“Would you say I have a plethora of piñatas?” –El Guapo… Three Amigos


I’ve seen a fair few movies. Its safe to say I am a movie fan, a film buff, a complete nerd… if you will.

As a kid my family watched movies. It was what we did. And we went after it with the gusto of an Amish family tending crops or hating buttons. The Stewarts owned hundreds of VHS tapes. A plethora, if you will.


See kids, in those days talkin’ pictures were only available for home viewing on these big, clunky plastic rectangles that had to be physically rewound to the beginning once you had journeyed to the end.


But, if you were frugal, you could totally fit more than one movie on a VHS tape.
2 1/3 movies was about average. This means that, at the Stewart house, if you wanted to watch Die Hard you had to fast forward through Robin Hood: Prince of Theives. Also, as soon as Die Hard ended, the Princess Bride would begin. But, if you got caught up in watching Princess Bride, right after Buttercup declares that she will never love again… you would have to go find the other VHS tape that had the last 2/3 of Princess Bride, Top Gun and 3/4 of Point Break.

You could also expect that the previous viewer had not been kind, had not taken the time to rewind, so before you could experience what happens should you go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line you’d spend 15 minutes holding down the RW button so it would go faster.
It was a great time to be alive.*

My family had a habbit of watching the same movies over and over again. Dad is a Kevin Costner fan and a Bruce Willis enthusiast. My mom likes Elvis and things involving a Hanks/Ryan situation. My siblings, thankfully, share my addiction to timeless comedy classics like the Jerk, Three Amigos, Funny Farm, Monty Python, Death Becomes Her, anything with Tim Curry (Rocky Horror, Clue, Fern Gully, Oscar. You know, the one where Stalone plays a gangster gone straight… you know, Chaz Palmenteri is in it and Marissa Tormei and Isabella Rossolini… stop acting like you don’t know what I’m talking about!). There is a Keanu Reeves fetish we mostly don’t talk about. I am happily and shamelessly pleased by Speed, Point Break, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and, yes, their Bogus Journey as well.

Sabrina, Kenny and I mostly communicate with each other via a system of movie quotes, like semifore. “Earnest, Im in the morgue!” “Flames, on the side of my face…” “El Guapo only kills men, he does not kill crying women.” we are stunted emotionally, but well educated in the currency of pop culture- and way ahead of our times.

In the interest of you getting to know me better I should also mention that my Dad, a man of many hats, was a sometime video production guy. We had a full, professional editing bay in our laundry room. It was huge. Like when you see computers in the 70s and they take up 3 stories of a 6 story building. You needed 1000 sq. feet of equipment in those days to do what any kid with a smart phone can do these days. My dad used his editing powers “for good” and would take out bad words, scary stuff or people doin it. I was fully an adult before I found out there was more to the line than “yippee kai-ya...” I grew up thinking that poltergeist was 37 minutes long and not that interesting, and I was at least 20 before I had any idea that Maverick and Charlie were “riding the hobby horse, as they say” in Top Gun.**

It was a great time to be alive.***

Continuing our proposition that you get to know me better, I should mention that I have an innate gift for memorizing things. Rather than memorize something useful, like- maritime law or something- I memorize things nobody cares about. Like the 1985 Val Kilmer classic Real Genius… “You remind me of me. And lately I’ve been missing me so I asked Hathoway if I could room with me again and he said “Sure.”

I would watch the same movies over and over and over again to the point where I achieved complete memorization of not only dialogue but also tone and inflection. As a nerd (which is cool now but, I assure you, was NOT then) and I person with control issues (never been cool at any point in history) my goal has always been to enjoy the things I love so completely that I bind them to my DNA spiderman-style and, as a result, conquer and own them completely. (see: Green Day)

We had laser disc. We had a 72 inch television in 1990. It was 3 feet thick. When my mom went out of town my dad let us rent horror movies. That’s right, we didn’t always turn to our impressive VHS/laser disc collection. The Stewart’s were also regulars known by name to Bill (our slightly more polite version of Randall Graves) at the corner Video +.

See kids, in those days we didn’t have DVRs or NetFlix-es. If you wanted to see something you didn’t own, that wasn’t playing on television at that very moment, you had to get all the way into an automobile and drive over to the corner Video+ and trade money with a professional nerd (as a renter you had amature status.) By doing this you officially entered into an agreement to borrow the movie for 24 hours.

Places like Video+ often had only one copy of each title, this was before even Blockbuster existed. One had to be a bit of a rental store ninja if you wanted to rent Jurassic Park hot off the presses. “Hold on to your butts.”

It was a great time to be alive.

Sometimes as we move through life it can be tough to remember that not everyone grew up same as you. Like, I imagine most Amish people assume that everyone has crops to tend and disdain for buttons. Me? I assume that all people on earth have not only seen, but also enjoyed and subsequently memorized, all the same things that I have.

When I approach someone and say “Pop quiz hot shot…” they will know to respond with “d\What do you do” and then, with more Keanu sass this time, “What DOOO you DUUUUE??” Instead, most regular folk (and especially the Amish) end up backing away slowly without breaking eye contact, palms raised in a universally non-threatening pose.

So, lets jump to this moment right now… I’m standing in the lobby of the National Comedy Theatre and my friend Anthony Lopez (see: Anthony Lopez) finds it amusing to list for me all of the movies he has not seen, Top Gun, the Usual Suspects, The Sixth Sense. It is shameful. And there are a lot of people out there like him.

I may never win a gold medal in usefulness, but I can do my part for America and see these wrongs righted. I can show Anthony Lopez a world where Kaiser Souze sees dead people but he hits the breaks and they fly right by.

I declare that NOW is a great time to be alive!****

*It was not.
**See, what I did there was mix in a Top Gun reference with a Breakfast Club quote. Still with me? Great. We are going to be fast friends.
***Again, it was not. We didn’t even have smart phones, for god’s sake.
****You can watch TV on your PHONE! Even Back to the Future 2 didn’t have that!