Insights from a person of questionable sanity

Ok, so we’ve established I love literature. Did you know I am also a movie addict? Yes I am! This is one addiction I won’t be seeking a cure for. On average I watch four movies a week, on the internet, at the cinema, filmfour, sky, LOVEfilm, I could go on.

Most of the time I watch good quality stuff, absolute essentials in the film world, like Shakespeare in the literature world. However, sometimes I do succumb to popular tastes – like most recently Confessions of a Shopaholic.

I’ve compiled a list below of films I would like to see, or see again. I intend to blog about them too, I would love to know your opinions. Even if you have none, like me - I’m not a movie critic and film modules at university don’t count, sometimes it is just enough to watch something great; just like when you read something great but lack the full knowledge and expertise to analyse it to bits.

I’d like to see more of Michelangelo Antonioni (dir), I’ve only seen Blown Up which was absolutely fantastic! Incredibly clever. By some strange twist of fate he died on the same day as Ingmar Bergman – famous Swedish director, son of a priest and yet he’s films are renowned for their ‘largely spare and stark aesthetic, an existential framework, and plots driven by a fascination with death and the moral torments of the human soul’. I’ve only seen Winter Light, The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries. Here on youtube you will find BBC Four documentary on the man, here is part one of four (the other parts should be easy to find) : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNXw_...om=PL&index=56



- Through a Glass Darkly (Bergman)
- The Silence (Bergman)
- Cries and Whispers (Bergman)
- Sophie’s Choice
- The White Countess (starring Ralph Fiennes, one of my favourite actors)
- The Passenger (Antonioni)
- The Eclipse (Antonioni)
- The Adventure (Antonioni)
- Doctor Zhivago (David Lean’s version, I love this film! It’s beautiful)
- The bridge on the river kwai (david lean, one of those movies everyone talks about but I’ve never seen, doesn’t seem like my cup of tea)
- Blue Velvet (David Lynch, one of those films always thrown into an undergraduate film module!)
- 2001: A Space Odyssey (I’ve only ever seen clips)
- The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover (Peter Greenaway)
- The Quarrel (1992, amazon describes it as: A chance reunion of two Holocost survivors - one a Hasidic Jew, the other a skeptical journalist who has turned his back on religion - leads to a searing probe of good and evil and an ultimate test of faith and redemption)
- Something by Andrei Tarkovsky, a Russian director recommended to me by a friend – any suggestions anyone?
- The Crying Game (1992, I’m sure we’ve all seen this but don’t give away the plot to those who haven't!)
- The 400 blows (1959)
- The Chatterley Affair (2006. Amazon: ‘a docudrama based on the obscenity trial held in October 1960 over D.H. Lawrence's book, Lady Chatterley's Lover’)
- Incantato (2003, a shy older man falls in love with a blind woman, friends who have seen this tell me it has the best love scene ever – sensitive, touching, romantic, erotic…must see this!)
- The Lives of Others (2006 Oscar winner for best foreign movie, a close friend lent me the dvd, I got to the end and rewound it immediately and watched it all over again. Compelling!
- Hitchcock! Can’t forget him. I’ve only seen a handful – Psycho, Vertigo, Rear Window, The Birds, Frenzy and North by Northwest (annoying ending or what!)