Last Saturday
I felt a bit ill and so decided to retire to my chambers early, to watch a bit
of TV and drink tea. Immediately however I faced a problem: the old tube TV in
my bedroom isn’t connected to cable and I didn’t have the life force to drive
down to the grocery store and rent a movie from the dispenser next to the
entrance. There was nothing to watch.
Dang, I thought, what am I supposed to do now? Read a book? Ridiculous! But at that
moment I spotted a black DVD case in the corner of the room. And suddenly it
all came back to me: yes, the
Shit Shelf!
This was a
brilliant wheeze I had come up with in Russia, as a means of getting free
movies. I told my friends that if they had any DVDs in their collections that
were so offensively bad it upset them to have them in the house, then I would
perform the public duty of taking them away.
Regular
readers of this column will know I have a fascination for bad movies, and once
spent a year watching Tom Cruise films pretty much exclusively. This however
was operating at a much higher level: I had become a toxic celluloid sludge
removal man. But there was also an element of self-mortification, for I also vowed
to watch all these films from start to finish.
Now you might think this is strange and masochistic and perhaps it is,
but in those long gone days of 2004-2005 broadband and English language films
were hard to come by in Moscow. Streaming did not exist. You had to make do with
what you could get.
Anyway,
there was strong demand for my service and very soon I was regularly returning
to my apartment with wads of atrocious pirate DVDs under my arm. Many of them
were horror movies. I remember “Ginger Snaps II” for instance, which was an
execrable film about a Canadian werewolf-girl and her monthly cycle. Then there
was “The Man Thing”, a straight to DVD atrocity about a swamp creature based on
the Marvel comic. With tears of pain in my eyes I watched them, but reader- I
watched them.
Sometimes I’d
get big budget blockbusters starring A-list stars. That’s how “Gigli” landed in
my collection, in which Ben Affleck plays a hit-man intent on turning lesbian
J-lo straight. “Gigli” is wrong on so many levels it is sublime, beyond
summation, a new ontology of badness. Actually almost every film J-Lo ever made
wound up in my hands.
The worst
film of all however was “Nothing”, which was an incredibly unfunny zero budget Canadian
comedy about two guys talking in a white void. I think I am probably one of
only about four people who have seen it, and this is for the best. Let that
film die, and be forgotten forever.
Anyway, I filled
up a few DVD cases this way. The funny thing is that when I moved to Texas, I brought
them all with me, so I would have something to watch. I had been in Russia for so
long I had forgotten what it was like to live in a country where people speak
English and all the media is easily accessible.
Those big black
cases lay dead in a corner for years, until I forgot that I had ever performed
this valuable service for my friends. But now, as I lay decrepit in my bed I saw
the case and remembered and thought this
is exactly what I need. Actually, I tried to find a good film first but that
proved difficult, as all of those movies had the wrong region code. Only
celluloid from my metaphorical shelf of darkness proved compatible with my
player.
Well, not
exactly. “Andrei Rublyev”, worked. I first watched Andrei Tarkovsky’s
masterpiece ten years ago, and had been meaning to re-watch it ever since. But
next to it in the case was Lindsay Lohan’s “I Know Who Killed Me”, a slasher
movie in which she plays a pole dancer. She made it in an attempt to shake off
her cute image, in the days before drugs, jail, community service at the
morgue, etc.
Hmm, I thought. Tarkovsky,
or Lohan?
No contest:
I went with Lohan. And I have to say, it was almost interesting in that the tone
of I Know Who Killed Me is absolutely
bizarre. Very early on Lyndsay Lohan has her hand and leg sawn off and spends the
rest of film wearing a glove but forgets she’s supposed to have prostheses. the
surreal awfulness kept me awake: I had to keep watching, to see what would happen
next.
And therein lay
my error - because had I watched Tarkovsky, I would definitely have fallen
asleep after 20 minutes, and received the rest I needed. The lesson is clear.
If you ever feel poorly, don’t watch a Lindsay Lohan movie. Choose quality:
it’s a much better sedative.
16/1/2013