I got to thinking about favorite films – the films we christen as our favorites…how long ago or how recently we see these movies…and just what it takes for that title of “My Favorite Movie” to get unseeded.

Near as I can tell, the first film that I considered my favorite was THE WIZARD OF OZ back when I was seven years old. Admittedly, trying to isolate what it is about this film that appealed to seven year old me is difficult at best (I can barely remember what Lady Hatter asked me to bring home from the supermarket tonight). If I had to venture a guess though, it’d be the combination of the music and the fantasy of the whole thing.

Most of my earliest memories involve music – listening to radios, singing songs, trying to dance. It was my first love, so to see a movie that stopped every fifteen minutes or so to sing a song, it’s a pretty safe bet that seven-year-old Hatter was enthralled. However in those years before I was raised on the songs of Michael Jackson and Van Halen, I was being told fairy tales…and as such, I spent much of my childhood gravitating towards some pretty fanciful stories. In hindsight I mighta held on to this one a little long, but it’s a classic. Ain’t no shame in it.

Around the time I turned 12, a friend loaned me a videotape that changed my mind about just how much i loved that film that took me over the rainbow. The flick was that bit of rah-rah-Americanism, TOP GUN. (Commence sidebar discussion about a Canadian pre-teen gravitating towards a story of rah-rah-Americanism).

Obviously the first factor to a film like this becoming my new favorite was growing up. Sure I loved my fairy tales as a kid, but I wasn’t going to be a kid forever. The second thing that latched me to this movie was the fact that Pete “Maverick” Mitchell just seemed so cool. Cool was…well something I just wasn’t. AT all (I’m still really not, but that’s a whole other discussion).

The flick was quotable at a time where I started to enjoy quoting films. It had that music factor going for it again, and it sparked a nickname for me that sparked a switch from peer mockery to self deprecation. I also never noticed any such thing as homoeroticism at the time, so this one stayed my favorite for a good long while.

I started college in the autumn of 1997, and with that change came an awful lot of uncertainty. I wasn’t sure my girlfriend was gonna stick with me, I wasn’t sure about my whole school-work-home treadmill that I was running on, and in some ways I wasn’t even sure that I was in school for the right thing.

Such uncertainty and nervousness, coupled with a budding talent for smartassery, drew me to GOOD WILL HUNTING. Like the change in favorites before it, it couldn’t possibly have less in common with its predecessor…but I think that’s part of how things become our new favorite. Sure we all have a type, but it’s not in most people’s nature to dump a smart homely person for another smart homely person. No – we mix it up…allow the pendulum to swing. Thus a big ticket blockbuster had to give way to something far less brash.

Not to toot my own horn or anything, but I also dug the idea of a guy being much smarter than he seems. I still do as a matter of fact. The funny thing is, this film wouldn’t hold on to that championship belt for long…

A mere seven months later, a new favorite was found.

The quiet if pedestrian indie gave way for something much louder, and in some way much more overt. By this stage in the game, I’d already started seeing film as a medium that could allow for more than just entertainment…but before this screening, I’d never actually been shaken up before. I can remember leaving this film and not saying a word to my brother who came to see it with me for easily half an hour.

It takes a lot for a film to rock me like that (still does), so even though it wasn’t perfect and contained moments of blatant obviousness, it became the new favorite. Like every previous “new champion” it was radically different than what came before, though unlike every other “new champion” it wasn’t one that spoke to me on some sort of personal level. It just moved me deeply, the way good filmmaking is supposed to…a mere six months after being previously so affected.

However, like its predecessor, SAVING PRIVATE RYAN wouldn’t remain on the top of the heap for long…

(To Be Continued)