Category Archives: Aaron Sorkin

The Caruso TV Awards Are Dead; Long Live Another Huge Post About TV

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Once upon a time Shades of Caruso flourished like a beanstalk borne of magic beans, sprouting poorly edited posts on a regular, almost daily basis. It was a simpler age, when I had lots of downtime at work and could futz about there in the company of other people similarly unoccupied. Ah, t’was glorious in that subterranean office, with nothing but lots of frothing about Torchwood and attempts to create running gags about Reed Richards to fill the billions of empty hours. As I’m sure many of you know, blogging can be addictive, and for a while there it grabbed me with greater force even than smoking or pasta. The Publish button was the plunger on a syringe full of opinion-smack, and refreshing the Sitemeter page was the high.

Luckily the love of a good woman and general indifference from the blogosphere persuaded me to scale that shit back a lot, but even so the sense of obligation remained, as if I had to keep something going for the sake of… I don’t know, truth or something? Or maybe to lance the boil of opinion in my head that constantly replenished itself over time? Probably more like that. I had thoughts that needed to be shared, it seemed, but now I so rarely blog the upshot is that the thoughts pile up, and I end up writing epic posts that are just stupidly long. 6,000 words on Prometheus? 9,000 on The Dark Knight Rises? 10,000 in total over three posts about the Lost finale (still one of my least-read blogging projects)? The less I blogged the more I wrote, paradoxically.

The busiest period of the Caruso year is September to December, where I seem to focus most of my energy. First comes the Caruso TV Awards, in which I would choose the best and worst episodes of the year, best and worst characters, and then sundry other observations I had accumulated during that TV season, though the size of those posts meant they would be finished about a month into the new season, rendering them even less relevant. Then comes the two weeks of the London Film Festival, during which time I’ve reviewed every film I’ve seen there for the past three years, leading to either barely any hits (Bernie/The Monk) or big numbers, such as my absurdly glowing review of Black Swan, which got mad hits (like it was Rod Carew). And finally, in December, a blow-out with the Shades of Caruso movie awards, which takes me months to write. I’m not kidding; I started working on this year’s awards in August.

But why? To have a voice? If part of living in the new world is servicing the compulsion to continually scream, “I am alive, in the world, and I opine!” then I have Twitter for that, and Letterboxd if I can be bothered to put up with the worst of the commenters there (the good people make up for it, but being talked to like a 6-year old two weeks ago because I didn’t ejaculate with glee over Rian Johnson’s otherwise very good Looper was enough to put me off for a while). Am I doing this for my loyal readers? I do have some and they mean the world to me, but when I have #TheProject sitting unwritten in the writing study in the cobwebbed west wing of my mind, the thought of doing this in the hope that I might somehow enhance the wider cultural debate even a little seems absurd and quite arrogant.

Of course, I also feel compelled to do it, which explains why I spent weeks building up the courage to write about The Dark Knight Rises, and I feel much better for sliding that out of my head and onto the page like I’m moving Iron Man armour schematics from screen to screen like Tony Stark (quick thank you to everyone who RTd it or commented on it or offered kind words; it’s a huge relief when I get positive feedback). There’s also my standard response when people ask why I do this; watching and dissecting TV shows is how I catalogue how I feel about works of fiction, how they have failed or succeeded, and how I can develop my own writing or understanding of story structure and artistic accomplishment through those studies. That’s the best reason of all, and watching TV has been incredibly educational in that respect.

But sometimes it feels like the lesson is merely, “Be more like the writers of Breaking Bad and The Good Wife, and less like the writers of CSI: Miami and Dexter“. That’s a broad lesson that’s learned already, and picking these things apart to see how they tick (or clunk) isn’t as useful as it once was. Actually, I’m learning more about writing fiction by writing fiction, though I’m glad I spent so long preparing my brain-soil before planting idea-seeds. All those hours watching The Shield / Buffy / Lost and learning about character and pace and timing of revelation really paid off, I can feel it.

And so, to my point. The LFF reviews will probably remain, though I might make them smaller. The end of year awards will remain because they make Daisyhellcakes laugh and I get a shitload of hits for them (I think it’s just image-trawlers but still). The Caruso TV Awards? No can do anymore. They take forever, I get about 12 hits a post, and no one ever mentions them even on Twitter, where no thought is left untranscribed. It’s a waste of time I could spend elsewhere. Agonising over that series of posts, which I dreaded for months, has been one of the most depressing things about this year, when much of the time I wanted to work on #TheProject.

Giving up on that plan has lifted an enormous weight off my shoulders; the weight of having to watch the rest of Revenge, the second season of Boardwalk Empire, or any of Grimm after that risible pilot. I honestly think I would have killed myself if I’d felt obliged to watch the second season of Falling Skies just for the purpose of writing 200 words about it that no one would even have noticed. As for the sitcoms; I will only endure comedies starring Zooey Deschanel or Krysten Ritter if someone pays me megadollah, and, as I have found to my great embarrassment, no one wants to do that, so you can forget it.

And why should I write a huge post about these things even for money? There are more than enough people doing that on a weekly basis anyway. The AV Club alone covers literally every episode of every TV show airing at the moment. Sometimes I wonder if they’re going to start recapping the news. The vast majority of their reviews are so far-and-away better and more insightful than anything I could come up with that the futility of it seems even more overwhelming, and even if that wasn’t the case, do I really want to become an active, visible member of a critical subculture in which writers I like can be pilloried and insulted by fans with the permission of bitter showrunners, as those who have criticised Sons of Anarchy or Community have found? What’s to be gained from participating? It’s just asking for trouble.

But those observations remain in my head, standing between me and #TheProject like an inspiration dam, making a blog purge necessary. So I can get on with my goddamn life, here’s what I thought of TV this year. I wrote a shit-ton; feel free to bail now if you want, I’ll understand:

A million people can tell me that Boardwalk Empire improved in its second season but it would have had to be reset entirely for me to even think about giving it a chance. Plus I know everything that happens at the end because Twitter. A character I didn’t care about killed another character I didn’t care about? Maybe if that suddenly transforms the show into The Chalky and Van Alden Intensity Hour in the third season, then I’d think about it. Perhaps I’d have been more willing to watch Boardwalk Empire if I hadn’t tried to get through the interminable Hell on Wheels. Five episodes in I had to give up. A Western! And I couldn’t get through it! I blame the drama-dampening work from Colm Meaney, who was only slightly less hammy than he was in Get Him To The Greek, which is still a huge Serrano Ham of a performance. Even Common and The Swede couldn’t keep me watching. Sorry AMC.

And sorry for not being more enthusiastic about The Walking Dead aka The Neverending Circular Conversation About Oh The Humanity n’ Ting. A lot of folks hated the fact that it was set on one farm. I understood the need for this; budgetary constraints made it necessary, and to be honest it’s theoretically possible that a show could work from one locale. But if the only thing that happens is that everyone has conversations about the thing that’s on their mind? For several weeks? And all anyone ultimately does is swap philosophical positions with someone else, before swapping back? I don’t care how many main characters you massacre, I stopped caring 8 hours ago. There’s no drama here anymore. There’s just talking and an occasional zombie ZOMBIE THEY’RE CALLED ZOMBIES NOT WALKERS ZOMBIES FOR FUCK’S SAKE ZOMBIESZOMBIESZOMBIES.

This lack of enthusiasm spelled doom for other shows. Revenge seemed like it would be campy fun but it wasn’t compulsive enough or trashy enough to keep me and Daisyhellcakes interested. A lot of folks like it but time is just too precious to use on something I think is okay. Especially when you waste 13 hours on Alcatraz, which seemed like it might have been a grower like Fringe, but was merely a series of narrative dead-ends before the enormous cul-de-sac that is Being Cancelled. They couldn’t even make good use of the excellent chemistry between Jorge Garcia and owner of the Best Hairstyle of the Season Sarah Jones. I don’t know if I’d like more of Alcatraz, but I’d like more of those two. However, watching that meant I never even got around to Person of Interest / Awake / Enlightened / Boss / House of Lies / Magic City etc. At least, that’s my excuse and I’m sticking with it.

Two fairytale shows arrived and became hits, improbably. The pilot for Grimm so offended me with its dreary sub-Buffy mythology that I dropped it instantly, and even though it’s apparently OMG sooooooooooo good now, again, my priorities have finally shifted, hallelujah. Once Upon a Time, on the other hand, was only really marginally better but for a Lost fan such as myself, that dual-timeline structure was like finding a packet of chocolate in the back of the cupboard that you’ve forgotten about. For all its many faults it was a great bandage on the wound that is the absence of Lost, plus it’s nice to watch less demanding, pleasant shows now and again. Best of all, it featured a fantastic villain in Rumpelstiltskin, one good enough to keep me tuned in even during the longueurs. Hopefully the second season will make good on the first’s promise.

Some of our favourite shows returned and were merely just good. Nothing spectacular, just eminently watchable and occasionally inspired. The Good Wife had its weakest season yet but it was still so sharply written and bouncily performed that even a few malfunctioning plotlines and strangely curtailed arcs couldn’t ruin it. Can anything? The show is a miracle of network TV; a pacy procedural that’s culturally relevant and politically complex without alienating the audience through impenetrable continuity. It’s still the most entertaining show of the week almost every week; nothing else surprises me as often or makes me feel as happy. I hope it runs forever.

Fringe understandably felt a little off because of the wait so many of us had for the timeline in which Peter exists to come back into being. Peter did return, but neither universe had ever known him. Still we waited for a reset but it never came, and maybe fans were disappointed that Olivia regained her memories of him because of love. But the show is about love, more than any other TV show except maybe Once Upon A Time. The wobbles in mid-season settled once the show basically came out and said, “IT’S ABOUT LOVE! CHILL OUT, NERDS!” and looking back it was stronger than it first seemed, and had a surfeit of terrific hours, as Noel Murray found recently. It would be churlish of me to be too critical of a show this entertaining and increasingly emotionally charged, especially if it’s willing to send two characters back to the Big Bang itself, just because it could.

The sitcoms, on the other hand, were a mess. The Office finally broke us, and we stopped watching it, our “Memories Of The Office” switch firmly stuck in the “That was a shit show overall” position. Maybe unfair, but the woeful start to the season was enough to banish many of the good memories. It should’ve ended halfway through season five, I tell you. Parks and Recreation was thankfully better, but the Leslie/Ben relationship annoyed Daisyhellcakes to distraction, the insane and desperately unfunny Tom and Anne coupling infuriated us both, and the promising campaign arc didn’t provide the LOLz we were expecting. A good idea in theory, but one poorly implemented, even with great guest turns by Paul Rudd and Kathryn Hahn (aka the hardest working woman in showbiz). Veep was good but worked better if you thought about it as a drama with jokes. Hopefully it’ll hit its stride soon and find its own voice.

Even Community disappointed this year, with a terrible split between bland formula and crazy concept stuff. The ambition gap between the two was way off; season two seemed perfectly blended in comparison. Which is not to say there were no great episodes; as it wore on it felt like there were good and clever things being done but they were being lost in the shuffle. I’ve spent the whole year trying to figure out what it was that bugged me about this season, and the main candidates were the long set up for arcs that got paid off in baffling haste, the endless, increasingly unfunny references to Inspector Spacetime (the worst running joke in the history of comedy), and that the performances were pitched way too manic and perky compared to previous years, which I attributed to everyone wanting to please the NBC box-tickers. And we all know how that turned out. [Edited to add: FFS]

But holy crap, 30 Rock bounced back with a bang, surprising everyone, and by everyone I mean 100% me and about 80% Daisyhellcakes who didn’t enjoy it quite as much as I did which is no knock on her because seriously I was SO THRILLED by this season you have no idea, guys. About four weeks into this year it kicked in and went from “About to be dropped” (yes, my favourite sitcom, and the previous season had been so bad I honestly nearly gave up) to “highlight of the week”. I want to hug everyone involved for finally fixing the Kenneth problem (i.e. they gave him something to do and cut back on his screentime), revitalising Tracy by pairing him up with Jenna (who had similarly become tiresome), and just doing everything better and funnier and snarkier and smarter and better and betterer and betterest.

Which is more than I can say for The Newsroom, which was so unbelievably, monumentally terrible on almost every conceivable level that I’m amazed even Aaron Sorkin’s most die-hard fans didn’t suddenly realise their Studio 60 boxset was filled with lemons. We tried to tell them to do what we did, and turn those lemons of preachy, repetitious tone-deaf mansplaining into the lemonade of mockery! Oh how we laughed as Sorkin turned his female characters into desperately flailing and shallowly-drawn comic relief! Oh how we marvelled as he filled the screen with Sorkin surrogates (Sorkingates) for everyone to fawn over, listing the person’s achievements and TELLING us they’re great so Sorkin never has to figure out how to SHOW us that greatness! Oh how we despaired whenever he’d get within pissing distance of a good point and then cut to the Maggie-Jim-Don-Lisa-Sloan (Oh lovely Sloan!!!) love pentagon or Neal going on about Cthulhu or some shit.

By the end of ten deliriously awful episodes we thought people would finally see that those of us who are fans (seriously, we are) but who feel obliged to call him out on his worst excesses were right all along but no, his more devoted/blinkered fans doubled down, and as the final episode aired, all of them spontaneously said, “he stuck the landing”. Yes, but he landed on a PILE OF FUCKING LEMONS AND KILLED EVERYONE ON BOARD! HE’S NOT AN ELEGANT GYMNAST! HE’S AN AIRBUS A380 BECAUSE THAT’S THE ONLY PLANE BIG ENOUGH TO CARRY HIS EGO, AND THE PILOT OF SAID METAPHORICAL PLANE WAS DISTRACTED FROM HIS PURPOSE BY A RIDICULOUS CONSPIRACY SUBPLOT ABOUT PHONE-HACKING, AND SO NOW WE’RE ALL DEAD AND COVERED IN PIPS!

Honestly, there were two shows I wanted to write about each week this year, the first being The Newsroom so I could list all of the imbecilities, and the other being Lena Dunham’s Girls, but that would mean I would be adding fuel to the awful fire that has raged across the Internet for months now, only to flare back up again last weekend when a very ill-worded tweet (if I can put it rather mildly) from Caitlin Moran led to many angry followers damning her and Dunham as at worst racists or at best feminists with too narrow a focus on their own issues. I have no wish to risk offending anyone who has any strong opinions either way about this show, so I will direct you to these two superb and insightful posts about the controversy from Sarah Ditum and Bim Adewunmi (and this new, excellent one from Ms. Bim), note that it was easily my favourite new show of the year (sorry), and leave it at that.

Mad Men! It was the season where all the metaphors and messages were really offputtingly obvious! Except that season one did that as badly and no one complained then. Admittedly this season was a retrograde step back from the fine-tuned subtlety of seasons 2-4, but even then it was still elegant, impeccably made, and filled with deliriously pleasurable moments. Yes, the Joan thing was unfortunate, but if Janet Street-Porter is to be believed in this column about that piece of shit Jimmy Savile, women were a commodity in this era and Joan was never going to escape it, and in fact was being used as a prop way back in the first season. The past was a miserable wasteland for a lot of people, and focusing on the mechanics of this plot overlooks the horror of the reality, and the brilliance of the storytelling here (as upsetting as this storyline was, at least Joan is finally an agent in this decision, and wins big as a result). And hey, at least we got Far Away Places, the infinitely clever and bold portmanteau episode that almost rivaled last year’s masterpiece The Suitcase. That more than made up for Don’s absurd throttling hallucination a few weeks earlier.

Fans also turned on Breaking Bad, not long after Matt Zoller Seitz wrote a review saying the train heist was one crazy step too far into the realms of action movies. Considering the MAGNETS, BITCH setpiece just a few weeks earlier, escalating Walt and Jesse’s ambitions and abilities a little bit more is not a dealbreaker, and betrays a dismissive attitude toward the action genre (disclaimer: my favourite movie genre next to superheroics). That episode of BB was easily the highlight of the truncated season, but I guess someone had to be the first to backlash against it. After that there was a tide of complaint about the hurried pace. Yes, it was regrettable. No, it didn’t mean the show was ruined, as will become apparent when it’s over and the plan makes sense. I have faith. Move along. Move along.

Did anyone complain about Game of Thrones? If so I didn’t hear it over the sound of me screaming “OH GOD THIS SHOW IS THE BEST!” This is the only season I watched twice this year and it works much better in one quick go, but even week to week it was remarkable. In one block, though, the War of the Five Kings is propulsive, thrilling and necessarily absurd in equal measure; the politics of the crazy situation are held up as the joke that they truly are without the stakes being diminished. And Brienne! And Jaqen! And Arya and Tywin chilling in the Banquet Hall Of Conveniently Face-Obscuring Shadows! And White Walkers! AND MOTHERFUCKING TYRION AT THE BATTLE OF BLACKWATER BAY! I spent ten weeks pooping myself over this masterful exhibition of imagination and emotion, and I can’t wait to watch it again for the third time. Best show of the year.

Basically HBO had an amazing year, and that’s not even considering the other instant classic show they had and then cancelled in a panic like it was an accidental Amazon double order. Michael Mann and David Milch’s Luck was a fascinating artifact, a labor of love from the writer and a triumphant return to TV for the director, but ultimately a sadly incomplete triumph, the ultimate in coitus interruptus. Watching it after the cancellation was frustrating, especially when it sank its hooks in early. I heard some say they “got” the show during the exquisitely shot horse race in the fourth episode, but some of us fell in love right away, and not just because its confidence and focus quickly erased the memory of John From Cincinatti. And the races? Simply some of the best setpieces in the history of the medium. Every one made me crane forward in my seat and scream at the TV. The last episode shouldn’t have mattered because of the cancellation, but I screamed anyway, and cheered at the results. Just look at the fourth episode race; it’s glorious.

Writing about a show as powerful, ambitious and off-kilter as Luck is one of the reasons why I wanted to blog about TV in the first place, but the downside of that is the obligation to cover other things, to make sure I’m not just watching shows from one country. Consider this another reason for giving up; I couldn’t bring myself to watch Borgen or The Bridge after the disappointment of the original Killing, have yet to try Continuum, and barely watched any UK shows. Missed Blackout, missed The Hour, missed Line of Duty, have never wanted to watch Downton Abbey and never ever will, am almost 100% sick of Doctor Who and the relentless one note smart-arse dialogue, not to mention the Doctor’s current arc as “sulky child man who twirls too much”.

Other than that there was the now-off-the-love-list Misfits which sadly had a really poor third season, what with Rudy basically being Nathan after a Find/Replace script job in the wake of Robert Sheehan’s departure. True, Joe Gilgun managed to make it seem like that wasn’t the case by adding notes of self-doubt, and his performance was the only bright spot of the show’s year, but we could still tell it was meant to be Nathan. By the middle of the season 10 minutes of drama was being dragged out to 45 mins a week, and when three other leads left the show that was it. Stick a fork in us; we’re done. Doubt I’ll stick with Who either, unless I’m wrong about the new companion, aka Sexxy McDalek.

Another bad thing about blogging is seeing people react badly to a show you like and having to deal with the inevitable arguments. If I’d been doing a weekly column about Homeland when it aired in the UK I think I would have entered a mild depression at the reaction to the show’s finale. Many seemed to think that the dramatic choice made by Brody was a cop-out, made necessary by the imminent second season (cue complaints about the US strategy of making more episodes), that he should have blown himself up and be done with it like would have happened in a short-run UK series, which wouldn’t be expected to flog the story to death. At around this point someone will inevitably mention Fawlty Towers.

To say I disagree with this would be to be talking around the fist I have crammed in my mouth so I don’t say anything that would be construed as too hostile (the last thing I’d want to do while talking about something as essentially unimportant as a TV show). But, if Brody set off the bomb then the entire season, with all of the debate about his motives and the extent to which he has turned against the US, would have been for nothing. It would have been ten episodes of watching a clock tick down, Brody would have been reduced to a fuse, and Carrie would have been vindicated but what then for her? This way, yes, there is a possibility that the show will go on too long or lose its momentum, but we also get to see Brody continue to wrestle with his obligations with new, even higher stakes, and Carrie can continue her fight for respect. That’s where the drama of this brilliant show lies, not in waiting for things to just end. It’s not Day of the Jackal, the series. It’s The Manchurian Candidate, and it will run for as long as it needs to. (Edited to add, having seen the second episode of season two, I feel utterly vindicated in this belief.)

Short runs lead to stories with the potential to only do approximately as much as other shows of similar length, with a consequent fall in dramatic and emotional potential as more event possibilities are curtailed. Though I like lots of short-run dramas (Edge of Darkness and The Shadow Line, in recent years, are a perfect length), the rise of longer continuity-heavy dramas has revolutionised TV drama, and despite viewer argument over the padding in Lost (which I didn’t mind) or other disliked network shows, such long-run shows will always win out in my eye just because they can do things you won’t expect (if they’re bold enough). Seeing a key line by Xander at the end of season 2 of Buffy being brought back with three years of subsequent drama in season 5 was like an epiphany for me. See also The Shield; the perfect seven-season show in which everything that happened mattered, cumulatively. Homeland has the potential to match that achievement.

Of course I get that shows run out of steam, as shown by The Vampire Diaries‘ third season. As a soap opera about two families of vampires it was a lot of fun, and Ian Somerhalder, Candice Accola and Joseph Morgan are still good value for money, but this season was entirely composed of moments of necessary détente punctuated by someone saying, “I’ve just found out there’s an ancient spell and/or amulet that will magically kill the thing we previously said was unkillable,” before someone else finds it and double-crosses everyone else by conveniently destroying it. By the halfway mark the repetition got pretty goddamn annoying. Hopefully the finale’s shocking events can reset this, because spending a whole season attempting to generate tension while also going out of its way to maintain the status quo meant what was once vital became as lifeless as about two-thirds of the cast. (P.S. I’m now a Klaroline shipper, just accept it haters.)

One show that has been fallen right into a balance between a short and long run is Spartacus, which has, through awful circumstance, run 6 episodes longer than it might have (the mini-season Gods of the Arena), but is still facing its final season as Steven S. DeKnight probably wisely reckons there isn’t enough story to keep it going beyond the next year. The sad outcome of this is a season that got rid of many of its best characters, leaving behind a stripped cast and a million corpses. That finale was great but if you want more of the show, it’s so horrible to see so many terrific foes or beloved heroes bite the dust that eventually the joy is tainted. Nevertheless, it was another strong year for TV’s most outrageous show, and as with previous seasons, once it got into its stride it was exhilarating. It will be sorely missed.

It would have been nice to watch American Horror Story to see how a show is willing to reinvent itself drastically in order to keep a story going while also providing the closure that people wanted from a short run, especially as this would maybe soften my argument about Homeland, but after giving up so much of my life to Glee (which I finally dropped this year), one episode was enough. I might still go back to it, especially as the idea of it appeals more than the bizarre execution (plus, Connie Britton Connie Britton Connie Britton), but I’ll only do it if someone can promise me I don’t have to see Dylan McDermott frantically jacking his dick in the midst of a nervous breakdown again. It was bad enough watching Damian Lewis do that in front of a horrified Morena Baccarin; like some kind of awful nightmare the night after a Firefly / Band of Brothers marathon. Whoever told TV executives that “the kids these days just love sad wanking” must stop this madness now.

FX was lucky to have AHS there because otherwise I would have ignored it as part of what might be a subconscious war against the network for cancelling Terriers. Still haven’t finished season 3 of Justified; we just don’t have the enthusiasm we once had. And I didn’t watch season 4 of Sons of Anarchy either. That’s how boring the third season was, no matter how well it ended. I’ll get to it eventually but conflicting reports about its quality are not making me want to hurry. As for Louie, it was FX’s finest hour, but even though I loved almost every episode I’m never enthusiastic about watching it. This hesitance mystifies me. If it wasn’t for Daisyhellcakes pushing me into it I would’ve missed that amazing episode with Parker Posey, or that insane Letterman three-parter, which were among the best TV of this year.

But maybe this is the problem. I’ve got so much on my mind lately that I find it hard to switch off enough to even get through a half-hour show that will almost certainly entertain me, and then something that has given me such pleasure like Sons of Anarchy languishes unwatched on the Sky+ box for months. Perhaps this is part of the malaise that has made me get annoyed at every nearly every film I’ve seen this year, or maybe my mind is champing at the bit to stop watching other people’s fiction and just get on with my own. I have to get #TheProject out of my head, you guys. You’re gonna love it, I think.

All I know is, this year I tried to watch TV to generate thoughts to fill out these posts, and even though this is yet another epic, it’s nothing like what I expected. This is surely a sign that I should just watch TV for me, and not bother trying to add to a cultural conversation that is doing just fine without my occasional post. Let’s hope that refocusing my energy means I have time to create something more constructive, while approaching TV shows as entertaining diversions, not homework assignments. I’ll keep you all posted. In the meantime, here are my top ten episodes of the year, for completion’s sake.

10. Spartacus: Vengeance – Libertus

9. Louie – Daddy’s Girlfriend Part 2

8. Fringe – Welcome to Westfield

7. Homeland – The Weekend

6. Girls - Welcome to Bushwick a.k.a. The Crackcident

5. Luck – Episode 4

4. Community – Remedial Chaos Theory

3. Breaking Bad – Dead Freight

2. Mad Men – Far Away Places

1. Game of Thrones – Blackwater

Anyway, thanks to all who have ever commented on the Caruso Awards; your kindness gives me strength. I’ll be back soon enough, hopefully.

With Great Sadness Comes Great Introspection

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Perhaps it’s a good thing I’m only a blogger, and not a Sorkin-approved paid journalist with official opinion-having credentials, because if I had to review Marc Webb’s The Amazing Spider-Man for an actual publication, it would be my last. Sure, I could add a synopsis, which would account for about 52-67% of what I write, and I could talk about how much I like Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone as performers in general, and I could talk about the history of the character a bit, throw in some stats about how popular he is around the world, maybe draw a comparison with The Avengers or speculate about its chances against the impending behemoth that is The Dark Knight Rises, but other than that all I can write about is tiny tiny details, nitpicking and highlighting and basically turning the whole thing into a pro/con table. [1]

Is it bad? No, not really. I’ve been engaged in a Twitter chat with the very lovely friend-of-the-blog Gally Freya about Green Lantern this morning, which led to a repeat of my usual unedifying frothing rants about why that movie is the barrel-scrapings of the superhero genre, a betrayal of the character, a bone-headed focus-grouped overthought and cowardly monster of a movie that should never have been allowed onto the screen. Probably the only really bad thing I can say about The Amazing Spider-Man is that it’s way too long and a bit boring. Sadly, the best thing I can say about it is, “Hey, good work Columbia and Sony on doing the bare minimum to keep hold of those valuable Spidey film rights!”

It’s obvious that the movie was made with affection for and awareness of the character, and some effort has gone into it, into thinking about who Peter Parker is and what motivates him to become a hero, and for that we should be grateful, even if the studio’s motives for rebooting the series are a little shaky. What’s most egregious is the lack of life in the movie. For a character who is meant to be an expression of youthful exuberance, a way to release a young science geek’s inner confidence in the most obnoxious/lovable manner possible, this is a dour, slow movie that very rarely perks up. I do not relish the thought of watching it again.

It’s impossible to talk about Webb’s movie without comparing it to Sam Raimi’s incredibly successful trilogy. [2] Though generally thought of fondly, there are many dissenters (at least, in my Twitter timeline) who dislike Raimi’s Spider-Man series. If they think they were too goofy or too garish, this Spider-Man might be the version they have been waiting for. For the rest of us, this bleak movie runs counter to Raimi’s (and Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s) vision, a bright and sunlit New York patrolled by an exuberant, colourful wise-ass in contrast to Webb’s shadow-coated city and the out-of-place flash of red-and-blue who spends an age deciding to look after the citizens; almost as long as Hal Jordan in that goddamn Green Lantern movie, in fact.

Even fans of Raimi’s movies would admit that his Three-Stooges-inspired wackiness could get in the way — even before we get to that dancing scene in Spider-Man 3 there’s the “Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head” montage in 2 and the Power-Rangers-iness of the Green Goblin’s costume in the first movie — but that heightened comedic tone worked because the character is inherently ridiculous. Not just in the sense that the idea of a man with the powers of a spider is daft, but that he’s meant to be jokey and irreverent. Considering Marvel’s popular Ultimate Spider-Man series features a modernised version of the character, Brian Michael Bendis eschewed any foolish ideas about ejecting Webhead’s comedic persona, keeping him silly instead of adopting a modish personality change, all without reducing the comic’s dramatic heft in any way. Spidey is fun; Raimi remembered that. [3]

Which is not to say Webb is wrong or fit for censure for trying something new with the character, especially as the history of Spidey includes many dark periods that can inform the reader’s mental image of the character as much as the early years with Steve Ditko and John Romita Sr. Even then the comics still featured the deaths of beloved characters from time to time, most notably Gwen Stacy. However the general air of melancholy in Webb’s movie, and the first half in which Parker is basically a total dick, are horribly stodgy. [4]

Things pick up later in the movie with some heroics, wisecracks, and gravity-defying FX sequences, but liking Parker is really hard work — a necessary narrative move to power the late-movie  conversion to heroism, but a real slog to get through. It didn’t seem that hard when Raimi did it, and he still managed to create that powerful scene with Uncle Ben dying in Parker’s arms without abandoning the lighter tone. In fact the only thing that harks back to the tone of Raimi’s series comes near the end, when some citizens of New York rally around their hero and help him out, but it’s a trick that doesn’t have the same soaring effect as it did before. The laboured scene here is no match for the emotional aftermath of Spider-Man 2‘s train setpiece.

It doesn’t help that maintaining this down-to-earth tone is incompatible with the presence of an over-the-top villain. Just as Batman Begins‘ goal of breaking down its main character and rebuilding him in a more recognisably real world isn’t helped by adding a supervillain who uses a microwave weapon to activate a madness-generating gas, all of the effort put into grounding the Spider-Man mythos is damaged by introducing The Lizard and getting Rhys Ifans to intone every line with ALL THE DRAMA, like a parody of what a supervillain would sound like. While Garfield fills the screen with his quiet competence, Ifans tries very very hard and makes no impression at all.

Of course Dr. Curt Connors is meant to be a tragic figure undone by his own hubris, but even before that Ifans sounds like he’s doing a bad impersonation of a depressed Christopher Lee villain from a Hammer horror movie; portentous intonation and stony expressions, which later give way to cackling, speechifying, and convenient character-erasing insanity. His motivations are present and correct and yet mean nothing on an emotional level, mostly because The Lizard is a boring threat already, and a few gruff internal monologues to add direction where there was none isn’t satisfying. Connors wants to put an end to weakness, and luckily he has some handy weakness-destroying technology lying around, giving Spidey something to battle against in the finale.

Again, compare that to Willem Dafoe’s brilliant work as The Green Goblin. Dafoe played Osborn as a vain and foolish megalomaniac whose worst impulses are accentuated by magical sciencey things, but the motor for his evil — wounded pride and jealousy — is a richer motivation than Connors’ frustration over his weakness. It’s more of a leap for Connors — who seems decent enough, despite hints of past wrongdoing — to go from wanting to heal the sick to poisoning New York, than it is for the fundamentally flawed Osborn to go from wanting to control everything and wreak vengeance on the people who wronged him to wanting to control everything and wreak vengeance on the people who wronged him but this time using superpowers.

Dafoe also did a great job of shading his demented villainy with comic notes, a touch of pathos, and some wonderful physicality. Heartbreaking though it is that for the majority of the film he’s hidden behind that ridiculous mask, that voice, those movements, those funny little additions — the moment he melodramatically drinks the serum, smashes the vial, and then lets out a little complaint about the machine’s restraints being cold on his skin is utterly perfect – all of those things add up to something that transcends the suit. I’m already having difficulty remembering Ifans’ work in this movie and I only saw it four hours ago.

Andrew Garfield is a good enough actor that the decision to play him as sour and petulant for the first half of the movie and haunted but increasingly heroic in the second doesn’t obscure his work. It’s a direction I don’t much like, but within that framework Garfield is terrific, playing Peter Parker as an angry young man who accidentally finds his calling. And if that’s not enough for you, the script — credited to James Vanderbilt, Alvin Sargent (writer on the last two Spidey movies) and Steve Kloves — makes sure to stress that Parker’s character arc is his search for himself by having one character say to him, as he looks for a name badge, “ARE YOU HAVING TROUBLE FINDING YOURSELF ZOMG THEMATIC MOMENT?” and finishing the movie with a teacher saying the only plot that exists is, “Who am I?” GEDDIT?? [5]

Even better is Emma Stone, despite getting to do very very little. She pops up every so often to ineptly flirt with Peter (very charming), get into trouble, and even get in a bit of Lizard-bashing, but her primary function is to be the object of Peter’s desire. It says a lot for Stone’s performance that I missed her whenever she wasn’t onscreen, even if being there meant she would just be Supportive Girlfriend, but anything would have been better than more interminable scenes with Ifans booming his lines at the walls, or Irrfan Khan making vague references to Norman Osborn, or Peter forgetting to buy eggs. Denis Leary is a nice surprise; his Captain Stacy is more interesting than his daughter, and makes a lot of what little screentime he has. His final scene is one of the highlights, giving some emotional charge to what is otherwise a ruck on top of a building while a doohickey counts down.

But the main crime of the film is that it wasn’t diverting enough or competent enough to make me turn off the part of my brain that was noticing a million trivial little things that pissed me off. How many scenes with Peter letting down Uncle Ben and Aunt May do we need? [6] Was the scene with him finding his powers on the train added later in the shoot, because he seems to go through another big discovery scene right after it? How did he get into the car when the car thief he’s ambushing needed a big technological doohickey to unlock the door? Is Peter Parker going to find Rodrigo Guevara and apologise to him for ruining his life? How did Connors get all of that equipment down into his sewer lair when he is, by that point, basically going, “Wibble madness blurg” all the time? A removal service? If I move to New York, I’ll use those guys.

How blind is Peter that he doesn’t notice the enormous patch of green skin on Connors’ neck during a long and boring conversation? Why does his Spidey-Sense only work about half the time? Do the filmmakers think we’re dense when they keep dangling Peter off the side of buildings as a big scary threat moment when we all know that he can just stick to the windows? Is that the most anti-climactic mid-credit scene ever? Will James Horner’s insipid soundtrack ever shut up? Will future Blu-Ray versions of the movie airbrush in whoever they cast as Norman Osborn in the sequel, considering the lengths they go to to include him while conveniently obscuring his face? Didn’t Gwen object to Peter turning up at her house covered in shit at one point? And why does she even like him? They spend about 15 minutes together before they’re in love. Garfield and Stone make it seem to work through charm alone, but looking back I realise I didn’t really buy it at all, certainly not as much as I did Tobey Maguire’s desperate longing for Kirsten Dunst, and her slow realisation that she loved him all along.

And my God, didn’t someone at Oscorp think it was a bit weird that some guy was ordering tons of their biocable cartridges, which I doubt come cheap? And even if they didn’t pick up on this ordering anomaly, wasn’t someone in the NYPD a bit curious about where all of the webbing left around the city was coming from? There were all sorts of controversies about the organic webshooters in Raimi’s movie (I’ve already seen people rejoicing at the inclusion of mechanical webshooters) but at least it simplified things. Here it’s just one of the many elements introduced that has to be jammed into place, like the costume and the growing sense of heroism [7] and his father’s work and Norman Osborn and Gwen and her dad and a poorly-designed lizard thing and a million other things.

None of this is organic. It’s all just pushed into place, with no narrative momentum to carry it. Koepp’s script for Raimi’s Spider-Man has lovely flow, and part of that was because Peter had a friend and romantic rival in Harry Osborn, a man who loves him and resents him for recognisably human reasons. The threat from Norman/Goblin — and Peter’s need to do the right thing to honour Ben — jeopardises his relationships with his aunt, his best friend and the woman he loves. Norman targets them knowing he can hurt Peter, and their confrontation at the end is only possible because he knows he can hurt Spider-Man most by using the tension between his heroism and his love of Mary-Jane Watson against him. All of the character work ties together, each choice builds to a crescendo in the last act and makes emotional sense. The big showdown in the new movie is between Spidey and a guy with a canister of gas. Who cares? Only the use of Captain Stacy makes this work at all, and even then it’s a shadow of the moment on the Queensboro Bridge, or Spidey dropping Norman’s body off at his house, thus turning Harry against him. [8]

There’s even a misguidedly similar moment between Gwen and Peter and Raimi’s final scene with Peter turning Mary-Jane away, but while Raimi and Koepp make this a grandiose, tragic choice on Peter’s behalf, Webb and whoever wrote that scene fluff it by making Peter exasperatingly quiet on why he has made his choice, giving Gwen enough smarts to see through Peter’s silence (negating the point of his exasperating silence), making her go along with it without question (guess she doesn’t really care for him after all), and then having Peter maybe possibly change his mind at the end, who knows? The narrative simplicity of Raimi and Koepp’s movie is one of its greatest strengths; this just feels like a lot of clumsy storytelling to make a malfunctioning plot work. Spider-Man was a smooth ride. The Amazing Spider-Man stalls and stalls and stalls.

Remember, it’s not bad. It has moments to celebrate — Stan Lee’s hilarious cameo, good performances here and there, a lovely line or funny line-reading, some perfect visual iconography, especially in the customary “I’m swinging around the city like crazy” scene before the credits — but the overall impression is that Webb either didn’t have enough of a coherent vision of what he wanted to do with the character, or he did and the studio got in the way too much. At times his approach works; taken as an intimate movie about a tortured boy it works okay, and Webb has a feel for creating male protagonists who are miserable (see also Tom from 500 Days of Summer), but to do that he has to lose something else, and that thing might have been what makes Spider-Man appealing in the first place.

This is obviously going to be one that the fanboys argue over for a very long time. [9] By not being an out-and-out calamity, and also by being so low-key and kind of anonymous, The Amazing Spider-Man will have its defenders, and it will generate a fanbase and money and sequels. But without a strong authorial voice, or more primal iconography such as that upside-down kiss, the memory of it is already fading. Raimi may have alienated some fans with the force of his zany vision, but at least his movies were vibrant, odd, memorable, flashy, weird, stirring, exciting, funny, confident and memorable. This Spider-Man movie is just a semi-competent film about Spider-Man, and that’s not enough.

Update: This morning I had a long conversation with blogger and fellow John Carter enthusiast Bassim El-Wakil, which can be found here for the sake of openness. If you don’t want to look at it the point of contention was with my use of Raimi’s Spider-Man as a comparison point with Webb’s reboot, and that I shouldn’t have damned TASM for not doing what another movie did. I argued that my problem was not that Webb failed for not making the same movie or the same choices as Raimi, but as Bassim said, “If Webb makes choices for angst vs Raimi for exuberance, it’s fallacious to then say ‘It fails because it’s not as exuberant’”. My intention in comparing these movies was simply borne of convenience, and I didn’t intend to say that Webb’s movie was a failure because it wasn’t the same as Raimi’s, or to say that if he had done the specific things I noted that Raimi did right or approached the movie from the same direction as Raimi, he would automatically have made a better movie. I apologise if I gave that impression.

As I said during the conversation, there were a number of things I think Webb did wrong, and have tried to express that. The script, also, is a tangled knot, and comparing it to Koepp’s script was merely a way of sorting out my thoughts. I don’t wish to imply that TASM‘s script is a disappointment because it doesn’t do what that one specific script did right; it’s just handy to have that comparison point around, especially as I only just watched the first Spider-Man again and it was fresh in my mind. I could’ve compared TASM‘s script to any number of films, or just said this: The script just doesn’t do a good enough job of creating emotional links between some of the characters, which is frustrating when some of them — Peter and Ben, for instance — work fine. The relationship between Gwen and Peter seemed almost arbitrary, though perhaps that was simply because early reviews hinted at a greater focus on this relationship, in a Twilight-audience-placating way, and I didn’t really feel that.

But the question of tone seemed to become the main sticking point, and the point I tried to make, and hoped that I had, was that Raimi’s vision of the character was more consistent with the idea I have of Spider-Man, but also that there are different takes on Spider-Man even in the comics: see my point about Bendis’ Ultimate Spider-Man, and the two visual takes on Spider-Man during J. Michael Straczynski’s run on the character. My focus was more on the movie because I was talking about the movies, but Peter Parker, in the traditional version of the character, is a light character — compare him to, say, The Punisher, or Daredevil — who suffers terrible tragedy and copes with it by donning a bright blue and red costume and becoming a sassy, confident version of himself.

Within the run of the character he has suffered further tragedy, and with different writers/artists has had different tones (look at the Venom period, with the black costume), but primarily he’s a wisecracker in a slice of the Marvel Universe that’s not particularly dour. He has ups and downs, but those are against a cheerier backdrop that doesn’t hang oppressively over him the way it does for some characters (Batman is the most obvious instance of that). I happen to think Raimi depicts that very well, but let’s ignore that now. As Bassim said, and I didn’t clearly express, this Spider-Man does indeed crack wise. He sasses Flash Thompson early on, and has many jokey moments throughout the film. One throwaway line — while swinging through New York he yells at a cab driver, “Hey, I’m swinging here!” — made me laugh heartily. Some of the jokes are great. But tone alters the context within which the jokes are received, and while Peter tells jokes, within this interpretation of the character, those jokes come off as more aggressive, more rooted in anger and frustration, than usual.

Again, I will stress, Webb is within his rights to take the character down this path. However, this Spider-Man may lack something that made the character so popular, as I stressed within the review. The key scene, which made me realise I just didn’t really like this Spider-Man, was the showdown with the car thief. Some of it is very funny — the knife joke was great — but having Spidey go so far as to cover the thief’s mouth and nose with webbing while ascertaining if he is the man who killed Uncle Ben troubled me. I get that Spidey is mad at the guy, but it’s sadistic, and his jokes suddenly seem like taunts. I’m not saying Webb turned Spider-Man into a monster; he’s still Webhead! Yay! But the decision to paint the character with darker colours means everything comes off differently.

I’m not even sure it’s the thing I disliked most about the movie — a movie I didn’t actually hate, but think is hollow and inelegant — and it’s not like Webb turned Spidey into Spawn or Rorschach, but it is the thing that stuck in my mind, and informed my review the most. I think I did enough to express that what Webb did — independent of Raimi’s movie — is come at the character from a place that I think distorts him, and makes him less appealing. So what I’m saying is that Webb’s movie fails for many reasons, but also because exuberance — an exuberance not confined to Raimi’s movie, but is intrinsic to what Spidey is — has been replaced with angst, not because that’s not like a movie I once liked, but because humour coming from a place of angst and aggression comes off more as sniping and arrogance than it does the chirpy, irreverent mocking of a Spidey I find more entertaining. My error was in drawing a direct comparison to Raimi’s version when in fact this is a widely recognised take on our wall-crawling hero, but I stand by my opinion that once you put Spidey in a darker context, be it in The Amazing Spider-Man, Spider-Man 3, or any number of comic versions, the guy comes off as kind of an aggressive jerk. And I don’t like aggressive jerks.

Return 1. Synopsis: It’s another origin story for Webhead, but this time with The Lizard. Actors: I really like Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone. They are great. The history: this is pretty loyal to the well-known origin of Spidey, though despite its punishing length much of the canonical detail (look, a wrestling ring!) feels shoe-horned into a plot that’s mostly interesting in pointing out just how depressed Peter Parker is. How popular is Spidey? Very! This movie is already packing them in the countries in which it opened early, despite inspiring numerous shrugging reviews and barely any noticeable excitement. How about them Avengers? Oh man, I loved that movie. What about The Dark Knight Rises? This movie has a couple of weeks to make its money and then it’s over.

Return 2. Before you ask, yes, this is significantly better than the appalling Spider-Man 3; easily the worst movie Raimi has ever made, and one of the very worst superhero movies ever inflicted on the world. And not just because of the dancing and the Hitler hair-do either. Nothing in it works. Fuck that movie.

Return 3. Still, saying that, Raimi’s movies are sadder than a lot of people seem willing to admit. There’s a tragic element to all versions of Peter Parker; there has to be, with an origin that includes being made an orphan and being indirectly responsible for the death of the man who raised him. Nevertheless, Raimi is assured enough to let that darkness play in the corner, allowing Maguire to come into his own in the foreground. Webb, on the other hand, swamps the film in blackness, almost smothering his lead actor. As I say, that’s a valid interpretation. It’s just one I find less interesting.

Return 4. If Raimi’s movie has a visual equivalent in comics, it’s John Romita Jr.’s bright work on Spidey back when J. Michael Straczynski was writing about Spider Totems. Webb’s movie, on the other hand, looks more like Mike Deodato Jr.’s gloomy issues with all of that malarkey with Norman Osborn fathering two super-powered children with Gwen before she died; a true low point for the character, aesthetically and narratively.

Return 5. If I were to believe this, it means The Amazing Spider-Man 2: 2 Amazing 2 Spider is kinda screwed already because Parker finds himself the end thanks to some graffiti or something. The end.

Return 6. Martin Sheen is so goddamn lovable and noble as Uncle Ben that I’m now torn on which is my favourite interpretation. He’s crabbier than Cliff Robertson’s version but as Garfield’s Parker is so much brattier than Maguire’s enthusiastic doofus I was grateful that someone was willing to call him on his crap. Sadly Sally Field’s Aunt May makes much less of an impression than Rosemary Harris, who was so perfect in that role that she basically owns it forever.

Return 7. Gotta give a shout out to the movie’s best scene, with a panicky Spider-Man struggling to save a young boy from a burning car which is seconds away from plummeting into the Hudson river. Garfield brings his A-game to the scene, and — as regular readers will be sick of hearing me mention — if there’s one thing I love about superhero movies it is unapologetic heroics. I don’t watch superhero movies to see superpowered individuals getting into tussles with each other. It’s not the “super” I’m interested in, it’s the “hero”. Any affection I will have for The Amazing Spider-Man will be from this scene, and Peter’s subsequent adoption of the hero’s persona, as he realises Ben was right about the responsibility of the good person. And yes I cried at that scene get off my back just be glad I had an emotion during the movie that wasn’t annoyance!

Return 8. If it seems unfair that I keep comparing this movie to the previous origin story, I’m sorry. But it’s hard not to, considering how often it treads on the same territory. Unavoidable for an origin story, yes, but even when it looks like it’s going to skew away from the Raimi version, Webb’s version just moves back toward it with some new narrative (but not tonal) similarity. Compare that with the Nolan reboot, which came eight years after Batman and Robin (the gap between Spider-Man 3 and The Amazing Spider-Man is only five years). Again we see something colourful (in the hands of Joel Schumacher, at least) replaced with “realistic” and dark, but as the four Burton/Schumacher Batman movies never directly addressed Batman’s origins, Nolan’s use of the same iconography didn’t seem as familiar, especially as he also brought in Ra’s al Ghul and the League of Shadows; something very unfamiliar for many audiences. Webb, on the other hand, is at times replicating beats the audience knows all too well. Much as I watched this new movie in the spirit of it being a clean break from Raimi’s movies, coming home and writing about it just made me want to write about how much I liked Raimi’s first two movies, and why I thought they worked so well; not just as an interpretation of a certain superhero, but also as well-plotted character dramas with strong emotional cores. Raimi (and Koepp and Sargent) gets a lot right that I think Webb (and Vanderbilt, Sargent and Kloves) got wrong, and it’s worth putting the two approaches together for comparison. If that makes me seem like someone who walked into The Amazing Spider-Man determined to hate it for not being Raimi’s , I can only assure you, dear reader, that this was not the case. I really hoped this would be a new franchise that I could love. Maybe the sequel will be good enough to silence my doubts.

Return 9. If I were to compare The Amazing Spider-Man to anything in terms of quality it would be last year’s X-Men: First Class (which I wrote about here); another franchise reboot that contained the germ of a good movie but squandered it by hiding a simple story under too many ideas, too many characters, and a divisive tonal choice.

The 2010-2011 Caruso Awards: Miscellaneous TV Gubbins of the Year

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It’s not over! I feel like a horror movie antagonist popping out of hiding ten minutes after the credits have finished rolling, but yes, the Caruso TV Awards have one last gasp before I retire them until the end of the year, when I will be almost as fanatical about the best and worst movies of 2011. This post should have been done at the start of the week but the 2011 London Film Festival kept me very busy, with one movie shutting down my brain for a couple of days (thanks for the mental shutdown, Take Shelter). This post is the first large blip on an EKG after my brain comes back to life. Enjoy.

Best New Show: Game of Thrones

Longtime readers will know that I have a habit of getting inordinately excited about big summer movies, to the extent that I can be bouncing up and down with anticipation years in advance (I’m looking at you, The Avengers. No, seriously, I’ve rewatched your trailer 288 times). TV is a different thing. The uncritical part of me will look forward to, say, a new Terminator movie or a second try at Daredevil just because of my affection for the franchise or character no matter how boneheaded it might turn out to be (though I hope David Slade can resurrect the DD franchise), but it’s rare that TV shows will be based around them.

Yes, a new version of Hawaii Five-O or Charlie’s Angels will pop up from time to time, but I’m not going to be excited about them in the same way, because when network TV pilfers from itself it betrays the dearth of imagination that critics feel is most rife during the summer film season. These shows are often contemptuous of the audience and cranked out like story-sausage, as brilliantly argued here by Linda Holmes. Who on earth set their TiVo with a quickened pulse when they realised there was gonna be yet another attempt to defibrillate the long-dead corpse of Knight Rider?

This is one of the things that has contributed to the renaissance of TV drama. Original dramas are being created all the time, and while many will be inspired by books or films or historical events, or be created to glom onto the success of some other show, much of the time these shows are distinct and arrive with no expectations. I have a pretty good idea of what The Avengers will be like — condensed awesomanium, of course — but I don’t really know what Boss or Homeland or Revenge will be like, to name three critically acclaimed new shows from the new TV season. I look forward to watching them, but I’m not chewing my knuckles.

This wasn’t the case with Game of Thrones. Though I’d only had a year’s worth of exposure to George R.R. Martin’s magnificent fantasy cycle A Song of Ice and Fire, the wait for HBO’s adaptation was nigh-unbearable, partly because they kept so much of it under wraps for so long. At least it felt that way. I recall being so excited about it on the day before it aired on UK’s Sky Atlantic that it disrupted my sleep. Ridiculous, yes, but this passion wasn’t unique. It’s doubtful that anyone who loves the books was agnostic about the show. All it had to do to be instantly amazing was not fuck up, and the pre-aired clips shown on the HBO site proved that the look and feel and language of the books was intact.

Just getting it right would have been enough, but Game of Thrones was so much more than just a competent adaptation. It was vivid and pacy and funny and dark and exciting, building such a head of steam that the last three episodes eclipsed almost everything else shown on TV this year. It was spot on from the very first beautiful shot of the snowy North, but it kept giving us little treats throughout: the brilliantly staged fight in the Eyrie; the superb casting (bringing in Charles Dance as Tywin Lannister made me finally like Charles Dance); the chance to finally see the grasslands of the Dothraki Sea, and King’s Landing, and the dragon heads of the Red Keep, and the Twins standing on either side of the Trident.

To those who loved the books, attempting to convert the doubters was surprisingly easy. The fatuous but compelling comparison made by the showrunners (“The Sopranos in Middle-Earth”) was enough to tempt some to give it a try. As expected, the end of the first episode, with Bran in the tower, was exactly the right kind of hook to keep viewers coming back, and draw new viewers in as those who gave the show a try dropped their bacon sandwiches en masse. Just by using GRRM’s superb storytelling tricks, the audience grew and became more fervent as each new bombshell dropped, as the ruthless became purely evil, the virtuous died, and the rest of the characters became more complex and unpredictable.

One of the great joys of experiencing this glorious success was seeing the enthusiasm for this show grow almost exponentially as the series progressed. My Twitter feed, which already included several very happy ASOIAF fans, became filled with sceptics turned rabid believers as this narrative behemoth powered toward its stunning finale. “Fucking Joffrey!” became a rallying cry, memes like Tyrion slapping the young prince and Stupid Ned Stark proliferated, and longtime fans chewed their lips in wait for the end of episode nine, with THAT ending, knowing that a few million more people would experience the same extreme denial that we did. One good friend of the blog had an epic mental meltdown on Facebook. That’s the beauty of ASOIAF.

So basically, all HBO did was take a beloved and brilliantly written book, get two big fans (D.B. Weiss and David Benioff, who is now forgiven for his involvement in X-Men Origins: Wolverine) to write and oversee it, throw a shitload of money and talent at it, promote the shit out of it with a perfectly judged drip of information, and wait for every passionate creative individual involved in the show to pay tribute to that story’s ferocious narrative drive. They built it, and we did indeed come, in droves. It’s that simple. Just make something awesome. Commit to something of enormous scope. Don’t hesitate or cavil or second guess. Just be bold, and the audience will love you for it. Thank you to everyone who made this first, incredible series. It was a blast.

Worst New Show: Camelot

Recently a TV critic asked me why I watch so much TV; it’s troubling, in a way, if someone who watches TV for a living thinks I’m watching too much. The easiest answer is that I enjoy it, especially when it’s good but even when it’s bad, because as I pointed out at really really really insane length a couple of weeks ago, there are lessons to be learned by watching anything closely enough. That means committing to some shows that are truly dire in order to see whether it can be turned around. Parks and Recreation started out with a really poor first season but has since become essential viewing. The same thing happened with The Vampire Diaries; what looked like Twilight-lite (yes, that bad) is now one of the highlights of the TV week. Even if something bad doesn’t improve much, surely it’s only fair to complete a journey to fully understand the directions you’ve been given.

But SoC has to confess, this award for Worst New Show is being given to Starz’ Camelot without reaching the final destination. I’m sorry. I tried. I tried so hard to finish it, and put this post off all week so I could try to get through the last four episodes of the short ten-episode-season, but it’s impossible. Something this boring and aimless is like an affront to the viewer, and all I can do is bitch about it from a position of 20% ignorance. Feel free to dismiss my complaints, but enduring this glacially-paced monstrosity felt like a battle for my soul. This morning it took three hours to watch a single episode as everything in the house distracted me from the endless, dreary conversations conducted in underlit rooms. I’ve got better things to do.

Nevertheless, Camelot was already number one on my bad shows list after just a couple of episodes, so finishing the series was nothing more than some kind of bizarre flagellation. Longtime readers will know that I hold Joseph Fiennes in the highest low regard; his LOADED performance in FlashForward is justifiably legendary. They will also know of my war against Torchwood, whose first two years were overseen by Chris Chibnall. Camelot united these two creatives, which drove SoC into paroxysms of joy. Within a few minutes our expectations were met; the first episode of Camelot was as shambolic and absurd as we had hoped, and the next few weeks did little to dispell that. However, while Torchwood was a hysterical abomination, this was merely dull.

And that’s the problem. I’ll admit, it’s incredibly mean-spirited of me to hope that a new show will be bad in a certain way so that I can enjoy mocking it (see also: The CW’s Ringer, which started out ridiculous but now seems to be settling down, unfortunately). However that’s preferable to the miasmatic tedium that surrounds this ill-conceived take on the Arthurian myth. Even after a seemingly infinite number of adaptations of the Arthurian myth, there is still magic in this tale. It’s one of the greatest stories of all time, one that contains so many elements compatible with Joseph Campbell’s concept of the eternal narrative it’s possible that the story will never die. And yet Camelot does its best to smother it with a pillow made of gloom and worthy realism.

Now, that’s fine. A deconstruction of the Arthurian myth is a perfectly valid approach, and though many objected to Jerry Bruckheimer, Antoine Fuqua and David Franzoni’s “historically accurate” version, I thought it was an interesting idea undone by some pretty weak execution. It helps that the Clive Owen version is so different from previous interpretations that it almost stands alone; part of the novelty of it is seeing how the myth and the (questionable) realism crossover. Camelot sometimes feels like this is its goal, but it muddies the water by introducing anti-realist elements like Merlin and Morgan Le Fay’s use of magic. It’s down-to-earth and fantastical at the same time, and that’s a big part of the problem.

It’s a fantasy that’s not allowed to be fantastical because that would clash with the realism. It’s not totally realistic because that would stop them being fantastical. The result is an awkward mix of the two, with Merlin’s constant complaining about how much his magical powers make him sad unfortunately setting the tone for the show. Chris Chibnall has stated that Camelot is meant to be a political take on the myth, a contemporary retelling that uses modern-day idealism as its basis (possibly taking JFK’s “Camelot” as its starting point in an amusing reversal). However this faux-seriousness means every opportunity the show has to spread its wings is curtailed in case it undercuts the message. In short, Camelot hates fun, and won’t let you have dessert until  you’ve finished all the vegetables.

This isn’t the only time Chibnall has done this. The very worst episodes of Torchwood are the ones that profess to be making a serious point about morality or modern life. Who can forget Countrycide, which dared to take on the very serious subject of rampant cannibalism in the north of England? Or Meat, which opened a window on the depraved and cruel world of the carnivore by dramatising the fate of poor Spacey the Space Whale, a creature that is kept alive in order to be carved up over and over again for meat, just like in a real abattoir with real cows. See also his ponderous Silurian episodes in Doctor Who that belaboured a point about the failure of diplomacy between two intractable opponents over two self-important hours.

These berserk attempts at dramatising serious issues with untenable fantasy comparisons betray the showrunner’s belief that a point MUST BE MADE at all times. Bollocks to fun; drama is here to teach us stuff, and must not allow for any levity or liveliness. At its worst, Sorkin’s West Wing was the preachiest and most condescending show on TV that wasn’t Studio 60, but dammit, in those early seasons that show was hugely entertaining. That bitter medicine went down easily because West Wing teemed with event, its purpose greased by sassy dialogue and vibrant performances. Camelot‘s seemingly endless walk-and-talks are conducted in the gloom of portentousness; it’s an interminable lecture about good and evil conducted by a depressed professor.

This is before we get into the ill-defined characters, the lack of event (a sub-plot about Morgan taking the place of Igraine to foment discord between Arthur’s boring knights takes most of the season to kick in), the poor production values, the omnipresent exposition, the weak performances from much of the cast, the sense that the season arc is being made up on the fly, with new characters constantly introduced while old ones are sidelined far too quickly. Worst of all, the central narrative line of the series seems to be about the illicit love between Arthur and Guinevere. Perhaps with some chemistry between the actors this would have seemed compelling, but… actually no. There was nothing that could save it. The show is held up by string instead of cables of steel, and as a result whenever Camelot needs to rely on this wet romance for narrative strength, it collapses.

While it’s unfair to criticise Camelot for what it’s not, it unfortunately exists in a world that has given us Game of Thrones and Spartacus. The narrative complexity and ambition of GoT shows Camelot up as the weak gruel it is, trouncing it in every way. I was willing to concede that this might be attributable to differing budgets, but GoT — which was shot in Ireland and Malta — cost about $50-60m for ten episodes while the budget for Camelot was $7m an episode, and that was only shot in Ireland. Of course those figures could well be unreliable, but the fact is that while GoT has a sweeping, epic scope, Camelot feels like it’s set in one dingy room. It’s not lack of money that holds it back; it’s failure of ambition.

The comparisons to Spartacus are even more damning. Chibnall and the rest of the Camelot team are under no obligation to emulate that show, of course, but it might have been prudent to see how vibrant and endlessly entertaining Steven DeKnight’s unrestrained TV classic can be. I’m not just talking about the infamous Fighting and Fucking formula either. There isn’t a single boring moment in Spartacus‘ run to date; every scene and line and performance adds up to a greater whole. There are few shows as pleasurable to watch as Spartacus; it’s endlessly entertaining, surprising, and beautifully presented. And it’s cheaper than Camelot too; the budget is about $5m per episode thanks to New Zealand tax breaks and creative use of effects.

Camelot wasn’t doomed by money or competition or audience antipathy or even the scheduling difficulties that made its stars unavailable for another series. It was doomed because it was the opposite of fun. You can put that down to hesitation or lack of ambition or muddled intent. What matters is that sitting through each episode felt like swimming through quick-set concrete. Still, even that’s not what makes SoC angriest. Has anyone heard anything about the King Arthur movie that was to be based on a treatment by Warren Ellis? This is the last I heard of it. There are a million possible reasons why the project has disappeared, but if this dull-as-ditchwater reimagining of the myth contributed to that movie’s descent into Development Hell, everyone involved has earned my eternal wrath.

Best Pilot: The Walking Dead

When I say Game of Thrones was the only show of the year to get me pre-excited, I’m omitting the AMC adaptation of The Walking Dead by Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard and Tony Moore which, for a while there, was the biggest game in town for horror and comic nerds. I was infected too; even though the comic leaves me cold, the thought of a zombie TV show helmed by a horror movie old-timer as Frank Darabont was good enough to raise expectations through the roof. And before anyone calls into question the use of the term “old-timer”, I remember seeing Chuck Russell’s A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors and The Blob back at the old ABC in Walsall in ’87 and ’88 respectively, and both were co-written by Darabont. I was a teenager then, so I’m sorry, but that makes him a goddamn horror movie old-timer and that’s that.

Both of those movies thrilled me when I was a TEENAGER OH GOD I’M SO OLD, and The Mist blew my mind a few years back, so I figured The Walking Dead was in good hands. Now, most of the current opinion of the show revolves around the latter half of the first season, which disappointed most people, and the start of the second season hasn’t exactly thrilled many people either. The consensus seems to be that this was a wasted opportunity, and one that might become even more frustrating with AMC cutting the show’s budget and driving Darabont to quit. Glen Mazzara runs things now, which has caused concern. I haven’t seen his Starz show Crash, which was widely mocked and hated by some critics, but I wouldn’t want to blame Mazzara — a long-running producer and writer on The Shield — as he ran a TV show based on the world’s worst ever movie. Only an evil tree can grow from a bad seed.

As for Darabont, he may have his detractors, but as someone who risked life and limb to see The Blob not once but twice at the local fleapit, I’m definitely in the love camp. I mean, did you experience the despair that gushes out of that photo I linked to earlier? That was some 1950s kitchen sink bullshit, I tell you. You don’t know what it was like going to the Walsall ABC on a Saturday night during the 80s. You can buy Kevlar at your local Asda nowadays but back then it was impossible to find it anywhere. It’s one thing to shoot angry looks over your shoulder whenever some clown at the recent London Film Festival arrives 25 minutes into a movie and hits you in the back of the head with his Moleskine-filled satchel, but try doing that to 300 hormone-fuelled Tasmanian Devils screeching with derisive laughter and pelting you with Smarties. You have to be devout to go through something like that once, let alone twice.

Anyway, forget about the torrent of bullshit and bad blood that has poured over the audience since the pilot first aired, and try to remember it untouched by controversy. Watching it again for this post, I was struck once more by just how bold and beautiful it is. How many other TV shows are willing to depict the end of the world in such stark and uncompromising terms? How many other TV directors would leave so many long, dialogue-free scenes in their show? Has any other show started with the hero shooting a child in the head? This is Darabont’s favourite trick, it seems, as kids die memorably in The Mist and The Blob. Perhaps that’s what every show needs. Maybe more people would watch The Good Wife or Community if more zombie kids got shot during the cold open.

What kind of people are we that we would watch The Walking Dead in droves just to see if any little girls will be blasted to death this week? Obviously, we’re people who like the fact that for a while there seemed to be a new show that would actually put its characters through weekly horror movie hell just for our ghoulish entertainment, and the thrill of that possibility was enough to make this AMC’s biggest hit. Darabont’s assured handling of the first episode was good enough that I’d put this hour of TV above most of the tiresome zombie movies of the past few years. Setpieces like Grimes’ walk through the hospital, or his ride into a seemingly deserted Atlanta were riveting and terrifying, but mostly they were made with care, attention to detail, and the courage to take things slow. Darabont treated the subject with deadly seriousness, and we responded with instant admiration.

After that the series became less interesting, sillier, and confused in tone, leading to a desperately underwhelming finale at the CDC. A real shame, because the first couple of episodes were so good it looked like we were in for a real treat; the second episode was very strong too, with its Excellence Quotient bolstered by 1000 Michael-Rooker-As-A-Loathsome-Redneck points. Hopefully at some point this show will get back on track with or without the input of Darabont, but even if it doesn’t we still have this remarkable exercise in sustained tension and atmospherics, impeccably performed by all, with special SoC love for Andrew Lincoln and Lennie James representing for the UK.

Worst Pilot: Blue Bloods

Earlier this year BSkyB launched Sky Atlantic, its secret weapon in the battle to win over the middle-class liberals who had resisted giving money to the monolithic Murdoch machine. After scoffling up every prestige show from the US that it could, it promised a roster of TV shows that not only included all HBO shows, but also Mad Men. How could the bottle-of-Merlot-a-night crowd cope without their beloved Mad Men? It was also a great way for Murdoch, Tempter, Son of Perdition, to strike yet another mean-spirited blow against his PSB enemy. “Screw you BBC”, it screamed with all of those adverts featuring Don Draper and his glass of booze, “all you get now is European dramas, and no one wants to watch those. Erm…”

Sky Atlantic’s first night promised the first episode of Boardwalk Empire, and numerous documentaries bragging about the sets and Martin Scorsese and, er, the sets, and the costumes, and that Steve Buscemi. This generated insanely high expectations that no show could have matched (well, Game of Thrones could have, but that’s just my partisanship talking). Nevertheless, this was a statement of intent. This channel was SERIOUS. It was the home of QUALITY DRAMA. It was worth the Sky subscription all on its own, even though daytime was filled with repeats of X-Files, thirtysomething and Star Trek: Voyager. This was where the best of the best could be found. They could have called it Sky Emmywinners, it was so loaded with quality.

And so, all of those people who tuned in to watch Boardwalk Empire hung around to watch the next show on the roster; Blue Bloods. To a UK audience who might not be as aware of its network, non-cable pedigree, this might have seemed like another prestige drama, just one that stars Wahlberg the Lesser and Tom Selleck and his Amazing Utility Mustache, instead of Buscemi, Shannon, Whigham, Pitts and DABNEY COLEMAN FTW. Sky Atlantic was not in the business of explaining that while Boardwalk Empire was funded by subscription and could make an effort to be distinctive without alienating its targeted audience, Blue Bloods was a commercial show dependent on advertising revenue and would therefore not offer a similar experience for the audience. To those who hadn’t read up about it, it was as if these wildly different shows were being treated as equal.

Let’s put it this way; Sky1 shows lots of commercial stuff, but Blue Bloods isn’t even good enough to be shown there, let alone this new prestige channel. I’m not saying it’s bad because it’s not as good as Boardwalk Empire; I’m saying it’s bad because it’s awful, and awful because it’s bad. It’s so awful. It’s so bad. It’s AWFUL! AWFULAWFULBADAWFUL. It was almost amusing to see UK newspaper reviews the next day. Some critics seemed to express great befuddlement at the gulf in quality between the two shows, having fallen for Sky Atlantic’s trick. SoC has gone on the record as saying that Boardwalk Empire was a disappointment, but compared to the pilot of Blue Bloods, the first episode of Boardwalk Empire was the entire first season of Deadwood and fifth season of The Shield combined.

How bad is the exposition in this show? So bad that The Soup, which is usually content to focus its derision on terrible reality shows, featured a long clip from the beginning of the pilot in which the assorted members of the Reagan family (!!!!) just name each other and explain their relationships with each other. Never – NEVER – have I seen anything as clunky as this. There is no attempt to wait for this information to be parceled out through the rest of the episode. In fear of losing the audience before the second ad break, we’re bombarded with clumsily-acted meteors of information. Yes, there are a lot of central characters to introduce, but exposition this ugly just screams of desperation.

Mind you, they have a lot to get through in this first week. Not long after the clumsy download of names and relationships we see a young girl abducted, and not only that, she’s diabetic and needs an insulin shot. Even the addition of a ticking clock at the bottom of the screen would seem less manipulative than this. An abducted child is a staple cop show plotline (CSI: Miami has had several), but it’s usually reserved for sweeps week, and an audience that has seen way too many of these shows can usually sleep through them as they rarely offer anything new. This is no exception.

We get emotive pleas by hysterical parents, growled lines by impatient macho cops as they race around the city, and intolerant comments about characters who don’t represent the most basic church-going football-watching red-blooded mainstream “norm” (here it’s a doll collector, who is the recipient of several sneering comments from Wahlberg 2.0). Blue Bloods isn’t about to delay its dive into the pool of mediocrity; it’s gleefully skinny-dipping by the time most lowest-common-denominator ratings-chasing shows would be bending down to undo their shoelaces.

Once the kid is found midway through the episode, things get worse. Wahlberg is such a maverick cop he had to torture the vile, gloating kidnapper to find out the kid’s location, and this means evidence is inadmissable blah blah you know the drill by now. This automatically leads into a debate about the use of coercive interrogation techniques (AKA toiletboarding); it’s the kind of thing added for some topicality, but this show has a new twist. Fascist cop Wahlberg’s sister is wet liberal lawyer Bridget Moynahan, meaning this debate can be conducted between siblings who don’t get on.

It’s like a power-up bonus for this overused scenario. It comes at the expense of logic, sadly. Having Moynahan represent her dick brother to the DA is so improbable that the scene comes to a close with her pointing out that she would have to recuse herself from the case if it went any further. And who comes out best in the argument? Do you really think a show about a family of cops that already features a scene where both journalists and bloggers are treated like obstructive shit-sculptures by morals-fetishist Tom Selleck is going to approach this subject with any restraint? Wahlberg dismisses Moynahan’s complaints with ease and contempt.

The scene is even framed with her sitting down and Wahlberg looming over her (no mean feat; he’s about three feet shorter than her, by my calculations); he’s the boss and she’s the subordinate, wasting her time with woolly ideas about human rights while he’s out banging the heads of cartoonishly evil paedophiles against the side of a stinky toilet because might makes right. You can practically hear the capital-punishment supporting patriarchs nodding sagely in their comforters while wifey washes the dishes like a woman should.

This debate continues later over a family dinner (where the main course is yet more exposition) during which Wahlberg asks Moynahan if she would feel the same way about protecting the rights of paedophiles if her daughter was abducted. She, of course, has no response to this, other than to spell out that she hates paedophiles just as much as he does, just in case the audience thinks that defending the rights of all citizens to a fair trial is the same as joining NAMBLA. This isn’t a reasoned debate; it’s a loaded argument for the abolition of human rights and the rule of law designed to give the right-wing audience something to fap over, with the fact that seriously I’m not kidding the family really is actually called THE REAGAN FAMILY being the NRA-supporting cherry on top.

The show oozes with disdain for moral equivalence or reasoned thought. A Judge Dredd TV show would be less aggressive in its promotion of strict force, though of course the intention there would be satirical. Blue Bloods is Judge Dredd without the jokes. Or the helmet. Or the futuristic setting. Or anything, really. But you get my point. The success of resolutely unliberal shows like CSI: Miami, and reports like this one showing that the most successful shows on US TV are watched by Republicans, could well have influenced the ideological positioning by the network, who happily loaded the pilot with brusque manly men, submissive women (please don’t tell me Moynahan’s lawyer is anything other than a Strong-Female-Character-In-Name-Only), and black and white villainy.

As the show progressed it introduced a season arc about the corrupt Blue Templar organisation within the NYPD, so the water did get muddied as it went along, but an hour of this fascist-pandering horseshit was enough for SoC. Which is a shame, as dialogue as bad as, “We need to find this kid. Alive,” or, “You know, there’s no shame in talking about what happened in Iraq,” would have kept us happily chuckling until Torchwood: Miracle Day came along.

And that’s that for another year. Thanks to everyone who has commented on, liked, or retweeted these long long articles. I’m now going to go soak my fingertips in water for a few hours.

Listmania ‘10! Crew Contributions Of The Year

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It’s weird how Black Swan and Inception completely took over 2010, to the extent that I’ve barely thought about any other movies. In the Best Movies list I finished last week, I intended to make a comment about how the enjoyment-gap between them was almost non-existent: my memory of both of them is that they were like really very loud out-of-body experiences, but with trains, lesbian sex, nail-clipping, Winona Ryder clutching a glass of some expensive drink and looking very angry, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s tight buns (a pair of buttocks I didn’t actually notice, what with him running across the ceiling in his most memorable scene, but I have since found out from some of his lady-fans that his bum was very nice). I liked everything in the Best Movies list (obvs), but the leap from number three to number two was pretty large.

As you can see from these categories, Black Swan and Inception keep cropping up. It’s hard to exaggerate how impressive they both were on a technical level. The pleasure I derived from seeing two films as well crafted as this make me wonder if I’m really just a sucker for pretty things onscreen: certainly a conversation I had about Tron: Legacy just a couple of hours ago — which saw me make an unconvincing case for it by just pointing out how much my eyes and ears enjoyed it — makes me think I’m shallow.

But balls to it. Black Swan and Inception moved my heart as well as my two primary face-sensors. They’re near-perfect film experiences that left me breathless with joy in their final moments, and deserve all the praise I can throw at them. In the meantime, see below for some compliments for other films as well. They are not intended to be scraps from the table: all the work mentioned below is exemplary.

Best Director: Darren Aronofsky – Black Swan

Honorable Mentions:

Christopher Nolan – Inception

David Fincher – The Social Network

Lisa Cholodenko – The Kids Are All Right

Lee Unkrich – Toy Story 3

Takashi Miike – 13 Assassins

Best Screenplay: Lisa Cholodenko & Stuart Blumberg – The Kids Are All Right

Honorable Mentions:

Christopher Nolan – Inception

Nicole Holofcener – Please Give

Aaron Sorkin – The Social Network

Noah Baumbach and Jennifer Jason Leigh – Greenberg

Michael Arndt – Toy Story 3

“Where Have You Been?” Director of the Year: Joe Dante – The Hole

Best Visual Effects: Digital Domain / Prana Studios Inc. / Ollin Studio / Mr. X Inc. / Prime Focus Vancouver – Tron: Legacy


Honorable Mentions:

Double Negative / Asylum Visual Effects / Method / Rising Sun Pictures / Ghost VFX - The Sorceror’s Apprentice

SPI / CafeFX / Matte World Digital / In-Three Inc. - Alice in Wonderland

Hydraulx – Skyline

C.O.R.E. Digital Pictures / Buf / Image Metrics - Splice

Double Negative – Inception

Best Cinematography - Shelly Johnson - The Wolfman

Honorable Mentions:

Matthew Libatique – Black Swan

Robert Richardson – Shutter Island

Wally Pfister – Inception

Christopher Doyle – Ondine

Martin Ruhe – The American

Best Editing: Lee Smith – Inception

Best Sound Design – Craig Henigan – Black Swan

Honorable Mentions:

Ren Klyce - The Social Network

Leslie Shatz – Meek’s Cutoff

Eugene Gearty and Philip Stockton - Shutter Island

Richard King – Inception

Akritchalerm Kalayanamittr and Koichi Shimizu – Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

Best Soundtrack (of the century, let’s face it) – Hans Zimmer – Inception


Honorable Mentions:

Clint Mansell – Black Swan

Daft Punk – Tron: Legacy

Alexandre Desplat – The Ghost Writer

Anton Sanko – Rabbit Hole

Kjartan Sveinsson – Ondine

Best Individual Song: Derezzed by Daft Punk - Tron: Legacy

Best Production Design: Kevin Ishioka – Tron: Legacy

(Image taken from Steve Jung’s lovely website.)

Honorable Mentions:

Dante Ferretti – Shutter Island

Thérèse DePrez – Black Swan

Albrecht Konrad - The Ghost Writer

Guy Hendrix Dyas – Inception

Robert Stromberg – Alice in Wonderland

Best Costume Design: Penny Rose - Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

Honorable Mentions:

Lindy Hemming - Clash of the Titans

Michael Wilkinson / Quantum Creation FX - Tron: Legacy

Bruce Yu – Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame

Janty Yates – Robin Hood

Michael Kaplan – The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

Worst Director: Paul W.S. Anderson - Resident Evil: Afterlife

Dishonorable Mentions:

Kevin Smith – Cop Out

Alexandre Aja – Piranha 3D

Tim Burton – Alice in Wonderland

Tom Vaughan – Extraordinary Measures

Chris Columbus – Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief

Worst Screenplay: Linda Woolverton - Alice in Wonderland

Dishonorable Mentions:

Paul W.S. Anderson - Resident Evil: Afterlife

Robert Nelson Jacobs – Extraordinary Measures

Rob and Mark Cullen – Cop Out

M. Night Shyamalan – The Last Airbender

Pete Goldfinger and Josh Stolberg – Piranha 3D

Worst Cinematography – Andrew Dunn – Extraordinary Measures

Dishonorable Mentions:

Michael Watson – Skyline

Robert Richardson – Eat, Pray, Love

David Klein – Cop Out

Oliver Bokelberg – The Bounty Hunter

Michel Abramowicz - From Paris With Love

Worst Editing: Kevin Smith – Cop Out

One more to go: miscellaneous gubbins of the year, where I pick the best hair, creepiest poster, and most debonair badass, among other things.

Listmania ‘10! The Best Movies Of The Year

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A last mad dash to the end of the year, watching as many movies as I can, and I still don’t catch everything I wanted to see. It’s always the way, and I don’t see any other way to beat it other than to become independently wealthy and watch everything the day it is released. As a result, consider this list incomplete for 2010. How can it be complete if I haven’t see True Grit, which promises to be great, or The Fighter, which promises to be gritty and/or great, or Burlesque, which promises to be not as great and therefore potentially eligible for the worst movies list that will follow this?

Another caveat for new readers of the blog, some of whom I have met this year via Twitter, and include some people whose views on cinema I have come to respect and trust. If you don’t know me well either in the real world or via the internet, you might not yet realise just how heavily my tastes skew towards populist cinema. It has been my preference for many years now, and even in this fallow year for big-budget, wide-appeal movies, I’ve still managed to find a lot that to enjoy. The list will also feature a lot of American movies, which is more to do with the amount of US product released. That’s not to say I haven’t seen some fine movies from around the world. It’s just that they didn’t move me enough for inclusion here.

As you can see, I’m riven with worry that my tastes will be considered gauche, but I really shouldn’t. After all, taste is dependent on your criteria for the success of an artistic endeavour, and with films this is merely that a film do what it sets out to do, doesn’t take the audience for a fool, and shows some evidence that the filmmakers have an ability to make their movies work on both the micro and macro-scale: are they aware of how each scene — either well-crafted or fudged — fits in with the whole? Get something basic like that right and I’m going to be a lot nicer to your movie. The bad movies list is littered with movies that could have been fixed in the editing room: it’s a simple thing to get at least slightly right but too many filmmakers don’t even know how to do it properly. As for my taste, I’ve come to expect that my unending and vocal support for despised “failures” like Hudson Hawk (never forget!!!) and Speed Racer has burned my cred already.

Right. Caveats over. Let’s list this mammajamma.

25. [Rec]2

Would it have been possible for Jaume Balaguero and Paco Plaza to top their original zombie horror classic? For those of us who are still waking in the middle of the night with the memory of those terrifying final moments, it seems impossible. [Rec]2 might not feature anything that horrific, but its writer/directors are smart enough to take a step sideways, jumping off from the end of the original in an Aliens-esque way while skipping back into the timeline and geography of the first film, cleverly sketching new details in the margins. Even better, they flesh out the mythology, revealing that their horror franchise has more in common with The Exorcist than Dawn of the Dead, though this franchise features a badass action Priest, which is none-more-cool. Other than that it’s more of the same, but this is no dismissal. Some of the setpieces here are as breathtakingly staged as in the original: one early scene in a ventilation shaft is a nerve-wracking highlight. Best of all, it’s proves the [Rec]-niverse has legs. The next two movies cannot come soon enough.

24. Reign of Assassins

Chao-Bin Su’s eccentric wuxia romp is apparently co-directed by John Woo, though there is no hint of the master’s unironic hero-worship here. There is only the giddy sense that you’re not going to guess what’s coming next: a rarity these days. At first it seems like Chao-Bin is making a historical martial arts version of Johnny Handsome or The Long Kiss Goodnight, with Michelle Yeoh as the deadly assassin on the run from her past with a new face, but we’re instead treated to a dazzling final act filled with delirious plot twists and hysterical action. Very little else this year has the impact of the reveal of The Wheel King’s demented motivation for chasing the movie’s bizarre MacGuffin (half of a corpse), nor the sight of flaming sword fights, sex assassins and zipping death-needles in the final fights. It is also essential viewing for fans of the amazing Yeoh, who once more excels as the woman who cannot escape those she has wronged. Vibrant, colourful, and unapologetically sentimental and sincere, it’s an irresistible experience.

23. Megamind

It’s been another good year for Dreamworks Animation. How To Train Your Dragon was a delightful, highly detailed and exciting adventure, fully deserving of its success. Shades of Caruso recommends it, but can’t help preferring Megamind. The clever script by Alan J. Schoolcraft and Brent Simons plays with expectation, adding enough variations to a straight-forward premise to surprise audiences: something that eluded the makers of the similar but inferior Despicable Me. Tom McGrath’s direction shines too, getting the most from his starry cast, while raising the stakes impressively in the final act. It’s also a 3D triumph: Metro City (Metrocity?) truly boggles the eyes, those concrete canyons fading off into the distance while the superpowered protagonists battle it out on the vast stage. This might not reach the heights of Kung Fu Panda, or Sony Pictures Animation’s Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, but it’s still an entertaining and surprisingly affecting romp.

22. A Serbian Film

Satire might be the rapier that elegantly stabs at society’s hypocrisies, but apparently blunt-force-trauma porn/horror depictions of unimaginable cruelty can serve as commentary as well. Srđan Spasojević’s unforgettable nightmare vision contains zero cynicism: accusations that A Serbian Film is merely provocative exploitation are entirely false. It’s a bone-rattling scream of horror from the gut, a gauntlet thrown in the face of the Serbian government for turning the populace into puppets without agency, controlled from birth to death by forces beyond their control — here depicted as the almost unwatchable degradation of a family for the sake of meaningless, depraved entertainment. Even the strongest stomach will be turned by the toxic images pouring from the screen, but it’s the honesty and fury of Spasojević’s message that will linger longest, and make this a cause celebre for years to come.

21. Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame

The US action movie roster was deeply disappointing this year. With the exception of a handful of films, most of this year was taken up with unconvincing nostalgia (The A-Team, The Expendables), fun but slight comic adaptations (Red, The Losers), or genre crossovers (sci-fi – Repo Men: horror – Daybreakers: romance – Killers). Meanwhile, Reign of Assassins and Tsui Hark’s berserk Detective Dee mystery set the screen alight with crazed invention, whirling movement, and abstract plotting worth a dozen feeble CGI-heavy shoot-outs. Hark’s fictionalised retelling of the tale of 7th-Century courtier Di Renjie is a fantastical concoction, with Dee reimagined as a philosophical man of action, a Zen version of Guy Ritchie and Robert Downey Jr.’s Sherlock Holmes, except that movie didn’t feature Ninja puppeteers, deranged reindeer attacks, spontaneous human combustion and face-altering acupuncture. You never quite know what madness will be thrown at you. While the garbling of the real and controversial historical legacy of Empress Wu is troubling, as a slice of entertainment this ranks with Zu Warriors and The Butterfly Murders as one of Hark’s brightest fantasies.

20. Green Zone

This mixture of Bourne-style intensity and United-93-style reportage failed to find an audience, and frustrating populist compromises within Brian Helgeland’s otherwise ambitious screenplay threaten to scupper the movie at every turn, but it remains a unique venture: an attempt to depict the fraudulent practices of a corrupt government in a politically unstable warzone by hiding the bitter pill inside an action movie. It very nearly succeeds, certainly enough to stir the blood and anger the mind. It’s commendable just for its seriousness of purpose, and the unobtrusive way Greengrass paints infuriating details from Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s non-fiction book into the sides of the frame, but for action fans there is also the rush of Greengrass’ perfectly staged and edited set-pieces, especially the exhausting final chase through Baghdad, a scene made poignant with the knowledge that the disastrous occupation of Iraq was not going to have a happy end. Sad that the filmmakers felt obliged to tag on such a silly coda, but still…

19. Winter’s Bone

Debra Granik’s adaptation of Daniel Woodrell’s novel crosses so many types of genre it’s hard to know where to start. It has the episodic structure of a fairy-tale, the indomitable hero and quest-arc of a detective story, the inhospitable landscape of a survival narrative, and the terrifying antagonists of a Hills-Have-Eyes-style horror movie. Granik’s control of atmosphere is such that the frozen world seems to bleed out of the screen, chilling the blood even before we get to the events depicted. Ree’s search for her no-good father takes her into the dangerous underbelly of her community, with only her menacing uncle to help her. Watching this young woman forced to endanger herself for the sake of her family is agonising, partially through some of the best storytelling of the year, but mostly through career-best performances from John Hawkes and Dale Dickey, and the memorable arrival of Jennifer Lawrence in the mainstream cultural consciousness.

18. Whip It

All hail Drew Barrymore! 2010 saw the release of Going The Distance, which was so far and away the best, most entertaining and most convincing romcom of the year that every other dashed-off failure should hang its head in shame. It also saw the UK release of her directorial debut, the utterly charming coming-of-age roller derby movie Whip It. Barrymore draws out Ellen Page’s most likeable performance yet as a young woman whose tiny rebellion against the small-town mentality of her home and family leads her to an equally tiny — yet momentous — sports career. Our hero’s direction is frenetic and fractured but invigorating, as quick and sharp as the best two-and-a-half-minute punk tune. This celebration of sisterhood is one of the most purely joyous movies about youth made in recent times. Hopefully its fanbase will grow, and its message of unsentimental female solidarity, and celebration of outsider culture, will be passed on and enjoyed for years to come.

17. Iron Man 2

It’s too long. There’s too much talking. There’s not enough action. Whine, whine, whine. Jon Favreau took the things most people seemed to love about the first Iron Man movie – Tony Stark being a smartass in formless scenes that lean heavily on the wisecracks – and multiplied them, turning the increasingly tired template of the summer blockbuster on its head. The box office was great, but no one seemed to be happy with what they got. Pish posh. The talkiness and loose nature of the Iron Man franchise has proved to be its greatest strength. This plays more as a semi-improvised comedy than a set-piece-heavy explosiongasm, a good-time free-for-all that still finds time to test Tony Stark’s character and build the Marvel Universe inbetween the rambling asides and coolly tossed-off non-sequiturs. It’s the most unconventional superhero movie yet: irksome if you’re not onboard but pure joy for the rest of us.

16. Salt

Some movies are just too crazy not to love a little. Kurt Wimmer’s screenplay – in which agent Evelyn Salt may or may not be a sleeper agent intent on destroying Russia, America, the Middle East or the whole world, depending on where you are in the movie – playfully messes with expectations, leaving the audience in a pleasurable state of confusion and doubt as to the motives of any of the main characters. Philip Noyce cranks up the action to levels far beyond those displayed in his Tom Clancy adaptations, throwing out several memorable set-pieces and brilliantly orchestrating the cast into giving broad performances pitched at the appropriate level of heightened emotional truth: some kind of miracle considering the preposterousness of the numerous plot-twists, of which the less said the better. It’s undeniably daft, but by God, it’s exciting.

15. Submarine

Those of us who have watched the career of the amazing Richard Ayoade can rejoice: his feature debut is a triumph of endearing observational comedy, empathic storytelling, and film-nerd fastidiousness. The coming-of-age story of Oliver Holt doesn’t shy away from depicting its hero as an emotionally-stunted klutz, but the masterstroke is making all of his misjudgements seem perfectly logical, magically regressing the audience’s point-of-view back to its own adolescence, when we didn’t realise we hadn’t quite figured out how the world worked. Ayoade extracts impressive performances from his cast, especially newcomers Craig Roberts and Yasmin Paige as the nervous, spiky young couple whose adventures in romance go so believably awry. Nevertheless, the director’s greatest achievement is the magical atmosphere he generates: nostalgic yet modern, bittersweet and utterly charming, even during its darkest moments.

14. Four Lions

Amazing how Chris Morris’ comedy about suicide bombers didn’t generate the torrent of controversy many of us expected: a testament to the movie’s unexpected warmth. Though the four terrorist-wannabes are obviously murderous scum, they’re also human, and the most daring thing about this magnificent farce is to give at least one character — Omar, brilliantly played by Riz Ahmed — a redemptive arc as he attempts to save dopey Waj (a hilarious turn from Kayvan Novak) from eternal damnation. This is also the movie’s greatest strength, depicting fundamentalists as people in all their fumbling, irrational glory. Playing them as nothing more than idiots would have no charge at all. It becomes more than just a film of its time, becomes a film about all of humanity. We’re all fools, all a mixture of good and bad. It’s just unfortunate that a very small minority of us are more likely to blow up others on a mission to pay tribute to an imaginary sky-god or to strike at a society that is not really that much of an enemy.

13. Dogtooth

Arguably the most upsetting horror can come from the exaggeration of normal behaviour, as displayed in Yorgos Lanthimos’ dark extrapolation of how they fuck you up, your mom and dad. A depraved couple conspire to keep their children captive within the grounds of their home, feeding them false information about the world from birth. Treated like dogs, the children — now post-adolescent adults — have a completely alien idea of what the world is: planes are toys, cats are deadly monsters, and venturing outside the compound before they lose their ‘dogtooth’ will end in disaster. Nevertheless, with adulthood comes an increased urge to escape, even without knowing what that entails. Lanthimos’ matter-of-fact direction is the perfect counterpoint to the disturbing subject matter, impassively charting the slowly-unravelling experiment. Who needs human centipedes when you have parents like this? It’s an unsettling tale – The Truman Show without the hope and uplift.

12. Meek’s Cutoff

Who would have thought that the writer and director of something as soporific as Old Joy could create something as charged with suspense as this? That’s unusual enough, but Kelly Reichardt’s masterstroke is doing that without changing her signature style in any way. Her retelling of the true story of Meek Cutoff — in which a group of settlers of the “Wild West” are pushed off course by a potentially unreliable frontiersman guide — is deceptively simple. Under the surface are tensions that inevitably spill out as water dwindles and Meek’s instructions become less certain. The introduction of a new element — a Native American who wanders too close to the group — sets the movie spinning off in a different, and even more fascinating, direction. Reichardt’s superb handling of the group dynamic and the allegorical dimensions of this survival tale is aided by notable work from sound designer Leslie Shatz, weaving a hypnotic soundtrack using nothing more than the wind, the sound of shuffling feet, and the creak of a wheel. It’s an exhausting journey, but a riveting one.

11. Agora

Alejandro Amenábar’s ambitious, big-budget biopic of philosopher Hypatia – The Passion of the Christ for atheists – struggled to find distributors around the world, was dumped into cinemas with barely any publicity, and was criticised by Catholic groups in Spain for defaming Christianity: the polar opposite of Mel Gibson’s berserk Passion Play. Who knows why audiences didn’t connect with this tragic epic: it has the requisite visual wow-factor, moves at a clip, and is easily accessible. Perhaps no one wants to be reminded of the ancient — and modern — punishment and subjugation of women by vicious misogynists whose pitiful moral shortcomings and weak-minded thuggery lead to acts of barbarous evil. Rachel Weisz’s towering performance breaks the heart, bringing to life a great thinker whose fate is decided for her by infantile monsters: a loss to the world more profound than the library she tries to save. It should be required viewing for anyone who supports reason over superstition.

10. Easy A

Much like Drew Barrymore’s Whip It, Will Gluck’s teen comedy was greeted with a shrug. It’s a crying shame: movies this clever and witty don’t come along every day. Taking Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter as an inspiration, rather than a template, Easy A treats serious subjects — sexual awakening, female empowerment, the negative effect of socially accepted and enforced codes of morality, etc. — with a lightness of touch that seems ever more rare in these fractious times, remaining good-natured and silly while driving home a welcome message: mind your own business, and I’ll mind mine. However, the sparkling wit and referential games would mean nothing without a solid central performance, and Emma Stone delivers a star-making turn. Her charm and comedic skill are the elements that push this movie from good to great, and ensure that time will be generous to this underrated gem. It’s the best movie of its kind since Clueless: the proselytising campaign to see it get its due starts here.

9. Greenberg

Noah Baumbach’s character study of an odious, self-involved shit-head who uses everyone around him and sabotages himself tests that well-known writer’s maxim — that protagonists don’t need to be likeable for you to root for their success — to the point of destruction and beyond. Ben Stiller delivers one of the finest performances of the year as the title character, cast adrift in a city he hates, surrounded by people he cannot emotionally connect with, and consistently making the wrong choices. It’s a testament to Stiller and screenwriters Baumbach and Jennifer Jason Leigh that you find yourself rooting for this douchenozzle, hoping that he will somehow figure out that he is the problem, and make some effort to rectify this. The movie succeeds admirably, regularly positioning him on a precipice of universally recognisable social failure, his empathic blindness exaggerated to unbearable levels — if this creep can find a sort of redemption, there’s hope for all of us. Kudos too for bringing the amazing Greta Gerwig to wider attention: her work as Florence Marr is one of the highlights of the movie year.

8. The Social Network

Aaron Sorkin’s voice is so distinct that no matter who adapts his work, it’s first and foremost an Aaron Sorkin project. Until now. David Fincher’s free-wheeling and zippy movie is as fast-moving as the world of social media which will probably see Facebook superseded by other sites by the time this film hits satellite (this sentence sponsored by Diaspora). His control of the material, his authorial confidence, almost completely overwhelms the various tics and habits of Sorkin – no mean feat. Which is not to denigrate Sorkin. The Social Network represents his best work since the early years of The West Wing, cleverly and bravely tinkering with fact in order to turn the prosaic origins of Facebook into a Greek tragedy as “Mark Zuckerberg” is undone by his ambition and ironically trapped in the unsatisfying world he created. It’s delirious entertainment, delivered at hyper-speed by two masters of their trade, and well played by a young and obnoxiously talented cast, with special praise due to Andrew Garfield, as good here as he is in Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go.

7. Please Give

It’s been said before, and Shades of Caruso can merely echo it: why are people squandering their time waiting for Woody Allen to find something new to say when there is a perceptive, funny, imaginative filmmaker already working in the same area, and who isn’t merely content to ape better directors while putting nubile young women into leading roles as muses to various lecherous proxys? Please Give is a vastly entertaining and thought-provoking comedy-drama, playfully addressing themes of white liberal guilt, social discomfort, distorted body-image, and the generation gap, all while delivering endearing and subtle character comedy and well-earned last-act epiphanies that are recognisably small but no less profound for that. Nicole Holofcener has been making lovable and well-crafted social commentary for years without preaching, without resting on her laurels, and without pandering to the audience. Why she isn’t more widely celebrated by critics is beyond us.

6. Kick-Ass

Kick-Ass the movie is much like Kick-Ass the character, stupidly starting fights with powerful opponents just because it feels like it. Matthew Vaughan and Jane Goldman could have toned down Millar & Romita Jr.’s super-homage for family viewing, but instead they stuck to their guns and delivered a provocative blast of bratty energy right at the tutting moral campaigners. The only downside to the tide of handbag-clutching vitriol aimed at it (because really, who gives a fuck what these idiots think?) is that it obscured the message of the movie: if someone needs help, you have a duty to provide it, whether you like it or not. Hit-Girl may kill dozens of people and say the naughty words, but it’s not about that. It’s about a new generation kicking against the pricks. As London’s streets rage and the Establishment stamps on The Kids with all its might, Kick-Ass needs immediate reappraisal. It feels more like a manifesto than an action movie, but never forget: it’s a really goddamn good action movie.

5. Toy Story 3

Finally we reach the end of Pixar’s trilogy of torment. Toy Story 3 is a gruelling and emotionally devastating trip into the dark heart of society, laying bare the compromises made by all of us as we become adults. A world where wrenching sacrifice is inevitable is here depicted, with grim irony, as a candy-coloured landscape of potential joy crushed under the jackboot of miserable conformity, with emotional attachment to anyone or anything being a surefire way to see your dreams destroyed, your friendships demolished, your life ruined. It’s a relentless assault on the soul of the viewer, a sadistic and twisted reminder that life is dust and all we can do is cherish the odd moment of connection and bliss before being cast into the abyss, unwanted and alone. Oh the tears that were shed as Lee Unkrich’s nightmarish masterpiece hurtled towards its miserable end! Oceans of sadness! Waterworlds of lachrymosity! Damn you Pixar! DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!

4. The Kids Are All Right

Lisa Cholodenko’s immensely satisfying family drama is a quiet triumph, compassionately extolling the virtues and compromises necessary to live a liberal life while frankly addressing the unavoidable urges and paranoias of us all. It’s gratifying to see a movie leap over the usual tangle of political argument to simply present a loving family in all of its flawed beauty. Annette Bening, Mark Ruffalo and Julianne Moore excel as the trio of parents whose seemingly happy exteriors hide paranoia, jealousy and sadness; feelings that are brought to the surface by the actions of their teenage children. Does it sound like faint praise to say that the reason this movie appears so high on the list is just that it gets everything right? The movie’s ace in the hole is the script by Cholodenko and Stuart Blumberg, which is a work of subtle genius. Without pandering to the audience we’re invited into the lives of some of the most exquisitely detailed characters of the year, whose actions are believable, recognisable, and revelatory. It’s a genuine crowd-pleaser in the best sense of the word.

3. 13 Assassins

It could have been a wild and tacky action extravaganza, something entertaining but disposable, a repository of empty iconography that trades in nostalgia for the long-gone heights of the action genre: i.e., it could have been The Expendables. Thankfully Takashi Miike’s startling action classic — featuring 13 outcast heroes facing off against an army protecting the insane brother of the Shogun — is anything but. At times it feels like an elegaic send-off for a period in Japanese history, as our hero Shinzaemon Shimada faces disgrace and death in order to do the right thing: literally destroying a way of life in order to save the country. As the final half of the movie kicks in, it feels more like Miike is saying goodbye to the Samurai sub-genre. The careful pace is jettisoned for 45 minutes of beautifully paced and choreographed carnage, and two final showdowns of incredible emotional power. Nothing can prepare you for the intensity of this brutal war-in-miniature, with courage giving way to insanity as the battle progresses. It will be a long time before anyone can top the director’s astonishing achievement.

2. Inception

It may not feature Batman, but Inception still swept in like the Caped Crusader to save us from a summer of lacklustre movies. Nevertheless, even in a strong year this imagination-shattering masterpiece would stand out. Christopher Nolan’s bold and befuddling puzzle mimicked the beats of a traditional action movie to tell one story that appealed on a lizard-brain level, ending in an hour-long setpiece of dazzling complexity and ambition. Nevertheless, the genius of Inception lies in its labyrinthine structure. Numerous stories/interpretations could be implied from the layers of Freudian and Jungian imagery piled on top of the heist-movie genre trappings. Much like Lost, there was more than one narrative here, and viewers could choose whichever they thought was most applicable. Such confidence in the audience’s ability to unpick a knot like this is rare enough, but to present it at the height of the summer season – a period traditionally dismissed as an intellectual dead zone by sneering cultural commentators – amounts to a statement of intent: this filmmaker is trying to single-handedly restore cinema’s confidence in itself, and justify its existence as the audience finds satisfaction elsewhere. To do that he had to construct a maze: one that takes two hours to grow in our minds, but will take years to solve.

1. Black Swan

Forget 3D. Forget the inevitable future technology of thought-transference, even. What Aronofsky has achieved using little more than empathic and artistic skill is to plant our consciousness into the mind of a deeply troubled woman: we see and hear everything she does, and slowly our grasp on reality falls apart at the same time as hers. The willing members of the audience — who allow Aronofsky’s hypnotic magic work on them — will find themselves trapped in their seats, bombarded with unreliable imagery and noise, forced to question everything they see and driven to a state of delirious euphoria. The intensity of the director’s vision has proved too much for some viewers, and caused some cineastes to cry “foul” as they denounce the movie for being “overwrought”. As if this is a bad thing. This tribute to the power of art to transform both creator and audience is exactly as heightened as it needs to be. Watching it is to experience the feeling of creating a new idea or to master an artform, with all of the emotional turmoil that that entails. Technically it is impressive: Matthew Libatique’s raw photography, Clint Mansell’s overwhelming score and the ingenious sound design by Craig Henighan create a claustrophobic atmosphere of inescapable hysteria, but it’s the emotional charge supplied by Natalie Portman’s performance that pushes this movie to the top of the list. Her total commitment to the project is the key to its success: Black Swan would be movie of the year just for her heart-wrenching turn.

Honorary Mentions:

Archipelago: Joanna Hogg’s beautifully observed and played drama about a middle class family riven with discord is heavily loaded with almost unbearable British reserve. It’s as uncommunicative as its protagonists, but says much more about class issues and familial strife than any histrionics ever could.

The Town: A muscular action flick directed with consummate skill by the great Ben Affleck, stepping in front of his own camera to give a career-best performance alongside a similarly great cast of Rebecca Hall, Jeremy Renner, Pete Postlethwaite, Chris Cooper and Jon Hamm.

Summer Wars: Mamoru Hosoda’s sci-fi movie about a family battling against a rampant AI is primarily about how the history of a warrior clan can be revisited in modern trappings, but it also struck me as a love letter to the Internet and its greatest asset: the people who populate it and defend it from marauding forces. It’s also a feast for the eyes.

Unstoppable: The traditional visual blow-out of Tony Scott remains a constant eye-sore throughout this pared-down action thriller, but this is still his best-paced film in an age, and his best overall movie since Crimson Tide. There may not be much to it, but what more do you need? It’s an runaway train! And Denzel has to stop it! Magic.

Amigo: What could have been a dry piece of historical fiction is instead both a vibrant celebration of humanity’s empathy and harsh depiction of its worst and most paranoid instincts, as the occupation of a baryo in the Philippines during the Philippine-American War flirts with success before disaster. A great cast; a great — and compassionate — movie.

Best Documentary: Tabloid

Errol Morris succeeds again with the wonderfully tawdry story of Joyce McKinney and The Case of the Manacled Mormon, which was a huge deal in tabloid newspaper culture last century. Timely points are made about how journalism can ruin lives, and how opportunistic individuals can make a living from turning their troubles into a kind of performance for the masses, but most of all it’s just a massively entertaining tale, filled with oddballs, twists and humour.

Best Fiction / Non-Fiction Hybrid: Self Made

Gillian Wearing’s feature debut is like nothing else out there, a pleasantly discombobulating method-acting experiment using non-actors. She plays with what fiction is expected to do, and how our response to it is tied up in our knowledge of the individuals involved in the making of it, while at the same time using her acting exercises as a tool to unwrap the thought-processes of her volunteers. It could have been a navel-gazing exercise, but Wearing is too smart and empathic for that. What she has woven is far deeper than some dry documentary, and more emotionally involving. It’s cathartic for those involved, and maybe for the viewer too.

Still to come: worst movies of the year, and my pick of the best performances, best crew contributions, and best miscellaneous gubbins.

New Poll: What Was The Best Movie You Saw In 2010?

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About 450,000,000,000 lifetimes ago I added a poll to the blog, asking readers to vote for the movie they were most excited about during the summer season, and then I got busy doing other things and left it stuck to the side of the blog as an unintentional warning to visitors that there was nothing going on here. Well, time to rectify that. Here are the results, and OMG they are surprising!

  • Nicolas Cage: Mindfreak 2.0: 16 (40%)
  • Man of Iron vs. Several Other Men of Iron Plus Mickey Rourke: 9 (22.5%)
  • Christopher Nolan’s Braneheist!: 6 (15%)
  • When Annie Hall Met Tekken: 5 (12.5%)
  • Toy Story 3D: A New Dimension in Feeling Guilty About Growing Up: 4 (10%)
  • Robin Hood and His Terribly Serious Men: 0 (0%)
  • Hell is an Infinite Number of Shrek Sequels: 0 (0%)
  • Step Up 3D: A New Dimension in Dance: 0 (0%)
  • Jakey G and the Persian Abs of Sexy Steel: 0 (0%)
  • Heigl and Kutcher are: Unlikeable!: 0 (0%)
  • Piranha 3D: A New Dimension in Fish: 0 (0%)
  • Tom and Cameron’s Desperate Adventure: 0 (0%)
  • The Twilight Saga: This Time Something Might Actually Happen: 0 (0%)
  • M. Night Shyamalan Presents: M. Night Shyamalan’s Last Roll of the Dice: 0 (0%)
  • Fishburne + Predators > Citizen Kane: 0 (0%)
  • The Bad, The Rad, and the Genuinely Ugly: 0 (0%)
  • Eat Pray Love Drink Fumble Artichoke Spanner Colostomy: 0 (0%)
  • Wall Street 2D: An Old Dimension in Making Obvious Points About Greed: 0 (0%)
  • Sylvester Stallone’s Bitching 80′s Actiongasm: 0 (0%)

I’m actually really flattered that someone decided to polljack me and vote 16 times for Nicolas Cage’s latest box-office-shattering megahit ($63,150,991 domestic! Somewhere in LA Jerry Bruckheimer is crying, and then telling himself off for crying before getting his teeth bleached to make himself feel better). It means a lot that someone was mischievous enough to do that, though it makes me worry that now people will think I did it to make sure my favourite angry film star got to the top of my own poll. Sadly, it doesn’t work like that, especially as I’ve seen it and it really doesn’t deserve to be there. Baruchel negates Cage, unfortunately. (Ah, the nasal nerdlinger was tolerable, and the movie was passable, but that doesn’t cut it.)

Iron Man 2, Inception, Scott Pilgrim and Toy Story 3 were bound to get the most votes, as they all sit at perfect confluences of fan love, but the lack of votes tells me two things. 1) I don’t have many readers, and random visitors aren’t likely to click on my polls, which is sad, and 2) of the readers I do have, none of them are fans of sparkly vampires, prehistoric fish monsters, Josh Brolin, film stars whose only talent is to smile a lot as their popularity dwindles (hello Heigl, Roberts, Cruise and Diaz), video game adaptations starring bad accents and some inadvisable brownface makeup (yes, I do believe Gemma Arterton had her English Rose complexion darkened, and yes, the mind boggles), and Plasticene-faced OAP Sylvester Stallone grunting at a visibly bored Jason Statham. And I don’t blame my readers, because nearly every movie in that list was shockingly poor. Seven of them will feature in my worst movies list. That’s seven movies so wretched that I actually like Killers more. Killers! With Katherine Heigl and Ashton Kutcher! I know!

Anyway, time to round out the year with another poll, hastily devised this afternoon while I waited for the blood to freeze in my veins. What is your favourite movie of the year? Note I’ve only given 18 options: time is tight as I’m still writing a billion words about the year as a whole, which I hope to have up before February 2011. That’s not a joke. Here are the choices:

  • How Creepy Was My Ballet?
  • Uncle Boonmee and the Deathly-Boring Hallows
  • Robert Altman’s Iron Man
  • Harry Potter and the Unguent of Perspicacity
  • Scott Pilgrim’s Unwatched Adventure
  • The Most Expensive Daft Punk Video Imaginable
  • Im In Ur Dreamz Killin Ur D00dz
  • Pixar’s The Neverending Guilt Trip
  • The Kids Are All Right But Their Parents Are Fucked
  • Sorkin Vs Facebook = Ten Million Word Count
  • The Execrables
  • Twilight: Eternal Narrative Stasis
  • Proto-Robin Hood And His Quasi-Merry Men
  • Prince of Parkour: The Absence of Entertainment
  • The Impoverished Hottie And The Quest For The Redneck
  • Another Year, Another Grim Mike Leigh Movie
  • Ben Stiller’s The Human Zoidberg
  • A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Jihad

I’ll round up the responses once I’ve got a reasonable number of votes, and I’ve finished all of my other end-of-year posts. I’ve been writing the film ones for a month and I’m not even halfway through. :-(

The 2009-2010 Caruso Awards: The Best New Characters of the Year

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Yes yes, I’m still not done. Traditionally Shades of Caruso feels obliged to praise showrunners for creating new characters that embody all that is great about a show, draw attention to aspects of the show that we hadn’t spotted before, or make us want to watch something that otherwise we wouldn’t be that bothered about. Previous years have seen us hurl garlands at Walter Bishop from Fringe and Dr. Amber Volakis from House like we were throwing love-frisbees. Who will win this year? Will it be Amy Pond? (Clue: no.) Will it be a sexy new vampire on True Blood? (Clue: No, because we haven’t watched it, despite all of the sexiness.) I’d like to think our choice is utterly uncontroversial. We’ll save the controversy for the following post, which will be about the worst new characters of the year. Rules apply: only characters introduced in seasons completed by the time the awards started are eligible, and only one character per show can be included, except for the two exceptions seen below, who made it onto the list because I think the relevant shows have two important, likeable characters that share a lot of traits and also show how issues of race can send two similar people down completely different roads.

10. Dan Stark – The Good Guys

Matt Nix’s endearing cop show sadly doesn’t have the consistency to become a regular watch, but whenever it comes on, your attention will inevitably be held by Bradley Whitford’s full-powered performance as retro-cop Dan Stark. He’s more than just a mustache-delivery system. Due to his time on Sorkin-Shows — where the amount of dialogue exceeds molecules in the universe — it’s forgivable to think that verbal humour is all Whitford can bring to a role, but much of the pleasure of his turn as the American Gene Hunt depends on his bizarre physical comedy. It’s worth tuning in each week to catch his weird stiff-armed high-kicking combat stance, let alone his clueless pronouncements and hysterical technophobia (as shown above). It’s a joke that’s been done elsewhere, but Whitford’s lively energy is infectious. Colin Hanks is a good foil, and RonReaco Lee is funny as a Huggy-Bear-esque snitch, but they don’t even need to be there for The Good Guys to work. It’s Whitford’s show: everyone else is just visiting.

9. Dr. Bennet Halverson – Dollhouse

Adding a character to this list of awesomeness should be a happy moment, but there is a twinge of sadness here. Though Dr. Bennett Halverson is introduced with a flourish and allowed at least one classic episode almost to herself, we don’t get a chance to see just how great this character could have been. The sense that there was a 500-page story-bible written about her various exploits is there in every scene. Halverson’s unpredictability, impishness and ruthlessness shine through Summer Glau’s most winning performance yet, so much so that we can go from being charmed by her to hating her guts in an instant. Other than Echo, she’s the most complicated character on the show, something made very clear even though her character is disposed of in a hurry, just like the show. You just know her final moment was meant to be a fourth season shocker, something that would have built to an amazing emotional crescendo. Unfortunately, we just a fraction of the ultimate plan. It’s enough to create a strong negative emotion, but still only a ghost of that all-too-familiar Whedon-pain.

8. Vince Howard / Luke Cafferty - Friday Night Lights

Sometimes all it takes for a character to win over an audience is just being a good guy. Not a Nice Guy, but someone who is shy and dopey and overly polite and too sincere for his own good. Luke Cafferty is a slave to his manners, his own worst enemy, a guy who makes a series of stupid mistakes and suffers terribly for them all while trying to do the right thing. Vince Howard is on the knife-edge of taking a wrong turn in his life that he can never return from, all the while knowing what the right choices are. Luckily for them, they’re in a show that has at its core a simple message: you can be better, and you can transcend this. Maybe I instantly loved both characters because they were just regular good guys who refuse to let misfortune grind them down, but I also wonder if I loved them because they enable Coach Taylor to do what he does best: change lives, save young men from the hell of their mistakes, and inspire them to be better people. After all, at its best Friday Night Lights is like uplift-porn.

7. Lucretia – Spartacus: Blood and Sand

In the new age of TV, we demand bad guys who are nuanced and not just evil. Spartacus starts off with a hissable villain in the form of Gaius Claudius Glaber, the legatus who ruins the life of “Spartacus” after our hero dares to question his orders. It’s telling that Glaber then disappears for the majority of the season, to be replaced with the glorious duo of Batiatus and his wife Lucretia. While SoC has long considered John Hannah to be a not-great actor, his work here has prompted a rethink. Nevertheless, as entertaining as the spluttering lanista was, he’s nothing without Lucretia. She works less as a Lady Macbeth and more as an equal, independently following her own plans to aid their political ambitions. What’s best about her — other than Lucy Lawless’ fine work — is that her plans don’t work out as well as she hoped: her “friend” Ilithyia eventually escapes her web of blackmail, and her inevitably doomed love of Gladiator Crixus proves to be just one part of her downfall. It’s that vulnerability and fallibility that makes Lucretia one of the most entertaining bad guys of the year.

6. Troy Barnes – Community

I agonised over which character on Best New Sitcom Community would make the grade here. Someone had to. Creator Dan Harmon did a fantastic job of populating the show with a central cast of memorable characters, and carried that good work through the season by altering relationships and focus to take advantage of growing chemistry and hidden acting strengths. All of the main characters (and secondary characters such as Star-Burns and Dean Pelton) are brilliantly realised, but the most consistently funny member of the core group has to be Troy Barnes, the dopey but good-natured former quarterback who loves Robin Williams, thrives on best friend Abed’s pop-culture savantism (even when he doesn’t quite understand it), has a notable way with words, and can harmonise even while scared of rats. Most importantly, Troy is a great showcase for the amazing Donald Glover, the Spider-Man who sadly never was. His ascent to immense super-stardom begins here.

5. Zoe Graystone – Caprica

Caveats naturally apply here, as of course the character of Zoe Graystone only exists in Caprica for a few minutes before being blasted into smithereens by crazed monotheist terrorists. The “Zoe Graystone” that captured my imagination is a computer extrapolation of metadata turned into a virtual avatar, hooked up to a robot, and then magically transformed into the first Cylon. Perhaps it’s this berserk origin story that makes her so fascinating, as she acts as a futuristic techno-Trinity of Mother, Daughter, and Holy Robot. Perhaps it’s seeing her grow — in the few episodes we got before Syfy maddeningly took the show from our screens — from a clueless, hostile teenager into a confident woman grieving for her own life and desperately trying to escape her physical prison. Mostly it’s because the most complex character in the Caprica-verse is played with such quirky energy by Alessandra Torresani, who drops into the nerd-culture consciousness with a splash and makes a meal of it. If she hadn’t been right for the part, the show would’ve been doomed. Thankfully, she’s perfect.

4. Davis McAlary / Antoine Batiste - Treme

Treme is about a number of things: it’s a critique of the Bush administration’s abandonment of a devastated city; a celebration of American culture and history; an organic musical that lacks the intentional artificiality of Glee; a thesis on the differences between commercial culture and “authentic” artistic endeavour. Most of all, it’s an attempt to document the “feel” of New Orleans, and though Albert Lambreaux’s furious Mardi Gras Indian chief might be the most detailed character in terms of introducing a slice of history that is unfamiliar to mainstream audiences, it’s lovable chancers Antoine and Davis that provide most of the laughs. Their lackadaisical personal lives are contrasted with their loyalty to local history, as Davis battles to preserve something of the town he loves and Antoine just gets on with being an essential part of Jazz culture. They’re also unreliable and shifty, with Antoine’s lovelife and Davis’ questionable appropriation of African-American language and culture being the salt in their sugary personas. They also serve as a subtle comment on race in America: while Antoine struggles, Davis coasts.

3. Raylan Givens – Justified

Shades of Caruso has many criteria for selecting the best and worst characters of the year, but there are some criteria we don’t often mention. One is Outrageous Hottness. I will admit to some weakness on occasion, but only one character made both myself and co-blogger Daisyhellcakes sit up in our chairs and say, “Hello!” Super-cool gunslinger Raylan Givens could turn even an unturnable head with his handsomeness, his pulse-quickening height, his lovely hair, his odd-but-sexy walk, and his excellent hat. Even better, the character is created by Elmore Leonard and is therefore rounded, funny, dark, and mysterious. Timothy Olyphant eschews the glumness of his previous TV character — Deadwood‘s terrifying Sheriff Seth Bullock — but keeps the Western elements. Raylan is a sharp-shooting, quick-witted, no-bullshit hero with terrible arch-enemies, compromised friends, a bad temper, a bit of a problem with drink, and two beautiful women who love him as much as he loves them. Basically, he is AWESOME and everyone who has yet to watch Justified needs to so they can contract Raylan Fever.

2. Lane Pryce – Mad Men

Ah Lane Pryce, let me count the ways that I love thee! SoC was already in the bag for Lane in the third season: his ups and downs in season four confirm the wisdom of our decision. In his first season as a secondary character, Lane is introduced as a stiff British dope who makes his American colleagues uncomfortable. As the season progresses, we see how he becomes won over by the American way of thinking, to the detriment of his marriage. It says a lot about Jared Harris’ wonderful performance that when it seemed he will be transferred from New York to India by his masters in London, we were mortified. Thankfully he is saved by THAT lawnmower, and stays long enough to see his exciting new life in New York jeopardised by PPL’s plans to sell off Sterling Cooper. There’s much to love in the stupendous season finale Sit Down And Have A Seat, but the greatest moment might be Lane turning on his bosses, saving the day and hanging up on them with a cheery “Very good. Happy Christmas!” like a puppet who just cut his strings. It’s an uplifting, delightful scene, and his emerging joie de vivre is infectious.

1. Sue Sylvester – Glee

It’s tempting to forgive all of Glee‘s flaws just because of Jane Lynch, though that would entail a boatload of forgiving. In a regular episode of Fox’s outrageously successful musical, there’s probably about five minutes of Sue Sylvester screentime, on average, and many weeks that five minutes can be enough to make watching the rest of the featherlight chaos worthwhile. Her florid dialogue, abuse of students, and quips about Will Schuester’s hair are comedy gold, but casting the magnificent Jane Lynch was the instant masterstroke. Party Down‘s loss is Ryan Murphy’s gain. Would Glee have any worth without her?  She’s the only reason Shades of Caruso has not yet given up on it. That’s how good she is: she utterly counteracts the considerable suck of the rest of the show. She’s the funniest thing on TV that isn’t in an NBC sitcom, and a source of unending joy. Don’t thank Murphy for it, though. His decision to make her a secret softy — her sister has Downs syndrome, and her interactions with her display a lighter side that no one else ever sees — could have ruined her. The only reason it doesn’t is because Jane Lynch is a comedy master worth approximately 58 Lily Tomlins (I say this as a fan of Lily Tomlin). We’re lucky we get to see her at the top of her game.

Coming up: the worst new characters of the year.

A Large List Of Movies I Enjoyed This Year (Updated With Canyon’s Picks So It’s Even Larger!)

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Happy New Year, denizens of the internet! The holiday season is over, unhappy workers are returning to their nasty offices, and I’m cleaning the house. But, before I get into the rest of it, here is an absurdly long list that has missed off a million things either because we’ve not seen certain films that stand a good chance of getting on here (Michael Clayton, There Will Be Blood, Tekkon Kinkreet, Rescue Dawn, etc.), and because I’m forgetful. There was a supporting actor performance this year that I loved but I can’t remember who it was now. That’s as annoying as later remembering that I wanted to give music of the year shout-outs to Tenacious D’s Master Exploder (song of the decade) and Steven Seagal’s album Mojo Priest (not the hilarious hubristic disaster people expected it to be; I actually quite like it).

Anyway, here is as complete a list as I can make. Note that the worst film winner is not yet decided. Over the next few days I intend to decide who should win this coveted prize with a Worst Film of 2007 Face/Off special! So stay tuned. Also, I’m hoping that at some point Canyon will include her best and worsts of the year. I’m not 100% sure what her list will look like, though I get the feeling it will be fairly different. I look forward to reading it.

Favourite movies of the year:


1=: Zodiac – A perfect movie about an obsessive quest made by an obsessive perfectionist.
1=: Ratatouille – A perfect movie about a perfectionist and the obsessive quest for perfection.
2: The Bourne Ultimatum – Like being beaten up by a film. But in a good way. Best threequel ever, best action film of the decade.
3: Black Book – Moral quagmires, betrayal, sex, death, twists, violence, blonde women being mistreated by the world but keeping their dignity even when doused in shit. Hitchcock would have loved it.
4: Once – My favourite romantic movie in ooooh, aeons. Lovely soundtrack too.
5: The Darjeeling Limited – Wes Anderson triumphs again! Yeah, I said it.
6: Grindhouse – Sorry to say it, but only the full version gives you the full effect. Fuck you, Weinsteins.
7: Exiled – Johnnie To’s gangster masterpiece. The most unpredictable film of the year (other than I’m Not There, but who knows what the hell Todd Haynes was thinking with that).
8: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford – Possibly the best ensemble cast of the year, certainly the best photographed. Hypnotic brilliance.
9: Paprika – A feast for the eyes, and featuring a heroine that I want to see return in a billion sequels.
10: The King of Kong – Best documentary I’ve seen since the magnificent Capturing the Friedmans. No other documentary I’ve seen has made me so angry and so overjoyed. Who’d have thought real life could be this interesting?

Honourable mentions:


I Am Legend
Jindabyne
Hot Fuzz
Superbad
3:10 to Yuma

Honourable honourable mentions (there were a lot of good films out this year):

Gone Baby Gone
The Mist
Sunshine
Transformers
Black Snake Moan

Honourable honourable honourable mentions (I mean, seriously, a lot):

The Lives of Others
Beowulf
Charlie Wilson’s War
Knocked Up
The Lookout

Favourite movies released in the US in 2006 but then released in the UK in 2007 and were good enough to get a mention here anyway:

The Fountain, Curse of the Golden Flower

Movies that are not getting included because I need to see them a couple more times before I know whether I was crazy about them or not:

No Country For Old Men, I’m Not There

Movie that I didn’t want to like because the director is an asshole but damn it’s a lot of fun:


Apocalypto

Worst movie:

To be decided between I Know Who Killed Me and D-War (Runners-up: Bubble Fiction Boom or Bust, Spider-Man 3, Southland Tales, The Reaping, Next)

Most pointless movie:

Ocean’s Thirteen

Best actor:

Chris Cooper – Breach / Casey Affleck – The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and Gone Baby Gone (Runner-up: Will Smith – I Am Legend, Kurt Russell – Death Proof, Viggo Mortenson – Eastern Promises)

Best actress:


Laura Linney – Jindabyne (Runner-up: Gong Li – Curse of the Golden Flower, Carice Van Houten – Black Book, Marketa Irglova – Once)

Best supporting actor:

John Carroll Lynch – Zodiac (Runner-up: Chris Evans – Sunshine / Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, Sam Rockwell – The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Anthony Wong Chau-Sang – Exiled) (ETA: OMG how could I forget! James Marsden’s hilarious performance in Enchanted! Easily the best thing about the movie.)

Best Supporting Actress:

Robin Wright Penn – Beowulf (Runner-up: Marcia Gay Harden – The Mist, Amara Karan – The Darjeeling Limited, Sairse Ronan – Atonement)

Most entertaining performance in a bad movie:

Nicholas Cage – Ghost Rider

Worst actor:

Patrick Dempsey – Enchanted (Runner-up: Jason Behr – D-War)

Worst actress:

Lindsay Lohan – I Know Who Killed Me (Runner-up: Amanda Brooks – D-War, Claire Danes – Stardust)

Best hero:

Remy the Rat – Ratatouille (Runner-up: Rachel Stein – Black Book, Paprika – Paprika, McLovin – Superbad, King Leonidas – 300)

Best villain:


Anton Chigurh – No Country for Old Men (Runner-up: Billy Mitchell – The King of Kong, Stuntman Mike – Death Proof, Anton Grubitz – The Lives of Others, Mrs. Carmody – The Mist)

Worst hero:

Ghost Rider – Ghost Rider (Runner-up: Elizabeth Swann – Pirates of the Caribbean 3, Ethan Kendrick – D-War, “Jack” – D-War)

Worst villain:

Thomas Gabriel – Die Hard 4.0 (Runner-up: Venom – Spider-Man 3, Doctor Doom – Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, Evil General – D-War)

Biggest badass of the year:

Zoe Bell – Death Proof

Best Director:

Brad Bird – Ratatouille (Runner up: Paul Greengrass – The Bourne Ultimatum, David Fincher – Zodiac)

Worst Director:

To be decided between Chris Sivertson – I Know Who Killed Me and Hyung-Rae Shim – D-War) (Runner-up: Mark Steven Johnson – Ghost Rider, Richard Kelly – Southland Tales, Lee Tamahori – Next)

“Stop perving, Grandad!” director of the year:

Mike Nichols – Charlie Wilson’s War. We get it, Mike, Charlie Wilson was a big perv, but that doesn’t excuse the leering shots of boobs and butts, nor does it even begin to explain why you cast Emily Blunt and then made her sit around in next to no clothes for five minutes and then not have her appear for the rest of the film. (Runner-up: Michael Bay – Tranformers. Megan Fox is not that hot, so please stop staring at her oiled midriff, kthx)

Best cinematographer:

Roger Deakins – The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and No Country For Old Men (Runner-up: Harris Savides – Zodiac, Robert Yeoman – The Darjeeling Limited)

Best sound design:

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Runner-up: I Am Legend, Tranformers)

Best visual effects:

Transformers (Runner-up: The Fountain, Pirates of the Caribbean 3: At World’s End)

Most improved director:


Danny Boyle – Sunshine. I’ve always been frustrated by the lionisation of Boyle, whose movies feature pretty shots and no overall coherence or concept of how one shot has to link into another (Michael Bay gets accused of this yet I think he’s much better at creating a whole movie than Boyle, and yes, I know that is considered heresy. Whatever!). Sunshine is the first film where he gets it totally right. The whole movie is an perfectly sustained audio-visual assault. He can be proud of it.

Runner-up: Len Wiseman – Die Hard 4.0. I’ve found Wiseman to be a hack with a bland visual style and little imagination, but even though Die Hard 4.0 shared the same monochrome look of his vampire movies, the action scenes featured some wonderfully imaginative moments, not counting the Jurassic Park 2 rip-off with the car in the elevator shaft. I was very pleasantly surprised. Still got a shit villain, though. Did Hans Gruber have no more brothers?

Most precipitous drop in directorial ability:

Sam Raimi – Spider-Man 3. Jaredan maintains Raimi purposely sabotaged the movie as a screw-you to Sony for making him include Venom, and I can’t argue with him. I can’t believe someone as talented and conscientious as Raimi could poop out something as dreadful as this. Let’s hope he improves soon, as he’s still top of the list of directors capable of pulling off The Hobbit.

Disappointment of the year:

Spider-Man 3 (Runner-up: Pirates of the Caribbean 3: At World’s End, Eastern Promises)

Most overrated film of the year:

Atonement. Stately, respectable, well-crafted, pretty. It’s all of those. It’s also empty, features some really dodgy acting, and makes no sense until the final twist comes into play. Then it’s all very affecting, but for an hour, the movie is filled with head-scratchers and logical leaps. (Runner-up: 28 Weeks Later)

Most underrated film of the year:

Hot Fuzz. Has none of the respectable cachet of Atonement, but is possibly the most carefully crafted British film in decades. Repeat viewings unearth a wealth of detail and beautiful structure. If only critics loved Point Break and the films of Michael Bay the way they should, they would have appreciated its genius. (Runner-up: Curse of the Golden Flower)

Best comic adaptation of the year:

300. I don’t even like it that much, but the competition (Spider-Man 3, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, Ghost Rider) is pitiful. Persepolis is almost certainly going to be better, even though Marjane Satrapi is not really a comic writer/artist, more like a writer who draws the odd picture.

Best schadenfreude:

The Brothers Affleck prove to a sceptical world that they are awesome, to the massive happiness of myself.

Best comeback of the year:


Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay for Charlie Wilson’s War was his best in ages; smart, funny, irreverent, and only a bit pompous. It went a long way towards making up for Studio 60.

Best action scene of the year:

Jason Bourne vs. Desh – The Bourne Ultimatum (Runner-up: Autobots and humanity vs. Decepticons vs. a city – Transformers, motoring ladies vs. Stuntman Mike – Death Proof, Viggo’s genitalia vs. hitmen – Eastern Promises)

Best non-action scene of the year:

Anton Ego eats a meal – Ratatouille (Runner-up: Cops interrogate John Carroll Lynch – Zodiac, every conversation between Simon Pegg and Nick Frost in Hot Fuzz)

Best musical moment of the year:

Marketa Irglova sings on her way back home – Once (Runner-up: Samuel L. Jackson sings Stack-O-Lee to a writhing sweaty mass of people – Black Snake Moan, Justin Timberlake lipsynchs to All These Things That I’ve Done by The Killers – Southland Tales)

Most WTF ending of the year:

The Mist – I cannot spoil it, and am still not sure whether I liked it or not, but I will say this: once seen, never ever forgotten.

Most bullshit death of the year:

Jazz going out like a punk in Transformers. Okay, so Megatron is five times taller, but still, that was not acceptable. (Runner-up: the various “tragic” moments at the end of Spider-Man 3)

Most wasted actors of the year:

Chow Yun Fat – Pirates of the Caribbean 3: At World’s End (Runner-up: Emily Blunt – Charlie Wilson’s War, Thomas Haden Church – Spider-Man 3)

Biggest jerks of the Year:

The Weinsteins’ decision to block the international release of Grindhouse may have been borne of their fears of financial ruin, but the dismissive attitude they have towards international audiences, and the lack of understanding they have of the movie itself (individually hardly anyone likes the films, but together they are perfect entertainment) is notable. Just remember, next time they push for a film to win an Oscar with their bully tactics, it’s got nothing to do with championing the film. They’re only in it for themselves.

Best screw-you of the year:


Kurt Russell mouthing off against the Weinsteins at the Cannes Film Festival. Just like Snake Plissken would! Now go appear in a bunch of movies next year because you are so awesome, okay?

************

Canyon’s Mostly Redundant End-of-Year List

Though you might have caught on that Admiral Neck is very fond of end-of-year list-making, I myself am not. I do love reading other people’s lists, I have to admit, and I appreciate the opportunity to step back, think about the year as a whole, and organize your thoughts. The problem for me is that I often don’t feel there are ten movies made every year that I will remember and really love as time goes on (the same goes with books and music and tv shows — most years will produce maybe three or four of each). With most movies I enjoy in a given year, “Oh yeah, that’s a good movie” is the first thought that springs to mind when I think about them later — not “Wow, what a haunting, life-changing masterpiece that was.”

I get that it’s probably the same for everybody, but I feel wrong memorializing merely good movies in a top-ten list when they probably won’t matter much to me in the long run. I guess this is kind of unfair to the very good movies I leave off, but it’s my list and I’ll do what I want. Also, Admiral Neck and I have very similar tastes, so I mostly have the same movies on as he does, and I liked all the other movies he mentioned mostly as much as he did (except The Darjeeling Limited, because I have been burned by Wes Anderson too many times and refused to see what was by all accounts another dollhouse whimsy-fest). Okay, enough clearing-of-throat preamble: my seven favorite movies of the year (I could stretch this to ten, but I feel a bit wrong doing it, so I won’t).

Top Seven

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford — One of the most gorgeous movies I’ve ever seen (the visuals in the train-robbery scene will stay with me a long time); the comparisons to Terrence Malick are apt, but this film is no rip-off (as if that would even be a bad thing). The narration was moving and elegiac and wonderfully literary, the pace was perfect, many scenes were incredibly haunting (especially the fantastic ending), and Casey Affleck needs awards shoved between his tiny Chiclet teeth immediately.

Ratatouille -- I adore The Iron Giant but was disappointed with The Incredibles (apparently I was the only person on earth who was), but this movie had Admiral Neck and I sobbing like little babies. I would have cried more if we hadn’t been in public. Gorgeous animation, wonderfully funny, with a turn by Peter O’Toole that made me choke up over a discourse on the role of critics. That’s some writin’, Brad Bird! And damn you, by the way, for making me cry more at your movies than even one of Joss Whedon’s.

Zodiac — Another one that stayed with me for weeks afterward. A meta-comment on obsession that was scary, funny, thought-provoking, and ended perfectly.

(Note: All three of the movies above are what I’d consider the haunting-masterpiece variety.)

I Am Legend — Yeah, I said it. I think the movie was very unfairly derided as being a typical Will Smith flashy blockbuster, a sci-fi FX-extravaganza with no brain and no heart. (And it almost was — Admiral Neck got hold of the original script, and it’s absolutely terrible, and the kind of movie you can imagine would have been perfect for Michael Bay [he was previously attached to direct].) Instead, it’s a quiet, thoughtful, incredibly moving meditation on isolation and loneliness, and the main character’s slow descent into madness. I don’t often agree with Salon’s Stephanie Zacharek (though I love reading her reviews), but I think she was mostly on the mark about this one. I don’t agree with the complaint I’ve often heard about the ending — I think it flows very well with what came before, and while I think the God stuff and the very end were missteps, those aren’t the moments that stayed with me. The shots of a deserted New York are incredible, the action set-pieces are brilliant, and I haven’t been able to get some scenes out of my mind since I saw it. There might have even been more sobbing during this than during Ratatouille (though I blame Admiral Neck for being a big crier himself and dragging me down with him).

Once — My favorite musical of the year (though who knows if Sweeney Todd would have bested it; that doesn’t come out here till January, thanks distributors!!!!!). Wonderful performances, beautiful songs — I went on about it earlier this year so won’t belabor it, but it was absolutely lovely.

3:10 to Yuma — The second-best Western of the year — perhaps a bit too neatly wrapped up at the end, but that’s kind of what I liked about the ending, that even though Russell Crowe’s actions are seemingly out of character, they make perfect sense in the context of the movie. I don’t know if that makes sense to anyone but me, but I loved the symmetry of it.

Grindhouse — Planet Terror was a perfect spoof — mocking grindhouse movies with hilarious accuracy but incredibly clever in its own right. Death Proof wasn’t a grindhouse spoof by any stretch of the imagination — it was more of a Tarantino movie badly filmed and scratched up — but it was brilliant in its own right (people moaned about it, but would they really want two back-to-back straight spoofs?).

Black Book — Straight up Verhoevenly goodness. In Dutch!

Best Coen brothers movie I’ve seen, but which still left me a bit cold: No Country for Old Men

Movie I thought I’d hate and, much to Admiral Neck’s gloating joy, I really, really liked: The Bourne Ultimatum

Favorite bad movie: Ghost Rider, mostly because of the weird character quirks Nicolas Cage adds to his performance

Biggest disappointment: Eastern Promises (I loved History of Violence and consider it one of those elusive masterpieces, so it was a huge disappointment to find that this barely felt like a movie)

Movies I liked but am a bit ashamed to admit to: Music and Lyrics, Hairspray, Transformers (and potentially Dan in Real Life, as it’s supposed to be a lot better than the mawkish trailer makes it seem)

Movies that would probably be on my list if they came out in the UK in %#$($# December like they should have: Walk Hard, There Will Be Blood, Juno, Sweeney Todd, Into the Wild, Away From Her, National Treasure 2: Book of Seeeeeecrets, No End in Sight

Things I learnt today (Oct 16th 2007)

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1. Michael Clayton opened in the US last Friday, and box office pundits are shocked and horrified to find that it failed to secure the number one spot. IMDb said:

Michael Clayton, which had been the odds-on favorite among movie pundits to win the weekend box-office crown, not only didn’t finish in first place — it didn’t even make third place, as studio estimates had initially indicated. Clayton, it turns out, earned $10.37 million, putting it slightly behind the crime drama We Own the Night, which took in $10.83 million. Equally surprising to some writers was that the film that did top the box office charts was the low-budget Why Did I Get Married, from writer-producer-director Tyler Perry. The film raked in $21.35 million, about twice the earnings of The Game Plan, which placed second with $11.04 million.

Really? This is surprising? I’m psyched that Gorgeous George is committed to making challenging, intelligent, adulty films (not counting Danny Ocean’s European Vacation and Danny Ocean and the Amazing Xeroxed Plot From Two Films Ago), and grateful to him for having that ambition, even when it doesn’t quite work out: Good Night, and Good Luck was a terrific hour of cinema with an extra pointless 20 minutes bolted onto it. Wow, making even the mildest criticism of Clooney makes me feel like I’m kicking a handsome and debonair puppy. I’m sorry, George! Good Night looked beautiful! And it was really well cast! Please don’t hate me! Anyway, Syriana was good enough for two films, so it evens up.

Sadly, his smart, liberal, humanist movies tend to make very little money, and even taking into account the often limited release, the audience for these films is large enough to make the odd small profit, but not big enough to make waves in the turbulent box office waters. Solaris only made $14,973,382 in the domestic market, and $30,002,758 overall. It would have to sell a shitload of DVDs to make up the rest of the budget. Syriana did a lot better, with a worldwide gross of $93,974,620, but it had an opening weekend of $11,737,143. Not earth-shattering. That said, it only opened on about 1500 screens, and Michael Clayton opened on 1000 screens more, but the fallacy is that the relative, small-scale success of his smart movies can be expanded when released on a larger scale remains.

I remember noticing this error years ago, when big and successful action movies (usually those produced by Joel Silver), would often gross around £100-120m, domestic box office. No matter what the budget, the final figure was often the same (and significantly less for the failures). No-brainer jokey action movies would often top out at the same number, but budgets were busted chasing a finite audience. Sure, there were variations from that; Lethal Weapon 2, 3 and 4 could top that (by about $30m), as could the Die Hard movies, and Terminator 2 broke that barrier and then some, but they had a wider appeal. Bog-standard action movies had a fixed audience, and trying to get bigger box office by spending more money was foolish.


You had to appeal to people outside that box to do it. It wasn’t just spectacle that made Terminator 2 such a hit; it was the message of hope within it (and the CGI, which drew oohs and ahhs of amazement from the audience when I saw it. Ah, the 90s!). In today’s money, the same holds true; Bad Boys II and The Rock, for example, both stopped at about $140m, and Con Air and Gone In Sixty Seconds made $100m each. In the end they’re profitable, but the larger the budget, the smaller that profit. It’s science. Or maths. Whatever.

So yeah, putting Michael Clayton on more screens and pushing it with more publicity was not going to work. SmartClooney has a fanbase, and they came out this weekend, probably grateful for the release of something meatier than family comedies starring a wasted The Rock. But that’s the ceiling for these movies. So why did pundits miss this? And why the hell did they think the new Tyler Perry movie would make less money?


I know very very very little about these things, but right now that guy guarantees boffo box office (yeah, I went there). His films cost a few cents and make around $50-60m each time out. His opening weekends are between $20-30m. His last film opened bigger than this one, in fact, so why would this one not be a big hit? Did they really think the Tyler Perry bubble had burst? He’s not going anywhere any time soon. So anyway, I have learnt that box office pundits can often make terrible gaffes, and I have also learnt that the international gross of Diary of a Mad Black Woman was $19,104. I doubt the new film will be appearing in our local Vue any time soon. I’m sure the studio would love to up their take by releasing his films internationally, but I get the feeling they have no idea what the hell Perry’s appeal is, so how would they be able to market it? Best to just let it make the modest money it is, rather than admit his unusual shtick perplexes them. (Almost all of the figures here are from Box Office Mojo.)

2. I may love Institutionalised by Suicidal Tendencies (which I first heard on the stunning Repo Man soundtrack many years ago), but playing that shit on a plastic guitar while sleep-deprived like I did this morning can actually cause you to get so addled you might actually end up actually literally instititutionalised, for realsies. It may have snapped my brain right down the middle. Now all I can see when I close my eyes are the coloured dots of Guitar Hero II, relentlessly descending, forever falling, like day-glo blobs of concentrated hand-cramp juice dropping into my eyes. It’s a miracle I can type anything other than “Bzzzzt”, because of all the rhythm-game induced mind-static. But I cannot stop until I better my score. Is crack this addictive? I doubt it’s as entertaining.

3. Two reports on immigration were published yesterday, and while the left wing press focussed on the positive, the right wing press, predictably, concentrated on the negative. This is, of course, nothing new, but yesterday I found out that the reason the paper prints such skewed garbage is that Paul Dacre and his vile minions know for a fact that the core readership of the Mail is obsessed with Anti-Logic. This letter is, I promise you, absolutely real.


I have it on good authority that the majority of letters sent to the Mail offices are even more insane than the ones that make it into the paper, but this one must have slipped through. Oddly, there is no evidence of this mountain of work on the internet. Someone should tell this guy that he can publish his staggering, world-changing work on the internet, where it will be lauded and coveted for the rest of time. I mean, what did Einstein ever do for us, other than pull that funny face they keep putting on posters? Screw you, Einstein. Go back to the patent office and shuffle your papers. Did you ever make all of life’s intrinsic paradoxes perfectly rational? No, you made them worse! Overrated big-haired jerk.

4. ZOMG NEW LOST PHOTO!!!


What’s going on? What does it mean? Is that the cockpit of Oceanic 815? Desmond has resurfaced? How did they get so far into the island since the season 3 finale? Where’s Hurley and Jin? Is that writing above the windows of the plane? Why does the clapperboard guy look so pissed? Is he working for The Dharma Initiative? If not, why doesn’t he realise he’s a lucky son of a bitch to be working on the best show currently on TV, even though it’s not actually on TV right now? And what’s going to happen with new cast member Andrea “Rescue Me” Roth? She’s just been hired to play a therapist, according to TV Guide. I guess she’s situated off-island. If she was on the island she’d have been dealing with multiple daddy issues, which would be even less fun than being repeatedly slammed into the ground by Ol’ Smokey.

5. Viggo Mortensen is a fascinating son of a bitch, and I can’t wait to see Eastern Promises.

Mortensen plays a mobster working for a Russian gang in London, and to hone his portrayal he travelled to Moscow, St Petersburg and the mountain villages of the Urals.

He refused to take an interpreter, relying on gestures and his own facility for languages – he speaks Danish and Spanish fluently and can get by in four other languages.

“I know everyone was a little bit worried because I disappeared for two weeks,” he said. “They said I should have someone go with me into the underworld, but the whole point was not to get a filtered version of what Russians do and what they’re like.

“I just wanted to draw my own conclusions. I met a lot of people and talked to them. I met people who had experiences in prisons and understood more about street slang. They helped me tweak some of the dialogue.

“Then I found someone who had a car and he took me into the countryside and to these villages. There I saw how these mobsters looked at each other and how they lived. I also drank a lot of vodka.”

It was not until the last day of his trip that his cover was blown. “A little boy started staring at me, then he pointed and whispered, ‘Aragorn?’”

All this and his Amazing Flying Balls of Doom. Counting the days until it comes out.

6. The cook in the canteen where I work is the worst cook in the world. I ended up with a piece of peri-peri chicken that oozed blood when cut into, and after taking it back and having it cooked for a while longer (15 minutes), it had brown skin but pink flesh. I’m amazed I’m not doubled over in agony right now. A colleague bought some scrambled eggs, and they were off. Yesterday this guy made baguette halves with oily, droopy roast vegetables and nuclear-orange cheese. Just thinking about it is making me woozy. Time to start bringing sandwiches in again.

7. Studio 60 just arrived on UK terrestrial Channel 4, and I see that the oleaginous praise has continued. As we’ve said before, it’s not so much the praise that bothers us (everyone is, of course, entitled to their own opinion) [Hold on there -- the praise definitely bothers me, and if you like the show, your opinion is wrong -- Canyon], it’s the relentless carping that it failed because the audience (i.e. everyone who watches TV who isn’t a fan of the show) killed it. They mean you, if you’re not watching it. And if you are watching it, you’re not watching it enough! You should be transformed by it like someone rising from their wheelchair at Lourdes, and then you should badger all of your friends and families into watching it. If you’re not walking down the high street wearing a sandwich board showing a picture of Danny and Matt treating their womenfolk like teeny tiny toy people who should just damn well shut up and worship their glorious alpha male genitalia, then you are scum! SCUM!!! Much to our amusement/horror, we saw that Andrew Mueller was up to his old tricks at the weekend:

West Wing auteur Aaron Sorkin’s series set in the milieu of a late-night chat show is possibly the greatest example of a show out-clevering itself. As well as being a superior soap opera, an intelligent comedy and a brilliantly acted ensemble piece, Studio 60 functions as an insidious critique of a televisual culture in which anything intelligent is hunted down and killed by the agents of mediocrity – as Studio 60 indeed was, cancelled by its network inside its debut season. These first two episodes, which have finally landed on terrestrial, are a tantalizing hint of what’s to come.

If he thinks TV is so bad now, how about this 70s gem, from The Laurence Welk Show:

In comparison, I think we’re doing okay nowadays. Yes, there is a lot of crap on TV now, and networks are run by craven cowards with no understanding of counter-cultural ideas. We get that. However, there’s good stuff too. Someone please hand Mueller (and several other UK TV critics) a few boxsets. Veronica Mars, Friday Night Lights, Arrested Development, everything by Whedon. Then you have the shows on cable: Battlestar Galactica; The Daily Show; The Colbert Report; all of the shows on the HBO roster. There is a point to be made that there isn’t enough biting satire on US (or UK) TV, or enough investigative journalism, but it’s not like there is no important, worthy work on TV, and besides, Sorkin making obvious points in his risible Studio 60 sketches is part of the problem, not part of the solution. Plus, it was often as emptily jingoistic as a Fox News broadcast, which was either Sorkin speaking from the heart or an attempt to placate his network masters in order to get more “subversive” stuff into the show. Like Crazy Christians. So much for Sorkin’s supposed moral courage.

Mueller and his ilk are right; the medium that is TV has an enormous hole in it, and Studio 60 tried to fill it. We will always need intelligent daring comedy and brave satire. But Studio 60 was. not. that. show. Which is why it was such a painful, frustrating, upsetting failure. Dear God, I have to let this go or I’ll go crazy. It never seems to end!

ETA: I can’t stop watching that Laurence Welk clip. Flap those arms in the xenon-rich air like you and your robot helper just don’t care! Then kick, Bobby and Cissy! Kick! Kick! Spin! Flap! Kick! Interpretive brilliance. Why was Spielberg so eager to get an Oscar for all those years when this superb tribute was out there? That’s just ungrateful.

Okkervil River Is My New Favorite Band (And A Rant About Studio 60)

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The A.V. Club did an interview with Will Sheff, who, despite looking a bit (oh, how do I say this without being offensive? No chance, I’m going for it) special, seemed like an intelligent and interesting person (he used the word “quixotic”! And said he liked movies! That’s generally enough for me). I’d never heard of the band, but we promptly downloaded* their latest album, The Stage Names. It is excellent. Filled with references to pop culture and its effects on people’s lives, it’s incredibly catchy, melodic, mostly deceptively-upbeat-sounding stuff, indie folk/pop/rock done with intelligence and wit and a real ear for hooks that get stuck in your head. Of course, I wouldn’t be a real critic unless I dubbed it a new ridiculous sub-genre – let’s call it “meta-rock.”

That’s a crappy-sounding version of the first single, “Our Life Is Not a Movie Or Maybe” – the sweeping sound references 80s pop songs with a discordant, desperate twist, though the genius of it is the racing heartbeat of the drum (though you can’t hear it very well on that version) and the song’s frantic crescendo. The second track, “Unless It’s Kicks”, may be even better – a rollicking, uptempo kick in the gut. The lyrics again deal with the influence of pop culture on the characters’ lives – in this song, the narrator asserts, “What gives this mess some grace unless it’s kicks, man / unless it’s fiction / unless it’s sweat or it’s songs?” And later:

And on a seven-day high, that heavenly song
punches right through my mind
and just hums through my blood.
And I know it’s a lie, but I’ll still give it my love.

Ouch. But Sheff isn’t simply condemning the fact that we tend to view our lives as if they were movies or songs; he hits on the feeling of hearing a song you love and instantly feeling like the world has expanded into something joyful and glorious (even though it takes a song to [perhaps artificially] create that feeling, and it only lasts for four minutes). It’s incredibly odd to hear a song that talks about that feeling while actually giving you that feeling, and it makes my brain hurt, so I’m going to stop talking about it for the moment.

I suppose unsurprisingly, it turns out Sheff used to be a critic – this page has links to a bunch of his old articles. Looks like he’s got pretty good, if slightly pretentious, taste, though his attack on soft rock is a bit harsh – poor old Peter Cetera. Why pick on such an easy target? Does he have something against bouffants and soft-focus lenses? (And I’m sorry, but some of his songs are great, and I don’t mean that ironically – I get genuine pleasure from them, partly because they remind me of my childhood and how much I loved them then. “I am a knight who will fight for your honor”? How much of a curmudgeon do you have to be not to find that strangely wonderful? [And with that I realize I’ve now become a character in an Okkervil River song.])

I do find it a little disconcerting to read Sheff’s articles, though. When’s the last time you saw a critic rocking out on stage? It’s not right – they’re supposed to be detached and thoughtful, with their pipes and their monocles and their big books full of words, not hot-blooded and full of ketamine (with the exception of Michiko Kakutani, obviously). It’s a little embarrassing – like watching one of your teachers sing Grateful Dead songs on an acoustic guitar. I suppose I’ll have to get over it, though, because they’re playing in London in December and we’ve got tickets. I suppose to be really obnoxious, whenever they finish a song, I could shout out, “B plus! What it lacked in precision it made up for in enthusiasm! WOOOOOO!!”

*While trolling YouTube, I found a clip of Sheff talking about deciding to be a musician and saying that it was worth it even though he doesn’t have health insurance (!) and last year he didn’t have a place to live (!!!). Oh god, the guilt. I’m really tempted to go out and buy the album, though I will probably end up rationalizing the guilt away by convincing myself that buying the tickets gave them more money anyway (okay, 20 pounds, but, um, the exchange rate is really good). Usually, like any music fan, I’m happy for bands I like to stay obscure, but in this case I really hope they start getting more famous. They certainly deserve to.

+++++

And Now, A Rant

By now we all know that Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip was poo. Where Aaron Sorkin was once clever and inspiring, writing fiercely intelligent and funny characters, he became hackneyed and insipid, recycling plotlines from his better days (badly, I might add) and writing characters who were either thinly-veiled versions of his crazy-for-Jesus ex-girlfriend (Harriet Hayes), supposedly ridiculously smart while never actually demonstrating this beyond being able to rattle off obscure statistics (um, everyone), or versions of himself (Matt Albie – I would say “slimy, massively arrogant, ridiculously unlikeable versions of himself,” but it appears this would be redundant) or his partner in crime, Tommy Schlamme (the absolutely odious Danny Tripp – and I cannot mention this without giving a shout-out to Television Without Pity, who said they were disappointed he hadn’t named the character Danny Schlanny, which made me laugh for half an hour [btw, Joe R.’s recaps were often the only reason we even bothered to watch, besides horrified fascination]). But I’m going to stop criticizing it now, because if I don’t, I will run out of internet.

Unfortunately for denizens of the UK, it’s time for them to be endlessly patronized about commedia dell’arte and Bush’s bad behavior during 9/11 (yes, the show actually goes back in time to lecture us. Thank god it didn’t get a second season, in which Matt and Danny would time-travel to Nazi Germany learn how evil Hitler was). It just started showing here a few weeks ago, to massive, slavish adoration from the journalists here, who apparently have never gone on the internet, because they are completely perplexed about why such a stunning example of show from infallible genius Aaron Sorkin would get cancelled by those awful money-hungry studios! They just didn’t understand his brilliance! To which I say, You lazy, incompetent little shits – it would take you two seconds of googling to find out exactly why it was cancelled – because it was shit.

It made me angry to read those articles, with their willful ignorance and their slavish devotion to Sorkin (they didn’t even bother to get anyone’s opinion other than his about why it was cancelled – I wonder if maybe he would be, I don’t know, biased?). This leads off into a subject for another day – the UK media’s shoddy reporting on American shows and movies, their simultaneous disdain for American media and the fact that they have to admit that it’s often better than what’s created here (at least in terms of TV shows and movies – though it will usually be with the tag “it’s good…in an American way”), and their love of anything coming out of it perceived to be intelligent (like Sorkin, which is why he is so ridiculously overpraised – he’s not like most Americans, because his show is about how bad American TV is!).

Aaaaanyway, I came downstairs this morning to find that the Admiral had scrawled a furious note in the Guardian Guide – the weekly TV guide from the Guardian, arguably the best paper in England (though notably filled with snobbery about American culture). Andrew Mueller, one of the reviewers, has been reviewing Studio 60 since it began six weeks ago – he praised the pilot, but foolishly we laughed and said that it would be funny to see his assessments get more negative as the show went on. Three episodes in and they were not – instead he was rambling about how mobs with pitchforks should have been storming the studios demanding that the show not be cancelled. Okay, we thought, well, the third episode wasn’t that bad, though alarm bells were starting to go off (notably with Danny’s rant about how cocaine addicts don’t hurt people [he was a former cocaine addict himself – I know, eerie coincidence!! Another eerie coincidence? Aaron Sorkin was a cocaine addict! OMG, this is freaky!] – no, only drunk drivers do that, and of course cocaine addicts are sedentary because we all know cocaine is a depressant).

We decided that the show didn’t become truly awful until the sixth episode – which has plotlines where the cast learns about how awful the blacklist was (really awful!), where we learn that the only black character on the show had a childhood straight out of Boyz N the Hood (this is after he rails against stereotypical “black people versus white people” comedy), and we learn that another character’s Midwestern parents are so ignorant of culture that they don’t even know who Abbott and Costello were (since when has the Midwest not been hooked up to electricity?), but they do know that their son is wasting his life on frivolous comedy while his brother, the war hero, is – get ready for it – STANDING IN THE MIDDLE OF AFGHANISTAN! It’s so incomprehensibly awful I can’t even express it.

But guess what Andrew Mueller’s reaction is?

The more of this we [we?? I sincerely hope he’s using the royal we] see, the more it seems appropriate to disdain from summarising the spectacular virtues of Studio 60 in favour of suggesting imaginative punishments to be visited on its American proprietors, who canned it. This week: feed them to hippopotamuses. [My suggestion: feed Andrew Mueller to Hiphopopotamus from Flight of the Conchords.] Anyway, tonight’s episode, with an Eli Wallach cameo, is another eruption of auteur Aaron Sorkin’s singular genius. In between adroitly perpetuating the internal soap operas, this thrillingly tours Sorkin’s signature obsessions [i.e., the things he writes about in a TV series about a COMEDY SKETCH SHOW]: American political, cultural and military history, and the clash between the country’s liberal and conservative impulses.

RAGE!!! And you thought I was exaggerating about the media’s circle-jerk of praise! I think the Admiral’s reaction sums it up best: he circled the review in pen and then wrote “FUCKING ANDREW MUELLER!!”

That’s about right.