jbottle – 11:59 AM/EST March 21, 2003 (#8564 of 21182)

“I guess we all hold onto some movie, usually for personal reasons…”

Yeah, for some reason I really like MIKE's MURDER, so I can forgive someone's personal faves. For every LLV [LEAVING LAS VEGAS] lover there's somebody out there who obsesses over routinely dismissed film O.C. & Stiggs and even something as distasteful as Ravenous.

Oilcanboyd23 – 12:04 PM ET March 21, 2003 (#8567 of 21182)

Obsess – “To preoccupy the mind of excessively.”

While O.C. & STIGGS does haunt me, and Ravenous is my 11th favorite movie of all time, neither one preoccupies my mind excessively. I only discuss them when I am asked to do so by a fellow poster. To ignore such requests would be rude. I may have a lot of bad traits, one of which is being not long on truthfully or fairly attributing remarks to others, but rudeness is not one of them.

The above is a fairly classic exchange from two of the more seasoned members of the New York Times Film Forums. It contains references to some of the most often-mentioned films of these Forums: oilcanboyd often expresses his admiration for O.C. & STIGGS (USA: Robert Altman, 1987), and every time RAVENOUS (Czech Republic/UK/Mexico/USA/Slovakia: Antonia Bird, 1999) or anyone related to that film is mentioned, he makes a point of commenting on it, often noting that it is his eleventh favorite film of all time. “Ravenous” in the title of this article refers not only to this film and the little ritual around it, but also to the position the “forumites” (Forum members) have had vis-à-vis the forums, in the way that this online community satisfied a long-standing hunger for discussions with fellow cinephiles.

The New Cinephilia

With the changes technology has brought to contemporary life, cinephiles – for whom movies are a way of life, films and how they are experienced have undergone major changes. The classic cinephile, as the term was adopted in the 1960s, connected the love of cinema to the actual medium of film, and to the movie-going experience.