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JAN (pronounced ‘John’):

As a young child in the Reagan-era 80’s, Jan was accustomed to watching a stream of quality movie programming from the incipient beginnings of the premium cable phenomenon that we all know and love to this day.  Parents Jose and Tess were bold enough to grace young Jan with all the good channels growing up, from HBO, Showtime, and Cinemax, to later upstarts like Starz and Encore.  These, coupled with a thriving home video cassette market, provided a veritable utopian landscape of film, and Jan absorbed all of it like so many kitchen sponges adrift in a sea of glorious, brackish dishwater.

Early tastes would define later discriminations, with prototypical 80’s action and horror blazing the trail into the serious drama, slapstick comedy, biting satire, and arthouse pretension of coming years.  Jan never missed a beat, most unequivocally into the DVD age, where a job in his teens at a used media store afforded him the privilege to buy/sell/trade his way into a gargantuan collection that has grown beyond his control of late.  The digital dawn of Internet movies has only added to the cause, as Queen Netflix has enveloped Jan into her wonderful, terrible red heart.

Jan likes: the 70’s and 80’s, especially pre-CGI horror, but not excluding any and all genres, from the early works of today’s greats to obscure one-hit/one-off wonders, as well as foreign and independent stuff, documentaries, faux-docs, and the occasional cult fave. 

Personal quote (paraphrasing from a friend): “I think any movie is watchable at least once.”