I Love/Hate Movies

Here's some movie lists I've put together after listening to a lot of movie podcasts and looking at my favourite films list on my blog profile. That's an off the cuff list written in like half an hour. Many films are not included because I haven't re-watched a lot of those old favourites (listed below). My brain also doesn't feel the need to have rigid rankings for things anymore. I would have once had strict well thought out lists for the top twenty movies of all time, the top ten films set in Melbourne, top seven Scorsese movies, top five worst actors etc. I could probably add to my favourite films list a few more Italian, Polish, South Korean, Japanese, Czech, French and German films, horror movies, film-noir, documentaries and a few more from Robert Altman,  John Cassavetes, John Huston, Woody Allen and a bunch of directors I've never heard of......

*Disclaimer

*These lists are by no means comprehensive, just what I came up with one night when I couldn't sleep. I didn't get out me Leonard Maltin or do any research, otherwise this post would then have taken up the entire internet.

**I didn't have a vcr until 1986 or 87 (my mid teens) plus had boringly strict catholic parents so I missed a whole lotta horror/trash/comedy/action stuff from the 80s. I was not an 80s teenage video shop nerd. I didn't love Joe Dante, John Hughes or teen tits and arse sex comedies. I've never seen a Charles Bronson movie, Troll 2 or Labyrinth. I've actually never seen Porky's from beginning to end but I do remember seeing Recruits. I have no interest in kids or teen films now. I think a lot of people's love for those genres comes from nostalgia ie. seeing them at the right age. By the time The Goonies came out I was too old for it but people just a couple of years younger than me cherish it. I went straight from Temple Of Doom, Back To The Future and Aliens to being obsessed with David Lynch, Wim Wenders and Peter Greenaway. I now find that hilarious and so pretentious.

I'd love to be into just one genre like Westerns, Krimi, Nunsploitation, Gialli, Turkish Rip-offs, Czech New Wave, Made For TV Horror, Rape Revenge, Hospital Horror or Blaxploitation. Being middle aged I've come to terms with the fact that I'm a middlebrow dilettante though. If I find a film I like, I haven't found a tribe - I've found a movie I dig. The films I like/dislike don't define me (Insert quote from Groucho Marx "I don't want to belong to any club...."). I've lost interest in sci-fi. My patience for slow films has dwindled. I've forgotten a lot of (pre 60s) old hollywood classics, musicals, comedies, monster movies, British films etc. that I once saw on telly and liked. I've also forgotten a lot of the names of avant-garde, arty and foreign films that I liked and would have seen at the Melbourne Cinematheque, arthouse/cult-y theatres and The Melbourne International Film Festival. Remember The Carlton Moviehouse, The Valhalla, The Lumiere, The Panorama (that was in Brunswick St. for like 10 minutes during 1993), The Astor, that one that was in Swanston Street?.... I've probably forgotten a few others too.

MOVIES I ONCE LIKED BUT CAN'T IMAGINE LIKING NOW (But you never know though)
Trust
Dazed & Confused
Chasing Amy
Reality Bites
American Beauty
There Will Be Blood
Stalker
Donnie Darko
Badlands
New York, New York
Leaving Las Vegas
Spirits (of The Air Gremlins Of The Clouds)
Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas
Betty Blue
Hiding Out
Buffalo 66
Faster Pussycat Kill Kill (Probably couldn't sit through this without being wasted man)
The Trip
Suspiria
Rolling Thunder
Wings Of Desire
Kiss Of The Spider Woman
Sex & Zen
Dead Man
Jean De Florrette
Manon De Sources
The Lover
Down by Law
Thelma & Louise
Unbearable Lightness Of Being
Better Off Dead (Actually watched this the other day too, pretty naff and oh so quirky. Maybe kids would like it, probably not. I mean this was great for an 80s fourteen year old me. Now all I see is that John Cusack's really fucking annoying)
Simple Men
Two Hands
Bad Lieutenant (Watched this the other day. Keitel was wavering between utter shite and really convincing as a depraved cop. Then came the whining/wailing scenes towards the end. That tipped an already ordinary and obvious film into total nonsense for me. Being young and impressionable makes you like strange things. Bad Lieutenant has put me off watching any of the other films in this particular list because I've proved myself correct twice)
Ferris Bueller's Day Off
Hot Fuzz
The Holy Mountain (I'm sure if I smoked a holy mountain of weed I'd like it)
Shine
Surviving Desire
Magnolia
Fellini films
Bergman films

MOVIES I ONCE LOVED BUT HAVEN'T SEEN FOR OVER 15 YEARS (So who knows? But I reckon I might still like 'em. Middlebrow alert!)
My Life As A Dog
Brazil
Sex, Lies & Videotape
Bad Boy Bubby
Love Serenade
Naked
Bliss
La Haine
Millers Crossing
Midnight Express
Angel Heart
3 Women
Stop Making Sense
The Elephant Man
Hana-Bi
End Of The Century
A Better Tomorrow
Paris Texas
Scanners
Deathdream
The Man Who Fell To Earth
The Living End
Pure Shit
Stone
Hardboiled
The Filth & The Fury
Drugstore Cowboy
Delicatessen
Tokyo Drifter (Watched this after I put up this blog post. Classic)
Fresh
To Die For
Proof
Rain
Targets
Race With The Devil
Marathon Man
The Getaway
Performance
Re-Animator
If
Stroszeck
Night Of The Creeps
Lenny
Raiders Of The Lost Ark
The Temple Of Doom
Woyzeck
The Ice Storm
Eating Raoul
Shock Corridor
Deep End (A 70s British film with a Polish director and Can on the soundtrack. How could you go wrong?)
Melvin and Howard
Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf
Three Colours Trilogy
Breaking The Waves
Mulholland Drive
Last Temptation Of Christ
Secretary
Day Of The Dead
Akira
Pink Flamingoes
Branded To Kill
Le Samourai
Shaft
Truck Turner
The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover
The Comfort Of Strangers
Nil By Mouth
Fun
Gas Food Lodging
Sexy Beast
The Fourth Man (Nobody ever talks about this film. It was directed by Paul Verhoeven in 1983 before he moved to Hollywood. It's his best film, I reckon.....although I only saw it once, maybe 28 years ago. John Hinde presented it on ABC TV)
Going Down
Death In Brunswick
Romper Stomper
Bachelor Party
Lantana
The Boys
Chunking Express
Do The Right Thing
Repo Man
Predator
Family Plot
Trees Lounge
Colors
My Beautiful Laundrette
Meantime
Living In Oblivion
The Age Of Innocence
Roadside Prophets
Route 66
Those 80s and early 90s Jon Jost films I saw, maybe at the Melbourne Cinematheque.

MOVIES I ONCE LOVED BUT NOW HATE
Clerks
Wild At Heart
Raising Arizona
2001: A Space Odyssey (Maybe this just doesn't work on blu-ray/telly ie. not in a cinema. I originally saw it in the early 90s on a 70mm print in the best cinema in Melbourne and it blew me young little mind)

MOVIES I'M INDIFFERENT TO (AKA Meh...What's all the fuss?)
Kill Bill I & II
Heat
The Proposition
DIG
Vertigo
One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest
Lord Of The Ring Trilogy
The Departed
Scarface
Blade Runner
The Breakfast Club
The Big Lebowski
E.T.
The Graduate
Cinema Paradiso
The Princess Bride
Rocky
Marnie
Robocop
The Hateful Eight

MOVIES I NEVER LIKED (yeah I know)
Harold & Maude
The Life Aquatic
Last Tango In Paris
Angel Baby
Top Gun
Star Wars
Pretty Woman
Priscilla: Queen Of The Desert (One of my heroes, Philip Brophy, wrote a monograph on how much he hates this movie. What a legend!)
The Last Waltz
Shawshank Redemption
Schindler's List
Boondock Saints
Forest Gump
Fight Club
Silence Of The Lambs
The Green Mile
Gladiator
Japanese Story
Gangs Of New York
Memento
Snatch
Dead Poets Society
Chinatown
MASH
Easy Rider
Citizen Kane
Broken Flowers
Lost In Translation
The Castle
Pump Up The Volume
24 Hour Party People
Wonderland
Swingers
Before Sunrise
Inglorious Bastards
....and a million more

MOVIES I USED TO HATE BUT NOW QUITE LIKE
The Shining
The Godfather
Groundhog Day
Taxi Driver
Crocodile Dundee
Dirty Dancing
The Tenant
Psycho
A Clockwork Orange (Well half of it)
Rio Bravo
Zabriskie Point

LOVED IT, HATED IT, LOVED IT AGAIN
Dogs In Space

MOVIE DIRECTORS I CAN'T STAND
Todd Haynes
Wes Anderson
Terrence Malick
Michael Winterbottom

NEVER SEEN
Tootsie
It's A Wonderful Life
Razorback

THREE CLASSIC 70s FILMS I ONLY DISCOVERED IN 2017
Chilly Scenes Of Winter
Puzzle Of A Downfall Child
(Thanks to Bill Ackerman & Mike White for alerting me to those above two)
The Dion Brothers

(Discovered this on a very dodgy print at either youtube or a pirate-y site while I was having a Stacy Keach fest. Hey its got Margot Kidder as well. This film's also known as The Gravy Train. Funnily enough it's written by Terrence Malick. He also wrote the script to Pocket Money which I really like too. He seems a bit looser and just plain better when he's doin the script sans the directing gig)

93 Darkside/Jungle

This one goes into the category of 'Heard it but never knew what the fuck it was and jeez it's a hardcore bewdy!' More dark 93 bizniz, this time on a funky jungle tip.



This is from the same EP. Melodic rhythms, bleepedelia and trippy kindness, you know what I mean. Lovely but it also gets a bit dark (I always wondered where the Omni Trio acolytes were).



Not so lovely, this one. Fantastic euphoric gloom.  Get on a bad trip and send your brain down the gurgler. This one will make you see spiders on the wall,

The Hip Hop In 2017

A REALLY DEEP ANALYSIS OF RAP FROM A FAN LOSING INTEREST

I finally got the urge to play some rap for the first time this year. I had five albums waiting in the wings - Thugger, Migos, RJ and two from Future. After an initial listen to Thugger Girls I thought 'Hmmm.....I dunno....I think listening to Future's 2014 mixtape Monster sounds like a much better idea'. It was a great idea because it seems even better than it did three years ago. Monster was the first place Fuck Up Some Commas appeared and contains the two below classics.





I guess it's pretty easy to get overlooked if you're from LA as Kendrick is so ubiquitous, has anybody got any room for another LA rapper? Last year however there were two excellent LA albums Schoolboy Q's Blank Face and Still Brazy from YG. This year we've got RJ's proper debut album. He has made guest appearances on DJ Mustard's Ketchup (2013) & 10 Summers: The Mixtape (2015). RJ's done a handful of mixtapes but his best album so far is the collaboration he recorded with Choice Rich off Mackin. The new record MrLA, on initial listens, doesn't seem as effortless as that collab with Choice but it's better than anything that K Lamar has done since Good Kid...

Two hours plus of Future was a hell of a lot to take in. His two albums are the best of this bunch though. HNDRXX seems much stronger than than the self-titled effort....

Culture from Migos seemed ok, much better than Beautiful Thugger Girls anyway....

I dunno I guess I have to give all these albums more of a listen. Then there's Drake, Young MA, DJ Quik & Problem, Kehlani etc..... can I be bothered though?

Maybe if I still had an hour and half commute daily or drove a car I'd be more in the mood to be digging this stuff.

93 'ardcore/Darkside.....

I'd heard Megadrive's Takin Control EP which contained the tune Demon from '92. I thought I'd come across Mega 2 before but perhaps I haven't. Classic hardcore into darkness/92 into 93 bizniz.



God I thought A1 was good but hold your little horses check out A2. That mental liquid bass frequency drop at 0.53 is astounding then the keyboard/bass/whatever the fuck it is riff comes in at 1.20 like it's straight from an Iration Steppas track. Mind and ears blown. Rewind!



The cheap and cheerful, made in 10 minutes style doesn't always work for everybody but fuck this works. What a ruff diamond. So Tight is pretty odd. The vocal science here is psychedelic and creepy. At the 3.36 mark it's crazy/weird time as the hoovers enter and the beats go off the charts. Never even heard of this until tonight = v happy.



This like So Tight is from The Man With No Name's '93 Follow The Leader EP. I guess there are a bunch of darkside tunes similar to this like Boogie Times Tribe's The Dark Stranger. You know, with a repeated sample of film dialogue, dark synthy strings and atmospheric lulls. It's a great formula joined here with some choice choppage and mentastic smears. The Painted Man sounds like a really scary horror monster of a thing but according to youtube it's a sample from Peter Pan (?)!



I've just figured out how I ended up back in 'ardcore/darkside zones. On the weekend we went to the pictures and saw IT which was pretty good. Anyway I couldn't get that bit of dialogue from the 90s tv mini series of IT out of my head and had to come home and play it. I didn't always like Neuromancer's Pennywise but the song has featured in several of my favourite darkside dj mixes. Over the years that demented "They all float down here" refrain has wormed its way into my brain (whoops....this one is from '92).

93 Darkside

Wow. Loving this. I don't think I've heard it before. Maybe it's in an old mix but I've never ID'd it before. I tried to listen to some current music today (rap and even some 2017 drum'n'bass) but I ended up here in 1993 darkside zones soon after. There's a good reason for that, which is that this music is so much better than anything from the here and now. This was the future and there was more future to be heard the next day....blah blah. I'm still discovering stuff from this era so it's not all a sad nostalgia trip. Uncovering unheard gold from '93 is still exhilarating.

Many rate Skanna's Night Stalker EP as one of the classics of 93 darkside. I'm not about to disagree with that!



Now I know my ears have never come across this one because that steppy bass drop at 3.38 is totally unfuckingforgettable. These records are now going for absurd prices on discogs. I missed the boat collecting these. I should have started six or seven years back when I got back into 'ardcore/darkside/jungle. The prices weren't so obscene then, I mean they were still high but...

ZANOV - Green Ray

Green Ray is another recently discovered killer space jam from France, sure it was on my radar but I'd never bothered to check it out. I'm starting to think maybe the French released even more cosmic synth LPs than the Germans did. I don't love them all, some are just good like Oliver Roy's Pochette Surprise and Cristal by Phillipe Guerre but I guess those two incorporate romantic classical aspects into their progressive electronic sound. Zanov's Green Ray (1976) is all pulsating drones and swirling analogue synthesisers. Strap yourself in for close up encounters with space weather then set the controls for an ominous metagalactic chase through the asteroid belt.

RIP Holger Czukay

The man behind Can.

RIP Walter Becker

Six years ago I finally succumbed to the genius of The Dan. I could have posted their entire first 4 LPs and Aja. So much pleasure, so many levels. Thank you Mr Becker.

Didier Bocquet - Eclipse

Another space synth jam that was unknown to me until I discovered it on the youtubes. It's another bewdy, this time from 70s France. Eclipse's tone is one of robotic gloom and dark solitude which becomes unforgivingly frosty. This might be the best of the recent interstellar discoveries on the blog which have included Anna Sjalv Tredje's Tussilago Fanfara and the previous post Hingus from Sven Grunberg. Get in your obsolete spacecraft to traverse the infinite void and disappear into Didier Bocquet's intense deep space trance.

Didier puts on his space hair before the voyage.

Sven Grünberg - Hingus

Been on a cosmic synth bender listening to a bunch of stuff Ive never checked out before despite these acts being on the peripheries of my cosmic radar like Clearlight, Automat, Dominique Guiot and Czeslaw Niemen (Thanks Hardly Baked). In the midst of this retro-futuristic space rabbit hole I came across Hingus, a 1981 LP from Estonia. I'd never heard of it before but this is a little classic of the aforementioned genre. It's great to know there's still a few things out there left to surprise and delight us all. Check out this epic space jam from Sven Grunberg.



This is the final track of the album which had me in intergalactic astonishment. Wow man.