Thread by @Carlos_Film, Hey friends! Cleaning my room I came across a cool thing (at [...]

Hey friends! Cleaning my room I came across a cool thing (at least I think it’s cool) from my early days as a cinephile in Mexico City, and I wanted to share it with you. This is apropos of nothing, just late Sunday afternoon boredom. So this will be a longish thread with photos.

So I grew up in Mexico City & lived there until the summer of 2004. I left in my early teens. Around 2002, when I saw AMELIE & SPIRITED AWAY, I started getting into movies beyond Disney and blockbusters. I started collecting movie reviews and posters from newspapers & magazines.

I would collect things about movies I wanted to see, or movies I had already seen & wanted to learn more about, many of which I snuck into because I was too young to get a ticket for them.

I would stick these cut-outs in notebooks creating very rough scrapbooks. Around the same time my mom & I won a contest that allowed us to go to the movies for free for a whole year, which of course increased exponentially the amount of movies I watched per month.

I would say it was between 2002 and 2004 that I really became obsessed with the film.

The photos below show some highlights of all the stuff in these notebooks. I would collect anything I could find. Keep in mind we never had a computer at home, and internet access for me was limited to Internet cafes. So this was a way for me to keep track & archive movies.

Another fun thing, you get to see the Mexican movie posters and titles for international movies.

SPIRITED AWAY was titled “El Viaje de Chihiro” (Chihiro’s Journey)

These are some of the many movie tickets from that time, which I used to cover one of my four notebooks.

I was big into KILL BILL. Just like many other young boys obsessed with his work.

Gaspar Noé’s IRREVERSIBLE was a big deal back then.

These are booklets that Mexico’s biggest chains would have in the lobby to promote upcoming releases for that month.

My mom, God bless her heart, took me to see Gus Van Sant’s ELEPHANT and then had a very open conversation with me, a prepubescent dumby. Still love the movie. It needs to be on blu-ray.

Curious fact. THE LAST TEMPTATION OF THE CHRIST was banned in Mexico for 16 years. In 2004 it finally got a theatrical release in the country. I was very mad because they didn’t let me in to see it. I eventually saw it on home video.

LOST IN TRANSLATION was called “Perdidos en Tokyo” (Lost in Tokyo) a very literal title.

At the time I thought Nicole Kidman was the greatest actress in the world (she is still increíble). DOGVILLE was a revelation for me, both as the first Lars von Trier film I saw, and for Kidman’s work.