Last week’s Friday Favourites post came out of a social media challenge that I was forced to take on board. This week is a similar thing. This time the challenge was:
Post a still from a film that’s influenced me over the next 10 days. Every day I’ll nominate one person to do the same.
Normally if someone tags me on a Facebook thing I just pretend I didn’t see it and walk away. Selfie challenges, Ice Bucket challenges, you name it, I’m avoiding it. But I haven’t got to where I am today by missing the chance to show off my love of films. So I did it. Even though I knew that trying to whittle down the list down to just 10 films would almost beak my brain. But I did it? Did anybody care? Nah. But nobody really cares about this blog and I’ve been doing this for nearly 10 years. It’s part of my charm.
This weekend saw the 77th Golden Globe awards take place. Unusually, the winners were pretty much the people you’d expect them to be. Well, apart from Olivia Colman winning for her work on The Crown. I love Colman in anything but she wasn’t given anything to do in that series. I know the Queen isn’t exactly a highly dramatic character but she was the least interesting character in her own show. But the most interesting thing to come out of the evening was the massive snub of Netflix’s two major award contenders. Neither Marriage Story or The Irishman walked away with any of the awards they’d been nominated for. Was this just a vicious snub by the HFPA or should Netflix be worried for the Academy Awards? If not even Scorsese is a guaranteed winner then who knows what will happen? Although, I’m sure Sam Mendes is a deserving winner. 1917 looks fucking amazing. But Netflix really had put massive work into getting the Oscar they so clearly deserved with Roma. Is this really proof that, no matter what they do, Netflix will never be accepted by the awards committees?
Today really does mark the end of Christmas. I’m back at work this morning after an 8-day break. It’s just flown by. It obviously didn’t help that I spent so many of the days in bed. But I’ve had a lovely time off and it’s been so nice to actually have a Christmas holiday for a change. I’m not looking forward to getting up in the morning. I’ve become too used to being able to get up whenever I want. I confess that I’ve been somewhat leisurely when it comes to getting out of bed. I set the alarm for 8 o’clock and get dressed at about 10. It does mean that a 7am wake-up call seems hellishly early. Though, I am looking forward to going back. If nothing else, it will mean that I might finally be able to work out what bloody day it is. I hate that period between Christmas and New Year when you don’t know what’s going. When every day fees like Sunday. When you can’t even work it out by watching TV because the schedules are all fucked and they’re only playing films. I love Christmas but I can’t wait until life feels a bit more normal again.
During my second or third year of university, Coraline was playing at our campus cinema. I say cinema. What I’m actually talking about is a lecture hall that had a huge projector in the back and really uncomfortable seats. Don’t get me wrong, it was really useful to have somewhere that showed films on campus but it was hardly a comfortable experience. But I still went with some of my flatmates. On the bus on the way home, we were sat in front of a group of people who’d also been there. One member of the group was loudly and confidently saying “you can tell it’s directed by Tim Burton. It was so similar to The Nightmare Before Christmas.” It certainly took all of my self-control to not turn around call him an idiot. I feel bad for Henry Selick. He’s been responsible for so many great films but he so rarely gets the credit. The fact that The Nightmare Before Christmas is also called Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas is a bit crazy. I guess it was a marketing strategy and, if it was, it bloody worked. But it does mean Selick gets forgotten about.
With the release of every new Quentin Tarantino fims there comes the same old gender discussion. Is he a massive sexist who refuses to give women ay real place in his films? This time it all kicked off when people started complaining about Margot Robbie being given so few lines in Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood. Does Robbie get short shrift? Yeah. But it’s not as if the film was even from Sharon Tate’s perspective anyway. It was a film about a male friendship that skirted around the star’s tragic death. It wasn’t supposed to explore Tate’s life but give an image of her as a person. It was a fairy tale where she was the kind, sweet, and promising young woman who didn’t deserve to have her life taken from her so brutally. Robbie and Tarantino manage to prove who Tate was without words. I’m not here to say whether Tarantino’s treatment of women is positive or negative but, in this case, it seems like a needless argument. Besides, since when is the only indication of a strong female character the number of lines they speak? As someone who has trouble speaking up at times, I’d say silence isn’t necessarily an indication of weakness.
On Tuesday I posted my spoiler free review of 
Yipee ki-yay, motherbooker 