welcome to MY criterion closet

 hello, lovelies!

i know i have a whole dedicated page to movies and television i watch, but i wanted to go more in depth on some of my favourites, since i've been itching to yap about them! a preface: there will probably be spoilers in this about several movies, so if you're planning on watching any of them, i suggest doing that and then coming back! but if you don't care or if my talking about it won't deter you from watching it anyhow, then get a snack and a beverage and get comfy!

i think the best place to start is the first movie i remember watching and immediately being in love with it: aquamarine, starring emma roberts, jojo, and sara paxton, released in 2006.

the first time i watched this movie, we were staying at my mother's half-sister's house. i begged my mother to let me rent a movie, and she said if i could find something before bed time, so i got to looking. nothing caught my eye (except for the season one poster of american horror story, it was the one of the leather man against the red background. gave me nightmares, honestly) until i saw the cover for this movie. now, i was heavy in my mermaid phase, as any six-year-old girl in 2010 would be, so i was sold just by looking at it. i went to my mother, kindle in hand, and said i wanted to watch this move. my mother, the woman that she is, side eyed me a little before renting the movie for me. i ran back to the room we were staying in and got my cheap hot pink skullcandy headphones and sat down on the couch and pressed play.

i was obsessed. the whole summer coastal town vibe was perfect, and i rewatched it as many times as i could in the forty-eight hours i had it for; when the time was up, we had already gotten home. i was eagerly awaiting our next trip to blockbuster, and i begged my parents to rent aquamarine for me. when they said yes i may have genuinely shrieked with joy. i watched that movie over and over and over again for the rental time, and when we had to go return it i asked if we could rent it again; i was told no, for some reason. i think the clerk just hated joy and whimsy and children, so i had to go pick out a different movie. my mother, as a consolation, said i could rent two movies this time, so i went and picked out the waterhorse: legend of the deep and the wild stallion. it should be noted that i was a horse girl, in the same vein as tina from bob's burgers. 

the year after, our local blockbuster shut down as the company had filed for bankruptcy, and i was devastated. no more friday night rentals and round table pizza. a positive side, though, was that my sister and i were both allowed to take two movies for keeps. i have no idea what my sister picked, i don't think she even remembers blockbuster, but i picked the wild stallion, because once a horse girl always a horse girl, and aquamarine. i still have the dvds (just... not the cases... i wasn't very good at taking care of my movies when i was a kid) and honestly treasure them. the aquamarine disc is one of those weird ones that has the movie in full screen on one side and wide screen on the other, and i only have two other movies like that. i watched the fuck out of that movie from the age seven to about thirteen, when i kinda sorta lost it (it was underneath my dvd player, somehow) and then i forgot about it. then we moved. shockingly, it had made it's way into my dvd case, and i was so happy when i found it again. like, tears of pure happiness fell from my eyes.

now, i have since put it in a new case, sans the cover. i used to have a old long sleeve shirt that i would wear the way aquamarine wore one in the movie; i stretched out and tore a lot of shirt neck holes doing that. the soundtrack is perfect, and is full of classics. i spent years looking for the specific version of island in the sun that plays during the summer splash dance scene in the film, but i never found it. i rewatch the movie regularly on disney plus, but i will always keep the dvd, and i hope that some day when my siblings have children, i can show them this movie and maybe they'll love it too.

one thing about me is that i love zombies. i think they're so cool, albeit a bit overdone in todays world, and in 2015 i was eleven and thought i was the shit. i was sick of little kid movies and i wanted to watch something that teenagers did. so when i come out of my room to see that a zombie movie was playing on the tv that my father said was rated pg-13, i sat there and watched the entire thing from about five feet away from the screen.

at first i was a little iffy because i thought it was a kinda weird concept: a zombie falls in love with a living girl. but then the more i thought about it, the more appealing i found the idea. it helped that i thought the male lead was hot (nicholas hoult i love you), plus... as i said, i love zombies. i was already a huge fan of the walking dead, and i wanted to get into more horror movies but was too scared to actually get into anything too scary, so this seemed like a perfect jumping off point, you know? plus, it was, for the longest time, the only romance movie i liked.

i hadn't seen this movie again until i was eighteen, i believe, but i still loved it just the same. well, okay, not exactly, and i had recently come to terms with my own sexuality, and finally allowed myself to be attracted to women, so i finally admitted to myself that, yeah, not only was nicholas hoult hot, but so was teresa palmer. from that point on, i asked for the dvd every year for christmas and birthdays until i finally received it for christmas when i was twenty-one. i have yet to rewatch it, as i no longer have a working dvd player (god rest it's soul) and it's not currently streaming anywhere that i have, but i think about this movie all the time. it's on my watchlist for this fall and halloween season, so i hope that i find a dvd player soon.

when i learned romeo and juliet in high school, my flabbers were ghasted when i realized that warm bodies was literally just a retelling of that story. i mean, the main characters are literally called r (yeah, the letter; he doesn't remember specifics about his life as a human, it's a whole plot point) and julie. i genuinely felt like an idiot because it had taken me so long to realize it. my teacher asked me what the movie was when i brought it up during our classroom discussion on romeo and juliet in popular modern media, and the look on her face when i told her what it was was priceless and i wish i took a photo. 

now, i've built up my tolerance when it comes to horror, which is a whole thing in and of itself with my generation becoming desensitized to violence with how prevalent and accessible it's become online, but that's another can of worms for some other time. my point is... i actually don't know what my point was. i'm sure it'll come back to me eventually, but for now, it's somewhere lost in the maze of my brain; to quote patrick starr, of spongebob squarepants fame, "the inner machinations of my mind are an enigma". OH, i remember now: i was going to talk about the next movie!

i think the first time i watched this movie, i was about fourteen, maybe fifteen, and wanted to watch something that would scare me. by that age, i was already becoming more comfortable with the thrill of being afraid on purpose. the issue? at the time, all we had was netflix, and i'm not sure if you guys are aware, but netflix's collection of horror and thriller films is... not good. back then, there were loads of shitty b-movies, universally panned films, and ninety-minutes of nothing with the worst cgi blood you've ever seen. but every once in a while, a gem would be found amongst the rocks, and this was one of those gems. 

i'll be honest, i was skeptical when i first started watching this movie. i thought it was just going to be another shitty slasher that i had seen a million times before. then the beautiful cinematography and interesting characterization began to draw me in. initially, i decided to watch this film because of the title; i knew a green room was essentially a rest area behind the stage that musicians and singers would go to before and after shows (me and my baseline knowledge), so i knew it'd be somewhat about someone in the entertainment industry. what i didn't expect was a movie about a punk band trying to survive the night against a club run by neo-nazis, spearheaded by patrick stewart. like.. what?? if someone told me that plot summary instead of the one i read on netflix, i would've laughed in their face.

i rewatch this whenever i'm in the mood for a comfort movie (yes, this is a comfort movie, sue me) and it's easily accessible via streaming, as i don't have it on dvd yet. earlier, i called this a horror movie. this is not a horror movie, it's a thriller; horror movies are more so films that try to elicit feelings of disgust, fear, and shock via imagery mostly, while thrillers are films that try to create an atmosphere of suspense, unease, and tension. an example is the texas chainsaw massacre (horror) versus the blair witch project (thriller). this film, while it has some horrific imagery, like when the main character gets his arm slashed to near ribbons offscreen by a machete wielding skinhead, it's more suspenseful and the scenes of the protagonists trying to escape the club without dying via machete or dog are so tense to me.

i adore this movie, and now that it's back on netflix, i've watched it a couple times. i feel that it's a more summer type of thriller, though based on the visuals it takes place probably in that in-between season that inhabits the end of august and the beginning of september. you guys know what i'm talking about.

since i'm on the topic of scary movies, another one of my favourites is mike flannagan's hush, starring his wife, kate siegel, and john gallagher junior. now, i know john gallagher junior from duncan sheik's spring awakening, so when i first watched this, which was right in the middle of my spring awakening phase, i was shocked. my worlds had collided in the best way.

this movie is peak late fall/early winter vibes. and the setting is perfect for a film like this; middle of fuck-all nowhere in the woods. the house is essentially all windows, which i historically hate with a passion. my grandmother has a house on the coast, and when i was little i would sleep in the living room on a blowup mattress, which was fine. the issue was that the entire left wall of the room was made up of windows, and my grandmother doesn't have curtains to cover them. being five years old, i was obviously terrified of the dark (i still am, but that's whatever), and there are no street lamps or anything to break up the darkness and make the shadows retreat. not even the land before time could make me not be terrified. but i'm getting off track, i'm talking about a movie, not my childhood traumas.

something about the antagonist in this film is just especially scary to me. some random masked man decided that he wants to hunt, and you're the target. he's playing a cat and mouse game with you, as he can get into your home and kill you at any time. you ask him to spare you, that you won't go to the police and tell, that you never saw his face so it would be futile to tell anyway. he removes his mask. like... girl i would've just taken myself out at that point. my will to live in that type of situation would not be strong enough.

i have made almost everyone in my life watch this movie: i made my dad watch it, my sister, and lizzy. my sister and i have an inside joke that came from this movie. i first discovered this movie on yet another night of looking for something scary to watch on netflix and coming up empty. this seemed the least awful of all the films i had perused, so i decided to just give it a shot. i'm so glad i did. i'm already a paranoid person, so this movie made it so much worse but in a positive way.

this movie is what kickstarted my love for mike flannagan and his work. his limited series' he's done for netflix, his other films (except for doctor sleep, which i have yet to watch as i haven't seen the shining yet), and his upcoming carrie television adaptation which i am so excited for. the haunting of hill house kills me every time i watch it, and the haunting of bly manor is just a masterpiece (i just wish the lesbians were happy FOREVER, not just a limited time). i rewatch his works every fall, all season long, all the way through to winter.

now, this final movie i'll be talking about in this post is one that means a lot to me. say what you want to about it, but we bought a zoo is, in my opinion, a little master piece.

it was released in december of 2011. eight months prior, my biological father, patrick, died. now, if you know the story of the movie, then you understand. for those of you who don't know, the film is about a father who has recently lost his wife and now has to care for their two kids on his own. when my father died, he left my mother to raise two children on her own; me, the oldest, and my sister, not yet old enough to even remember him.

when i rewatch this movie this year, i wrote a long review on my letterboxd which i think is a perfect way to describe how i feel about this movie.

    "this movie means more to me than i think i can put into words. it came out about eight months after my dad passed, so to say the story hit close to home would be a bit of an understatement. my mom used to watch it a lot over the six months after it came out; it was pretty much always playing at least three times a week in our house. more often than not i would be sat on the rug in front of the tv, which to me was massive, watching this story of grief and overcoming it and learning to live with it long before i even knew what it meant to do so. revisiting this movie 15 years later, long after i've come to terms with my own version of grief, has been therapeutic in a sense. i found myself living vicariously through dylan's outward struggles and outbursts. sometimes i wish i would've acted out like that, just so i could've had someone listen and ask me what was wrong with me before things became detrimental to me physically. but that's neither here nor there. i remember asking my mom if we could buy a zoo about a year after my dad passed. "someday, maybe" she said, before kissing my head. but now i don't think we need a zoo. i think that now, at twnety-one, i've learned how to hold on to the memories, and let go of the grief.

but hey, maybe someday we can finally buy a zoo."

about three months ago, i finally learned how my parents met; summer 2003, my mother was working a fireworks booth when she saw my father from across the lot. she was immediately infatuated with him, and he knew right away he was going to marry her. simple, but i think it's nice to finally know how it all started, just like how benjamin finally tells his children how he met their mother at the end of the movie. fun fact: if i was a boy, i would've been named benjamin, so i always think that's funny. benjamin lee.

well, i think this might be my second longest, if not the longest, post i've made thus far. i hope you all enjoyed reading about my thoughts and random opinions on some of my favourite movies. i might make a few more posts in the future talking about more of them, if that's something that y'all would be interested in! until next time!

xoxo