Came across this list of questions via the post linked down below.
Now I’m shamelessly plundering the tag to add my own answers, just like in the old question-tagging days of YouTube and Tumblr.
Tag yourself and answer likewise if you feel like doing so, too!
=))
1. HOW OFTEN DO YOU WATCH A MOVIE?
I try to watch a film at least once or twice a week at the bare minimum, but when I’m in higher spirits with extra energy, I’ll try to watch one film per day, if not more.
2. WHAT MOVIE GENRE ARE YOU PARTICULARLY FOND OF?
Horror… but I’m not beholden to any one genre over another. I love any and all sorts of films, and I never want to limit myself from the pleasures each genre can provide.
3. WHAT WAS THE LAST MOVIE YOU WATCHED AND LIKED?
Noroi: The Curse (2005) - dir. Koji Shiraishi - ★★★★
4. WHAT WAS THE LAST MOVIE YOU WATCHED AND HATED?
Dashcam (2021) - dir. Rob Savage - ½
5. WHAT IS YOUR FAVE MOVIE OF ALL TIME?
That’s too big a question for me to definitively answer. For a time, I seriously considered Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. The World to be my all-time favourite, and later on thought the same of Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash, but generally speaking, I always reset to my default position that I have far too many favourites to pick just one. Hence why I will now point you in the direction of my Letterboxd list compiling the 300+ fave films I cannot choose between:
6. YOUR FAVE GUILTY PLEASURE MOVIE?
The first examples that come to mind would have to be any of the first four entries in the Scary Movie series (with the exception of Scary Movie 3, which I think is lowkey the best one of the bunch, thus not needing to have guilt associated with it). The second and fourth films are the worst ones, and even the first one has its own share of dire jokes that’ve aged as poorly as milk left out in the sun during a heatwave, but because I grew up with the films as a kid, I have a nostalgic soft spot for each of them, and the parts of each that still remain funny.
(For what it’s worth, I’ve never had any interest in watching the fifth film, both because all the reviews for it were exceedingly rotten, and also because it was the first to lack the presence of Anna Faris and Regina Hall, and without either of them in the mix, it’s just not a proper Scary Movie.)
7. WHAT MOVIE/MOVIES HAVE YOU WATCHED A MILLION TIMES ALREADY?
Airplane!, Con Air, The Rock, Zoolander, and Blade Runner rank the highest among the movies I’ve watched the most in my lifetime.
8. ARE YOU THE TYPE WHO WATCHES A MOVIE ON ITS FIRST DAY OF SHOWING?
Nope. Rarely if ever have circumstances aligned for me to see movies on their opening days of release. The one exception to the rule that I always recall is the luck I had in seeing The Dark Knight on its opening day - July 25th - back in 2008.
9. DO YOU USE FANDANGO OR PREBOOK MOVIE TICKETS?
I never use Fandango (because I think that’s just an American thing, and I’m British, so that’s not a service I think the UK utilises much, if at all). As for pre-booking tickets, I only ever book to see a film in advance on the day itself, usually within a couple of hours of the film’s start time, and often when I’m already travelling to the cinema by bus and/or train. However, Christopher Nolan returns to provide the exception to the rule, because when I travelled hundreds of miles to see Dunkirk and Oppenheimer in IMAX/70mm (in 2017 and 2023, respectively), by necessity I did have to pre-book my tickets days in advance. So it goes.
10. STREAMING, DVD, OR PIRATE?
All of the above! Plus Blu-ray! Minus 4K UHD, because I don’t have the requisite TV or disc player to play such a format, not to mention I nary have the money to afford 4K’s exorbitant prices!
As for the ethics of what I euphemistically refer to as seafaring, it’s important to remember that these days, as streaming services and companies clearly don’t hold the preservation of art as sacrosanct in the face of their bottom lines, frequently deleting their content on a whim and a tax write-off incentive (fuck you, David Zaslav), the proliferation of piracy is now an imperative act of preserving media in the face of callous corporations carelessly casting them into oblivion.
11. HOW OFTEN DO YOU GO TO THE CINEMA TO WATCH A MOVIE?
As often as I humanly can, money/time/energy permitting.
If it were possible, I’d see every movie in cinemas that I had an interest in watching, but as with many things in life, you have to pick your battles.
Still, I’m grateful that my cinema-going options around where I live are as cheap as they are, especially with my Cineworld Unlimited card that costs £10.99 a month, and allows you to see all the films you want, as many times as you want. Were it not beyond the scope of my monthly expenditures, I would also choose to get the Odeon Limitless card that offers the similar all-the-movies-you-want deal for £14.99 a month.
But if you’d prefer cold hard data to answer this question, perhaps you’ll enjoy these graphs I made which detail how many movies I’ve seen in cinemas per year for the past 20+ years:
12. WHAT ARE THE MOVIES THAT MADE YOU CRY?
In alphabetical(ish) order:
Aftersun (2022)
Avengers: Infinity War (2018)
Avengers: Endgame (2019)
Bo Burnham: Inside (2021)
First Man (2018)
Fruitvale Station (2013)
Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 (2017)
Inside Out (2015)
Interstellar (2014)
The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)
Schindler’s List (1993)
The Snowman and the Snowdog (2012)
13. DO YOU WATCH FOREIGN FILMS?
Of course! As I always say, I love films of all sorts, no matter the genre, runtime, time period, or country of origin. I never want to limit myself from experiencing everything that worldwide cinema has to offer, and since one of the greatest aspects to movies are that they’re what Roger Ebert called “a machine that generates empathy”, being open to the plethora of great cinema produced from countries other than my own means I can be shown the world through the eyes of different people from different cultures, showing where we differ, but more importantly, where we are universal.
As Bong Joon-ho famously said (via his translator, Sharon Choi) during his Oscars speech for Parasite in 2020:
14. WHAT ARE YOUR FAVOURITE FOREIGN FILMS?
Oh, god, another big question.
Off the top of my head:
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
Oldboy (2003)
City of God (2002)
Confessions (2010)
Funny Games (1997)
Autumn Sonata (1978)
Titane (2021)
Pulse (2001)
Victoria (2015)
Memories of Murder (2003)
Irreversible (2002)
Rififi (1955)
Suspiria (1977)
Inside (2007)
Run Lola Run (1998)
Tell No One (2006)
Battle Royale (2000)
Miss Bala (2011)
Stalker (1979)
Timecrimes (2007)
That’s enough for now, innit?
15. WHO ARE YOUR FAVOURITE DIRECTORS?
This’ll probably be a pretty cliche list, but hey, when the directors are good, they’re good for a reason. So let’s see… in no particular order:
Steven Spielberg. David Lynch. Christopher Nolan. Denis Villeneuve. Mike Leigh. Wes Anderson. Gaspar Noé. Edgar Wright. Martin Scorsese. David Fincher. Ridley Scott. Tony Scott. Stanley Kubrick. Alfred Hitchcock. Brian De Palma. Mike Flanagan. Lilly and Lana Wachowski. Jordan Peele. Michael Mann. Richard Linklater. James Cameron. Dario Argento. Greta Gerwig. Bong Joon-ho. Robert Altman. Quentin Tarantino. M. Night Shyamalan. John Woo. Robert Zemeckis. Steve McQueen. Sam Raimi. Rian Johnson. Christopher McQuarrie. Park Chan-wook. Andrea Arnold. Ari Aster. Julia Ducournau. Sidney Lumet. Andrei Tarkovsky. Ingmar Bergman. Guillermo Del Toro. John Carpenter. Danny Boyle. Jane Campion. Wes Craven. Kelly Reichardt. Peter Jackson. Kevin Smith. Damien Chazelle. Terrence Malick. Jonathan Glazer.
I know I’m going to have forgotten somebody, so I’ll cut it short there for now. Don’t hold any accidental omissions against me, please and thank you.
16. ARE YOU PARTICULAR WITH MOVIE SCORES / SOUNDTRACKS / MUSIC?
I’m not entirely certain what it means to be “particular” about film music in this context, so forgive me if the following interpretation isn’t what the question intends to know, but… I’ve been a soundtrack nerd ever since I was a child.
You know how some people say they don’t notice the background music that plays in movies (with the exception of source music needle drops, and original songs for musicals and whatnot)?
That’s never been me. For as long as I can remember, I’ve always taken notice of the scores to films, and kept an eye and an ear on the composers who made them.
When I watched The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgement Day when I was, like, five or six years old or so, I noted the name of composer Brad Fiedel.
As soon as I started watching Spielberg’s movies (E.T., Jurassic Park, and Hook were likely the earliest), of course John Williams then became a household name to me.
Hans Zimmer probably came to my attention via The Lion King and The Prince of Egypt before anything else.
James Horner crossed my radar thanks to Titanic, and my mother buying the two soundtrack albums to the film during its 90’s peak in popularity.
Going to the cinema to see The Lord of the Rings trilogy between 2001 and 2003, between the ages of 8 and 10, cemented Howard Shore as a lifelong favourite.
Hell, because I saw the Rowan Atkinson film, Johnny English, at the cinema as a kid, I still recall the jaunty score by Edward Shearmur, who also did the music for the film K-PAX around the same time. (I know we don’t talk about K-PAX anymore, largely because of its disreputable, disgraced leading man, but Shearmur’s score still sticks with me, gosh darn it!)
Thanks to M. Night Shyamalan, and watching The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable on VHS, then Signs on DVD (one of the first I ever owned), the music of James Newton Howard infused itself into the core of my being.
Ditto for Don Davis’ music for the Matrix trilogy, and John Powell’s scores for the Bourne trilogy.
I could go on! But the long and short of it is that film music is an integral part of the fabric of who I am. Nowadays, I’m even an aspiring composer myself, taking inspiration from the innumerable composers who’ve inspired me over the years. If you’d like to hear my work, check out these videos here:
17. WHAT MOVIE SOUNDTRACK CAN BE FOUND IN YOUR SPOTIFY?
The question’s phrasing would imply there’s only one soundtrack I might have saved to my streaming libraries, when in fact, probably the vast majority of my libraries on Spotify and Apple Music (see below) are comprised of film scores and soundtracks, in amongst all the classical, rock, electronic, post-rock, and albums by Low.
18. HAVE YOU EVER WATCHED A MOVIE ALONE IN THE CINEMA?
Dude, most of the movies I see in cinemas are ones I watch by myself. Indeed, the times when I do go see movies with other people are the anomalous outliers. Whether it’s because of my age (31) meaning that most people in my age group whom I know are too busy with life and jobs and general domesticity, my other online friends all live in other countries, I’ve never been in a relationship, and/or the sorts of films I see most often are ones only I am interested in going to the trouble to see in cinemas - (i.e. Raw (2017), Pig (2021), Infinity Pool (2023), and In A Violent Nature (2024) are some of the strongest contenders of Films I Went To See That Nobody Else I Knew Would Have Wanted To) - it’s just the way of my life that 95% of the time, I’m unironically doing the Don Draper meme.
(Minus the cigarette, of course.)
19. IS THERE ANY MOVIE THAT’S CHANGED YOUR PERSPECTIVE ON LIFE?
Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival (2016), for reasons I can’t delve into without massively spoiling it. Suffice it to say that, while it didn’t make the above list of movies that have made me cry, what Arrival did do is acutely pierce my heart with an aching melancholy and bittersweet beauty whose profound impact has never left me.
20. YOUR FAVOURITE COMIC BOOK MOVIE?
To quote Scott Pilgrim vs. The World - which itself is an example of one of my CBM favourites - “that’s kind of a big question.”
So, to name just a handful, again in no particular order:
Road To Perdition (2002)
Watchmen (2009)
Men In Black (1997)
V for Vendetta (2005)
Kick-Ass (2010)
Wanted (2008)
Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014)
(Side note: is it true that every film adaptation of a Mark Millar comic is better than Millar’s source material? It’s definitely true of Wanted, which is a book I actively detested, so I wonder if it’s the case with other films based on his works. Anyway…)
Blade (1998)
30 Days of Night (2007)
The Dark Knight (2008)
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)
Sin City (2005)
Blue Is The Warmest Colour (2013)
Dredd (2012)
Etcetera, etcetera.
21. DC OR MARVEL MOVIES?
Both, just so long as the movies coming out of either side are good.
22. WHAT ARE THE MOVIES IN THE TOP 10 IN IMDB THAT YOU’VE WATCHED?
As of the time of writing, the Top 10 of IMDb’s Top 250 ranks like this:
The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
The Godfather (1972)
The Dark Knight (2008)
The Godfather Part II (1974)
12 Angry Men (1957)
Schindler’s List (1993)
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)
Pulp Fiction (1994)
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
The Good, The Bad and the Ugly (1966)
Also as of the time of writing, I have seen - and given 5 stars to - all of those films… with the extreme exception of The Godfather Part II, which I’ve continually and shamefully neglected to watch for far too long.
BUT I’LL GET TO IT EVENTUALLY, SO HELP ME GOD(father)!
23. DO YOU READ MOVIE CRITIC REVIEWS BEFORE WATCHING A FILM?
Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
If I don’t read the full reviews themselves, so I can try to keep my opinions my own without inadvertently echoing others’ thoughts I’ve seen/read/heard, I will at least check the prevailing average Letterboxd ratings for certain films I’m unsure about in advance. But if a film has me curious enough, nothing will dissuade me from checking it out and determining my own opinion for myself.
24. WHAT’S THE BEST MOVIE ADAPTED FROM A BOOK?
Yet another too-large question to whittle down so many great options to choose from.
A brief selection of some of my favourite examples, rather than just a single choice, which is frankly impossible to determine:
The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-2003)
The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012)
No Country for Old Men (2007)
Little Women (2019)
Under the Skin (2013)
Gone Girl (2014)
Trainspotting (1995)
The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
The Exorcist (1973)
Dune (2021) + Dune: Part Two (2024)
A Scanner Darkly (2006)
American Psycho (2000)
Man alive, there’s just too many!
And I know I’ll look back at this list later, and be like:
“How could you forget THAT film, you dolt?!”
But hey, we’d be here forever if I listed every great book-to-film that’s worth mentioning, so this truncated assortment will have to do.
25. DO YOU WATCH THE MOVIE BEFORE READING THE BOOK OR VICE VERSA?
I alternate, depending on circumstance, or merely a whim.
Like, I saw Spielberg’s Jurassic Park as a kid before I read Michael Crichton’s novel in secondary school, while I read Frank Herbert’s Dune in 2021 before I watched both David Lynch and Denis Villeneuve’s adaptations.
I read Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl before I watched David Fincher’s film version, yet conversely, I’ve only seen Fincher’s (and Neils Arden Oplev’s original) The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, without ever reading Stieg Larsson’s multi-million-copy-selling blockbuster novel. (Well, that’s not entirely true; I did start reading the book many years ago, shortly before or after I saw Oplev’s film, but I only got about a fifth of the way through it - around 100-ish pages into the doorstop tome - before my attention got divided elsewhere.)
I read Andy Weir’s The Martian before I watched Ridley Scott’s film of it, yet on the flipside of that equation with a whole other movie, I watched Susanne Bier’s (terrible) Bird Box before I read Josh Malerman’s (excellent) source novel that Netflix completely botched in translation from page to screen.
You get the gist. I don’t have a fixed preference one way or the other. I just go on the vibes I feel on a case by case/book by book/film by film basis.
26. WHAT IS YOUR FAVOURITE COMEDY MOVIE?
Can’t go wrong with Airplane! (1980).
27. FAVOURITE DRAMA MOVIE?
28. FAVOURITE WESTERN MOVIE?
Perhaps The Proposition (2005), or Bone Tomahawk (2015).
29. FAVE ROMANTIC COMEDY?
Mayhaps Palm Springs (2020).
30. FAVE HORROR?
If it’s fun-horror, then maybe Scream (1996).
But if it’s traumatising-horror, then definitely Hereditary (2018).
31. FAVE SPORTS MOVIES?
Rocky (1976), Creed (2015), and basically all the movies in the Rocky franchise.
Yes, even Rocky V, which I think gets an unfairly bad rep.
32. FAVE SCI-FI?
Big question regarding an even bigger genre, so here’s a handful of my all-timers:
Children of Men (2006)
Blade Runner (1982) + Blade Runner 2049 (2017)
The Matrix (1999)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Snowpiercer (2013)
Interstellar (2014)
Moon (2009)
Minority Report (2002)
Annihilation (2018)
Sunshine (2007)
Proper list would be longer, but this is a decent starting point for encapsulating my sci-fi tastes.
33. ACTION MOVIES?
I adore the John Wick quartet, the Mission: Impossible movies, all the Mad Max films (except Beyond Thunderdome), at least half of the James Bond series, the original Indiana Jones trilogy, the original Bourne trilogy, plus such one-off examples as Atomic Blonde, The Raid, Die Hard, Backdraft, Upgrade, Speed, and so on. There’s so much action excellence to love!
34. WAR MOVIES?
The Thin Red Line (1998), Saving Private Ryan (also 1998), and Dunkirk (2017) rank the highest for me, for sure.
35. WHO IS YOUR FAVOURITE MOVIE COUPLE?
Jesse and Celine, from Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy.
36. ANY MOVIE CHARACTER YOU CAN RELATE TO?
Charlie (played by Logan Lerman) in The Perks of Being a Wallflower often springs to mind first when I hear this question.
37. IF YOU WERE ONLY TO WATCH 5 MOVIES FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE, WHAT WOULD THEY BE?
You’re killing me, Smalls!
(He says, having never once seen The Sandlot in his life, and only knowing anything about it through pop culture osmosis, and repeatedly seeing the trailer for it as a child, thanks to it being front-loaded onto the trailer reel at the start of his VHS of Baby’s Day Out.)
Alright, as of this moment of asking, the five movies I’d pick would be:
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring - Extended Edition
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers - Extended Edition
Donnie Darko
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King - Extended Edition
38. YOUR LEAST FAVOURITE MOVIE OF ALL TIME?
There’s a special kind of infuriation I feel whenever I contemplate the cataclysmic clusterfuck that was The Last Airbender (2010). From the fateful decision of Nicola Peltz’s billionaire father pushing to get his white nepo baby daughter woefully miscast in the non-white role of Katara, to the appalling lack of imagination in bringing the original animated show’s various element-bending abilities to life, and basically everything else in between (James Newton Howard’s majestic score notwithstanding), The Last Airbender sets my teeth on edge every time I think about it, and how egregiously it bungled the execution in every conceivable aspect when adapting Avatar: The Last Airbender to live-action.
39. HAVE YOU EVER WATCHED A MOVIE BASED ON THE LEAD ACTOR/ACTRESS ONLY?
Yeeeeeah. I’m only human, after all.
For instance, I confess that I only ever watched the forgettable late-2000’s dance movie, Make It Happen, because Mary Elizabeth Winstead was the lead, and as I said in my little Letterboxd review for it years ago: “I’m a slut for Mary Elizabeth Winstead.”
I mean, look at her in this movie!
My god!
40. WHAT MOVIE YOU EXPECTED AND WANTED TO BE GOOD, BUT FAILED YOU?
The Whale (2022). One of the biggest disparities between my half-decent expectations for it, and what I felt its actual quality turned out to be. Out of all the works in Darren Aronofsky’s filmography, this was his first to bitterly let me down.
41. FAVOURITE MOVIE CHARACTER OF ALL TIME?
As of this moment, I think it might just be Ethan Hunt from the Mission: Impossible movies. His über-competence, physical prowess, deep-rooted humanist empathy in striving to save every life possible without compromise, and inspirationally superhuman determination to constantly keep pushing and pushing and pushing, no matter what, through the (ahem) impossible odds always stacked against him, makes him an appealingly aspirational, motivational character.
42. FAVOURITE MOVIE VILLAIN?
Every option I think of is one of the most predictable answers I could give.
Michael Myers, Hannibal Lecter, Heath Ledger’s Joker, Anton Chigurh, Jigsaw… all are true, and yet all are such cliched picks, I know.
43. ANY MOVIE SEQUEL YOU’RE STILL WAITING TO SEE?
The aforementioned The Godfather Part II, plus The Raid 2, and Paddington 2, are all still burning a hole in my watchlist, to my great chagrin.
44. EVER MADE A MOVIE REVIEW?
Oh, not much. Just a handful of YouTube film reviews I shot over a decade ago, and then the hundreds of reviews I’ve written on Letterboxd since 2015. So, y’know, I’ve had a fair bit of practice, you could say…
45. STAR WARS OR STAR TREK?
Star Wars, but only because I don’t firmly remember much about the many episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation/Deep Space Nine/Voyager that I once watched as a kid, and the only Star Trek films I’ve seen are from the J.J. Abrams “Kelvin Timeline” continuity of Star Trek (2009), Star Trek Into Darkness (2013), and Star Trek Beyond (2016), so that overall franchise unfamiliarity means I don’t consider myself a proper fan, much as I would like to be one. That leaves us with Star Wars - a franchise I grew up loving, and still do by and large, but which the obnoxiously loud and toxic contingent of modern-day fans keeps finding new ways to ruin for everyone else with their childish entitlement, particularly post-The Last Jedi bizarrely breaking so many people’s brains for reasons I still can scarcely comprehend, considering it’s one of the best films the franchise has ever produced. Shame that the overblown backlash to Rian Johnson’s efforts lead to Disney’s grotesquely cowardly The Rise of Skywalker in response, huh? But hey, we’ll always have Andor…
46. RIGHT NOW, THINK OF ANY MOVIE. WHAT COMES FIRST?
Speak No Evil (2022) - because I still need to watch it, and doubly so if I’m going to see the English remake to compare and contrast.
47. FAVOURITE MOVIE LINES?
Several examples among many others left unsaid:
“‘Now I have a machine gun. Ho… ho… ho.’”
(Die Hard)“You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”
(The Dark Knight)“I'm writing them back, and when I sign that letter, I'm signing ‘Mr. President!’”
(Poltergeist II: The Other Side)“Ernest Hemingway once wrote: ‘The world is a fine place, and worth fighting for.’ I agree with the second part.”
(Se7en)“Look up ‘idiot’ in the dictionary. You know what you’ll find?”
“A picture of me?”
“No! The definition of the word ‘idiot’, which you fucking are!”
(Kiss Kiss Bang Bang)“The body cannot live without the mind.”
(The Matrix)
48. TV SERIES, BOOKS, COMPUTER GAMES OR MOVIES IN ORDER OF INTEREST?
Movies (in case it wasn’t clear enough already).
TV series (a subject that could easily fill a whole other set of dedicated tag questions).
Books (another lifelong passion I barely scratched the surface of earlier, but I’ll casually make a throwaway mention here that my book collection is larger than my film collection by a sizeable margin).
Computer games (a hobby I wish I’d kept abreast of during the last couple of decades of the art form’s evolution, but alas, the last proper video game I had ever played to completion, up until a couple of years ago, was Enter The Matrix for PC back in 2004).
49. LASTLY, IF YOUR LIFE STORY WAS TO BE MADE INTO A MOVIE, WHO WOULD YOU LIKE TO PORTRAY YOU? WHO SHOULD BE DIRECTING IT, AND WHAT WOULD BE THE TITLE?
If he was a decade younger, shaved his head, and put on a convincing British accent, the actor who’d most resemble me would be Seth Rogen. (Back when I still had hair, our superficial similarities were even stronger, and with the addition of glasses, those with face-blindness might have trouble telling us apart.)
Director-wise, I think Yorgos Lanthimos could adroitly capture with ease the mundane surreality, bleak humorousness, and occasional intrusions of sudden horror my life has been composed of since my birth.
And as for a title?
Maybe it’d be… oh, I dunno, something like… The Persistent Throb of Dull Agony.
Yeah, that’ll do.
50. AND NOW, HERE I DOTH TAG…
No-one, and everyone!
Whoever wants to do this!
Go forth!
Fly free!