The Best Movies You’ve Never Seen

But say you have any way, so you don’t sound like a jerk

Ever been in a situation where some folk are talking about a movie. A really big, era-defining movie everyone has seen. Except you.

Then someone asks you: ‘What did you think of it?’

You shrug and say. ‘What more can I say. It was brilliant! Genius!’

Who’s seen Psycho? I mean not just the shower scene on YouTube. But the whole movie.

I haven’t. Yet I once entered into a discussion on it with a pair of Hitchcock buffs simply from stuff I’d read on the internet. They only caught on that I was bullshitting when I kept getting Norman Bates mixed up with Norman Whiteside, who used to play football for Man Utd.

Close, then.

I’ve only ever seen the first three Star Wars movies, Episodes 4, 5, 6. Or for the purists: Episodes IV, V, VI. I saw them back-to-back at the Odeon in Chester in 1988, aged 14. All three, one after the other, having never seen them before.

My father fell asleep after about half an hour, probably when Obi-Wan Kenobi appeared, as he hated Alec Guinness. But for a 14-year-old boy, it was a brilliant afternoon, and unlike my father, I enjoyed it immensely.

Unfortunately, that was the end of the saga: Darth Vader was dead and the Death Star had been blown to pieces (again). Surely they wouldn’t build another?

It was therefore a shock when years later, I heard some nerds at work talking about a Star Wars movie I’d never heard of.

‘They made another?’ I asked.

They looked at me like I’d crawled out of the swamps of Dagobah and drew their Light Sabers.

‘Sorry,’ I quickly backtracked. ‘Of course, I’ve seen it. Brilliant. Genius…’

So what other movies have I lied about.

Well there’s Apocalypse Now and The Godfather (plus the sequels). And all those classic movies like Casablanca, The Third Man and Citizen Kane, that I say I’ve seen but haven’t.

And the Batman movies as well. But I only lie about them because I get so fed up with people saying, ‘Oh! You haven’t seen The Batman movies!’ as though I am a total moron. So now I lie through my teeth and say: ‘Love them. Especially the Heath Ledger one. Brilliant. Genius. And so sad.’

That normally ends the conversation.

It’s not that I’m an inveterate liar. Everything in this piece is the nailed-on truth. It’s just that when I was at school everyone lied about everything and everyone, including movies, simply to get laid.

It’s easy to lie about film. If someone asks you if you’ve read a book, and you say yes, and you haven’t, you’re letting yourself in for ridicule. Books are more specific and detailed. With movies, you can simply say, ‘I loved the bit where he blew his brains out!’

Chances are, there will be a bit in any movie where a brain has been scattered over the floor, even in a period drama. You might be caught out with something like Derek Jarmin’s Blue. But how many conversations do people have about that movie?

Years ago, a girlfriend brought a movie back from the video store. I had specifically said: ‘The Big Blue by Luc Besson. Don’t bring back anything else, please.’

She brought back Derek Jarmin’s Blue saying they didn't have The Big Blue in stock, but thought this might be similar. It wasn’t, so we watched Jaws instead.

The great thing with movies — except Derek Jarmin’s Blue — is that they are all pretty much the same: Shit happens, shit needs fixing, people get killed. Therefore, if you get tripped up by some film buff, you can always say: ‘Sorry, I got mixed up with The Terminator.’

I’m not promoting lying. I have young children too (somewhere). But seeing as the whole movie industry is based on duplicity, deceit, deception, and sheer fantasy, it’s not the biggest crime in the world to lie out of your ass to make friends.

As I said, I haven’t seen Casablanca, but I know what happens. At the end the hero gets blasted into space and promises to return in a million years when he’s found aliens to give him a new body…

Or is that Star Trek?

Thanks for reading this pack of lies. For more untruths, check out: