An Oeuf is an Oeuf...

...Procrastination over! 


I've been trying to decide what my challenge would be this year. I wanted to avoid just reading a particular novelist / playwright - as this took its toll on my own reading list last year. Instead I have decided to have a cinematic challenge. But what? The complete works of Hitchcock? Shakespeare again (see last year's challenge) but on film this time? Or, as was suggested by one friend, the more lowbrow attempt to watch the complete filmography of Sylvester Stallone! But the answer was presented to me in a round about fashion...

First I tried to find a 'Best of' list of films to work from. There's been a BFI 'Top 100 of British Movies' list doing the rounds on Facebook - but that's about five years old now. Then I found a more recent BFI 'Top 50 Greatest Films of all Time'. Although I'd only seen 17 of them I also noticed that the majority of the list were FLF's (Foreign Language Films) which started me thinking...

At the same time my daughter received the DVD of 'A Town Called Panic' for Christmas. As we sat watching the film it suddenly occurred to me that this was the first time either of my kids had watched a complete movie with subtitles. They had previously enjoyed the exploits of Jacques Tati but as that is practically a silent movie I didn't think it counted. However, far from being put off by simultaneously reading and watching they had loved the film and we're quoting from it for days...

Now I freely admit that back in the time before I had kids I was something of a film-aholic. I would spend days watching films back to back into the wee small hours of the morning. For years I had a trunk full of videos I'd either bought or taped from TV - things got to a stage where I had to keep a card index to catalogue them all (I say 'I had to' but basically as an anally-retentive list-maker in my mind the world would have ended if I hadn't). Among these were a fair number of foreign language classics. But unfortunately the trunk was slowly emptied over the years as videos became redundant and with the demise of the VCR. I do have one or two favourites still on DVD but not many.

So my challenge -  To see how many FLF's I can tick off another film list - 'Empire's 100 Best Films of World Cinema' (only about two years old), while also revisiting some old FLF favourites and other classics not on the list. I will also only watch them in their original language - so subtitled not dubbed (which is still way easier than trying to understand Stallone!) 
  

The blog title, for those that don't know, comes a favourite film of mine - 'What's New Pussycat'. Not an FLF itself although it is set in Paris and includes an international cast. The expression 'Foreign Movie Time' there being a euphemism for 'A bit of how's your father' and 'What about the workers'! 

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