I have loved the movies for as long as I can remember. Some of my earliest memories:

Superman: The Movie
This, one of my favorite movies, was screened on ABC in the early ’80s. I was very young when it first debuted on television — only three years old — so I must have seen it a couple of years later. I remember seeing promos for the movie and begging my parents to let me stay up. (Some of this memory may be pure conjecture, though I’d swear it isn’t.) They gave in, but told me I had to go to bed as soon as Christopher Reeve turned into Superman. So I stayed up, eagerly waiting for the big reveal. Any Superman fan knows that your first glimpse of Superman, live and in costume, doesn’t occur for quite some time. Forty-five minutes, maybe? Maybe not that long, but it’s a while. And then, with Lois Lane perilously dangling from a helicopter, there he is! There’s Superman, finally, flying around, saving people, talking like a hero — finally, after forty-five minutes, there’s the billowing cape and etc. and oh shit, here’s Mom and Dad, ushering me off to bed while the ABC Sunday Night Movie plays on without me.

This, by the way, may be the same promo that started it all:

Musicals in general
My parents were great advocates of the classic Hollywood musicals. So we grew up on Singin’ in the Rain, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, the whole Rodgers & Hammerstein catalogue. Donald O’Connor’s hilarious physical comedy in Rain, and his “Moses Supposes” duet with Gene Kelly, were some of my favorite moments. I loved the intrigue of the final act in The Sound of Music. One of the first times I consciously noticed, on my own, that actors appeared in different movies was when I saw Cyd Charisse in Rain and later in Brigadoon. It took a little longer to realize that Debbie Reynolds, who I first saw in Rain, was the same person as the scrappy title character in The Unsinkable Molly Brown. Years later I had a similar revelation when I realized that the sullen badgering father-in-law from Fargo was Harve Presnell, the very same man who sang of Colorado, his home swuh-eeeeeeeet home, in Molly Brown.

Not all of the musicals they showed us were hits, however. We finally threw in the towel when the folks made Liz and I watch Flower Drum Song, which I still regard as one of the worst movie experiences I’ve ever had. (Perhaps because we were fairly forced to watch it.) Even now, all I remember is some atrocious song about chop suey.

Alien
This is the great movie moment of my childhood. I was in the third or fourth grade when my folks brought home a rented movie and wouldn’t tell me what it was. Dad pressed play on the VCR, and I watched this. Precocious little bastard that I was, I figured out what we were watching long before the title sequence finished unfolding, and turned around excitedly to ask if I guessed right. Just watch, my parents told me, and so I did, completely captivated. This movie set my standard for horror, established my love for movies that show just enough but never too much, and turned me into the detail-obsessed movie fan that I am even now. Since that wonderful day I’ve seen so many movies starring Sigourney Weaver and Tom Skerritt and John Hurt and Ian Holm and the lot of them, but they’ll always be Ripley and Dallas and Kane and Ash to me.

Going to the movies
Alas, I was born just a few years too late to say that I saw Star Wars and Superman and all of the other grand childhood movies during their initial theatrical releases. (I am a 1978 baby, one year too late even for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which even now is one of my five favorite movies.) So while my peers talk of seeing Christopher Reeve fly on the big screen, or of watching Quint get his ass chewed up by the great white, I cringe just a little bit. Because confessing the first movie I saw in the theatre to my movie-fan friends is much like confessing my favorite ballplayer of all time to, well, anybody who likes baseball even a little. My favorite ballplayer? Darryl Strawberry. And my first movie?

Yep. D.A.R.Y.L. And, since we were raised Pentecostal, and Pentecostals only go to the movies when they’re on vacation and in places where nobody knows who they are — because movies are bad, see — my second movie was An American Tail. My third was Oscar. My fourth was Jurassic Park. And to make up for all of this, I spent all of 1996 ditching school and work to see every movie I possibly could. And this is probably as good a reason as any why I never managed to complete more than a semester of any college I attended.

Wednesday, October 14, 2009   

1. Michael wrote:
   October 15th, 2009 at 4:10 pm

   I LOOOOOOOOOVED D.A.R.Y.L. when I was a kid. Funny timing, I’m seeing SUPERMAN at a theater tomorrow night for a “classics” series.

2. erinhaigg.=] wrote:
   June 25th, 2010 at 4:30 am

   i am soo bored stuck in suportbaseeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee……………………………………………………………………………………………………….. at waidacaemyyyyyyy - bordommmmmmm ;D

3. erinhaigg.=] wrote:
   June 25th, 2010 at 4:32 am

   found this randomly :/ any decent hings gawn on,danielle told me boot this cse robert made suhn like this

the blog and design portfolio of Jason Gurley. (Learn more.) This site has been around since 1998; me, since 1978. In 2005 I drove 3,000 miles to see a movie. 2009 is pretty aimless so far, but I'm sure I'll get around to something sooner or later.

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Lust, Caution
Double Indemnity
Iron Man
Forgetting Sarah Marshall
There Will Be Blood
Gone, Baby, Gone
Live Free or Die Hard
The Indian Runner
The Iron Giant
Contact
An Inconvenient Truth
X-Men: The Last Stand
Superman Returns
Enigma
Nobody's Fool
Look, Up in the Sky
Numb3rs
Mission: Impossible III
Heaven
The Abyss
The Constant Gardener
The Mosquito Coast
The Hustler
Limbo
Grizzly Man
The Verdict
Superman Returns
Elizabethtown
Battlestar Galactica
You Can Count on Me
Rolling Roadshow 2005
The American President
My DVD collection

01. dreaming of falling
02. marvelous descent
03. a conversation
04. the colors
05. huffnagle island
06. a hundred million
07. sixty-six stories
08. anyone earthbound
09. a girl named eleanor
10. a route obscure and lonely
11. a certain stillness
12. this is jack
13. wide flat lands
14. going home
15. girl unscrewed
16. slow rehabilitation
17. twenty-three stories
18. a far-off point
19. fifteen years quiet
20. a one-beer fella
21. luminescence
22. one-sided conversation
23. hearts big and stupid
24. nineteen seventy-eight
25. first light
26. a hundred years
27. too long to stop now
28. plainswept
29. a widower in training
30. spies and assets
31. thirty years and then some
32. leaping over couches
33. cricket song
34. eleanor's first kiss
35. like so much ballast
36. too much
37. the longest wait
38. the second ice storm
39. rocket summer
40. waiting
41. wax wings
42. breakup
43. tough beans
43. the heavy gray sea