What movie changed my life? Yes, I know any film snob worth their salt takes making a statement about which film changed their life very very seriously. And Yes in the thousands of films I have seen, I could have given you a palatable film snob answer that would've also been mostly true, but today I have chosen chose not to do that.
Ladies and gentleman, a film that changed my life and was an essential part of making me The film lover I am today is called.......Six Weeks
What? You have never heard of Six Weeks (of if you have heard of it you are asking "What kind of delicious thing is he smokin?"). Six Weeks was released in 1982 and went on to be nominated for exactly zero Oscars and it can claim to be a Razzie (worst in movies) nominee.
It stars the late 80s romantic comedy icon Dudley Moore as a married politician who strikes up an affair with an uptight character played by Razzie Nominee and television icon Mary Tyler Moore. What? That sounds boring to you? It gets better! Mary's character has a daughter who is a really good ballet dancer and GET READY FOR THIS, she has leukemia! Her daughter has six weeks to live (get it?!) and her one dying wish is to dance in the nutcracker in NYC. It's melodrama at its...uh....finest?
So actually I can wholeheartedly admit that it isn't a very good movie, but in the summer of 1983 that movie was my jam. You see these days kids are raised by tablets. Well my generation was mostly raised by a big fat half ton console television, and around that time something called HBO reached the culturally starved town of Casoer Wyoming where I grew up.
We had a few movie theaters back then, but this was before the multiplex. We had a movie theater with TWO theaters and that was really living large! So while I saw movies before Six Weeks, obviously, HBO was great because it was a then 24 hours a day movie channel. I spent much of that summer holed up in our freezing basement watching HBO and especially the movie Six Weeks. I think I also watched Willy Wonka a lot that summer AND I cannot forget all the times I also watched Grease 2. But I must have watched Six Weeks over a dozen times in a month. One time I actually set my alarm clock to go downstairs and watch it at around 5:00 in the morning. I was a Six Weeks maniac!
It was very dramatic! And now I know too dramatic! The writing is kind of terrible there is a very dramatic speech given at the end by MTM (Spoiler Alert!!!!! THE DAUGHTER DIES!!!!) that has a line that starts out "There's a place in France" and even through my pre teenage crying eyes I could not resist responding to the screen with "where the naked ladies dance!" I was indeed a very mature 11 year old!
But why was it so important to me? Six Weeks was my film gateway drug that made me want more much more. Eventually I was on to bigger and better things (while still loving some pretty admittedly terrible movies), but Six Weeks deserves some credit for making me the film lover I am today. Even if today I won't touch the Nicholas Sparks type films that is spawned with a twenty foot pole.
Granted I am now very nostalgic about the film, and I would love to find a watchable non VHS copy of it, but have yet to find one. It doesn't matter though because in the summer of 1983 in my basement, at 5:00 in the morning, Six Weeks was everything to me!
Next in this series: a TV show that changed my life.
No comments:
Post a Comment