JFK: pretty good, although anyone wanting enlightenment would do well to note that this is not filed in the Documentary category.

Natural Born Killers: yay! This film is lots of fun. I love the sets filled to the brim with chaos and detritus and junk, which you have to see a Terry Gilliam film to top.

Sky Captain: nice to look at. Loses points for silliness, then goes the extra mile and wins them right back and more for ridiculousness. Another classic example of this is Bottom: kicking somebody 10 times might not be funny, but kicking them 32 times is. Unfortunately, the script wasn’t up to much, and Jude Law will apparently never top his performance in Gattaca.

Hudson Hawk: there are 3 or 4 good jokes in this film. I can see how it might have been a Cult classic, but aside from a glimmering here and there never really rises above Light Entertainment.

Story of Ricky: this is a truly crazy film. Watch it with the subtitles on as they’re bizarrely different from the dubbed dialog, which I imagine is bizarrely different from the original Cantonese. Buckets of gore here, but it’s just not in the same league as the Jackson/Raimi classics. Let’s face it, if you’re going to make a splatter horror-comedy film, it’s got to have at least the words “brain” or “dead” in the title. This is why “Braindead” will always be the number one, although “The Brain That Wouldn’t Die” is pretty funny, especially the MST3K’d version.

Anyway, the film itself is pretty dire. The DVD cover is made with Word Art, which says all you need to know about the production values. It just manages to stay in the zone of badness that is funny. If you watch it on your own you will probably hate it, but if you get a bunch of reasonably non-offendable friends together it’s a guaranteed party.

This is Spinal Tap: Somewhat funny. It’s more of a giant insult to “hair-rock” bands than a belly laughing comedy. There’s something really squalid and depressing about 80s films featuring people smoking and drinking onscreen; must be the implied hopelessness of living in an info-poor age when it was genuinely possible to be bored. The best thing here is that it makes their Simpsons episode funnier.

Memento: Hard to talk about this or compare it to other films without providing spoilers. Excellent stuff though. It’s one of those films that you’ve heard is good but might be hard to get into so you’ve been avoiding it. There’s no need to do that: confusing you is part of what the film is about, so just sit back and watch it with friends you can argue with afterwards about what the hell just happened.

Trainspotting: Awesome top-100 stuff. It’s a film about why drugs are so cool and everyone should take them.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show: This is one that I watched on my own, which was a terrible mistake. It’s 100% culty and camp, and generally quite bad. I hear that watching it with fans is best, or at least watching it with people to whom you can turn and say “what the fuck?!”. As a huge fan of Clue, Tim Curry in hideous drag is really not something I wanted to see. (In fact, the resonances with Clue are deep. I was going to write up the parallels, but this being the internet an’all, someone’s already done it.) It’s 1000x more fucked up by the fact that it’s a musical. There are 2 or 3 good songs and some awful awful cabaret-style dirges. Having said that, I think I could grow to appreciate this film if I watched it with someone dedicated to liking it.

Withnail and I: Very good. Not the classic I’ve heard it proclaimed, but sharply written and dark dark dark. See above about the squalid 80s drugfests - further proof that civilisation didn’t really begin until about 1992.

Akira: This film has so much back story and surrounding culture that I’m reluctant to write anything about it at all lest I get it all completely wrong. I haven’t read the original manga (or any manga ever, in fact) but I enjoyed this a lot. It’s sort of ruined some classic games for me, since I can now see that their aesthetic was ripped off from this. I used to think Syndicate was mainly inspired by Blade Runner, but now it’s clear that although that certainly provides some of the SF tropes, Akira was the primary source. I should’ve guessed before now, from the in-game Ghost in the Shell advert in Syndicate Wars. Then there’s Beneath a Steel Sky and even Half-Life (I’m thinking of that steep lift shaft from near the beginning).

It’s a beautiful thing to behold, especially considering that it’s hand drawn.

Non-films

I’ve also discovered Cheers, and realised that Alan Partridge is much much funnier than I remembered it, and Father Ted not quite so.