27 Jun 2018

Ten Films With a Big Impact

At first I figured this exercise was pretty indulgent, but I liked that it prompted me think about the actual feeling of first watching many films. Remember how you felt the first time you saw Neo stop bullets? Or when you first saw Elliott on his bicycle fly past the full moon, or a bus fly over some unfinished highway, or the T-rex break through the electrical fence?

It’s easy to become jaded in the era of Marvel movies, when someone says that the new Thor movie “is actually really great.” For me it was restorative to remember how much cinema has given us. It nourishes our souls, it consoles us, guides us to become better people. Cinema is the greatest tool we have to understand each other and ourselves.

I went trawling through YouTube to find this video I first saw as a kid, a montage from the 1998 Oscars that depicts how cinema has seen all of human history.

I can’t watch it without getting a little misty.