Allow myself to introduce....myself?
(No, wait...that's not right.) Alself me to introlow my...
(One sec.)
pop! screeeeeeee-
(Ah, there we go.)
ALLOW ME TO INTRODUCE MYSELF!
There, that's better. My name's Carlos. I'm currently 18. I'm from Los Angeles, CA, but I've been around a lot, spending a spell in Phoenix and currently residing in good ol' Pasadena, where the little old lady lives. I'm the son of Honduran immigrants (God love 'em) and am superbly blessed to have gotten into my dream-school, Stanford University. (Making my parents proud day-by-day; love ya, Mamita.) This is my blog.
(It'll come out slowly but surely that I'm a rather cheerful sort. I figure one must always look towards the silver linings in life, even during moments of great distress and emotional turmoil.)
It's about time I've started my own official blog. I've been keeping an informal movie blog on Letterboxd (the Facebook for cinephiles) for the past year or so, but I'll be maintaining this blog to parlay about other things in my life: school, music, books, the state-of-things-as-they-currently-are, maybe some poetry or short-stories I've had swirling in my mind. But the main thrust of this blog is, of course, movies. I've had a hankering for going to the movies since I was a little kid. I've grown a lot from simply watching them unfold, and I take a perverse pleasure in watching movies. There are days when I consider it downright unhealthy, sure, but at the end of the week, I look back and find I'm that more enriched by what the cinema can offer each and every one of us. They offer us glimpses into worlds we otherwise couldn't possibly begin to imagine--a conjugal French bourgeois family, the hardships of a Senegalese village, the life of an optimistic Eskimo roughin' it in an Arctic Tundra.
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| "Don't look at me like I'm crazy. All will be explained soon enough..." --An Eskimo. (Source: DVDBeaver.com) |
To paraphrase an epiphany I had after watching the rom-com-drama masterpiece that is Billy Wilder's The Apartment, each movie is just a little square in an ever-expanding quilt that make up who each of us are. They are binoculars that see beyond our seemingly ennui-filled boringness and help us realize the richness, the holiness in every singular moment of our lives. However, the movies help us make sense of our world just a tiny relative bit. To really be present in every moment, we must talk with others, we must love, we must accept the totality of death, we must engage the social sciences and the natural sciences and spirituality. Do the movies have all the answers? Certainly not. But they do point us in the right direction.
One of the main goals in my blog is to direct people to new discoveries, revisit old classics, and talk about why the movies are so gosh-darned important in our present lives. We have to see why movies are worth studying. Not just watching, mind you!; that implies you're taking up a passive role and simply letting the movie happen to you. No, I'm talking about seriously analyzing what it is that makes a movie great, what makes another not-so-great, and what it is about the cinema that's appealing. When you find the right one, you're left mesmerized. It's a rich pleasure to experience a movie that affects you, that grabs you by the lapels and shakes your soul out of you, putting it on display before you as its closing credits solemnly roll by. It's positively life-changing if you know what you're looking for.
But, bah! Enough jibber-jabber. On to the scrivvy writty!
