Welcome to We Like Movies

Hey there, welcome to We Like Movies, a space for my film reflections, award musings, and completist tendencies. More on that last one later. I'm Ryan Gaysling, and for now, I'm just placing myself here and looking ahead to the opportunity to write more about film, obsess about Oscars and making top ten(ish) lists, seeing new movies, and talking a lot about older ones too. 

Why is it called We Like Movies? Easy, because we do. I do, and if you're here, you do too. What have the movies meant to us? How have our lives changed over the course of a movie? Were you also overwhelmed by the ending of Before Sunset when you saw it the first time? Did you wear Auteur Training Wheels like Tim Burton or go straight to French New Wave, Ozu, and/or Ousmane Sembene? Maybe it was John Waters or Kasi Lemmons. Perhaps your cinematic awakening was Michelle Pfeiffer cartwheeling into a store and proceeding to whip the heads off of several mannequins. It could have been Kate Winslet whispering "meet me in Montauk" to Jim Carrey or the way Lily Gladstone looks at Kristen Stewart. Of course, it may have been something a man does too (I guess) like Dustin Hoffman's revelations in Tootsie or the first time Heath Ledger pops his tongue out in The Dark Knight. We all have at least one, and even if you're a more casual film fan, a movie moment still likely stands out as a core memory and a reason you revisit the art form.

I grew up in a home that enjoyed movies. They were a part of weekends or sometimes weekday evenings. We went to malls, we took my dad's younger siblings sometimes (his parents too), we went to drive-in on summer nights. We rented movies on VHS (listen, I'm not young, ok?) at an independent store run by an old Indian man who would sharply demand "number please" for your membership number and then go get the movies. My dad had a laser disc player (I told you, not young) and Christmas mornings when my sister or I received Jurassic Park or Speed on laser were a big deal. Roxanne. Thelma & Louise. Pretty Woman. Discs and cassettes that got worn out with re-watches. As I got older, movies began to be more than entertainment. I saw Annie Hall at 14 because I loved Diane Keaton, and something shifted. I saw 12 Angry Men the same year and I was so engrossed, I whispered a response to something that was being revealed onscreen. The love and passion grew from there, but its seeds were planted early. Once, our carbon monoxide detector went off in the wee hours and we had to call the fire department. Upon receiving the all-clear, none of us felt like going back to bed, so my dad pulled out his laser disc of Jaws which my sister and I hadn't seen, and we watched Steven Spielberg's breakthrough hit.

That is a good place for us to discuss my completist tendencies. I like to see all of something. It isn't that I've never walked out of a movie (a few really just weren't worth it, I'm sorry). I'm thinking of all of the Best Picture winners (which I've done) or the nominees (working on it). All of Katharine Hepburn's Best Actress nominations (10 down, 2 to go). That kind of thing. While my writings here will be about what's intriguing me currently, though not always a new release, and my (possibly unfortunate, but unlikely to fade) deep love of the Oscars, they will also be contained in The Completist Project, a chance to delve fully into a filmography. And that is why my family's early morning watch of Jaws made a good segue: in celebration of Steven Spielberg's upcoming 80th birthday, and the impending release of Disclosure Day, his 35th feature in 55 years, I will be making my way through the feature films of the great Peter Pan complex-haver himself. Rather than a simple chronological track through them, I want to pair, or occasionally triple up, the movies and discuss common themes, context, storytelling quirks, and whatever else strikes me as I go. 

All of this to be discovered as we move through the movies that made me, and the movies that move me. And, I hope, a conversation with you about the same things. The curtain is up, the first reel is on the projector, it's time for the movies.