See more movies and you will get more jokes: A Manifesto.

"See more movies and you will get more jokes."

Tom Trevenen, Sophomore English, Masconomet Regional High School

Home for christmas this year I was driving to see Saving Mr. Banks with my family and discussing with my dad my lack of a creative outlet. He told me he reads the imdb message boards and that after all of my facebook posts about every movie I see I should just write a blog. My sister writes for Disney Diva (Diva Viva) and I think its time I made my own. About Movies.

3D Glasses and a full Captain America Costume. Judge away.

I work a high pressure 50 hour a week job. I get two days off, usually wednesdays and thursdays. I always see a movie. Always. I love film. I love popcorn, my amc stubs card and the lincoln square cinema on 68th street. (Especially if my ticket says my movie is in the lowes theatre, new yorkers know what I am talking about! Choosing between mezzanine and orchestra seating is sometimes more exciting than the movie.) The summer of '98 when the first AFI top 100 list came out I was allowed to watch as much TV as I wanted as long as it was a movie from the list. I went to blockbuster once a week and grabbed as many as I could find. I was 13. Everything changed. Citzen Kane seemed long winded, Gone with the Wind felt like a chore but The Godfather shook me to the core. I was going to be a cinefile.

Look at me. All shook to the core.

Senior year my high school gave everyone the last quarter off to create and perform an internship. Most kids worked at their parents offices or built a bridge over in a park or studied quantum physics. My proposal was to watch movies. I was instantly sent to the review board. I walked into a room that included the head of the english department, my guidance councilor and the principal of a 1,800 student regional school district. I had to defend my project and some how convince these terrifying authority figures that watching movies was an academic pursuit. The plan was simple, my two friends and I, over 5 weeks would watch and review as follows: Monday, one of the AFI top 5. Tuesday, one of the best picture winners of the last half decade. Wednesday, one of the top 5 box office grossers of all time. Thursday, one of the Razzie winners for worst picture of the last half decade and Friday was new movie day. The whole thing would be typed up and posted online. I blew them away. I talked about Ty Burr and Roger Ebert. I talked about the importance of film in our society. I laid out the careers available in film critique and threw down my copy of "1000 movies to see before you die". We got our internship. In one week we would watch Schindler's List, Shakespeare in Love, Star Wars, Battlefield Earth and Van Helsing.  We met every morning at 10 and fired up my buddies 50 inch screen. We wrote pages and pages of reviews, we yelled at scarlet o'hara and turned off battleship earth for fear of brain damage. We got an A+ and were the talk of the intership fair. We had beat the system, we were counter culture heroes, we were golden gods of the high school war between the bourgeois establishment and the lowly plebeian students.  I maybe glorifying this memory a little.

My High School Principal, I think...

That project is lost in time somewhere, everything probably erased from some long forgotten windows 98 with a pentium one. But ten years later, I am back. I want to write about movies again. Not for a grade. For my Dad, so he stops reading the imdb message boards. For Louis, so I can finally put into words why I make mine Marvel and not Nolan. For Jordan, whose True Blood episode blog was one of my favorite things. For Noah, who still floors me with the absolute obscurity of his yearly top 10 list. For Andy, the man I share my stubs account with, who told me "Do it, cause your facebook status' about movies clutters up my newsfeed." For Jeff and James who watched a lot of movies with me 10 years ago. For Ashley who is currently going to school for this and makes me jealous with every paper she "HAS" to write. Also, for me. Cause I want to talk about movies. I want to talk about Movies A LOT! So read on, enjoy, and most of all TALK BACK!