Taste is a strange beast. I know a lot of the things I like now all started with my parents. They showed me some great films, some great TV. They got me into some brilliant books. They played me the first songs I ever heard. Then, at a certain point, you start to pull away from their tastes. Or I did, anyway. I wanted to fit in with other people. I wanted to like what they liked. That expands your taste even more. In some cases, I eventually ended up introducing my parents to things they might have missed by themselves. Or, in other words, that’s how my dad ended up becoming a bigger Radiohead fan than me. My mum, not so much.
One film my dad couldn’t wait to show me was Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was his favourite film. Over the years, a few other ones came close. The Big Lebowski. The Shawshank Redemption. City of Lost Children. Not that one of them ever managed to push 2001 off that glorious top spot.
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