Category Archives: Ben Foster

Listmania ’11! Miscellaneous Movie Observations: Part Four

Posted on by

Finishing this in February feels so wrong it’s almost right. By now I’ve actually seen movies released in 2012 and I’m still posting about last year (the movies from this year being The Muppets, which the UK got obscenely late, and Chronicle, which is fantastic stuff and well worth a watch). The Oscar nominations have also been announced, with the deeply-average The Descendants and the deeply-awful War Horse getting a few nods while Fassbender, Swinton and Brooks are snubbed. Disgusting. If ever proof was needed that the Academy doesn’t know what the hell it’s doing.

Anyway, I’m sure I’ll have a whine about that before the award ceremony, so without any further ado, let’s end Listmania! with a bang. The only other posts that have taken me this long were my Lost finale posts, which took three months to write. This only took a month and a half, so I’m getting better at this. If you’re a fan of pointless miscellania, you’ve come to the right place.

Best Movies I Saw In 2010 That Were Released More Generally In 2011: Black Swan, 13 Assassins, Archipelago, Amigo, Meek’s Cutoff, Submarine

Best Scene: Rango walks through the desert during a crisis of confidence (Rango)

Honorable Mentions:

Tom Cruise climbs up the side of the Burj Khalifa (Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol)

Matthew Broderick attempts to teach a class of precocious kids about King Lear and it doesn’t go well (Margaret)

Michael Shannon and his family attend a meal with their fellow townsfolk and it doesn’t go well (Take Shelter)

Jung tries to tell his new buddy Freud about synchronicity and it doesn’t go well (A Dangerous Method)

Kristin Wiig gets drunk on a plane and it doesn’t go well (Bridesmaids)

Best Action Scene: Tintin and Captain Haddock chase a hawk through the streets of Bagghar (The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn)

Honorable Mentions:

The final physics-mangling car chase in Rio De Janeiro, including some serious hardcore badassery from The Rock and Vin Diesel (Fast Five)

The longest and most explosives-packed train in the history of the world crashes for a long time (Super 8)

The Revolutionary Army of Apedom makes a break for freedom through San Francisco (Rise of the Planet of the Apes)

Alex Pettyfer, Teresa Palmer and a big alien dog wreck a high school using telekinesis and big lasers (I Am Number Four)

Guy Ritchie goes crazy with ramping and cameras attached to people running and all sorts of tricks in a forest (Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows)

Best Hero: Caesar – Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Honorable Mentions:

Captain America – Captain America: The First Avenger

Thor – Thor

Moses – Attack The Block

The Driver – Drive

Rango – Rango

Best Villain: Loki – Thor

Honorable Mentions:

Bernie Rose - Drive

Society’s indifferent or vexed reaction to those unfortunate enough to be afflicted with mental illness – Melancholia

The oppressive horror of modern life – Take Shelter

Rattlesnake Jake – Rango

Chris Cleek – The Woman

Best Couple: David Norris and Elise Sellas (Matt Damon and Emily Blunt) – The Adjustment Bureau

Worst Couple: Emma and Adam (Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher) – No Strings Attached

Most Doomed Couple(s) of the Year: Justine and Michael and Claire and John (Kirsten Dunst, Alexander Sarsgaard, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Keifer Sutherland) - Melancholia

“I Hope These Guys Make It” Couple Of The Year: Russell and Glen (Tom Cullen and Chris New) – Weekend

“Please Bite Them And Get It Over With, Evil Colin Farrell” Couple of the Year: Charley Brewster and Amy Peterson (Anton Yelchin and Imogen Poots) – Fright Night

“Okay, I Really Don’t Think He Should Be Attracting These Improbably Hot High School Hotties In These Movies, What With Looking Like A Surly Child Half The Time” Couple of the Year: Porter and Norah (Anton Yelchin and Jennifer Lawrence) – The Beaver

Greatest Disparity In Energy Levels Between Partners of the Year: Hal Jordan and Carol Ferris (Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively) – Green Lantern

Most Improbable Couple of the Year: Ernesto Botta and Laura Aliprandi (Toni Servillo and Sarah Felberbaum) – The Jewel

“Only In The Movies” Adorable and Romantic Couple of the Year: George Valentin and Peppy Miller (Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo) - The Artist

“Only In The Movies” Twee Asshole Couple of the Year: Enoch and Annabel (Henry Hopper and Mia Wasikowska) – Restless

“Rather Raunchy For A PG-13 Movie, Eh What?” Couple of the Year: Ren McCormack and Ariel Moore (Kenny Wormald and Julianne Hough) – Footloose

Most Adorable Fuckbuddies of the Year: Dylan Harper and Jamie Rellis (Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis) – Friends With Benefits

Most Inappropriate Couple of the Year: Robert Ledgard and Vera Cruz (Antonio Banderas and Elena Anaya) – The Skin I Live In

Worst Love Triangle of the Year: Bella Swan, Edward Cullen and Jacob Black (Kristin Stewart, Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner) – The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part One for the third year running

Best Love Triangle of the Year: Brian O’Conner, Dominic Toretto and Luke Hobbs (Paul Walker, Vin Diesel and Dwayne Johnson) – Fast Five

Most Satisfying Finale: The Artist

Honorable Mentions:

Attack The Block

Melancholia

Real Steel

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol

Arriety

Best Finale in a Bad Movie: You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger

Least Satisfying Finale: Green Lantern

Dishonorable Mentions:

The Adjustment Bureau

I Don’t Know How She Does It

Blitz

In Time

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

Worst Finale in a Good Movie: Source Code

Badass of the Year: Lisbeth Salander – The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

Best Double Act: Tucker and Dale (Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine) - Tucker and Dale vs. Evil

Worst Hero: D’Artagnan – The Three Musketeers

Dishonorable Mentions:

Hal Jordan - Green Lantern

Mater – Cars 2

Theseus – Immortals

Joey the Super-Special Horsey – War Horse

Dagny Taggart – Atlas Shrugged: Part I

Worst Villain: Karl Hendricks – Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol

Dishonorable Mentions:

The concept of generosity – Atlas Shrugged Part I

Hector Hammond – Green Lantern

The Red Skull – Captain America: The First Avenger

That sinful sexuality in any form it’s SO SINFUL – The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part One

Blackbeard – Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

Most Likeable Cast: Thor

Least Likeable Cast: Blubberella

Most Annoying Character of the Year: Sid – The Descendants

Dishonorable Mentions:

Moberg - The Rum Diary

Kate Reddy – I Don’t Know How She Does It

Dexter – One Day

Sean Cassidy (aka Banshee) – X-Men: First Class

Homer Yannos – Tomorrow, When The War Began

Best Live Action Animal: Uggie The Dog – The Artist

Best Animated Animal: Snowy – The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn

Best Trailer: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

Honorable Mention: Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol

Best Poster: The Tree of Life

Worst Poster: Hall Pass

Limited Edition Poster I Wish Had Been Used: This superb retro Captain America: The First Avenger poster by Paolo Rivera

Most Profound Poster: Shame

No photo of it will do it justice, but the poster for Shame that we saw outside the London Film Festival screening had a reflective surface, but with the word “Shame” printed at the bottom. Because the movie speaks for all of us who have shame, do you see? Something to think about.

Most Misleading and Tonally Inaccurate Poster: We Need To Talk About Kevin

Nicest Photography In A Headshot Poster: Martha Marcy May Marlene

Most Defiantly Wrongly-Angled-By-90° Poster of the Year: Super 8

Most Fucked-Up / Desperately Controversial Poster of All Time: The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence)

Most Out-Of-Control Trend In Posters: Character variants (::deep breath:: The Adjustment Bureau; Arthur Christmas; Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked; Bridesmaids; Cars 2; Conan the Barbarian; Contagion; Cowboys and Aliens; Crazy, Stupid, Love; Drive; Footloose; Friends With Benefits, Fright Night, Gnomeo and Juliet; The Green Hornet; Green Lantern; Hall Pass, The Hangover Part Two; Happy Feet Two; Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part Two: Hop; Horrible Bosses; Hugo; Immortals; In Time; Johnny English Reborn; Killer Elite; Kill The Irishman; Mars Needs Moms; Margin Call; Martha Marcy May Marlene; Melancholia [!!!!!]; Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol; The Muppets; Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides; Priest; Puss in Boots; Real Steel; Red State; Rio; Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows; The Smurfs; Snow Flower and the Secret Fan; Spy Kids 4: All The Time In The World; Straw Dogs; Sucker Punch; Super; 30 Minutes or Less; Thor; The Three Musketeers; Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy; Tower Heist; Transformers: Dark of the Moon; A Very Harold and Kumar Christmas; Warrior; Water For Elephants; Winnie The Pooh; X-Men: First Class; Your Highness; The Zookeeper)

How many of these posters ever make it into cinemas? How many of them convince people to go and see these movies? Do casual cinemagoers see any of these and think, “Well, I wasn’t going to see Green Lantern but now that I know Tomar-Re is in it I’m IN”? Will people really be excited at the array of not-really-that-well-known actresses in the cast of Bridesmaids before they see how funny they all are (scroll down for the full selection)? Do we really need 31 posters for The Three Musketeers? Do we need more than one poster for Melancholia? It’s not harming anyone, obviously, but it still seems like a waste of resources. If anyone can explain why we need so many variants, please let me know.

Best Publicity Campaign: Paranormal Activity 3

Usually SoC likes to praise a publicity campaign that successfully promotes a tough sell, but this year I have to give huge props to the makers of Paranormal Activity 3 for doing something that should’ve been done a long time ago. However, to do that I have to spoil, so please consider all of the text between these two scary-as-fuck trailers a huge spoiler for PA3‘s best trick.

I won’t lie. That first trailer for this franchise scared the absolute shit out of me when I first saw it, and it deserves some credit for making even this cynic forget about the overwhelming familiarity of the Paranormal Activity template and vow to see the third one as soon as it came out. In that sense, job done. However, what’s really great is that that scene doesn’t happen in the movie, and neither do almost all of the biggest shock moments in the trailer below.

Seeing that at home and getting annoyed at all of the spoilers is one thing; I switched it off halfway through as I was horrified at the amount of spoilage. But if you’re in a cinema and can’t escape, you’re going to absorb all of that information, and more than likely you’re still going to see it (because these movies make money hand-over-fist without even breaking a sweat). And yet all of that stuff you’re expecting won’t happen. Instead you’ll get a bunch of other scary stuff. And even better? You still got scared by those trailers, as if you’re watching a very very short horror movie for free. I’ve waited for a long time to see this done so well. The movie was okay too. That’s a bingo, I reckon.

Worst Publicity Campaign: X-Men: First Class / Green Lantern

Nerds are hard to please; I know because I am one. Thor and Captain America did a mostly good job of introducing two less well-known characters, with the non-mainstream Thor making $450m worldwide and the super-patriotic Cap overcoming some of the anti-American prejudice that could’ve prevented it making any money at all ($370m’s okay. Green Lantern wishes it made that much). If they’re an example of how to do it right, the other two big superhero releases of the year show how to do it wrong, thus squandering all of the nerd energy they needed to stay alive.

Each campaign commits a different crime that has the same result; underwhelming box office. X-Men: First Class‘ promotional crime was to destroy a lot of good will towards a franchise that desperately needed it, even more than the previous X-Men movie did. Wolverine should have killed X-Men dead but Fox wasn’t going to let the franchise go to waste when it could release yet another movie and maybe resurrect it for another few sequels. A lot of good decisions were made regarding casting and crew choices, but all of that was hobbled by some terrible promotional errors.

One was to have the only convention appearance take place at the inaugural London Comic-Con, with an appearance by co-writers Ashley Miller and Zack Stentz. Other than that, the production and release schedule meant they unfortunately missed out on those opportunities, and had to rely on trailers and posters. While all of the trailers are good enough, if a little calm, the first leaked picture of the cast was a disaster. Even worse were the posters: the ones above were two separate teasers, with little heads gestating inside shadowmen; the one below is an advert for X-Men-themed bobbleheads. I can’t understand why someone would sign off on it.

Only one of the posters was any good, but if you look at the bottom of the page you’ll see even more awful examples, including some shocking Japanese ones. XM:FC was considered enough of a success to warrant a sequel (it made less than Cap and cost a bit more, but it’s not a dramatic difference), but that success was only because of the (bafflingly) good reviews and the fact that it had the weekend to itself. Though it’s not a representative sample, there were a number of X-Men fans of my acquaintance who were burned out on the franchise after Wolverine and even the raves for this couldn’t persuade them. Who knows what that opening weekend would have looked like if Fox had done a better job of getting my nerd brethren off their sofas?

Warner Bros., on the other hand, couldn’t do anything to get anyone into the cinema to see Green Lantern. I only went because I try to see as many films as possible, and we’re talking about my favourite superhero of all time here. To be fair to the folks responsible for promoting GL, they were dealing with a (relatively) obscure character with a mythology that’s hard to explain in posters and short trailers, plus it was saddled with a cast and team of writers that didn’t excite the fans either, so they were trying to ice-skate uphill from the start. The posters were okay, I guess. They were nice and colourful enough, though that fucking stupid mask really doesn’t help.

The mainstream audience doesn’t love Ryan Reynolds or Blake Lively enough to take a risk on a movie that looks like the adventures of a rubber-bodied space man versus a creature made of sentient dreadlocks, but readers of the comic weren’t likely to show up either. Most of the initial reports on the movie made it seem like the filmmakers were trying to be loyal to the comics while getting the tone entirely wrong. There was also barely any sight of Oa or the Corps early on (most likely because the FX weren’t finished), so the fans felt even more nonplussed. When footage was released at Wondercon the fans justifiably went nuts. Sadly, that was almost all of Oa / Corps footage that appeared in the finished movie. WB shot their wad in desperation. The movie opened to at best, indifference; at worst, derision. Was that the fault of the promotional campaign? Well, it certainly didn’t help.

Best Hair: The assorted period-appropriate ‘dos in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Worst Hair: Daniel Craig – The latter half of Dream House

Most Appropriate Hair For A Cancer Patient: Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s unnerving shaved head – 50/50

Least Appropriate Hair For A Cancer Patient: Mia Wazikowska’s tasteful pixie-cut – Restless

Best Facial Hair: Dominic Purcell - Killer Elite

Worst Facial Hair: Clive Owen - Killer Elite

Scariest Hair/Make-Up Combo: Tom Hanks - Larry Crowne

Best Wig (Actor): Nicolas Cage – Season of the Witch (possibly borrowed from the set of last year’s winner The Sorceror’s Apprentice)

Best Wig (Actress): Emily Browning – Sucker Punch

Worst Wig (Actor): Logan Lerman - The Three Musketeers (actually they were glued-in extensions but you get my point)

Worst Wig (Actress): Cate Blanchett – Hanna

Wig I’m On The Fence About: Justin Theroux – Your Highness

Best Hats: The Adjustment Bureau

Honorable Mention: Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

Best Dressed Chap in Sweden: Daniel Craig – The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

Worst Casting: Sensible Reese Witherspoon as a PG-13-raunchy and unpredictable acrobat in Water For Elephants

Most Scatological Movie of the Year: Spy Kids 4D: All The Time In The World

I’m kinda glad I didn’t see this at the cinema with the Smell-O-Vision scratch card; if the middle section of this movie is anything to go by, I’d just be sniffing a piece of cardboard soaked in Essence of Fart. But I’ll be honest; the cavalcade of poop, barf and fart jokes made me laugh more often than most adult comedies released this year. Shame about that incoherent final act, though.

Most Weather: Wuthering Heights

Best Recasting: The mostly awake and reasonably charming Rosie Huntington-Whiteley replacing orange-hued erotic rabbitbot Megan Fox on Transformers: Dark of the Moon

Messiest Eater: Mickey Rourke - Immortals

Most Expressive Fist: Ryan Gosling - Drive

Biggest Build-Up For Least Payoff: The appearance of Kominsky – New Year’s Eve

Midway through Garry Marshall’s fractured compendium of schmaltz, Hilary Swank decides she needs to hire the legendary Kominsky to fix the broken new year ball in Times Square, and this causes a ripple of excitement to run through the extras clumsily assembled around the set. Kominsky, they whisper with amazement, she’s getting Kominsky. There is much fuss, palaver and hullabuloo about the imminent arrival of Kominsky. It’s infectious. This is, after all, a movie that features a dazzling array of cinema legends like Lea Michele and Josh Duhamel, while filling the smaller roles with yer DeNiros and Pfeiffers. So what legend will they get to play Kominsky? Pacino? Cruise? Hanks? No, silly! It’s Hector Elizondo! For fans of Garry Marshall I’m sure this was a big deal. For the rest of us? Even those of us who have nothing against Hector Elizondo? Not so much.

Most Admirable Commitment To Onscreen Skeeviness: Ben Foster (duplicitous assassin in The Mechanic, wheelchair-bound substance-abusing snitch in Rampart, convicted sex offender and possible murderer in 360)

Most Convincing Lust Object of the Year: Michael Fassbender – Shame (And also X-Men: First Class, A Dangerous Method and Jane Eyre)

Honorable Mention: Hayley Atwell – Captain America: The First Avenger

Least Convincing Lust Object of the Year: January Jones – X-Men: First Class

Dishonorable Mention: Ryan Reynolds - The Change-Up

Most Obscenely, Depressingly Beautiful Cast: Immortals

Ugliest Contact Lenses: The Rum Diary

Honorary Manuela Velasco Award for Services to Scream-Queen Culture: Florencia Colucci - The Silent House

Most Depressing Mise-en-Scène: Tyrannosaur

Honorable Mention: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Best Use Of Split Screen: The Green Hornet

Worst Use Of Split Screen: 360

Most Depressing Depiction of a Sexually Aggressive Woman: Jennifer Aniston – Horrible Bosses

Dishonorable Mention: Marisa Tomei – Crazy, Stupid, Love

Cheapest But Most Effective Device In A Horror Film: The swiveling camera in Paranormal Activity 3

It’s just a camera on the bottom half of an oscillating fan, but that simple trick, with the camera panning back and forth very slowly, amps up the tension more than any expensive CGI trick. Kudos to Henry Joost, Ariel Shulman and Christopher Landon for coming up with it.

Worst Product Placement: New Year’s Eve, because nothing says New Year’s celebrations like those joy-embodying products from Toshiba, Phillips and Nivea.

Worst Manners: Jason Statham – Blitz

Weirdest Impersonation of What Sounds A Bit Like Ray Winstone: Mel Gibson – The Beaver

Weirdest Impersonation Of What Sounds Like Jennifer Jason Leigh In The Hudsucker Proxy: Andrea Riseborough – W.E.

Most Logistically Impressive Movie: Transformers: Dark of the Moon

Honorable Mention: Battle: Los Angeles

Most Unusual Fighting Implement Wielded by Zoe Saldana In An Otherwise Forgettable Luc Besson/Robert Mark Kamen C-Movie Actioner: A toothbrush (Columbiana)

Best Location Shooting: The Descendants (Hawaii)

Honorable Mentions:

Blitz (London)

Transformers: Dark of the Moon (Chicago and many other parts of America)

A Dangerous Method (Germany, Austria)

Wuthering Heights (Yorkshire)

Thor (Asgard)

Worst Cinematic Trend of 2011: Underwhelming third acts – Insidious, Captain America: The First Avenger, Thor, The Ides of March, Hugo, The Silent House, The Eagle, Dendera, Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil, Warrior, Paul, Cowboys and Aliens, The Adjustment Bureau, The Skin I Live In, Source Code, The Descendants, War Horse, Super 8, Drive, In Time, Trespass

Anne Billson wrote this great article on the problem of the bungled third act, and though I enjoyed a couple of her examples, there are a few there that cannot be argued with. Too many movies this year fell apart in the last 20-30 minutes, sometimes so badly that the rest of the movie was irreparably damaged. I’m not sure what the reason for this is, other than that too often films aren’t rewritten often enough before reaching the set, but whatever it is, three-quarters of each of the films above were reasonably-good-to-great, and that’s a very frustrating fraction.

Most Publicity Pictures of a Director: Paddy Considine – Tyrannosaur

Last year (scroll down to the bottom) I noticed the IMDb page for Biutiful‘s images featured a lot of shots of Iñárritu (aka The Director Formerly Known As Alejandro Gonzales Iñárritu), most of them featuring him pointing and looking very thoughtful on set. It struck me that he was going for the title of Most Pictures Of A Director Pointing And Looking Very Thoughtful on IMDb, a title currently held by Michael Bay. And yet this year there’s a new potential winner in the shape of Paddy Considine, with four pictures on IMDb, more than co-star Eddie Marsan (he gets one), and as many as Olivia Colman. Bear in mind, Considine’s not even in the movie.

Even more shocking, Bay only has three on-set photos from Transformers: Dark of the Moon on IMDb this year, the other 600 pictures being 67% shots of Rosie Huntington-Whiteley getting out of cars, and 33% images of smoking rubble. Considine even manages two more shots of himself than Bay got on his debut movie Bad Boys, though none of the shots of Considine are as moving as this ferociously erotic pic of Bay’s torso. So this race to the bottom of the ego continues, but with a new contender around, THIS SHIT OFFICIALLY JUST GOT REALER.

And with that, I’m finally done. Thanks to all who have contacted me about this epic series of posts, and to everyone who has made their way through this mass of opinion and bad jokes, I doff my cap, and say, until next time. ::theme tune plays me out:: ::collapses::

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

Posted on by

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BFI LFF 2011: Shame / Rampart

Posted on by

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Listmania ‘09! Performances Of The Year

Posted on by

As ever I got carried away. This post was going to cover my picks for cast and crew in 2009, but I ended up going on about performers at such length that I figured it’s best to save the rest for later.

Best Actress: Charlotte Gainsbourg (Antichrist)

Honorable Mentions:

Rachel Weisz (The Brothers Bloom)
Isabelle Huppert (White Material)
Zoe Saldana (Avatar, Star Trek)
Melanie Laurent (Inglourious Basterds)
Alison Lohman (Drag Me To Hell)

Best Actor: Hott Sam Rockwell (Moon, G-Force)

Honorable Mentions:

Nicolas Cage (Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, G-Force)
Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker)
Peter Capaldi (In The Loop)
Willem Dafoe (Antichrist, Fantastic Mr. Fox)
Joseph Gordon-Levitt ((500) Days of Summer)

Best Supporting Actress: Anna Kendrick (Up In The Air)

Honorable Mentions:

Diane Kruger (Inglourious Basterds)
Gina McKee (In The Loop)
Mimi Kennedy (In The Loop)
Lauren Ambrose (Where The Wild Things Are)
CCH Pounder (Avatar)

Best Supporting Actor: Christoph Waltz (Inglourious Basterds)

Honorable Mentions:

Michael Fassbender (Inglourious Basterds)
Billy Crudup (Watchmen)
Tom Hollander (In The Loop)
Zach Galafianakis (The Hangover, G-Force)
Ben Affleck (Extract)

Breakthrough Actress: Katie Jarvis (Fish Tank)

Breakthrough Actor: Tahar Rahim (A Prophet)

Best Voice Cast For An Animated Movie: Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs

Anna Faris, Bill Hader, James Caan, Neil Patrick Harris, Andy Samberg, Mr. T, Bruce Campbell, Bobb’e J. Thompson, Benjamin Bratt, Lauren Graham and Will Forte, all perfectly cast and all funny. Even Al Roker is good in it. It’s a kind of miracle.

Most Surprising Dramatic Performance From An Actress Better Known For Her Comedic Work: Maya Rudolph (Away We Go)

Most Surprising Dramatic Performance From An Actor Better Known For His Comedic Work: Ricky Gervais (The Invention of Lying) (It’s not a drama, but he sells the dramatic beats better than I could ever have imagined.)

Best Performance From An Actress In A Really-Not-That-Great Movie: Meryl Streep (Julie and Julia)

Best Performance From An Actor In A Really-Not-That-Great Movie: Vincent Cassel (Mesrine)

“Surely This Will Be The Year This Actor Becomes A Superstar” Performance Of The Year: Chiwetel Ejiofor (2012)

Most Committed Performance That Transformed A Diverting Movie Into An Totally Absorbing Experience: Ben Foster (Pandorum)

Best Performance From An Actor I Was Never Keen On Before But Now Think Is Capable Of Miracles: Karl Urban (Star Trek)

Funniest Performance From An Actor Who Has Been Sorely Underused For Years: Eric Bana (Funny People)

Worst Actress: Cameron Diaz (The Box, My Sister’s Keeper)

Dishonorable Mentions:

Sandra Bullock (The Blind Side, All About Steve, The Proposal)
Katherine Heigl (The Ugly Truth)
Beyonce Knowles (Obsessed)
Kristin Kreuk (Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li)
Rose Byrne (Knowing)

Worst Actor: Chris Klein (Street Fighter: Legend of Chun-Li)

Dishonorable Mentions:

James Corden (Lesbian Vampire Killers)
John Travolta (The Taking of Pelham 123)
Tim McGraw (The Blind Side)
Peter Sarsgaard (Orphan)
John Krasinski (Away We Go)

Worst Supporting Actress: Betty White (The Proposal)

Dishonorable Mentions:

Melanie Lynskey (The Informant!, Up In The Air)
Fionulla Flanagan (The Invention of Lying)
Ali Larter (Obsessed)
Malin Akerman (Watchmen, The Proposal)
Rosamund Pike (Surrogates)

Worst Supporting Actor: Eli Roth (Inglourious Basterds)

Dishonorable Mentions:

Tom Sturridge (The Boat The Rocked)
Sam Riley (Franklyn)
Neal McDonough (Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li)
Bobby Canavale (Paul Blart: Mall Cop)
Geoffrey Arend ((500) Days of Summer)

Most Thankless Role: Jayma Mays as Paul Blart’s love interest in Paul Blart: Mall Cop.

All she is allowed to do is frown or open her eyes wide. She barely gets any dialogue, and certainly no jokes. It’s deeply frustrating as she can do so much when given the chance.

Runner-Up: Amy Smart as Chev Chelios’ girlfriend Eve Lydon in Crank: High Voltage. Last time she was forced into having sex with Chelios in public against her will. This time forced to wear stripper’s clothes for the entire movie, as well as be licked and molested by a crazed prostitute and then athletically shagged on a racecourse in front of a large crowd of baying men. Is she a glutton for punishment? She really needs to fire her agent.

Scenestealing Actor Of The Year: Woody Harrelson (Zombieland)

Scenestealing Actress Of The Year: Carrie Preston (Duplicity) (Couldn’t find a picture of her in Tony Gilroy’s delightful con-trick movie. Here she is at an awards ceremony with her husband, World’s Greatest Actor Michael Emerson.)

Scenestealing Duo Of The Year: Bill Hader and Kristin Wiig (Adventureland)

Most Glorious Ham: Michael Sheen (Twilight: New Moon)

Most Wasted Actress: Naomi Watts (The International)

Honorary Manuela Velasco Award for Services to Scream-Queen Culture: Katie Featherston (Paranormal Activity)


Best Cameo: You know who (Zombieland)

Runner-Up: Ralph Fiennes (The Hurt Locker)

Worst Cameo: Every celebrity that showed up in Funny People and bogged down the first thirteen hours of the movie

Runner-Up: Mike Tyson (The Hangover) / Lou Ferrigno (I Love You, Man)

Weirdest Cameo: Geri Halliwell as Chev Chelios’ mother in Crank: High Voltage

Where The Hell Have You Been? Actor of the Year: Rod Taylor as Winston Churchill (Inglourious Basterds)

Biggest Disparity In Quality of Performance By An Actress From One Film To The Next: Kristin Stewart – charming in Adventureland, deeply irritating and boring in Twilight: New Moon.

Biggest Disparity In Quality of Performance By An Actor From One Film To The Next: Ryan Reynolds – extremely charming in Adventureland, obnoxious in The Proposal.

And he shouldn’t have been cast as Hal Jordan. I say this as a fan of Ryan Reynolds: he really was fantastic in Adventureland, and was very funny at the start of X-Men Origins: Wolverine before his character got dumped over by the mindless buffoons who wrote it. But he’s not Hal Jordan! [/GL fanboy] Okay, I’m rambling now. More to come, amazingly enough. Got to give props to the crew on this year’s films.