In Heaven, Everything is Fine

A few days ago David Lynch - the wonderful film director, artist and human being - slipped off this plane of reality and into the next. He died, victim of his own very strong desire to spend his entire life bathing in a web of cigarette smoke. In fairness, he did look great. But his passing leaves my world a little smaller, and I am sad. 

Much has been written about Lynch. A long line of people have queued up to have a go at explaining his mad, elliptical movies - like people lining up to try and open a particularly tight jam jar, all convinced that they would be the one with the strength in their wrists to manage it, despite the clear failure of everyone who went before them. His work resists interpretation, and so of course the attempts will continue forever. The jam's going to stay in the jar, and we just get to peer in and wonder.

I can't open the jar either, and I'm not going to try. I have no clever insight. What I do have is my own relationship with his work, snaking through the years as I come across each new film. I think, really, that's all any of us have. 

Here, for your reading pleasure, is my particular journey beyond the red curtain. 

Eraserhead

One Thursday in the 1980s I called round at my friend Paul's house to see if he was coming out. We were not-quite teenagers, and so were in that phase where plans extended no further than "I knock on your door and, if you are free, we wander round the streets giggling and climbing walls." Imagine that now. If someone knocked on my door, out of the blue, and said, "Let's just hang out with no particular agenda," I would chase them away with a stick. 

On this particular Thursday, I went into the living room of Paul's parents' house to wait while he got ready. His parents were watching a film, and that film was bonkers. There was a woman, singing, on a stage. Except there was something wrong with her face. She had huge, hamster like cheeks and strange, rough skin. She was smiling, but her eyes were desperate and sad. The whole thing was in black and white, and felt vaguely nightmarish. Paul's dad looked up at me, and by way of explanation said, "She lives behind his radiator." Right. Thanks Paul's dad. Paul and I left the house and probably went to sit on a shed roof or something and talk about Blake's 7. But that weird, mysterious image of the woman stayed with me. 

Years later I saw all of Eraserhead, and it was as delightfully uncanny as that first impression suggested. I've seen it maybe a dozen times since, and every time it is equally unsettling. The non-sequitur imagery pulses with the logic and tone of a nightmare: the moon faced guy, the radiator lady, the baby... oh God, the baby. A couple of times I've made a new friend and, excited to share my world with them, stuck the film on, with the caveat that it is 'probably the weirdest thing I've seen.' The way they looked at me afterwards suggested that this was not adequate preparation.

Wild at Heart

I went to university in the early 90s, just as Twin Peaks was unfurling its tendrils across the television landscape. I didn't watch it at the time. I'd missed the first season, I think, and wasn't in a position to catch up. Plus, and this is probably the real reason, everyone else was watching it. And by everyone, I meant all the cool people on my course at college. They were really into it, and went on about it, and had cool in-the-know conversations about the Log Lady and Bob and The Owls and all that.

I was already pretty much an outsider on my course. I hadn't read enough books, I wasn't as smart as everyone else and I was much less sure of myself. Or rather, I wasn't as good at covering up my not-sure-of-myself-ness. This was just one more reason to feel left out, and so I rejected Twin Peaks, taking control of my outsider feelings by acting like it was a choice. 

However. The people who were into Peaks were also into David Lynch in a big way, and they started a film society called - brilliantly - Lynch Pin. And they showed Eraserhead, which I knew I loved. And they showed Wild At Heart. Well. It's hard to express the impact this had on me. In the first sequence, Nicolas Cage smashes a guys head open, in a shocking moment of visceral violence that made me uncomfortable, horrified and thrilled in equal measure. The film then careened off on a crazy path that was like a banquet of new, exotic flavours and textures. Did I like it? Maybe? I wasn't sure. I just knew there was something mesmerising about the too-dark night through which our heroes drove, the seductive music that accompanied their bewildering adventures, and the out-there characters they met - people who seemed both cartoonish and yet frighteningly real. None more so than Willem Dafoe's appalling Bobby Peru, who leered horribly into my soul from that day on. 

I loved it. And something shifted inside; I couldn't go back to enjoying film in the same way, now I'd tasted this. The next week they showed Heathers (they weren't exclusively a Lynch film club - they allowed other weird, nightmare-adjacent stuff too). Heathers is a very good film with loads of cool ideas. But it felt tame and conventional after the astonishing heroin hit of Wild at Heart. I never properly fell in with the cool guys - and deservedly so, I was a right mess - but I have always silently thanked them for that exposure to the beauty and brilliance of David Lynch.

Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway, and all that

I completed my degree in literature, having learned many things, chief among them being that I wasn't actually very interested in literature. I preferred film, thanks. Why did books still exist when we had films? (This may, also, be part of the reason I didn't fit in at college - they all loved books and thought they were great). I spent the rest of the 1990s exploring the world of cinema, trying to get a sense of what were the films you 'should' have seen. What were the ones that got talked about, and referenced by magazines - the ones that influenced the work that came afterwards? 

Previously, my guide-ropes through the world of film had been fairly basic. Did I like the actors? Would there be explosions and/or murders? Was it Star Wars? If the answer to any of these questions was yes, I would pursue the film. Now I had something new: the concept that the director was the author of the movie, and that if I liked one of their films, I'd probably like the others. 

So off I went, chasing down the other movies of directors I liked. I would later learn that the concept of  'the director as author' is not so simple. However, in the case of David Lynch, it appeared to be a pretty compelling argument. As I devoured Blue Velvet, Lost Highway and - later - Mulholland Drive, I recognised that weird, otherworldly flavour that I'd first tasted in Paul's living room, and again in the darkened room of the college film club. David Lynch had a set of very clear preoccupations and they appeared to be, in no particular order:

dark, twisted sexuality

cool jazz

no, you may not understand the story

nudity

dreams

violence that comes out of absolutely nowhere

film noir

fluctuating worlds and/or realities

elemental evil

you will laugh, but you will not be sure why

these three or four actors are my friends and get to be in everything

I've lumped these films together because, to me, they are part of the same experience: an awakening into the idea of cinema as one person's vision. As if we're looking not at a person making art, but rather into a world that you can only see when that person briefly pulls at the edge of the world and draws it back, like a curtain you never knew was there.

David Lynch started to become a touchstone for me, like David Bowie: someone I didn't really understand, but who exemplified the things I wanted to understand. A creator who made things that seemed genuine and personal, and unique. I was struggling a lot with that, in the 90s, I was trying to make things - songs, poems, stories - but I couldn't hear my own voice in anything I did. It seemed lost in imitation, in fear of how it might be received, in the foolish belief that it needed to say something. Have a purpose.

For now, I would watch this guy, and others like him, and try to work him out. Not what his work meant - that jam jar wasn't going to open any time soon. I wanted to know what it was he was doing. How he found a way to get that elemental, beautiful stuff inside him out into the world, in a way which made people... feel something. 

How was he doing that?

That will do, for now. We're about to get onto my first viewing of Twin Peaks, and that needs a little time to breathe. See you next time, for warm synths, swinging traffic lights and a decade where I outsourced my emotional life to the inhabitants of a small, beautiful town on the edge of the world.

Rob's Amazing Film Collection - Part Seven: Box of the Banned to A Bridge Too Far

 

What's better than looking through someone else's stuff? That's right - nothing. It's not weird, it's great and normal.  Well, happy days for all of us, because I've decided, for some reason, to let you gaze in admiration at my shelves of DVDs and BluRays.  We'll look at some of the films in there, I'll try to remember anything at all about the film and you get to judge me for my lack of culture! It's win win.

This time, we're wandering towards the end of the 'B' section. Let's see what's in there. 

Box of the Banned

Well straight away we've hit what scientists would call 'A complication'. The first two items on the shelf are not films but, rather, collections of films. 

The films in question are all ones that were banned in the 1980s. Apparently they were too horrible to watch and if we saw them we'd all go mad and eat each other or something, so they were hidden away where no-one could see them. A few years later, in the mid 00s, everyone calmed down and went, "Alright, you can watch them - just promise not to go mad and eat each other or something." And we all said, "We promise," and so here we are, with these lovely collections in our houses, and almost no-one got eaten.

A lot of these films had been mysterious, forbidden titles since I was a child, so I was most excited to get my hands on them. They came from a fascinating time - a time when film makers went, "Hey, no-one is regulating this - we can do whatever we want!" It turned out that what they mostly wanted to do was to show people's faces coming off.  

I don't propose to go into them all in detail. The quality is variable, with the only real constant being, "Don't put this on unless you want everyone else to start crying and being sick". There are some real highlights, like the original Evil Dead (which I'll be talking about if we ever get to 'E') and Zombie Flesh Eaters - a mad Italian zombie film where a zombie fights a shark underwater. I know, amazing, right? 

But there's also stuff that's quite dull, having gained notoriety simply through the act of being banned in the first place, like Driller Killer, which peaks once you're done reading the title. And some stuff that's genuinely quite horrible, and after you've watched it your DVD player seems to glare at you for making it touch the thing. Yes, I Spit On Your Grave, that would be you. Go away and think about what you've done. 

Boys Don't Cry

Alright, this is going terribly. I've owned this film for years but never seen it. I know, I know - it's meant to be amazing. There's no excuse. I'm just a very lazy boy.

I bought this when I was teaching a module on the new wave of independent cinema. One of the great things about cinema is that it's easy to become an expert - much easier than literature with all those stupid long books. So I quickly bought and watched all of the films in this 'new wave' and declared myself the king of being hip and cineliterate. 

Well, I watched all of them except one. Kimberley Pierce's Boys Don't Cry has sat on my shelf for over ten years, silently judging me. Why have I watched everything else but not this? I even watched Aronofsky's Pi for God's sake, and that's about ants and drills and in black and white.

I'm sorry, Boys Don't Cry. I did watch Pierce's remake of Carrie, so it kind of feels like this is on you. Did you have a telekinetic fight scene? No, you did not. 

Boys N the Hood

You'll be delighted to know I've actually seen this film, though only quite recently. It was another film, like Boys Don't Cry, that seemed to hover about forever saying, "You should have watched me, you know." And because I'm a contrary beast, I'd put it off as long as possible. You can't tell me what to do, films with 'Boys' in the title.

I'd always kind of thought, "Well, this isn't really made for me." I'm as white as it's possible to be, and I felt like watching it might be the equivalent of suddenly trying to do complicated handshakes with everyone and calling them 'Bro'. 

Which is, of course, idiotic. One of the great strengths of film is that it helps us to step into the shoes of others. As Roger Ebert said, it's a machine for generating empathy. Also, I bet I'd be ace at doing a complicated handshake, and there's no way anyone would call it cultural appropriation. 

Braindead

Back before he became obsessed with Hobbits and Beatles, Peter Jackson was into blood and zombies and making you feel sick. Braindead is one of his earlier, funnier works. In terms of content it's a horror movie, with people becoming violent zombies and rampaging through a quiet town. But in tone, it's played as broad farce - a comedy of manners where disguising the effects of the zombie outbreak is as important as surviving them. 

I was a university student when this came out. I already loved Bad Taste - Jackson's first horrifically violent monster comedy - and was well up for more. This ticked all the right boxes. Visceral cartoon violence (slicing through an army of the undead with a lawnmower). Implausible, outlandish set pieces (hosting a dinner party while trying to conceal that some guests have body parts falling into the soup). And brilliantly silly dialogue ("Your mother ate my dog!" "Not all of it.")

This is one of those films I used to show to everyone, fondly believing it to be a universally hilarious piece of work which everyone would enjoy. I've since been informed, by the friends that are still around, that this is not really the case, and had I considered taking some kind of personality test?

Brassed Off

This is lovely, isn't it? I think it suffered a little at the time for being 'Not Trainspotting'. It came out around the same time as Danny Boyle's tale of Scottish drug shenanigans, and the marketing - sensibly - leaned into some surface level similarities. "Did you enjoy Ewan McGregor shooting heroin into his veins and experiencing the bleakest, most desolate levels of human misery? Then maybe you'd also like to see him play the tenor horn with some old men!"

When I first saw this, I assumed it was going to be part of that same "New British Film" thing, shaking off the stuffiness of the Merchant Ivory stuff and doing young, fresh, anarchic things with style and content. But that's not Brassed Off's gig, really. It's a precursor to more down to earth films - a  kind of John The Baptist to the politically inclined regional Jesuses of The Full Monty and Billy Elliot. 

It's funny and good hearted, but shot through with a kind of melancholy love for the struggle of the working class. And at no point does a dead baby crawl across a ceiling.

Braveheart

I've not watched this in years. Not since Mel 'Racism' Gibson went awful in public and made it hard to watch him in anything without thinking, "You bad racist! I hope you lose."

That's not the reason I've not seen it for so long, though. I'm generally fine with distancing an artist from their work, and a film in particular is the work of so many people that it seems mad to associate it with just one villainous contributor.

No, it's not that. It's just... it's so very long, isn't it? Three hours or thereabouts. Who's got that kind of time? Maybe if it had robots. I'll happily sit through Blade Runner 2049. But if memory serves, Braveheart is mostly a load of kilted non-robots, being sad in the mud. 

I probably will get around to watching it again before too long. It's very enjoyable, as I recall. If it's ever on when I'm flicking through the channels, it's one of those films where you think, "Well, I'll just watch ten minutes of this and then go to bed," and then suddenly it's midnight and you're jumping up and down on the sofa demanding reparations from the English. 

Brawl in Cell Block 99

My friend Andy used to buy me a serious, quality film every Christmas. Eventually I had to confess to him that, though I appreciated his contribution to my cultural life and the thought he had put into his selections... if I was honest I'd rather watch people getting shot and/or punched in the face.

His look of disappointment was legendary, but he is nothing if not a listener. From then on, he swung right to the other end of the dial and started to gift me the most depraved, horrific and downright dumb films he could think of. 

This is such an example. I can't remember much about the plot, but I don't need to because there's the title, summing it all up. Some men have a very violent series of fights. Various film making techniques conspire to make you forget that you are an educated human being who opposes violence in all its forms, and you cheer on the frankly horrible punishments as they happen. At one point something happens that is so unspeakably gross that you find yourself making a noise that is at once an astonished laugh, a cry of horror and a whimper of relief that no-one else is witness to how excited you are.

Breakfast at Tiffany's

This is a weird film. It's a bit like Alfie, in that loads of people seem to love it and associate it with a kind of sexy, cool super fun lifestyle. And then you watch it and everyone is having a terrible time and their personalities are made of dust and there's a deep, dark ennui running through the veins of the narrative and oh my God why is life so bleak?

There is, however, a super nice song and Audrey Hepburn has a tremendous face. So I guess we'll file it under 'feel good hit of the Summer' and move on. 

The Breakfast Club

Haven't seen this in years, and have no strong desire to revisit it. I can't remember when I first saw it, but it was already too late to be caught up in whatever mad swell of zeitgeisty joy made everyone love it to pieces. I knew there was a great song in the soundtrack - the sublime Don't You Forget About Me, of course - and that it was meant to make you pulse with the endless Summers of youth. But I was in my 20s by then and already hated teenagers with a huge, uncontrollable passion. Bunch of whiny pricks. 

These days the opinion seems to be very much that The Breakfast Club is fairly problematic and that it hasn't really aged well. So why don't I throw it out? Well, it's a kind of document of time I suppose, worthy of study as a kind of bellwether of late 20th Century attitudes to sexual identity. And, also, when I'm really old, I'll probably watch any old nonsense if it makes me feel briefly, gloriously young again. Hey hey hey hey.

Bride of Frankenstein

I'm not a huge fan of classic horror. For me, everything pretty much starts with Night of the Living Dead and properly kicks into gear with Halloween. But this, if I remember it correctly, is a sparkly, sprightly joy. There's a knowing sense of playful experimentation to the whole thing that seems way ahead of its time - throwing up striking, iconic images and deftly playing with the form of the genre. 

It's almost as if they knew they were making something that would shape popular culture for decades to come and went, "OK, we're going to make a film, and the answer to every question we might have is 'Yes, let's'".

Bridesmaids

This could easily have been one of those films that became big just because it was important, what with its large female cast and proper attempt to redress the massive imbalance in who women were allowed to be in comedies. 

It is, however, great in its own right. There are massive swings at big, silly ideas and set pieces that lean heavily into the opportunities afforded by cinematic spectacle. But there's also proper solid character stuff in there and a love for the characters that makes this work beyond it's slapstick premise. 

The Bridge on the River Kwai

I have a lot of gaps in my 'proper old school film' knowledge. I watched this again recently, having  first watched it over 20 years ago while recovering from a broken arm. I couldn't remember anything about it, possibly because I'd been on loads of painkillers last time and kept laughing at everything. My verdict on this watch is that it's quite good, if a bit long, and maybe it would be funnier if I was on painkillers.

Bridget Jones's Diary / The Edge of Reason /  Baby

These are good, aren't they? I avoided them for ages, because I'm a bloke and page one of our manual makes it quite clear that time watching Bridget Jones is a waste of time that could be spent watching Pulp Fiction again. 

And from the bits I saw when it was on TV - usually Hugh Grant and Colin Firth slapping each other, or Renee Zellweger trying on some pants or something - it all looked a bit twee and broad and, frankly, for girls. The sort of cinematic equiivalent of a hen party. I know, and after all the nice things I said about Bridesmaids. I can hear you crossly scribbling out the bit of your notes that says "What an amazing feminist this man is."

Well, I don't think I was particularly wrong about the overall tone of these movies, but they're fun and well written and everyone in them is being generally delightful. And there's Sally Phillips in there too, and she's just lovely. Why isn't she in everything? 

A Bridge Too Far

Another 'classic' that I'd not seen until a few years ago. Before that, my primary association with the events depicted in the film was the computer game Arnhem, for the ZX Spectrum. If you're very young and don't know what a ZX Spectrum was, try to imagine what your phone would be like if you smashed out most of its brain and replaced its screen with horrid, fleshy rubber keys.  Yes, that's right - loads worse.

Nevertheless, my teenage self spent hours re-enacting the battle of Arnhem in a game with blocky, dayglo graphics, and considered himself fully up to date on the events of the Second World War. This turned out to be somewhat disastrous for my History O Levels and I do not recommend computer games as a 'primary source'.

Anyway, this film is great. Now, this is another long film but in this case the scale of the storytelling seems to justify the running time. We follow a massive cast, across a wide narrative field, and at no point was I looking at the time and shouting, for example, "Could you please just get on with blowing up the Bridge On the River Kwai please?"

I was very excited when I recently watched this film and, the very next day, found an emulator for my PC which allowed me to play Arnhem as if I still had my old ZX Spectrum. I'm pleased to report that I'm much better at it now, though I bet I'd still fail my History O-Level.

That's all for now. Hope you've enjoyed nosing around in my film collection, and hearing me desperately try to remember what happens in the very same films that I once spent money on. See you next time, for the last few films under 'B'. 

If you've enjoyed this, and we have to at least pretend that it's a possibility, then why not check out the last instalment, where I looked at Blue Velvet to Bowling For Columbine.

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

Next: Box of the Banned to A Bridge Too Far

Nope-enheimer

 

Well hello. Fancy meeting you here. 

Did you see Oppenheimer? The Christopher Nolan film, not the real life bloke. It seems likely that you did. It was one of those films that everyone sort of had to see, for some reason. Even people who couldn't be bothered with films went to see it. 

It was like in 1997 when my parents went to see The Full Monty, even though they hadn't been to the cinema since the dawn of the moving image. Such was the buzz about the Sheffield based strippers, they shook off their cobwebs and shambled down to the multiplex to stare at the big screen and marvel at how things had moved on since "Train Arriving at Station".

I didn't like Oppenheimer very much. Putting me in opposition (oppensition?) to most people, it seems. You all loved it, didn't you? You people! Loving things, as if that's cool or something. 

Anyway. It annoys me that I didn't like it. I want to like things, and I'm generally inclined to find the positive in things. So why didn't I like this thing? Let's find out together. Here's my reasons for not liking Oppenheimer. And yes, I'm quite likely wrong about all of it.

It was too long

Before the film had started, it had already annoyed me. Three hours? That's too long, for almost everything. Even something amazing will pall if you do it for three hours. Eating a Curly Wurly. Singing along to the chorus of 'Live it Up' by Mental as Anything. Watching the little glow run around the title in the opening credits of "Cheers". All great experiences that would be rendered terrible by going on too long.

Some films do justify a hefty run time, of course. Blade Runner 2049 is nearly three hours, and I bloody love that. Nolan's own Inception is fairly long - also great. And one of my favourite films - Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia - is over three hours. Over!

So it was possible for Oppenheimer to surprise me, and pull off the same magic trick. "Ta daa! I was worth the run time!" But it didn't. It started to tell its story, then wandered off to tell a whole bunch of different stories. Then it had some new characters talk about the story we'd just been told, except now in black and white. And then it looked at its watch and went, "Well, that's three hours. Guess I'll arbitrarily stop now."

A longer film often betrays a lack of discipline in the writing. Focus, people. Focus.

A boy enjoys some falling frogs. 

Just one of many reasons to sit through three hours of Magnolia.

Nalon Rehpotsirhc.

Yeah, that was annoying to read wasn't it? Well that's because, rather than just writing Nolan's name out forwards, like a normal human being, I decided to put it backwards for no reason. 

Part of my irritation with this film is that I used to love Christopher Nolan films. My first viewing of his second film, Memento, remains one of my greatest ever cinema experiences. I can remember the thrill as I slowly started to see what he was doing with structure, and marvel at the complexity and brilliance of the way he was manipulating time. 

A few years ago I would have said that he was one of my favourite directors. I loved the way his films played with narrative, and made us reconsider concepts like motivation, causality and responsibility. He used cinematic storytelling in brilliant, exciting ways and there was a real thread running through his work that was distinctive and - to me - incredibly engaging. 

Recently, though, it's all started to feel like this narrative approach is less his signature and more like a sort of catchphrase. Like he can't tell a story without cutting it into chunks and throwing everything up in the air. What was once a powerful and integral part of his message is now a gimmick that everyone, including him, seems to expect.

Memento: Coherent. Focused. Under two hours. Tattoo that on your wrists, Nolan.

I, the Contrarian

As I mentioned above, I don't like not liking things. A self-reflexive concept that Nolan would probably enjoy. 

I'm often suspicious when people loudly claim that they don't like a popular thing. You know the kind of behaviour. You'll get something that there's a generally positive buzz about. Sherlock (the TV show). Coldplay (the popular music beat combo). Football (the horrible, boring activity). Stuff like that.

And there they are - the professional contrarian, preening themselves like a peacock and harrumphing to the world that, actually, they most certainly don't like it. Or never watch it. Or whatever is the opposite of what everyone else is doing. Because they, you see, are a dangerous, cool minded thinker. 

Don't get me wrong - it's fine not to like stuff.  As you may have gleaned from the above, I don't have much time for football. But it's not a personality trait, and I certainly don't need to leap in when other people are enjoying it and make sure they know how different and dangerous I am.

All of which is to say... I'm suspicious of my own dislike, here. I knew, before I went in, that everyone was coming out of this film saying it was amazing. Admiring it seemed like a foregone conclusion. What if my dislike is not based on a critical appraisal of the film at all, but rather a subconscious desire to stand apart - to be that iconoclast who sees things for how they really are?

You see, that's why Nolan's earlier films are so good. They present characters who seem to be noble and well motivated, and then undermine them through narrative revelations, challenging that most basic of human beliefs: that we know who we are and why we do things. 

I guess there's some of that in Oppenheimer too. Maybe if it wasn't so bloody muddied by all the extra pointless detail, then I'd have seen it. 

"Dear everyone who likes football. I won't be watching, because I don't like it. It is important that you know this for some reason."

Oh, so worthy

Not all my reasons for disliking this film are fair, as you'll have seen. And this last one is possibly the least fair of all: I don't like it because it's so very, very Awards Friendly. 

I'm writing this before both the BAFTAs and the Oscars - both events where Oppenheimer might sweep across the board, destroying everything that lay before it like... well, you know. And for some reason that annoys me. 

It's not that it's a film without cinematic merit. There are some amazing visual ideas in there, and only a fool would argue that Nolan is a bad director. The sequence of the bomb test is incredible, and there's real power to the scene where Oppenheimer visualises the flesh-shredding effects of his work on the faces of those he knows. 

But that's not what's going on with these nominations, I don't think. Plenty of films have demonstrated this kind of innovative, cinematic flair, and failed to get so much as a mention. No, what's being rewarded here is the importance of the subject matter. The atom bomb. The Destroyer Of Worlds.

And I sort of get that. This is a super important subject, and people should know more about it. And it's a timely tale, of how our actions are part of a wider tapestry, of accountability and consequences. I can see why that's a message that needs shouting out in the current political climate. 

But we're not rewarding essays here. This is about film. A visual, kinetic experience that engages us on a primal level. The message is part of that, yes, but it should arise from the storytelling, and that storytelling should be cinematic. The importance of the message is not an excuse for failings in those other areas. On the contrary - if your message is that profound, focus yourself in the bloody telling of it.

I am very here for the universe where this wins all the awards. But I bet it won't.

So there we go. Like I say, I'm probably wrong about everything. I might well watch the film a second time and go, "Hey, you know what - I missed so many things and actually this is ace. " But if I do, I'll leave this little rant as it is. 

One thing Christopher Nolan's films have made me think about - his earlier, funnier films - is the way we can never be fully sure of where we stand. Our beliefs and opinions don't spring from some pure, righteous source within us, born of rigorous logic and self knowledge. 

We're subject to past experiences, unconscious prejudices, the people around us and the things we read... millions of things that nibble away at us every day, altering our perspectives in ways we don't even see.

The people who are most dangerous are those who are sure of what they think, and won't be budged on that opinion. Maybe the real destroyer of worlds is not a bomb, but rather, that state of being where we are utterly certain of the rightness of our own opinion.

Yeah?

Yeah?

Nah. It was that bomb. Did you see it go off? Try arguing with that on social media.