Rob's Amazing Film Collection - Part Six: Blue Velvet to Bowling for Columbine

 

Do you still collect physical media? I bet you don't. Why would you clutter up your finite living space with Blu-rays, DVDs and the like, when streaming exists? You can just pluck films and music from the air, like the 21st Century Techno-God you are, and leave that shelf space for something more useful. Spice jars, maybe, or the hollowed out skulls of your enemies. 

Well, I still have those shelves full of films and I tell you what - they still bring me pleasure. There's something about seeing those titles, arrayed proudly and - of course - alphabetically that makes me glad. There's a kind of archeology to it all, these layers of the past, each one rooted in time and experience, that gives me pleasure. 

This series of blogs is a slow excavation of those layers - looking at the films in my collection and asking... why did I buy this? When did I last watch it? Actually, have I ever got round to watching it? Are these, in fact, mostly films that I borrowed off other people and is that why so many of my friends are annoyed with me?

Let's take a look at this little selection...

Blue Velvet

I love David Lynch, and recently my household had a little 'Lynch' season - charging through most of his films and all of Twin Peaks, and then sitting staring nervously round the house in case any of it turned into a demon. He's a director with a very distinctive flavour, David Lynch, and it really helps to be in his particular groove when watching his films. 

Blue Velvet is among the more mainstream of his works, but it's still a dark, weird beast that you wouldn't want to be watching when your mum walked in. I've never loved it, exactly, but I want it around. It's like one of those blue cheeses you taste and then kind of retch, and twitch a bit, then go back for more. 

The Boat That Rocked

I don't know why I own this. It's not particularly good. I think maybe it was a big deal when it came out, and sometimes it's good to watch those films to see what's going on. 

In retrospect, this is like someone precision tooled a film to reflect the particular sensibilities of an era. The narrative seems to have been constructed in order to create cool clips for the trailer. The cast is like an algorithm was tasked with finding 'cool actors of the early 21st Century'. Bill Nighy, Nick Frost, Rhys Ifans etc. All fun actors and good in their own right, but here cast more as a kind of shorthand - "Hey, you liked other films with these guys in. Please like me by extension". 

It's not easy, though, to like anything that's going on here. On one hand this feels like a middle aged man's idea of what it is to be young and free, and it all seems a bit desperate to be cool and irreverent. On the other, the sexual politics have dated terribly - a celebration of men treating women like prizes which is obviously terrible now, but probably should have been flagged as suspect then too. 

And then there's the end, where the spirit of Dunkirk is invoked to create a happy ending where some sex pests are rescued from a deserved drowning... it's like a satire on everything that would become wrong with the UK, except played in earnest. 

Bodies, Bodies, Bodies

A charming, unpretentious horror that does a few clever things and doesn't outstay its welcome. I got this because my brother recommended it, and it was actually cheaper to buy the disc than it was to rent it from Prime. 

I fear that this will become a fair amount of my collection - things I bought simply to watch once. And then they sit there, on the shelf, landfill waiting to happen. Will I watch this again? Probably not. Dare I throw it away and admit that I'm part of the reason the Earth will eventually be a dead, radioactive pit of toxic slime? Also no. 

Bonnie and Clyde

Ah, we're back in 'DVDs I bought when I was teaching film studies' territory. This was a film I'd reference constantly when discussing the Hollywood New Wave. Bonnie and Clyde was one of the cool kids who, along with Easy Rider, The Graduate and Night of the Living Dead, swaggered into cinemas in the late 1960s and said, "Get out of here, you squares! We're here to shake things up in ways your tiny minds simply wouldn't understand! Also we are smoking cigarettes!"

I've not actually watched this more than once. I've watched the first five minutes loads, when showing classes how cool it was to watch Faye Dunaway pout and punch the headrest of her bed, and how this kind of thing provoked cinema audiences to instantly leave the cinema and protest the Vietnam war. 

I should probably watch the rest of it again, some day. I couldn't tell you a single thing that happens after that. It's a bit like True Romance, right?

Boogie Nights

This was a massive deal when it came out in the 90s. Empire magazine was all over it. The huge success of Tarantino's films was a tide that lifted all boats: auteur directors were big news, and it just so happened that there were loads of them making really interesting films around this time.

As a relatively new film nerd, I was very up for being told where to go and what to see. There's a lot of films, and only so much time, so any threads were gratefully followed. Paul Thomas Anderson was one of the new messiahs of the era, according to the world's leading film mag, so who was I to disagree? Plus, they mentioned, there was tons of nudity. Well. As I say, I was there for the auteur directors and no-one can prove otherwise. 

Revisiting this film, it's very impressive, but not as focused as Anderson was to become in later films. He's clearly going for a Scorsese/Altman thing, and though he's good at that, it feels more like someone trying to remake Goodfellas than it does someone with their own vision. The structure is a bit lopsided, and there's a weird diversion into a sort of heist towards the end that suggests a lack of confidence in the material. 

All that said, it has the sort of amazing ensemble cast and a period soundtrack that we take for granted now, but was less usual then. 

Borat

I like this, but I'm not sure why I own the DVD. This is more the sort of film that I'll enjoy when it comes on TV, and I'm desperate not to go to bed, because then sleep comes and the day has won and one day I'll be dead. But I am unlikely to ever actively decide to pick the DVD off the shelf, so why is it here?

I wonder if I was teaching documentary making at some point, and thought that this would be a fun way into the subject for bored teenagers? If so, I bet it spectacularly failed, and they all looked at me like I was an idiot. 

It's funny and smart, though, and the joke has sustained pretty well. The sequel was great, wasn't it? 

Borg Vs. McEnroe

I was bought this as a gift, I think, presumably by someone who wanted to punish me for being an inattentive friend throughout the year. "Here's how much time we've spent together recently - I've bought you a film about sport as if that was a good idea."

It's not a bad film, at all. It's just that I don't care about tennis, even one tiny bit. And further to that, I've no interest in expanding my horizons to start caring about it. I have a number of obsessions and I'm pretty happy with them, so no thank you to new areas of life experience. 

I've definitely watched this film, but I could not tell you a single solitary thing about it. I bet they play tennis, and probably it's based on a real thing, and I imagine there are some excellent performances by some good actors, that get to the heart of the human experience. It probably transpires that, even if you don't like tennis, you could learn something about the universality of the existential struggle to be better, and how the real struggle isn't against our earthly opponents, but the darker angels of our souls. 

Well. Joke's on you, because I can get all that while watching John Wick. And even though I can't remember anything about this film, I bet ten thousand pounds that Borg doesn't beat McEnroe by sticking a pencil through his head.

Bottle Rocket

This is Wes Anderson's first film, I think. I will have bought it in an act of completism, after realising how much I loved Tenenbuams and Rushmore etc. It isn't as good. You can see bits of his later style poking through - a symmetrical composition here, and set of labelled plans there - but the whole thing is a bit nothingy and Owen Wilson has stupid hair.

I still like the idea of owning all the films by a certain director. But this noble aim is problematised by those directors either a) occasionally releasing a film I hate so I resent buying it or b) releasing so many bloody films that I simply can't keep up. Come on, directors. Either release exclusively good movies, or have the decency to die.

Bound

I've only seen this once, and it must be over twenty years ago. I bought it for one reason only, which was that it was directed by the siblings who made The Matrix and at that time The Matrix was the coolest movie anyone had every seen, ever. 

I got together with a friend who'd also enjoyed The Matrix, This doesn't narrow it down as everyone back then loved The Matrix, and spent all day every day quoting The Matrix and dressing like people from The Matrix and occasionally trying to run up walls like they do in The Matrix  except we all fell over and hurt ourselves. But the cool thing about it was that even though we all liked The Matrix, we all felt we had our own special, personal connection to the film, and that it had spoken to us on a direct and individual level. 

Anyway. She came round, I stuck on this film. It soon transpired that it wasn't much like The Matrix. This wasn't the story of super cool people doing amazing fighting in a cyberpunk environment. It was the story of sexy people, doing sexy things, in a seedy environment that probably smelled of sex and maybe rubber. 

It was a profoundly uncomfortable viewing experience. My choice of film suggested that I was engaged in some kind of covert seduction technique, whereby I put images on the screen and then nodded encouragingly. I felt the need to keep shouting things like, "Oh, I wasn't expecting this film to be full of women tying each other up!" Which I don't think helped. 

The Bourne Identity / Supremacy / Ultimatum

I own these films because they are ace. They are smart and interesting, and they changed the shape of action cinema forever. These are the films that the James Bond series looked at, and said, "Oh no! My fight scenes look like some old women mildly disagreeing with each other about the weather!" And then instantly stole the whole rough and ready aesthetic for Casino Royale. 

However, my favourite thing about them is how the different instalments are named. 

As you will have seen, I like to keep my films ordered alphabetically by title. This brings order to a chaotic universe and also makes them easier to find. But problems arise when you have a film series. Take, for example, Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy.  There's Batman Begins, up with the B films where it belongs. And then its sequels, The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises, languishing away a couple of shelves down. It doesn't work, does it? Would it have killed him to call the first film The Dark Knight Begins? Or title the sequels Batman Gets On With It and Batman Calls It A Day?

You see how hard my life is? But, look at the lovely old Bourne films. It's as if they were designed for me. Not only to they have the good grace to all begin with the same word, but the sequels appear in alphabetical order! You beauties!

One small thing, though. You can't have Albert Finney and Brian Cox in the same film series, playing similar characters in different films. Too confusing! Who's going to keep track of that?

Bowling For Columbine

Finally, for today. A film that I absolutely loved at the time. I watched it loads, and agreed with it loads, and shouted about it to everyone who would listen. It felt like a well argued, funny and interesting polemic that really got to the heart of the horrible events post 9/11.

This felt like an essential film, in the mid naughties. Has it held up? I haven't seen it for a while, but I would imagine not. Michael Moore's blunderbuss approach to things is fun to watch but it can be quite overbearing. He's not one for subtlety. I kind of liked that at the time - you needed to make a loud argument to combat the shameless rhetoric of the pro-war lobby. This movie, full of cartoons and jokes and big, loud visual essays, really hit the spot and shaped a lot of my approach to the situation. 

But nowadays it all seems a bit much. Noisy, oversimplified, cartoonish arguments have become the fundamental currency of online discourse, and the joke doesn't seem so funny any more. And the concerns of 20 years ago seem almost quaint - it's hard to feel as incensed by George W's antics now we've seen so many other charlatans in power.

Will I watch this again? Yeah, probably, one day. But less as a call to arms, and more as a document of times gone and not coming back. 

So there you are. Here are some films I own, and why. I hope you feel enlightened. 

Should you wish to look at other amazing examples of films I own, you could click here...

Previously: The Beyond to The Blues Brothers