Discovering the #FilmStruck4 Hashtag
The latest hashtag to make the round on social media is #FilmStruck4. Started by the fine folks at FilmStruck, a movie streaming service that focuses on classic, foreign, and arthouse movies in the Criterion Collection and Turner Classic Movies library, it is meant to be a celebration of the intensely personal nature of cinema: encouraging followers to share the four movies that define you. Regardless of critical acclaim or popularity, you share the movies that are most meaningful to you personally, that got you into and loving movies in the first place.
And because I am, like I imagine everybody reading this is, a movie fan, I thought that I would share my #FilmStruck4. These might not be the “best” movies, or even really my favorites, but they are wholly and emphatically me.
3-Iron: A Film That Challenged My Preconceptions
3-Iron — When I entered college, I had a very specific idea of what movies were. Sometimes they were sepia-toned classics obviously shot on a Hollywood backlot. Other times they were glitzy blockbusters with the very best special effects money could buy. Still, other times they were weighty dramas that captured the essence of the Human condition (even if they dragged a little bit in the middle). All of that changed, though, when I sat down for a gen-ed film class and watched 3-Iron.
To call 3-Iron weird is a gross understatement of what it really is. From the outside looking in, it’s about a homeless man who breaks into people’s homes when they’re on vacation, lives there for a couple of days while fixing up the place, then leaves just before they return, whose bizarre, nomadic life is upended when he accidentally walks in on an abused housewife who runs away with him and is later chased down by her jealous husband. Additionally, this South Korean drama is almost entirely silent, with the romantic leads never once speaking to each other. Heartbreakingly poignant and deeply personal, it challenged every preconception I ever had about movies and launched me headlong into a world of movies I had never before considered.
The Avengers: Proof That the Marvel Method Works
The Avengers — Anybody who has been following my Road to Infinity War series should know by now that I am a huge fan of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It is hands down my favorite blockbuster franchise on the market right now and reminds me — now going on three times a year — what it is that made me fall in love with movies in the first place. They’re big and colorful and bombastic beyond belief, but they’re also deeply personal, character-driven stories that are far more than the mere sum of their parts.
While I would argue that Civil War, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, and The Winter Soldier are all stronger films taken on the merits, none of them has stuck with me in the same way that this first mega-crossover has. It was proof positive that the Marvel method worked on the big screen: that movies today could be bigger than they had ever been before — not just a single movie or even a single franchise but an entire universe of possibilities.
Hellraiser: A Love for Horror
Hellraiser — While the MCU may be my current obsession and I will always love the “best of the best” that duke it out at the Oscars every year, my first love will always be horror. From the first time I saw Night of the Living Dead — when I was way too young to be watching something like that and I shrank away from the TV and continued to watch it safely from the kitchen upstairs — I became obsessed. I watched every last spine-tingler I could get my hands on, and there were plenty to sift through.
Although not the best of the genre, Hellraiser is everything I love about it distilled into perhaps its purest form. It’s horror, yes, but not the commonplace variety that hits movie theaters every October. It’s cosmic horror in the Lovecraftian tradition: beings of unfathomable terror descending onto a sleepy, boring, everyday family. The Cenobites, the so-called surgeons of beyond, are possibly the best-realized movie monsters of all time, each with a rich and tragic history only hinted at over the movie’s and its sequels’, runtimes.
Seven Samurai: A Netflix Gem
Seven Samurai — Despite all the guff it gets for not being “real” cinema and for destroying the local rental depot, Netflix is probably the biggest boon to cinema in the medium’s history. It has made everything from undisputed masterpieces to obscure gems readily available to the movie-going public at an incredibly low price and straight from the comfort of their living rooms. And while many are content with catching up on the latest features missed in the multiplexes or childhood favorites that have somehow evaded their movie collection, I use mine to catch up on the weird, the obscure, and the foreign: in short, everything that I can’t seem to find in my little cornfield in Illinois.
And of the movies that I’ve been introduced to through Netflix, none have ever managed to live up to Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. Maybe it’s because it was made by a master director at the prime of his career or maybe it’s because I grew up watching The Magnificent Seven (its American remake) with my dad growing up. Either way, it is the closest thing that I have to a “favorite movie” and is unquestionably Kurosawa’s best outing from a career seemingly defined by nothing but masterpieces.