Dear readers, I am currently writing to you while standing on the bedhead in my dorm that is for only my lovely roommate Chace and I to share. My name is Burke Rollins and I am a junior transfer student. I am excited to bring about the genesis of Furman’s first biweekly movie column, Flopcorn. We had a different name, but I was advised by the legal team and by The Council that it would not be a good idea, mostly because the branding would be hard.
I was introduced to film at an early age, but mostly wrote it off due to the span of films that I was allowed to watch. Since I have loving, caring parents, I was not allowed to watch such horror shows like Spongebob Squarepants and Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith until the proper age. To fill this gap, my brother and I made a few dumb movies in our basement, with our magnum opus, The Life of Burke, featuring my brother behind the camera and me in front.. If I ever find it, I will release a redacted version for the four readers of this column.
As I got into my early adolescence, movies to me were a formula that drove me crazy with boredom. I knew that the people I was made to care about were not going to die and the stories were bland. However, this all changed at 16. Film entered into my life by a punch in the face movie with a punch in the face intro, Pulp Fiction. I bought the DVD to watch over at my friend David Decker’s stunning estate in Pfafftown, NC during COVID. I had heard rumors of the film from older people and, since I was 16 and had a driver’s license, I pushed weight down the highway to get to my favorite market in the world, McKay’s. Funko Pops, to “I farted” T-shirts, the world is yours at McKays. I brandished the DVD, hooked up the Blu-Ray player, and fired up Pulp Fiction. An incredible two and a half hours teleported me into a world that I could have never imagined. This movie about drugs gave me a secondhand high for movies that look and feel really cool. This love for cinema has many perks, such as being able to refer to scenes and movies that only I have seen, or being able to give a Wikipedia profile of whatever movie/actor someone offhandedly referred to in a conversation that did not involve me.
Now that I have filled you in on the backstory, let us examine what I want from this column and for you dear readers. This column will not, most of the time, be a summary of a movie or analysis of said movie, but rather I want to bring a gonzo style to the movie critiquing. You can read people who are much more articulate than me on the internet talk about the movies that I will be reviewing. However, they cannot write about the experience that I had surrounding a movie. That, to me, is something that you will not be getting anywhere else. That short story about Pulp Fiction is a prototype for what an entire article would be. For example, if I was reviewing the movie Project X, I would never tell you what happens in that movie. Rather, I would tell you about how I was lifting weights with my friend and his four-month-old sister, and decided to fire up Project X after we finished working out and had a wonderful time, sitting in our sweat with our shirts off. These stories are also what is true to my memory. These stories could be, 100% false, however my deceitful mind has a story in it that I think is worthy of being told.
The other times, I will be providing the usual movie review/analysis if it is a movie that no one has seen or a movie that has a really interesting theory/lens to view it through that will provide you dear readers a way of looking at a movie in a more fun way. Also, the movies that I will be reviewing will not be such movies as Citizen Kane or Casablanca. Those have been done to death and are really boring. I want to provide movie recommendations so that these movies may spread by word of mouth and get a cult following. The lost art of word of mouth is something that I hope to be bringing back to Furman’s campus.
Finally, what is anything without a grand vision? The grand vision of this column is to be read by the Pope, Ueli Maurer, and the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court is mostly because I think that in the Idiocracy future of this country, the Supreme Court will not be deciding constitutional issues, but rather they will be discussing who was more attractive in certain movies. I just hope to be a footnote in history. I do have to excuse myself because I am really hungry and The Good Friend has alfredo sauce cooking up.