Column #9 - My Seminal Movie-Going Experience

A lot of people come up to me and go, "Big J" -- that's what they say, they go, "Big J, what's your seminal movie-going experience?" And I reply, "Dear faithful reader, why I have had a movie-going experience so profound, so life-altering that that ever since, I've been seeking to duplicate it. It's reduced me to a movie whore, struggling to find my next fix of coherent storyline, turned me into a junkie mainlining foreign films, pushed me to my limits with truckloads of bad Hollywood pre-packaged star-driven vanity projects. And yet I come back to the trough and ask, "May I drink some more?" It's at this point, the fan gets an awestruck look is his or her eye, and whispers, barely enough for anyone to hear: "What film could have impacted you so?" I can barely get words out in a single breath: "Hard Core Logo". You see, at 12:01 am on a cold winter night in 1996 my life changed forever...

Oh, I wasn't a film virgin at that point, not by far. I'd had my four block line-ups to see Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom at the Palliser (before it was a nightclub), my six-hour wait on-line to see Batman. Remember, these are all pre-multiplex days, or at least pre-twenty-films-all-squeezed around-a-central-core-area-designed-to-make-you-so-thirsty-and -water-fountains-placed-so-far-apart-that-you-have-to-buy-a-drink-lest-you-perish theaters.

I was at the preview screening of a little film called Pump Up The Volume that led to my lifelong love affair with the music of Leonard Cohen. It was also the first time that a film ever spoke to me, that really called out in something more, with its siren song. You see, this was the first time that a movie moved me. Pump Up The Volume was a movie with a message, "Fight the system, speak out, stand up", about the little guy having his say in the face of overwhelming odds. For days after I wanted to start a pirate radio station and share myself with the world. It never came to fruition. I still think I could've been a good pirate deejay, though.

It was the first movie that I ever identified with, that made me think in a deep and real way. Movies may thrill and chill and feed and fume and payoff big in the end, but here I identified with Christian Slater's Happy Harry Hard-On. Maybe it was the fear of impending adulthood or the transition to high school, but something about that movie experience always stuck with me. And I thought that it would be my seminal experience. How na•ve I was. It was, that is, until...HARD CORE LOGO.

The one-sheet, the poster, this was all I knew of the film. It consisted of the words, "HARD CORE LOGO", with the "A" vandalized with red spray paint into Anarchy -- this sums up the movie perfectly. HARD CORE LOGO is the kind of flick that does it a disservice if you print it lowercase. I don't know why I went. It was at one of those little theaters that show foreign films and esoteric Canadian movies that don't make it into the chains, but still have their niche. For some reason, a friend and I made our way to a midnight showing for an obscure movie, about which we only knew one thing, the director was the guy who made Highway 61 and Roadkill. Now, Highway 61 places third on my list of all-time greatest Canadian-made films after Jesus of Montreal and Perfectly Normally. So I must've thought, why the heck not?

IT CHANGED MY LIFE.

Join me next time where the words HARD CORE take on a whole other meaning.
Jess Nakaska is an aspiring screenwriter always on the lookout for the next great script idea. He'll let you know if he finds it. Feel free to contact him at jessnakaska@hotmail.com.