You Need To See This

Foreword from You Need To See This: a decade of writing about underrated films by Rupert Lally

In the season three finale of The Newsroom, Aaron Sorkin’s TV show about the fictional Atlantic Cable News, Dev Patel’s character returns from enforced leave to find that his baby, ACN Digital, is being run by callow geeks whose idea of a worthwhile article is “The Nine Most Overrated Movies of All Time”. “Why is overrated more fun than, say, underrated?” he asks them – knowing that, for guys like these, tearing something down is more satisfying than talking something up. Rupert Lally, happily, likes talking things up. For more than a decade, amid releasing albums and publishing novels, he’s been blogging about underrated films: “Movies you should see but haven’t, Movies you have seen but should watch again”. He’s reviewed nearly 140 films in that time, including numerous old favourites of mine: The Dead Zone, Defence of the Realm, The Fog, Gorky Park, The Name of the Rose, The Russia House, Sneakers, Starman, Wolfen – and the film that originally led me to his blog, Jennifer 8.

Jennifer 8, in fact, was partly responsible for my non-fiction debut – albeit via a circuitous route. A common feature of the movies Rupert blogs about is that they underperformed at the box office, and Jennifer 8 is Exhibit A. Despite being a Paramount production, with rising stars, in a popular genre – the serial killer thriller – it wasn’t even given a theatrical release in the UK, instead going straight to video. This distinction is almost meaningless in the modern film marketplace, where big-budget movies frequently bypass cinemas and premiere on the streaming services that funded them, but in 1993 it signified that a film was either dross or a flop (or both). Sadly, Jennifer 8 was the latter, but it certainly wasn’t the former. I read the video review in Empire magazine, rented the film as soon as possible and watched it twice in two days, once with my parents and once with my best friend, Greg – whose video collection I often raided. Which is how I came to know about an earlier film from the maker of Jennifer 8: a little British comedy called Withnail and I, written and directed by Bruce Robinson.

Around this time I wrote a couple of chapters of a biographical dictionary of British screenwriters, started under the influence of Lesley Halliwell’s Filmgoer’s Companion and abandoned soon after. One of the chapters focused on Bruce Robinson, and several years later I sent it to him, along with a request to interview him for the Bristol University newspaper. I still have his typewritten reply, agreeing to the interview and thanking me for my essay: “Considering we never met I thought it very perceptive”. The essay was lost many laptops ago, although I remember drawing a comparison between Withnail and Jennifer 8, something along the lines of, “Andy Garcia’s burnt-out cop finds, like Withnail and Marwood, that as much danger and darkness lurks in the country as lives in the city.” But that first interview led, ultimately, to the book Smoking in Bed: Conversations with Bruce Robinson, and it all started with me watching an underrated film and saying to myself, “This deserves to be better known.”

Rupert thought the same, and devoted his second blog post to the film in March 2016 – which I later discovered during lockdown by googling “Jennifer 8 director’s cut”, probably after my umpteenth late-night viewing of the movie with my Dad. I didn’t find a director’s cut (a remastered edition with the original ending finally emerged in 2024), but I did find Rupert’s post, tweeted about it, and got to know its author. Like most of his film posts, his appraisal of Jennifer 8 deals with its production and reception, considers it thematically and aesthetically – giving due weight to its score, editing, design and cinematography – and, true to his mission statement, makes you want to see it if you haven’t, and see it again if you have. His advocacy for Ridley Scott’s 2006 comedy-drama A Good Year prompted me to revisit that film, and while I still think it’s no classic, I did enjoy it more than I had before (although partly, and appropriately, because I sank a tasty bottle of vin rouge while watching it).

Now, looking through Rupert’s blog posts, it strikes me that “underrated” could simply be another word for “cult”. Several of the films on his list featured in the BBC’s late lamented cult movie strand, Moviedrome, which formed a major part of my (and Rupert’s) film education between the late 90s and early noughties. Then again, even films that were critical and commercial successes upon release can, over time, come to be seen as overpraised and hence become overlooked. Gandhi, for example, won more Oscars than Lawrence of Arabia, but Richard Attenborough has never been as fashionable a filmmaker as David Lean, so his film, I would argue, is underrated. Whatever criteria you use, though, the appeal of watching and writing about movies like these remains the same: you appreciate them, and you want other people to appreciate them (but not too many other people, perhaps; the sense of being a member of an exclusive club may be part of their appeal). And if Rupert’s blog, and now this book, help make that happen, then the effort that went into them will be well rewarded.