If I haven’t made it readily apparent, I watched a ton of movies as a child. And by ton I mean billions, quite possibly literally. Growing up in Wisconsin I tended to have a lot of free time. Now, unlike the kids of today I spent most of that free time outside.

I created countless games and would spend hours playing them. One of my personal favorites was a version of baseball involving my basketball hoop and a tennis ball. You see I was always the pitcher and the object was to throw the ball into the square of the backboard for a strike, and if the ball hit the rim that was the equivalent of the batter hitting the ball. Trust me, it totally made sense to me and was a blast to play.

But when I would get tired of playing my own personal version of BASEketball I would bike to my local video store and rent a movie. Now it didn’t take long for me to work my way through the giants of the day and I soon began to search out far riskier fare. As an interesting side note, I know have the odd ability of identifying a good two decades worth of movies solely by their cover art, often times coming up with my own idea of what the movie was about based on these images.

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When I was growing up in Wisconsin I would often times kill time at my local video store. I would roam through the aisles, looking at the VHS boxes, searching for something interesting to watch. I was fascinated with genre mash-ups and Ralph Bakshi’s films and quickly immersed myself in them. But Waukesha wasn’t exactly stationed along the cutting edge of pop culture, so I had some rather sizable gaps in both my film knowledge and exposure.

It wasn’t until college that I began meeting people who were giving enough to introduce me to German Expressionism, Italian neorealism, and Turner Classic Movies. From then on I always have had great respect for people who introduce me to new and exciting things, especially when it comes to films.

Which brings me to my girlfriend, Anna. I found my first excuse to talk to her when she was reading Watership Down, which was one of my favorite books (as well as animated films) as a child. Much to my delight she had never read it before so it afforded me the perfect opportunity to lay down some serious knowledge, and from there we soon began introducing each other to all sorts of of new experiences. One interesting thing to note is she was far more open to trying out my recommendations early on then I was with hers. This is quite simply explained. She likes Bjork, Dogville, and Ayn Rand. I like cool crap.

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