Discovering Something New

Isn't it funny when something comes along and changes your perspective on things? It can be something as big as finding love, or making a new friend who shows you a different view of your entire life. Or it can be something as small as realizing that you actually do like peppers when you swore you didn't.
For the last couple of years each year has had a change like this occur. It happens in the spring, almost like clockwork and comes to define the next 12 months of my existence in a way that is most pleasant. It started on February 4th, 2011 with the Swedish theatrical release of Disney's 50th animated release, Tangled. I walked in expecting little, hoping that it would at least provide an enjoyable 100 minute experience and walked out of the theater with a warm joyous feeling throughout my body. I was changed permanently, and the following year was filled with a re-discovery of the love for Walt Disney's legacy I thought was lost forever, and to anyone who knows me even remotely well will, if asked about my favorite movie answer without hesitation that Tangled is that film.
Nearly 13 months later, at the end of February 2012 it was time for the next big change to appear. I was working through my back catalog of movies and just happened to put on a film named Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House starring one of my favorite actors, Cary Grant and a sadly forgotten actress named Myrna Loy, who I had only heard mentioned before seeing Mr Blandings. However after viewing the film I ordered the complete collection of the The Thin Man-series which Loy starred in with William Powell. About a week later I was hooked and Myrna Loy and William Powell-collaborations were a must-see. The following 12 months would be filled with Myrna Loy both on the screen and off with both biographies on her being acquired and an autographed photo of her finding its way into my possession. To say the least, these "months of Myrna" were very educational and looking back at the amount of times I saw her picture in stills from The Thin Man as well as the Rouben Mamoulian film Love Me Tonight in what has become my personal holy scripture 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, it feels slightly strange to think that less than a year ago as of writing this entry my now favorite actress was nothing more than just an image and a name on a page. I didn't know how she sounded, how she acted or even what her biggest roles were.
This brings me to January of 2013, a month which I think can safely say will continue the last two years tradition without fail. It actually started in the fall of 2012, with my purchasing of the first entry of Park Chan-Wook's "Vengeance-Trilogy"; Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance along with Kim Ji-Woon's A Tale of Two Sisters and A Bittersweet Life.  I've always been one of those people who easily gets invested in something he is doing and if I start down a specific path of film it is really easy for me to keep going and exploring it deeper, like a child walking further into an unknown part of a forest. This fact, along with my already relatively strong feelings toward cinema from the far east meant that once January rolled around and I actually got around to watching Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance along with the final part of Wook's trilogy, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (having already seen the middle chapter Oldboy before) I quickly decended into a sea of Asian cinema.
They say the art of browsing, walking into a video store and glancing at the covers until you find something that catches your eye, is a dying experience since the rise of both piracy as well as online distribution of films both through iTunes, Amazon and rental services such as Netflix have made the physical stores where one can partake in such practices nearly obsolete.
This along with just the overall fact that the internet has made knowledge of what movies are available so much more convenient that for someone as engrossed in the mainstream film medium as myself, the moment where you walk into a store and don't already know what the vast majority of the stock of DVDs and Blu-Rays are extremely rare. However with this newfound curiosity for Korean and Japanese films I found myself for the first time in years being able to walk out to the foreign section of one of my regular haunts and once again just glance at covers and titles, seeing which catch my eye. In a way it is dangerous, because my enthusiasm for the browsing experience has been so amplified by how rarely I get to browse, that I can easily spend more money than I should be able to by just picking things up, checking an app on my phone which judges films based on my previous scorings and then tells me whether I probably will like the film I'm checking out or not, and then adding it to the pile that swiftly grows to a small mountain. I so excel at this practice that at the time of writing I have already started to reach the bottom of the well that are my local stores and even though I have at least 30 movies still available for me to see from South Korea, China and Japan either through movies I simply have not had time to watch, but have already bought or through Netflix, I can't help but feel a sad feeling when thinking of the inevitable end of my little side-hobby. I'm confident that, as I have already made clear, that this is a trend that will live throughout the coming year, but it's always the initial "infatuation-period" which is the best, like how it is with new love.Watching Yim Pil-sung's Hansel & Gretel and being exposed to a type of blend of styles that I can only describe as a mixture between that Twilight-episode where the kid holds his family hostage with his god-like powers, Pan's Labyrinth and yes, a demented version of the fairytale the film takes its title from, is an experience like none I have ever had before and quiet honestly is a perfect incapsulation of what is so great about watching a hefty amount of foreign films from another region in a short period of time. It gives you a more concentrated perspective on another culture and unlike just watching a single film and then returning to what is more conventional for you, it makes you view different aspects about that culture. I've seen several South Korean funerals in the last few weeks, grown to understand the relationship between teacher and student, mother and daughter and countless others and even though one could easily make the argument that a few films will hardly give great insight into what it is like to live in South Korea or Japan, it can't be claimed that is does nothing at all.
This entry is more than anything a simple statement of what may come to inspire my return, or at a few more entries over the next 12 months. I plan to make 2013 a year that counts. A year of progress. A year of knowledge. But most of all a year that more than any previous, manifests what I want to do with the remaining years of my life, and somehow I think this little hobby may be part of it. I'll make sure to write again, if only for myself.