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Holy cow, we’re here already! I love the top threes; you’ve gotta make just the right choices, you can’t have three of the same but they all have to be absolute quality and earn their places. These have definitely earned their places!

Top Ten Movies
3. Fight Club – I didn’t create some loser alter-ego to make myself feel better
The film that proves to me that a movie can be better than the book, with Blade Runner helping the case greatly. David Fincher creates a real world here, and Brad Pitt and Ed Norton just knock it out of the park. Tyler Durden becomes one of cinemas true icons. This movie has everything nailed in it. The soundtrack by the Dust Brothers, the supporting actors in Helena Bonham-Carter, Meatloaf and Jared Leto. The sets, especially the house on Paper Street. There is no way that this film could ever be made any better, though I will forever be curious as to how it may have worked had Pitt been the Narrator and Norton as Durden…?

Top Ten TV Shows
3. The Twilight Zone
This show completely changed how television could be used. A stable of unreal writers, quality writers and the world’s smallest host. Each week you never knew what you were going to get. Morality tales wrapped in little pieces of sci-fi. So many anthology shows owe their entire being, and purpose, to Rod Serling. There are so many classic episodes, too many to list here. But you can be guaranteed that if you start to describe a premise many people will know how it ends. This show deserves to be top three because it is good, but because it just demands it, for so many reasons.

Top Ten Books
3. Vita Brevis – Jostein Gaarder
I read this book and just though, my God, you can do that with a book? I’m sure it’s been done before, but this was my first, and your first is always special. Gaarder ‘apparently’ found this manuscript in an old second hand book store in Rio. He bought it for a cheap price and when he got it home he realised that it was an authentic letter to St Augustine from his former concubine. I am, pretty, sure that story is fabricated, but it still keeps you thinking as you read what is set out before you. The thoughts of a concubine after her man has turned to the Lord. The letter, which is the book, is just a fascinating inside look at their relationship. The barbed tongue of the scorned woman carries through so much. At the end I realised that this book decided to tell a tale, but went about it a completely different way than I would have thought of. Just a great read!

Top Ten Comic Books
3. Vault of Horror
I was about ten and my brother gave me a comic he had just bought. It was the first issue of the re-releases of the Vault of Horror comic. I had never heard of it, but I was intrigued, the cover featured a demonic Johnny Craig guy looking down into what appeared to be a coffin with a square hole cut in it. I read the issue and just loved the fuck out of it. A guy gets buried alive, a killer femme gets a sweaty demise from a smoke ring billboard, a dying old coot has his revenge, a man buries his wife behind a wall downstairs and then tweaks out, a mad magician gets his dastardly comeuppance and a strange goo creature messes up hillbillies in the swamp. All pretty standard EC fare, but I didn’t know that yet. But the two stories that stuck with me were “While The Cat’s Away…” where some burglars bust into a house only to find it infested with zombies, vampires and werewolves, and impossible to navigate out of; and “House of Horror” where some kids dare each other into going into the haunted house of the neighbourhood and one of them ends up mindfucked, but we never find out what it was that got him. I loved the irony of the stories, the just desserts constantly served up. Each story had you till the end, and they were only about 5 pages long, that’s pretty tight story telling. I ended up on a love affair, all I could get, Tales From The Crypt, The Haunt of Fear; and then encompassing Weird Science, Weird Fantasy, Crime SuspenStories. Anything EC had me hooked. But I always liked the Vault Keeper way more than the others, and this one comic was a definite turning point in my reading and writing future.

Top Ten Songs
3. Breaking The Girl – RHCP – I am a man, cut from the know
This is a song that I discovered on my own. The album was a complete product of my brother, but singling this one out was all me. I just love hearing a band that can be this hard and this funky break down something this simple and awesome. I used to play the shit out of this at uni. I still play the shit out of it now, and I am pretty sure I will be dusting it off for many years to come. It’s another one, of what appear to be many, calm songs that just rock the shit for my soul. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this song at all.

There they are, that narrows down what’s left in one and two, but what order will they come…?

Posted on March 25th, 2008 by ryan
Filed under: books, comics, life, movies, music