What Great Cinema Means to Me

I will never forget the first time I laid eyes upon ‘Spirited Away’. At that hazy, bygone, cloud of basement smelling musk era, bright-eyed and snot-nosed Luke (much like most children) was an impulsive, unworldly consumer of almost anything animated, slurping up the CG swills of ‘Space Chimps’ and ‘Igor’, much to the anguish of Mum and Dad, often dragged to the dubiously rendered, celebrity voiced, putridly chintzy flicks ; “it’s a new animated film, I have to see it!” Of course there were the gems of Pixar, Disney and Aardman, but I could only watch ‘Finding Nemo’ a few hundred more times before I started to notice the whimsically perennial ‘what if [blank] had feelings?’ formula. Cinema, to me at that time, was simply something you watched, had fun with and then swiftly moved on.

Little did I know that the medium of movies, once only perceived through the naïve lens of talking animals and toys, was about to be monolithically shattered. I was ten years old when I airily rented ‘Spirited Away’ from Blockbuster, due to it “looking like Pokémon”. I sat down, and then in an almost otherworldly trance proceeded to enter a world that was so staggeringly different to anything I had ever seen before. This certainly wasn’t Pokémon. With every elegantly obscure creature that graced the screen, every perilously riveting set piece, every exquisitely expressive and innovative idea that was being hurled at my eyeballs every minute, I felt them. I felt every emotion. I felt everything that Chihiro felt: as she comes of age through this fantastical, spectre infested realm, I myself was being changed by the film itself. I think the scene in which she silently eats a rice ball, with tears streaming down her face, with the realisation of her harrowing predicament encroaches her, accompanied by a score that was quite possibly conjured from the ether by gods, was the moment. I had never experienced such an emotional reaction from a film before, at such a tentative age too. I didn’t know films could do that. ‘Spirited Away’ simply made me love cinema.

As I grew up from a snivelling, specky lil’ squirt into a snivelling, specky lil’ adult, I watched a lot more films. It sort of became my defining trait; the ability to sling recommendations and spout a (usually unwanted) cinematic serenade during general conversation (cheers autism!). And yeah I went through a wince inducing, fourteen year old ‘film-bro’, Tarantino-worshipping phase (*vomits violently*), manically fawning over cinematography and dialogue and revering it as the austere apex of the moving image. The indisputably sublime technical prowess of Mr Tarantino, Scorcese, Kubrick or Powell and Pressburger is something that still fascinates me, but as I began to develop my taste, I found my favourite films were ones made up of precise pin point emotional reactions, memories and creative influences, echoing back to that first viewing of Miyazaki’s monumental magnum opus. Now the phrase "This film has good cinematography" morphed into "This film's cinematography made me feel this way". I firmly believe film is about emotion, feeling and how it personally affects or inspires you, regardless of objectional quality or filmmaking flaws. I remember getting up off the couch and standing in a state of shock at the twist in ‘Oldboy’. I remember viscerally feeling the almost uncomfortable, frustrating relatability and poignant pain of the naturalistic drama, ‘A Woman Under the Influence’. I remember having my brain launched out of the top of my skull witnessing the genre-bending bonkers-ness of surrealist head-trips such ‘Hausu’, ‘MindGame’ and ‘The Holy Mountain’. I remember watching ‘Chungking Express’ nearly every day for a week because I just wanted to climb through the screen and live in director Wong Kar Wai’s kinetic, neon world he had crafted. These moments of cinematic euphoria that have spurred a sometimes challenging, comforting, fearful, introspective, and above all, different way of feeling, is what I want to gain out of a film. I feel that this is what cinema means to me.

The most recent entry on the ‘favourites’ list was Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan’s ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’. I was literally ecstatic with excitement after my first viewing; seeing something beautifully juggle a dizzyingly intoxicated level of creativity, humour and outlandishly maximalist ideas, woven into such a tangibly intimate love story between a mother and her estranged daughter and husband, was something I felt I needed to see. That emotional rollercoaster was soaring, contrasting between the electrifying highs of the absurd and frenetic, to the soulful warmth of relatability. The relationship between the lead character, Evelyn, and her daughter, Joy, I felt was me and my mum. That transcendental ‘Spirited Away’ feeling was there in all it’s overwhelmingly wonderful glory: that feeling of falling in love with the art form all over again. That’s when I know I’ve seen a great film. Let’s just say I cried a bit (a lot).

Here are 100 films that I consider my favourites: https://letterboxd.com/lukemason/list/top-100/