Lately I’ve been exploring the theme of remembrance of things past, that place within childhood I am always trying to get back to and only comes back in glimpses like a stranger walking by that smells vaguely like my kindergarten school teacher. It’s hard to perfectly describe what California felt like in the days and years surrounding 2006, but there are some unmistakable markers; a Tuscan Style kitchen, a Yankee Candle, and realizing I was one of 7.46 million viewers eagerly anticipating the premiere episode of “The O.C.”.

Many of the films I’ve conjured up for this list; make me recall balmy nights and the films that filled the empty spaces in the parlor room with an uncorked bottle of red wine beside the fire after a long afternoon playing Mermaids in the pool and sheepishly working on my diving skills. Or in my mother’s bed and the couple of films we watched repeatedly that would start over from the beginning at 2:00AM like I Am Sam, or Secondhand Lions. Then there were the films that were on VHS and constant replay at my aunt’s house often of the PG-13 and R rated variety, like The Fifth Element. Although this list is comprised of films that were without a doubt not age appropriate, many of the films I enjoyed during the No Child Left Behind era were what you’d expect of a little girl with a Barbie Dream house sitting ridiculously close to the television set. A personal goal at this time was to rent and watch The Lizzie McGuire Movie from Blockbuster 100 times. If my memory serves me correctly my brothers staged a coup for the TV remote once they realized I was serious.

There were of course the more sentimental moments that defined this time for me. The sprinklers being turned on after dark in the middle of a drought just as my mother’s fiancé departs for a business trip to Shanghai, or the numerous weekends my family spent pulling into the driveway of my great-uncle’s home in Riverside, California to care for him in his older age. My great-uncle Harvey was a proper bon vivant and often regaled long tales of drag racing in Southern California, inventing a NOS-like component for his car builds and dumbfounding his white competitors because, “…how does this nigger keep winning?”… I think that’s why these films means so much to me, there’s no film to compare to the real-life moments that came before or after sitting down on the couch, or placing a disc into a portable DVD player during a long drive on the I-5, but they stand still in time despite everything else that’s fallen away.

Spanglish (2004)