This year was important for the
fact I finally entered paid employment. This is far more important than any
film could be as this opens an entirely new side for my life, one that does
intermingle with this hobby of a cineaste directly because as I gain a lot more
wisdom and enter out into the world more, reality is going to encroach on these
fictitious movie worlds and documentaries drastically.
In terms of the year in films,
going to a theatre to see films started off well but like every year before
took a nosedive. At one point I couldn't really afford to either, only for the
point when I could afford it again for there to be less access to films I want
to see than I originally did. Unfortunately cinemas to survive even in
Sheffield, an urban metropolis with a large artistic culture, have to show
films like Jurassic World (2015) or
Oscar nominated dramas to make up their incomes, and places because of the
limitations of transport are inherently going to be difficult to go to if I
want to see special screenings. I've mainly had to consume films
through DVD and Blu-Ray, and having bought Mark
Hartley's anticipated Cannon Pictures
documentary off iTunes, streaming
whilst not taking a priority over the former physical formats is going to be a
lot more pronounced for me in the next year. I'm likely not to go to Netflick though, more to the newly
released BFI+ service if any, because
the problem with streaming films is that, while its incredibly practical as Spotify has been for me in 2015 for music
in terms of avoiding expenses on bad albums, the choice is still badly limited
with a complete disinterest in Netflick
or Amazon Prime exclusive programming
on my part when BFI+ looks like a
nirvana where everything added is going to be interesting or is something I
already own with pride on DVD.
My only concern with home cinema
viewing is the growing amount of Limited Editions we're getting for archive
releases. Thankfully in only a few cases has this meant films have only been
available for a limited amount of time, but there's a huge concern of mine not
only of the amount people pay just to catch up with a single company's releases
like with Arrow, but that it
completely goes against the point of being a cineaste, buying stuff blindly so
you can get the limited edition blu-ray before it goes out of print rather than
discovering it unexpectedly. I never lived in an era where an Aki Kaurismaki film could appear late at
night on BBC2, but the DVD boom for
me as a child, especially renting discs by post which I still do now, lead to
me discovering so many peculiar and fascinating gems. Forcing people to take
out a second mortgage turns the discs into the priority rather than the films, a
problem as well as the discs will be worth nothing after even five years,
something that came to mind finding a Limited Edition version of Scarface (1983), which came in a
cigarette box, in a second hand technology store for only thirty English pounds
or so. For every interesting limited edition extra, like the Goblin soundtrack for Deep Red (1975) will be for me when the
set comes in the post, the packaging and the booklets unless they're really
vital to getting more out the films are going to be disposable. The good news
however is that a company like Arrow
(or Eureka or Second Sight and so forth, not to mention if I import releases from
the US) releases obscure gems like The
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne (1981), even restores them
with additional funds, and keeps them out as regular print run releases
alongside their more well known and best selling material. I don't want the
mentality of Twilight Time to reach
Britain, a company known for releasing films like Zardoz (1974) in very limited Blu-Ray runs, when Arrow can release Zardoz as a normal release Blu-Ray
racked with extras. Nor do I want what happens when Japanese companies like Aniplex directly releasing anime to US
fans, over $300 dollars for imported Blu-Rays of all one of the entries on my
Best of List for last year. Even if physical media goes behind streaming as
many do say, I don't want companies ripping people off for the remaining media.
Worst First Watches of 2015
Unfortunately I saw little in
terms of premieres. The lack of interesting films on at the cinema was matched
by the fact that, even if I'm getting on well in a paid career, I cannot gamble
money on cinema blindly when they can cost a lot to go to see, preferring to
invest in retrospective DVD and Blu-Ray releases instead. I cannot promise
doing a list for Best 2015 films - I promised one last year and never did it -
but I intend to catch up with everything I wanted to see. I can however cover the best retrospective
first watches instead, but first before I deal with the best I saw last year,
it's best to deal with all the clutter that I encountered last year.
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10. Casino Royale (Directors: Ken Hughes, John Huston, Joseph McGrath,
Robert Parrish and Richard Talmadge, 1967)
Unfortunately for every gem I
saw, many films were incredibly shallow and weak. The following, part of a
desire to see everything related to the James
Bond franchise, shows when a film is so bad it actually turns out to have
been pleasurable in hindsight. An unholy mess that lead to Woody Allen wanting to direct his own films, where Peter Sellers walked off the set causing
the film to be reshot in places, with five directors as shown above and with a
scattershot comedic tone that becomes more and more bizarre as it goes. Only Orson Welles as Le Chiffre can qualify
as a reason to see the film, and he spends his time out-of-character performing
magic tricks, as the rest feels like an attempt at an LSD head trip that will
offend Scottish viewers throughout its length. It's shocking to thing how such
a bizarre and ramshackle disaster, excluding a fifties American TV adaptation,
was the only adaptation of Ian Fleming's
first Bond novel until 2006.
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9. Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (Director: Hark
Tsui, 2010)
The effect China has had on
mainstream cinema has been publicised a bit this year. As Chinese cinema goers
turned out to be the more lucrative audience for Hollywood, adding cameos by
Chinese actors and making creative decisions to remove unsellable content,
there's the irony that as soon as this is being criticised, said Chinese
audience is getting a little sick of Hollywood's clumsy attempts and are
watching home grown movies. The affect the Chinese government
on its own cinema and that of Hong Kong is a different issue. I'm not throwing
my weight into all the controversial issues surrounding that government, with
more than enough to read online against them. But, ever since the mid-2000s
onward at least, the effect on what type of films being made especially in the
martial arts genre has stood out, very different from those of the Hong Kong
golden age of the eighties or Shaw
Brothers films which have been divisive for fans unless one talks about Johnnie To. They have a new aesthetic,
and they are either pro-China or politically neutral; admittedly there were
plenty of pro-Chinese martial arts or action films in the past, but you also
got Category III movies like Naked
Killer (1993) which revealed in muck or politically minded films like Tsui Hawk's earliest features, and it's
a lot more pronounced how political some of these newer films are, especially the
likes of The Founding of a Republic
(2009).
What is problematic with Detective Dee and the Mystery of the
Phantom Flame, a fantasy period film with the potential to be interesting
and has a great cast to work from, is entirely to blame however not on any
propagandist mentality but how current Hollywood cinema has influenced other
cultures' filmmaking, Detective Dee
a dreary, extensive CGI fest which turned a potentially great mystery tale with
political intrigue into a rush of noise without the grace that Tsui Hawk brought to his older films. Considering
how beautiful something like The Blade
(1995) or Once Upon A Time In China
(1991) was, how even the Jean-Claude
Van Damme films Hawk made are so
visually inventive and felt like insane living manga, it was soul crushing to
see someone like him make a soulless commercial movie like this. That this got
positive reviews back in the early 2010s baffles me.
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8. A Nightmare On Elm Street (Director: Samuel Bayer, 2010)
2015 was when I went through a
lot of franchises and popular cinematic characters in marathons, something that
I intend to carry on in 2016 with going over directors, other franchises and
interconnected series of films I feel I should've gotten to by now. During 2015,
I went through all the Nightmare On Elm
Street movies. Contrary to what many would think, I found all the films in
the originally series compelling. For me the third film Dream Warriors (1987) was far less interesting to something like Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991),
which for how bad it was still compelled me with its creative use of dreams and
for how weird it was even for stuff like the Roseanne Barr and Tom Arnold
cameo. This, the Platinum Dunes
remake, is a truly bad film with nothing even memorable to it in terms of its
mistakes, an attempt at a more serious story that comes off as cynically grim rather
than having dramatic weight. It's a film that has far less creativity to its
premise even compared to the original sequels and was ghastly to sit through in
comparison for its murky, lifeless tone. Again, in another form and language,
this is like number nine a horrible example of how current Hollywood cinema
trends strips out a lot of the best in genre filmmaking, the only entertainment
to be found for me viewing it that Jackie
Earle Haley looked less like a burn victim in the makeup but a cat man
missing whiskers.
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7. Tusk (Director: Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1980)
By far the real disappointment on
this list, but considering Alejandro
Jodorowsky had always disowned this film and The Rainbow Thief (1990) in his filmography, I should've known it
would've been bad. A children's film about a girl and her beloved elephant, the
third generation VHS rip I saw wasn't responsible for how sluggish it was and
that, heavily compromised in what he could do, known of Jodorowsky's trademark style was here. If I end up ever rewatching
this film again, it'll be out of morbid curiosity only, so glad that after this
Santa Sangre (1989) came afterwards
and that I still have The Dance of
Reality (2013) to catch up to as a remedy.
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6. Agente S 03: Operazione Atlantide (Director: Domenico Paolella,
1965)
5. Ganjasaurus Rex (Director: Ursi Reynolds, 1987)
4. Humanoids From The Deep (Director: Jeff Yonis, 1996)
3. S.S. Experiment Love Camp (Director: Sergio Garrone, 1976)
And sometimes you just watch a
lot of junk. You have hope for these films but sometimes you look back at them
and regret ever wasting one's lifespan on them. I knew the Naziploitation film S.S. Experiment Love Camp, which I
watched wanting to see as many Video Nasties as I could during late 2014 onwards,
might've been dreadful but I never expected it to kill off the desire to continue
that Video Nasties marathon, something even Toxic Zombies (1980) or Frozen
Scream (1979) didn't succeed in doing.
An Italian Bond rip-off, Agente
S 03: Operazione Atlantide inexplicably appeared on TCM and I hoped for a fun Euro genre movie, only to find something
that failed miserably. I just happened to stumble over Ganjasaurus Rex whilst pressing the Random button on Criticker a
few times one year and became obsessed with the title; like so many of them, my
obsession with ridiculous titles and premises has led to my downfall of
suffering through utter dreck, making Things
(1989) look like high art as shot-on-VHS films go. Humanoids From The Deep was an accidental con job for me, thinking
I bought the infamous 1980 Roger Corman production
about rampaging, sexually incensed fish men only to realise I got the bland
made-for-TV remake from the nineties also produced by Corman which stripped out all the content that made the first so controversial.
Despite my love of Corman as a person and especially as a director in his own
right, he has made some incredibly dubious ideas in terms of quality control
especially after the eighties, and while I may have found the first version of Humanoids From The Deep offensive and
crap, this nineties TV version doesn't even make sense as a way to make profit.
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2. Emmanuelle (Director: Just Jaeckin, 1974)
In comparison to the previous
four however, expectations were optimistic with seeing one of the most well
known erotic films in existence and I ended up with a disgusting taste in my
mouth. I can feel confident in defending films now which can have potentially
dubious gender politics to them, or at least feel less guilt to finding virtues
in them, now that I've seen a film here that's a real example of a movie, even
if it might've have feminist applause to it once ago, that's misogynistic in its
bones. What's gross about Emmanuelle,
alongside the fact that its badly made and never feels erotic in the slightest,
is that here you can probably see why the sexual revolution of the late sixties
and seventies died a death in only ninety minutes. Rather than the politics of
pro-sex feminists who want to possess their own pleasures and bodies, or what films
like W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism
(1971) brought philosophically to the conversation, or what even Jean Rollin horror films sub textually suggested
in having sexually open and strong female characters, you have a film all about
scuzzy white men who want to re-enact colonialist ideals in Thailand and only
want their wives to sleep around for their own pleasures under their thumbs. Sylvia
Kristel as the titular character is a child-woman who has to be raped at the
end and be taught by a creepy old man to become sexually awakened rather than
learn from her own experiences, more problematic when this plot line isn't
meant to challenge the viewer as trangressive storytelling but is a matter of
fact expectation from the audience watching it. Flatly made, nicking a music cue
from King Crimson to piss me off
further, a film like this makes me far more comfortable defending directors
like Kim Ki-duk who take far more
complex and nuanced approaches to these troubling concepts of gender relations
and sexuality. Emmanuelle is worth its existence for the sequels and Italian
rip-offs, which will all probably be better than it completely, the original
work a dated artefact from a decade which produced far more progressive and
artistically brilliant erotic films around it.
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1. Spawn (Director: Mark A.Z. Dippé, 1997)
Technically Emmanuelle is the worst film I've seen, as I may have seen Spawn as a child, but I am cheating regardless
of that being the case since I would've not seen Spawn since I was a child and that, watching it for the first time
with adult eyes, Spawn is
diabolically bad. Barring the pleasure of Melinda
Clarke, especially wearing a tight leather cat suit and chewing the scenery,
Spawn was agony to sit through. In
comparison Batman & Robin (1998),
which I adore knowing it's a car crash, is so much more accomplished in every
way compared to this superhero adaptation, a mass of noise and terrible jokes
where I wanted to throttle John Leguizamo
every time he appeared onscreen in the fat man clown costume. The worst part is
how much it squanders the cast, not only
Ms. Clarke, but especially Michael Jai White, who could've been an
A-List star with his real martial arts skill and charisma but was probably
handicapped by this starring role for the rest of his career. Making it
personal for me is that this was the last film of Nicol Williamson too, who played a very eccentric Merlin in one of
my favourite films, John Boorman's Excalibur (1981), which makes the film
even worse to sit. Emmanuelle
might've been the most agonising to sit through for its politics, but Spawn was the only film this year I'd
give a 1/10, a rating as rare from myself as rocking horse shit is.
PART 2 COMING SOON
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