Shall we?


Hello and welcome to a new blog of film reviews - specifically, old films, with an emphasis on those in my possession. Previous blogs have never recovered from the ambivalent reception to their second posts, and so it is only to be hoped that this one endures a bit longer or, whisper who dares, prospers. 

I now turn us over to the formal opening of this new endeavour by the Foundation for DVD Abundance. Thank you. 

Foreword: 

2019 bears witness to the embarkation of a major cataloguing project of signal importance and interest to the cinephile community. This long reputed and mooted project centres on the vast DVD collection amassed by Mr. R. Murphy Esq over a period of two decades, much coveted by some, speculated upon by innumerable fantasists, though by others dismissed as vitiated of value by the aleatory and self-indulgent lack of principle behind its composition. The following weblog utilises the most cutting-edge “inter-related network” computer technology to make available a document of what this connoisseur has curated. The following weblog also represents a thoroughly incomplete version of that project, though the items remaining unlisted on completion will constitute mere esoterica, juvenilia, trivia and, as John Fowles might so indefectibly have it, mantissa. 

Under no circumstances should a title’s appearance in the catalogue be taken to correspond to physical availability of the item, due to the admirably space-efficient methodology of storage used.

One further and grave warning must be advanced to the ingenuously piqued reader. Regrettably, certain wholly unwelcome decisions as to style and presentation cast a pall over every single entry. In its current form, the index is severely, perhaps irretrievably marred by gratuitous editorialising on the part of the archive’s owner. These fatuous and presumptuous comments constitute a desecration of an otherwise serious endeavour in scholarship. This is only compounded by the following, grotesquely unfortunate introduction, lamentably titled “Ooh La La”. 

Project Introduction: Ooh La La! Cinema Du Frère Est Revenu – Un Rêve Pour Tu, Mon Parvenu!

Cinema! Cinema, cinema, cinema – O Handmaiden to our waking phantasias – and indeed our sordid rationalisations! What dizzying multiplicity she proffers, what homage to tradition, what lure to revolution. Spanning the warp and weft of film from the beautiful glamour of Hedy Lamarr to the glamorous beauty of Sherilyn Fenn, from the sultry voluptuousness of Claudia Cardinale to the voluptuous sultriness of Monica Bellucci, I confess my tastes are too eclectic. How disappointing to hear this catholicity denigrated as “anything with a hot chick” or “anything with boobs”. I am wounded by this injustice. It is not so! Or rather – yes, it is so. But let the jury note that I do love Dame Zoetrope for more than just that, as a cursory glance at the syllabus soon to unfold before us will joyously confirm!

As I write, it is August 2019, nebulous border between summer and autumn, and in the soft breeze, apples fall heavily from the tree like nations suddenly departing a trans-national trade organization. Much has changed in the world since I began my DVD collection but when I look back on my guiding principles at the outset of that quest, I find them sound, wise, prophetic, brilliant. It began one maudlin evening when I regarded my video collection with the sombre epiphany that I had amassed dozens of films within a basically quite narrow spectrum, and that, at that pivotal moment, I wanted to watch a film but I didn’t want to watch anything within that spectrum. From the first, my mission in DVD collection was – thusly! -  to cover as broad a range as possible, as I could never predict what caprice or even whim would command me, and so quixotically I sought to out-wit myself by planning for every eventuality of mood, a self-reflexive Machiavelli of movie-accumulation. In this, I have been successful and have rarely been stuck for a film to suit my confessedly mercurial temperament. When it does happen, I simply rectify the omission and so the collection is now a chaotic mess. It is my rare privilege to share this random heap with you in some detail.

So come with me now, join me, as we venture forth on this greatest of all adventures (apart from literature)(and possibly painting) (and socialist revolution) and sail out on to the seas of celluloid, buoyed by gusting winds of our gnawing high-culture FOMO, only so that we may drop anchor, dive deep and immerse ourselves in the waves (indeed, the New Wave) and depths of movieness. Here, a spooky face! There, a stoic cowboy. Ahoy, a torrid romance. Behold, a materialist deconstruction of the illusionist fallacy. Set sail and let the horizon be our destination as we spend many, many, many hours alone in a sedentary position gazing at long forgotten films that nobody else in the world cares about. Adventure!

Robert Murphy, 2019, Frère en Cinephilia (et aussi frère actuelle)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Arrival (2016)

Does the will to live not dim a little whenever “The Nature of Daylight” starts playing? If I can just offer one helpful note to the producers of Hollywood and television: we hate this piece of music, it’s always been shit, stop using it. Apparently, Denis Villeneuve had wanted to make a science-fiction film since he began his career as a director - a career of, let's say, unpredictable choices - and settled on this: aliens land on Earth and the US Army press-gangs the world’s top linguistics experts into figuring out how to talk to them, so "we" don’t have to start a war. The experts, led by Louise (played by Amy Adams) don’t really have to be asked twice, what with it being the biggest event in history, although from the dour mood of the Army you would think it was latrine duty. SF fans might remember elements of this from Ian Watson’s novel The Embedding. So they put on their astronaut suits for protection and pop round to meet the new neighbours. The film then follows
Read more

The Specialist (1994)

You may have often wanted to see Sylvester Stallone as a heroic terrorist bomber and Sharon Stone, aged 36, as Hot Blonde In Her Early 20s With An Air Of Mystery And Trouble. In the same film. Well, Warner Bros agreed wholeheartedly and that's what 1994 was like. This very mid-90s thriller makes the very mid-90s decision to be a hybrid of action movie and neo-noir, both of which were still runaway popular then (and, looking back, they saved the whole decade). The Getaway did the same thing, same year. Guns were briefly out of fashion in Hollywood so Stallone’s character just blows people up with explosives instead of mowing them down, a really unimprovable example of Hollywood being socially responsible. It was based on a series of 80s pulp novels I used to read and has nothing much in common with them except that he’s an ex-military guy for hire who, in every book, gets hired by a sultry babe to do a revenge hit on a Mafia boss (usually in New York, but the film goes for Miami), a
Read more

Valmont (1989)

Sometimes I write rather loosely, do I not, so on this occasion I am toying with a more essayistic approach which I suspect will be a passing fad to the mutual relief (or common relief, as Fowler would say) of the author and his readers. The object of this fine writing will be Valmont , an adaptation of Dangerous Liaisons from an interesting and - to begin the flourishes - heady collaboration between the director of One Flew Over A Cuckoo’s Nest and the screenwriter for Belle de Jour and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,  subversively doing Dangerous Liaisons against itself.   They clearly don’t like the book and redo the whole thing in the polar opposite genre – get ready for Dangerous Liaisons as a dry comedy with some occasional slapstick. You may wonder what that’s like. Well, here’s how I’d put it: Milos Forman’s film of Dangerous Liaisons can be slightly jolting if you know any other version of the story – it’s quite an imperious display of the auteur’s prerogative to tu
Read more