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
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?
Sunday, 11 November 2007
Here Come the Hotsteppers: Ten Great Movie Walks
posted @1:26 p.m. by Richard Kelly
Yes, YOU decided, folks, and after receiving my most bumper mail-sack yet... the winner was clearly Best Walks. Let's do this again soon, shall we? The Top Ten that follows is a more than usually subjective mix of movie legends and unsung heroes, all with a special knack for putting one foot in front of the other...
