“Yeah, I’d have to say Scent of a Woman and… uh… Rugrats Go Wild… you know, the one where they meet the Wild Thornberrys? Those are my favorite films. Without question!” 

It never goes well.  

These are my favorite questions to be asked—the kind I psychotically rehearse in my head, just in case they ever come up. What really matters is you’re asking the question, whether it’s to a friend or to yourself in the mirror—it matters. Any art or obsession will do here. When it comes to film, theater, and music, it’s a game of hoarding—building endless lists to make sure the “right” ones are checked off, obsessively scouring the vast collection of so-called masterpieces, as if missing one would be some kind of crime. 

Much like a hoarder who compulsively collects things of little value, convinced of their worth despite the clutter they create, film lovers do the same. It turns into a form of artistic hoarding—an obsessive need to watch endlessly, consuming as much as possible, as often as possible, witnessing everything you can. From filmmakers to genres to decades, you'll never see it all. It’s an insatiable urge to experience the human condition again and again, from different perspectives and heights, to feel deeply everything a one-to-four-hour film has to offer. Endlessly. 

There’s also a sense of ego that flares up, and a fear that you’re going to name the wrong movies. That you’ll be at party and upon mentioning your favorite movie, the person you're talking to might look at you with a mix of confusion and judgment, scoff, and storm off, shouting that you have the film palate of a neanderthal, while calling for your immediate ostracism from anything cool and worthwhile—effective immediately! 

To anyone deeply struggling with this, I’d give you these soft words of advice: get over yourself. It’s not that serious. No one is going to brutally judge you for whatever your favorite film is, and if they do, they are likely not someone you want to spend valuable time with anyway. Just say the first film that instinctively comes to mind—it’s probably a more interesting choice than blabbering on about why Metropolis is your favorite film. If the first film that comes to mind happens to be Metropolis, good for you. Now, you’re at a party—make your explanation fun, at least.

Beyond this psychoanalysis, there’s an important, relevant question…  

Why?  

Very rarely in the wild am I asked why I like films. This is likely because the answer could be inherently boring—especially in a dinner party setting. I’m aware that you, the reader, did not ask me why, but since this is my blog, I'm giving myself the stage to ask this extremely self-indulgent question.  

The best, albeit self-deprecating, answer is that I am an anxious person. The absence of perceived control or safety in my life causes knots in my mind and body, and this has been debilitating for a good quarter of my life. I’m working on it. Film, for my anxious self, is a way to step out of sorrow, step out of strife, and the thousand natural shocks. It allows you to bask in something bigger, something more important than whatever it was you were walking into the theater with. It’s the moment your eye latches onto moving images and sounds, and you let go. It’s the ultimate meditation of humanity.  

Screenwriting and directing are control freaks' playgrounds—the approach of willfully trying to change reality to fit into your own narrative. As a writer or director, you are the almighty composer of reality within the world you’ve built. You are molding and twisting something that, in our normal reality, functions steadfast and unwavering; we are at the mercy of things we do not have control over. 

From a viewer’s perspective, it is the only art form that, regardless of how abstract or strange, directly holds your hand through the experience. Every forlorn expression, laugh, or terror of suspense is presented to you, the viewer, unwaveringly. Your interpretation comes from the relationship you develop with the film over the course of its runtime. If the film works for you, it grows inside you and colors your world in some way. Somewhere, sometime, you will see something that sparks a moment from that film—evoking a feeling you had while watching. If the film doesn’t work for you, it gives you the gift of anger, a rage that your time has been wasted and you could’ve made a better film blindfolded. Like a record you listen to from start to finish. If the craftsmanship of melody and lyricism has been successful in evoking its magic, you are a changed person by the end of that record. You carry those melodies, poetic images, and turns of phrase with you in everything you do—it becomes the texture of your life. Regardless, you now have a relationship with this piece of art as you would a person you have a relationship with. These are living things that now exist with you, like it or not. Film is the pinnacle of this feeling, combining all mediums into one collaborative form. The relationships we have with it burn hot. If someone asks for your thoughts on a certain film, you have the ammunition to describe it deeply as you would a lover, or fundamentally attack the essence of its character like a person you lament.

I grew up on a steady diet of films. A warped bookshelf of VHS tapes sat in the rec-room, and Saturday mornings—before the world got loud—I’d sneak them out of their cases and fire them up on the corner TV. There was a silent film version of Little Red Riding Hood from 1911 that wrecked me at six years old. I don’t know if it was the eerie silence or the crooked, nightmarish film grain of a German Shepherd—not a wolf, mind you—chasing a little girl through an old house. It horrified me—sticking in my mind like glue on my fingertips. Nevertheless, the horror subsided and my liking of movies only continued to grow as I got older, and as I found myself in more spaces where films were talked about.

 It’s very rare you find someone that doesn’t like films, so by that logic, it is easy to spark up conversation around the topic. Through cultural osmosis—the way we absorb knowledge without even realizing it—film references have become a kind of shared language. In a world saturated with media, we don’t just watch movies; we absorb them, their stories and characters sinking into our collective consciousness.

Even if you haven’t seen the film being boisterously fawned over in the cramped kitchen of the house party, chances are you know its most iconic lines or scenes—maybe even recognize one of the actors. It’s proof of how deeply entertainment weaves into everyday life.

And that, in its own way, feels a little like magic.

There’s something electric about tossing around bits of art and media, sharing that rush of satisfaction when a reference lands, when someone gets it. A good film recommendation? It’s like a love letter. Recommending a film? Even better. Especially when you get that spark in someone’s eyes, that real excitement—not the awkward, “I’m just trying to be polite” look. There’s a connection when someone shares your passions, when your tastes align.

Hell, movements—real change—are born out of that.

I’m convinced that if every authoritarian figure of the 20th century had just had a solid crew to watch films with—friends poised to challenge and reflect—they might’ve turned out to be better people. Films about fascism? Phenomenal. Films made as tools of fascist propaganda? That’s one of the few branches of art that should rightfully be dismissed. I’m not being controversial when I say all fascist cinema is garbage.

This aforementioned camaraderie begins in the spaces where we watched movies. Whether it was a glamorous theater, a dilapidated one, or someone's makeshift living room, these were the places where the magic happens. A good portion of my adolescent evenings were spent with close friends, coworkers, or even strangers, watching films—sometimes more than one in a single sitting. Whether we’re watching intently or making commentary, the spaces where we watch them are where the connections begin. Those holy theaters and cozy rooms were as much a part of the experience as the films themselves. It’s painful to think that, over the last two decades, movie theater attendance has plummeted by 46%. Sure, there’s hope—people are slowly trickling back to theaters post-pandemic—but with streaming goliaths looming large, it seems like theaters may never recover. 

In the chaos of 2021, with the pandemic still raging and a year and a half of lockdowns and societal decay packing ten years of trauma into a hellish blur, it felt as though the already declining movie theater industry was on death's door. With shareholder-pockets dwindling and hope fading, bright-eyed executives had the bold idea to reinvigorate the picture house business. With the star power of Nicole Kidman, and Captain Phillips screenwriter Billy Ray behind them, AMC launched its now iconic “AMC Theatres: We Make Movies Better” ad in September of 2021.  

These immortal words were spoken in the ad…

“We come to this place… for magic.  

We come here to laugh, to cry, to care.  

Because we need that, all of us,  

that indescribable feeling we get when the lights begin to dim.  

And we go somewhere we've never been before;  

not just entertained, but somehow reborn.  

Together.  

Dazzling images, on a huge silver screen.  

Sound that I can feel.  

Somehow, heartbreak feels good in a place like this.  

Our heroes feel like the best part of us, and stories feel perfect and powerful.  

Because here

they are.”  

It is an odd, sentimental, and instantly iconic advertisement. The commercial's lavish style, paired with the earnest melodrama of Kidman’s monologue, has elevated it to the status of a camp classic. People have parodied it, quoted it, printed it—even dramatizing it as though it were Elizabethan verse!  Although it hasn’t shifted or altered the trajectory of movie theaters, which continue to flounder in an ever-changing media hellscape, the ad has lasted. The ad still plays before every AMC screening, showing up just before the film starts to remind you that you are, in fact, in a movie theater.  

Maybe it's because people love Nicole Kidman, maybe it's because the ad is genuinely catchy, or perhaps it’s the subtle Stockholm Syndrome of being forced to watch it every time you step into an AMC theater. Whatever the reason, the ad has endured. It lives on as one of the defining memes of the 2020s. When those heels walk straight into that puddle, and Nicole’s monologue begins and she unveils her hood like the mystics of old; people smile. I’ve even been in theatres where people cheer and clap. What began as an awkward, overly sentimental ad campaign has since evolved into something that endures. Its staying power isn’t merely a product of its meme potential; I would argue the appeal runs much deeper.  

This quick-hit ad for America’s biggest movie chain has lasted because, at its core, the monologue speaks a profound truth. Nicole is right. What it captures is the very essence of why film continues to resonate so deeply within our cultural zeitgeist. 

There is a reason Broadway and theater have been dethroned as the primary entertainment for the masses, and it has nothing to do with anti-intellectual rhetoric or the dumbing down of society. Film takes the spectacle and contemplation of the stage and presents it to the masses in a way that, sadly, theater cannot compete with. Fundamentally, this is because you can take the same film anywhere, and it will completely transform the experience. While theater is a living, breathing thing, A movie is a frozen moment of the human condition—something that can be repeated endlessly, ideally until the sun explodes. You don’t need some quality performance or slick direction to throw an old DVD into a busted television. I’ve seen people get swept up by the simplest movies, staring at a worn screen in a crumbling living room, like the whole world is crashing down around them. Now that’s effective art. 

Witnessing a film in the right context, the right state of mind is an experience—one that I will continue to argue can be life-altering. We engage with humanity when we engage with film, and through the magic of its craftsmanship, we live out things unfathomable: things we wish we had, or things that only exist in our mind's eye.  

That’s essentially what Nicole Kidman is fumbling through in her monologue—and, truly, God bless her for it.  

In that same chaos of 2021, I was going through a similar downward spiral to that of AMC’s stock value. It’s curious, the seasons writers have—one moment, you are harvesting every idea you have, sure that everything is golden, and the next, you’re avoiding the pen and the keyboard, wondering if you’ll ever write again. That year, I slowly started to become the worst iteration of a writer: the one that just talks. Talks about writing they’re going to do, writing they want to do, and the writing of others. The thing is, all while doing this talking, they don’t do the literal thing that makes one a writer—writing. During the pandemic, and especially the lockdown portion at the start, I was too obsessed with my personal dramas and obsessions to create. Like so many people, I felt like this was a wasted period. If there is any silver lining, it’s that the existential dread of COVID was a strong motivator to make the leap to Los Angeles, a move I felt would jumpstart progression in my life.

When I first moved to Los Angeles, I dove headfirst into a screenplay that I had been sitting on for years. It is a passion project of mine that I hope to share with the world in the near future—a love letter to so many facets of my being that made me the person I am today. Promptly after finishing this draft, I lent a hand in helping write another screenplay, finished it, and then fell off a proverbial cliff in terms of writing. The fear of doing kept me from writing. I just could not get back on the horse in any meaningful way. Tragically, this infiltrated my film-watching habits and rotted it from the inside out. I became the person that only saw one or two movies a year in theaters and only engaged with current media, rarely having the energy to engage with older films or try to discover things I hadn't seen before. I could feel myself rotting, losing inspiration, and growing a spiteful edge. I wasn’t growing. I wasn’t doing the thing that brought me joy. I do notice that when I watch something, say an older film, or something in the indie circuit like a NEON or A24 production, I felt a spark of inspiration. I felt alive. In following this urge, I slowly began to force myself to watch things. 

On September 22, 2024, I joined the AMC A-List. For the uninitiated, this gives you the ridiculous ability to see three movies a week for the price of one. Twelve movies a month. I have no idea how they’re making money with this program, and frankly, I’m not complaining. It felt like a way to jump-start the inspiration I’d been lacking, and with any luck, keep me going.  Each film I watched, whether brilliant or flawed, became a treasure trove of ideas, the ultimate prompt. The inspiration was there, but I wasn’t sure where to direct it. 

Hard cut to January 2025: Los Angeles is burning. I was one of the lucky ones whose home and earthly possessions were not lost in the wildfires. But the place where I worked? Ten minutes from Altadena, where some of the worst fires in California history were raging. The place shut down for almost two weeks. I hadn’t had this much time on my hands since the pandemic. It turns out, unresolved trauma has a funny way of surfacing when you’re stuck at home with nothing but time on your hands.

I had two choices: sit in fear and do nothing, or do the thing I loved. Write. So I started watching films again. I started writing about them. I could escape the dread of chaos by diving into another world through film, and better yet, write about it afterward—the perfect meditation and exercise, like a transcendental pilates class. And now we’re here. At the time of writing this, I will have seen twenty-seven movies in the month of January and fifteen in February. I have written about all of them and plan to post every subsequent review on this blog. This is all out of love. Love for sitting in a theater, love for drama and laughter, for stepping out of your own life's hardships, and into someone else’s. This blog is the total culmination of my love for two things: film and writing. 

This is the effort of doing, not just talking. I can’t think of a better reason why.