Eating Movies

There’s a small but fascinating section in Peter Biskind’s legendary book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls that is further explored in the same author’s recent biography of Warren Beatty. It concerns how legendary New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael was lured to Hollywood to be a producer by Beatty and how badly it all went.

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“You must watch a lot of movies”.

I hear this phrase a lot, usually after I’ve just dazzled a room by dropping some sort of movie knowledge bomb. I do see a lot of movies, but only slightly more than the average person I reckon. Most of my fundamental movie knowledge comes from books.

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The right kind of scumbag can really make a movie. Elevated beyond their traditional roles in actual society, scumbags take on a greater meaning in movies, representing everything the hero is not. Scumbags in movies deserve our respect, and in this blog I’m gonna talk about some of my favourites.

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I love being scared by movies. It thrills me to no end. But since I went through puberty, very few films genuinely freak me out. So it is cause for celebration when one does.

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In the second ever blog I wrote for this site , I talked about movies that seem to draw mostly hate from audiences, but which inspire only love within me.  Since writing that, several other films which fit this bill occured to me, so here I am with a follow-up.

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Welcome to the first ever Dommie Awards, named after all the wonderful movie actors and characters who bare the glorious moniker, Dominic. Or Dom. Can you identify all the Dommies in the banner above?

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About half-way through the 2010 Euro action thriller From Paris With Love, a bald-headed John Travolta is sitting on a park bench with sidekick Jonathan Rhys Myers, extolling his love of the titular city. His favourite thing about Paris? “The Royale with Cheese!” he exclaims with a shit-eating grin as he presents the burger and wallows in his Pulp Fiction-referencing crapulence.

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With seemingly Gatsby-esque levels of societal ascension, I recently found myself right at the glittering pinnacle of the local media industry – the newly renamed Aotearoa (formerly Qantas) Film and Television Awards. This is what happened.

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