Monthly Archives: December 2011

Listmania ’11! The Best Movies Of The Year

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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.

Listmania ’11! Music Round-Up

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This post wasn’t supposed to happen. This year has been spent writing, not for the blog but for a higher purpose, and I’ve found that the perfect accompaniment is jazz. As a result the majority of the year has been spent blissed out listening to classics like No Room for Squares by Hank Mobley, Straight Life by Freddie Hubbard, Mingus at Carnegie Hall, The Sidewinder by Lee Morgan, Bill Evans live at the Village Vanguard, and many many more. As a result I don’t think I listened to anything from 2011 until August, fully expecting to go a whole year without bothering with anything modern. The long delay meant I went on a rampage. It was around then that I heard my number one album of the year, and everything else released this year has been eclipsed by it.

When I say it’s my number one album I’m not even scratching the surface of how how much I love it, how much it has come to mean to me. The last album that shook me up that much was Joanna Newsome’s Ys; another ambitious project that transcended the concept of the album. The discovery of this towering achievement has more than made up for some disappointments, most notably the kinda boring Parallax by Atlas Sound (a shame considering Bradford Cox is coming off the triple whammy of Microcastle, Logos and Halcyon Digest) and the way-too-short The King of Limbs. I can see that Radiohead are experimenting with new delivery systems and song-delivery systems, but even with the supplementary release of Supercollider/The Butcher, the way in which the album was distributed to fans was more exciting than the album itself.

Other than that the year was good enough, I guess. Frustratingly two of the year’s highlights — Undun by The Roots and Days by Real Estate — came out so late that I’ve not had time to fully appreciate them. This happened last year with Kanye’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, which I only listened to seven times before making my list, and then listened to about 70000 times in the next three months. Amazing stuff. I hope that happens with Undun and Days too. I’m really pleased at how lovable Days is, after giving Real Estate’s previous, eponymous album an award for Best Debut. That was good; Days is magnificent. A little sample is included below, among many many others.

Best Albums:

15. Gutter Rainbows – Talib Kweli

14. Wolfroy Comes To Town – Bonnie “Prince” Billy

13. Undun – The Roots

12. Mountaintops – Mates of State

11. Tomboy – Panda Bear

10. James Blake – James Blake

9. Mirror Traffic – Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks

8. Slave Ambient – The War on Drugs

7. Bon Iver – Bon Iver

6. Watch The Throne – Jay-Z and Kanye West

5. Days – Real Estate

4. We Must Become The Pitiless Censors Of Ourselves – John Maus

3. Let England Shake – PJ Harvey

2. Smoke Ring For My Halo – Kurt Vile

1. David Comes To Life – Fucked Up

Most Essential Free-To-Download Mash-Up Album of the Year, If Not All Time: 13 Chambers – Wugazi

Best Album I Only Listened To Because It Was Nominated In The “Token Jazz Album” Slot In The Mercury Music Prize And Turned Out To Be A Bit Of A Cracker: Good Days At Schloss Elmau – Gwilym Simcock

Album I’m Kinda Resisting Now Despite All Of The Pitchfork Fapping But May End Up Loving Eventually If I Can Ever Get A Bead On It: Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming – M83:

Best EP: So Outta Reach – Kurt Vile

Best Singles

10. Honey Bunny – Girls

9. Broken Record – Katy B

8. Midnight City – M83

7. The Wilhelm Scream – James Blake

6. Lift Off – Jay-Z, Kanye West and Beyonce

5. Getting Nowhere – Magnetic Man (feat. John Legend)

4. Supercollider – Radiohead

3. The Glorious Land – PJ Harvey

2. A Little Death – Fucked Up

1. Holocene – Bon Iver

Best Album Tracks

10. Kool On – The Roots (feat. Greg Porn & Truck North)

9. Soft – Washed Out

8. The Shakes – Atlas Sound

7. Ain’t Waiting – Talib Kweli (feat. Outasight)

6. Stick Figures in Love – Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks

5. Tomboy – Panda Bear

4. Three Blocks – Real Estate

3. Maracas – Mates of State

2. Peeping Tomboy – Kurt Vile

1. Serve Me Right – Fucked Up

Best Video: Lotus Flower – Radiohead

Best Star Cameos in a Video For a Song Featuring The Word “Blowjob”: Jack Black, Gary Cole and Maria Thayer in Senator by Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks

Most Confounding Earworm Lyric Featuring A Questionable Slang Word For A Lady’s Private Bits: Matter of Fact – John Maus

Best Album Tracks That Should Have Made It Onto This Year’s Best Album Tracks List But Sadly Both Featured On An EP Last Year And Thus Are In Contravention Of My Arbitrary Rules But Here’s The Videos For Them Anyway Because They’re Amazing, Really Seriously They’re So Amazing You Have To Watch Them Right Now: Baby Missiles and Come To the City- The War On Drugs

Best Opening Track: Perth – Bon Iver

Best Closing Track: Believer – John Maus

Most Valuable Player of 2011: Kurt Vile

So that’s 2011, a year dominated by a shouty man and an absurdly overcomplicated narrative about terrorism and love beyond death, eclipsing even the discovery of Kurt Vile, who I’d never heard before this year. If you haven’t heard Fucked Up’s David Comes To Life yet you can sample the whole thing on YouTube. Pretty much every tune on it could’ve found its way onto one of these lists; the richness and complexity of it is breathtaking, and that’s even before we get to the seemingly infinite multitude of hooks. Everything here is recommended, of course, but if you’ve missed out on Fucked Up (or Kurt Vile, or John Maus), your year in music is incomplete. Trust, bruv.

New Poll: What Was Your Favourite Movie of 2011?

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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

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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.

BFI LFF 2011: Six Degrees of Jude Law (360 + Contagion)

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My first experience of the 2011 London Film Festival was attending 360, the instantly derided new project from Fernando Meirelles and Peter Morgan, who were in attendance for the movie’s second screening following the opening night gala. Sadly the second experience of the festival was watching a fight almost break out between the guy sitting next to me and the couple sitting in front of us who conducted a phone conversation with an unseen third party through the first five minutes of the movie; a little gift to the audience that included some calisthenics from the guy who stood up, turned around, sat down, got back up, all while chattering away as if he was the only person in the room. I’ve whined about the unusually poor behaviour of festival attendees before, but this was on a whole new level. It didn’t bode well.

One miserable consequence of this was that I missed the opening of 360, in which Mirkha (Lucia Siposová), a young woman preparing to begin work as a high-end escort, is photographed by a sleazy pan-European pimp. As this happens we hear a voiceover which I suspect is from her sister, Anna (Gabriela Marcinkova) who, as far as I could see past Mr. Inconsiderate Twirling Guy, was talking about things coming full circle which, if you think about it, is super-apt considering the fact that the movie, named 360, is a loose adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde. Annoying that I couldn’t see the subtitles, but then I knew, just from the format of the movie, that I would get another chance to read them again at the end of the film, when it inevitably finished with the same speech. And what do you know, I was right. This is not a movie that contains a multitude of surprises, then.

Maybe it’s delayed fatigue brought on by exposure to Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel, which hopped around the globe from story to story, showing how connected we are, or maybe it’s my belief that this kind of linked anthology story has already been written definitively by David Mitchell (dedicated Cloud Atlas fan here), but 360 felt tired almost from the very first shot. Mirkha leaves the Grimy Room of Depravity™ to begin her escorting career by travelling across Europe to meet with Jude Law, a seemingly inept businessman hoping to have a sexual encounter while away from his wife. An unfortunate encounter with one of the pushy men he has travelled to see stymies his sexcapade, and from this moment on, a wave of accidental meetings, misunderstandings and revelations sweeps across the globe, changing the lives of a number of otherwise unconnected characters.

Meirelles’ critical stock appears to have fallen precipitously over the years, and for a while it felt like I was the only person still banging a drum for him. From critical adoration (City of God) to bemused grumbling (Blindness), his reputation has lost its lustre. Personally I liked Blindness, thought the performances were strong and the movie’s aesthetic appealing enough that I ignored the obviousness of the tale’s metaphorical conceit, but there’s hardly any way to defend 360. It’s a disappointingly ugly movie, rendered in washed-out tones, while the sludgy pace caused by its stop-start anthology structure means Meirelles struggles to generate any tension. The final scenes attempt to create some suspense but so little time has been spent with the characters the only way to make it work at all is to throw some pretty cheap melodramatics at the audience.

It’s possible that the version we saw was incomplete; it’s so flatly shot there’s a chance it hadn’t even been colour-coded, and the subtitles contained spelling and grammatical errors. And I’ll admit 360‘s plotting is mostly drum-tight, with only an occasional unrealistic fudge to help the narrative along. It’s also a surprisingly optimistic film, which gives it an edge over the modish, unconvincing dourness of Iñárritu’s work. In the Q&A following the movie Morgan happily admitted that he’s a jolly person at heart and didn’t feel it necessary to add any bleakness to the tale. It’s refreshing to see something so cheerful and life-affirming, especially considering the stream of huge downer movies I subjected myself to over the next two weeks.

Unfortunately it also means that 360 has little bite, except for a mid-movie sequence sullied with the most startling tonal inconsistency imaginable. Most of the movie’s indiscretions involve adultery, here seen as a chain of infidelity that spreads across Europe. Through a number of linked events we see heartbroken Laura (Maria Flor) leave London to head back to her native Brazil. On the plane she meets kindly Anthony Hopkins, a lonely bereaved father who helps her out, and during a layover in the States she encounters Tyler (Ben Foster), a sex offender struggling with an almost overwhelming urge to rape her and who may have been responsible for the death of Hopkins’ daughter and eh what hold on?

Foster (on admittedly fine form) is just dropped into the movie without any previous connection. A quick discordant scene establishes that he has been released to travel across the States to a halfway house thanks to the intervention of an apparently blind and delusional care worker. That’s very nice, but considering how jumpy he is, how easily tempted he is and how much he is still struggling to overcome his urges, it seems utterly inconceivable that he would be allowed to do this alone. Upon meeting this twitchy, unpleasant, antisocial mess of grunts, Laura is instantly, insanely smitten and drags him back to her room, thus brushing off Anthony Hopkins, who has agreed to meet her in the airport diner because he’s such a lovely and friendly old man but fuck that, eh? Who wants to hang around with someone like that when you can attempt to get over your heartbreak by trying ineptly to seduce a redneck whose body language screams “rapist/murderer” (or should I say “Actor who thinks rapist/murderers act like rapist/murderers”)?

The upshot of this is that we see a ridiculous split-screen suspense sequence seemingly directed by a mogodon-dosed De Palma in which a number of bureaucrats and jobsworths slowly realise that maybe letting someone as transparently dangerous as Tyler out to roam the world might not have been a good idea after all. We also, in the middle of a movie that gaily skips between light drama and broad comedy, get to see Foster in a bathroom frenetically masturbating and miming violent abusive sex acts in an attempt to stop himself from accosting poor oblivious selfish Laura. It’s so bizarrely inappropriate, compared to the rest of the movie, that I felt like asking if the reels had been switched. The fact that this is the only sequence in the movie to generate any kind of frisson complicates matters further. It’s desperately manipulative, almost comically so, but I guess it worked. Insert sadface here.

This wasn’t my favourite sequence, however. I will not hide the fact that I’m a fan of every single one of Anthony Hopkins’ brilliant acting tics; the gabbled run-on sentences, the oddly creepy smile, the constant leaning, and that rich, commanding voice. In drunken moments I have attempted to imitate him, so dearly do I love him. This has been a great year for fans of the thespian colossus. He was brilliantly unhinged in the otherwise unwatchable exorcism movie The Rite, magnificent in Kenny Branagh’s vastly entertaining Thor, and endearingly dopey in Woody Allen’s You Will Meet A Tall, Dark Stranger where, sadly, he had to share a lot of screentime with Lucy Punch, hammily playing the worst chav caricature imaginable. Yes, worse than Mira Sorvino in Mighty Aphrodite and Patricia Clarkson in Whatever Works. Nice work Woody, you massive fucking snob.

In 360, however, we get to see what happens when a writer and director completely indulge him. Morgan gives him a long speech about his dead daughter, delivered at an AA meeting, that goes on for what feels like about five minutes. I’m not sure what guidance Meirelles gave him, but the result is a long, unbroken slice of pure Hopkinia, and it took all of my power not to hoot with joy throughout. There is SO MUCH ACTING in this scene. The great man throws in every single tic and technique you can imagine, but goddamn it, the scene works like gangbusters, at least for me. Hell, I’d watch a whole movie of this. Someone get on that shit immediately.

It would certainly be more entertaining that this bitty hodge-podge of promising but underdeveloped short stories. For something that supposedly spans the globe and pays tribute to the hoary old idea that we’re all part of the same great human melange, 360 feels small and inconsequential. There’s no great truth here, and while it passes the time well enough, it’s disconcerting to see something so half-hearted come from Meirelles, who previously seemed to have a better grip of what it is to be alive in the modern age. This is a pick-and-mix bag compiled by someone who doesn’t understand you; there’s probably something in there you’ll like, but there’ll also be far too much licorice, and some of those unappetising-looking fried egg sweets with that nasty foamy texture.

I feel bad saying any of that because 360 is kinda sweet, and both Meirelles and Morgan were utterly charming in the post-movie Q&A. While looking for info about this movie online just now, I spotted here that Morgan’s inspiration for 360 includes the viral contagion that also, regrettably, connects us with each other. Jude Law also showed up in Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion, which takes that idea and runs with it, and though Contagion wasn’t included on the London Film Festival roster, I saw it while the festival was happening and it struck me as such a perfect companion piece with 360 that I have to talk about it. Also, because I think Soderbergh’s movie has been given an unfairly rough ride by critics.

Contagion has been described in the same damning way as David Cronenberg’s superb A Dangerous Method; too clinical, too sterile, not fluffy and crazy and melodramatic enough. Just as I strongly believe that such criticism of A Dangerous Method is wide of the mark, and will eventually be consigned to a dustbin once people have seen it more times and have come to appreciate its subtlety, I think Contagion will be treated with greater respect over time (coincidentally, the critic who seemed to value Contagion most was Amy Taubin, whose incisive and similarly enthusiastic review of A Dangerous Method can be found here). Nevertheless, it irks me to hear this gripping, serious drama compared negatively to Wolfgang Peterson’s ridiculous — though admittedly entertaining — plague movie Outbreak.

Written by the brilliant Scott Z. Burns (who was responsible for the exquisitely scripted The Informant!), Contagion follows a number of people affected by a global outbreak of a deadly new virus, MEV-1. Burns and Soderbergh focus mainly on the scientists struggling to find a vaccine, but also show the effect of the pandemic via bereaved citizen Matt Damon and blogger Jude Law. There are multiple strands here, but unlike 360, which parcels its stories out in discrete lumps, Contagion‘s stories run parallel to each other as the virus flourishes, triggering vast societal changes as humanity struggles to cope with impending disaster.

And yes, it is clinical. Soderbergh avoids melodramatics — there are only a couple of histrionic flare-ups during the movie, mostly from poor, terrified Damon, struggling to protect his daughter from the fate that befell other members of the family. But this approach, eschewing easy drama, is entirely appropriate for a movie dedicated to celebrating the best of the human intellect. What might seem like an oddly subdued movie about apocalypse is teeming with suppressed emotion, most of which is tamped down in order to maintain scientific objectivity to prevent the death of almost 10% of humanity. This is a paean to the great minds toiling away to prevent global catastrophe, a testament to the unsung experts who try to save us from our hostile world.

Many years ago I was lucky enough to read Laurie Garrett‘s The Coming Plague, which triggered a fascination with epidemiology and virology. Contagion is the first movie to successfully channel these fascinating subjects in an a serious fashion, but then this is probably because Ms. Garrett was one of the consultants who helped Burns write his authoritative screenplay (Dr. Larry Brilliant and Dr. Ian Lipkin were also among the contributors). The movie screams authenticity; there’s no synthesis of barrels of vaccine in a couple of minutes, there’s no temporary stupidity gaps among the scientists in order to generate fake tension or emotion, there’s no plucky maverick saving the day, and no applause for anyone who isn’t a professional. This is a movie that loves the intelligent, objective elites that know their shit. For this novel approach alone Contagion should be heralded as a major success.

I may rail against Aaron Sorkin as often as I praise him, but his love of the smartest of the smart — most often expressed by giving his characters speeches where they reel off their CVs to a clearly stunned audience of drooling lesser-folk — is refreshing, when not distorted by his personal bias against anyone who dares to question his brilliance. Too often the template for movies is to provide a little man to cheer on as he does battle against the know-it-alls who dare to order the rest of us around. It’s this glorification of the plucky ignoramus that has led to the rise of ideologically motivated idiots like Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter, Melanie Phillips, Peter Hitchens, Jon Gaunt, Amanda Platell and the rest of their malevolent small-minded ilk. This is most definitely not a good thing.

Meanwhile the quiet brains that make the world better or safer are drowned out by this frothing torrent of anti-knowledge, best shown in Contagion via Jude Law’s financially-motivated blogger Alan Krumweide. There have been some grumblings that Contagion is tarring all bloggers with the same brush, but I don’t think Soderbergh and Burns mean to use the vile Krumweide as a critical tool against those of us who write online without the seal of honour provided by a paid job by the official media (see also: Sorkin and his mean-spirited complaints against amateur writers). There are a number of comments made by Krumweide that plainly show their satirical target is the kind of corrupt individual who seeks to alter public perception of scientific endeavours for financial gain.

Their target is almost certainly Dr. Andrew Wakefield, who campaigned against the MMR vaccine. There is dispute over whether his now-discredited claims about links between the vaccine and a rise in autism diagnoses have caused a surge in measles cases around the world, but nevertheless his motives for arguing against MMR closely align with the motives of Krumweide, who promotes the use of Forsythia as a cure for the MEV-1 virus in order to capitalise on the inevitable run on the false remedy. He is a pitiful, unpleasant character, but he is at least given a few moments of what seems to be doubt and pity. I usually react negatively to unrepentant villainy in movies, but my own sense of anger at such venal behaviour in the real world meant Krumweide seemed almost insufficiently evil.

Contagion doesn’t deny that there is a political element to public health provisions, governmental disaster response, or the financial, social and religious reactions to outbreaks, but it strenuously lobbies for a cessation of needless complicating actions when faced with the death of millions. There is a sense of great anger against such behaviour in this movie, and the way in which attempts to capitalise on crisis inevitably obstruct the nobler work of scientists. This is a hero-worship movie, and how you respond to that will be linked to how much you think the CDC is trying to help humanity or exploit it. As someone who thinks these guys are to be trusted, Contagion is the movie I’ve been waiting for since discovering their humbling, courageous work.

And for those who feel Contagion is a heartless movie that denies any expression of emotion, I direct you to the final act of the movie, where we see the assorted characters get a moment to pause for breath. It is in these final scenes that we see them find time to react to the global — and personal — shift caused by the pandemic. There is humanity here in spades. It just had to be put on hold for a while. How rare it is to see something in popular culture praise reflection and professionalism, to take a break from severing Gordian knots with an slashing knife instead of taking the time to unravel it, before exhaling and embracing the horror that the characters have survived.

360 may have tried to tell a story about the wonder of humanity in the connected 21st Century but it rarely rises above the level of potboiler. Contagion is the movie that eulogises the best of our species, by showing how, even when the majority panic and try to make things worse, we were once at least smart and civilised enough to have prepared the safety net that will save us. There is fear here, and raging frustration, and Soderbergh and Burns dramatise both brilliantly, but they also offer a vision of hope. Their cleverest trick comes in the very last minute, in which we see just how fragile we are as a species, and how much we can jeopardise ourselves if we’re not careful. We can be almost entirely undone by the smallest fluke moment, but still we prevail. That last note is haunting, but even as it hangs in the air we can still hear the minimalist symphony of hope played just before. We will prevail, no matter what gets thrown at us. We’re going to be just fine.

BFI LFF 2011: Bernie / The Monk

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Whenever I try to come up with a list of perfect movies — movies that get everything right, that never fail to lighten my mood, that have moved me so profoundly that I see the world and our culture in a new and better light — there are some that leap straight to mind. Midnight Run is the main one, with Galaxy Quest right behind; Carroll Ballard’s beautiful Fly Away Home is on TV as I write this, and I’m instantly in love with it all over again. To that list I’d add School of Rock, Richard Linklater and Mike White’s lovable comedy which remains one of those films that, if it shows up on TV at any point, will make me put down whatever else I’m doing. Along with Kung Fu Panda, it’s one of the examples I use to justify my longstanding affection for Jack Black. The role of Dewey Finn allows him to channel his rock-slacker shtick into the ideal personification of his muddled anti-authoritarianism and bone-headed enthusiasm.

I couldn’t love the movie more, and if you don’t adore it too, we can never be friends. (#Dealbreaker) Good news for us; the LFF was generous enough to nab Linkater and Black’s newest collaboration; pretty fortunate as it seems to have had some trouble finding distributors, even in the US. Bernie is based on a Texas Monthly article – Midnight in the Garden of East Texas — by Skip Hollandsworth, who co-wrote the movie with Linklater. (Warning: it’s impossible to synopsise this movie without giving away a huge plot point.)

It starts innocently enough; gregarious assistant funeral director Bernie Tiede (Black, of course) arrives in the town of Carthage and immediately charms everyone with his upbeat personality, generosity, and enormous singing voice (fans of Mr. Black’s vocal stylings will be very pleased with his unctuous phrasings and epic bellowing here). In hardly any time he becomes a beloved member of the community, helping with school productions, contributing to church ceremonies, and coming to the aid of even the town’s worst occupant, the mean-spirited Marjorie Nugent, played with sour relish by Shirley MacLaine.

Nevertheless, no man, no matter how kind or loving he is, can remain unchanged following prolonged exposure to poisonous individuals like Marjorie, and their odd friendship goes horribly awry. She begins to wreck his life, demanding more and more from him, estranging him from the townsfolk he has grown to love. Her onslaught of hostility begins to wear the good-natured Bernie down; even his shield of good-natured positivity is not impervious to one demented, irrational outburst, and in a moment of madness he shoots Marjorie. The events that this triggers strain credulity, but it’s apparently all true.

A curmudgeon could complain that Black’s performance is pitched a little bit too weird, but that layer of cheeriness covering a tortured soul is perfectly judged considering just how bizarre the rest of the cast is. Other than MacLaine and Matthew McConaughey as District Attorney Danny “Buck” Davidson — the man who seems so uncomfortable with Bernie’s camp mannerisms that he directs his energy into bringing him down — the majority of the cast are citizens of Carthage who were present at the time of the movie’s events, and who both talk directly to the camera in a documentary style or act in scenes that they seem to have lived through already. Their “performances” are the key to the movie’s success; they’re almost eccentric, but instantly recognisable and human, no matter how odd their beliefs might seem to outsiders.

This mixture of reality and artifice, which includes interviews with both real people and actors as if they were both there at the time, is a dizzying conceit I don’t recall seeing anywhere else, but if someone knows of an instance, please let me know. The most unusual thing is that both reality and unreality mix and support each so well that there’s no mental argument about the veracity of the story. It feels real, no matter how unbelievable it gets. Something like Capturing The Friedmans – one of the best documentaries of the past few years – will offset conflicting viewpoints from the subjects that creates a pleasing and discombobulating friction between possible interpretations. Which narrator can be trusted? There’s no such conflict with Bernie. It’s pretty much straight down the line.

Linklater depicts Bernie’s appalling crime and we’re never meant to question it, even though the townsfolk who defend Bernie against the accusations by DA ‘Buck’ Davidson are convinced their opinion is correct. The joy of Bernie is not trying to get to the heart of a mystery; it’s watching the subjects’ willing leap into delusion because they want to believe something so badly. Linklater has created a picture of a fascinating and bizarre phenomenon, a mass delusion that should be sinister but is actually charming, thanks to his comedic touch. It resembles Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, except that Linklater aces the tone in a way that eluded Clint Eastwood, most probably because, as a Texan, he understands the way in which a small town like this would rally around someone they had taken into their hearts.

This is a far superior snapshot of the effect of a shocking crime on a tight-knit community, reminiscent of Errol Morris’ superb Tabloid – another crowdpleaser that touched on serious subjects. Bernie is broad and spritely while still managing to paint a sophisticated picture of small-town politics, Southern justice, and the way celebrity (either local or national) can warp the perception of criminality. Naturally it has drawn criticism for portraying Bernie’s crimes in such a light-hearted way; Linklater was never going to completely get away with making a black comedy about such things, though his use of real Carthage residents and his command of tone makes this a lot easier to swallow than it should be.

But I’ll be honest, concerns about the rights and wrongs of portraying these real events in this way never occurred to me while watching. Everything about this is pleasurable, especially yet another stand-out performance from Matthew McConaughey. Thanks to his funny turn in this and his strong work in the very entertaining Lincoln Lawyer, he’s having a fantastic year. Shades of Caruso has defended him in the past, but sadly failed to sway even a single hater. However, after these two movies, and (hopefully) his appearance in Jeff Nichols’ Mud, it might be time for more people to cut the big guy some slack. Yes, I’m talking to you, Bim of Yoruba Girl Dancing, you big sceptic you.

Black is great too, though an unfortunate side-effect of the movie’s format is that while everyone else gets to be “interviewed”, Bernie himself comes across as a blank slate with no chance to speak to us about his motivations. Black is required to be the one mysterious individual in the movie, but this is not to denigrate his strangely touching performance; he does more than enough to convince us that Tiede’s crime was a consequence of that red rage I’m sure most of us would recognise. Shades of Caruso remains committed to Jack Black fandom, and this is worth seeing for him alone.

(Sidenote: Much as you would hope for perfect or near-perfect film projection during an international film festival, Bernie was sadly projected in a baffling ratio that clipped off the top and bottom of the image. I mean, I could happily blame that on Linklater and claim that the guy suddenly forgot how to place his camera correctly, but seeing as how I was recently told by @AntCrossfield that the screening of Meek’s Cutoff I attended last year was also projected in the wrong ratio, it’s fair to say that West End Vue needs to hire a few more projectionists for the next festival. It’s especially galling that Meek’s Cutoff was projected incorrectly. Kelly Reichardt specifically chose a 1.37:1 ratio to create an almost square image, but the Vue projected it far wider than that. I think I even commented on the “panoramic vistas” in my review last year. So they made me look like a complete know-nothing asswit like my biggest non-fans already believe. Thanks for robbing me of my dignity, West End Vue.)

Bernie’s fall from grace is played for laughs, while Dominick Moll’s The Monk depicts a grave tale of hubris and corruption. Based on a novel by Matthew Gregory Lewis, The Monk tells of Father Ambrosio (Vincent Cassel, as compelling as ever), a mysterious and adored Monk with a mysterious past whose unwavering belief in his own righteousness brings about his doom. After doing what he sees is right in reporting the “sinful” behaviour of a nun, who is then punished to death by her Abbess, Ambrosio finds himself falling under the spell of a new presence in his abbey. Valerio, an eerie deformed man hiding behind a mask, is the only person who can quell the pain of the terrible headaches Ambrosio experiences, and the bond they forge becomes deeper and more threatening to the monk’s eternal soul.

As with Bernie, The Monk is a movie that is more rewarding for being seen with as little foreknowledge as possible (difficult considering it’s based on a 1796 novel by Matthew Gregory Lewis, but it’s safe to relate that Ambrosio’s arrogance and almost militant, humility-free piety are not going to be things that save him from damnation). His situation is complicated by the introduction of Antonia, a young woman being courted by Lorenzo, a nobleman’s son. As questions about their suitability for each other arise, Ambrosio soon becomes involved in the lives of Antonia and her mother Elvira. It’s not long before Ambrosio’s sense of honour and restraint begins to collapse, and an obsession with the virtuous young woman begins to affect him.

The original novel appears to have many sideplots and diversions, but Moll’s adaptation strips out much of that in order to focus primarily on Ambrosio’s downward spiral, thus accentuating the morality tale at the heart of the novel. The key is the treatment of Agnes, the young nun whose indiscretion leads to her demise. She survives Lewis’ novel after being rescued from her imprisonment by the Prioress, and settles down with Don Raymond, the father of her child. In Moll’s movie, all we see is Agnes foolishly dropping a love letter in front of Ambrosio, who rats her out to the Abbess (a short role for Geraldine Chaplin). There’s no happy ending for Agnes in Moll’s movie. By linking her protracted and miserable death to Ambrosio’s rigid piety, his comeuppance is assured.

And what a comeuppance. There are hints of what is to come laid throughout the movie, including one casting decision that struck me as odd early on but made sense eventually. Synopses of the novel talk about Ambrosio’s descent into pure evil, but while the movie version of the monk certainly commits terrible acts, Cassel plays Ambrosio as a terrified man dwarfed by the dark powers arrayed against him. He’s not sympathetic at all, but he appears haunted by what he is doing, aware of the depravity of his acts but almost powerless to stop himself. Visions of the future plague him; when he finally succumbs to his urges, it almost seems as if he feels he has no choice.

Cassel’s riveting performance is as well-modulated as Moll’s direction, neither descending into overt melodramatics. The few concessions to directorial bombast from Moll are a few surrealist touches, such as the unnerving mask and sinister, whispery voice of Valerio, and a particularly unpleasant demonic millipede that Ambrosio encounters in his beloved rose garden (a visual echoed later in the movie by the procession that takes place outside the building in which Ambrosio commits his final, terrible crime). Patrick Blossier’s dramatic lighting sculpts numerous memorable moments from the medieval darkness; several shots of Cassel’s anguished face surrounded by black shadow are particularly effective, forming a nice contrast with the garish washes of primary colour near the end, a startling choice which wouldn’t look amiss in Hitchcock’s Dial M For Murder. The very final scene, where the full scale of Ambrosio’s failure is made apparent, is rendered without bombast, but is all the more powerful for that.

But it’s Linklater’s movie that says more about humanity, even though The Monk is very solidly made and atmospheric. Moll’s macabre and oppressive semi-horror is impressive, but it’s so far removed from modern experience that it exists more as a curio — albeit a very entertaining curio — than Bernie’s delightful humanist tale. Cassel deserves praise for doing everything he can to make Ambrosio relatable, and it’s arguable that he does a better job than Black, whose work as Bernie is lots of fun but more than a little alienating due to the number of peculiar tics on display, but even with such an impressive display of acting fireworks at its core, The Monk is still a movie about a near-saint who falls victim to his pride and suffers an operatic fate involving vastly powerful supernatural forces. Bernie is about that horribly recognisable moment when every good thing you do as a human is undone by one weak moment when pent-up fury bursts out. That’s something that most audiences — for better or worse – would find more believable.

BFI LFF 2011: Children Who Chase Lost Voices From Deep Below / Restless

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After a burst of Western interest in Japanese animation triggered by screenings of Katsuhiro Otomo’s masterpiece Akira in 1991, cinema releases of anime seem to have dried up, at least in the UK. It feels like only Studio Ghibli movies get any attention any more; other than a couple of festival appearances we didn’t get to see Satoshi Kon’s Paprika or Mamoru Oshii’s The Sky Crawlers on the big screen, while DVD releases come out pretty regularly. It’s not all bad; at least we’re getting to see new Ghibli movies. Nevertheless it’s easy to forget that there are other filmmakers out there producing distinctive anime that isn’t about armoured cyborg cops or sword-wielding vampires (disclaimer: I have no problem with movies about armoured cyborg cops or sword-wielding vampires).

I haven’t seen anything by Makoto Shinkai before, though I had noticed he has a gift for adding evocative and unwieldy titles to his movies. Voices From A Distant Star, 5 Centimeters Per Second, The Place Promised In Our Early Days: they’re poetic and just pretentious enough to pique my interest. Children Who Chase Lost Voices From Deep Below (a pretty accurate description of this movie’s content) was one of my 2011 London Film Festival wildcards, except that the presence of an animated movie from Japan in a schedule that contained what mostly seemed to be movies illustrated in the BFI’s lovely 2011 programme by pictures of sad people looking out of car windows was instantly appealing to me. I didn’t know anything about Shinkai (though I soon discovered this lovely poetic little thing about a cat in love with his owner), but I had high hopes that Children… would be an otherwise undiscovered gem.

And it was. Shinkai’s melancholy fantasy follows Asuna, a young girl whose run-in with a mysterious and terrifying creature leads to a meeting with a mysterious boy, Shun, who saves her at the cost of his life. This encounter brings her to the attention of a vaguely sinister substitute teacher, Ryūji, who tells her of his theories about an underground world called Agartha. He believes this subterranean realm is analogous to the Underworld of ancient myth, and as such could be the place where he can find the soul of his dead wife. Asuna is similarly bereaved; her father is dead, and her mother is a nurse who is never at home. At first friendly, it becomes apparent that Ryūji’s real motives for approaching Asuna and seeking out Agartha might not be as innocent as it seems. Soon after meeting Shin, Shun’s aggressive brother, Asuna and Ryūji find themselves in a menacing world of great beauty, where their grief drives them toward a showdown with infinite, terrifying forces.

Daisyhellcakes reads a lot of novels for children and young adults for her job, and had told me about the tropes that occur frequently. Many of the plot devices Shinkai uses here — the other world, the dead loved ones, the possibility that they might be resurrected — are so familiar that I wondered if this was an adaptation of a Western children’s novel in the same way that Ghibli adapted and transformed Howl’s Moving Castle and The Borrowers. Turns out it isn’t, but the reliance on such oft-used devices makes Children… seem at first like it will be travelling down some disappointingly familiar paths.

Thankfully that’s not the case. Before long Children… has settled into a hypnotic pattern of tension and reflection while creating an intriguing and complex mythology for Agartha and the multivarious clans and creatures that live there. Shinkai’s fantasy is a feast for the eyes and the mind, transforming some familiar ideas (floating Viking vessels, spirit guides) and making them unique to this vast world, all while keeping their essence. For all its visual dazzle and culturally specific detail, the world of Agartha is recognisable to all audiences, as if Shinkai has tapped into the collective unconscious.

One could quibble and say that this familiarity means Children… doesn’t have the pleasantly discombobulating atmospherics and primal surreality of, say, Miyazaki’s classics Spirited Away or Princess Mononoke, but there are still visual and conceptual pyrotechnics here, especially during the movie’s hallucinatory finale, which operates on a terrifying scale that dwarfs our characters. The stakes for Asuna and Ryūji, and for the denizens of Agartha, become desperately serious, as the price Ryūji has to pay to fulfil his desire becomes apparent. The seeds of this final resolution are sewn throughout the rest of the movie, in its quietest moments. For instance, a particularly memorable scene near the end sees Asuna, exhausted and trapped by terrifying shadow creatures, reveal her reasons for embarking on this hazardous trip. Until that moment her motivation was frustratingly unclear; in this quiet, wrenching moment Asuna’s sadness is made clear. I won’t lie; tears were shed.

The finale is darker than you’d expect, and includes some pleasingly unconventional aspects. Miyazaki is a master of subverting the traditional Manichean conflicts used by most storytellers to power their tales. There is often a sense during his final acts that the characters who have opposed each other throughout are not the enemies you would have expected, and often face a greater threat than each other. Without getting too far into spoiler territory, it’s fair to say that a similar thing happens here. Asuna and Ryūji’s fate when facing forces of gigantic power is tied up with their own real-world problems, and though they appear to be antagonists, they are actually kindred spirits facing a greater opponent. Shinkai brilliantly plays out the final reckoning on both micro and macro levels; the resolution is awe-inspiring and moving in equal measure.

Children Who Chase Lost Voices From Deep Below is a gratifying success, a mind-expanding meditation on loss and loneliness that doesn’t stint on adventure and suspense. It feels honest and real even as Shinkai takes the viewer into a dazzling  fantastical world. There’s much said here about what it is to be a human in the face of unavoidable sadness, and how we can reconcile ourselves with emotions and events that are beyond our control. It is, in other words, the polar opposite of Gus Van Sant’s Restless, which is easily the most facile, absurd and shallow movie of that director’s long and fascinating career.

Adapted by Jason Lew from his play, Restless unites Enoch (Henry Hopper), a death-obsessed young man and Annabel (Mia Wasikowska), a terminally-ill young woman suffering from movie cancer, i.e. she looks healthier than me, barring a single non-traumatic seizure that pales in comparison to the harrowing ones suffered by Michael Shannon and Gwyneth Paltrow in Take Shelter and Contagion respectively. Enoch’s habit of loitering at funerals is his way of coping with the death of his parents; he’s like Ed Norton hanging out in cancer recovery groups in Fight Club, but even paler and weaker. He even has his own imaginary friend in the form of the ghost of a WWII Japanese pilot, Hiroshi (Ryo Kase), who is his Tyler Durden, if Tyler Durden liked to play Battleships and sulk instead of shagging Marla Singer.

Both Children… and Restless depict the efforts of the bereaved to find a state of grace and acceptance, but while Shinkai’s fantasy touches on deep emotional truths, Van Sant and Lew’s phony exercise in Harold-and-Maude-esque quirkiness is depressingly shallow. Van Sant has worked on commercial projects before; Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester have been dismissed as mainstream confections taken on to bankroll his more experimental projects. I’m on the record as being a fan of Good Will Hunting (back off, folks), and I haven’t seen Finding Forrester, but I can’t imagine it’s worse than Restless. This is the kind of cataclysmic misjudgement that sinks a career. I won’t feel good about this until Van Sant makes another good movie, to dispel this bad karma.

What’s so bad about it? As many other critics have pointed out, it’s almost unbearably cloying and cutesy, treating the subject of death with a disappointingly glossy approach so far away from Van Sant’s usual experimentalism that it almost verges on an avant-avant-garde trick, an intentional reversal of his previous aesthetic, as if the arty filmmaker had travelled back around a spectrum of seriousness toward twee emotionally-retarded stupidity. It’s Van Sant satirising himself, if you want to be generous. Trust me, though, after sitting through something as excruciating as this, generous is the last thing you want to be.

At least in the middle of the mess is a charming performance from Wasikowska, but what she’s asked to do — to be a beatific force of empowerment for the benefit of this unappealing collection of quirky character details indifferently performed by Hopper — is just unacceptable. It’s the worst kind of Sweet November / Manic Pixie Dream Girl bullshit; the saintly woman who experiences life at its most intense and donates that viewpoint to the poor man who is transformed. Thanks for dying, lively girl with a selection of endearing eccentricities! Now that you’re dead I can enjoy looking at flowers again or something. It’s telling that this hoary old trope, when done this badly, is less problematic than the inclusion of the ghost of a kamikaze pilot.

I’m not opposed to MPDGs in principle; it could be argued that Glen in Andrew Haigh’s lovely Weekend could be the Manic Pixie Dream Boy who brings lonely Russell out of his shell. That wasn’t a problem in the context of that story, especially as Glen is empowered by Russell to embrace intimacy just as his sudden vulnerability gives Russell strength to face down his enemies. Annabel, on the other hand, resembles a human about as much as a wire-frame pre-viz of Bumblebee in Transformers: Dark of the Moon does. She’s a stew of “endearing” cliches, a writerly concoction who should never be able to die as she has never been alive.

This goes double for Enoch, whose intangibility as a character is not helped by an underpowered performance by Hopper. It’s the kind of hesitant work you’d expect to see in a low-budget indie movie by the press-ganged friend of a first-time director, but here we have someone who knows their shit behind the camera, and the amateur dramatics and obvious hammering of well-worn narrative beats are just inexplicable. How can this have been made by the guy who made Elephant? It’s only the photography by the ever-brilliant Harris Savides that pushes this above the level of — dare I say it — Sundance Audience Award Winning Movie That Can’t Even Get A Distributor. There’s a short mid-movie love scene that is luminous and almost magical, but it only features as a short respite from the inconsequential and frankly cringe-inducing miasma.

Spoiler paragraph! What’s even worse is that Lew and Van Sant satirise the use of photogenic cliche in Hollywood depictions of terminal illness even as they rely on such triteness. A short sequence near the end of the movie features Enoch and Annabel acting out her death with silly soap-opera histrionics as a kind of weird QUIRKY joke ha ha. However they disagree on the best way to perform this morbid skit, and end up arguing about the rights and wrongs of airbrushing depictions of mortality. By this point, with Annabel’s only apparent symptom of terminal brain cancer being her Mia-Farrow-in-Rosemary’s-Baby-esque hair, that’s already a bit cheeky, but her eventual offscreen death and sappy funeral scene — in which Enoch learns how to laugh / simper at all the lessons he has learned– render this choice utterly bizarre. Will Gluck’s Friends With Benefits recently did a similar thing — mocking the conventions of romcoms before embracing them at the end — but that was entirely appropriate considering the arc of the characters from cynics to romantics. There’s no such arc here, no satirical point or character note. The movie is just so badly made that it thinks it can have its cancer-cake and eat it. Spoilers end!

Turns out Van Sant was a contender to direct The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part One; even though that franchise is one I consider almost comically bad, I would pay hypothetical billions to have seen Van Sant make that instead of Restless. You can imagine that he could take the most interesting aspects of Stephenie Meyer’s drama — Bella’s loneliness, the heightened emotions, the idea of adolescence as a kind of prison — and make them sing, as well as bring some beauty and artistry to that most mundane and ugly of franchises. Instead we’re left with this childish mis-step in one of the most interesting careers in modern American independent cinema.

BFI LFF 2011: Shame / Rampart

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As mentioned before, buying tickets for the 2011 BFI London Film Festival was a miserable clusterfuck; the pilot light on the single gas-powered server the institute uses must have gone out, resulting in an almost total shutdown. We refreshed the BFI website more often in five hours than Tom Ford refreshes himself in the average decade. That’s a lot of F5-ing. We actually managed to buy tickets to Rampart and A Dangerous Method without even realising it. When we found out that our requests had broken through we felt like we were characters in a William Gibson Cyberpunk novel, sneaking through digital ICE in order to hack into an AI.

And yet, even though we got tickets for 13 films, there was a sense of unavoidable failure, as Shame, the follow-up to Steve McQueen’s remarkable debut Hunger, was sold out even before the members priority booking opened. This was one of two movies both me and Daisyhellcakes were determined to see (the other was A Dangerous Method) that wouldn’t be released in the UK until next year. Yes, even though we had already seen Michael Fassbender in X-Men: First Class and Jane Eyre this year, we selfishly demanded more of him, preferably naked and tortured by the consequences of his own irresistibility. That’s how deeply Fassbender Fandom penetrates our souls.

But worry not, we got the tickets, no thanks to the website which crashed again on the day that extra tickets were released; once more a big thank you to the incredibly helpful staff at the BFI Southbank who dealt with my hyperventilation with great understanding. Even better, Shame was worth the humiliations of my pathetic, petulant sturm-und-drang complaints, and became an early highlight of the festival. Quick synopsis; Brandon (Fassbender, obvs) is a sex addict on a downward spiral which accelerates as he is visited by his sister Sissy (the luminous Carey Mulligan) with whom he shares a dark past. Brandon has sex. A lot of it. He’s mean to his sister. He has more sex. And on and on and on…

It’s hard to convey the visceral impact of McQueen’s formally bold and beautiful depiction of Brandon’s descent into self-negating eroticism, certainly without spoiling what happens, but it is easy to recommend, and for one very good reason; Fassbender is breathtakingly good in what has to be the best performance of the year. On a technical level the man is on peak form, once more reunited with his muse McQueen; we’re talking DeNiro/Scorsese levels of cinematic harmony here. You can feel an electrifying alchemy being created as you watch.

However, the brilliance of Fassbender’s performance goes beyond mere talent. It’s the fearlessness of his work, the ability to allow the audience to peek into a tortured soul as naked as his body. McQueen makes a bold statement very early on by showing Fassbender fully nude for long shots, with the camera defiantly set at groin height. As Fassbender passed back and forth in front of the lens from one room of his spartan New York apartment to another, the audience started to petrify into its seats with horror, made even more uncomfortable by the knowledge that the owner of the penis ticking past our faces like a large metronome was in the building.

It sounds lascivious, but it’s not. It’s startling, but it’s also alienating. We stop seeing this as a sexual organ, something to be leered at. It’s an organ for fucking and pissing; by the end of the opening montage of Brandon’s life, any erotic charge is eliminated. This is a grind of a life as miserable as any other. At this point he looks like a functioning addict, but all it takes is for the sudden introduction of his exasperating and impulsive sister to throw him into a tailspin from which he may or may not recover, which requires Fassbender to bare his soul and his body in ways that are startling and darkly beautiful.

It also allows McQueen to add some of his now trademark long-shots, all as exciting to experience as the setpiece conversation between Fassbender and Liam Cunningham in Hunger. The first is the already notorious scene with Mulligan singing New York, New York in some high-end bar while a testy Fassbender and an excitable James Badge Dale (also very good) watch from their table in front of a gloriously lit Manhattan backdrop. Sean Bobbitt captures a radiance that seems to pour from Mulligan’s delicate face as she sings the most excruciatingly drawn-out version of the song; it’s as if McQueen has captured the tension of the movie’s ever-present promise of eventual collapse in an excruciating microcosm. There’s one significant cut away from Mulligan, which I won’t spoil, other than to say it’s devastating.

There follows a tracking shot of Brandon running along a New York street to get away from his apartment, which has now been colonised by the people he has tried to hide away from. It’s a relatively simple shot made more complicated by being filmed in the busiest city on earth, but it’s riveting nonetheless, and represents the absolute opposite of this shot from Mauvais Sang by Leos Carax. After that we see a dinner date between Brandon and co-worker Marianne (Nicole Beharie) that is either his attempt at normality, or an example of his seduction attempts. Prior to this women seem to just throw themselves at Brandon, but Marianne is warier. It’s a riveting scene, partially because of the ambiguity of Brandon’s motives, but also due to the choreography of everyone in the restaurant. It’s Hunger‘s conversation scene, but with a meddling waiter and a lot of sexual tension.

These aren’t McQueen’s finest hour, though. That comes in the final act, turning what might have been some disappointing redemptive notes from writer Abi Morgan into a bravura sequence of degradation and misery, so beautifully shot and disturbing that the viewer is hypnotised, much as I was during the final minutes of Darren Aronofsky’s majestic Black Swan (or, more aptly, Requiem For A Dream). The final graphic sex scene in the movie is a wash of image and sound — thanks to an ominous score by Harry Escott — but it’s terrifyingly unerotic and haunting, as Brandon tries to lose himself in orgasmic oblivion. Instead he looks like a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown; dead eyes, agony, desperation all painted on his face. That Fassbender, you guys. Seriously.

Morgan’s script is, for the most part, ambiguous and pared down, clever and funny and only at the end a little rote. That’s the difficulty with character studies like this. As with any straight version of a genre type, there’s very little room for manoevre, and post-screening my initial feelings were that I was less engaged with it than I had hoped simply because the arc of a character study tends to be a straight line with the possibility of an uptick or downtick at the end. Biopics have the same problem; we’re ostensibly being told the story of a person’s life, either as an overambitious whole or a mere slice that illuminates their whole being. In the wrong hands this can lead to clumsy attempts to dramatise an inner life, usually through awkward exposition (the worst problem with biopics).

And yet even though Shame isn’t a bad character study, my misgivings about the sub-genre spoiled my experience. The momentary clunkiness of a couple of scenes at the end of Shame (not counting the final shot, which I won’t spoil) conspired to sully my opinion. How could I really like Shame, an example of that miserable sub-genre that I’ve never really had time for (confession: I’ve never truly loved Taxi Driver, despite its many good points)? Luckily for McQueen’s movie, a couple of days later we saw Oren Moverman and James Ellroy’s Rampart, a character study that has numerous parallels and similarities with Shame except that while that is a truly superb and exciting piece of cinema, Rampart is a cluttered failure, a waste of your time.

Okay, there is one very good reason to watch Rampart. Woody Harrelson is on fire as Dave Brown, a corrupt cop with the LAPD at the time of the Rampart scandal, who is videotaped beating an African-American. This slip — if you can call it that; the man is obviously on the edge of some kind of breakdown — sends him down a long path to oblivion. Harrelson’s bewildered and paranoid reaction to the slow unraveling of his life is mesmerising, and powers the movie through what would otherwise be crippling longueurs, but it doesn’t change the fact that while Shame avoids being nothing more than a simplistic morality tale through the use of ambiguity and the skill of McQueen and his cast, Rampart is little more than an empty box being carried around desolate LA scenery by a very talented and underrated performer.

Much of the problem with Rampart is that the story has been told before, with enormous detail and complexity, in The Shield. SoC likes The Shield. A lot. If you’re going to play in The Shield‘s back yard, you’re going to have to bring something new to the table, and Rampart has nothing. Dave Brown is a morally compromised jerk, but if you’ve experienced the fluctuating fortunes of Vic Mackey — one of the great characters of the modern age, whose fall from grace is positively Shakespearean in scope and power — then being a dick to the mothers of your children and getting a bit grumpy with Ice Cube pales in comparison.

That familiarity is made more noticeable due to the connections with Ellroy’s other work. Police corruption has been a constant theme in his books, and approaching it from this angle — as a real example of wrongdoing that was exposed to the light — is perfectly valid. However, confusingly, Dave Brown’s personality is very similar to that of Ellroy’s Lloyd Hopkins, immortalised by James Woods in the nifty James B. Harris thriller Cop. Both are men who bend or break the law, profess to venerate women, have messy home-lives, and have been notoriously involved in the suspicious deaths of rapist-murderers. That one point made me think that Rampart was intended to be some kind of follow-up to the Lloyd Hopkins trilogy, that we were seeing the ignominious end of his career.

That’s apparently not the case. To be honest, Rampart is so ramshackle and loosely plotted that it often doesn’t feel as if Ellroy had much input, though this could well be the assumption that makes an ass out of me and mption. The flabby plotting isn’t helped by the seemingly improvisational dialogue in many scenes. Without Ellroy’s precision, we’re left with rambling actorliness, especially between Harrelson and Ben Foster, here playing a wheelchair-bound lowlife. They only appear in two scenes together but it feels like you’re getting approximately 50 hours of intense staring, babbled words, tics, gestures and conversational dead-ends, all filmed by a camera crew positioned across the road for extra verite.

Moverman should have been more ruthless in the editing room, or more focused when preparing to shoot. As an actor’s showcase Rampart does the job, but it’s indulgent to think this passes muster as a movie. It was doomed, being screened so soon after Shame, which is a gleaming, precision-tooled Faberge egg compared to Rampart‘s clumsily assembled clay ashtray. Every directorial decision made by Steve McQueen either makes sense in the moment or comes to take on greater meaning afterward. Some might argue that such care makes for a bloodless movie, but rather that than the rambling incoherence and ugly hand-held look of Rampart.

This popular aesthetic of our age, the gritty faux-documentary mode of filming (that, oddly enough, seemed to be a new and edgy thing back when The Shield began) has really begun to seem played out. When Philip Pullman wrote this article criticising the overuse of present-tense narrative voices and hand-held cameras, I thought he was being a bit of a whiner, but now I’m beginning to think he had a point. The worst recent offender is Gavin O’Connor’s Warrior, starring Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton. At least I think it was Tom Hardy; the camera never focused on him long enough for me to tell. As for Edgerton, I still don’t know what he looks like. For all I know he genuinely looks like Metal Beak the Nazi Owl.

Rampart is not nearly as bad as Warrior, which situates the camera either one hundred feet from the actors, with numerous obstructive objects between them, or places the camera so close that you can’t understand what anyone is doing. This modish grittiness only serves to render the movie unwatchable; I long for the day when it becomes unfashionable. Sadly Rampart‘s power is diminished by this approach, not to mention memories of both Bad Lieutenants, which were directed in such a way as to allow for improvisation or unpredictability while still exerting control over the tone and the narrative. Moverman’s film is a poor cousin to those fine movies; a shame, as Harrelson here operates almost on a par with Harvey Keitel and Nicolas Cage. Of all the actors, he seems to have the best bead on what the movie needs from him.

I’m not crazy. On-set experiments with dialogue and camerawork can deliver moments of great power and emotion, I’ll happily admit that. Just picking the best example off the top of my head, Friday Night Lights was built on this format, and for the most part it was truly magical. Nevertheless, except for the odd moment of frisson, Rampart doesn’t hold together, and certainly doesn’t hold the attention. And yet I’m almost grateful to it for crystallising something that has been brewing in my mind for a while now. Shame belongs in the same category of movie experiences that includes Black Swan, Inception, 13 Assassins, Inglorious Basterds, and to a lesser extent 2011′s Drive, We Need To Talk About Kevin and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; movies that are finely wrought and made with proper care and fastidious design.

Those were some of the most rewarding and pleasurable movies I’ve experienced in recent years. These are the things that excite me. Rampart‘s failing, and Shame‘s considerable success, has made this clear. Going forward with this knowledge may make me harder to please, but the happiness I’ll feel when I witness something as beautifully made as McQueen’s memorable portrait of psychic confusion and loneliness will be all the greater.