We're all baseball card lunatics (or, lunatics in training). We spend countless hours each week discussing players from a long ago era, on pieces of really old cardboard. And, when we're not posting, more than likely, we're all thinking about baseball cards. At least, for a little while.
What, if anything, do you guys also collect besides baseball cards, other baseball collectibles and ephemera?
I've always loved movies, and more and more I found myself losing interest in the movies coming out of Hollywood recently. While there are still some really good or great films that catch my eye, the vast majority of what gets released to the theaters today is utter crap, in my opinion. It's highly derivative trash. It seems that Hollywood, in general, has run out of ideas. Everything is getting a remake now. Everything. And if it's not a remake, it's yet another sequel of a first film that wasn't really any good. If I offend anybody here, I apologize, but how many
Transformers movies, or
Fast & Furious movies, do we need?
So, about a year ago, I decided to explore the history of cinema. I've loved the Golden Age of Hollywood since I was young, but there were so many classics I'd never seen. I set out to remedy that. It's also a big world out there, and I'd never even scratched the surface of foreign films, either recent, or from long ago. So, I started reading. I explored the directors I loved, and found out who influenced them. Then, it all kind of snowballed. Ten months ago, I had about 75 movies on Blu-ray. Now, I'm closing fast on 600. Film appreciation has become a second passion, on par with my love of baseball and baseball cards. And to be honest, I really don't miss today's Hollywood. I'll still check out films that interest me once in a while, or have critical acclaim. And, whenever a new
Star Wars film comes out, I'm there because of the memories they bring back of childhood. But those are the exceptions.
So, now, I spend much of my free time watching films from Alfred Hitchcock, François Truffaut, Federico Fellini, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Akira Kurosawa or, probably my favorite director at the moment, Ingmar Bergman. I've grown to love the silent film era, so I am always adding Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd or Buster Keaton to my collection, as well as movies F.W. Murnau and Carl Theodor Dreyer. If you perused my collection, you'd see Jean-Luc Godard, Orson Welles, Yasujiro Ozu, Edward Yang, Sir Carol Reed, and a lot of the biggest names from the past 50 years; Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Roman Polanski, the Coen Brothers, and Steven Spielberg.
I love watching great directors and actors create magic together. There was something special about Elia Kazan and Marlon Brando working together. Billy Wilder's oeuvre was filled with great performances by Jack Lemmon and Fred MacMurray, Marlene Dietrich, Barbara Stanwyck, Gloria Swanson, Tony Curtis, and, of course, Marilyn Monroe. It didn't matter if Wilder was doing a comedy, a drama, or noir. He worked well with Bogie in a romance. But then again, Bogie was great with everybody. Bogie and Bacall had incredible chemistry. Bogie and Ingrid Bergman had great chemistry. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Gene Kelly singing in the rain, or dancing with a mouse. The stars back then were greater, the movies better. Elizabeth Taylor's eyes, Betty Grable's gams. If Esther Williams was near a pool, some magic was about to happen. "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn!" Is there an actor today that could truly pull that off? Any actor with Clark Gable's gravitas? Who could toss off a line like, "fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night" as convincingly as Bette Davis in
All About Eve? There is no Cary Grant today, no Audrey Hepburn. No James Cagney or Jean Harlow. Nobody brings the heat on screen like Rita Hayworth or Veronica Lake. There's no Kate Hepburn, or Grace Kelly, no Kirk Douglas. And nobody is nearly as cool as James Dean, or Steve McQueen. They don't make films like
The Big Sleep,
Touch of Evil,
Double Indemnity or
Laura. There's no
Sunset Boulevard, or
Citizen Kane, no
Casablanca or
The Graduate. The vast majority of today's "epics" are CGI-laden crap. What happened to true epics, with their seemingly infinite scope. I'm talking about
Spartacus, and
The Ten Commandments,
Cleopatra and
Quo Vadis.
No, if you want to see truly great new films, those new films are those old films you've not yet discovered. Give me
A Streetcar Named Desire, or
West Side Story,
The Bridge on the River Kwai,
Patton on
The Seven Year Itch.
Bonnie and Clyde,
Rear Window,
The Third Man or Dr. Strangelove.
White Heat,
Lawrence of Arabia,
High Noon or
The Grapes of Wrath.
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf,
Rebel Without a Cause,
North By Northwest, or
Chinatown.
La Dolce Vita,
Seven Samurai,
The Seventh Seal or
Au Revoir Les Enfants.
2001: A Space Odyssey,
Close Encounters of the Third Kind, or
Solaris.
The Grand Hotel, Clark Gable's
Mutiny on the Bounty, Fay Wray's
King Kong, Errol Flynn's
The Adventures of Robin Hood. Give me Fritz Lang's
Metropolis,
M, or
The Big Heat. Or, give me Alfred Hitchcock's
Psycho,
Notorious,
Vertigo or
Rebecca.
I am building a Blu-ray collection that I will have for the rest of my life. Countless hours of entertainment at my fingertips. Whatever strikes my fancy at any given moment, I'll have it. And while I'm watching, I'm reading books written by the great film critics, and learning about how films are shot in documentaries done by men like Martin Scorsese and Ingmar Bergman.
That's my other collection. What's yours?
