#oneaday, Day 8: Film Illiterate

I am woefully film-illiterate, as becomes painfully apparent the moment anyone uses the tried-and-tested icebreaker “Have you seen [insert movie that everyone has seen here]?”

I just don’t watch that many movies. It’s as simple as that. When given the option between spending nearly two hours watching a movie passively or interacting actively with a video game, nine times out of ten I’ll pick the video game, particularly if I’m by myself. This is inclined to change if I’m with other people, though, since unless you’re sitting with another gamer (or at least someone who’s invested in the story, characters, gameplay and/or your progress in the game) then sitting watching someone else play a game is no fun. (There are exceptions to this rule, of course; titles like Heavy Rain spring immediately to mind.)

But for the most part, because I live a long way from some of my friends and several thousand miles away from even more of my friends, watching a movie is usually a solitary experience. And if I’m going to be playing solitaire, I’d rather be, you know, playing.

That doesn’t stop me thinking that there are certain movies that I “should” see, though. There are a few of the classics that I have seen—unlike Ash, who wrote about this very topic earlier today, I have seen 2001: A Space Odyssey, for example. (And I can’t remember a bloody thing about it, leading me to believe it might not have been as good as everyone says it is.) But for the most part, if someone mentions a film that supposedly “everyone” has seen, chances are, I haven’t.

Now, in an effort to rectify this, and partly in celebration of its arrival on the PS3, I signed up for a LOVEFiLM trial subscription. My thinking behind it was that I’d finally be able to jump on board with some of these supposed “classics” and catch up with what I’ve been missing for all these years. The first film I watched was Team America: World Police which, while probably not a “classic” in the same way as certain other films are, it’s certainly one which gets quoted and referenced a lot. (And it was pretty hilarious, too. The scene with “Kim Jong-Il’s panthers” had me in stitches.)

Last night, though, I jumped in at the deep end and watched one of those films that is supposedly “iconic”, a quintessential snapshot of the art form at a particular moment in time. That film was Dirty Harry.

I wasn’t sure what to expect, even though I’ve been seeing Dirty Harry references throughout literature, games and journalism for the last twenty-five years or so. But I was pleasantly surprised to find an enjoyable film that you didn’t have to think about too hard, yet which still carried an underlying message that is still relevant today—that of criminals’ “rights”.

One thing that was particularly striking about the film was how differently it treated its antagonist to today’s movies. These days, there is often some lengthy exposition detailing exactly how and why the “villain” of the piece came to be so, well, villainous. This can lead to some interesting moral ambiguity situations when you discover that sometimes a “villain” can just be someone who’s doing what they think is right, or that they have underlying problems that explain their actions, however reprehensible.

There’s none of that in Dirty Harry. Scorpio is a scumbag, pure and simple. He’s a pure personification of “evil”—he rapes, he kills, he manipulates, he tricks, and he sure doesn’t like to be brought to justice. His demonisation throughout the course of the film causes the audience to subconsciously and automatically side with Harry, as questionable as some of his methods might be. It’s an effective trick, and one which makes the whole movie immensely satisfying right up to its conclusion.

So there’s one I can tick off my list. Any other suggestions?