Ten Bad Dates With De Niro

To watch movies is to judge them, to list them — divine. As Richard T Kelly's new anthology of "alternate" movie lists shows, there's (almost) nothing better than arguing about movies save perhaps actually watching them in the first place. I've never quite understood the old adage which states that there's no arguing about taste — tactful and diplomatic as it may be — because what the hell else is there to argue about?

What's great about arguing over what is rather trivially referred to as "taste" is that everyone ultimately comes to the conclusion that you like X and I like Y, and that you're a damn fool for it. Arguing about, say, foreign policy has a different weight entirely — arguing facts and philosophy gets dangerous when moral relativism starts to kick in. In Real Debate, you can't just throw your hands in the air — you've got to solve for X. When it comes to talking movies, it's more playfully about the dialectical process. At the end of a long debate a movie is quite a different film from the one you watched a couple hours ago. The only proper answer is, of course: watch it again. And then, since we are an organizing species, the fun's only getting started. Kelly's anthology, Ten Bad Dates with De Niro, gets these wheels turning.

The opening, naturally, is an explanation of cinephilia, the obsessive love for movies that borders on the unhealthy. What follows is a series of top ten choices unique in category and intent. The biographical urge is always at the forefront: "10 Films That Traumatized Me When I Was Younger," "10 Uncontrollable Movie Tears" and (my favorite) "10 Films It's Painful To Like." I've always been a firm believer in lists and the therapeutic nature of list making. Choices dictate character (right?) and 10 of your most moving aesthetic experiences are bound to cast light on one's character. This is particularly true for the ones which are, by one's own admission, kind of embarrassing. It's a way of revealing oneself which has a confessional quality to it.

Movies are like that, in a uniquely spritual way. When it's done well, cinema is like a seance. It casts a spell, a pall over the proceedings. It becomes a piece of the aura of the room. The people watching have a strange intimacy. Together, huddled closely in the dark amid flickering lights and images, they are each a million mind-year's distance from one another. A roomful of people off into their own separate trance. It's tribal in the sense that a television is a new campfire. Everyone watches, rests and dreams. I read somewhere that cinema is supposedly a drug. The same pool of brain chemicals are drawn from, no question. It's a matter of what one takes.

Consciousness gets delightfully twisted up by design and many of the little essays reflect this. Everyone remembers watching a movie and loving/hating it the first time, only to have a reawakening sometime later. It's like trying on a dream with all the fantastic camp and dread and desire that entails. One of the critics remarks, after proclaiming that he was "apparently the only critic in the world who liked Times Square," recalls a striking and hauntingly bizarre image from the climactic scene but ends the paragraph by musing: "Or did I imagine this film?" Exactly. Or take the critic Nev Pierce (with whom I am seriously in need of having a beer) who writes with endearing honesty about the ten best films he hasn't seen, conjuring up some evocative prose while he's at it. Of Eraserhead, he says, "That hair...that director...The subject matter of child-rearing, death and mutation...Even thinking about it makes me feel queasy, troubled and upset. A singular vision hailed as the greatest ever cult movie; a masterpiece, no doubt. One day I will watch it. But not yet...not yet..."

As Hitchock knew, and everyone knows he knew, what you don't see is more powerful than what you do. The 10 films he's ashamed of liking naturally find him seemingly on the edge of a nervous breakdown. This has something to do with Jennifer Love Hewitt's breasts and a certain inability to cohabitate with the opposite sex...some things just touch a nerve, whether you want them to or not. Writing down one's inner monologue is a certain form of rehabilitation for all manner of social degenerates, for the pale and bespectactled film buff this book is a wonderful contact high.