100 Film Facts About Me

Borrowing this idea from Stevee. Or, if you prefer, stealing it outright. Quite a few folk have been doing the same of late, and though I don’t normally participate in these memes and things, I thought a bit of a change from the norm wouldn’t be a bad thing. So brace yourselves, cos I go up to a hundred with this and I crap on a lot more than I usually do here…

1. For years I thought the first film I ever saw—or at least could remember seeing—was Robert Altman’s Popeye. Which I recall seeing at the State Theatre here in Sydney (obviously when it still ran films regularly instead of just at film festival time).
2. But, if IMDB’s release dates are right, I find after a bit of research that this honour probably actually goes to Herbie Goes Bananas, which was apparently released here in December 1980, as opposed to Popeye being released in May 1981.
3. I think the earliest film I can actually date when I saw it is E.T., which would’ve probably been January 28, 1983. I know this because I remember when we came out of the cinema, I remember a story on the front page of the newspaper about one of the dwarves who operated the E.T. suit having died. Research indicates this was the one, so I’m taking his death date as a guide.
4. I haven’t seen E.T. again since then.
5. I almost never went to the cinema when I was little, except if Dad took me during school holidays. One exception to this rule was when my late brother Grant took me with him to see The World According to Garp. For the life of me I have no idea why he thought that would be suitable viewing for an eight year old.
6. I don’t believe I’ve seen Garp since then either. It and E.T. are probably the two films I’ve gone the longest between first and second viewings (first seen January 1983, not seen since). There’s two films I can think of that might be longer than those two (the above Herbie film and Condorman, which I would’ve seen in mid-1982), but I can’t remember if I ever saw them again or not.
7. Mum almost never went to the cinema after the family moved here from Scotland in 1968. This is the sum total of all her cinemagoing that I know of since then: Oliver, The Poseidon Adventure, For Your Eyes Only, one of the first two Crocodile Dundee films (or was it both?), Dances With Wolves, Braveheart, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, and The Passion of the Christ. I took her to the last two. The first two were before I was born and the others were family gatherings.
8. I actually still recall how I felt at the time when we went to For Your Eyes Only, i.e. kind of quietly freaked out by Bond dropping Blofeld down the chimney stack at the start. That’s probably my first memory of what I thought of a film at the time I first saw it.
9. I also got Mum interested in martial arts movies when I was getting into them myself in the mid to late 90s. I could never have done anything of the sort with Dad, I don’t think.
10. I didn’t seriously get into film until I was 15. The film that tipped me over the edge was a German film from 1928 called Alraune, which just goes to show that it’s not always the recognised standard classics that draw you in. I still treasure my recording of it, cos I don’t believe SBS ever showed it again apart from that one Saturday night in July 1990.
11. SBS then showed Sergei Eisenstein’s October a few months later. That sealed the deal for me.
12. If I could travel back in time, I would give myself a severe beating for many things, not least for being, at that tender age, the sort of classic film snob I’ve since come to hate. So many films I could’ve seen at that time if only I hadn’t been sniffy about watching them cos they weren’t old enough.
13. I like to think I’ve outgrown that sort of behaviour, which I do now find kind of contemptible, though now I fear I’ve just transferred my affection to different decades…
14. I don’t know if I actually do just like older films more than newer ones, or if I’m just waiting for more recent films to become sanctioned by the passage of time like most designated classics have been. Probably the latter.
15. I have a watchlist containing over three and a half thousand titles, which I’ve compiled from a number of lists at ICheckMovies.com (specifically: the Criterion and Eclipse collections, 1001 Movies, They Shoot Pictures, Doubling the Canon, 21st Century Top 250, Top 500 Horror, Top 500 Cult, Amos Vogel’s Film as a Subversive Art, my own Drive-In Delirium list, and lists from Ebert, Rosenbaum and David Thomson). I am resigned to the fact that I will likely never see most of these (particularly the ones from the Vogel book, though I will admit to being self-impressed by some of the titles on that I have found), but it’s still nice to have something to aspire to.
16. I spent five years (1993-1997) doing a Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Film Studies at the University of New South Wales (with a BA in History as a second major). The day I discovered it was possible to do such a thing was one of the best in my life.
17. I still don’t really regret the fact that it was completely useless.
18. I’m not sure what made me want to actually make films, but I think it may have been seeing Battleship Potemkin. Certainly I recall writing some montage-style script for a scene some time after that.
19. Any desire I had to be a filmmaker was then fairly comprehensively destroyed by the experience of actually working on two short productions (one of them part of the university degree) and the fairly unpleasant personal aftermath of same. Long stories but suffice to say both ended with good friends no longer being good friends.
20. In the Honours seminars, a lot of the stuff we watched was on 16mm film. I wound up being the projectionist more often than not.
21. My Honours thesis was on Stanley Kubrick’s use of genre, with particular reference to 2001 and The Shining.
22. For a couple of years after the university course finished, I did a Continuing Education course in film history taught by Australian critic David Stratton, and I actually taught him something one week: we were watching Häxan, and the print he showed was the 1968 reissue with the William Burroughs narration and no title cards (apart from the dialogue titles)… but it didn’t have the narration, so all we had was this thing with no expository intertitles and it baffled the hell out of people. I told him what the situation was after the screening. Stratton had no idea there was another version of the film that actually made sense.
23. I also contributed to his video library by loaning him my kind of shitty VHS copy of The Cocoanuts.
24. About the only good thing the degree did was make me look kind of impressive when I started doing Celluloid Dreams, the film program on community radio station 2SER, in September 1999. Especially when it turned out one of my co-hosts on the show had been in one of my film classes in 1995. Neither of us really remembered the other.
25. The first film I reviewed on the show: The Sixth Sense.
26. The first interview I did: Julien Temple, on the occasion of The Filth & the Fury. He’s one of two people I’ve met (Don Letts—who I met in passing at 2SER when someone else was interviewing him for the show—being the other) connected with the Sex Pistols.
27. I’ve also interviewed Bruce Campbell (when Bubba Ho-Tep made its belated Australian debut). He was fun.
28. I probably shouldn’t admit this, but I bear a certain personal grudge against Australian director Ray Lawrence after he refused to be interviewed by me in 2006 when Jindabyne came out. I had a nightmare of a time getting to the interview location, and when I got there the publicist came out and very apologetically said Lawrence wasn’t doing any interviews that day. Needless to say, I was not impressed, especially when an interview with him appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald the next day that must’ve been done the same day my interview with him was called off. So yeah, fuck Ray Lawrence. His film was shit anyway.
29. I hate doing interviews (quite apart from the experience I just described), which is why I did as few of them as possible and stuck to reviews and other pieces.
30. I actually came close to leaving the show in 2004 cos I was sick of being left with what I thought were the shit films to review cos the others kept picking the ones I really wanted to see first.
31. I didn’t, though. Lasted until just about a year ago, in fact, and am considering doing stuff for it again in the near future. The last piece I did for the show (as of this writing) was the Metropolis review here.
32. When Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Skin was threatened with a ban by the OFLC, I was one of a number of critics asked by the distributor to write to the OFLC asking them to reconsider. Which they did. I like to think I played my minimal part in saving the film from the Christian Right here.
33. Another “job” I got through Celluloid Dreams was judging a short film festival called Kaleidoscope in 2003. It was an interesting, if slightly strange experience. The only actual professional critic on the judging panel (Peter Castaldi) never actually showed up to the judges’ gathering or the screening of the films or the prizegiving (in fact I was the only one of the judges at the latter). We managed fine without him.
34. I suspect the fact that I rarely saw films at the cinema when I was little (I was raised more on TV and video) contributed to me not particularly enjoying the filmgoing experience when I did start going more regularly.
35. Which I didn’t really do until the mid 90s anyway.
36. And the behaviour of some of my fellow students at UNSW at times probably didn’t help. LOOK! IT’S A FILM IN BLACK AND WHITE! IT’S OLDER THAN I AM! HOW FUCKING HILARIOUS IS THAT! LET’S LAUGH INAPPROPRIATELY AT HOW OLD IT IS! BECAUSE IT’S OLD AND WE ARE EVER SO MUCH MORE SOPHISTICATED! Bah.
37. Also there’s the consideration that I am an inherently solitary bastard who doesn’t really like big crowd situations of any sort. So when I did go by myself I’d usually try and go to a session earlyish in the day when there’d be fewer people around.
38. The lesson that I’d rather go alone was hammered home in 1996 by a film called Screamers, a dreadful SF film that for some reason actually played my local multiplex, so a friend and I went to see it one afternoon. I hated it and would’ve left except my friend was there and seemed to be enjoying it, so I stuck around in a fairly bad mood. When the film was over, he said he hated it too and would’ve left except he thought I was enjoying it! Grrr…
39. The only time I’ve actually been in a cinema by myself was Bringing Out the Dead at Cinema Paris in 2000. It was actually a far stranger experience than I’d thought it would be.
40. My cinemagoing actually tailed off significantly in the latter half of the last decade, ironically enough because of Celluloid Dreams. From 2006 onwards we changed tack a bit to accommodate more reviews of classic films. As such, there was a lot less pressure to see new stuff all the time. And so I generally didn’t (unless it was something I really wanted to see rather than something I’d watch just in case I needed to review it).
41. The side-effect of this was that if I didn’t see a film at a media preview, I usually didn’t then see it on its theatrical release. And the further problem with that was that I wasn’t usually catching up with them on DVD either. I have a remarkable amount of lost time to make up for.
42. I actually went through a phase of not really watching much at all, a tendency which peaked (bottomed out?) in 2008. According to my records, I saw only 121 films for the first time that year—old and new releases—and less than two-thirds of those were actually feature-length.
43. As of this writing, the last film I’ve seen on a cinema screen was Oliver Stone’s W, and that was a media screening at a distributor theatrette in early 2009. The last film I actually paid to see was There Will Be Blood in 2008.
44. On rare occasions I might see a film twice at the cinema, but that’s rare. The one and only film I’ve seen more than twice on the big screen is South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut.
45. I’ve seen 2001: a Space Odyssey twice in a 70mm print. It is as awesome in that form as you’d think.
46. I have no idea what film I’ve seen the most number of times, but Taxi Driver is probably the film I’ve seen the most (around ten times) without actually liking it at any point.
47. I don’t actually rewatch films a lot in the way some people do, though back in the mid-90s I did have a phase of watching Reservoir Dogs every couple of months or so.
48. The first R-rated film I saw at the cinema was Pulp Fiction. I still remember the whole audience screaming at the bit where Uma Thurman gets jabbed in the heart with the hypodermic to revive her. That was the point where I think we all realised “oh, it actually is OK to laugh at this”.
49. The only film I can think of that I saw at the cinema after I bought it on DVD is Zhang Yimou’s Hero (which I got a Chinatown DVD of about a year before it finally made it to cinemas here; thanks for nothing, Miramax). I couldn’t pass up the big screen experience when the opportunity finally arose. There’s a few films I’ve seen at Cinematheque or something after seeing them on TV, but none that I’d previously paid to own.
50. Longest film I’ve ever seen is, arguably, the 1960s Russian War and Peace, at about eight hours. Arguably because it was in fact released in four parts over four years, so I don’t know if it strictly counts or not. (This question is even more pointed, and vexed, with regards to Jacques Rivette’s Out 1—which I have lately scammed from Youtube and will watch sometime soon—for a number of reasons.) It required two separate Cinematheque sessions (mainly because they scheduled it that way out of necessity). It wasn’t really worth the effort.
51. Longest film I’ve ever seen in a single sitting (with pauses to change disc, toilet breaks, etc) would be Bertolucci’s 1900. It wasn’t really worth it either.
52. I’m always amazed by people who’ve never seen Star Wars. Especially when they’re in my late 30-something age bracket.
53. I’ve never seen a Three Stooges film. There are probably people who are amazed by that.
54. I try never to rule out watching anything, however hard it is for me to imagine me actually doing so. Once I’d have said I’d probably never watch Alvin and the Chipmunks. But when you’re lying in a hospital bed half-paralysed from a stroke, you’d be amazed at what you’ll watch just to pass the time (and because you can’t do anything else). After that, I try never to say never, cos you never know…
55. Having said which, I cannot envisage myself under any circumstances whatsoever watching The Iron Lady, because I will not watch any film that tries to make Margaret Thatcher a sympathetic figure.
56. Meryl Streep has always given me the shits for some reason. I don’t know why. Maybe her desperation for people to think she’s a great actress gets in the way of her just being a great actress.
57. And I don’t get the love for Daniel Day-Lewis either. I think he’s the embodiment of ham in Gangs of New York and There Will Be Blood.
58. I don’t really have any favourite actors or actresses. I focus on directors instead.
59. The director I’ve done the biggest critical backflip over is probably Werner Herzog. For years I said his Even Dwarves Started Small was the worst film I’d ever seen. Now he’s one of my favourite directors.
60. I haven’t seen EDSS since that one time about 20 years ago, mind you. Wonder what I’d make of it now.
61. The director I’ve done the biggest backflip over in the other direction is probably Lars von Trier. Years ago I was a big admirer of Zentropa, The Kingdom and Breaking the Waves. Now I can barely tolerate him. You’re not depressed, Lars, you’re just an arsehole.
62. The only director I’ve wanted to kill is Gaspar Noé. That stunt he pulled with the low-frequency noise on the Irreversible soundtrack worked on me; if he’d actually been there in the cinema with me I don’t know if I could’ve restrained myself from attacking him. As the film went on and the noise stopped, I was willing to settle for grievous bodily harm instead of death. Not sure if he’s a bigger arsehole than Lars von Troll or not, though.
63. I still think Jean-Luc Godard is a joke played on film history, and that he’s unfortunately forgotten this himself.
64. Broadly speaking I am an adherent of director-centred auteurism. In spite of what disgruntled screenwriters may say, I operate on the belief that a script is not a film, but words on a page; a film is the specific audiovisual rendering of those words, and the director is—usually—the person responsible for co-ordinating that rendering.
65. That said, I still realise the auteur theory has problems, not least of which is its very designation as a theory. (Thanks for nothing there, Andrew Sarris.) And the insistence upon the value of the whole oeuvre. If a given director made 10 films and only 2 of them were much good, isn’t it better to acknowledge those two actually good films rather than dismiss all 10 of them? I think so.
66. Also, I don’t believe in “auteur” status as a necessary guarantee of quality. Just look at Ed Wood and Andy Milligan.
67. I actually get quite angry when people call Plan 9 from Outer Space the worst film ever made. I usually assume they’re just parroting those wankers the Medveds, or else their film-watching experience has been so limited that they’ve never actually seen a genuinely bad film.
68. I think there is something like a taxonomy of “bad films”, in which the worst films are those made by people with supposedly adequate talent and resources but which are so misguided from their conception that they cannot possibly work, and there’s no pleasure or interest (not even of an ironic kind) to be derived from them. According to which, Catherine Breillat’s Anatomy of Hell could be the worst film I’ve ever seen.
69. I have no particular theory about what a “good film” is or should be, as I find most such artistic theories to be too limiting. The only thing I expect of any film is that it shouldn’t bore me. And, preferably, the people responsible should actually give a shit about what they’re doing.
70. I will cut some slack for a film I feel is lacking in some department (particularly story) if I think it’s visually interesting.
71. I don’t believe in “guilty pleasures”; either you like something or you don’t, and whether or not you “should” is beside the point. As such, I freely admit to having liked Police Academy at one point. I may still like it, indeed.
72. I’m not proud to admit, however, that I’ve watched up to the fifth film in the Police Academy series.
73. Or that I saw the fourth and fifth ones at the cinema.
74. Enjoying a film you expected to enjoy is fine, but I think enjoying a film you didn’t expect to enjoy is better, not least because it tends to be a rarer experience.
75. I used to be scared of horror films. Not by them, cos I rarely watched them, but of them. I’d see them on the video shop shelves and be kind of freaked out by the fact that they existed.
76. It wasn’t until I saw Dawn of the Dead in 1996—something which I treated as a sort of exercise in endurance, to see if I actually could watch something so infamously violent—that I really started getting into horror. It was the scene with the zombie that gets the top of its head chopped off by the helicopter blades that did it. I just erupted with laughter.
77. I still don’t really dig splatter that much, though, and my taste in horror still seems to lean towards the old-school (30s Universal, 40s RKO, 50s/60s Hammer, etc). I feel quite isolated from the horror subculture that exists these days.
78. I firmly believe that Warner Brothers’ cartoon departments turned out some of the best films made anywhere in the world during the 1940s and 50s (especially Bob Clampett’s 1946 run of cartoons).
79. Never been a fan of the Road Runner & Coyote cartoons, though, and I don’t understand why some critics view them as Chuck Jones’ masterpieces.
80. I still kind of mourn the disappearance of the two-reel comedy after the 1930s. It was an art unto itself.
81. I used to have an odd prejudice against Italian cinema that I no longer remember the reason for. I think it was something to do with how they used to always completely post-synch the soundtracks of their films. And yet the Hong Kong film industry used to do the exact same thing and I never disliked Hong Kong films for that reason…
82. I’m a pragmatist when it comes to watching films I want to see. I hate those people who are all “OMG YOU HAVEN’T REALLY SEEN IT IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN IT IN 35MM” and so forth. OK cunt, if it’s that important to you, why don’t you build me my own cinema with a really fucking big screen and get me 35mm prints of everything I want to see, and while you’re at it make sure those prints are better than the ones on DVD. For example, I’ve seen The American Friend in a 35mm print that was mostly orange (hello Eastmancolor!) and on a DVD which used a print that hadn’t faded to shit. Still want to tell me the latter was the truly inadequate viewing experience?
83. In spite of which, I am kind of bothered that I’m increasingly finding Youtube to be an acceptable way of watching stuff I can’t see any other way. Like the earlier-mentioned Out 1, which is on Youtube from an Italian TV broadcast. I know it’s the only way I’m likely to ever see it (not least because the rumoured German DVD release—whose existence I kind of doubt for some reason—apparently won’t have English subtitles), but somehow I’m not terribly happy with myself for settling for this.
84. I suspect I am in the minority in thinking Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films actually improve upon Tolkien’s books. (Though I’ll concede dropping Tom Bombadil was a considerable error.)
85. I don’t think remakes are an inherently bad thing, and I’ve always liked something Fabian Bielinsky said about his own film Nine Queens being remade by Hollywood: if the remake was shit then his original was still there, undamaged, and if the remake was good then fine, that was two films people could enjoy. (Cf. what I just said about Jackson vs Tolkien: a friend of mine sniffed after seeing Fellowship that he thought the book was better and I thought, fine, read the fucking book then. Nothing’s happened to it.)
86. I do get irritated by sequels to some extent, though, particularly sequels that don’t have any of the creative team of the first film. I know they’re usually a cash-in on a successful film, but they don’t have to be so obvious…
87. I am fairly crap at picking out logical flaws in stories, continuity errors, that sort of thing. So if I ever do notice them, you know they must be bad…
88. I don’t hate the Oscars so much as I hate the way people get excited by them as if they actually meant anything, and treat them like the only indicator of what’s important in film culture. Really, they mean even less than most industry awards.
89. With a few admitted exceptions, I’m not a fan or collector of film soundtrack albums. A good film score works best in the film it accompanies rather than on record divorced from the images on the screen.
90. I don’t understand what some people seem to have against slow motion. It’s one of the simplest cinematic tricks there is, and, done properly, it’s beautiful.
91. I definitely come down on the side of traditional special effects rather than CGI. The latter might be able to produce more “believable” results, but as much as, say, a model spaceship in a SF film is obviously a model, a digital effect is just as obviously a digital effect. I like that the model spaceship has the decency to be an actual object rather than just a string of 1s and 0s.
92. I remember the 80s 3D boom, which is why I’m baffled that its latest comeback has lasted this long.
93. I fear I’m a health hazard to elderly directors. Consider: I watched my first film by Claude Chabrol and he died about a month later (80). Ken Russell popped his clogs not long after I watched that box of his BBC films (84). I watched those two films by Don Sharp late last year and he died about ten days later (89). I bought the Masters of Cinema edition of Shohei Imamura’s Onibaba (I have the Criterion disc but wanted the MoC as well cos I had their discs of Naked Island and Kuroneko, and I found it cheap so why not complete the set) and he died just a few days later (100). Oh, and Andrew Sarris, a critic admittedly rather than a director but, even so, he died while I was coming up with this piece after I invoked him in it above (maybe David Stratton should be worried now). Is it any wonder I’m holding off on exploring Manoel de Oliveira’s oeuvre? I know he’s 103 years old and he has to go some time soon, surely, but I don’t want to jinx him. Having said all of which, at least Alain Resnais is flourishing at 90…
94. I don’t get half as annoyed by people spoiling films as I do by people whining about them being spoiled. Once something’s put into the public arena it’s fair game for discussion, and unless they’re under an embargo from the distributor or something, no one is obliged to protect you from finding out something you didn’t want to know.
95. But I do get irritated by trailers that tell you too much.
96. For all that I crap on at times about the “economy” of older films, and how they do their business better in their generally shorter average runtimes than more recent films seem to do with generally greater average runtimes, I don’t actually object to long and/or slow films as such. I think any film should ideally be whatever length it needs to be, be it three minutes or three hours. What I don’t like is long and/or slow for no apparent reason.
97. And similarly, I’ve nothing inherently against bleak and depressing films, but I do kind of hate empty nihilism with nothing else going on.
98. I try not to take “best films of all time” type lists seriously. Conversely, I take the making of such lists far too seriously. This is why I can’t do them. (Probably also why it’s taken me so long to come up with this thing. The amount of fiddling and shuffling about I’ve done with it in the slightly over two weeks it’s taken me to do it is ridiculous even for me.)
99. I will confess that sometimes I look back over this blog, and my own list of films that I’ve seen over the course of my life, and I wonder: who the hell am I trying to impress? I mean, I will go in search of some quite weird and obscure stuff at times (and have lately reviewed a few good examples of same), not just the stuff recommended by the various guides I use, and at times I do wonder why. There seems to be some degree of self-conscious display of “breadth of taste” or something like that, but who am I trying to show off to? I generally don’t go out of my way to attract readers to the blog. Am I trying to impress myself? Am I trying to tell myself, “hey, look at some of the shit you’ve seen that most people wouldn’t go near even if they knew about it, you’re more serious about this stuff than they’d ever be”? Maybe. It’s probably one of my less attractive character traits. At the same time, why shouldn’t I cast my net wide? If I’m interested in cinema, then I want to dive in and explore it properly. Why limit myself?
100. I went through a phase in the previous decade of being a regular Mu-Meson Archives attendee. I had, so I thought, not exactly exhausted the “classics” but I had an adequate grip on the conventional course of film history; now I wanted to explore the odder byways and occasional dead ends of the art form, which Jaimie and Aspa specialised in. I don’t regret those years in any way, I usually had a great time and was introduced to some quite marvellous stuff I may never have seen otherwise. (Plus there was always Aspa’s pumpkin soup during the winter months.) But, since I started this blog, I’ve come to realise just how mediocre my grip on conventional film history actually was, and in some ways still is, because a lot of it really was theoretical. Lots of filmmakers I’d heard of but never actually seen anything by. Mu-Meson was at least showing me stuff I’d heard of. I haven’t been to Mu-Meson in ages for various reasons, but at least I’m trying (with varying degrees of success) to make up for some of the other stuff I’ve missed over the years (including the trashier end of the spectrum). And the nice thing is, there’s so much of it. I don’t think I’ll be running out of new discoveries any time soon.

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