Film Favourites: Sam Zucca

Content warning: this article discusses suicide and abuse.

It’s hard to limit yourself to just five films that stand out to you more than the rest, and I have no doubt that this list will change quite dramatically over time. These five films aren’t necessarily my favourite films, but I feel confident in including them primarily since I find myself thinking about them on a regular basis. None of them I’d call perfect, but it’s often their imperfections that can sometimes be so fascinating and keep me returning again and again.

I’d also like to note that I detail minor spoilers for some of these films, so if it’s a film you haven’t seen and are wanting to go into blind, then I’d skip the passage for it. I don’t talk about any big plot twists or revelations, but consider yourself warned if you wanted to watch one knowing nothing at all.

Monsters, Inc. (2001)

Although I never saw it in the cinema, Monsters, Inc. was my favourite film as a child. Unlike other kids capers, there was never a moment where I felt embarrassed for enjoying it, and I’ve never revisited it to find even a second of it too corny or dated. It’s probably the only film I’ve consistently enjoyed throughout my whole life. Even rewatching it during the start of lockdown last year gave me the same thrill of entering a world that is so expertly thought-out and constructed. I know I’ve seen it way too many times, but the film seems designed for lodging itself inside your brain. The imagery of doors opening to other worlds fuelled by child’s screams is understandably grim, but there’s so much humour and colour brought out by the character design and style (not to mention Randy Newman’s fabulous swing soundtrack). Even the casting of this film is spot-on, with John Goodman and Billy Crystal somehow sounding exactly how their characters look – it’s sheer magic.

I used to own a VHS copy that I’d watch over and over– it was tinted blue to match Sulley’s fur. One particularly memory I have is of leaving the VHS beside an electric heater and being shocked to find the plastic casing beginning to melt into a blue goo. I was horrified (and at the time didn’t know that could happen to plastic). Regardless, if any film can make you feel so distraught over a piece of blue plastic, then it must be doing something right.

Life of Pi (2012)

This is the film that has perhaps diminished most in my mind since first watching it, but I wanted to include it for the influence it had on me at the time rather than how I feel about it now. I watched Life of Pi for the first time in early 2013 when it was showing in my local cinema. At the time I was halfway through reading the book when I went to see it and seeing how vibrantly it was adapted to film really opened my eyes to the potential of the medium.

Life of Pi is a film that is still great to look at, although I’ve never enjoyed it as much as seeing it on the big screen. Most importantly though, it was a film that made me want to watch more films. It may seem quite tame now but for someone who watched far too many Bond movies – this was an eye-opener. It’s somewhat ironic that it only stayed as my favourite film for a few months before I saw the next film on this list, and that its influence on me was that it lead me down a path of watching much better films. I still like the film, but I find it as heavy-handed now as it was once profound. Even with films that have a similar message about fantasy and the comfort of fiction, I think films like Big Fish or Pan’s Labyrinth are much more successful in their execution.

Casablanca (1942)

After seeing Life of Pi I wanted to expand my cinematic horizons. I asked my parents for film recommendations (because I’m a nerd) and one of the first films they suggested was Casablanca. We rented the DVD from Lovefilm because back then the best way to watch older films was to get them sent to you in the post.

It’s a film full of grand statements and oversized emotions

I hadn’t seen many old films aside from Disney classics before Casablanca, and you certainly have to adjust yourself to it. Many people complement classic films by calling it ahead of its time, and Casablanca really isn’t that. The opening intro shows a rotating model of Earth covered in smoke with this cheesy radio announcer telling us about the state of the war. I don’t think it could have been made anywhere other than a Hollywood lot in 1942, but what makes it so riveting is that the emotions of the film are so relevant. It’s a film full of grand statements and oversized emotions, but why should it be anything else? It’s important to remember that when the film was released, World War Two was ongoing, in that context its sense of hope feels so much more striking. Its grand gestures seem bigger, and it’s a real triumph when a film can be so uplifting when it ends with two of the main characters likely walking off to their deaths.

Vertigo (1958)

It’s a film that makes your skin crawl

Vertigo is a complicated film. I’d call it a horror film, although in a much less direct way than Hitchcock’s instant success Psycho, released two years later. It’s a film that makes your skin crawl not for any violence shown onscreen, but for the tale it tells of obsession. If you know much about Hitchcock behind the scenes, you’ll know he was a misogynist obsessed with blondes, and a manifestation of this person appears quite prominently through Jimmy Stewart’s character. I don’t know if this was supposed to a self reflective film, but Stewart’s character is as morally ugly by the film’s end as he is sympathetic at its start. And I think the complex relationship the audience has with Stewart is what intensifies the discomfort.

The narrative of Vertigo is quite messy, and there are a handful of plot twists over its runtime that I find myself lost in upon rewatching. One red herring in particular suggests that Kim Novak’s Madeline is possessed by her suicidal grandmother, and even on my fourth or fifth viewing I can’t tell from Novak’s performance who exactly is looking through those eyes. There’s quite a famous dream sequence in the film elevated by Saul Bass’s hyperactive special effects and Bernard Hermann’s riveting score, but it’s no more dreamlike than the rest of the film that seems lifted from subconscious to celluloid.

Mulholland Drive (2001)

Mulholland Drive to me feels like a spiritual inheritor to the style Hitchcock begins to explore in Vertigo. The ambiguity and loose ends are even messier here, to the extent that you have to untangle the threads yourself. There are countless theories online trying to assemble the film’s narrative or decode it, but for me ‘solving’ the film would almost take its magic away. Because throughout Mulholland Drive we are constantly being told the same thing: ‘no hay banda – there is no band’. In other words, this film is not real. You are watching an illusion, a recording, a spectre. The film includes variations on this same idea over and over again; we are introduced to a performance, or a dream, and have its falseness highlighted to us. Despite the warnings though I always find myself submitting to the illusion before inevitably having the rug pulled from under my feet. It’s an emotionally exhausting film, and one that left me in tears when I first saw the credits roll. It’s also an incredibly manipulative experience, but also more honest in its manipulation than any other film I’ve seen.