Welcome
"Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome " to the online home of Ten Bad Dates with De Niro: A Book of Alternative Movie Lists, published by Faber and Faber on October 18 2007. As Joel Grey says in Cabaret (US 1972, dir. Bob Fosse) - I am your host.
What is an 'alternative' movie list? Well, what it's not is the sort of thing you find in those bloated TV shows devoted to the 'Greatest Films of All Time'; or in film-trivia books that cite all of Alfred Hitchcock's portly cameos in his own movies, or all the famous actors who turned down the chance to be in Star Wars.
No, an alternative movie list is about celebrating the things that just plain fascinate you about cinema, in spite of what anybody else might say - we're talking private passions, guilty pleasures, cult actors and actresses, unsung directors, disreputable genres, idiosyncratic themes, styles, and motifs that just happen to plug into your particular movie-loving socket ...
To learn more about Ten Bad Dates, please check out Book Information, and Contents of Book. I hope what you'll find may amuse, provoke, or otherwise stimulate you to post your own movie lists (see What's Your Ten...?). In any event, I'll be blogging here on a daily basis, and I welcome corrections, suggestions, ripostes, reflections - feedback of all kinds.
Richard T. Kelly
Wednesday, 30 July 2008
My Favourite Year, and Yours...
posted @11:20 p.m. by Richard Kelly
A few years ago after the success of Peter Biskind's book on 1970s cinema and a minor rash of imitators, a reputable film-scholar friend of mine told me she was minded to write a tome called 'F&!k Off With Your F&!king Decades', so as to counter the trend toward boxing movies up in this 10-year allotment. A useful suggestion, since a historian such as Eric Hobsbawn has shown us how "the 19th century" was probably longer than 100 years, the 20th probably shorter. Paul Schrader once wondered quite appositely whether his AMERICAN GIGOLO was the first film of the 1980s or the last of the 1970s. If however one confines oneself to the virtues of a single year's releases, that's maybe a purer criterion. It suits the Academy. In the list that follows RAVI HOLY offers a chronological Ten of what he considers to be the outstanding single years in the history of movie production. Clearly his choices suggest larger preferences of time-period, pre-WW2 and most of the 80s and 90s not getting a look in. But the jury's still out, right? As the Chinaman declared on the question of the worth of the French Revolution, 'Too early to tell...'
