Category Archives: Hott Sam Rockwell

Can Someone Please Buy Kenny Branagh A Spirit Level?

Posted on by

Apparently, according to professional troll and tired-shtick-purveyor Joe Queenan and mysteriously grouchy former colleague Stephen Evans,  British acting-giant Kenneth Branagh is suffering from terrible career-doldrums, and has seemingly consigned himself to the dumpster. They have a point. Once on track to becoming a national institution a la Emma Thompson and Stephen Fry, Branagh has gone from making a few energetic but clumsy Shakespeare adaptations (Henry V, Much Ado About Nothing), to the craziest reincarnation-murder-mystery imaginable (Dead Again).

From there he made what is unarguably the most deliriously awful adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein), to a supporting role in a derided Nazi-riffic thriller with a pre-spoiled finale (Valkyrie), to what is surely, if his critics are to be believed, absolutely the worst thing that could happen to anyone; directing a massive-budget tentpole release at the start of summer, a huge logistical project which stands a good chance of making a shedload of money and is arguably the best thing he has made by a country mile, kicking off the blockbuster season with such a burst of surprisingly confident film-making, crowd-pleasing fun and franchise-ensuring success that he can basically write his own ticket for years to come. Won’t you join me in laughing at the dreadful hubristic failure of that poor loser Branagh?

Of course, there is a chance that it won’t actually make that much money; it has already opened in Australia where it was beaten at the box office by The Fast Five and The Furious Five. Audiences probably won’t recognise the character Thor, and many of them don’t know who Chris Hemsworth is unless they have a special ability to see through the obfuscatory lens flares in JJ Abrams’ Star Trek. However, the reviews are rightly positive and this could end up with great word-of-mouth. I await its US opening figures like a child waiting to see how high White Lines by Grandmaster Flash and Melle Mel will appear in the UK top 40 on a Sunday afternoon in 1983 (true story).

N.B. I would wait to see what the UK figures are like but the damn thing is opening in the same week as some wedding or other; I think Jordan’s marrying Andrew Marr or something. Means it might be worth my while to go see it again on Friday, hopefully in a cinema that is only sparsely attended and where my enjoyment won’t be interrupted by numerous incontinent men, wailing vomity babies, and important people checking for the arrival of important emails on their super-bright phones; three hypothetical irritants that in no way pissed me off this morning, no not at all.

So why is Thor a success, above and beyond any financial concerns? Mostly because it continues Marvel Studios’ streak of good-to-great superhero adaptations, and yes, in that list I do indeed place Iron Man 2 despite the considerable backlash against it for not being explodey enough or whatever the hell crime it committed against humanity. As I said in my end of year poll last year, that loose structure and air of genial knowingness was something that I considered a plus, and having Hott Sam Rockwell along for the ride was even better news.

The complaints about it being nothing more than a set-up for the wider Marvel Film Universe (MFU) concern me not a jot, as that’s something that I want to see, and get actively excited about. I didn’t find it annoying in the slightest, and the same goes for Thor, even though the major Avengers set-up in the middle of the movie – featuring a damp Jeremy Renner on a crane getting cramp in his fingers – looks like it was filmed last week and spliced in during the drive to the big factory where they replicate all of the prints (I don’t know how these things work; I assume it’s done using a big hard-drive and a shitload of memory sticks).

Thor isn’t as smart-arse as Iron Man 2, but then it doesn’t feature Robert Downey Jr., and I doubt Branagh has a sarcastic bone in his body. He’s hyper-sincere, which turns out to be exactly the kind of thing Thor needs. The previous Marvel movies featured a couple of big set-pieces but were mostly conversation-and-character-based; being a bit more of an universe-spanning epic about “gods”, Thor’s big chats take place in gargantuan golden rooms, vast crumbling ice cities, and in a town built (especially for the movie) on the side of a hill looking down at a desert. It has something the other movies lacked; a sense of grandeur.

That’s helped by the use of 3D – a smarter choice than expected, as there are hardly ever more than two planes in the movie; the foreground where everyone is talking, and something else about a mile away. It’s a nifty post-production conversion, and does add a bit to the sense of scale, though the majority of the heavy lifting is done by the amazing FX guys at Buf Compagnie and Digital Domain, and eye-massaging work from ace production designer Bo Welch (who also directed The Cat in the Hat, but let’s just forget about that for today).

Which is not to say Thor isn’t funny. One of the best things about the Marvel Film Universe is that fun is not a dirty word. I’m quite happy to watch a “gritty” superhero tale if the tone fits the character and the movie is good, but too many filmmakers are not willing to expend an effort in making the characters likeable, or their adventures appealing. Iron Man was a perfect opening act for the Marvel Film Universe for a lot of reasons, but most importantly for making sure the audience is having a good time, which has thankfully become the template for the other movies.

I suspect that was originally the plan with The Incredible Hulk but sadly Edward Norton is a weirdly alienating actor at the best of times and much of the light stuff happened between him and Liv Tyler, who was wearing her customary “Did the director just say action?” look of incomprehension. Those jokes landed with an uncomfortable thud. Thor features a number of big laugh-out-loud moments, happily puncturing the pomposity of the genre / the epic scope of the tweaked Norse mythology without mocking it. When you hear critics or film buffs lamenting the passing of the adventure movies that cropped up at the beginning of the summer blockbuster era, the Marvel Studios movies are the kind of movies they’re talking about. Bit of romance (but not too much, and must be untragically unrequited), bit of swagger (but with eventual humility), plenty of derring-do, and a smattering of hearty jokes based around character.

They’re not quite as good yet, but I honestly think of the Marvel Studios movies as being the spiritual descendants of Raiders of the Lost Ark and Back to the Future. The studio has become the 21st Century Amblin. In fact, I’ll go even further, and I expect this will make people think I’ve taken a leap into the crazy abyss: Marvel Studios is the only large, big-budget film-making production company currently making movies with a similar level of consistency and care as Pixar. Now, that’s not to say I think any of the Marvel Studios movies released so far are as satisfying, finely-wrought, or intellectually satisfying as Pixar’s big successes, and I doubt they could ever make a superhero movie as perfect as The Incredibles (or any of their non-superhero movies). However, I honestly believe they’re as safe a pair of hands as we’ve seen in a long time.

Even The Incredible Hulk, which was an entertaining movie but certainly not a great one, was made with care and attention and didn’t feel half-arsed in any way. Iron Man 2 is harder to argue for in that respect, but that supposed demerit – the hints and set-ups for The Avengers – show that it was conceptualised and made as part of a much greater whole. This wasn’t like the G.I. Joe movie, where so many choices seemed to be the easiest options, or the various adaptations of popular YA novels, which are often hamstrung by weak source material (e.g. Twilight). People sweated over those decisions in Iron Man 2, whether the audience liked them or not, and these choices were okayed by the creative collective at the heart of the studio – people who love and understand the Marvel Universe better than anyone, and are making an effort to create an enormous, consistent world filled with thrilling detail.

Who else is stepping up to the plate in an attempt to make a bigger impact on the popular consciousness than a quick first-weekend burst of goodwill? Bruckheimer Productions? Much as I love my boy Jerry, right now he’s in danger of becoming The Guy Who Produces the Pirate Movies, after last year’s failed franchise attempts. Bad Robot? I liked them, but Morning Glory was such a lazy and apocalyptically awful failure that they’ve lost all of my good will in one fell swoop. Di Bonaventura Pictures? Any production company that has made a movie with a first draft script written in a couple of weeks does not deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as Pixar, no matter how many times Michael Bay says he knows that was a bad idea.

This admittedly crazy comparison came to me about twenty minutes into Thor, as our hero (at this point basically a bit of a dick) ignores his father’s advice and zips off from Asgard to Jotenheim alongside his companions – Sif, Hogun, Fandral and fan-favourite Volstagg – via the Bifrost, also known as the Rainbow Bridge. I have no idea what that looked like on the page, but here it is a propulsive and emotionally satisfying thread from Thor’s arrogant dismissal of Odin (perfectly set up in the previous scenes showing him as a brash child) to the manipulation of his friends, and then to an incredible FX blow-out; a sequence of crazed imagination and exquisitely detailed visualisation culminating in an enormous ruck.

For a while there – and at other points throughout the movie – Thor operates for maximum efficiency and effect on every level, adapting the original source material with as much respect and imagination as Peter Jackson brought to Lord of the Rings. If a movie is going to be a big-screen success aimed at a large crowd of people, it needs to wow, and Thor does just that. The clever casting, the narrative confidence, the appealing dynamics between the characters, and the conceptual boldness of the frankly beautiful Bifrost (like a huge golden railgun creating Einstein-Rosen Bridges that propel Asgardians through the cosmos at a terrifying velocity); it was more than I could have hoped for. I was, at that moment, Thor‘s bitch.

Much of the praise for Thor‘s success goes to every writer who has ever tried to bring this larger-than-life character to the screen, a list that includes J. Michael Straczynski, Mark Protosevich and credited screenwriters Ashley Miller & Zack Stentz (from Fringe), and Don Payne (er, My Super Ex-Girlfriend and Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer). While many superhero adaptations have featured characters that I’m familiar with, Thor is a bit of an unknown quantity to me, mostly because his world often has so little to do with anything else going on in the Marvel Comic Universe (MCU). Much as Green Lantern has his own thing going on in the DC Universe, Thor has the Nine Realms (from the Nine Worlds of Norse mythology) to explore, and that, along with the large cast of characters, made jumping in seem like a fool’s errand.

My most notable exposure to him came during Kurt Busiek and George Perez’ run on the Avengers (arguably the definitive run), with special mention to his Nuff Said issue in the middle of the Kang Dynasty epic (issue #49, volume three, fact fans!), where Thor screams in horror and pain as his efforts to save Washington fail. Powerful stuff. Bearing my ignorance in mind, the various writers have done a magnificent job in getting the audience up to speed quickly, with information about Thor’s world cleverly parcelled out during the movie’s running time (the mention of Yggdrasill late in the movie, and its depiction in terms of science, is very pleasing).

Even better, any fears that Thor will sit apart from the “realistic” movies in the rest of the MFU are quickly removed; though the comics are filled with magic and castles and suchlike, the Asgard of Thor is a technologically advanced world populated by what is likely an alien civilisation that resembles humanity living in an inter-dimensional city with floating buildings, vast waterfalls, and lots and lots and lots of gold. It’s not said outright that this alien origin is the case, but there is more than enough wiggle-room for any possible interpretation. The result is a surprisingly consistent vision across the MFU, in which we can have a “Norse God” hanging out in a small town and getting pestered by the same vaguely-sinister SHIELD agents that keep bugging Tony Stark and not have this seem like a contradiction or a leap of logic. A small miracle in itself.

Thor‘s most successful stroke of genius might be in the casting; another example of Marvel Studios really taking care to make sure every aspect of their universe works. Just about every character is cast right, with special praise to Chris Hemsworth and Tom Hiddleston as Thor and Loki. Their disintegrating relationship is the heart of the movie, even more than that of Thor and Odin, and Hiddleston does incredibly effective work as the “betrayed” son who lets his sense of pride ruin his life. He is scarily good in every scene, and promises to be one of the best things about all of the forthcoming stories told in the MFU from this point on.

Also great are Ray Stephenson, here escaping the terrible dark pull of that last, execrable Punisher movie by embodying the burly and voracious Volstagg, and Jaime Alexander as brave Sif – a fearsome warrior who doesn’t need a schoolgirl’s outfit when she fights, cough Zack Snyder cough cough. As for DJ Big Driis, aka Idris Elba, in the role of Heimdall, all I can say is I forgive you for Loofah OMG you are a fucking badass to the max OMG you need a spin-off movie stat holy shit that golden armour and massive sword really look good on you. Sadly, the much-missed Rene Russo gets little to do, but at least she swings a sword at one point. I guess. ::sadface:: Anthony Hopkins makes up for that; he does his traditional Hopkins thing, but for some of us (i.e. me) that’s more than enough. Especially as Asgard doesn’t have as many objects for him to do his trademark lean on, so he has to improve his posture for once.

The human characters are also well-cast, with Kat Dennings being more charming than usual as Comedy Relief Girl (she has a name, but she’s pretty much just Designated Clown Who Mentions Facebook And Abs; luckily she does it well), and Stellan Skarsgård thankfully eradicating the memory of Mamma Mia by being generally funny (and, it seems, playing a more important character in the MFU than I thought; he’s in The Avengers too). Natalie Portman is less noticeable, but then Jane Foster is not the most interesting of characters anyway. Sadly that flatness is a big problem for the final act; some of the choices Thor makes don’t have the impact they should, as it’s hard to really care for his relationship with this earthwoman after just an hour in their presence.

The filmmakers and actors attempt to make the relationship work by taking a few shortcuts, meaning they kind of leap into each other’s arms by the middle of the third act, but the unfortunate side-effect of this is that, as some tetchy Tweeters have already complained, Foster suddenly seems to go all “HE’S SUCH A DREAMBOAT!”, thus eliminating her as a recognisable human being. I’d argue that this weird post-post-post-post-feminist “He’s such a hunk!” swooning is necessary in terms of plot, and is kinda played for laughs anyway (“Look! This guy is just so impossibly hot and heroic that the strong woman lost her cool!”), but yeah, it seemed like a bit of a stretch.

There are other flaws here too. The finale is really hectic, with lots of “Let me explain what the terrible outcome of this action will be if you do that thing!” exposition delivered while various characters hurtle through walls. Loki’s motivation is explained in a single exhale just seconds before everything kicks off, which robs the final showdown of its power. Many of the characters are underused, but that’s inevitable, and just makes me want many sequels so we can see Sif and the Warriors Three at full power. Some of the action sequences are garbled and confusingly edited, which is nothing new, sadly. Many of the scenes on the Rainbow Bridge sadly look like what they are; a bunch of folks arguing in front of a green screen. Things pick up considerably when those incredible sets are used.

Much has been made of Thor’s jump from brat to hero, which does seem to skip a few steps, but it struck me that his initial petulance upon turning up on Earth had more to do with him not really understanding how serious Odin is. His “WHYYYYYYYYY??!!??” of horror wasn’t just Branagh over-egging the drama; it’s the moment Thor realises his pops really did just cast him out of the family home. His immediate reaction is to finally doubt himself, and the subsequent scene is what pushes him over the edge. It’s speedy, but it’s not inconsistent.

Worst of all is Branagh being his own worst enemy, as usual. Though he thankfully allows much of Thor to play out relatively calmly, dialling down the Branaghnian shouting and running until the relevant dramatic scene, he still can’t resist using the most obnoxious Dutch tilts ever committed to film. Much of the movie appears to take place on a severe incline; audiences will more likely suffer neck pains than headaches from the 3D conversion. Still, I’ll take that over his usual style; Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is the first movie ever made where all of the actors were required to sprint around the set while screaming at each other. Less is more, Kenny.

Flaws aside, this is an immensely entertaining movie, made with love and ready to give the audience the good time for its very very many pounds / dollars / shekels. This is something that is done so rarely nowadays that it’s easy to forget how much fun it can be to sit in a cinema watching a couple of hundred million dollars get squandered just to make you believe a big hollow robot can shoot fire out of its retractable face like Gort from The Day The Earth Stood Still (except this time he’s ribbed for our pleasure). The naysayers and haters can back off for now; 2011 summer blowout has arrived with a big, colourful splash. Thank you to Branagh, Hemsworth, and the rest of the cast and crew on this good-time epic because, against all of the odds, it has made a believer out of me, and turned me into a fan of the God of Thunder. HAVE AT THEE!

P.S. Advice for those who have yet to see it; keep an eye out for what I think might be the Eye of Agamotto in one scene, and do stay for the post-credits scene. Instead of just being a tiny hint about the next MFU installment, this actually seems to be a key plot-point for The Avengers. I doubt it’s crucial, but it does give an idea of what is in store.

Listmania ‘10! Performances Of The Year

Posted on by

It’s tempting to think of 2010 as the year that women ruled cinema. That would almost certainly be too bold a statement, but it’s worth noting that when collating my favourite performances of the year I had to think for a while before getting my usual six candidates for Best Performance From An Actor, but there were so many strong performances from women in well-written and conceived roles that I had to prune out some of my absolute favourite work of the year. Apologies to Catherine Keener (Please Give), Julianne Moore (The Kids Are All Right), Rachel Weisz (Agora), Aggeliki Papoulia (Dogtooth), Michelle Yeoh (Reign of Assassins), Kristin Scott Thomas (Partir), Marion Cotillard (Inception), and Nicole Kidman (Rabbit Hole).

Compare that to the actors I left out: Colin Farrell, who was great in Neil Jordan’s Ondine, Riz Ahmed and Kayvan Novak for providing the heart that powers Four Lions, Kôji Yakusho for his badassery in 13 Assassins, Aaron Eckhart for providing the understandable histrionics in Rabbit Hole, and Will Forte for his shameless work in MacGruber. And yes, I’m serious on that last one. It’s one of the funniest comedic performances I’ve seen in years, truly shameless and 100% full-on. Still, that’s not as big a list, considering the meatiest roles usually go to actors. I’m certainly not so optimistic / delusional to think that this is evidence of some kind of sea change, but it is heartening, and one of the best things about cinema in this otherwise quite low-key year. The lack of good roles for non-white performers, however, is deeply depressing. Perhaps I’m not watching the right films, but even so, I can’t think of anyone of “colour” (sorry, that always sounds patronising coming from someone as white as me) who was given a meaty role this year. It almost makes me pine for Precious. Almost.

I’ve subtly changed my annual performances list by stressing it’s the performance that matters, not the performer. In the past it’s seemed like I’ve been dissing the person and not their work. There are some people that I’ve listed in the “Worst” category here that have just had a bit of a crappy year, or were directed poorly. It’s no reflection on the person: I just think that something went wrong in the conception of the role. Yes, this is another of my regular caveats. And so, here we go, with what might be my favourite performance of the last 10 years. Yes, she’s THAT GOOD.

Best Performance By An Actress: Natalie Portman – Black Swan

Honorable Mentions:

Annette Bening - The Kids Are All Right

Michelle Williams – Blue Valentine

Greta Gerwig – Greenberg

Carey Mulligan – Never Let Me Go

Emma Stone – Easy A

Best Performance By An Actor: Ben Stiller – Greenberg

Honorable Mentions:

Andrew Garfield – Never Let Me Go

Javier Bardem – Biutiful

Mark Ruffalo - The Kids Are All Right

Ryan Gosling – Blue Valentine

Casey Affleck – The Killer Inside Me

Best Performance By A Supporting Actress: Olivia Williams – The Ghost Writer

Honorable Mentions:

Dale Dickey – Winter’s Bone

Mia Wasikowska – The Kids Are All Right

Rebecca Hall - Please Give

Chloe Moretz – Kick-Ass

Ellen Page – Inception

Best Performance By A Supporting Actor: Zach Galafianakis – It’s Kind of a Funny Story

Honorable Mentions:

John Hawkes – Winter’s Bone

Andrew Garfield – The Social Network

Jackie Chan – The Karate Kid

Nicholas Cage – Kick-Ass

Eddie Marsan – The Disappearance of Alice Creed

Best Individual Voice Work – Steve Carell – Despicable Me

Best Voice Cast / Direction: Toy Story 3

Best Cameo: James Franco / Mila Kunis – Date Night

Most Likeable Cast: Going The Distance

Worst Performance By An Actress: Milla Jovovich – Resident Evil: Afterlife

Dishonorable Mentions:

Cameron Diaz - Knight and Day

Julia Roberts – Eat, Pray, Love

Sarah Jessica Parker – Sex and the City 2

Katherine Heigl – Killers

Jennifer Aniston – The Bounty Hunter

Worst Performance By An Actor: Brendan Fraser – Extraordinary Measures

Dishonorable Mentions:

Gerard Butler – The Bounty Hunter

Benicio Del Toro – The Wolfman

Aaron Johnson – Chatroom

Ashton Kutcher – Valentine’s Day

Chris Messina – Devil

Worst Performance By A Supporting Actress: Uma Thurman – Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief

Dishonorable Mentions:

Jamie Winstone – Boogie Woogie

Taylor Swift – Valentine’s Day

Heather Graham – Boogie Woogie

Jessica Alba – Machete

Brittany Daniel – Skyline

Worst Performance By A Supporting Actor: Sam Neill – Daybreakers

Dishonorable Mentions:

Steven R. MacQueen – Piranha 3D

Aasif Mandvi – The Last Airbender

Jackson Rathbone – The Last Airbender

Jackson Rathbone - Twilight: Eclipse

Tom Selleck – Killers

Worst Individual Voice Work: Jim Sturgess – Legends of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole

Worst Voice Cast / Direction – Despicable Me

There are a lot of terrific actors in this movie, and Steve Carell’s work is so perfect I feel like giving everyone else a break, but in general the jokes are either hammed up or allowed to die (I’m looking at you, Russell Brand), and the cutesiness is way overplayed. It’s what stops the movie from being truly satisfying. A pity.

Worst Cameo – Eli Roth – Piranha 3D

Least Likeable Cast: The Switch

Again, a lot of terrific actors, some of whom are SoC faves, but in something this unpleasant and badly conceived, no one stands a chance. We just wanted every character in the film to fall into a threshing machine. Not a good thing to have in a romcom.

Most Incomprehensible Cast: The Expendables

Just for Stallone alone, but poor Jet Li and Dolph Lundgren — neither of whom are the best speakers of English — complicate matters further. Jason Statham and Mickey Rourke are mumblers at the best of the time too. I’m still not 100% sure what the movie was really about.

Breakthrough Performance by an Actress: Jennifer Lawrence - Winter’s Bone

Breakthrough Performance by an Actor: Patrick Fabian – The Last Exorcism

“Where Have You Been?” Actor of the Year: Michael Keaton – The Other Guys / Toy Story 3

Scenestealer of the Year: Craig Robinson – Hot Tub Time Machine

Most Entertaining Performance in a Terrible Movie: Pierce Brosnan – Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief

Most Wasted Actor: Kim Coates - Resident Evil: Afterlife

Best Accent: Kim Cattrall – The Ghost Writer

Worst Accent: Jake Gyllenhaal - Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

Best Performance By Hott Sam Rockwell: Iron Man 2

Best Replacement For Another Actor Who Was Controversially Removed From A Franchise: Don Cheadle - Iron Man 2

Best Replacement For Another Actor Who Left A Potential Franchise To Star In A Shitty Mr. & Mrs. Smith-Esque Disaster: Angelina Jolie – Salt

Best Performance From An Actress Brought In To Replace A Less Famous Actress And Then Asked To Do Almost Nothing Challenging Because The Entire Franchise Is Just Awful, Let’s Face It, But Still, She Was Good, As She Always Is: Bryce Dallas Howard – Twilight: Eclipse

Best Performance From One Of Those Rapsters That The Kids Like These Days: Sean “P. Diddy” Combs – Get Him To The Greek

Hammiest Performance By Michael Sheen: Tron: Legacy

Soon to come: crew contributions of the year, featuring my completely not surprising Best Director pick.

Give That Lady A Strudel With Extra Cream

Posted on by

Recently I asked you, my fragrant readers, what was the Oscar snub that irked you the most, and this was how the strudel crumbled: 17 votes, and a definite winner.

  • Best Supporting Actress: Mélanie Laurent (Inglourious Basterds) – 8 (47%)
  • Best Actor: Hott Sam Rockwell (Moon) – 2 (11%)
  • Best Writing – Original Screenplay: Greg Mottola (Adventureland) – 2 (11%)
  • Best Picture: In The Loop – 1 (5%)
  • Best Director: Jacques Audiard (A Prophet) – 1 (5%)
  • Best Supporting Actor: Michael Fassbender (Inglourious Basterds) – 1 (5%)
  • Best Actress: Charlotte Gainsbourg (Antichrist) – 1 (5%)
  • Best Costume Design: Jim Henson’s Creature Shop (Where The Wild Things Are) -1 (5%)
  • Best Writing – Adapted Screenplay: Scott Z. Burns (The Informant!) – 0 (0%)
  • Best Visual Effects: 2012 – 0 (0%)
  • Best Original Score: Elliot Goldenthal (Public Enemies) – 0 (0%)
  • Best Cinematography: Anthony Dod Mantle (Antichrist) – 0 (0%)
  • Best Animated Feature: Ponyo on a Cliff By The Sea – 0 (0%)

    • Here’s an embarrassing admission: I wasn’t going to add Mélanie Laurent to this poll. I figured she was the lead actress in Inglourious Basterds, and adding her to that category meant I would miss out Charlotte Gainsbourg’s work in Antichrist, which was the most impressive and startling performance of last year, in my eyes. It was the eternally wise Daisyhellcakes who convinced me to add her to a different category, thus knocking out my previous supporting actress candidate (sorry, Diane Kruger).

    Good job I did. Her superb performance as the preternaturally calm and devious Shosanna Dreyfuss was rightly loved by SoC readers, and ignored by an Academy that obviously doesn’t think a woman applying war paint to her face while Bowie croons in the background qualifies as sufficiently awesome. I maintain she should have been given a best actress nomination, knocking out Sandra Bullock. That blank-faced, charisma-lite caricature isn’t fit to stand alongside the thrilling work by Gabourey Sidibe, Carey Mulligan, and Queen Meryl (I’ve not seen The Last Station, but I would be surprised if I liked Bullock’s performance more than Dame Helen’s).

    Saying all that, I’m very surprised Hott Sam Rockwell didn’t get more votes. Considering the tide of support for Duncan Jones’ grassroots Twitter/Facebook campaign to get Rockwell nominated, I thought he would walk it. It’s even more surprising to see Greg Mottola get two votes for his screenplay, a delicate piece of work that managed to take (what I see as) the weaknesses of the Coming-Of-Age genre and turn them into lovable strengths. I’d like to think the single vote for Michael Fassbender was for his performance in Tarantino’s movie, and not because of the lingering memory of that moment in Fish Tank when he comes down the stairs and the camera drools all over him, that square-jawed basterd.

    With only a week to go, I reckon I’ve got time for another quick poll. By now many categories have frontrunners, with one or two seemingly decided already (having seen – and enjoyed –  Crazy Heart this morning I reckon the other four best actor nominees might as well not turn up, as good as they were in their respective roles. Nevertheless, if Academy-Award history has proved anything it’s that there is always room for a surprise. Most years there is at least one big shock, and so I ask, if there is one this year, which one would thrill you the most?

  • Best Director – Quentin Tarantino (Inglourious Basterds)
  • Best Picture – District 9
  • Best Adapted Screenplay – In The Loop
  • Best Original Screenplay – Up
  • Best Actor – Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker)
  • Best Actress – Carey Mulligan (An Education)
  • Best Supporting Actor – Stanley Tucci (The Lovely Bones)
  • Best Supporting Actress – Anna Kendrick (Up In The Air)
  • Best Animated Picture – Fantastic Mr. Fox
  • Best Original Song – Almost There (The Princess and the Frog)

    • I’ll end this in just a few days, to give me time to get ready for the big night.

    New Poll: Overlooked Oscar-Worthies

    Posted on by

    Aaaaaaand, I’m back…

    So yeah, the Oscars. An interesting set of nominations, and an even more interesting set of frontrunners. It looks like The Hurt Locker could well win more than just a cursory nod for being a good movie while a series of empty but worthy feel-good movies sweep the boards, which is thrilling. Though my favourite direction of the year was Tarantino’s masterly handling of Inglourious Basterds, I’m 100% rooting for Bigelow, as much as for a career of challenging, distinctive, and superbly well-made movies as for her work on The Hurt Locker. There’s a very good chance she will win. There will be much rejoicing Chez SoC if she gets it.

    Even more amazing were the nominations for District 9 (Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Picture: the latter something I would never have predicted in a million years) and In The Loop. That nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay is the most surprising one of all: who would think something as profane, complex and challenging would get noticed by the Academy? It’s so exciting that I temporarily didn’t care about all of the awful writing nominations, by which I mean all of the clangingly obvious writing on Precious, An Education, and Up In The Air (to a lesser extent).

    I’m really quite serious when I say that this year’s most universally loathed screenplay (James Cameron’s Avatar) struck me as less clunky than Precious and An Education, but because those movies are TERRIBLY SERIOUS they get a free pass whereas hating on Avatar for not being more sophisticated is the go-to criticism cynics trot out when trying to explain why they were immune to its appeal. I’m certainly not saying Cameron’s writing has some hidden nuance: it’s an efficient engine with almost no nuance or poetry. Nevertheless, it has enough energy to distinguish it from any number of dreary plotting-by-numbers efforts in respectable movies, where characters regularly give little speeches to tell the audience what they are thinking.

    Anyway, that’s what my brane says. It also says that odd perfect nomination doesn’t really make up for some of the most egregious snubs, of which there were many. Last year I did this same poll, with the result that SoC readers voted overwhelmingly for Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man Best Actor snub, though hey, at least he got a Supporting Actor nomination, and a Best Actor Golden Globe for his outrageously entertaining take on Sherlock Holmes. And so, in 2010, I return to this poll format and ask you, dear reader, to take your pick of what I consider to be the most egregious snubs this year.

    • Best Picture: In The Loop
    • Best Director: Jacques Audiard – A Prophet
    • Best Actor: Hott Sam Rockwell – Moon
    • Best Supporting Actor: Michael Fassbender – Inglourious Basterds
    • Best Actress: Charlotte Gainsbourg – Antichrist
    • Best Supporting Actress: Melanie Laurent – Inglourious Basterds
    • Best Cinematography: Anthony Dod Mantle – Antichrist
    • Best Costume Design: Jim Henson’s Creature Shop – Where The Wild Things Are
    • Best Original Score: Elliot Goldenthal – Public Enemies
    • Best Visual Effects: 2012
    • Best Writing – Adapted Screenplay: Scott Z. Burns – The Informant!
    • Best Writing – Original Screenplay: Greg Mottola – Adventureland
    • Best Animated Feature: Ponyo on a Cliff By The Sea

    Once I stop faffing around with PollDaddy’s coding, the poll should settle down, and I invite you to choose which one you agree with most.

    Listmania ‘09! Crew Contributions Of The Year

    Posted on by

    Time to praise (and not-praise) crew contributions to cinema in 2009. A quick caveat: though it probably renders these “awards” moot, I’d like to give a shout-out to all of the crewmembers and professionals who are about to win Worst whatever awards or dishonorable mentions. For the most part, I know that these men and women are very talented people whose contributions to other movies have been worthy of praise. It’s very rare that I think someone who worked on a film is completely beyond hope, and that’s certainly the case here. I just think that their work has been compromised by some bad choices or decisions by those higher up, and have only attached their names to the ignominious Worst awards for clarity.

    Case in point: last year I selected Anthony Dod Mantle’s work on Slumdog Millionaire as the Worst Cinematography of the year, knowing full well that he is a remarkable cinematographer with a long list of great projects behind him. However, I thought his work on Slumdog was hideous. That was either because of choices he made, or because of decisions made by director Danny Boyle. Saying someone’s work represented the worst cinematography or editing of the year is not meant as a diss against them personally. It’s just a way of saying that their work here was not up-to-scratch, for any number of reasons. I’m sure this little Get-Out Clause will make everyone feel so much better about what I say. [/delusion]

    Another thing. Some of the technical categories such as Production Design and FX are there to praise more than one person or FX company, but for brevity’s sake, I’ve chosen to mention just the most prominent names responsible. Certainly, big FX movies feature work from dozens of different FX houses, and I feel really bad for just choosing to mention the one or two biggest names involved. If the movie is on the FX list or the Production Design list, rest assured I liked all of the work done on those movies, and everyone who worked on them deserve praise. My apologies for not going through every name. Just know that I am filled with respect and gratitude for all of the work done on those movies.

    Right, on with the show, and I start with a completely unsurprising choice…

    Best Director: Quentin Tarantino (Inglourious Basterds)

    Honorable Mentions:

    Gaspar Noe (Enter The Void)
    Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker)
    Armando Iannucci (In The Loop)
    Sam Raimi (Drag Me To Hell)
    Jacques Audiard (A Prophet)

    Best Screenplay: Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Armando Iannucci, Ian Martin, Tony Roche (In The Loop)

    Honorable Mentions:

    Quentin Tarantino (Inglourious Basterds)
    Scott Z. Burns (The Informant!)
    Greg Mottola (Adventureland)
    Pete Docter, Bob Peterson, Thomas McCarthy (Up)
    Wes Anderson, Noah Baumbach (Fantastic Mr. Fox)

    Best Editing: Jeffrey Ford, Paul Rubell (Public Enemies)

    Best Soundtrack: Joe Hisaishi – Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea

    Honorable Mentions:

    Elliot Goldenthal (Public Enemies)
    Alexandre Desplat (A Prophet)
    Michael Giacchino (Star Trek)
    Michael Giacchino (Up)
    Mark Mothersbaugh (Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs)

    Best Use of Music: Street Fighting Man - Rolling Stones (During the Terrible Tractors segment of Fantastic Mr. Fox)

    Best Visual Effects: WETA / ILM (Avatar)

    Honorable Mentions:

    Uncharted Territory / Digital Domain / Many many many other FX workshops (2012)
    BUF (Enter The Void)
    Digital Domain / ILM (Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen)
    ILM / Digital Domain (Star Trek)
    Image Engine / The Embassy Visual Effects / Zoic Studios (District 9)

    Best Production Design: Rick Carter / Robert Stromberg (Avatar)

    Honorable Mentions:

    Scott Chambliss (Star Trek)
    Jess Gonchor (A Serious Man)
    David Wasco (Inglourious Basterds)
    Alex McDowell (Watchmen)
    Denise Pizzini (Black Dynamite)

    Best Cinematography: Anthony Dod Mantle (Antichrist)

    Honorable Mentions:

    Dante Spinotti (Public Enemies)
    Robbie Ryan (Fish Tank)
    Benoît Debie (Enter The Void)
    Morten Søborg (Valhalla Rising)
    Steve Yedlin (The Brothers Bloom)

    Funniest Cinematography: Shawn Maurer (Black Dynamite)

    Most Gimmicky Cinematography: Dan Mindel (Star Trek)

    I’m not sure whether I liked or disliked Mindel and Abrams’ insistence on using lens flares in about 89% of the movie. All I know is nothing else looked like it this year, for better or worse.

    Best Cinematography Wasted On A Terrible, Uncinematic Movie: Caleb Deschanel (My Sister’s Keeper)

    Best Sound Design: Ben Burtt (Star Trek)

    Burtt, who last year excelled himself with his incredible work on Wall-E, did another great job this year in redesigning the sound effects from the original series of Star Trek. At once retro and futuristic, familiar and new, his work here was a joy to listen to. Here’s a fascinating interview with the great man.

    Runner-Up: Ken Yasumoto / Thomas Bangalter (Enter The Void)

    Immersive, ambient, constantly in flux. Yasumoto and Bangalter’s audio work here is as impressive as the visual work done by the rest of the crew.

    Worst Director: Phil Claydon (Lesbian Vampire Killers) (The rest of the movie is exactly like this except more blue, to denote night-time.)

    Dishonorable Mentions:

    Lee Daniels (Precious: Based On The Novel Push By Sapphire)
    Steve Carr (Paul Blart: Mall Cop)
    Robert Luketic (The Ugly Truth)
    Chris Columbus (I Love You, Beth Cooper)
    Richard Curtis (The Boat That Rocked)

    Worst Screenplay: David Benioff / Skip Woods (X-Men Origins: Wolverine)

    Dishonorable Mentions:

    Paul Hupfield / Stewart Williams (Lesbian Vampire Killers)
    Justin Marks (Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li)
    Brandon Camp / Mike Thompson (Love Happens)
    Brian Helgeland (The Taking of Pelham 123)
    Richard Curtis (The Boat That Rocked)

    Worst Editing: Jeff Freeman (Paul Blart: Mall Cop)

    Worst Use of Music: Sabotage – Beastie Boys (Star Trek)

    Worst Cinematography: Russell Carpenter (The Ugly Truth)

    Dishonorable Mentions:

    David Higgs (Lesbian Vampire Killers)
    Ken Seng (Obsessed)
    Tim Suhrstedt (All About Steve)
    Robert McLachlan (Dragonball Evolution)
    Danny Cohen (The Boat That Rocked)

    Most Annoying Sound Design: Chang-seop Kim and Suk-won Kim (Thirst)

    No offense to either sound designer. They did exactly what was asked of them by director Chan-park Wook. Unfortunately that meant two hours of slurping sounds. After about five minutes it became unbearable. Then came the gristly snapping sounds. ::feels ill remembering it::

    Worst Directorial Decision: The Nigerian Gangsters – Neill Blomkamp (District 9)

    Blomkamp and co-screenwriter Terri Tatchell hobbled their movie with the controversial decision to depict the Nigerian gangs ruling the District 9 slum as cannibalistic criminals. The Nigerian government took steps to ban the movie in their country, and debate over the potentially racist overtones of this depiction detracted from Blomkamp and Tatchell’s message about the venality of all humans no matter what their race. Certainly the cannibalism of Nigerian gangs is meant to be equated with the white South African’s fondness for vivisection, and Wikus’ treatment by both his white compatriots and the dreadful gang leader Obesandjo is similar, but did Blomkamp have to make them specifically Nigerian? Wouldn’t he have managed to make the same point if he had just had a generic gang in District 9? Or is that just a mealy-mouthed way for me to feel a bit better about this depiction, by making it diffuse instead of specific?

    When I left the cinema my overall positive experience of the movie was tempered by this one directorial decision. Though Blomkamp has been bluff about it (to this blogger’s disgust), his choice — whether wrong in my eyes or right in his — has lingered in my mind ever since. I don’t think I’ll ever be comfortable with it. Maybe that was the point, to shock this liberal out of his complacency instead of just giving me an easy, toothless fix of self-congratulatory righteous anger against the evils of racism, as the utterly empty Blind Side did. Nevertheless, it left a bad taste in my mouth. He got so much else right, but I can’t help but fear he went too far on this one point.

    Runner-Up: Endless Starfuckery, Nepotism, and Navel-Gazing – Judd Apatow (Funny People)

    There’s a really good 105-minute-long movie hidden inside Funny People. A really good movie that manages to capture the exact James-L.-Brooksian aura that Judd Apatow was trying for. Sadly it’s buried under endless, pointless cameos, home videos, and poorly edited introspection. Some critics complained that the movie changes tone and direction too drastically once Adam Sandler and Seth Rogen turn up on Leslie Mann’s doorstep, and Apatow should therefore cut a lot out of those scenes, but to be honest there is more interesting and funny material in the final hour than there is in the previous six months or however long that shit is. If Apatow had tightened the first part of the movie up, he could still have retained the observations about the uncertain and insecure life of the comedian and still have that entertaining plot about chasing your past. It was a movie we liked a lot, but damn if it wasn’t a frustrating experience.

    Best Poster:

    Runner-Up:

    Worst Poster:

    Most Sexist Poster:

    Runner-Up:

    Best Response To Said Sexist Poster: From The Frisky…

    Strangest And Worst Poster Change: First poster for Moon…

    …and the second, uglier poster for Moon

    Nastiest But Most Accurate Poster That Reduces A Complex Work Of Art Down To A Single Controversial Moment: The Australian poster for Antichrist

    Best Promotional Campaign: District 9

    Now lauded as the movie launched by Twitter, it was a perfectly judged idea to screen the entire movie to fans and journalists at the San Diego Comic-Con. Journalists were forced to observe an embargo on full reviews, but the word spread via Twitter and Facebook, and it wasn’t long before the film rolled into theatres on a tidal wave of viewer-generated hype and enthusiasm. Paramount did a similar thing by showing Star Trek at the Alamo Drafthouse to an audience primed for a screening of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, but that was a film that owed much of its success to a typical PR blitz on top of a bunch of very enthusiastic reviews. Sony Pictures used a smaller promotional budget with greater skill, building word of mouth through that first screening, creating funny teaser posters (a necessity considering how the movie had no name recognition and no well-known stars), and airing thrilling and mysterious TV spots. District 9 is a good enough movie to deserve its high box-office take, but it was the beautifully judged PR campaign that really pushed it over the edge.

    Worst Promotional Campaign: Inglourious Basterds

    Hey look everyone! Quentin Tarantino has made another of his mad pastiches of genre cinema from the past! There’s a comedy Hitler and Brad Pitt’s all silly and there’s gonna be a ton of violence of action all the way through! It’ll do for WWII movies what Kill Bill Vol. 1 did for martial arts movies! Yeeeeeeeee-hah! Except not. Tarantino’s maturity has been hidden behind some entertainingly silly post-modern pyrotechnics for a while now, but his intellectualism has been bubbling up to the surface. The most dramatic example of this is the difference between the Grindhouse and non-Grindhouse cuts of Death Proof. While the former moves faster and works well enough as an exploitation piece with a nifty sting in the tale, the longer version features much subtext about both groups of women targeted by Stuntman Mike and their relationship to him. It’s a slower movie but a much richer one.

    Inglourious Basterds is richer still, and looks and feels nothing like the action-packed diversion the trailers and posters make it seem. The PR campaign also plays up the Basterds as the main characters when in fact they’re mostly secondary to the main plots involving Landa, Dreyfus, Hicox, and Zoller. Though enough people liked it enough to make it a reasonably sized hit, who knows whether it might have made even more money if it had pre-empted the oft-heard complaint that Brad Pitt wasn’t in it enough. Or maybe it worked perfectly in getting bums on seats? What do I know? I’m just a shlub with a blog.

    Okay. If there is any more list-making to be done, it’ll be haphazard, even more trivial, and will arrive whenever I can get around to it. I’d forget about it but the world must know what I considered to be the best insult of the year.

    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.

    Summer Movies Poll: Readers Choice Bonanza

    Posted on by

    Many moons ago I asked readers to cast their votes for best and worst movies of the summer season circa 2009. First: Best.

    • Eric Bana Is: An Especially Tetchy Romulan – 7 (25%)
    • Quentin Tarantino Presents: Quentin Tarantino’s Masterpiece - 7 (25%)
    • Christopher Johnson and Wikus Van Der Merwe’s Excellent Adventure – 4 (14%)
    • That’s No Moon; It’s Hott Sam Rockwell’s Talent! – 3 (11%)
    • Pixar’s The Bucket List – 4 (14%)
    • Cover Me With Drool, Drop An Anvil On Me, Then Drag Me To Hell – 2 (7%)
    • G.I. Joe: STOP THE NANOMITES, JOES! – 1 (4%)
    • Hangover: (n. painful & unamusing experience) – 0 (0%)
    • Publicity Hungry Enemies (Now In Grainy-o-Vision) – 0 (0%)
    • When Anti-Matter Met The Vatican – 0 (0%)
    • STREEP, TUCCI & LYNCH vs. a Blogger and her Annoying Husband – 0 (0%)
    • Night at the Museum: Sound, Fury, & Nothing – 0 (0%)
    • Futile and Fatuous – 0 (0%)
    • Dad! My Guinea Pig Sounds Like Tracy Morgan! – 0 (0%)
    • The Shaking [Cameras] of Pelham 123 – 0 (0%)
    • Klansformers: Revenge of the Fratboy – 0 (0%)
    • X-Men Franchise Sabotage: WTFverine – 0 (0%)
    • Eric Bana Is: An Absentee Time-Travelling Husband – 0 (0%)
    • The Ugly Truth Is That Katherine Heigl Is Not Charming – 0 (0%)
    • Terminator 4: When Third Acts Collapse – 0 (0%)
    • Harry Potter And The Toenail of Effervescence – 0 (0%)
    • Eric Bana Is: An Endearing Aussie Cuckold – 0 (0%)
    • Final Destination: We’re Trying To Get Inside Your Eyeballs – 0 (0%)
    • Zooey Hall – 0 (0%)
    • Oh Will Ferrell. A TV Show Remake? We Want Anchorman 2 KTHXBAI – 0 (0%)

    The number of high votes for Star Trek are no surprise at all. People have been calling for a light, fun movie with some substance during summer for years now, and Star Trek‘s blindingly bright visuals and hectic tone hit the spot, disregarding the fact that all of the fun surrounds the genocide of several billion Vulcans in the middle of the film. Yay summer movies! I’m a little more surprised that Inglourious Basterds (or, as the TV spots would have us believe, Inglourious!) got that many votes. Not because it doesn’t deserve them: more because many who liked it only seemed to just about like it, not love it with a passion. Perhaps there are more of us out there who think it’s a flat-out masterpiece and one of the greatest movies of the decade. Did the former camp vote for it because they thought “good enough” made it better than everything else on the list?

    It was a great summer for genre fans, with the release of two audacious low-budget SF movies that were good enough and popular enough to stop nerds complaining about the success of less intellectually ambitious mainstream SF movies like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and — later in the year — Avatar. Ha ha! Only kidding. Nerds will never stop being mad about mainstream filmmakers making money off their beloved genres. For a while there it felt like the only reason Moon and District 9 were being praised by nerds was that they were not Michael Bay movies, and indeed Duncan Jones’ film was the anti-thesis of big budget pyro-movies. The rush to praise them for what they were not meant it took a while for anyone to spot that there were problems with both of them. Moon‘s considered pace was refreshing, but at times faltered on the wrong side of slow, and it was perhaps not as surprising as it thought it was. District 9‘s problems were more glaring: the sub-plot about how Nigerian gangs dabbled in prostitution and cannibalism was horribly ill-judged. I could see where Neill Blomkamp was going with it — i.e. painting a picture of all of humanity as a broken, venal species with no compassion to spare — but by explicitly stating it was Nigerian gangs running the show in District 9, that bleak message of living creatures as selfish and brutal became unpleasantly specific.

    That said, despite those flaws, both movies were terrific, and I would never argue that those flaws overshadowed the things Jones and Blomkamp got right. Moon was a lot of fun even just to look at, with those Gerry-Anderson-esque production designs and lo-tech FX. It also featured possibly the best performance of the year, with Hott Sam Rockwell giving what might be his best work ever. For that alone, I’ll be eternally grateful Jones took us on his genial ride. District 9 risked more, caused me more agita over its racial politics, but in the end thrilled me far more. With all of humanity — and Prawndom — portrayed as singularly awful, the whole movie boils down to a single act of sacrifice. The final action scene of District 9 was powerful enough to overshadow my concerns over Blomkamp’s tone-deaf error, and even managed to make me cry, completely catching me by surprise. All of that despite sitting next to the most inconsiderate woman in film-going history, who spent the entire movie narrating the onscreen events to her annoyed boyfriend, and then got pissy with me when I asked her to be quiet an hour in. The kind of behaviour that makes me wonder why I bother going to the cinema.

    The other three movies gaining votes were Up (a movie I didn’t care for on first viewing due to terrible projection in a crappy NJ cinema, but loved when seen in IMAX), Drag Me To Hell (Sam Raimi’s delirious instant horror classic), and G.I. Joe: Road To Nowhere. Seeing that get a vote made my soul cry. Still, it got another vote, in the Worst Summer Movie List, as seen below:

    • Klansformers: Revenge of the Fratboy – 7 (30%)
    • X-Men Franchise Sabotage: WTFverine – 6 (26%)
    • The Ugly Truth Is That Katherine Heigl Is Not Charming – 4 (17%)
    • When Anti-Matter Met The Vatican – 2 (9%)
    • G.I. Joe: STOP THE NANOMITES, JOES! – 1 (4% )
    • Publicity Hungry Enemies (Now In Grainy-o-Vision) - 1 (4%)
    • Hangover: (n. painful & unamusing experience) - 1 (4%)
    • Dad! My Guinea Pig Sounds Like Tracy Morgan! – 1 (4%)

    The rest of the movies on the list got no votes, so let’s just move on. It doesn’t surprise me that Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen topped this list. It had been treated like a soiled nappy long before it was even released, and though I wasn’t crazy about it, I certainly didn’t hate it either. If people really hate it that much, more power to them (and certainly whenever I think about those fucking racial-stereotype-bots I feel like putting it at the top of this list as well), but I suspect a lot of Internet commenters who rail against it just haven’t seen enough bad movies this year. Of course, if that’s the case, they’re lucky. We’ve seen so many shitty movies this year that T:ROTF doesn’t even get on our bottom twenty list, let alone bottom ten.

    It certainly doesn’t beat out X-Men Origins: Wolverine as worst movie of the summer. Who’s to blame for that farrago? I’m willing to let director Gavin Hood off the hook, as his work was so often compromised by Fox executive Tom “Nerd-Sauron” Rothman. He has long interfered in the making of Fox’s slate of superhero movies and been rewarded with high box office grosses despite the shitty quality of those films. X-Men Origins was the worst yet. David Benioff and Skip Woods’ script was impossibly bad. Could there be a draft of it that wasn’t a morass of cliches and tired jokes? Did there ever exist a single line given to Sabretooth that wouldn’t make me risk breaking bones through convulsive super-cringing? Compared to this disaster, T:ROTF was a source of almost endless delight. I truly wish it killed off the X-Men movie franchise, because now it has made money we’re looking at yet more soulless, brainless movies soiling our memories of those fantastic original stories.

    I also have no problem with the simply appalling Ugly Truth getting some votes, and would like to think that my renaming of it helped. Gerard Butler is not very good in that film, but he’s Rudolph Valentino compared to Katherine Heigl. Her appeal is completely alien to me. Spiky, charmless, and unable to sell even the most basic of jokes, her continued success is a mystery. I know Grey’s Anatomy is very popular, but even if every fan of that show traipsed out to the cinema to catch the latest Heigl movie, would that account for the high box office The Ugly Truth managed? (We’re talking a worldwide gross of $203m on a budget of $38m.) Rail against the success of T:ROTF all you like, but that did everything it could to attract and entertain a certain sub-section of the audience (i.e. fans of BIG). The Ugly Truth did the bare minimum to get the job done and is technically far more profitable. Yay for cheaper movies, but boo for movies that are crafted with such lazy indifference towards their audiences, that said nothing about gender politics, that think a lumbering joke about vibrating panties was classifiable as entertainment.

    What else got votes? Two for Angels and Demons, which was a passable enough thriller, and was certainly more entertaining than the flat-as-Holland Da Vinci Code. I can’t get angry with it, even when it was being very silly (i.e. for much of its length). A vote for The Hangover, which ranks alongside Up In The Air as most overrated movie of the year. The one thing I liked about it — that it is a comedy with a well-developed script and fascinating initial premise — meant nothing when the jokes were so lazy and the characters so unappealing (other than Zach Galafianakis’ Alan Garner, who was a delight). Watching Graham Linehan rail against it on Twitter during the summer made me feel a lot less alone. After that we get a vote for G.I. Joe, a movie I did not like at all, and single votes for Public Enemies and G-Force, both of which I liked to varying degrees.

    Thanks to everyone who voted. What now? No poll for a bit (I usually add polls after the Oscar nominations are announced), but more lists. Been working on the damn things all year.

    The Top One Hundred and Six Movies of the Oughts (60-46)

    Posted on by

    Of all the movies I’ve missed off this list through my own stupidity, the one I’m most annoyed about forgetting is Jonathan Glazer’s controversial Birth, also known as That Film Where Nicole Kidman Does The Creepy Bathtub Thing With A Kid. It’s one of those movies that generated a firestorm of controversy when it came out but also didn’t seem to appeal to anyone.

    It came and went with just a lot of burbling complaint, and while Nicole Kidman’s career wasn’t harmed by it, it did make Jonathan Glazer vanish from sight, electing to return to his previous job directing videos and commercials. What’s most annoying about that controversy is that that scene is far less effective than the incredible scene where Kidman’s character has to process the possibility that the man she loved and has been grieving over for ten years may have been reborn. The camera captures her confusion, pain, and hope in a long close-up: along with the opening scene of Inglourious Basterds and the lengthy conversation in the middle of Steve McQueen’s superb Hunger, it’s one of the great long takes of the last ten years.

    Of course the movie doomed itself by having a fascinating  central premise (what would you do if a person you loved had died and come back as someone else?) and a mystery at its core that was not really the final focus of the movie. Glazer and his co-writers Jean-Claude Carrière and Milo Addica are more interested in depicting the ways in which grief can destroy a mind and hope can make a person do crazy things, much as The Constant Gardener also does. I really like that movie, but Birth is even better. Glazer filmed it as if it were a modern-day fairy tale, but one in which the evil prince “wins”  in the end, and alongside the bravura close-up he creates some other memorable scenes including a meltdown from Danny Huston at a recital, a final shot of Kidman pretty much losing her grip on reality, and a stunningly beautiful opening in Central Park, all to the sound of Alexandre Desplat’s stunning score.

    It’s one of the five best soundtracks of the decade. Speaking of movies set in New York and featuring creepy children intent on wrecking a family, praise is due George Ratliff’s beautifully judged thriller Joshua. Eschewing most dreary Bad Seed shock tactics (such as those employed by the moronic Orphan from earlier this year), Joshua shows how one smart, creepy kid can destroy lives just by playing upon people’s expectations of what children are like. Hott Sam Rockwell and Vera Farmiga are fantastic as the tortured parents whose lives are ruined by the son that has grown to hate them, and the whole thing burrows under your skin in a pleasantly unpleasant way. If I were to do this over again, it would definitely feature lower down in the list, but Birth would be in the top forty at least. Damn, I really loved that movie.

    Here is the next fifteen entries on my best of list, though as you can see it’s become rather unfinished what with all the late entries. As before, there are no movies from 2009, etc.

    60. Gomorrah

    Matteo Garrone’s fractured narrative shows how crime affects all strata of life in Naples and Caserta, corrupting the inhabitants, robbing them of their autonomy, and even poisoning the ground they live on. As Girrone’s movie progresses, all hope of escape from the black cloud dwindles. A sobering experience, and an essential one.

    59. City of God

    As with Garrone’s crime epic, this shows how anarchic criminality can destroy every life it touches. While the Italian movie was paced with considered calm, Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund’s movie is a blur of energy unmatched by any other movie since Goodfellas. What could have been mere poverty-porn becomes profound, thrilling, and inspirational.

    58. Primer

    As with Mulholland Drive, this one left me behind. Shane Carruth’s time-travel movie has arguably the most labyrinthine plot in film history. On first viewing it challenges you for an hour before leaping off the deep end. Only after multiple viewings and consultations with complex flowcharts does it begin to make sense. The ultimate puzzle movie, and the equivalent of real intellectual benchpressing.

    57. Inside Man

    The heist movie to end all heist movies. Spike Lee creates a modern day Taking of Pelham 123, perfectly capturing the grouchy solidarity of New York with numerous entertaining asides and performances, all while leisurely touching on Lee’s trademark concerns about racial tension within that fractious melting-pot. A rare feel-good crime drama, and all the better for its genial air.

    56. The Mist

    Saved from obscurity by the enthusiasm of horror nerds across America, Frank Darabont’s timely horror classic works as a ghoulish B-Movie homage and disturbing time-lapse exploration of how ignorance and paranoia (embodied as the decade’s best villain, Mrs. Carmody) can tear us apart. Darabont’s previous films show how hope can set us free. Here he shows how despair can only lead to ruin.

    55. A History of Violence

    David Cronenberg and Josh Olsen took a weak graphic novel and turned it into a dissertation on the true nature of violence, separate from the sanitised movie version of violence, all while retaining the thrills and tension necessary to keep an audience riveted. Possibly the most intellectually satisfying suspense movie since Hitchcock’s prime.

    54. Waltz With Bashir

    Who would’ve thought that something as simple as Flash could be used to create something as profoundly moving as this? Ari Folman used hallucinogenic visuals to depict his distorted memory of the 1982 Lebanon War, and by proxy the entire country of Israel. The well-judged shift in format in the final five minutes is wrenching.

    53. Pineapple Express

    For anyone who loved the shaky action movies of the 80s and early 90s, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s pitch-perfect satire/mash note is manna from heaven, but what sends it over the top is James Franco’s performance as stoner Saul. His sincerity, heroism, and constant bewilderment are endlessly endearing.

    52. Monsters Inc.

    Unfairly treated as the poor cousin to Dreamworks’ Shrek at the time of release, time has proven that Pete Docter’s wildly imaginative adventure was the monster movie with brains and heart. Random remembrance of the final image triggered floods of tears even months after first viewing.

    51. Casino Royale

    Just when it seemed James Bond was finally ready for the skip, Martin Campbell returned to the franchise in time to save it. Tricksy plot construction, clearly edited action scenes, and excellent performances by the six lead actors add up to the best Bond movie since On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and one of the most thrilling action movies of the decade.

    50. Serenity

    For those of us who love Joss Whedon’s work, this sequel to his cancelled show Firefly was an event not to be missed. Fortunately, it was worth celebrating. Whedon can be proud of his SF Western, achieving the miracle of introducing a large cast to newcomers while satisfying hardcore fans with answers, character arc resolutions, and high drama. It would have been higher if Whedon wasn’t such a beloved-character-killing meanie. ::pouts::

    49. Paprika

    Satoshi Kon’s dream fantasy offers the most startling visual onslaught in years, as well as one of the most endearing protagonists in modern SF. Even though countless cultural references will be wasted on the average Western viewer, it still offers an unforgettable, dizzying head-trip.

    48. Hidden (Caché)

    Michael Haneke’s rightly celebrated thriller deals with guilt, persecution, middle-class isolationism, racial politics, and the unthinking consequences of youthful behaviour with an icy intellectualism that nevertheless makes the heart pound. Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche are riveting, as always.

    47. Idiocracy

    A chaotic mess trapped under a terrible expository voice-over, Mike Judge’s dystopic satire has more than enough bite and uncomfortable humour to justify the compromise necessary to get it made. Possibly the angriest satire in living memory and one that is slowly accruing cultural cachet among nervous anthropologists observing modern society. Plus, I can attest to the fact that repeated viewings unearth a wealth of funny details.

    46. Limbo

    John Sayles’ meandering thriller starts off as a simple tale of frontier life, and gradually becomes darker, taking twists and turns that you could never see coming. Perhaps it’s the most aptly titled film of the decade, as Sayles expertly manipulates your expectations and offers the greatest, most exasperating and yet most profound open ending in years.

    Right, another one done without the help of WordPress’ useless autosave function which got rid of a wodge of words earlier. More to come, hopefully tonight.

    The Last Action Rodent

    Posted on by

    Shades of Caruso makes no bones about its enjoyment of truly bad movies, and our search for the right kind of cinematic dreck means we watch a lot of movies that are dismissed by critics. This approach has pros and cons. While something that feels like it was made in a kind of mass delirium (e.g. Obsessed, My Sister’s Keeper) can be a real source of pleasure, films that are merely formulaic and boring (e.g. Bangkok Dangerous, The Boat That Rocked) can really defeat us. Nevertheless, while our hunt for something terrible is a pretty cynical way of watching films, there is another reason to do it. Critics watch even more films than we do, and as a kind of cerebral shortcut will make assumptions about movies — especially genre movies — before seeing them.

    I’ll happily give any genre movie a chance, hoping to stumble upon something that has been dismissed en masse which contains some purpose or highlight that has been overlooked. Occasionally, we watch a movie that got shortshrift for hiding a greater ambition under generic trappings, and this makes the effort of watching the chaff of cinema worthwhile. That said, though I’m obviously some kind of wonderful saint for doing this, it’s easy to aim my anger at critics who treat childrens’ movies with this kind of frustrated huffing and puffing, as I don’t have to put up with the same amount of cynical, poorly thought-through tripe that clogs multiplexes during holidays. It’s all well and good going to see Pixar movies or my beloved Speed Racer, but what about the rest?

    In the interest of fairness, I recently subjected myself to Dragonball Evolution, the caucasian-ised live-action version of Akira Toriyama’s manga. Directed by James Wong of X-Files fame, it tells the hackneyed tale of a nerd boy with a secret past and no parents trying to find a series of MacGuffins before they are claimed by a poorly sketched bad guy who will use the MacGuffins to destroy the world or enslave it or maybe both depending on who is re-telling the expositional bits about evil magicians and aliens and monsters and dragons etc. Much as I try to give every film a fair shake, and will admit that even really terrible movies have some redeeming qualities, when something is lazy and pointless, I’ll grant that. Dragonball Evolution certainly qualifies as the biggest waste of time I’ve subjected myself to in a long while, and even managed to make me temporarily not like Chow Yun Fat. Unacceptable!

    Any critic who had just had to see that feeble collection of cliches and cheap effects would have been forgiven for groaning at the thought of an incredibly expensive and aggressively marketed spy movie aimed at kids. Hoyt Yeatman’s guinea-pig spy action epic G-Force has several strikes against it immediately. It’s a kid’s movie not made by Pixar. It has a premise — intelligent guinea pigs working as spies against an evil corporation — that sounds unworkable. It has a starry cast, which is often a way of adding clout to a movie that might otherwise be some cookie-cutter money-making exercise. It’s full of CGI. It’s the sort of movie that’s built to create a line of merchandising to further bankrupt parents everywhere. The trailer is full of awful jokes and crashing explosions. Nic Cage is in it and the received wisdom, lazily trotted out by people who don’t have the time to inspect this claim, is that he’s crap nowadays. What could be more unappealing than this?

    Worst of all, it’s produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, who — in the eyes of much of the critical community — is the enemy of good taste and art, a galumphing unsubtle populist who doesn’t care about educating audiences or giving them breathing space between hectic, orange-tinted action scenes. His movies cost millions and make billions, and that lowest-common denominator approach to filmmaking has debased our culture to such an extent that no one learns anything any more. Bruckheimer is a name now automatically attached to any discussion about the soul-deadening dreadfulness of contemporary commercial filmmaking, a one-man blame-magnet. While Michael Bay destroys the art of direction, Bruckheimer destroys the possibility of thought-provoking adult cinema with his roller-coaster ride ethos and relentless tide of tightly plotted fireworks displays. Never forget, he once made a movie based on a theme park ride.

    Of course, it’s best we forget that the theme park movie — Pirates of The Caribbean — was enormously entertaining and not to mention made with real skill and love of the swashbuckling movies of old. It’s also best to forget that while it’s undeniable that a lot of Bruckheimer movies are not that great, he has also been responsible for the first Beverly Hills Cop — a pacy comedy-thriller that still holds up well — as well as the excellent Fail-Safe-esque Crimson Tide, prescient surveillance thriller Enemy of the State, and the endearing bombast of The Rock. The ratio of bad movies to good is probably not something I should think about too hard while constructing an argument for his movies, but even though he has delivered some awful, lazy movies, he has also given us some gems. These are never considered when rushing to denounce him as the worst thing to ever happen to popular cinema.

    Of his previous movies Con Air might well be my favourite, though this is treated like the absolute bottom of the barrel by many. Those who do praise it usually refer to it as a guilty pleasure movie, “so bad it’s kinda good”. Those who hate it consider it especially tasteless and garish, the dumbest film Bruckheimer has produced. Perhaps it deserves a slot beside Starship Troopers as a satire that many people didn’t get, though Troopers had a higher aspiration than Simon West and Scott Rosenberg’s action comedy. It’s plainly obvious that the movie is making fun of action movie memes and expectations, with a cast of supervillains standing between our whiter-than-white hero (Cameron Poe, played by a hilarious Nicolas Cage) and a reunion with the daughter he has never met.

    Very nearly every scene is played for broad laughs, with a nice compliment of sly gags running in the background. It makes fun of movies that fetishise serial killers — Steve Buscemi’s character is awful, but not much worse than the widely-adored Hannibal Lecter — not to mention the moral equivalence of good and bad. For instance, Poe might be a hero, but he’s also a killer himself, as are many “heroes” in action movies. We also get to see an action-liberal (as Bruckheimer is a Republican, it’s amusing to see a sandal-wearing pencil-pusher saving the day several times), and one of the most extreme and hilariously protracted “Bad-Guy-Deaths” ever, as John Malkovich’s Cyrus Grissom is stabbed, thrown through a building, electrocuted, and then has his head crushed. This play on the delightfully ghoulish tradition in action movies to have the villain killed in outrageous fashion might be my favourite moment in all of Bruckheimer’s movies.

    This interest in picking apart the conventions of his own movies is similar to that shown by 90s action producer Joel Silver, whose movies were so formulaic he could afford to make fun of that template three times over. The Last Action Hero is exactly the kind of genre deconstruction Shane Black does better than anyone, and the movie managed to pull of the difficult trick of showing its plot machinery while still working as an exciting and hilarious crowd-pleaser. Demolition Man had as much fun playing with action movie tropes as it did with the idea of a joyless politically-correct world gone mad.

    More notoriously, Hudson Hawk set those conventions in a deeply absurd world that paid homage to 60s spoofery (e.g. The Pink Panther, the Flint movies) as well as Silver’s actioners. Both movies suffered the same fate as Con Air, their satire missed or ignored by audiences and critics alike. Making fun of these solid conventions is a tough trick to pull off. Trey Parker and Matt Stone had to use puppets to make sure the comedic point of Team America: World Police wasn’t missed.

    To this list of action satires can be added G-Force. Though it’s not as successful at making fun of the stable it comes from as the other movies mentioned above, it is still silly and self-lacerating enough to stand alongside them. The film opens with a team of secret agents infiltrating the home of Leonard Saber (Bill Nighy, excellent as usual), the shady owner of electronics and appliances firm Saberling Industries (is this a nod to director Brad Silberling? And if so, why?). Though the mission is successful, their mentor — FBI scientist Ben (a subdued Zach Galafianakis) – has operated without authorisation from the supervisor he is trying to impress (Will Arnett, not given enough to do), and the team is disbanded. Separated from Ben, team leader Darwin (Hott Sam Rockwell) rallies his colleagues and tries to prove the nefariousness of Saber while eluding Arnett’s agent goons, who seek to capture the team to use in experiments.

    Bit harsh, but then the team is made up of guinea-pigs (and Nicholas Cage’s mole computer expert Speckles). As you can imagine, a lot of the comedy in the movie comes from the sight of well-animated guinea-pigs wise-cracking and getting into various scrapes involving grappling hooks, skateboards and motorised exercise balls. There are also almost unbearable wisecracks and cultural catchphrases quoted at depressing length as in the worst kind of sub-par cheap-skate animation: if there is anything that made my enjoyment of the movie drop to worrying depths, it was the stream of unfunny puns from Blaster (Tracy Morgan).

    The movie is at is funniest when it plays things as straight as possible, with the team of tiny mammals acting like stereotypical covert spies and computer experts, spewing tech-speak as if they were action movie archetypes. Such straight-faced chatter is overused in modern movies and usually bears only a passing resemblance to real life: many of my favourite moments in 24 come from hearing CTU computer experts panicking over opening sockets and tasking satellites. Nevertheless, we take it for granted that this is how these people speak, until these words come out of the mouths of CGI guinea-pigs. Re-contextualised, the absurdity of these action movies — and the oeuvre of Bruckheimer — is exposed to the light of scrutiny.

    Better than that is the flirty sparring between Darwin, Blaster, and female guinea pig Juarez (Penélope Cruz). Not only does she rebel against a young girl’s attempts to feminise her with dresses and make-up (a refreshing change to see a female character unsoftened by this kind of brainwashing), she also plays both men off each other in order to win their affection on her terms.  It genuinely sounds like a romantic sub-plot from another movie drafted in without alteration. The effect is discombobulating.

    I wasn’t the only person delighted by this playfulness. The Guardian’s David Cox (the only critic working on that paper who seemed to understand what Tarantino was trying to do with Inglourious Basterds) wrote an excellent piece about G-Force‘s satirical bent, while pretty much every other critic waved it away with a bleat about how it was mere summer-movie kids fodder with not a thought in its mind. Tasha Robinson of the AV Club stated:

    Pointing out G-Force’s plot holes would be redundant; it’s more hole than plot, and more videogame commercial and exhausted-old-trope clearinghouse than film. Events follow each other with a sublime disregard for coherence or story continuity.

    Thus missing the point. Her comments about the plot are especially aggravating as screenwriters Cormac and Marianne Wibberley have done a good job of emulating the tried-and-true action plots of recent times, and from where I was sitting it seemed watertight.

    Even more surprising was the considerable emotional charge therein. While I was less invested in the sub-plot involving team leader Darwin and his brother Hurley (Jon Favreau), the final act revelations about the villain and the true reason for his evil plotting is unexpectedly powerful. Though even I would baulk at claiming the movie is some kind of classic, or even one of the year’s best, I cannot lie about the effect the final fifteen minutes had on me. In those moments what had been a fun diversion with a cunning sense of its own absurdity became a real dramatic triumph, helped by first-time director Yeatman’s nifty handling of the final act action scenes. The sight of an enormous robot rising out of Bill Nighy’s estate and raining space debris down on FBI officers is an image I won’t be forgetting any time soon.

    I strongly feel a little gem has been ignored in the rush to damn a movie for wasting the time of critics who would much rather be watching L’Avventura. Bruckheimer is man enough to know that the product he churns out has a formula. Here he has given Yeatman and the Wibberleys permission to have fun with that template, and we’re all the better for it. Even the seemingly lazy witticisms could be seen to be digs at the usual macho catchphrases of action heroes, though I’ll admit they truly do test the patience.

    Nevertheless, even if that is a satirical dig too far, the voicework is spirited enough to dispel the audience’s annoyance. I’m tempted to say this is worth renting just to listen to an almost unrecognisable Nicolas Cage, channeling his Charlie Bodell voice. His work is almost solely responsible for G-Force‘s most satisfying moments and, along with his turn in Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, signals a real return to form. For that, and for exceeding my expectations so completely, I shall seek to defend G-Force from lazy criticism from now until someone comes up with an equation proving me wrong.

    What Now For Horror?

    Posted on by

    For the first time in a long while, Halloween was a real event at Shades of Caruso HQ. Sure, we’ve had pumpkins and decorations before, which were fun, and absolutely no Trick-or-Treaters, which was even better, but this year I was hit with the sense that the day was imbued with some kind of unholy significance, far more so than usual. A pumpkin was carved…

    pumpkin4

    …and horror movies were watched. Twitter greatly helped. Scary videos, photos of costumes, and blog articles celebrating Samhain were linked to, creating a real sense of event. Twitter does a few things really well, and being a sort of mini-aggregator of topical observations and relevant information is top of that list. It really tied the night together.

    The one thing that let the whole experience down were the movies we decided to watch, which were either thoroughly awful or distractingly inconsistent. The best of them was the insane mega-hit Paranormal Activity, which has become the most profitable movie of all time after grossing $85m on a $15000 budget. It’s a terribly flawed movie, filled with banal dialogue and repetitive arguments, not to mention tortuous plot contrivances that keep the conceit floating. Some of the best moments are punctured by the behaviour of Micah, whose defiantly obnoxious confidence — a plot requisite, sadly — doesn’t sit well with the really quite terrifying events surrounding him. Special mention here to the amusement he greets an EVP recording of his girlfriend’s demon. As someone who has long been utterly terrified of the sound of unearthly events captured on tape (this book fucked me up as a kid), the moment should have been chilling, but having this doofy jerkbag giggling and goading the demon on ruined the moment.

    paranormalactivity

    And yet, and yet… Let’s just say that there are several moments in the film that gave me the fear, and one in particular nearly made me give up on the film entirely, it was so scary. Writer-director Oren Peli has hit on a magic formula that is effective and durable enough to survive the distracting necessities of the plot mechanics that hobble the movie, with help from committed performers Katie Featherston (this year’s Scream Queen for sure) and Micah Sloat. Who cares about the contrivance, or the unpleasant behaviour of Micah, or the late-movie YouTube exorcism silliness that complicates the hair-thin plot? None of that matters. When Micah’s camera switches on at night, and the creaking starts, you forget every annoying thing that you had to go through to get there, and you instantly put yourself in their position. You’re going to be asleep later, and you’re going to be unaware of what’s going on. The scares in the movie — manifested with absolute mastery of the craft — are one thing. What makes the movie so terrifying is knowing that you are going to bed later. It’s impossible not to imagine yourself in the same situation, and that’s the scariest thing of all.

    Luckily for my sanity, the resolution of the film is more mundane than the build-up, which blunted the effect of the film. For most of the running time we can’t understand the motives of the demon haunting Katie. Terrorising her from childhood is one thing, and the thought that Katie will never be able to escape her psychic torture is more upsetting than the actual resolution, but as this is a movie with a finite running time, we have to have a resolution. I’m not sure what Peli could have done to fix this problem, and the fact that the movie has three different endings suggests he wasn’t sure either. A disappointment, then, but a disappointment that touches greatness at times, and lingers in the mind far longer than you would like.

    katiefeatherston

    Though Paranormal Activity invites comparison with 1999′s The Blair Witch Project, it’s still very much of its time. When considered alongside Matt Reeves’ Cloverfield and Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza’s magnificent [Rec], this kind of faux-subjective horror — with the line between onscreen participant and viewer blurred — has become one of the most significant innovations in horror cinema of the past twenty years, and has surprisingly been used rarely enough to still feel fresh. Certainly, though the genre seemed to be in a rut during that period, Blair Witch and [Rec] are two of the most effective horror movies around, arguably more so than almost all others, and have revitalised the traditional horror sub-genres (ghost story, zombie movie, monster attack).

    That’s not to say the genre has been completely moribund. The other horror movies that have stood out – certainly in my view — are partially most effective for playing off real-world fears that have been ignored by numerous tedious slasher films, remakes of Japanese techno-ghost stories or “torture” movies. In a world where increasing automation and computerised interaction has made us less likely to wander out of our comfort zones, the best horror movies of recent times have worked on our fear of other people, where stressful situations make us turn on each other. While a lot of horror concerns the Fear of the Other, as the groups we ally ourselves with shrink in size we find The Other is not that alien any more. The Descent, The Ruins and The Mist all feature characters trapped in horrific environments, surrounded by unthinkable horror, but ultimately these movies are upsetting because of the way the protagonists react to these threats. In all three the most dangerous thing you can encounter is the person standing next to you, who is probably someone you have known all your life.

    theruins

    The thought that it is not the Other that could provide the horror, but maybe even you yourself if pushed the wrong way — by betrayal in the case of The Descent, politics and religious intolerance in The Mist, and allegorical Idiocracy-style selfishness and ignorance in The Ruins — is where the real horror lies. My other favourite horror movie of the past few years — James Watkins’ gut-wrenching Eden Lake — is as topical as The Ruins or The Mist, with two well-to-do UK city-folk undone by their inability to respect their countrified brethren. Their fate is sealed when they antagonise some children — The Other — but protagonist Jenny’s ultimate doom is provided by people who should be on her side. Hell really is other people. As we increasingly use the Internet to interact, and often realise that being physically present with other people is a mixed blessing, it’s tempting to think that the current popularity of the zombie genre is down to the cathartic pleasure of seeing hordes of “people” mown down. It’s the most misanthropic of horror sub-genres, and increasingly the one where the appeal of it seems to be watching the violence we can perpetrate upon surrogate humans without worrying about morality getting in the way as much as it is the thrill of being menaced by something unpleasant.

    During our weekend of horror we also watched some endearing throwbacks to previous horror eras, though sadly they left us even more cold. Ti West’s House of The Devil has been attracting attention and rave reviews for its intentionally retrograde approach. Set in the 80s, West fills his movie with period detail: feathered haircuts, synth soundtrack, clunky Walkman etc. He also spends much time setting up an atmosphere instead of throwing a bunch of youngsters into a rusty basement to have their teeth pulled out. About 75% of the movie shows college student Samantha (played by Saffron Burrows lookalike Jocelyn Donahue) walking around a creepily deserted campus and an even creepier isolated house, as she babysits an old woman for Tom Noonan and Mary Woronov. We’re talking about half an hour of walking around a campus, and then half an hour of walking around a house, with as little plot as a short movie expanded to feature length.

    tomnoonan

    Though I certainly didn’t take against West’s movie, and though it had several pleasurable things to recommend it (casting Noonan and Woronov certainly makes up for a lot of the movie’s flaws), I suspect a lot of the praise heaped on House of the Devil is for what it isn’t, rather than for what it is. It’s not torture porn. It’s not a shitty remake of a slasher classic. It’s not edited into an incomprehensible, staccato mess. It generates atmosphere instead of relying too much on turning the volume up to jolt the viewer. It’s paying its respects to the horror movies adored by a certain sub-set of movie critics. It has charm and is made with reverent love, and never once feels like a cheap cash-in. For those reasons, it is to be applauded.

    For the most part there is little dialogue and a couple of shock jump moments (in their defence, they’re earned), but also lots and lots of longueurs. West goes the extra mile in setting up an atmosphere of eerie stillness before things kick off in the final act, but as with a lot of average horror movies from the past, that involves having very little happen very slowly. The 95 minute running time feels a lot longer, and by the time the scares arrive, there’s a good chance you’ll be bored. Is this a result of eroded attention spans? Or has West balanced the film wrong? It doesn’t help that the finale is overplayed to the point of not being that scary after all, shooting past “effectively scary” to settle at the total opposite end of the horror spectrum.

    houseofthedevil

    As for West’s influences, sometimes they seem to have inspired him too literally. Like the runty child of Rosemary’s Baby and The Dunwich Horror (with a pinch of The Medusa Touch), it serves up something we’ve seen a million times before which, after the long wait to get there, is just not enough. I’d even argue that it’s got its eras mixed up. While the film goes out of its way to add 80s period details, the pace and subject matter of the movie feel more suited to the 70s, like something Roger Corman and Samuel Z. Arkoff would have made before The Exorcist and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre came along and changed the rules of the genre. 80s horror movies were pacier and often sillier than this, and if you’re going to pay homage to that era, you need to have more going on.

    As in Michael Dougherty’s Trick ‘r Treat, which was a proper 80s horror homage right down to its bones. Ostensibly an anthology of tales linked by a couple of common threads, Dougherty pays tribute to numerous horror classics while playfully subverting expectations. Hoary horror conventions that are given a sprucing up include the sexuality of the vampire, the vulnerability of young virgins, townsfolk trying to kill a group of undesirables who then come back from the grave, the pillar of the community who has a terrible secret, the Bad Seed, and the unstoppable killing machine seemingly intent on enforcing some bizarre rules. By the end of the film, the nods to other films were keeping me more entertained than the narrative tricks or the lacklustre scares: The Howling, The Thing, Fright Night, Pumpkinhead, The Evil Dead, Nightmare on Elm Street 1 and 2, Creepshow, Pet Sematery, The Company of Wolves, Halloween (obviously)… There’s almost too many to count. While House of the Devil serves up the familiar and hopes it will still scare us, here Dougherty simply tries to pay respectful homage.

    samfromtrickrtreat

    This approach has its pros and cons. On the plus side Dougherty captures the look of 80s cinema with images full of rich golds, reds and oranges, not to mention leaf-strewn suburban streets, Bacchanalian fire-lit orgies of violence, and use of the frame that calls to mind vintage Carpenter and Dante. It’s a gorgeous movie, despite its low-budget, but as with House of the Devil it’s low on scares. The balance of the movie falls too heavily on the lighter side, which wouldn’t really be a problem at any other time of the year, but after seeing something as soil-yourself-scary as Paranormal Activity it couldn’t help but feel like a bit of a letdown. While the intertwined stories and narrative surprises are cleverly unravelled by the end, all four tales (and the two linking arcs) feel underdeveloped, even taking into account the bigger picture. It’s Love Actually Syndrome. Four two-act tales linked together do not replace one tale with three acts. As much fun as Trick ‘R Treat is (and it is a lot of fun), it can leave the viewer unsatisfied. Consider it recommended, however, especially if you grew up loving any of the movies listed above.

    All three movies feel like throwbacks in one way or another (if you’re ungenerous and take Paranormal Activity to be a straight rip of Blair Witch), but the fourth movie we watched over the Halloween weekend was very much a modern mainstream horror movie. Jaume Collet-Serra’s demented Orphan was probably more thriller than horror movie, but with the various Catholic orphanages, wintery settings, bloody carnage and concerned nuns — not to mention that it is a Dark Castle Entertainment picture — it felt very much of a piece with everything else we had seen. Except terrible. Vera Farmiga and Peter Sarsgaard (resembling a pudgy, effeminate Keifer Sutherland with a bad case of narcolepsy) adopt a Russian child after Farmiga’s third pregnancy ends in disaster. Haunted by this, a previous alcohol dependence, and an accident that left her second child deaf, Farmiga puts all her hopes of recovering from her past on the new child, who sadly turns out to be a murderous psychopath who tears the family apart with psychological games, a can of lighter fluid, and a big hammer.

    ORPHAN

    The movie starts unpleasant and stupid, and gets more unpleasant and stupid than you can possibly imagine. During its initial theatrical release, an internet meme appeared that claimed the murderous child (Esther, played with astonishing eerie skill by 12-year old Isabelle Fuhrman) was actually a Lithuanian hooker born with dwarfism. This rendered the movie impossible to take seriously, though the actual reveal at the end is just as silly and possibly even tackier, especially when taken with some absurd third-act loose-end-tying of breathtaking clunkiness (I’m thinking of the frozen pond, here).

    It certainly seems odd… nay, depressing that something this catastrophic and tasteless can be made with a cast of talented actors such as Farmiga, Sarsgaard (in a career-worst performance filled with drowsy histrionics), Margo Martindale and poor CCH Pounder. What’s worse is that a far superior movie with a similar plot was released in 2007 to massive indifference. George Ratliff’s Joshua starred Hott Sam Rockwell and Farmiga as — again — parents dealing with the psychological manipulations of a devious child, and again hamstrung by their inability to deal with this threat due to the perceived vulnerability of their nemesis (echoes of Watkins’ Eden Lake there). Ratliff created an atmospheric and disturbing tale with almost no tricksiness, relying instead on talented actors portraying people at the end of their tether. Collet-Serra — who, let us not forget, is part of the Pointless Remake Brigade thanks to his astonishingly tedious Paris Hilton vehicle House of Wax — has no interest in creating something as challenging as this, despite his excellent cast, relying instead on cheap shock tricks, over-direction, gothic lighting and unsubtle musical cues. Luckily, it’s hilariously wrong, and littered with bizarre tonal and directorial mistakes. It’s not quite a failure along the lines of, say, Shyamalan’s The Happening, but it’s damn close.

    isabellefuhrman&pounder

    When critics praise House of the Devil for being a breath of fresh air, it is garish, tawdry nonsense like Orphan that they’re comparing it to. After seeing it the other movies of the weekend seemed much better by comparison. It was particularly amusing to note that the frenetically edited Orphan generated not even a fraction of the tension created by Paranormal Activity which contains hardly any cuts at all, in defiance of Hitchcock’s theories on editing. Sadly none of these Halloween movies thrilled me as much as the movies I linked to a horror renaissance in this post (scroll down). Pastiche can be fun, but unless it has something else there, it can be little more than an empty exercise in playing off nostalgic feelings, and suggests a lack of imagination in the filmmaker. A working knowledge of the various developmental stages of a genre, allied with a vivid imagination, can give us something as respectfully constructed as Juan Antonio Bayona’s The Orphanage – which is a classic ghost story in the mold of The Haunting and The Innocents that pays homage to its forebears and then becomes its own thing — or something that bursts conventions like Tomas Alfredson’s Let The Right One In. This year, pastiche had its pleasures, but didn’t take the next step. The closest we got was seeing Sam Raimi return to what he does best with Drag Me To Hell. It was pure joy, yet another wonderful amalgam of disturbing comedy and silly horror from the man who gave us Evil Dead II. Of course, when you’re making a pastiche of a sub-sub-genre of horror that you yourself invented, it’s going to be hard to fuck it up.

    So is there cause for concern? I’d argue no. This year the only completely satisfying straight horror movie I’ve experienced is Lars Von Trier’s harrowing Antichrist, which is one of the most astonishing sensory assaults in recent memory. Doused in unpleasant atmosphere and featuring imagery that will probably haunt me for years to come, even if Von Trier’s intent was not to make a great horror movie — he’s more interested in parsing his recent depression, and exploring recurrent themes like violent misogyny and humanity’s destructive urges — he managed to create something that disturbs more than anything else released this year. That’s not just because of the now-notorious genital mutilation scene. That one moment — which is utterly horrifying but not exploitative — would not be anywhere near as effective if it were not for Von Trier’s command of mood up to that point.

    antichrist

    While it certainly doesn’t look or feel like anything in the mainstream of the genre, there’s the hope that other filmmakers will see what Von Trier has done with the conventions of the genre, mixing fairy tale imagery, nightmarish atmospherics a la David Lynch, sustained suspense, extreme body horror, and an oppressive, Hideo-Nakata-esque dread to create something new, something chilling and unforgettable. Maybe Von Trier, who operates outside the sometimes claustrophobic and relentlessly self-referential confines of the world of horror cinema, will accidentally influence other horror filmmakers and bring about another evolution in the genre. It’s that or someone very very smart comes up with a new approach, just like Carpenter once did with Halloween. One can only hope.

    Note: This blogpost was not written in an attempt to exorcise the memory of Paranormal Activity from my branes so I can get a decent night’s sleep. Anyone suggesting this is the case is dead wrong. ::whimpers::