Film Twitter Has Found Its Newest Hero: A Kid Showing Off His Criterion Collection
I could wax poetic about Criterion for hours. In addition to an expertly-curated streaming service, they are going to great lengths to preserve the art of physical media. In a way, you ascend to another level of movie fandom once you add one of their premium Blu-rays, with beautiful restorations and detailed bonus features, to your collection. This week, one movie fan’s efforts to do that early have gotten a lot of attention.
On Wednesday, screenshots of a TikTok from @kasonlovesmovies quickly went viral on Twitter. In the video, the 13-year-old Kason enthusiastically shows off his collection of Criterion Collection releases — which spans David Lynch classics like Blue Velvet and Eraserhead, and horror staples like The Silence of the Lambs, Scanners, and Funny Games. They’re not necessarily the titles you would expect a younger movie watcher to gravitate towards, much less want to buy premium Blu-rays for… and fellow cinephiles have a lot of feelings about that.
In part, the post about Kason’s collection went so viral because of one newer entry: Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, the infamous 1975 film from director Pier Paolo Pasolini. The film, which loosely adapts The 120 Days of Sodom through the lens of Italian fascists kidnapping and torturing teenagers during World War II, has become controversial worldwide ever since its initial debut decades ago. It does not shy away from the brutality of its subject matter… so some responses have been shocked or worried at the idea of a cinephile this young being subjected to it.
In Kason’s defense, he does admit in the video that he doesn’t think he’s actually going to watch Salò, but he at least wanted it to be part of his collection. In the comments of the video, he reiterates that if he does end up watching the film, it probably won’t be until he’s much older. (A separate video about his Criterion watchlist reveals that he might take the same approach to John Waters’ 1972 cult classic Pink Flamingos.)
Get Him in the Criterion Closet Immediately!
Kason’s video and the Salò of it all have inspired quite a few interesting conversations. The first is about the act of being a physical media collector (especially in this day and age when that’s a more difficult task than ever), and owning copies of things before you even know if you’re going to like them. I know I, personally, treat some of my Blu-rays and books like a wine snob treats a specific bottle: letting it sit on my shelf and age until I feel that it is the right time for me to watch or read it. I didn’t even start to consciously adopt that philosophy until I was much older than Kason, so I admire his ability to do that at such a young age.
And even then, plenty of comments have pointed out that it’s a sort of cinephile rite of passage to watch a more “adult” movie well before you’re old enough to be the target audience of it. That doesn’t seem to be a foreign concept to Kason — again, his Criterion collection includes plenty of horror films, and even the very dark 1985 anti-war classic Come and See.
Ultimately, a lot of comments (both on TikTok and Twitter) have applauded Kason for already having such eclectic film tastes, to the point of wanting to start his own Criterion collection this young. Plenty have applauded his taste, compared him to the grandkid from Sentimental Value, or just found it refreshing that a young person is this interested in classic movies and physical media. As one tweet from @baileylikemovie puts it, he is the “cultured, eclectic, refined chad” opposite of “your loser chud kid: tiktok doomscroller, addicted to AI brainrot, chicken jockey and 67 or whatever.”
(featured image: Criterion Collection)
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