Thursday, January 26, 2006

MOVIE MEMORIES

The first two movies I ever saw in theaters were Pinocchio and the 70s remake of King Kong. Up here in NY/NJ, Channel 9 (used to be WOR, is currently UPN, will probably soon be WOR again) showed King Kong, Son Of Kong and Mighty Joe Young back-to-back every Thanksgiving, and I remember watching them with my brother at my grandmother's house several years in a row. The only drive-in movie I've ever seen was Up In Smoke (double-billed with Reefer Madness), and this was first-run, so I was sitting in the back of the car with absolutely no idea what was going on while my dad laughed it up and my mom giggled a little at a couple of things. The movies that remain strongest in my kid-brain are E.T., which I didn't much like at the time and saw again recently because my wife had never seen it before (it hasn't improved, and she absolutely didn't give a shit when he died, which I kinda admire in a first-time viewer); and a bunch of the crappy early 80s 3-D movies (Jaws 3-D, Metalstorm: The Something Of Jared-Syn, The Last Dragon, and particularly Parasite, which scared my brother and me so badly we had to leave the theater while my dad made fun of us). Of all of those, the only one I still like is The Last Dragon, which was on Univision a few weeks ago - it's even better in Spanish.

In high school, when most of my nerdy friends were memorizing Monty Python dialogue, I knew every line from Repo Man. I still use "Plato Shrimp" as a pseudonym for porn stuff occasionally.

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