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, 23 July 2008
Black and White in Colour
posted @12:46 p.m. by Richard Kelly
Our loyal contributors RAVI HOLY and TIM HEANEY have been engaged in an interesting dialogue over on the recent Stevo King best-of list comment board, this to do with the best movies shot in monochrome in the years since colour became the industry standard and black-and-white was reduced to an increasingly rarefied art-house taste. (Off the top of my head I would put the dividing line here somewhere around 1966-67.) Ravi and Tim share a great many tastes in this field so I'm going to run Ravi's list below and add here that Tim also spoke up for LA HAINE, PI, YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN, and THE LAST PICTURE SHOW. For the sake of form I can also say I fondly remember WINGS OF DESIRE, EUROPA, RUMBLEFISH, portions of MISHIMA, NOIR ET BLANC by Clare Devers, BLACK RAIN (by Imamura, not Ridley Scott...), and others that are now a black-and-white blur...
Wednesday, 23 July 2008
Movie Lists Are No Fun...
posted @12:44 p.m. by Richard Kelly
... if they run to 250 entries, IMHO. The Internet Movie Database offers a running tally of the Great Movies based on readers' submitted scores, and it's great that they get so much feedback. But then there's something so panoramic about a Top 250 that it sort of defies understanding or coherence. Is Grindhouse (averaging 8.0 from 50,000 ratings) deservedly higher than Klimov's Come and See (7.9 from 5000)? Or is it fair that Seven Samurai and Star Wars are locked together near the top at 8.8. when three times as many voters have expressed an opinion on the Lucas picture? I don't know. You tell me. For the moment we welcome back guest poster RAVI HOLY who offers his list of 10 favourite titles not even placing in that Top 250 - at least not today, anyway...
Tuesday, 22 July 2008
Curzon/Faber Ten Bad Dates film quiz - the sequel, July 22 2008
posted @11:01 a.m. by Richard Kelly
Causing nearly as much excitement as the opening numbers of 'The Dark Knight' is the news that London's Curzon Soho Cinema and Faber and Faber will once again present TEN ROUNDS WITH DE NIRO, in conjunction with the book 'Ten Bad Dates With De Niro'. This time it's personal, etc etc. The quiz will be on Tuesday 22 July at the Curzon Soho bar. Turn up early to reserve a table: 6:30 PM for 7PM start, £10 entry fee per team (max. six people). Great prizes and free popcorn are on offer!
Tuesday, 22 July 2008
Ranking The King of Horror
posted @11 a.m. by Richard Kelly
We're back - this weekend, anyhow. And Ravi Holy, our most prolific recent poster, is back too, having decided to share with this site his 'Top Ten Movie Adaptations of the Works of Stephen King'. Ravi has been somewhat enigmatic in eschewing any comment on his selections or the ordering thereof, so I'm just going to slap them down for you here as 10:
1: The Shining
2: The Shawshank Redemption
3: Carrie
4: Stand by Me
5: The Green Mile
6: Misery
7: The Running Man
8: Apt Pupil
9: 1408
10: Creepshow
Quite a mix, wouldn't you say? No room, you will note, for 'Maximum Overdrive', King's 1986 attempt at directing his own script, about a crazy truck with a goblin mask on the hood. In the trailer King chose to address the camera direct as master of horror ceremonies, a la William Castle or Rod Serling. But King, though he has always looked a little odd, has never quite mustered a chilling persona for himself, and so his ominous comments in said trailer (the inevitable self-in-third-person 'I just wanted to see Stephen King done right' and the frankly implausible 'I'm gonna scare the hell out of you...') didn't raise much more than a wince in this viewer. No, for me the real omissions in Ravi's 10 are the highly scary 'Salem's Lot' (Tobe Hooper, 1979, for TV) and the very moving 'The Dead Zone' (1983, David Cronenberg, feature). My guilty pleasure vote would be 'Sleepwalkers' (1992), a slightly grisly yet tongue-in-cheek number with the fair Alice Kruge as some sort of lush cat-beast. But enough of me. What say you?
