8th March 2010

Like at least eight other people across the country, I've recently been reading Dr Mark Kermode's new book It's Only A Movie, and I've been thoroughly enjoying it. I've got up to the Russia section and the coverage of Mariano Baino's DARK WATERS, a film of which I'd seen a brief showreel at a festival one weekend at the Scala in Kings Cross. Subsequently unable to find the VHS release (via Tartan, I believe) I managed to get it stocked by my local council where it was borrowed by up to three people over the following decades.

The thing about DARK WATERS, of course, was that we didn't really know very much about it apart from the contents of that showreel, so there was a sense of discovery about it, a sense of journeying into the unknown because we had no idea what the movie would take us. Dr Kermode touches on this briefly about the days before a "culture of 24-hour Infotainment [where] it's increasingly hard to see a movie without some prior knowledge of its form, history and financial performance".

I've been coming round to this way of thinking for a while now and am actually wanting to know less and less about films until I finally see them. My big test right now is to try and avoid absolutely everything about SHUTTER ISLAND: reviews, interviews, clips and trailers. I'm not even sure what genre it belongs to and have nothing to go on but the poster artwork. In this week's Saturday Telegraph magazine there's a huge article on Martin Scorsese and I'm not going anywhere near it until Friday when the film opens. To me it's an ideal where I can see the film with as few preconceptions as possible, far removed from the summer blockbuster behemoth of marketing insanity, where we're so relentlessly bludgeoned by merchandising and publicity that finally seeing the film is almost an afterthought, and you've practically seen half of it already. How often did the TWISTER people flog out those wireframe demonstrations of the big effects sequences? How many times did we have to see the INDEPENDENCE DAY money shots of the White House blowing up? It's almost as if we're being programmed with our responses to the film, and then somehow it's our fault if we didn't like them.

The proof of this idea, that the less you know the better, came just the other evening with the new Atom Egoyan film CHLOE, about which I knew absolutely nothing beyond the three leads (Julianne Moore, Liam Neeson, Amanda Seyfried) and Egoyan himself, of whose earlier films I'd only seen two, and half-liked one of them. So CHLOE came pretty much out of the blue as a total surprise and I thoroughly enjoyed it - I suspect a great deal more than if I'd read a stack of reviews and the details from the film's IMDb page. Going back and reading those other opinions afterwards is frankly much more interesting that knowing the minutiae of the casting, writing, shooting and scoring processes. Similarly, because I wasn't at Glasgow I have very little information about 2001 MANIACS: FIELD OF SCREAMS, but now I've seen it I shall have a look on the forum and see what the general reaction was. (Oh, how I'm hoping I'm not the only one that wasn't thrilled by it.)

Come to think of it, if I had my way (which I won't) then the Frightfest programme would list nothing more than "10.30am: Film 1. 1.15pm: Film 2. 3.50pm: Film 3", and so on, so we really wouldn't know if we were getting a gloriously non-ironic slasher film like HATCHET or a Russian fantasy thingummy like THE SWORD BEARER. Obviously it can't happen - how could we choose between the two screens? - but there's always the Halloween all-nighter. Alright, admittedly we didn't know very much about UMBRAGE either and that didn't work at all....

Trouble is, of course, that it's practically impossible to see 95% of films entirely virgin - too much information is all around us, whether it be the film's official Facebook pages or the tracklisting on the soundtrack albums (John Williams is a particular offender in this regard). And I wouldn't want to cut myself off completely from the internet just so I didn't discover in advance who the mystery villain is. Spoilers are a particular annoyance for me so I never watch the trailers, unless I've seen the film already, which is why I'm amused that all the trailers for THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO are almost going out of their way to hide the fact that it's a foreign language film. And the spoilers are sometimes couched in ridiculous ways, the worst being an ancient article in the days of when Granada rented tapes as well as TV sets and VCRs; their video rental magazine had a bit concerning RETURN OF THE JEDI where the reviewer hinted about the big plot twist "as for Luke and Leia - well, we really don't want to spoil anything but they should be aware of the laws about incest"! Gee, thanks for that incredibly subtle way you didn't give anything away there. Even a particularly dumb Ewok would have caught on to that one fairly quickly.

But no. No-one tell me anything about SHUTTER ISLAND, at least not until Friday. I don't want to know anything. Fingers in ears, la-la-la, I can't hear you.....

Untill the next time.

Richard.

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