What follows is a list of miscellaneous trivia about my movie-watching habits and opinions on films.
-- I estimate that I have watched about 1,200 movies in my life. I have kept a detailed spreadsheet of every movie I've seen since 1994, which comes to a total of 657. Pages like this helped me determine the movies I saw before 1994.
-- If we assume that every movie I watched was two hours long, then I've spent exactly 100 days in my life watching movies. This estimate, however, doesn't include the many films I've watched over and over, or those I saw portions of but never finished.
-- The first movie I ever saw was Star Wars in 1977. I was six months old, and my parents brought me to a drive-in.
-- I have never seen a single movie from 1941. That is the only year in the entire talkie era I haven't seen a movie from.
-- The first R-rated non-sequel I saw in a theater was Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992).
-- I have only been to a drive-in six times in my life. The last time was 1997, when I saw My Best Friend's Wedding and Men in Black.
-- My earliest memory of a drive-in film is E.T. when I was five years old. I remember playing on a playground right near the movie screen, and eating Reese's Pieces.
-- As a child, I watched lots of Chaplin, Marx Brothers, Laurel & Hardy, and Disney films.
-- Even as an adult, the genre I watch most frequently is comedy.
-- My favorite movie is Groundhog Day (1993).
-- My favorite horror movie is Misery (1990).
-- The Exorcist didn't scare me one bit. Arachnophobia (1990) did.
-- My choice for the worst big-budget film I've ever seen is The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003).
-- The most hilarious bad movie I ever saw was the 1983 version of Hercules starring Lou Ferrigno.
-- I'm a fan of the author Philip K. Dick. In my opinion, the best movie that captures the spirit of his books and stories is not any of the actual adaptations of his works (e.g. Total Recall, Minority Report, etc.), but the independently conceived Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
-- Rowan Atkinson is a talented comedian whose TV work greatly surpasses anything he's done in the movies. Still, when it comes to movies, he has done a number of effective cameos (e.g. Love Actually), but he is absolutely awful when he's the star of a picture. His five-minute role as an inept agent in the 1983 Bond film Never Say Never Again is funnier than the entirety of his agonizingly bad 2003 Bond spoof Johnny English.
-- I think that when it comes to surrealism and cynicism, English comedy far surpasses American comedy.
-- I prefer the weird Beatles movie Help! to their more critically lauded A Hard Day's Night.
-- My favorite Tim Burton movie is Ed Wood, but the film that best captures the essence of his quirky style is Beetlejuice, and I have considerable fondness for the Henry Selick-directed, Burton-produced Nightmare Before Christmas.
-- Roald Dahl was one of my favorite writers as a kid, with James and the Giant Peach being my favorite of his works. I have yet to see a movie do justice to his works. Most of the adaptations (and that includes the '70s Willy Wonka) are okay, except for James and the Giant Peach, which I found unwatchable (and actually never got past the first thirty minutes).
-- In the last two decades, the year with the most great movies was 1994. The Best Picture Oscar went to Forrest Gump (which I enjoyed at the time, but which has come to seem increasingly less significant as the years have passed). Also that year were Pulp Fiction (the best movie of the '90s), Shawshank Redemption, Ed Wood, and Quiz Show--all great films. Siskel & Ebert claimed the best film of 1994 was none of those but Hoop Dreams, a 3-hour documentary about the lives of inner-city kids playing basketball. I never got around to seeing it.
-- None of the Star Wars prequels were worth making. Neither was the new Indiana Jones film, but at least it was enjoyable.
-- If you can ignore horrible dubbing, abysmal dialogue, and often incomprehensible plots, Jackie Chan's Hong Kong films are amazing.
-- Originality is overrated. What's important is how a movie is done, not whether its ideas are new.