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Top 10 (and more) films of … 1974

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On October 18, 2024

In Ramble

It’s 1974—the year that Nixon resigned, ABBA won Eurovision (down in sunny old Brighton, no less), and an English teacher called Mr King published his first novel, entitled Carrie. Now, join me as we talk about none of those things.

IMDB Top Ten (by popularity) (link)

  1. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
  2. The Godfather: Part II
  3. Young Frankenstein
  4. Blazing Saddles
  5. Emmanuelle
  6. Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
  7. The Conversation
  8. Chinatown
  9. Murder On The Orient Express
  10. The Man With The Golden Gun

US & Canada Box Office Top Ten (link)

  1. Blazing Saddles
  2. The Towering Inferno
  3. The Trial Of Billy Jack
  4. Young Frankenstein
  5. Earthquake
  6. The Godfather: Part II
  7. Airport 1975
  8. The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams
  9. The Longest Yard
  10. Murder On The Orient Express

We’re not even halfway through the seventies and we can already see one of the genres that defined the decade peaking, as well as Mel Brooks more or less single-handedly elevating the satire to blockbuster status. Not only that but we get a number of titles that could comfortably wear the title of Best Film Ever in their respective genres. It might not be my personal best year ever for cinema but it could be a pretty strong contender.

So, without any more waffle … what’s good? What’s not? What’s unseen? What’s missing? Read on!

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Top 10 (and a bit) films of … 1973

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On October 11, 2024

In Ramble

I’m blogging about the top ten (more or less) movies of every year since I was born. This week it’s time to delve into 1973 where things are starting to pick up.

IMDB Top Ten (by popularity (link)

  1. The Exorcist
  2. Soylent Green
  3. The Wicker Man
  4. American Graffiti
  5. The Day Of The Jackal
  6. The Holy Mountain
  7. The Sting
  8. Westworld
  9. The Long Goodbye
  10. Serpico

US & Canada Box Office Top Ten (link)

  1. The Exorcist
  2. The Sting
  3. American Graffiti
  4. Papillon
  5. The Way We Were
  6. Magnum Force
  7. Live and Let Die
  8. Robin Hood
  9. Paper Moon
  10. Serpico

As per above I’m using two sources for my top ten lists. First is IMDB filtered by year and sorted by Popularity (doing this with User Rating, which would seem the sensible way to go produces … unexpected results). Finding reliable box office rankings is a bit tricky, so for 1971 thru 1976 I’ll be using the North America box office published on The Numbers. From 1977 I’ll be able to use worldwide box office, which will be a bit less geographically biassed. Either way, the goal here is not to provide definite statistics, but simply to provide a nominal list of top movies from the year, both contemporary and retrospectively, with which I can then embarrass myself by revealing how many classic works of modern cinema I’ve failed to see!

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Top 10 (ish) films of … 1972

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On October 6, 2024

In Ramble

I’m blogging about the top ten (more or less) movies of every year since I was born. This week we delve into 1972.

IMDB Top Ten

  1. The Godfather
  2. Jeremiah Johnson
  3. Deliverance
  4. Last Tango In Paris
  5. The Poseidon Adventure
  6. Travels With My Aunt
  7. Pink Flamingos
  8. The Last House On The Left
  9. Cabaret
  10. The Getaway

US Box Office Top Ten

  1. The Godfather
  2. The Poseidon Adventure
  3. What’s Up, Doc?
  4. Deliverance
  5. Deep Throat
  6. Jeremiah Johnson
  7. Cabaret
  8. The Getaway
  9. Last Tango In Paris
  10. Lady Sings The Blues

With a couple of notable exceptions it looks like 1972 was not so much of a banner year for cinema. That being said, we’re certainly in an interesting transitional stage—budding blockbuster giants like The Godfather, The Poseidon Adventure and more traditional titles such as What’s Up Doc and Jeremiah Johnson share the stage with subversive fare like Pink Flamingos, Deep Throat while Last Tango In Paris further blurs those boundaries. We’re definitely moving … somewhere.

Unsurprisingly, this is a year of movies that I remember my parents talking about, and directly introducing me to in a few cases. Despite that, it’s remarkable how few of the titles listed above I’ve actually seen. So let’s get into it.

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Top 10 (sorta) films of … 1971

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On October 1, 2024

In Ramble

I’m blogging about the top ten (more or less) movies of every year since I was born. It’s gonna take a while …

IMDB Top Ten (link)

  1. A Clockwork Orange
  2. Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory
  3. The French Connection
  4. The Last Picture Show
  5. Dirty Harry
  6. Get Carter
  7. THX 1138
  8. Straw Dogs
  9. Klute
  10. Summer of ‘42

US Box Office Top Ten (link)

  1. Billy Jack
  2. Fiddler on the Roof
  3. Diamonds Are Forever
  4. The French Connection
  5. Summer of ‘42
  6. Dirty Harry
  7. A Clockwork Orange
  8. The Last Picture Show
  9. Bedknobs and Broomsticks
  10. Sweet Sweetback’s Baad Asssss Song

Inspired by my friend Clay’s roundup of the top 25 movies of 1999 I’ve decided to blog about the top ten (sorta) movies from every year since I was born. I won’t be fully reviewing each movie because that would be ridiculous, instead I’ll briefly share my personal connection with the movie … including whether or not I’ve even seen it! Since biggest doesn’t necessarily mean best, I’ll be working from both the box office stats for the year and the IMDB rankings. In researching this project I’ve discovered that detailed box office records aren’t available prior to 1977.

My preference going forward will be to use the worldwide box office top 10 as reference, but for 1971 through to 1976 I only have access to the US data. If anyone can point me to a better source than the above listings then please let me know in the comments.

So, 1917 was the year I was born – no, wait—1971. Obviously I didn’t go to the cinema at all that year … at least as far as I know … but I’ve definitely seen several of its movies. Read on to find out what I’ve seen, what I’ve not seen, and what I think is also worthy of note. Let’s begin!

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A menagerie of Things

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On August 30, 2023

In Ramble, Read

At some point in the recent past I was struck with an urge to read Who Goes There?, the John W. Campbell novella that inspired one of my favourite movies, The Thing. I can’t recall where that urge came from—maybe it was nothing more than a desire to read something new and yet also familiar—but it was suddenly very important that I read it. Unfortunately it turned out that I did not, in fact, own a copy of Who Goes There? nor could I find a sufficiently cheap copy online that would arrive quick enough to scratch the itch.

What I did have, I soon remembered, was an ebook of Frozen Hell, the original version of Campbell’s novella which I had picked up through Kickstarter several years earlier. This version had been discovered among Campbell’s papers some years after his death. By all accounts it is largely the same as the eventual published version, the inclusion of three introductory chapters being the major difference from the novella.

Reading this triggered something of a descent into a rabbit hole during which I read almost everything Thing-related that I could get my hands on and—because this is how things work—my thoughts on all of them are below!

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#interesting – Saxophone

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On January 5, 2021

In Ramble

Today I discovered that the saxophone is banned by the Vatican, which is a delightfully random and utterly useless piece of knowledge. Strictly speaking, the saxophone was banned by Pope Pius X in 1903 (to avoid the temptation of churchgoers indulging in sexydancing, or something or other) and the ban has never formally been repealed. What might happen if you were to turn up in Vatican City with a saxophone I do not know.

The saxophone was also banned by the Nazis as a tool of ‘degenerate’ art due to its popularity with black jazz musicians (but mainly due to the Nazis being irredeemable walking piles of crap). Not to be outdone, Stalin also banned the saxophone due to its links with jazz, but in this instance it was because he viewed jazz as “the embodiment of bourgeois American imperialist culture” (i.e. he hated all americans, not just the black ones … though I expect Hitler wasn’t too fond of americans either after they beat him).

Knowing all this gives me newfound respect for the sax.

#interesting is a series of random facts that I find interesting, and will be posting here during 2021 for your edification, amusement, derision and/or diversion.

#interesting – Contact

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On January 4, 2021

In Ramble

If you’re a fan of science fiction movies then you’ve hopefully seen Contact. And, if you’ve seen Contact you’ll remember The Machine, which has one of the more striking designs seen in the film (unsurprising, since the film generally relies on existing real-life locations and technology to preserve its sense of realism).

Turns out The Machine was not an original design for Contact, but is based on an unused concept (by Steve Burg) for Terminator 2, in which we would have finally seen the time displacement machine that sends our heroes and villains back in time.

Once you note the way time travellers in the Terminator movies tend to arrive in spheres of lightning; and travellers in The Machine sit inside a spherical pod it all seems rather obvious …

Why waste a good design, eh?

#interesting is a series of random facts that I find interesting, and will be posting here during 2021 for your edification, amusement, derision and/or diversion.

#interesting – Chaka Khan

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On January 3, 2021

In Ramble

Chaka Khan, arguably best known for her Prince-penned hit single I Feel For You (but who has a celebrated career spanning half a century) is the voice you can hear in the chorus of Steve Winwood’s Higher Love (arguably giving us a glimpse of how compelling this very whitest of MOR hits could potentially sound). Once you hear her, you can’t imagine how you never recognised her voice in the first place.

More interesting that that, however, is the fact that another iconic MOR hit—Robert Palmer’s Addicted To Love—was originally intended to be a duet with Chaka Khan. It’s hard to imagine how Addicted To Love could be improved, mostly because it’s so indelibly etched in commercial music history, but I suspect we’ve been deprived of something even more remarkable here.

(I’ve picked up a lot of really interesting factoids reading through Tom Breihan’s very excellent Number Ones series, in which he has pledged to write a post on every single song that has reached number one on the Billboard chart. I highly recommend bookmarking it for a rainy day (or several.)

#interesting is a series of random facts that I find interesting, and will be posting here during 2021 for your edification, amusement, derision and/or diversion.

2020: Week 52

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On December 31, 2020

In Diary

(December 28 – 2021)

The end of the year. The start of 2021. We actually made it! It would take a whole website to adequately sum up 2020, and all the thoughts and feelings within, but I’m at least grateful that things in my neck of the woods are far better than I could have ever expected them to be when everything started changing back in Feb/March.

This is usually the time of year when I think about how the format of my blog is going to work for the following year. While I enjoy these weekly posts, I’m less and less driven to do them as the year goes on—I certainly don’t schedule time to write them, they just happen when I feel like it. Consequently, I think it’s time to move away from the weekly post. I still want this blog to focus on my writing, however, so maybe what I’ll try is writing a post whenever I wrap up a writing project—either a new story, or a chapter in the novel.

There’s also something else I want to do. Something that’s bugged me is that I have a terrible memory for trivia (I have a terrible memory for many things, but tiny nuggets of random info have a particular habit of falling through the sieve). So, in a bid to improve that I’m going to take a note every time I find myself thinking ‘ooh, that’s interesting’ and I will then share those random snippets with you as we go. I may just do them as separate tiny blog posts, or I may append them to the main posts. Let’s see …

2020: Week 51

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On December 27, 2020

In Diary

(December 21 – 27)

It is the week of Christmas which means a few things. It means no work for starters. I always enjoy this period of the year: a chance to zone out and mentally reset … and also to catch up with various odd jobs around the house (mostly tidying and sorting).

In theory there should be plenty of time for writing, but in practice the lack of routine, the need to prepare for christmas, and the drive to strike things off my household to-do list means that writing takes a back seat.

I have committed myself to focusing on the novel as my main writing project. While I don’t do New Year’s resolutions anymore, I do intend to finish this one off in 2021. I’m currently working on the opening to chapter two and, in a familiar refrain, it’s needing a lot of surgery. At this point the characters are better defined than they were in chapter one, but there’s huge icebergs of exposition that I need to carve up and rearrange a bit more elegantly. This has required going back and forth over the first quarter of chapter two several times … but I think it’s been worth it, and I think I’ve finally reached a point where I can move onto the rest of chapter two.

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