When I was a child, my mother took me to the movies A LOT. Not just me: she took all the children in my building who could fit in her VW – the equivalent of a dozen, approximately. So I have some interesting memories, both of films that qualify in the “classic” category and of films that perhaps are just “old”. Some of my most memorable experiences were:
Do you know this image? If not, the gentleman sitting in the chair on the left in the photo is the famous “autopilot”. I was ten years old when we watched “Fasten Your Seat Seat, the Pilot’s Gone!”. It was at Gemini, in Paulista, my favorite cinema (named after a space capsule!). We were in a huge group, all kids from all walks of life… There were jokes that we couldn’t understand, like this one, when the autopilot failed and the flight attendant had to blow on it to make it work again:
By the expression on his face, you can tell where the pilot’s inflator nozzle is, right? Even without understanding much of anything, I can say: to this day, the film I laughed the most at was “Fasten Your Seat Seat”.
The day I had the biggest movie overdose of my life was when I went to watch “The Wrath of Khan”. Without a doubt the best Star Trek film to date, I was really looking forward to watching it… The problem is that, ON THE SAME DAY, another film that was making me curious came out. Nothing more, nothing less, than starring this beautiful blonde:
And what did twelve-year-old Juliano do? Did he manage to hold back his anxiety and watch first one, then the other? Nooooo… At the time, paying the ticket gave you access to the complex’s cinema rooms. There were no assigned seats. As both films were showing at Gemini, I checked the times: if I entered the cinema at the moment we arrived and watched “ET” from the point where I was, waited for the session to end, watched the next one until the point where I went in and then left, there was time to watch “The Wrath of Khan” right after.
And that’s what I did…
I regret this tremendously, because I watched “ET”, one of my favorite films to date (notice what I did, unconsciously, with the cover of my book)…
…in a very strange way (I entered the scene where ET was already dying, in the bathroom of Elliot’s house, shortly before the astronauts arrived). On top of that, I mixed emotions, I immediately fell in love with “ET” and soon after faced the death of Spock (at the time, we didn’t know he would be reborn in the next film), one of my “best friends”. Bullshit or not, this night was probably the most emotional I’ve been at the cinema in my entire life.
Another film that had a tremendous impact on me watching its premiere was the one about the girl who walked through walls:
This was in 1997, and I went to the cinema completely wrong. I had read an article in Folha de São Paulo talking about the film’s costumes and, therefore, out of context, what I read gave me the impression that the film was fashion-forward nonsense .
I was very wrong.
“Matrix” had a funny effect on me. I watched it at the cinema at Shopping Iguatemi. An actor at the beginning of his career, tough as graphene, I didn’t want to park the car in the very expensive parking lot at the mall. I stopped on the street, blocks away. The film left me so excited, so full of adrenaline, that when I left the cinema, I wanted to run. I really wanted to do this through the walls, but as it would be impossible in the real world (if this world is the real one, maybe the machines just want me to think like that), I really ran through the streets. I arrived at the car out of breath, but happy!
I attended the premiere of many other classics, such as “Jaws”, “Star Wars” (all), “Indiana Jones” (all), “Back to the Future” (all), Superman… But as I’ve already told some of these stories here , I don’t want to repeat myself.
Cinema is a great passion in my life. It’s no wonder I became an actor.