Kevin Global Movie Day 2021 fell on a Saturday, which is a day I don’t normally post on, and probably won’t for the foreseeable future. That makes us a day late and a dollar short in terms of posting about it, but wtf-ever. There’s no better time like today to talk about it and celebrate it in any case.
This year marks the second anniversary, according to the Oscars website. They started this tradition to celebrate the unifying power that movies ultimately have on us, both as a society, and us individually.
Ever since my family got a TV with a built-in VCR, which no longer made cable a requirement to watch videos, I’ve been sort of a movie buff. Trips to Suncoast at the mall were something I looked forward to, and I remember flipping through their catalog of movies that they’d have in the store that was probably the size of the Manhattan phone book. Movie days in school were always a win in my book, even before the TV with the built-in VCR came into our lives. We’d either watch them on the TV and VCR on a cart from the A/V room, or in early elementary school, we’d watch them on the film projector.
In my history class in high school, we watched Schindler’s List, and Glory, both of which the teacher had to send notes home for parental permission before we were allowed to watch them. Glory was one I was familiar with. A family member got it on video, and watched it constantly one summer. I tried to watch it with them, but I fell asleep. Hey, I was 10 at the time.
I hadn’t seen Schindler’s List before, and it made a huge impact on me. For the rest of the day, I thought about all those people Schindler ended up saving, and wondered how they were doing these days.
Back in college, I took several classes on cinema, starting with a more general course, and later took one on the French New Wave genre. I wished I’d had the chance to take more classes in film, but at the time, I needed to focus on getting enough credits to graduate.
Who knows? I may go back to school at some point and take these kinds of classes for fun, instead of them being for a degree.
Anyway, Global Movie Day falls on the second Saturday in February, which ended up being last weekend. While I had other things going on that took priority, I celebrated it in spirit instead.
What’s the last movie you saw and liked? Which ones have you seen so far that made an impact on you, for better or worse? Speaking for myself, I saw Rommel on YouTube a couple weeks ago, and added it to my Watch Later list. One night when my day job work was done, I fixed my desserts and snacks after my dinner, plopped ’em on my tray with my Coke Zero, found Rommel, and hit the Play button.
I was really impressed. The movie was in German, but they had the subtitles, and the cinematography was done in a way that made me wanna keep watching, instead of listening as I switched between browser windows like I sometimes do with other movies, especially the ones that fail to hold my attention and interest.
Even if a movie interests me, sometimes I’ll write in my journal, or write or draw random stuff in my catch-all/scratch notebook. Not with this one. Some say Rommel was basically an apolitical autocrat, and others say he wasn’t, so the jury’s out on where he stood politically during the Third Reich. However, he was involved in the plot to assassinate Hitler in 1944, but the extent of his involvement’s lost to the ages. In any case, the movie’s depiction of Rommel was so compelling, and the way he never really had the chance to say goodbye to his family beyond those brief moments (at least according to the movie) was sad on so many levels.
Another one I’ve come to like is Blinded by the Light. I saw it at one of the Redbox kiosks in my neighborhood, and I picked it up to rent on a Friday night. It’s about this kid, Javed, who’s living in Luton. Javed takes a liking to Bruce Springsteen after a classmate at school loans him a couple albums, and it’s been history ever since according to the co-creator who based the character of Javed on himself.
Over to you, readers? Did you celebrate Global Movie Day? If so, how? What movies have you seen lately that made an impact on you? What was your favorite part? What do you like to do when you make it a movie night?
