I nabbed this from Scott the Reader:
I visit your house/apartment, and you spot me looking at your DVD/VHS shelf.
1. What's on there that you instantly force me to borrow, because it's a great movie and you figure I haven't seen it?
2. What you do also lend me, because even though it's not considered a classic, it's a personal favorite?
3. What movie is on there that you have no rational explanation for owning, and which you try to slide under the couch while I'm distracted?
1. Last Year at Marienbad – directed by Alain Resnais from a script by Alain Robbe-Grillet. Not to everybody’s taste I suspect, but the script is a masterclass in opacity and ambiguity, i.e., how far can you take a narrative and still make people say, ‘Huh?’
2. Halloween III – with a script by Nigel Kneale (that he eventually disowned due to the amount of violence in the finished product), this is outlandish and demented with the best ending of any film ever in the history of everything. So there.
3. Hard Cash – the only reason I can think of for owning this is because it came free with one of these DVD player deals, where five godawful straight to video flicks are thrown in as some kind of enticement. Honestly, it’s so awful it’s not even funny. Not so much straight to video as straight to the recycling bin.
Right - your turn. Yes, you, over there. No use hiding, I can see you (and for god’s sake take your finger out of your nose - it's really not very becoming).
Scriptnotes, Episode 658: Advice Show, Transcript
14 hours ago
4 comments:
1. Small Faces. The 1996 Gillies MacKinnon Scottish coming-of-age drama, not a film about the '60s mod combo. A classic that, at the time, became lost under all the hype for Trainspotting. Though it's amuch better film in my humble, but correct, opinion. (this could also serve as an answer to #2 but anyway).
2. Martha Meet Frank Daniel and Lawrence. The rom-com no-one saw/liked! Keep yer mushy Four Weddings et al, I'll rep for this as a good comfort movie, and a good London film.
3. My collection is quite small. I've pared it down over the years so only the films I actually watch remain. except, maybe, Ultimate Kylie - the video collection. Hmm.
1. Bedazzled - the original mind, not the remake which my friends hid the existence of for the best part of a year before I found out. They even went as fas as ripping the relevant pages out of Empire to avoid my wrath. I mean, for fuck's sake, who looks at Peter Cook and thinks Liz Hurley would be a good replacement?
2. Doc Savage - Man of Bronze: a film so shit it passes out the other side and becomes a work of pure genius. I would consider my life complete if I ever wrote anything with its tongue as firmly in its cheek as this.
3. The Fury of the Dragon - The Green Hornet: I didn't know they made a Green Hornet movie ... oh, they didn't. What some bright spark did do is take two episodes, glue them together (badly) and then take ALL of Bruce Lee's fight scenes from the entire series and cut the moves to make some very, very strange fight scenes. Bruce and the Green Hornet get attacked in a forest. Bruce kicks one guy and turns round to face a man in a quarry. He kicks the man so hard he ends up in an ornamental fountain in someone's front garden. Bruce spins and gets attacked by a cougar in the jungle, he dodges and blocks a punch in the quarry - from the same man he kicked into a fountain ... and they're all like that. It starts off funny but quickly becomes unwatchable.
I have so many films that would fit quite neatly into the third category, it's frightening - Lady in the Water, anyone? In which Shyamalan plays a writer who's going to save the world with his rubbish novel? *shudder*. How about Alligator directed by Tobe Hooper? Extremely random.
That said, Fury of the Dragon sounds pretty good to me, but I suspect that's because I've forgotten to take my anti-psychotic medication today ;-)
It really isn't. It sounds like it might be hilarious and it is for a few minutes ... then it becomes hateful.
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