What is it about choosing cinema snacks? Deciding which combo of overpriced junk food to go for takes up as much time as picking the film you’re going to see. You have to have popcorn, of course, but will it be sweet or salted? Or what about nachos and a dip. But then will the dip be cheese, salsa or guacamole? How about an ice cream instead? Although it will be tricky to pick from all those flavours. Or some pic’n’mix ? Or a bag of chocolates? Perhaps a hot dog? And then what about something to drink? Maybe you like to swill the popcorn out of your teeth with that auditorium classic, watery coke, or kill the spice of your nachos with a beer, or augment the traces of the cigarette you puffed outside by having a coffee (see Jim Jarmusch). The choices go on, and the combinations will all work together in different ways.
The same could be said of putting together a double bill — an innovation that came about during the depression of the 1930s as of way of roping in a larger audience who would be more likely to part with their hard-earned if they were getting two films for the price of one. The art of the perfect double bill has always been about finding two films that bring out something in the other that might not be quite so piquant if they were shown on their lonesome, or alongside something else. It’s like choosing to put gin together with tonic or Angostura bitters, or to eat a hot dog with ketchup or mustard — a view shared by New Statesman film critic Ryan Gilbey:
“The only rule I can see for a double bill is finding two films with complementary flavours,” he says. “I guess there doesn’t even have to be a literal connection like the same director, star or even genre. One good example that I remember — actually it’s a triple bill, but one of the films is short — was at London’s old Scala cinema in the late 1980s, where I got most of my cinematic education. It was playing the first run of Alex Cox’s bizarre warmed-up spaghetti western Straight to Hell, which they showed with Bob Rafelson’s Monkees film, Head, and Luis Buñuel’s 40-minute religious comedy Simon of the Desert. It was genius, because each film opened up the other for the viewer.”
Ice cream, all the flavours (too much of a good thing)
It is exactly this sort of hotchpotch of filmic fare that appeals to online cinema Mubi.com’s content manager Duncan Gray, who says the only real rule for a double bill is that it be “an instructive but fun way to compare and contrast, to acknowledge the breadth of cinema and the joy of omnivorous consumption by bouncing two films off one another”.
By the same measure, a lot of the obvious connections for double bills — sequels; remakes; same leading actors — may leave one feeling rather surfeited; as if one’s eyes were bigger than one’s belly. Gray again: “One Saturday night in college, I joined a group of friends to watch all three Indiana Jones movies back-to-back-to-back. Though I’d already seen each film many times (and loved them all), placing them side by side gave me the belated realisation that Indiana Jones goes through the same damn character arc each time. In other words, taking them all at once diminished the impact of each individual film instead of growing them.”
Gilbey cites the pairing of Alan Parker’s Midnight Express and Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver — two films about young, American, criminal outsiders that were commonly screened together in the 1970s and 1980s — as another example of double bill overkill. “It sounds like eating potatoes and rice to me: way too heavy. Likewise William Friedkin’s Cruising and Brian de Palma’s Dressed to Kill — how much sex and violence do you really want in one sitting?”
While a director double bill may be a more rewarding way to exploit obvious connections — “ask any card-carrying auteurist, and they’ll tell you that the best way to experience a great director is to look at their films as an entire body of work”, Gray says — it does seem to lack imagination, especially when there is a pretty much endless platter of movies to be picked at.
Sweet popcorn & Seven-Up (two takes on sugar-coated)
One of the best double bills I remember going to see — at London’s home of double bills, the Prince Charles Cinema on Leicester Square — is Chris Columbus’ Home Alone withFrank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life a couple of Christmases ago. The films look at a lot of the same themes (festivity; home; family; being trapped in a little town) but consider them through different eyes — the eyes of a little boy in 1990 and a middle-aged man in 1946 — although one gets the feeling that these eyes have elements of the same soul behind them: James Stewart’s character in It’s a Wonderful Life George Bailey, even declares at one point “I wanna do what I wanna do” — a dream that Macaulay Culkin’s Kevin McCallister gets to fulfil — as if they are the same spirit in different bodies (see the newly released Cloud Atlas).
Gilbey suggests teaming up It’s a Wonderful Life with Joel and Ethan Coen’s Raising Arizona — “the sweetness and tradition of the Capra satisfied one part of you, and the breakneck mania of the Coens another” — and Harold Ramis’ Groundhog Daywith Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel — “very different treatments of the subject of stasis from different traditions, Hollywood and arthouse, but there is enough crossover to make the pairing spark”.
Galaxy Counters & salted popcorn (anarchy and incongruity)
Gray adds something new to the recipe, saying a favourite double bill of his is the classic Looney Tunes short Duck Amuck (which is easily worth six-and-a-half minutes of anybody’s time) and Leos Carax’s Holy Motors. “They not only share similar themes in genres as disparate as children’s cartoons and arthouse films, Duck Amuck provides the ideal gateway and context for the Carax film, as its anarchy makes no more or less sense than that of Holy Motors, so you get to loosen your expectations and see what happens to anarchy when it grows up.”
Gilbey’s fondness for watching films while munching on “Galaxy Counters sprinkled into a tub of salted popcorn, shaken well,” may well be the cinema snack equivalent of that anarchy grown up, with “the combination of salt and chocolate, hard counters and spongy popcorn, offering the same odd combo of incongruous flavours as an unusual double bill”.
Nachos & coke (a spot of heat with a splash of sugar)
For me, the cinema diet of choice has to be nachos — something a little bit sharp, that will stick in your teeth (and your throat) — washed down with diet coke — something a bit easier to take. Cinematically, this could translate into Matthieu Kassovitz’s La Haine followed by Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket. They have a lot in common — both French, black and white films, about criminals and outsiders, and are both about 90 minutes long — but come at similar material 40 years apart. And while Pickpocket is not a simple watch, Bresson’s style gives it almost a fairytale touch that makes it a much easier watch than La Haine, at least aesthetically, allowing it to wash away the nasty taste Kassovitz’s film might leave behind.
So what are your perfect cinema pairings — from the box office and the refreshments stand?
