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· Dialogue
A film could be great in every way to me. An excellent director, visuals, casting, plot, writing etc -  but one thing can let a film down. That thing would be some rubbish dialogue. You know the stuff! Awkwardly recycled words, poorly delivered lines and just idiotic writing could let the whole team down (let’s not mention any names!) Well OK, one perhaps.  One example of this is Avatar, which embodies all of the signs of being an excellent film. The flaws in the dialogue (especially at the end) though are disappointing. The Colonel Quaritch dialogue during the battle scene at the end kind of ruined it for me. Yes, I know a lot of testosterone was there and they were playing army guys – but I was really disappointed in the whole ‘gung-ho’ thing that I had seen done so many times before. It felt like I was watching Cameron as a young boy playing with his toys and bashing them together with adolescent madness.

· A for Effort
    A film can be good. Even if all of the above things are missing from the final product, a film can still be a good watch. The reason for this is the effort that is put in to make it. When a director, or a producer or anyone involved with bringing their work to the screen has love for a project, you can see it in every frame and in every aspect of a film.

    Examples of this would be something like Terminator Salvation. The director, Christian Bale and the team put so much effort into the production that it overwrote most of its faults (e.g. the dialogue, the casting, the boring direction) and made it a worthy edition to the franchise. The death of my hero Stan Winston (creature and makeup effects extraordinaire who created such monsters as the dinosaurs from Jurassic Park, the Terminator and the Queen Alien) who was working on the Terminator effects in 2008, ensured that everyone on the team tried their hardest during production to honour him and his work. You can definitely see that love in the film, and my particular favourite kind of love is in the details/the small things.

    Another film that wowed me in the amount of effort and love that was given to the project was the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Director Peter Jackson and his team honoured the memory of Tolkien, his living relatives and fans of the story by adding so much detail and character. #

    The things I’m talking about are small things, like the detail on the costumes (the artists created them as their characters would in those times e.g. weaving by hand) or the dedication of the cast. In one scene in the Two Towers, actor Viggo Mortenson (Aragorn) was supposed to act distraught at losing the hobbits, kicks a helmet, breaks his toe and still continues to act in the scene until the cut was announced. He then promptly limped off to hospital after the scene was given the O.K.  If I see dedication and effort like that, I develop respect and appreciation for a film and its creators.

· The R.A.S.
    More specifically, the Remakes, Adaptations and the Sequels. I believe that studio money is made by manipulating a viewer’s want/need to see something that they have already enjoyed before.

    A remake of a popular film perhaps?  Adaptations of novels, plays and television programs have been literally thrown at us when studios run out of innovative screenplays. Sequels of massive films in the past have been mass produced for profit gain.

     I believed that Hollywood could create nothing original and went through a phase where I could only see the above three things in every film I saw until 2010, with the arrival of The Year of Awesome, Inception and Avatar which were the best original things I had seen in a long time, and put them into the running of my favourite films top ten list.

     I am however a little bit of a hypocrite. I do not hate all R.A.S.’s by any means, because some of them are good films that have elements of the above list. They aren’t all bad, but unfortunately I can say that most of them aren’t as good as their original source materials. There are some exceptions.

· The Guilty Pleasure
     If you don’t have one you are either lying out of embarrassment or a member of an alien species from the red wastelands of Mars. I will admit to some of mine later to prove it!     ‘Guilty Pleasures’ are an inexplicable phenomenon – because you will like a film and not have the slightest clue why. Perhaps it’s nostalgia, which is normally the main reason. As children we all enjoyed watching shiny images or listening to sounds in films without any context, but they provided comfort for us and shaped our imaginations for years to come. These Guilty Pleasures can be understood.

    One of mine would have been Fern Gully. How could I have known that it was an allegory for deforestation when I was five? I liked the pretty fairies, the colours and the songs – what of it?

    Other examples of Guilty Pleasures are even more of a confusing thing. These films are things you didn’t watch as a child and as a sane adult human being you shouldn’t possibly like. For example, I brought home Jackass 3 to watch a couple of months ago. My mother was disgusted at the very idea of men hurting and humiliating themselves for money. However, at the part when Johnny Knoxville had climbed onto a jet-ski in a stars and stripes costume, and went zooming over that ramp – something strange happened. She cackled uncontrollably and went quiet when she realised what she had done. I reminded her to just go with it if she found it funny and not wonder why.

     After all this time, film still surprises me. My personal Guilty Pleasures would be a romantic comedy of some sort. I’m not one for romantic clichés to be honest, but a few (I can count the ones I like on my right hand) managed to tug at my emotions.  These films include Bridget Jones’ Diary, The Girl Next Door, Easy A, Waitress and Definitely Maybe. I could unsuccessfully argue that these films have superior writing and direction, but I truthfully have no idea why I like them. I just do, and this is part of the reason why the world of film continuously surprises me.

So that’s how I do it. Of course I could go on about film theory, but I don’t suppose you would want to hear that. Some films I still study mentally, like Alien and some of the earlier horror films according to their conventions. I’d love to continue doing that at university someday, because I believe that studying a film is like studying a person’s mind and human history simultaneously. Fascinating really.

The perfect film does not exist. Considering that the IMDB (Internet Movie DataBase) is my home web page and that I troll it for at least two hours a day – you’d think I’d have found something resembling the perfect film by now. Either that or my dignity has left the building.

I hope that you have either found or will find your favourite film. My advice is to try watching everything to find it, even the things you never thought you would like. My surprise favourite film is the King’s Speech. No blood, gore or action – just a cracking good drama about a man’s choices he has to make for his country. When watching the Oscars I hadn’t seen it and believed that the awards were given to appease the support for the monarchy or reflect the hype. I was wrong and can freely admit it now that I think it is the best film we have on the shelf. It deserved everything it got, and Colin Firth deserves much more – being the fantastic actor that he is.

Try everything and continue the search. It will be as ambiguous as looking for true love, but trust me, it will be love at first sight.


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