I kick arse for the Lord!

When I was in high school, I used to watch a lot of movies with one of my friends. We went to the cinema pretty much twice a week and also rented quite a lot of videos. This means I did see a whole lot of crap, but was also introduced to some pretty good movies that I wouldn’t have seen otherwise. One of those movies was Braindead.

Basically, I would never have rented it because it’s a horror movie and I’m generally not much into horror. It’s not that I can’t watch them because I get scared or anything, quite the opposite actually. I remember watching A Nightmare on Elm Street at a sleepover when I was 12 and laughing myself stupid at the special effects. No one else found it funny though. I may have been a little odd. Anyway, my friend had already seen Braindead and said it was really funny, so I watched it. He was right. Yeah, it has all the bad special effects, but it was so obviously deliberate you knew it was supposed to be funny.

I’ve rented the movie a few times since then, but had never been able to find it on DVD. It was always a battered VHS hidden in some dark corner of the video store. Then last week a guy at work advertised it for sale second hand, so I bought it. The poor guy told me how much effort he had gone to to find the movie, but was selling a whole lot of DVDs to make more space.

Here’s one of my favourite scenes, which was frequently quoted by my friends:

So you’re monumentally busy?

I was watching Say Anything the other day and I was thinking how much I like Cameron Crowe movies. Well, that, and how I’d love to date someone like Lloyd Dobler, but that’s another matter entirely.

Out of my top 10 movies, I think 3 of them would be Cameron Crowe movies – Say Anything, Singles and Almost Famous. It’s funny, because the only reason I rented Say Anything to begin with was because they had a poster of it in the window of a video store I used to stand in front of while waiting for a bus home after school. At that stage, I was only 11, so had no interest in the movie, but noticed the cover of it some years later while looking for weekly videos to rent. I loved the movie (and John Cusack) straight away. Singles I initially rented because of my love of Pearl Jam, since it featured Eddie Vedder, Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament.

By the time Almost Famous came out, I knew I liked Cameron Crowe movies and 70′s rock, so figured I would like the movie. I was right. I remember seeing it at the cinema and being absolutely blown away when Stillwater started playing Fever Dog. I’ve never been able to recreate that feeling, possibly because the sound in the cinema is a lot better than my stereo at home, so you don’t get that awesome bass effect that makes you feel like you’re at a concert. I grinned through the entire movie. If anyone’s seen me at a concert I’m enjoying, I also grin stupidly through them. Dark and mysterious I’m not.

Unfortunately, every Cameron Crowe movie I’ve seen since then has been somewhat of a disappointment. Jerry Maguire was ok, but didn’t grab me the same way. Probably because Jerry was such an arse. Vanilla Sky should just never have been made. The Spanish version, Open Your Eyes, was good. They should have left it be. And Elizabethtown I just found kind of dull. Could be because that’s when I realised that Orlando Bloom really couldn’t act. I never really found him attractive after that. Sucks how that happens.