#54. Sad Movies and Scary Movies (Saturday, December 18, 2004)

#54. Sad Movies and Scary Movies (Saturday, December 18, 2004)

What was your best day…of watching a movie that would stick with you forever?

Every person has that distinct set of films that, upon being watched for the first time, hits them in a particularly sensitive emotional place – and in a way that they can’t even adequately describe after the fact. From my experience, that is followed by either one of two things: (1) crying; or (2) an uncontrollable obsession, where you spend the next two to three weeks hunting down every piece of internet prose or media related to that film as well as rewatching it multiple times.

The heavy ones only come upon you once every couple of years or so – classics like A League of their Own (2019), A Walk to Remember (2013), Click (2007), and, last but not least, The Butterfly Effect (2004).1

Christmas was in a week, and at that time I really wanted an MP3 player (this was 2004, remember). So on that Saturday I mentioned it to my dad, and to my surprise, he offered to go with me to Future Shop2 right then and there to pick one out. I ended up getting a BenQ Joybee 130 with its incredible 512 MB of storage. And with that, I could now listen to my favorite songs from the radio (back then mostly Eminem) whenever I wanted! I was totally stunned. (My dad almost never did anything like this.)

Yet before that feeling could sink in, we’d arrived at the Rogers Video store3 and my dad told me to pick out a few movies. This was my first time renting DVDs on my own and I had thousands to choose from, so I was ecstatic. I ended up getting The Tuxedo, Miracle, The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King Extended Edition, and the R-rated Fahrenheit 9/11 and The Butterfly Effect (screw the MPAA).

So alone in my dark basement that evening, the first thing I watched was The Tuxedo. I had seen parts of it on the bus back from our Grade 7 class trip to Montreal, and really wanted to see the whole thing – mainly because of Jennifer Love Hewitt and multiple scenes involving her that had been etched in my twelve-year-old brain.

Once that was done, it was time for The Butterfly Effect. And the film – with Ashton Kutcher doing everything he could to go back to critical points in his childhood to save his one true love – just had this whole epic air to it that I had never experienced before. It also scared me shitless at a couple of points4. (Interesting, because I didn’t bat an eye during The Ring and The Grudge from my next DVD spree.5)

And then of course, for the next six days, I just wore that DVD out.

  1. Lord of the Rings (#108), despite (and partly because of) its epic scope, does not make that list. Though, interestingly, it was during the previews of Return of the King in theaters that I first saw the trailer for The Butterfly Effect.
  2. Canadian Best Buy that has since got bought out by Best Buy.
  3. Also became defunct.
  4. SPOILER. Namely the scene where Kid!Kutcher’s mom turns to see him holding a knife out of nowhere, and the one where Teen!Kutcher puts a stick of dynamite in a mailbox, and it explodes just as a baby picks it up.
  5. But I was really weird like that. The one movie that I’ve refused to ever watch again out of fear is Election, because of one particular scene: the freeze-frame when Matthew Broderick catches Reese Witherspoon spying on him counting the votes (that I’m not going to try to find the link of); and multiple smaller scenes.