2007: The Year of Taste-Making
For every wannabe creative kid, there comes the point where the culture they love consumes them. That time was 2007. For my New Year’s resolution, I told myself that I would see one movie a week at my local theater. It started wonderfully with seeing Children of Men. I’ll talk about it when I cover 2006, but that movie was a massive moment in my life. I kept up until September when the only new movie playing in theaters was Dragon Wars. In May, I turned 18 and got a job at Blockbuster. It was minimum wage, but I found more value in the free movie and video game rentals. In June, my dad and I went to North Carolina to visit film schools. I had read Blankets on that road trip and lost myself in a melancholy world of first love.
Around that time, I got my first girlfriend after we met at a Catholic Leadership conference. We stayed in touch over MySpace and broke up after a few weeks. So being an impressionable teenager, I drowned my sorrows in Wes Anderson films. I adored The Royal Tenenbaums and wanted to be in that world filled with oddballs. I think that DVD was my first Criterion. To get hyped up for The Darjeeling Limited, I bought the soundtrack. It was just this wonderfully odd and colorful that I could dive into. For a little bit, I could live the life of these tragic figures. I even got my parents to see a preview at the Winter Park Regal, close to where I had my SAT prep. That movie helped me get through a challenging academic time.
But I mostly remember the films that were nominated for Best Picture. I remember it fondly for the first time my dad and I did the AMC Best Picture fest. If I recall, my dad had just healed after his first stroke. It was a scary time. But it was also one of the last things we got to do before I went off to college — that and seeing the Tigers Spring Training in Lakeland.
In October, I was accepted into the University of Central Florida, which was my first choice. That acceptance email was like having a gorilla taken off my back. Like, I could coast for the rest of the year. I could enjoy my part-time job, movies, and TV shows and play the new video games coming out. Call of Duty 4 was such a great experience before all these young kids just beat me mercilessly and call me horrible names. Granted, it wasn’t as bad as the Halo 3 players.
I was also introduced to podcasts, and the first I listened to was Filmspotting. I had no idea what a podcast was. I thought it was a way to see free movies. With my classic iPod, I was ready to watch classic movies on a square, two-inch screen. What a time it was to be alive in 2007, and it wasn’t going to get any better than that.
Instead, I found a conversation between people who love movies about movies. I loved the Matty Ballgame era and the weekly Top 5 Lists. I don’t listen to Filmspotting that much now, but I’m always interested in seeing their top ten of the year. Their review of No Country for Old Men got me hyped to see it. That podcast got me excited about movies I couldn’t see yet.
For me, 2007 was my year of Taste-Making. I discovered tons of great stuff. Some things like Zodiac still hold up for me. While I loved dumb movies like Transformers or Disturbia when I was younger, I see the flaws more clearly. And great movies that I didn’t like at the time, like Ratatouille and No Country for Old Men, I end up enjoying and loving.
