#AGAIN AND AGAIN SIGNPOST MOVIE#

I still vividly remember watching it for the first time, as a ten-year-old boy, both terrified and fascinated by the sheer immensity of imagination that had been distilled into a such refined form. It is a film that retains a special place in my heart. James Cameron’s sci-fi masterpiece (a word I use very sparingly), Aliens is one of that prestigiously select cabal. But then, there are very few films that I can watch again and again without ever getting tired of.

#AGAIN AND AGAIN SIGNPOST MOVIE#

Perhaps it says something about the warped nature of my subconscious that I find a movie about vicious predatory xenomorphs that gestate inside your chest and burst out of your rib cage a comfort film. My wife secretly knows that too, I’m sure. It’s a machine gun battery of jokes, some terrible, some great, but it’s up there with Airplane as one of the most consistently funny, gleeful comedies of all time.Īnd the Potato Farm gag is seriously, seriously awesome. Yet it’s the astoundingly funny parody of spy and war movies from the Airplane/Naked Gun team of Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker that’s the DVD in my collection that’s most constantly on call. A little Russian? Val Kilmer singing Skeet Surfing? The sign on the electric fence declaring ‘Das Fencen Switchen’? The ballet? Perhaps the finest of them all: “He’s a little hoarse.” Seriously: pick any five minute segment of the film, and I can write bucketloads on its genius.īut then I do love comedy films, and inevitably turn to them more than any other genre when I’m looking for a lift. It’s one brutally silly gag in a film that’s chock-full of them. Add unforgettable dialogue (for example, the blasting “Bullshit Mr Han, man!” from Jim Kelly’s afro-excellent Williams or Bruce Lee’s deep wisdom: “Don’t think… feel.”) and you have a timeless classic. Han with his dismembered hand, army of kung fu cronies and private paradise island lair. It also has a perfect megalomaniac villain in Mr. It’s got Lee and astounding martial arts, Far Eastern philosophy, blaxploitation soul, the essence of old-school espionage cinema and a Lalo Schifrin score giving it funk. Or maybe it’s the fact that Enter The Dragon – in under two hours – encapsulates all my guilty pleasures and melds ‘em together in one rip-roaring righteous blast of chopsocky brilliance and retro cool. Maybe it’s the sheer animal magnetism and all-round superhuman aura of Bruce Lee that brings me back again and again. Why? Because there’s no better way to answer life’s big questions than to stand on the precipice of humanity and stare into an abyss of nothingness, an artistic vacuum so dark that it reaffirms the meaning of life just by watching. But, I can almost guarantee that the next time I’m feeling down, the next time it’s a bit drizzly out, or when I start to question the futility of my own meagre existence, I’ll slip that same DVD off of my shelf. 10 hours! That’s enough time to learn basic Spanish or to finally investigate that slightly off-putting beige substance in my fridge. There’s nothing intelligent about it, nothing worth remembering and nothing to be thankful for (except perhaps that it kept the also-odious Jessica Biel and Jamie Foxx from ruining other perfectly good scripts at the time) yet my self-flagellation continues and I’ve now spent more than 10 hours of my life watching this movie. In fact, I’d go so far as to say it’s one of the worst products of cumulative human endeavour since the atom bomb and yet, I’m strangely drawn back to it time and time again. In Nelson Shin and Toei Animation’s 1986 masterpiece, you may marvel as the gestalt Constructicon single-handedly bests all four remaining Dinobots (Snarl’s robotic form having been destroyed and his brainwaves transferred into a living stegosaurus sometime prior to the movie. If you want to appreciate true giant robots Bob the Builder would envy, combining into an even gianter robot, then the original Devastator is your… robot. The perfect teen film which many have tried to copy since but none have managed to top.įorget this summer’s cybertesticularly-challenged pyrokinetic blabberfest. I still laugh at the lunch scene and when they get high as well as always getting slightly emotional at Brian’s soliloquy on the ceramic elephant. There are so many elements to why I love it, the script, the cast, the one liners (“Screw’s fall out all the time, the world is an imperfect place”), the soundtrack. When five very different students get thrown together for a Saturday detention, they learn that, actually, they are not as different from each other as they think, played against a wonderful, funny and touching script that even two decades later is still relevant to today’s teenagers.

Again and again signpost