Hunter Liu's Website

Movies

When I was a freshman at UCLA, one of my good friends and I started holding movie nights together. One of the first movie nights was held not too long before the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. We were drinking blue raspberry Svedka (nasty!) while watching Ip Man (2008) in our dorm’s shared lounge. We both kind of just got sucked into the movie for two and a half hours, mouths agape and bodies paralysed, right up until the movie ended.

We periodically held online watch parties during the pandemic itself, and when we both moved back to UCLA, we started holding regular movie nights! We’d pick out a movie or two, enjoy some beers, or just forgo the movie altogether and hang out.

It’s become a tradition of sorts now, and it’s a really special one to me. We owe a lot of it to all of the moviemakers: the directors and actors and writers for sure, but also the cameramen and sound guys and lighting dudes and editors and all the other people we don’t think about a lot while watching the movie.

We’ve watched some really, really good movies over the past few years; we’ve watched some incredibly awful movies; and we’ve enjoyed almost all of them. I wanted to collect and share the movies that I’ve enjoyed the most. You’ll find that there’s a mix of good and bad movies, of high and low budgets, and of all sorts of genres. It takes a lot of work to make a movie, and they don’t have to be perfect to add value to people’s lives. They all deserve some sort of recognition.