My first memory of Spike Jonze came about when I was 13 years old and I read about his upcoming film Being John Malkovich in a Q&A between John Malkovich and then Time Magazine reporter Joel Stein. At the time I was madly in love with both Malkovich and Joel Stein. I was an odd child. Needless to say the movie did not come anywhere near my little hamlet of a town and I had to wait and rent it. At the time we still didn’t have a DVD player so I had to rent it on VHS tape and I hadn’t gotten my own TV/VCR yet (a present I would get upon 8th grade graduation a few months later) and thus was stuck watching it out in the living room. Let’s just say every time a parent or my brother came out of their respective rooms to get something from the kitchen, I immediately turned it off and pretended I was watching something on television. I really do not think I could have watched that in mixed company. Regardless, I really loved it and it marks the beginning of my love for strange, offbeat films.

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