Movie lists to love (From The Oxford Times)

Movie lists to love

12:07pm Thursday 25th October 2007

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TEN BAD DATES WITH DE NIRO: A BOOK OF ALTERNATIVE MOVIE LISTS

Ed Richard Kelly (Faber, £12.99)

Let's face it, we love lists. They're the fodder of pub conversations and arguments. We love nothing better to categorise our favourite music, books and various other obsessions. You only need to look at the endless array of 'Top 100' shows that litter the TV schedules of a weekend to prove that.

Movies are by no means immune from this phenomenon, and Richard Kelly's new compilation of alternative movie lists is a welcome addition to the trend. Usually, there is a grim inevitability to movie lists, with people naming the films that they think they should like, rather than those they actually do enjoy. Thus you get lists crammed with Welles, Renoir and Godard, full of intellectual cachet but lacking in the sheer exuberant fun of cinema.

Kelly avoids this problem, for the most part, by deliberately sticking to rather off-kilter subject matter. There are some rather predictable lists here - Mark Cousins's Top Ten Greatest Movie Trilogies, for example, contains no real surprises.

But where the book does come into its own is in the more offbeat lists - Ten Worst Wigs an Actor Dared to Wear; as well as the downright specific ones - Ten Most Gratuitious Sex Scenes in a Paul Verhoeven Movie or Top Ten Shoutiest Al Pacino Performances.

Another fun aspect to the book is checking out the lists compiled by your favourite film-makers and see if they accord with your own. Some of these lists work and some don't - as you might expect, the Cohen Brothers' contribution is downright weird. But filmmakers like Kevin McDonald, Mike Figgis and Steven Soderbergh all provide solid entries.

While it's obviously not a book that you would read cover to cover in one sitting and is perhaps more suited to an idle bedside browse, Ten Dates with de Niro has much to recommend it, if only for confirming your own particular prejudices on film.

Colin McBride

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