30 Day Film Quiz: Days 21-30

It's super self-indulgent. It's extremely pointless. It's, well, not really a "quiz". But today is the concluding part of the '30 Day Film Quiz'. For those with an interest, parts one and two are also available. Yes folks, this is what passes for a blog post these days. More reviews soon...

Day 21 - Your Favourite Sci-Fi/Fantasy Film

Sci-fi or fantasy? Well how about a film which is a huge dollop of both? Princesses and knights and magical powers... and space ships.

Ask me this question for probably 90% of my lifespan so far and I would have immediately shouted (yes, shouted) 'The Empire Strikes Back' - so I'll stick with that answer even though I'm more ambivalent towards 'Star Wars' as an entity these days. It remains a sensational film.

Directed by the late Irvin Kirschner and co-written by future 'Raiders of the Lost Arc' scribe Lawrence Kasdan, 'Empire' is the best of the old trilogy, with clever dialogue (yes, really), a genuinely touching romance story and one of the most downbeat endings in blockbuster history. It's full of exciting moments too, such as the the battle of Hoth and the asteroid field chase, whilst it also debuted John Williams most iconic and enduring piece of music: The Imperial March. A tune memorably first heard as we witness Darth Vader's gargantuan "super" Star Destroyer, as seen below:



Day 22 - Your Favourite Horror Film

Errr... I don't really watch a lot of horror, so almost by default I'll go with perhaps the greatest horror ever made and one of the few I can enjoy: Kubrick's 'The Shining'.

I trust most people know what 'The Shining' is, so in the interests of levity here is a funny re-edit of the trailer from YouTube, which ingeniously casts the film as a family comedy:



Day 23 - Your Favourite Thriller/Mystery Film

Ooohhh... that's a difficult one. I really like the films of Bong Joon-ho, whose 2009 film 'Mother' is a superior example of both genres. I'll go with that one.



Day 24 - Your Favourite Animated or Children's Film

Being a big fan of the classic Disney animations, my favourite animated film would have to be 'Sleeping Beauty', which is an auteured piece, with a unified art style and a daring stylised approach which has no parallel amongst the studio's other features. The backgrounds are especially detailed and incredible and the animation so fluid that years later some of it was re-used on 'Beauty and the Beast'. As a runner-up, I'm a huge fan of Brad Bird's 'The Iron Giant'.



Day 25 - Your Favourite Documentary Film

I wouldn't cast myself as any kind of connoisseur of documentary film as I've only begun to watch theatrical release documentaries in recent years - and then generally only fairly mainstream ones. However, I find Werner Herzog's films interest me most due to a mix of his distinctive narration and his eye for absurdity. Wherever he goes and whatever the subject of his film, his thesis is always thoughtful, frank and human, lacking in cheap sentimentality of man or nature.

His 1977 documentary 'La soufriere' is one of the best. This comparatively short film sees the German director risk his life to capture footage of an island abandoned due to the pending explosion of its active volcano (hauntingly interviewing those who have chosen to stay behind). The whole thing is available to stream on YouTube:



Day 26 - Your Favourite Foreign Language Film

This is a strange category, maybe even more so in this poll than at the Academy Awards. Surely "foreign language" film - for most of us - accounts for the vast majority of all the films ever made.

Anyway, I won't argue. Instead I'll just post a trailer for Kurosawa's breathtaking and timeless 'Rashomon'. The film credited with opening the door to Europe for Asian cinema after it won the Golden Lion in the Venice Film Festival of 1951.



Day 27 - Your Favourite Independent Film

This is a potentially messy category. These days, as with the music industry, the so-called "indie" films are all actually backed by huge corporations. The likes of Miramax (especially in the 90s), and big studio offshoots like Fox Searchlight more recently, have threatened to make the term meaningless.

With that considered, I'll pick a proper independent film from yesteryear. The debut feature of Terrence Malick: 'Badlands'.



Day 28 - The Most Obscure Film You've Ever Seen

Last year the BFI did a brilliant Kurosawa retrospective, which included a couple of screenings of his earliest films - made during the second world war. Many of these, like 'Sanshiro Sugata' and its sequel, won't be obscure to Japanese audiences, yet in the UK many of these films are not available on DVD. One such gem is 'They Who Step on the Tiger's Tail', which was loosely remade years later as the better known 'The Hidden Fortress'. There aren't any trailers or clips online that I can find, so you'll have to make do with an image.




Day 29 - Your Favourite Film As a Kid

See "Day 21". Alternatively...



Day 30 - Your Favourite Film This Time Last Year

In an "all time" sense, I don't remember that being any different to my favourite film of right now. So instead I'll try to think back to whatever film I was most excited by in April of 2010.

Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant dominated my thoughts this time last year with their drama-comedy film 'Cemetery Junction'. This is because I interviewed them about it, which was a huge deal for me being my first contribution to Obsessed with Film and also my first big interview.

However, the best film I saw this time last year was 'Dogtooth', a disturbing and darkly funny Greek satire about a group of "children" who are kept in ignorance about the world outside their house by possessive parents.



So concludes the "30 Day Film Quiz". It's been fun.

30 Day Film Quiz: Days 11-20

Last week I decided to follow many of my Facebook friends onto the "30 Day Quiz" bandwagon. But instead of doing it on the intended daily basis I'm posting my responses here in ten day chunks of the pure self-indulgence. My responses to the first ten 'questions' (they aren't really questions are they?) can be found here. Below are the next ten. Enjoy.

Day 11 - A Film By Your Favourite Director

This is possibly the trickiest of all questions. Who is my favourite director? Wes Anderson, the Coen brothers and Stanley Kubrick are some of the names that come to mind, though I'm going to go with Akira Kurosawa here - the director about whom I've read and written the most. If you're also a fan - of any size - I'd really recommend his humble and enthralling autobiography, as well as Donald Richie's stunning and comprehensive volume which provides detailed critical essays on every one of his films.

Below is the American trailer for my favourite of his overlooked gendai-geki (contemporary) films, 'High and Low'. I like how this trailer tries to sell it as a sort of Hitchcock movie.



Day 12 - A Film By Your Least Favourite Director

This is just as hard to answer as the above. The obvious knee-jerk response would be Michael Bay, but I don't want to be so obvious (even though I hate the 'Transformers' movies an awful lot). Say what you will about Mr. Bay, but he has a distinctive style and is an influential filmmaker in his way. Think about how many times you've seen his specific oeuvre parodied - in everything from the bombast opening of Disney's 'Bolt' and the films of Edgar Wright to the "Pearl Harbour Sucks" song in 'Team America: World Police'. In that way he has inspired some entertaining work.

Zack Synder is the same: director of horrible, excessive films which are beyond tacky. But at least 'Sucker Punch' is giving people something to write about, however rubbish it may be.

Worse than the vulgar and the grossly stupid are the boring. And who is more boring than hired gun and Spielberg clone Christopher Columbus? His work isn't at all hateful (unlike that of Bay and Synder) and he's made some enduring and harmless family movies ('Home Alone' for one), but who goes to the cinema to see a Chris Columbus film? Would the world be poorer if he stopped making generic family movies? Would the cultural landscape be any different without him? I tend to sympathise with Terry Gilliam for feeling a little peeved that Columbus was Warner Brothers' preferred choice to direct the first Harry Potter instalments.

There are loads of bland directors turning out bland studio films, so he's not alone or even the worst offender. (Also, the man wrote 80s gems 'Gremlins' and 'The Goonies', so he deserves a bit of respect.) But he is probably the most gainfully employed and successful of the bland, jobbing director crowd, so I've chosen him here. Below is one of his most forgettable films.



Day 13 - A Guilty Pleasure

I don't know that I have one. If I like something then I am happy to say so (or least I'd like to think). I enjoy some bad movies, but I guess a "guilty pleasure" has to be distinct from a "funny bad" movie, such as the 1986 Charlie Sheen vehicle 'The Wraith'. It's got to be something you realise is badly made, and maybe even against everything you stand for, but you enjoy it anyway without irony.

I definitely used to have these guilty pleasures as a kid. An Australian kid's show called 'The Tribe' was a favourite, and that was really cringey. I was also addicted to the 'Pokemon' cartoon. Those were embarrassing admissions then, but when you're young you place more importance on how your tastes are perceived.

I love loads of "girly" films, I guess. Like 'Enchanted' and 'The Little Mermaid' - but they're just good films, not guilty pleasures in the way I understand it. In any case, after a certain age it's not really worth tee-heeing about a person's disregard for gender norms.

It's not that I'm an elitist or that I'm pretending my DVD collection is full of popularly heralded classics. I like plenty of films most people think are bad, such as 'Titanic' and 'The Phantom Menace'. But I'd defend both of those - and plan to do so on this blog at some later date.

I guess 'The King's Speech' fits the bill for me. I enjoyed it, but I have trouble with that. It's funny and well acted but I hate myself for thinking so! It's politically objectionable, culturally conservative and takes many liberties with history. It annoys me, especially now as the Royal Wedding looms and unthinking subservience hits the nation. I've gone on about this on this blog before, so I'll leave it at that.



Day 14 - The Film That No One Expected You To Like

I really didn't expect to enjoy the last Harry Potter film, having disliked all the previous entries in the series by varying degrees. Though like it I did, with my girlfriend pleasantly surprised. I'm even looking forward to the next chapter: this Summer's 'Deathly Hallows: Part 2'.



Day 15 - The Film That Depicts Your Life

This will yield the same answer as "Day 7 - A Film That Reminds You of Your Past". Noah Baumbach's 'The Squid and the Whale' feels like the story of my childhood - at least the arc of the Jesse Eisenberg character. It's a beautiful movie, and if you haven't seen it you should.



Day 16 - A Film You Used to Love, But Now Hate

I thought Zach Braff's 'Garden State' was super witty, poignant and inventive back when it was released in 2004. But even on a second viewing a few days later (I returned to the cinema to see it again) it lost all its magic. It diminishes in my eyes every time I see it or think of it and nowadays I have no affection left for it at all. Now it seems every bit as whiny, self-satisfied and full of trite self-help advice as an episode of TV sitcom 'Scrubs'. There are still some imaginative moments (like the doctor with the improbable number of certificates on the wall) but they don't save it.



Day 17 - Your Favourite Drama Film

Most movies are dramas aren't they? Or at least they all have dramatic elements. I don't know what my favourite is, but the first film to come to mind was Kubrick's epic 'Barry Lyndon'.



Day 18 - Your Favourite Comedy Film

In recent years at the cinema nothing has made me laugh more than 'Team America: World Police', but that's not my favourite comedy film of all-time. A lot of the old Steve Martin films I saw as a kid have stayed with me. 'The Jerk' is brilliant, but I'm going to cite 'The Three Amigos' because I saw it over and over again in my youth and have fond memories.



Day 19 - Your Favourite Action Film

No question: Jackie Chan's 'Project A'. Watching Chan move it always strikes me that he is a modern ancestor of the great silent clowns. This has a lot to do with the way he moves, coupled with the inventiveness of his choreography and his desire to make audiences laugh. He turned his skills to slap-stick violence, just as Gene Kelly turned his to dance, but for me both capture the spirit of Chaplin.



Day 20 - Your Favourite Romantic Film

What could be more romantic, in the truest sense, than 'Casablanca'? Much more the baby of producer Hal B. Wallis than director Michael Curtiz, this is the finest example of a Hollywood studio film. Even if you haven't seen it, you'll also know half the script as, like Shakespeare, it's full of lines that have fallen into popular culture ("beginning of a beautiful friendship", "round up the usual suspects" etc). I never get bored of this film. I recommend critic Roger Ebert's commentary on the DVD if you're a fan.



Check back for the final batch in another ten days.

30 Day Film Quiz: Days 1-10

A few friends of mine have been filling in a '30 Day Film Quiz' on Facebook over the last week or so and - with all my distractions of late - I'm arriving late to the party.

Day 1 - Your Favourite Film

For reasons I've gone into time and time again on this blog, Paul Thomas Anderson's 'Punch-Drunk Love' is my favourite film.



Day 2 - Your Least Favourite Film

Hmmm. This is a hard one. As a kid my least favourite film was Brian De Palma's 'Mission to Mars'. I haven't seen it in over ten years, so maybe it's better than I remember, but at the time it became a byword for "bad" between myself and the friend who saw it with me. I remember it being really dull. Watching the trailer (below) it doesn't look anything like as bad as I remember, but I'll list it here anyway to save me going off on one about 'Transformers 2'.



Day 3 - A Film You Watch to Feel Good

I'm trying to think of a scenario where I've been down and put a film on to cheer myself up. What would that film have been? Certainly the aforementioned 'Punch-Drunk Love' would do the trick, but having already used that as an answer I'll pick something else. I can't imagine being sad watching 'Singin' in the Rain', so here is an upbeat musical number from that.


Make 'Em Laugh by movieclips

Day 4 - A Film You Watch to Feel Down

I don't know if I'd watch a film to feel down but, accepting the premise of the question for a moment, I'd likely stick on 'The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo' because everything about it is so ugly, from the look of it to its view of the human condition. It wouldn't fail to bring me down.

I hate revenge flicks and torture porn anyway, but here those sorts of things are wedded to a kind of dreary realism that makes them all the more antisocial. Say what you will about 'Kill Bill', but at least that's clearly a colourful, comic book of a movie - set in a slightly campy alternate reality. However, 'The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo' injects the same ideas into a trite, TV detective story and provides over two hours of intense misery.



Day 5 - A Film That Reminds You of Someone

A lot of films remind me of the people I first saw them with. 'Bubba Ho-tep' reminds me of an ex-girlfriend. 'The Phantom Menace' reminds me of my best mate who watched it with me (for my eleventh viewing and his seventh or eighth) on the floor of an empty screen at the Bournemouth Odeon some weeks into its run - where we talked, using the film (which we knew by heart anyway) as expensive wallpaper during an otherwise eventless summer afternoon. Bond films remind me of another mate of mine from Bournemouth, with whom I used to play a lot of GoldenEye on the Nintendo 64 and who has accompanied me to 'Tomorrow Never Dies', 'The World is Not Enough' and, more recently, to the two Daniel Craig movies. I don't even like Bond films, but I like watching Bind films with him.

Loads of films remind me of my father and my granddad, both of whom introduced me to a lot of movies growing up. I think I'll pick something that reminds me of the latter, with a 1987 TV movie called 'The Murder of Mary Phagan' coming to mind first.

I can't find a trailer or a clip for it anywhere online, so you'll have to take my word for it when I say it was an incredibly effective drama about a real-life murder case from the US state of Georgia which took place in 1913. The cast speaks volumes for its quality: Jack Lemmon, Kevin Spacey, William H. Macy, Dylan Baker, Cynthia Nixon and Peter Gallagher. I was probably around ten or eleven when he made me watch it (I'd rather have been playing video games), but as it went on it got incredibly gripping. Being a barrister himself, a lot of his favourite movies were legal dramas and he also introduced me to 'Inherit the Wind'.

Day 6 - A Film That Reminds You of Somewhere

Having been to film festivals in Berlin, Venice, Cambridge and Kaunas in the last year, a lot of films now remind me of those places. 'Black Swan', for instance, will always remind me of stepping into the Sala Darsena on the Venice Lido for the first time - an aircraft carrier sized cinema with a massive screen. A storm hit the island during the first few days there (possibly during 'Happy Few') and I remember hearing the wind and the rain through that makeshift building's paper thin walls.

I'm going to go with 'Wild Wild West' though, which always reminds me of my brother and I excitedly dashing into a midweek preview screening at our local Odeon after missing the first ten minutes. The trailer (below) is strangely hypnotic.



Day 7 - A Film That Reminds You of Your Past

Um... I feel like the answers to the last two sort of apply to this one. But looking at it a different way, Noah Baumbach's 'The Squid and the Whale' is deeply personal for me. It's a film that speaks to me about my own adolescence through Jesse Eisenberg's character and his relationship with his father, played by Jeff Daniels.



Day 8 - The Film You Can Quote Best

Anything by Wes Anderson or the Coen brothers could fit here (I can quote 'The Big Lebowski' from beginning to end, which means I can no longer watch it with people), but I'm going to go for 'Jurassic Park' - which I quote constantly with a number of people, including Dave of IQGamer and Toby of Shine A Light.



Day 9 - A Film With Your Favourite Actor (Male)

Sam Rockwell is certainly a candidate. However, Phillip Seymour Hoffman is maybe the greatest actor living. Here he is in the film 'Doubt'.



Day 10 - A Film With Your Favourite Actor (Female)

Samantha Morton is a fantastic actress. In everything from 'Synecdoche New York' to 'Sweet and Lowdown' she is extremely committed and intelligent, giving raw, emotional performances. Here she is with Sean Penn in the latter film, where she plays a mute. As a side-note, this is possibly Woody Allen's best work.



I'll post my remaining answers here to two further blocks of ten later this month. If anyone else wants to "play" here is the full 'quiz' as posted by frequent podcast guest, local radio personality and fellow Disneyphile James Tully:

Day 1 - Your Favourite Film
Day 2 - Your Least Favourite Film
Day 3 - A Film You Watch to Feel Good
Day 4 - A Film You Watch to Feel Down
Day 5 - A Film That Reminds You of Someone
Day 6 - A Film That Reminds You of Somewhere
Day 7 - A Film That Reminds You of Your Past
Day 8 - The Film You Can Quote Best
Day 9 - A Film With Your Favourite Actor (Male)
Day 10 - A Film With Your Favourite Actor (Female)
Day 11 - A Film By Your Favourite Director
Day 12 - A Film By Your Least Favourite Director
Day 13 - A Guilty Pleasure
Day 14 - The Film That No One Expected You To Like
Day 15 - The Film That Depicts Your Life
Day 16 - A Film You Used to Love, But Now Hate
Day 17 - Your Favourite Drama Film
Day 18 - Your Favourite Comedy Film
Day 19 - Your Favourite Action Film
Day 20 - Your Favourite Romantic Film
Day 21 - Your Favourite Sci-Fi/Fantasy Film
Day 22 - Your Favourite Horror Film
Day 23 - Your Favourite Thriller/Mystery Film
Day 24 - Your Favourite Animated or Children's Film
Day 25 - Your Favourite Documentary Film
Day 26 - Your Favourite Foreign Language Film
Day 27 - Your Favourite Independent Film
Day 28 - The Most Obscure Film You've Ever Seen
Day 29 - Your Favourite Film As a Kid
Day 30 - Your Favourite Film This Time Last Year