MY FAVORITE MOVIE OF ALL TIME

Rating: 10/10 (3 September 2018)

When I was eight years old, my dad showed me Back to the Future for the first time, and it changed my life. Over the years, I've seen it hundreds of times, and Michael J. Fox quickly became my favorite actor ever. I love this movie so much that I've even gone to comic conventions to meet Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, Lea Thompson, Tom Wilson, and Bob Gale, and I even met Crispin Glover at an Alamo Drafthouse once. This movie got me into skateboarding, and guitar playing, and it really began my fascination with the 1980s and the 1950s. Alan Silvestri's score is iconic, and so is the soundtrack featuring "The Power of Love" and "Back in Time" by Huey Lewis and the News, as well as the now iconic remakes of "Earth Angel" and "Johnny B. Goode." I have the soundtrack for this movie on vinyl as well, and it's one of the great movie soundtracks and scores. I've always been a small guy, about the size of Marty McFly/Michael J. Fox, so seeing someone like him that I could relate to made me feel cool to be short. It amazes me that Michael J. Fox did this movie with roughly four hours of sleep every night, while doing Family Ties during the day. Anyone who has been on a film set or tried memorizing lines knows that this couldn't have been easy, but hey, "pain is temporary, film is forever." The opening scene with the credits followed by the "Power of Love" scene are the perfect way to start a movie. I still re-watch this movie and catch new subtleties that I never picked up on before. When you look at the behind-the-scenes production of this movie, it's actually astounding that this turned out so perfect, especially since they ironically enough, didn't have much time. This movie is a masterpiece, especially in it's clever writing, with subtle foreshadowing in ways that remind me how they just don't make movies like this anymore. This movie has fun, and it has heart. The fact that the stakes are really so small is also a testament to the writing, because if you really think about it, the only people this whole movie would affect are Marty and his family. The stakes are so small, yet when Marty is racing to get back to the future in the finale, it is still as epic and riveting as the first time you saw it, and somehow still manages to keep me on the edge of my seat, as if I don't know what's going to happen. That's how well made this whole movie is. It's a fun, timeless movie that resonates because of the values it places on time and family.