

I was a huge Simpsons fan back when this movie came out and I had quite a collection of Simpsons stuff. Before this movie was announced I had been wanting a Simpsons Movie to exist and I was puzzled by why they haven't made one yet. The moment they released the first trailer for it I was hyped for it, but I didn't like that I had to wait for one year to be able to see it and that felt like a lot of time back then. Still, every trailer they released for it was able to hold me over until then. Seeing it in theatres was great as it felt good to be in a room with other people laughing at what was going on and I actually remembered crying when the villian was pointing a gun at Homer as I really thought he was going to die and reading internet rumors on that subject didn't help as I believed them at the time. I should've known that Maggie would save the day as this isn't the first time she's done this. I still think this is a great movie that represents what the show used to be very well although I still watch this show whenever a new episode is on and while I can't argue that it's overstayed it's welcome, I still enjoy some of the newer episodes and I do watch it whenever a new episode is airing. That's just how much of a Simpsons fan I am.

This was another movie that I was really hyped for as I was a huge SpongeBob fanatic at the time as I had a lot of the merchandise and I would watch it whenever it was on TV which was all the time. Now all I can say is that this movie came out at the right time as this was around the time where the obsessive SpongeBob phase was starting to fade away. I was so excited to see this movie and I remember laughing a lot while seeing it and I remember even being scared at one point in the movie. To this day I think it's a great movie as it represents what the show used to be so well and the sequel is just as good too.

This movie was pretty much my introduction to Jim Carrey. Well, technically How the Grinch Stole Christmas is as I saw that movie before I saw this one, but this movie was my introduction to him as a comedic actor. When I first saw this I just couldn't stop laughing. There were even a few instances where I was repeating dialogue from the movie that I shouldn't have like "I'm kicking my ass, do you mind?" and "See you later dickhead." and my dad told me that I didn't have to repeat everything they said, but I just couldn't help myself. It was just that funny to me at the time. Ever since I saw this movie I considered Jim Carrey to be my favorite actor and after seeing some of his more serious movies in more recent years that statement still rings true today.

Just like with Jim Carrey, this movie was my true introduction to Mike Myers. I heard about this movie from Ebaums World when I discovered soundboards which lead me to find the Dr. Evil soundboard. I thought it was hysterical and it made me want to see the movie. I also remember seeing certain parts of this movie before like when I randomly walked in on a fembot shooting lasers out of her breasts which was before I actually saw the movies. While most of the humor went over my head, there was still things in this movie for me to laugh at. This is a movie that I actually think gets funnier the more you watch it as the older I got, the funnier this movie became. The sequel is also just as hilarious, while Goldmember was the weakest installment, but it still had it's funny moments.

This movie I saw when I was either 11 or 12 and it was the first R-rated movie I saw. Now, you may be wondering why someone my age would be interested in seeing this kind of movie. Well, that was because I was a fan of Mike Judge's work and loved his shows like Beavis and Butthead and King of the Hill, so I rented it at Blockbuster back when they did moderately well and watched it with parental supervision. While the language was much more than I was used to back then, but this movie still made me laugh from time to time.

See, this list will not just be covering good movies. I had the misfortune of seeing this movie in theatres because I was dragged to it. The people I was with seemed to like it much more that I did as I was pretending to fall asleep throughout it because it clearly did not catch my interest and this is coming from someone who is somewhat familiar with the show. From what I remember the show was OK and it did have some interesting parts, but the idea of making this concept in a movie is just a recipe for disaster. I haven't seen this movie since, but I have skimmed through parts of it online. Judging from that and the reception this movie has gotten, it's clearly an awful movie that I should not waste my time with again.

I remember this being the first Dr. Seuss movie I was really hyped for as I didn't see the Grinch movie until it was released on video. I was a huge fan of Dr. Seuss as a kid and I owned every one of his books that I could get my hands on at the time since he had so many. I begged my mom to take me to see this movie and her knowing I was a Dr. Seuss fan she did so with no hesitation. Now I remember this being a movie I saw in theatres and after that I would continue to watch it multiple times on DVD. I remember loving the movie back then at one point I thought the movie was better than the book which I find to be insulting now. I didn't really find out the problem with this movie until one day I saw clips for it on YouTube and I figured out what was wrong with it. Well besides Mike Myer's hideous portrayal as the title character it would be the innuendos. Now I have no problem with kids films sneaking in a few adult jokes, but in this movie they aren't even clever. Hell, they aren't even subtle as even I got a couple of these jokes as a youngster. It's also really insulting to the source material and oddly enough this is the only movie based on a Dr. Seuss book that I don't like. It's a terrible movie and it's unfortunately when Mike Myers started to go downhill when it comes to starring in movies.

When I saw the trailer for this movie back then I thought it looked so hilarious that I wanted to see this movie as quickly as possible. So I "legally" watched it at home and I actually thought this movie was hilarious at the time. Then again I was 11, so the fact that I found this movie funny isn't that surprising. It wasn't until a few years later when I looked back at this movie and then realized that it sucked. It's sad to see Mike Myers stoop this low and unfortunately he hasn't starred in another movie again excluding the final Shrek film.

I remember being so hyped with this movie because the trailers looked hilarious and because I was already familiar with Alvin and the Chipmunks as I saw The Chipmunk Adventure and a couple of their other specials on TV. I remember seeing this in theatres and finding it hysterical at the time and when the movie ended I said to some random guy that I would give this movie a 10. Well to a kid this movie would probably be a 10/10 for them, but I have a pretty photogenic memory of this movie due to watching the hell out of it back then and looking back at this movie it's just OK. I don't hate it as much as most people do and it at least captures the charm that the cartoon series had even if they modernize it a bit too much, but The Chipmunks were always about staying relevant to today's audience, so I really can't fault the movie on it too much.

This is probably another odd choice, but I consider this a transitional period for me. This was when I was starting to mature just a little bit as I was still pretty immature back then, but I was starting to notice the flaws in this movie. I hated the over-abundance of shitty songs that were popular at the time and The Chippettes added absolutely nothing to this movie. I also didn't really find the movie to be funny back then, but I laughed at it just because the person I was watching it with was laughing too. I was starting to realize that the childish jokes in the movie weren't very funny and was starting to become interested in different kinds of humor. I remember back then when I would watch Tourette's Guy which was hilarious to me at the time (It actually still gets me to this day.) because it was different from anything I had seen since I wasn't exposed to that kind of comedy. I did get caught watching it once when my mom walked in, but instead of her getting mad she just asked me "Why would you watch this?". I was embarrassed at the time, but she was starting to realize that I wasn't a little kid anymore. I unfortunately saw this movie twice and while it isn't a good movie, it's still better than the atrocity that was the third one. At least this one was funny in certain parts.

Count this one as another transitional period movie. I saw this movie in theatres because it was this kid's birthday party and I was invited to see it. I didn't really like him as he really got on my nerves at times, but I decided to come just to be nice. This was another one of those movies where I was just picking apart things about this movie that didn't work in my head. I was starting to realize near the middle of the film that I'm tired of the cliche third act where somebody screws up and they have to make up for it in the end. It was so cliche and sappy, but the kid sitting beside me (Which was the one who invited me to his party by the way.) was crying over it and he said to me "Isn't this sad." and I lied by saying yes as I felt like giving my honest opinion wasn't the best thing to do. It was during that point where I was wondering if my love for movies was dying and I even asked about it on Yahoo Answers about it and I happen to have the link which I'm reluctant to post as I had some really stupid questions on that account, but here it goes. answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090129174400AAEKLxQ

Turns out that I was just watching the wrong kind and the more that my tastes expanded I started to find some great movies and I'm still finding them to this day. It just goes to show how easily entertained kids can be if this is able to entertain them. I mean it's not a terrible movie or anything, but it's very forgettable and I have a hard time imagining that anyone will disagree with me on that one.

I saw this one in theatres with my mom and I vaguely remember thinking that this was a good, but not great movie which is kind of odd as I wasn't as critical with movies back then. After it was over I said to her that I would give it a 7 and oddly enough I still stand by my rating from what I can remember. It could be something I might watch again, but wouldn't go out of my way to do so.

I didn't see the Toy Story movies until the mid-2000's, so I didn't wait nearly as long to see this movie as I was still pretty young when the second one came out. I was actually on the fence about this movie because I initially didn't like the change of Andy being an adult and the trailer just didn't make the movie look good. However when it got rave reviews and there was this thing going on Rotten Tomatoes where any critic that gave it a negative review would get all pissed off over it and with that in mind I decided to see it in theatres. I was proven wrong by this movie as it is easily the best one in the series even though I think all of the Toy Story movies are great and even though I was 13 when I saw it, I was still pretty freaked out by the fire scene which shows how I was a child at heart at that time although I wouldn't dismiss that fact to this day either. Now I didn't cry near the ending and I got mad with how people would go far to say that anyone who didn't cry during the ending of Toy Story 3 was a terrible person. Now I didn't cry, but I at least felt something during that scene and I was able to relate to it. I walked out of the theatres with my dad saying that he would give it 100% which confuses me now because he's rarely this lenient with film as he had a conversation with me that the only films that deserve a perfect score are Scarface (Which coincidentally happens to be my favorite movie.) and The Ten Commandments and movies like Ed Wood shouldn't be put in the same league as those two. Now I love my dad, but I think he's wrong with that statement because there is no same league. Different movies are trying to accomplish different things and saying movies like for example Star Wars or Ed Wood shouldn't be in the same league is just ridiculous. Star Wars is in the league of great sci-fi movies, Ed Wood is in the league of great biography movies and this would be in the league of great animated movies. Well, this turned into a minor rant, but I just wanted to get that out of the way.

I had to see this movie in theatres since I was a huge fan of the books back then. I actually remember being pretty disappointed by this movie as while it was funny in certain parts, it really wasn't that much different from the book and it relied a bit too much on gross-out humor. I remember walking out of the movie feeling indifferent and I just had no strong feelings for this movie. The sequels were an improvement though.

I saw this movie when I was 14 during the summer vacation and this was right after I got over a depression phase and I don't want to get to into detail with it, but let's just say part of it was being caused by being transferred to a different school which meant being separated by most of my close friends and because I just wasn't completely happy with high school which lead me to miss being a kid. Even though I wasn't a bad kid and didn't really get in trouble for anything, I would annoy other students without really meaning to and would get made fun of for my appearance because I would often get mistaken for a girl due to the long hair at the time. I kind of felt like an outcast because of it and I'd spend most of my time at home watching cartoons I grew up with which was how I dealt with depression at the time.

I think me feeling like an outcast is the reason this movie spoke to me. I could relate to the characters. When it ended it really stuck with me and I proceeded to watch it 3 more times ever since and it was even my favorite movie at one point until I saw Scarface which is currently my favorite. After summer vacation ended I finally came out of my shell and got accustomed to high school. I'm not sure if this movie had anything to do with it or not, but regardless of that it's still one of my favorite movies of all time.

Well you're probably wondering what can I say about this movie that hasn't been said already, but I actually have a story to tell about my first time watching this movie. It happened about 3 years ago although it feels like it was longer than 3 years. It was about 2 o' clock in the morning on Christmas Day and I just couldn't sleep, so I snuck into the living room and grabbed my stocking. I opened my present from "Santa" and it was The Godfather trilogy which was something I always wanted. Since I couldn't sleep I decided that I was going to watch about an hour of the first one and then try to get some sleep. Now at the beginning of this movie I was like "OK... this is good, but how is this the best movie of all time?" However, the moment when the horse head scene happened I saw this movie in a completely different light. That was when the movie really started to get interesting and I couldn't even stop watching it because I was so interested with what was going on. I managed to watch the whole movie in one sitting and it was around 6 AM when I finished watching it. I still had the energy to open presents in the morning and I did manage to take a couple hour nap after. It is a fantastic movie and I will never forget my first experience watching this movie.

This was during a time when I was still restricted from watching certain movies by my mom and I would like to touch on the fact that Canada has a different rating system from the MPAA, so I wasn't allowed to watch anything higher than 14A. Now that rating system is much more lenient as it doesn't give explicitly high ratings just because a movie has bad language and 14A movies are basically the equivalent of PG-13 movies, so while it's gotten me to be able to watch some R-rated movies there were still ones above that rating that I wanted to see desperately. I decided that I didn't want to wait to be 18 to watch some of these movies, so I watched some behind her back and this was one of them. I was amazed by this movie as it was beyond anything I've seen before... OK I've seen this style of storytelling done in Hoodwinked, but does anyone really care about that movie? I thought so, but that's beyond the point as this was the most brutal movie I saw at this point and I loved it because of it. I loved the raw dialogue, I loved the characters and I loved the storytelling and everything about this movie. Really the only things I found unsettling/startling in that movie was the scene where Mia accidentally does heroin and they had to inject her with something which would probably still make me cringe today as I hate needles and Marvin's death which just made me jump because it came out of nowhere. I was able to get through this whole movie without anyone knowing and later on around the time I started doing this movie logging thing Mom finally knew me well enough to let me watch the kind of movies I wanted to. I didn't even have to talk to her about how I felt or anything, it just came up in a conversation that I love Stanley Kubrick's movies and she asked me if I liked Quentin Tarantino's films. I said no because you wouldn't let me watch them, but then she just said to me that I know the difference between reality and fiction and knew that I wasn't the impressionable kind of person. That was one of the happiest moments of my life.

I was 13 when I saw this movie and this was around the time I was delving into different kinds of movies and this was one of them. I loved every minute of this, but I was actually surprised when I found out that the apes in this movie could talk and was startled when one of them said "Smile." with an ape taking a picture which was the first thing said by an ape in the movie. Believe it or not I actually wasn't aware of the twist ending in this movie which is amazing due to how infamous it is especially on the internet which caused me to be shocked and a little bit peeved. To this day it's one of my favorite movies of all time although I probably should watch it again as it's been almost 5 years since I've seen it.

This is another one of those movies from the same year that also became one of my favorite movies of all time. Now I will admit that when I saw this movie I was confused with what was going on with the apes scene at the beginning to pretty much everything that happened after HAL got shut off. (Which I hope isn't a spoiler to you guys.) Yet I loved it for this reason that I couldn't explain. It definitely wasn't because everyone else loves it and I wanted to fit in or anything as I was never like that, but I guess it was because it was messing with my mind and it's one of those cases where a movie being confusing isn't always a bad thing. This was my introduction to Stanley Kubrick and later on he became my favorite director and I don't know how popular of an opinion this is, but this is my favorite movie of his.

As much as I hate this movie's guts, I will always remember this movie for it being my first experience with an overrated movie. I mean sure there were others like Dazed and Confused, The Usual Suspects and Marley and Me, but the first and third one weren't that bad and the middle one is a movie I liked, but didn't think there was that much to the movie besides the ending.

This one however I was really confused with why people loved it. I didn't think the movie was so bad at first, but the more it went on the more I started to hate it. I couldn't care for the characters, I found most of the movie to be boring and I just couldn't believe that two talented actors were wasting their talent on this garbage. I also could not stand the way they portrayed Asians in this movie. Almost all of the Asians in this movie were portrayed in such a stereotypical way and none of it was funny. Especially this bit where this one girl tells Bill Murray to "lip" her stockings and I was all like "Ha ha, it's funny because she pronounced rip wrong. What an original joke." In fact almost all of the moments in this movie that were supposed to be funny just weren't. The only time in this movie that made me chuckle was that part where Bill Murray takes a shower and leans because the shower head was too low. The one thing about this movie though that truly made it a chore for me to watch that there was no plot. It was just a random string of events happening in a day and I'm very picky about movies without a plot because if nothing interesting is happening then I just get bored and I put this movie in a group called "nothing of substance happening movies" which is a phrase I coined. When I finished watching it I felt really conflicted with why people loved this movie so much. Looking back at my thoughts on this movie in my movie log for 2012, I didn't really do that good of a job of saying why I didn't like it as I was still trying to find my voice, but at least I have a friend on here named the giraffe who would comment on my list every month or so to say that he agreed with some of the movies I liked/didn't like and luckily he agreed with me on this one which made me feel somewhat better about not liking this movie. Later on I found out that this is a very polarizing movie, but even with that I still don't get why people love this movie even when people give reasons for it. Well at least it's better than Somewhere which is a hundred times worse than this film.

During the October of 2011, I started to delve into the horror genres by starting with some of the tamer ones like Psycho, Night of the Living Dead and this one and then I started to work my way into some of the heavier movies of the genre. While the former two films weren't that scary, (That's not to say I didn't love them though.) this one had me scared shitless by the time the movie ended. It was the first time a horror movie has given me that feeling and I've seen this movie a couple more times since then and it's just as scary the second and third time around.

I also saw this one in IMAX and the thing with this one is that I remembered loving it back when I saw it. As time went on though I decided it was a decent, but forgettable movie.

I saw this in theatres due to the amount of praise it got and going into it I didn't know that much about it which I think is what part of what made the experience work. Some of the stuff in this movie really made me cringe and not very many movies are able to make me do that. When the movie ended the audience went into complete silence until they walked out of the room. I talked to my dad about this movie and just wondering why the people did what they did back then which was exactly what I was thinking during some of the disturbing shit that happened in this movie. I even talked about how groundbreaking it was because as far as I can recall no movie has ever shown the worst in slavery before this movie came out. I mean there was Glory which really didn't do that good of a job of doing that and Django Unchained which didn't glorify it as the leading hero was a victim of it, but it didn't take it seriously either as it wasn't that kind of movie. He did tell me though that there was this mini-series called Roots which was about slavery, but I haven't seen it so I can't say how seriously it was portrayed and because it's a mini-series which is different from a movie about slavery. Now some people said this is a movie you'd only want to watch once because of how disturbing it is, but honestly I'm willing to give this another watch at least 10 years from now or so as I'm not going to not want to watch a movie again just because it's disturbing and because there's so much more to it than the leading character getting whipped.