Meg’s zapped me with the film meme that’s running around like Asian ‘flu. Here’s my choice:
Total Number of Films Owned: Difficult to say because categorising them all has always been a sort of theoretical concept alongside hypothetical projects like, ‘If I had the money & the space, I’d buy a classic car & restore it’, or, ‘One day I’ll walk the entire length of the Pennine Way’. But I’d guess-timate something around the 3 -400 mark on video & another 50 – 60 on DVD.
Last Film Bought: Cold Mountain, which, in spite of Nicole Kidman’s default simpering throughout, I enjoyed very much.
Last Film Watched: See above.
Five Favorite Films That I Watch Frequently or That Mean A Lot To Me:
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Brief Encounter – David Lean + Trevor Howard & Celia Johnson. If ever a film tapped into & communicated with heartbreaking intensity English emotional modesty, restraint &, ultimately, heroic self-sacrifice, this is the one. I weep each time I watch it.
- If – Lindsay Anderson + Malcolm McClaren & David Wood. Again, a quintessentially English film, this time tapping into that deep vein of heretical radicalism that was in full & joyous revival in 1967, the year in which its maverick director shot it. I cheer each time watch it.
- The Wild Bunch – Sam Peckinpah + William Holden, Robert Ryan, Edmund O’Brien & Ernest Borgnine. The last Western. In its bloody but elegiac wake no further Westerns should have been made (with the exception of Unforgiven). A rare & precious example of that most satisfying of syntheses, the human scale epic.
- Battleship Potemkin – Sergei Eisenstein + ??? My father took me to see this most influential of films when I was 12. Its stark images & terrifying action sequences entered my dreams & have haunted me ever since. Many years after seeing it that first time I learned about concepts like montage & the power of Truth over Reality, but it’s the sheer elemental power of the film, its creation of a world into which the viewer is immediately drawn, that exert their influence over me every time I watch it.
- Some Like It Hot – Billy Wilder + Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon. In a final playoff, probably the funniest film ever made. Dream casting – although everyone on set hated MM - & two actors clearly enjoying themselves so much they’d have done it for free.
Movie you would most like to see again if you could find it: Shadows - John Cassavetes + Ben Carruthers & Lelia Goldoni. An enormously atmospheric movie about a mixed-race relationship, set in New York Cit & released in 1959 (after an earlier mid-‘50s version was poorly received). Largely improvised, virtually plotless & defiantly hand-made, powered along by an intoxicating jazz score. When at the age of 15 I saw it at the National Film Theatre (again with my very hip father), it supplied the visual & aural context to the Beat novels & poetry that I was devouring at the time. I’ve caught up with it occasionally in the years since, but have only just tracked down a decent copy on DVD.
Additional mop-up category for some of the other films that, had the wind been blowing from a different direction, I would have chosen instead of the above…
- Lost in Translation (Sophia Coppola).
- The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman).
- The Way to the Stars (Anthony Asquith).
- Dead Man Walking (Tim Robbins).
- Airplane (Jim Abrahams & David Zucker).
- On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan).
- The Lord of the Rings (Peter Jackson).
- State & Main (David Mamet).
- Un Coeur En Hiver (Claude Sautet)
- A Canterbury Tale (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger).
- Prospero’s Books (Peter Van Greenaway).
- Kanal (Andrzej Wajda)
- Schindler’s List (Stephen Spielberg).
- Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais.
- The Searchers – John Ford.
- Gadjo Dilo (Tony Gatlif).
- Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Stephen Spielberg).
- Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola).
- Glengarry Glen Ross (David Mamet)
I gotta stop…
By inflexible meme law, I’m supposed to sling this to three unsuspecting souls who probably commit more than enough time to preparing & posting their own material already. So I’m going to risk expulsion from the sanctum sanctorum of the Hard Core Memers & place it on the open market. Pick it up. whomsoever, but maybe link back here so we can all have a look.
9:44:44 PM 
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