Film at Age 23

Being a film nerd in 2010 feels sort of archaic. Passion for film seems to me to fall into three categories: those who love and champion it as a popular "art," fans of Spielberg and the Star Wars and Lord of the Rings Trilogies, who rarely venture higher than the middle-brow works of Milos Forman (Amadeus) or Clint Eastwood (Million Dollar Baby, Invictus); those who prefer to recognize it only in its high culture formations, who strictly prefer Bergman, Fellini and Kurosawa, and, to a lesser extent, Kubrick and Woody Allen; and those who will literally watch anything, from low-budget Japanese exploitation to the French New Wave, from the earliest silent film to the latest Hollywood blockbuster, and have a strong and often particular opinion about all of it. I count myself in the final category, which often seems smaller than the others, and work hard to maintain my place in it. I've watched an episode of Gray's Anatomy and an episode of Bergman's Fanny and Alexander in the same night. I can speak about and reasonably find connections between Jean-Luc Godard's Band of Outsiders and Takashi Miike's Ichi the Killer in the same breath. I have syllabi of classes on cinematic surrealism (exhibit a.), soviet montage (exhibit b.), and the American gangster movie (exhibit c.) floating around in the back of my head. Anybody starts talking about anything they saw recently, and I inevitably butt-in and start asking "well, have you seen this?" And being in this anything-goes category of film nerds is not without its hardships: variously, you may be ridiculed for thinking that the turns in Up In The Air and Slumdog Millionaire are fairly commercial, while also having a healthy appreciation of trashy John Carpenter movies like They Live and having trouble mustering the interest to see Rashomon again. There may be some critics you agree with sometimes--Pauline Kael, Jonathan Rosenbaum, even Manny Farber--but mostly you're just sitting alone at home watching these things on DVD with no one to talk to who gives a shit about any of it. You troll the imdb message boards and Slant Magazine for help, but everybody on the internet just seems lonely too. So you just watch and think and hope things will get better if you go to graduate school. That's what film fandom is like at age 23.

(a.) Luis Bunuel's Un Chien Andalou, Simon of the Desert and Phantom of Liberty, Raul Ruiz's Three Crowns of the Sailor and Klimt, David Lynch's Eraserhead and Mulholland Drive, Alain Resnais' Last Year At Marienbad, Richard Linklater's Waking Life.

(b.) Eisenstein's Strike, Potemkin and October, Dviga Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera, Dovzhenko's Arsenal, Pudovkin's Chess Fever.

(c.) William Wellman's The Public Enemy, Hawk's Scarface, Raoul Walsh's The Roaring Twenties, Coppola's Godfather, De Palma's Scarface, Scorcese's Mean Streets and Goodfellas.