Listmania ’11! Miscellaneous Movie Observations: Part Three
Oh blogging. You are the occasional pastime that makes me absurdly unhappy, for the most part. That’s because I don’t do it as often as I would like, and so when I do I over do it and write posts large enough to choke Cthulhu. And this last post in Listmania metastasised as soon as I started complaining about something; griping posts tend to run out of control. Friend of the blog @Beggarsoshat said to me after my Listmania! Crew Contributions post that he looked forward to me listing my favourite dolly grip of 2011, and after I had stopped crying because of how much he had cut me to the core, I wondered if there was maybe something in that. Why not keep spinning this out? I’m scratching my blogging itch even though all I’m doing is lazily transcribing the thoughts I’ve had lying around in my “mind palace” for months anyway.
But how could I? How could I keep talking about last year’s movies when I’d only seen 120 of them? Simple; why not talk about movies released in 2010? People love reading reviews of movies released 14 months ago. I traditionally do this during Listmania! season as an aside in the last post, but as this post had already gone all top heavy, why not post this section on its own without all of the other photo-heavy stuff I had planned on posting (and which will turn up in Listmania ’11: Miscellaneous Movie Observations: Part Four, and probably Five, Six and Seven too)? And so here we are, with a couple of thousand words on three movies that I’m sure only a handful of people have already talked about. After all, the first movie here was a pretty obscure little number.
Best Film(s) From 2010 That We Saw In 2011: True Grit / Tangled
Both of these movies were released in the UK just after SoC finished its last Listmania (which was done a lot quicker and with less baloney than this one, I can tell you), but would have radically changed the state of my Best Movies of ’10 completely. Both would have breached the top ten, with True Grit possibly making it into the hallowed and legendary top five of that year. The Coens were coming off the back of one of their least accessible — but most highly regarded — films with A Serious Man, and True Grit represents one of their “crowdpleasers”, if that’s the right word, as they did with No Country For Old Men and Burn After Reading. This is a slightly different beast, too dramatic to qualify as one of their comedies, but too funny to be a tragedy. It’s the most successful blending of their two different “flavours” to date.
The pleasures of this magnificent Western are numerous, but the best thing about it is the precise dialogue, which evokes the Wild West in a way only David Milch has ever come close to achieving. This poetry — so often evident in their writing but at its most striking here — is matched by the photography by Roger “King” Deakins, who does career best work with shadows and darkness; the night-time ride to save Mattie is one of the most haunting scenes in recent cinema, a dream painted almost solely with black. Hailee Steinfeld shines in her first role, perfectly riding the line between charmingly forward and obnoxiously precocious. I can picture her playing The Hunger Games‘ Katniss Everdeen far more readily than Jennifer Lawrence — an actress I admire but who is too old for the character, as are co-stars Liam Hemsworth and Josh Hutcherson.
She’s matched by Jeff Bridges and Matt Damon, who both have their own balancing acts to do, between humour and drama. While Bridges has the flashier character to work with, Damon has a harder job, playing a dandified and ridiculous ranger LaBeouf who wins over Mattie and the audience despite being an awful blow-hard. Obviously, he succeeds; with each performance SoC realises how lucky we all are to have such a thoughtful, charming actor working today. This is not to take away from Bridges, though, who is as good here as he is in The Big Lebowski. This was already a late-career classic from the Coens, but his vastly entertaining turn pushes True Grit up there with Lebowski, Miller’s Crossing, and A Serious Man.
But I’ve had trouble figuring out whether I love it more than Disney’s Tangled, which so completely fried my brain at IMAX that I became a fervent and boring proselytist for it for months after. If you’re a 3D sceptic, this is the movie to change your mind. Seeing this in 3D, on that vast screen, was a memorable, tear-inducing experience I shall cherish forever. The whole film is great fun and filled with lovable characters (none more so than defiant horse Maximus), but the most memorable scene is also the single greatest use of 3D I’ve ever seen. Being in that room, dwarfed by the vast IMAX screen, was the most immersive cinema experience I’ve ever had. The illusion of being surrounded by floating lanterns was utterly convincing; when I wasn’t distracted by wiping tears from my eyes, that is.
The songs by Alan Menken feature lyrics from his sometime collaborator Glenn Slater; a happier fit than Stephen Schwartz, at least on this small sampling. They’re rich and funny and charming, reminiscent of his best work with the late, much-missed Howard Ashman. They’re the cherry on top of a superbly well-designed movie, that matches its symbolism (the light motif is present throughout) with its story so deftly that I wanted to applaud throughout. I’ll even go so far as to say… ::deep breath:: …I think I like it more than Beauty and the Beast, and I really loved Beauty and the Beast. It’s a triumph for Disney; a thrilling modernisation of their animation technique that pays humble tribute to the studio’s history, and possibly a portent of great things to come. SoC can’t wait to see what comes next.
Worst Film From 2010 That We Saw In 2011: Morning Glory
Until last year it looked like the movie output of Bad Robot Productions was going to be less diverse than their TV division, which has tried (and failed) to tap non-nerd audiences with Six Degrees and What about Brian? It’s worth praising them for adding Morning Glory to a roster that so far contains only sci-fi and spy movies (not counting Joy Ride), but the addition of something this unchallenging makes you wonder if Bad Robot’s other movies are as cynically produced as this. Even with a terrific cast (including Harrison Ford, in his liveliest performance since The Fugitive) and an interesting director, it has an enormous handicap: a rote script by dreaded screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna.
If Michael Bay is a cinematic villain for aiming all of his movies at the same Mountain-Dew-drinking, FHM-absorbing, Call-Of-Duty-playing fratboy demographic, then can we add Brosh McKenna to Hollywood’s rogues gallery for making numerous movies from the same template in which a doofy woman — with work skills so brilliant and yet so poorly depicted that she almost appears to have mystical powers — has trouble finding a man due to a habit of occasionally bursting with an emotion-geyser like all the normal people don’t. So far ABM has churned out 27 Dresses, The Devil Wears Prada, I Don’t Know How She Does It, and now Morning Glory; it’s almost impossible to tell the difference between them as they come tumbling down the conveyor belt like malformed Barbie dolls.
Among its crimes: trying to make us believe that Rachel McAdams’ awkwardness is representative of some large cross-section of the female audience, and that bagging Patrick “Saintly and Uncomplicated Love Interest” Wilson is some kind of victory for these mythical klutzy women; making Diane Keaton rap with 50 Cent in a display of cinematic desperation unmatched by anything else released in the past four years; punishing McAdams by making her run in high heels in almost every scene, which just makes her look like a lunatic with superhumanly strong ankles; inadvertently making Anchorman — a Dada-esque comedy — the superior comment on the treatment of women in the TV industry; setting up Harrison Ford as a villain with the AWFUL crime of criticising McAdams’ fringe/bangs; making me pine for another Bridget Jones sequel just to stop Brosh McKenna from going back to that dried-up well.
Worst of all, it attempts to make a case for breakfast news as something worthwhile, something as necessary as serious investigative journalism. Ford’s Mark Pomeroy is portrayed as a conceited horse’s ass who has a snooty attitude to the fripperies of breakfast TV, objecting to the clowning of Daybreak’s jokiest segments. We’re meant to be excited when he abandons his serious self in order to make a frittata in an effort to magically summon McAdams from her job interview with NBC (because all job interviews are done in the morning while you’re supposed to be at work).
This character moment, which shows what he is willing to sacrifice in order to placate his producer McAdams, softens him — a nice twist on the romcom trope where a romantic interest humbles himself in order to win the girl. And yet no matter what side-effects this final act has, we can’t escape the fact that this is a betrayal of a good point personified by the grizzled old news hound pining for his old career. All the way through the movie he’s right about the importance of investigative journalism, and McAdams is so averse to his philosophy that he has to lie to her to get her to cover the scandal story he’s been trying to tell her about for weeks, and only seems to recognise its value for the sake of plot convenience. And to stop her looking like a complete idiot.
This is similar to the scene in Devil Wears Prada in which Meryl Streep defends fashion from criticisms that it isn’t important. It’s a very well-acted speech by a great actress, but her claims that high fashion is what eventually trickles down to the lowest forms of clothing — that the Cerulean blue she celebrates in haute couture one month becomes the blue that everyone wears later — isn’t really the answer to the question “why should we care about fashion”, because if we weren’t wearing that shade of blue we’d just wear another. What she’s arguing for is the influence of fashion journalism, which is fine, but it’s a bit disingenuous to assume that without Vogue we wouldn’t know how to dress ourselves. Though I will say InStyle is a fine publication (one for @Ms_RH there).
So here we’re meant to swallow the line that breakfast TV is an essential component of the news cycle, that it acts as the “sugar” that sweetens the “fibre” that constitutes news. As if the world isn’t awash with sugar, while fibre is rarely present in our news diet. Anyone who watches, say, BBC Breakfast (which SoC has railed against before), will note that what little serious news is shown inbetween puff pieces and appearances by the magnificently oleaginous Chris DeBurgh is poorly researched, biased, and revealing of the presenters’ poor preparation. Any time the show covers matters of popular culture more racy than Midsomer Murders, or youth issues, will know that this is less fibre, more asbestos.
So to see a movie attempt to make excuses for something inconsequential, when in actual fact it’s salty and challenging investigative journalism that needs to be celebrated, is like hearing the self-defensive and unconvincing justifications of someone caught watching something frowned upon by others — say for example, a cliche-ridden Aline Brosh McKenna movie that sets back gender politics about 20 years. If you want to watch a breakfast show that spends more time covering Al Roker being a clown than it does serious issues, that’s your prerogative. If you want to argue that this is important, do it by making your case, not by belittling serious journalism. And Bad Robot? Stick to what you know best (i.e. lens flares).
Will this ever end? Can I keep this going forever? If not, I’m taking a break from it as soon as Listmania! is finally brought to heel, which will either be by mass reader apathy or a typing coma.
Listmania ’11! Miscellaneous Movie Observations: Part Two
No preamble, nothing worth saying when there’s already almost 5000 words here, but I should stress that I felt bad writing this post due to all the negativity involved. Bear in mind two of the movies I criticise here are films I like and have seen more than once. I just wish they were perfect. Thanks to the folks on Twitter who threw ideas at me while I was writing this; I’ve tried to credit you all, but if I’ve missed anyone off I apologise.
Most Pleasant Surprise of the Year: Real Steel
Though SoC tried to keep an open mind, sometimes it’s so so hard. A boxing movie about robots starring an actor whose recent choices had seemed so wobbly and which was directed by the dictionary definition of the journeyman and featuring a performance by Lost‘s least popular actress some time after she had promised us she was done with all that acting malarkey because she had had such a terrible experience living in Hawaii for six years oh dear. I’ll watch any old SF crap but even this didn’t appeal. It looked like a classic Disney merchandise trawl (well, Dreamworks, but Touchstone distributed it, so you know what I mean), and after enduring the cynical cash-in of Cars 2, I didn’t feel like going through that again.
But reviews were good, Levy had won a spot in our hearts for making the much-rewatched-and-enjoyed Date Night, and friends of the blog seemed to enjoy it, so we put it back on our watchlist, even though the sight of Hugh Jackman teaching a sparring robot how to box in the trailers never failed to reduce Daisyhellcakes to a mess of derisory laughter. Turns out those friends were right, as we were rewarded with an emotionally honest surprise, a family movie unafraid to paint its characters as douchebags who earn their redemption. What had seemed from the trailers to be the kind of toothless thing Disney would once release back when Kurt Russell was a fresh-faced kid was surprisingly hard-nosed.
That’s not to say it’s some gritty drama; it’s about a guy who tries to make a living by pitting his robots against other robots in boxing matches, so we’re already in a weird and unbelievable future world. Nevertheless, protagonist Charlie Kenton is surprisingly unpleasant. He doesn’t give a damn about his son and only agrees to take him on because his step-uncle is going on holiday and doesn’t want him around. He’s also an idiot who takes forever to actually earn any cash, and even then it’s only because his son has a better understanding of the robot boxing world. I doubt Shawn Levy would have pushed Charlie’s sourness so far if he hadn’t got Jackman on board. It’s amazing what he gets away with in the film while still maintaining audience goodwill.
There are some problems with Real Steel, and not just because it’s so implausible and riddled with plot holes (this podcast makes that case very well). It’s certainly too long, lasting over two hours. Large chunks of plot come from two movies by Sylvester Stallone — Rocky and arm-wrestling nonsense Over The Top — with barely any alteration visible. Also Evangeline Lilly’s in it. I mean, how can it be expected to survive all of these problems? And yet it does, because it does two things well; it takes itself seriously, and it treats the fights lightly. As a result, it becomes a genuine crowdpleaser with real emotional charge.
By this I mean it doesn’t make light of the stakes involved. Charlie is on the verge of real trouble throughout, and Jackman’s performance is dark enough that we get a sense that he really will become a broken and lonely old man if something drastic doesn’t happen to change it. The way his fate, the relationship with his son, and the slow climb out of the pit of his self-loathing, is beautifully intertwined with the world of robot boxing in a way that would utterly fail if Charlie’s plight — and what looks like depression — isn’t addressed. Levy does a fine job of bringing Charlie and son Max together in such an organic way that it was only when Real Steel hits the end-of-second-act crisis that I realised how close they had become, how likeable the pairing is, and how much I wanted them to prevail.
It also helps that Levy and writer John Gatins don’t anthropomorphise the robots too much. Though Max bonds with their sparring-bot Atom there is no hint that he has sentience. He really is just an avatar for Charlie, and a symbol of Max and Charlie’s relationship — he’s rescued from a pit by Max and is fixed by Charlie before being taught how to fight, like a father would teach a son. It’s not a subtle metaphor but it’s a powerful one. I won’t lie; there comes a point during the final fight when the link between Charlie and Atom becomes more personal, and Max watches his father overcome his self-doubt, that made me blub the happiest tears I had blubbed in quite a while.
And yet the film doesn’t unbalance itself by making Atom a character with agency, which would turn this into Short Circuit 3. The fights are fun but they’re not treated as if the stakes are about the robots. We’re not meant to fret about what happens to Atom — early in the film we’re disabused of the notion that the robots are anything to sympathise with as Charlie loses two bots in quick and humiliating succession. We’re meant to be concerned about the people involved, and as a result what had looked like a silly robot movie in the publicity becomes one of the best popular movies about familial bonds to be released in a long time.
Other smart choices, such as the decision not to make Hope Davis and James Rebhorn’s aunt and uncle characters into out-and-out villains enhance this air of seriousness. There is more dramatic weight here than expected, at least considering how it was marketed as something inconsequential and cynical for kids who just like robots. Ditch your preconceptions about Real Steel before you watch it — and I do urge you to watch it. If you’re anything like me you’ll find yourself craning forward in your seat during the superbly orchestrated finale, and realise you just lost yourself in a robot boxing movie for a moment and you really just don’t care.
Most Frustrating Movie of the Year: Captain America: The First Avenger
As I said in my review of Thor, Marvel are on a hell of a roll right now. If Avengers is even half as good as everyone hopes, it might be too much for this old nerd to handle. At the beginning of last summer Thor appeared to be the wildcard in Marvel’s deck, with Captain America guaranteed big US box office; at least to pundits who foolishly thought the movie would be gung-ho patriotic nonsense. But Marvel are smarter than that, and its international box office doesn’t reflect the care they put into making it universally appealing. Thor won out, and in the process overshadowed Cap. Maybe other countries were sick of superheroes by that point in the summer season, in which case we can happily add one more thing to the list of Green Lantern‘s crimes.
However, just on the level of its quality as a film, Cap was problematic. Not because it was bad, but because it was almost Marvel’s finest hour. I was horribly conflicted over it, even more so than when watching X-Men: First Class, which squandered its best opportunities before it even got to the screen; a consequence of diluting the potentially amazing Magneto: Nazi Hunter thread with way too much plot. Cap made it to the screen with some brilliance intact but dropped the ball halfway through. Not so much as to ruin the experience completely, but enough to leave me deflated as I walked out of the cinema.
The first half of the movie was fine. Better than fine. Miraculous, even. Until Cap breaks Bucky and the rest of his platoon out of the Red Skull’s factory, I’d argue that Captain America: The First Avenger represents the best thing Marvel has done. Regular readers may recall my common vexation with superhero movies that don’t feature super heroes, merely superpowered people who get into fights with each other. Villainous threats to the public are either ill-defined or non-existent, and often supervillains are only interested in punishing the friends and families of our protagonists; fine on a basic dramatic level, but kinda missing the point of why people like superheroes in the first place.
Captain America, at least in its magnificent first half, might be the primary example of a superhero movie that’s actually about someone who wants to do good. Steve Rogers wants to be a hero more than anything else, and goes through hell to fulfil his dreams. I won’t lie; the sight of Steve Rogers leaping on a grenade and yelling at everyone to run away, or begging Howard Stark’s scientists to finish their experiment on him despite his agony, made me sob happy tears out of my face. There’s very little that stirs me more than pure heroism in movies; in recent times only Kick Ass has revolved around someone who wants to do the right thing no matter the cost.
It gets me right there, and Cap’s sincerity and heroism was exactly what I’ve been waiting for in a superhero movie. It’s also one of the reasons why criticism of Chris Evans’ pitch-perfect work as the titular hero has upset me so much. Critics have complained that he’s boring or muted, apparently not realising that Evans’ portrayal of the quietly heroic Rogers is absolutely spot-on. Longtime fans of the character picked that up immediately, and have quietly noted the silliness of the criticisms; yet more proof, if proof be needed, that mainstream critics are just not qualified to judge this corner of culture.
Evans personifies the stoic righteousness of Captain America, whose sense of duty is as overdeveloped as his muscles, and who takes no pleasure in being a super-soldier. Even though SoC has long been a fan of Evans we fretted that he had too flighty a personality to play someone who is meant to be an inspiration to everyone around him, as Cap is in the comic, and as the country he represents is meant to be to all of the nations in the world. We shouldn’t have doubted. Evans excels as the beacon of hope, virtue and courage. It’s thrilling, terribly underrated work.
That’s not the only success of the first half of the movie. We’re also treated to yet another showstealing turn from Stanley Tucci as Abraham Erskine, whose recognition of Steve’s inherent decency and courage led to even more tears. Tommy Lee Jones and Hayley “Rather Pretty” Atwell were perfectly cast too; great picks by Joe Johnston, who was a perfect choice as director considering his time on fantastical WWII movies Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Rocketeer. The now-traditional Marvel stamp of quality meant every element was an integral part of a greater whole, and an example of gratifying attention to detail, not to mention nods to the comics, like the first shot of Arnim Zola, or the references to Cap’s fight against Hitler. It’s popular moviemaking done right; 100% effort from very smart people.
And then the wheels came off. As soon as Cap is united with Bucky and the Howling Commandos, it all starts to feel a bit hollow. Part of that is the underwhelming villainy of the Red Skull, who spends the first half of the movie growling in labs and the second half getting angry in front of a green screen. Screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely do their best to create a link between Cap and Red Skull by pushing the idea that the Super-Serum enhances a person’s inner self, turning Steve Rogers into the angelic antithesis of Johann Schmidt’s demon. Nevertheless, coming after Thor‘s resonant hero/villain dynamic between Thor and Loki, Cap suffers in comparison.
It doesn’t help that the final act of the movie has little impact and makes so little sense. The threat that the Red Skull poses to the US is barely described, but apparently at the end he’s flying over to the US with some things that do some stuff that won’t be nice. That’s not enough. We needed a demonstration of some kind of Doomsday device, even though we know he has harnessed the power of the Cosmic Cube and even though demonstrations of Doomsday devices in movies are overdone. Even just a quick shot of Red Skull destroying a city would’ve been enough to enhance the tension at the end. Instead we’re not sure what Cap is sacrificing himself for. As for the logistics of that sacrifice, I’ll let this superb video speak for me:
That’s bad enough, but as the movie zips through the war in a lengthy montage, we only get a sense of what Cap meant to the world; a problem as we head toward The Avengers. Apparently that will mostly focus around Cap, so there’s a chance his legacy will make more sense, but as of this moment, we don’t get enough Cap vs Nazis, and certainly not enough of the Howling Commandos. That’s the price we pay for that superb first hour. Minimal Peggy Carter, minimal Dum Dum Dugan and co. If we knew they’d be back in a sequel it wouldn’t feel like we just got shortchanged but how can they return? To have spent so little time with these great characters is like a kind of punishment.
It’s not all bad. That first hour is amazing, and the second hour has numerous pleasures too: quick but heartening glimpses of proactive badass Peggy Carter, Bucky’s “death” (surely a Winter Soldier set-up), a couple of nifty action scenes. Even more pleasing is how this movie acts as the connective tissue for the Marvel universe so far, with Yggdrasil, the Stark Expo and the Super Serum bringing the other movies together; a revisit to Louis Leterrier’s Hulk was far more pleasurable after having seen Captain America.
But it could have been Marvel’s Superman – The Movie. Part of me hopes for a 6-hour directors cut with loads of extra action scenes, and maybe a cameo from Namor, and a scene where the Red Skull’s version of the Afrika Corps is repelled by an African nation with access to incredible technology. But that’s not to be, and until Avengers or Cap 2 comes along to show me what comes next, I’m going to feel a bit deflated when I think of this, and what could — and should — have been.
“Greatest Gulf Between Critical Opinion and the Feelings of SoC” Movies of the Year: Tyrannosaur / Snowtown
After swimming through the grimy water of Innaritu’s Biutiful SoC took the opportunity to have a good old moan about miserabilist movies, that sub-section of cinema that mistakes the skin of the kitchen-sink genre for the meat. The consequence of this error of judgement, other than to present us with an unpleasant flagellatory experience, is to delude the makers into thinking that they are providing some kind of education. This glimpse into horror, they seem to say, will make you a better person. You’ll understand humanity more for seeing how the other half lives. And I shall bask in this glow as a brave chronicler of the lowest circles of our man-made hell.
SoC thinks that this is absolute horseshit. Life can be cruel, no doubt. There are people out there suffering terribly, in lives of quiet desperation, but making movies about this kind of experience is a problematic exercise that can’t honestly capture what a bad life is like. It’s a noble intention, but inescapably patronising, even if the story told is directly analogous to something genuinely experienced. Too often it’s a contrived distillation of the worst of life presented as a real document of what it is to exist in the modern world, and as such is fundamentally dishonest.
Of course all narrative is a mixture of translated truth and opportunistic lies, but this is a different kind of falsehood, one that insults the people who do suffer terribly through lives of squalor and unhappiness. They also represent a negation of the human spirit. Though many of these stories feature some kind of redemption (as Tyrannosaur does to a certain extent, and Precious before it), there’s often a sense that until that moment there is absolutely nothing that makes life worth living. The woes that are heaped on such characters can often reach comical levels of misfortune; the number of vile events that stack up by the end of Tyrannosaur are almost unintentionally funny, if you haven’t bought into it by that point.
I say almost; any possibility of laughing had been smacked out of me by the time writer-director Paddy Considine was done slathering his movie in depressing circumstance, but the crucial thing is that I didn’t buy into his film for even a second. Though I have no idea what this film meant to him, or whether it represents something of his life, it’s curious that he chose to make this as his first project, in much the same way that Gary Oldman and Tim Roth chose to make Nil By Mouth and The War Zone respectively. That’s an odd trilogy of gritty grey misery right there.
Is this penance for living a reasonably lucky life, or guilt over escaping lives of desperation (I know that Oldman wanted to dramatise the effects that alcoholism had on families, after experiencing something similar in his own life)? I’m not about to judge their motives, or the reasoning behind Justin Kurzel and Shaun Grant’s decision to make Snowtown – the dramatisation of Australia’s most notorious serial killing spree – but I will happily say that these movies are oppressively unpleasant for reasons that don’t justify this approach.
I don’t trust Tyrannosaur as a depiction of real life, and I don’t think anything can be learned by picking at the sordid details of John Bunting’s crimes in Snowtown other than to say people who are disenfranchised may say or do unspeakable things. That’s a message that can arguably be justified in terms of fiction – I’d defend Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer or Man Bites Dog, especially as their larger point was to question the complicity of the audience in the violence shown or not shown onscreen – but when it’s something real, a line is crossed.
So can stories about the struggles of the unfortunate, unemployed, unloved working classes be handled at all, if I were to have my way? I’ve got more time for tales of sadness that either tell a story other than “look at how totally shit I’ve imagined life can be”: Andrea Arnold’s three wonderful full-length films trade in some of the tropes of miserabilist cinema but she’s also telling stories about vivid, interesting, mysterious characters, who experience more than just a hundred gallons of bad-luck-bukkake. There is also the matter of her superior artistry, but that’s a viewpoint I don’t really have the vocabulary to explain, and I’m sure someone will have a coherent and convincing argument for Kursel’s washed-out visuals and Considine’s choice of an oxtail-soup palette.
The bitter pill of modern realism can also be sweetened with genre touches: Attack the Block‘s message about the effect of disenfranchisement on modern youth was rendered more powerful by being handled as the metaphorical subtext of a sci-fi horror movie, and the replicants of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner are more memorable for being tragic slaves treated with an exaggerated disdain that the working classes suffer now (“Skinjob” as the next decade’s “Chav”?). John Carpenter’s They Live shone a light on the plight of the homeless in LA in a way that very other few movies have, and its allegorical treatment of the victimisation of the poor by our heartless corporate overlords has struck a chord that very few miserabilist movies ever could.
This diet of glum social commentary, served up like worthy gruel, is no good for you, I’m telling you. It’s sad that these two movies hit me in this way, almost one after the other. Except for good work from Daniel Henshall as the charismatic leader of the murderous gang in Snowtown, and the exceptional, award-worthy performance by Olivia Colman in Tyrannosaur, there was nothing else in either movie to keep me watching once the semi-parodic roll-call of social-realist images began to pour past my eyes like gloopy misery-treacle.
I’m not asking for every movie to be some kind of Chris Tookey-placating floofy feel-good marshmallow, but I’d ask that a work of art at least address that life is a tapestry of feelings, that it’s not all misery (and no, the one happy scene in Tyrannosaur doesn’t count as it’s set during a wake, a choice that made me wonder if Considine was actually taking the piss). As much as I regret that the lives of the poor and weak in the world are under-represented in the media, the thought of them being treated as little more than Dickensian victims to be stared at and pitied is even worse. Arnold gives her characters agency and stories to live within, and Kurzel and (for the most part) Considine don’t.
A lot of folks I know and respect liked one or both of these movies, and I don’t doubt they derived some genuine… well, not pleasure, but inner appreciation for these movies. Let my criticisms here not stand as criticisms of their viewpoint, or dismissal of their criteria for success in a story. But know this; if there was ever a kind of movie that would be SoC’s Kryptonite, these represent the most shocking examples, that sucked the heart out of me and left nothing in its place but a suspicion that I had been duped. I hope I never see even a frame from either of them again.
Movie That Would’ve Found A Place In My Top Ten If It Wasn’t For That Goddamn Third Act: The Adjustment Bureau
Nothing else released this year annoyed me as much as this, George Nolfi’s directorial debut and adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s short story. Nothing else bothered me and niggled at my brain as much as this during 2011. Total abject failures are one thing, and I added those to my worst movies list. Good movies that fall slightly short still have a chance of getting onto my best films list, as seen with the lower-numbered inclusions like Tintin and Kung Fu Panda 2. But this film, which mostly succeeded, just couldn’t find a home. And so it shall be placed here, for me to fawn over and rail against simultaneously.
Romance in sci-fi is often badly handled. Good examples that come to mind include Han and Leia in the Star Wars movies and Deckard and Rachel in Blade Runner. A quick Twitter survey came up with Neo and Trinity (thanks, @ericthehamster), Tom and Izzi in The Fountain and Wall-E / Eve (gracias @cockbongo), Kyle MacLachlan and his own fringe from Dune (cheers @nathanditum), Sean Connery’s red nappy and The Eternals from Zardoz (merci Masticateur), and Bud and Lindsey Brigman in The Abyss (Xie xie, @Cowfields).
Then I was reminded of Eddie and Emily Jessup from Altered States (how could I forget that? Sorry @catvincent), Chris/Kris Kelvin and Rheya/Hari in the two versions of Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris (spasiba, @FilmLandEmpire), Tom Cruise and himself (not sure if the lovely @KitCaless meant Tom in Minority Report or War of the Worlds), Logan and Jessica in Logan’s Run (nicely done, @douglasmillan), and Kyle Reese and Sarah Connor in The Terminator (well picked, @SparklyPaws). All fine choices, and gratefully received.
Mostly, though, if you look at the sheer number of movies made, the memorable choices are pretty limited. And not just in SF. Romcoms of recent years have made a hash of representing actual romantic feelings with any kind of verity. Just shoving a wild-eyed and panicky Katherine Heigl into a movie with some rictus-grinned B-lister does not a relationship make, and so whenever a film comes along that features any kind of chemistry between the leads, it’s worth beating a path to see it.
In recent years I can only think of Mila Kunis paired with Justin Timberlake in Friends With Benefits and Jason Segal in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and Drew Barrymore paired with Justin Long in Going The Distance and Hugh Grant in Music and Lyrics, as truly convincing partnerships between people who seem to enjoy each other’s company. The stakes in these movies mean something because we want these guys to stay together. I’ve haven’t cared if J-Lo gets together with the male lead in a movie since Out of Sight, and I doubt I ever will again.
Which is why The Adjustment Bureau has stayed in my head all year. The relationship between David Norris (Matt Damon) and Elise Sellas (Emily Blunt) is arguably the most convincing and endearing love match in a movie for years. Blunt’s natural energy and Damon’s easy charm combine to create a pairing that seems perfect. George Nolfi has to be congratulated for bringing these two together, and for letting Blunt go wild with her off-kilter charm. It’s been a miserable experience watching almost every director squander her charisma. Adjustment Bureau deserved a place on SoC’s best movies list just for giving us that burst of unfiltered Blunt. (For the record, I’ll happily admit that I’m a chronic Bluntman. So keep that in mind.)
By placing that easy, funny and flirtatious relationship at the heart of his SF paranoia tale, Nolfi is already streets ahead of most other filmmakers, as the stakes instantly become raised. After years of waiting for a really likeable pair to show up onscreen, the thought of them not getting together is genuinely troubling. We root for them as Nolfi cleverly casts his Dickian tale as a parable for all thwarted relationships. A lot of people watching will have had a “What if…” romance in their past, and by casting those past failures as a matter of cosmic significance, Nolfi flatters the audience and reinterprets our past dalliances as mistakes erased by God.
It’s such a versatile idea that it should have become a universally accepted trope, like the Deja Vu explanation in The Matrix. Nolfi even goes so far as to draw parallels between political spin and the micromanagement of the Bureau; a nice little touch. However, even though Nolfi creates two thirds of a brilliant, affecting movie from Dick’s original idea, there’s nowhere to go by the end, no way for our heroes to resolve the situation, which sees them kept apart through divine intervention. Nolfi tries to fix this problem by giving David and Elise a real corporeal threat in the form of Thompson (menacing Terence Stamp), but there’s no way for them to combat that without the help of Mitchell (Anthony Mackie, fantastic as ever), who gives David a chance to do something.
Unfortunately, that “something” would see their lives ruined; his intervention, though inspired by his frustration with the Adjustment system, doesn’t really have an endgame. David’s final gamble should have seen him lobotomised. No one can predict that it would turn out okay but it does, with a very literal deus ex machina. It’s such a monumental cheat that it undoes all of the good work previously done by Nolfi. It also doesn’t help that there is a long scene of Mitchell prepping David for his plan, but in the end David just ignores it; obviously this was to give him more agency in the final minutes, but it also wastes our time.
And what else does the ending give us? A lot of running. There’s no other way to finish the story so Nolfi just makes our heroes run around a lot, but he hasn’t figured out a way to visualise the supernatural threat, or where they are spatially. The door-jumping technology is cleverly used earlier in the movie; John Slattery’s frustration with the tangle of subspace jumps through downtown is a lovely light touch that helps the audience look past the reality-bending confusion of Nolfi’s conceit, but in the third act there’s no sense of menace or danger. It’s just running and running and running. Maybe if Nolfi added some kind of abstract visualisation of the labyrinth of doors and subspace jumps, it might have worked. Instead all of the tension created by that point evaporates.
As for that menace, it has to come at the expense of the good-natured air in the first half. Richardson, so well-played by as the perpetually annoyed John Slattery, is such a fun antagonist that it’s a huge loss when he gets sidelined. I understand that the threat needed to be amped up after David and Elise hook up for the third time, but to lose such a richly developed character is a crime. Once he’s sidelined and the chirpy, good-natured air of the first two-thirds is replaced by a necessary but unavoidably grumpy earnestness, my enthusiasm for the film began to wilt, and by the end, when a magic wand is waved and everything turns out okay, I was done.
Does this movie deserve to be pilloried the way it was by some mainstream critics? Absolutely not. Does it deserve to be complained about by a shlub like me with a very narrowly-defined sense of what constitutes a success? Of course! Don’t get me wrong, I certainly don’t think the movie counts as a failure at all. It’s a not-success, and that’s arguably worse. If it had stuck the landing this could have been a huge commercial and critical hit, and could live on beyond 2011 as an ingenious allegory for romantic strife. That it didn’t is a crying shame. Nevertheless, it remains essential viewing. Anyone considering making a romantic drama or comedy in the future should be forced to watch this first. It may fall short of greatness, but its representation of love between David and Elise should become the benchmark for movie romance. For that, I’m eternally grateful to all involved.
“Is it over?” begs the reader. But no, I’m still not done. 
Listmania ’11! Miscellaneous Movie Observations: Part One
Here’s my hasty explanation for this gargantuan post: I had originally meant to write quick capsule reviews of a few films that stood out this year, but the words, the words they kept coming, you see, and I couldn’t stop them, no matter how hard I tried. This is why I should blog more often. It’s a boil I should lance, a radiator I should bleed, but instead I just save it all up for the end of the year like an idiot who doesn’t understand his audience. I’m so sorry for using up all of the words. I had to, though, because these two movies prompted a lot of pondering, for good reasons and really really really bad ones. As a result, this part of Listmania, which has been a two-parter in years past, will now be a three-parter. Blame Rod Lurie.
Best Remake: Footloose
It was sad to see Craig Brewer’s Twitter timeline in the weeks before his remake of Footloose was released. For the majority of that period, he just retweeted people aiming baffling levels of rage at him for daring to remake what must, if they were to be believed, have been a modern classic of American cinema on a par with The Godfather and The Last Picture Show. “Another remake?” they asked en masse. “Hollywood has run out of ideas. Fuck this movie.” And yet Mr. Brewer continued to RT these negative opinions, interspersing them with the one or two tweets of praise from folks who saw preview screenings and enjoyed his work.
At this point I still hadn’t seen all of Footloose, but I knew that Chris Penn danced in it, Kevin Bacon looked like a 40-year old high school student, and the final scene in which the teenagers of Bomont danced at their prom was bafflingly directed by Herbert Ross so that you could barely see what was going on. I probably wouldn’t have ever watched it if it wasn’t for a strange confluence of events; namely the presence of Craig Brewer as director and co-writer (SoC is a fan of Mr. Brewer’s previous movies and TV work), and Daisyhellcakes’ enthusiasm for dancing.
The return of So You Think You Can Dance (US, not the miserable UK version) is a cause for celebration in one half of this household, but I’ve started to be pulled into watching it due to the obvious expertise of the contestants and the fair-minded assessments of the judging panel; a rarity in most reality TV, which has less interest in actual talent and a greater focus on spectacle and entertainment. Also a key factor were numerous rewatches of Step Up 3; 25th on last year’s Listmania: Worst Films list and yet I’ve seen it more times than about 90% of the Best Films entries.
So I watched the original Footloose as preparation, and was mostly unimpressed. The cast were game, with special mention to Penn, Dianne Wiest and the simply amazing John Lithgow, but it was flabbily-paced, and the relationship between Lithgow’s preacher and his daughter (Lori Singer) was overblown, not helped by the gulf in acting ability between the two of them. If it wasn’t for the wonderfully empathic work of Lithgow — who often seems to have wandered in from a different, better movie — I don’t think it would have any spark at all, and would only be remembered for the kitsch elements.
Thankfully Brewer gets that. Ross’ movie could have done with some subtlety, as shown by this far superior remake, which manages to amp up the energy of the original while dialling back the melodrama. A lot of its success is down to Brewer’s feel for Southern life, as shown in Hustle and Flow and Black Snake Moan. A New Yorker like Ross would never really be able to understand that kind of life in the bone-deep way that Brewer does, though he makes a good fist of it. Footloose ’11 feels more honest and raw even while it has a glossier sheen, thanks to the vibrant photography of Amelia Vincent.
Brewer’s movie is also raunchier, but then what do you expect from the man who filmed this brazenly filthy musical moment? The preacher character in both versions wants drinking and dancing and general carousing banned in Bomont in order to prevent another tragedy like the car crash that killed his son, but the dancing ban also “prevents” the sexualisation of teenagers so feared by parents. However, in Ross’ version the dancing is so tame and sexless that it makes the argument completely one-sided. When you see nerds frugging ineptly (though admittedly realistically) the message from Rev. Shaw Moore seems out-of-place. When you see Kenny Wormald bumping up against Julianne Hough in the remake, you know Moore is onto something, and that makes the fight to rescind the dancing ban more interesting, and the eventual victory fully earned.
It’s not Brewer trying to amp up the sexuality of the original in order to appeal to a modern palate, though. He gets what made the original work, and keeps those shining moments while fixing the stuff that misfired. In Footloose ’84 Ren (Bacon) relocates with his mother to Bomont to live with his aunt and uncle, who don’t really understand him or treat him well. Brewer changes this subtly; Ren is orphaned after his single mother dies, and finds a happier home with aunt and uncle (a Deadwood reunion for Kim Dickens and Ray McKinnon). Lessening the familial drama here paradoxically makes the rest of the drama work better. The effect of Ren’s rebellion on his now-sympathetic relatives — who find themselves treated as complicit in his campaign — heightens the stakes.
It also serves to create a connection between Ren and Rev. Moore, who have both suffered bereavement. One of the best things about Ross’ movie — and Lithgow’s performance — is that the conflict between the two main characters is so low-key, and the same thing happens here, but this little enhancement by Brewer really makes that muted antagonism, which morphs into respect, so much more affecting. It also makes up for the less compelling performance from Dennis Quaid. No knock on the guy; he’s very good here, and it’s great to see him cast in a real movie instead of guff like Legion and G.I. Joe, but he’s following in some pretty big footsteps.
One dramatic change in the remake paid unexpected dividends that I didn’t fully realise when I first saw it. Footloose ’84 features a scene in which Moore finds out the principal of the local school is burning books that he feels have a corruptive influence. This comes just as his daughter Ariel’s rejection of him reaches its sad zenith. Realising his attempts to protect the children of Bomont have gone too far, Moore’s enthusiasm for his ban is dented, and though Ren’s campaign to change the law’s of Bomont fails, the reverend “blesses” the prom and its dancing.
In the remake the book-burning is removed, and it’s more clearly shown that Moore’s endorsement of the prom is a sign of his recovery from his grief — a moment that is enhanced by Brewer’s choice to show the crash that inspires the ban. Moore’s sadness is a big element of the original, but the catharsis of his final speech doesn’t hit as hard when diluted by the bookburning. Though an atheist such as myself might appreciate a popular movie depicting a rejection of fundamentalism by a moderate preacher, this change is definitely for the best, narratively speaking. Moore grows past his loss, and his acceptance of Ariel is more meaningful.
I could go on listing all of the things Brewer does right. It’s easier just to say this; remakes don’t have to be cynical cash-ins. With the right filmmaker onboard, you can turn something familiar and underpowered into something fresh, something relevant, something that purrs like an engine. By tinkering with the plot, giving the story more focus, adding elements such as the different racial make-up of the new town — thus adding a new source of tension without distorting or overwhelming the plot — and polishing everything else until it really shines, you have a remake that renders the original surplus to requirements.
The leads are terrific, the dancing is thrilling, the music is eclectic but apt, and the cast is filled with dependable character actors and soon-to-be-stars — here I’m thinking of Miles Teller, who takes over from Chris Penn and delivers one of the year’s most entertaining performances. Footloose ’11 seemed to be ignored by most filmgoers, which is a crying shame. Even if you think a remake is an insult to the original, it’s worth giving this hugely entertaining crowdpleaser a try. It’s the definitive Footloose. Sorry, Kevin Bacon.
Worst Remake: Straw Dogs
Sam Peckinpah’s controversial thriller exploring the curse of masculine urges and the darkest consequences of territoriality might be the most profound and disturbing film of his short career. A very recent rewatch confirmed my feelings from my first experience of it, that it gets at the worst things about being a man in a patriarchal society; the relentless one-upmanship, the victimisation and dismissal of women and distrust of femininity in general, the malevolent urge to escalate conflict.
Straw Dogs is one of the very few movies that honestly portrays the cruel consequences of machismo, that distortion of masculine energy that ruins everything, turning normal people into psychopaths. Peckinpah was obviously troubled by his own impulses, if the excellent biography by ST:DS9 / Battlestar Galactica writer David Weddle is anything to go by. Straw Dogs was his best attempt at working through his heart of darkness, and spoke to me more about the effect of Alpha males on their fellow men more than any other work, except maybe Fight Club or A History of Violence.
I feared Rod Lurie’s remake would break completely that, but he keeps more of Peckinpah’s clever original than I thought he would. Co-protagonist David still exercises with an “effeminate” skipping rope, his relationship with wife Amy is still fractious (though less so, and with less childish acting-out by Amy), and the politics of small-town life is still dramatised well. However its the incomplete aping of Peckinpah’s original that sinks the remake as much as the differences, betraying that personal vision and eventually turning it into what the original version was described as by many critics; a celebration of violence as a way to resolve conflict.
Lurie’s version keeps the idea of the wimpy intellectual coming into conflict with the macho Alpha males of a new town, but transposes this to the US, meaning this David (played by SoC favourite James Marsden, and hereby referred to as MarsDavid) is still aware of the customs of the Southern town his wife comes from. The original David (played by Dustin Hoffman; let’s call him DustDavid) is a total stranger in a strange land, which contributes to his unease. MarsDavid doesn’t feel the same disconnect; the strife between a city boy and a country dweller in the modern US doesn’t have the same oomph as DustDavid being in a land as alien to an American as Cornwall in the 70s.
MarsDavid and his wife Amy (Kate Bosworth; BosAmy) are depicted as being in love, with tensions between them growing as the movie progresses. DustDavid and Amy (Susan George; GeorgeAmy) are almost immediately at odds with each other, passive-aggressively sniping at each other in scenes that are sometimes taken word for word from Peckinpah’s movie but with the tetchy subtext removed. That snippiness in Peckinpah’s original is necessary to power GeorgeAmy’s attraction to her former lover Charlie. She’s still drawn to the man even though she loves DustDavid, and her feelings only strengthen as her relationship with DustDavid deteriorates.
This leads to the controversial rape scene, where she is seen to be torn between understandable horror and unexpected acceptance of the act. Charlie is, of course, 100% in the wrong, and it’s obvious that GeorgeAmy is upset by the event, but she is conflicted due to her feelings about the man. It’s a difficult scene to watch, and even more difficult (if not impossible) to defend, but at least in this dreadful moment there is something going on in her head. I’m not sure it counts as agency, but she’s more than a victim, is a complicated human being, until Charlie’s friend Norman appears and takes the scene into even darker territory, which also serves to alter the relationship between the two guilty men.
In the remake, we see BosAmy rejecting Charlie from the very beginning. She doesn’t warm to him at all, which means the fracturing of her relationship with MarsDavid serves no real purpose. When the rape happens it looks as if there will be no ambiguity there, that she is utterly opposed to the violent act, but then Charlie — here depicted as a shirtless buff hottie, bringing new variables about objectification into the equation — asks if she wants him to stop and she hesitates.
With no real set-up or build to that moment, the effect is to be far more offensive than Peckinpah’s original, if that’s possible. Without the obvious chemistry between the two, and no previous shading to the character, BosAmy’s moment of doubt legitimises the “women secretly want to be raped” argument. I just can’t imagine what Lurie thought he was doing. Did he think this choice made the scene less problematic? He then holds back from depicting the second rape in as graphic a way as Peckinpah did, compounding the problem by leaving us a mental image of the earlier, less violent act. It’s a monstrous miscalculation.
The end of the movie shows where Lurie was probably heading. In Peckinpah’s original, GeorgeAmy is traumatised by this act but never tells DustDavid about it. This means the final siege takes on a different meaning. Charlie, Norman, and the rest of the vile gang accidentally shoot the magistrate of the town before attempting to kill our protagonists to get at simpleton Henry, and DustDavid — who has fled America to avoid having to take a moral stand over the Vietnam war — becomes a killing machine to defend his house.
He’s not defending his wife’s honour, and it has been argued that his motivation in protecting Henry is to provoke his tormentors, allowing him to finally strike back. All he wants to do is kill, and there’s no glory in this, no higher purpose. Peckinpah, through his surrogate David, is expressing his fear of losing control, of becoming a murderous agent. It’s a critique of that male impulse for destruction and dominance; Hoffman plays David as a man who has turned a terrible corner, deriving a ghoulish glee from his actions. This is not a celebration of violence, and those who think it is have missed the point.
Lurie instead escalates the threat to MarsDavid and his home in a much shorter time, removing any hope of debate or escape. The gang become dangerous very quickly, with James Woods’ Coach Hadden intentionally killing the Sheriff in front of MarsDavid. This triggers a descent into violent retribution that’s sudden and borne as much out of necessity as male impulse. It might have worked if Lurie had been as interested as Peckinpah in exploring the subject, but the almost comical framing of MarsDavid — small in the frame with his face surrounded by either male torsos, arms, and groins with phallic beer bottles pointing out — is all we get.
Peckinpah’s film was soaked in machismo and commentary on male insecurities. Almost every shot and line strengthens the feeling that DustDavid feels emasculated by the power of the Alpha males, but Lurie has less time for this, and the finale is thus blunted. Even worse, BosAmy is an active participant in the finale, which turns a treatise on male violence into a mere revenge story. Don’t get me wrong, the sight of Kate Bosworth blasting her assailant with a shotgun has some power, some kind of basic balancing of the narrative scale, but for the first time ever in the history of storytelling, giving the female protagonist more to do makes a story less interesting and more conventional than a story in which the female character is sidelined.
The complexity of GeorgeAmy in the original remains until the end, when she calls out to Charlie and not Dust David for help, and later hesitates before saving DustDavid from a final attack. This can be read a number of different ways. BosAmy is just out to kill her attacker; she (and her husband, who then finds out about the rape) has nothing on her mind except revenge. It pains me to say it as I’m thoroughly sick and tired of seeing female characters shortchanged by not being given enough to do; this is a timely point considering the release of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (which regrettably depicts the abhorrent rape of Lisbeth Salander, a character otherwise wonderfully pro-active and dynamic) and Steven Moffat’s recent controversial imagining of the character of Irene Adler in Sherlock.
Peckinpah’s critical examination of the crimes of men is something that has very rarely been done with such anger, and to do that he had to give his female characters less to do or to treat them in a dismissive way that gave him room to make his argument that masculinity is a destructive force. It’s regrettable, but in its most vital moments, Straw Dogs ’71 feels like the raging Tasmanian-Devil-whirl of a man flagellating himself, and a consequence of that raging introspection is that women are sidelined or presented as a baffling threat to his masculinity. We may not like it, and for good reason, but Peckinpah is at least honest enough to present that for us to accept or reject as we see fit. Michael Bay — whose female characters are mere lust objects — would never look into himself long enough to realise that he’s part of the problem.
Lurie’s remake goes in a more conventional direction than Peckinpah’s, diluting that story into little more than another I Spit On Your Grave. I’m glad BosAmy gets to exorcise herself of the trauma she endured, but her cathartic destruction of her assailant is nothing we haven’t seen before, and represents another example of that miserable trope Rape And Revenge, where a woman becomes an agent only once she has been horribly violated. This is something that Drew McWeeny was railing against recently, and prompted a discussion about the overuse of this most awful of plots. It’s as if no one can imagine a woman being prompted to take drastic action unless she’s sexually assaulted first; anything less than that and she’s just being “ambitious” and we don’t like that, eh? ::Insert angry emoticon here::
Lurie has removed enough character detail from Peckinpah’s version to make a hollow facsimile, a rote action movie that sees violence as the answer to our problems, not the cause of our psychic pain. I could accept this as the consequence of hesitancy on his part, but I suspect he doesn’t understand the original, and has no interest in giving the story any dimension other than to provide rousing violent moments for us and the characters and then to cheekily pretend that this has damaged their souls in some way.
There are numerous details in the original that enrich or strengthen Peckinpah’s personal vision; his distrust of women is revealed in the fact that GeorgeAmy buys a man-trap for their home (geddit?), whereas in Lurie’s film the trap — now referred to throughout as a bear-trap — is just sitting around to be used as a mere weapon, stripped of its allegorical weight. He might have removed a clumsy and unpleasant metaphor, but he also loses the point of including the trap in the first place. He’s using the iconography of the first without wanting to bring in any themes that would complicate his vision.
And what about MarsDavid’s vocation? DustDavid is a mathematician, someone who lives in the mind and is thus perceived as feminine by the Alpha males, which obviously bothers him to the point that he happily abandons his anger at them when they suggest they go hunting, as it allows him to feel like part of the pack. MarsDavid is a screenwriter from LA who is writing a movie about the WWII battle in Stalingrad, and who is so repulsed by the pack that he resists the call to hunt until he thinks it will allow him to find out if they killed BosAmy’s cat.
Peckinpah’s David is a man of the mind who cannot resist the pull of macho pursuits; a perfect depiction of the war that raged within the filmmaker. Did Lurie make David a screenwriter as an autobiographical touch? If so then the co-opting of Peckinpah’s (and co-writer David Zelag Goodman’s) dialogue, plotting and imagery is especially cheeky. This is not a personal movie for Lurie. He’s living someone else’s life. Of course it might be that Lurie thought that this was a clever way to set up conflict between MarsDavid and the pack, by modernising the intellectual /macho man divide (because apparently there are no mathematicians any more, only Hollywood writers), which is the generous interpretation.
The less generous interpretation is that he thinks he’s making a movie that satirises the violence in modern movies, like he’s suddenly Michael Haneke. If so, the alterations to Peckinpah’s original are doubly stupid, considering the catharsis of the finale. It’s especially galling as he could have made a timely movie about the Red State / Blue State divide in America, which is alluded to in the movie without ever going too far. All he had to do was make David a screenwriter (or playwright, as Daisyhellcakes cleverly pointed out; that’s perceived as being even less masculine a profession than screenwriter) from New York making a movie about the American Civil War.
Instantly the movie is transformed, but Lurie is obviously not interested in making something that works on a number of levels, as Peckinpah did with a movie that used the Vietnam war and the US protests as basis for so much of his movie’s drama. And this is the most damning thing I can say about this misguided remake; this year Kevin Smith managed to make a movie about the Red State / Blue State divide, but Rod Lurie didn’t. Outdone by Kevin Smith. That’s gotta hurt.
Yet more to come. Not about remakes, though. You can relax.
Listmania ’11: Crew Contributions Of The Year
Ever more aware that this is taking way too long, I shall keep this short but sweet, and note that yes, I am indeed posting something while websites with far fewer hits than me (such as Wikipedia and Google) are protesting the evils of SOPA/PIPA with a blackout. Part of me feels like a scab crossing a picket line but then I think to myself no, I have to do this. I have to tell the world just how much I loved the costume design on Conan the Barbarian. The world needs this information. Without it, however would our civilisation cope? This is the kind of thing that the internet was invented for. Seriously! Tim Berners-Lee was just saying the other day how glad he was that he had the chance to read what I said about Green Lantern, though he seemed disappointed that I wasn’t as enthusiastic as he was about Mark Strong’s interpretation of Sinestro.*
Besides, if Congress goes ahead with its plan to give itself the power to censor great swathes of the internet in order to prevent citizen activism during times of social strife which are probably around the corner… erm, I mean, combat the ev0l of piracy, obvs… then I’d better get this shit up now because most of this post is made up of publicity photos and clips from YouTube and I’ll have to “police” myself in future to make sure none of this stuff ever appears again. Thanks for ruining the best thing in the world, Overlords. Like you haven’t done enough damage already.
DOWN WITH SOPA! DOWN WITH PIPA!
* This is a lie. He wasn’t crazy about Strong really.
Best Director: David Cronenberg – A Dangerous Method
Honorable Mentions:
Andrea Arnold – Wuthering Heights
Steve McQueen – Shame
Lars Von Trier – Melancholia
Jeff Nichols – Take Shelter
Asghar Farhadi - A Separation
Best Directorial Debut: Joe Cornish – Attack The Block
Honorable Mention: Sean Durkin – Martha Marcy May Marlene
Best Screenplay: Asghar Farhadi – A Separation
Honorable Mentions:
Kenneth Lonergan – Margaret
Christopher Hampton – A Dangerous Method
Scott Z. Burns – Contagion
Bridget O’Connor / Peter Straughan - Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
John Logan / Gore Verbinski / James Ward Byrkit – Rango
Best Cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezki – The Tree of Life
Honorable Mentions:
Robbie Ryan – Wuthering Heights
Anthony Dod Mantle - The Eagle
Sean Bobbitt – Shame
Amelia Vincent – Footloose
Rodrigo Prieto – Water For Elephants
Best Digital Photography: Roger Deakins – Rango
Best 3D Photography: Robert Richardson – Hugo
Best Editing: Paul Hirsch – Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol
Best Soundtrack: Cécile Corbel – Arrietty
Honorable Mentions:
Hans Zimmer - Rango
Harry Escott – Shame
John Powell / Hans Zimmer – Kung Fu Panda 2
Cliff Martinez – Drive
Michael Giacchino – Super 8
Best Original Song: Star Spangled Man (Alan Menken / David Zippel) – Captain America: The First Avenger
Best Costume Design: Eiko Ishioka – Immortals
Honorable Mentions:
Alexandra Byrne – Thor
Wendy Partridge - Conan The Barbarian
Anna B. Sheppard - Captain America: The First Avenger
Paco Delgado / Jean Paul Gaultier – The Skin I Live In
Trish Summerville – The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
Best Visual Effects: Digital Domain, ILM, Legend 3D and many many more - Transformers: Dark of the Moon
Honorable Mentions:
Modus FX, Tippett Studio, Scanline VFX and again, many more – Immortals
Prime Focus, Animal Logic, Pixomondo and… you know what I’m going to say – Sucker Punch
ILM, Hammerhead, Entity FX, and dear God, how many FX houses are there in the world? - I Am Number Four
Digital Domain, Buf Studios, Stereo D, etc. etc. etc. sorry guys – Thor
Douglas Trumbull, Prime Focus, Double Negative, but mostly hey check it out, it’s Doug Trumbull! – The Tree of Life
Best Sound Design: Nicolas Becker – Wuthering Heights
Honorable Mentions:
Erik Aahdahl / Ethan Van der Ryn – Transformers: Dark of the Moon
Koji Kasamatsu – Arrietty
Oliver Tarney / Mark Taylor – Sherlock Homes: A Game of Shadows
Ren Klyce - The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
Peter Miller / Adam Kopald – J.R. Grubbs / Addison Teague – Rango
Best Production Design / Art Direction: Dante Ferretti – Hugo
Honorable Mentions:
Mark “Crash” McCreery – Rango
Bo Welch / Maya Shimoguchi – Thor
Chris August – Conan The Barbarian
Scott Chambliss / Christopher Burian-Mohr / Daniel T. Dorrance - Cowboys and Aliens
Tom Foden / Michele Laliberte - Immortals
Worst Director: Paul Johansson - Atlas Shrugged: Part I
Dishonorable Mentions:
Madonna – W.E.
Rob Marshall – Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides
Lone Scherfig - One Day
Paul W.S. Anderson – The Three Musketeers
Ivan Reitman – No Strings Attached
Worst Screenplay: Madonna and Alex Keshishian – W.E.
Dishonorable Mentions:
John Aglioloro / Brian Patrick O’Toole – Atlas Shrugged Part I
David Nicholls – One Day
Elizabeth Meriweather / Michael Samonek - No Strings Attached
Jason Lew - Restless
Tom Hanks / Nia Vardalos – Larry Crowne
Worst Cinematography: Dion Beebe – Green Lantern
Dishonorable Mentions:
Hagen Bogdanski – W.E.
John Mathieson – X-Men: First Class
Masanobu Takayanagi – Warrior
Adriano Goldman – 360
Ross Berryman – Atlas Shrugged Part 1
Worst Editing: Danny Tull – W.E.
Still more to come even after all of this excessive listmaking. Hey, I can’t help it if I don’t get a chance to write for the rest of the year. There was a huge build-up of opinion inside me and this is the slow release, like air leaking out of a zeppelin.
Listmania ’11: Performances Of The Year
Yet again my blogging schedule is thrown into disarray by what can only be described as a waking coma. A combination of night work, lack of sleep due to warring cats, and god know what else — probably some hex cast on me by some anti-blogging warlock — meant that last week I felt like I was trapped under a fog of confusion as thick as the thickest Greek yogurt. I’m not fully out of it yet, so this prologue might become a little off-kilter. Please bear with the blog until normal services are restored.
Not really much to say about this post other than that I’m watching a recording of the Golden Globes and seriously, this blog is more composed than this goddamn mess. It’s an uncomfortable experience made even more hard to bear by the fact that we’re watching it on the UK’s E! channel which has bleeped out every vaguely risque comment or mention of a product, thus rendering it unintelligible. Also in our favour; SoC hasn’t spent all year talking about last year’s Listmania as if it was easily the most shocking and daring blogpost of the year, and how we don’t care about the controversy it caused, and holy shit wait until you see what shocking jokes we’ve got in store for you this year; a build-up somewhat ruined by being followed with a couple of Kim Kardashian jokes.
No. We’ll be honest. This is merely a blogpost, one of millions. And yet we have our integrity, and our annual awards for Sam Rockwell and Michael Sheen, no appearances by Sofia Vergara’s Voice, and no awards for The Iron Lady. That, somehow, is enough. Please enjoy, and imagine them being read out in the voice of a slightly tipsy Ricky Gervais, punctuated by some cozy jokes about Johnny Depp and that faux-sneering thing he does to make out that he doesn’t really worship the people he is mocking (with, I’ll admit it, a bit of skill). The atheism is also implied.
Best Performance by an Actress: Tilda Swinton – We Need To Talk About Kevin
Honorable Mentions:
Anna Paquin – Margaret
Olivia Colman – Tyrannosaur
Jessica Chastain – Take Shelter
Carey Mulligan – Shame
Kirsten Dunst – Melancholia
Best Performance by an Actor: Michael Fassbender – Shame
Honorable Mentions:
Michael Shannon – Take Shelter
Gary Oldman – Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
Jean Dujardin - The Artist
Brendan Gleeson – The Guard
Woody Harrelson – Rampart
Best Supporting Performance by an Actress: Charlotte Gainsbourg – Melancholia
Honorable Mentions:
Jennifer Lawrence – X-Men: First Class
Anna Kendrick – 50/50
Ellen Page – Super
Déborah François – The Monk
Emily Mortimer – Our Idiot Brother
Best Supporting Performance by an Actor: Christopher Plummer – Beginners
Honorable Mentions:
Benedict Cumberbatch – Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
Sir Ben Kingsley – Hugo
John C. Reilly – Terri
Albert Brooks – Drive
Don Cheadle - The Guard
Best Individual Voice Work: Johnny Depp – Rango
Best Voice Cast/Direction: Rango
Breakthrough Performance by an Actress: Elizabeth Olsen - Martha Marcy May Marlene
Breakthrough Performance by an Actor: John Boyega - Attack The Block
Best Career Moves of the Year (Actress): Jessica Chastain - The Tree of Life / Take Shelter / The Help / The Debt / Texas Killing Fields / Coriolanus
Honorable Mention: Carey Mulligan - Drive / Shame
Best Career Moves of the Year (Actor): Michael Fassbender - Shame / Jane Eyre / X-Men: First Class / A Dangerous Method
Honorable Mention: Ryan Gosling - Drive / The Ides of March / Crazy, Stupid, Love
“See? I Told You He Could Act” Performances of the Year: Matthew McConaughey - The Lincoln Lawyer / Bernie
“Wow, He Actually Can Act?” Performance of the Year: Jake Gyllenhaal - Source Code
“My God, I’m Even Angrier About The Uselessness Of Gilmore Girls Now Because You Deserve So Much Better Than The Bog-Standard ‘Pathetic Best Friend Of The Protagonist Who Is Only There To Make Her Look Better’ Stereotype And Look What Happens When You Get A Chance To Let Your Freak Flag Fly” Performance of the Year: Melissa McCarthy - Bridesmaids
“Dude, Where Have You Been? This Is The Best Thing You’ve Done In Ages. Oh Man, I Really Missed You, You Know. Jesus, X: Men Origins: Wolverine Sucked, But I’ve Got No Hard Feelings And This Kind of Commitment To Your Craft — Enhanced By Your Effortless Charm — Is Why We’ll Always Have A Place For You In Our Hearts” Performance of the Year: Hugh Jackman - Real Steel
Scenestealing Actress of the Year: Kat Dennings - Thor
Scenestealing Actor of the Year: Stanley Tucci - Captain America: The First Avenger
Most Wasted Actress: Robin Wright - Rampart / Moneyball / The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
Most Wasted Actor: Walton Goggins - Straw Dogs / Cowboys and Aliens
Most Fearless Performance of the Year: Keira Knightley – A Dangerous Method
“Look, Can We Just Stop Acting Like He’s Some Anonymous Beefcake And Accept He’s Got Smarts And Range On Top Of His Looks And Is Actually A Very Charming, Committed and Talented Actor, FFS” Performances of the Year: Chris Evans - Captain America: The First Avenger / Puncture / What’s Your Number?
Best Cameo: James Franco - The Green Hornet
“Holy Shit, You’re Seriously Scaring The Bejesus Out Of Me” Performance of the Year: Pollyanna McIntosh - The Woman
“Please Let Him Become A Huge Star And Use His Clout To Bring Friday Night Lights To The Big Screen” Performance of the Year: Kyle Chandler - Super 8
“I Bet All Those Critics Who Used To Think You Were Nothing But A Pretty Boy Feel Real Stupid Now” Performances of the Year: Brad Pitt – The Tree of Life / Moneyball
“Now Can You Please Do Me The Favour Of Shutting The Fuck Up, Assorted Whiners Hiding At The Bottom Of The Internet Like The Tiresome Trolls You Are?” Performances of the Year: Kristen Wiig – Paul / Bridesmaids
Worst Performance by an Actress: Cate Blanchett – Hanna
Dishonorable Mentions:
Natalie Portman – No Strings Attached
Milla Jovovich – The Three Musketeers
Taylor Schilling - Atlas Shrugged: Part I
Julia Roberts – Larry Crowne
Blake Lively – Green Lantern
Worst Performance by an Actor: Jim Sturgess – One Day
Dishonorable Mentions:
Colin O’Donoghue - The Rite
Paul Rudd – How Do You Know
Ashton Kutcher – No Strings Attached
Henry Hopper – Restless
Grant Bowler – Atlas Shrugged: Part I
Worst Supporting Performance by an Actress: January Jones – Unknown
Dishonorable Mentions:
January Jones – X-Men: First Class
Lucy Punch – You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger
Lucy Punch – Bad Teacher
Juno Temple – The Three Musketeers
Lake Bell – No Strings Attached
Worst Supporting Performance by an Actor: James Corden – The Three Musketeers
Dishonorable Mentions:
Richard Coyle – W.E.
James D’Arcy – W.E.
Rami Malek – Larry Crowne
Rafe Spall - One Day
Ken Stott - One Day
Worst Individual Voice Work: James McAvoy - Gnomeo and Juliet
Worst Voice Cast /Direction: Gnomeo and Juliet
Actress in Most Dire Need of a New Agent: Naomi Watts - Dream House / You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger / Fair Game
Dishonorable Mention: Olivia Wilde - Cowboys and Aliens / The Change-Up / In Time
Actor in Most Dire Need of a New Agent: Jason Bateman - The Change-Up / Paul / Horrible Bosses
Dishonorable Mention: Ryan Reynolds - Green Lantern / The Change-Up
Actor/Actress Duo With The Worst Luck in 2011: Abbie Cornish and Oscar Isaac – Sucker Punch and W.E.
Performance Most Likely To Make Fans Think Some Consciousness-Altering Substances Were Involved Though I’m Sure That’s Not The Case And I’m Certainly Not Suggesting He Was As High As Voyager 1 When He Slurred His Way Through This Piece Of Shit: James Franco - Your Highness
“Hmmm, Okay, You Were Actually Okay This Year, And Thus Deserve Recognition And A Temporary Reprieve From My Usual Derision” Performances of the Year: Cameron Diaz – The Green Hornet / Bad Teacher
Most Entertaining Performance by an Actress in a Bad Movie: Andrea Riseborough - W.E.
Honorable Mention: Mindy Kaling - No Strings Attached
Most Entertaining Performance by an Actor in a Bad Movie: Anthony Hopkins – The Rite
Honorable Mention: Anthony Hopkins – 360
Most Bafflingly Busy Actress of the Year: Frieda Pinto - You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger / Rise of the Planet of the Apes / Immortals
Most Bafflingly Busy Actor of the Year: Billy Burke - The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 / Drive Angry / Red Riding Hood
Worst Cameo: Convicted rapist Mike Tyson, again – The Hangover Part II
“Where Have You Been?” Actor of the Year: Fred Ward - 30 Minutes Or Less
Best Accent: Chloe Grace Moretz – Hugo
Worst Accent: Anne Hathaway – One Day
Most Entertaining Acccent: Gary Oldman – Red Riding Hood
Most Disconcerting Accent: Jeffrey Wright – Source Code
Best Performance By Hott Sam Rockwell: Cowboys and Aliens
Best Argument For The Use Of Performance-Capture Technology And The Freedom It Gives To Actors Performance of the Year: Andy Serkis - Rise of the Planet of the Apes
Best Argument To Destroy All Performance-Capture Technology To Prevent Such A Crime Ever Being Committed Again Performance of the Year: Seth Green – Mars Needs Moms
“More Of This And Less Of This, Please” Actress of the Year: Rose Byrne (More comedies like Bridesmaids as she has a real gift for comedy, less dramatic roles like X-Men: First Class and Insidious.)
“More Of This And Less Of This, Please” Actor of the Year: Bradley Cooper (More dramatic roles in unexpectedly entertaining movies like Limitless, less fratboy bullshit in odious crap like The Hangover Part II.)
Hammiest Performance By Michael Sheen: The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part One
Hammiest Performance By Chow Yun Fat: Let The Bullets Fly
Next up: crew contributions of the year. Best screenplay is a lock but I’m going back and forth on best director. Who will it be? #HitchcockianSuspense
Listmania ’11! The Worst Movies Of The Year
It feels like a hundred years ago that I published my Best Movies list, but it was actually only 8 days ago. This post has been delayed by attempting to understand the rules to Twilight Struggle. That is an ongoing project that could take a while. Meanwhile I was also rattling through more potential bad movie nominees, which led to me finding an extra dishonorable mention as well as the number three film on the main list.
There’s a good chance that was actually the worst film I’ve seen in a long time, but as with A Separation on my best films list — which I saw on the day I hit publish, and ended up at number 4 on the list — I’m not sure it would be fair to leapfrog over the two stinkers I had above it. Those were movies that have pissed me off for months, and I want the world to know how much I hate them.
But why do I need to do this, especially now that we’re firmly embedded in 2012 like a tick? Dan Kois recently wrote a lovely article in the NY Times about why top ten lists are so important to him, and some of his reasons tallied with mine. When challenged on the usefulness of something like this, in which I attempt to quantify art and trap it in a list, I’ve often pointed out that this isn’t really about the films. It’s a snapshot of me.
When I read Kois’ article and saw that he felt the same way I almost cheered. So okay, this is about me, and as the majority of visitors to this page don’t know me and wouldn’t give a damn about me if I was in front of them in a line for a lifeboat, that means this list may only be of worth to those who want to capture these images, but I’ve tried to add some value by being very mean about these movies. Because they really stank. I hope you enjoy my ire.
25. Trespass, Drive Angry, and Season of the Witch
One can only assume that the mighty Cage has Dr. Wesley T. Snipes as an accountant. Oh Nic, it’s been hard to be one of your loyal fans in a year that saw you star in three, maybe four (I haven’t seen Seeking Justice, and neither have most people) of the year’s worst movies. Trespass was possibly the least awful, mostly because King Cage expended some effort, and seemed energised by having famed Oscar-winner and part-time Auton Nicole Kidman as a co-star, but sadly this was a movie with two strikes against it: 1) it was ineptly directed by Joel Schumacher and 2) the plot depends on a twist generated by tricking the audience with a lie embedded in a flashback. Not cool. Drive Angry was worse, but at least had a spirited performance from Amber Heard and a very entertaining turn by William Fichtner. Otherwise it was an unconvincing attempt to utilise the Grindhouse aesthetic to make something consciously trashy. While not as bad as the fundamentally dishonest, misogynistic and generally loathsome Piranha 3D it comes from the same dark pit, where a nod and a wink is supposed to excuse the slapdash execution and contempt for the audience. And then there’s Season of the Witch, which was just boring boring boring. Even more boring than Gone In 60 Seconds, the previous mogadonian collaboration between Cage and director Dominic Sena. Three absolute stinkers, all desperate cash-grabs by a fascinating performer. The moral of the story is, don’t go crazy buying castles if you’re not ready to get your tax on.
24. New Year’s Eve
Last year gave us the saccharine delights of Garry Marshall and Katherine Fugate’s Valentine’s Day, in which a dazzling collection of stars from the Hollywood firmament (not an endorsement) gurned through a number of first/third act sub-plots about falling in love in LA. SoC did not like it. And look, here we are a year later to find Marshall and Fugate have hastily cranked out another shuffled pack of cliches, written in what feels like a few days and populated by a scintillating kaleidoscope of celebrities from Hollywood’s jewel-palace or some shit in an attempt to distract the audience from noticing that this depressing franchise is made out of recycled tin and bits of broken mirror. It’s a horrible, cynical rush-job that confusingly casts two actors from the first film — Ashton Kutcher and Jessica Biel — in new roles, meaning anyone not wasting time keep close track of these movies is utterly lost. Even worse, the other characters are introduced hastily and then treated as if they’re familiar to us. Look at how Josh Duhamel is dealing with the overly-friendly family! Hold on, why should I care? I’ve only known this guy for 5 minutes, and this simple juxtaposition isn’t enough to qualify as a joke. The laziness of this writing, and the sheer gall that such lack of effort will be accepted by the audience, is just one example of the cynicism of this exercise. Let’s hope that the mediocre box office means we won’t be treated to Thanksgiving, starring the leftover actors from TV shows that couldn’t spare a day’s shooting time for this film.
23. Priest
In 2009 FX expert Scott Charles Stewart co-wrote and directed Legion, in which Paul Bettany played an angel protecting Adrianne Palicki’s child because of the coming apocalypse. It was similar to Gregory Widen’s The Prophecy but with a bigger budget and Dennis Quaid flipping burgers. It was all right. I enjoyed it well enough. Seen worse. In 2011 SCS directed this adaptation of Min-Woo Hyung’s popular graphic novel, and it wasn’t all right. I didn’t enjoy it at all. Seen MUCH better. The problem is that by now the visual aesthetic and genre-mashing seen here have become so commonplace that there’s no point in making more of these direct-to-DVD-worthy sub-par SF actioners unless there’s something unique to add to the genre. Priest is exactly the movie you think it will be from the trailers; a bit of ramping, some posing with weaponry, a dollop of Western iconography, growly villains, unconvincing FX that mistakenly act like the laws of physics can be ignored, lots of long coats, etc. Seeing this moved to a mid-summer US release, three weeks after Fast Five and a week after Thor, and treated like an event movie in the same way as The Warrior’s Way in 2010, almost made me feel sorry for it. Seeing it fail in the South Korean market, much as Ninja Assassin and Speed Racer did despite the presence of superpopstar Rain, made me feel worse. Enduring Priest‘s slow trudge through a hundred recognisable and indifferently filmed moments pilfered from better movies ended that pity. I pray for a moratorium.
22. You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger
Seemingly considered to be the 14th Woody Allen comeback before he actually made a movie that could conceivably be considered a return to the form of, say, Alice or Shadows and Fog, YWMATDS saw the formerly great director return to London for hopefully the last time. This movie’s sacrificial lambs included those talented performers Josh Brolin, Naomi Watts and Anthony Hopkins, as well as Frieda Pinto and Lucy Punch, in a tale that admittedly has more bite than his recent films. Selfish intellectuals bicker and conspire to gain money or influence within the rarified world of Belgravia, their venality hidden behind a barely functional facade, before Allen springs one of his best modern finales, one that is unexpected and unusually tense, thanks mostly to the sterling work of Watts. Sadly that moment of frisson doesn’t make up for the inclusion of prostitute Charmaine; yet another of Allen’s vile caricatures of the unsophisticated women he considers beneath him, and who must be saved from their stupidity by educated and cultured men such as himself. This is nothing new, but YWMATDS‘s greatest crime is to suddenly make the viewer see, as if scales have fallen from his or her eyes, that this patronising fetish has been around for decades. Add this to Allen’s inability to get a good performance from Pinto, or to restrain the nigh-unwatchable clowning of Punch, and this movie lays to rest the claim that Allen is a filmmaker sensitive to the inner world of the woman. He’s just the King of Mansplainers. How sad.
21. Dream House
Bond fans now have another reason to be frustrated with the post-Quantum-of-Solace delay caused by MGM’s recent troubles; the long pause means Daniel Craig has plenty of time to appear in ill-advised projects like this one. It’s possible he was attracted by the pedigree of those attached; Jim Sheridan, Rachel Weisz, Naomi Watts and Caleb Deschanel are all present and correct. However, it doesn’t matter what talent gets thrown at a project like this, because if you’re filming a self-consciously tricksy Shyamalanian mystery as silly as this, you’re never going to win. Even the most innocent of viewers will suspect there is something up in Dream House‘s opening hour, as characters mysteriously walk away from conversations leaving questions hanging in the air, to the bemusement of Craig’s character; surely that can’t mean some key information is being ignored? That’s before we even get into the problem of his name – Will Atenton – which has never existed anywhere on the planet before, and gives The Number 23‘s brilliantly stupid Topsy Kretts a run for its money as the worst mystery name of all time. The eventual reveal at least comes two-thirds of the way through the story, but the final act has more than its share of risible plot twists and signposted surprises. Kudos to the talented cast for giving this creaky hogwash all of their effort, but it’s still piss-weak stuff, the kind of spec script that would have been rightly rejected as hokey by the producers of Tales of the Unexpected.
20. Larry Crowne
SoC is proud to call itself a pro-Tom Hanks blog. He’s so nice. We’d love to invite him over to play Ticket To Ride with us and Kevin Spacey. So it was with a heavy heart that we watched his second directorial effort with confusion. We assume it was an empowerment exercise for older folks, and a creditable attempt to make something old-fashioned that would appeal to a demographic ill-served during summer. That’s generous, and kinda shrewd, if it wasn’t for the fact that the finished product is so flaccid and studiedly inoffensive, so joke-free, so out-of-time. It’s almost endearing how baffled by and yet enamoured of today’s youth Hanks and co-screenwriter Vardalos seem to be; they go out of their way to prove that Larry can embrace new beginnings, but pairing him with poor Gugu Mbatha-Raw – who has to pretend to enjoy hanging around with a 90% acrylic man desperately trying to make the word “Speck-tack-alar!” into a catchphrase – is a kind of berserk cruelty. We haven’t even touched on the unpleasant performance from Julia Roberts, whose overplayed acidity is out of odds with all around her, including poor Bryan Cranston, here given the miserable task of portraying a man addicted to looking at chaste burlesque pictures of bosoms – nothing too racy to upset the elderly audience, eh Tom? It’s tempting to forgive this curio its trespasses just because it’s so bafflingly, uniquely wrong, but no. It’s the kind of movie you ponder for years, but never ever enjoy.
19. Sucker Punch
Poor Emily Browning. This year she was stripped naked and thrown around a room like a sexy frisbee by some sad old men in Julia Leigh’s self-consciously spartan Sleeping Beauty, but even the indignity of lashings of nudity and a bit of ugly-crying are nothing compared to the things she had to go through here. Zack Snyder’s Remedial Feminism for Nerds fell between two stools; too preachy for the fapping masses of the arrested adolescents, too lascivious (and stupid) for the righteous feminists. There’s a message about subverting the power of the Male Gaze here but it’s submerged in a sea of pop culture iconography, all made up of jumbled nerdobilia, so we get totes rad mash-ups with steampunk Nazis, robot samurai, pirate zombies, alien vampires, Jedi Vulcans, Cylons bitten by radioactive spiders, er… It’s as if a copy of Previews came to life. By seeking to be a one-stop shop of nerd culture, it actually insults us all, that we could only accept Snyder’s garbled and patronising message about respecting the hot chicks by dressing it up with dragons and Sailor Moon cosplay. Unfortunately for him, no one wanted to see his ambitious message movie, and so I guess nerds will carry on being misogynists despite his intervention. Well, I say unfortunately for him, when in fact he’s going to bring his “visionary director” (shurely shome mishtake – Ed.) shtick to the new Superman movie, which means tons of ramping and slow-motion. At least that gives us time to ponder just how intellectually hollow his approach is.
18. The Help
There is an incredible story to be told here, a bleak indictment of a terrible time in America’s history. Tate Taylor’s adaptation of the bestseller by Kathryn Stockett features numerous moments that will cut you to the core, made worse by the realisation that the segregation and open racism depicted here happened within the last 60 years, and never went away. It remains an open wound, and salt pours in every day. The scenes that capture that sense of desperation are the best things here, but are betrayed by various unnecessary plotlines. What could have been focused and righteously angry unfortunately bites off more than it can chew by taking on the less compelling troubles of affluent white women. A Mad-Menian attempt to depict the stirrings of feminism in conservative America is commendable, but here it has the effect of offsetting the social ostracisation of Celia (Jessica Chastain in unbearable ham mode) and protagonist Skeeter’s difficulty in finding a boyfriend with the assassination of Medgar Evers and the reality that African-Americans lived with the constant fear of murder. There’s not really an equivalence there. The leaden humour might make this bitter pill more palatable, and the movie’s box office success is testimony to that, but Taylor’s nervous directorial tic – in which the camera cuts to one of the white cast members mid-emotion whenever an African-American actor relates a horrific event from their past – betrays its insulting timidity. So yes, an essential story, diluted by wrong-headed nervousness.
17. The Resident
Nice of Hammer Films to give a small role to Christopher Lee in their first release in so long; a nifty way of maintaining some continuity with the past. Shame nothing else here respects that heritage. Even if you think the output of Britain’s primary horror studio was a bit shonky, that’s nothing compared to this low-rent bit of sub-Sliver tedium, which seems to be almost entirely composed of shots of Jeffrey Dean Morgan weeping in dark rooms, or Hilary Swank explaining every single thing she thinks and feels in order to save the writer and director from working out any elegant method of dramatising her predicament. Seeing this Oscar-winning actress forced to stumble backwards and forwards through gloomy crawlspaces for what feels like a week while thudding music desperately tries to generate some tension is one of the most dispiriting experiences of the movie-going year. What could have been a very dull 45-minute horror anthology installment becomes a double-dose of sheer boredom injected straight into our eyeball, offering no frisson, no deeper point, no imagination, just barrel-scraping woman-in-jeopardy horseshit, with plenty of creepy rape terror lazily offered up as if we were watching some straight-to-DVD offering from a disreputable cheap-ass studio who have no intention of treating the genre seriously, or the audience with any respect. Hammer Films may have returned, but this is the worst statement-of-intent imaginable. Consign it to the toilet where it belongs.
16. Cars 2
Fans of Pixar’s many great movies were understandably frustrated that their annual dose of CGI magic would this year be a continuation of John Lasseter’s ode to driving. While it has its defenders, the first Cars movie still feels off-kilter compared to their other efforts, but at least it’s about something – the slow death of towns along the roads that cross America, now neglected due to the introduction of freeways. Cars 2 might represent the first subtext-free Pixar movie, and no, the irritatingly-rendered crisis of confidence experienced by Mater doesn’t count. Though it’s refreshing to see a sequel pick up a different character’s story instead of complicating the emotional progress of the original’s protagonist, that means we’re stuck with Larry the Cable Guy’s irksome shtick, as the redneck tow-truck gets to do them fancy things whut thuh city folk does; i.e. get embroiled in an incongruous espionage plot. That out-of-place idea is a redirection too far from the original, which was pleasantly innocent. Rather that movie’s yearning for simpler times than this movie’s charmlessness, scenes of car torture/death, and confused environmental message. And if there was any doubt that this was made to capitalise on the incredible success of Cars merchandise, check out the scene where Mater transforms into a number of different paint jobs; there’s five more Mater toy variants that your kids are gonna bug you about. Thanks Pixar.
15. Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides
The first two sequels to Jerry Bruckheimer and Gore Verbinski’s surprise smash hit Pirates movie were pilloried for being cynical cash-ins, but Shades of Caruso always thought they were quite the opposite. The attempt to create an entire fantasy world deriving its rules and laws from those of nautical myth was, in the end, far too ambitious to succeed, but for a while there it was exciting to see writers Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio go for broke with their plots, counter-plots and counter-counter plots. As if to prove this blog’s point, the fourth Pirates movie sloped into view to show what a cynically produced Pirates movie looks like, and it wasn’t pretty. Or funny. Or coherent. Or energetic. Or anything, really, other than a colossal, expensive, tedious waste of everyone’s time and talent. Rob Marshall deserves a lot of the blame for this. The inertia generated by his unimaginative direction infects the actors, who behave like the cast of a parochial pantomime at the end of its run. Fans of Elliott and Rossio might want to argue that it’s the listless editing that did the most damage to the movie, as a few clever plot payoffs near the end make a case that there were greater treasures there that could have been plundered with a bit more discipline. But let’s be honest, this was one of the most blatant cash-ins of the year. No amount of spreadsheets and revised drafts can convince Shades of Caruso that anyone involved gave a crap about making a good movie, merely a profitable one.
14. The Three Musketeers
Well, at least it’s better than the last Resident Evil movie. That can be attributed to two things; the uncharacteristic lightness of some of the jokes here (I’d like to think that the amusing running joke about fashion is down to co-screenwriter Andrew Davies), and plot elements that are unchanged from previous incarnations of Dumas’ novel. Sadly, this is a Paul W.S. Anderson movie. He has been called “the worst storyteller in the world” by a fairly reliable source (scroll down to number 2), and I’m inclined to agree. This classic tale had to be sullied by his filthy fingerprints, and the result is the inclusion of some listless steampunk nonsense and wirework for Lady DeWinter, here reinvented as crinoline-bedecked cat burglar and assassin Milady and played by Mrs. W.S. Anderson using her trademark acting scowl to full effect. That’s the least of this idiotic movie’s problems, though. The addition of flying ships and anachronistic booby-trap sequences only serve to make a fun story tedious; the face off between the Musketeers and evil Rochefort – conducted on different sets – is some of the laziest filmmaking of the year. The contempt Anderson has for his audience is astonishing, expending as little effort as possible to churn out his standard lowest-common denominator dreck. And I haven’t even mentioned James Corden’s charmless mugging, insulting the memory of Roy Kinnear’s work as Planchett in Richard Lester’s classic version. Unforgivable.
13. Straw Dogs
More on this ill-advised remake in a forthcoming post (there’s too much to say here), but suffice to say, Rod Lurie takes an already problematic (though bold and questioning) movie and remakes it in such a way that its most controversial moment ends up being even more objectionable than the original was thought to be. And it totally wastes acting titan Walton Goggins. An unforgivable crime.
12. The Hangover Part II
Yes, Part II, just like The Godfather had a Part II. Todd Phillips has proved so inept at directing comedy that it’s hard to tell if the title is meant to be a joke or a statement of some weird intent, that this is something that the filmmakers are proud of. Because that’s a bit hard to swallow considering the script was written by taking the first movie’s screenplay, hitting Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-O, Ctrl-V, Save As – thehangoverptIIlulz.doc, find = Vegas, replace = Bangkok. And why Bangkok, pray tell? For the ladyboy jokes, of course. In fact, I had a bet with myself as to how long it would take for a transsexual to show up for the gay panic jokes, and it turned out to be about 51 minutes. I’m surprised it took that long. Thailand is here treated like a stained fuckhole where the lowlife are insane and the rich are stuck-up assholes waiting to be told how to live by the Americans. Those fratboy Yanks sure know how to par-tay, right, and those boring jerks will rue the day. And at the end, when a guy loses a finger and possibly damages his career chances he’s just fine with this because he got drunk once. Life lesson learned! And the adoring women laugh as the men bond, even though Alan is now near-sociopathic, (oh Zach Galafianakis, please get out of this malignant franchise), Phil is becoming worrying violent (Bradley Cooper deletes any good will earned from his turn in Limitless), and look who’s back! Everyone’s favourite rapist thug Mike Tyson! THP2 is pure hatred, depicting male friendship as a gnarled, hostile parody of the real thing.
11. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part One
For the past few years Shades of Caruso blogposts have received numerous one-star ratings from Twi-Hards as we railed against the world’s worst franchise and screenwriter Melissa “Dexter” Rosenberg’s preposterous insistence on faithfully adapting those awful event-light books. Three movies have already been adapted from the equivalent of about one and a half acts of a short story, padding out hours of yearning stares with dull love triangles, poorly defined clan squabbles and many shots of wet forests. We’re approaching the merciful end of this interminable saga, and yet this penultimate chapter offers up nothing but more forestry, more pouting from Jacob, and seemingly endless scenes of poorly-acted angst. This might actually be the best of the series so far, thanks to a modicum of sustained low-level tension, but even so, barely anything happens, with only the hint of some Grand Quignol reproductive horror at the end providing even a hint of dramatic power. Other than that we have a hilarious growly werewolf summit, a couple of shots of lovely Michael Sheen gnawing on scenery, and way too much of Stephenie Meyer’s dodgy gender politics. On an aesthetic level the tedium of Bill Condon and Rosenberg’s adaptation is shocking; on a political level, Meyer’s concept of the passive womb-carrier that is Bella, punished with death for her lust even within wedlock, and redeemed by a return to chastity (here depicted by a hallucinogenic shot of a flower closing as she becomes a vampire), is truly odious.
10. No Strings Attached
Amazing how tone and energy can make such a difference to a movie. Will Gluck’s Friends With Benefits uses its irreverent script as a springboard for all sorts of frank and funny conversations about the complications caused by casual sex between friends. Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake are endearing and uninhibited, their relationship made appealing in both before and after forms. In Ivan Reitman and Elizabeth Meriweather’s movie, the first scene depicts two young teenagers (Emma and Adam) awkwardly flirting, at the end of which Adam asks Emma if he can finger her. And with a glum clang, the movie is lost. From then on the tone is alienating, as Adam and Emma’s reason for delaying their inevitable romantic relationship is revealed to be pain and personal anguish, and their casual sexual relationship is depicted as an unfortunate consequence of their dysfunction. This makes No Strings Attached a darker experience, not helped by Portman’s choice to play Emma as dour and seemingly traumatised. That’d be fine if this was a character piece that had something to say about damaged individuals, but as it keeps throwing in lazy romcom staples like wacky friends, broad villains and inconvenient complicating relationships (complicationships!), Kutcher’s listlessness and Portman’s spikiness is out of place. As a comedy the jokes don’t land, but as a drama it’s too flippant; errors compounded by Reitman’s soporific direction. What we’re left with is overlong, charm-free, and too cowardly to realise its full dramatic ambition.
9. The Dilemma
Readers of SoC who checked out last year’s worst movies list may have noticed the high placing of The Switch, the truly dire reproduction comedy that featured the accidental insemination of Jennifer Aniston by Jason Bateman. That sprang from an article by Jeffrey Eugenides, then adapted by producer and writer Allan Loeb, who failed to explore the ethical quandaries involved, preferring instead to make baffling joke-flavoured noises about the subject. This year Mr. Loeb posed another, far less pressing question; should you tell your friend if you saw his wife cheating on him? The answer is yes, you should. And now I have saved you from having to watch Vince Vaughn wrestle with this problem for 100 minute of padding, improbable obstacles, cartoonish caricaturisation, and yet more of these now trademark LoebJokes; lines delivered like humour but otherwise unrecognisable as comedy. The result is a mystifying experiment. Who greenlit this movie? What was Ron Howard thinking? What was anyone else thinking, for that matter? You know you’re in trouble when the audience is grateful for the appearance of Channing Tatum to alleviate the tedium. For once he’s the only person in the movie to stay awake; a total reversal of the usual state of affairs. Epic poems will be written about SoC’s battle to get to the end of this unnecessary film. We only hope that whichever studio head/producer won the bet for who could make the most boring movie of 2011 donated the money to an orphanage.
8. The Change-Up
As if foisting the noisome Hangover onto the world wasn’t bad enough, screenwriters Jon Lucas and Scott Moore also poured this fetid waste over the heads of the 12 cinemagoers masochistic enough to sit through two hours of Jason Bateman robotically saying, “I’ll ruin that bitch” over and over again. SoC is no prude, but this miserable fashion for R-rated comedies triggered by the success of Judd Apatow’s recent adult-themed movies has completely lost sight of the fact that his movies understood and sympathised with humans, and were more frank than profane. The Change-Up is a miserable experience by comparison, bereft of compassion or empathy, as phony as any knock-off Prada handbag, as mechanical as any mass-produced soon-to-malfunction off-brand gadget. The formula here is that single Ryan Reynolds and married Jason Bateman swap bodies and see how the other half lives; Freaky Friday for Nuts readers. The least director David “Wedding Crashers” Dobkin could do is slot the relevant story parts into place with some form of competence, but he can’t even keep the characters consistent. Reynolds’ sex-mad slacker begins the movie as a foul-mouthed loser; an hour later, in Bateman’s body, he’s a noxious, sociopathic piece-of-shit who should be euthanised. And don’t get me started on Leslie Mann and Olivia Wilde, forced to be little more than signifiers of virtue and lust respectively. Sitting in a bath of cyanide-laced horseshit would be preferable to watching this empty, cynical enterprise trail slime across the finish line.
7. One Day
Early reports that Lone Scherfig and David Nicholl’s adaptation of his global megaselling novel was not that great were generous, to say the least. What could have been the tragic romance of the year is in fact indistinguishable from some kind of unhinged parody, and for that SoC is grateful. Any possibility of emotional connection between character and audience is ruined by the gimmicky structure, leaping through time from one improbable event to another as we see two poorly-realised caricatures do and say things you only find in badly-written books. Every possible cliché of the romance genre is crammed in, leaving no room to explore a thought or express an emotion; everything here is exposition, a cacophony of out-of-tune notes blasted at a disbelieving audience. It’s hard to say what is the funniest thing here; the movie-wide overacting, the overwrought plot twists, the dearth of honest feeling, Rafe Spall’s godawful caricature of a nerd — apparently Nicholl’s mockery of himself, but dangerously close to being an assault on my brethren. This bloodless monstrosity is the kind of thing that the British film industry could do without; a pompous confection for a middle-class audience who, sadly for these patronising filmmakers, saw right through its micron-thick sheen of “classiness”. It’s regrettable the same audience also focused their ire on Anne Hathaway and her wandering accent, ignoring the fact that she’s the only person in the cast to give a performance with any modulation or imagination.
6. Mars Needs Moms
The year’s most notorious flop is the kind of movie that SoC likes to champion. It’s critically reviled, it’s sci-fi, and it’s made using performance capture, a technique that we’ve previously defended. But despite interesting production design by Doug Chiang and a fun score by John Powell, this is a project riven with flaws. Simon Wells’ parable is technically assured but also joyless; these are the sorts of problems that should be addressed before committing $150m to its production. The rash decision to forgo revision means ImageMovers Digital are either the dream production company for allowing Wells to go forward without intervention, or they’re idiots who signed off on this, which would make their subsequent closure a little easier to take. Either way, it seems they approved of the movie’s hateful anti-feminist message, where those goddamn castration-happy lesbo Martian feminazis conspire to discard all of the poor fun-loving men who didn’t help with the childcare because they just wanted to enjoy life, thus leaving the kids to be cared for by machines; you know, like today with the TVs and those video games. As if that pissy comment on single mothers and their “responsibility” for the breakdown of society isn’t enough, the movie ends with the Martians embracing the nuclear family unit with a sense of obnoxious wonder, before learning life-lessons from a hippy in a sitcom. More baby boomer worship and hatred of modernity, then. In that case, its box office failure is a success for progressive ideals. Which is nice.
5. W.E.
Upon leaving the screening of this memorably silly biopic, SoC wiped tears of giddy mirth from its eyes and began proclaiming on Twitter that it had seen the worst movie of the year. It’s a farrago! It’s a catastrophe! It’s Showgirls meets The King’s Speech, written by Jackie Collins and directed by a distaff Oliver Stone! Though SoC has not changed its mind on those damning comparisons, it has grown immensely fond of Madonna’s vanity project, as much for its peek into her questionable taste in subject matter and what it says about her self-image as for its hilariously off-kilter direction and sub-Mills-and-Boon writing. Many long and dreary days since have been enlivened thinking about Andrea Riseborough dancing the twist while while wearing Gary Oldman’s Herr Dracool wig, or James D’Arcy’s visit to a Welsh town filled with stuttering, worshipful peasants, or Richard Coyle’s eye-watering turn as the whiskey-swigging abusive cad who torments poor virtuous Abbie Cornish, or any number of staggering moments of bad-movie genius. Of course it also features a hasty bit of apologia for Wallis and Edward’s pro-Nazi behaviour, not to mention a scene featuring a fake Mohammed Al-Fayed intended to draw a parallel between the Windsor’s treatment of Wallis and Diana Spencer, and numerous other problematic choices, but the main thing to remember about W.E. is that it’s the best kind of terrible; a frenetic camp melodrama with no concept of its own ineptitude. I can’t wait to see it again.
4. Restless
Even the best directors have off days, but how many have taken their critical reputation, set fire to it and thrown it off a cliff into a lake of petrol-soaked faeces? Even die-hard fans of Gus Van Sant, who have previously defended his choice to make Good Will Hunting – a project that gave him enough clout to make the clout-evaporating Psycho remake — cannot even begin to explain the thinking behind this catastrophe. Henry Hopper and Mia Wasikowska play a Harold and Young Maude-esque couple who face the prospect of death with an onslaught of twee role-playing, Indie™ mumbly dialogue, excellent but wasted Harris Savides photography, cutesy philosophising about mortality, and the addition of a ghostly Japanese kamikaze pilot who facilitates many many life lessons. It’s like a sick joke from Van Sant, a weird art project in which he burns his credibility to the ground in order to build it back up somehow. Sadly this is more than just burning something to ashes; this is salting the ground and casting a hex on it too. It’ll take approximately 3 Gerrys, 6 Elephants and 9 Paranoid Parks to restore Van Sant’s Artistic Power Bar back to full strength. If you do have to watch this godawful, lightweight student-film parody, make sure you carry a syringe full of insulin, otherwise you may succumb to its claustrophic, relentless sugariness and expire, photogenically, in a cloud of reality-defying magic dust, after which your friends will learn valuable lessons about embracing life and laughter. Carpe fucking diem.
3. Blubberella
Thin-skinned artistic colossus Dr. Uwe Boll and his crew of cinematic titans last year filmed Bloodrayne: The Third Reich in Croatia, and much as the cast and crew of Little Shop of Horrors cranked out their movie in two days on a free set, Boll took advantage of his shooting schedule to make this knock-off piece of excrement. Let me list the crimes: Adolf Hitler (played by Dr. Boll) playing Risk with a blacked-up, jive-talking ally and repeatedly invading Africa to annoy him. Holocaust jokes. Michael Paré being turned into a vampire after being forced to drink Blubberella’s breast milk. A torrent of predictable fat jokes. A bitchy, effeminate gay man called Vadge Isil who has very little physical strength. An onscreen credit that explains Blubberella lives in “The Jew-y part of town”. Rape jokes. A fantasy dream sequence spoofing Precious, with Blubberella making food for her abusive mother, here played by a white man in blackface and drag. That fucking title. Attempts to explain away the awfulness by explicitly referring to said awfulness. The end credit, “Extra special thank you to Adolf Hitler for making so many great movies possible”. There’s an argument for irreverence and cocking a snook at civilised behaviour, but this overblown, ill-advised DVD extra is definitely not it. Enduring this childish, sniggering prank, which barely counts as a movie, made me feel like the audience watching the opening number of Springtime For Hitler. Boll might think he’s daring, but in fact he’s just a belligerent idiot, and an unclassy one at that.
2. Green Lantern
For a committed Green Lantern fan, this was a difficult viewing experience. The characters were present and correct, the mythology of the Green Lantern Corps was rendered fairly accurately, and considering the fringe nature of the comic franchise, some effort had been made to bring it to life. Perhaps the fans should be grateful for that, but considering that this debacle felt wrong on every other level, perhaps not. How can something so costly look so cheap? How can a reliable – sometimes surprising – director like Martin Campbell create something so flaccid and hollow? Every aspect of Green Lantern is either, at best, slightly off or, as is too often the case, disastrously wrong.
Who thought that a big mid-movie showdown between the hero and one of the main villains — which amounts to two men lying on the floor touching each other’s foreheads — would make for compelling summer cinema? Who could imagine that pitting a rubbery-looking superdouche against a wafty shitcloud would suffice as a rousing finale? Why is Sinestro evil at the end, other than as a patronising sop to the fans and a lazy set-up for a sequel that no one wants? Why are the Guardians of Oa stuck to their pointlessly high chairs, like intergalactic toddlers in a restaurant that has no tables?
Come to mention it, why does the Corps disappear for the majority of the movie when they’re obviously the key selling-point of the franchise? Couldn’t we have sidelined a couple of characters — including Hal’s obnoxiously anti-fun comedy flatmate — in order to get us some quality-time with Ganthet, surely one of the most important characters in the GL canon? Does the fact that Hal Jordan learns how to take down the supervillains in something like an afternoon count as a kind of space-racism against the alien Green Lanterns who have been training for years and yet are about as helpful as a green ring light-construct in a custard factory? (#Nerd)
Why did no one with any objectivity speak up about the ghastly neon lighting scheme, or the comically-bad CGI costume, or the castastrophic miscasting and misinterpretation of Hal Jordan as a glib wiseacre when portraying him as the more interesting and dramatically valid stoic grouch of comic lore might have meant fewer misfiring jokes but would have at least grounded the tone of this confused jumble? What could have been DC’s Iron Man is instead another Supergirl. The wonder of the beloved comic is here translated into a listless, ugly farrago, an embarrassing and obscenely expensive failure that irrevocably taints something wonderful. Please, please let the movie franchise end here, so the promising animated series can try to repair the damage done to this amazing character.
1. Atlas Shrugged: Part I
The long process of adapting Ayn Rand’s bloated novel is testament to the enthusiasm of her acolytes, which is why it’s especially delicious that the only reason we saw an Atlas Shrugged movie in 2011 is not because someone just said, “Fuck it, I’m putting up my money for this because the world needs it,” but because the novel’s rights were about to lapse and it was this or nothing. Considering how strenuously Rand’s ethos denies the beauty of life, merely the glory of money and selfish achievement, it’s fitting that this movie — a movie so opposed to the notion of organic life that one of the publicity photos on IMDb is of a bridge that isn’t even in it – was borne of pragmatism and not passion.
And what a perfunctory, half-arsed effort it is, something so ugly and soulless that producer and co-writer John Aglialoro might as well have linked together pictures of the first 2916 pages of that inhuman block of hate with a flashing caption saying, “Will this do?” Of course the uncinematic nature of Atlas Shrugged is likely because the movie’s budget ended up being much smaller than Randfans hoped, with only Aglioloro funding it, and a five-week shooting schedule that didn’t allow for errors, but hey, at least he got it made, and he got to adapt it. That, to me, feels like he’s desperate to ride on Rand’s coat-tails, but that’s not how Randians behave, right?
It’s perhaps wrong to say that this wretched movie’s worst crime is to render Rand’s vision as this prosaic procession of meetings and stern conversations, when the daft asshole-empowering nutter’s book is already repetitive, overlong, and devoted to reducing humanity to its most unappealing characteristics, but as pointed out to me by Anne Billson and Daisyhellcakes, you only have to look at King Vidor’s improbably entertaining The Fountainhead to see that the one thing Rand’s writing had going for it — a demented grasp of the epic — can be used as raw material to create vivid and appealing cinema. Vidor took Rand’s screenplay and went nuts with it, casting iconic actors Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal to embody Rand’s almost godlike protagonists. The Fountainhead still has that miserable, compassion-denying message at its heart, but it works as a compelling movie; just look at that brilliant final shot.
Atlas Shrugged: Part I would barely pass muster as a 90-minute Powerpoint presentation. Co-writer Brian O’Toole has pooh-poohed criticism of the low budget and the unstarry cast (all of whom will forever reside on SoC’s shitlist for agreeing to work on this), saying that the ideas are more important, but sadly Rand’s ideas are so… well, counterintuitive is the nicest way of saying it, though antithetical to the human spirit is closer to the truth… that the movie needed to be super-extra-compelling to work as propaganda for the glory of the 1%, and Atlas Shrugged: Part I really doesn’t count.
The camera is located in exactly the worst place in every shot, the palette is murky, the performances muted, the craziness strangled. It needed starpower, glamour of some kind. Instead we get Michael Lerner, the captain of the Kahana from Lost, and An Actress as Dagny standing awkwardly in some brown rooms. Some have complained that the movie has failed in not featuring the character of Richard Halley, the artistic genius rejected by the fad-obsessed mediocrity-praising critterati of the day, but his absence is telling; I doubt the team behind this artless farrago ever found Rand’s discussions of culture as interesting as her pro-money defence of rapacious capitalism. What piece of art is as beautiful (to these robots) as a bank statement from the Cayman Islands?
To make matters worse, Aglioloro, O’Toole and director Paul Johansson haven’t even stayed true to the book. The version of Dagny Taggart seen here does not resemble the character in the book. She alternates between confidence and hesitance, stoicism and irrational emotion, begging banks to give her loans to invest in the John Galt line and actually willingly responds to Hank Rearden’s sexual advances instead of fighting him off until he has to take her by force. I mean, that’s good because yay less rapey weirdness, but it’s not how Rand sees the world. How would she feel if she knew her sub-dom fantasies had been replaced with a chaste smoochy scene? Even Vidor didn’t shy away from Howard Roark’s dominance of Dominique Francon, and that was during the time of the Hays code. So much for respecting the audience’s ability to take on even the most unpleasant aspects of Rand’s book.
But to be honest these complaints about the uncinematic nature of the movie, the inability of the “creative” team to breathe life into this project, the cheap and nasty visuals… they’re missing the point. The worst thing about the Atlas Shrugged movie is that the Atlas Shrugged movie exists. Rand’s thinking has played a key role in making this world into the volatile, unjust hellhole that it currently is, and any attempt to celebrate or popularise her philosophy — which boils down to, “Thou shalt pay no taxes to the looters because thou art totes awesome” — instantly puts my back up. I mean, for fuck’s sake, she paints a picture of a world where regulation and nationalisation of the rail system is to be dreaded, and yet I live in a country where privatisation of the rail service has been one of the most scandalous disasters ever to befall it. So much for her vision.
To hear actors talking about the evil of generosity, or claiming that self-interest is the highest ideal, or howling in horror at a burning oilfield not because of the environmental impact but because oilfields themselves represent something beautiful… these are things that make me sick. Isn’t life hard enough to get through without having to endure the automaton-like moneymen of the world promoting a philosophy that reduces us to little more than sentient bank accounts, with PINs for souls? This is a movie treated like an event by the Koch Brothers — the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of Perdition. Inviting their Archon followers for dinner and the equivalent of a spreadsheet convention; if only they considered that the punishment that I felt it to be.
The book Atlas Shrugged is a vile thing partially redeemed by the rubberneck value of seeing an author’s scarred psyche and bigotry transformed into a meticulously thought-out yet repellent philosophy that denies the existence of abstract beauty or humanity. Reading it is an alternately hilarious and disturbing experience, but it helps you understand the workings of the moneymen who arrogantly and incorrectly assume that their blind luck and ruthlessness in gaming the system is evidence of their Übermenschian superiority over the riff-raff.
Atlas Shrugged: Part I can’t even get that right. It’s incoherent and tedious, as soulless as the people who find value in it, and yet mundanely evil. It advocates the worst behaviour, it celebrates the worst of our species, it gives Wall Street psychopaths an argument for their pillaging, and it’s proud of its ethical crimes, like Hannibal Lecter gloating in front of the families of his victims. This is the worst movie of the year. This is the worst thing of the year. This is the nadir of cultural history. Avoid as if your soul depends on it.
Dishonorable Mentions:
I Don’t Know How She Does It: ”It” being getting nits, stumbling over chairs, talking to the camera as a lazy narrative device, and agonising at length over the literally hours she spends not being in happy montages with her children. As for the women in the movie who don’t want kids or men, don’t worry! By the time the credits roll, you’ll fucking get them and you’ll LIKE IT. Can’t wait for the sequel; I Don’t Know Why We Gave Those Chicks The Vote.
The Rite: Mikael Hafstrom’s dreary horroresque dramatisation of reportedly true exorcisms is notable for featuring such a dramatic gulf in talent between its leads. Anthony Hopkins gets to unload a heaping pile of acting tics all over poor unprepared Colin O’Donahue, who looks alternately perplexed and sleepy. Other than that it’s a sucky morass of cliche: call it William Peter Crappy’s The Exorshit. Or The Rong.
In Time: Andrew Niccol’s metaphorical use of time as a currency is an ingenious one (don’t sue me, Harlan Ellison), making a salient and timely point about wage inequality, corruption and the 1%. That’s the first act. Then it becomes an increasingly unfocused Bonnie-and-Clyde narrative with Justin Timberlake badly miscast as a rebel without a pause (geddit). By the end all the potency is gone, and we’re left with sub-Equilibrium posturing. Disappointing.
Bad Teacher: For once, SoC bête noire Cameron Diaz makes some effort as the teaching equivalent of Billy Bob Thornton’s Bad Santa. This movie, however, features a last-act conversion to sociability that makes no narrative sense; a dreadful cop-out that undermines the unpleasant build-up. This also features 2011′s other unwatchable Lucy Punch performance; a vortex of desperate gurning in need of stronger direction. Between this and The New Girl, what’s Jake Kasdan playing at?
Conan The Barbarian: “Conan, what is worst in life?” “To see a popular character treated to der vurst kind of brainless simplification, to be saddled viz a cliched revenge plot that even John Milius treated viz more delicacy, to feature incoherently shot action scenes furder ruined by der awful post-conversion 3D dat makes der movie too dark to vatch, and to hear der lamentations of der fanboys.”
More to come, and yes, I’m aware that it’s now practically the middle of 2012 and I’m still going on about last year.
Listmania ’11! The Best Movies Of The Year
A major caveat needs to be applied to this exhaustively thought-through list of the year’s best cinema, and I don’t mean the usual caveat I add about missing some key movie. The number 4 film on this list is so fresh in my mind (I watched it about 5 hours ago) that I’m not entirely sure it belongs in that place. It’s such a rich movie, such a complex and challenging piece of drama that there’s a good chance it should feature even higher, and yet I cannot place it where I think it will belong in future. Listmania is about how I feel at the moment I hit Publish, for better or worse. This means that sometimes I make almighty fuck-ups like including Megamind on last year’s list instead of How To Train Your Dragon, or putting Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs and Up below Michael Mann’s Public Enemies in ’09. As a result, it’s at 4, and if I decide that’s wrong in future, I’ll mention it somewhere.
Another thing to note; this year’s list doesn’t include a Best Documentary entry as I broke my new year’s resolution by not watching a single one. The Interrupters is on my Sky+ box, and I really wish I’d seen Senna even though I have next to no interest in Formula One. The one big documentary highlight of the year that I have seen — Errol Morris’ Tabloid — was shown during the 2010 London Film Festival and I wrote about it then, so my arbitrary rules demand I can’t add it this year. Those rules are very important, I’ll have you know. Contravention of the rules requires flagellation and right now I’m already feeling sorry for myself after one of our cats decided to use my face as a scratching post. ::sigh:: It’s been a long day.
As for the movies we traditionally didn’t get to see, the only possible contender for this list was The Descendants, which we could’ve seen at the 2011 London Film Festival if we’d been able to afford £25 each for gala tickets (which… no). Other than that I bet there was a ton of great stuff out there that would have surprised us and warranted inclusion, but I really doubt The Iron Lady (January release over here, rather perversely), Harry Potter and the End of the Franchise, or Jack and Jill would have made the cut. So, for about ten minutes at least, I feel pretty satisfied with this list. Yes, even the placing of Fast Five. You have no idea how much I enjoyed that movie. No idea. #ActionMovieBoner #CrushingOnTheRock
25. Wu Xia
How to describe this thrilling curio, other than to list the mashed-up elements: CSI, A History of Violence / Reign of Assassins, One-Armed Swordsman, Seven, and a dash of Raising Cain meld together to create a unique modern martial arts classic. Donnie Yen, Takeshi Kaneshiro and the legendary Wong Yu-lung face off in a relentlessly surprising tale of hidden identity, suspicion, and obsession. Yen is especially good as a family man thrust into a situation that jeopardises the lives of those he loves, but Kaneshiro matches him in the acting stakes as a possibly-demented detective who suspects he is on the brink of arresting a notorious and deadly killer. All the while, his distorted view of justice threatens to trigger a chain of events that could destroy an entire town. The battle for his soul, and the innocents of Yen’s village, is thrilling and unpredictable, aided by assured direction from Peter Chan, and beautifully photography by Yiu-Fai Lai and Jake Pollock. The well-controlled madness culminates in a final battle of epic intensity that is well worth the wait. Ignore critics who complain that Wu Xia is too much of a slow burn; the build-up contains pleasures too, before paying off in memorable fashion.
24. The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn
Two legendary filmmakers experimented with new technology this year, following in the pioneering footsteps of James Cameron and Robert Zemeckis. Those men made movies that have been critically shunned; perhaps Scorsese and Spielberg would have better luck. Hugo was embraced by film buffs for its loving homage to the works of a revolutionary filmmaker, but while Scorsese’s use of 3D and CGI FX was beautifully handled, the result was a little indulgent, too long, too personal to really breathe. Spielberg’s adaptation of the works of Herge was, on the other hand, derided by many. But it does more than just breathe; it hyperventilates with enthusiastic abandon as it leaps and gambols and sprints in an effort to entertain. The first half is less involving as it introduces beloved characters with too much reverence, but around the halfway mark Spielberg takes his new toy out for a real test drive, and from then on the audience is treated to a whirl of inspired choreography, unbridled imagination and sheer filmmaking genius. The series of setpieces that close out the film – especially the dizzying chase sequence through the elaborate Escher-like maze of Bagghar – are trademark Spielberg; beautiful, unconventional, technical marvels that left me giggling like a drunkard. The promise of further installments is enough to make this former Tintin-sceptic giddy with joy. More! Now!
23. Kung Fu Panda 2
This year’s crop of animated features was pretty disappointing, but that’s not to say there weren’t gems there. The blaze of publicity – and anxious online concern – for Pixar’s car-crash Cars 2 meant that attention was directed away from this Dreamworks sequel. The oddly dismissive reaction to the original might have contributed to the muted response but, for those of us who think the original is an underrated masterpiece of both computer animation and martial arts cinema, this was a cause for celebration. While not as thrilling and powerful as the first movie, KFP2 did the most important thing; it honoured that original, finding new ways to build Po’s character that followed on from his first arc, both by giving him a new source of inner pain to conquer, and by providing an antagonist whose own pain echoes that of our hero. Even the nigh-perfect Toy Story movies trod the same ground from one end of the franchise to the other; to see the KFP franchise show new facets of its central character was most welcome. On top of that, Jennifer Yuh Nelson – who provided the magnificent opening of KFP1 – does stunning work here too. Her direction is hectic but clear, packing giddy setpieces alongside well-judged character moments and perfectly timed gags. If this level of quality can be maintained, let’s hope Jeffrey Katzenberg’s pledge for a dozen sequels will come true.
22. Rise of the Planet of the Apes
What seemed like the most unnecessary movie of the summer season turned out to be one of the year’s highlights. It’s probable that no one thought we needed another Apes movie after Tim Burton’s woeful remake hurled scat bombs at the franchise, but hallelujah, Peter Chernin figured there was enough juice left to be squeezed out, and the result was a rousing triumph. Director Rupert Wyatt took the brilliantly “simple” script by Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver and treated it with respect, conjuring up some breathtaking setpieces more thrilling than any amount of crazy Bayhemian pyrotechnics. The fully realised cast of ape characters may have made the humans seem dull in comparison, but that’s only fair; this is a story about the emancipation of our poorly-treated simian brothers, after all. There’s lots to love about RotPotA, but special praise and garlands must be thrown at the amazing Andy Serkis. He’s terrific in Spielberg’s Tintin, but he’s even better here, bringing to life a truly great character. Caesar’s arc from innocent companion to vengeful freedom fighter is the key to this movie’s considerable success, and Serkis does thrilling performance capture work that deserving of award recognition. This summer may have opened with light mocking about RotPotA‘s existence, but the season ended with millions of us impatient for further installments. Who could’ve seen that coming?
21. We Need To Talk About Kevin
The formal daring of Lynne Ramsay’s long-awaited return to cinema is almost frightening, but welcomed gratefully. This adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s novel could, in less intelligent hands, have been reshaped into a run-of-the-mill thriller, but thankfully Ramsay is an artist of the highest order. Her crimson vision of cruelty and misplaced guilt washes over the audience like a wave, playing elliptical games with time and sensory input to create a sense of bafflement similar to that experienced by poor mistreated Eva. As with her previous movies, We Need… is an epic ambient hum compared to the three-minute manufactured ditties that we are usually served up. However, it would have been higher up this list were it not for the character of Kevin, here portrayed as a ludicrous force of pure malevolent evil, not a human being, whose actions are so dreadful as to unbalance the film. As a metaphor for the guilt and pressures placed on women as mothers, and a way to dramatise the vile rejection of Eva by a society that has yet to learn how to process grief, the demonic Kevin works brilliantly. As a believable person, less so. That means the movie’s higher allegorical purpose lacks the human core that would allow it to work on two levels, but even so, there is greatness here. Cinema needs Ramsay’s purity of vision; let’s hope she doesn’t stay away so long next time.
20. The Tree of Life
Terrence Malick’s semi-autobiographic cosmic meditation not only divided critical opinion but has such a split personality that viewer sympathies can change wildly from one moment to the next. Is this too self-indulgent, even for a Malick movie? Is it transcendental? Is it profound or profoundly stupid? The truth almost certainly lies somewhere in the middle, but for fans of the great man’s formless musings and pro-nature fixations, this triggered epiphanies that dwarfed the frustrations. Brad Pitt excels as the cold father who alienates his son, driving him to flirt with feelings of isolation that haunt him for the rest of his life. The microcosm of this transference is given an extra dimension by Malick’s startling decision to present a view of the macrocosm, an infinity of randomness and loneliness that seemingly extends beyond our lives. Tree of Life is arguably more compelling in its wilder moments; Sean Penn’s sojourn into what might be a barren and baffling afterlife, and the early Doug Trumbell-hewn effects sequences, are unexpectedly moving, grandiose bookends to a story of tainted childhood that can’t help but pale in comparison. Nevertheless, this peek into what makes Malick tick is also worth the effort. A filmmaker who for so long has been an enigma opened his heart to his audience, and in its finest moments, his honesty makes that journey worthwhile.
19. Arriety
There have been a number of adaptations of Mary Norton’s Borrowers novels — just this week the BBC showed a new version that featured lots of familiar Beeb-approved actors screaming and shouting and getting into all sorts of hi-velocity scrapes. Studio Ghibli’s version couldn’t be more different; it’s so relaxed that the only antagonist in the movie is revealed late in the movie and barely presents a credible threat. Hiromasa Yonebayashi and Hayao Miyazaki’s tale of dislocated family is disarmingly gentle, and focuses more on the details of life within the walls of our houses than the possibility of danger. The gloriously rendered background paintings and exquisite animation reintroduce us to our world from this new perspective, helped by stunning sound design that turns the ambient noise of a house into something alien. There is no need for empty histrionics; the tale of Arrietty’s growth into an adult, and the strain that puts on her overprotective parents, is drama enough. Arrietty’s friendship with Shô provides the rest of the narrative force; against all caution she befriends this potential enemy and inadvertently saves him from despair. This delicate, achingly lovely movie might not have the flights of imagination that other Ghibli movies have, but its grounded nature works in its favour. There is magic and beauty in this ode to friendship, this instant classic of pastoral fantasy.
18. Friends With Benefits
The profitability of cheap, bawdy comedies has led to a glut of films unafraid to depict gross-out bodily humour or frank discussions of the literal ins and outs of heteronormative sexuality (and its unfortunate homosexual partner, high-larious gay panic jokes). This year we’ve had the good (Bridesmaids), the bad (Bad Teacher), the lazy (The Hangover Part II), and the underrated (What’s Your Number?). Only one truly verged on greatness. Friends With Benefits trounces its other fuck-buddy rival No Strings Attached thanks to a good heart that is never swamped by the hilarious sex chat, rampant irreverence, and high energy hijinx, as well as a winning co-starring combo of Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake at their most charming. Will Gluck provides the same enthusiastic movie-referencing nerdery as he did with last year’s exemplary Easy A, this time drawing attention to the conventions of the romcom genre. Quite rightly, our cynical heroes, hurt by past lovers and eager to strip relationships of their romantic baggage, gleefully mock those conventions, and yet are unable to escape their draw when they finally, inevitably fall in love. Some have said Gluck is having his cake and eating it. I say he’s depicting the emotional arc of his protagonists. Honestly, what are critics paid for these days? Not enjoying transparently wonderful comedies? SADFACE.
17. Thor
It doesn’t have to be all Nolan-esque sourness in the superhero movie world, and Thor is the best example of the sheer fun that can be had within this maligned genre. Kenneth Branagh’s remarkably confident experiment with caped heroics does almost everything right, from introducing an audience to an alien world and unfamiliar hero, to using that new world to expand a recently established one, to matching its tone to its predecessors. The Marvel Film Universe has now been established as a place of high adventure and sneaky humour, both of which Thor has in spades. The perfect cast bring the ambitious script to life with infectious verve, with special honours going to scenestealers Anthony Hopkins and Kat Dennings, new star Chris Hemsworth, and especially the amazing Tom Hiddleston. His work here as the tragic and tortured Loki, “God” of Mischief – the year’s best villain – is a revelation. Branagh was right to think of this movie in Shakespearean terms; Loki’s anguish over his birth and insecurity over the love of the King Lear-ean Odin has shades of Richard III with a touch of Don John’s malevolence as he tries to undermine his brother by exploiting his Prince Hal-esque hubris. Thor takes the comic subject matter simultaneously lightly and seriously; it’s that balance between the two states that makes the best superhero movie of the year such a triumph.
16. Drive
For the majority of its running time, Nicholas Winding Refn and Hossain Amini’s pared-down crime thriller features the purest kind of cinematic iconography, using classic elements from the past thirty years of movies to create their simple tale of a getaway driver doing the wrong thing to protect the wholesome girl. It’s a glorious painting done in primary colours, depicting a luminous LA in which our near-silent anti-hero – a professional from the Michael Mann / Walter Hill school of perfectionists – performs miracles, but is undone and/or saved from solitude by a connection to the human world. File this alongside Refn’s previous movie, Valhalla Rising, as a portrait of a man whose singular purpose cannot change his inevitable future, as all around him complicate their lives with suspicion and misguided ambition. Refn’s pure imagery and purposefulness was revelatory, and his playful use of 80s-style imagery went some way to redeeming that ugly decade’s bad reputation. What a shame that overplotting in the last half hour had to tarnish this almost crystalline object. It’s a frustrating final act stumble that dampens the impact of what came before, but even taking that into account, Drive‘s mixture of innocence and grotesque violence is still remarkable, all the more so thanks to thrilling work from Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, and an unexpectedly terrifying Albert Brooks.
15. Martha Marcy May Marlene
Much like Jennifer Lawrence won a legion of fans with her appearance in Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone, Elizabeth Olsen’s debut performance in this dark drama is one of the highlights of the year. Her titular character is a mystery, an uncomfortable presence in our world and a sympathetic one when trapped in her cult. John Hawkes is the link between Bone and Marlene; his menace crosses over, but here he adds a layer of messianic charisma, controlling his minions and compelling them to commit terrible crimes. The question at the heart of this remarkable and bleak movie is whether Martha (Marcy May / Marlene) is a victim or a participant, and Olsen’s achievement here is to never tip us off. Sean Durkin’s directorial debut may feature a pleasingly ambiguous protagonist, but the one thing that’s not in doubt is his skill at using the natural world to generate an oppressive atmosphere of dread, one which curls over our anti-heroine from the first frame to the last like a closing fist. That gradual darkening, brilliantly evoked by the photography of Jody Lee Lipes and paced to perfection by editor Zachary Stuart-Pontier, is more effective than any horror movie made this year; when combined with the humanity of Olsen’s work, the result is unforgettable.
14. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
Tomas Alfredson’s dour adaptation of John Le Carre’s classic novel is the kind of movie that gets plaudits just for being so out of sync with modern populist tastes; all of those garish loud movies that no one will admit to enjoying. Luckily there’s another reason for the critical praise; Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a riveting and intelligent thriller, made with exacting care by Alfredson, here proving that he is a major talent. The complex novel is cleverly condensed by Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan (redeeming himself for the mess he made of The Men Who Stare At Goats), wasting no time in feeding the audience swathes of information. Full attention is necessary, aided by the anti-distracting spartan visuals and authentically glum mise-en-scene; there’s an argument to be made that Tinker… captures Britain’s damp melancholic soul better than any other movie. Every performance is pitch-perfect, with special praise to be given to Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hardy and a never-better Gary Oldman. Their task is to take something that seems dry and clinical and show that the espionage element of the plot rests on subdued and submerged emotions. They leak out at times, giving us a peek into a world of immense, unaddressed grief. The result is a quietly devastating movie about betrayal and compromise, and the toll it takes on the secret guardians of society.
13. Fast Five
The summer season kicked off with Thor and Fast Five hot on each other’s tails around the globe, bringing with them the possibility that this could be the best summer season of them all. Sadly it was not to be. Nevertheless, at least we got this. Fast Five may be “just” an action movie, something that attracts derision from the criterati, but this “lowest-common denominator” action movie was like mainlining adrenaline. Embracing its humble origins, Justin Lin and Chris Morgan’s cacophonous action extravaganza is unapologetically crazy, doing everything it can to entertain its target audience, exceeding all expectations. It’s a perfect example of what a late entry into a series should do; it expands the franchise’s world without abandoning its roots, it adds new elements to enhance what we already have, and it pays off emotional beats that have been lying around for years. It also atomises most of Rio de Janeiro thanks to a joyous disregard for the laws of physics. No one here will win any awards, except for awards in my head, such as Best Movie Uniting Underrated Action Icons. Fast Five is Ocean’s 11 in cars mixed with The Fugitive, and the big showdown in the movie pits a sweat-spritzed Rock against an angst-ridden Diesel. If Shades of Caruso believed in the concept of guilty pleasures it’d file this in that category, but fuck that. This is just pure, delirious pleasure, a classic of the genre.
12. Wuthering Heights
Odd to think that this project has been in the works since 2008, considering the regular TV adaptations of Charlotte Bronte’s novel. There’s an industry at work doing nothing but churning out movies and TV dramas that try to depict the surface of Bronte’s story without capturing its essence. Adaptations need to break their source material apart to get at the meat within, and this version by Andrea Arnold and Olivia Hetreed does just that. By casting black actors to play young and “old” Heathcliff, they have done the impossible; they have breathed life into characters who have long lived as alien icons trapped in amber. With the rejection of Heathcliff here caused by ignorant bigotry due to his ethnicity, the motivations of all involved make sense in an instant, and from there we can empathise with them as people and not as tragic romantic caricatures. For the first time in my life I now understand Cathy and Heathcliff, feel their pain, ache for their tragic loss. This single move is a miraculous bravura flourish made even more profound by depicting this world as a kind of hell, in which Heathcliff can only rage and suffer. Arnold and Hetreed show how he brings everyone down into the depths with him, but they never lose sight of his humanity, inhumanity, and aching soul. Aesthetically perfect, atmospherically oppressive and thematically precise; this is the definitive visual adaptation.
11. Contagion
Doomsday fiction usually has to operate on a fantastical plane to generate a menace large enough to threaten all of society, but the plague subgenre doesn’t have to fake it. Which is why Contagion is so welcome, after years of Cassandra Crossing / Outbreak-style wackiness. Only Robert Wise’s Andromeda Strain ever got close to depicting the uniquely fascinating world of virology / epidemiology with any real rigour before, but Soderbergh and Burns’ terrifying vision of societal meltdown knocks even that terrific movie into a cocked biohazard mask. A brilliant cast tamps down its emotions to dramatise humanity’s reaction to imminent pandemic horror; muted emotions, delayed sadness, dutiful conscientiousness. Where lesser plague movies have succumbed to melodramatics, Soderbergh has made a forensic experience, using multiple narrative arcs to cover a lot of ground, all depicted with his trademark neat visuals. There are no pyrotechnics here, no races against time or miracle cures; there is only bureaucracy, panic, stupidity, and venality. Nevertheless, these qualities are balanced by the scientific minds that dispassionately work to prevent calamity. Contagion will probably scare the bejeezus out of you, but there is hope there too, because Soderbergh and Burns show that the connective web that threatens to destroy us is also the thing that will keep us alive.
10. Shame
They should call 2011 Annus Fassbenderis. After being the best thing about Jane Eyre, X-Men: First Class, and almost every movie he’s been in for the past five years, Michael Fassbender proved fans like SoC right by giving us the year’s most memorable performance, one that would send shockwaves through the culture if it wasn’t about that icky sex that people don’t want to reveal that they’re thinking about. His depiction of a sex addict’s psychological meltdown is mesmerising and courageous, and is enhanced by Steve McQueen’s evocative portrait of night-time New York, lit by the remarkable Sean Bobbitt to match Fassbender’s calm facade, all sterile, gleaming perfection hiding a darker core. Abi Morgan’s script wisely avoids providing explicit information about what made the protagonist, Brandon, the way he is. This isn’t about a journey into darkness. It’s about the arrival, and we are invited to look at ourselves without excuses or reasoning. It’s not an anti-internet message either, or a political statement about an over-sexualised culture. McQueen, Morgan and Fassbender may be trying to trigger a conversation about how we’ve all arrived at the point we’re at, alone and scared of opening up to others, without making facile assumptions. A problem doesn’t get fixed until we recognise it; perhaps that’s Shame‘s purpose, as well as to grip us, and horrify us.
9. Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol
The thought of Brad Bird following Ratatouille — one of the most profound meditations on art and creativity ever made — with another attempt to justify the existence of cinema’s most malfunctioning franchise made SoC depressed. It’s like hearing David Cronenberg is going to adapt a Robert Ludlum novel. And yet while that project was so deformed and weird that it never happened, Bird’s Ghost Protocol blasted onto IMAX screens in a flurry of confidence, taut suspense, and epic audience satisfaction. Bird’s beautifully designed and filmed setpieces are rightly attracting praise from even the most critical of viewers, with the Burj Khalifa scene on its way to becoming a new star in the action pantheon, maybe eclipsing even De Palma’s Topkapi homage in the first Mission Impossible. Supporting those thrilling highlights is a strong framework of improved character work (only Ving Rhames has registered in previous installments), propulsive pacing, and a giddy sense of silliness that compliments the drama. These touches, which turn a good spy movie into a great one, bear Bird’s fingerprints, more than justifying the decision to bring the great man on board. Yes, the villain’s terrible. Yes, the threat’s outdated. But Bird knows this genre so well, and can transmute the basest elements into gold, so what could’ve been another boring MI movie becomes 2011′s best action movie.
8. Melancholia
It’s a dark thought to have midway through Lars Von Trier’s brilliant end-of-the-world movie, but his recent awful experience with depression may have brought about a renaissance in his art, replacing his petty taunting of the audience with a greater awareness of himself, and his ambivalence toward himself. The result of this redirection has been the remarkable Antichrist and now Melancholia, which depicts the crushing weight of Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg’s depression as the inevitable end of the world due to collision with a metaphor in the shape of a planet. As blunt as this metaphor is, it’s effective in capturing the scale of a depressive episode within a person’s life, and is mitigated by subtler details that express with devastating accuracy society’s exasperating and uncaring attitude to those who suffer from mental health problems; the first half of the movie, with Dunst’s bride pushed and pulled by meaningless social obligations that she has become unable to comprehend or care about, is especially good. Dunst is mesmerising as the woman who dissolves into her depression, reaching something like a state of grace as her sister (Gainsbourg, also phenomenal) succumbs to her own version of this dread. Von Trier’s frank and honest exploration of his experience is an invaluable aid for those of us fortunate enough to escape its misery, and for that he should be thanked.
7. Margaret
Kenneth Lonergan’s long-delayed movie-as-novel is here presented with approximately a sixth of itself missing, and who knows how the restoration of that chunk would alter the movie. But what multitudes are already contained here, what glorious truths, what immense joy and anger. Lonergan has weaved a tale about perception and interpretation by making a movie that is intentionally opaque and misleading, but his primary achievement is to transcribe the fractured, confusing experience of PTSD into disorienting dramatic beats and unpredictable explosions of emotion. This unconventional approach is especially apparent during the final hour, as precocious student Lisa tries to mitigate her feelings by lashing out at everyone. Anna Paquin gives the performance of a lifetime as a young woman who believes she knows herself and her place in the world, despite all evidence to the contrary. What Lonergan has done is perceptively capture the exasperation of those adults who have stepped aside to let their progeny find their feet, only see watch in horror as they founder and then fall back on obnoxious bluster. Many commentators decry this as “merely” an outdated movie about 9/11, but it’s as much about how parents can fuck up their children, while offering hope that eventually those children will come to realise and accept they are a part of society, not above it.
6. A Dangerous Method
The accumulated works of David Cronenberg have shown his fascination with the life of the mind, and how our inner selves contain secret things that can bring us low. This metaphysical horror has been overtly addressed by him many times, but this is a more subtle exploration of the threat of our hidden self poses to ourselves. The Carl Jung here brought to us by Cronenberg, Christopher Hampton and Michael Fassbender is an enthusiastic man of high ideals and loyalty who is undone by a lust he could not have anticipated, one which erodes his marriage, his public reputation, his friendship with father-figure Sigmund Freud, and eventually his expectations for his future. But this superb film keeps this torrent of disappointment and longing out of sight; Cronenberg’s subtle direction means only Keira Knightley’s explosive catalyst Sabina Spielrein gets to unleash her emotions, often against her will. Jung’s yearning for such freedom, and Freud’s reaction to the young man’s ambitions, leak out in occasional moments of recognisable childish weakness at odds with our image of them as great men. These relationships are the engine for this masterful dramatisation of their theories in action; psychoanalysis as psychodrama. Though this hasn’t landed with as big a splash as Cronenberg’s most recent movies, SoC suspects time will be kind to it. One day it will be ranked among his best.
5. Attack The Block
It’s rare that a British filmmaker has enough control over his urge to emulate his directorial heroes that he can pay homage to them without making a hollow copycat exercise, and Joe Cornish deserves plaudits for his expert handling of suspense and pace. But this is more than just a proficient sci-fi homage. The real-life mugging that inspired Attack The Block has been transformed through Cornish’s compassionate and questioning approach into a treatise on the ethnic and social tensions that exist between the victims of our unjust economic system and those who glamorise it. There’s no patronising here; Cornish is aware of the wrongness of his protagonist’s crimes, and doesn’t excuse them, but he at least tries to understand what drives those who are sickeningly referred to as “the feral underclass” to such lows. This curiosity and empathy is almost unheard-of in British culture, especially after the recent riots that caused a shudder of sneering disgust to ripple through our media. That it has taken so long for someone fortunate enough to not sit at the bottom of Britain’s socio-economic ladder to sympathetically wrestle with these themes is a black mark on our country. AtB isn’t just a thrilling horror-action movie; it’s an attempt to communicate something about the UK that no one wants to think about, a time-capsule representation of who we are and what we’re doing to our disenfranchised youth.
4. A Separation
Proof, if proof was needed, that a movie about a simple gamble within a marriage could create the dramatic equivalent of a train crash. Asghar Farhadi’s riveting drama begins simply as the tale of an Iranian couple considering divorce, with Simin (Leila Hatami) testing the resolve of her stubborn husband Nader (Peyman Maadi), before becoming a cross between Kramer Vs. Kramer and Rashomon. Farhadi’s stunning movie becomes complicated with such stealth that it’s not until you’re an hour in that you find yourself engaged in a kind of dialectic with the movie, questioning everything you have seen in an effort to keep up with the shifting narratives of the protagonists. The stubbornness of Simin and Nader, which causes such damage to those around them including their daughter and the tragic figure of Razieh (Sareh Bayat), should make them unsympathetic but Farhadi’s humanity means we recognise every stupid, selfish thing they do. His direction is forensic, his cast uniformly impressive, and his script is the screenwriting highlight of the year. This is a movie to watch and study to in order to pick up all of its subtleties and surprises, and that’s before you consider its allegorical richness. But it’s not necessary to know the intricacies of Iranian politics to get the most from A Separation. All you need to do is be a human, with all the understandable flaws so perceptively captured here.
3. The Artist
There are numerous arguments against Michel Hazanavicius’ silent movie homage:” it’s too light”; “the melodrama is overplayed”; “there’s not much to it”; “it’s too derivative of several movies”; “the dog’s not in it enough”; “why is it black and white and why are there no words”; “there’s no way I could possibly enjoy this as being happy is anathema to me and my very serious ways”. It’s all a load of stuff and nonsense. Experiencing this ode to joy, this gratifyingly weightless and ecstatic love letter to the power of populist art, is the best time you will have in the cinema at the moment, and being a part of the collective audience experience – as depicted very pointedly in the opening moments of this modern classic – is an unforgettable treat. Jean Dujardin and Berenice Bejo are delightful as lovers separated by pride and fear of the future; their infectious joy and indestructible attraction to each other is the secret of The Artist‘s considerable success. As opined here, it’s also a tribute to the artists who have been part of the tapestry of culture that is still being woven, and the way in which an idea generously given can flourish. One act of flirtatious kindness pays dividends in the future, with the recipient paying it back in order to save a loved one’s soul. But forget about that; see it, succumb to its delirious, enthusiastic embrace of cinema and romance, and don’t forget to bring your dancing shoes.
2. Rango
Who would have believed that Gore Verbinski had this in him? Shades of Caruso is proud to call itself a pro-Gore blog, having been one of the five audience members to have enjoyed the determinedly peculiar Mousehunt on release. Even taking that early oddity into account, Rango is a startling leap into the weird for Verbinski. A Chinatown homage that mangles the Western genre and goes out of its way to alienate the audience it needs to be a success? Just for taking that risk it deserves to be praised, but tokenism like that isn’t necessary when the end product is this much fun. As SoC tweeted at the time — in a state of some shock and joy — it’s like a Grant Morrison Animal Man comic directed by Sergio Leone, breaking the fourth wall and probably even a hypothetical fifth wall as Rango seeks to define his personality by pulling our new modern cinematic mythology into his world to form a path of self-discovery. Much of the rambling discourse on how we define ourselves makes it seem like the recording of the dialogue – done by Verbinski with all the cast present, acting out their parts on a soundstage – was actually an informal group therapy session. There’s structure within this berserk adventure, and Verbinski stages a couple of delirious action sequences too, but it’s the doodling in the margins, the asides and self-inspection of Rango himself that make this one of the most exciting and lovably deranged movies of the new century. It’s also a vision of beauty; thanks to the stellar production design of Mark “Crash” McCreery and the lighting design of consultant Roger “King” Deakins it’s almost too much to take in on first viewing.
1. Take Shelter
For far too many of us, the world has become a buzzing, unpredictable maelstrom of doubt and fear, as established institutions crumble and threaten to take everything familiar with them. A combination of things beyond our control have conspired to alter the world too quickly for us to keep up with, so that we’re assailed by external and internal strife that manifests in global pessimism about the future; there was too much news this year, too many things going wrong. The earth shifted beneath our feet metaphorically and literally in 2011, and no other cultural experience captured that terrifying feeling like Jeff Nicholl’s magnificent end-of-days movie. Expertly combining a sense of imminent world-shattering event and the personal story of one man’s battle to overcome his seemingly inevitable mental collapse, Take Shelter is suffused with the sense that devastating things can happen to us and there’s nothing we can do can stop them.
The final scene can be seen as either hopeful or not, but for anyone who feels their stomach drop every time they turn on the TV or look at Twitter or read a newspaper, and hear that the world as we know it has become alien and newly fragile, it’s the slow build of dread that makes this the most immersive and upsetting cinematic experience of recent times. Nicholls has put his finger right on the synapse that controls our terror; watching this exhausting experience, and marveling at the mesmerising performances from Jessica Chastain and Genius-Level firebrand Michael Shannon is to see your fears realised before you. For those of an optimistic bent, there is still much to enjoy here, but for the rest of us, this is the movie of our time, the touchstone and representation of our psyche.
Honorable Mentions:
Children Who Chase Lost Voices From Down Below: Makoto Shinkai’s magical trip into the underworld is an afterlife myth for our time, as a young girl and a shady operative both seek to deal with their feelings of loss and loneliness by embarking on a death-thwarting journey into Agartha. CWCLVFDB‘s epic sweep and honesty make this a visual and emotional success.
Weekend: Comparisons to Before Sunrise are inevitable, but this depiction of a brief encounter is transformed into something different due to the inevitable political element within. Andrew Haigh is to be commended for not making this romance specifically about gay politics, but addressing it cleverly provides an extra emotional level. It’s also just very romantic.
Footloose: More to come on this Craig Brewer remake in a forthcoming post. Suffice it to say, it did everything right, nothing wrong, and fixed everything wrong with the beloved but heavily flawed original. A hugely underrated crowdpleasing treat.
Super 8: 2011 was a year in which our best filmmakers were eager to plunder the history of cinema, and J.J. Abrams’ homage to the golden years of Spielberg’s Amblin so accurately captured the look and feel of those movies that all structural flaws could be forgiven. To those who grew up watching the movies referenced here, Super 8 was a glorious reminder of their power and beauty.
Moneyball: Brad Pitt co-produced this, and it’s pretty much his show. Eschewing the usual mythologising of baseball (at least until its final act), Bennett Miller, Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin use a dry tale of statistical manipulation to depict the slow awakening of a man to life’s possibilities. Pitt “knocks it out of the park”. (UK readers note that this is a baseball metaphor.)
Coming up, once I’ve harnessed my considerable grumpiness — Listmania ’11: Worst Movies of the Year. There will be grump.
New Poll: What Was Your Favourite Movie of 2011?
Hello, bloglings. Quick post to cover my next big poll for the next year, after the last one became a bigger project than I had expected. Every year I run a poll of the best movies of the past 12 months, and the 2010 one ended up staying up in the sidebar until now solely because I figured it was only fair to give participants time to catch up with everything on there, and not because I totally flaked out at the start of the year and almost gave up on blogging about three times because of mild mental trauma, faltering side-projects, ennui and suchlike. Nothing like that at all. It was all for you, my assorted fragrant lovelies.
So anyway, this is what you thought, and I have to say, I’m surprised:
- Scott Pilgrim’s Unwatched Adventure: 6 votes = 18%
- Sorkin Vs Facebook = Ten Million Word Count: 4 votes = 12%
- A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Jihad: 4 votes = 12%
- How Creepy Was My Ballet?: 3 votes = 9%
- Ben Stiller’s The Human Zoidberg: 3 votes = 9%
- Uncle Boonmee and the Deathly-Boring Hallows: 2 votes = 6%
- Im In Ur Dreamz Killin Ur D00dz: 2 votes = 6%
- The Kids Are All Right But Their Parents Are Fucked: 2 votes = 6%
- The Impoverished Hottie And The Quest For The Redneck: 2 votes = 6%
- Another Year, Another Grim Mike Leigh Movie: 2 votes = 6%
- Robert Altman’s Iron Man: 1 vote = 3%
- The Most Expensive Daft Punk Video Imaginable: 1 vote = 3%
- Pixar’s The Neverending Guilt Trip: 1 vote = 3%
- Harry Potter and the Unguent of Perspicacity: 0 votes = 0%
- The Execrables: 0 votes = 0%
- Twilight: Eternal Narrative Stasis: 0 votes = 0%
- Proto-Robin Hood And His Quasi-Merry Men: 0 votes = 0%
- Prince of Parkour: The Absence of Entertainment: 0 votes = 0%
Scott Pilgrim? I think I have a good idea who voted for that; there is a large pro-Pilgrim element among my Twitter clique, and that’s cool. Sadly, I might have been on the fence last year but watching it again this year made me realise how much it annoys me. But I’m glad it has a following, and I suspect it will only grow. Congratulations, Edgar Wright and your lovable cast. I trust this epic victory makes up for the non-existent box office.
Some surprises there. Two votes for Inception? Three for Greenberg? Tron: Legacy gets the same amount of votes as Toy Story 3? How peculiar. I worry that Tron: Legacy got a vote because of the new name I gave it. Anne Billson complemented me on the joke but I think I stole it from Roger Ebert. When they say “Talent borrows, genius steals” I really don’t think they meant to say I’m a genius because I plagiarised a tweet. But anyway, it has been interesting to see how the votes land, and as you can see from the huge voting pool here this qualifies as actual statistical science, so please be sure to refer to Scott Pilgrim as officially the film of 2010 from now on. Thank you to everyone who voted, and if you’ve stumbled across this again, please vote once more for your favourite movie of 2011.
- Mission Unpossible: Goat Prototype
- Harry Potter and the Dirty Pillows, Part 12
- Lynne Ramsay’s One Colour: Red
- We Need To Talk About Thor’s Lickable Deltoids
- Twilight: The One With The Werepaedo
- Cheer Up, Kirsten Dunst, It Might Never Happen
- Tarsem’s Immortale, Pour Homme
- It’s a Tree, Yeah, And It’s, Like, A Metaphor For Life, Man
- Drive, He Didn’t Say
- Pirates Of The Caribbean: A Lovely Nap
- We Need To Talk About Captain America’s Ripped Abs
- Rise and Rise Again, Until Apes Become BrainApes
- Cheer Up, Michael Shannon, It Might Never Happen
- Zack Snyder’s What’s Wrong With Being Sexy?
- Therapeutic: Freud Vs Jung
- The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly Lizard Thingy
- Jean Dujardin Is: L’Artiste Adorable
- We Need To Talk About Green Lantern’s Shitty CGI Onesie
- Hey Kids! It’s Uncle Marty’s “Fun With Film Preservation!”
- Cheer Up, Michael Fassbender’s Penis, It Might Never Happen
- Transformybots: Bang of the Boom
- The Adventures of Tintin: The Whiny of the Butthurt
- Tinker, Typist, Souljah, Spelunker
- We Need To Forget About Charles Xavier’s Thinkyfingers Gesture
Thanks in advance. Get clicking (the poll should be in the sidebar) and if you get a chance, please send the link around. And remember, a vote for Steve McQueen’s Shame is a vote for penis.
BFI LFF 2011: Let The Bullets Fly / Dendera
Forgive me for this, but my final report on this year’s London Film Festival requires a bit of a digression. A crisis of confidence paralysed me after seeing two mystifying movies, and it’s affected the way I see movies in a way that’s not entirely positive, and I feel like it’s something that I need to work through. It’s partially caused by my visceral hatred of travel. Though I’d love to visit China and Japan, home of my favourite non-Western cinema, it’s not about to happen. Daisyhellcakes is the one with the Wanderlust; I’d rather just sit here and pick up snacks from the table using one of those robotic grippy hands. As a result all I know about both countries I’ve picked up from rumour and gossip, much of which sounds kinda general and probably skewed by empathy-gaps in the gossiper, or from what I see in their culture.
It goes without saying that this is unreliable. If I were to believe the cultural output of the UK was accurate I’d think the country has two halves: one prevented by law from progressing past a technological or historical level that would offend the average Amish, with courtly manners being the only distraction from all the handsome but grumpy men riding around on black horses; the other a modern urban hellscape populated by grizzled Cockneys called Roy “The Aardvark” Bulletface or Danny “The Damson” McScrofula, all of whom have passionate love affairs with their shotguns only matched in intensity by their loyalty to their “mam”. It comes to something when the movie that I think most speaks to the state of modern England is Attack The Block.
For all I know China isn’t a country where 50% of the population can fly through the air and do twenty roundhouse kicks in the time it takes to reload a gun, and the other 50% are cowering bureaucrats wearing oversized glasses. And Japan isn’t a place where the populace is dealing with a terrible epidemic of sinister dark-haired schoolgirls appearing in doorways. I should go there and check this out, but it’s not on the cards. Too late for that, and I hate travelling further than this sofa. Sadly that means that understanding the culture of both countries leaves little room for the small details, the cultural and historical tidbits that provide a better idea of what it is to be Chinese or Japanese. Even without the language barrier, there are times when being a tourist in the cinematic world of China and Japan is as baffling as being dropped into Kowloon with no money and no guide.
Which brings me to Jiang Wen’s Let The Bullets Fly, currently the highest grossing domestically produced film in China’s history, and second only to Avatar overall. The majority of the LFF movies that drew my initial attention were the big ticket events (Shame, A Dangerous Method, The Artist), or films by artists I liked and trusted, for better or worse (Bernie, Restless). Let The Bullets Fly (and Daisuke Tengan’s Dendera) were wildcards, picked in the hope that they would surprise me. Ticket prices for the LFF are pretty reasonable (£7 for an afternoon ticket for BFI members is better than the normal afternoon prices for the West End Vue, and a bargain if you take into account the prices of other cinemas in the area, e.g. the Leicester Square Odeon, whose cheapest afternoon tickets for Tintin in 3D were nearly £20). Nevertheless, the cost stacks up, and lack of time and cash meant I had to carefully select just a sprinkling to add variety.
In that case a Hong Kong action movie starring Chow Yun Fat seemed like a no-brainer, but it was not to be. Any attempt to summarise the plot here would be futile, other than to say that Jiang Wen plays an outlaw who may or may not be the infamous Robin-Hood-esque “Pocky” Zhang, who teams up with conman Tang to trick corrupt mobster Master Huang (Chow Yun Fat, in fine form) into thinking he is a newly arrived mayor come to collect tithes. Zhang’s plans end up enraging Huang to the point that they end up in a war of attrition, double-, treble-quadruple- and quintuple-crossing each other until most of the cast is either dead or maimed, and some viewers are lying in their chairs in a state of frustrated stupefaction, their brains tangled into knots trying to deal with the constantly twisting narrative.
To be honest, as long as you’re paying attention it’s not so bad; thank Buddha for a movie that actually expects the audience to pay attention. The trouble is that I can’t help but think that it’s my ignorance of those tidbits of Chinese culture that made the experience baffling and annoying, as so many moments in the movie seemed to make no sense. An early scene with Zhang’s godson Number Six being accused of theft was an early warning that I was out of my depth. Six proves his innocence in a way that, shall we say without spoiling, stretches believability to breaking point, certainly from a Western perspective. It seems unlikely that anyone would go to the lengths that he does to prove that he’s not a thief, at least from the way I saw it.
This was only the beginning. A scene with Zhang, Huang and conman Tang bartering for a share of Huang’s fortune, all the while debating the existence of the mythical Pocky left me utterly baffled. At various stages of the conversation I became convinced that Huang knew that Zhang wasn’t a Mayor, but was in fact Pocky, but then two seconds later I thought the opposite. At one point I thought Zhang had admitted he was Pocky, and for the next five minutes just got more and more exasperated. It just got worse. One double-cross involving a bunch of dead soldiers made absolutely no sense whatsoever, if you take into account the laws of physics. By the time Zhang and his men were shooting question marks and exclamation marks into an iron gate for no apparent reason I just gave up. Was this a joke? A mistake with the translation? A cultural reference I would never understand?
It’s tempting to say I thought it was great and just move on from there, but I honestly can’t. This confusion completely ruined Let The Bullets Fly for me, even though I was never bored during it, and certainly enjoyed many scenes. Jiang Wen is particularly good as Zhang; this is the first time I’ve seen him since he appeared in Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum, and he effortlessly holds the screen while Chow Yun Fat goes overboard as Huang and his hapless comedy-relief body double. Nevertheless, as the incomprehensible and overlong finale finally came to an end after what felt like hours of repetitive feints by protagonist and antagonist, all that mattered was that this movie, so popular in its country of origin, just made no damn sense on a narrative or filmmaking level.
Friend of the blog and prolific B-Movie Message Board poster Beggar So’s Hat saw a subsequent performance and reported that he greatly enjoyed it (N.B. The very excellent Mr. So’s Hat has kindly left a mini-review in the comments beneath this review; please skip down and absorb his considerable knowledge of Hong Kong cinema). I trust him; he’s a bigger fan of Hong Kong cinema, and has more experience of untangling these befuddling Eastern plots, which sometimes bear as much resemblance to a McKee three-act structure as James Corden does to Donnie Yen. Perhaps I’m just too sensitive about this, and how my response to Hong Kong cinema is selective — e.g. I’ve seen 30 minutes of Jackie Chan’s Police Story about 100 times, and the other 70 minutes twice, and I’ll leave you to guess what happened in those 30 minutes. It’s also the case that Eastern cinema is often edited into international cuts that drop stuff that doesn’t translate well. Even my beloved 13 Assassins has chunks missing, including this awful scene that would have wrecked the meticulous set-up to that final battle.
My concern over my culturally-ignorant responses was exascerbated when I saw the Rotten Tomatoes page for Benny Chan’s unexpectedly compassionate historical drama Shaolin, which mixes bursts of action and melodrama with a message of Buddhist optimism. Chan focuses on the redemption of some pretty unapologetic villains, and takes the time to show their passage from callousness to empathy. That makes for a longer movie than most, but it’s time that’s well spent. Nevertheless, even though it has a Fresh rating, the consensus seems to be that there isn’t enough action in it.
This surprised me. I can’t imagine a Western movie being criticised for that. In fact, as soon as a movie stops being about themes and starts being about chases and fights, critics usually complain that it has abandoned story in favour of dull crashing pyrotechnics. Why is non-stop action a requirement of Eastern cinema but not Western cinema? Is it because ::gulp:: many Western critics don’t get those movies either? Or is that an unintended consequence of the predominance of action releases around the world, that expertly choreographed fighting has now become an expected element in Eastern movies in the way the first thing that comes to mind when people mention Bollywood are extravagant musical numbers?
Is it possible to ever assess a different culture with a measure of objectivity? Almost certainly not, but then I’m quite happy to admit that I’ll give a bad movie with some funky FX and pyrotechnics an easier ride just because those are two things I like. Even so, my biases and ignorance sometimes talk too loud, and drown out a fairer voice, as with Dendera, which was the last movie I saw during the festival. It’s a sequel to Shohei Imamura’s The Ballad Of Narayama, which depicted a village that consigns its elderly to the nearby snow-swept mountain to die in order to conserve the minimal resources in the area. Dendera takes that idea further; what if one woman refuses to die when it’s her time, and prevails for so long that she ends up building a village of her own, filled with the women she saves from certain death?
This woman (Mei, played with fearsome intensity by Mitsuko Kusabue) wants nothing more than to destroy the village which discarded her, and sees the arrival of Kayu (Ruriko Asaoka) as a sign that the time for her vengeance has come. Kayu challenges her on this, maintaining that it was their time to die and such thoughts of survival have upset the order of things, not to mention preventing them from passing into the afterlife that has been promised them. The debate between Mei and Kayu rages until the village is attacked by a bear which threatens their very existence, derailing their plans for much of the latter half of the film.
Pretty much as soon as Kayu is rescued by the women of Dendera and begins arguing for death and obedience, my cultural ignorance about Japan took over. I began thinking about the legendary Japanese respect for the elderly, here turned on its head, and the depictions of societal deference in Western tales about Japan (I blame Michael Crichton). It was impossible to watch this movie — a movie with some feminist meaning, mixed with action — with clear eyes; all I could see was myself. That and a terribly unconvincing fake bear. Any suspense in the final hour is undone by the image of a man in a bear suit galloping through the woods; Mamet and Tamahori’s The Edge by way of Neil LaBute’s The Wicker Man.
Of the two movies, Dendera is a more solid piece of work than Let The Bullets Fly. Tengan elicits strong performances from the entire cast, especially Kusabue and Mitsuko Baisho as the leader of the town’s pacifist group, derisively referred to as the Cowards. It’s a movie that promises many things; it’s ripe with metaphorical power which dwindles as the movie trudges toward the final showdown between Kayu and the bear. Subplots are dropped and points are obscured, with only the unexpected finale to wrap things up in a reasonably satisfactory way.
Not that any of that mattered to me by the end. The confidence-sapping poison that had been injected into me during Let The Bullets Fly began to take hold during Dendera, so that by the end I wasn’t sure I could ever have a reliable opinion on it. The last half of the movie, which seemed to have veered so far from what I had enjoyed about the first half, made no sense to me on a narrative or emotional level. I became restless and annoyed; why wasn’t the movie doing anything logical? Why were the set-ups of the first hour abandoned like this? I thought the movie was going to fit in a box, but by the end the 3D shape I had imagined had liquefied and started to leak out of the sides.
Was it the movie, or was it me? Can I really be expected to understand all of the subtleties of a movie made in this alien culture? And who’s to say I can understand my own culture? As mentioned earlier, I loved Attack The Block, but my interpretation of what it meant might have been based on my incomplete misunderstanding of youth culture. My experiences with modern youth culture are restricted to trying to understand dubstep, which ended ignominiously during my third listen to Benga’s Diary of an Afro Warrior — a good album but Jesus Christ, I get that it’s called Diary of an Afro Warrior, Benga, and you don’t have to remind me with the phrase, “You are listening to Benga, Diary of an Afro Warrior,” inserted between every goddamn song! #GrouchyOldMan
In that case, can I ever get it right? Are these reviews just ways for me to broadcast to everyone that I’m an ignoramus? They’re meant to be my attempts to work out my feelings and theories about narrative, but perhaps I’m just setting myself up for a fall. Are my thoughts as unreliable as Chris Tookey’s, whose inability to see movies from any viewpoint other than that of anti-modernity, anti-political-correctness Middle England means he has pretty much zero worth as an objective, insightful critic (see his recent slating of Andrea Arnold’s remarkable reinvention of Wuthering Heights)?
The experience of watching Dendera suddenly became a whirlpool of doubt and recrimination, in which I came to an awful conclusion; I’m just not cut out for this game. It has long been my hope that I would make something of this writing malarkey, but as I struggled to interpret Dendera on a deeper level than just, “Pretty photography, bit muddled thematically, lots of snow,” I began to question everything I’ve ever said about films. Maybe the negative comments I’ve received calling me an idiot and saying I’m full of shit were right. Maybe this recent article about how blogging has ruined film criticism had a point. Maybe I should give up.
The fact that these London Film Festival reviews are here should give you a clue as to how I feel now, though it’s not as simple as that. I’m sticking with it for a while longer, but the doubts remain. It was only the experience of seeing The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn that put me back on track. As soon as Dendera finished I rushed out to see the latest Spielberg movie, still shaken by my crisis of confidence but eager to give this movie a try. This was a risk. While most folks seem to have grown up reading Hergé’s books, I was more of a 2000AD kind of guy, and tasteful Belgian comics moved me not a jot. The only reason Tintin appealed to me was because it was the first Spielberg movie in way too long, and I was curious to see what he would do with the performance-capture.
So wasn’t watching this movie while feeling fragile a bad idea? I had no frame of reference here, other than to think Tintin was a dull character. Would I be mystified again? Would this be the nail in the coffin of my blogging career? Thankfully, no. I have no idea whether Speilberg’s movie honours Hergé’s creation or insults him, as pretty much everyone working at the Guardian seemed to think. What I do know is that my initial scepticism about the movie vanished at the halfway mark, as it became obvious that this filmmaker, who has meant so much to me since childhood, was reinvigorated by the use of this new performance-capture toy, and was using it in a way that no one else had before. The succession of eye-boggling action set-pieces pinned me to my chair like an amazed butterfly. It’s a miraculous achievement just for the “one-shot” chase through the streets of Bagghar; it’s one of the most important action scenes in the history of cinema, one which film scholars will be studying for years to come.
But what do I know? I’m not a Tintin fan, so I can’t be trusted on this. Well, in a sense, yes, but as someone who adores Spielberg, who isn’t averse to performance-capture in movies, who doesn’t immediately pull a disgust face every time someone says the word “Hollywood”, I think my viewpoint has some worth. Everyone’s does, because their tastes have been shaped by the things they have seen and enjoyed in the past, and they can articulate something specific about every movie from that angle. I might not be able to tell the difference between the Thompson Twins but I can spot a lovely bit of Spielberg’s kinetic framing a mile off. While others have interpreted Spielberg’s Tintin as a cultural insult, I experienced a breathtakingly fluid experiment gone right, a triumphant meshing of technology and innovative storytelling that demands to be seen, no matter what the massed ranks of the Guardian say. This is the gift that Spielberg gave to me; the gift of shutting up the voice of my doubt, at least for now.
As statements of intent go this isn’t much of one, but for what it’s worth I’ll keep doing this for the time being, explaining why movies or TV shows moved me or repulsed me, in the hope that this connects with others. My reviews are obviously subjective, and I don’t have the gift of cultural omniscience, so there’s bound to be a lot of things I miss out or misunderstand. But this is what I have to offer. Thank you to everyone who contacted me about this series of blogposts; all comments were appreciated and received gratefully. I’ll be back soon for my Listmania! picks of the best and worst of the year, in which I will praise Kenneth Lonergan and make some mean-spirited jokes about what a nutjob Ayn Rand was.
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Shades of Caruso Mini-Blog- Listmania ’11! The Best Movies Of The Year December 31, 2011
