MY TOP TEN MOVIES
RANGE-FINDING Like most people, I’m fairly partial to movies and have been ever since I was a sprog. Movies operate on lots of different levels- even the bad ones- and I’ve always thought that they are markers for the societies in which they’ve been developed and made. They might not be mirrors but they don’t have to be. Revisionism, back mapping and brazen opinion often fill that void. One of the first movies that I can remember was The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) and it left an almost permanent post-it note on my skull regarding the power of movie making. The gill man scared my pants off as he lurked amongst the underwater reeds while an unaware Julia Adams activated a weird type of Australian crawl/ backstroke combo on the surface above. To a seven year old, the lass was not so much shapely as potential bait for the terror below. Strategic bubble-generating and the murky lagoon value-add to the experience. But terror is only one attention-gette...