Here’s my second batch of favourite films of the last decade in haiku-form, which covers number 75 through to 51.

For 100 through to 76 scroll up or go here.

More to come…

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75.  Drag Me To Hell (dir. Sam Raimi, 2009)

Raimi’s zeitgeist surf

As bank clerk is damned

Due to Evil Debt

74.  The Bourne Identity (dir. Doug Liman, 2002)

New ‘JB’ in town

It’s those initials again!

Bond and Bauer – meet Bourne

73.  Gone Baby Gone (dir. Ben Affleck, 2008)

Those Affleck brothers

Adapt Boston-set thriller

(Look out for Omar!)

72.  The Wrestler (dir. Darren Aronofsky, 2009)

Rourke drifts to glory

With tale of aging fighter

Who’s your (Big) Daddy?

71.  Donnie Darko (dir. Richard Kelly, 2002)

Post-modern ‘Harvey’?

Quantum theory for kids?

There’s no ‘F’ in ‘Chance’

70.  Chopper (dir. Andrew Dominik, 2000)

Real-life Oz hard man

And his mad horse-shoe moustache

(Hope he don’t read this)

69.  The Proposition  (dir. John Hilcoat, 2006)

From Bad Seed Nick Cave

Comes a Down-Under Western

That’s straight-up and true

68.  Dead Man’s Shoes  (dir. Shane Meadows, 2004)

Bloody homecoming

For Staffs’ Robert DeNiro

(East Midlands Western)

67.  Zatōichi  (dir. Takeshi Kitano, 2004)

Beat Takeshi’s ode

To sight-impaired Samurai

Cuts, slices, dances

66.  Persepolis  (dir. Vincent Paronnaud/Marjane Satrapi, 2008)

Cartoon slice of life

That’s rich in humanity

And opens our eyes

65.  Zoolander (dir. Ben Stiller, 2001)

Male model mischief

As Stiller’s dumb looker thwarts

Photogenicide

64.  Grizzly Man  (dir. Werner Herzog, 2006)

Herzog’s odyssey

Smarter than average doc

Bear necessity

63.  Kung Fu Hustle  (dir. Stephen Chow, 2005)

Martial Art Slapstick

From Shaolin Soccer guy

(Loony Tu-Manchu)

62.  Unbreakable  (dir. M. Night Shyamalan, 2000)

M. Night got it right

With indestructible Bruce

Make a sequel, now!

61.  Hannibal  (dir. Ridley Scott, 2001)

Sequel to Silence

Operatic Grand Guignol

(Love story, of sorts)

60.  Ocean’s Eleven  (dir. Stephen Soderbergh, 2002)

Soderbergh remake

Tops Rat Pack original

Slick, frothy and fun

59.  Team America: World Police  (dir. Trey Parker, 2005)

Top-shelf Thunderbirds

Tackle the War on Terror

Fun, with strings attached

58.  Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit  (dir. Steve Box/Nick Park, 2005)

A man and his dog

In Horror fromage homage

Plasti-scene stealers!

57.  Gangs of New York  (dir. Martin Scorsese, 2003)

Marty’s Good Fellows

An underrated epic

Stove pipe hats at dawn!

56.  Man on Wire  (dir. James Marsh, 2008)

Towering saga

Walks a dangerous tightrope

But maintains balance

55.  Sideways  (dir. Alexander Payne, 2005)

Breezy road movie

A boozy mid-life crisis

Excellent vintage!

54.  Hulk  (dir. Ang Lee, 2003)

Arthouse blockbuster?

They said: ‘Don’t make it, Ang Lee!’

But I still like it

53.  Into the Wild  (dir. Sean Penn, 2007)

Lyrical portrait

Of doomed real-life rebellion

Arctic retreat

52.  Coffee and Cigarettes  (dir.  Jim Jarmusch, 2004)

Unhealthy vignettes

With Jack, Meg, Iggy and Tom

Always makes me smile

51.  Being John Malkovich  (dir. Spike Jonze, 2000)

A big-screen version

Of Beezer comic’s ‘Numskulls’

(Unofficially)

What follows is the first part of the hideously overdue rundown of my Top 100 favourite films of the last decade. Not a Top 20, not a Top 50 but a Top 100. You can see why I’m doing this in installments.

Most lists like this are published in late-December or early-January, but most lists like this don’t contain lovingly hand-crafted haiku summaries. You get what you wait for. This delay has also given me the chance to catch up with films released in 2009 that I didn’t manage to catch last year. That helps to explain why some films included in this list didn’t appear in my Top 10 Films of 2009. That, and the fact I’m pathologically fickle.

Of course, strictly speaking, the first decade of the twenty-first century started in January 2001 and ends later this year. In that sense, then, this list has actually come early. The only problem with following that line of thought, however, is that I’d have to reconfigure the chart to include films that haven’t been made yet. That’s too much hassle.

The dates I use are UK theatrical release dates, which are often later than US release dates. As a result, this list contains films you may think belong to the previous decade.

I sympathise with these films. I’m often accused of belonging to a previous decade, too.

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100. 3:10 to Yuma (dir. James Mangold, 2007)

Cowboys Crowe and Bale

Evoke a simpler era

(Train arrives on time)

99. Moebius Redux: A Life in Pictures (dir. Hasko Baumann, 2007)

French comix legend’s

Influence is everywhere

We live in his world

98. Watchmen (dir. Zack Snyder, 2009)

Caped Citizen Kane?

Not quite, but it sure does try

Heroic attempt

97. The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (dir. Errol Morris, 2004)

War and remembrance

From US politics giant

Life lessons linger

96. Infernal Affairs (dir. Wei-keung Lau/Alan Mak, 2004)

Hong Kong cop and crook

In deep cover collision

There will be bullets

95. Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (dir. Jim Jarmusch, 2000)

Urban warrior

Finds Zen in a pigeon loft

(He could have found worse)

94. Sin City (dir. Robert Rodriguez/Frank Miller, 2005)

Miller’s comic noir

Faithfully cut-and-pasted

Rourke’s Marv steals the show

93. Tropic Thunder (dir. Ben Stiller, 2008)

Actors’ film folly

As they stumble into war

Year’s funniest film

92. Casino Royale (dir. Martin Campbell, 2006)

James Bond is re-Bourne

Exchanges gadgets for grit

He’s blonde now, you know

91. Big Fish (dir. Tim Burton, 2004)

Shaggy dog story

Brings the best out in Burton

(Sequel: ‘Cardboard Box’)

90. Public Enemies (dir. Michael Mann, 2009)

Mann’s gangster epic

Is a fedora-clad ‘Heat’

(The film, not the mag)

89. Insomnia (dir. Chrstopher Nolan, 2002)

Sleep deprivation

Prevents scenery-chewing

At least I think so

88. Avatar (dir. James Cameron, 2009)

J.C. rose again

With pulp sci-fi eye-popper

Tangled up in blue

87. Gran Torino (dir. Clint Eastwood, 2009)

It’s flawed, but who cares?

Clint’s in front of the camera

And that makes our day

86. Coraline (dir. Henry Sellick, 2009)

Neil Gaiman’s kids book

Becomes stop-motion delight

Sinister buttons!

85. American Splendor (dir. Shari Springer Berman/Robert Pulcini, 2004)

Not a cape in sight

As comix artist laid bare

Underground classic

84. Rocky Balboa (dir. Sylvester Stallone, 2007)

Italian Stallion’s

Final return to the ring

A Sly-con swansong

83. Lost in Translation (dir. Sofia Coppola, 2004)

Platonic affair

What’s so funny about that?

It’s Big in Japan

82. The Orphanage (dir. Juan Antonio Bayona, 2008)

Twisty Spanish yarn

With a very sad middle

Behold the sack mask!

81. Million Dollar Baby (dir. Clint Eastwood, 2005)

Clint tugs at heart strings

In girl boxer tearjerker

That still packs a punch

80. Death Proof (dir. Quentin Tarantino, 2007)

Best half of ‘Grindhouse’

Left many moviegoers cold

(Like I give a shit)

79. The Departed (dir. Martin Scorsese, 2006)

Jack’s shows a mean streak

On Marty’s gritty Mean Streets

Infernal remake

78. A.I. Artificial Intelligence (dir. Steven Spielberg, 2001)

Neo-Pinocchio

As Spielberg channels Stanley

Beautifully bleak

77. Brokeback Mountain (dir. Ang Lee, 2006)

Ang Lee’s ‘Giant’ became

A shorthand for homophobes

But what do they know?

76. Burn After Reading (dir. Ethan Coen/Joel Coen, 2008)

Coen’s strike again

Dumb idiots hatch dumb plot

It’s sadistic fun!

Or, The Life Arachnid with Peter Parker.  A slyly clever parody by Jeff Loveness which -- like Anderson’s actual films -- you’ll either get or you won’t.

(Thanks to zenbullets for the heads-up.)

I’m probably the last person in the world to see this, but here’s a tremendously funny movie mash-up that features Darth Vader reimagined by Guy Ritchie:

I meant to write this on Friday night, but I was sick so I didn’t.

Friday would have been the 75th birthday of Mr Elvis Aaron Presley, a name you probably won’t need to look up in Wikipedia.  Like most anniversaries (or, for that matter, most things in life), the news coverage was a fairly predictable affair. Stock footage covering both ends of his career followed by smug observations about Elvis impersonators and obligatory soundbites from eccentric fans, which invariably consisted of a random great granny from The King’s original target demographic (who, ideally, doesn’t much care for modern music) juxtaposed with some young arsehole with a quiff. I assume the latter was “going through a phase” and his or her parents were probably into Britpop or hip hop.

Personally speaking, I’ve always been rather fond of Elvis. My parents’ were part of his original target demographic, you see, and some of the first songs I ever heard were by The King. In psychological circles that’s known as imprint vulnerability. I’m also old enough to remember what I was doing when I first heard that he’d died. I was putting on a snake belt and getting ready to go to infant school.

In any case, in memory of Elvis I planned to spend Friday night watching Bubba Ho-Tep and listening to Gravelands by The King and Porcelain Monkey by Warren Zevon. Unfortunately I was sick, so I didn’t. To the best of my knowledge, Bubba Ho-Tep, Gravelands by The King and Porcelain Monkey by Warren Zevon did not feature prominently in the mainstream media’s coverage of the Elvis anniversary. I suppose that’s the reason why God created the Blogosphere and idiots like me.

Bubba Ho-Tep, in case you don’t know, was a blackly comic but strangely touching independent film directed by Don Cascarelli that was released in 2004 or thereabouts. It featured the mighty Bruce Campbell playing an aging Elvis who cheated death in 1977 and now finds himself living in a Texan rest home.  Together with an elderly black guy -- who may or may not be JFK -- he has to face down a deranged mummy who’s preying on the souls of pensioners.

It’s one of my favourite movies of the last decade, and I cringe a little as I type that. Blog logic -- or blogic, if you will -- states that I’m now have to follow through on that comment by churning out a list of my favourite films of the decade. More bad haiku, then.

Gravelands, on the other hand, is a 1997 album which features cover versions of songs by dead rock stars performed by an Elvis impersonator from Belfast whose real name is James Brown. Yes, I know that sounds like the ingredients for some God-awful novelty record, but it really is quite wonderful. ‘The King’ really does sound like The King, the musicians really do sound like the Takin’ Care of Business Band and the choice of songs is priceless. They make it sound as though Nirvana’s Come as You Are, Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart and AC/DC’s Whole Lotta Rosie are new additions to the Presley back catalogue. To put it another way, it gives us a weird glimpse into a parallel world where Elvis got to live for another couple of decades and Rick Rubin helped him rehabilitate his legacy.

Finally, there’s Porcelain Monkey by the late Warren Zevon, which featured a blistering riff and some brilliant lyrics:

From a shotgun shack singing Pentecostal hymns
Through the wrought iron gates to the TV room
He had a little world, it was smaller than your hand
It’s a rockabilly ride from the glitter to the gloom

Left behind by the latest trends
Eating fried chicken with his regicidal friends
That’s how the story ends
With a porcelain monkey

Zevon, however, was not what you might call a fan of Elvis. In an interview in 2000 he said:

“He furthered the cause of ripping off a culture we’ve already oppressed for 400 years in my country. But I don’t know how much is individual brilliance, genius, and how much is just the currents of culture. Being at a cultural crossroads can be luck, you know? Don’t be absolutely sure that Soundgarden wasn’t as good as the Rolling Stones. They just came 30 years too late to be innovative.”

I’m a big fan of Zevon’s, but that’s a pretty harsh and iconoclastic position to take, even by his standards.  The 6th Century sage Chilon of Sparta once said “Let only good be spoken of the dead”,  but if that’s the case then how have Channel 5 documentary makers managed to stay in business?  And does this lofty ideal still apply when the person wagging a finger at a dead rock star is another dead rock star?

I can’t say for certain, but I do know that  Zevon’s Life’ll Kill Ya is one of my favourite albums of the decade.  I cringe a little as I type that, too.

I guess that means I’ll be churning out even more bad haiku.

As a blogger, I’m contractually obliged to produce and publish annual lists of things wot I like. It’s one of those tedious tasks in life you try to put off until the last moment and always bitterly resent, like getting your car serviced, completing a tax return or flossing. If I don’t do it, though, bad things might happen. I could lose my weblog licence, get a nasty email from Technorati or even end up with a terrible gum disease.

So what follows are my favourite films of 2009 at this particular moment in time. These are movies that were released in the UK between 1st January and 31st December 2009 that I watched during this period, and it doesn’t include any films that were released during this period that I watched last night with Clare. Which is a shame, really, because otherwise Sam Raimi’s Drag Me To Hell might have been a contender.

Just like last year, each entry comes complete with a lovingly hand-crafted piece of bad haiku.

Don’t say I never treat you.

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10. Public Enemies

Mann’s gangster epic

Is a fedora-clad ‘Heat’

(The film, not the mag)

9. Avatar

J.C. rose again

With pulp sci-fi eye-popper

Tangled up in blue

8. The Wrestler

Rourke drifts to glory

With tale of aging fighter

Who’s your (Big) Daddy?

7. In The Loop

Big-screen Thick of It:

In this sharp, sweary satire

‘Fog of war’ turns blue

6. Gran Torino

It’s flawed, but who cares?

Clint’s in front of the camera

And that makes our day

5. Inglourious Basterds

Don’t burn cinemas

Unless there’s Nazis inside

In which case, it’s OK

4. Fantastic Mr Fox

Roald Dahl kid classic

Goes stop-motion to Wes World

(It’s no cluster-cuss!)

3. Star Trek

Lapsed Trekkers rejoice

As Abrams’ restores their faith

Final frontier fun!

2. Where The Wild Things Are

Spike’s grown-up kids’ film

That’s perfect in every way

A beautiful freak

1. Let The Right One In

Swedish vampire tale

Is no flat-pack Drakea

More Bergman with bite

I’ve left it a wee bit late, but I just wanted to say a few words about the recent death of Edward Woodward.

It’s always sad when a performer you’ve admired and respected for a sizable chunk of your life passes away.  In my knee-high-to-a-grasshopper days, I always thought of Woodward as Callan, the disillusioned and conscientious bad-ass assassin he played in the gritty British TV show of the same name.  The Callan series was a bit before my time -- it was first broadcast in the late-1960s and early-1970s -- but as a kid I never let a chronological technicality like that stop me from enjoying something.  No wonder I ended up doing a history degree.

Come to think of it, I can remember Woodward being synonymous with Callan long before I saw any of the re-runs or the 1974 feature film.  It was probably my parents’ fault.  They had a disconcerting habit of referring to actors they liked by the roles they were synomymous with.  Instead of saying, for instance, “Oh look, there’s Edward Woodward on The Morecambe and Wise Show”, they’d instead say: “It’s Callan.”  I don’t know if anybody else’s parents did this, but mine always carried it off with a certain air of quiet authority that  informs my sensibilities to this day.  Maybe it’s because they delivered these observations in a melodious County Derry accent, and I’ve always been a sucker for a melodious County Derry accent.  I blame that on my parents, too.

Eventually -- and by ‘eventually’ I mean at about the age of eleven or twelve -- I watched a handful of Callan re-runs and the 1974 feature film and enjoyed them tremendously.  Eventually I’d like to see them again.  When I remember Callan I think of a very British espionage thriller that was shot through with a palpable sense of claustrophobia and a generous helping of moral ambiguity.  To put it another way, it was like a bit like watching a Bond film with Ken Loach at the helm.

Callan also had a wonderfully low-key title sequence that evoked both classic film noir and the splash page of a Will Eisner Spirit comic:

From that snake-belt and Farrah trouser-wearing era I also recall being captivated by Woodward’s performace as Breaker Morant, in the eponymous Australian military courtroom drama set during the Boer War.  I haven’t seen the film since I was old enough to shave, but -- like Callan -- I’ve got a sneaking suspicion I’d appreciate it even more now.

(As a personal aside -- and this is a blog, so I’m allowed personal asides -- Edward Woodward was born on the same year as my dad, who passed away in 1995.  As irrational as it sounds, I’ve developed a special kind of fondness for famous people I respect who are now as old as my dad would have been.  The list includes Clint Eastwood, Sean Connery, Gene Hackman and all of the Apollo 11 astronauts.  A shrink would have a field day.)

But back to Edward Woodward.  During my teens I was a big fan of his hit American TV series The Equalizer.  Again, I haven’t seen it for years, but -- unlike Callan and Breaker Morant -- I imagine it hasn’t aged very well.  American action series of the 1980s have a tendency to curdle over time.  While my grown-up sensibilities would probably dismiss it as a post-Bernie Goetz urban paranoid’s wish fulfilment fantasy, back in the Thatcher/Reagan era I used to avidly watch it on TV every week.   I liked the show so much, in fact, that I ended up buying a pair of glasses with fancy fibreglass frames because my optician said that they were the same specs that Woodward sported in the show.  This led to me doing a series of highly accalaimed impersonations of The Equalizer which were all the rage during a 6th Form disco in 1987.

Maybe it was my hyperactive teenage imagination at work, but I developed a rather elaborate theory that Woodward’s character in The Equalizer -- Robert McCall -- was actually David Callan who had (of course) faked his death, emigrated to the States, assumed a new identity and was now trying to find redemption for the budgetry constraints of his past.  This theory foreshadowed the 90s action flick Enemey of the State -- in which it was strongly implied that (ahem) Gene Hackman’s paranoid surveillance vet was the same character he played in Francis Ford Coppola’s 70s classic, The Conversation .  In any case, it all made perfect sense to me at the time, and every week I’d find myself scavenging the latest Equalizer episode for clues to support my theory.  Just be grateful I didn’t grow up to be a conspiracy theorist.

Anyway, we’re nearly 800 words into a blog post about Edward Woodward and I haven’t mentioned The Wicker Man yet.  How’s that for restraint?

Lets get this out of the way: The Wicker Man is one of my favourite films.  Along with The Third Man, Withnail and I and Monty Python & The Holy Grail it’s a contender for my all-time favourite British films.  It’s certainly my favourite British genre breaking horror-thriller-musical film.

There are many things about The Wicker Man that make it special, terrifying and unique, but at its core is Woodward’s faultless performance as the tragic Sergeant Neil Howie.  To typical secular sensibilties,  this butt-clenchingly uptight Christian copper would appear to be a fairly unsympathetic protagonist (particularly when compared to Christopher Lee’s charismatic ‘villain’ of the piece, Lord Summerisle).  Woodward’s performance, though, wins over the audience over remains a masterclass in how to portay controlled and pent-up fury.  His final act transition from righteous indignation to sheer, absolute terror is one of the key reasons why this remakable film continues to disturb and delight audiences.

I won’t say any more about The Wicker Man than on the slim offchance that someone reading this hasn’t seen it yet.  If that’s the case, then I strongly urge you to watch it at the earliest opporunity.  Just make sure it’s the original film and not the 2006 remake with Nicolas Cage.  It would be wise not to confuse the two.

Thanks for all those years of brilliant work, Mr Woodward.  Rest in peace.

J.J. Abrams’ rather excellent Star Trek film will be available on your home entertainment format of choice this coming Monday.  That seems like a reasonably good excuse to dig out the following slice of Trek-themed nonsense from my archives:

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It’s a short parody of Star Trek: The Next Generation (or should that now be Star Trek: The Previous Generation?) that was illustrated by my pal Rob Walsh, a proper artist (he has exhibitions and stuff) who was gracious enough to illustrate several comic strips for me in the past.  Rob’s a tremendously talented chap and I think he did a bloody marvellous job with this.  If you want to see some of his proper art (ie the kind of stuff that hangs in galleries and doesn’t feature speech balloons or cheap puns), then he has a website you can find here.

In case you’re interested, the strip originally appeared as a back-up feature in an issue of Stonebroke, my long-in-hiatus small-press comic about public transport in a post-apocalyptic world (think ‘Mad Max’ meets ‘On The Buses’).   This is my first attempt at a webcomic, so to make it browser-friendly I re-lettered it using Plasq’s Comic Life then used the WordPress plugins NextGEN FlashViewer and NextGEN Gallery so you can navigate and enlarge the pages to your heart’s content.

I might be doing more of this in the future.  Consider yourself warned.

I went to Worcester last weekend to catch up with my old pal Phil. He and his lovely fiancée Beth are getting married at the end of the month and they’ve asked me to be their Best Man. This makes me very proud.

Phil and I drank beer, stayed up late and chatted about the various things that we’ve been chatting about for years. While I was there he introduced me to a couple of rather excellent movie trailer mash-ups that I hadn’t seen before. A mash-up, in case you don’t already know, is where two or more movie trailers are spliced together to varying degrees of comedic effect by people with more spare time than I could possibly imagine.

The first one is the cleverly-edited and unashamedly ungrammatical Battle of the Batmans, which features Bat Bale, Bat Keaton, Bat Kilmer and Bat Clooney beating the Bat Bejesus out of each other:

Who in their right mind wouldn’t want to see a movie like that? It’s a pity they couldn’t have squeezed in Adam West, who -- to my mind, at least -- was the hardest Batman of them all. He may not have had the kind of six-pack stomach that would grace the cover of Men’s Health magazine, but at least he didn’t fight his Bat-villains in protective body armour and could climb up ropes without hydraulic assistance. Batmen nowadays don’t know they’re born.

The next mash-up is even better. Quantum of Bonds features a showdown between Pierce Bond and his successor, Daniel Bond, and is one of the funniest things I’ve seen in ages:

Ho ho, seven.

Mr review of Robin Ince’s recent gig at the Electric Cinema is now up on Brum comedy site Who’s Laughing Now?.  You can find it here.

After the show I ended up briefly chatting (or elbowing my way into a conversation) with Mr Ince, who turned out to be a tremendously nice bloke.  I like it when that happens.  We talked about Jaws, Highlander and British Sex Comedies of the 1970s (well, he’d just performed at the former Tivoli Cinema, after all).  Eventually, we moved onto the subject of those forgotten films you still can’t get on DVD, and -- for that matter -- probably never will.   He told me about a British horror flick from 1974 called The Mutations.

Here’s the plot, courtesy of IMDB:

Students have been going missing from the local college, and the one person who knows what’s happened to them is Dr. Noller, a rogue biologist. Not satisfied with the pace of natural selection in driving evolution, Noller wants to push things further by creating his own genetically engineered creations. Having already created some amazing specimins by mixing the DNA of plants and animals, the doctor has now set his sights higher, and want to work on modifying humans, as well.

It starred Donald Pleasence as the mad scientist Noller and Tom Baker as his hideously deformed assistant, Lynch.   Yes, Donald Pleasence and Tom Baker.  Together.  In the same film.

I’ve never seen this movie.  I’ve never even heard of it before.  How can this be? I’m in the grip of some strange and terrible compulsion.

Looks like I’ll be dusting down the VCR and going on eBay, then…

Pleasence and Baker in 'The Mutations'