First of the Short Cuts

Since this blog's most loyal follower has suggested  more regular journeys into film, I can only oblige. Not that I'll stop writing about music, but I think I'll just return to the practice of writing about works of art that mean something to me, but with no particular pattern - maybe films, maybe songs, maybe albums, maybe even TV shows.

Now's the time of  year for judgement of film of all sorts, and I saw a list recently of the 1000 Greatest Films of All Time, which was that predictable film buff's mixture of wide range of nationalities, general low position for anything too successful and general absence of much from the last 25 years. I'm not going to criticize that, as I said before, I don't know enough about film to - I had only seen about a quarter of the films on the list - there are so many films considered great works of art I haven't seen and really should make more of an effort with.

It just got me thinking about films that really took my breath away, surely one of the main things a film should do. The top film on the list, 'Citizen Kane', didn't take my breath away. I liked it, but if I hadn't been told it was the greatest film of all time, I'm not totally sure how I'd have reacted. It's rather like the idea that WG Grace is the Greatest Cricketer of All Time or that Sgt Pepper's The Greatest Album of All Time.

With film, I manage to avoid, in a way I can't avoid when it comes to music and sport, the canonical approach - the films that have blown me away won't necessarily find their place near that many "Greatest of All Time" lists.

I'm not saying I like Norbit, mind ... it's more that I enjoy the "now" of the film, I like the cinema, and I don't always have to see a film twice - if i loved it once, that's usually enough for me.

I will start, though, with a film I've seen three or four times all the way through (and caught up with bits of it a few other times), which is pretty good going, as it's 188 minutes of solid content - Short Cuts.

This is a film that took my breath away, slowly but surely. It came out in 1993, and I probably watched it for the first time in 1995. I know this because it was an 18, and there was a point where the man at the video store asked my sister how old I was and she told him, so I couldn't get 18s any more on my own, goddammit (he was very nice, I just think there'd been some kind of word from head office to crack down on youngsters).

Now, I was the kind of youngster trying to get 18s like 'Short Cuts' rather than 'Gruesome Zombie Aporncalypse Part 3', but it's all the same in the eyes of the law.

So I watched it first  before my 18th birthday because my sister got it out, then loved it so much I tried to get it out again (as I recall, it when I was about 17 and 10 months) and was cruelly denied, so had to wait a few months till late 1996 to take it in again.

I don't think it was vastly acclaimed - it's reputation has gradually grown over time but it's not a ... canonical, there's that word ... classic.

But it's definitely one of my favourite films, and one of the greatest, most unique and meaningful, I've seen. I'm not aware of too many like it beforehand. I mean, there's Robert Altman's own Nashville, which I saw years later, which is an acknowledged classic, with its interlocking narratives, gallery of "main" characters, its sense of a particular place and time. Perhaps it was film critics' awareness of Nashville which kept Short Cuts from being fully embraced.

Anyway, there've been quite a few similar films since, all of them inferior in my view - Magnolia, Crash, Traffic, Lantana, Babel, not counting Pulp Fiction, which though it interweaves can hardly be seen to be much influenced by Short Cuts.

Short Cuts is, to me, the masterpiece of this epic form, the one that doesn't feel forced and strive for meaning (oh, the ugly, dumb striving for meaning that ruins the decent films Magnolia and Crash might have been).

It's effortlessly engaging and funny and true and shocking and sad. It doesn't hurry, it just builds story on story -  some of the stories build then fizzle, some build then explode. The acting is fabulous, introducing me and familiarising me, a 16/17 year old with fairly limited knowledge but growing interest, to some of the finest of the era - Julianne Moore, Matthew Modine, McDormand, Downey Jr, etc. Looking at it now, the film contains an awful lot of actors who were in Brat Packy films grown up and playing adults. And there's Jack fucking Lemmon. And Tom bleeding Waits. And Huey sodding Lewis. Minus the stinking News.

It's based on short stories by Raymond Carver (Carver, of course, is the joke at the heart of this year's Birdman), but it was Altman himself, I believe, who really knocked it into narrative shape.

I'm trying to remember the feeling I had when I first watched it, of how very long it was going to be and the fact I'd probably need two or three sittings to get through it, but just stayed with it, of the point where it was probably about 1 hr 50 through and I kind of realised this was the point most films end but knew this film had a whole extra act, then the quiet, powerful devastation of that last act - the truths of the characters revealed. I pretty much knew what kind of people they all were by the end.

So many disconcerting and memorable characters - Lyle Lovett's baker, Tim Robbins' reprehensible prick of a cop. Many actors put in (as far as I'm aware) career high performances - Andie McDowell and Peter Gallagher, Lori Singer and Chris Penn.

Where Nashville's soundtrack was, naturally, country, Short Cuts is a jazz film (like Birdman again!). It's the most vivid portrait of Los Angeles I've ever seen too. It being LA, of course, the film end with an earthquake. That's the one "meaning".

I watched it again fairly recently - I think I'd forgotten large parts of it, and had forgotten some of the more bizarre behaviours, they are presented in such a low key fashion, they could easily slip by.

So, this film might well have been the first film I recognised as a burgeoning adult as an adult masterpiece - that may be why it means so much to me. I wouldn't say it defined my taste in film - like I've said, I've struggled with a lot of those interweaving films since. I do, funnily enough, love novels with interweaving narratives, so perhaps it set a template for my taste in storytelling.

It's not a film which won any Oscars, that was the year of Schindler's List, but it's certainly my idea of a great film.