Dodici

Hallo darlings.

My temporal awareness is all wonky. I work in blocks, three week cycles. I haven't really appreciated that months have elapsed. It's all so disjointed. I feel like I just storylined Christmas, now I storyline March. Events like Pancake day happened 'in week three' of a block since gone. The future is already over.

Where did I leave you all? I can tell you I've safely moved into a swank little white box not far from The Albert Docks.(I can see them from my balcony, don't you know.) and I'm still a busy bear on Hollyoaks. None of my episodes have gone out and as there's not much ownership to celebrate on them you probably won't hear any fanfare here when E4 ships them out to you one Sunday morning. It took a while for me to organise broadband and the thing about writing for ten, eleven, twelve hours a day is you kinda like to just play with your pants when you come in. I crash in front of Entourage with a vodka tonic. I'm a writer, sweetheart.

Anyhoo, I'm well. I'm in good spirits. I like where I'm at.

This blog is a brief one. We Can Rebuild Him set the challenge of a list of 12 films you haven't seen, but want to. It had come to him from a bunch of other highbrow blogs, and he's described it as a 'meme'. Internet Simon Says.

Of course he'd know about ones so obscure that they can only be seen when you look down a special telescope they keep in the Vatican. All of mine had YouTube clips and I'm pretty sure I could just stroll into Zavi and buy at least one of them. There's more than one Criterion Colection here. But I've Badlands tried Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid to Fistful of Dynamite leave Dog Day Afternoon out Rio Bravo the Touch of Evil really Kiss Me Deadly obvious.

No order. If there's overlaps or patterns that's just mojo magic.

12. Blast of Silence.
Dirty, cheap, cynical, pitch black New York Noir from '61.



11. Charley Varrick.
Look at that cast. And it's Don Siegel. And Mattahau capsizes a plane on Joe Don Baker. Because he's 'a genius' I think this gets a DVD release in a few weeks.



10. Le Mans
Not obscure. It's McQueen doing brooding, cool, daredevil masculinity in a car. My sometime lover Francoise Hardy is in it. Steve's got a slick watch.



9. CQ
It looks pretty and silly.


8. L'Arcidiavolo
A sex comedy about satan in medieval Italy. With the most desirable woman in all of history (Oh Domino...). And Mickey Rooney as monkey. An evil monkey. Trovajoli scores.



7. La Decima Vittima
When I feel my time here is done, I'm going to arrange the exact same exit (albeit with a different, younger girl.)



6. Modesty Blaise
I've one of the novels. It was entertaining enough, a bit of light, Flemingian fluff. Fantastic cover to the paperback. Film doesn't look all that much like Peter O'Donnell's pulp. But it does have Terrence Stamp singing.



5. Drunken Master 2.
I'm not sure how I missed this. I watched fucking hundreds of Jackie Chan movies when I was a teen. I even watched that one that doesn't seem to have any martial arts in it, where he fights ghouls in World War II.



4. Rolling Thunder.
Pushed. Too. Far.



3. Le Cercle Rogue
Melville! Delon! What exactly am I supposed to write about a film I've never seen?



2. House of Bamboo.
I'm big on the idea of men, men's men, back in the day when they were men, and they wore suits and skinny ties and manliness was there in the jawlines and short back and sides. Boy, I wish.



1. Casanova di Federico Fellini.
This is what the I imagine history looks like. Decadent and grotesque, but somehow attractive. I'd have loved to have seen Vincent Ward's wooden planet Alien 3.



Ta ra la. You big mef.