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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.

2020: Week 50

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On December 20, 2020

In Diary

(December 14 – 20)

I managed to finish my Christmas story and I’m pretty darned pleased with it too. It may be just a slight trifle of a tale, but I got a bit more substance in there than simply a monster hiding in a child’s room. The plan now is to promote my previous christmas tales and then publish this new one on or before Christmas Eve.

I’ve decided to continue using Medium for now. It has a nice, easy to use interface, I get stats telling me how many people have looked at vs read my stories, and I’m able to publish my stories under my ‘Slightly Odd Tales’ strand.

I still have one of my christmas stories on Vocal (dot media) and I’ll leave it there for now, but I’ve already deleted the other one (which had barely any views). This was the story I recently did an edit on, but it turns out Vocal does not let you edit stories once they’re published, which is a big no-no given my propensity for leaving typos (aka easter eggs) in stories for my readers to find. Furthermore, I couldn’t even delete the damn thing without having to email the folk at Vocal first and waiting several hours for them to come back to me. It’s a nice enough platform, but I need full control over my content.

I have also been continuing to revisit the novel. I’m up to chapter 2 now, which is needing even more invasive surgery than the first chapter. The latest section in particular has taken on the semblance of a jigsaw: I’ve separated out the various scenes (and by scenes I mostly mean dialogue exchanges which convey a distinct aspect of plot or character) and am currently working out how to make them fit together, and which pieces belong in a completely different part of the story altogether.

Most people, of course, would do this sort of thing before actually writing the novel. However, if you’ve been reading this blog long enough you’ll recall that I took a hybrid approach to this one: I went in with an overall plot for each chapter, but left enough room in for the story and characters to find their own way. I think it’s paid off in the wild and crazy tangents this tale has taken, and tidying up these inconsistencies was always going to be part of the deal.

Who knows: maybe I’ll finish the damn thing next year!

2020: Week 49

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On December 13, 2020

In Diary

(December 7 – 13)

Excellent: it turns out that I already released the haunted mobile phone story last Christmas (which probably explains why it was in fairly good shape already). Even though no one actually read it, it still feels like cheating to release it a second time around, which leaves me with the problem of having to come up with something new.

So I’ve had a necessary trawl through the Archive Of Unfinished Masterpieces (coincidentally also the title of the next Indiana Jones movie) and found this fragment that I scrawled down earlier in the year:

I know it’s hungry.

I can hear its tummy growling.

It hides in the darkness in the corner of my room, waiting in the shadows where I can’t see it. It stays away from my bed. But I know it’s there.

The air is cold and moist with its breath

Now, if that doesn’t have the makings of a classic Christmas tale then I don’t know what does. Watch this space.

2020: Week 48

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On December 6, 2020

In Diary

(November 30 – December 6)

This week I remembered my semi-official tradition of releasing a new spooky story each Christmas and decided that this was a thing I also wanted to do for this Christmas.The inevitable problem is that I always remember this tradition too late in the year to give me a chance to write anything new.

To solve this dilemma I’ve dug out an old, almost-finished story about a man being haunted by his mobile phone. It’s a very M.R.James inspired story (one might even suggest it’s a plain rip off of Casting The Runes) but one I’ve never managed to get quite right.

That being said, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by what good shape it’s in. So far all the scenes seem to be in the right place and it’s needed nothing more than a light polish.

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