Films, life, crap health and general musings

Favourite films by Year

2011-12-07T17:33:00.001Z

Not really a blog, more a list for Ken Armstrong (who does some of that there writing here.) A twitter conversation led to him asking if I had a list of favourite films of each year. I did, but it was in an old fashioned book. Never one to pass up the opportunity to make a list, I’ve transcribed it below. The list is of course subject to change should I see another film from a particular year that I prefer to the one currently listed.

(and yes, it did hurt having to leave out Rashomon and It’s a Wonderful Life). Some years just had too many great films.

2010 Inception

2009 Moon

2008 Let the Right One In

2007 No Country For Old Men

2006 The Lives of Others

2005 Good Night and Good Luck

2004 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

2003 The Station Agent

2002 Adaptation

2001 No Man’s Land

2000 In The Mood For Love

1999 Fight Club

1998 Gods and Monsters

1997 L.A. Confidential

1996 Fargo

1995 Secrets and Lies

1994 The Shawshank Redemption

1993 Groundhog Day

1992 Unforgiven

1991 JFK

1990 Millers Crossing

1989 Crimes and Misdemeanors

1988 Cinema Paradiso

1987 Planes, Trains and Automobiles

1986 Jean de Florette

1985 Ran

1984 Broadway Danny Rose

1983 Local Hero

1982 The King of Comedy

1981 An American Werewolf in London

1980 Airplane

1979 Being There

1978 Superman

1977 Annie Hall

1976 Taxi Driver

1975 Jaws

1974 The Conversation

1973 Don’t Look Now

1972 What’s Up Doc?

1971 Duel

1970 MASH

1969 The Wild Bunch

1968 The Odd Couple

1967 In the Heat of the Night

1966 The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

1965 The Battle of Algiers

1964 Dr Strangelove

1963 Charade

1962 The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

1961 The Hustler

1960 The Apartment

1959 Some Like it Hot

1958 Vertigo

1957 12 Angry Men

1956 The Searchers

1955 The Lady Killers

1954 Rear Window

1953 Tokyo Story

1952 Singin’ in the Rain

1951 Strangers on a Train

1950 Harvey

1949 Kind Hearts and Coronets

1948 The Bicycle Thief

1947 Monsieur Verdoux

1946 A Matter of Life and Death

1945 Rome, Open City

1944 Double Indemnity

1943 Shadow of a Doubt

1942 Casablanca

1941 Citizen Kane

1940 The Shop Around the Corner

1939 His Girl Friday

1938 Le Grand Illusion

1937 Way Out West

1936 Modern Times

1935 Bride of Frankenstein

1934 It Happened One Night

1933 Duck Soup

1932 Freaks

1931 M

1930 All Quiet on the Western Front

Jodie 1997-2011

2011-10-14T16:45:00.002+01:00

Sad times as today we said goodbye to the last of our Cavaliers, Jodie. She outlived all her six children, but our suspicion that she’d found the elixir of eternal life proved unfounded as she fell asleep for the final time.

Not much else to say, except a thank you to her for her companionship over 14 years. Not that she’d understand that, cos she was a dog.

So here’s some pictures instead,

She began life as a puppy – I believe this is typical dog behaviour

With Jess in the early days

She got older and then lots of little dogs started coming out of her

She was a bloody brilliant mum though.

Yes, this is mainly an excuse to look at pictures of puppies.

The “crew” together in their heyday

She even tolerated Jasper in her autumn days.

Bloody dogs….and bloody dead dogs.

Let Me In, Subtitling, and a post without a point.

2011-06-08T15:59:00.001+01:00

Oh hello – is this blog still on?

Apparently it is. Anyway, we’ll just gloss over the several months that have passed since my last post and pretend it was due to me being really busy and having much better things to do (neither of these things are true).

Anyway, 2 separate events inspired me to return to the bloggaging thing – needless to say, both film-related.

The first was my viewing last night of Let Me In, the remake of the truly excellent Swedish horror film, Let the Right One In, which I previously blogged about here, and indeed here, when it made my list of “Top Five films of all time, beginning with the letter L” (pithy, hey?)

Given my love for the original, I was hesitant to watch the English-language version as in the past these have inevitably disappointed (yes I’m looking at you Vanilla Sky, The Ring, etc, and who can forget, Vin Diesel taking the lead in the English remake of Kurosawa’s Rashomon. Oh, I may be remembering that last one incorrectly. Remembering…Rashomon… see what I did there *ahem*.

But due mainly to the persuasion of the genial and all-knowing twitter guru Ken Armstrong who had also shared my love for the original and had then gone on to enjoy the remake, I added it to my Lovefilm list and it landed on my doormat yesterday. (It didn’t actually land on the doormat – the postman handed it to me, but it seemed a better turn of phrase and something a normal person would write. (I’m just realizing now why I haven’t blogged for ages, I kind of get distracted by other thoughts and then the paperclip eats the stapler etc)).

And my verdict on Let me In? Well, I was ambivalent, in the true sense of the word. On the one hand it was atmospheric, superbly acted throughout, the story was gripping, and the interesting themes of the first film were all there. If I had never seen the first film I would have been really impressed by this unusually intelligent mainstream horror film.

But..but..But

On the other hand, I HAVE seen the original and although the remake was faithful, it was almost TOO faithful. Very little changed. There’s some slight alterations to the story’s focus but all the memorable scenes (bar one) from the first film are played out in Let Me In, but in EXACTLY the same way. Some scenes even appear to be a shot by shot copy, and reminded me of what Gus Van Sant did with his shot by shot remake of Hitchcock’s Psycho. Yes, there’s nothing wrong with this film taken on its own merits, but I can’t take it on its own merits. It’s like me handing over a manuscript of Crime and Punishment that I’d typed out and saying I’d written it. Yes, it would still be a literary masterpiece, but a COPY. (don’t think about that analogy too much – it doesn’t hold up to great scrutiny)

I guess my point is I just can’t see the point of making Let Me In. Or more specifically, I can see the point of making it, but am frustrated that that point exists. I am troubled that the majority (and it does seem to be a majority) of cinema audiences just will not entertain the thought of going to see a film not in the English language. Yet even as I write these words, the success of Passion of the Christ (not a word of which was in English) and Avatar (containing subtitles) jump into my head, immediately disproving my theory. So is it foreign films that are the problem? Will audiences not accept a film unless it’s been made in the US or UK? I don’t know the answer to be honest, and this is fast becoming a blog post without a point (there’s a theme developing here about why I shouldn’t blog).

Anyway I said TWO things inspired me to write this post and the other was the trailer I saw at the cinema on Friday for David Fincher’s version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Again, my heart sunk, it has to be said. For judging by the trailer (and I’m aware of the danger of judging solely from the trailer), the shots in that film seemed exactly the same as those in the Swedish version of the film. Maybe in the longer cut that will not turn out to be the case and at least in Fincher there is a director who generally does interesting stuff with his material, but again it struck me as to the waste, almost, of spending all that money remaking a film that was perfectly acceptable to begin with, when the investment could be spent on bringing new stories to the screen.

Following these two events, I spent the early hours wondering what the Swedes have ever done to us that makes it such torment to sit through a film in their language, following the subtitles at the bottom of the screen. Is it ABBA’s fault? Tomas Brolin, perhaps? Maybe a dislike of herring? Or is it, as I have always suspected, all the fault of Magnus Magnusson?

What’s that – he’s not Swedish, you say?

He’s ICELANDIC?

But this was my big “I’ve started so I’ll finish” ending.

This is why I don’t write many blog posts – sorry for wasting your time.

See you in December.

The King’s Speech

2011-01-20T11:24:00.002Z

After a break for Christmas, I’ve done another reader’s review for the Doncaster Free Press, this time for the film, The King’s Speech. You probably haven’t heard of it as it’s not had much publicity or acclaim!

The review is as written below.

The King’s Speech is the latest home-grown film that’s been making waves on both sides of the Atlantic, garnering Golden Globe nominations and raising Oscar hopes for those involved.

There is always a worry that critical acclaim and awards’ talk does not necessarily guarantee an entertaining film (yes, I’m looking at you, The English Patient). However that scepticism is rapidly washed away as the film proves equally as entertaining for the public as for the critics.

Colin Firth will surely be clearing a space on his mantelpiece, owing to his magnificent portrayal of the future George VI, struggling with a severe stammer that hampers all attempts at public speaking. When a country needs a King to speak for them, what use is a King without a voice?

The future Queen Mother (Helena Bonham Carter) enlists the services of unconventional speech therapist, Geoffrey Rush to aid her husband. It is this relationship that the film focuses upon, as the ‘commoner’, Rush begins an uneasy friendship with the future King, much to the latter’s initial discomfort.

The film encompasses wider events; from the relationship between Edward and Wallis Simpson; to the rise of Hitler and the build up to World War Two; the director Tom Hooper convinces in his depiction of this time, and elicits exemplary performances from his actors (a miscast Timothy Spall as Churchill is the sole exception).

At its heart the story is not so much about royalty, but rather a universal tale of friendship and a man’s attempt to overcome adversity. That he happens to be the King naturally gives the story added weight, and will undoubtedly help in the American market, but even for those who are not ardent monarchists, it is still a moving, funny, and inspirational tale and highly recommended

Megamind

2010-12-16T20:41:00.001Z

After a week’s gap due to the snow and subsequent decimation of that week’s reviews’ page, I was back in the Doncaster Free Press this week with a review of the animated film, Megamind. It wasn’t a film that I’d have chosen to go and see at the cinema but I rather enjoyed it. Other reviews I’ve seen since have been harsher on it, but I found it diverting enough and it had a fair few laughs. The review I wrote is, as ever, reproduced below:

What’s the point of being bad if there's no good to stop you? That question forms the crux of Dreamworks’ new animated film, Megamind.

You see, Megamind is not a superhero. Voiced by Will Ferrell, he’s actually the nefarious enemy of the superhero Metro Man (Brad Pitt) but it’s the villain’s story we follow. And after Metro Man departs, what is there for Megamind to do without life seeming rather dull? Where’s the fun in being evil if there’s no-one on the side of good to stand in your way?

Admittedly it’s derivative; The Incredibles and the Austin Powers films weaved similar paths with their superheroes and villains suffering from existential angst, but it’s done with charm and most importantly, humour.

Whether it be the pithy one liners, the incongruity of a villain developing a heart, or the enjoyable parody of the Superman story, replete with Marlon Brando lookalike, there are plenty of laughs to be had.

Tina Fey voices the part of the hot shot reporter, clearly based on Lois Lane, who causes Megamind to rethink his ways. But the course of true love will, as ever, be far from smooth, especially when an even more villainous character (Jonah Hill) emerges.

Whilst the film won’t win prizes for originality, and some of the in-jokes may be lost on the very young, the animation is as well crafted as you’d expect from Dreamworks. And despite the rather distracting soundtrack of 80s rock songs, the film manages to sustain the entertainment levels until the final credits roll.

Skyline

2010-12-06T19:41:00.002Z

A bit late this week, but another of my film reviews appeared in the Free Press last week. The difference was the word count was lowered from 300-350 words to just 150 words. I found this quite difficult as there’s really not a huge amount you can say in that space. Still, it’s a good job I wasn’t reviewing Everything You Wanted To Know About Sex (But Were Afraid To Ask) as the title would almost have taken up 10% of the word count itself!

Anyway, the review is below. I didn’t think much of the film, and I think I could have done better with the review too – it didn’t flow very well, which is perhaps something to do with the limited word count – I clearly need to learn to be pithy and concise in an eloquent way.

As an old-style alien invasion B-movie, Skyline enjoys the benefit of spectacular visuals, utilising computer-generated effects that would have been unthinkable on the same low budget just a few years ago.

The effects, however, remain the film’s high point. The human characters that populate the story are cardboard thin, fairly unpleasant, and so undeserving of our empathy that you find yourself siding with the marauding intruders.

The film itself feels derivative. You spend half the time thinking “There’s a bit from Independence Day, a bit from District 9” and so on. However, the filmmakers do nothing new with the genre, and the resulting film feels like watching a firework display in the company of thoroughly objectionable spectators.

If you want a thought-provoking, character-driven drama, steer away from Skyline. If, however, you want to turn your brain off for 90 minutes for some effects-laden schlock, then it’s diverting enough for a Friday night.

(152 words)

150 words is less than you might think!

Due Date

2010-11-18T12:03:00.001Z

The latest of my Doncaster Free Press came out today; this time for Due Date, a film with which I wasn’t entirely enamoured. As ever, it was cut down to fit, but here’s the original 300 odd word review that I submitted, should you wish to read it.

Due Date, the new film from The Hangover director, Todd Phillips, has been labelled as this generation’s Planes, Trains and Automobiles. This being the case, you’ve got to feel sympathy for the new generation at being saddled with this pale imitation of the earlier film, lacking its humour and with none of its heart.

The plot sees Robert Downey Jr’s passive-aggressive architect trying to get home from Atlanta to Los Angeles where his wife (Michelle Monaghan) is preparing to give birth to their first child. This attempt is hampered by an encounter with oddball Zach Galifianakis (previously also seen in The Hangover), resulting in them both being ejected from an aeroplane and placed on a no-fly list. Consequently the mismatched pair is thrown together for an obstacle-ridden car trip across the width of America.

A lack of believability permeates the film, both in the plot and also in how characters behave. This results in us not really investing ourselves in the film, not helped by the rather clumsy more serious moments that are presumably supposed to be emotional but are difficult to swallow.

Whilst scenes such as that where Downey Jr inappropriately punches a child or spits at a dog in a face are momentarily funny, they are also a sign of the film increasingly relying on shock and gross-out humour to cover its lack of imagination.

All this could be forgiven if the film was funny enough. However, two or three amusing moments are a poor return over 90 minutes. Brief highlights are a lively cameo from Juliette Lewis, and a perhaps unintentionally funny line where Downey Jr’s character states “I’ve never done drugs in my life” –anyone with a knowledge of his real-life wild side will appreciate the irony there.

There’s some picturesque views of the American landscape too, but it’s probably obvious here that I’m clutching at straws in trying to find aspects of the film to recommend. It’s almost not worth getting annoyed about the film because it’s not entirely dreadful, but there’s frustration at a film that’s just so lazy and instantly forgettable.

Rhod Gilbert Live in Doncaster

2010-11-15T10:42:00.001Z

As well as my regular film reviews for the Free Press over the last month, I’ve also had chance to see occasional live shows. The latest of these was Rhod Gilbert, live at the Doncaster Dome last week. I was worried I wouldn’t be able to make it at first as my health was pretty shoddy that day, but I just about managed to get through it. My review appeared in the paper last week (picture to prove it below!), and then I’ve included a copy of my original review, should you care to read it.

It’s not one of the best reviews I’ve done and I can see many ways I could have made it better, but too late for that now – I’m not as confident with the live reviews as I am with the film ones.

“Rhod Gilbert brought his new show, the succinctly titled Rhod Gilbert and the Cat that Looked Like Nicholas Lyndhurst to a sold-out Dome last week.

If you’ve seen Gilbert’s routines before, it’s essentially more of the same which is either a good or bad thing depending on your tastes. He spends two hours venting his spleen at the annoyances in his life – overcomplicated washing machines, the nightmare of trying to buy a simple vacuum cleaner, and the newspaper reviewers who accuse him of getting overly frustrated over life’s trivialities.

You have to admit the reviewers do have a point about the trivialities but Gilbert can be very, very funny in his anger. Flailing about on stage, taking out his anger on the stage furniture, and with the omnipresent can of lager in his hand, he expels his frustration with so much vigour, it’s tiring just watching him. The pneumonia that he was still recovering from seems to have done nothing to quell his energy

The funniest sections of the show were those when Gilbert interacted with the audience – his bewilderment at there being a ten year old boy in the audience was a highlight, as was his frustration at inappropriate suggestions from the audience when he opened a topic up for discussion.

The ranting does get a bit repetitive at times; he even reprises the duvet buying sketch from his last show and at times it’s a little bit Rhod Gilbert by numbers. One could argue that he’s found a winning formula and is sticking with it but it does cross the line of credibility: whereas we believed his frustration on trying to buy a duvet in previous shows, we don’t believe that he actually ended up buying 27 vacuum cleaners as he claims here

Nevertheless the show is expertly wrapped up with all the strands weaving together in the finale in an entertaining fashion. Venting his fury over life’s frustrations is still proving fertile material for Gilbert and whilst the formula may soon wear thin, this time it was a successful return to Doncaster for the Welsh comic.”

Burke and Hare

2010-11-11T12:12:00.001Z

The Free Press is out again today and this week I’ve got two, yes TWO reviews in. The main one is the review of Rhod Gilbert live last week and I’ll put that up in due course, but the film review was for Burke and Hare which I saw at the cinema. It was cut down by half again due to space issues, but here’s the original, should you wish to read it:

The real life exploits of the 19^th century grave-robbers turned murderers, William Burke and William Hare seem ideal source material for a cinematic thrill. Sadly, Burke and Hare, the new film from An American Werewolf in London director, John Landis does not do their story justice and at first glance it’s difficult to see why.

In the lead roles, Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis are more than capable as the eponymous duo and Jessica Hynes provides decent support as Serkis’ bawdy wife. In a true celebration of British talent, Tom Wilkinson, Tim Curry, and Ronnie Corbett all enjoy substantial roles, and there are brief cameos from horror stalwart Christopher Lee and director Michael Winner. Landis’ recreation of early 19^th Century Edinburgh is convincing and his direction never seems less than that we’d expect from a veteran of his standard. The production is brought to us from Ealing Studios and harks back to that studio’s golden age where films such as Kind Hearts and Coronets and The Ladykillers dealt with murder in a wickedly funny and subversive way.

So why doesn’t it work? The main problem is the screenplay. Ultimately, no matter how hard the cast try, if the script isn’t up to scratch, the end product is unlikely to flourish. The film is pitched at the humorous end of the market – no danger of gritty realism here - but the laugh count simply isn’t high enough. Making an audience care about two murderers is a tough sell and this is accomplished but beyond that, there’s a feeling of a lost opportunity. The tone is confused; starting out slightly macabre and then introducing an awkward romantic subplot involving Isla Fisher (who has startling perfect teeth for a 19^th century ex-prostitute). There’s nothing wrong with mixing genres but the film doesn’t seem confident enough in its own identity and unfortunately falls between two stools; neither funny enough for a comedy, nor dark enough for a dramatic horror.

I was really looking forward to this film and maybe that those high expectations led to the disappointment. It’s certainly not dreadful but you just feel it could have been so much better.

Paranormal Activity 2 and the scary cuts

2010-11-04T16:21:00.001Z

Well I got another review in the Free Press again this week, but I’m not so pleased with this one. I didn’t like the film I watched (Paranormal Activity 2), and wrote a review of 343 words (it has to be under 350) which I thought was fairly entertaining – you can be the judge of that below though. However on looking at the paper this week it had been cut down to 170 words.

Of course I understand this happens and much, much better writers than me have had their work cut, but I was disappointed with the outcome – the tone of the piece changed and the bits that I thought were the best ones had gone. It also gave a slightly differing opinion in the review; for instance the review in the paper starts “If you like frightening moments and enjoy extended periods of tedium then Paranormal Activity is the film for you” which is quite different from what I wrote below.

The bits about Kubrick and Hitchcock were also cut out which is more understandable as they weren’t crucial to the review, but I still feel a bit odd about the whole thing, especially as I spent a while trying to find the right words. It’s not a big thing I guess (there were more reviews on the page than usual this week which explains the cuts) and I probably shouldn’t be precious about it, but it’s my name on the reviews and I just hope that people reading understand that they are sometimes heavily edited. I fear they won’t though, because it’s not something I’ve ever really thought about before recently.

Anyhow, should you be interested, the original review in its entirety is below. If you really want to see the edited result then you’ll have to buy the Free Press (a bit tricky if you don’t live in Doncaster, mind!)

This sentence is a bit dull and…BOO! This sentence is also a bit dull and...BOO! This sentence is also a bit….well you get the idea. But if you found that frightening and you also enjoy extended periods of tedium followed by loud sudden shocks, then there’s a chance you may enjoy Paranormal Activity 2, the wearisome prequel to the low-budget surprise hit of 2007. For everyone else however, disappointment is likely.

The story revolves around a seemingly happy family of whom the mother is the sister of the female lead in the original Paranormal Activity. Following a mysterious burglary, video surveillance is installed throughout their house (it is this footage along with hand held home-movie pictures that constitute the film); and then we wait. And wait. And wait some more.

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with scenes of normality where little happens. Used effectively these can give bursts of action greater impact and this technique has been used with great success by heavyweight directors such as Kubrick and Hitchcock. Here however it is as if the director has a vague idea of what makes a good horror film, but not realised that the periods of inactivity must serve a purpose. Too often it appears that footage is shown simply for the purpose of filling time

Eventually, after a whole lot of waiting, there’s a shock. And yes, it makes the audience jump. But you could achieve the same effect by forcing a friend to watch dull CCTV footage and randomly bursting a balloon just behind their ear. It’ll give them a start, but it’s not exactly subtle and won’t linger long in the memory.

There’s no real involvement here; it’s difficult to care much about what happens to the characters and none of them say much of any interest. Admittedly the film improves slightly in the last act when the atmosphere becomes more sinister and we lurch towards some sort of conclusion, but by then your attention may have wandered to much better horror films than this. After all, there’s plenty to choose from.

The Social Network

2010-10-28T17:36:00.002+01:00

Another Thursday and another review in the local paper, the Doncaster Free Press. That’s 3 weeks in a row – yet still the requests for autographs have not yet started. I snuck 2 reviews in this week. One was for a play that I went to see at the local Little theatre, although the review got cut down a bit – something I’m gradually getting used to through gritted teeth; but the other review was for the film, The Social Network. Again, there’s no link to the article as it’s only in the paper copy, but below is the text of the review:

Mark Zuckerberg is the youngest billionaire in America, wholly due to a website he created whilst a student at Harvard University. That invention went on to become Facebook, and The Social Network, the new film from Fight Club director David Fincher tells the story of the site’s foundation. The tale is told through subsequent multi-million dollar lawsuits brought against Zuckerberg; these serve as a way to structure the story in flashback form as the evidence is heard.

It is rare that a modern film focuses on such flawed and dislikeable characters. The strength of this film is that it doesn’t shy away from doing this, yet still emerges as an engaging story. Zuckerberg and his ilk may be the academic cream of the crop but few of them are portrayed as people with whom you’d like to spend a lot of time. Jesse Eisenberg gives his best performance to date as Zuckerberg, and whilst his portrayal of social awkwardness may help explain how Facebook came about, it is far from endearing and there’s a streak of unsavoury misogyny which is shared by several characters in the film.

The dialogue from Aaron ‘The West Wing’ Sorkin is as intelligent as you’d expect from one with his track record. Not only is it quick-witted, it’s also simply… quick. I’m not sure there’s been a film with such fast dialogue since Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell traded verbal punches in His Girl Friday. It takes a minute or two to adjust to the rhythm but once you’re used to it, you’re left wishing that all of life’s conversations could be scripted by Sorkin.

The unfussy direction by Fincher serves the story and creates an intelligent yet absorbing film. Arguments will continue as to the veracity of some of the events depicted in the film but as a piece of entertainment, it’s spot on. And thus ends a review without resorting to corny facebook references. In summary I ‘liked’ it. Oh, so close!

Farewell to Jasmine

2010-10-27T16:01:00.002+01:00

The worst aspect of dog ownership is their limited lifespans and sadly, almost a year to the day since we lost Jack we have had to say goodbye to his sister, Jasmine. She had health problems for a while but had still been managing an active life on medication until recently, and finally we had to let her go.

There’s not a lot to say – if you’re a dog owner you’ll understand the sadness. If not, you may think it’s a bit silly grieving over an animal as it’s not the same as losing a human friend or family member. This is of course true, but Jasmine, like Jack, had been almost a constant companion over the last 11 or so years. Being stuck in the house for as long as I have, there’s no human I’ve spent as much time with over the last decade (that may explain my social skills!), so forgive me this brief moment of feeling sad for the loss.

I won’t forget holding her on the day she was born – out of the 6 surviving pups, she was the one that was the first to bark and she remained the noisiest of our dogs, especially on greeting the parents back from holiday after they’d been gone for a week or so – her yapping would last up to ten minutes until she considered she’d been given enough attention to make up for being left in my (in)capable hands!

The house seems a bit emptier again now. We’ve gone from having four dogs to now Jodie being the last dog standing. She was the mother of Jack and Jasmine and is looking a bit lost at the moment. I always thought she’d outlive her offspring as she’s always been a sturdier dog – it’s clearly the pesky dad where the defective genes have come from!

So anyway, before I get even more melancholic, goodbye Jasmine (1999-2010) and thanks for being a great friend

Armstrong & Miller Live – Sheffield Lyceum (5 Oct 2010)

2010-10-21T17:33:00.002+01:00

Following last week’s debut, I have another review in the Doncaster Free Press this week. It was for a show I saw a couple of weeks back in Sheffield, so was actually written before the Made in Dagenham review that appeared last week. Below is the review in its entirety:

Alexander Armstrong and Ben Miller brought their comedy show to the Lyceum last week for the Sheffield leg of their nationwide tour. The comedy duo have found success separately (both have ventured into acting and Armstrong has carved out a niche as a presenter) but it is as a partnership - now into its 18^th year – that the duo remain more comfortable. The third series of their BBC sketch show airs this autumn, but before that, there’s the matter of an ambitious 60-plus date tour, their first time on the road since 2001.

The show opens with the duo’s most recognisable creations, the WW2 “chav” RAF pilots, who are disturbed to find themselves parachuting in to a place even worse than wartime Germany – yes, Sheffield! The airmen reappear throughout the show, proving that A&M know what the audience like, and are happy to deliver it in spades. They make the airmen not only funny but also touching in a final scene reminiscent of Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death,

Most of the TV show’s regular characters are transferred to the stage, generally with great success, although a sketch involving Miranda and Pru, a pair of seemingly placid old ladies whose disagreements invariably end in violence seemed a touch underdeveloped and below A&M’s usual standards; the sketch’s conclusion of the audience being pelted with buns was a bit pantomime-esque and not in good way.

The best of the sketches are saved for the second half of the show and audience participation is involved, showing the duo are just as capable of ad-libbing, as they are at scripted performances. Highlights include the marvellously silly “How many Hats?” gameshow, which basically does what it says in the title, and the brilliantly lewd Brabbins and Fyffe, the Flanders and Swann take off, who are as hilariously rude as ever

Ever the entertainers, the show concludes with a mass sing-a-long which had all the audience on their feet, concluding a thoroughly enjoyable evening’s entertainment. The performers remained behind after the show to sign autographs, proving just as personable in the flesh as they appear on screen.

Next week: The Social Network

Made in Dagenham

2010-10-14T16:21:00.002+01:00

Well today saw the first (and perhaps last, if no-one likes it) of my reviews appear in the Doncaster Free Press, as part of a readers’ reviews section. I responded to an appeal for contributors a few weeks back, and this is the result – my review of the film, Made in Dagenham. It’s not available online so here’s the proof:

And what the heck, here’s what I wrote – it’s not exactly up to the Mark Kermode standard, but apart from a couple of attempts on this here blog, it’s my first attempt, so go easy.

Made in Dagenham, set in 1968, tells the true story of a group of female machinists working for Ford in their Dagenham plant, and their battle to achieve equal pay to their male counterparts. An excellent Sally Hawkins leads the line as the women resort to industrial action that would change women’s employment rights throughout the world. Bob Hoskins gives as reliable a performance as ever in the role of the union shop steward, one of only a handful of men throughout the film to support the women. The supporting cast is outstanding, especially Rosamund Pike in a pivotal role, and the tremendous Miranda Richardson as Barbara Castle, the Secretary of State for Employment. The only misfire is Andrew Lincoln playing an arrogant teacher in an unconvincing plotline which appears tacked on in order to service the plot.

Made in Dagenham continues a tradition in British cinema of depicting a community uniting against adversity; think of the unemployed steel workers in The Full Monty or the miners’ band in Brassed Off. Here, Nigel Cole constructs a film just as engaging as these aforementioned films, and one that outshines Calendar Girls, his previous entry into this oeuvre. He skilfully injects entertainment into what could be a dry subject and whilst a criticism of the film may be that it is a slightly glossy version of events and is at times in danger of descending to cliché, this is perhaps understandable in order to gain a mainstream audience for this very important story. Be warned however - it’s not all smooth sailing as the strain of the strike begins to toll on the workers and their families, and as well as laughs, there will also be tears before the final credits roll.

And that’s that. It was fairly heavily edited, and there wasn’t enough room to say all I wanted to about the film in only 300 words – my first attempt came in at double that amount. It probably won’t lead to anything, but it was nice to be able to write with a purpose in mind, knowing there was a good chance of it getting published. I think I need that motivation, as you can probably tell if you’ve noticed the absence of posts on this blog over the last couple of months.

Incidentally, I also appeared on the letters page having asked to write about what made me proud about Doncaster. That was more difficult, thought I eventually came up with a couple of paragraphs. Sadly the way it was cut down makes me seem a bit of a loon and the humour in it has disappeared. It’s amazing how you can completely change the tone of a piece of writing, simply through the editing of it. Lesson learned, and maybe that’s a subject for another day.

Anatomy of a Car Accident – A True Story

2010-06-11T14:47:00.001+01:00

If you follow me on twitter you’ll be aware that I had a certain “incident” in my car yesterday, involving me driving into a wall – not once, but twice. If you don’t follow me on twitter, well I’ve just told you anyway.

“But how did this happen?” I hear you ask. Well brace yourself – it’s a tale of horror, bad luck, near-tragedy, and incompetence. But mainly incompetence.

Step One – Stationary Car

For the purposes of this reconstruction, my car will be represented by the yellow fella to the left. The other (blameless) car will be represented by a green hovercraft. I mention this just in case you think I parked next to an actual hovercraft. I wouldn’t want such confusion to creep in at such an early stage. In a similar vein, the books are not ACTUAL GIANT books, but they are buildings. Immovable buildings that can cause dents (spoiler alert there)

Step Two – All is Normal

So I turn right, seeming oblivious to the HORROR soon to come. I can’t complete the turn in one go though as I don’t want to drive into Bad Science…. I mean the opposite building.

Step Three – The final moments before chaos reigns

Thinking it’s just an ordinary day, I nippily changing into reverse gear (see, I can change gears perfectly) I reverse back to make space for my exit. Note – I do not hit the hovercraft at any stage (spoiler alert 2)

Step Four – Impact IMPACT IMPACT

Moving out again to make my exit, my world changed forever. A noise. Scratching. Then scraping. Like my car was being ripped apart – the wall had somehow moved closer to the car and was viciously attacking it with all its might, the great big bastard. Reader, I shall never forget that noise for as long as I live.

Step Five – Second impact SECOND IMPACT – NOO.

Now if I’m honest, I’m not completely sure what happened here. In an attempt to stop the back of the car scraping on the wall, I think I turned hard right, hoping the back of the car would turn left. Sadly I slightly overdid this as I immediately drove the front half of the car straight into the wall on the right at quite some speed, eliminating my wing mirror, taking a huge gash out of the bodywork, and generously scratching all the front half of the car to match the back half.

Step Six – This didn’t happen but it COULD HAVE!

The impact causes the car to overturn and catch alight. I manage to crawl free, also rescuing an orphan puppy before the engine explodes as I dive clear, suffering only superficial cuts and burns.

And now I have quite a mashed-up car. Who wants to buy the film rights to this little escapade to pay for the repairs?

Return to bloggaging

2010-05-28T13:03:00.004+01:00

Well hello there!

It appears to have been 2 months since my last blog. For this I can apportion the blame to 3 conveniently sized scapegoats

1. Technical problems – my 13 month old laptop spluttered and died, annoyingly when just over a month out of warranty. I tried the whole sales-of-goods act malarkey to no avail, so thanks e-buyer and HP, you buggers *shakes fist* – you are two companies I will steer clear of in the future. Anyway a few days ago I took delivery of a shiny new Acer laptop which will hopefully outlast its predecessor; handily this one comes with a TWO year guarantee, so I expect it to last 25 months, before coughing, belching, and finally vomiting out its harddrive circa June 2011.

2. The third part of my blog’s title “Crap health” covers this scapegoat but I’m not going into details cos it’s frankly too depressing. There was an arse of a month followed by a change in medication followed by another arse of a month, and now I’m still probably around the rectal area, but there you go. That’s a metaphor by the way – as far as I know my rectal area is not top of the list for cause for concern

3. Apathy – I would elaborate but meh.

Anyway, hopefully normal service will be resumed soon, and by normal service I of course mean infrequent grumpy updates to be read by 4 or 5 people. Hurrah!

So Films, life, Crap Health and General Musings over the last 2 months.

Hmm, films I’ve seen reduced to synopses of no more than 5 words:

The White Ribbon – German. Lack of ribbons noticeable
Inglourious Basterds – Let’s kill Hitler, babbles Tarantino
Zombieland – Shaun of the Dead? No
Gojoe – Who, What, hey? Fell asleep
Hollywoodland – Affleck acts. Yes, really.
Pickpocket – Not Oliver Twist you silly
It Happened One Night – Classic Hollywood. Gable and Colbert
A Might Wind – Not Spinal Tap, but okay
Fast Food Nation – Cheeseburger would be more memorable
The Men Who Stare at Goats – Should have stayed a documentary
Sanjuro – Yojimbo character returns. Mixed results
Messrine Parts one and two – le French gangster. Tres bien
Paris Je T’Aime 18 stories. Some are good.
Eight Legged Freaks – Scarlett appears. Nothing much else
The Road – Depressing, depressing, depressing. But good.
Flightplan – The Lady Vanishes? Not close.

So that’s the films. I’m not talking about the crap health, because that would just be depressing and maybe too personal (maybe I should change the title of my blog to Films, and none of your bloody business) which just leaves life and musings, of which I’m having difficulty recalling any.

We had an election didn’t we, and some parties won and some didn’t whilst I stayed awake until 5 am before giving in. If this election has taught me nothing else, it’s that two men in their 60s, David Dimbleby and Jeremy Paxman, have many times more energy than me. But then, as crap health suggests, I knew that already. So I didn’t really learn much from the election. Except the Eng Democrats didn’t gain any seats and for that I am glad, especially after being called a Nazi and a twat by them on twitter with no provocation.

Hmm, I bought some pyjamas….I went to the loo a few times...twittered nonsense..

Okay, you haven’t missed much really.

Kurosawa's 100th Birthday - My Top 10

2010-03-23T14:37:00.006Z

So today would have been Akira Kurosawa's 100th birthday which is well worth a mention. Ask anyone outside of film circles to name a Japanese director and odds are he'll be the first (and possible only) one to come to mind.

Through reading various tributes today, I've discovered he made over 30 films of which I've only seen a third. I think i've probably seen his more famous ones, but it's good to know that even when I seem to have been saturated in films for the last decade thre's still plenty left for me to see, even from a director as renowned as Kurosawa.

As my own little tribute, and because I love lists, I'll arrange the 10 films i've seen in ascending order, ending up with my favourite.

10 - Red Beard (1965) Set in 19th Century Japan, Toshiro Mifune stars as a priviliged doctor having to get used to his new life in the country, treating the poor. It's one of those 3 hour films that, to be honest, felt like a 3 hour film

9 - High and Low (1963) Saw this just last year, it's about a kidnapping and the police case that follows it. Toshira Mifune again stars in an intriguing film, but it dragged a little towards the end for me.

8 - Kagemusha (1980) - This film concerns a warlord who dies and is replaced by a double (Kagemusha) who takes his place so that enemies will not know realise the warlord is dead. Another slow burner of a film with some good action sequences, though not up there with Kurosawa's best.

7 - Stray Dog (1949) - Unusually, a film-noir from Kurosawa about a cop who has his gun pinched - it is then used to commit various crimes, and the cop, along with an older colleague tries to track the culprit down. A decent enough modern day thriller.

6 - Yojimbo (1961) - Toshiro Mifune again takes the lead in this acclaimed drama. Made partly as a tribute to Hollywood Westerns, it was then remade by Sergio Leone as A fistful of dollars. Mifune turns up in a town where two rival gangs are at each others' throats. Mifune plays them against each other. Quality filmmaking

5 - Throne of Blood (1957) - Classic adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth, here transposed to Samurai times. The film follows the play pretty closely, although doesn't use any lines from it. The atmosphere is brilliantly conveyed and that chap Toshira Mifune plays the Macbeth character and does it excellently before coming to a nasty end via a barrage of arrows.

4 - Ran (1985) - Beautiful looking film based on Shakespeare's King Lear. A retired warlord divides his kingdom between his three sons, only for it to end in division, warfare, and tragedy. There are no close ups in the film- almost each shot looks like a painting. It may be over two and a half hours long but is a rewarding experience. The acting is first-rate and it's a stunning visual experience.

3 - Ikiru (1952) - Powerful and moving account of a man suffering from stomach cancer, following his final few months as he tries to find meaning to his life. Takashi Shimura is the civil servant, living a pretty meaningless existence doing a job which gets nothing done, and just wandering through life. When he learns he has stomach cancer, first he goes out to try and enjoy himself, then resolves to get a kids' playground built; something he had ignored prior to learning of his illness. The second section of the film is set at Shimura's wake, where old colleagues discuss him, and the change in him over his last few months. It's not exactly an action film, but it seems beautifully filmed and acted with intelligence and subtlety. Maybe not the most feelgood material, but still a treat.

2 - The Seven Samurai (1954) - Epic three and a bit hour film, generally acclaimed as one of the best ever made. It also served as the basis of the American remake, The Magnificent Seven. A village hires a group of Samurai to protect their village from bandits. This they do, and therein is the gist of the story. The direction is impeccable and innovative camerawork and editing are used.A film to be admired and enjoyed in equal measure

1- Rashomon (1950) - Intriguing film from the Japanese master, exploring what is truth; does the camera sometimes lie. The story is fairly simple; a man has been murdered and his wife raped. However from varying accounts from such figures as the suspect, the rape victim, the murder victim (through a medium) and an onlooker we get four differing accounts of how the events came to pass. Three of the four accounts end with the narrator owning up to the killing. How do we know who is telling the truth? We don’t really and perhaps that is the point; can we ever know the truth? Stunningly photographed, this is a film well worth watching again and again.

So Happy Birthday Akira, and rest in peace.

The Blind Side

2010-03-16T16:11:00.002Z

The Blind Side (2009)

I got to see this as my first ever preview screening a couple of weeks ago, the day before Bullock won her Best Actress Oscar. Truth be told, she puts in a solid performance without being showy, and the film itself is a decent enough true story of a wealthy white family taking in a troubled black youth who discovers a talent for protecting the “blind side” at American Football. It’s a little bit TV-movie of the week material but elevated by its cast, notably Ms Bullock. There’s no great surprises in the story – you can pretty much telegraph each plot point – and the little obstacle at the end seems a bit tacked on. Some viewers may be uneasy about how it takes a white family to lift a black youth out of poverty and crime, and give him hope for the future; however in this instance with it being based on a true story, that’s probably an accusation that’s less than valid here.

Overall I’m not sure if it’s worth laying out money to see the film at the cinema, but it’s probably worth catching on DVD or even when it comes on TV and as a Bullock fan, I was pleased to see her get recognition from the Academy – if only she’d stop choosing rotten films like All About Steve to star in.

The West Wing - end of an era

2010-03-07T20:47:00.006Z

There was despair in the Jamie household on Friday when, after a year and 154 episodes, I watched the final minutes of the final episode of the final DVD of the final season of the greatest TV drama I’ve ever seen - stand up and take a bow - The West Wing.

My journey with The West Wing started when Channel Four began showing the first season in around 2001, a couple of years after it had aired in the US. I had heard whispers of this new political drama from across the pond, but nothing prepared me for the audio and visual feast I was about to enjoy. This was a show populated with characters you either wanted to be or to spend time with, speaking dialogue that seemed written by the gods and getting involved in plots that were both intimate and far-reaching at the same time. And in its depiction of President Bartlett’s (played by Martin Sheen) presidency, it gave us an almost fantasy version of a president, greatly needed when compared with the actual Bush presidency that took over in 2001. Within less than an episode I was hooked and this carried on for the next four seasons. I’m not quite sure what happened next – I think the powers that be moved it to one of the digital channels – E4 or More4 – and I did not have digital TV at the time so stopped watching it. However at some stage I bought the DVD set of the first 2 seasons and rewatched them at least twice, still in awe at the writing and performances.

Eventually, having found myself with lots of time to spare I took the plunge and bought the whole boxset – all 154 episodes over 7 seasons in one satisfyingly chunky box. So the odyssey began again as I started from the beginning (again), seeing episodes I’d seen many times before, and then moving on to the later seasons which were all new to me. But alas all good things come to an end and last Friday, President Josiah Bartlett’s eight year presidency ended and his successor was inaugurated.

I do seriously feel a bit empty now – I know it’s only a TV show and is not that important – but as TV shows go, it’s just about unsurpassed. How am I meant to go back to regular television now after watching arguably the finest show the medium of television has to offer?

Admittedly it wasn’t all sunshine. Seasons 1 to 4 were televisual gold, but there was a definite dip in quality in series 5. Rob Lowe had left during season four and this may have played its part, but of a far greater significance was the departure of creator and writer Aaron Sorkin between seasons 4 and 5. He wrote almost every episode of the first 4 series – 87 in total, and when he left the difference was notable. The fifth season also seemed to suffer from not having as much direction as the previous seasons – the series seemed to be killing time before it took up the next challenge of the battle to be Bartlett’s successor. This race reignited the series in the 6th season and throughout the seventh and whilst it may have never again hit the heights of the Sorkin-penned first four series, it definitely improved and the quality returned.

It’s difficult to pick out other highlights from the series as it’s just all so damn good, but you’ve gotta love the walk and talks as characters discuss matters of international importance whilst walking at speed through the offices of the West Wing. The attempted assassination cliff-hanger at the end of season one was inspired too as I then spent the next 6 months worrying about who would live and who would die. The ensemble cast is simply unbelievable; Martin Sheen is the father of a troupe that includes Bradley Whitford, Allison Janney, Richard Schiff, Janel Moloney, Dule Hill, Rob Lowe, Joshua Molina and Stockard Channing. Not forgetting those who queued up to take smaller parts or cameos during the series including Matthew Perry, Christian Slater, Ron Silver, Marlee Maitlin, Oliver Platt, John Goodman, Jason Isaacs and even Karl Malden.

Anyway, whilst I’m willing to accept there may be a series that matches the quality of The West Wing (in the interest of fairness I should disclose I’ve never seen The Sopranos or The Wire), I refuse outright to believe there’s been a better introduction to a character than that of the introduction of Bartlett at the end of the first episode. He’s been discussed throughout the episode, but we’ve not seen him and when he enters, his speech is positively Shakespearean and we know the Presidency is in safe hands. No wonder Sorkin changed his mind and kept Bartlett as a main character rather than having him just pop up now and again throughout the series.

In summary, the finest TV drama I’ve ever seen – I just wish I could watch it all over again for the first time. It also signified the point I realised just how deranged the Daily Mail were; the day after it was first broadcast on Channel 4, I remember their TV critic giving it no stars and saying it was one of the worst things she’d ever seen!

A-Z of favourite films - THE END

2010-02-23T19:46:00.009Z

So you thought it was all over? Well it will be soon. I started way back in October with this series of blogs featuring my favourite films. For better or worse, I arbitrarily chose to categorise them by letter, ending up with my favourite film beginning with A, beginning with B etc. Some letters were harder than others - M&S stick in my mind, not for being a supermarket, but for annoyingly huge categories that took hours to do. Q and Z on the other hand were annoying for the opposite reason - the low number of films seen. But anyway, it's all over now, and below is the final list with a bit of a summing up underneath.

I haven't linked all the films, but if you want to see the blog for each letter in more detail (and why wouldn't you(!)), just do a blog search on the right for the A-Z of films and all the blogs should be there.

A – Annie Hall
Woody Allen’s film came out on top in a large category of 105 films, narrowly beating such films as The Apartment, Amelie, All About Eve and Anatomy of a Murder

B- The Big Sleep
Another huge category, this time with around 150 films in. The Howard Hawks film saw off competition from Laurel and Hardy’s Blockheads, De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves and the Coen Brother’s The Big Lebowski, among others

C – Casablanca
120 films came down to a two horse race between Casablanca and Citizen Kane, though City Lights, Chinatown, and Chungking Express also made up the final 5.

D – Dr Strangelove
The Kubrick film came top out of the 100 films in the D category, although Duck Soup and Double Indemnity ran it close

E – Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
A bit of relief with the first sub-100 film category; only 35 films in this category. Michel Gondry’s film was the clear winner here, and the most contemporary of all the winners.

F – Fight Club
I’ve just looked back on my blog to check the winner for F – I was convinced it was Fargo. It was another 2 horse race in the end; I’m not sure I made the right decision as Fargo is such a favourite of mine. However I plumped for Fight Club in the end. Others in the final five were Frankenstein, Freaks and The French Connection

G – Le Grande Illusion
75 films were whittled down to this French winner - the first of my foreign-language winners. It was a close call though, with The Great Dictator and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly as strong contenders.

H – Harvey
Let’s face it, none of the other 70 –odd films in this category were going to beat the near-perfection of Harvey. Try as they might, His Girl Friday, High Noon, and Hot Fuzz, could not dethrone it.

I – It’s a Wonderful Life
Over 50 films in this category and the final five included three East Asian films: Ikiru, In the Mood for Love, and Infernal Affairs. In the Heat of the Night was the other American contender, but the perennial Christmas classic won it.

J – Jaws
A small category – only 25 in total, with the Spielberg film triumphing over Jean de Florette and Jackie Brown.

K – Kind Hearts and Coronets
A similar sized category to J, and the Ealing studio’s film won it, although Kikijuro came damn close to winning too. Did I make the wrong decision? Ah, it’s too late now.

L – The Lady Killers
Needless to say, this is the original version of The Lady Killers and NOT the remake. A second Ealing winner in a row, though a much larger category. A couple of Hitchcock’s in the final five, along with Local Hero and Let the Right One in. It should also be noted that I forgot to put The Lives of Others in this category, for reasons too mundane to explain. It would probably have got in the final five too, dislodging either The Lady Vanishes or Lifeboat.

M – A Matter of Life and Death
Another gargantuan category of about 150 films and loads of contenders, but this Powell & Pressburger took the plaudits, beating off movies such as M, The Maltese Falcon, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and Magnolia. It was also the third British winner in a row.

N – North by Northwest
The first of my Hitchcock winners saw off competition from another of his films, Notorious, as well as Night of the Hunter, No Man’s Land and No Country for Old Men.

O – The Odd Couple
Under 50 films in this category, but there were some good ones amongst them; Lemmon and Matthau’s great comedy beat off the likes of On the Waterfront and Once Upon a Time in the West

P – Psycho
Our 80 P films were whittled down to a final five that included The Philadelphia Story, The Producers, The Player and Pulp Fiction, but the master of suspense triumphed and Hitch had his second winner

Q – Quiz Show
Only five films in this category, so pickings were slim indeed – it still grates that I had to have the awful Quartier Mozart in my “top” five, but out of the five, Quiz Show is my favourite.

R – Rear Window
From 5 Q entries to 100 R films, and our third Hitchcock winner within five letters. Rear Window beat off three foreign language entries (including two from Akira Kurosawa in Rashomon and Ran) as well as Raging Bull to deservedly win the crown.

S – Some Like it Hot
Such a huge category it was split over 2 blogs, there were 200 S films to deal with. Finally the Billy Wilder comedy came through, beating other greats such as Shadow of a Doubt, Singin’ in the Rain, The Shawshank Redemption, The Seven Samurai, The Sting, The Station Agent, Shaun of the Dead, and well.. you get the message. There were A LOT of S films.

T – Toy Story 2
Possibly the winner over which I was most unsure – did it really beat Taxi Driver and Twelve Angry Men? How did that happen? Possibly because I wanted an animation amongst my winners, but was also a compromise as I just couldn’t decide which film out of 125 would win. I kept changing the winner –at various stages it was To Kill a Mockingbird, This is Spinal Tap, and even the original The Taking of Pelham 123, a film not even now in the top five.

U – The Usual Suspects
U was a more manageable category – just 17 films with The Usual Suspects seeing off Unforgiven and Up to win here.

V – Vertigo
Another small category and Hitchcock gets his fourth and final winner on the list, beating off Spanish film Volver for the title

W – The Wild Bunch
Over 70 films in this surprisingly large category. I opted for Peckinpah’s Western above such films as The Wizard of Oz, Whisky Galore, and the animations Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were Rabbit, and the recent Wall-E.

X – Citizen Kane.
I hadn’t seen any X films so I basically cheated and put into this category films from other letters that hadn’t quite won. Hence Citizen Kane beat the likes of Singin’ in the Rain and Fargo to win.

Y – Young Frankenstein
Only 9 films in this category and Mel Brooks eventually gets a winner, just beating Frank Capra’s You Can’t Take it With You to the top spot

Z – Zatoichi
Another category with only five films, and Zatoichi became only my second foreign-language winner – I was expecting there to be more to be honest.

So there’s the 26, and if there’s any you haven’t seen, I’d recommend you remedy that as soon as possible. They’re not quite my favourite 26 films of course, due to the difference in sizes between the categories; for example two films that didn’t make the list - Fargo or Singin’ in the Rain would have beaten Quiz Show or Jaws for instance. Having said that, it still looks a pretty good list – 24 of them are in English, so even if you don’t like films with subtitles (you idiot!), it’s safe to watch most of them.

Little bit of dull stattage:

I own 22 of the winners on DVD; the exceptions being Le Grande Illusion, Jaws, Quiz Show and Toy Story 2
The earliest winner is Le Grande Illusion
The latest winner is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
There’s four Hithcock films, though unless I’m much mistaken, no other director has more than one film in the list. Woody Allen’s got one, as have Howard Hawks, Stanley Kubrick, Frank Capra, Steven Spielberg, Billy Wilder, Sam Peckinpah and Orson Welles. Disappointed there’s no Coen Brothers or Laurel and Hardy film but then you can’t have everything.
I've seen too many films, but also not enough - it can't be a definitive list, simply because even though i've seen a lot of films, the number I've seen pale into insignificane compared to the number I haven't see.

And well, that’s about it. If you thought I was working my way towards a huge, exciting, Hollywood ending, you’d be wrong. It’s more like an arthouse ending, gradually drifting off until…. FADE OUT ....

A-Z of favourite films - Zzzzzzzzz

2010-02-22T14:13:00.004Z

Is it really number 26? Is this the end of the alphabet? Have we finally reached the end? Are there too many rhetorical sentences in this opening paragraph?

And so, with a slight sense of anti-climax we reach the final step on our film odyssey. That’s not strictly true – there’ll be one more blog soon, rounding everything up and listing all the winners in a simple cut out and keep format. Just as well, as Z would not be the best category to end on (though admittedly it is the logical one, coming at y’know… the end of the alphabet and all that) as, just like with the Q category, I’ve only seen 5 films which obviously will all make the final five. A far cry from the M and S categories which contained several thousand films each (may be slight use of hyperbole there). But I know you’re gasping to find out what those five films are, so here goes.

Zulu: Our first film is a homegrown product from 1964; Cy Enfield directs Michael Caine, Stanley Baker and Jack Hawkins among others in this tale of the battle of Rourke’s Drift between the British army and the Zulus in the late 19th century. It’s kind of a cross between a war movie and a western, and if you want to read more about it, I should direct you to this book, written by Sheldon Hall, an old film studies tutor of mine from Sheffield whose favourite film this is. He may not be happy if this doesn’t win the Z category – oops.

Zombie Flesh Eaters: Lucio Fulci’s 1979 horror. The first time I saw it was at the cinema and I wasn’t actually that impressed. However, next time I saw it, on DVD, I really liked it – what a difference a second viewing makes. Quite explicit in its depiction of flesh-eating zombies; it also features an underwater fight between a zombie and a shark! Yes, it's a bit silly but it's a well made film with some good sequences; the most memorable being the eye piercing incident; in its full version this is perhaps the best eye related injury caught on film since Un Chien Andalou. Granted, some of the acting is dodgy, and everyone takes it a tad too seriously, but for what it is - a zombie horror film - it's pretty good and almost up there with Romero's works.

Zelig: Woody Allen’s 1983 film takes the form of a "documentary" about Leonard Zelig (Allen), a man who in America in the 30s had a unique medical condition in which he takes on the appearance and characteristics of whoever is in his company at the time. Shot as a contemporary documentary but with lots of archive footage from the 30s with Allen cleverly inserted (later to be copied in Forrest Gump). Hence Leonard is seen behind Hitler, with movie stars, etc. Mia Farrow stars as the doctor who tried to treat Zelig but ended up falling in love with him. An interesting film; it’s certainly funny at times, though a bit of a departure from Allen’s previous comedies.

Zoolander: Ben Stiller stars as the world's top (and possibly stupidest) model, Derek Zoolander, who decides there's more to life than being really, really, really good looking and he intends to find out what that is. He finds himself as an unknowing pawn in the scheme of fashion mogul Will Ferrell who intends to have the Malaysian prime minister assassinated as he is cracking down on the sweatshops that the fashion industry relies upon. There are laughs to be had, mainly revolving around Zoolander's stupidity and his and Owen Wilson's rivalry. Stiller's real life father, Jerry Stiller stars as an agent, and his wife, Christine Taylor is the Time magazine reporter, helping to uncover the plot. David Duchovny has a nice cameo as does Jon Voigt. It's not an award winner by any means but it skips along at a fair pace and at just over 80 minutes, there's little chance for boredom.

Zatoichi (2003) This was fantastic! Takeshi Kitano directs and stars, under his acting name of Beat Takeshi, in this Samurai film set in the nineteenth century. However, not only is it a Samurai film, it's also a comedy, a drama, and even at times a musical. Kitano just throws everything but the kitchen sink at the screen and it comes off. Kitano himself plays the titular Zatoichi, apparently a famous figure in Japanese culture. He is a blind Samurai, and arrives at a town that has been taken over by a gang. Add to this the story of two geishas - one of them a transvestite - who are trying to avenge the slaughter of their family, then chuck in the fact that the gang have hired a new bodyguard Tadanobu Asano who seems to be invincible, and you have all the ingredients for a rollicking and very enjoyable two hours. There's a fair bit of blood a la Kill Bill, but I'd rate this streets above that film - this is the King, not the pretender to its throne. Some may not like the mix of genres and the musical dance ending, but I thought it was nearly perfect - Kitano seems to just want to entertain his audience and this he does in spades.

And the winner is Zatoichi… a stunning piece de resistance from Kitano – an all round entertainment extravaganza.

So that concludes the list, but look out for another blog soon, summing up this whole pointless exercise.

A-Z of favourite films - Y, oh, Y did I start this?

2010-02-19T11:43:00.006Z

Okay, 24 down, 2 to go, and we reach the penultimate entry in my series of blogs on my A-Z of favourite films.

Right, hopefully a quick entry here as we reach Y. It’s a small category – have only seen 9 films beginning with Y. Thus, as I’ve said before in a Groundhog Day style, the top five will contain several films that wouldn’t make the top five in many other categories, but do here because of the shortage of films. Got that? It was a silly system I came up with, doing the films by letter, but I’m not changing it now that the endings within touching distance. So there.

We’ll start in 1928 with the last Laurel and Hardy film that will be mentioned in this series of blogs – the 1928 silent short You’re Darn Tootin’ which sees the boys fired from an orchestra, having troubles with their landlady, and then busking in the street before it all predictably descends into a full scale fight at the end. Good fun from the duo.

Two consecutive years in the 1930s bring two entries from two of the finest directors in film history. First, Hitchcock appears for the last time in this blog series (I have mentioned him before, haven’t I?) with his 1937 British film Young and Innocent. Admittedly it’s not one of his greatest works and some of the casting does not convince, but even an average Hitchcock film is well worth watching and this is no exception. The following year Frank Capra made You Can’t Take It With You, a film that won Best Picture Oscar for that year, as well as a Best Director gong for Capra himself. It’s a fine comedy starring James Stewart (yes, I know I’ve mentioned him a fair bit too!) and Jean Arthur as the romantic leads who run into trouble when Stewart’s snobby parents have to meat Arthur’s very eccentric family. Although I wouldn’t rate the film as quite up there with Capra’s finest such as It’s a Wonderful Life or Mr Smith Goes to Washington, it’s still a charming tale and well worth two hours of your time.

Skipping forward a bit to the 1960s we find a work from another great director, this time Yojimbo from the Japanese master-director Akira Kurosawa. His regular collaborator Toshiro Mifune takes the lead in an acclaimed drama made partly as a tribute to Hollywood Westerns; it was subsequently remade by Sergio Leone as A fistful of Dollars. Mifune turns up in a town where two rival gangs are at each others' throats and Mifune plays them against each other, just as Clint does in the later film, until they are all either dead or just wish they were. As with Capra, I don’t think this is Kurosawa’s best work, up there with Seven Samurai or Rashomon, but again, an average Kurosawa film still blows films by many other directors right out of the water. Also from the 1960s is You Only Live Twice, which is the fifth Sean Connery film in the franchise. It’s the one with the Japanese secret service ninjas, and with Bond trying to stop America and Russia heading towards nuclear war having been manipulated by Donald Pleasance’s Blofeld. And from what I remember, it’s a fairly decent entry in the series.

Into the 1970s and one of my favourite Mel Brooks’ comedies appears in the form of Young Frankenstein. It’s a great spoof of the old Universal Horror films starring Gene Wilder as the great grandson of the original Dr Frankenstein. He finds himself at the old castle of his grandfather and history begins to repeat itself. Lots of laugh-out-loud moments and like I say, this is one of Brooks' best, also featuring Peter Boyle as the monster and Gene Hackman in a small but funny role as a blind man.

From horror to western in the 1980s with Young Guns about a gang of young men who seek revenge following the killing of their mentor,Terence Stamp. Charlie Sheen ,Emilio Estevez, and Kiefer Sutherland are among the group in this updating of the Western for the MTV generation. A reminder of the old school remains though as Jack Palance plays the villain.

You’ve Got Mail is our Y entry for the 90s, with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan teaming up yet again in this romantic comedy. No matter what its merits or failings, the reality is unavoidable – it’s nowhere near as good as the 1940 Jimmy Stewart movie, The Shop Around the Corner of which it is a remake, and whilst watching the latter film, there’s just no avoiding that fact. Finally, from 2004 there’s Yasmin which I suppose was more a TV movie starring Archie Panjabi as a Western Muslim living in Britain in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Not a barrel of laughs but an interesting piece of contemporary drama nevertheless.

So, them’s the runners and riders. What are the final five – (not difficult, only have to get rid of four films!)

Young and Innocent 1937
You Can’t Take it With You 1938
Yojimbo 1961
You Only Live Twice 1967
Young Frankenstein 1974

And the winner is Young Frankenstein, just edging out You Can’t Take it With You – either of them could have won it to be honest.

A-Z of favourite films - X-tremely tricky category

2010-02-15T12:50:00.001Z

The 24th in my series of blogs on my favourite A-Z films, and we hit an obstacle.

So we finally reach letter X, and dear reader, we have a problem. As regular readers (yes there are two, or three at a pinch) will know, I’ve been shortlisting each category into a final five list of films, from which I choose a winner. This method nearly hit the skids with letters such as Q where I’d only seen a very few films, but I’d just managed to see enough to keep it going. X is a different story though – not only have I not seen enough films here to make up a final five – I haven’t actually seen a single film beginning with X. Nope, I’ve never seen X-Men or The X-Files movie; Olivia Newton John’s Xanadu passed me by and not only did I not see Xtro 2: The Second Encounter, but I didn’t even seen the original Xtro (a UK Science fiction adventure apparently, which doesn’t look all that good to be honest)

So what to do? A few options

1. Leave the X category out altogether – unsatisfactory from my OCD point of view – I need 26 films dammit, not 25.

2. X-rated films – a possible option, though I’d have to go through each film and look up its original certificate which might take longer than it took me to write the S blog. However I do know that Midnight Cowboy was the first X-certificate film to win the Best Picture Oscar. What do you mean you already knew that?

3. Include films just with x in the title. Another possibility – it’s rather arbitrary, but hey, so is the present system

4. Do what I’m about to do

And yes, I’ve chosen option four. Sod democracy, this blog here is a dictatorship and if you don’t like it, then….no hang on, don’t go….

Anyway, what I’m going to do is take a film from each category so far (A-W) taking a film from each that didn’t win the category, but NEARLY won it. That’ll then make it fairer on those films in huge categories such as M and S that only missed out because the category was so strong. Or something. Basically it’s just an excuse to list films that I like, and then choose one at random that I favour of the others.

I won’t say anything about the films as it’s probably been said in previous blogs. So the list (and I’ll miss Q out as there really isn’t another contender from there) consists of the following films:

The Apartment
Blockheads
Citizen Kane
Duck Soup
El Orfanato
Fargo
The Godfather
His Girl Friday
In the Heat of the Night
Jackie Brown
Kikijuro
Local Hero
The Maltese Falcon
Notorious
Once Upon a Time in the West
The Producers
Rashomon
Singin in the Rain
Taxi Driver
Up
Volver
The Wizard of Oz

And with a huge sense of anti-climax, I’ll narrow those down to five:

Citizen Kane, beaten in the C category by Casablanca
Fargo, beaten in the F category by Fight Club
Rashomon, beaten in the R category by Rear Window
Singin' in the Rain, beaten in the S category by Some Like it Hot
Taxi Driver, beaten controversially in the T category by Toy Story 2

And out of those five, the winner is Citizen Kane. I’ll be honest, it was always going to be Citizen Kane ever since I rejected it in favour of Casablanca.

But to be fair, Citizen Kane does have a connection with the letter X.

Oh yes.

What’s the name of Charles Foster Kane’s huge gothic house in the film?

Yes, it's Xanadu.

And what does Xanadu begin with?

Yes, it's X.

Q, and indeed ED

Thank you and good night.

A-Z of favourite films - Dubya it is.

2010-02-09T11:10:00.001Z

Nearly there. Stay awake at the back. It's the 23rd edition of the series of A-Z of my favourite films.

So, after the relatively small categories of U and V, we’re faced with another biggie – not as large as M or S, admittedly, but pretty substantial with around 70 films seen. Yep, it’s time for the dubyas.

A few silent films that we’ll just skip past – there’s Chaplin’s A Woman of Paris from 1923 and the Laurel and Hardy film Why Girls Love Sailors. Neither of those will trouble our top five however. 1927 marked the year sound came to cinema, but Wings was a silent epic – the first winner of an Oscar for Best Picture, yet also the last silent film to win the award. To be honest I found it too long and melodramatic, but the flying sequences are well worth catching – they put cameras on the planes themselves to achieve some of the shots, and the director, William Wellman had flown planes during the Great War. So it’s a case of ignoring the rubbish story, and just picking out the action sequences – I guess you could say the same about Pearl Harbor nearly 75 years later.

There’s a few more Laurel and Hardy short films – With Love and Hisses, We Faw Down, and Wrong Again, before we move from comedy to horror with Werewolf of London, a creaky tale that’s really not that scary, but is notable for being the first proper American werewolf tale. Following this in 1937, we get another Laurel and Hardy offering, this time the feature-length Way out West, one of my favourites of theirs in which the villain James Finlayson is trying to get his hands on the deeds to a goldmine – deeds which Laurel and Hardy have been entrusted to deliver to the rightful owner. The 1930s end with The Wizard of Oz, the perennial family classic with Judy Garland as Dorothy making her trip down the yellow brick road.

The forties and another werewolf tale with The Wolf Man which is an improvement on Werewolf of London, due to the story and the cast which includes Lon Chaney Jr, Claude Rains, and Bela Legosi. Worth catching, if only to compare with the upcoming remake. 1942 sees a classic of British cinema with Went the Day Well which sees a village being taken over by Nazis disguised as British soldiers. It must have been pretty frightening in its day, made whilst the war was still going on, and when the events in the film could have conceivably become a reality. It’s a fine film and where else are you going to see Thora Hird shooting German soldiers? The Way Ahead is another British war film from 1944 and then the following year Gainsborough Studios gave us The Wicked Lady, a rollickingly enjoyable historical romp starring Margaret Lockwood as the titular “heroine” and co-starring James Mason. We finish the 1940s with two very different films; from the US we have White Heat, a James Cagney gangster picture, and from the UK’s Ealing Studios, Whisky Galore is one of their best comedies, revolving around a shipment of whisky that washes ashore on a Scottish island, and the repercussions that follow. The ensemble cast includes Basil Radford, Joan Greenword and Gordon Jackson.

Skipping joyfully into the 50s (yes, I’ve run out of ways to begin paragraphs), from 1950 there’s the little-known but pretty good film-noir Where the Sidewalk Ends and a marvellous James Stewart western, Winchester 73. Directed by Stewart’s frequent collaborator Anthony Mann the film uses the journey of the gun of the title to weave the story round as it passes from hand to hand. 1953 sees the first version of War of the Worlds, and then in 1956 you didn’t think I’d forgotten Hitchcock did you - it’s The Wrong Man. Hitchcock’s take on an almost neo-realist style, it stars Henry Fonda as the falsely accused man, and the impact this has on him and his family. Based on a true story it’s a departure from Hitchcock’s usual work, but is still adeptly done and a solid film. The following year brought Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries following the roadtrip of an elderly professor in Sweden, and from the US in the same year, Billy Wilder made Witness for the Prosecution, a top notch courtroom drama with Tyrone Power, Charles Laughton and Marlene Dietrich.

The 1960s brought the caper movie The Wrong Arm of the Law from the UK, with Peter Sellers amongst the cast. From the US, the same year saw the emergence of the overblown Whatever Happened to Baby Jane with Bette Davis and Joan Crawford tearing strips off each other, apparently behind the scenes too if rumours are to be believed. Talking of overblown, in 1966 Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf saw Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor also tearing strips off each other – a fine cast in this adaptation makes for riveting viewing as long as you don’t mind people arguing. From France came Godard’s baffling Weekend including a ten minute continious shot of a traffic jam, and Richard Burton again appears, this time opposite Clint Eastwood in the boys-own adventure Where Eagles Dare. If you ever meet my Mum, which is admittedly unlikely, she’ll tell you this was the film which my dad wooed her with at the cinema – she was expecting Dr Zhivago but got a World War Two caper instead. Fair enough, I’d have thought. Also in 1969 comes The Wild Bunch, one of Peckinpah’s bona fide masterpieces. Controversial on release for its violence, it helped coin the term “Peckinpah/Penn aesthetic” and is almost ballet like in some of its sequences. You can argue the morals until the cows come home, but it sure is a film from a director who knows how to make proper movies.

1971 brought the original Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory with the fabulous Gene Wilder. If you think the Tim Burton remake is better, you’re wrong. Sorry. Also from the 1970s came The Wicker Man with Edward Woodward and if you think the Nicholas Cage remake is better, well you’re not only wrong, you’re mentally deranged. Westworld is another fun movie from 1973 with its mix of the sci-fi and western genres; Yul Brynner is the robotic cowboy and if that sentence doesn’t want to make you see the film, nothing will.

The 1980s bring Who Dares Wins from the UK which is a bit, well, meh. From the US War Games was a film I liked as a youngster with a young Michael Broderick and Ally Sheedy helping to take the world to the brink of nuclear war, and then saving the day through noughts and crosses. 1985 brought a fine Peter Weir film in Witness; Harrison Ford is a cop that has to go undercover in an Amish community, and he gives a nice understated performance. Less understated is Wall Street with its “Greed is good” mantra. Ironically director Oliver Stone intended it to be an anti-capitalist film, but many capitalists themselves jumped on the Michael Douglas stock broker character as an aspiration rather than a warning. Martin Sheen also stars along with his son, Charlie. In 1987 Withnail & I was released in the UK; it would become a massive cult hit and spawn hundreds of drinking games amongst students for decades to come. Probably less suited to drinking games was Wings of Desire from Wim Wenders; Bruno Ganz plays an angel who descends to earth to become mortal; bizarrely Peter “Columbo” Falk is another former angel. Two films round off the decade; Who Framed Roger Rabbit mixes live action and cartoon effects to create an outstanding spectacle, and When Harry Met Sally was one of the romantic comedies of the 80s with Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal taking the leads who love, hate, like, hate, then eventually love each other all over again.

1990 brought Wild at Heart from David Lynch, one of his more understandable films, and from Nicholas Roeg came a fine adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The Witches, replete with dark humour, though sadly changing the ending of the book, presumably to make it more palatable. What About Bob was an excellent 1991 comedy with Bill Murray as the patient who makes psychiatrist Richard Dreyfuss’ holiday less than relaxing. Wayne’s World and Wayne’s World 2 were both more than watchable comedies for the MTV generation, with Mike Myers and Dana Carvey as the likeable leads running their own cable programme. Other 90s offerings include the passable White Men Can’t Jump; the Kevin Costner flop, Waterworld; Sandra Bullock in romantic comedy territory in While You Were Sleeping; average footballing drama When Saturday Comes; and the excellent American satire Wag the Dog. Waking Ned practically defined the word “whimsy”, Wild Things excited the male population with a threesome including Denise Richards and Neve Campbell, though admittedly the rest of the film was decent too, and Michael Apted helmed the Pierce Brosnan Bond film, The World is Not Enough, also coincidentally featuring Denise Richards as a nuclear scientist – yes, really.

Into 2000 which saw a fair few comedies – the Mel Gibson vehicle What Women Want, the hit man/dentist tale in The Whole Nine Yards with Bruce Willis and Matthew Perry, and from the UK the amiable comedy Wild About Harry with Brendan Gleason in the lead role. Also in 2000 came a nice little thriller Where the Money Is with an increasingly rare performance from Paul Newman. The final film here from 2000 was Wonder Boys which was Curtis Hanson’s follow up to L.A. Confidential; it didn’t hit the heights of his previous film, but was still decent enough. 2002 saw Waking up in Reno which was fairly disappointing given the quality of its cast, and then in 2005 came the frankly marvellous Wallace and Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit which saw the Aardman creations on top form. Spielberg’s remake of War of the Worlds came out in 2005 with its 9/11 and terrorist undertones; I liked it apart from the whole sentimental family subplot. I wasn’t blown away by Wedding Crashers or We Own the Night either, but one I was pretty blown away by was Wall-E, an excellent animation from Pixar which also packs an emotional punch – not easy for a romance between machines!

And that’s the longlist – what about the final five?

The Wizard of Oz - the timeless family classic

Whisky Galore – Whimsical whisky from Ealing studios

The Wild Bunch - Groundbreaking Western from Peckinpah

Wallace and Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit - Aardman animation achieves er. Amazingness?

Wall-E – Another winner from Pixar, beautifully made

And the winner is… The Wild Bunch. The violence gets the headlines but the story of men outliving their time is pretty flawless too.

A-Z of favourite films - V

2010-02-04T12:55:00.003Z

Post 22 out of 26 in the A-Z list of my favourite films series of blogs and we're up to:

Excellent, V is another easily manageable category, with just 14 films in it. The drawback of course is that they’ll be films in this final five that wouldn’t have come near the final five in other categories due to the competition there, but them’s the breaks.

Anyway we start with a film that WOULD make the top five of most categories, Hitchcock’s 1958 masterpiece, Vertigo. Starring James Stewart and Kim Novak, it’s a film that’s probably the most critically acclaimed of all of Hitch’s works. It’s not quite my favourite – that would go to North by Northwest or Rear Window, but it’s up there with them and is arguably the darkest and most psychological of Hitch’s films.

Into the 1960s and a very British horror film with Village of the Damned – lots of “gollys” and “goshes” at the start, before the atmosphere becomes darker as a group of creepy blond children begin controlling people’s minds. The following year came another British film with Victim; this was a ground-breaking Basil Dearden film starring Dirk Bogarde as the lawyer who has to make a choice between staying silent or revealing his homosexuality when he is threatened with blackmail. Made at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in the UK it may seem tame by today's standards, but every journey has to start with one step, and Bogarde took quite a risk in taking the lead role in a film that also stars Sylvia Sims.

Jumping over the 1970s and we reach 1983 with David Cronenberg’s Videodrome a film telling how a television program called Videodrome controls people's lives and makes them kill. James Woods is the unknowing guinea pig in a film that also stars Debbie Harry. A couple of years later came A View to a Kill, a Roger Moore Bond film – you know, the one that has bonkers Grace Jones in it.

Into the 1990s, and there’s Tommy Jones in the fairly preposterous disaster movie, Volcano and then the better Very Bad Things featuring Jon Favreau enjoying a disastrous stag night with friends before marrying Cameron Diaz. Featuring a nice twist in the tale for the Lady Macbeth-like Diaz, the film employs VERY dark humour which may not be to everyone's taste but it works for me.

In the 2000s we have the enjoyably Danny Boyle TV movie Vacuuming Completely Nude in Paradise which probably doesn’t count, being a TV movie, and from the same year Cameron Crowe remade the Spanish film Open Your Eyes as Vanilla Sky starring Tom Cruise and, reprising her role from the original, Penelope Cruz. If you’ve not seen the original I guess it’s ok, but if you have, you’ll spend most of the film wondering why it was made – it’s a shot by shot remake at some points and without the originality of its predecessor. 2004 brings three V films, the poor Van Helsing, the bleak, well made abortion drama Vera Drake, and, from M Night Shyamalan came The Village which is watchable schlock, although his directing career does seem to slowly be going down the pan.

A director with a better current reputation is Pedro Almodovar, and his excellent 2006 film Volver was a sort of cross between Mildred Pierce and Arsenic and Old Lace. Penelope Cruz stars as the mother of a 14 year old and wife of a layabout husband; her life is soon turned upside down by a certain event which she has to deal with, whilst at the same time taking on a neighbour's restaurant, and dealing with her aunt's death. Plus Cruz's sister is now seeing visions of their late mother. Is she a ghost - or is it more complicated than that? The plot sounds complex but it all makes sense, and it's an enjoyable watch. Cruz is on top but all the cast do a great job. Cruz’s third appearance on this list (is it in her contract to appear in most V films?) comes in Woody Allen’s return to form, Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Cruz won an Oscar for her role in a film that follows the relationships that ensue after friends Rebecca Hall (Vicky) and Scarlett Johansson (Cristina) spend a summer in Barcelona and meet artist Javier Bardem. Cruz plays Bardem's ex-wife, and if nothing else, you have a very good looking cast. However the conversation sparkles, and though it might not be very deep, it's an enjoyable souffle of a film, also featuring Patricia Clarkson

So them’s the fourteen – what are the five?

Vertigo - One of Hitchcock’s best, casting Jimmy Stewart in not the best of lights!

Victim – Tackling a taboo subject at the time, Dirk Bogarde is excellent in this 1960s drama

Vera Drake – Bleak but well made period drama; Imelda Staunton takes the title role

Volver – Almodovar’s excellent Spanish language comedy with Penelope Cruz on fine form

Vicky Cristina Barcelona – Cruz again in a cast to die for, in a film that sees Allen back on form after recent misfires.

And the winner is Vertigo – joining North by Northwest, Psycho and Rear Window as the fourth Hitchcock winner, but will it be the last. Er, probably, though there’s still Young and Innocent and The Wrong Man to come.

A-Z of favourite films - Especially for U.

2010-02-02T13:33:00.001Z

Right we're on the home straight now in the A-Z blog of my favourite films - Part 21 out of 26

After the three-pronged horror of the Rs. The Ss and the Ts, with their hundreds of films, we move onto the U and refreshingly there are only 17 films to choose from – I needed a smaller category following the last three.

From 1929 there’s Laurel and Hardy’s first talkie film, Unaccustomed as We Are. It’s a bit stagey to be honest, and would later be remade more successfully as the second half of Blockheads. Twenty years later comes another underwhelming film; Hitchcock’s Under Capricorn was, thankfully, his only costume drama; despite the presence of Ingrid Bergman it doesn’t work very well. A much better film is Vittorio De Sica’s Italian neo-realist film, Umberto D. You may remember the same director made Bicycle Thieves, which featured in the top 5 of my B list, and this is no more cheerful – it centres on a man whose life becomes unbearable until he wants to commit suicide, but first needs to find someone to care for his only true friend – his dog, Flike. Despite its themes, it’s a beautiful film and one of the finest examples of neo-realism.

Into the 1960s and Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is certainly a unique film. Starring Catherine Deneuve it’s a musical with a difference – instead of set piece songs, every single line is sung, even mundane dialogue. The story’s fairly generic – a romance gone wrong, but the tale’s all in the style of the telling.

No decent entries here from the 1970s, but moving into the 1980s we have Under Fire, a film about a romantic triangle between journalists covering the conflict in Nicaragua. Starring Nick Nolte, Gene Hackman and Ed Harris, there’s a fine cast in a well-made film. Also from the 1980s comes The Untouchables with Kevin Costner as Elliot Ness, trying to bring down Robert De Niro’s Al Capone. One of De Palma’s best films, it’s an involving crime drama. Rounding off the 1980s we change genre slightly with Uncle Buck, starring the likeable John Candy as the Uncle of the title, trying to take charge of his nieces of nephews, one of which is Macauley Culkin.

Into the 1990s and Clint Eastwood’s revisionist western Unforgiven was the surprise hit of 1992, garnering awards left, right and centre. Fine support came from, among others, Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman, and Richard Harris, and the Western was back on cinema screens. Continuing in the 1990s, Under Siege and Under Siege 2 were probably two of Steven Segal’s better films – not that that’s saying much. Much better was Brian Singer’s The Usual Suspects, a superb crime thriller and one of the most talked about films of the 1990s. Kevin Spacey picked up a Best Supporting Actor Oscar, but the rest of the ensemble cast is also tremendous. From 1997 comes U-turn, a film that’s not all that well known which is a shame because it’s pretty good and has a good cast including Sean Penn, Billy Bob Thornton, Nick Nolte, Jennifer Lopez and John Voigt. A claustrophobic tale involving incest, it’s not to everyone tastes and perhaps suffers from a lack of likeable characters, but as you’d expect from an Oliver Stone film, it’s well told and directed. The following year came US Marshals, the sort of follow-up to The Fugitive, but nowhere near as good, and with no Harrison Ford this time. The same year came an interesting documentary, Universal Horror which looks back to the classic horror films from the Universal studio in the 1930s.

Into the last decade and M Night Shymalan’s follow up to The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, is decent enough – at least it was made before he really started going downhill fast. It’s not up there with The Sixth Sense but, starring Samuel L Jackson and Bruce Willis, it’s worth a watch. From the same year came Under Suspicion – again a good cast with Gene Hackman and Morgan Freeman, but the story doesn’t really come together. Our last entry is Up, the recent Pixar release which I saw at that there cinema, replete with 3D glasses. I have my doubts as to how much the 3D added to it, but it was a superb film; the first 20 minutes in particular is cinema making at its finest.

And that’s all the contenders for U, but what about the final five?

Umberto D - Neo-realism, and humanism from the director of Bicycle Thieves, following a retired civil servant as he faces debts, loneliness, and finds life unbearable. The only happiness in his life comes from his dog Flike, but will that be enough to save him?

The Untouchables - It's 1930 in prohibition America and Kevin Costner is Elliot Ness, a man given the task of bringing down Al Capone (Robert De Niro). Corruption is rife throughout the police force so he gets together a small gang including veteran Irish cop Sean Connery and new recruit Andy Garcia. Some of the film may be factually inaccurate but I liked it and it's one of De Palma's best films

Unforgiven - Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman star in this Oscar winning Western. The old West is coming to an end; Eastwood is trying to block out his past; his character is not proud of the gun slinger he used to be but when a prostitute is cut up her friends put together $1,000 dollar reward for the person that kills the men who did it. A cocky young wannabe gunslinger comes to enlist Eastwood who eventually agrees, bringing Freeman along. In the town is Gene Hackman, another figure from the past, now a dodgy Sheriff trying to build himself a house. Conflict ensues and there's not a great deal of triumph in the killing; the general theme of the film is anti-violence, no-one can forgive each other and things inevitably end up in a shoot out. The movie is really well filmed and the film is dedicated to Eastwood's two mentors, Don Siegel and Sergio Leone.

The Usual Suspects - Superb crime thriller from Bryan Singer. Kevin Pollack Gabriel Byrne, Kevin Spacey, Stephen Baldwin and Benico Del Toro are the criminals brought together in a police line-up and then enlisted to carry out a job for the mysterious Keyzer Soze. The story is told in flashback through police interrogation of Spacey’s character, Verbal Kint, the sole survivor of the gang. Contains one of the biggest twists you’ll see but even disregarding this, it is still a tremendously entertaining film with fine performances all round. Also stars Pete Postlewaite

Up - Fine offering from Pixar telling the tale of an old man who, after his wife's death, and being hassled by property developers, attaches balloons to his house and flies off to South America for adventure. Unbeknownst to him an 8 year old cub scout is along for the ride. Touching and moving to begin with as the relationship between the old man and his wife is told from beginning to end with little dialogue, things then go slightly off kilter when the talking dogs arrive, but if you go with it, it's an enjoyable and involving experience.

And the winner is… The Usual Suspects, just for its sheer audacity.

Stewart Lee - Live at Sheffield Lyceum 27th Jan 2010

2010-01-28T16:49:00.003Z

Taking my seat in the third row at the Lyceum theatre, Sheffield, it’s fair to say I was rather excited about seeing Stewart Lee, officially the 41st Best Stand Up ever. At 7:45 he came on briefly to explain that in the second part of the evening he’d be performing his new show, “If you prefer a milder comedian, please ask for one.” First up though was the support act, introduced by Lee as a better comedian and man than Lee himself, Simon Munnery.

It turned out Munnery wasn’t quite as funny as Lee, though that’s no great criticism, as we'll see. His affable 25-minute routine made me laugh a lot with his takes on, amongst other things, supermarkets, being a father, and the awkwardness in deciding how close someone has to be to you before it’s socially acceptable to say “Hello” to them. Not having been to a live comedy show before, I was surprised by the brevity of the routine, as after 25 minutes he departed the stage and we were already at the interval.

The main show started as Lee entered to a thumping soundtrack and smoke machine, before quickly curtailing proceedings as that’s how “comedians called Russell” enter the stage. He started his routine, before taking (presumably fake) exception to some people not laughing enough and proceeding to dissect what he had said so far, explaining why it was funny and why the audience should laugh. As he makes plain, “I’m not Michael MacIntyre spoon-feeding you diarrhoea” and if the audience weren’t going to get the early clown related jokes, he didn’t know how they’d get through the tougher stuff to come. He needn’t have worried – he pretty much had the audience in the palm of his hands, and I don’t remember ever laughing so much as I did over the next 90 minutes as he covered topics including his feelings on emigrants, his hatred of Top Gear (might be best if Richard Hammond doesn’t turn up at one of his shows), and finishing up with 20 minutes concerning an advertising tag line, that just got funnier and funnier. To extrapolate a 20 minute routine out of a simple tagline is the sign of a gifted comedian, and this was certainly a confident comedian at the top of his form, even if, as he explains, at the age of 41 he may no longer have the rage that a 38 year old Frankie Boyle feels towards the Queen’s vagina.

You could class it as some sort of post-modern comedy I suppose, as Lee shows the workings of the routine, letting one story peter out because he couldn’t think of an end to it, but whatever label you want to give it, one things for sure – it was damn funny AND intelligent, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

So I may not have been to the theatre and/or gigs in my teenage years and for most of my 20s, but what with my first “gig” being REM at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff, and my first live comedy being Stewart Lee at the Lyceum, at least I’ve started with the best. The only trouble now is will anyone live up to the standard they’ve set?

A-Z of favourite films - Mr T ain't getting on no plane

2010-01-27T17:03:00.006Z

Ah, we've reached T in my list of my favourite A-Z films of all time. Surely it can't be as big a category as S?

So, T films then. I was hoping for an easier category after the mammoth S project, but T is almost as bad – there’s 125 films in this category. I’ll try and do them in just the one blog, so apologies if I miss a few decent ones out!

From the early days there’s a mix of Chaplin, and Laurel and Hardy. Chaplin’s entry here is The Tramp, in which the tramp character makes his first appearance of many. More prolific were Laurel and Hardy – ten of their films fit into this category, the best of which include Their Purple Moment, Towed in a Hole, Twice Two and Thicker than Water. Not forgetting Them Thar Hills, a classic short which is the only Laurel and Hardy film to get its own sequel – Tit for Tat – which is also a contender in this category, revolving around a dispute between shopowners. With Laurel and Hardy as one of the pair of shop owners, you know it’s not going to end well! Moving on from comedy, Hitchcock made The 39 Steps in 1935, one of his best British films featuring Robert Donat and Madeline Carrol. Its themes of the wronged man would be found in many of his later films, most notably North by Northwest.

Into the 1940s, and I’ll whittle the films down to four contenders. David Lean’s This Happy Breed follows the lives of a British family in the years between the two world wars. It’s like a who’s who of British cinema of the 40s with performances from, among others, Celia Johnson, Robert Newton, Stanley Holloway and John Mills. Howard Hawks brought us To Have and Have Not – an adaptation of the Hemmingway book starring Humphrey Bogart and Laurel Bacall. Okay, the plots eerily similar to Casablanca but I guess there’s worse films to be compared to. Staying in the US, John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is another Bogart film which also stars the director’s father, Walter. Trivia fans note – this if the only film in which father and son have both won Oscars (John for directing, Walter for Best Supporting Actor). Rounding off the decade and back to the UK (well, Vienna actually) for one of the greatest British films (it came top of a BFI poll to find the best British film), The Third Man. Don’t ask me why it’s classed as British – it stars American actors Joseph Cotton and Orson Welles and is set in Austria. Still, it’s got a British director and he does a great job creating a noir classic, famous if nothing else for its zither music and Orson Welles’ speech on the ferris wheel.

From the 1950s, The Thing from Another World is good fun – an enjoyable alien film, a genre that was most popular in the US at the time. The Titfield Thunderbolt is worth a mention for being a typically British Ealing comedy from Charles Crichton, but to be honest it's not quite up there with the best of the studio’s output. From Japan comes a film that frequently tops critics’ lists of best films of all time: Tokyo Story. Yes, it’s slow and no, there’s not much action, but if you let yourself be drawn into it, it’s a fine, moving film. I wouldn’t describe it as one of my favourite films of ALL time, but then, I’m not a proper critic! Two entries from Hitchcock emerge from the decade; both laced with humour. To Catch A Thief is a cinematic soufflé of a film starring Cary Grant and Grace Kelly; if you don’t like the tale of cat-burglary and romance, you’ve at least got something to look at. I probably prefer The Trouble With Harry, Hitch’s dark comedy about a group of people trying to decide what to do with a dead body they’ve found. Several people all think they’re responsible for the death and it’s the closest Hitch came to filming a farce. Plus the lovely Shirley Maclaine is in it too. Kurosawa’s excellent take on Macbeth, Throne of Blood is worth a mention, as indeed is Sidney Lumet’s classic Twelve Angry Men starring Henry Fonda as the juror not quite in agreement with his peers. Rounding off the decade is Touch of Evil; Orson Welles directs and appears in this marvellous noirish thriller starring Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh and Marlene Dietrich, also made famous for its long unbroken take that kicks off the film.

So, the 1960s then. The Time Machine isn’t a bad film, and is infinitely better than its Guy Pearce remake. Two Rode Together starring James Stewart is a decent enough John Ford western, even though not one of his best. 1962 brought To Kill a Mockingbird, the sterling adaptation of Harper Lee’s novel, with Gregory Peck as the all-American hero Atticus Finch, voted the greatest movie hero by the American film institute a few years back. Thunderball’s an ok Bond film, This Sporting Life is a good example of the British New Wave cinema, and Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain is probably one of his films that’s worth forgetting. Three good entries from 1968 are Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets, Norman Jewison’s The Thomas Crown Affair, and most famously, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: a Space Odyssey – his highly influential sci-fi film that baffles and enchants in equal measure. After watching that you’ll probably fancy a knockabout comedy and that comes the following year with Woody Allen’s Take the Money and Run. Just don’t make the mistake of watching another rare Hitchcock failure in Topaz. Trust me, it’s really not very good at all.

The 1970s arrive and I’ll just pick out three films from this decade for brevity’s sake. From 1974 we have The Taking of Pelham 123, a brilliant heist thriller starring Walter Matthau as the rail worker trying to foil a group of hijackers. To be honest, I’ve not seen the recent remake, but I can’t see it living up to the original, especially given the remake is directed by Tony Scott. Also from 1974 came The Texas Chainsaw Massacre – it seems to have a reputation as being a classic horror but to be honest it didn’t do much for me. A group of teenagers are individually picked off by a masked chain saw wielding maniac, but after you’ve met the annoying teenagers, you’ll probably be on the side of old Leatherface anyway. Our final example of 70s cinema is Taxi Driver, Scorsese’s classic with Robert De Niro as the borderline psychotic Taxi Driver, seeking to romance Cybil Shepherd, save teenage prostitute Jodie Foster, and gain vengeance on her pimp, Harvey Keitel. Bloody, cine-literate and stylish, how the film lost out to Rocky at the Oscars is beyond me.

And to the decade that taste forgot – the 80s – but surprisingly there are some contenders here. Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits is visually interesting, as are all his films, Tootsie is perhaps the best example of the cross-dressing genre (if it exists) with Dustin Hoffman giving a fine performance as the actor who resorts to becoming an “actress” in order to get work. Staying with comedy, Trading Places is one of my favourite 80s films, with Eddie Murphy, Dan Ackroyd and Jamie lee Curtis all at the tops of their games – it’s well worth watching if you’ve not seen it. The following year (1984) came the first Terminator film – the second best of the franchise, basically a feature length chase, but it racks up the excitement and is highly entertaining. The same year comes the classic comedy This is Spinal Tap, a mockumentary that has yet to be bettered – it goes all the way up to 11. More comedies from the 80s include Teen Wolf, Top Secret, The Three Amigos, Throw Momma from the Train, Twins, Tremors, and Turner and Hooch. And that’s without even mentioning Three Men and a Baby! The 80s also brought the gayest film ever (in the homosexual sense) with Top Gun, and more seriously, one of the greatest film documentaries of all time with The Thin Blue Line; Errol Morris’ documentary exposed police incompetence in a murder case, and led to the innocent man finally being released from jail.

Right, a ridiculous number of T films from the 90s so I’ll shoot through them, inevitably leaving out the majority of the dross or semi-dross. There’s Terminator 2; in my opinion the best of the 4 Terminator films that have so far been released. Thelma and Louise was the feminist’s dream in 1991, although us men were allowed to enjoy bits of it too – I think. Kieslowski’s Three Colours trilogy took many of the plaudits of the early 90s – all three films stand up on their own as great stories but put together they make up one of the best film series in cinema – my favourite incidentally is the comedy, Three Colours White. 1993 brought True Romance from Tony Scott which is fun ride while it lasts. True Lies from 1994 is my guilty pleasure – it was the last film I saw at the cinema before my 8 years illness-caused absence (my first film on return in 2002 was About a Boy, for those of you who are interested. Anyone? Hello? Nope, thought not). 1995 was a good year, containing as it did films such as Things to do in Denver When You’re Dead, To Die For, The Truth About Cats and Dogs, Twelve Monkeys, and the glorious Toy Story which would eventually produce an arguably even better sequel. All those films are well worth watching, especially Twelve Monkeys, but if you’re just going to watch one, it’s got to be the Toy Story – genius filmmaking, and the first wholly computer generated animation. The big film from 1996 was Danny Boyle’s excellent, if grim at times, Trainspotting; another much lower budget film I enjoyed was Steve Buscemi’s Trees Lounge, a low key story. We’ll gloss over Titanic in 1997 (if only we could back then too) and arrive in 1998 with the rather rude, but very funny There’s Something About Mary. The same year brought The Truman Show, a fine satire that was ahead of its time – it doesn’t seem so funny watching it now as it becomes more like a documentary! The last year of the decade brought Toy Story 2 (brilliant) and Three Kings (almost brilliant).

So into the noughties which start with Thirteen Days, a fine dramatic reconstruction of the Cuban Missile Crisis under JFK in the early 60s. Even though you know the outcome, it’s still extremely tense. Stephen Soderbergh’s Traffic is a sprawling multi-story film, focussing on the drug trade, inspired by a Channel Four mini-series. It’s intelligent filmmaking and well worth viewing. From Japan we have Twilight Samurai and from South Korea, Tale of Two Sisters. Danny Boyle returns with effective horror, 28 Days Later and Kevin Macdonald’s documentary Touching The Void made for incredible viewing too. 21 Grams was a hard hitting drama, notable for me for the fact I watched it in the cinema and I was the only one in the screening. Team America: World Police came from the South Park creators and lampooned everything in sight – Americans, French, Iraqis, terrorists, the Hollywood right, the Hollywood Left, no-one was safe, not even MAATTT DAAAMON. Spielberg’s The Terminal got some sniffy reviews but I thought it was a perfectly fine film, Wong Kar Wai followed up In the Mood For love with 2046, another film that baffled the viewer at the same time as hypnotising them with its mood and palette. Thank You for Smoking is a fine little satire, and then there’s Taxidermia – more a film to be endured than enjoyed, though entertaining in a scatological type of way. Finally from Britain we have Shane Meadow’s excellent portrayal of England in the 80s with This is England, and then from France, Tell No One was a marvellous thriller about a grieving husband finding his wife might not be as dead as he thought she was.

So that’s that for the Ts and fortunately the last mammoth category. Just time for the final five:

Well this is almost impossible to get down to a final five. So far I’ve narrowed it down to 23.

Hmm, okay another go…

Right, here’s the final five

Twelve Angry Men – Shows you don’t need multiple sets to make a gripping story.

To Kill a Mockingbird – A fine adaptation, and portrayal of a thoroughly decent man in Atticus Finch

Taxi Driver – Arguably Scorsese’s best film, De Niro gives a virtuoso performance

This is Spinal Tap – Great comedy mockumentary about the rock band Spinal Tap

Toy Story 2 – Just about outclasses its predecessor, it’s not just a great animation. It’s a great film, full stop.

And the winner is Toy Story 2. The first animation to win on my list, it may not be better than the others, but it sort of wins by default, because I can't decide which film out of about 15 I prefer. Tomorrow, no doubt, a different film would have won!

A-Z of favourite films - S part two

2010-01-22T00:06:00.005Z

Okay, bring out the bunting, sound the celebratory alarms.It’s time for the second part of the S blog in my favourite A-Z films of all time.

PART TWO!

As you may or may not recall, we paused our S blog at the end of the 1960s due to there being just too many damn films beginning with S. We shall resume our story where we left off at the beginning of 1970s

1970s

From 1971 came the cult classic Shaft, though to be honest it’s not one of my personal favourites. The same year, the controversial shit hit the fan with Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, the brutal tale of a man turning to extreme violence in order to protect his own home. Starring Dustin Hoffman and Susan George, the film was banned from being released on video or DVD in Britain right up until 2002. Controversial also for its rape scene, it’s not an easy film to watch, but I don’t think it deserved the widespread revulsion it received on release. A less controversial film from 1972 was Silent Running, a minor science fiction classic with an eco-message which clearly had a major influence on the recent Wall-E. A couple of films from 1973 notable for bravura performances from their main actors were Serpico with Al Pacino as the cop refusing to bow to corruption, and Save the Tiger, with Jack Lemmon winning a Best Actor Oscar as the executive struggling with how the world is changing, and considering underhand tactics to try and save his company from going under. If you only know Lemmon from his excellent comic turns, this exhibits the darker side to his acting, and very powerful it is too. Also in 1973, The Sting provides excellent fun and capers, with Robert Redford and Paul Newman reprising their partnership from Butch Cassidy in this tale of a couple of con-men trying to battle against head honcho Robert Shaw. The film is pure entertainment and won the Best Picture and Director Oscars for the year. Less entertaining for me was Pasolini’s Salo – its controversial scenes just left me bored. Other 70s movies which are worthy of a mention include Cronenberg’s Shivers, Don Siegel’s The Shootist (John Wayne’s last film, also featuring James Stewart), Superman featuring the first outing for Christopher Reeve, and Alan Clarke’s hard hitting Scum, the story of life in a young detention centre starring Ray “Who’s Your Daddy” Winstone. Oh, and I nearly forgot a small film from 1977 in Star Wars. I know, I know some people love it and fair enough and all that, but for me it’s a glorified toy commercial. More to my taste from the same year was Dario Argento’s Suspiria, a horror tale set within a ballet academy. Featuring an astonishing use of colour and visual imagery it’s a treat for the eyes and contains a few shocks too.

My winner for the 1970s will be The Sting – top notch cinema entertainment.

1980s

Into the 1980s and from 1980 we have The Shining, Stanley Kubrick’s slow burner of a horror film, featuring Jack Nicholson as the writer slowly going mad in an isolated hotel putting his wife and son at risk. Kubrick’s typically detached style of filming suits the tale of isolation and though the shocks may be few and far between, they’re all the more effective for it. Also in the early 80s we have comedy with Bill Murray in Stripes, and gangster tales with Al Pacino in Brian De Palma’s showy remake of Scarface. You can’t ignore a love story between Tom Hanks and a mermaid, and that’s what Splash provides. Daryl Hannah is the said mermaid and John Candy provides fine support in a charming feel good film. Much less feelgood, but most effective was Krzysztof Kieslowski’s A Short Film About Killing. Before you start wondering how many points his name would be worth at Scrabble, you should know that his film examining the ins and outs of a murdered being put to death is stark, unrelenting, but ultimately successfully provokes the sort of questions one imagines it intended to do. After watching it, you’ll probably feel the need to watch something a bit more light-hearted like Stakeout, or Scrooged, both comedies from the 80s.

So the 1980s a bit light on quality films compared to the next two decades but I’ll put The Shining through – the horror film as art.

1990s

Right, I’ve seen 48 S films from the 1990s, so forgive me if this category turns into a bit of a list, rather than the usual “incisive commentary” – yeah right! Anyhoo, we have Anthony Hopkins chewing the scenery as well as other things in Silence of the Lambs, a film that won a hatful of Oscars. Skipping over Stop or My Mom Will Shoot (it came close to winning, but just missed out), we have Schindler’s List from Spielberg, a stark film about the Holocaust, but uplifting in a way due to its examination of one man’s human kindness. Changing tone entirely, So I Married an Axe Murderer is always a favourite comedy of mine with Mike Myers in pre Austin Powers territory. From Japan comes Takeshi Kitano’s Sonatine though I enjoyed his later films more. Danny Boyle emerged on the scene in the UK in 1994 with Shallow Grave, a darkly comic tale. In the same year came The Shawshank Redemption, one of my all time favourites starring Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins as prisoners inside the prison of Shawshank. Pretty much ignored on release, it then built up a following on video and now frequently finds itself at or near the top of polls to find the public’s favourite film of all time. From the same year came Speed with Keanu Reeves and the lovely Sandra Bullock (that is her full name – “lovely” Sandra Bullock) and from American Independent cinema there came Spanking the Monkey. It’s not quite as rude as the title implies, but as it deals with incest, isn’t for the easily offended. Reaching the mid-point of the nineties we have the serial-killer tale Se7en with an all star cast, and this side of the Atlantic came my favourite Mike Leigh film Secrets and Lies, which is uplifting and heartbreaking at the same time – if your eyes don’t moisten in one scene, you’re not human. We’ll gloss over Showgirls and Species, but Wes Craven’s post modern horror Scream reinvented the genre – you can’t really blame it for opening the floodgates for hundreds of inferior copies – yes, the Scary Movie franchise, I’m looking at you. Also worth watching are Shine, Slingblade and Swingers. I’ve also got a guilty secret that I quite liked Starship Troopers – it’s actually deeper than it first appears, honestly! The 1998 Oscar battle for Best Picture was between Saving Private Ryan and Shakespeare in Love, both fine films. The latter won out eventually, though sadly so did Gwyneth Paltrow – I’m still trying to get that Oscar speech out of my mind even a decade later. A Simple Plan from Sam Raimi is an underrated gem; Sliding Doors was a successful British film, Sweet and Lowdown was a decent Woody Allen film, and then the sleeper hit of 1999 was The Sixth Sense. Don’t worry, I won’t give away the ending here if you’ve not seen it. (it’s a sledge)

Well a lot to choose from the 1990s, but my final vote goes to The Shawshank Redemption. When I first saw it around 1998 I knew it would be one of my favourite films, and not much has changed since.

2000s

Moving into the last decade – “only” 40 S films seen this decade. I liked Sexy Beast, the gangster film with Ray Winstone and a quite astonishingly profane performance by Ben “Gandhi” Kingsley. Snatch from Guy Richie was ok but a bit “meh” with its gangster laddishness. Shrek and its sequel (not seen third one yet) were brilliant examples of the levels that animation has hit with its mix of adventure for the kids and savvy postmodernness for the parents with its multiple references and in-jokes. From Italy, The Son’s Room deals with a family’s grief following the death of their son. It’s clearly not a laugh a minute, but is wonderfully filmed with fine performances and a real honesty to the subject that is quite refreshing. From 2002 came Secretary, which I’d better not say too much about, but has the lovely Maggie Gyllenhaal (yes, her first name is “lovely” too) as the secretary in question embarking on an odd relationship with her boss James Spader. Yes there’s spanking, but it’s actually quite a good hearted film – honest. A couple of decent films from South Korea were Sympathy for Mr Vengeance and Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter, and Spring – very different films, but both great examples of the recent growth in popularity of East Asian films here in the West. 2003 also sees a marvellous golden nugget of a movie – The Station Agent. A low budget affair, I was bowled over by its charm and it remains a firm favourite of mine still. My two favourites from 2004 are Shaun of the Dead from this side of the Atlantic – simply put the best British comedy for several decades, and Sideways, Alexander Payne’s low-key masterpiece about a couple of men celebrating an upcoming wedding by going on a wine road trip. It’s difficult to explain why the film’s so good. To say it's an intelligent film makes it sound pretentious but it isn’t – it just doesn’t feel forced to aim for the lowest common denominator. The pacing is perfect, the characterisation spot on and the characters all too believable. Gentle comedy is a horrible term as it brings up memories of Last of the Summer Wine but Sideways is a gentle comedy in the best possible sense. Moving on, I felt Syriana was a fine film, tackling difficult issues (plus it’s got Mr Clooney in it), Son of Rambow was a charming British film, and of course I believe Slumdog Millionaire was quite successful and won a few awards. Rounding off the decade, 2 films from 2009 are also worth a watch – State of Play, and finally Guy Richie brings his directing career back from the dead in Sherlock Holmes.

So the winner of the 2000s is difficult. Hmm, it’s down to Shaun of the Dead, The Station Agent or Sideways. It’s difficult to separate them but I think my final vote will go to Shaun of the Dead.

Well, that’s nearly 200 films whittled down to 9 and it’s taken bloody ages!

The final list is:

Pre 1940s Stagecoach
1940s Shadow of a Doubt
1950s Singin’ in the Rain
AND Some Like it Hot
1960s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
1970s The Sting
1980s The Shining
1990s The Shawshank Redemption
2000s Shaun of the Dead

So I guess I’ve got to pick a winner out of that lot. Damn. Do I have to? Ah, yes. Right, I’ll go for Some Like it Hot – classic Hollywood at its best.

A-Z of favourite films - S part one

2010-01-20T15:39:00.006Z

It's the category I've been dreading - yes, it's S in the blog series of my favourite A-

Z films. Or at least, part one of S!

(PART ONE)

Right, so this is no normal category – I’ve seen nearly 200 films beginning with S, therefore I’ll change the blog slightly. It’d be too cumbersome to go through all the contenders and try and get them down to a final 5 – hell, I’ve seen 9 Hitchcock films beginning with S alone, up to 7 of which would be worthy of a place in a final five. So my plan is to go briefly through each decade, and pick a winner from each decade, and these will form the final shortlist from which I’ll (hopefully) pick a winner. Bear in mind though, this is the most difficult category, and I’ll probably miss loads of decent S films out due to sheer numbers.

PRE-1940s

So in this period we have Eisenstein’s acclaimed film, Strike in 1924 which is arguably one of his two most famous films along with Battleship Potemkin. Moving into the 1930s, Howard Hawks’ Scarface is one of the most influential gangster films of the pre-war years, loosely based on the escapades of Al Capone. Changing tack entirely, two of my favourite Laurel and Hardy films come in this category. There’s the short film Scram in which the duo are given 24 hours by a judge to leave town, and also their feature length offering, Sons of the Desert in which telling lies to their wives inevitably comes back to bite them! Two Hitchcock films from the 1930s are Sabotage, the thriller where Hitch blew up a young boy and his dog on a London bus, and Secret Agent, an admittedly below par spy thriller with John Gielgud miscast in the lead role. Finally in 1939, John Ford made Stagecoach, establishing many Western conventions that would become cliché in later years, but an example of accomplished filmmaking – Orson Welles reportedly viewed Stagecoach over 30 times before making Citizen Kane.

And the winner of the pre-1940 period is Stagecoach – an exemplary Western

1940s

The early 1940s brought some fine films, too numerous to mention here. However The Shop Around the Corner has to be mentioned, a charming romantic comedy starring James Stewart. It would be remade 48 years later as You’ve Got Mail, but the original is far superior. Another comedy was Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels about a filmmaker wanting to make more serious films rather than inconsequential comedies. However he soon learns that comedies are what’s needed during times of trouble. From 1941 to 1945, Hitchcock himself made 4 films, all beginning with S – he clearly didn’t spare a thought for my list at the time! The films are, in chronological order, Suspicion, Saboteur, Shadow of a Doubt, and Spellbound. All eminently watchable of course, but the standout is Shadow of a Doubt, the darkly comic tale of a man who goes round killing off rich widows. Joseph Cotton is excellent in the lead, but there’s also a fine supporting cast, and it’s a great portrayal of American suburban life, coming more than 50 years before American Beauty. It was also the film Hitchcock usually named when asked to come up with his favourite of his own films. The second half of the 1940s are not so productive as the first, but it’s worth just mentioning two foreign language films; Vittoria de Sica’s Sunshine, and Akira Kurosawa’s Stray Dog, a film noir that doesn’t quite reach the heights of his best films, but is still well worth a viewing.

And the 1940s winner is Shadow of a Doubt – Hitchcock hitting his stride in the US

1950s

The 1950s start with a bang. As well as Hitch’s Stage Fright in 1950, we also have Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, arguably the greatest Hollywood satire, focussing on an old silent actress who has been left behind since sound arrived in films. Full of classic lines including “I’m ready for my close-up” and “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small” it’s an all time classic, and is even narrated by a dead man! 1950 also saw an underrated, if now dated British thriller from John Boulting; Seven Days to Noon deals with the threat of a nuclear device gone rogue. The next year Hitchcock appears again with Strangers on a Train; one of his most tense films concerning two men who may (or may not) agree to switch murders so they can get away with them without having any connection to the suspect. The same year saw Elia Kazan’s adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire, but the real treat came in 1952 with Singin’ in the Rain. There’s not a lot to be said about that film that hasn’t already been said, but the fictional tale of a studio’s transition from silent to sound cinema is simply glorious with memorable set-pieces and a bucketful of charm. Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai also emerged this decade; whilst it may be long, it’s a true work of art and hugely influential not only in Japanese cinema, but in cinema as a whole. It also overshadows the other quality Japanese film of 1954, Sansho the Bailiff. Moving on, John Ford’s The Searchers is a great exploration of the Western myth which also reevaluates Westerns that preceded it. From ’57 we have Alexander Mackendrick’s The Sweet Smell of Success and, from the master of depressing cinema Ingmar Bergman, The Seventh Seal. Though that’s not really a fair moniker – there’s a lot of beauty and hope in many of his films, of which The Seventh Seal is probably his most famous. You’ve probably seen a clip of it even if you’ve never seen the film – the scene where a soldier plays chess with Death on the beach is one of the iconic classics. Finishing off the 1950s we have just the small matter of Some Like it Hot – a film that would always make my top 10 favourite films of all time. Maybe “Nobody’s Perfect” but this film is damn near perfect. If you’ve never seen the film, stop reading this blog now and go out and buy it on DVD – you won’t regret it.

And the 1950s winner is.. oh bugger.. I’ve got to choose between The Searchers, The Seven Samurai, Singin’ in the Rain, and Some Like it Hot. Not easy as all four are masterpieces, but I’ll put the decision off and let two films through – Singin’ in the Rain and Some like It Hot – both close to cinematic perfection

1960s

Well after the difficult decision of the 1950s, the 1960s seems to show a dip. Nothing of the quality of The Searchers or Seven Samurai here I’m afraid. Highlights from the early 60s are Francois Truffaut’s Shoot the Pianist, Karel Reisz’s British New Wave film, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and Stanley Kubrick’s Sand and Sandals epic, Spartacus. Other notable 60s films are the first Pink Panther film, A Shot in the Dark and Robert Wise’s The Sound of Music – Nazis and singing nuns a-go-go there. Francois Truffaut rounds the decade off as he started it, this time with Stolen Kisses, a light comedy from the French auteur.

So, seeing as I can’t put another film from the 1950s in, my 1960s winner will have to be Saturday Night and Sunday Morning with Albert Finney putting in a fine performance as the “Angry young man”.

Right, that’ll do for this blog – I’ll have to split it as otherwise it’d just be too TOO long.

A reminder of the S finalists so far

Pre 1940s - Stagecoach
1940s - Shadow of a Doubt
1950s - Singin’ in the Rain
AND - Some Like it Hot
1960s - Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

I shall be back soon with part two….

A-Z of favourite films - Say 'arrr

2010-01-17T16:42:00.006Z

So after the frankly embarrassing Q category, we’re back on track with R where I have at least seen more than a handful of films – nearly 100 in fact, so can at least whittle them down to a decent final five.

We’ll get three Hitchcock films out of the way first – from 1927 and 1932 respectively there’s The Ring and Rich and Strange. The former is a silent film about a boxer trying to win back his girl and the latter involves a couple seeking adventure on the high seas. Neither are particularly brilliant but Hitch redeems himself in 1940 with Rebecca, his first US film, albeit one that perhaps bears more the influence of the producer David O Selznick (fresh from his Gone with the Wind success) than the traditional Hitchcock themes and touches. Nevertheless, it was the only one of Hitchcock’s pictures to win Best Picture Oscar, though Selznick ended up taking it home, leaving Hitch empty-handed.

From 1939 comes one of Jean Renoir’s most famous films – La Regle du Jeu. Critics often see this as his masterpiece, but although I can see its merits, I have to admit I much prefer Grande Illusion – bonus points if you remembered that won the G category in my blog.

From the 1940s I guess some would say that John Ford’s Rio Grande should be a contender, but to be honest it was one of my least favourite of his films. A better film is Rossellini’s Italian neo-realist Rome, Open City, a mixture of humour and shockingly bleak tragedy set during the war. Not easy viewing but perhaps essential viewing. Also essential viewing is Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes, a beautifully filmed piece of work from the duo. Okay, it’s not my favourite of theirs – A Matter of Life and Death (winner of the M category, remember!) takes that “accolade”, but it’s up there with their best work. From the same year (1948) came Howard Hawks’ Red River, and another Hitchcock film, Rope – his experimental movie, filmed in a series of long, unbroken takes, all in the one location, as two young men in an apartment try to hide the fact they’ve just murdered a fellow student from their professor, James Stewart.

Turning to Japan, and the master director Akira Kurosawa has three entries in this category. The lesser of them is Red Beard, though that’s no major criticism when you consider the other two are of the calibre of Rashomon and Ran. Rashomon, a film where the same event is told from different perspectives is a true classic, and incidentally proved the subject of one of my favourite Simpsons jokes when Marge is trying to convince Homer that he likes Japan and says “You enjoyed Rashomon, didn’t you?” and he replies “That’s not the way I remember it.” I guess it’s only funny if you’ve seen the film, but it made me chuckle. Ran, coming 35 years after Rashomon in 1985 is a colourful spectacle, retelling the King Lear tale and is a glorious experience. If you’ve not seen either of those two films I urge you to give them a go.

Other contenders from the 1950s, this time in the English language are the charming romantic comedy Roman Holiday with Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn taking the leads; there’s James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, though that left me a bit cold, and the excellent Rio Bravo from Howard Hawks, perhaps one of the quintessential Westerns. However, surely the best English language R film of the 1950s is another Hitchcock offering, Rear Window. Pure cinema, and with Grace Kelly and James Stewart, how could it go wrong? Answer is, it didn’t

Roman Polanski has 2 entries from the 1960s – Repulsion, starring Catherine Deneuve, and then the better known Rosemary’s Baby with Mia Farrow giving birth to the devil. Most unnerving and one of only 2 films Polanski made in the US – the other being Chinatown.

The 70s unusually isn’t a great well of excellence for this category – there’s the odd film like The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Rocky, but I still have a grudge against the latter for beating Taxi Driver to Best Picture Oscar. There’s the original Rollerball too, but we’re clutching at straws in the 70s – like I say this is unusual as normally the 1970s along with the 1940s, provide the best films in these lists.

Things turn round in 1980 with Raging Bull, Scorsese’s boxing picture with standout performances from De Niro and Pesci, and brutal fight scenes. It’s said that when it didn’t win Best Picture Oscar, that’s when Scorsese gave up on ever winning one, and you can see why – it’s a marvellous piece of cinema. The next year another two renowned filmmakers teamed up for Raiders of the Lost Ark. Together, Spielberg and Lucas brought back the type of action movies seen during their childhood, as Harrison Ford took on the role of Indiana Jones in a rolliciking adventure. 1982 brings an interesting move as Gerard Depardieu stars in The Return of Martin Guerre as a man who returns to his home village after 9 years at war. But is he who he says, or rather an imposter? That forms the plot for the movie, and is rather involving.

Other notable contenders from the 80s are Woody Allen’s Radio Days; a fine comedy drama that gives a good sense of place and time; Raising Arizona from the always reliable Coen Brothers; Red Sorghum from the Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou; Rainman from Barry Levinson, and then Michael Moore’s breakout documentary Roger and Me, concerning mass unemployment after the car industry abandons Moore’s hometown.

Into the 90s and Yimou appears once again with his classic Raise the Red Lantern, a film that makes great use of colour as it tells the tale of a Chinese lady who becomes the fourth mistress to a man, although cleverly the man is never shown directly as he is only important in what he represents. In 1991 comes Mike leigh’s tale of a group of men on a building site in the excellent Riff Raff, then changing tack entirely, there’s Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves; the film at fault for Wet Wet Wet being Number one in the charts for an interminable length of time. Red Rock West is an underrated film from 1992 and from the same year, Tarantino announced his emergence on the scene with his debut Reservoir Dogs. A good companion piece to Reservoir Dogs (perhaps!) is Remains of the Day, the Merchant Ivory film. I don’t normally go in for that sort of film, but I really enjoyed it and it certainly pulls at the heartstrings. Late on in the 90s came Ringu, Hideo Nakata’s Japanese horror which certainly outshines its later Hollywood remake. Ronin, Rush Hour and Rushmore are fairly good fun, and then we end the decade with the excellently frenetic Run Lola Run, in which Lola has 20 minutes to find 20,000 German marks. The story is told three times with three different endings. The pace is breathtaking as Lola, well runs and runs. The editing is almost like a music video at times, but it carries you along with it, and leaves you fairly breathless by the end.

Just a handful of films to finish up with from the last decade. Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums divided opinion somewhat, but I was a fan of its brand of humour. Sam Mendes’ Road to Perdition was a movie with a stellar cast including Paul Newman, Jude Law and Tom Hanks. Taylor Hackford’s biopic Ray brought a Best Actor Oscar for Jamie Foxx for his portrayal of Ray Charles, and Wes Craven’s Red Eye was a low key little gem of a movie. Finally two fairly depressing films from 2008, both starring Kate Winslet, There was Stephen Daldry’s The Reader and then Sam Mendes’ Revolutionary Road, where his wife starred alongside her Titanic costar Leonardo DiCaprio.

Anyhoo, they were the contenders. What about the final five?

Rashomon – Kurosawa’s breakthrough film exploring the nature truth; and investigating whether the camera sometimes does lie. The story is fairly simple; a man has been murdered and his wife raped. However from varying accounts from such figures as the suspect, the rape victim, the murder victim (through a medium) and an onlooker we get four differing accounts of how the events came to pass. Three of the four accounts end with the narrator owning up to the killing. How do we know who is telling the truth? We don’t really and perhaps that is the point; can we ever know the truth? Stunningly photographed, this is a film well worth watching again and again

Rear Window – James Stewart is the photographer, housebound with a broken leg who watches the lives of his neighbours from his apartment. He becomes convinced that one of them has killed his wife so with the help of his girlfriend, Grace Kelly, tries to uncover the truth, putting both their own lives in danger. More a film exploring the nature of cinema, Hitch’s use of the “gaze” and mise-en-scene has perhaps never been bettered.

Raging Bull - Robert De Niro stars in this acclaimed boxing drama as we follow his career up, and very much down. A great character study, rightly famous for his boxing sequences which have you almost ducking out of the way of the camera. Also stars Joe Pesci

Ran – Kurosawa again, this time with a beautiful looking film, based on Shakespeare's King Lear. A retired warlord divides his kingdom between his three sons, only for it to end in division, warfare, and tragedy. There are no close ups in the film- almost each shot looks like a painting. It may be over two and a half hours long but is a rewarding experience. The acting is first-rate, especially from the lead and also one of the son's wives as a Lady Macbeth type figure.

Run Lola Run – Frenetic editing, inventive shots, with even live action turning to cartoon shots at one point. It’s basically a young woman (Famke Potente) running and trying to save her boyfriend’s skin as he’s under threat from a drug dealer. We see 3 different outcomes and if ever a film will exhaust you, it’s this one.

And the winner is… Rear Window. Sorry, I know it’s my third Hitchcock winner, but when you mix Hitch with James Stewart and Grace Kelly, you know you’re on to a good thing!

A-Z of favourite films - Join the Q

2010-01-12T16:11:00.002Z

And so we reach Q in the blog series of The A-Z of my favourite movies

Ah, this is where a slight drawback emerges in my method of choosing my favourite films by letter. Whereas some letters have over 100 films to choose from, and S, as we shall see, has many more, Q is a bit of a bugger as I’ve only seen five films beginning with that letter, none of which if I’m honest would probably make the top five of any other letter up to this point.

Of course I could cheat and ever so slightly alter the titles of deserving films that have so far missed out on winning their category due to there being another great film starting with the same later. Hence, we could have a top five of Quitizen Kane, Quight Club, The Quapartment, Quo Country For Old Men and The Quig Lebowski. However, I know you, my loyal 3 readers would think less of me for that, so I’ll just have to continue with the method employed up to now and stick with my stupid rules.

So, no Q films outside the final 5 to mention so straight to the top five itself

The Quiet Man – Winning a Best Director Oscar for John Ford in 1952, this Irish-set drama stars John Wayne and Margaret O Hara. It’s a while since I saw it, but I from what I remember Wayne is a bloke returning to Ireland from American, he falls for O Hara and wants to marry her, but her brother is the stumbling block. It didn’t blow me over and seemed a tad dated.

Quick Change – This was an enjoyable comedy from 1990 starring Bill Murray, Randy Quaid and Geena Davis They’re a trio of bank robbers trying to get away with an audacious robbery in Manhattan. The heist goes well, but can they get to the airport to make their escape – the journey is not an easy one. Good, undemanding fare.

Quartier Mozart – Yep, the fact that this is in the top 5 of any list grieves me. I didn’t enjoy it at all. It’s a 1992 movie from Cameroon (note the spelling – it’s the country, not James Cameron) and just seemed a mess to me. A girl wants to be a boy and by witchcraft, hey presto she is, and then she finds a girl to have sex with. Or something. I’ve blocked most of it out of my mind cos it was bloody awful

Quiz Show – Now this is one I liked, a Robert Redford directed film from 1994 about the true life story of a lawyer discovering a quiz show is fixed in the 1950s and that a contestant is being fed answers beforehand. I mainly watched it due to the presence of Rob “Northern Exposure” Morrow, and he gives a fine performance, as do John Turturro, Ralph Fiennes, Hank Azaria and the rest of the cast in an absorbing drama that captures time and place beautifully

The Quiet American – From 2002, Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser star in this drama set in Vietnam in the 1950s at the end of the first Indio-China war. It’s based on the Graham Greene book and is decent enough, though again, I’m afraid dear reader, I don’t have very strong memories of it, so it didn’t have a huge effect on me.

And that’s the quintet. And out of the five, my favourite is…. Quiz Show. In all honesty, it wouldn’t have got into the top five of any of the previous categories but it beat the competition here and is hence the winner.

A-Z of favourite films - I'll have a P please Bob

2010-01-10T19:41:00.007Z

Onto number 16 in my series of blogs on the A-Z list of my favourite films, and we’re onto P. I’ve seen 78 ‘P’ films, so may as well get started.

Laurel and Hardy, as ever, have a few entries here – short films such as Pardon Us, Pack up Your Troubles, and Perfect Day. None of which are probably quite good enough to make the top five, but they’re well worth a watch nevertheless. A more serious contender comes with the 1940 film The Philadelphia Story. With ther presence of Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant, and James Stewart, it would have been difficult to make it a bad film, and true to form it’s a fine comedy from the Hollywood golden age. Other films from the 1940s include Phantom of the Opera (the Claude Rains version), The Postman Always Rings Twice (the original version), The Pirate, and one of Ealing’s much loved films, Passport to Pimlico which stars Stanley Holloway as the shop keeper in a district of London that declares itself independent from the rest of England.

The 50s is pretty much a desert in terms of decent P films that I’ve seen so we move straight onto 1960 where we find two films from two major filmmakers which garnered very different reactions. First Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, a film about a serial killer who films his victims whilst he kills them. An unsettling film, but also an exploration of the nature of cinema itself, the film was almost universally vilified and effectively ended Powell’s career, before he was rehabilitated in the 80s and 90s by filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese. If ever there was a filmmaker who was ahead of his time it was Powell, and he unfortunately paid for this. On the other hand, another similar release from the same year was Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Again, exploring similar themes on occasions, this ended up being one of his most successful films, made on a shoestring budget, but changing the cinema landscape immeasurably. (note – I know it’s another Hitchcock film in my blog, but hey, I left out his 1947 film The Paradine Case, which is really rather dull so am not completely blinkered). Anyhoo, other 60s contenders include Jean Luc Godard’s le Petit Soldat, Rene Clement’s Plen Soliel, Blake Edward’s The Pink Panther, featuring the first appearance of Peter Sellers as Inspector Clousaeu, and Jacques Tati’s intriguing Playtime. Then there’s the original versions of both Planet of the Apes and The Producers – the latter featuring a quite brilliant performance from Gene Wilder. The decade finishes with Paint Your Wagon, the Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin musical western which features singing so bad, it’s actually good, and entertaining with it.

The 70s begin with a tour-de-force performance from George C Scott in the biopic Patton. He won an Oscar for his portrayal of the military man, then turned it down, saying he didn’t believe actors should be judged against each other. 1971 brought Clint Eastwood’s directorial debut with Play Misty for me, then two years later came Peckinpah’s flawed epic western Pat Garret and Billy the Kid, and the prison movie Papillon starring Dustin Hoffman and Steve McQueen. Alan J Pakula’s conspiracy tale, The Parallax View came in 1974 and that’s about it for the rest of the decade.

I’ll just be clear now that sadly none of the Police Academy films will make the top five – sorry about that. From 1984 however a contender is Paris, Texas, Wim Wenders road movie tackling the theme of isolation. A very different foreign language film was Jackie Chan’s Police Story from Hong Kong – Jackie would soon find world recognition. From 1985 and 1986 we have films from three American heavyweight directors – John Huston with Prizzi’s Honor, Woody Allen with the excellent Purple Rose of Cairo, and then Oliver Stone with the Vietnam war movie, Platoon. John Candy and Steve Martin teamed up to great comic effect the following year in Planes, Trains and Automobiles, the same year that Rob Reiner made The Princess Bride – one of the best children’s films from the era. The 80s end with Steve Martin again, this time starring in Parenthood.

Into the 1990s and Pretty Woman isn’t going to appear here either – sorry to disappoint. Point Break from 1991 has its fans, but I wasn’t as blown away by it as others appeared to be. More to my taste was the Robert Altman film The Player, with Tim Robbins as a screenwriter in a film chock full of celebrity cameos. 1993 goes a bit highbrow with the films Philadelphia and The Piano. All very worthy, I’m sure, but a tad dull and earnest for my tastes. Quickening the pace, Pulp Fiction was Quentin Tarantino’s follow up to Reservoir Dogs and garnered huge acclaim for changing the face of modern cinema. Whether he did or not is, of course, up for debate, but whatever your thoughts, it’s still a well constructed film with fine dialogue, and seemed to sum up a certain zeitgeist of the age. A couple of other films from the 90s are Pleasantville and Primary Colors, both decent films and worthy of mention.

Into the noughties (if we must call them that), and Pearl Harbor is possibly the greatest feat of moviemaking since the invention of cinema. The director Michael Bay is a genius and…. no, sorry can’t keep it up. Pearl Harbor’s an absolute abomination and Bay encapsulates all that is wrong with much of modern cinema. Anyway, moving on and Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher is an interesting film though not one I’d want to watch again in a hurry – it’s a bit grim at times. Speaking of grim, Polanski’s The Pianist tackled the experiences of Jews during WW2 again, though given the subject matter, it’s not entirely depressing and features a fine lead performance from Adrian Brody. (Note to fact fans – he became the youngest man to win Best Actor Oscar for that film – Richard Dreyfuss was the previous youngest). PT Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love is that rarest of things – a bearable Adam Sandler film, and we end our journey with the animation Persepolis – an involving tale from the perspective of a young girl growing up in Iran around the time of the revolution.

And now the final five

The Philadelphia Story – Grant, Stewart and Hepburn team up in the George Cukor directed comedy. Great lines, chemisty and performances create a most enjoyable film

Psycho – Hitchcock’s horror, starring Janet Leigh as the unfortunate traveller checking into Bates’ motel, with Norman Perkins as the boy whose best friend is his mother.

The Producers – Mel Brooks’ insanely funny tale of two producers trying to put on a broadway flop with Springtime for Hitler. What are the chances it would end up a success?

The Player – Altman’s insider look at the film industry, told from the perspective of struggling screenwriter Tim Robbins. Insider jokes, star cameos, - it could have ended up being too self-congratulary, but instead it’s an acerbic look at Hollywood for all to enjoy.

Pulp Fiction – Probably still Tarantino’s most famous film, playing with film structure and time. Stars Bruce Willis, Samuel L Jackson and Uma Thurman amongst others, this was the epitome of coolness back in 94.

And the winner is Psycho. Sorry – I know it’s Hitchcock again, but you’ve got to admit, he did make some fine films!

Twitter - One Year on

2010-01-05T16:37:00.003Z

I’ve just realised I’ve now been on twitter for a year. In that time I’ve sent over 5,000 tweets, the majority of which admittedly have probably been of very little interest. However I was thinking last night about what I get out of twitter and thought I’d set them down in print,

Twitter gets a lot of bashing from some people – Piers Morgan for example says it’s one of the world’s most stupid inventions – perhaps reason in itself for everyone to sign up immediately. The general point of the naysayers is that people should interact more in real life and experience things first hand, rather than make transitory friendships through cyberspace whilst remaining alone in front of a computer or handheld device. Now I’d probably agree with that, but the two are certainly not mutually exclusive (I know of many instances in which people who have twittered each other have then met up), and also not everyone has the opportunity to be out meeting new people all the time. Surely socialising through a computer and feeling part of a community is better than not socialising at all?

Speaking for myself: as some will know, I’ve been ill for 15 sodding years with varying levels of severity. However the last 2 years have not been good and I’ve been stuck in the house, sometimes bedbound. Socialising is therefore not really a great option – I can’t just pop out to a pub or nightclub easily. I found twitter last January at a very low point and whilst I won’t claim it changed my life etc, it was great to be able to start actually “meeting” people and socialising in the only way I could at that point, even if I was stranded in the house.

Let’s look at some of the things I’ve done vicariously through twitter in the last year. I’ve been to America on holiday several times, I’ve taught in a US High School, I’ve lived in France, and Switzerland (where I worried about the minaret issue), I’ve been to see Cliff Richard and the Shadows in concert, hell I’ve been ON TOUR with Cliff Richard and the Shadows. I’ve been to see Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode LIVE on five live, I’ve talked about films and football more than is perhaps healthy, I’ve learnt about new bands, I’ve touched on politics and discussed the intricacies of the 1990s Vitalite advert, I’ve compared snowfall with tweeters in other parts of the country, mourned the loss of a dog with others, seen pictures of other people’s dogs (always a favourite), laughed, been grumpy, and generally enjoyed conversation with others. And this doesn't include the comedians I follow who can often come up with some great off the cuff stuff to make you smile.

Now it's true that I’ve experienced most of the above things through others rather than firsthand, but you could level the same accusation at movies, TV, plays, literature etc. If I’m reading War and Peace or watching Dr Zhivago, then I’m no more in Russia than I am if I was to follow the twitter stream of someone on holiday there. I’m not saying twitter’s up there with great literature by any means but, in a similar vein, it’s a way to experience things that one wouldn’t ordinarily experience.

It’s not perfect of course – you sometimes end up following someone you shouldn’t have, but it’s easily remedied by the unfollow button, and to date I’ve not had one nasty message addressed to me so no need to block anyone apart from spammers. At times it can make you feel a tad insecure when a day or so has gone by with no replies, but then I’ve realised it’s hopefully that other people are busy or talking to other people, and isn’t because they don’t like me (though that can understandably remain a possibility!)

Overall though, it’s been a positive experience and has turned a crappy year, if not into a good year, then into a slightly less crappier one. Which is pretty much all you can ask for.

So to all people I follow, or who follow me, a big thanks.

Right, now I can get back to my usual cynical self ;-)

A-Z of favourite films - O Behave.

2010-01-04T16:47:00.005Z

After the Christmas break, the all-dancing, all-singing A-Z of my favourite films is back, and now we’re onto O.

I’ve seen 43 films beginning with O and there’s some good ‘uns amongst them.

Laurel and Hardy again contribute several decent shorts from the 1930s; notably One Good Turn, Our Wife, Our Relations, and the excellent Oliver the Eighth in which Ollie is in danger of being murdered by his new bride – relying on Stan to save him probably isn’t the best idea! For a longer length movie, there’s Only Angels Have Wings, a smart comedy from Howard Hawks starring Cary Grant and Jean Arthur. Often overlooked, coming as it did, in the Hollywood bumper year of 1939, this is still an excellent couple of hours’ viewing.

In the forties came neo-realism from Italy with Visconti’s Ossessione, an adaptation of The Postman Only Rings Twice, and David Lean’s Oliver Twist. A fine British gem occurs in 1949 with Obsession – a tale of a man wanting to kill his wife’s lover and to dispose of his body in a bath of acid. Changing tones completely, in the same year On The Town was released in the US – Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra two of the three sailors enjoying 24 hours shore leave in New York.

On the Waterfront is the release of note in the 1950s – a tale of corruption at the head of the dock unions. Marlon Brando gives arguably his best film performance and there’s great support from Janet Leigh, Eve Marie-Sant, Karl Malden and Rod Steiger. Winning a barrowful of Oscars, the film is often seen as the director Elia Kazan’s justification for outing suspected communists during the Mccarthyite witch hunts and as such has a slightly soiled reputation. However, whatever your views, there’s no doubt it’s an accomplished piece of work, well constructed and fine performances throughout.

Moving into the 1960s and there’s The Odd Couple, a Jack Lemmon/Walter Matthau comedy which is very close to being perfect. Mere words cannot convey my love of this film, and the chemistry between the pair is, as always, sparkling. In 1969 two films of note appear – the Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, which whilst often maligned due to it being the only film with George Lazenby as Bond, is actually really good and one of the best stories. In the same year came Once Upon a Time in the West, a pretty awesome Sergio Leone Western with Henry Fonda cast against type as a cold blooded killer – and yes he even kills little children!

From the 70s comes the multi Oscar winner One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, winning all the five main categories including Best Picture, Director, and Actor for Jack Nicholson. Set inside a mental hospital it’s one of the films of the 70s. The following year came The Omen with Gregory Peck as the father who perhaps shouldn’t have called his son Damien – that was his first mistake. In ’76 Clint Eastwood also came up with one of his best Westerns with The Outlaw Josey Wales.

Not much of note from the 80s unless you include On Golden Pond with Henry Fonda and Katherine Hepburn giving performances in the twilight of their careers. There’s also Octopussy but one wouldn’t put it in the top few Bond films.

Into the 1990s and Once upon a Time in China is well worth a watch if you can catch it. Orlando, maybe not so much – it was critically acclaimed but I found it as dull as dishwater. From 1995 Outbreak is a silly but quite enjoyable thriller about a team trying to eradicate a deadly virus before it kills millions. From Alejandro Amenabar came Open Your Eyes, the film that Hollywood turned into the far inferior Vanilla Sky. The original is far more satisfying if you can cope with the subtitles, and Penelope Cruz shines more than she does in the remake. Into 1998 and Out of Sight is as fine film that helped propel George Clooney from TV to Movie superstardom, and also includes a bearable performance from Jennifer Lopez – a feat in itself. The decade finished with Kevin McDonald’s fascinating documentary One Day in September, telling the tale of terrorism at the Munich Olympic Games. Narrated by Michael Douglas, it’s an absorbing piece of work.

The last decade started excellently with the Coen Brothers’ musical O Brother Where Art Thou. It was a bit of a Marmite film – you either loved or hated it, but I was definitely in the former category and not just because of the presence of George Clooney. The aforementioned Mr Clooney also appears the following year in Ocean’s Eleven – a fun heist film which probably didn’t need the two remakes. From the same year came The Others, an effective creepy horror film starring Nicole Kidman. Robin Williams proved he can actually sometimes act the next year in One Hour Photo, a film that I rather liked, though it seemed to disappear under the radar a bit on release. Emerging from 2003 was Oldboy, a Korean revenge thriller where a man is released from a room in which he has been held prisoner for years, not knowing why. An intriguing and off-the-wall film. Finally, in 2006 came Once, a low budget bittersweet romantic comedy which can only be described as charming, with fine music and low-key, very likeable performances from the two leads.

So that’s the contenders; what are the final five?

On The Waterfront – The performances are enough to get it into the top five, including Brando’s “I coulda been a contender” speech to his brother Rod Steiger in the back of a taxi. Bleak, gripping, but always involving.

The Odd Couple – It’s difficult to go wrong with a film starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau but this is the best of the lot with the two moving in together – the fastidious Lemmon and the slob Matthau. Simply magical filmmaking

Once Upon a Time in The West – Probably my favourite Leone film; this time with Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson, Jason Robards and Claudia Cardinale. Slow at times, but go with it and it’s a great piece of art – the first ten minutes alone is worth seeing for the way tension is racked up with no dialogue.

O Brother Where Art Thou – A gem from the Coen Brothers with a musical theme – the soundtrack actually outgrossed the film. George Clooney, Holly Hunter and John Goodman are among the cast in this tongue-in-cheek tale that never takes itself too seriously.

Once – the surprise hit of 2006, winning Best Song at the Oscars, this tale of possible romance between two musicians in Dublin is a fine romantic tale. Low budget in the extreme, it really doesn’t matter, as it’s about the story and characters, not expensive sets or locations.

And the winner is The Odd Couple, quite simply one of the best comedies ever made.

Top films I've seen this year

2009-12-30T17:16:00.004Z

MY FILMS OF THE YEAR

So I’ve seen 119 films this year through a combination of TV, DVD, and the cinema (only 3 on the big screen though).

The top thirteen (yes, thirteen) I’ve seen (not all released this year, but in the last 2 years) are:

Tell No One – my first Lovefilm rental and it was a good start – a gripping French thriller about a woman seemingly coming back from the dead.

El Orfanato – Another Lovefilm rental and probably the most frightening film I’ve sent this year – horror of the psychological kind rather than visceral but very effective

Wall-E – Last year’s big hit which I saw on DVD. An animation with real heart and the first 20 minutes are about as good an example of silent cinema as you’ll see.

Frost/Nixon – the first of the two Michael Sheen films on my list, this adaptation of the stage play based on the Frost/Nixon interviews was a classy act with fine performances all round

Vicky Cristina Barcelona – this soufflé of a film from Woody Allen saw him back on form with a ridiculously good looking cast.

In Bruges – tremendous British film with Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleason as two hit men hiding out in Bruges. Dark, but very comic at times with one of the best scripts of recent years.

Slumdog Millionaire – the one that got all the Oscars in the Spring and well deserved recognition for Danny Boyle. It didn’t blow me away, but maybe that was due to all the hype there’d been about it. However, it’s still a fine film.

Let the Right One In – possibly my film of the year which earned its own blog-post earlier in the year. Atmospheric scandanavian horror and marvellous stuff

In the Loop – from the team behind the Thick of It, this scathing satire of government on both sides of the Atlantic was foul mouthed but very funny and relevant.

The Damned United – Michael Sheen again, this time as Brian Clough in this fine film about his time in charge of Leeds United.

Up – Seen at the cinema, this was the animation of this year. Nothing quite lives up to the first 15 emotional minutes, but when they’re as good as they are here, that’s not a major failing.

Moon – Brilliant science fiction film starring Sam Rockwell. Has a bit of an oldschool feel to it eschewing flashy CGI and is all the better for it – it’s about the story, not the spectacle

Sherlock – I wasn’t expecting great things from this Guy Ritchie film, but give it its due, it was decent enough. A tad too long, but the Robert Downey Jr/Jude Law partnership of Holmes and Watson works effectively enough.

Other films I enjoyed this year included The Departed, Ratatouille, State of Play, The Reader, The Good the bad and the Weird, Volver, Man on Wire, Changeling, Persepolis, Ghost Town, Son of Rambow and Burn After Reading.

And what about the worst film I’ve seen this year – it’s an “honour” shared by two films – both the fourth instalments of a franchise.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull – what did they do to our memory of the first three films. Spaceships, bloody spaceships, that’s what. *sigh*

Die Hard 4.0 – I spent 2 hours trying to find a plot but eventually had to admit defeat

Maybe there’s a lesson there – stop at 3 films!

Merry Christmas to all!

2009-12-24T12:15:00.002Z

Merry Christmas to all!

Merry Christmas, movie house! Merry Christmas, Emporium! Merry Christmas, you wonderful old Building and Loan!

It's all in the headline -

2009-12-22T13:58:00.002Z

Hmm, an Anglican Priest delivers a sermon in which he touches on the morality or not of certain crimes. In it he says that shoplifting is a better option than prostitution/mugging etc.

He quite clearly states

Let my words not be misrepresented as a simplistic call for people to shoplift

So what simplistic headline would you imagine the Daily Mail would give to such a story?

Yup, that's right - Thou Shalt Shoplift .

Good to see them not trying to sensationalise anything.

A-Z of favourite films - N tertainment?

2009-12-21T15:08:00.006Z

We're past the halfway point - it's all down hill from now on in my A-Z list of my favourite films

And it’s on to the letter “N”, thankfully a much smaller category than M. I’ve already decided the top five, but first a quick look at a few that didn’t make it:

From 1921 come 2 very different silent films. There’s the comedy short Never Weaken; Harold Lloyd’s last short film before he moved to feature length films. Lloyd plays a man trying to commit suicide when he thinks (erroneously) that his girlfriend is cheating on him. Sounds grim but is in fact hilarious at times and contains some great stunt work from Lloyd. The other 1921 offering is Nosferatu, Murnau’s German expressionist film based on the Dracula story. Shadows abound, and the film is full of atmosphere and innovative film techniques. Max Schreck’s portrayal of the vampire is unsurpassed.

Back to comedy and the Marx Brothers classic A Night at the Opera, from 1935, very nearly made our final five. There’s great comedy in it – the famous stateroom scene where a growing number of people try and cram into a tiny cabin, and the puntastic “there ain’t no sanity clause” line. The only thing that counts against the film are the musical interludes which slacken the pace rather.

Skipping past the 40s which only provide one film (that made the final five) and we arrive in the 1950s. The Narrow Margin is a fine thriller set on a train from 1952, The Naked Spur from 1953 sees James Stewart teaming up again with director Anthony Mann in a psychological Western; Niagara, a film noir from the same year was dominated by the presence of Marilyn Monroe, and also starred Joseph Cotton.

Nuit et Brouillard from Alan resnais is a hard-hitting French documentary from 1955 – a documentary about the concentration camps of WW2. It’s only half an hour long and consists of shots of the now abandoned concentration camp mixed with stock footage, with a simple commentary track. The lack of sensationalism makes it all the more powerful and emotional – a film that’s a must see, even if you it’s not one you really enjoy. Another contender was the 1957 Fellini film, Nights of Cabirira, in which Fellini’s real-life wife plays a naïve prostitute.

Our entry from the 1960s is the 1968 film Night of the Living Dead. Directed by George A Romero, this low budget zombie horror is highly influential and still packs a punch, even viewed 40 years later.

2 excellent American films from the 1970s films, Robert Altman’s ensemble Nashville – if they’d been a final ten instead of five, it would have definitely made it, and from 1976 Sidney Lumet’s Network with Peter Finch as the newsman who’s mad as hell and isn’t going to take it any more. He won a posthumous Best Actor Oscar for his troubles. Werner Herzog’s remake of Nosferatu in 1979 is also worthy of mention.

Into the 1980s and we’ll ignore Nightmares in a Damaged Brain as it’s really not that good. Never Say Never Again was an unofficial Bond from 1983 with Sean Connery reprising his role as the secret agent. A year later Wes Craven’s Nightmare on Elm Street spawned numerous sequels, and also gave an early glimpse of Johnny Depp. From 1984 came, well, 1984 in Michael Radford’s decent enough adaptation of Orwell’s book, though not up to the standard of Terry Gilliam’s similarly themed Brazil from the same year. No Way out was a good Kevin Costner thriller in 1987, and then from the Airplane team came The Naked Gun in 1988, a spin off from the TV series Police Squad starring Leslie Nielson. Very funny though two slightly less funny sequels would emerge in 91 and 94.

In 1993 came the stop motion animation Nightmare Before Christmas – an excellent gothic tale from director Henry Selick, though produced and co-written by Tim Burton whose hallmarks can be seen all over it. In 1999 came the Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts-starring romantic comedy Notting Hill, and in the same year, The Ninth Gate came from Roman Polanski.

Which brings us to our final five

Notorious (1946) Hitchcock directs one of his best thrillers starring Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman and Claude Rains. Bergman is the daughter of a German spy, and is recruited by the Allies to infiltrate a group of Germans in Brazil. Bergman falls in love with Grant who is her contact, but he asks her to pretend to be in love with Rains, one of the gang. Espionage, love, thrills and spills; it’s a tightly constructed film and one of the classics.

Night of the Hunter (1955) What a shame Charles Laughton only directed one film, but the one he directed was top class. Robert Mitchum is the sadistic preacher/serial killer trying to infiltrate a family in order to find a stash of stolen money – only the young children know where the money is. Filmed in an expressionist style with a foreboding atmosphere and great performances all round, this is a fine film influenced by the film-noir movement.

North by Northwest (1959) – Sorry, 2 Hitchcock films in the top five again, but this is a truly great film starring Cary Grant and Eve Marie Sant. Grant is the businessman who finds himself mistaken for a secret agent and goes on the run. Crop-dusting planes, assassins, drunk car rides, shoot-outs on Mount Rushmore – the film is full of iconic moments and is one of American cinema’s finest achievements.

No Man’s Land (2001) A great satirical war film set in the war-torn former Yugoslavia. A Bosnian and a Serbian find themselves stuck together in a trench in no-man's land with a booby trapped corpse The film follows the twists and turns in the relationship between the two soldiers and also takes in the wider picture; the frustration of the UN soldiers who are unable to interfere due to orders from above and the way they get around it by getting the media involved. Quite a cynical take on the situation but one gets the sad feeling it is perhaps rooted in reality

No Country For old Men (2007) The one that finally brought home the Oscars for the Coen Brother garnering their first Best Picture and Director awards. Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Tommy Lee Jones, Woody Harrelson and Kelly McDonald star in the tale of Brolin coming across drug money and trying not to be caught by psychotic hit man Bardem with a comedy haircut. Lee Jones is the policeman also trying to stop the confrontation. Fine cinematography and story-telling – the ending upset some, but it’s true to the original novel.

And the winner is North By Northwest. I can never decide on Hitchcock’s best film, but this is certainly one of my two or three favourites. Cary Grant has never been better and it’s an all out entertainment fest from Hitch.

A-Z of favourite films - M it is then.

2009-12-17T17:22:00.005Z

And we're up to letter 13 out of 26 in the A-Z of my favourite films of all time

Crikey Charlie, M is the biggest category so far, – I’ve seen 147 films beginning with M. That makes it the second biggest category after S, so lots of M films may get skipped – I’ll just try to mention the pertinent ones.

The Man appears to be very busy – I do worry about him. He knew rather too much information in both versions of Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, yet then clearly had amnesia as in 1997 he was The Man Who Knew Too Little. This is surprising as he has double the brainpower in The Man With Two Brains. We don’t know a huge amount about him apart from where he came from – The Man from Laramie tells us this, although he left without permission in Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped. We learn what he wears in Ealing’s magnificent The Man in the White Suit and what he carries in Vertov’s The Man With the Movie Camera and the Bond film, The Man With the Golden Gun. He battles alcoholism in The Man With the Golden Arm and commits murder in the excellent John Ford western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, (or did he?) starring Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne. In 2001 he sued God in the below par Billy Connolly film and he even got his own documentary made in the excellent 2008 film, Man on Wire. But did he even exist at all – after all where was he in the Coen Brothers’ excellent film The Man Who Wasn’t There?

Anyhoo, onto films not featuring “The Man” and early highlights include two Fritz Lang’s film. First Metropolis, the silent epic sci-fi that to be honest goes on a bit too long, but is still an astonishing achievement of the 1920s. Probably more influential than enjoyable, there’s not a sci-fi film made since that doesn’t in some way bear the hallmarks of this seminal film – for a prime example see Blade Runner. Also from Lang came M, the early German talkie starring Peter Lorre (who also appeared in Hitch’s first The Man Who Knew Too Much) as a child-killer – another highly influential film filled with expressionism and atmosphere; a film that remains long in your memory.

There’s a fair few decent Laurel and Hardy films in this category including Men o War, Me and My Pal and The Midnight Patrol, but their best would be The Music Box- the short film where they try to get a piano up a set of stairs. Simple but effective, I’m pretty sure it won them an Oscar, and has been parodied to death ever since. From Chaplin comes Modern Times – a great satire on the industrial age, made several years after sound came in, but containing no discernable dialogue – we just hear mechanical noises and the like. Frank Capra then comes up with a couple of gems to round off the 1930s – in 1936 Mr Deeds Goes To Town was released with Gary Cooper in the leading role, but that was outshone three years later when Jimmy Stewart played the idealistic young senator in the truly great Mr Smith Goes to Washington.

The standout of the early 40s is The Maltese Falcon with Humphrey Bogart as the private eye Sam Spade and with Peter Lorre (who else?) cropping up again in a supporting role. We’ve also got Hitchcock’s Mr and Mrs Smith – unusual for him in that it’s a comedy, not a thriller, Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons, famous for its studio interference and films depicting British life during the war such as Mrs Miniver and Millions Like Us. There’s an unusual film noir in Mildred Pierce in that the protagonist is female, and then in 1946 we get what I think is the best British film of all time – A Matter of Life and Death. Starring David Niven this is a glorious fantasy set on earth and in the afterlife and is just filmmaking at its best from the directing team of Powell and Pressburger, ably contributed by cinematographer Jack Cardiff to create an almost perfect film. My Darling Clementine is a decent John Ford western starring Henry Fonda, and Charlie Chaplin makes another appearance with Monsieur Verdoux; a tale in which he plays a man who goes around murdering old women – quite the departure for him.

The 50s begin with the oddity that is Miracle in Milan – a neo-realist fantasy which is something of an oxymoron. Monkey Business is a really enjoyable Howard Hawks comedy starring Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers and Marilyn Monroe – Grant plays a professor who develops a potion that makes the recipient younger – trouble is he takes too much and regresses to childhood! Then there’s Jacques Tati directing himself in Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday and Douglas Sirk’s melodrama Magnificent Obsession.

The 60s begin with The Magnificent Seven – a marvellous Western based on Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. Try and name all seven actors – go on – I always forget Horst Buchholz or Brad Dexter. John Huston’s The Misfits is more famous for its production than the resulting film – it was Clark Gable’s last film, and Montgomery Clift wasn’t long after. The Manchurian Candidate is an intriguing tale with a stellar cast and outshines its remake in the 2000s. For musical fans there’s My Fair Lady and the decade ends with the only X Certificate film to win Best picture at the Oscars as Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voigt star in Midnight Cowboy.

Highlights from the 70s include Robert Altman’s MASH, a tale about army medics and their gallows humour during the Korean war, Polanski’s bloody version of Macbeth, Scorsese’s Mean Streets and the uproarious Monty Python and the Holy Grail. There’s also Marathon (is it safe?) Man, and Woody Allen’s black and white love letter to New York in Manhattan. Finishing off the decade it’s the gang again with the hilarious Monty Python’s Life of Brian.

The 1980s brings Manon de Sources the sequel to Jean de Florette, and it doesn’t disappoint. From the UK comes Mona Lisa with Bob Hoskins as the taxi driver developing a relationship with prostitute Cathy Tyson, and then there’s US comedy with Moonstruck and Midnight Run.

Into the 90s with Miller’s Crossing from the Coen Brothers and Misery from Rob Reiner starring James Caan and Kathy Bates. I used to be quite partial to My Cousin Vinny from 92, though haven’t seen it for a while now. Woody Allen’s Mighty Aphrodite was enjoyable even if not one of his best and there’s big budget films with Mission: Impossible and Men in Black from 96 and 97 respectively. Ken Loach’s hard hitting My Name is Joe is definitely worth a viewing, as is the classy ensemble piece from PT Anderson, Magnolia – funny, tragic, sweet, vulgar, heartbreaking – there’s not enough adjectives to describe it. The decade ends with a film you may have heard of as Keanu Reeves takes the lead in The Matrix. It’s about computers and that.

Into the last decade and Maybe Baby takes the distinction of worst M film, in fact perhaps the worst film I’ve ever seen – was this really the same bloke that wrote Blackadder? On the plus side, Meet the Parents was a good laugh with Ben Stiller and Robert De Niro getting most of the best lines. From the same year came Memento, an absolutely superlative film starring Guy Pearce as an amnesiac. Adventurous filmmaking, pulled off with aplomb by Christopher Nolan. Two very different films from 2001 – the animation comedy Monsters Inc. and the almost impenetrable David Lynch film Mulholland Drive. An interesting double bill they would make! Other contenders include Minority Report from Spielberg, Master and Commander with Russell Crowe, and Mystic River from Clint Eastwood. Eastwood also crops up the following year with Million Dollar Baby, and Spielberg returns too with Munich. To round the decade off there’s Moon, an excellent sci-fi film directed by David Bowie’s son, Duncan Jones.

So out of the 147 films, what’s made the final five?

M – Peter Lorre as a child killer in this early German sound offering. His performance is the highlight of this highly influential film.

The Maltese Falcon – Private eye movie from 1941 – Bogie, Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet and Mary Astor star in this Hollywood classic.

A Matter of Life and Death – Shot half in black and white, half in colour, this is one of the greatest movie fantasies of all time. David Niven falls in love with Kim Hunter – the only trouble is he’s meant to be dead and Heaven wants him back. Film-making at its most imaginative.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail – In my opinion the best of the Monty Python movies – they may not have had much money, resulting in coconuts replacing horses, but that led to some of the best gags ever seen on film.

Magnolia – Ensemble piece that lasts over 3 hours, but never feels that long – the stories draw you in and weave in and out each other splendidly. Confident filmmaking from PT Anderson.

And the winner is…

A Matter of Life and Death. Stiff competition, but this still comes out on top – it’s my favourite British film of all time and I have to watch it at least once a year.

A-Z of favourite films - Flippin' 'el, it's L

2009-12-14T17:13:00.006Z

And we're onto L in my A-Z list of favourite films. Hey, it's nearly halfway!

After the relatively narrow range of films available in the last couple of letters, J and K, we’re now up to a choice of about 80 that I’ve seen beginning with L. Don’t worry, I won’t mention them all here, just the ones that are in the running for the top five shortlist.

The earliest offering in the list is The Lodger from Alfred Hitchcock in 1926. Arguably the first true Hitchcock film, by which I mean the film where he hit his stride and addressed themes that would recur throughout his career over the next 70 years such as the wronged man and the Hitchcock blonde. It also contains some nice directorial touches which, in retrospect, show great promise for a directing career.

There’s then six Laurel and Hardy short films in the L category; the best of which I’d say is Laughing Gravy, a fine comedy about the duo trying to keep the presence of a dog secret whilst staying in a guesthouse – and failing miserably! Looking further afield Rene Clair’s 1931 French comedy Le Million is also a decent watch with characters trying to get their hands on a winning lottery ticket. In the same year, but with a completely different tone, came Little Caesar, one of the most influential gangster films of early Hollywood, and with a standout performance by Edward G Robinson. Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon crops up in the 1930s too, though it didn’t greatly appeal to me, then Hitchcock crops up again in 1938 with the marvellous British comedy-thriller The Lady Vanishes. There’s competition for Hitch’s best British film (39 Steps, Man who Knew too Much etc) but The Lady Vanishes has got to be a contender with its mix of British humour and spy thriller.

The 1940s start with The Lady Eve from Preston Sturges, a typically well-crafted comedy from the director with Henry Fonda in the lead role as a rich explorer who encounters con-woman Barbara Stanwyck on his journey home aboard a cruise ship. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is a fine drama from the Powell/Pressburger team; a film that Churchill wanted banned as he thought it would have a negative effect on public morale during the war. However it is a great biopic of the fictional Colonel Blimp. Hitchcock returns yet again in 1944 with the excellent Lifeboat; a film set entirely on a lifeboat following the bombing of a cruise liner. Not many directors could pull off that feat, but Hitchcock certainly did. Four other notable films crop up in the 1940s – for brevity’s sake I’ll just mention them by name – Otto Preminger’s Laura, Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend, Orson Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai, and from Max Ophuls, Letter from an Unknown Woman. Each of these is worthy of more explanation but I don’t want this to turn into a dissertation.

I’ll just pick two highlights from the 1950s – both from Ealing Studios. There’s The Lavender Hill Mob from ’51 and then four years later came The Ladykillers. Both exquisite films, sharp and humorous but with a dark underbelly, especially the latter. The Coen Brothers tried to remake The Ladykillers 50 years later but even they couldn’t match the Alexander Mackendrick original with its cast that included Alec Guinness and Peter Sellers, though the film is stolen by the elderly Katie Johnson – the lady that the killers are trying to target. A must-see film.

The 60s begins with The League of Gentlemen – no, not the Royston Vasey kind, but the Basil Dearden film that follows the planning and execution of a bank heist by a group of ex-military men, led by Jack Hawkins. Just a shame that crime couldn’t be shown to pay. Our other film of the 1960s is Lawrence of Arabia – David Lean’s masterpiece, making epic use of the desert locations and creating a work of art with Peter O Toole as the eponymous lead.

The Last Picture Show had its fans in the 1970s but I wasn’t really blown away by it; the same could be said of Last Tango in Paris which I just found cold – I know that it’s probably meant to be like that, but I just didn’t warm to it. Passing over the Bond film Live and Let Die, and Logan’s Run, the decade ended with the superb film The Long Good Friday, the British gangster movie with Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren in the lead roles and even with Pierce Brosnan popping up in an early film appearance.

The 80s is dominated by Local Hero, Bill Forsyth’s gentle comedy drama about an oil tycoon trying to buy up a village on the Scottish coast. Wonderful performances and a pitch perfect script make this one of the best British films ever made. Burt Lancaster appears as the American tycoon and his salary took up most of the budget but it’s the Scottish cast that make the film so endearing and a pleasure to watch. Other entries for the 80s include the first 2 Lethal Weapon films – a further 2 would follow – with Mel Gibson and Danny Glover teaming up as the “mismatched” couple. There’s the 2 Timothy Dalton films – License to Kill and The Living Daylights – both more violent than the preceding Roger Moore films, but decent enough nonetheless. Scorsese courted controversy with The Last Temptation of Christ and on a similar theme, the decade ended with Look Who’s Talking – a film that you can be pretty sure won’t make the final five.

The 90s are ridiculous with over 24 contenders – one could say flipping ‘L, but I won’t. Well, not again anyway. Of these, LA Story is a highlight, as is The Last Seduction and Leon with Jean Reno and Natalie Portman forming an odd partnership, directed by Luc Besson. Nicholas Cage won an Oscar for his performance in the bleak Leaving Las Vegas, and two interesting low budget offerings crop up with The Last Supper and Living in Oblivion, both in 1995. The Long Kiss Goodnight is a decent “suspend disbelief” action thriller with Geena Davis and Samuel L Jackson, and then in 1997 came the excellent LA Confidential. Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce and Kevin Spacey all took leading roles but it was Kim Basinger that won the Oscar for her turn as the moll in this film-noir thriller, full of twists and turns, and excellently filmed by Curtis Hanson. Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful is also worthy of mention – a comedy set in a concentration camp may sound like something of an oxymoron but he just about pulls it off. From the UK came Little Voice, and then Guy Richie hit the scene with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels which appealed to mockney gangsters everywhere.

Into the 2000s and I may as well say now I’m not a great fan of Lord of the Rings, hence I’ve only seen the first one. Sorry, but I was a bit bored by it so whilst it’s got its fans, I’m not one of them. I wasn’t really looking forward to The Last Samurai but, even with Tom Cruise in the starring role, I thought it wasn’t bad. Not good enough to make the final five, but not bad nonetheless. Lost in Translation was another supposed classic that left me a bit cold and I didn’t really buy into the hype around it. Lady Vengeance from Korean director Chan-Wook Park was more to my taste, as was Little Miss Sunshine, gem of a low-budget indie film that came in 2006. Our list ends with the recent Let the Right One in, a quite remarkable vampire film from Sweden, which I’ve addressed previously in another blog entry. Tender, beautiful to look at, a real surprise of a film, and in a good way.

And after all that the final five is:

The Lady Vanishes – Hitchcock’s 1938 film, his penultimate one before leaving for Hollywood. An old lady disappears on a train but no-one seems to believe she was ever there, a spy dresses as a nun, two Englishmen discuss cricket scores, a shootout on a train, a coded message – what else could you want from a film?

Lifeboat – Hitchcock again, this time from 1943. A group of diverse survivors from a ship end up in a lifeboat with a German U-Boat commander for company. Can they trust the man who bombed their ship out of the water? A tense tale, made all the more claustrophobic for being set solely in a small lifeboat.

The Ladykillers – Ealing comedy from Mackendrick, just winning out over The Lavender Hill Mob for a place in the final five. Devilishly dark and funny, a gem of a film.

Local Hero – Bill Forsyth’s greatest hour, almost harking back to the days of Ealing with its focus on community coming together. A delightful watch and bizarrely, as I learnt the other day, Jeremy Clarkson’s favourite ever film!

Let the Right One in – I’ve discussed this in more depth here in a previous blog and my opinion hasn’t changed since – I still think “it’s a thoughtful atmospheric film offering far more than the odd chilling moment.”

And the winner is:

The Ladykillers – following Kind Hearts and Coronets, an Ealing film takes the title for the second letter in a row. It’s just a hair’s breadth above the other contenders.

A-Z of favourite films - Okay, it's K.

2009-12-11T11:40:00.006Z

So it's the 11th in the series of A-Z of my favourite films and we arrive at K

Following the J films, K is another category with less films than usual; at the time of writing I’ve only seen 28 K films. For the avoidance of doubt that doesn’t mean I’ve seen 28,000 films, just 28 films beginning with K. (note to self - find out if there actually are 28,000 films beginning with K in existence)

First the ones that didn’t make it. From 1933 comes King Kong; its effects may look a tad shaky now, but at the time they were state of the art. Fay Wray took up the screaming honours as the woman the monkey develops a crush on. In the interests of disclosure I should state that I’ve not as yet seen any remakes of the film and that includes Peter Jackson’s recent “reimagining”.

The 30s and 40s pass without further troubling this category (apart from one which you’ll find in the final five). 1957 brought A King in New York, one of Charlie Chaplin’s lesser films in my opinion, though notable for being the first film he made after his forced return to the UK, and also for being the film in which he last had a leading role.

In the 1962 Roman Polanski emerged with the Polish thriller, Knife in the Water, a tense tale set aboard a yacht where the owners make the mistake of picking up a stranger. In 1964 Don Siegel’s The Killers was released – this was the last film to star Ronald Reagan before he turned to politics and was never heard of again; here he plays the bad guy, starring alongside Lee Marvin and Angie Dickinson among others.

Closer to home, quite literally in my case being from Yorkshire, Kes was released in 1969. Ken Loach took the directing reins and a career was born. It’s a bit grim, admittedly, hence the reason it’s not in my top five, but you get a real sense of time and place, and who can forget Brian Glover’s deranged P.E. teacher on the football field?

Back to the US in the 70s and there’s the jolly good yarn Kelly’s Heroes with a group of allied soldiers sneaking across enemy lines to try and purloin some Nazi gold. The fact that these soldiers include Clint Eastwood, Telly Savalas and Donald Sutherland adds to the fun. A year later with a very different tone, Donald Sutherland appeared again in Klute alongside Jane Fonda who played a prostitute and won a best Actress oscar for her troubles. Changing tone again, we move to anarchic comedy with the 1977 film Kentucky Fried Movie. Directed by John Landis and written by the team behind Airplane, it’s more a series of sketches rather than a narrative film, but is still good fun.

The 1980s bring a couple films from Asia. There’s Kagemusha from Akira Kurosawa which is decent enough, though not up there with his best films – he would return to form a few years later with Ran. Then there was The Killer in 1989, a typically stylish action film from John Woo, still working in Hong Kong at this time. There’s also a couple of films from the US, but perhaps not up to the standards of their Asian cousins, being as they are The Karate Kid in 1984 and K9 in 1989. I think the States lose the battle of the 1980s!

The 1990s don’t start a whole lot better with Arnold Schwarzenneger in Kindergarten Cop, then King Ralph with John Goodman finding himself the King of England a year later. What actors like John Hurt, Peter O Toole or Joely Richardson were doing in it is anyone's guess, but possible money played a bigger part than artistic endeavour! A Kiss before dying improves the standard a little in 1991 and then in 1996 there’s Kingpin from the Farrelly brothers which is laugh-out-loud comedy starring Bill Murray, Woody Harrelson and Randy Quaid in an uproarious tale about ten pin bowling.

2000 brings the good - Keeping the Faith, a decent comedy directed by Ed Norton who also stars alongside Ben Stiller, and the truly dreadful with Kevin and Perry go Large – the embarrassing Harry Enfield spin-off. A year later Paul Bettany steals the show from the late Heath Ledger in A Knight’s Tale, then in 2003 and 04 Quentin Tarantino released the long awaited Kill Bill Volumes one and two. Those films divided opinion but I enjoyed them – probably the second one more than the first as it had more narrative than the first which contained most of the action. In 2004 Stephen Chow made Kung Fu Hustle which was a fun tongue-in-cheek Kung Fu film from China and Hong Kong. Back to the UK and I was thoroughly underwhelmed by Kinky Boots in 2005 – a comedy about a plucky shoe factory fighting to stay in business – a film clearly made by someone wanting to recreate the style of The Full Monty or Brassed Off, and failing.

But those are the ones that didn’t make it. What about the final five?

Kind Hearts and Coronets – A 1949 masterpiece from the great Ealing studios, Robert Hamer directs, but this is Alec Guinness’ film all the way. He plays all 9 members of the same family who Denis Price is trying to kill in order to avenge the way they treated his late mother. A devilishly dark comedy with a bite, this is superb stuff that can be watched over and over again.

Kiss Me Deadly – 1955 film noir from Robert Aldrich. A private eye makes the mistake of picking up an attractive woman lost on the highway. When she turns up dead, the private eye is drawn into an unsavoury world where things may not be quite as they seem. With a complex plot revolving around some highly radioactive material, it’s a film that certainly goes with a bang.

The King of Comedy – Scorsese’s underrated gem with Robert De Niro as the deranged fan obsessed with Jerry Lee Lewis *edit - I mean Jerry Lewis of course - oops*. Funny and dark at the same time, it’s more relevant today than ever in this celebrity obsessed world. Maybe not as high profile as Taxi Driver, Goodfellas etc, but just as enjoyable and probably my favourite Scorsese film.

Kikujuro – 1999, - A quite simply marvellous offering from Japanese tour-de-fource Takeshi Kitano. The story’s basic – a young boy goes on a trip to try and find his mother and finds himself accompanied by a quite unsuitable companion in Kikujuro (played by Kitano) – a grumpy, low level gangster, a man of few words. Doesn’t make it sound great, but it’s full of charm and is a real treasure. I’m not making a good job of explaining it but if you get the chance, watch it when you can.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang – From Lethal Weapon writer Shane Black comes this splendid directorial debut.; self referential to the nth degree. Our narrator is Robert Downey Jr. a crook who somehow finds himself in LA auditioning for the role of a private investigator. He has to spend time with gay P.I. Val Kilmer and it is this partnership that drives the film and produces much of the humour. A spoof of the world of Chandler, film-noirs etc. but it is done with affection and it works splendidly as well as having enormous fun at its own genre's expense.

And the winner is…

Kind Hearts and Coronets, one of the best Ealing films; wickedly funny and containing a bravura performance(s) from Alec Guinness

A-Z of favourite films - Jay of the Dackal

2009-12-08T17:36:00.005Z

It's the one you've all been waiting for - we're on to the letter J in the list of my favourite films.

Not as many to choose from in this entry as I’ve only seen the quite pathetic number of 25 films beginning with J. Which still means 20 will miss out on the top five. Of those 19 a few are worth of mention.

We'll start with, and disregard Alfred Hitchcock’s Juno and the Paycock from 1930 which is quite frankly unwatchable rubbish. My DVD copy of it admittedly isn’t great but, much as I love almost all things Hitchcockian, this is probably my least favourite of all his films. Thank goodness he redeemed himself by making much better films over then ensuing 50 years. Slightly better from Hitch was Jamaica Inn, though still one of his lesser films; this in 1939 was the last film he made in the UK before making the move to the US to start his Hollywood career with Rebecca.

In the forties came Robert Stevenson’s adaptation of Jane Eyre which is pretty decent, mainly due to its cast which includes Orson Welles, Joan Fontaine, and Elizabeth Taylor. In Europe, Jacques Tati made Jour De Fete at the end of the forties; a film I didn’t enjoy as much as his later films such as Mon Oncle and Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday.

The only notable 50s entry is Johnny Guitar; a typically unconventional Western from Nicholas Ray starring Joan Crawford. The 1960s brought Jules et Jim from Francois Truffaut; again a film that others seem to enjoy more than me – there’s other Truffaut films of which I’m far more fond.

The 70s brought zany comedy from the team of Carl Reiner and Steve Martin in The Jerk and then not much of note in the 80s unless you include Jagged Edge; a contrived legal thriller starring Glenn Close and Jeff Bridges.

A few more contenders from the 90s including Spielberg’s box-office smash Jurassic Park. On a completely different note, Michael Winterbottom’s adaptation of Jude is enough to depress you for a year or two. James and the Giant Peach is a decent enough animation from 1996, the same year that brought Jerry Maguire from Cameron Crewe; Cuba Gooding Jr won an Oscar for it (what happened to his career?) and Tom Cruise and Renee Zellwegger took the leads in a pretty enjoyable romantic comedy.

Glossing over Jackass: the Movie, the 2000s brought Juno, a neatly scripted comedy drama about a teenage girl finding herself pregnant. You could accuse it of being unrealistic, but fine performances and endearing characters made it an enjoyable watch.

But none of the above make the final five which are:

Jaws – Steven Spielberg’s mega-grossing film set the precedent for the curse of the big-budget summer blockbusters throughout the 80s and 90s. But we can’t hold that against it; it’s a particularly well crafted piece from a young director who used the fact that the shark wasn’t realistic to his advantage by hiding it from the viewer and creating the majority of the thrills through suspenseful editing. Robert Shaw, Roy Schieder and Richard Dreyfuss are all on fine form and take the acting honours.

Jean de Florette – From 1986, this marvellous French drama about a hunchback trying to make a success of his farm is beautiful and heartbreaking. With Gerard Depardieu as the titular character, and Yves Montand and Daniel Auteuil as the villains of the story, set against picturesque rural France, it spawned a sequel Manon Des Sources which acts as a great companion piece. It may be famous for its score (used to advertise Stella Artois), but it’s got a lot more going for it than simply the music.

JFK – Whatever your feelings about Oliver Stone’s conspiracy theories, there’s no denying this is an engrossing and riveting film about the assassination of the former president. Stone successfully weaves found footage and newsreels with his film, so much so that at some points you’re not sure if you’re watching stuff he’s filmed, or that which already existed. Kevin Costner takes the lead in a cast that’s too long to mention but contains Kevin Bacon, Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau among others.

Jackie Brown – Whenever anyone asks me what my favourite Quentin Tarantino film is (admittedly this doesn’t happen very often – I think I’ve been asked it twice), I say Jackie Brown. It may not have the visceral impact of Reservoir Dogs or Kill Bill; maybe didn’t play about with cinematic conventions as much as Pulp Fiction did, but it’s a great story, I think it’s got the finest acting in it of any Tarantino film, and also has more heart, actually allowing you to get emotionally involved with the characters. Probably Quentin’s most intelligent film and, like I say, my favourite of his.

JSA (Joint Security Area) – From Korean director Chan-wook Park comes this brilliant film, made in 2000. You could describe it as a war film – the action takes place in and around the JSA – the demilitarized zone that separates North and South Korea. An investigation is underway after 2 North Korean soldiers have been found dead and suspicion is on a South Korean soldier. However things may not be as they seem and the action is revealed in flashback as a neutral team of Swiss and Swedish investigators look into what has happened. The action builds to a suspenseful climax and it’s a film that lingers long in the memory.

And the winner is.. well this is a tricky one. There’s no one real standout film like there’s been in many previous categories. However, using the criteria of "If I was going to sit down and watch one right now, which one would it be?" I’ll go for Jaws.

A-Z of favourite films - I of the tiger

2009-12-06T15:58:00.003Z

It's the ninth in the series of my favourite films by letter and we're on to I

To be honest, I thought “I” would be an easy category as I’ve only seen around 50 films beginning with that letter, but there’s many top quality ones in amongst them; it’ll be most difficult to get them down to a final five.

From the 30s comes The Invisible Man from Frankenstein director James Whale; it utilises such stunning special effects to portray the invisibility that you really marvel at how they were done considering the film was made in 1933. A year later comes the multi Oscar winner It Happened One Night – a Frank Capra comedy starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert. It was the first film to win all five major Academy Awards – Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress and Screenplay – this feat wouldn’t happen again until 42 years later with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Two notable entries from the 40s. First there’s Powell and Pressburger’s charming I Know Where I’m Going; maybe not up to the standards of A Matter of Life and Death, but still among their top films. Then, there’s the perennial classic It’s a Wonderful Life – another Capra film; a dark masterpiece with Jimmy Stewart as the man who wishes he’d never been born, only to be shown another side to his life by n apprentice angel.

In 1950 Nicholas Ray and Humphrey Bogart teamed up for In a Lonely Place, a dark tale of a Hollywood scriptwriter which contains one of my favourite movie lines: “I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me; I lived a few weeks while she loved me.” Another of Kurosawa’s masterpiece Ikiru crops up in 1952 – one of his films set in the modern day rather than his samurai epics for which he is more famous. A lesser Hitchcock, but hey, still a Hitchcock arrived a year later in I Confess with Montgomery Clift playing the Catholic priest falsely implicated for murder. 1956 brought Don Siegel’s Invasion of the body Snatchers, filled with analogy and subtext; more straightforwardly John Mills was just looking for an ice cold beer in the war adventure Ice Cold in Alex a couple of years later. Stanley Donen’s Indiscreet draws the decade to a close, a soufflé of a romantic comedy.

The swinging 60s brought an unlikely tale about a prostitute in Irma La Douche. Directed by Billy Wilder and with a cast including Jack Lemmon and Shirley Maclaine, it’s not as sordid as it sounds though and is immensely entertaining. The working class alternative to Bond made his debut in The Ipcress File, starring a bespectacled Michael Caine, and then in the US, race relations came to the fore in In the Heat of the Night, another Oscar winning film with sterling work from Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger on screen. If tales of boarding school shenanigans are what you are after then Lindsey Anderson’s If may be for you, though be warned – it’s no Harry Potter. The 60s end with the British classic The Italian Job; Michael Caine again taking the lead in the crime caper with minis.

The 70s are a tad disappointing for I films. There’s the infamous In the Realm of the Senses from Japan, famous for its sexually explicit subject matter, but actually quite dull. I’m not going to recommend I Spit on Your Grave, and the remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers is fairly interesting but not up to the original.

Indiana Jones appears in the 80s with instalments two and three actually beginning with “I” ( the first was Raiders of the Lost Ark so not to be found here). I prefer Indiana Jones and the last Crusade to the earlier Temple of Doom, mainly due to the banter between Harrison Ford and Sean Connery in the latter film. Plus Temple of Doom is saddled with that most annoying character played by Kate Capshaw.

A plethora of I films arrive in the 90s. In the Line of Fire is a decent thriller with Clint Eastwood as the ex-presidential bodyguard. It Could Happen to You is a charming romantic comedy of the sort that Frank Capra could have made had he still been around at the end of the century. Independence Day is extremely silly but does its job as mindless entertainment and you find yourself carried along despite yourself, mainly due to the charisma of Will Smith in the leading role. From the Dogme school came Lars Von Trier’s The Idiots; a film with which I can’t decide my opinion – on one viewing I thought it was hideous; on another I quite liked it and saw its merit – I’m still undecided. Michael Mann’s The Insider gave Russell Crowe a chance to flex his acting muscles and the decade ends with the fabulous animation The Iron Giant, directed by Brad Bird (later to helm The Incredibles), a film full of charm and adapted from the Ted Hughes poem, it packs an emotional punch.

Into 2000 and Wong Kar Wai comes up with a masterpiece In the Mood For Love. Full of atmosphere with a great score and buckets of atmosphere, this is a heartbreaking film – it’s kind of like a Brief Encounter for the 21st Century, only set in Hong Kong. Also from Hong Kong, the first decade of the century brought the Infernal Affairs trilogy; a labyrinth of a film series, Shakespearian in its complexity and depth of characters. It would be remade by Scorsese as The Departed, but the original in this case is still the best. From the US came a fine emotional drama about the death of a son with In the Bedroom, and then Brad Bird re-emerged with The Incredibles; a massively successful superhero animation from Pixar. We’ll ignore the fourth Indiana Jones movie, mainly because it was pants. From the UK came In Bruges, a superb, if foul mouthed drama about a hitman, starring Brendan Gleason, Colin Farrell and Ralph Fiennes. Speaking of foul mouthed, the spin off from the TV series The Thick of It arrived with In the Loop, a superb satirical comedy about the lead up to a fictional war; a thinly disguised take on the lead up to the Iraq war.

The final five

It’s a Wonderful life – Capra’s life affirming film from 1946 marked the comeback from James Stewart after his wartime service, and what a comeback it was. Actually a flop on first release and you can see why – most of the film’s very dark, tackling suicide and a man’s sense of worthlessness of his own life. It’s not what you’d call cheerful fare for the majority of its running time. This only makes the ending all that more joyful though. Quite possible Capra’s best ever film, and the only film I’ve seen at the cinema where the audience broke into spontaneous applause at the end.

Ikiru – We’re on a dark theme in this final five – this modern day (for 1952) tale from Kurosawa deals with a bureaucrat who leads a monotonous life until he is diagnosed with cancer and told he has less than a year to live. The film deals with his search for life’s meaning and whilst it may not have any easy answers and address grim issues, it’s a beautiful film with Takashi Shimura giving a career-highlight of a performance in the main role.

In the Heat of the Night – Oscar winning drama with Sidney Poitier as the black detective from Philadelphia helping Rod Steiger to investigate a murder in a racist town in Mississipi. He encounters all sorts of bigotry, even from his new colleague. A superbly atmospheric film, nominated for 7 Oscars and winning 5.

In the Mood for Love – Along with Chungking Express, perhaps Wong Kar-Wai’s best film. It’s not for everyone; some find it frustratingly slow, and if it’s action you’re after, perhaps give it a miss. However give it a chance and it’ll draw you in, seducing you with the characters as well as with the film-making techniques – the sound, lighting and cinematography are all near-perfect

Infernal Affairs – Actually a trilogy of films, adapted into The Departed by Scorsese, this examination of both sides of the criminal divide in Hong Kong is fascinating filmmaking at its best. A gang member is undercover in the police; a policeman is undercover in a gang; what does that do to their identities, and at the end of the day who’s really on whose side?

And the winner is ...

It’s a Wonderful Life – beating off 3 East Asian films in the top five, it’s one of my all time favourites and worthy of repeat viewing time and time again. Just don’t watch the colorized version – sacrilege!

A-Z of favourite films - H it is then.

2009-12-01T20:32:00.003Z

No point dropping the aitches so we’re onto H in the A-Z of my favourite films list.

Laurel and Hardy make their obligatory appearance in two fine entries from their extensive back catalogue – Hog Wild and Helpmates - both excellent shorts that are guaranteed to raise a laugh. From one comedy team to the other as the Marx Brothers crop up too with Horse Feathers with Groucho as a college professor trying to help his college win a football match. The 30s comedy continues with the 1939 Howard Hawks screwball comedy, His Girl Friday which is quite simply genius and one of the fastest talking comedies ever filmed with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell sparking quite brilliantly off each other.

The forties bring an excellent performance from Humphrey Bogart in High Sierra and a couple of decent American studio comedies with Here Comes Mr Jordan and Heaven Can Wait. From Britain came Laurence Olivier’s Henry V, doing Shakespeare and propaganda at the same time during the Second World War.

1950 brings perhaps the most charming film ever made – Harvey with James Stewart making everyone fall in love with him (yes, I’d have probably changed sexuality to marry him and we’d spend our days saying “Ah, shucks..” Anyway, I digress). Harvey is almost perfect in every way, but there are other H films to discuss. In 1952 came High Noon which is up there with my favourite Westerns, starring Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly. It was almost an anti-western, challenging the generic norm and took the genre into a new direction. Grace Kelly crops up again 4 years later in High Society opposite Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby. To finish the decade off if you fancy a bit of arthouse cinema there’s Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour, though be warned - it’s not light viewing.

During the 1960s, The Hustler contained a powerful performance from Paul Newman as the pool shark, ably supported by George C Scott. Changing tones entirely there’s A Hard Day’s Night with The Beatles which is a film that seems to sum up an era (from what we’ve been told anyway – I wasn’t actually there!) There’s also the very un-politically correct comedy How to Murder Your Wife with Jack lemmon and Terry Thomas. Wouldn’t be made nowadays but still funny at times.

The cult dark comedy Harold and Maude kicks off the 1970s, charting the romance between a teenage boy and a elderly lady and full of weird charm. Clint Eastwood directs himself in the interesting Western High Plains Drifter, with more of a touch of the supernatural about it. Mel Brooks came up with the Hitchcock spoof High Anxiety in 1977, then a year later John Carpenter directed his horror masterpiece Halloween, starring a very young Jamie Lee Curtis and introducing the character of Michael Myers to the world.

The 1980s is a pretty barren time for H films (as indeed it seemed to be for films in general – yes, there are exceptions before you start!) and the only real diamond in the muck is Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters – a great ensemble piece with Mia Farrow and Michael Caine amongst others. Sir Michael picked up an Oscar for his troubles.

Into the 90s and we’ll gloss over the Home Alone films. The Hunt For Red October is a good cold war yarn and there’s juvenile humour to be had in the Hot Shot films too. The Coen brothers came up with The Hudsucker Proxy in 1994 – some say it’s one of the Coens’ lesser films, but I have a soft spot for it and could watch it over and over again. From France in ‘95 comes La Haine, a superb hard-hitting look at gang life in Paris that is very powerful. From the same year comes Michael Mann’s Heat which paired up De Niro and Pacino on opposite sides of the crime divide. We’ll round off the 90s with Todd Solonz’s independent American film, Happiness – controversial, opinion-splitting, but for me an involving and excellent movie.

From recent years comes High Fidelity with John Cusack and Jack Black starring in this adaptation of the Nick Hornby novel pretty successfully. Zhang Yimou’s Hero is well worth a mention from 2002, as is his follow up film in 2004, House of Flying Daggers – both absolutely beautiful to look at, as you’d expect from him. A History of Violence is a standout film from David Cronenberg; then there’s the award winning Hotel Rwanda and finally from 2007 there’s Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg’s excellent follow up to Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz which very nearly lived up to its predecessor.

You’ll notice an absence of Harry Potter in this list – that’s because it’s my favourite films, not a popularity contest!

And on to the final five

His Girl Friday – Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell, Ralph Bellamy, direction by Howard Hawks- all the ingredients were there and they added up to one of the all time classic Hollywood comedies. Try and hang on to the light speed dialogue and just enjoy the ride.

Harvey – James Stewart is the alcoholic with a six foot invisible rabbit as a best friend. As you do. A charming comedy, with Josephine Hull winning a Best Supporting Actress Oscar as his frustrated aunt. The dialogue is exquisite as this seemingly crazy amiable man spreads his good-naturedness and has a profound effect on all that he meets.

High Noon – Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly are the newly marrieds about to leave town on honeymoon just as a band of criminals return after spending time in prison. Cooper, the ex-Sheriff finds himself torn between his new wife and his sense of duty to fight off the criminals whoo have returned for revenge. None of the townsfolk will help him so he has to resort to taking them on single-handedly. A classic western, essential viewing.

The Hudsucker Proxy – Ah, shucks to the critics – I love this Capra-esque offering from the Coens. Tim Robbins is the employee suddenly rising to the top through a scam by boss Paul Newman. Jennifer Jason Leigh does her best Rosalind Russell impression as the newspaperwoman investigating the new protégée.

Hot Fuzz – Bad Boys meets Midsomer Murders in this marvellous British comedy from Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg. Pegg is the London cop drafted into a sleepy town with zero crime rate, but all is not as it seems. Timothy Dalton and Edward Woodward also feature in a film crampacked full of visual and verbal jokes.

And the winner is…

Harvey. What else? If you’re having a bad day, sit down, get the DVD out, and put the film on for 90 minutes of topclass feel-good fare.

A-Z of favourite films - insert G pun here.

2009-11-26T19:55:00.005Z

You know the format, it’s my favourite films, this time beginning with G, whittling them down to a final 5 shortlist, before picking the favourite.

Going in chronological order, we start with 2 Buster Keaton films, so far conspicuous by their absence in these lists. There’s the excellent The Goat, a short from 1921, and then from 1927, The General, a famous feature length film set during the American civil war and with Buster on a runaway train – The General of the title.

From 1938 comes my favourite of Jean Renoir’s films, Le Grande Illusion. Every time I watch it I think that it must be more modern than 1938 – it just seems fresh and so well made that you assume it was made more recently. It’s one of the finest examples in the anti-war film genre.

I’m going to mention Gone with the Wind very briefly – that was it. I just didn’t like it okay, and it was far too long. You’re free to disagree if you think it’s the greatest film ever made, but you’re wrong. 1940 brings two great films – Henry Ford stars in John Ford’s adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath and then there’s Charlie Chaplin’s masterpiece, The Great Dictator with him playing both Hitler and the tramp who gets mistaken for Hitler.

Another 2 great films come in 1946 (what is it with the doubling up of classic films?) with Gilda – Rita Hayworth at her best, and Great Expectations – not only David Lean’s finest film, but also one of the best British films of all time, just beautifully told. From Europe a year later came Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero, another neo-realist film which sticks in my mind for having one character who is both a Nazi AND a child molester. Hmm, I’ll go for number 2 or 3 actually, Cilla.

Passing through the fifties (there’s decent films like Genevieve and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, but nothing to trouble the shortlist) and we reach the sixties where we find a handful of contenders. There’s Peckinpah’s excellent and underrated Western, Guns in the Afternoon from ’62; a year later comes the perennial Christmas TV classic The Great Escape, and then 1964 brought Goldfinger – the best Bond film ever? Discuss.
My favourite G film of the 60s is none of these though, and neither is it The Graduate or Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. It is in fact Leone’s The Good, the Bad and The Ugly, which is just about as flawless as a Spaghetti Western can get and spawned a slew of imitations.

The 1970s bring a couple of films that you may have heard of – The Godfather, and The Godfather Part II. They’re undoubtedly classics but I wasn’t as blown away by them as some are, perhaps because I’d had almost 30 years of being told how good they were before I finally watched them.

Ghostbusters and The Goonies are highlights from the 1980s; from the UK came Gregory’s Girl and the slightly dull Gandhi. The 90s got off to a blazing start with Scorsese’s Goodfellas and the hustling movie, The Grifters. Glengarry Glen Ross shows off some sterling acting from the likes of Jack Lemmon amongst others, and then we have the timeless classic Groundhog Day – a film that could have easily been made by Capra in the forties and that’s high praise indeed. Good Will Hunting and Grosse Point Blank are both decent entries from 1997 and the following year comes the marvellous Gods and Monsters, a film based on the life of Frankenstein director James Whale in his final years with a fine performance from Ian McKellan in the lead role. To round the decade off, Frank Darabont made The Green Mile which, whilst not quite living up to his earlier film The Shawshank Redemption, didn’t fall far short.

Ridley Scott started the new millennium off with a Best Picture Oscar for Gladiator, a surprise return for the sword and sandals epic and Scorsese had a slight misfire with his ambitious epic Gangs of New York. From Germany came the delightful Goodbye Lenin a tale set around the coming down of the Berlin Wall, and then George Clooney came up with Good Night and Good Luck, not only starring but also taking responsibility for the direction. From last year came Ricky Gervais in Ghosttown and a big budget oddity from South Korea – The Good, the Bad and the Weird. Barking mad, but good fun.

That’s all very good you say, but what about the final five?

Le Grande Illusion – nope I’m not just being pretentious, putting in a Jean Renoir French film. It’s a superb tale set in a POW camp during the First World War, examining the relationships between the French soliders and also between one of the French upperclass soldiers who has more in common with a German guard of his own class than with other soldiers on his own side. Thought-provoking but also laced with dark humour, it’s a damn fine film

The Great Dictator – At a push I might put this 1940 film ahead of Modern Times and City Lights as Chaplin’s best film. Although he later said he wouldn’t have made it had he known the true horrors of what Hitler was doing to the Jews, it’s one of the finest examples of satire you’ll find in film, so much so we can almost forgive the self-indulgent ending.

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly – Along with Once Upon a Time in the West, this is one of Leone’s best films. Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, Eli Wallach,k guns, horses, buried treasure – what more could you want?

The Godfather – It still makes it in even if it didn’t live up to my exorbitant expectations – it remains a definitive example of classy filmmaking and acting. Brando, Pacino, Caan, Duvall, Keaton – a who’s who of 70s actors, a sprawling epic, Shakespearean in its themes and intensity, and eminently quotable to this day.

Goodbye Lenin – from the German director Wolfgang Becker, this is a charming little gem about a son who has to pretend to his Communist mother that the Berlin Wall is still standing after she emerges from a coma – the shock of finding out the truth may kill her. Comic, but told with a real sensitivity, this is a classic of the new German cinema.

And the winner is … Le Grande Illusion – the first foreign language winner in this list and deservedly so for being pretty much the best war film ever made.

It's the F in A-Z of favourite film series

2009-11-23T15:34:00.006Z

It's the sixth in the A-Z of favourite film series so it must be time for F.

Slightly different format this week: the top five won’t be mentioned until, well, the top five. Instead I’ll just look at those that almost made it, but were just pipped at the post.

It was difficult to whittle 80 films down to 5 so a few outstanding films had to be rejected. From the 1920s a fine Laurel and Hardy film, From Soup to Nuts misses out as does Murnau’s silent German expressionist film, Faust. A couple more Laurel and Hardy films from the 30s miss out too – The Fixer Uppers and Flying Deuces.

There was lots of to-ing and fro-ing before I finally left Hitchcock’s 1940 thriller, Foreign Correspondent out of the top 5. Whilst I don’t think it’s up there with his best, it still very nearly broke the top 5 proving that even a non-classic Hitchcock can still be better than the majority of films from lesser filmmakers. The same could be said for three more major directors, all who made films in the 40s that just missed out. There’s the Powell and Pressburger team with 49th Parallel, John Ford with Fort Apache, and the great Billy Wilder with A Foreign Affair. All fine films, but all just fail to break into the shortlist.

From the 50s comes the multi-Oscar winning From Here to Eternity. Sinatra, Kerr, Lancaster – all still not quite enough to make it on the shortlist. Forbidden Planet is one of my guilty pleasures – Leslie Nielson (yes, him) takes the lead in a straight role in this loose reworking of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Very close to making the top five was Francois Truffaut’s classic, The 400 blows (or Les Quatre cent coups, to give it its French title); his tale of a young boy’s coming of age with that famous freeze-frame ending (later nicked by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid).

Another Truffaut offering appears in the 60s with his only English language film Fahrenheit 451, an interesting if sometimes stilted adaptation of the Ray Bradbury novel concerning a future where books are banned. A couple of Sergio Leone spaghetti Westerns also emerge with A Fistful of Dollars and then For a few Dollars More. The ubiquitous James Stewart also makes his compulsory appearance as part of the impressive ensemble cast of Flight of the Phoenix. And lets not forget James Bond again with From Russia With Love, a fine entry in the series.

Into the 70s and Hitchcock and Wilder both make another appearance – Hitchcock made films spanning over 50 years, from the 1920s onwards. Wilder’s entry is The Front Page with the marvellous Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau teaming up again with most funny results. Hitchcock has 2 films from the 70s which whilst sometimes maligned in comparison to his earlier films, are still decent enough and blow his other 1970s film, the dreadful Topaz out of the water. The films in question are Family Plot and Frenzy- worth a watch if you can catch them. Also from the 70s is The French Connection 2 which is a more than capable sequel to the original. Now mentioning that and not the original kind of gives away what one of the final five will be but never mind.

The 80s (worst decade for film since records began) does actually provide a couple of contenders – Flashdance definitely NOT being one of them though. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is looked upon with affection by many, there’s the first Friday 13th film which spawned approximately 147 sequels and another Bond film with For Your Eyes Only. The remake of The Fly with Jeff Goldblum is also worth a mention, as are Fatal Attraction, Polanski’s Frantic, and from the UK, A Fish Called Wanda – always good value for a laugh.

The early 90s brings us A Few Good Men. Then in 1993 and 1994 in one of those statistical quirks there’s 7 films released in those 2 years alone that were serious contenders for the top five. They are Falling Down, Farewell My Concubine, Fearless, The Firm, The Fugitive, Forrest Gump, and Four Weddings and a Funeral. Crikey, that’s a lot of F-ing films. The extremely silly, but mindlessly entertaining Face/Off is also worth a mention, then at the other end of the arthouse/mainstream spectrum comes Festen, a Dogme-95 film that is absolutely exceptional and probably closest of all these films listed to making the top 5. Michael Haneke’s original Austrian version of Funny Games is also a fine, if grim and difficult watch. Oh, and nearly forgot The Full Monty, the mammoth British hit of 1997.

From the 2000s we have Pixar in all their glory with Finding Nemo and the fascinating Errol Morris documentary The Fog of War. Sticking with documentary’s there’s Michael Moore’s polemic Fahrenheit 9/11 and then from last year, not a documentary but based on fact, there was the fine Frost/Nixon with sterling performances all round.

Without further ado, we move to the Top Five, the first top five in which I own all of the shortlisted five on DVD. Edit - don't know what i was talking about - I own all of the shortlists for A, B, C, and D too. Must have had a mind blank.

The Shortlist

Frankenstein – the original 1931 and the best version with Boris Karloff giving a career defining performance as the monster. Unlike Dracula, made in the same year, this hasn’t aged as badly, still looks great, and has been unsurpassed in the near 80 years since its release.

Freaks – From the director of Dracula came Freaks in 1932, a unique film in almost every sense. Banned for years after its release, I’m still not sure if it’s been shown on TV ever. It does what it says on the tin – it’s set in a freakshow with bearded ladies, Siamese twins, men with no arms and legs etc. It could be dreadful, but the humanity shines through and the “freaks” are never patronised by the film, and hey, they triumph in the end over the evil able bodied villain.

The French Connection – Winner of the Oscars for Best Picture, Director, Editing, Writing, and Actor for Gene Hackman, this was a deserved winner on all accounts. Hackman gives what is still perhaps a career defining performance as Popeye Doyle on the trail of drug traffickers. Shot in a naturalistic documentary style by William Friedkin, this set the standard for all police procedural films to follow. Plus it’s got one of the best car pursuits ever filmed (up there with the ones in Bullitt and Ronin).

Fargo – It’s difficult to pick my best Coen Brothers film – they’ve just made so many great ones, but at a push this may be my favourite. Exquisite cinematography from their regular collaborator Roger Deakins, a flawless script, and genius performances from, amongst others Frances Mcdormand, William H Macy, and Steve Buscemi add up to a modern classic that’s a pure joy to watch time and time again

Fight Club – Brad Pitt and Edward Norton are the stars in this quite remarkable film; an indictment of modern life as we reached the millennium casting a scathing look on our commodity ridden culture and the purposelessness felt by many in the consumer society in which we live. Extraordinarily filmed by the helmer of Se7en, David Fincher, this is perhaps one of the most dangerous films ever made mainstream in Hollywood and still packs a punch today.

And the winner is… I don’t really know. I’ve narrowed it down to Fargo and Fight Club but it’s a toughie – have probably seen both films half a dozen times of so. If I could make it a tie, I would, but I can’t so, deep breath:

The

Winner

Is

Fargo, no, Fight club. Fight Club, no. Fargo. Oh bloomin heck. For its sheer bravado I’ll go for

Fight Club.

Pointless Audition - Superstardom beckons (or maybe not)

2009-11-22T15:49:00.009Z

Sitting in a sparsely furnished room in a budget hotel in the middle of Sheffield alongside other pairs of prospective contestants, I began to wonder if this was such a good idea and tried to remember whether it had been mine or L’s idea to apply to be on Pointless, the BBC2 quiz show hosted by Alexander Armstrong.

We’d sent off the application a few weeks previously, having developed an unhealthy obsession with the first series of Pointless. We both loved the format (trying to find obscure answers – kind of like Family Fortunes in reverse) and berating the contestants for not finding the obscure answers that we came up with. So, despite the fact that neither of us had any history of applying to be on any programmes before, we decided to send off an application form and then promptly forgot about it.

A couple of weeks later, we’d both received separate phone calls from a researcher at Endemol, the company that produces Pointless. We were asked about our backgrounds, how we knew each other, why we’d applied etc, and then given a quick general knowledge quiz consisting of ten questions. We both got nine right – my mistake was not knowing the name of the mantle layer of the earth, whereas L’s was guessing Chelsea had won the Premiership last year instead of Manchester United. Presumably we did enough, and got another phone call later that evening inviting us for an audition. And that’s how we found ourselves sitting in the hotel meeting room in Sheffield.

We felt a little out of our depth on meeting our fellow applicants although they were all very friendly. It did seem we had entered a world of game show groupies; there was a pair of friends from Hull who had recently appeared on Eggheads, and a retired married couple whose previous appearances on quiz shows was extensive to say the least – Mastermind, Think Tank, Fifteen to One, 100 to 1, the list went on. As quiz show virgins this was a bit daunting but one veteran game show contestant assured as that our not having been on any other shows was an advantage. He also said that the way we met – over the internet – would also stand us in good stead – not something that we’d previously considered if we’re honest. Maybe we should have made up a tale about meeting whilst working at NASA but we'd probably have been caught out at our lack of science-related knowledge.

We had to fill out a couple of forms before the audition started; one of which may well rule me out as it asked for medical history. Four hours later, and after sending out for more spare paper, I’d finally filled it in and it was time to start auditioning.

First we had 5 minutes to answer 20 questions on an A4 sheet. I thought this would be my forte given my love for exams but I don’t think I did very well. I misread one of the questions which was about Maths, surely one of my specialist subjects! I fully knew the answer but having misread it got it completely wrong. I also suffered from mixing up Billy Joel with Billy Ocean, much to L’s amusement. Anyhow I think I probably got between 14 and 16 right so not a disaster but not great.

Then came the game of Pointless, albeit in a much lower budget version than on the TV - no flashy studio lights here, and a white flipchart board replacing the electronic Pointless meter. Our “oohs” replaced the fancy sound effects as a researcher moved a cardboard arrow down the scale until it reached the right number. All this game was being filmed but as we couldn’t see ourselves on a screen anywhere I didn’t feel too self-conscious. We were encouraged to smile if we did well, look disappointed if we didn’t etc etc. The first round was coming up with football teams with something in common (better not say more than that as they may use the same questions in each audition!). I was third to go, and got the first Pointless answer. I did an over the top celebration, probably looking like a loon but in my defence I was only following orders!

In the second round we didn’t do as well, getting an incorrect answer on films of all things. The third round was naming the original stars of a TV show – we felt confident in that round as we had quite a few that we thought wouldn’t be too popular. Unfortunately the first team said our top answer, so I picked to go for one of the others, only to find this was a very popular answer indeed with 57 out of 100 people coming up with it. If we'd picked one of the others we'd thought of, we could have got as low as 3 or 4.

After all 3 rounds we’d actually come last so were in disgrace. However your chances of getting through the audition do not depend on how well you do in the game – it’s more to do with how well you come across in front of camera. The researchers send the tapes to the producers in London who pick a further shortlist for filming in January. The audition wasn’t quite over yet though – we sat in the lounge but were then called back in for a five minute interview, again in front of the camera, where we were asked general questions about us – I said I was “between jobs” rather than unemployed as I thought it sounded better – L suggested I say I was a writer and I suppose I do write, but I think you really have to have something published before you refer to yourself as that. We were also asked how we met which again the chap seemed impressed with – I guess they like to have an angle for each pair of contestants. There was much laughing when L brought up my penchant for keeping lists of films I’d seen etc – apparently the researchers seemed to find this funny and odd – can’t think why!

Anyway the whole process had taken about 2 hours and we left the hotel not sure how it had gone. We weren’t as boisterous as some of the other contestants and we both agreed on a couple who will definitely get on the show – a mother and daughter team who had great chemistry and will be perfect for the show. However we’d got down from what we were told were thousands of applicants to the 200 that had been auditioned. They need 75 for filming so you never know. If we don’t hear from them in the next fortnight we’ll know we haven’t been successful but it was still a good experience and a sneak peek into a world we knew nothing about. No doubt we’ll see some of the couples we met in Sheffield on the next series, so that will be our tenuous claim to fame. Next stop, Hollywood.

It's been a month now and not heard anything so assume we didn't make the cut. Not to worry - think it may half have been the health disclosure form for the insurance company that scuppered us. Well, that and the fact we weren't entertaining enough. Updated - 21 Dec 2009

A-Z of favourite films - E by gum.

2009-11-20T12:24:00.002Z

And now for the fifth in the A-Z of favourite films series and we’re on to E

This’ll be shorter than usual (stop cheering at the back) as I’ve only seen 35 films beginning with E whereas for B,C and D I’d seen over 100 for each letter. This means it's not as difficult to reach the top 5 in E as with other letters but hey, I set the rules and arbitrary as they are, I’d better stick to them.

One film NOT making the top 5 will be Easy Virtue, one of my least favourite Alfred Hitchcock film (along with Juno and the Paycock). Just shows a great director can occasionally make a stinker of a film.

In terms of Foreign language films, there’s just a handful of contenders – Fellini’s 8 1/2, arguably his greatest flm, and Marcel Carne’s mammoth undertaking Les Enfants De Paradis, all the more impressive for being partly filmed whilst France was still under occupation by the Nazis. Also, it’s a bit of a cheek as it should really be filed under O but I’ll bend the rules slightly and allow El Orfanato (The Orphanage) which is one of my favourite films of the last couple of years; a psychological horror which really affected me on watching it alone in the house in the early hours of the morning!

Turning to British films, there’s no real contenders here, though East is East and Elizabeth could possibly be up there at a push. Apart from that there’s Essex Boys and Enduring Love, neither of which I really rated and neither of which will appear in the final five.

In the US, Chaplin’s short Easy Street is an early silent contender from 1917 – in it he plays the tramp who becomes a policeman and it is very funny at times. I’m afraid I’ll pass by East of Eden and Easy Rider - I know people will disagree but I didn’t care for either of them very much. Woody Allen gets the prize for the longest film title in this blog with Everything You Wanted To Know About Sex (But Were Afraid To Ask). For Bruce Lee fans there’s Enter the Dragon, and then in 1973 comes the marvellously spooky The Exorcist, banned for 30 years and only allowed to be released on DVD in recent years.

The 1980s bring David Lynch’s remarkable The Elephant Man, John Huston’s Escape to Victory (stop laughing again at the back, I like it) and of course Spielberg’s classic ET: The Extraterrestrial. On a lower budget a young filmmaker called Sam Raimi came to the film world’s attention with The Evil Dead, a masterpiece of low-budget horror filmmaking.

In the 1990s Tim Burton has two entries; first in 1990 with Edward Scissorhands and then 4 years later he teamed up with Johnny Depp again for the excellent Ed Wood, a biopic of the much maligned director of such films as Plan 9 from Outer Space. Other 90s films of note include Enemy of the State and Election. Needless to say, the film The English Patient does not feature. Winning Best Picture Oscar does not always a good film make (rearrange sentence as applicable).

From the last decade comes Erin Brockovich which does what it says on the tin but which I found a little disappointing. A film which did not let me down in the least was Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a contender for best film of the decade with the minds of Andy Kaufmann and Michel Gondry colliding in spectacular style.

Anyway, down to the final five shortlist:

The Exorcist – Up there with the best horror films ever made, the film that was banned and reportedly caused mass faintings in theatres still packs a punch today. The villain is the biggest one possible – the devil, who’s possessed a young girl, but can a priest save her soul?

E.T –Spielberg’s landmark film which I imagine has escaped very few people. A young boy, a lost alien needing to phone home, a bicycle ride in the moonlight – it all adds up to a perennial classic and even the appearance of ET in a British Gas advert can’t spoil it.

Ed Wood – Tim Burton’s affectionate tribute to the failed movie director Ed Wood. Shot in black and white, it’s full of atmosphere and you can feel the love that Burton has for his subject – he clearly empathises with him, and the enthusiasm of Wood for movie making really comes through.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet are the leads in this romantic comedy that’s not a romantic comedy. A unique film in almost all respects, it’s an intelligent film and the influence of maverick Andy Kaufmann really shines through as well as the imaginative direction of Michel Gondry. A modern day classic

El Orfanato (The Orphanage) – Beautifully judged and filmed horror set in an old orphanage which perhaps is not ready to lay all its ghosts to rest. A sensitive mother, a missing child, a creepy old woman – all the horror ingredients are there but they’re blended together so skilfully it still seems fresh.

And the winner is:

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – proof that there’s still original films been making these days and taking risks can pay off – I can see this being viewed as an all time classic in 50 years or so.

Ladybirds, Ladybirds

2009-11-19T17:07:00.006Z

Wondering if the ladybirds hibernating at Steve Shark's are the same ones I saw on holiday in Norfolk this year. They were swarming like something out of a horror film. Albeit, a very non-scary horror film - ladybirds are not the most threatening of God's insects.

They probably weren't these though - they didn't look too healthy

Pics taken in Walcott, Norfolk in August 2009.

A-Z of favourite films - we reach D

2009-11-17T12:08:00.006Z

So, it’s the fourth in my series of the A-Z of films and we reach D. Don’t panic though - The Da Vinci Code will be nowhere in sight, being as it is, utter crap.

We’ll take foreign language films first. La Dolce Vita is one of Fellini’s most highly acclaimed works, but here I risk the wrath of any sophisticated film critic reading and say that despite seeing it 3 times, I’ve never been that impressed by it, and crikey, doesn’t it feel long? More to my liking is the Wong Kar-Wai offering, Days of Being Wild and the tale of Algerain soldiers fighting for France during WW2 in Days of Glory. Talking of WW2, the German film, Downfall is also a contender, but probably the highlight of the foreign language contingent is Lars Von Trier’s work from 2000, Dancer in the Dark. Starring Bjork, this is a film that can quite honestly be termed unique and is utterly brilliant, but perhaps not one that you’d want to watch again and again – it’s rather hard hitting. Another film that splits audiences is Dumplings, a tale from Hong Kong that is either darkly amusing, or sick, depending on your viewpoint. I’d go for the former but don’t judge me for it!

The British contingent includes the marvellous Dead of Night from Ealing Studios – a series of spoky tales including one rather creepy one where a ventriloquist’s dummy comes to life. Then there’s the perennial classic, The Dambusters, and the brilliantly tense The Day of the Jackal. Two of the best entries in the James Bond series also appear with Dr No, the first of the series, and then 9 years later, Diamonds are Forever. Nic Roeg’s Don’t Look Now is one of the finest examples of psychological horror you’ll see, and you’ll never see a red anorak in the same way again. From the last decade comes three very different British films; Dirty Pretty Things, a tale of immigrants in London, Shane Meadows’ superlative Dead Man’s Shoes, and then from this year Michael Sheen appeared in The Damned United, the tale of Brian Clough’s disastrous management spell at Leeds United.

From America in the 1930s came Tod Browning’s Dracula with Bela Lugosi making his mark as the vampire. Less scary, but utterly hilarious is the Marx Brothers with Duck Soup, arguably their best film. James Stewart makes an appearance (as he is contractually obliged to in this list) with Destry Rides Again. Our Billy Wilder contribution from the 40s is Double Indemnity, one of the best films-noir ever made.

The 1950s brought three American classics: The Day the Earth Stood Still – thankfully Keanu Reeves-free unlike its remake, Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder, the one 3-D film he ever made, but still just as good in 2-D, and The Defiant Ones, a tale of racial tension as two prisoners Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier go on the run from the authorities. An oddity from the 1960s is the very simple but charming short, The Dot and the Line. More mainstream was The Dirty Dozen which, as action films go, is pretty good. The top film from the 60s though has got to be Dr Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick’s outstanding war satire.

1971 brought us two films from 2 icons; Clint Eastwood starred in Don Siegel’s classic Dirty Harry, asking us if we felt lucky, and Steven Spielberg brought us the high-concept Duel – basically Jaws but with a truck instead of a shark. It set the tone for many of his later films and though made for TV in the US, gained recognition and a cinema release in Europe and a directing career was born. Other notable films from the 70s up for the shortlist are Deliverance, Dog Day Afternoon, Dawn of the Dead and The Deer Hunter, though am I alone in finding The Deer Hunter overrated? What’s that? I am? Oh well, never mind.

Just the two entries from the 1980s with the archetypal action movie of the 80s, Die Hard, and Steve Martin’s post-modern film-noir pastiche, Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid. Desperado and Deconstructing Harry are the 90s highlights, though a case could also be made for Dave, and possibly Dead Man Walking (though not a barrel of laughs) From the last decade comes the cult offering Donnie Darko, the guilty pleasure of Dodgeball, and Scorsese finally bagging his Oscar for The Departed – a fine film only let down by the fact that I had a soft spot for the original trilogy and they were of a high standard to live up to.

After all that waffle, it’s time for the final five

Duck Soup – From 1933 this is a comedy classic with Groucho leading his country in a war for the fictional country of Freedonia. One of the reasons for going ahead in the war – because he’s already paid a month’s rent on the battlefield – tells you it’s not exactly a serious war film – it’s very silly, very anarchist, but most importantly very very funny.

Double Indemnity – Billy Wilder’s film-noir with Fred MacMurray perhaps never better as the insurance salesman taken under the spell of housewife Barbara Stanwyck and plotting to do away with her husband. Great support from Edward G Robinson, tight direction, and a real sense of atmosphere make this a real standout of Wilder’s films.

Dr. Strangelove – Stanley Kubrick and Peter Sellers combine to create a heavily satirical take on the threat of nuclear weapons; the cold war being very real at the time of making. Not forgetting George C Scott who gives sterling support, but this is really Sellers’ career highpoint, starring in a film that packs a punch with its message but is never less than very very funny.

Duel – Spielberg’s early film, the blueprint of many of his later films as an ordinary man, driving across the country is stalked by a huge truck – we never see the driver of the truck and never learn the motives of the attack, arguably making it all the more sinister. That’s all the plot there is – a truck chases a car, but Spielberg stretches it out for a tension-filled hour and a half with creative direction and exciting editing. Judging by this film, I think the director’s got a good future in the film business

Dead Man’s Shoes – Paddy Considine stars as the man who comes back to his home town looking for revenge against the gang that had been bullying his disabled brother. All may not be as it seems in this bleak but beautifully made film which is a great example of British filmmaking and, along with This is England, one of Shane Meadows’ best movies.

And the winner is…

Dr Strangelove, arguably the best satirical comedy of all time and, in my opinion, Kubrick’s finest film, which with his back catalogue is praise indeed.

So to recap: the current winners so far are:

Annie Hall

The Big Sleep

Casablanca

Dr Strangelove

Scotland Unveil New Football Manager

2009-11-16T13:37:00.002Z

Though he may well be better than Steve McLaren was.

A-Z of favourite films - Now for C

2009-11-11T17:13:00.003Z

Now for the third in the increasingly unpopular A-Z list of my favourite films and

we reach letter C.

Whereas with the letters A and B I didn’t know when I started which films would come out top, C is slightly different as two of my favourite films of all time begin with C – Citizen Kane and Casablanca. They’d always make my top ten film last of all time, so maybe here’s a drawback to my arbitrary system of having one film per letter – one of them won’t make it to the final 26, whereas they’d probably both have made it had they begun with different letters.

Anyhow, it’s not quite a two-horse race so let’s look at the other contenders.

From the UK we of course have the Carry on series of films. I don’t think I rate any of them high enough to make the final 5 shortlist, but I’m quite partial to Carry on Cleo as well as Carry on Screaming – two of the better entries in the Carry on canon (forgive the alliteration). Also from the UK comes Powell and Pressburger’s wartime film A Canterbury Tale which is a very interesting work and well worth catching. Forty years on, the Oscar winning Chariots of Fire is also one of the great mainstays of a British cinema which perhaps met its nadir with the execrable Can you Keep it up for a week? – a film which safe to say would not make any shortlist of the good and great. Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, made in the UK is also a seminal film, though not one that I enjoyed enough for it to make the top five. Also in the same category would be The Crying Game (it’s a man!) More enjoyable was Nick Park’s Chicken Run which while not up to the Wallace and Gromit standard is still mighty fun at times.

Foreign language film time and we have Un Chien Andalou, the 15 minute short from Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali, and less weirdly, Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, an excellent 1935 work by Jean Renoir. Bergman’s Cries and Whispers doesn’t make the list because good film as it may be, it’s deadly depressing and calling it a “favourite” may be going too far. However there are four other foreign language films all in contention; Cinema Paradiso, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, City of God, and Chungking Express. Of this quarter Wong Kar-Wai’s Chungking Express has to be my favourite – it was a film like no other I’d seen before in its style and technique and was a real breath of fresh air.

Then there’s a huge chunk of contenders from American cinema; too many to go into in too much detail. From the first half of the 20th Century we have comedic offerings from the Marx Brothers with The Cocoanuts, from Charlie Chaplin with The Circus and the delightful City Lights, and from laurel and Hardy with, amongst others, Come Clean and A Chump at Oxford. In drama we have the two behemoths; Citizen Kane, written, directed and acted by the precocious Orson Welles, and the all time classic Casablanca starring Bogart and Bergman.

There’s a real purple patch of C films in the second half of the century. There’s both versions of Cape Fear – I prefer the 1961 version but the 1991 version is no mean shakes either with Scorsese directing and De Niro starring. The 60s and 70s brought some classic cinema; starting with Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn in the Hitchcock-esque Charade (directed in fact by Singin in the Rain helmer Stanley Donen) then Cool Hand Luke and Countdown in 1967, the great caper movie Charley Varrick starring Walter Matthau in 73, followed a year later with 2 all out heavyweight classics, The Conversation and Chinatown. The decade wasn’t over yet though as before it was out it would bring us Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, De Palma’s Carrie, and the tale of near nuclear meltdown with The China Syndrome.

The 80s and 90s weren’t so prolific but still brought the odd highlight including Woody Allen’s Crime and Misdemeanours and Scorsese again with Casino. Bringing us up to date, recent contenders would include the brilliant and disturbing documentary Capturing the Friedmans, Michael Mann’s Collateral, the return of James Bond in Casino Royale, and Clint Eastwood directing Angelina Jolie in Changeling.

So lots of contenders but who’ll make the final five (or rather who’ll take the remaining 3 places after Citizen Kane and Casablanca take their rightful places)

The Final Five

City Lights – say what you like about Chaplin, and I never used to like him, he did make some pretty astounding films. Meticulous in his methods, this tale of a blind flower seller and the tramp (Chaplin himself) who tries to help her may have been a nightmare for the actors to film, but is far from a nightmare to watch.

Citizen Kane – regularly topping critics’ best films of all time lists, this biopic based on newspaperman William Randolph Hearst’s life (much to his chagrin as he tried to get it banned) brought us many cinematic innovations and narrative tricks, almost developing a new language of cinema as it did so. Top performances and sterling storytelling, an almost faultless film

Casablanca – Eminently quotably, often wrongly – no-one ever says “Play it again Sam” and with Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman on the top of their form with flawless support from Claude Rains amongst others, this romantic wartime tale manages not to fall into sentimentality, keeping a good mix between tugging at the heart strings and being cynical. They started filming without even having an end to the script and if this is the result, maybe that’s how all films should be produced!

Chinatown – Starring Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, John Huston, direction by Roman Polanski, it could hardly go wrong, and indeed it didn’t with this throwback to the private eye noir movies of the 1940s. Dark, immensely cynical, and with incest thrown in, this is storytelling at its finest as the plot weaves its way – labyrinth like – through the city, ending up in the Chinatown of the title. A film, once seen, never to be forgotten

Chungking Express – One of my favourite foreign language films of all time, this Wong-Kar Wai offering mixes Cantonese cinema with Western influences (most notably the omnipresent song California Dreamin’), resulting in a film with a unique look – romance, crime, love and loss intermingle in the tale of 2 different characters – both policemen – as they seek relationships and happiness in Hong Kong

And so to the final decision and taking by a whisker is… Casablanca.

To be honest I think Citizen Kane is the better film, technically, but purely based on which one I’d rather sit down and watch tonight Casablanca takes it. Who knows though, maybe Citizen Kane might make a reappearance later – especially when I’m a bit stuck on films beginning with x!

Nanowrimo - a novel in a month

2009-11-08T14:25:00.002Z

Hmm, this month I signed for the National Novel Writing Month, a scheme in which participants are encouraged to write a novel in a month. The target word count is 50,000 words before Novermber is out.

I thought I'd give it a go seeing as am stuck in the house and writing is the one thing I can actually do (not necessarily do well, but it's doable healthwise). The trouble is the main thing I like about writing is FINISHING writing. I wish I was one of those people who enjoy the process of writing but I don't - the only enjoyment I get is of having finished writing the piece.

I was the same at uni - I got all my assignments and dissertations done and to a good standard but they were a real slog - I'd sit down for about 3 minutes at a time at the computer, only to then walk around the house getting distracted before sitting down again quarter of an hour later for another 3 or 4 minutes. Not the ideal formula for writing a novel.

Hence after 8 days I'm only on 2,100 words and about ready to give up. But I'll give it another go for a few more days and maybe blogging about it will embarass me into actually making a concerted effort to finish it.

Of course actually writing 50,000 words doesn't necessarily mean they're going to be 50,000 good words, as shown from my first two paragraphs below!

It hadn’t been a good day. Doug was sure of that. Things had begun to look grim that morning when, on awakening to a whining from his dog, Bruno, he had entered the kitchen, only to submerge his clean cold foot into a pool of warm, sticky, vomit. The ensuing slip had resulted in Doug banging his head on the marble work surface, and falling to the floor in a most ungainly fashion, which Bruno, if he had been scoring it for technical merit and execution, would have been forced to give a less than generous mark. This had gone through Doug’s mind at the very moment of the slip, which seemed odd because Bruno, as well as being a dog, had hitherto showed scarce interest in any active sports whatsoever and was unlikely at any stage in the future to find gainful employment as a gymnastics judge.

After clearing up the unwelcome mess using a combination of an old edition of Total Film and a Wacky Races plastic beaker, Doug’s breakfast of coco-pops and a dairylea triangle had passed uneventfully and he had found himself leaving the house and making his way to the newsagent’s. It was raining, and Doug ambled along the pavement under a large umbrella. For years Doug had resisted umbrellas, taking the firm opinion that they were an accessory that should only be carried by females, or upper-class gentlemen in lieu of a bowler hat. However after a particularly grim day in Cleethorpes one wet February morning, he had performed a 180 degree turn, and now clutched on to his umbrella as if it were an integral part of his body. Whether this change in his outlook suggested he was aspiring to move up several echelons in the class scale, or even more radically perhaps, become a woman, was up for debate, but so far both aristocratic accent and ovaries had stayed well away.

What was it Homer Simpson said?

"Trying is the first step towards failure"

Adverb game for a bored afternoon

2009-11-06T15:13:00.002Z

In which the adverb related to speech is a pun related to what is said within the speech:

“I’m rather partial to redheads,” he said gingerly

“I’d rather go out with a blonde,” he responded fairly

“I like angles of less than 90 degrees” he stated, acutely

“I prefer angles of more than 90 degrees” she replied obtusely.

“I can’t wait to eat my burger,” he stated, with relish

“I’m going to start a lawsuit” he decided, plaintively

“I’m going to vote for David Cameron” she said, conservatively

“Oh, no. I much prefer Nick Clegg,” she argued, liberally

“I’m going to go camping,” he said intently

A-Z of favourite films - on to B

2009-11-02T22:09:00.004Z

Continuing the world famous A-Z of favourite films and we reach letter B. I thought A was tough with many contenders for the top spot but B is just as competitive, if not even more so:

Taking foreign films first, standout films include the remarkable Battle of Algiers, the charming Belleville-Rendezvous, and the extraordinary Italian neo-realist film Bicycle Thieves. Mention should go to Battleship Potemkin, the hugely influential Eisenstein film which appears on many critics’ top ten lists. I own the film on DVD and have seen it probably half a dozen times, but it won’t make my top five shortlist as these are my favourite films and it’s not exactly a film I’d watch for an evening’s entertainment.

Turning to America and the contenders come ten to the dozen. I’m a fan of Laurel and Hardy and they have enough contenders by themselves with the shorts Be Big, Big Business, Brats, Busy Bodies, and the feature length Blockheads, possibly my favourite film of theirs.

Classic Hollywood provides such standouts as the excellent Hepburn and Grant vehicle, Bringing Up Baby, Humphrey Bogart in career-defining form in the classic noir The Big Sleep, the Hollywood satire The Bad and the Beautiful, Spencer Tracy in fine form as the one armed hero of Bad Day at Black Rock, and not forgetting Hitchcock’s shocker The Birds.

Later contenders from the US include Terence Malick’s Badlands, Woody Allen’s all out comedy, Bananas, Peter Sellers in fine form as the idiot savant in Being There, the seminal Bonnie and Clyde, and then the pairing of Robert Redford and Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. And not forgetting Steve McQueen in Bullitt, though that’s probably more notable now for the car chase rather than the film as a whole. For more comedy there’s Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles – the film that perhaps saw off the Western genre for a few years at least.

More recent films now (i.e one’s from my life time) and there’s the dystopian classic Blade Runner which will probably miss out on the top five purely because I saw it so many times when doing a dissertation that familiarity, whilst not breeding contempt, made me a bit tired of it. To be honest, I prefer Terry Gilliam’s dystopian-esque view in Brazil instead. From the Coen Brothers come two nominations – Barton Fink and The Big Lebowski, both unmistakably Coen films with their unique style and humour. The Blues Brothers is another comedic offering on the longlist, as are Woody Allen’s Broadway Danny Rose and Bullets Over Broadway, and the Tom Hanks’ vehicle, Big. Honourable mentions also go to Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, Bound, Breakdown, Bowling for Colombine, (the first documentary on the list), Best in Show (the first mockumentary on the list!!) and the hugely enjoyable and idiosyncratic Being John Malkovich.

The Brits do slightly better than they did with B with four true classics in Brief Encounter, Brighton Rock, Black Narcissus and the multi-Oscar winning Bridge on the River Kwai.

One film that certainly didn’t make the list was Battlefield Earth, one of the worst films I’ve ever seen.

And so down to the final five:

Blockheads – how could I leave out what is arguably my favourite Laurel and Hardy film. Okay, the plot’s not up to much – it’s more a series of set pieces, but when it’s done as brilliantly as this, who cares. A highlight is Ollie encountering Stan after he’s been missing in the war, and mistakenly assuming he has no legs – I guess you’ve got to see it to fully appreciate it!

The Big Sleep – Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall shine in this film noir, with Bogie as private eye Philip Marlowe. The plot may be incomprehensible at times, even famously to the director at one point, but the dialogue sparkles, the chemistry is turned up to 10 and the characters from Raymond Chandler’s original novel all come to life in a true Hollywood classic

Bicycle Thieves – A man has his bike stolen and spends the rest of the time looking for it with his son. On the face of it, an involving film that does not make, but not only did this neo-realist film from Italy changed the way many people looked at film, it’s also involving, has a message and packs an emotional punch. Though I only had something in my eye whilst watching it, nothing else.

Blazing Saddles – Puerile, childish, and above all, damn funny, this is one of Mel Brooks’ best. Gene Wilder has never been funnier and the Western never really recovered! There’s laughs in every scene – slapstick, wordplay, double entendre – you name it, it’s got it.

The Big Lebowski – Jeff Bridges as the Dude in this slacker comedy from the Coens. It shouldn’t really work but somehow it does with the story revolving around a soiled rug of all things. John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Julianne Moore – the cast is superb, and the film is brimful of quotable lines, although most of them profane!

And the winner is

… drumroll again

The Big Sleep, which joins Annie Hall in the final 26. It wins for its near perfection and the presence of Bogie, Bacall and director Hawks all at the top of their game.

Road Rage

2009-11-02T19:28:00.003Z

To the lady in the Ford Mondeo behind me at the roundabout today:

Yes, I stalled. That was my fault and I humbly apologise.

What was not particularly my fault was the fact my car would not restart, despite many attempts, hence me putting on my hazard warning lights.

What helped the situation was your incessant beeping on the horn. That really relaxed me. Unfortunately it did not have the magical effect on my engine that I imagine you were hoping - it still refused to respond.

Still, your hand signal as you passed must have done the trick as ten minutes later, the engine eventually started. Thank you so much for your patience.

May contain spoilers...

2009-10-28T20:14:00.003Z

For when you just don't have the time to watch the whole film...

It's a sledge

His Mum's dead

They all did it

It's Earth....in the future

She's her daughter AND her sister

It was a dream

He was his son all along

He's a cop

She's a man

Her head's in the box

He made it all up

They're the same person

He's a ghost

Jack - never to be forgotten

2009-10-27T12:06:00.008Z

Jack

Born 3 January 1999

Died 27 October 2009

A best friend for ten years and the gentlest, softest dog I've ever known

Just a couple of days old, with his mum Jodie

and his brothers and sister.

Six weeks old and cuteness developing!

Six months after an operation

Then he got all grown up and handsome (though perhaps not so rugged!)

Mischievous to the end, we found him in the tumble drier a few months ago.

He brought happiness to many and it's impossible to describe how much he'll be missed. But we've got all the memories and he'll never be forgotten

Jack (1999-2009)