2016 The Year of Cinema Disappointment

Spoiler Warning - some minor spoilers for Suicide Squad, War On Everyone, Bone Tomahawk, Tale of Tales

The last year has been a very good year for films with diverse gems like Spotlight, High-Rise and The Jungle Book being some of the standouts, however, the emotion I feel most with 2016's films is disappointment. There were a number of films I have had  high expectations for but delivered everything from crushing disappointment to mild let-down-ness. I'll start with the biggest disappointment first.

Suicide Squad

I am a big fan of comic book films; with the Nolan Dark Knight trilogy of Batman films acting as the high watermark for me and I was really looking forward to this film. My understanding is there are a number of different versions of Suicide Squad in graphic novels and I haven't read any of these but I have watched an animated version on Amazon after I had heard about the upcoming film. In a nutshell a group of supervillains are forced into working on behalf of the government on extremely dangerous missions. Again, the lineup of who the particular villains are seems to change with each version but the two central members of the squad are usually Harley Quinn and Deadshot. Harley Quinn (played by Margot Robbie in this film version) who was essentially the Joker's girlfriend/accomplice/sidekick, and while I don't like classifying the identity of a female character by their relationship to a male character it is undeniable that this is what Harley Quinn is in the DC universe (in the same way as Robin would first and foremost be described as Batman's sidekick). To give her a little bit more depth Harley was a psychiatrist at Arkham Asylum where she treated the Joker, but the Joker ultimately converted her to his side. The relationship between Joker and Harley Quinn is complicated to an unpleasant degree - is it a portrayal of an abusive relationship? - and to have problems with it doesn't make you some ridiculous politically correct liberal. In the DC universe the Joker often seems indifferent to her fate yet capable of extreme jealousy and in this film it is suggested that to convert Harley he tortured her to break her mind. As to what powers or skills Harley has are limited to being rather good at fighting and in this version she is extremely flexible and agile.

Deadshot (played by Will Smith in this film version) is a less well known figure from the DC universe and I don't know much about his backstory aside from what was in this film, namely that he was an expert marksman and assassin and has a daughter who he loves. The rest of the Suicide Squad are not terribly important and one seemed to exist purely to die moments after being introduced and as it would take a long time to go through each one I'm not going to bother and I think this is a real problem as there were a few characters I didn't care about. The other major character, who was not actually a member of the squad, is the Joker who in this version does seem to care deeply about Harley Quinn. Anyone portraying the Joker in a film has an almost impossible task of matching up to both Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger's performance but I actually thought Jared Leto's portrayal was quite good, it was certainly a different direction. Batman featured only in passing, do not see this film to see Batman.

The real problem with the film is the villain. Part of the reason I hold up the Dark Knight trilogy so highly is that it had really good villains, especially the Joker. The villain in the Suicide Squad is...well I'm still not really sure, one of the squad is a witch and I think it's her brother, who took over a city and made people into black goo zombie monsters. Whoever it was the film completely failed to put across any jeopardy or menace and it succumbed to the curse of comic book blockbusters of CGI scenes of destruction that don't look real. I have no problem with getting behind a group of bad guys, after all, I stayed on Walter White's side in Breaking Bad far longer than most people. Often the bad guys are the most interesting people in a film, look at Darth Vader or Hans Gruber and there is a Dirty Dozen feeling of creating a team of bad people which I liked. No, this film didn't work because it wasn't good enough. So why were my expectations so high? Two brilliant trailers were released for the film which I loved but watching again now it is obvious that the villain is not really in them at all.

Next up was the disappointing War On Everyone, which again, had a couple of excellent trailers. War On Everyone was an action-comedy about a pair of buddy cops. In most buddy cop films you have one "by the book" detective and one "loose cannon", but in this film both cops are loose cannons, so much so that rolling up to work drunk, framing people and just random violence are everyday occurrences for these two. The plot revolved around a heist in which the only person to escape was the getaway driver, with all the money, and our two protagonists go after that money, planning to keep it for themselves naturally.  While the film was funny in parts and had some good scenes I was very disappointed, first, the plot, at some point it was decided that two crooked cops going after stolen money for themselves wasn't enough and a second reason to go after the real bad guy was given that made no sense whatsoever. Secondly, there was no real reason to get behind them, as I have said, I am quite happy with anti-heroes but these two were actually quite annoying. I saw the film with my girlfriend, Spooky Reading Girl, who had a long list of problems with the film, which I largely agreed with, and I tried to put up half-hearted arguments.

Why were my expectations so high? Well, the film was written and directed by John Mcdonagh, who previously made the hilarious film The Guard and the funny and moving Calvary, he is also the brother of Martin McDonagh who made In Bruges, which is one of my favourite films, and the brilliant Seven Psychopaths. All of these  films share a dark sense of humour which I really enjoy but that just didn't work in this film.

The final two disappointments were Bone Tomahawk and Tale of Tales, both films that I missed at the cinema. Bone Tomahawk is a horror western, a completely new genre to me. The plot is that a coupe of bandits walk through a Native American burial ground, thus incurring the wrath of the Native Americans. One of the bandits was killed at the burial ground but the other escaped and made it to a nearby town but the Native Americans are in pursuit. When the Native Americans kidnap the bandit they also take a sheriff's deputy and a woman who was tending to the bandit's injuries (I don't think she was a qualified doctor, but had medical training). Naturally, the sheriff (Kurt Russell) decided to put together a posse and bring back the kidnapped people. A local Native American warned the group that these weren't like the other Native Americans but that these were cannibal cavemen, vicious, perhaps even supernatural.  What followed was an odd story that followed some typical horror and/or western tropes and had a few exceptionally gruesome scenes.

I thought the idea of horror western intriguing (but was concerned from the start about is it okay making a film about a savage group of Native Americans) and really didn't get the original and inventive film I was hoping for.

I had high expectations for Tale of Tales as it had received very positive reviews from critics who I listen to, Mark Kermode, for instance. But not for the first time the good doctor and I disagree - I hold him personally responsible for the debacle of when I saw Berberian Sound Studio on my birthday and that is one of the worst films I've ever seen in a cinema. Tale of Tales is a retelling of a number of common European fairy tales but keeping true to the original, often gruesome, nature of the fairy tales, for example for a queen to have a child her husband must kill a sea monster and for her to eat the heart - which we see in explicit detail. The narrative switched back and forth between these stories and despite some good scenes, such as when the king goes to kill the sea monster, it was quite dull.

Part of the reason of my disappointment with Tales of Tales and Bone Tomahawk is that as I had missed them in the cinema my expectations had been building over time and my expectations were probably too high.

I do not really begrudge the time and money spent watching these films, after all, each of them had some enjoyable qualities. The only way to find new films is to not just go and see the next Coen Brothers film because you know you'll like it. What is really disappointing is that I saw these films over other films that I missed, there have been a lot of films that I wanted to see but didn't such as,-

• Captain Fantastic - The story of an unconventional family starring Viggo Mortensen, one of my favourite actors who makes very interesting choices, i.e. I won't always like them but I never think he just did it for the money.

• Ghostbusters - if I was judging it just from the trailers and the people involved I would have been quite keen on seeing this film, I think Kristen Wiig is really funny and I've not seen any Melissa McCarthy films some of them have looked like films I would like. What made me really want to see it was the absolutely insane response from certain people whose main problem seemed not that a classic film was being remade, but that the main characters were now being played by women, not men.  I don't have the energy or patience to get into the absurd argument "are women funny" or "are women as funny as men". Some men are funny. Some women are funny. The torrent of sexist and racist abuse directed towards the cast was appalling and it now felt it wasn't just going to see a film but choosing a side in a cultural war and I instinctively knew I was on the side of Kristen Wiig et al. But I didn't get round to seeing it, hopefully when I finally do see it I'll be able to judge it on it's own merits and not get caught up in the nonsense that has accompanied it so far.

• Doctor Strange - my skeptical and scientific heckles were raised by the vague mysticism mentioned in the trailer but a mindbending comic book film starring Benedict Cumberbatch is surely worth watching.

• Edge of Seventeen - good reviews and a funny trailer starring Hailee Steinfeld (probably best known for her starring role in the Coen Brothers' True Grit) and Woody Harrelson, who I am a big fan of.

• Arrival - Still hoping against hope to see this in the cinema and still can't believe I managed to let it pass my be. I loved Sicario, this director's previous film, and I always want to see intelligent thought-provoking sci-fi, that isn't just giant CGI robots punching each other.

• Welcome To Me - never even saw this advertised at the cinema,a Kristen Wiig comedy about a woman who won the lottery and decided to make her own television show. As the woman is self-funding it she has no need to care about ratings or what producers might think she makes a bizarrely idiosyncratic tv show.

• Kubo And The Two Strings - this looked amazing, an animation about the son of a great warrior who told stories about his father- which he thought he had made up - and entertained the locals, he then has to flee when his father's enemies come looking for him. It looked really funny and exactly like the sort of thing I would like.

• Joy - I'm a huge fan of Jennifer Lawrence and have enjoyed a lot of  David O'Russel's previous films (Silver Lining Playbook, American Hustle), the story of a woman who invented a map, but you know, a really, really good mop. I don't think the subject matter of a film is what makes it entertaining - for example, I don't think you need to be interested in formula one to enjoy Senna, so with this film I don't think the fact that mops are quite boring doesn't mean the story around the mop is going to be boring.

• Anthropoid - a World War 2 spy film about a theatre of the war I don't much about with Cillian Murphy? Certainly sounds like the sort of thing I'd like.

• 10 Cloverfield Lane - despite a terrible name the trailer for this film intrigued me, and had the original version of I Think We're Alone Now by Tommy James and The Shondells from 1967 in it.

• The Infiltrator - Bryan Cranston played an undercover DEA agent infiltrating cocaine drug cartel, as a huge fan of Breaking Bad (and a smaller fan of Malcolm in the Middle) I'm eager to see what Bryan Cranston does next. Also having loved the two seasons of Narcos on Netflix this is a subject I want to find out more about.

• The Girl With All The Gifts - a British zombie film that seemed a bit different to the millions of other zombie films out there. I'm a big fan of zombies and zombie-like films (such as 28 Days Later, which technically aren't zombies. I do think people get a bit bogged down in the classification for zombies, after George A Romero never thought of the monsters in his films as zombies, as to him a zombie film was about  people put under voodoo curse. I think the legendary filmmaker John Landis said it best, when he paraphrased a Supreme Court Justice's remarks on pornography - I can't define a zombie but I know it when I see it) but I do think that it might be time to leave the genre alone for a little while.

• My Scientology Movie - I'm a big fan of Louis Theroux and find Scientology fascinating, in  the way a person might find a deeply sinister organisation fascinating. I recently watched the documentary Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief which was great and is held up as the definitive Scientology documentary as well as listening to the Scientology episodes of the podcast Oh No, It's Ross and Carrie (who sign up to cults, bizarre religions, etc. to see what actually goes on) which I thought were very even handed and gave an insightful look at Scientology. So I was a bit scientologied out when Louis Theroux's film came out.

• Train to Busan - another zombie movie (as I said, I like zombie movies) but this one was from South Korea and was mainly set on a packed commuter train which seemed like a fun premise. In recent years I've tried to work on some of the areas of cinema I've overlooked and while I do watch foreign films certainly compared to British and American films they're in the minority. 

All these films I wanted to see but didn't and while I didn't explicitly choose Suicide Squad over any of these I can't help but think I should be able to swap out Suicide Squad for one of these other films.  After this year of disappointments I felt very wary about Rogue One : A Star Wars Story. I enjoyed The Force Awakens so I was quietly confident I would like this prequel. I had a slight moment of horror when I realised there was no crawling text setting the film, as there has been in every other Star Wars but ended up absolutely loving the film. I am huge Star Wars fan and am exactly the sort of person who would pick out every flaw, every mistake, but overall the film was a huge success (okay, they did seem to send and receive messages when in hyperspace but I am willing to let that go). Certainly in my opinion compared to the reboot of Star Trek the Star Wars films have been a huge success.

So, while I had a lot of film disappointed me this year, the one that really mattered, the Star Wars, one really came through right at the end of the year.

Top 10 films of 2016

Spoiler warning - very minor spoilers for films ahead, nothing you wouldn't get from a normal review or the trailer

 1. Rogue One : A Star Wars Story

 

Ben Mendelsohn walking around being evil

I have just seen this movie at the weekend so the primacy effect might be going on here but I absolutely loved this film. There is so much to enjoy in this. The first two thirds are interesting and fun but the last part of the movie is genuinely amazing. Great cast from Felicity Jones down but I’ve got to single out the go-to guy for dirtbag villains – Ben Mendelsohn, someone I’ve liked since Animal Kingdom. The director handled any number of Easter eggs for fans with surprising lightness of touch and this can really annoy me, for example the great Bond film Skyfall is marred by the inclusion of a Bond spy car.  Two fashion points – someone high up on this film really wanted to bring mustaches back into fashion and Ben Mendelson rocks a cape.

2.   2. The Nice Guys

Seeing Ryan Gosling being hilarious in a film is a genuine treat for me (much like when Jon Hamm was funny in 30 Rock) as it adds another string to his already nearly perfect bow. Another crime-comedy caper from Shane Black of Lethal Weapon and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang fame and I really enjoyed it. I already essentially love Ryan Gosling, and Russell Crowe was quite likeable in this, which felt like something of a triumph in of itself. The criminal conspiracy at the heart of the film is refreshingly small stakes and is vaguely plausible within the characters' powers to solve.

3.    3,  Spotlight

Budget cuts in decorating for Sterling Cooper

Going back right to the beginning of the year a film that made looking in old books dramatic and tense. Fantastic ensemble cast but nice to see John Slattery  not playing a bastard for once. This film took a topic that is very difficult to talk about and made it into a film that engrossed people.

4.   4. Hail Caesar!

You know, I used to really dislike Channing Tatum, I had him pegged as someone with no acting talent and perhaps some dancing talent, but after enjoying his performance in Haywire and his part in Hail, Caesar! I’ve come round to him. The film is collection of stories set in the golden age of Hollywood, from a communist kidnap plot to a star actress’s unexpected pregnancy with lots of people putting in good performances – all tied together by Josh Brolin’s studio fixer character-  but Channing Tatum as the star of a new musical is what I’ve remembered most. Oh and "Would that it were so simple".

5.   5. High Rise

Note to rich people - if you throw parties where you dress like 18th Century French
aristocrats you've really only got yourself to blame for what happens next

I’m not sure if “liked” or “enjoyed” are the right words to use with this film but it had a profound effect on me. It’s one of the most unsettling films I have ever seen and the rising sense of tension and just an awful feeling that something terrible was going to happen was almost unbearable.  The film set it’s stall out in it’s first minute (apparently the book does this as well, the same awful act is the first line of the book) and then it showed you these civilised people ended up like this.

6   6.The Neon Demon

Another film that is hard to say I liked but really stuck with me. I am a big fan of Nicolas Winding Refn (best known for Drive) and didn’t even let the subject matter of the film – it’s about the fashion industry – put me off. It’s a good film that is made brilliant in the last twenty minutes which completely change everything about the film.

7.  7. Deadpool

The one good thing about the Wolverine origins film was Ryan Reynolds playing Deadpool and since then a Deadpool film has been in the works. Ryan Reynolds was well suited to the constantly talking, constantly joking, fourth wall breaking anti-hero and while the film was very funny with some good action scenes what I really liked was the relationship between Wade Wilson and his girlfriend played by Firefly alumnus Morena Baccarin, which was like nothing I'd seen before.

8.   8. The Jungle Book

I was very surprised by how good this film was. Not only were comparisons to the Disney classic inevitable (the first film I remember seeing in the cinema) but virtually everything in the movie apart from Mowgli is CGI and that seemed like a recipe for disaster. Nevertheless the film was hugely entertaining and the realism of the CGI animals is outstanding and they look completely, absolutely real. 

9.    9. Triple 9

This thriller didn’t do terribly well but I enjoyed it. There are three great scenes, the first, the one most apparent in the trailer, is the getaway from a bank heist were red dye packs hidden amongst the stolen loot exploded, the third not exactly a police car chase but a police race to the scene of a crime where cop Woody Harrelson broke just about every traffic law going. The second is the best and most tense – a terrifying police raid that upset the carefully laid plans set up by the protagonists. The basic plot is crooked cops are forced to do an impossible heist, the only way to succeed is do a “Triple 9” the police code for when a police officer is shot. The film was directed by John Hillcoat who has previously made The Proposition, The Road and Lawless and as I liked all of them and was impressed with the cast I was well-disposed to like the film.

  

1     10.  The Revenant

      Again, a film from early in the year, I’ll probably never watch this again but it was quite something. I’ve been a big fan of Leonardo Di Caprio for a long time – since The Man In The Iron Mask – and so was very glad he finally got his Oscar. Sometimes when you’re watching a film based on real events, as this one is, you might sit and reflect about how you couldn’t have gone through what the character did, you’re not tough enough, not strong enough. Well I’m happy to admit that not only could I not have gone through what the character went through but I couldn’t have gone through what the actor went through for the film, which sounded very unpleasant. I don’t like the theme in Oscars in rewarding roles that required a lot of endurance on the part of the actor, rather than acting ability, but it’s undeniable Di Capio went through a lot to finally get his Oscar.

Films That Aren't Always Easy To Watch - Starting With Neon Demon

Spoiler Warning: Minor spoilers for Neon Demon, High-Rise and A Field In England

My girlfriend (Spooky Reading Girl) and I had recently decided to go to the cinema, I wanted to see the new Nicolas Winding Refn film, Neon Demon, and Spooky Reading Girl wanted to see indie rom-com Maggie's Plan with the amazing cast of Julianne Moore, Ethan Hawke and Greta Gerwig. As both films were playing at the same cinema at more or less the same time we decided that we would go out to the cinema, split up to watch our respective films and then meet up for something to eat. This worked out very well for both of us. One of Spooky Reading Girl's concerns about Neon Demon was that a review had stated "not for the faint of heart" and she can sometimes be quite faint of heart. I enjoyed Neon Demon a lot. I am big fan of Nicolas Winding Refn, I loved both Drive and Only God Forgives and would have wanted to see his next film whatever it had been about. When I heard the film was going to be about models and the fashion industry I still wanted to see it despite having no interest in either. While I enjoyed it the film  it was not an easy watch with some brutal moments and unlike Drive was not a film I could watch again and again, and that's not just because Neon Demon lacked the very easy-on-the-eyes Ryan Gosling who starred in both Drive and Only God Forgives.

Ryan Gosling in Drive

It is an odd thing liking a film but also not particularly wanting to watch it again because of the unpleasant content. Neon Demon reminded me a lot of Black Swan (which I enjoyed but have only watched once) both occasional shocking moments of horror combined with a slow growing feeling that the story was heading somewhere very bad. Both films had a female lead cast where the male characters were only there to advance the plot or as useful props for the women. Usually cinema is seen as escapism and is meant to be enjoyable, however much I admired Neon Demon did I actually enjoy it? And Neon Demon is far from the only film where I have these conflicted feelings.

Perhaps the most famous example of a great film with very unpleasant content is A Clockwork Orange which caused such an uproar and supposed copy-cat violence that Stanley Kubrick had it pulled from release himself. The thing that I find so disturbing in A Clockwork Orange is the violence, which is odd, because often the violence is not very realistic. Near the beginning of the film a fight between two gangs is so ridiculously, and intentionally, over the top as to eliminate any sense of menace. But later, the violence meted out to defenceless innocents is very unsettling, a viciousness and horribleness no other film has matched. I have seen far bloodier, far more gruesome and violent films but the violence has never bothered me. It might be that it is the twisted pleasure that the droogs take in their violence that is conveyed so clearly and it is the intent behind the violence that is shocking and rarely seen. It might just be what happens when a director of Kubrick's quality is given such source material to work with.

A Slightly Less Unsettling Version Of The Droogs
 From A Clockwork Orange

There are two directors and almost everything they have done consists of films that I appreciate as brilliant but not something I would watch for an enjoyable evening; Ben Wheatley and Mike Leigh. To start with Ben Wheatley he is a relatively new British film director and I have seen nearly all of his films, the one exception being Down Terrace, his first film. The first that I saw was Kill List a peculiar horror thriller with a few intense scenes of extreme violence and amongst others features Michael Smiley who will always be Tyres from Spaced as far as I am concerned. A Field In England was his fourth film and is a very trippy film essentially filmed in a single field which is fine in terms of unpleasantness apart from one scene. In this scene the viewer doesn't even see what happened to poor Reece Shearsmith and the violence or torture he went through was implied by what was heard, but it is not this implied violence rather the deliriously happy expression that is on Shearsmith's face as he comes back on screen.

Michael Smiley in Kill List (left)
and A Field In England (right)

Wheatley's most recent film High-Rise is another film where most of it is fine and only a few scenes shock. At one point Hiddlestone's character explains how he ate a dog for food, which is apparently the first line of the book, a bold opening if nothing else. High-Rise is brilliant and probably my favourite of Wheatley's films. It is a film that at times is sickening by the awful decadence and brutal violence that quickly breaks out amongst normally perfectly civilised people who live in what is supposed to be the perfect tower block. Two side notes for High-Rise, if you're rich and throw a party where the theme is to dress as eighteenth century French aristocrats you've only yourself to blame if the poorer people revolt against you and secondly there is an amazing cover of Abba's SOS by Portishead, an incredibly spooky rendition it suits the film perfectly.

Wheatley's third film was the one that was easiest to watch, perhaps because it was, broadly speaking, a comedy; Sightseers. The film was about a geeky couple going on a caravan holiday who ended up committing a string of violent murders. In this film it was not the violence that was hard to deal with it was the tragic quality of the lives of the two central characters, the sadness they endured, and this was before all the murdering started. And that is what bothers me about Mike Leigh films. Many people would probably wonder why I would include Mike Leigh with directors like Ben Wheatley, Nicolas Winding Refn and Darren Aronofsky, known for their violence and unusual subject matter. Leigh makes realistic down to earth comedies not thrillers or horror films. With Leigh it is not the violence, of which there is essentially none, but the tragedy. To be clear, Mike Leigh's films are usually masterpieces and always worth watching but he taps into the tragedy of everyday lives like no one else. The best two examples are Abigail's Party and Nuts In May, both comedies that I think are hilarious and will probably never ever watch again. Abigail's Party was part of Play For Today on the BBC and I think it was criminally irresponsible of them to of a public service broadcaster to put something so life crushing on television. Abigail's Party the story of a dinner party of middle-aged sort of middle-class people brimmed with unhappiness, bitterness and the horrible feelings people who supposedly love each other can have for one another.

Abigail's Party - a terrifying glimpse of England in the 1970s

As for Nuts In May I don't think there is a character in all of film and literature that compares to Roger Sloman's Keith for utter patheticness - a man constantly heaped with failure, frustration and humiliation. Ben Wheatley's Sightseers has been called Nuts In May with murders which is a good analogy. Nuts In May is about a couple going on a camping holiday and their weird middle-class pretensions, getting into arguments with farmers about pasteurised milk and debating how many times you should chew food. While Keith was the pathetic figure his partner was the irritatingly naive Candice Marie advocating the complete disbandment of the British army as an example to the rest of the world. Leigh's great skill is bringing such pathos and sadness to what are typically normal lives. Even Leigh's 2008 film Happy-Go-Lucky about an eternally upbeat woman had moments of terrible sadness showing how no life, no matter how happy it is, is free of tragedy.

Candice Marie and Keith in Nuts In May

Ultimately I am happy that I watched all of these films and even if I don't watch them again they were brilliant enough the first time.

One Hit Wonders, Good Songs by Bands I Don't Like and Great Scenes In Not Great Movies

Spoiler Warning - spoilers for The Men Who Stare At Goats, As Good As It Gets, Superman Returns and X-Men: First Class


I've never understood people mocking one-hit wonders. I'm not talking about novelty songs or awful cash-in songs but genuinely good songs, but where the artist creating them had no other hits. Often artists referred to as one hit wonders have had long and successful careers and that one "hit" was their commercial high point, for example I've heard The Wannadies referred to as one-hit wonders, a band with a lot of really good albums but many people only know them for "The You and Me Song", a song that in my opinion is not even their best. But even if a one-hit wonder is the only good song a band has that is nothing to be ashamed of - hardly anyone at all has written a good song, most of the songs that have been written aren't good. It is incredibly hard to write a good song and there is no shame in that a person has only one song in them.

Big Fan by The Wannadies - better than You and Me Song

There are bands that I have complicated feelings for because undeniably they have one good song and I hate everything else they've ever done so they are very much one hit wonders individual to me. The two that immediately spring to mind are Courtney Love and My Chemical Romance. I've never liked Courtney Love's music, and have never liked her much as a person from my admittedly third hand information on her, but "Mono" is a great song and it is hard to admit that. I have listened to the whole album and don't like it and I never liked the stuff she did with her former band Hole.

I hate all of My Chemical Romance's songs, I hate the way they act, the way they present themselves but there is one song I like and I think that if I had known it was by them when I heard it my mind would have rejected it. When I was in university I went to a rock-punk-ska night at the student union called Get Your Skates On and while a lot of the music wasn't to my taste it was always fun. There was this one song called "I'm Not Okay (I Promise)" and I found it quite catchy and I was stunned when I later learned who it was by. In my Stalinist history revisionism of my own cultural life I would very much like to throw that down the memory hole but I can't...it is a good song. I have broken some stuff down so much that I would say there is a five second part of a Kaiser Chiefs song I like but I don't like the whole song.

The frustratingly good Mono by Courtney Love

The term one-hit wonder is usually just used for songs, but you get one-hit wonder novelists or filmmakers, people who make one "good" thing and never manage it again. But as I think songs that are one hit wonders are often only the high point of a good career there are films that are good but have a single flash of brilliance. The Men Who Stare At Goats was a great book by Jon Ronson that was adapted into a good film starring George Clooney and Ewan McGregor. I enjoyed the film but there is one scene which is one of my favourite ever scenes. To explain; the film is about the US army trying to tap into special powers people might have - the ability to be invisible, to read minds, that sort of thing. When they look through their soldiers, however, they find few people who have minds open enough to explore these ideas, when they manage to find some candidates they are put under the charge of a genuine hippy soldier whose first order is for them to dance. One soldier, played by Clooney, explained how he didn't like to dance and the hippy soldier challenged him about this and well -

I love this scene, I think the director managed to capture something that is true for just about everyone - we don't allow ourselves to do the stuff we want to do because someone in the past told us it was wrong, for Clooney's character it's dancing and later in the film Clooney's character expressed his love for dancing. The film is good but flawed but this one scene made the entire film worthwhile.

As Good As It Gets is certainly an uneven film - although it did win Oscars for Best Actor and Best Actress - but it has a couple of scenes that are very, very good. The first is when Greg Kinnear called Jack Nicholson an "absolute horror of a human being" which is one of my favourite insults ever, how do you come back from that? The second and better scene is the odd compliment that Jack Nicholson's character gave Helen Hunt's after he insulted how she is dressed. She insisted he compliment her upon which he started telling a long story about his OCD and what this meant for his life, culminating in him telling her, "You make me want to be a better man". It's hard to think of a better compliment to give someone.

There have been a lot of films about Superman, some are very good and some are terrible, and Superman Returns is generally lumped in with the bad ones. And I can see why, the film has a lot of problems, as my girlfriend Spooky Reading Girl pointed out there is hardly any time devoted to "Clark Kent" it''s all Superman, and Kevin Spacey is a bit over the top as Lex Luthor, but anyway I rather liked it. But that was all based on one scene. There is a point in the film when Lois Lane is covering a story about a space shuttle being launched off the back of a plane, the plane flies into the sky, the shuttle detaches and then fires it's rocket. Anyway, something goes wrong with the launch and the shuttle isn't disconnected from the plane meaning they're both going to crash. Superman shows up and surprisingly saves the day. That scene is brilliantly shot, for something not being real it actually looked real. I have never heard anyone else talk positively about this film or even just this scene.

Superman Returns - great scene bad film

Perhaps the most frustrating film for this is X-Men: First Class. On the whole I have enjoyed the X-Men series of films but there have been some bad ones. X-Men: First Class is half of a great film and half a very bad film. It's really easy to split it into the good and bad parts, the bits about Magneto are good and the bits not about Magneto are bad. The film was at first intended to be a Magneto origins story but was instead folded into a larger story about Charles Xavier starting his school and how he and Magento fell out. It helped that Magneto was played by one of the best actors going, Michael Fassbender but his story of vengeance across decades and what he would do to get that vengeance was very interesting. I couldn't care less about the largely boring group of students - the exception of course being Jennifer Lawrence - and their adventures. The idea of bringing in real historical events, the film is very much centred around the Cuban Missile Crisis worked as well and it could have been a great film.

Creating anything good is really hard and people should be proud of anything good they've made even if it's just a couple of minutes long.

Missing Out - Not Watching The Wire, Watching A Film Day and The Inevitable Mortality of Authors and Readers

At Christmas I was kindly given the complete box set of The Wire which I am slowly working through and enjoying. The Wire is a television programme that many cite as being the best thing ever on television beating even such gems as The Sopranos and Breaking Bad, but despite it's huge critical success I had never actually watched it. The Wire is a drama based in Baltimore about crime that featured the police, journalists, lawyers, criminals and more. Each season took on a different aspect, some being from mainly the perspective of police or journalists, even looking at schools and how they impacted on crime, the important thing being that it was examining crime and the causes of crime. It is odd that such a programme passed me by as it is exactly the sort of thing I would like (including the pretentious kudos of watching an imported high quality drama hailed as the best thing ever that most people haven't watched) and it was even picked out on Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe and higher nerd praise does not exist. Actually as Spooky Reading Girl pointed out Charlie Brooker didn't just mention it on Screenwipe, when we bumped into him in Edinburgh he told us specifically to watch it.

The best tv show ever?

I was perhaps too young when The Wire started and many people say it is hard to get into with complex dialogue that took no prisoners. There is also definitely a state of mind people enter where they actively resist something that is being watched by everyone else. A lot of people got so annoyed about people asking them if they had watched Breaking Bad, they swore never to watch it. For a long time I did not believe television was capable of making something that was genuinely brilliant. This was a huge hole in my pop culture knowledge and something that I was going to have to address. I held film in high regard and saw television as very much the inferior medium, where even the good stuff was drowned in an ocean of gameshows and reality television. Eventually I changed my opinion and it wasn't just the relatively recent prestige television but realising just how good something like Buffy The Vampire Slayer was. 

Spooky Reading Girl for a long time had a similar problem but with films. When we started going out and we talked about our favourite films, tv shows etc. I felt that she hadn't seen a lot of classic films. Importantly, this doesn't necessarily mean good films, but films that most people have watched, films that are perhaps cultural touchstones. I think everyone  has some gaps in their knowledge, to this day I have not seen Raging Bull despite being a huge Marin Scorese fan. Some of the films that SRG hadn't seen included Rocky (and to this day we argue when SRG refers to The Rocky Horror Picture Show simply as "Rocky", that name is already taken by another very famous film), Back to the Future, any James Bond film, any of the Star Wars films and eventually she became tired of the exasperated cries of "How have you never seen Back to the Future!" and for a year watched a film a day, crossing off many of these films. Spooky Reading Girl found it a very interesting experience and watched, and loved, many films that she wouldn't have normally watched. It also got her, and by extension me, into listening to Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo's film radio show.

Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode do the best film
show in all of radio, tv and podcast land - hello to Jason Isaacs

There have been many other things that I got into late, or in the wrong order. I loved The Foo Fighters before I even knew about Nirvana. I didn't buy any LCD Soundsystem albums until after they had broken up. Being born in 1983 I missed the 1960s, the decade I consider to be the best in music history so what chance did I have? There will be numerous bands lost in the mists of time that I would love and will remain forever hidden. I only watched Firefly when it was being repeated for the fiftieth time on the Sci-Fi channel and that is one of my all time favourites.

Usually when people talk about things they have missed or haven't got round to watching yet are cultural behemoths, Star Wars, Bond films, The Simpsons, things that even if you don't like them you should still watch them as they will help you understand culture better (I have heard this argument used for both Shakespeare and the Bible). Some things though are missed because they were never that successful or always just maintained a cult following. Garth Marenghi's Dark Place is one of the funniest programmes ever on television and there is a grand total of six episodes, just the one series on Channel 4, but to merely mention the name Thornton Reed is enough to reduce some people to laughter. Arrested Development, perhaps the best sitcom in the history of American television struggled for three seasons to find an audience but was eventually cancelled (Netflix did give the show a reprieve). Films like Vertigo or television shows like Twin Peaks are going to be glaring omissions but with really cult things you might never even be aware of what you're missing out on.

Arrested Development - Arguably the best sitcom that hardly anyone has seen

Marcus Brigstock hosted a very interesting radio, and later television, show called I've Never Seen Star Wars on which the guests would check through a list of things that most people have done, with having seen Star Wars being used as the classic example. The show would then pick some of these things to - the guest would watch Scarface, or eat sushi, or listen to The Archers. Most of the time the guest would not really enjoy whatever new thing they had done, as after all, people will probably know whether they will like something like The Archers but occassionally they would really enjoy the experience and it is certainly true that that has happened to me, where my conception of what something was like was completely inaccurate. When Harry Met Sally is a good example as I had expected a very boring, very straight forward romantic comedy (the second worse genre of film after musicals) but was in fact something very different and far more interesting and funny than I had anticipated.

I have heard some people say they won't start reading a series of books until the series has been completed, so they know it has been finished (poor George R. R, Martin, creator of the Games of Thrones series of books has to endure constant speculation about his own health). There is a similar thing with tv shows with people not wanting to invest time in a show that gets cancelled after one season. This is all well and good but what about if it's not the cancellation of a show or death of an author that is worrying, what if it's your own mortality? Dying is a pretty bad thing to happen but knowing that almost certainly I will die in the middle of a book is incredibly frustrating. I will die in the middle of excellent tv programmes or eagerly awaiting a sequel or I've bought tickets to see a comedian but will never make it. This would all be okay if I believed in an afterlife but as an unapologetic atheist I know I will miss out.

The Game Of Thrones series of books -
 more correctly known as A Song Of Ice and Fire

But does it really matter? Even if I accept that my own mortality and the vastness of culture available means it is impossible to see, read and listen to everything worthwhile...is that such a bad thing? It might not be objectively bad but it seems an awful shame to miss out on the good stuff especially when so much bad stuff is inflicted on me without even asking for it. I am rather proud of the cultural island I have managed to construct where I can keep most of the bad stuff out but even so I have heard songs by Justin Bieber, I have seen clips of Mrs Brown's Boys and even suffered the mindnumbing banality of The One Show and there is something wrong with a world where I haven't found the time to watch Raging Bull but have seen Batman And Robin.

"Revenge Is Sweet and Not Fattening" Alfred Hitchcock - Revenge in films, comedy and even a musical

Minor spoilers for The Revenant, Rushmore, The Machinist and Munich


Often when watching a film based on a true story the viewer will often think, "I couldn't have done that. I wouldn't have been able to take it." Well in Leonardo Di Caprio's latest role in The Revenant that is certainly true, I couldn't have endured what his character did. I also don't think I could have endured what Leonardo Di Caprio endured just doing the acting. It looked really hard. The Revenant is a story of revenge and what a person will go through to fulfill their desire for vengeance. Di Caprio's character is brutally savaged by a bear and left for dead, his revenge sustaining him and certainly at numerous points I thought, "I would give up, I would die". After all what does the character have to look forward to? It's the 1820s so medical science is not going to do much for him. Still, perhaps revenge will be enough. Revenge is a well trodden topic in pop culture and rarely does it turn out well for everyone.

My favourite example of revenge in film is quite possibly the wonderful feud Bill Murray and Jason Schwartzman's characters find themselves in in Wes Anderson's brilliant Rushmore. After Murray stole the woman of his dreams Jason Schwartzman's Max Fischer started a mad revenge against his former friend. A brief montage of their quickly escalating war is perfectly soundtracked by A Quick One While He's Away by The Who.

The greatest revenge fantasy (I'm hoping it is a fantasy) I have heard was from the comedian Paul Foot. I first saw Paul Foot at the 100 Club in London, Adam Buxton was headlining the gig and there were five or six acts on. One of them was Paul Foot. I did recognise Paul Foot from television, and if you have even glimpsed him once you will remember what Paul Foot looks like, but I didn't really know much about him. He did twenty minutes of material all on the subject of getting revenge on the landladies of Bed & Breakfasts and it is probably the funniest twenty minutes of standup I have ever seen. I love it when comedians have a short amount of time and instead of doing lots of short jokes put all their comedic eggs in one weird basket and Paul Foot did that. Paul Foot's revenge on the landlady was to put them through a complex themed nightmare which resulted in him smashing their collection of porcelain dollies including the precious "Super Dolly" with a tomahawk.

Rushmore is essentially a comedy and Paul Foot is definitely a comedian, and so the revenge can only go so far. It takes something more serious to get really into the depths of revenge. The Machinist is essentially a man taking revenge on himself. It stars Christian Bale as the eponymous machinist who is on some odd quest to destroy himself by losing as much weight as possible. Bale got a lot of attention as he actually did drop a lot of weight to play the role and Bale is almost skeletal in the film. He then put all of the weight he had lost back on and more to star in Christopher Nolan's Batman films then lost it all to be in The Fighter and then put on a lot of weight, and not in the attractive Batman way, for American Hustle where the first shot was of a balding Bale with a fat stomach.

The many different physiques of Christian Bale, I'll let
you work out for yourself which one was for Batman

I can only hope that Bale is never cast as someone with only one eye or hand as he may decide not to trouble the makeup and special effects teams and sort it out on his own. Whether or not such drastic weight loss and gain is a prerequisite for doing these roles I don't know and I would think it would be entirely reasonable for such drastic changes in appearance to be handled by makeup and special effects. I do think Bale is one of the best actors currently working. Anyway back to the film, why Bale's character is punishing himself is slowly revealed in the film and a shot of a healthy and normal weight Bale at the end of the film showed just how much had gone into his transformation.

Steven Spielberg's Munich is I think an often overlooked film and I am a big fan of it. Philosophically revenge is given pretty short shrift in most films, books etc, that ultimately you're harming yourself as much as those who've wronged you. and "Living Well Is The Best Revenge" is often hailed as the most wise advice. Munich is largely based on the true story of the murder at the 1972 Munich Olympics of eleven Israeli athletes by a Palestinian terrorist organisation. The film details Israel's response to this attack. Eric Bana is the Mossad agent (Israeli intelligence) who is tasked with hunting down those responsible.

Working in very secretive conditions the team set out across the Middle East and Europe killing their targets. Showing the slippery slope of vengeance more names keep getting added to the list, perhaps people who had nothing to do with the specific Munich attack but are enemies of Israel. The Israeli team, but particularly Bana, feel increasingly uneasy with the ever expanding list of targets and the each succumbs to the paranoia this life leads to - for example early in the film they put a bomb under someone's bed and one tells a story of a spy colleague who never slept in his bed and slept in the closet instead, for fear of a bomb being under his bed, something which Bana started to do towards the end of the film. The revenge Israel sought inevitably only escalated the violence and made the situation worse. All of the characters that made up Bana's team lost something in following the revenge mission.

Finally, something from a genre I don't usually like; musicals. Perhaps my favourite musical ever is Gutted: A Revengers Musical. The show was written by Danielle Ward and Martin White and is an over the top musical about a woman, Sorrow, whose parents were killed when she was a child and the terrible revenge she planned against the culprit - she will grow up, marry him and then kill all of  his family. Not only are the songs great it is funny throughout and a fun feature is that every character is named after a David Bowie song or lyric (Sorrow, Kook, Jean). The cast featured some of the best standup comedians going - Thom Tuck, Humphrey Ker and David Reed of The Penny Dreadfuls, Sara Pascoe, Michael Legge and more. Tuck, Ker and Reed played two sets of characters, the first set are three spirits that are there to help Sorrow carry out her revenge and then in the second half a trio of police officers sent to investigate the murders; they have the best song in the whole show, In We You Can Trust, in which they encouraged Sorrow.

The revenge obsessed Sorrow

The whole thing is free to download via Sound Cloud (Gutted Musical) as well as other work by Danielle Ward and Martin White (such as Psister Psycho - a musical about an insane arms dealing robot nun obviously). The best recommendation I can give it is that as someone who loves music but typically hates musicals I loved it.

"There are lots of people who mistake their imagination for their memory": Memory in pop culture and fictional famous people

In Season 6 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer a new character is introduced but in a very unusual way. The new character was Buffy's sister, Dawn, and this wasn't a sister who had lived with Buffy's father and had come to visit, or a long lost half-sister, but rather she appeared in an episode and everyone simply acknowledged her as Dawn, Buffy's younger sister, who had always been around. Fans of the show were confused as in the previous seasons Buffy had had no sister. What was even more confusing was that this wasn't cleared up in a single episode where it was revealed that Dawn was a monster who could alter memories, or was a weird ghost, but the storyline of where Dawn came from was the subject for the whole season and for a number of episodes nothing was made of her sudden appearance at all. At the time I had been convinced that they would never explain where Dawn came from and that Buffy had always had a sister but she had just never happened to be present or ever mentioned. I swore to stop watching the show if that was the case. Fortunately Joss Whedon had not elected to do a Stalin-esque style reimagining of history and there was a suitable sci-fi/fantasy reason for everything that had happened and indeed everyone's memories had been altered and Dawn had only started to exist a few months ago.

Michelle Trachtenburg playing Dawn - because of her
character's arrival I nearly stopped watching Buffy

This leads me to a curious and potentially terrifying idea, how do we know any of the people around us are genuine and our memories are correct? This is even more of a problem with celebrities and public figures in that most of us will never meet them. I raise this issue because I feel I have found two such instances of people who did not exist until very recently, two "Dawns" as it were. The first is Amy Schumer, star of Trainwreck, who I had never heard of before the publicity for that film. Now, I am a fan of American comedy, I watch a lot of standup and listen to a number of American podcasts where they discuss pop culture and I had never heard of her. Schumer was not some overnight star and people referenced her successful career to date but the fact that I had never heard of her was very suspicious indeed. Who was this woman who was so funny? YouTube is full of Amy Schumer clips, interviews and more, she has a wikipedia page, a website, twitter, IMDB page and more.

The potentially fictional Amy Schumer

The second example is even creepier. A few months ago I first heard the name Wilkie Collins, for those who don't know (which until very recently included me) he is a nineteenth century English writer known for such works as The Woman in White and The Moonstone and was a friend of Charles Dickens. I think I first heard about him on Robin Ince and Josie Long's Book Shambles podcast and all of a sudden he was everywhere. He was mentioned in books, articles, other podcasts and here is the really creepy bit...I recently read a book called Canonbridge, which is a novel about a mysterious nineteenth century author named Matthew Canonbridge who never really existed and was only created recently. And who does Canonbridge meet at one point in  the book? Wilkie Collins. That has to mean something very important and is definitely not just a coincidence.

This can't be the real Wilkie Collins - he's what an acting agency
would send to play stereotypical Victorian novelist

What is going on here? One conclusion is that I am not as well read and culturally savvy as I think I am (I think we can safely rule that out), the other is that new and interesting people are being inserted into our collective culture and memory. Look at the evidence, Wilkie Collins is not the name of a Victorian novelist, it's what the frontman of an obscure American indie band is called (probably Grandaddy) and as for Amy Schumer, many people seem to think women are inherently not funny so she must be fake. This could mean that all the other women I've thought were funny are perhaps fictional as well but we'll leave that to one side for now.

Memories are by no means an immutable record of exactly what has happened and are easily influenced.Groundbreaking psychology experiments by Elizabeth Loftus showed just how bad memory could be, in perhaps her most famous study people were shown footage of car crashes and then later on asked questions about what they had seen. Simply by changing one word in the question completely changed people's answers, so they were asked about what they saw when one car "hit" another or "smashed" or "contacted", these small cues had people inventing all sorts of details. If you phrase a question like in certain ways it affects the answers, far more people reported seeing broken glass when asked "did you see any broken glass" than asked to simply recite the things they had seen.
Pop culture is obsessed with memory, whether it's Guy Pearce's anterograde amnesia in Memento, which prevented him from making new memories and made him very vulnerable when trying to investigate his wife's murder, or  Arnold Schwarznegger in Total Recall playing a spy given a false memory of a boring every day existence.

Guy Pearce in Memento - he used tattoos to record important information

One of the most interesting and terrifying uses of memories is in Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series of books which contained a truly terrifying villain, Aornis Hades who has the ability to manipulate the memories of her victims, at first she uses her power on the hero, Thursday Next, to try and empty out all her memories, When Thursday Next defeated this attempt Aornis has a new weapon. Instead of erasing memories she gives Thursday new memories, to be exact she gives her the memories of a non-existent daughter; Jenny. From time to time she will ask after Jenny and her family play along, "Oh Jenny is at a friend's house," or whatever but sooner or later Thursday will work it out and every time she goes through the horrible realisation that a daughter she thought she had didn't exist and goes through a unique and devestating mourning. All of Jasper Fforde's work is an absolute treat of quirky ideas, well-written and intensely likeable characters and to those well-read enough to get all the references in the literature themed Thursday Next series there are constant delights - please note that I don't get all the literature references and have to consult my girlfriend, Spooky Reading Girl, to explain reference to Austen, the Brontes and many other classics.

The first of the brilliant Thursday Next series

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind features memories as characters, most of what we see of Kate Winslet's character Clem is not the real Clem but the memory of her. The film was about a very niche company who would erase unpleasant memories and their clients are often people who want to forget about past loves, which is what Clem does and in response what Jim Carrey's Joel does in retaliation. The film is genuinely heartbreaking as memories are erased from Joel and inside his mind he tries to fight it as he realises the value of these memories and even if in the end their relationship didn't  work out the memories were too important to lose.

The confusing world of Joel's memory

So as we've established memories can be changed, deleted, or invented so is it really so hard to believe that both Wilkie Collins and Amy Schumer are fictional creations the real questions are who has done this and why? Admittedly it gets a little more complicated with Amy Schumer seeing as she is...well, alive, but still not impossible. I suspect it to be a sinister and shadowy government organisation responsible for creating elaborate illusions of famous comedians and writers but unfortunately I am still at a loss for why. I am hoping that there will be a Wilkie Collins-Amy Schumer vehicle, probably an action-comedy buddy cop movie featuring Wilkie Collins and Amy Schumer in which not only do they solve time travelling crimes against literature but she learns valuable lesson about motherhood - but perhaps I am reading too much into Schumer's IMDB page.

Fan Theories - The X-Files, The Tommy Westphall Universe, Lost and more

Major spoilers for The X-Files, St. Elsewhere, Lost, The Shining

As I watched The X-Files the other day I noticed something slightly peculiar. The episode was Chinga, which is about an evil cursed doll, but what was peculiar was the actor playing the sheriff had appeared in The X-Files before, in Jose Chung's 'From Outer Space', where he played a detective. I have looked it up and he has been in the show five times playing different characters. This happens quite often in television, especially American shows where they might have twenty episodes a season, But it perhaps offers an interesting additional insight. In the world of the show are they meant to be completely separate characters? The X-Files has had episodes about clones and about creatures that change their appearance, is there more going on here? The short answer is no, I'm sure the producers just knew he was a good actor so why not keep using him? There a lot of fan theories in television and movies, sometimes involving just the world of the show, sometimes more about how it was made.

Larry Musser - this guy played five different characters in The X-Files

The best fan theory has to be the "Tommy Westphall Universe" theory from the tv show St. Elsewhere. It's not a show I've ever watched but at the end of the show it became apparent that the entire universe of St. Elsewhere existed only in the imagination of one of the characters; Tommy Westphall. That isn't the weird part, the weird part is that some characters from St. Elsewhere have appeared in other television shows, which would suggest they only exist in Tommy's imagination as well, such as Homicide: Life On The Streets. Currently The Tommy Westphall Universe blog has listed 419 tv shows as potentially only existing in Tommy's mind. Really though it can effectively cover all of film and television as any actor appearing on St Elsewhere was just a creation of Tommy, so it could follow that Denzel Washington is his creation, and all of the films Washington has made are his creation and that all the actors in all those different films are Tommy's creations and on and on.....
To see the complete list of shows and more ideas about the theory go to https://thetommywestphall.wordpress.com/the-master-list/

Tommy Westphall - who imagined hundreds of tv shows

There are three main fan theory categories that have been suggested for so many things they've become a little cliched:

1. It's just someone's fantasy - examples -Harry Potter, Titanic, Saved By The Bell, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Friends - all these and more have been suggested as the fantasy of one of the central characters or a large part is fantasy. Something like Harry Potter, where a person is whisked away from a dull or bad life into something new and exciting and where they are very special is a common psychological problem in people who have had traumatic lives. Ferris Bueller's Day Off is said to be largely the creation of Ferris's friend, Cameron, the neurotic stressed out, weirdo who created the figure of Ferris Bueller to allow him to do stuff he really wanted to do.

Ferris Bueller...this guy was a fantasy

2. They're dead - Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Rug Rats, Grease, Mad Men, Interstellar, Breaking Bad - this is perhaps the most common, a central character has died and the story taking place is either the dying dream of the person or their perception of the afterlife. In The Fresh Prince of Bel Air Will was actually killed in the fight shown in the opening credits and living in rich Bel Air was Heaven. Just looking up these theories I found the one about Rug Rats, in that all the children apart from Angelica, are dead most disturbing.

Will Smith...this guy was dead

For category 1 and 2 it should be a distinction made between films where this is a fan theory and what is actually supposed to have happened in the story, so far example Grease is a film where there is a theory that Sandy has been dead all along, but  in The Sixth Sense Bruce Willis's psychiatrist actually has been dead all along.

3. Everything is connected - Tarantino, Pixar universe- these are theories about connected pieces of work and how they share a deeper connection, for example with the works of Quentin Tarantino. It started with the idea that Kill Bill starring Uma Thurman as a member of a team of assassins is very similar to the tv show described by Uma Thurman's character, Mia Wallace, in Pulp Fiction, is Kill Bill simply the film of the fictional tv show from Pulp Fiction? It has since been expanded with Inglourious Basterds into something far more complicated, in this film Hitler is gunned down, set on fire and blown up, which is obviously different to reality and a theory suggests that in an alternate universe that is what happened. In this alternate universe as these acts of violence brought an end to World War 2 pop culture is far more violent and aggressive so films like Kill Bill or Django Unchained are made. So there are two types of Tarantino films - first the ones like Inglourious Basterds which are the audience seeing this alternate reality, and second type like Kill Bill which are movies from that alternate universe. Tarantino has recently confirmed that this theory is right insofar as Kill Bill is the film version of the tv show mentioned in Pulp Fiction.

The interconnected Tarantino films

The Shining is a film with so many bizarre theories they made a film about some of them, Room 237. What is the film really about? One of the most interesting theories is that it is Kubrick's confession that he faked the moon landing footage and while I don't believe this for one second there is a somewhat convincing argument.  The proponent of this theory goes to some lengths to show how everything in a Kubrick film is put there intentionally - another documentary Stanley Kubrick's Boxes showed the huge lengths Kubrick went to to get things exactly right - so why is Danny wearing a jumper with the Apollo 11 rocket on it? That was Kubrick's subtle clue that he had filmed the moon landing. Other theories include the film is all about the genocide of Native Americans, or that it's about the holocaust. Many peculiar little features are pointed out, the layout of the hotel doesn't seem to make sense and why does the typewriter Jack used change colour? And if you think that these odd little mistakes are just some oversight on Kubrick's part then you don't know Kubrick. As mentioned if something was in shot it was there for a reason, if that typewriter changed colour it's because it meant something to Kubrick.

The Shining - Kubrick's elaborate confession that he faked the moon landing

In terms of fan theories Lost is very much The Shining of the television world (but is certainly not it's equal in quality or originality). I gave up on Lost as I felt like the writers had no idea where it was going and that their plots were picked the same way South Park claimed jokes were written for Family Guy. Every week something new and weird popped up and there came a point where I realised the writers were never going to be able to satisfactorily explain it all. In fact, fans of the show had guessed the plot-twist, that they had been dead all along and the island was some weird purgatory, quite early on but this was denied by the writers. Lost is the perfect show for fans to make up their own theories as the show was so overly complicated and had all kinds of weird stuff going on and even when the "real" explanation was given fans have kept coming up with their own "better" theories.

Lost - there are far too many theories for this show

Here are a few of the suggested theories:

• The island is Hell, 
• The island is Eden (as in Adam and Eve Eden), 
• The island is Atlantis.
• The island is a broken time machine from the future.
• The island is an alien spaceship
• The island was created when the moon and Earth collided,
• The island is a "Truman Show" style reality tv show/board game played by powerful people/social experiment
• The black smoke monster is a cloud of nanobots 
• The whole thing is caused by the Y2K virus
• Clones!
• Dinosaurs!
• Zombies!

Increasingly some of these theories don't have much evidence behind them other than just being weird. The actual finale to the show was considered to be a disappointment by many as it failed to tie everything together in a pleasing way. I think to do that you need to know from the beginning what is going to happen and where the show is going and I can't help but think they just made it up as they went along. The reimagined Battlestar Galactica struck me as a show where the writers had planned everything out in advance and broadly knew what was going to happen every season but Lost just seemed to have the weirdness turned up to 11. In many ways Lost is similar to The X-Files in that The X-Files showed lots and lots of weird things happen and for all of it to make some kind of logical sense was impossible.

So we're back to The X-Files which is back on television and I am watching very closely to see if this guy turns up again.