It’s the question cinephiles always bristle at. It was posed to me recently on CBC Radio, and I was momentarily baffled. I knew the truth wouldn’t satisfy, which is that it changes with the weather, with the hour, day, and week. How can I choose from between the Stanley Kubrick, Christopher Nolan, Sofia Coppola, Celine Song, or Jim Jarmusch movies I adore?
You’ve got to say something, right? So I landed on Withnail & I. It’s certainly one of my favourites over the years, and I introduced a screening of it at Carbon Arc Cinema last summer. It was still front of mind.
But here’s the thing — how do you really answer that question? I was also asked for a favourite Christmas movie, which is tough enough to call — I went with Peter O’Toole and Katherine Hepburn in The Lion In Winter — but if you take cinema seriously, and you can tell I do because I call it “cinema,” your picks for your favourites are deeply rooted in your identity. It’s a point of pride, whether you can narrow it down to one or mention a smattering.
A fellow cinephile recently asked me about the title of this blog. It’s inspired by another of my favourite movies, Chinatown. JJ Gittes (Jack Nicholson) in one scene notes that there’s a discolouration in one of the eyes of Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway), which she says is a flaw. I love the references to “imperfect seeing” in that film, whether it’s Evelyn’s eye or the cracked lens of a pair of spectacles.
In terms of this blog, it also serves as my admission to subjectivity: I’m a professional, but I’m also just another dude with an opinion. If I write this blog for another 15 years, I’ll still be that when I complete the last post.
I’m sure there are a lot of people who won’t watch Roman Polanski movies anymore — he’s a rapist, after all. It’s hard to name a movie as your favourite when it was directed by a man who spent decades on the run from justice due to having sexually assaulted a minor.
The irony here is the villain of the piece in Chinatown is someone who has assaulted his daughter — it’s funny how we never assume creatives who tell stories about terrible men are identifying with them, we assume they’re elevated from that given their stories frequently identify the evil. We credit storytellers with knowing the difference between right and wrong, and being able to choose the light.
Screenwriter Robert Towne wanted a less devastating conclusion for the film, but Polanski insisted otherwise and undoubtably the film is better because of it. That’s a dark recognition.
Another favourite film of mine is Blade Runner. I remember a classmate of mine in my undergrad railing against it when I brought it up as an influence on the work I was doing at the time, claiming the film was misogynistic. I couldn’t see it then, and I was offended by his perspective, but over the years how can you not consider that possibility?
Deckard (Harrison Ford) kills two women, and forces himself on a third. The narrative ambiguity around the particulars of his humanity, none of that excuses what the film shows us about who he is. I’ve heard a theory that Deckard is the antagonist of the film, where the replicants are the protagonists, which makes a certain amount of sense even as they murder innocents in order to free themselves from slavery.
It’s a dystopic vision of the future, no doubt, but every science fiction film is in conversation with the era in which it’s made. Was director Ridley Scott and screenwriters Hampton Fancher and David Webb Peoples commenting on the way men treat women in a conscious way, or just plumbing violent thrills for genre kicks? I’ve heard competing arguments, but the film is beloved either way.
What brings me back to Blade Runner are the same things that bring people back to Pandora in James Cameron’s Avatar movies — the immersion in a universe that feels strangely comforting. And I know how gross that sounds, given the assertions above. It’s the film’s fantastic urban milieu, the hypnotic score by Vangelis, the gorgeous visuals, the multilingual, multiethnic city of people travelling through acid rain in flying cars. It’s terribly beautiful.
At different times in my life, I would’ve named Annie Hall or Manhattan as a favourite, but Woody Allen troubles a lot of people these days, myself included. If you named one of his pictures — and I still have a soft spot for his musical, Everyone Says I Love You — you’re making a political statement right there.
Certainly Michael Mann’s romantic adventure The Last of The Mohicans would be on my list. It’s still amazing in so many ways, but it doesn’t land the same way today as it did when it was made in the wake of Kevin Costner’s Dances With Wolves.
My all-time favourite movie franchise is that bastion of male fantasy James Bond 007, which through the Daniel Craig era has been deconstructed and smartly modernized. But as was so deftly satirized in Alan Partridge, many of us hold Bond sacred even as it has been wildly sexist, racist, and colonialist.
There are other, problematic picks from my list, and I’ll sometimes admit to them. It’s also good to practice holding conflicting ideas in your head at the same time. Identifying your favourite movie says a lot about you, whether you like it or not, but what you love isn’t who you are. Another way to think about that is, you’re *more* than what you love. You contain multitudes.
