A Film Buff Primer

I was lucky, arguably. My mom was a fan of the two greatest voices for film preservation and history in pop culture, and we watched them every Sunday. Not only did I grow up seeing reviews of new movies every Sunday, they would routinely do specials talking about things like the importance of letterboxing and why colorization is bad. I also had an uncle who was deeply into collecting movies, an English teacher who cared more about old movies than most of the texts assigned to us by the State of California, and a sister’s boyfriend who was into cult movies. All things considered, it’s more surprising that I’m the only one of my sisters who is a film buff than that I became one.

Oh, I’m sure it has a lot to do with personality. My sisters both enjoy movies, and they enjoy movies on a wider level than a lot of other people. My sisters are also conversant in things like pre-Code films and the New Hollywood, though they may not have the terminology. They’ve just seen movies from that time period. And that really is because of how we were raised and the people around us. I think it also helps that we grew up in a day when a lot of cable channels were interested in a devoted but narrow following instead of trying to appeal to everyone. So I did see at least parts of Three Men in a Boat and The Rapture on basic cable.

But that doesn’t really happen anymore. So okay, you can subscribe (or have access, cough cough) to the Criterion Channel. And I took my son with me when I went to browse the sale at Barnes & Noble this month. (I could only afford The Princess Bride, and anyone who wants to give me more movies, hit me up.) I explained to him many of the movies that I was strongly considering. He now knows that Roger Ebert wrote Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, and I owe him a viewing of the Oscar telecast version of “Theme From Shaft.” I’m pretty sure he’s the only kid at Nisqually Middle School who has an opinion on the Marx Brothers.

Making your own bespoke film buff is a time-consuming process, though, and you have to have someone you can shape from scratch. And, as my sisters prove, it’s unlikely to work every time. Still, there are ways you can do it even in today’s scattered media culture. Even though I can’t take him to my local video store and browse the shelves, we can look at the streaming services we have access to and discuss the movies there, and we can choose to watch older ones we haven’t heard of instead of just whatever blockbuster is dominating conversation at his school.

It’s worth noting that I do this with my daughter, too, who chose last night to watch Zenimation. I think she has the personality to really become a film buff, which I’m not sure about with her brother. Today, we went and looked through my DVD shelves and she picked out a bunch she’s interested in watching, many of which she hasn’t seen before. We couldn’t find my copy of The Shaggy Dog, which I told her was on Disney+, and she responded with, “I’m more in a DVD mood.”

But I’m good with that, because physical media is an important step. The shelves matter, because it teaches them that the movies matter. Yeah, we have a lot of streaming services available to us. But also, we directly physically pay for things that then go on a shelf and into the DVD player because we can do that. Most of the holiday stuff is stockpiled in their dad’s workshop, because he marathons Halloween and Christmas. They’re used to that.

And importantly, it’s not just the quality stuff. My daughter rejected watching He-Man and She-Ra: A Christmas Special not because it’s a Christmas special and not because it’s a TV show and she was picking movies but because she doesn’t care for the quality of the animation. However, it is still on my shelf, and I think I paid real American dollars for it once. I do tend to blame their dad for the worst of the stuff we own, and I am justified in doing that. I did not pay real American dollars for The Postman. That wasn’t me. But there are things on my shelves that aren’t terribly good that I love anyway.

Even Roger Ebert of Sainted Memory did that sort of thing. There were movies he had a hard time justifying his love of that he freely loves anyway. And even if he didn’t love things, he could acknowledge their value. The films of Roger Corman are pretty universally bad, goodness knows, but the film landscape does not look the way it does today without them for a whole list of reasons. I’ll teach my kids that, as they get older.

And, yes, we watch things streaming. And sometimes that involves mindlessly streaming YouTube for hours. Sure. I watched a lot of syndicated junk as a kid myself, and things I haven’t seen in decades. And don’t ever want to see again. There is nothing wrong with that. I think it’s good for you as a person and as a viewer. My kids don’t have to learn all the time, and they don’t have to study film every time the TV’s on. They’re kids, not automata.

But the main way I teach my kids to love movies, even if they aren’t film buffs in the way that, oh, created this website, is by just watching movies. Old ones. New ones. The same ones over and over. Ones I love and ones their dad loves. Ones we’ve never seen and turn out to hate. Movies for work and movies for fun. You’re bored? One of the things you can do is just watch a movie. We have books about movies and soundtracks—and if you want fun, try to explain to a twelve-year-old why he can’t watch Sinners yet without describing the specific scene that means I don’t want him watching Sinners yet.