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Mar. 9th, 2008 09:09 pmSo, I'm doing this meme for my mother.
( Top 250 Movies on IMDB. )
OK, why did I do that meme for my mother? She's not ever going to read it. Here's the thing: I was homeschooled by my mother (and actually, one year, by my father) until I turned 11/went into Form 1/Year 7/First year of middle school. During this time, and after it, my mother embarked on an aggressive campaign of forced enculturation.
Now, this sounds ghastly, right, but mostly we loved it, or it didn't register as unusual to us. We went around galleries and parks and sculptures constantly, we read Robert Frost and Hone Tuwhare when we were 6, we weren't allowed to watch television, and - finally, relevance - we watched a lot of classic movies at film festivals and so on. I mean, a lot. As I got older I started to whine about this, and I still feel that Walkabout is a very difficult movie that I never got a good hand on. However, we also saw some truly fantastic stuff - like Ben Hur, Emma, Doctor Strangelove, Bridge Over the River Kwai, and so on and so forth. I didn't always love them straight off but I learned a hell of a lot. My subsequent enjoyment of movies like Memento and the fact that I chose to go to Hotel Rwanda are direct results of my exposure to these films. I'm no longer a great movie-goer, and when I do go I often see rubbish, or genre films (which are not rubbish, but which rarely present anything new to me). So looking at this list, a lot of what I bolded is stuff that my mother took me to see, or stuff that I saw because I'd seen the films my mother took me to see and... I bitched about it a lot when I was a teenager but, Mum, I'm really really glad you did it now. Thanks and I'm sorry!
Also, it was cool to see a bunch of foreign-language films on there. I love it when I'm reminded the Internet is actually not all in English. Also-also, I've been reading the flist but not commenting at all: I'm sorry, you all are still shiny to me, honest!
( Top 250 Movies on IMDB. )
OK, why did I do that meme for my mother? She's not ever going to read it. Here's the thing: I was homeschooled by my mother (and actually, one year, by my father) until I turned 11/went into Form 1/Year 7/First year of middle school. During this time, and after it, my mother embarked on an aggressive campaign of forced enculturation.
Now, this sounds ghastly, right, but mostly we loved it, or it didn't register as unusual to us. We went around galleries and parks and sculptures constantly, we read Robert Frost and Hone Tuwhare when we were 6, we weren't allowed to watch television, and - finally, relevance - we watched a lot of classic movies at film festivals and so on. I mean, a lot. As I got older I started to whine about this, and I still feel that Walkabout is a very difficult movie that I never got a good hand on. However, we also saw some truly fantastic stuff - like Ben Hur, Emma, Doctor Strangelove, Bridge Over the River Kwai, and so on and so forth. I didn't always love them straight off but I learned a hell of a lot. My subsequent enjoyment of movies like Memento and the fact that I chose to go to Hotel Rwanda are direct results of my exposure to these films. I'm no longer a great movie-goer, and when I do go I often see rubbish, or genre films (which are not rubbish, but which rarely present anything new to me). So looking at this list, a lot of what I bolded is stuff that my mother took me to see, or stuff that I saw because I'd seen the films my mother took me to see and... I bitched about it a lot when I was a teenager but, Mum, I'm really really glad you did it now. Thanks and I'm sorry!
Also, it was cool to see a bunch of foreign-language films on there. I love it when I'm reminded the Internet is actually not all in English. Also-also, I've been reading the flist but not commenting at all: I'm sorry, you all are still shiny to me, honest!
