I can still remember the first time I watched Donnie Darko, it just blew me away. It's one of the few films where I've watched the entire end credits. I just sat in a trance just trying to process exactly what I had seen and how I was feeling.
That for me is the power of film. It can awake something inside you that either you didn't know you could feel or hadn't felt for long enough to have forgotten what it is.
People always say 'the magic of the cinema' in reference to how seeing a film at the cinema is the ultimate way to see a film, yet I don't agree with that - now I'm not condoning illegally downloading them instead so chill out homeslice!
Watching a film in your own house, flat, studio - wherever! Is a much more personal experience than a cinema. I love going to the cinema I really do - but the films that have struck me the deepest have been those I've watched in my own room or house.
Like I said earlier - I can still remember sat curled up - yes curled up - well more like sat with my legs up on the chair, is that curled? We'll say yes!
Anyway, sat CURLED up in my room almost sat right up to the screen just being sucked through a portal into the mind of Richard Kelly in a magnificent work of mind-fuck art. It was just me and the film, no one eating loudly beside me or annoying teenager chatting or texting in front. Just total focus on the film. Exactly what it deserves. Perfect.
I remember the goosebumps I got, laid on my bed in the early hours of a school night watching Robin Williams deliver the greatest, calmest 'fuck you' speech to Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting, not in a cinema, on a little portable tv video combo. If a film is that good it will suck you in wherever, whenever you watch it.
Being utterly spellbound as I was watching the stunningly beautiful Princess Mononoke in my own living room, not even realising someone had come home and started talking to me as I was no longer on my sofa, I was in that forest, that magnificent forest just taking it all in.
Christ even holding back the urge to shout 'come on' on a plane as I was inspired by Billy Bob Thornton's awe-inspiring monologue in the brilliant Friday Night Lights.
I could go on and on and on...
Look, never stop going to the cinema but ask yourself the films you remember, how many did you watch at the cinema and how many did you watch in the comfort of your own home where you are free - from the smell of nacho cheese or noisy kids - to be taken wherever the director chooses to take you?
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