I’ve talked about this on the blog before (and a number of other places), but I’ve never been one of those people that cares too much about spoilers. Granted, I’m not going to go out and search for them to satiate that “I gotta know” need, but I’m also not going to flip a dude for accidentally spilling some details. In fact, one of my biggest pet peeves is when I tell somebody that I loved a new movie or an episode of a show, only to have them contort their bodies and shout “don’t tell me!”
To me, the thrill of any story or movie is its execution, the beats that stories take as they unfold, the sharpness of the characters and the journey that the storyteller takes you on. Because really, if a story is only as good as its twist or its ending, then it falls apart upon the scrutiny of a second viewing.
As such, I’m the kind of guy that can watch a movie a dozen times over and never grow tired of it. For some these things might not be related, but I think they’re intrinsically tied together. I believe a movie or story can be just as entertaining upon multiple viewings if it’s told well, and as a result I’ve seen a handful of items far too many times.
Over the years, I’ve come to refer to these precious movie gems as my “sick list”. They’re the movies I would watch when I was sick as a kid. I would watch them over and over again, memorizing the lines, and in the cases of movies recorded on a VCR, where the commercial breaks fell. I imagine every body has some kind of sick list. Here’s mine.
– Jurassic Park
– Star Wars: Empire Strikes Back
– Terminator 2: Judgment Day
– Mission: Impossible
– Superman and Superman II
– Batman
– Back to the Future 2
– Twister
The king of that list was Jurassic Park. Seriously, I went through a period of several years where I would literally watch that movie back-to-back for an entire day when I was home sick from school. Empire Strikes Back is definitely a close second to that, with a similar level of mania associated with it.
What’s funny is that this list is not all too dissimilar from what it would be now, although I’d exchange Back to the Future 2 for the first one. When I was a kid I was a sucker for hoverboards. Sue me. Also I would probably remove Twister. I was in love with that movie when it came out for some reason. Interesting fact: Twister is rated PG-13 for “depiction of very bad weather”. True story.
So what about you guys? What’s on your sick list?
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