Meet Mo Burford: CCCNews' Movie Reviewer

Mo Burford is writing a new Column for CCCNews - Moving Pictures. He intends to hand us some gems and immerse us in world where anything can happen.

Editor’s Note - We welcome Mo Burford to the CCCNews fold this week as our new movie reviewer. Burford said he was ecstatic to have the chance to write about something he has loved since a child, the art of film. And we now get to benefit from his years of study. Look for his column twice a month.

By Mo Burford

Moving Pictures is a column born out of a life-long love of watching films and going to the movies. While the mission is to highlight and review current showings at our local theaters, the enthusiasm behind it developed long before I became a resident of The Dalles.

As a teen, in Wofford Heights, California, we had a tiny, one-screen theatre, which never showed more than two films at a time (minus the Titanic craze of ’97). Since I lived in Kernville (one town over), the theater was too far from where my friends and I lived to bike or walk to, which meant relying on the occasional benevolence of our parents and having to coordinate both a ride there and back. It was at this theater, its indoor walls painted a sickly green, where I saw things like The Ring, and Kill Bill: Vol. 1 and 2. When transportation wasn’t feasible, there was always Mystery Science Theater 3,000, which played around midnight on the Sci-Fi channel.

Johnny Depp and director Tim Burton kept our new reviewer on his movie reviewing path at the age of 16.

Something shifted around 16 years old. I began to realize that a movie wasn’t just a discrete product, but a complex piece of art made by someone. I understood that Edward Scissorhands, Beetlejuice and Nightmare Before Christmas, three movies I loved, were directed by the same person. The older I got, the more I realized there was a whole world of movies out there, so large that I could expand my horizons beyond the mainstream blockbusters while still growing more curious, and more specific, about the films and directors I liked most.

I’m lucky to have had a diversity of movie-going experiences over the years. I’ve watched community arthouse and independent films at a small church in Orono, Maine. I’ve attended film festivals in Ashland, Oregon, where I frequented the Varsity Theater year-round as a college student. And I’ve come to relish any chance I get to drive into Portland and watch 70mm and 35mm screenings at the Hollywood Theater, movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Throne of Blood, respectively.

Of course, things are different now. At the start of the pandemic, while realizing I’d need to rely heavily on streaming services I could affordably access from home, I assigned myself the task of watching 100 films per year—a goal I’ve consistently overshot each year by about 50 movies. I track them all on an Excel spreadsheet, where I record the director, year of release, date of viewing, and an idiosyncratic plus and minus rating system. My last entry, Mac and Me (1988), an MST3K pick, received a -/+. I’m a firm believer that some bad movies are so bad that they become, almost miraculously, good again.

Though this experience of watching hundreds of movies at home has been a meaningful one, nothing quite compares to the smell of buttered popcorn, or the feel of that small paper ticket in hand: I’m aware of a whole new level of gratitude as I find myself once again sitting down in front of the big screen, maybe even with a renewed patience for the occasional loud whisperer, or that person who, bursting with emotion, asks a question during a pivotal moment of silence.

Don’t look.

Coincidentally, my first formative movie-going experience, and one of my favorite memories, took place at the cinema here in The Dalles. It was 1993, and my family and I had gone to see Jurassic Park. Right as the T. rex made its first appearance, its massive head taking up the entire screen with a bellowing roar, I looked over and saw that my grandmother, eyes closed, was holding her hands in front of her face. She reassured me that it was fine if I needed to cover mine, too, and I carry that moment with me as a reminder of what movies do to us, their capacity to penetrate into our own (dino) DNA and make the whole world, at least for a couple of hours, feel like a theme park ride where anything is possible.

~Mo