Three cult classics to watch this weekend

Inspired by a recent encounter with an opinionated 17-year-old, I recently started displaying the symptoms of that most middle-aged of diseases, nostalgia, as I tried to remember what I had been like 25 years ago.

Inevitably, I found myself thinking back to the thing that I spent most of my time at that age doing — going to the movies — and realising that 1998 was a pretty good year for 17-year-old South African film obsessives who could still hope to see something out of the ordinary at their local cinema, back in the days before arthouse became a synonym for tear-jerking BBC films designed to bring a tear to the eye of even the most cynical pensioner.

There’s been research by scientists — who increasingly seem to spend their time researching things that seem unnecessary to the advancement of the human race and our knowledge base in favour of proving things that will make for good clickbait — that as you get older you find yourself more and more drawn to the cultural obsessions of your teenage years.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing if the films of a quarter century ago are anything to go by, and so here, in a decidedly sentimental vein, are three films that I was obsessed with back in the era when Bill Clinton’s appendage, Nelson Mandela’s shirts and Tony Blair’s haircut were the main concerns of a deceptively less stressful world.

THE ARTHOUSE ESSENTIAL

The Thin Red Line —  Disney Plus

Steven Spielberg’s World War 2 war epic Saving Private Ryan, high on realistic details, patriotism and sentimental European theatre, may have been 1998’s most revered and celebrated war film, but it was neither its best nor its most intriguing and poetic.

That honour belonged instead to elusive cinematic poet Terence Malick, who came out of the wilderness he’d retreated to for two decades to make this elegiac, haunting and star-studded adaptation of the autobiographical war novel by James Jones.

Centred on the mission by a US marine platoon to capture a hill on the island of Guadalcanal it’s a daringly original war film that focuses on the feelings and existential angst of its young soldiers rather than the military minutiae of the campaign.

Held together by Malick’s distinctively impressive use of oblique, poetic voiceover and visually striking imagery that echoes the achingly deep philosophical battles within the souls of its characters, it’s the finest film about what war does to the minds and psyches of those tasked with fighting it, and still stands as one of cinema’s most beautiful and poignant considerations of war in all its horrid futility and inevitability as a fundamental fact of human existence. 

Breathtakingly shot by cinematographer John Toll and hauntingly scored by a then up-and-coming composer named Hans Zimmer, it remains one of Malick’s greatest achievements and a film that’s imminently rewatchable and newly rewarding every time you return to it.

THE STONE COLD CLASSIC

The Big Lebowski — rent or buy from Apple TV +

The Coen brothers had already established a strong reputation for dark genre twisting and memorably oddball characters in films that had garnered a string of awards from Cannes Palme D’ors to Oscars when they unleashed their most memorable and quotable creation on audiences who, even though they’d come to know what to expect from the Coens, weren’t quite prepared for The Dude.

Played with enviable laid-back charm by Jeff Bridges, Jeff “The Dude” Lebowski,  his motley crew of bowling buddies and the case of mistaken identity leading to the increasingly strange events that saw them cross paths with a millionaire heiresses, German anarchists and a sagely cowboy helped the Coens to move from niche off-centre favourites to mainstream pop culture game changers.

Still as quotable as ever and filled with too many memorable scenes to recount, the film remains one of the brothers’ most successful and rewarding attempts to absorb a wide variety of manifold cinematic influences and use them as the ingredients for a new recipe that’s uniquely their own. The result is a blackly comic, surreal experience that still stands up to scrutiny and earns The Dude his rightful eternal place as once of cinema’s most distinctively endearing antiheroes. Hell, these days you can even sign up to practice the spiritual practice of Dudeism, which boasts 700,000 devotees whose greatest wish is just to own that one rug that holds the room together and be left in peace.

THE DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH

Rushmore —  Disney Plus

Before he became the focus of a debate about style vs substance in the movies, Wes Anderson made films that showed that he was more than capable of being both stylish and touching.

His second film, starring Jason Schwartzman as a nerdy, precocious private school overachiever who finds himself at the centre of a battle for the love of a teacher with bored, wealthy parent Bill Murray is quirkily styled and emotionally affecting. 

Drawing on Anderson’s obsession with the precocious character populated literary universe of JD Salinger it’s a still unique and hard-to-define mix of comedy and menace that offers a memorably bittersweet fable about the blindness of youthful romantic obsession.