It was 20 years ago today

On June 16, 1998, CBS aired a two-and-a-half hour special titled AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies - a countdown of the 100 greatest American films of the then-past 100 years (1896-1996) as voted on by roughly 1,500 write-in ballots and submitted to the American Film Institute.
In partnership with Blockbuster Video, Newsweek, Entertainment Weekly, and several other publications and Turner-owned networks, this list of 100 movies was available on posters, on the video shelves, in print form, and several honest-to-god write-in checklists so we could all play along at home.

More than just a bit of exposition, this 'mega list' - as stuffy, predictable, and conformed as it was - started a small but significant shift in my movie viewing habits (even if it was only for a brief time). As someone who was (and still kinda is) deep into cataloguing and ranking this & that, this sacred inventory of mainstream cinema came at me with the timing and precision of Luke taking out the Death Star; this was a time when Titanic - a film that was already six months old - was not only dominating every plane of pop culture, but every facet of human civilization, period. Love it or loathe it, it's hard to remember a time when a movie was the most important thing in the world to anyone not living under a rock.

As Henry Hill said, "It was a glorious time" - especially to a young man who'd spent all of his life fascinated with cinema, and now - apart from floating around in Titanic culture - had found a published and critically-endorsed trail of breadcrumbs (across an admittedly safe terrain for sure, but professionally-approved nonetheless).
I may not've sat up and paid so much attention had the list not been so firmly legitimized in my own eyes due to the inclusion of Pulp Fiction, Fargo, A Clockwork Orange, Goodfellas, The Silence of the Lambs, and a handful of other 'teenage boy movies' that'd already worked their way into a space in my heart. By this rationale, I'd figured that The Apartment, It Happened One Night, Ben-Hur, The Sound of Music, and Citizen Kane must be at least of equal or greater value than, say, Dr. Stranglelove, Star Wars, Taxi Driver, and Jaws... (In some cases, yes - in others, no).

But there were, in fact, three films that very much fell into that sorta 'right place, right time' department that seemed to've already been circling my young self like the sharks of punk rock cinema that they are. With a bit of ambiguous hinting from my folks (Dad, particularly), this short list of 'must-sees' swelled in my brain as a short list of movies I must see.

A cassette tape of Midnight Cowboy had been in my parents' stash for as long as I could remember, and with some nest egg of my own cash accumulated from gifts or allowances or some place I can't remember, I'd purchased my very own brand new videotapes of Easy Rider and The Graduate.
These were the three that would define a summer - and in so many ways, my taste in film, the rest of my adolescence, and my life. But mostly, summer.

Totally separate from the exhilaration of the all-around innovative production qualities of editing, structure, cinematography, and performances (in particular the near-incomprehensible range of one Dustin Hoffman) was a more-than-refreshing step outside of the usual genre staples of a 15 year old boy in the 90s (action, violence, crime, monsters, sci/fi fantasy).
Alas, here were three films that were, genuinely, steeped in traditional (but still seemingly subjective to myself) themes of youth: freedom, alienation, sexuality, fear, courage, uncertainty, spontaneity, antiauthority, personal achievement, and catastrophic failure.

People, and institutions alike (see: American Film Institute) wax poetic about the 'power' of movies: they inhabit our dreams and transport us to magical places and sometimes manage to change our lives... for 2 hours.
What a buncha shit.
I don't know if it was a symptom of the times (when the tapes you owned + whatever HBO decided to air on any given day + whatever was available at the video store = 'never enough') or a characteristic of how passionate I once was about anything, but I used to watch certain movies in a repetitious cycle - religiously, if you will - often dominating an entire season, and sometimes even a year.
Jess, who shared this same habit around the same time calls them "obsession movies." And whenever it happened, it chiseled a unique notch in my timeline.
So, while I can go ahead and recommend these movies as a killer triple feature, it really goes above and beyond something like 'An Evening of Post-Classical Cinema From the Rock 'n Roll Generation,' or whatever... My experience with these films involved an ongoing regime and letting them dominate the rhythms and routines of my existence. And a major ingredient in succumbing to obsession movies properly is investing your non-screen time into the soundtrack albums.

Digital downloads weren't really goin' on in '98, and soundtracks to then-30-year-old movies were tough to come by on CD. But during the one stretch of time in the past century when vinyl was fucking dead as... dead, I managed to track down and acquire all three albums from flea markets and whatnot shops.
And while these movies have several fundamental similarities between them, and while I like them all for drastically different reasons, the three separate soundtracks from these three different movies feel as though they're part of one unified collection of pop/garage/psychedelia/country/folk/metal.
With modern technology, one can shuffle a digital collection of these songs and see just what I'm talkin' about here.

If you'd told me 20 years ago that I'd own these films as Criterion blu rays, I'd have said, "I don't know what any of those words mean."
But seriously, folks - now, during our holiday season (by which I mean the Barnes & Noble Criterion sale) I extend this recommendation to you; if you have none or some, get 'em all, learn 'em all, and give yourself a chance to transcend and evolve with some equality for all.

- Paul