What’s this?…hmm….something’s happened…
Yeah, I decided to revamp my site and give it a new layout. You can search the site with a key word, look through the archives, and select certain post categories by scrolling down to the bottom of the page.
Hope you like the new look!
My list of favourite films is forever changing…here it is as it stands now…
1. A Clockwork Orange
2. 2001: A Space Odyssey
3. Monty Python and the Holy Grail
4. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
5. Scott Pilgrim vs the World
6. The Shawshank Redemption
7. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
8. Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Arc
9. The Social Network
10. The Color Purple
11. The Rocky Horror Picture Show
12. Before Sunrise
13. Fight Club
14. The Shining
15. Eyes Wide Shut
16. Full Metal Jacket
17. Reservoir Dogs
18. Boogie Nights
19. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
20. The Green Mile
21. Back to the Future
22. The Karate Kid
23. Pulp Fiction
24. The Truman Show
25. Bedknobs and Broomsticks
26. 1984
27. 12 Angry Men
28. The Deer Hunter
29. Toy Story 2
30. Trainspotting
31. Live and Let Die
32. Halloween
33. The Man with the Golden Gun
34. Toy Story
35. Taxi Driver
36. Inception
37. Brokeback Mountain
38. The Silence of the Lambs
39. Die Hard
40. Die Hard 3
41. Mulholland Drive
42. Johnny English Reborn
43. Freedom Writers
44. Memento
45. Airplane!
46. Commando
47. The Matrix
48. Donnie Darko
49. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
50. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (David Fincher version
There is a ‘genre’ of movie which main concern is to mess with your mind and make you leave a cinema with that beautiful emotion known only as: ‘whatthefuckisgoingon?‘ I am indeed talking about the ‘cinematic mind-fuck’. From Terry Gilliam, to David Lynch and the influential Luis Bunuel, there are directors out there who delve into our minds and distort reality and unreality so much that we don’t know what the hell is going on. Below is my top 5.
In no particular order.
1) Un Chien Andalou – Luis Bunuel
Nothing makes sense in this surrealistic nightmare, and indeed it’s not supposed to. Severed hands are hit with sticks, books turn to shotguns, clothes disappear and reappear, and near the end, there’s a random shot of a butterfly. It’ll frustrate you, anger you, and fuck with your mind.
The infamous eye-slitting scene
2) A Clockwork Orange – Stanley Kubrick
Masterpiece of satire, yet unbelievably weird. A woman is killed with a giant sculpture of a penis, there are random pieces of pop-art with naked people on, there’s a fast-motion sex scene, and none of the characters speak what we’d call ‘English’. And all of the main characters where jock-straps on top of white trousers. Psychadelic, or what?
PENIS WEAPON!
3) Mulholland Drive – David Lynch
David Lynch’s movie is just about comprehensible as it nears its end, yet the rug is pulled from under the carpet in the last thirty minutes. People randomly turn smaller, dreams become reality and reality becomes dreams, and…oh I don’t know what’s going on. I imagine Lynch himself doesn’t know what the hell is going on…
Mulholland Drive - David Lynch's dark nightmare
4) Memento – Christopher Nolan
One of the best thrillers ever made. A man investigates who raped and murdered his wife…yet, it’s all told backwards. Yes, backwards.
Memento
5) The Alphabet 1, 2 and 3 – David Lynch
An oddly disturbing set of films consisting of random images and clips. It’s also a bit silly as a story is told through different letters of the alphabet. It’ll probably ruin your memories of learning the alphabet as a child forever.
David Lynch's film has managed to ruin the alphabet...
“An Andalousian Dog”
5 STARS
General Information:
Information below is taken from the following link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0020530/
15 16 min – Short | Fantasy – 6 June 1929 (France)
YouTube link to short film: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9zhKuV86NA
Director
Writer
Stars
Pierre Batcheff; Simone Mareuil
Plot:
An eye is slit, a woman falls off of a bicycle, a man has ants crawling on his hands, books turn into shotguns and many more surreal events occur.
Review
Un Chien Andalou is the greatest prank in cinema history. It’s an attack on the mainstream, it’s an unorthodox cinemagoers’ wet-dream, it’s a shockingly pointless nightmare.
Those who waste their time by attempting to find meaning in this are the main target audience of this film. Not only that, but they are the people with the mindsets that this film targets in the first place. To attempt to describe its ‘plot’ is merely listing its shots. In fact, the irony of writing this review was writing something in the ‘plot’ section in the first place.
Un Chien Andalou was made by the great surrealists: Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali – who is mainly known for his paintings. The point of Un Chien Andalou is to attack society and its norms through the meaning of cinema.
Salvador Dali - a surrealist painter
When we watch a film, we unconsciously apply logic to it: one event will trigger another event, which in turn, triggers another, and so on…Yet, in Un Chien Andalou, the events are completely unconnected, and we are lead into a false sense of security by believing this when we are told time differences occasionally between shots, for example: “Sixteen years before”. The time differences in this film are utterly irrelevant to the narrative, in the same way that each individual ‘sub-plot’ serves no use in driving the narrative any further. This is what makes the film utterly frustrating.
SIXTEEN YEARS BEFORE
The film also attempts to shock us, not just by its use of ‘anti-narrative’, but by what we’re shown. Many critics have commented on the first shots being a woman’s eye being slit with a razor, but there are other sequences to.
The infamous eye-slitting scene
A woman is sexually harassed by a man, he fondles her and when he touches her, she suddenly has no clothes, and then seconds later, she has clothes. Later on, she’s in the corner of a room, and the same man traps her in that corner whilst dragging a piano holding dead donkeys on it. I have frequently heard that this film has ‘dream logic’, yet in my opinion, it doesn’t. After all, dreams have more logic than this film, and this film doesn’t have any form of ‘logic’.
Everything in this film is random and illogical. Even the title, which translates as “An Andalousian Dog”. The title isn’t related to the film at all, there is no dog in this film, let alone an ‘andalousian’ one.
It was somewhat difficult to come up with a star rating for this film. The fundamental basis of criticism is: “did the film do what it intended to do?” I was frustrated by this film, I hated it, it annoyed me and dare I say, it irritated me. Yet I suppose, that was how I was meant to feel, and in an odd way, that makes it a masterpiece.
Verdict:
You’ll be utterly frustrated by watching this 16 minute anti-narrative film. It won’t make you feel happy, sad or any emotion like conventional cinema, apart from one: frustration.
Star Reviews 