365 Films in 365 Days
Way back at the end of 2012, my Facebook Wifeface Nicola Manning and I resolved to watch a new film together on every single day of 2013. It’s probably the only New Year’s resolution I’ve ever kept, and we managed it with a minimum of drama and catch-up marathons, but a healthy dollop of whining about not having time to re-watch Con Air or finish Breaking Bad.
Essentially, 2013 taught me that when it comes to sitting on our arses staring at a screen, we’re stubborn, opinionated bastards.
So, here are my top and bottom ten films from the entire project. They’re not in any particular order, because I think I’ve done enough rating and reviewing for one year. Decade. LIFETIME.
THE GOOD: Frankenweenie, The Stendhal Syndrome, This is the End, Baise-Moi, Brick, Triangle, Excision, They Live, The Doom Generation, Django Unchained.
THE BAD AND THE UGLY: Howard the Duck, Monster House, Die Hard Dracula, Santos, Girls Just Want to Have Fun, Elysium, 9 Songs, Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Robotropolis, Puppetmaster.
Happy New Year everyone!
I ain’t sayin’ she a gold digger…
A few months ago, Nic started keeping a list of “shit to buy Emma when I get rich”.
I’m an impatient fuck, so I stole it:
1) Totoro bed
2) 1980s Bruce Willis
3) The entire Vivienne Westwood range (except the Union Flag stuff)
4) Space (all of it)
5) A really fat Asian chef (never trust a thin chef)
6) A pub
7) A Mega Piranha
8) Bellhop and monkey, in matching uniforms
9) Crop circle
10) Wii U, because ZOMBIES
11) The beetle earrings from Moonrise Kingdom
12) A tetanus shot
13) The complete Arrow Video collection
14) Hong Kong Disneyland at Christmas
15) Those creepy but awesome tights that make it look like you have cum dribbling down your legs
16) That thing we came up with when we were drinking, then promptly forgot before we could write it down (working title)
17) The 3-litre bottle of Jack Daniel’s behind the bar in the Caroline of Brunswick
18) Pepsi Max, on tap
19) Atheist bus banners, because there’s probably no God
20) A bra maker, whatever the proper name for one of those is
The young and prodigious #wifebanter Film Festival
When we’re rich and famous Nic and I are going to have our own film festival, because fuck Cannes in the face.
The guest list comprises of five categories of directors, with seven names in each category. It changes constantly, but this is how it stands today. Later, Nic will probably crack open the vodka and shout at me about missing out Von Trier (I’m more Dogma than Dogme 95), while I’ll chain-smoke and fight in John Landis’ corner, because I’m a sucker for a man in a gorilla suit.
1. Allowed the good whiskey
Quentin Tarantino
John Waters
Guillermo del Toro
Darren Aronofsky
The Coen Brothers (we see them as a single, squishily conjoined entity)
Dario Argento
Martin McDonagh
2. General admission
Kevin Smith
David Lynch
George A. Romero
Edgar Wright
Álex de la Iglesia
Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Wes Anderson
3. Made to sit in the corner and think about what they’ve done
Pedro Almodóvar
Ridley Scott
Sam Raimi
Wes Craven
David Cronenberg
Luc Besson
Tim Burton
4. Personae non gratae
George Lucas
Steven Spielberg
James Cameron
Michael Bay
Paul W.S. Anderson
Uwe Boll
Steve McQueen
5. Worthy of re-animation
Lucio Fulci
Stanley Kubrick
Alfred Hitchcock
John Hughes
Tony Scott
Jim Henson
Sidney Lumet
Finally, just to bug Nic, here’s a list of people we haven’t argued about yet:
Christopher Nolan, Martin Scorcese, David Fincher, Terry Gilliam, Spike Lee, Roman Polanski, Oliver Stone, ANY FUCKING COPPOLAS, Hayao Miyazaki, William Friedkin, Zack Snyder.
New Year’s resolutions
Although I’m now fully recovered on both counts, when I was little I used to be fat and Catholic. As a consequence of these twin afflictions, whenever Lent rolled around it was gently but firmly suggested to me that I should give up chocolate for 40 miserable, fruit-laden days.
I cheated every single year. I never confessed to it either, because I didn’t want to disappoint Father Michael. He was a lovely man, and I felt bad enough already not believing a word he said.
To me, New Year’s resolutions sound suspiciously like extended director’s cut versions of Lent, and my chubby, chocolate-smeared inner child has always been firmly against them. I usually side with the little bloater, but this year I’m kicking her to the kerb and getting my resolution on.
I’m going to quit smoking, join a gym, and teach myself to cook properly so I don’t have to rely on takeaways and microwaving everything until it burns my finger when I poke it in the middle.
Just kidding. The wife and I are going to watch 365 new films in 365 days. Here’s the Tumblr: http://wifebanter2013.tumblr.com/
Five word festive film reviews
Suburban Mayhem
IMDB score: 5.6, #wifebanter score: INCESTY
Blow jobs and bad parenting.
F (2010)
IMDB score: 4.8, #wifebanter score: CRINGEY
Seemingly motiveless hoodies run rampage.
The Bird with the Crystal Plumage
IMDB score: 7.1, #wifebanter score: SQUAWKY
The bird wasn’t actually crystal.
Trailer Park of Terror
IMDB score: 5.2, #wifebanter score: JERRY JERRY
Zombie rednecks and pink flamingoes.
Black Christmas (1974)
IMDB score: 7.1, #wifebanter score: HIPPIE
The original seasonal sorority slasher.
Dance with the Devil (AKA Perdita Durango)
IMDB score: 6.2, #wifebanter score: MICKEY/MALLORY
Bardem in another terrible wig.
Swimfan
IMDB score: 4.7, #wifebanter score: STALKY
Fatal Attraction for MTV kids.
Mega Piranha
IMDB score: 2.6, #wifebanter score: SNAPPY
Fish throw themselves at buildings.
Prowl
IMDB score: 4.6, #wifebanter score: SPURTY
Don’t get in strange vans.
Snail Mail My Email
“Snail Mail My Email is a collaborative art project where volunteers handwrite strangers’ emails and send physical letters to the intended recipients, free of charge.
A total of 431 volunteers have artistically interpreted and collectively sent 13,968 letters across the world since the project began in 2011.”
Now I could have just sent Nic a nauseatingly doting love letter, especially since the 2nd anniversary of our fake Facebook marriage is coming up (Don’t believe everything you read on Facebook, kids!) but instead I decided to have a little fun. Wibbly wobbly timey wimey and all that.
Antiviral
IMDB score: 6.2
#wifebanter score: FLUEY
“I noticed he was incredibly sensitive to the music of film. He knew what scary music was…he’d run away.” – David Cronenberg on his son Brandon, Cannes 2012
At some point Brandon Cronenberg must have stopped running, because Antiviral doesn’t fall very far from the genetically modified franken-tree. It’s beautifully shot, tense and visceral, and burrows under your skin with a disturbing ease. It’s set in a celebrity-obsessed near-reality in which the rich pay to be infected with viruses harvested directly from their idols, and it follows Syd March, an employee at one of the clinics that offers this dubious service of biological communion. Syd has a neat little sideline in smuggling viruses out of the clinic in his own body to sell on the black market, which is where his life gets, for want of a better word, Cronenbergian. Caleb Landry Jones is wonderful as Syd, which is particularly impressive considering a lot of his screen time is spent standing very still and looking like death warmed up, sometimes simultaneously.
Admittedly some of the sets overdo the clinical aseptic shtick and end up looking like ’90s loft conversions, and when Malcolm McDowell turns up to ham his way through a five minute scene it completely breaks the tension, but it beats watching Robert Pattinson fail to act his way out of the back of a limo in Daddy Cronenberg’s latest.
You know I’m going to have to say it, right?
Yep.
“Long live the new flesh!”
Acción Mutante
IMDB score: 6.4
#wifebanter score: CAKEY
The debut feature from Álex de la Iglesia, who looks like a Spanish Kevin Smith and directs like the deranged bastard offspring of John Waters and Dino De Laurentiis. I’ve seen two of his films already; the blood and greasepaint-smeared Balada Triste de Trompeta (The Last Circus) and the comparatively sedate 800 Balas (800 Bullets), his homage to spaghetti Westerns and compulsive liars. Now that I’ve bought Acción Mutante I’m probably going to have to collect the whole set, because I’m a dick like that.
Acción Mutante is a charmingly cheap slice of sci-fi sleaze set in a dystopian beautocracy which rejects everyone from the hideously deformed to the just plain creepy-looking. The plot, what there is of it, follows the kidnapping of a rich heiress by the titular group of terrorists Mutant Action, who are probably the most inept criminals in the history of film-making. Essentially if you’re looking for in-depth characterisation, or perhaps a coherent narrative, then you should probably move along quietly. If you’re more into floating torsos, lip-stapling, Siamese twins and condiment-based torture, then put your feet up and stay a while.
Only figuratively of course, because if that’s really what you’re into then I’m not letting you in my house.
The Ghost
IMDB score: 6.3
#wifebanter score: SOGGY
This was one of Nic’s amazing Poundland finds. It comes up on Wiki under the rather lamentable title Dead Friend, presumably because whoever was in charge of Korean to English translation the day they were thinking up international titles hated their job. Anyway, it’s about an amnesiac student who’s trying to piece her past back together while being persecuted by a ghost who’s roughly 60% hair and 40% bath water.
I’m probably not selling it to you am I? It’s really quite good, in that semi-incomprehensible way that South Korean horror tends to be. Also, if like me you’re terrified of those nasty knots of hair that get pulled out of plug holes like drowned hamsters, it’s distinctly nightmare-inducing. Oh, and there’s a recurring water-vomiting theme, if that’s your sort of thing.
Zombies: Wicked Little Things
IMDB score: 5.0
#wifebanter score: CUTESY
A low-rent 2006 horror which I bought because it has Hit Girl in it. Well, okay, that and the z-word. I’m a sucker for the z-word. In this instance we get zombie ghost miner children, because of some evil landowner or something. I don’t know, I wasn’t really paying attention to that bit. So, dead minor miners, and a pre-purple wig Chloë Grace Moretz playing a character so saccharine that half the time she seems to be disgusted with her own lines.
Zombies does absolutely everything by the hick-horror book. Creepy cabins. Animal mutilation. Loco locals. Tearaway teens getting hacked to death by hungry, pick-axe wielding Victorian children….
Okay, so it gets a few points for originality there. Plus, the zombie ghost children are really quite endearing. They spend most of the film ambling around harmlessly, looking delightfully Dickensian and photogenic. I ended up rooting for them, hoping they’d put poor Miss Moretz out of her misery.
EmmaMendesdaCosta 