MovieFest, to the Power of 10

It started with a dream – and a Steven King book

Back in 2000, I was a freshman at Longmeadow High School, in Longmeadow, Massachusetts (a little suburb right next to Springfield, Mass, birthplace of basketball). I had just finished “The Stand,” an epic 1,000+ page novel about the battle of good and evil, which, like all of Mr. King’s books, ends disappointingly. Still, I loved it.

Then I found out there was a ‘90s miniseries starring Gary Sinise, Molly Ringwald, Ruby Dee, Rob Lowe and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar! Only problem was, it was 7-hours long and not very good. That, of course, did not stop my desire to see it.

And so, I went to my high school friends and told them that not only should we watch it – we should watch it in one sitting. This was met by a shrug and a, “What the hell. We got nothing better to do.”

Over the next week, we planned this thing…and it began to get bigger. First it was The Stand. Then it was The Stand and other movies. Then it was The Stand and lots of other movies. Finally, it was The Stand and 24 hours of movies straight. 

Thus birthed the first MovieFest – in which we didn’t actually watch The Stand, since they didn’t have it at Blockbuster, but still, 24 hours of films were watched.

The rules were simple:

• No Sleeping
• No Leaving
• If three people in the group have seen a film we can’t watch it.*
• *Rule three is negated by the fact that every Fest ends with The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine, which was watched the first year when there was 45 minutes left to make it a full 24-hours, and every year since the same thing has been done to round out the time.

Coming up on Saturday, June 5^th, it will be our 10^th Annual MovieFest. Seriously, 10^th – and my friends are coming from all over to watch it at, once again, my mother’s house in Longmeadow, Massachusetts. My friend Tom is doing a doctorate program at Yale, my friend Zach works for Google in Seattle, my friend Eric is an actor/waiter in Canada, and so on, and they’re all coming in. Only Matt, who’s currently a PA for “90201,” can’t make it – and we will miss him.

We’ve watched some terrible/awesome films. This was last year’s selection, in order:

1. Wendy and Lucy
2. Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog 
3. Sex Drive
4. Who Made the Potato Salad?
5. Brazil
6. The Spirit
7. You and Me and Everyone We Know
8. Repo! The Genetic Opera
9. Expelled
10. Låt den rätte komma in
11. The Fall
12. Sydney White
13. Eating Out
14. Loving Annabelle
15. Chung Hing sam lam 
16. The Other Boleyn Girl
17. Yellow Submarine

If you want to see a list of ALL the movies we have watched over the years, there’s a link for that. 

Now, to the point of this post.

I’m going to be tweeting through this thing – through this whole thing! It’s going to be 24 straight hours of tweets, each about the infamous #MovieFest. I’ll be talking about which films we’re watching and why they’re either awesome or awful. 24 hours of it.

You. Have. Been. Warned.

(And if you want to follow me, you can BY CLICKING HERE)

Wish me luck!

-Alex