I'm 13% Good

When I was a certain age, I switched from BBC One to BBC Two at the end credits of Match of the Day and a film was just beginning. With little else to do at midnight on a Saturday, I decided to watch it. Being that I had a liking of kung-fu films, I was not perturbed by the fact that it was a film from Hong Kong in Cantonese with English subtitles. 97 minutes later at the end credits I had enjoyed what I had just watched, probably more so than the undoubted bore draw I had probably watched Villa play during Match of the Day.

That film was ‘Fallen Angels’ by Wong Kar-wai, and for many years, I had waited for its release on DVD which never came. A year ago, I went to Hong Kong and picked up a copy while there, so I could enjoy the film again first the first time in well over a decade. This week, on Monday, ‘Fallen Angels’ finally got a UK DVD release: a year to the day since my return from Hong Kong.

‘Fallen Angels’ isn’t a great film – it’s barely in Wong’s Top 5 – but is a film I remember as an early step into a love of Asian cinema, and so pretty influential in my life. Also in recent days, the BFI’s ‘Sight & Sound’ Magazine has published the results of its poll of ‘the greatest films of all time’ conducted among leading directors and critics.

‘Fallen Angels’ was, unsurprisingly, not featured. Wong’s ‘In the Mood for Love’ – my second favourite of his films – was, but out of the 100 films included, I have only watched 13 to date. In much the same way as Stewart Lee’s ‘41^st Best Stand-up Ever’, these polls serve only to make you feel less cultural and sophisticated and unable to attend fancy dinner parties. They are the opinions of others, who will have a lot more knowledge on the subject than you for they are experts who have way more time to study these films than us, who simply fly past for entertainment value. Few of the films are from beyond the 1960s, and so reflect the opinions of a different generation who are likely to know where the ‘inspiration’ for many of today’s directors came from. That’s what I told myself when I realised I had only seen 13% of ‘the greatest films of all time.’

The 13 that I have seen are as follows:

6. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968)

14. Apocalypse Now (Coppola, 1979)

17. Seven Samurai (Kurosawa, 1954)

21. The Godfather (Coppola, 1972)

24. In the Mood for Love (Wong, 2000)

26. Rashomon (Kurosawa, 1950)

=31. The Godfather Part II (Coppola, 1974)

=31. Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 1976)

35. Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960)

=53. North by Northwest (Hitchcock, 1959)

=53. Raging Bull (Scorsese, 1980)

=69. Blade Runner (Scott, 1982)

=69. Blue Velvet (Lynch, 1986)

All of these are films that I like (though I’m not a massive ‘Blue Velvet’ fan); and all bar 2 are films made before I was born, but how many would be in my personal top 13 favourite films? Well, I’d say about 4, maybe 5 if I’m feeling kinky, so it can be said the list is a pretty good reflection of film tastes. But what is more interesting is the publication of the individual top 10s of selected critics/directors, showing that an overall list is relatively uninteresting and that personal favourites and individual influences is a better way of looking at it. Here, you can see what people truly like, rather than just generic consistencies, such as the amount of people that will say that ‘The Godfather’ is one of their 10 favourite films; and titles you will never have heard of will invade your consciousness and may lead you to watch something you may not have considered.

While many of those asked will be of an older generation, and so their favoured films will reflect as much, there were still many younger critics/directors included and many still chose films made many moons ago. Very few were made in the new millennium, or indeed post-1980 showing an extended period of quantity over quality.

For fun, here is a list of the 13 films I consider to not necessarily be favourites, but important films in my life and ones I could probably watch over-and-over again. These are certainly not the greatest – though there is quite a bit of overlap with the 13 I have seen from the BFI poll – and there is probably a lot of bias in here, but there should be when deciding your favourite films. But don’t take my word for it: I’m only 13% good…

Hana-bi (Kitano, 1997)

Happy Together (Wong, 1997)

Do the Right Thing (Lee, 1989)

Rashomon (Kurosawa, 1950)

Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 1976)

In the Mood for Love (Wong, 2000)

Seven Samurai (Kurosawa, 1954)

Raise the Red Lantern (Zhang, 1991)

The Godfather (Coppola, 1972)

Clerks (Smith, 1994)

Enter the Dragon (Clouse, 1973)

Ghost in the Shell (Oshii, 1995)

Fallen Angels (Wong, 1995)