10 films that have left an indelible mark

Thunderheart - more violent than I normally like but such a great film. Shows a side of America rarely seen in film, great landscape and a man character struggling to come to terms with his identity.

Children of Men - based on a short story by P.D. James. Some great acting but all the more disturbing in that it is so believable - especially in the context of the refugee crisis.

Hi Fidelity - probably in my top 3 films of all time. Faced with a relationship crisis the main character decides to re organise his record collection autobiographically - brilliant. Great sound track too - when I saw this at the cinema I was the last person to leave as I had to stay until the Stevie Wonder track had finished (I believe when I fall in love) it sounded amazing on the big speakers.

Three Colours Blue - my favourite of the three colours films. Has a special poignancy as I first saw it a couple of years after my first partner was killed in a car accident (the main characters son and husband are killed in an accident). I really identified with her desire to just leave and start over where no one knew her. The music is haunting and the film is beautifully shot. I always wanted a blue glass mobile like the one she has but never found one.

The Consequences of Love (Le conseguenze dell'amore). An Italian thriller with one of my favourite soundtracks. An unlikely romance between a weird middle-aged guy living in a hotel and a waitress. The film is quite weird and involves the Mafia and drugs. The soundtrack does sudden switches from almost complete silence to beautiful melancholic music to loud thumping dance tracks. Needless to say things don't end well for the central character. Brilliant and compelling.

Manufactured Landscapes - a beautiful and disturbing documentary following photographer Edward Burtynsky as he photographs landscapes that have been irrevocably changed by human activity. One of the most memorable scenes is near the beginning when they are filming inside a Chinese factory - that just goes on and on and on. The scale is mind boggling. The Chinese scenes are the most memorable for the sheer scale of the devastation (and how beautiful it sometimes is in its ugliness. A city demolished to make way for a giant reservoir where the residents are forced to take it apart by hand sticks in my mind. As does the description of how the earth rocked on its axis when it was filled. Terrifying.

Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus - 2003 documentary film of Jim White's musical exploration of the American deep south, looking at where Christianity and music overlap. Beautifully shot and with an amazing soundtrack - the shots of the handsome Family singing on the verandah of a wooden shack on a Louisiana swamp stayed with me for weeks. Amazing!

The Breakfast Club - you can tell by this choice that I came of age in the 1980s. A bit dated now but still a great coming of age story which also has a great soundtrack. Five archetypal teenagers (the swot, the jock, the popular girl, the rebel, the shy weird girl) find themselves in Saturday detention together and unite against the teacher discovering that they may have different backgrounds but aren't so different after all. There are some moving scenes where they share secrets and some funny really funny bits too. Feel good nostalgia.

The Lives of Others - great German film from 2006 set in East Berlin. A Stasi agent who monitors conversations gets obsessed with the life of a theatre director and his partner. The film brilliantly portrays the paranoia and back stabbing behaviour that goes on living under such a repressive regime - the fact that you never know who you can trust and that sometimes help comes from unlikely places.

Truly, Madly, Deeply - Alan Rickman and Juliette Stevenson star in this romantic film about a cello player who dies and comes back to haunt his distraught fiancee (bringing with him a bunch of famous ghosts to watch videos). Poignant, moving and with a soundtrack featuring some great cello music as well as Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan.

Honourable mentions: The Conversation, West Side Story, Star Trek - First Contact, Falling in Love, Donnie Darko, Quadrophenia, Alice's Restaurant, Withnail and I, The Future is Unwritten, The Goob, Boyhood.

Once

We watched a really good film last night called "Once". I wasn't sure I was going to like it but I can't recommend it highly enough. The film is made great by the naturalistic acting of the two main characters and also by the brilliant soundtrack featuring the two leads. The music reminded me a lot of damien Rice and Lisa Hannigan at their best. It is so refreshing to watch a film where the story isn't tied up neatly for you. In the great tradition of European films "Once" is more about what doesn't happen and what isn't said than what is and that is what makes it so beautiful.

Bargains and Favourites

I found myself in HMV yesterday looking for birthday presents. Didn't find a present but somehow ended up spending twenty quid in the sale - not sure how that happened. I console myself with the fact that one of the CDs was a complete bargain - Appetite for Destrution by Guns n Roses for three pounds! (yes I know it's cheesy but there are a few good tracks on there and I'm not proud!). The other CD was the latest Killers album which is very good. I can also console myself that the two DVDs were cheap too - five and three pounds which is as much as you might pay to rent a film and we can always sell them on or give them to the charity shop later.

N and I watched "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" last night, which I thoroughly enjoyed on a second viewing and N enjoyed it too - it's intesesting to see what 14 year olds like. He asked me last night to name my favourite film of all time. A hard task - there are so many. If I was really pushed I might say High Fidelity. I tried to narrow it down to a top ten and even found that difficult. Here they are in no particular order:

High Fidelity

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Garden State

Two Lane Blacktop

Labyrinth

Children of Men

This is England

Donnie Darko

Quadrophenia

The Three Colours Trilogy

Lord of the Rings

The Breakfast Club

Falling in Love

Yes I know that's more than ten! and then of course there are the music films:

Rude Boy

The Song Remains the Same

The Wall

Westway to the World

Funky Monks

Not Fuzz

Simon Pegg fails to thrill in this thoroughly unfunny pastiche of cop films. Pegg delivers a film overloaded with famous British actors and gratuitous and pointless violence. This film was a sad reminder for me of the sorry state of British society.

I once rated Simon Pegg very highly as a comic writer - the series Spaced was original and extremely funny. It seems though, that he has gained stardom and lost the comic plot. He may be hob nobbing with the likes of Tom Cruise but he seems to have forgotoon the ingredients of a good, intelligent comedy. The intentions in Hot Fuzz are good, it gives a nod to several genres of film - most notably cop and Hammer Horror, but sadly fails to deliver the laughs. In a cinema three quaters full there were only one or two laughs and those were from teenagers.

Simon needs to get back to his comic roots and rediscover intelligence and subtlety.

What is Scary?

Thanks Richm for the idea of a horror party. I will bear that in mind. This week I have to write a ghost story. I haven't read many ghost stories for years. I was an avid fan of the genre as a teenager and had loads of anthologies of ghost stories. I can remember being really spooked by some of them.

These days there aren't many things that really scare me in a book. Maybe the age of cinema has hardened us up so that we harder to scare. We are certainly exposed to copious amounts of tension and violence via the cinema and tv. A friend of mine said that she finds ghost stories scarier if they are true tales - an interesting point.

The stories I find scariest are post apocolyptic tales where you can almost imagine they are real or could happen - in books this is things like "Day of the Triffids", Douglas Coupland's "Girlfriend in a Coma" and Peter Dicksons Changes trilogy, in film it is things like "Children of Men" and Quatermass. Somehow these strike me as being far more chilling than something about monsters or ghosts.