Meet Your Critic

July 31

Posted by Tom Atkins on July 31, 2013 in Meet Your Critic | 1 Comment

Having a Dannii Minogue ‘Neon Nights’ moment

By nature inquisitive and by style flamboyant, my childhood interest in film stemmed from a preoccupation with glamourous film stars that started around the age of 9.  Buttressed by my grandparents love of vintage film, I developed a particular fondness for Audrey Hepburn; I was taken by her glamour and ‘untouchability’, qualities I deemed to demarcate a true movie star.  In the years that followed, I obsessed over every detail of her life, filmography – and even made a pilgrimage to her grave years later in Tolochenaz, Switzerland (where I had a near collision with a lorry driver as I slipped into ‘left hand driver’ mode for nigh on a second – the road would have been plastered with fruit!)

In any case, this site is not really about my love for Audrey Hepburn. I created it as a way of returning to films that I know and love from my childhood obsession with b-movies and enjoying them all over again, but with the added intention of sniffing out new cinematic truffles that I somehow missed along the way.  Whether that was simply a matter of access or neglect, now most of the films discussed are available in various DVD editions – delightfully easy to find with a few clicks on Amazon. This uber-convenient solution was of course was not always the case.  In the dark days of VHS, it was harder to discover vintage films anywhere outside of a bottom shelf of a video store with some proximity to Hollywood – which made this a particularly precarious scenario for me, given my location in suburban South Auckland, New Zealand.

However, it was in this southern paradise that I had my first taste of cinema which took root as a full throttle obsession.  ‘Cine Centa’ was a cinema paradise, a little slice of Hollywood right out in suburban South Auckland.  It was out of place by merit of its location, opposite brick and tile houses with large front yards and plonked between an aerobics studio and a car repair depot.  Post workout jazzercizers, power-walking to their minis in the cinema parking lot, were often subjected to ogles from the greasy mechanics next door, as well as the blue-collar families streaming in for a matinee.

A heinous display of flamboyance

A huge neon sign was affixed to the cinema, bearing its name in lights (with one or two bulbs occasionally blown).  This big beige splodge of a building contained a world of excitement and magic for a five-year-old child of the 80’s.  I would beg my mother and grandmother every day to take me there, checking the back of the newspaper to see what films they’d managed to dig up – sometimes years out of date, deposited into a cinematic scrapyard in a little town at the ass-end of the world.

I loved walking in to the main hall and seeing the gaudy red drapes that lined each wall, flaccidly hanging from years of neglect, with nary a breeze to flutter them.  So dusty and tattered they appeared, that with one swift tug they could come tumbling down, providing the fabric for a dress befitting of our local ‘southern belles’ (normally 6”5 transgender hookers in $5 cha-cha heels, for whom the footpath outside was a catwalk of epic proportions).

With day-old chewy popcorn in hand and my obliging mother sitting next to me, at least once a week I snuggled up in a wire-framed seat, upholstered with glorious orange-brown polyester, to consume 80’s America through film.

An Eye for the Absurd

Bellina the magical talking chicken, mid thought

The first film I saw at Cine Centa was ‘Return to Oz’, the 1985 sequel to ‘The Wizard of Oz’.  Dorothy and her friends (a robot and Bellina the magical talking chicken) manage to escape the clutches of evil Princess Mombi, a head-swapping, palace roaming denizen, by creating a makeshift aircraft out of a wall-mounted moose head and chaise longue (!).  Jumping to the next scene, Mombi screams to her minions: ‘Go and get Dorothy for me – and make sure you bring back that chicken!’.  Jean March’s delivery was so hilariously arch, that coupled with an ill timed jump cut, I was so startled that I threw a large coke in the air, saturating me, my mother and everyone around us in the process.  Couldn’t Mombi have plundered the emerald city and upgraded to rainbow horses and a barouche?

Something important happened to the way that I watch films in that moment.  Aside from activating my ‘I want more’ function (which notably led to my fixation with ‘Annie’, which I watched on VHS at least once a day for the following year), the scene planted the seed of a strange sensibility, which I can only describe as an appreciation for extraneous moments that catch your eye if only for only a second, but have the ability to provide more laughs and enjoyment than the rest of the film combined.

What do you call that kind of enjoyment – loving that which is found in the margins, rather than in the film entire?  In the years that followed, I allowed this twisted eye nerve for absurdity to flourish.  I could always find a scene to enjoy within a film that, as a whole, didn’t really work for me.  I developed a special affinity for scenes or characters that seemed out of place, frivolous, or perhaps runs just a little too long or plays a little too strangely.  Possibly through repeated exposure to John Waters, Gregg Araki or Peter Jackson’s early films did I realise that the moments of enjoyment I’d derived could be characterised as ‘campy’.

← What makes something ‘campy’? How I Review →