Christopher Brett Bailey's Top 5: Films All of Time

Christopher Brett Bailey's 5 most favorite movies

Christopher is a writer, performer & musician, born in Canada, raised on the USA border, now based in London, England. Other projects include the award-winning punk-opera The Inconsiderate Aberrations of Billy the Kid, the multi-award winning “cult hit” theatre show This Is How We Die, ambient music duo Moon Ate the Dark, experimental theatre collab Psychodrama and a short story collection called Suicide Notes. I Saw Satan at the 7-Eleven is his first novella.

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My new book, I SAW SATAN AT THE 7-ELEVEN, aims to be cinema for the mind's eye. So, here then, dear reader, is my top 5 movies of all time. Grab some popcorn and enjoy!

 

Holy Mountain (Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1973)

The ultimate midnight movie. First time I saw it was at 12 noon, stone cold sober, on the big screen, sitting front row, and alone. All these ingredients felt crucial. I’d also not much liked another movie of his I’d seen two days earlier. Also a crucial ingredient. What then happened was not only a revelation (“this is the best movie I’ve ever seen, without a doubt” my brain kept saying from about 2 minutes in until the end) but something like a cinematic orgasm from start to finish. Jodorowsky said he was trying to “outdo the Bible” with this one, and I’d say he managed it. 

 

Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1997)

Not the “best” Lynch flick (Mullholland Dr.), nor his breakout (Blue Velvet), nor his most iconic (Twin Peaks S1-3), nor his first and therefore purest (Eraserhead), nor his least compromising and therefore purest (Inland Empire). Sitting somewhere in the middle and often lost in the shuffle, is this, my favourite Lynch. Why? It might be his scariest, depending on what scares you. It’s certainly his jazziest, and possibly his most metal. Unless you count Wild At Heart, which features a heavy metal band on screen. Like that movie, Lost Highway is a collab with writer Barry Gifford, who I think is an undersung genius in his own right. The structure of Lost Highway is a thing of idiotic beauty, a simple audacious idea that they probably shouldn’t have committed to but did. And for me the ratio of narrative to abstraction is just right in this one, making it Lynch’s most durable movie on repeat viewings. Oh, and there’s the obvious icing-on-cake stuff that I almost forgot to mention… The late 1990s was a wonderful time for colour grading, Bowie croons over the opening credits, and two Patricia Arquette’s are better than one. 

 

Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (Robert Zemeckis, 1988)

Saw this about 50 times as a kid, nearly wore out the VHS. Irreverent, freewheeling family fun, made by folks high on the fumes of cinema. Inspires in the viewer a love of the art form, and a desire to erode boundaries between worlds. Much much better than any other film mixing live action and animation. If you watch it with any understanding of what they went through to make it your jaw is on the floor, but that would be meaningless if the humour, emotions, and story didn’t work, which they do, even for an adult all these years later. In its little corner of the cinematic landscape it’s never been topped, and now that computers have ruined animation, it probably never will be. Bet you didn't know... this flick is based on a novel.

 

Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974) 

I can’t remember whether I was 9 or 10 or 11 when I saw this. Accounts vary. But what everyone agrees on is I was “too young”. My dad rented it and we watched it together. He’d seen it back in ’74 and somehow misconstrued it as a comedy. He still laughs when we talk about it, he does the chainsaw noise, bugging his eyes, “Vrrrrrr! Vrrrrr!”, chortling and snorting. Because I watched it with him, I saw it through his eyes; as a comedy. I didn’t find it scary. “It’s only ketchup” he said of the bloodshed. And that was some excellent Dadding. It defanged cinema violence and taught me an important lesson about the difference between reality and fiction… “it’s only ketchup”. 

 

Buffalo ’66 (Vincent Gallo, 1998)

Control freak. Underwear model. Troll. Vincent Gallo is everything I would be if I had no sense of shame or guilt, and no interest in other people. Why applaud that then? Because in a career of self-centred artistry, misfires, and posturing, he somehow generated one bona fide modern classic. So full of heart and feeling yet completely devoid of schmaltz or sentiment. It is a love letter to a town he hates, a romance about a kidnapping, a reconstruction of his childhood traumas filmed in his childhood home, in which he hired two of the world’s most gifted actors to portray his real parents in the least flattering light possible. There’s catharsis in this for me; it’s what I’d do if I didn’t care about the world or what it thought of me. And against the odds, these ugly solipsistic impulses generate something gorgeous and quite universal. Oh, and there’s the obvious… it has the greatest bowling alley scene in the history of movies. And I too am from Buffalo. In fact, Vincent Gallo’s brother once pulled a gun on my dad.

 

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Fear and Loathing meets South Park in a screwball horror novella. Part romance, part buddy comedy, part body horror, I Saw Satan At The 7-Eleven is a dark-as-night tale from a phenomenal new name in literary fiction.

Two miles north of Hell, a nameless deadbeat narrator spots Satan buying soy milk at the 7-Eleven. Satan's a washed-up has-been, who's totally lost his edge. That is until he falls in love with our narrator, and the two embark on a debauched misadventure, by turns slapstick, violent, whimsical, dreamlike and tender.