Movie Mad

I've been thinking about my film consumption these days. I watch a lot of movies. I am considering getting a master's degree in film or media and cultural studies. Am I weird in some way that I enjoy watching movies a lot?

In the past, I would say yes. But since moving to Baltimore, I've met several people who are even more movie mad than I am. They collect DVDs obsessively, and almost always know the films that I can reference. They have memberships to the American Film Institute and go to film festivals. Compared to them, I'm an amateur. (I'm also at least twenty years younger than them, so I've got time to catch up too.)

Sometimes I wish that I had been born during the 1930s. In a big city, of course, where I could go to the theater all the time and see movies whenever I wanted. I would be able to live in a period when great movies came out -- Gone With the Wind, The Thin Man, all the Mickey-Judy musicals, and so on. And I could read the fan magazines -- not the fan magazines that we have now like Entertainment Weekly and US Weekly and so forth, but fan magazines that didn't care about movie grosses like Photoplay and Screenland. I know it's easy to look back nostalgically, but those would have been the good old days for movie fans. Plus there weren't as many distractions -- I wouldn't sit in front of a computer all day and there would be no TV to watch at night. The dawning of the information age is great, but simplicity has its place at times.

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