I still haven't shot the piano player

If there was ever a single moment when I decided to be a movie fan, it was the day I picked up my first copy of Empire, the British film magazine. It was three months old by the time it appeared on bookshop shelves, but everything was three months old in this part of the world in the early 90s, so it wasn't that much of a bother, and the films the Empire team were starting to get breathless about were only just showing up in the first multiplexes and boutique arthouse cinemas.

To be honest, I only got the magazine for the posters, because it had the bitching Blade Runner one-sheet and a striking quad-style version of Bram Stoker's Dracula, and they were a good buy, still up on my walls years and years later (but now lost to a clean-out.). But the magazine was a nice bonus, especially since it literally changed the way I consumed and enjoyed all sorts of movies.

I had been a science fiction and horror fanatic since a very young age, and almost all of the movie magazines I'd read were genre focused - Starlog and The Dark Side and Fangoria and such, not anything about straight movies.

But that Empire magazine was full of fascinating details about all sorts of weird films from all sorts of countries and genres - films that offered new perspectives on life and love and action, and I was 18 and ready to hoover all that shit right up.

I've read a lot of Empire magazines since that first one (I would say I've never missed an issue, but the appearance of the dread Australian edition fucked up distribution into this country, and I missed a few before I got into the comfortable regularity of a subscription), but I can still remember one particular meaty article from that first issue.

It was an thing about Shoot the Piano Player, the French New Wave film from 1960, directed by the great François Truffaut and starring the mighty Charles Aznavour, and it sounded so fucking hot and smart. I could still dig on the Umberto Lenzi, and still do, but there were cinematic worlds beyond ray-guns and gore and existential dread.

And reading that article in my bedroom at our house with the hedge on Richard Pearse Drive, in another freezing winter, when there were still only two channels on the TV,,that movie became a metaphor for it all. It represented all the drama and foreign and arty films I'd never looked at, for all the new perspectives great cinema can aspire to. It has constantly inspired to try out new stuff, to get out of the dreaded comfort zone. All there, in the appreciation for Truffaut's little film. I had to check it out.

The punchline is obvious - 30 years later, and I still haven't actually seen it. It's never been on any TV station I was near, was in no video stores, and never popped up on any streaming services I've toyed with. I'd still like to see it just as much as I did in 1993, and if it comes near me, I'll lunge at it.

It doesn't matter, it's still a great metaphor. Metaphors don't need reality sticking its face into things.

I also haven't seen any of Satyajit Ray's masterful Apu Trilogy, even after Empire's poetic ode to it sometime in the early 2000s. I'll get there, man. I promise.