Giddy as a 13-year-old (aka: Leonardo DiCaprio won)!

There's something special about those movie stars that you grow up with. One of the most impactful ones, for me, was Leonardo DiCaprio. As the oldest of five siblings, I never had any real say regarding what we watched at home. It was all Disney or Swedish movies based on Astrid Lindgren's books or Björnes magasin. Consequently I hadn't watched anything remotely "grown-up" until my 11th or 12th birthday, when my aunt gave me a VHS copy of Dirty Dancing. In other words: It's not hard to imagine why, when I went to watch Titanic in 1997, I was literally swept of my feet. I was 13 and it was the first movie that made any real impact on me as a person; it made me think more deeply about life and death and the meaning of everything.

Soon after Titanic, my dad showed me What's Eating Gilbert Grape? whereupon I borrowed the book to read and then made it a tradition to watch+read it every summer, along with Marvin's Room. On my friend's 16th birthday, we watched Romeo+Juliet and then, even though I didn't like The Beach that much, I chose to do a project on the book in school the following year anyway. The Basketball Diaries was my first glimpse into certain parts of life that I'd been very sheltered from thus far, which left me with my mouth open for the majority of it.

The point I'm trying to make here is that not only did I grow up with Leonardo DiCaprio's movies but they also helped shape me as a person - and as a movie lover, during my most impressionable years. This process was aided by the fact that he was playing characters just a few years older than I was, which made him feel very relatable to me. Seeing him gain fame therefore, was like seeing a friend succeed (am I sounding stalkery right now?) and that's why; when I learned that he won the Oscar for The Revenant, I got all 13-year-old-giddy again. YAAY, Leonardo!

Ps. This is so un-Swedish of me, I almost feel ashamed..

Nostalgia: Summertime

In the summer of 1996 I spent many evenings over at my friend Sofia's house, where we watched lots of movies on her living room floor/read lots of David Eddings's books on her roof. To this day, late summer evenings still makes me think of The Bridges of Madison County and The Langoliers.

My best friend Marléne and I grew up together on the same street and spent most of our summers outside (almost never watching any movies). That's why I remember the summer we watched Terminator 2: Judgement Day so well - mainly because I spent the rest of it randomly asking my mother what our hamster's name was (we had a bunny) to make sure she wasn't a robot. Around that time I also watched Twister and Broken Arrow a lot.

In 1997, when I turned 13, my aunt gave me a VHS copy of Dirty Dancing and since I grew up with four younger siblings it was a big deal for me. My birthday became the one day of the year when I got to watch something "grown-up" at home. In the summers that followed, I discovered both What's Eating Gilbert Grape? and Forrest Gump and I started watching those on my birthdays instead. I don't know why I remember this one birthday so vividly, but it was getting dark earlier and had started to smell a little like autumn. We had picked some blueberries in the morning and while my mother made my cake I watched Stealing Beauty on the TV. I haven't watched it since, but somehow the memory of that particular birthday has stuck with me.

Today, I try to watch less movies in the summertime and spend more time outside. Mainly doing stuff like this:

My brother and me and our bunny in the summer of 2008. She was the bossy one that bit us wherever she could (once through the cartilage on my ear).