Some acknowledgments:

I've been watching and loving movies since I can remember but there are some movies and directors makers that have defined my present taste of movies.

Quentin Tarantino preserved my fading sense of cinematic wonder and his manic love for cinema was definitely inspiring. As I have grown older I've come to reconsider/revise his growing repertoire of genre pictures that I find mostly underwhelming and childishly provocative. His first four film are in my opinion the only ones worth re-watching.

Kevin Smith's "Clerks" made me discover the indies and have patience for low budget cinema. "Clerks" is another of those movies that I've watched and revised critically. I still find it fun but it is hardly a masterpiece. Smiths following films bear witness to a carrier in adolescent indulgence but his cinematic debut was instrumental in shaping my taste today.

Low budget genre movies like "Omega Doom" (Pyun, 1996) and "Screamers" (Duguay, 1995) have taught me to appreciate B movies. I don't like ironic watching of bad cinema (although I have seen the classics like 'Plan 9 From Outer Space' and 'Manos: The Hands Of Fate' but mainly because of morbid curiosity). I will never see "The Room" just because it's so bad that it's good. Hoping to find low budget gems forces you to watch a lot of dreck though. But I'm up for the challenge.

"La Pianiste" is one of those movies that I avoided watching for years but I gave it a shot (I disliked Hanekes "Funny Games", and still do for that matter) when I belatedly 'discovered' the wonderful Isabel Huppert. That dark and twisted movie made me appreciate French cinema even more. I had seen a lot French movies but up till then I had mainly seen light-hearted fare (Like Francis Veber comedies). I know that Haneke is a German-born Austrian but I still consider "La Pianiste" part of French cinemas greatest.

The older I get the less patient I get for middlebrow, mediocre Hollywood fare and have almost revised all of my favorite movies from the 90's and early aught's.

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