You and your mates don’t see each other as much. You’ve changed. They’ve changed. Your collective memory of the single, unending Saturday night of your teenage years is something you cherish, but you can’t quite recapture the magic. Deep down you intuit that things will never be the same, that you’ll never again feel the sense of true belonging you felt as a seventeen year old, chinning Glens on a freezing street corner, talking about the time you almost got with Sharon from French.

But that intuition, which will prove ultimately to be correct, is something we’re all ignoring. So here are six songs to prove empirically that absolutely nothing has changed between you, Eric and Jenna, and you’re all still brilliant mates.

Which you definitely are. Brilliant, brilliant mates.

1. Call Me Maybe – Carly Rae Jepsen

This blast of childish joy was all that anyone listened to a couple of years ago. Of course, that was when Steve still called me to hang out. Steve, if you’re out there, call me? Please? 

2. Flourescent Adolescent – Arctic Monkeys

“Do you remember how we all used to wear those hilarious coloured jeans? And yellow hoodies from H & M?” Yes Dave, I do remember. Yet I cannot reclaim the moment. Just like the easy rapport we once had, it has been lost to the black wastes of time.

Sorry, what was that you were saying about political correctness having gone something or other? 

3. When You Were Young – The Killers

An absolute classic from the golden time when your mates were still actually your mates. Less well known is the follow-up to this, titled ‘Now You’re a Bit Older and I Pretend to Myself That I Like You So As To Preserve The Memory I Have Of My Teenage Years’.

 4. Too Late (To Apologise) – Timbaland (feat. One Republic)

It’s not too late to apologise for the time you called out one of your mates for saying something stupid, and they all agreed that ‘you’d changed’. But you are too proud to apologise. And what your mate said was really stupid. But there’s a big crew reunion coming up. What should you do? Well, play it cool and do some funny dancing. Why let on that you’re trying to convince yourself that you still know who you are? It will really bum everyone out.

5. That’s Not My Name – The Ting Tings

‘I remember back at home they called me Pintmaster Flash’. But you’re not Pintmaster Flash any more, are you? No, now you’re Tim from Hilda’s. Even your old friends don’t call you Pintmaster Flash now, and anyway you only see each other for an awkward drink once every two months. Say it to yourself, go on – ‘Pintmaster Flash’. Understand the extent of your deracination as the words turn to Pintmaster Ash in your mouth.

6. Teenage Dirtbag – Wheatus

When was the last time you saw Miranda? Or Alex? Dave’s having a kid, though it seems like only yesterday he was walking around telling girls to smell his finger. When you all meet up at the pub, this comes on, and the smiles that go round diffuse the tension between you all. But later on, in your sleep, you scream the chorus into the uncaring night. Soon you will wake in the grey dawn, too fearful to articulate what you already know, that you’ll never fit in anywhere again.

Happy listening!

★★★★☆
Four Stars

Before Roger Ebert, no film critic had ever won a Pulitzer Prize or been awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. On his death in 2013, Barack Obama wrote that “for a generation of Americans Roger was the movies… The movies won’t be the same without Roger”. Steve James’ life-affirming documentary paints the picture of Ebert’s long love affair with cinema and charts his debilitating disease as it takes its course in his final days. Unafraid to get close and personal with Ebert’s at times abrasive personality, his alcoholism in his early days, or the crippling effects of his cancer, Life Itself is a stoically honest but always celebratory portrait of the most famous film critic in cinema history.

Following Ebert from his strong Chicago roots, we see him rise up through the ranks of journalism, displaying an editorial aptitude from an early age. Chicago is to become more than just his home – it is to be forever more his journalistic stronghold, and from the moment he takes up the mantle of film critic at the Chicago Sun-Times in 1967, he begins changing the game of cinema criticism. He is pestered throughout his career to move to higher-paid, more “illustrious” newspapers, but he never wavers. He remained with the paper until his death almost fifty years later.

The documentary finally sheds light on the uneasy Albee-esque catfights that took place between Ebert and his costar Gene Siskel when the cameras stopped rolling on their smash-hit review show, Siskel & Ebert & The Movies. Ebert and Siskel were two giants of their time, both bullish and stubborn, and their relationship was more like feuding brothers than fierce rivals. Together, they established the make-or-break “Thumbs up!” or “Thumbs down!” verdict that became so ubiquitous in movie marketing, but throughout their successful careers, they never ceased to grab an opportunity to outshine the other. In the film, their respective wives speculate as to what may have happened if only they had put aside their differences and come to terms with how invaluable they were to one another.

We see Ebert’s adoration of the prestigious Cannes Film Festival, and his impressively tight mingling with celebrities of the screen, harkening back to the days when critics and artists would socialise together in the same exclusive circles. In many ways, Ebert was a chip off the old block of old-fashioned critics, but the documentary asks the poignant question – did his friendly association with the stars ever compromise his criticism of their work? A light-hearted Martin Scorsese – who was firm friends with Ebert for many years – thinks not, jovially recalling a wounded response to Ebert’s crippling review of The Color of Money. It was a way of “condemning and helping”, Scorsese assures us.

Martin Scorsese isn’t the only big name to sing Roger Ebert’s praises. Ava DuVernay and Werner Herzog are among a host of other directors and artists who felt personally shaped by his acerbic craft. Even Steve James credits a large part of his success to Ebert, who lauded his first feature, Hoop Dreams, in 1994. It feels as if the entire documentary is in some way James’ way of thanking Roger Ebert for this early praise; he gives the critic a chance to review for once his own life, rather than the lives of movie characters.

Omnipresent in the film of course is Roger’s wife, Chaz, whose indomitable spirit aids Ebert through his final cancer-stricken years. The camera pokes its neck in deep into Ebert’s hospital bed, and doesn’t shy away from showing us his worst days. There are uncomfortable scenes of the incapacitating disease and the critic’s painful attempts at rehabilitation and recovery. Fighting a disease as tenacious as cancer, Ebert knows that his days are numbered, but this only forces him to continually press on with his work. By his last years, invasive surgery has had to completely remove his lower jaw, and Ebert is only able to communicate via a computerised voice system, not unlike Stephen Hawking. Stripped of the ability to speak, however, Ebert does not allow his voice to be silenced. He triumphantly and inspirationally channels his suppressed energy into online blogging and reviewing, and continues to watch and love films until his death in 2013.

Towards the end of the film, Ebert relays how he often invites a close friend to recite to him the last page of The Great Gatsby. It isn’t hard to understand why these passages resonate so effortlessly with him. Ebert relates that he is more than aware of the passage of time – “of its flow, slipping through our fingers like a long silk scarf” – especially in his final years. Like Jay Gatsby, Ebert was a firm advocate of chasing dreams. He believed in the “green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us”. And, also like the eponymous dreamer, Ebert had too come a long way to his own “blue lawn” – from a working class small-town boy in Urbana, to becoming a national celebrity and the most renowned film critic of all time.

When audiences first watched a crazed Norman Bates rip open the shower curtains and incessantly stab a nude Janet Leigh to a myriad of chilling stringed screeches, many deserted their seats and stormed out of the cinema. The film was of course Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 landmark horror flick Psycho, and it remains one of his most acclaimed works of cinema. But what was it that horrified audiences so wretchedly? There is no visible nudity – rigorous censorship made sure of that – and we never see the knife touch, let alone penetrate, a single shred of skin. In fact, when one watches the film now it seems incredibly tame. So why did audiences feel so uncomfortable? It’s a simple but revealing explanation. Hitchcock forced them into a position in which they simply did not want to be – the position of voyeur.

As far back as ancient Greek tragedies, it was customary for horrific or violent deeds to take place “offstage”. Indeed, Roman poet Horace quipped in his Ars Poetica that although “the mind is less actively stimulated by what it takes through the ear than by what is presented to it through the trustworthy agency of the eyes”, gruesome acts such as Medea butchering her children or Atreus cooking his dish of human flesh should never take place “within public view”. It was a rejection of scopophilia, but a simultaneous acknowledgement of its power. There was something undignified and gratuitous about attempting to display violence right in front of the audience’s eyes. Not only were they unlikely to show it particularly effectively, but it was also not what the audience had come to see. As a voyeur, audiences somehow feel complicit in the events onscreen. With Pyscho’s infamous shower scene, Hitchcock thrust his audience into directly witnessing something that may just as well have taken place off-screen, or through a silhouette or some other suggestive technique. The audience are instead rendered as helpless and tragically vulnerable as poor Marion Crane herself: stripped down, holding up their hands in protest, screaming in vain.

Hitchcock pioneered a camera that represented the eye of the audience. Rather than watching all the action from a distance, like a play, the audience are granted their own position within the action itself. They are a character, in many ways. In particular, Hitchcock’s cameras often work as an individual’s point of view. In Vertigo (1958), for example, we experience Scottie’s acrophobia firsthand when the camera meanders and distorts via the dolly-zoom when at a great height. In Rear Window (1954), our vision is eclipsed by florescent bright flashes signifying the temporary blindness caused by the flashbulbs to Thorwald. It also allows us to pick up on things that other characters do not notice, such as when it zooms slowly in on Marion’s wad of stolen money in the motel room whilst Norman attempts to clean up the crime scene in Psycho. It is only natural that this special point of view acquired by the audience comes with its own advantages and disadvantages, liberties and limits. The boundaries are blurred between diegetic and non-diegetic audience involvement. The audience, as a voyeur, must take care with what they “choose” to see.

There is a prevailing obsession with voyeurism running throughout Hitchcock’s oeuvre. He knew that human beings have a fascination with watching. We are naturally nosy, curious, intrusive in our daily existence. This is demonstrated no better than through James Stewart’s protagonist in Rear Window. Finding himself crippled and bored, a man resorts to spying on his neighbours with a pair of trusted binoculars and the zoom of his camera, spinning a web of speculations and accusations from what he takes in through his subjective eyes. It’s also worth noting that the man is a photographer – he literally makes his living from observing with his eager lens. The opening passage of Christopher Isherwood’s 1939 novel Goodbye to Berlin comes to mind, when the meta-narrator declares, “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.” Hitchcock confines his audiences to a similar disposition. We are able to look, but not touch. From the safety of our seats, we watch the narrative unfold, except there is one key difference between Hitchcock’s audience and Isherwood’s narrator – Hitchcock wants us to think. As L.B. Jefferies watches his neighbours, he cannot help but make judgements and conclusions about their lives. Hitchcock knows that his audience will inevitably be forced to do the same.

But Hitchcock also knew of the darker side of voyeurism. Jefferies does, after all, become dangerously swept up in the illicit affairs of his neighbour through his scopophilia. This voyeuristic prospect is so compelling that it was adapted 50 years later into a loose remake called Disturbia (2007) with Shia LaBeouf. Norman Bates too exercises his own fetishisation of voyeurism to disastrous results. Before Marion Crane enters the shower, Norman removes a painting from the wall to reveal a peephole, through which he watches her undress. This is creepy to say the least, and Gus Van Sant in his 1998 remake capitalised on this creepiness to the full, having Norman masturbate as he peers at Marion’s body. Hitchcock plays too with his characters’ awareness of their own entrapment in a voyeuristic society. What is paranoia, after all, if not the fear of being watched, of being scrutinized, manipulated, and laughed at? Paranoia in film is a blacked out window – the fourth wall between character and audience. The characters are the victims, the audience are the watchers. North by Northwest (1959) is a prime example of this. Just as Roger Thornhill cannot see the sadistic pilot of the crop duster in the infamous scene in the cornfield, Hitchcock’s characters are often overwrought with a sense of being personally victimised and spied upon by unseen forces. More often than not, these forces turn out to be us, the audience.

What Hitchcock’s voyeurism established was a camera that never leaves its subjects alone – a camera that never hides behind bushes or pans to euphemistic shots of the ocean during lovemaking – a camera not afraid to show the audience exactly what is happening. As well as granting the audience a new role in the watching of cinema, he also opened the floodgates for what could be shown on screen, being somewhat bold and liberal with his prevailing themes of sex and violence. Of course, Hitchcock worked in a world far more heavily dominated by censorship than the cinema of today, but his influence has been invaluable. When Sharon Stone slowly opened her legs in Basic Instinct (1992), revealing her – erm – lack of underwear, she created one of the most infamously erotic scenes of modern cinema. The camera does not shy away from Miss Stone’s vulva; instead, we see exactly what the detectives in the room see, and thus we are just as shocked and uncomfortable as they are.

Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman undoubtedly owes its innovative “eternal” camera techniques to Mr. Hitchcock as well. The camera (and thus the audience) become a inquisitive and curious backstage presence, following the action wherever it leads. Birdman is an example of pure cinematic voyeurism – the camera literally cannot stop watching people for a single moment. It is even scared to blink. We see his influence in the point of view shots of Michael Myers in Halloween (1978), and even the eponymous shark’s beady perspective in Jaws (1975).

Moreover, we must ask if a film as “racy” and explicit as Fifty Shades of Grey could have ever been made without Hitchcock’s audacious smashing down of the barrier between the eyes of the audience and the eye of the camera. There is practically nothing in modern cinema that would now be deemed “unshowable”. The audience – as voyeurs – are trusted with the all-seeing camera lens. To attempt to allude or to hide things from the audience is to patronise them and to be untruthful to the events of the film. It isn’t about showing nudity or violence gratuitously, it’s about trusting the audience with the nature of the material and – moreover – indulging the inherently human fascination with watching other people’s lives, and for that we must unreservedly thank Mr Hitchcock.