The Cameraman's Revenge

I’ve seen a few bloggers doing this meme of sorts, found it via Andy Buckle, and decided I might as well play along, thought it might make a nice end to this year of blogging… basically, the idea is to pick 12 films that stand as noticeable holes in one’s film literacy, and then try and watch all of them over the course of the next year. Unlike others, I don’t intend to make a regular feature of these films or do them on a monthly schedule or any such, but I’ll try and get through them all through the course of 2012. And then at the end of next year this post will either stand as an indicator of how well I did, or it will continue to mock me. I’ll link to any reviews I write of these films as/when I see them.

At any rate, here are 12 films I’ve never seen that are not currently on my backlog of stuff I own. Prepare to be aghast, or not.

1. The Kid (1921)—because it is ridiculous that I’ve seen everything Chaplin has made up to Limelight, shorts and features, except this
2. Captain Blood (1935)—which I’ve been meaning to watch for, oh, the best part of two decades without ever actually getting around to doing
3. Notorious (1946)—seems to be the prime Hitchcock I’ve never seen
4. The Furies (1950)—mainly cos it looks awesome in Scorsese’s Personal Journey
5. Little Shop of Horrors (1960)—seen some of the remake but never the original, and I should rectify that
6. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)—musicals aren’t my thing, really, which is probably why I’ve never seen this
7. Mouchette (1967)—would appear to be the major easily available Bresson that I haven’t seen
8. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)—which I’m sure is as good as it’s said to be, but I’ve just never been able to summon up the will to watch it
9. Back to the Future (1985)—since you ask, no, I have no fucking idea how I’ve never seen this at any point. It’s not like Channel 10 don’t show it or one of its sequels seemingly every other week
10. Groundhog Day (1993)—again, no idea how I’ve never seen this
11. The Death of Mr Lazarescu (2005) and
12. Certified Copy (2010)—both of which are, I gather, among the most acclaimed arthouse products of the last decade

I’m probably not challenging myself overmuch with this list, cos I can get my hands on all of the above without too much difficulty; it’s just a matter of stirring myself to actually do so. As I said, this time next year we’ll be able to judge how well I did…

Normally I limit myself to reviews here, but the passing of Sidney Lumet, coupled with some reading I’ve been doing of late… going back through some old film theory/criticism books. What particularly motivates this post are various bits in those books related to auteur theory, including Truffaut’s “Certain Tendency”, Sarris and Kael duking it out, etc. It remains problematic in many ways, but it’s still the approach I tend to use the most, and I want to consider Lumet somewhat in that light. All of which needs to be prefaced with the fact that, admittedly, I’ve only ever seen two of his films (those being Fail Safe and Network),  but anyway…

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I keep an Excel spreadsheet which lists all the films I see, as well as all the ones I own and ones I’ve still to watch. This is a screenshotof part of the latter:

That’s five out of about 70-odd films I’ve got waiting for me on DVD that I’ll be reviewing at some point in the next few months. And up until now, in going through the backlog, you may have observed me taking a somewhat broadly chronological approach to the task. Unfortunately, by the time I get to the 1980s that approach will present me with a certain issue. Can you see what it is? Yes, that’s right: if I go about it chronologically, I’m going to be doing two “Ozploitation” films, a French sexploitation film, a Hong Kong actioner, and right in the middle of them I’ll be doing a nine-hour documentary on the fucking Holocaust. One of these things is not like the other indeed. I might have to rethink chronology as a method…

With the announcement of the next lot of upcoming Criterion Collection releases, I thought it might be interesting to actually go through the collection and see how much of it I’m familiar with. By “interesting” I mean probably only to me, not to anyone else, but eh.

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Hello to the surprising number of people who’ve visited the blog recently from various Livejournal communities devoted to The Professionals. (The reference to Lewis Collins in the For Your Eyes Only review seems to have caught some attention.) Nice to see CI5 still have a decent fanbase, though I will confess to feeling slightly weirded out at the discovery that Bodie-Doyle slash exists…

For anyone who may or may not be interested…

As an experiment, I’m reopening comments on the blog. I’m getting a bit bored talking to myself here, but depending on how the open comments thing goes I may go back to that. I will moderate all comments so that spam doesn’t get published, but if I’m attracting too many spambots I’ll shut them off again.

Once the Bond film “project” is over, I’ve got a few other things in the pipeline:

— a round-up of the other titles in the Satanic Sickies boxes that I don’t think warrant individual reviews

— the Val Lewton RKO horror films of the 40s

— the Harold Lloyd DVDs. I’m using the nine-disc Australian issue cos it’s in PAL and so not afflicted by the video combing that makes the US NTSC version hard to watch, and also it has Welcome Danger which isn’t in the American set

— Kino’s Avant-Garde series

— the Unseen Cinema box

Obviously not counting the mountain of other unwatched DVDs I’ve still to get through, nor the ongoing loans from Brendan, etc. In short, there’s a lot of content to come on this blog, and it’ll be a while before I need to struggle for something new to add here. What do I do once I’ve finished the mound of stuff I haven’t seen before? Why, I just go out and buy more stuff and in the meantime go back to things I have seen before and write about those! Hell, I may even GO AND SEE SOMETHING NEW AT THE CINEMA at some point…

A couple of blog posts I’ve seen in the last few days have resonated with me. Read the rest of this entry »

This is a list of all the Hammer films I’ve seen to date, based on the list in A Thing of Unspeakable Horror…

• Song of Freedom
• The Quatermass Xperiment
• The Abominable Snowmen
• The Curse of Frankenstein
• Dracula
• The Hound of the Baskervilles
• The Mummy
• The Damned
• Dracula, Prince of Darkness
• Rasputin the Mad Monk
• The Plague of the Zombies
• Frankenstein Created Woman
• Quatermass and the Pit
• Dracula Has Risen From the Grave
• The Vengeance of She
• Moon Zero Two
• The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires
• To the Devil a Daughter

Must do better.

“Who, me? Oh no, I got a bellyache…” With those words, uttered 75 years ago, one of the silver screen’s great performers made his film debut. If the mouse was still Disney’s most famous creation, the duck would rapidly prove much more interesting. This was particularly true for Disney’s production crew, who were tiring of Mickey by the mid-1930s; as Maltin says, Mickey needed to be surrounded by other co-stars who were funnier than he was, and didn’t offer a great deal of possibilities otherwise cos he had to be kept child-friendly. Donald Duck had potential that the mouse was running out of; no wonder this barely understandable ball of feathered bad attitude wound up displacing Mickey by the end of the decade.

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