15 Films That Explain My Weird Taste in Cinema
A Personal Journey Through the Films That Shaped My Cinematic Soul
I have never had what you might call conventional taste in movies.
Don't get me wrong. I like a good blockbuster as much as the next man. Give me explosions, spaceships, superheroes, dinosaurs and a sufficiently unreasonable budget and I can find a way to enjoy myself.
But the films that really stick with me tend to be a little... different. Foreign films. Independent films. Historical films. Religious films. Martial-arts films. Animated films about extremely strange people. British gangster films where everybody owes everybody money. American comedies about socially maladjusted people. Films about colonialism. Films about identity. Films that make me laugh while somebody is quietly having an existential crisis in the background.
Looking over some of my favourites, I realise that I don't really have a genre. I have a preoccupation.
I like outsiders. I like people caught between cultures. I like underdogs. I like people navigating systems that are bigger than them. I like absurdity with something serious underneath it. And apparently I also like movies in which people get themselves into increasingly ridiculous situations because somebody thought they could make some quick money.
So here are 15 films that probably explain my cinematic brain better than I could.
1. Rabbit-Proof Fence — Australia
This was one of the films that really opened my eyes to the power of historical cinema. And its a tearjerker!
Rabbit-Proof Fence tells the story of Molly, her younger sister Daisy and their cousin Gracie, three Aboriginal girls taken from their families under Australia's assimilation policies. They escape and begin an extraordinary journey home, following the rabbit-proof fence across Western Australia.
And that is almost all you need. Three girls. A fence. The Australian outback. And a government determined to make sure they don't get home.
There is something devastating about the simplicity of it. The fence itself becomes almost a metaphor. Something built by a colonial society to control animals becomes the means by which the children navigate their way back to freedom.
I love historical films that don't need to shout. This one simply lets you walk. And walk. And walk. Until the political meaning of that journey becomes impossible to ignore. I heard about it from my cousin Camara and her husband at the time Thura/Tupac.
2. They Cloned Tyrone — USA
Now we're going in a completely different direction. Or perhaps we're not.
Because They Cloned Tyrone is basically what happens when Afrofuturism, blaxploitation, conspiracy theory and social criticism get drunk together.
John Boyega, Jamie Foxx and Teyonah Parris form an unlikely trio investigating a sinister conspiracy in their neighbourhood.
The brilliance is that the movie is funny. Very funny. But underneath the humour is some genuinely uncomfortable material about behavioural conditioning, consumer culture, surveillance and the manipulation of Black communities.
It asks the sort of question conspiracy theorists love: What if somebody really is pulling the strings? But then it asks the more interesting question: What if the strings aren't quite where you thought they were?
As somebody who has spent a considerable amount of time thinking about Afrofuturism, technology and Black futures, this movie was practically designed to crawl into my head and rearrange the furniture.
3. Napoleon Dynamite — USA
This movie is gloriously stupid. I mean that with tremendous affection.
Napoleon Dynamite was an actual American independent film, directed by Jared Hess and made on a tiny budget before becoming a surprisingly big success.
And what I love about it is that nobody seems particularly interested in being normal. Napoleon is weird. Pedro is weird. Kip is weird. Uncle Rico is weird. Everybody is weird. And nobody really gets "fixed."
That's important. Hollywood normally wants the outsider to undergo a transformation. The nerd becomes cool. The ugly duckling becomes beautiful. The loser becomes a winner. Napoleon Dynamite basically says: What if everybody just remained weird? And somehow that is enough.
4. Thank You for Smoking — USA
This is one of those movies I appreciate more the older I get.
Nick Naylor is a tobacco-industry spokesman whose job is essentially to argue for something that everybody knows is difficult to defend. His weapon isn't facts. It's rhetoric. And that distinction is important. Because winning an argument and establishing the truth are two completely different activities. I'd show this to any philosophy student as a masterclass on what Sophistry is.
Thank You for Smoking is a satirical black comedy about lobbying, spin and persuasion, based on Christopher Buckley's novel.
I particularly enjoy the film because it understands something that journalists, politicians, advertisers and public-relations people learn very quickly: you don't always have to prove that you're right. Sometimes you just have to make the other person less certain that you're wrong. That is a frighteningly useful skill.
5. Snatch — UK
Guy Ritchie understands one fundamental law of storytelling: If everybody in the movie is an idiot, give them complicated plans.
Snatch is crime cinema as a pinball machine. Money goes missing. Diamonds go missing. People get double-crossed. People double-cross the people doing the double-crossing. And somewhere in the middle of all this is Brad Pitt speaking a language that appears to have been invented specifically to confuse the English. I saw this in the theatre with a Trini girlfriend who I almost had to thump in her "griblings" for ogling and drooling at Brad Pitt in a brief... ew!
As for the show... I love the energy. The editing. The dialogue. The characters. The sheer Britishness of it. And underneath all the chaos is something I find fascinating: an entire informal economy operating through hustles, gambling, stolen goods, violence and personal relationships. Basically capitalism without the PowerPoint presentation.
6. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels — UK
If Snatch is the polished version, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels is the garage-band version. Actually I watched this after Snatch because Snatch was so good.
This was Guy Ritchie's feature debut, about a card player who loses a fortune in a rigged game and has a week to find the money. And then, naturally, everything goes to hell.
The plot is basically a Rube Goldberg machine constructed out of gangsters, gamblers, thieves, weed growers, loan sharks and people who have made very poor financial decisions.
Which brings me to another reason I enjoy these films. I have a weakness for stories in which somebody says: "I have a plan." And the audience immediately knows: No you don't.
7. Ip Man — Hong Kong
Then we get serious. This one is another tearjerker!
Ip Man is a 2008 Hong Kong martial-arts film directed by Wilson Yip and starring Donnie Yen as the Wing Chun master.
And yes, there are spectacular fight scenes. But that's not really why I love it.
What interests me is the idea of disciplined strength. Ip Man doesn't need to walk around telling everybody how powerful he is. He knows. That is a different kind of masculinity.
The film also places that martial discipline against the historical trauma of Japanese occupation. So the fights become about more than fighting. They become about dignity. Humiliation. National identity. Resistance. And the question of what happens to a person's sense of self when another power decides it has the right to dominate them. SPOILER ALERT, the 10 vs 1 fight scene, no other fight scene beats that for me!
8. War of the Arrows — South Korea
War of the Arrows is a 2011 South Korean historical action film set after the Qing invasion of Joseon. Its protagonist is an archer trying to rescue his sister after she is taken into slavery.
And what a film. The thing I love about it is that the hero's greatest weapon isn't brute strength. It's skill. Distance. Terrain. Patience. Accuracy. The landscape itself becomes part of the weapon.
There is something deeply satisfying about watching an apparently outmatched person discover that he doesn't have to become stronger than his enemy. He just has to become smarter.
9. Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale — Taiwan
Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale is a Taiwanese historical epic about the Seediq people and the 1930 Musha Incident during Japanese colonial rule in Taiwan. This is a mighty long watch and for some reason the protagonist in this show, the first part of the epic, he reminds me of Tommy Lee Sparta, in his youth and his violent imagery and ruthlessness. It's his face on the poster.
This is a serious piece of cinema. And it is brutal. The film deals with colonisation, cultural suppression, resistance, identity and violence without reducing everything to a convenient morality tale.
What particularly interests me is the Indigenous perspective. The Seediq are not simply scenery in somebody else's history. They are the people whose history this is.
Coming from the Caribbean, that distinction matters. We know what it means to inherit a history in which the coloniser often gets to write the first draft. Films like this remind us that there are always other drafts.
10. Rapa Nui — Easter Island
Rapa Nui is another film I have to classify carefully. This is one of those shows you wake up late night and you see it on Cinemax or HBO and you watch it because you are up and then the slow burn hooks you into the history of a people.
It is actually an American/Australian production directed by Kevin Reynolds and produced by Kevin Costner, rather than a foreign film in the strict sense. It is, however, set on Rapa Nui — Easter Island — and draws heavily on Rapa Nui legends, particularly the Birdman competition.
And this is where the film becomes interesting to me. It is a story about competition, hierarchy, ecology, religion and social order. It also raises the familiar question about environmental collapse.
But there is an important caveat: the film's historical reconstruction is highly debatable. Even the idea that ecological destruction straightforwardly caused the collapse of Rapa Nui society is much more complicated than the popular version of the story suggests.
That actually makes me like it more. Because a good historical film doesn't have to give you the final answer. Sometimes it gives you a question.
11. The Last Temptation of Christ — USA/Canada
Now we get into territory where I am less interested in historical accuracy than philosophical provocation. Man I remember my parents watching it and cautiously sending kids away. But it piqued my curiosity enough to mark it down on my one-day-I-must-watch list. Man this show is really a crazy theosophical and theological deep dive. Not for the faint of heart.
Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ is based on Nikos Kazantzakis's controversial novel and stars Willem Dafoe (Green Goblin) as Jesus. It explores fear, doubt, temptation, human desire and the conflict between Jesus' humanity and his divine mission.
And yes, it caused an enormous controversy. But controversy isn't really what interests me.
The fascinating thing is the premise itself. What happens when you stop treating Jesus only as an icon and start asking what it might mean for him to experience the psychological burdens of being human? That is a philosophical question. And philosophy has always been much more interested in uncomfortable questions than comfortable answers.
12. Jesus Christ Superstar — USA/Israel
This is another movie that probably looks completely out of place on a list like this. Until you watch it.
Jesus Christ Superstar is a 1973 American musical directed by Norman Jewison, based on the Tim Rice/Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. It was shot entirely in Israel, using locations including the Dead Sea, Avdat, Bet Shean and the Judean Desert.
And I love how strange it is. It doesn't look like the Sunday-school Jesus movie. It looks like somebody took a rock musical, transported it to the biblical landscape and said: "Let's see what happens."
The result is theatrical, psychedelic, irreverent and surprisingly psychologically sophisticated.
And Judas becomes particularly interesting. Because the story isn't simply: Jesus good. Judas bad. It is about loyalty, politics, fear, friendship, betrayal and the terrifying consequences of believing that you understand history better than everybody else.
Where as The Last Temptation Christ was serious and intense, sometime this movie can come off as funny, flippant and trite, it does as serious questions about Jesus's relationships rather than Jesus per se.
13. Forrest Gump — USA
Okay. Now I'm going to cheat.
Because Forrest Gump is absolutely not an independent or foreign film. It is mainstream Hollywood. Big studio. Tom Hanks. Oscar-winning blockbuster. The whole nine yards.
But I'm putting it here anyway. Because this isn't supposed to be a film-school taxonomy. It's supposed to be my list. And this show feels independent, its a departure from Hollywood mainstream sensibilities.
And Forrest Gump is one of those movies I find difficult to dismiss because of how effectively it turns one man's seemingly ordinary life into a tour through American history. Vietnam. The civil-rights era. The counterculture. Watergate. The Cold War. American capitalism. Celebrity. Trauma. Love. Loss. And shrimp. Lots of shrimp.
What makes Forrest interesting isn't simply that he is innocent. It's that he moves through history without fully understanding the ideological machinery surrounding him. Everybody else is trying to explain America. Forrest just keeps running through it.
14. Cinema Paradiso — Italy/France
Now we get to one of the great love letters to cinema.
Cinema Paradiso is a 1988 Italian-French film by Giuseppe Tornatore about a boy's friendship with an aging projectionist in a small Sicilian town.
This is a movie about movies. But really it is about memory. Growing up. Leaving home. Returning home. And the strange way childhood attaches itself to places that cannot remain unchanged.
There is something particularly beautiful about the idea of a cinema being the centre of a community. People come there to laugh. Cry. Fall in love. Escape. Imagine. For a little while, the whole town shares one dream.
And then time moves on. That's the part that hurts. Because eventually every Cinema Paradiso becomes something we remember. For some reason it reminds me of Jeremy Jahns that film review YouTube guy, like this could have been his origin story in another dimension somewhere out there in the multiverse.
15. The Triplets of Belleville — France/Belgium/Canada
Finally, something completely bananas.
The Triplets of Belleville is a 2003 animated adventure-comedy directed by French filmmaker Sylvain Chomet and produced through an international partnership involving France, Belgium, Canada and the UK.
And I adore it. It barely needs dialogue. The characters look bizarre. The world looks bizarre. The humour is bizarre. The music is bizarre. Everything is bizarre. And somehow it is beautiful. It just reminds me of the French Cat of Warner Bros. and Chuck/Charles M. Jones cartoon style I used to love as child in the 80's. The art of Jones had a very jazz and philosophical mood and undertone and I find some of that in this. Something about reminds me of the past and maybe my mother and her 2 main sisters, and how as child people would ask me, "Are they Triplets?"
This is animation reminding you that you don't have to make everything look realistic to make it emotionally real. Sometimes a character with a nose like a potato and legs like coat hangers can communicate more humanity than a thousand CGI superheroes.
So What Does This Say About Me?
Looking at this list, I realise that my taste in cinema isn't really about whether something is "indie," "foreign," "Hollywood," "art house" or "mainstream." Those categories are useful for film distributors. They aren't particularly useful for explaining obsession.
What connects these films is something else. They are about people navigating worlds that don't quite fit them.
Aboriginal children trying to get home. A Black neighbourhood discovering something sinister beneath its surface. A weird kid trying to survive high school. A tobacco lobbyist turning rhetoric into a weapon. Gangsters trying to untangle their own stupidity. A martial artist defending dignity. A Korean archer turning terrain into strategy. Taiwanese Indigenous people resisting colonial domination. An island wrestling with ecological and social pressures. Jesus wrestling with the burden of being Jesus. Judas wrestling with what he thinks history requires of him. An ordinary man accidentally wandering through American history. A projectionist preserving the magic of cinema. And three eccentric old women going after a kidnapped cyclist.
Apparently, that's my thing. People trying to find their way through somebody else's world.
Maybe that's why I gravitate toward films from outside the conventional Hollywood template. They often remind me that there is no single way to tell a story. No single way to understand history. No single way to imagine identity. And no single way to make a damn good movie.
Sometimes you need a $200-million blockbuster. Sometimes you need Donnie Yen kicking somebody through a wall. Sometimes you need three Aboriginal girls following a fence home. And sometimes you just need Napoleon Dynamite dancing like his life depends on it.
Cinema is a big place. I intend to keep wandering around in it.
_______
No comments:
Post a Comment