Listmania ’12! The Worst Movies Of The Year

Posted on January 3, 2013 by admiralneck

Rather worryingly, it was a lot easier to get this list up to thirty than the best movies list, and I even had to stop watching bad movies because otherwise I’d never have finished. There were so many candidates this year that I ended up having to force myself to kinda sorta like some of them just to get them out of contention. As I said in the Best Movies list, this has been a shaky year for me with movies. I found myself becoming very disillusioned with the medium at one point, possibly because I’ve been writing and have found my patience for over-familiar storytelling tricks waning. It has caused much brow-furrowing, and as anyone who has met me knows, I have a lot of brow to furrow.

An important thing I want to say before I get into this. A lot of internet debate this year has concerned the politics of popular art (or maybe it’s always like this and I only just started following the people who talk about it the most). Much of it has been fascinating and illuminating, shaping the way I understand the responsibilities of storytellers, to the point that even more than in previous years I now respond very strongly to negative portrayals of women, persons of colour, members of the LGBT community, or anyone differently abled. However, one thing hasn’t changed, and that’s that I come to these movies as someone interested in the mechanics of story first. Some readers may think I should do it the other way around, but this is how I’m built, how I’ve been doing this for years, and it’s the approach that suits my (privileged white male) outlook the best.

Which is not to say I don’t care about such matters; I do, very much. However, I’ll always watch a film for the film first, and deal with the rest later, mostly because I’m more confident in assessing something through the storytelling lens than the political one, as I’ve been thinking as a storyteller for a lot longer than I have as an analyst of political messages (and I’m always going to be in the process of learning more about both). If a film does interesting or worthy things on a story level, I won’t automatically ignore or excuse its political problems; my praise will be tempered, but I’ll still feel compelled to commend what works.

For example, Jack Reacher has massive problems in how it treats women, which made me livid, but in terms of directorial approach and storytelling tricksiness I loved it, so I’m on the fence about it. Only when we become fixated on binary love/hate reactions would such a thing be a problem, but I’ve always tried to see films as an aggregation of different variables, so I can like something for one reason, hate it for another. The truncated nature of social media, and the subsequent removal of nuance, means it often feels like no one does that any more, though I’m sure I’m wrong on that one. Right?

As for the movies on this list, they’re here because I think they failed on a storytelling or artistic level, and all deserve to be here for that reason alone, but the top ten especially seemed to fill up very quickly with movies that committed both crimes against storytelling and people. I will inevitably come across as a humourless, overthinking, fun-averse chide during this post, but as I wrote it I realised how angry some of these films made me, so my usual chirpiness vanished. This is where trying to have an open mind gets me; watching everything in the hope that I’ll find a misunderstood gem means I have to wade through an ocean of fecal matter to get the odd gem.

Anyway, apologies for the traditional caveats. Two more quick ones before I get into it: sadly I haven’t seen Atlas Shrugged Part 2 in time for this, which is a shame as it’s supposed to be worse than the first one and that topped last year’s list with ease. This is the Bad Movie List equivalent of not seeing Django Unchained or Zero Dark Thirty before finishing the Good Movie List. Also, please don’t be offended by any selections here that you liked. Nothing here is meant as a judgement on anyone other than the people who made the films, and even then their failure is often the result of a badly-tossed coin rather than anything more worrisome. If you liked any of the movies here, then it fit your Criteria For Success, as I’ve taken to calling it, which is obviously fine as no two people have the same ones. And that’s cool. These just really weren’t for me, and that means nothing in the scheme of things. Though really, number two in this list is just flat-out fucking horrible.

25. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part Two

It wouldn’t be a worst of the year list if it didn’t include a Twilight movie at some point, though from next year onwards Shades of Caruso will have to figure out a way to cope without our least favourite supernatural bores. Our long, international ordeal is over. Bella and Edward are together, like they were pretty early on in the first film and continued to be for the majority of the series; a perfect example of that depressing narrative stasis I’ve been complaining about for half a decade. So, considering how high these films have been on each year’s worst list, why is this at no. 25 and not, say, no. 1, like when Return of the King won all those Oscars? Because this one was actually sporadically entertaining, with a bit more Michael Sheen than usual, a crazy mid-movie sequence involving some hastily introduced story-padding vampire eccentrics, one undead ghoul with the brilliant super-power of “PARALYSING VAPOURS” which made me laugh for a week, and a fantastic big finale fight that left me reeling with shock. But in that case, I hear you cry, why is it on the list if you liked it so much? Because of one choice made right at the end that invalidates everything that has happened, meaning that once more we get absolutely no narrative progression at all. It’s two hours of waiting for something to happen, only for that thing not to happen. The book contains no dramatic impetus and the only way the movie can get around that is by lying to the audience. It’s a very entertaining lie, but it’s still unacceptable. Goodbye. Twilight, thanks for the laughs. But I won’t miss you. Not really.

24. [REC]³ Génesis

Since Evil Dead 2 a lot of horror comedies have hewed to a very familiar template; while Kevin Williamson, Joss Whedon, Drew Goddard, and Robert Rodriguez have tried to break open the genre to figure out how it works, most filmmakers have been content to mimic Raimi’s groundbreaking work by throwing some monsters at a group of protagonists in order for them to be dispatched in as grisly a way as possible. It’s the easiest kind of transgressive cinema, with slapstick taken to the logical, unpleasant extreme; tread on a rake in one of these films and your head will fly off and land in a nun’s lap, probably. The third in the [Rec] series eschews the intensity of the previous installments in favour of laughs; a promising way to inject new life into a franchise that was finding it hard to maintain its found footage format. Sadly the result is an underpowered and overfamiliar gross-out comedy that often resembles the execrable Torchwood episode Something Borrowed, itself guilty of mimicking Raimi’s horror-comedy landmark. Juxtaposing the horror of a demonic zombie plague with a wedding ceremony sounds promising but instead all we get is some depressing wacky hijinks from some of the guests and a bit of unimaginative gore. Less scary than Lamberto Bava’s Demons, to which it bears passing resemblance, and disappointingly low on laughs, this might only be as underwhelming as every other horror comedy clogging up the shelves, but considering the pedigree, and the damage it might do to the integrity of the ongoing [Rec] saga, it’s especially annoying. Let’s hope [Rec]: Apocalypse gets the franchise back on track.

23. The Five-Year Engagement

Many of the films on this list are by writers and directors with previous form. If you haven’t looked further down the list you’ll see that some of Shades of Caruso’s many bêtes noire are coming up. More depressingly, then there are misfires by people we like, and these entries are no fun to write. Nicholas Stoller and Jason Segel have, between them, been responsible for three films we think of very fondly; Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Get Him To The Greek and The Muppets are a big deal in SoC HQ. You can imagine how excited we were when we heard they were collaborating again, this time on what they trumpeted as the ultimate romantic comedy. They studied the classics, they analysed the conventions, they stuck to the rules, and yet this is what we got; two hours of contrived stasis, with a malfunctioning and unconvincing premise as its spine. And where were the jokes? Even the Reality-Bending Charisma Storm that is Emily Blunt (future Monarch of the post-apocalyptic Human Alliance of Planets; you heard it here first) can do nothing here other than make you wince in horror at the indignities poured upon her. It’s rote, it’s mechanical, it’s absurdly drawn-out, much like the titular engagement. Only a spirited final scene registers in the memory, but what a slog to get there. God knows what it was like before the reshoots that occurred before release. What should have been one of the best examples in this genre has turned out to be one of the worst; a how-to manual that unexpectedly ends up showing future storytellers how-not-to instead.

22. Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance

How to disappoint Shades of Caruso part 2. When I heard that Neveldine / Taylor were going to make a sequel to Ghost Rider – one of our favourite bad movie indulgences – I was thrilled. With money and support there was a chance that their chaotic and ballsy visual approach would yield dividends, a suspicion bolstered by a trailer showing Johnny Blaze pissing fire. This was what we wanted; some honest-to-god madness, and none of Mark Steven Johnson’s hesitance. But again, this weirdness of this character defied the attempt to translate him / it to a new medium. Neveldine / Taylor’s madness only really works when the stakes in their movies don’t matter. We don’t give really give a shit about Chev Chelios’ survival, except that his death would mean the end of the movie. As N / T don’t care either, and are only interested in throwing more random imagery at the camera in the weirdest ways possible, it works. But Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance has a sympathetic protagonist and attempts to create a goal for him to achieve, people to protect. Fine, except that this ends up feeling like scenes from two movies shuffled together, and we see how hollow it truly their approach is. N / T don’t know how to make us care, but even worse they don’t seem to realise that they’re meant to. The result is truly disheartening, and hints that early suspicions about N / T are true; they don’t actually know what they’re doing. It’s on them to prove me wrong. This boring, ugly mess is not the way to go about it. That said, my main men Cage and DJ Big Driis are awesome in it, at least.

21. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

Movies set in India tend to make me nervous, with Western filmmakers treating the country like some kind of magical spiritual wonderland. I blame The Beatles. Slumdog Millionaire annoyed me for its flaws as a film, more than anything, and Darjeeling Limited walked a fine line, falling mostly on the side of satirising the idiocy and ignorance of its rich protagonists rather than making some patronising argument about the virtues of the country. Eat, Pray, Love‘s trivialisation of issues like poverty and depression, on the other hand, were unforgivable, and while watching Best Exotic Marigold Hotel I held onto the thin argument that at least John Madden and Ol Parker’s adaptation of Deborah Moggach’s novel wasn’t as clueless as that. But the depiction of the honest poor of India is still wince-inducing and overly sincere, most horribly seen in Dev Patel’s gallumphing performance as the cowering simpleton running the old folk’s home. Even worse is the pandering, shallow guff about living life to the full even when old, reducing the characters to two-dimensions, their arc a binary switch which will be flicked during the final act in a tornado of predictable uplift. The cast contains many of my favourite actors, doing their best with the weak source material, but compared to Hope Springs, which dealt with the complications of old age in a more sensitive and measured way, this comes across as just yet another mechanical British movie about overcoming adversity, devoid of genuine warmth and humanity despite the great performances from almost everyone involved.

20. Taken 2

The first Taken was one of the most surprising box office hits of recent years. Why this movie? Films about action men killing swarthy foreigners are a dime a dozen and have been for years. Liam Neeson wasn’t a huge box office draw, and neither was Maggie Grace. It didn’t have anything that seemed to be a hook and yet it made $145m in the US. The uncharitable reading is that it appealed to an undercurrent of xenophobia in a sub-section of the populace, but thanks to Pierre Morel’s taut direction it is at least, for all its faults, a compelling action movie, and Neeson’s re-emergence as an action hero makes a lot of sense as the film powers towards its conclusion. So how to explain Taken 2‘s popularity? This time let’s chalk it up to familiarity with the format, and the now-justified position of Neeson as box office powerhouse, because this doesn’t even have competence as a variable. Morel did wonders with Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen’s traditionally tin-eared dialogue and threadbare plotting, but Oliver Megaton is unable to bring anything to the table other than straight-to-DVD-level mundanity and brain-scrambling editing used to hide the thin, unappealing footage. Without lizard-brain appeal this franchise’s shortcomings are laid horribly bare, and Neeson and villainous Rade Sherbedzija, both men with inbuilt gravitas, can do nothing to save it. Back in the day we had Silver Pictures to churn out a series of cheap but wry and appealing action movies; Besson and Kamen should stay in and watch a bunch of them one weekend to see how high the bar is really set.

19. One For The Money

Funny that this came out at the beginning of the year, and Jack Reacher came out at the end. Both are about characters in popular novels, both were turned into star vehicles by actors who desperately needed a new tentpole franchise to call their own, both were rejected by the fans as entirely wrong for the part. And yet, while Jack Reacher is made with care and attention to detail – while preserving the worst and most beloved aspects of its source material – One For The Money is one of the laziest films in recent memory. It all hinges on Katherine Heigl’s charms, and if you’re resistant then this is a tough slog, but to be fair her spiky personality is better matched with protagonist Stephanie Plum’s brassy NJ persona than fans of Janet Evanovitch’s novel would accept. Sadly Heigl struggles to inject any life into this still-born project, which neither amuses or excites. On top of that there’s a tedious romantic subplot that makes the recent atrocious The Bounty Hunter look like a Hepburn / Tracy classic. If this mini-review seems to lack detail that’s because this eminently forgettable film left my mind within minutes of the credits rolling. All I can recall with full confidence is that 90 minutes felt like 16 hours, and the only thing I got from it was a rage headache at all that wasted time.

18. Snow White and the Huntsman

As if we didn’t already have enough reason to hate Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, still the most maddening piece of cultural vandalism that this blog has seen in its time on the net. Its incredible, baffling success means “fairy tales” are in, triggering the genesis of Jack The Giant Killer and Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters. ::pauses to sigh wearily:: It also gave us two Snow White movies. Mirror, Mirror is merely a leaden star vehicle for Julia Roberts, with Tarsem’s usual visual business curiously lacking in oomph this time around. Rupert Sanders’ Huntsman, on the other hand, is one of the more depressing films of the summer, finding its own success despite offering nothing but a listless mishmash of tones in search of a unifying idea. It’s got a bit of Twilight, not just in the casting of Kristen Stewart as Bella Swan with a sword, but also the love triangle between her, the Prince of the original tale and the Huntsman who searches for her, his role in the tale beefed up past breaking point. It’s got lots of Lord of the Rings too, not realising that expanding the original Grimm tale with courtly drama and big action scenes means empty spectacle without a complex and well-imagined world to build on. There’s even some faux-Miyazaki stuff about the spirit of the forest lifted almost directly from Princess Mononoke. But this is no light-footed genre mish-mash. It’s just the lining of a magpie’s nest, shot like an advert by a man who doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing, with only an over-thought, noted-to-death script as a guide. The dead-end of the genre; next to this even mad shit from the 80s like Hawk The Slayer looks visionary.

17. Take This Waltz

Sarah Polley’s second movie may not have won as many critical plaudits as her first movie — Away From Her — but it still got multiple award nominations and festival raves. Certainly Polley does something very welcome in taking on a thorny subject with a refreshingly non-judgemental approach, detailing the slow and regrettable dissolution of a marriage as the protagonist, Margot, makes a choice to take control of her life and allow herself to fall for another man. Affairs in films are usually used to make “slut-shaming” judgements on women for their wanton ways, so Polley’s decision to make this choice an empowering one for Margot is commendable. However, to do this means we get a full 90 minutes walking on the spot as Margot, played as a cutesy child-woman by Michelle Williams, agonises over her choice in scene after scene of overplayed, near-unwatchable stasis, eroding the sympathy of any audience member with a low-threshold for meandering storytelling. Take This Waltz spends so much time justifying Margot’s choice, clearing her of any possible audience negativity, that the whole film seems like a defensive argument, blunting the drama of her choices and making her seem more a fool for taking so long than a brave woman taking control of her destiny. It leads to a lopsided film that lacks the courage of its convictions, made worse by its unbearable mopey characters and their self-consciously twee behavior; to endure Luke Kirby’s drawn-out-beyond-the-limits-of-endurance café seduction scene is to know burning, soul-deep agony.

16. What To Expect When You’re Expecting

The thought that movies are being made of pregnancy guides and relationship advice manuals has caused much hilarity and/or despair among the critical community, but as I argued in this review of Battleship, it doesn’t really matter where you find your inspiration from as long as the end product is worthwhile. This is not worthwhile. Using a similar structure to Garry Marshall’s Valentines Day / New Year’s Eve ensemble pieces, WTEWYE addresses a number of different scenarios involving childbirth, from adoption to miscarriage to the long road to birth, but while the book offers advice and tips on how to cope, this has nothing but cheap jokes, clumsy slapstick, and a strange balance in which there seems to be more time spent dealing with how the fathers will cope than the mothers, who are only really present to be hysterical. That’s not its main crime, and neither is the depiction of one character’s miscarriage, which is as movie-convenient and insultingly sugar-coated as you’d imagine in a light comedy. The true horror comes when J-Lo’s childlessness triggers a tearful rant during which she says of herself, “I’m the one who can’t do the one thing that a woman is supposed to be able to do.” Yes. The one thing — THE ONE THING — that a woman is supposed to do. Of all the things I saw in 2012, that probably generated the most vocal reaction of disgust. Good job I didn’t see it in a cinema, or I’d have gone Shoshanna Dreyfus on the building.

15. Intouchables

Kicking this feel-good movie about a paraplegic and his carer feels like torturing a puppy, but sometimes needs must. While sincerity in films is a big plus point as far as we’re concerned, when it tips over into oleaginous sentimentality we close the door and never look back. Olivier Nakache and Éric Toledano’s dramatisation of their documentary A la vie, à la mort looks like it’s on solid ground, transcribing reality into life-affirming cinema, but once separated from reality the temptation to coat this tale in sugar seems to have been irresistible. Much of the movie is spent presenting Philippe’s depression as being easily cured by the intervention of Driss, but this eagerness to show the efficacy of all that dancing and lovable hamminess from Omar Sy means the film is dangerously lopsided, and the second act crisis – in which Driss quits for plot convenience – is so feeble they might as well have not bothered. It’s inert on a dramatic level and cutesy to an intolerable degree; two terrible strikes against it. But then we have the deeply questionable decision to change the real life carer – an Algerian – to an African who is pathologically lazy and thoughtless. So we have the stereotype of the lazy black man transformed by the benevolence and friendship of the cultured and affluent white male, compounded by the also-included trope of the square middle-class guy learning to live life thanks to a Magical Negro. And France chose this as their Foreign Language Academy Award nominee instead of the far-superior Rust and Bone? FFS.

14. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

There are two ways to make a movie based on a gimmicky idea like Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter; make a dumb joke out of it or go serious. Comedy would be an insult to the people who fought and died in the Civil War and the fight against slavery, so you don’t want to do that. Of course, pretending that it was vampires that almost split America down the middle, and caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people is also an insult to the people who fought and died in the Civil War and the fight against slavery, but Seth Grahame-Smith and Timur Bekmambetov seem to see no problem in trivialising the issue in this manner. Quentin Tarantino has received considerable flack for addressing slavery in the context of a Spaghetti Western homage but from all accounts he goes all out in depicting the horror of the South’s treatment of African-Americans, whereas this spectacularly misjudged debacle barely drew any criticism for saying, “yeah, the enslavement of over four million slaves by Americans was bad, but hell, it could have been vampires doing it.” SERIOUSLY, WHY WAS NO ONE BOTHERED BY THIS? Is it just because it’s a metaphorical use of vampires? Why bother doing that when the thought that humans would commit this crime is more potent than adding supernatural elements? This doesn’t illuminate the issue, or bring a new perspective to it. It just takes tragedy and turns it into an instantly forgettable Syfy-worthy one off, not even making up for its redundancy by being exciting, or funny, or even alive on screen. Now that I think about it, there’s actually a third way to tell this tale; don’t make a movie about it, just treat it as the mildly amusing idea for a Halloween costume that it actually is and leave it at that.

13. Dark Shadows

You can show me a hundred interviews with Tim Burton in which he claims that this adaptation of the quirky supernatural ABC soap opera is a dream project borne of his childhood love of the show, but that won’t make it seem any less like a movie Burton felt obligated to make, like he woke up one morning and said, “I guess it’s time to do that one,” before letting out a weary sigh and storyboarding the whole thing while his morning pot of coffee finished brewing (FYI he takes his coffee black because he’s a fucking Goth, you might have noticed). The realisation that this fantasy scenario might be accurate comes when you finally endure the desperately dreary movie and it occurs to you that Burton would have phoned his producer and sold it on the strength of the wacky sex scene, and his producer would have exclaimed, “Holy crap, I can see it now! Or rather, I can see the trailer!” And that’s because there’s nothing here we haven’t seen before. Dark Shadows is so perfunctory, so devoid of life or vibrancy, that it feels like you’ve already endured it before you have, but even then, with this dearth of imagination on display, you will still be astonished by the ill-thought-out plot that tries to mimic the soap opera format of the show by writing characters out after one or two key scenes — meaning the film never seems to settle down — or the seemingly endless first act in which Barnabas goes around the Collins household meeting people. Just meeting them. For, like, fifteen minutes. This isn’t cinema. It’s not even old TV. It’s just shit.

12. The Sweeney

While the James Bond franchise busies itself with the job of turning its out-of-date misogynistic asshole into a tortured, justifiably hateful shitbag we can all love – three dimensions of worthy but highly entertaining odiousness – this reboot of the beloved original doesn’t even bother to address the problematic 70s-era politically incorrect Jack-The-Lad hijinx, presenting it with no commentary as business as usual. Perhaps it should be commended for trying to remain faithful to its origins, but even to a target audience that has a Sweeney boxset at home and lectures its friends dahn the boozah abaht them PC wankahs will find this to be pretty thin gruel. Nick Love and co-writer John Hodge – yes, the man behind Trainspotting and Shallow Grave – do an unconvincing job of updating the original, taking a bunch of cliches and adding in the names “Carter” and “Regan” every so often, ladling in some excruciatingly dated banter about them birds and making sure the bad guy is a Serb for extra Guardian-baiting fun. Ian Kennedy Martin would likely look at this metallic blue machine and weep. Not even for a moment does this feel like anything other than a rote retelling of a million other stories, yet another cash-in, hoping to make some money from the kind of incurious twerp who thinks Garry Bushell is a man of insight and courage. Watching a cast this good (well, Damian Lewis, Hayley Atwell and Ray Winstone) swallow their pride is enough to make you pray for the British film industry to immolate itself; we’ve got the accelerant right here.

11. Friends With Kids

Anyone reading this list of the year’s most horrible movies could end up thinking that Shades of Caruso is populated by terrible prudes, what with all the necklace-clutching over those off-colour comedies. Nothing could be further from the truth, but considering the glut of adult comedies released into the post-Apatow world like cum-scented Kudzu, someone has to take a stand. This shift from numb acceptance to active annoyance occurred midway through Jennifer Westfeldt’s Friends With Kids, an off-putting adult comedy about a woman who decides to have a child with her platonic best friend. Westfeldt wrote Kissing Jessica Stein, which I recall was frank about sex and relationships but never became unpleasant. This, on the other hand, seems to be overly aggressive in its urge to shock the audience with swearing and “daring” jokes. This might be the kind of thing a prude would say, but the crime here is not to be offensive but to drive past the point of acceptability, beyond where transgression is funny, to end up in a place where the tone is uncomfortably, relentlessly sour. It’s bad enough that Westfeldt’s premise is so unbelievable; the protagonists decide to go through with their plan on what feels like a whim, and are then required to snottily dismiss everyone around them in a whirlwind of misanthropic complaints. None of it rings true, and the convenient final act muting of that inappropriate voice to show growth comes out of nowhere. I’m sure Westfeldt would cry foul if I said the crass dialogue spouted by her hateful characters was a cynical choice, but even so, it feels like she jumped on a bandwagon and tragically misjudged how far she could go before alienating the viewer.

10. The Expendables 2

Perhaps the worst thing about the Expendables franchise – and with the second installment making $300 million, it’s fair to say that this is a franchise, not an anomaly – is that the idea behind it is so compelling to a sub-section of film fandom, so ripe with promise, that the dreary first movie is especially disappointing. But that movie is like a peak-era Silver Pictures film compared to this, something that even Golan and Globus would consider dumping in a lake and never talking about again. Eschewing the poorly dramatised double- and treble-crosses of the first film, Simon West’s sluggish sequel relies solely on the goodwill of the audience to ignore the threadbare plot, the underwritten villain, the overly familiar scenarios and flatly-shot action scenes. Because look! It’s everyone’s favourite birther, Chuck Norris, slowly walking into shot and referring to himself as a Lone Wolf! And look! Arnie and Bruce swap catchphrases! “Will this do?” screams the film, as we cut once more to Stallone looking like his batteries are about to run out. Apparently it will, if it’s going to make this much money. Less a homage to the best of the genre, more an out-of-date nightmare mutated through the introduction of irradiated dollars into a lumbering beast crushing the genre underfoot. Don’t put a copy of this on your DVD/Blu-Ray shelf; your copies of Die Hard, Predator, Lethal Weapon, The Killer, First Blood, Demolition Man, The Last Boy Scout, 48 Hours, Con Air, The Rock – even Action Jackson – will jump down and beat you to death for the insult.

9. The Lorax

At the forefront of culture, where sentiment’s free,
There’s a well-meaning well-spring of sanctimony.
A clattering chatter of serious chaps
Come to warn us of doom; Eco-horror collapse!
And plastic doohickeys that suck out the soul
Of we miserable fools, our dead hearts black as coal.

“Oh woe, these poor dopes — grasping, ignorant saps
With their claptrap and waffle and counterfeit crap.
Don’t they see,” cry the men, their hands wringing in fear,
“What dire fate lies in wait if our cries they don’t hear?”
So they commenced their project, to adapt a great book,
Spent ALL OF THE DOLLARS, begged, “Please, you must look!”

And what did they give us? A veritable onslaught
Of ads and promotions, TV spots with a cohort
Of fabulous faces; An orgasmical sight!
Taylor Swift and Zac Efron! Ed Helms! Betty White!
And there’s Danny DeVito, who was chosen to play
The thing they call LORAX, nature’s orange Sensei.

The Lorax was unleashed but, a curious thing;
We heard rumblings and mumblings; “Oh this movie doth ming!
It’s so garish and ugly and much more than a tad
Hypocritical and lousy and vapid and bad.
We know that the future holds horrible trials
For our kids and our kids’ kids; We’re not in denial.

“Yet you treat us as if we’re all deaf, dumb, and blind,
Preaching ‘caring for nature makes you virtuous, kind.
And also buy Mazda! Our corporate sponsor who
Makes cars that don’t run on splut-splatter goo.
No no no, someone else commits those crooked acts.
Mazda’s cars run on wishes, fairy farts; check the facts!’

“We see through your flim-flam, this insult to the truth
You exploit to justify selling trash to our youth.
This far, no further! (Oh yes, we went there). No more, please!
Our next generation knows it’s gotta save trees.
Admit it, you made this because of the guilt
At the towering shower of turds you have built.”

“So now,” say the victims of this loud, joyless screech,
“To those midwives who birthed it, of you we beseech:
It’s time that you ended this endless abuse
Of beloved and gentle and saintly Doc Seuss.
UNLESS filmmakers like you give up making this rot,
Nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”

8. The Watch

As time passes you realise that big summer movies that work are as rare as hen’s teeth, or sober compositions in a Tom Hooper movie. This means you cherish the ones that work; Ghostbusters, Raiders, Back to the Future; they all look better now than ever, while the underpowered nature of a half-competent sequel like Men in Black 3 casts the inventive original in an even better light. Those were movies that sweated the details, polishing a promising idea, adding layers of detail to create an immersive world. The makers of The Watch figured you can just turn Invasion of the Body Snatchers into a bitter comedy about empowering under-achieving men and then pile on the popular actors until the jokes just spontaneously happen. Watching actors like Vaughan and Stiller – men who once showed up on set to do a job instead of sending life model decoys programmed with all of their previously endearing stock personality traits – go through the motions, unwilling to be prodded into life by their director Akiva Schaeffer, is this misfire’s most disheartening spectacle. Well, second most. Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, whose script work until now has been mostly very entertaining, do nothing to bring this 90-minute ad for Costco to life, choosing instead to turn it into another of their now patented meditations on male friendship, except without the insight or jokes or sincerity of their previous films, and betraying a lack of interest in the female worldview that limits their range. It’s tempting to say it couldn’t have been any lazier, but then I think, “They could have removed Richard Ayoade, Rosemary DeWitt and Will Forte from it,” and I realise that’s the version they play on a loop in Hell.

7. Resident Evil: Retribution

Notorious performance artist Armond White’s most provocative review of the year saw him denigrate Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master while praising Paul W.S Anderson’s latest installment of the Resident Evil franchise; how thrilled he must have been when he realised they were being released in the same week, thus giving him a hook for his latest exercise in peer-trolling. The sentence that betrays his lack of conviction is the last, where he says that RE: R “transforms a genre franchise with visionary newness,” suggesting that he wrote the review without even seeing it. Because this is the total opposite of new or visionary. As with all of PWSA’s films, RE: R is a compilation of moments from other films that he remembers, transcribed with low-budget creakiness, cobbled together into a barely coherent and emotionally empty collage, but without the enthusiasm or glowing adoration of Tarantino’s genre pastiches. It’s just another money-maker from a man with no urge to innovate or communicate a point, and while SoC is happy to watch unambitious B-movies, PWSA’s cynicism and lack of imagination is especially dispiriting. This is perfect for anyone who enjoys watching Milla Jovovich, wearing her “Determined Face” expression, yet again posing stiffly in front of a green screen with co-stars who mechanically utter characterless exposition, safe in the knowledge that they don’t have to go to the trouble of making the cyphers they’re playing come to any recognisable kind of life, while PWSA recycles not only shots from his other movies but from this one too; numerous action beats are replicated over and over again, almost defiantly rubbing the audience’s face in it. Here’s a sobering thought, though; considering the persistent, viral success of this franchise, perhaps games will spell the end for cinema, just not in the way we thought. (NB: Worth noting that this is the only film in the top ten that treats women as human beings, so massive, sincerely-meant kudos for that.)

6. The Devil Inside

If the case against Found Footage ever went to trial, the defence lawyers, with Blair Witch Project, [Rec], Paranormal Activity and Chronicle at their side, would weep with horror at their imminent defeat when the prosecution calls just this catastrophic failure into evidence. There are dozens of lazy exorcism movies out there, so William Brent Bell’s low energy home movie has company, but compared to a qualified success like Daniel Stamm’s The Last Exorcism, you realise just how little effort was put into this. Bad enough that the premise doesn’t even work logically – two rogue exorcists scared that their secret work will be revealed to the Vatican allow a documentary film crew to follow them around – and bad enough that the last 20 minutes of this 70-minute-long film are basically filled with people screaming incoherently at each other, the biggest insult is the incomplete finale that directs the viewer to a website that explains what happens next. Considering that the movie rests on the archaic and disgusting idea that the protagonist is being punished by the Devil for daring to have an abortion when it turns out her baby won’t carry to term, it’s probably not worth the effort of typing the URL which, let’s face it, is about as much effort as has been expended by the filmmakers. Unconvincing, cynical, histrionic, The Devil Inside single-handedly sets the horror genre back fifty years. And yet it made millions. Abandon hope, all ye who love horror films, and despair.

5. Act of Valor

This bare-bones actioner should be seen by everyone interested in cinema or storytelling, but not for the reasons the directors and writers would like. Famously shot originally as a video for the military, it was expanded into a film by Scott Waugh, Mouse McCoy and Kurt Johnstad with real soldiers playing the main characters. Well, I say characters, but basically they’re the equivalent of NPCs in a video game, holding guns and moving about the screen but doing very little in the way of coming across as sentient beings, with the two “protagonists” leaving me with the impression that one of them is called Steve, the other isn’t, and the only things they can say to each other is, “bland comment about family,” followed by “awkward laugh”. The comparison between this and games like Call of Duty has been made numerous times – after all it features a lot of POV shots from behind guns, and vapid quotations from military thinkers to add gravitas so they’re practically identical, right? — but games have plots. Oft-derided games like CoD at least have an emotional charge, much as critics would like to pretend they don’t. Sure, sometimes they don’t work but when they do they have compelling protagonists and antagonists, arcs and momentum and event and all of the things that good stories should. This has nothing other than a string of firefights and a threat to be vanquished. Act of Valor is How Not To Make Movies 101; indifferently-directed action wrapped around a hollow core, plus lazy sentiment replacing meaning. Even worse, despite the heavily-signposted death of Steve (or not-Steve, I couldn’t tell who was who), it still serves as an advert for the Navy. It’s the equivalent of a giant erection pointing at a bloodied corpse.

4. Ted

Credit to Seth McFarlane for coming up with this great idea — like a twisted version of AI in which David somehow grows up and gets stuck with a sociopathic Teddy — with which to explore the ways in which child-men resist the responsibilities of adulthood. It’s such a great visual, the man accompanied everywhere by the visual representation of his infantile attitude. Which makes McFarlane’s traditional lack of effort even more frustrating than usual. The man is a machine cranking out very basic material on an industrial basis, and thus Ted goes through the motions much like his irksome TV shows, except this time he can add profitable and fashionable R-rated jokes about sex to his repertoire, which usually just consists of pop-culture references and hastily tossed-off non-sequiturs. Getting into a discussion about what is and isn’t funny is a waste of time; I think McFarlane’s a one-note huckster, but he has passionate fans who would be annoyed at my dismissal of his work. I get that. But what makes Ted truly worthless, aside from the cracks about Muslims and “sluts”, and the obnoxious nods and winks he throws at the crowd to “excuse it all”, is that I don’t believe, not even for a femtosecond, that McFarlane means a thing in this film. Not the moral ending, in which the slacker hero gets everything — including a Hallmark-card lesson about responsibility that McFarlane figures constitutes an arc because he saw it in an Apatow movie — and his girlfriend gets nothing. Not his supposed love for Flash Gordon, which I bet he watched once before making this film, knowing that a section of the audience would respond favourably. Not even the filth. He just knows what makes a buck, and he shovels it into our faces without a second thought. He’s P.T. Barnum with dick jokes. If this guy’s really the cultural powerhouse he seems to be, then we need to find the reset button, and pronto.

3. This Means War

Remember Mr. and Mrs. Smith? That was a curious film. Kinda hateful, but with a central conceit that might have worked, with a few dozen rewrites and a complete change of cast and director. I don’t know how you’d go about getting it into full fighting shape but it’s conceivable. Now along comes This Means War, a film that treads in the same footsteps (and shares a writer in Simon Kinberg) in which relationship troubles are dramatised via the conventions of the espionage genre. That’s an unusually good match, the consequences of secrecy being the most compelling aspects of both kinds of story. It’s telling, then, that only James Cameron got close to getting it right with True Lies, but even then had that massively problematic middle act. Imagine an entire movie of that and you’ve got this… thing… from McG, a film in which we’re meant to root for two colossal fuckbags who manipulate and spy on the ditzy heroine, a film in which the only choice she gets to make is which of these maladjusted fratboy scumbags she will end up with. If Mr. and Mrs. Smith had some possibility of working out with some tweaking of the material, or the tone, or some goddamn thing, there’s nothing that could be done to save this vile mistake. It’s nasty, it’s devoid of jokes, it’s unexciting, it has no insight, no verve, no wit, no purpose other than to fill a gap in a studio’s release schedule and to further chip away at the possibility that women’s lot in life will ever improve; to watch it is to feel all hope of parity between the genders evaporate. Its other big crime? Surgically removing Tom Hardy’s continent-sized SuperMojo to prevent him rightly showing up everyone else in it. I suspect Christian Bale’s infamous Terminator: Salvation rant was an EMP that wiped all sense from McG; we’ll get nothing competent from him ever again.

2. Project X

The recent American elections saw a phrase enter the lexicon: The War on Women. Republicans eager to restrict the lives and opportunities of women by making it hard to get on in this world by removing their rights cynically refused to accept that their policies were motivated by a distrust or hatred of women, but the wave of bitterness coming from the Right was impossible to ignore. But then it’s no wonder legislators figured women were fair game. If there’s anything this list of the worst films shows, it’s that men still think it’s perfectly acceptable to treat women as baby-incubators or, in their teens, as a reward men deserve for being bold. Nima Nourizadeh’s Project X might pretend to be another film in a lineage including Porky’s, Animal House, American Pie and Superbad, but this isn’t fit to be mentioned in the same breath. Three nerdy teen boys hold the biggest teen party imaginable in the hopes of getting “pussy”. And they do. That’s the movie right there. The most odious teenagers ever committed to film are rewarded for their sociopathic disregard for everyone around them with the respect of their peers, the adoration of numerous mute naked girls, and barely any censure from the law. Only the ostensibly sympathetic protagonist is prosecuted, but that’s okay, because his dad secretly thinks he’s a bad ass and the virginal girl who he previously cuckolded with a “slut” (here punished for her sexual activity by being secretly filmed naked) still loves him and forgives him, but then she would, as she’s practically a dudebro so she’s okay. This was written by Michael Bacall, the guy who co-wrote 21 Jump Street and Scott Pilgrim? This was co-produced by Joel Silver? It’s by far the worst thing he has ever been involved with, a fuck you to half of the population of the world, a diseased window into the worst of what Western civilisation is. Everyone involved should be fucking ashamed of themselves, and forced to wear a scarlet A (for Asshole) on their chests.

1. Alex Cross

This blog’s Best of 2012 Movies list was topped not by the intellectually challenging movies we saw but by the one that made us happiest; a choice made necessary by a desire to honour the intensity of that joy. Let us carry that on into this list. Instead of placing one of the loathsome, misogynistic insults to humanity in the top spot — for surely Project X or This Means War would be right at home there — it only seems right to pick a bad movie that made me so happy, so sore from mocking laughter, that all I wanted to do was run around all the social networks quoting lines and posting clips and basically just worshipping at the altar of the most haphazard, clumsy, ugly and stupid movie since Madonna’s brilliantly dreadful W.E. In other words, Alex Cross is the perfect cinematic representation of James Patterson’s galactically monstrous novels, with its lead character — a grab-bag of contrived tics and dull virtue fighting to save the world from exhaustively-described maniacs who murder or violate every woman he loves — now brought to life not by Morgan Freeman, a man far too charismatic to embody this thinly-written void, but by his living equal; Tyler Perry, giving what is easily 2012′s most hilariously awkward performance, almost the match of SoC’s recent favourite, Chris Klein in Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li.

It’s impossible to encapsulate the myriad ways in which this colossal sack of shit entertained us recently, the sheer number of gaffes and howlers and WTF moments that poured from the screen like a deluge of rainbow-coloured diarrhoea. Suffice to say Rob Cohen has now jumped past Paul W.S. Anderson, Jon Avnet, and Robert Luketic to become SoC’s pick as the worst director currently working in cinema, a man who has channeled the spirit of Ed Wood to bring us a film of such hysterically wooden and ugly imperfection that the Rifftrax guys might have to take two or three runs at it to cover all of its nigh-infinite incompetence. From its clumsy blocking (actors stepping in front of each other so we can’t see them half the time) to its 100% pure-cliche screenplay (in other words, a totally accurate adaptation from the source material) to its woeful compositions and photography (easily worse than anything else in 2012); this goes beyond Lifetime movie or rejected TV pilot to find its own slot on the quality spectrum. It’s a distillation of every shitty cop drama you’ve ever seen, a compilation of the worst aspects of our culture, but done with such a straight face, with such cluelessness, that I loved it. And in case you think I should have picked one of the three previously-mentioned misogynistic films instead of something that’s just bad, that I’m being finicky for going after something for little more than being a bit shoddy, don’t worry; three of the five women in this film are murdered — two of them mutilated horribly — because that’s all cinema seemed to be this year. Just a never-ending bellow of horror at the mere existence of women, and even when a movie is dumb enough to be relatively harmless, we still have to endure the presence of this disgusting bullshit, because that’s apparently just the way it is now. Fuck you, cinema! FUCK YOU, WORLD!

Dishonorable Mentions:

The Raven: A transparent attempt to tap into the success of Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes, sadly this is reminiscent of the Hughes Brothers’ misfiring From Hell more than anything else. James McTeigue never gets a grip on the material or the tone; John Cusack’s obnoxious Edgar Allen Poe is overplayed, performances misfire and tension fails to materialise. I asked a passing raven if it thought McTeigue had a chance of making another movie; it said, and I quote, “NEVERMORE!” Bit harsh.

Chernobyl Diaries: Oren Peli continued to scramble to consolidate the slice of industry power provided by the success of Paranormal Activity with this Wrong Turn-esque horror film set in Chernobyl. Yes, that Chernobyl, the one in Russia, the one that was irradiated by a horrifying accident that changed the world. A perfectly tasteful location for a dumb exploitation flick, I’m sure you’ll agree. It’s not even a good dumb exploitation flick; there’s no tension, no plot, just a long wait in some really interesting (non-Chernobyl) locations until everyone’s dead.

Step Up Revolution: SoC loves Step Up 3D, a movie with very little to recommend it other than the dancing, the one thing good enough that we recommend it constantly. This is worse, and the dancing’s so poorly shot that it lacks even that saving grace. Extra points for the heroes’ plot being remarkably stupid, using their incredible dance skills to gain enough YouTube hits to win a competition, staging flash mobs that could get them arrested, instead of trying to get jobs as dancers that would pay all of them, cumulatively, probably more than the prize money. Genius.

The Cold Light of Day: Hitchcock would have wept to see the state of the thriller genre today. This weirdly bland North By Noroeste plants bland Henry Cavill into a classic thriller template, trying to figure out who killed his somnabulent dad (Bruce Willis, between naps) while avoiding the police through touristy Spain. But the ramshackle plotting means characters only do things for convenience, not recognisable motivations, so even when it wakes up you don’t really care. I think in the end it was something to do with Mossad? In Euro-set thrillers it’s usually Mossad.

Ruby Sparks: A brilliant idea, indifferently brought to life with one great moment and a cop-out ending. At least, that’s the movie I saw. Friend-of-the-blog @DarkEyeSocket has passionately argued to me that the ending that so offended me (no spoilers, but from where I sat it seemed to invalidate the lesson learned by the odious protagonist) has a deeper meaning. Sadly, on first viewing I don’t agree, meaning I’m left with an bold idea about male expectations of relationships and the manipulation of partners that ultimately amounts to nothing. Sorry DES.

More to come, as ever. For anyone who has come to Listmania! for the first time, you should know I really milk this for all its worth. You’ve been warned.

Lost, In Space: In Defence Of Prometheus

Posted on June 8, 2012 by admiralneck

(WARNING! Massive spoilers for Prometheus and all six seasons of Lost. Contains inessential footnotes that can be ignored if you want to leave this page with your sanity intact.)

It took about thirty seconds from the end of the first public screening of Sir Ridley Scott’s Prometheus before co-writer Damon Lindelof shared this tweet from an Alien fan:

And there were many more to come, which he “kindly” RTd to his followers. Those quote marks are there because Mr. Lindelof’s Twitter behaviour often feels like a self-flagellatory performance piece, as he attempts to engage with the many aggrieved fanboys who despise him for Lost, the Star Trek reboot and now this. With Lost at least he created his own accusatory and gallumphing anti-fanbase, but by working on the other two franchises he’s surely leaping into the path of endless butt-hurty bullets. I can’t help but respect that kind of courage. It’s testament to his inner nerd, that he would risk the barbs and complaints of the most easily-irked subcultures on Earth just to work on the things he loves. ^[1]

Going into Prometheus last Friday, days after it had aired for many of the critics I follow, as well as in some European countries, there were already rumblings that it was a failure, or a partial failure, or a “waste”, as Mr. Beaks from AICN bluntly put it on Twitter. I didn’t look any closer as I didn’t want to spoil the movie any more than the obscenely spoilery trailers had already done (wanna give a fuck you shout-out to Fox’s promotional campaign which effectively stripped every bit of mystery from this movie in a way even Robert Zemeckis would have considered extreme), but my concern was that even if there were legitimate concerns about the quality of Prometheus, some of the criticisms were evidence that the boring old rift between Alien and Aliens fans was being reopened.

There are many nerd debates that will never be resolved. Marvel vs. DC, Star Trek vs. Star Wars, Hunger Games vs. Twilight; none of them are as boring as the Alien wars. There are factions within the Alien fanbase who prefer the long, slow takes and exquisitely-paced suspense of the first Alien movie to the bombastic, militaristic rollercoaster of James Cameron’s sequel, and there are vicey-versa types who think Cameron’s beautifully structured sexy machine of kill is better than Ridley’s hesitant original. There are those who think David Fincher got close with his mangled but bold third installment, and there are even those who think Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s French sensibilities reinstalled some of the original’s perversity back into the series. I’d like to think no one believes the two Alien Vs. Predator movies are on the same level as even the fourth movie. ^[2]

So was the initial burst of grumbling about Prometheus borne of the scars caused by this war, one that should have been ditched the moment Paul W.S. Anderson stepped behind a camera on the AVP set? Because seriously, fighting over the deckchairs on the Titanic while the iceberg that is PWSA’s monolithic ineptitude, crossed with the desperate short-sightedness of Fox, gets us nowhere. Alien and Aliens are different approaches to similar material; the very simple template for this series – space monster terrorises humans – is blank enough to be used as a canvas for experiments in differing tone and narrative approach. AVP, on the other hand, was a blunt knife that stabbed right through the canvas so nothing could ever be painted there again.

Even if this would end up fueling a new round of arguing about which approach was better, it would at least mean an objective viewer might enjoy Prometheus; the alternative was that the complaints were justified. Sadly, as the fans said, Prometheus has problems, mostly caused by its attempts to connect to the franchise, but there is still much to like in it, most significantly that it definitively removes the AVP movies from the canon. Even if Prometheus isn’t as innovative and beautifully-wrought as the original Alien, fan predictions that Scott would restore dignity to the Alien universe have proved true, just by excising the banal AVP and idiotic fratboy b-movie AVP: Requiem like a surgeon removing a tumour. For that alone, Prometheus should be lauded.

What else is there to love? Certainly some of the lead performances, especially Noomi Rapace as Dr. Elizabeth Shaw, the most resilient human being since John McClane, who spends much of the movie in either extreme emotional or physical turmoil. It’s arguable that her character is sidelined too often to act as a real centre, and her relationship with atheist Logan Marshall-Green isn’t as developed as it could have been; surely some room could have been found for it. This is a shame as her damaged faith, shredded by ill fortune and nauseating, psyche-shattering body horror is meant to be one of the central planks of the movie’s structure, but even if she’s not given enough screentime, she’s still good enough to be memorable.

Michael Fassbender is arguably even better as David, the Weyland Corporation android who tends to the crew of the Prometheus. As with Ash and Bishop in the other movies, David’s agenda is mysterious, setting up many of the movie’s most interesting moments and calling back to one of Lindelof’s finest creations, Ben Linus, as well as the infamous AI Hal 9000. Is David malevolent? Mischievous? Innocent? Vengeful? Badly programmed? It’s likely that much of the forthcoming debate about Prometheus will focus on his motives. Lindelof has a real talent for creating such ambiguous characters and situations which, if the tenor of his treatment online and elsewhere is anything to go by, annoys many who want certainty from their fiction.

The rest of the cast are fine enough, though many of them have little to do. Nice to see Red Road‘s Kate Dickie here, though she generally just imparts exposition, while Rafe Spall plays another eccentric. His reliability is a bit of a coin-toss, and for this movie we sadly got the “tails” that gave us his excruciating performance in One Day, and not the “heads” of The Shadow Line. Fans of DJ Big Driis will likely enjoy his performance as Captain Janek, with his accordion, scamp-like charm and fine habit of standing on the bridge, legs akimbo, like a big sexy legend; classic Elba typecasting. Guy Pearce is also in it, buried under so much latex I wasn’t sure what he was up to. I think I found him amusing? Certainly incongruous. A perpetual snarl on Charlize Theron’s face is also in it. Make of that what you will.

On a technical level the movie is astounding, as you’d expect from the infamous stylist and detail-obsessive Sir Ridley, though the creatures in the movie are a mite disappointing, looking like waxy and unimaginative first drafts; passable in any other movie but unacceptable when sharing a universe with HR Giger’s nightmarish vision. One particularly annoying design failure has Noomi’s disgusting squid baby connected to her by an umbilical cord that juts out of the side of its head. The lengthy sequence in which Shaw gives herself a grisly automated abortion is unarguably the highlight of the movie, but I couldn’t stop looking at that stupid dangling umbilical cord. Who signed off on that distracting touch?

That said, the horror is already undercut by the confusing threat. Is the crew of the Prometheus threatened by a deadly virus? Zombies? A Lovecraftian Old God? A mutated version of the Trash Compactor monster from Star Wars? All of those things are upsetting on their own, but by not settling on any one thing it dissipates some of the tension as the viewer tries to match them up. Here’s where the Alien comparisons do the most damage. The elegant and rigorously thought-through reproductive cycle in Alien is now muddled, evolving from some ill-defined matter to become the Apexiest of Apex Predators, though it’s perversely pleasing to think that at some point in the evolutionary timeline of the Xenomorph, one of the most diabolical and primally terrifying creatures ever imagined, is a devout human woman struggling to hold onto her faith in the face of indescribable horrors.

There’s also the fact that this movie feels so familiar; something noted by Daisyhellcakes as we left the IMAX. ^[3] That’s mostly due to the central conceit regarding our origins that’s been used in other movies or books; At The Mountains of Madness, Chariots of the Gods, Stargate etc. have dealt with the same idea in differing ways. Additionally, David’s impenetrable behaviour evokes memories of 2001; not just his HAL-like unreliability but early scenes with him puttering around the ship and busying himself with chores resemble Dave Bowman’s relaxed moments on Discovery One. The weird alien special sauce that dooms the crew is, of all things, reminiscent of the organic meteor matter in Ivan Reitman’s Evolution. Its purpose is the biggest mystery of all. It accelerates evolution? It breaks down DNA?

Further muddying the waters, the Alien movies are overtly referenced throughout, thus making it hard to separate this from the previous films no matter how hard we’re told not to. The look of the movie directly reflects the other films, with the (remarkable) production design by Arthur Max evoking memories of Syd Mead’s work, but the script is where the main resemblances occur. Lindelof has peppered familiar scenarios and lines of dialogue from the previous Alien movies throughout Prometheus; so much so that Sir Ridley’s comments that the movie “shares Alien‘s DNA” is a wry comment on the DNA / RNA manipulations in the plot as well as an acknowledgement that this often feels like a rehash. The structure, apart from some significant diversions, is identical to the other movies:

Discovery of message > waking from cryo-sleep > introduction of characters > arrival on planet > visit alien object > find unpleasant things > attempt to return during storm > things go wrong on the ship involving unpleasant births > android / corporate stooge has shady agenda > chaos ensues > lifepod ejects in which a showdown with the antagonist occurs.

It’s worth noting that Prometheus also borrows thematic material from Blade Runner, to such a degree that for a confusing moment I wondered if Blade Runner also occurred in the Alien universe, and Weyland Corporation’s androids were merely following in the footsteps of Tyrell Corporation’s replicants. Prometheus feels more like the third part of a thematically-connected series a la Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance trilogy than the fifth/first part of a franchise, thanks to these concerns. The main characters are searching for answers to questions about their origins, and Weyland is also looking for extended longevity, just like the replicants in Scott’s other sci-fi favourite. The showdown with the Engineer is as disastrous as Roy Batty’s encounter with Eldon Tyrell, with a popped-off android head and some vanilla butt-kicking replacing Tyrell’s crushed noggin.

And what answers do the team find? Nothing satisfying, of course, because nothing can truly satiate the whole audience, even if the movie ended falling either on the side of Shaw (faith) or Holloway (science). Those of us who forgave Lost its “trespasses” will recognise Lindelof’s approach. Prometheus asks the question, “who made us, and who made the race that made us?”, but instead of God or benevolent celestial beings we’re given the possibility that we might be the subject of an experiment, the organic components of a long-played terraforming operation, or the accidental biological waste product of a botched suicide by an alien trapped on Earth after missing his ride. That Carl Sagan line, “We are all made of star stuff,” is only half right here. We’re also just clever human-shaped sludge. (In fact Prometheus is the anti-Contact. They’d make an interesting double bill.)

Viewers of Lost were led to believe that its central mystery – what the hell is going on with this crazy island, and what has it got to do with these chosen ones – would be answered by one of the regularly introduced characters who seemed to have the answers. This was not to be. The Oceanic survivors, especially poor Locke, expected answers from the leader of the Others – Ben Linus – but he too was in the dark. So the audience waited for his mentor Richard Alpert to provide answers, but he had none either. In fact, as a result of a time-travel accident he thinks it’s Locke who has answers; a brilliant joke played by Lindelof and co-showrunner Carlton Cuse, highlighting the point that we make fools of ourselves for looking to others — Messiahs — for answers.

After Richard we expect Jacob has the answers, or the Man in Black, or their “Mother”, but none of them had a clue. They only had their own humanity, for better or worse. The layers could be peeled back forever, and all we would ever find were more confused, stupid people bringing their own baggage to the mysterious island, which contained a glowing thingy that was basically a magical Maltese Falcon. Over the course of six seasons Lindelof and Cuse could fully explore this idea, and some people even seemed to get it, though most complained that with no answers the show was a failure, instead of the slyly subversive success it actually was. Prometheus, with a running time of only two hours and a lot of info to get through, can only suffer in comparison.

So why ask these questions if you have no interest in answering them? Because there are other things you can dramatise with these questions, and the late-movie revelation that the Engineers were actually on their way back to Earth to eradicate our species using toxic goop wrong-foots the audience in a way that is reminiscent of Lost‘s games with expectations, as well as being a nicely mundane counterpoint to the grandiose first half of the movie. This resembles the way Lost teased epic and supernatural answers to its mysteries that were almost always caused by trivial but recognisably human things like confusion, venality, greed, delusion and the hilariously panicky reactions of characters who feared that they would soon lose their tiny allotment of power. ^[4]

The juxtaposition of the importance of the questions and the triviality of the human drama was one of the most pleasurable aspects of Lost, creating an unexpected frisson that transformed what could have been a simple mystery show into a Vonnegut-inspired treatise on the absurdity and arrogance of the human quest for knowledge it cannot handle. Prometheus does a similar thing, but that comment on the futility of our quest for truth is wrapped up in the tropes of a horror movie, which threatens to overpower the cosmic joke. Perhaps there’s another story they could tell that fits squarely into the sci-fi genre without the need to adopt Alien‘s horrific genetics, giving that commentary on our hubris more room to breathe and/or be recognised.

That said, the thought that humanity is a mistake that needs to be eradicated by beings more powerful than us is a chilling one, and the atmosphere of existential dread experienced by the Prometheus crew as they realise they have have been rejected by their creator is its own reward. It even thematically matches the responses of David, daily reminded of — and seemingly disgusted by — the flawed nature of his creators. Does he poison Holloway because he wants to punish his creators, as Shaw does re: the Engineers in the film’s final moments, or is David hurt by Holloway’s dismissal of his sentience? The fact that he invades Shaw’s dreams suggests Holloway’s racist behaviour arrived too late to affect David’s actions. David may have been broken all along.

Is this a consequence of his programming by Weyland or Vickers, a flaw in his construction (as suggested by Burke in Aliens), or that he has manifested a dark soul of his own accord? ^[5] These questions are as interesting now as they were when first asked in Blade Runner, and are given extra power by Fassbender’s brilliant work and Lindelof’s commendable restraint in explaining things away. I’d expect nothing else from the man who created Ben Linus and Charles Widmore, though I wonder if pointing out that Prometheus is yet another tale of children struggling to understand, placate, or wreak vengeance upon their fathers will make former Lost fans turn against this as fiercely as they turned against the island show.

It can be argued that Prometheus strengthens Lost and vice versa. It’s easy to assume that Lindelof truly is the bad writer of popular myth, a man smart enough to ask big questions but too stupid to answer them. Some ugly exposition and leaden dialogue does little to dispel that argument, though this could be down to necessary editing choices. There are other complaints ready to be levelled at the filmmakers that don’t fit within my forgiving parameters, and my defence is not meant to be a blanket dismissal of reasonable, non-trolling complaints, or an excuse for the film’s flaws. But what if Lindelof’s actually smart enough to know there’s no satisfactory way to settle the science / faith debate, to understand that drama that aspires to profundity demands that these questions be asked despite the inevitable disappointment that follows when the answer given falls short of expectation?

The drama here isn’t resolving “Why?” It’s in showing how people react when given a chance to find the answers. Lindelof’s done this twice now. Why is it beyond the realms of possibility that he’s not just some idiot who doesn’t know how to end a story, but is making a point about the ineffable mysteries of the world, and the possibility that matters of great significance are actually mistakes or trivial events that show up the absurd randomness of existence? ^[6] Vonnegut and Philip K Dick would enjoy the cosmic jokes of Lindelof’s worldview, and how he uses the gulf between our expectations and the truth to illuminate the failings of humans when they believe that they are in the position to acquire the greatest commodity of them all — truth — showing us up as cowards, fools, villains or, occasionally, noble heroes willing to sacrifice themselves to prevent the extinction of what they love.

Most other creators would be given a break at this point but ill feeling towards him for not ending Lost the way people wanted ^[7] will probably follow him forever now (check out this terrific, revelatory interview where Lindelof reveals he suggested to Scott that they make the ending clearer as he was “still eating shit a year on from the end of Lost“). As a result Prometheus is viewed as a mistake, with him taking all of the blame; convenient that he gets all the flak when Sir Ridley is notorious for changing the direction of projects and, if that interview is anything to go by, was developed with much input from the great director who was, never forget, considered for the longest time to be the only one who could save a franchise sullied by pretenders to his crown.^[8]

What a shame that this couldn’t be a blank slate, to be approached with open minds ^[9], instead of being a failure for not being an Alien movie, a failure for being as inconclusive as Lost, a failure for appropriating beloved sci-fi tropes and treating them with a populist’s unsubtle touch, a failure for lacking the beautifully judged stillness and artistic tableaux of Blade Runner, a failure for not being as classically-wrought – or as gloriously obscure – as 2001; I’m not dismissing these points as automatically wrong or worthless but I don’t think they qualify as sufficient reason to reject a movie which should be considered on its own terms. It doesn’t matter. Fans love a big raging debate, and given years of practice arguing over the merit (or lack thereof) of each Alien film many will launch themselves at Prometheus with great hunger. New flesh to tear apart! Why isn’t this Alien? How dare they? Sellout Ridley! All movies suck now! I hate 3D! At least it’s better than Robin Hood I suppose! Etc. etc. ad infinitum.^[10]

Hopefully this will all settle down and people will eventually engage with it without baggage. Maybe further editions of it – and maybe even sequels, if its apparent success inspires Fox to fund more – will provide a clearer idea of Lindelof and Scott’s vision, and improve what even I, a fledgling defender of Prometheus, think of as an imperfect project that nevertheless doesn’t deserve to be thrown out of an airlock. The breathtakingly spoilery trailer also shows a moment in which Shaw prays after her grisly abortion scene. The film is already ill-served by the conflict between its lofty thematic goals and the need for distracting, grotesque horror; perhaps that scene – or other scenes about religion / science – would have unbalanced the film further, and maybe for the better.

But these possibilities, and the new battles over Prometheus‘ worth, are at least an evolution of those long-running skirmishes mentioned earlier. The fighting over the previous movies feels like quibbling over the individual threads in the tapestry of this surprisingly diverse franchise; Alien is classy/cold, Aliens is tacky/exhilarating, Alien 3 is uncompromising/cruel, Alien: Resurrection is inept/stupid, Alien 3 should’ve been the William Gibson version, Aliens should’ve been made by Ridley, Newt should’ve lived, Ripley should’ve stayed dead, Jean-Pierre Jeunet should not be allowed to direct movies ever again… The arguments are only about the movies as cinematic artefacts and not as narratives with metaphorical purpose, spats that are only of interest to cineastes, to be futilely rinsed-and-repeated forever, accomplishing nothing, changing no minds.

Prometheus, on the other hand, offers up a text that can be interpreted and debated on its own.^[11] Sure, fans of the franchise are raging about it, whether it should’ve been made or not, whether to build a guillotine for Lindelof, whether the design is a failure as HR Giger was not asked to participate, whether it’s just total shit and a shallow insult to the ambitious speculative ambitions of genuine hard sci-fi, etc. But, as with Lost, there are mysteries within the film that can be discussed by even those who don’t agonise about that loathsome fantasy, the “childhood raped by the uncaring creator”.^[12] Dear God/Grouchy Space Engineer, how do we impose a moratorium on that insensitive and ridiculous sense of entitlement?

Whether even those mysteries are worthy of discussion is another debate to be had, though as someone who greatly enjoyed thrashing out theories about Lost with fellow fans I think my mind about Prometheus is already made up, but it’s worth noting that Scott and Lindelof have intentionally given us something different than The Greatest Space Monster Series Of All Time; a puzzle box that may or may not become more complex and more interesting as time goes by. As Mr. Lindelof himself has said…

Dude, have a rest. You’ve earned it.

Return 1. Who knows what Sir Ridley thinks, as he doesn’t have a Twitter account, shockingly. I assume his response to the kind of abuse Lindelof is getting would be a pithy, “Go fuck yourselves”. I believe he doesn’t suffer fools gladly.

Return 2. And yes, I admit that these paragraphs, were they to appear on Wikipedia, would be covered in “Citation needed” warnings, but these wars are fought as much in pubs and nerd gatherings and comment sections and forums etc. as they are in scholarly publications or blogs. Stick two nerds in a room together and there will come a moment when this debate begins and immediately descends into acrimony and deeply-held opinion blurted out as fact. This paragraph, which asks you, the reader, to just go with me on it, is my tribute to that ephemeral dark cloud that hovers over fandom. ^[13]

Return 3. Warning: never sit in the front row for a 3D IMAX performance; the miserable trailer for The Amazing Reboot Of The Spider-Man was a black and red blob wiped across my eyeball, and the ickiest bits of Prometheus were thrust aggressively right into my face as if I was being assaulted by a cross between a drunken football fan and Yog-Sothoth itself.

Return 4. There are other aspects of Prometheus that seem familiar to a Lost fan. The black toxic sludge, when seen within its ampoule, floats within a green fluid; when tipped up it floats down like a black cloud. This substance must never reach Earth, much as the Man in Black, aka The Smoke Monster, must never escape the island or he/it would cause an event that would signal “the end of everything good”. Jack sacrifices himself to prevent this, as Holloway, Janek and, to a lesser extent Shaw, also do. Meredith is obviously horrified to think her father, Weyland, considers his mechanical son David to be more of an heir than she does, much as The Man in Black is jealous of Mother’s love of Jacob. Holloway and Shaw are a man of science and a woman of faith; Lindelof choosing to make them lovers here may be his way of getting some unpleasant Jack/Locke slash out of his system. I’m sure there are dozens of other parallels between the two tales.

Return 5. And does this evolution within David echo our own development beyond that which the Engineers had planned, thus prompting their decision to destroy us? What does the Engineer’s reaction to David mean? Is his burst of violence triggered by David’s use of his language, proving that we have the potential to become a threat to them?

Return 6. On this point, I’d like to stress that yes, it could be argued that this assumption — that Lindelof has no idea what he’s doing and is bluffing his way through these stories like a faker — is valid if you consider Lost‘s finale on its own, but the show made this point over and over again throughout its six season run, so we have enough evidence for this theory to at least consider it, instead of dismissing it because of Occam’s Razor or something. We’re talking about one of the main themes of the show, not just a couple of incidents. Who knows, perhaps if we look back through his other TV shows we might find further evidence for this theory, though somehow I can’t see Nash Bridges being a treatise on the unknowability of the great questions pondered by philosophers and scientists of times past, no matter how potent the chemistry between Don Johnson and Cheech Marin.

Return 7. Here’s yet another fantastic interview with Lindelof, who seems to be one of the most approachable and friendly of creators despite the torrent of bullshit that keeps getting poured over his head. Lots of good stuff there, but the comments made by the interviewer, asking why all the characters in Lost had been dead all along ^[14], and his hypothetical argument that a concrete answer at the end of the show along the lines of, “they were being experimented on by aliens all that time,” would have been more satisfying gives a depressing insight into the extent to which many of the show’s naysayers were prepared to engage with it. Seeing the interviewer talking about gadgets on a recent edition of Late Night With Jimmy Fallon made me so pathetically angry I pitched an undignified shitfit and nearly threw one of our cats through the TV.

Return 8. Note that Jon Spaihts, who was the original writer on the project, is also free from opprobrium, at least as far as I can see, even though he’s already been treated like a mound of bear scat by sci-fi fans for making the not-well-liked alien-invasion movie The Darkest Hour. That’s how much people hated Lost. Seriously, admitting that I love that show in public often makes me fear that it’ll trigger a flurry of movement and then suddenly everyone will be pointing a gun at my face like they do in the movies.

Return 9. I include myself in this assessment. Watching Prometheus was a horribly confusing experience as my own expectations kept getting in the way. Much as I’m frothing away throughout this epic post about the — as I see it — unfair criticism Prometheus is receiving, I can’t honestly justify my anger at fans for judging this movie in relation to the others, as the promotional material and the unconvincing statements by Scott and Lindelof did little to prevent the growth of these assumptions. There are no words for how inept the marketing onslaught of the past few months has been, though I can’t figure out a way they could have promoted this without making the same mistakes.

Return 10. Funny that Scott includes footage from Laurence of Arabia, in what is one of the movie’s most endearing moments. For a while it might have seemed that a filmmaker with such a feel for composition and epic scale, indeed a man who made Kingdom of Heaven (which is heavily indebted to David Lean’s movie), might be the next in line to claim Lean’s crown as King of Classical British Cinema, even despite beginning his days as a lowly commercial director, but that seems far less likely now, and some of the criticism of Prometheus is that it’s not as restrained as Alien. Perhaps not, but it’s made with commendable skill, and now he has more money that he can use fill the original movie’s money-saving suspenseful longueurs with cacophony and event, for better or worse. I guess once Jerry Bruckheimer’s had his claws in you, you can never go home.

Return 11. Three months after Lost finished, once I had recovered from the dehydration caused by my uncontrollable sobbing, and removed my black armband, I wrote these three posts — part 1, part 2 and part 3 — which outlined my theories about the show’s ultimate meaning (i.e. as a primer for atheists about what it is to experience faith in something for which there is no proof). In the midst of that was my rather pompous, meta-fanwanky description of the show’s “plotholes” as “interactive plot gaps” (yes I did, and I’m very serious about this being a real and good thing), which are basically intentionally positioned blank spaces within a story which can be filled in by the audience with theories and / or non-meta-fanwank. Prometheus has plenty of these holes, which have this week been the focus of much of the ire of those viewers in my Twitter timeline who were appalled at the movie’s “mistakes”. As I said earlier, there are plenty of things wrong with the movie that deserve censure, and I wouldn’t accuse anyone of being wrong for holding a negative opinion, but I do think what some see as errors or first-draft fuck-ups might be something more interesting and justifiable on second viewing.

Return 12. How about this for another take on the film. Is it also a sly commentary on the inevitable sense of dismay felt by the fanbase, as humanity / Alien fans return to the source of their existence and find something there that doesn’t live up to expectation, causing all kinds of aberrant behaviour? Maybe this is all just Lindelof’s response to the long-running anger directed at him over Lost, and his experience with being verbally assaulted by the angry former fans is akin to wrestling with a Lovecraftian proto-Facehugger and then getting an inseminating tentacle shoved down your throat, leading to the birth of a proto-Chestburster, which in the case of this strained metaphor would be Prometheus.

Return 13. I also appreciate that this post reads like a very direct assault on pretty much anyone who has ever held an opinion on the Alien movies, and might even seem like a declaration of war against anyone who didn’t like Prometheus, making my concerns about the creation of a new front in the Alien Wars seem rather cheeky. That’s not my intention at all, especially as I have spent literally years of my life arguing the toss over the first two movies.^[15] The inspiration for this post, the thing that has compelled me to write over 6000 words (my God!), is not so much the criticism of Prometheus, much of which I agree with to some extent or another, but the increasingly hostile attacks on the filmmakers for daring to sully something as perfect as Alien. We fans all bring baggage to this movie no matter what we say, and anyone else’s reactions are not necessarily invalid even if they dare to be different to my perfect opinion, obvs (joke). What galls me is that we are now in a post-”wow Internet” period, where the use of the net has become such a familiar way of life that we can finally settle down and inspect our behaviour. Unfortunately this means we’ve found that many people here are so badly brought-up that they feel it’s acceptable to direct untold splenetic rage and disgusting hatred upon others for putting their hearts and minds into creative endeavours. What’s most upsetting is that many of the worst offenders are those I would ordinarily consider my Nerd Brethren, people whose passion I can understand on some level, but whose love of these cultural objects and events has mutated until they become compelled to bombard a guy with cruel messages when all he did was, at worst, write a movie that isn’t as good as another movie. He didn’t rape any childhoods (yuk), he didn’t erase all copies of Alien, he didn’t mock the fanbase or set out to diminish the originals in any way. He just wrote something, with the input of some other people, that he thought was cool. He doesn’t deserve to be hunted across the Internet like a rat, for fuck’s sake. And that goes for George Lucas too. I don’t like the Star Wars prequels either but they didn’t ruin my life in any way.

Return 14. I mean really? There was a VERY CLEARLY EXPRESSED SPEECH by Christian that made it VERY CLEAR that the events on the island, everything we had seen outside of the season 6 afterlife HAD HAPPENED exactly the way we saw it, that they had NOT been dead all along, that nothing we had experienced as viewers was rendered meaningless by some moronic final St. Elsewhere-esque twist. This is why I’m continually spouting off about Lost, and why I decided to write this ridiculously long review of Prometheus, that will most probably only be read by about 12 people, many of whom will think I should just get over this and move on instead of having a serious of life-threatening embolisms over something that almost everybody has forgotten about by now, because if fans such as myself don’t take the time and effort to restate facts about stories that are rushed past by storytellers who don’t want to belabour a point for fear of burdening their work with extraneous explanations that would take more attentive audience members out of the story-experiencing spell they have worked so hard to create, then we end up with the “official” take on something being, “You haven’t seen Lost? Oh man, don’t bother. They were dead all along. How lame is that?” or, “You haven’t seen Prometheus? Oh man, don’t bother. They don’t really explain how the Xenomorphs were created. There’s just a bunch of plotholes and then it ends on this weird inconclusive note because the writer is some kind of idiot who doesn’t understand how to tell stories.” When did it become unfashionable to surrender yourself to a work of art? To have faith that maybe the creator has a greater awareness of his or her work than someone experiencing it for the first time? To just go with the flow and stop with the, “Well, I’d have done it differently because I know these things more deeply,” thoughts until the work is over and you’ve had time to process it? Jesus Christ, sometimes it feels like we have to retrain audiences to just shut the fuck up and absorb something in one go without thinking that any plot event that isn’t identical to a million other plot events from a million other stories is a mistake or evidence of “ignorance of storytelling rules” (my own personal bugbear), instead of an intentional choice to tell a story that’s different to all the carbon copy stories cluttering up the world. [/crazy rant over]

Return 15. For the record, just so you, the reader, can better frame my feelings about this franchise, my favourite of the two is Aliens, but the difference in preference between the two is infinitesimally small, like, a micron thick, and the only reason I argue so vehemently for Aliens against the literally psyche-changing cinema-shaking brilliance of the original is because many of the arguments against the sequel — it’s garish and manipulative and stupid — are arguments used to dismiss many of my favourite films, and I just happen to like movies like Aliens that wear their heart on their sleeves, especially as I honestly believe that those criticisms are wrong. Aliens is as hard as nails. It has a beautiful structure used in other notable action movies such as Assault on Precinct 13, 13 Assassins, and even future beloved classic The Avengers. It is also very loud, but it has an emotional charge more powerful than about 99.999999% of movies made to date. Loving something that makes me sit on the edge of my seat screaming at characters to move faster even though I’ve seen it 100 times is not a problem for me. I also don’t think James Cameron is the enemy of cinema that many others do, mostly because Aliens is perfect so there INFINITY no comebacks. #Iwin

Taylor Kitsch Returns In: Water For Aliens

Posted on April 13, 2012 by admiralneck

First things first. There will be NO REFERENCES to the phrase “You sank my battleship!” during this review, except for just now in the middle of this sentence when I did it to illustrate a point. This joke will no doubt be used in every single review of Peter Berg’s Battleship, though I will award a troublemaking, furniture-wrecking, sleep-disrupting but very pretty cat to the critic who makes the most original play on the phrase. All I could come up with after sitting through it was, “The only thing Battleship sank was my enthusiasm for Peter Berg movies.”* I almost tweeted it, but it’s just so painful to say. Because I love Peter Berg, as long as I ignore Very Bad Things, aka the proto-Hangover. After all, this is the man who brought us Friday Night Lights, one of the finest TV shows ever made, for which he earns a deserved Shades of Caruso Free Pass.

And yet I’m increasingly troubled. The Kingdom was politically dubious but professionally made; the final fifteen minutes are lizard-brain-thrilling to the max. However Hancock was a mystifying, garbled mess in search of a point, marketed as a simple parody of superheroics while actually being a continuity-heavy franchise opener that made lots of money but seemingly no fans. People say Seven Pounds was the movie that halted Will Smith’s physics-defying career momentum, but I think it was the general annoyance over Hancock‘s failings that slowed it down enough for that to happen.

Battleship will most likely be the movie that does the same to Berg. It’s already been relentlessly mocked since it was announced; seeing Berg defend the movie over and over again is painful for a fan, because no matter what justification or defence he uses, all anyone wants to say is, “I wonder if anyone says, ‘You sank my battleship!’” as if they’re the only ones who thought of it. (Sorry, I said it again to illustrate that new point.) And for once it’s not just the critics who think it’s boneheaded; everyone seems to be scratching their heads. How can you adapt a board game into a story?

Anyone who has ever played a board game should realise by now that each iteration of that game has something that could be considered a narrative flow, just not a three-act one. Events happen in sequence and there is an ebb-and-flow of power throughout as players make decisions, attack or sabotage other players, or find themselves at a disadvantage as other players move against them. The idea of adapting a rulebook is worthy of derision, but the power plays that occur within a game are surely the kind of thing that can inspire an idea. They can be triggered by anything, and what is story but a way to interpret events, emotions, and relationships within the framework of a manipulated world?

Sadly Battleship only occasionally tries to make something of the interesting dynamic between players within the famous location-guessing gameplay, preferring instead to allude to the game with references to the shape of the pegs, or the invisibility of your opponent, or the grid with its familiar location codes. Critics will be thrilled with the late-movie action sequence with characters calling out grid references for strikes against two alien battlecruisers. They can base a whole derisory paragraph on that scene, with the only complication being that it’s arguably the only sequence in the movie that generates even a smidgen of tension, and to be honest the sheer brass balls of doing that in the middle of a blowout summer blockbuster should be applauded.

Additionally, Berg’s insistence that this is not just a lazy cash-in is very true. It’s apparent that a lot of effort has gone into making something that has some kind of dramatic or emotional heft. There is a very strong central character arc involving Alex Hopper (Taylor Kitsch) turning from feckless charmer into a naval genius and captain of men in the space of a single day. There is an alien force with technology that feels consistent from one scene to the next, an interesting design, and an ambiguous motivation. Naval battle tactics are outlined well and have obviously been given some thought. There are a couple of reasonably orchestrated setpieces. There is an attempt at creating a range of character archetypes. Liam Neeson’s in it and everyone loves Liam Neeson, right? The camera is mostly in focus. Erm…

Okay, I’ll get to the point. There is effort expended, but the movie is ruined by weird decisions and shoddy editing, especially in the dull mid-section. Scenes feel like they’ve been plonked in at the last minute, or added in the wrong order, or shot after focus-group complaints showed serious structural faults. The result is a baffling half hour where nothing makes any sense. Big whirring balls of fire and metal wreck an airbase (makes tactical sense), demolish a random freeway (makes no sense) and terrorise a kid playing baseball (a waste of FX money). Meanwhile, some characters die off screen and an alien is captured. Both times we’re treated to exposition to cover up the cracks, but it just makes it look like a low-budget movie with cut corners, not a huge potential tentpole with a $200m budget.

Just as annoying, the decision to make the motivation of the aliens unknown is a grave error, and having someone very loudly proclaim, “This is an extinction level event!” at one point without prompting doesn’t help. They obviously have more going on than the plunderers of Battle: Los Angeles or Cowboys and Aliens; they make decisions about who to attack or ignore, and do things like waft their alien hands over machines while their HUDs show battery-filling bars like in a video game, but none of it is explained. It’s obvious that someone thought, “Making your antagonist a ship is a bad idea,” and so the alien invaders have more character than usual. We see their eyes through their visor, we see them make choices, but without knowing what they’re doing this characterisation feels like half a solution. Has this information been shifted to the sequel that won’t happen?

That said, they do better than most of the humans. Only Alex Hopper has an arc; everyone else is there to provide help or hindrance on that arc, or to be sassy (Rihanna) or dopey (Jesse “Landry” Plemons; a welcome sight for FNL fans). It’s all archetype and cultural representation. Liam Neeson (underused) plays a grouchy father figure to appease. Alexander Skarsgård (tall) plays the disapproving family member. Tadanobu Asano plays Iceman (by way of Yokohama) to Kitsch’s Maverick. Yes, Battleship is Top Gun on boats, with a dash of Battle: Los Angeles and a hefty dollop of Transformers. If you dislike any of those movies, you’re gonna dislike this.

The Transformers comparison is the hardest one I have to make. Midway through Battleship, as the characters suddenly exclaim, “They’re on the boat!” before scuttling down hallways with guns in a scene that looks like it was added after principal photography wrapped, I realised what was bugging me. Berg is a better director than the material here, and could have been off doing something far more interesting. Though everyone hates Michael Bay, he would have been perfect for something as mechanical as this, and in fact would have made a better, dumber movie, much as it pains me to say it.

In fact, it feels like an amalgamation of his movies. It’s set in Pearl Harbor, and features the elaborate sinking of one ship that is reminiscent of the unwieldy but technically dazzling centrepiece of his epic pile of WWII crap. The machines don’t turn into cars but they do clank about and change shape in a way that’s meant to evoke the movement of the robots in Transformers. Steve Jablonsky did the score. There’s also a lot of jingoism and military fetishism, though Berg approaches this in a more interesting way, which I’ll get to in a bit.

And yet what Battleship lacks that Transformers 1-3 have is clarity. I don’t mean in editing; I’ve said many a time before that Bay’s action scenes are not edited with the eye in mind, but the ear. They’re drum solos, not ballet. If you happen to like that kind of thing, as I do, then it can be exhilarating to experience that bewildering mash of image and cacophony. But within that garbled and clumsy tumble of event, the imagery is relatively clear, considering the Bayhemian tumult. You can see things within the syncopated cuts. Some of Bay’s imagery is piercing, even stirring at times. Despite his misogyny and racism (and never let us forget those despicable flaws), he’s good at that.

Battleship, on the other hand, is quite ugly. The palette of the movie is almost entirely blue, green or battleship grey; at least Bay throws a lot of orange in there as well to mix it up. The effects here are used mostly to obscure what’s going on. Thematically that makes sense, as the game is about not being able to see what’s going on, but it’s a pain in the eyes. There are also enough lens flares to make JJ Abrams run to the box he keeps his lens flares and start wailing in horror at the horrible theft of ALL THE LENS FLARES. Even his use of ramping and slow motion is disappointing. Though I’m not one to dismiss CGI altogether, and in fact take a great deal of pleasure in well-executed computer effects, the worst thing a director can do is not choreograph his action properly, instead expecting the FX guys to fix things in post.

The result of this is ugly distortions of image through energy effects such as the blast from engines, water vapour in the nautical scenes, so many lens flares, or just general smearing of the image. During shooting (not just in Battleship but in many modern SF movies) the camera is whipped around to denote the frenetic darting movements of objects not present on set, and the FX guys have no choice but to work with that clumsily-shot footage, with the result that the objects have to move with no connection to the world they’re supposed to be in. Even objects from a technologically advanced civilisation would be hamstrung by momentum, inertia, gravity or atmosphere. Instead movies too often feature poorly-choreographed scenes with no awareness of how the final product will look.

Berg has not yet mastered this; Hancock was similarly poorly shot on an FX level. Battleship features far too many moments where the FX work isn’t integrated properly. Compare the action scenes here to the bug scenes in Starship Troopers, or anything by Peter Jackson, or even Transformers 3, where there are many more physical effects than you would think, allowing Bay to choreograph the subsequent CGI better. These filmmakers, and guys like Spielberg or James Cameron understand this — especially Cameron, whose action scenes are clear, choreographed with care and feature imaginary objects designed with an engineer’s rigour. Too many other directors have yet to understand that FX can’t fix everything.

Of course Berg is a much better filmmaker than Bay, especially in terms of his facility with actors and his treatment of women and ethnic minorities. He’s also better at filming action than Battleship would have you believe. As mentioned earlier, the end of The Kingdom is truly nail-biting stuff, and his early action classic The Rundown / Welcome To The Jungle shows that he knows what he’s doing, and has an imaginative approach to the staging of an action scene. As an actor he also knows how to get quirky performances from his actors; Rundown and both film and TV versions of Friday Night Lights are perfect examples of this.

However the demands of something as vast as Battleship has forced his attention from the small and onto the vast, meaning the only scene with any real life to it comes right at the start, as Kitsch attempts to woo Brooklyn Decker (given nothing to do except be blonde in some short shorts, even Rosie Huntington-Whitely gets more agency in Transformers 3). It’s a terrifically funny and likeable meet-crazy scene, with Kitsch evoking a dopier Tim Riggins in a way that made me think I was in for a treat. It also showcases Kitsch’s charms — and potential movie-star charisma — way better than John Carter; a far far superior movie but one that regrettably couldn’t tap into the source of the absurdly handsome actor’s best attributes (no, I’m not talking about his finely-chiseled musculature).

Sadly, much as military life crushes the individual, as soon as he ships out that sense of fun mostly vanishes, which moves the burden of making us laugh onto Plemons (a good choice) and Hamish Linklater (an excruciatingly unfunny scientist). The strictness of naval protocol saps much of the movie’s energy and robs Berg of chances to goof off. It’s not entirely laugh-free, but Bay’s awful shouty-jokes approach would, again, have done much to save Battleship from its doldrums. The tone of the movie hints at funnier things to come; it’s a box that says “funny” on the outside but inside only has packing peanuts and not one but TWO instances of someone saying, “motherfucker” with the soundtrack prudishly cutting away halfway through. And that’s just unacceptable.

But it’s not all bad. While Berg has made a movie praising the glory of the military-industrial complex, in which the only thing that can make a man out you is military service, he’s not just about the Ooorahs and “Bring the rain” nonsense of most of those paeons to the penis. While this sub-genre of action cinema is filled to the brim with gallons of stinky testosterone and troubling patriotism, Berg is thankfully more thoughtful than that, and while we get the requisite pro-armed forces message, it’s tempered by an awareness of military history, tradition and international comity that would baffle Bay.

For a start, the presence of Tadanobu Asano would never happen in a Transformers movie. In Battleship Asano’s Nagata is noble but impulsive, the only vaguely interesting character next to Alex Hopper. In Transformers 4: Metal Machine Music he would be a shrill fool who gets trapped in a toilet. Twice. I guess this is part of the international strategy for Battleship; it opens worldwide over this week, then eventually appears in the US in the middle of May. Studios are finally committing to chasing international dollars first on a movie that’s so expensive a slow US opening weekend would likely taint it with seeming failure. Nevertheless, it’s gratifying to see the rapprochement between the US and Japan dramatised in this way, especially in the historically significant locale.

That’s one of the more interesting things about the movie. Additionally, there’s a sizeable role for Gregory G. Gadson, Director of the U.S. Army Wounded Warrior Program. Bay’s military fetishism has so far found no room for the war-wounded, but Battleship features a significant sub-plot for Gadson’s character getting over the terrible injuries he received in Afghanistan. It’s an entirely predictable arc, but for highlighting this aspect of war in the middle of a populist action movie about killing aliens, Berg deserves some credit. [Spoilers coming up in the next paragraph.]

Even more interesting is the final act, in which the crew of the USS John Paul Jones are forced to go analogue and commandeer the USS Missouri, the decommissioned battleship currently standing as a museum in Pearl Harbor (“You recommissioned my battleship!”) (Sorry). Along with the old ship comes a crew of old-timers, former navy crewmen who get their own walking-in-slow-motion moment that made the audience I saw it with burst into laughter. (Ugh, kids today. No respect for their elders and betters.) With this crew of expert seamen helping them, they take the Missouri out to sea one more time to take on the main alien superbattleship that conveniently appears in an end-of-game big boss stylee. [Spoilers end]

This awareness of naval history was entirely unexpected, and while it’s no less patriotic than anything else in this sub-genre, it’s also quite touching to see something modern pay tribute to the fighting men of the past. Who would have thought that a dumb sci-fi movie about alien invasion could take the time to comment on the real world with a more respectful manner than Bay and Bruckheimer had when making a film about the actual attack on Pearl Harbor? It’s one of the reasons why the movie rallies in its last 15 minutes. It doesn’t suddenly become good, but the set-ups pay off better than anyone could have hoped.

Yes, the battles depend on the belief that enormous ships can manoeuvre as nimbly as jet-skis, and one particular move made by Kitsch in order to defeat the final ship is… how can I put this delicately… fucking bonkers? But it was at that moment that I realised what the movie could — and should — have been. Naval battle is slow and thoughtful. It’s strategic and smart and doesn’t depend on dexterity or speed, like a video game. It’s a crawl to victory, like a board game. Battleship shouldn’t have tried to mimic Transformers, which is influenced by the pace and power of a first person shooter. It should have emulated the greatest movie about naval warfare ever made: Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.

That’s a movie that owes a lot more to Battleship the game than anyone seems to want to admit. It honors naval history, it is filled with detail and character and fun, it revolves around a cat-and-mouse chase between two vessels, and is exciting even when things move slowly. If Berg had been able to fully commit to making a modern Master and Commander instead of hinting at a link between the two, I would have dedicated my life to making a case for it to be the biggest film of all time. Instead I say this; despite being one of the few people who looked forward to this, and despite being its target audience, while I very strongly doubt it’ll be the worst movie I see this year, I just as strongly doubt it won’t be the best movie I see this week, and I only intend to watch one other one. No one is more upset or disappointed about this than I am.

*Actually, at the moment of finishing this review I also thought of “You spunked my crappleshit” but that’s just gross, and too mean. It’s a 3-5/10 movie at worst.

Why You Should Give John Carter A Chance To Blow Your Mind

Posted on March 2, 2012 by admiralneck

BFI Southbank was invaded by emissaries from Mars last night, and they were remarkably pretty and polite. Shades of Caruso has said it before and it’ll say it again for new readers; seeing famous people in the flesh never gets old, and when that line-up includes Willem Dafoe and international megastar Taylor “Riggins” Kitsch himself, the levels of pre-movie excitement were almost unbearable. It’s enough to make one forgive the cinema for projecting John Carter as badly as it did, or to at least think there was something wrong with the deluxe 3D glasses provided. Nevertheless, during a very entertaining post-screening Q&A hosted by Garth Jennings, director Andrew Stanton pointed out that the projection was haywire. Considering how often this happens during the London Film Festival, this is no surprise.

That picture there is obviously incredibly indistinct (how anyone can make a movie with an iPhone’s crummy little camera is beyond me), but for clarity’s sake, the line-up shows Andrew Stanton, producers Jim Morris and Lindsey Collins, James Purefoy (Kantor Kan), Samantha Morton (Sola), a blurred Dominic West (Sab Than), Mark Strong (Matai Shang), Willem Dafoe (Tars Tarkas), Lynn Collins (Dejah Thoris) and Taylor Kitsch (John Carter, obvs). Why am I telling you this? Because one of the most distressing tweets I read last night (from friend-of-the-blog and pop-culture expert @stayfrostymw) concerned how she was unaware that the movie had this cast (not to mention Bryan Cranston, Polly Walker, Thomas Haden Church and Ciarán Hinds). This is how poorly this movie has been promoted; one of the best casts of the year has not been exploited properly. Madness.

You’d think that with cinema currently embracing nostalgia in the face of modernity that Disney’s John Carter would be an enticing prospect for audiences, and one that could benefit from being tied in with this trend, but then you look at the slow pick-up in US box office for The Artist, the disappointing take for Hugo, and audience discomfort for such palpably old-fashioned confections as The Tourist (a big hit internationally but a fumble in the States), and you have to wonder if the considerable bad reputation of the yet-to-be-released John Carter is down to the bad promotional campaign and intensely, frighteningly stupid and panicky namechange, or just that American audiences don’t particularly want to look back right now.

Filmmakers seem to be eager to harken back to a time before movies were soiled by… well, whatever the hell they’re supposed to be soiled by; pick your poison from 3D, CGI, rapid editing, digital photography etc. etc. However that doesn’t match up with what the cinema-going public wants to see. The Transformers franchise is treated as the cancer that will devour Hollywood, but if that’s what people want, for better or worse, that’s just the way it is, and hating audiences for that gets us nowhere. We can merely hope that obscenely expensive “blockbusters” are made with a modicum of intelligence and passion; “big dumb summer movies” aren’t contractually obligated to have the word “dumb” in there.

These films can be done right. They can be big and human and crazy and grounded all at the same time. Cinema will always be a mixture of the intimate and “independent”, and the monolithic and numbing and corporate. If we’re going to go big, and make something on a scale that justifies attendance of public screenings on vast screens instead of waiting for Netflix to stream it in a year’s time, then we need the Epic to continue as a genre, and we need to pray to the Gods of cinema (John Ford, Howard Hawks, Buster Keaton and Ingmar Bergman) for the vegetables of intelligence to go with the steak of populism. And by God, John Carter is that fully balanced meal.

For those who have yet to hear the premise of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ books (and certainly the woeful promotional campaign gives little sense of what it’s about), John Carter is a war-wearied and heartbroken Civil War veteran trying to make a living prospecting for gold in the unruly West, attempting to escape his past and the fighting that brought him nothing but misery. Through various mechanisms (underexplored in the books but here forming a central plank of the narrative), he finds himself on Mars, or Barsoom as it is known to its natives, where he is feted as a warrior with incredible powers caused by his superior earth-borne strength. He encounters incredible creatures, warring tribes, sinister supernatural forces, and the love of his life, Dejah Thoris, Princess of Helium. As his story progresses he unites Mars, beats back the forces attempting to profit from the destruction of Mars, and gets the “girl”.

Whereas the ad campaign seems to have created the impression that the movie is some kind of baffling feature-length montage about a weedy Victorian gentleman pretending to be Conan the Barbarian or something, with a tidal wave of CGI that makes the dunder-headed and empty likes of Stephen Sommers’ filmography look like a Dogme festival. It’s really quite simple to promote, even if you’re not giving the full picture of this surprisingly complex but tightly plotted success. Just say this: “You know Star Wars and Flash Gordon and all those movies you loved when you were a kid? The daddy of those movies is back now, and he’s pissed at his kids for making him seem like an out-of-touch fossil.”

It might not be as camp as the beloved Mike Hodges / Lorenzo Semple Jr. Flash Gordon, or as concerned with trade disagreements and Macchiavellian politics as the Star Wars prequels, but John Carter is better made, smarter, funnier, and convincing than any of those movies. The most important factor in the considerable success of this lovable adventure is the enthusiasm and imagination of director Andrew Stanton and his collaborators Mark Andrews and Michael Chabon (yes, that Michael Chabon). They obviously adore Burroughs’ flight of fantasy, which reads like the out-of-control imagination-blurts of the smartest teenager ever to sit in front of a notebook with a fountainpen.

SoC has only read A Princess of Mars, but the mad gallop of invention was enough for about ten books. Here’s the impression given on first reading: Carter arrives on Barsoom (the native name for Mars) and meets and befriends the Tharks, fights against the Warhoon, woos Dejah Thoris, fights against white apes, resolves the familial troubles of his Thark friends Tars Tarkas and Sola, teaches their race how to love, fights the Zodangans, brokers a truce between the Tharks and the red Martians of Helium, discovers the atmosphere processor that keeps everyone on Mars alive (and learns telepathy in the process), and in the process criss-crosses Mars about 16 times. It’s a lot of fun, but coherent on a narrative level it’s not.

Stanton, Andrews and Chabon are obviously in love with this world, to the point that they manage to cram in not only the majority of this plot but also half of the second book, The Gods of Mars, which features the Barsoomian “afterlife”, the god Issus, and the creepy technologically superior Therns, who manipulate events in the universe for their own benefit. That’s a lot of event to add to a movie, but by stripping out unnecessary repetition (there’s a lot in the books) and simplifying the anthropological nature of Burroughs’ descriptions of Barsoomian culture (alluded to in the movie but dropped in favour of action and adventure), we get a pleasingly complicated movie with multiple dramatic set-ups, all with satisfying payoffs.

Part of the reason this multi-layered plot works, despite containing more exposition than a movie can usually handle, is because of the familiarity of many of the elements here; after all, they’ve influenced so many other tales over the last century, and were in turn influenced by stories told before that. The story of a mere soldier fighting for the love of a princess in a world riven by warfare and distrust is instantly recognisable, and the look of the movie harkens back to the artwork of old pulp fiction while also gleaming with modern production values.

Which is not to say the movie seems derivative. Quite the opposite, in fact. Stanton has run with the ideas presented in the novels, so on top of this familiar template he adds layers of invention and madness to make this feel utterly new. The unsettling bio-mechanical growth of the Thern’s technology, the walking city of Zodanga, the hyper-kinetic leaping of our hero as he flits around the screen with the ease of a God made flesh; the array of visual treats here is dizzying and thrilling. Stanton fills the frame with marvels, but never once does it overwhelm. It’s a world made real, as complete and convincing as James Cameron’s Pandora, but more lively, more informal. While Cameron was on a mission to prove that his new technology worked, and created a world to prove it, Stanton is running around in that playpen. His sense of joy is infectious.

So there is lightness here, and great humour, mostly from Willem Dafoe as Tars Tarkas, and adorable sidekick Woola, though most of the main characters get a fair shake. James Purefoy’s Kantos Kan is obviously set up here as a more significant character in any sequel, as he’s given way more devilish charm than a forgettable side character should ever get. Nevertheless, there’s a dramatic heft too, and Stanton makes sure to give Carter an emotional obstacle to surmount that is far more elegant than the overly complicated relationship-delaying Martian manners subplot that keeps Carter and Thoris from consummating their love in the book.

Carter’s horrific past has tainted his soul and made him shy away from interaction with those around him, even as his naturally heroic nature keeps getting him into scrapes. We see him face his demons in the middle of the movie in a setpiece as brilliantly staged and visualised as I’ve ever seen. Some of the imagery therein, as Carter battles for the life of his beloved against the massed army of the Warhoon, took my breath away — the second time in the movie, after a bravura sequence involving Carter’s first meeting with Dejah left me agog and almost delirious with joy. In its best moments this is pure cinema, but then did anyone expect anything less from someone who could make something as elementally effective as the first half of Wall-E?

Stanton and his team of writers have also addressed the questionable politics of Burroughs’ outlook. Though it might seem churlish to complain about how Burroughs imagined his world considering it was written in such a different time, there is an unpleasant frisson when reading of how Carter brings civility and compassion to the primitive Tharks, rescuing his humanoid damsel in distress time and again as she faces enslavement or torture or even — in the most WTF-heavy passage — alien rape. Burroughs could have called it Noble Savages of Mars, to be honest, with Tars Tarkas progressing from Man Friday to Oroonoko thanks to the guidance of his white human friend. As I say, this isn’t really a dealbreaker, but it’s hard going for a handbag-clutching liberal such as myself.

John Carter the movie sees the Tharks treated a little better. The aggression of the Tharks is seemingly a clan-based matter, not a racial one, as these sympathetic creatures are compared to the utterly terrifying Warhoon, and are more accepting of Carter from the get-go. They are also convinced to join Carter’s fight against the Zodangans through reason, instead of it being a matter of our hero exploiting primitive Thark conventions to get them to kick off. It’s also telling that Stanton hints that the Tharks are in a more primitive state than the cultured and advanced humanoid Red Martians because of the interference of the evil Therns, an even more advanced race of European-esque pale villains that would make right-wing bloggers whine about their portrayal in the lib’rul meejah. They are The Man in ghostly white form, preventing the people of Barsoom from finding their feet.

This point is made lightly, however. The politics of Mars are not so heavily dictated by our own, thankfully, as turning this movie into an allegory for our own differences would ruin the tone of high adventure. The hints are there if you want to look for them but they’re embedded in the fabric of the movie in a way that certainly wasn’t the case for his sledgehammer-subtle Wall-E. I managed not to chortle during the Q&A that followed the BFI premiere when the utterly charming Stanton said that he didn’t like to make such points too obvious, considering the brazen agenda of his lovely Pixar sci-fi epic. I’m not saying I have a problem with it (again: I’m liberal), but that was not a subtle movie. In comparison, the comments in John Carter about how the advance of the walking city Zodanga is despoiling the Martian landscape are like feathers in the wind.

The portrayal of Dejah Thoris and the women of Barsoom is more subtle still, though pointed enough to warrant comment. The guards and aircraft pilots are female, which is treated matter-of-factly; Mars has much to teach us humans. The Dejah Thoris of Burrough’s books is strong enough to be a precursor of certain beloved women of fantasy and sci-fi, but is never really an agent in her future, tending to fall into trouble to be protected by John Carter. The Dejah Thoris so memorably personified by Lynn Collins, on the other hand, is a pioneering scientist and brave warrior who benefits from the help of John Carter but could probably survive without him. She saves his life at times, and their love comes from mutual respect, not servitude.

In fact, their meeting is caused not by happenstance, as are the majority of events in Burroughs’ books, but by her hasty departure from Helium after her father offers her up as a wife to evil Zadongan ruler (and Thern puppet) Sab Than; agency at last. Marriage to the odious oppressor would curtail her scientific research into the ninth-ray technology that would allow her race to save the planet from ecological meltdown, and so she flees for the sake of everyone — a rare instance of flight in a fictional work being borne of conviction, not cowardice.

Her imminent capture is foiled by John Carter but she ends up protecting him as much as he looks after her, and for much of the movie her dire fate at the hands of Sab Than and Thern leader Matai Shang is only a problem for her as she wrestles with the possibility that the easy route — marriage and an end to hostilities — is preferable to resistance, war, and the slim chance that she might be able to save Barsoom through her research. How rare to see a film give the female lead that much respect and responsibility.

And this is why I’m writing this, and tweeting about it every few minutes, and directly imploring the sci-fi and fantasy fans I know to see this movie on its opening weekend. The response I got after last night’s flurry of excited tweets was a mixture of disdain and concern that maybe I fell on my head and was imagining that Willem Dafoe was sitting three rows behind me (he totally was, you guys!). No one could believe it, which surprised me as I thought there had been a change in the tide, with critics coming out via Twitter to say they had a great time. But no. Apparently the consensus on John Carter that it’s a huge failure, an inevitable bomb, a warning to all studios to abandon waste and ambition and hubris, so that we never see another movie like John Carter again.

To which I say FUCK THAT. We need John Carter more now than ever. Yes, it’s too expensive. Yes, it seems a bit anachronistic. Yes, it’s naive to think that an audience would embrace something like this when there’s going to be another G.I. Joe movie this summer and that’s what the kids want nowadays. But goddamn it, I’ve seen enough good movies falter because of early negative reports or the gleeful malicious gossip of those who revel in the failure of expensive movies, not to mention the mindset displayed last night when numerous concern-troll questions were asked of Stanton, basically egging him on to decry the overuse of CGI and the pressure placed on him to post-convert the movie into 3D. He was a gentleman about it, of course.

Guys, the money is spent now, and the failure of John Carter will not put off studios from making big movies. They’ll just make them quicker and more generic, they’ll take less time to get it right, and they’ll ignore the input of smart filmmakers like Stanton in favour of committee thinking that removes any spark of imagination or joy. Damning John Carter before seeing it, or stating that it’s an inevitable failure prior to release, does nothing to improve cinema. It deters audiences from discovering it when right now it needs all the cheerleaders it can get to mitigate the dire promotional campaign.

This is a movie that has the chance to fire the imagination of millions of future moviegoers and filmmakers, to become the culture-enhancing hit of the year. We could all benefit from its success, and to deny it a chance is tantamount to spiteful vandalism. Sure, if you don’t like it that’s fair enough, criticise away. But if you’re just firing arrows at it because you enjoy shooting at things, then the only thing you’ll hit is your own foot. So I implore everyone who reads this; if you like high adventure, and are interested in seeing something light and fun and vibrant and imaginative, something with spectacular vistas and sumptuous design, a sense of romance and vision, something with remarkable characters played with total conviction by great actors, fantastic creatures and dazzling concepts and an epic sweep, you need to see John Carter. Please give it a chance.

Listmania ‘10! Miscellaneous Movie Observations: Part Two

Posted on January 10, 2011 by admiralneck

One last post, and then I’m done for a bit, though I may return to film blogging when the Oscars happen. As usual, I had finished writing most of this series of year-end posts just before seeing the Coen Brothers’ True Grit, which would have easily found a place on many of the Best Of lists here: certainly it would be on the 25 Best films list, as would ace cinematographer Roger “King” Deakins and lead actor Jeff Bridges. I expect to be seeing The Fighter and The King’s Speech soon too. I have high hopes for one of them: anyone who knows me will know which one that is. As ever it difficult to do these posts in timely fashion, and I envy critics (especially US ones) who get to sample so many movies with plenty of time to compile lists. Sad, really. I’d love a job as a critic not because I love films so much, but because I want more time to make a bunch of pointless lists. I may need to reassess my life-goals here.

So anyway, this is a bunch of extremely miscellaneous gubbins. Have at it.

Best Movie From 2009 That We Saw In 2010: The Princess and the Frog

2009 was the best year for feature length animation that I can recall, thanks to the efforts of Pixar, Studio Ghibli, the Cloudy chaps, and Henry Selick. Just as Christmas rolled around lucky Americans got one last treat: a cel-animated Disney musical good enough to stand next to their 90′s run of classics. Ron Clements and John Musker got back the mojo they had started to slowly lose after Aladdin with a joyous and spry reworking of the Grimm Brothers fairy tale and subsequent novel by E.D. Baker, smartly adding iconography and mythology from African-American history. This decision seemed to rejuvenate the creative powers of all involved: it’s funny, moving, energetic, has a cast of utterly charming characters — plus Keith “Superawesome” David’s Dr. Facilier, the best Disney villain since Little Mermaid‘s Ursula – and features songs and music from Randy Newman that eclipse anything else he’s done in years. A triumph, in short, and one that already needs to be reappraised after it came and went from public view with such little fanfare.

Honorable Mentions:

Bright Star – Another great movie from Jane Campion: no real surprise there. What was unexpected was how much this tale moved a schmuck like me, who thinks that films about writers are usually only interesting if they feature Mugwumps. Credit is due to Ben Whishaw and Abbie Cornish for bringing the fragile love affair of John Keats and Fannie Brawne to such vivid life, and even more credit is due to Paul Schneider, who is truly excellent as the repellent Charles Brown, lingering in the shadows and spitting poison at the lovers.

Sherlock Holmes – Haters can suck it. Guy Ritchie’s surprisingly entertaining romp caught two-thirds of Shades of Caruso completely out by not being awful. Quite the opposite, in fact. It’s loyal to the books, very funny, properly exciting and imaginatively filmed. It’s also the most successful film Joel Silver has produced in years: as a fan of his output from the 80s and 90s, it’s good to see him hit big every once in a while, especially as he seems increasingly keen to promote smaller genre movies like Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang and Splice and he isn’t making much money from them.

Worst Movie From 2009 That We Saw In 2010: Whatever Works

Whenever I impotently but passionately rail against the staggering of global release dates for films, I should always be grateful for one thing: the fact that Woody Allen’s movies seem to arrive here very late or not at all, even though Britain is supposed to be one of the countries that are most fond of the increasingly irrelevant old grouch. Whatever Works limped over to the UK about a year after it was released in the States, and really, thanks so much to UK distributors Warner Bros. for getting a last few spins out of those worn-out prints. This is not quite as bad as Cassandra’s Dream, but it’s considerably worse than Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which was already not that great. Basically it’s just an excuse for the once-great director to hire nubile Evan Rachel Wood to bounce around in front of his latest ancient proxy in a tight-shirt-and-hotpants combo and acting like one a’ dem Suthners frawm thuh Red Stayts what is men-ta-lee challunjjed. It’s nothing more than a snide wank fantasy. I fucking HATED IT. I note that Peter Bradshaw is YET AGAIN tying himself in knots to justify the formerly brilliant director’s descent into awfulness. Not mediocrity: I’m talking total and utter artistic decrepitude. Give it up, man!

Dishonorable Mentions:

An Education – Carey Mulligan is transcendentally wonderful in this uninspiring coming-of-age tale, perhaps so much so that some critics failed to see what a lemon they had on their hands. A lot of great work was done to give this adaptation of Lynn Barber’s memoirs an authentic period feel, but the tone is all over the place. Alfred Molina seems lost in his scenes, broadly playing a character that could have done with being quieter, though thankfully he is skilled enough to add some nice notes. Worst of all of Nick Hornby’s clunking screenplay, banging the movie’s points as hard as possible in case the audience was asleep. Dispiriting stuff.

Nine – How do you make a clumsy and unappealing musical worse? Get Rob Marshall to make a hash of filming it! As if Maury Yeston’s lyrics weren’t already excruciating to listen to (Possibly my least favourite lyric ever: “My husband makes movies / To make them, he makes himself obsessed. / He goes for weeks on end without a bit of rest. / No other way can he achieve his level best.”), now they’re linked to dance routines whose listless choreography is only matched by Marshall’s inability to put the camera in the right place, or cut to the most dynamic moments. If you thought Chicago was badly filmed, stay the hell away from this. Only the godlike Marion Cotillard and Fergie’s voicebox come out of this with any credit. A pox on it. Watch 8 ½ and then go watch the nearest Sondheim revival.

Invictus - Forgive me for taking the review I wrote on Flixster several months ago and just dumping it here, but it says what I need to say about Clint Eastwood’s horrid sport-uplift-a-thon better than anything I could no crank out, many months later:

For an hour Morgan Freeman’s performance as Nelson Mandela is entertaining enough to hold the audience’s attention even with the overwhelming treacle-thick sentiment pouring out of the screen and into your face. After that, nothing can save it. Endless – ENDLESS – scenes of incoherently edited rugby matches drag the movie to a halt, as the slow-motion sports scenes get slower and slower and slower. By the end you can’t remember who is playing any more. Which end of the pitch are they supposed to run to? Who is passing the ball? Why is he passing it now? Who’s that guy?

It eventually becomes an avant-garde exercise in deconstructing linear experience by bringing it to the temporal equivalent of absolute zero. Someone slowly points left. Another man falls over. Who are all these people watching? Morgan looks a bit excited. Another man points. A ball arcs slowly into another man’s chest. Matt Damon is tired now. Or in pain.

By now the movie has been on for fourteen years. The ball bounces across the floor. Morgan looks scared. The sound of cheering is like the screaming of God. Matt Damon leaps into the air: it takes so long he might be flying. Another shot of the crowd: CGI never looked so real-ish. Is that a goal? It can’t be. The South Africans shout “NO!” Oh, actually, they shout “YES!” The sound design is such that I cannot tell any more. Did they win? The uplifting music suggests they did: I check Wikipedia just to be sure.

In all, it is a staggering triumph.

South Africa’s victory, I meant. The movie’s shit.

The one comment I got on this was someone pointing out that the South African rugby team for that year was actually really terrible. If the worst team won, this conclusively proves my point about all sport being a total waste of time.

Best Movies I Saw in 2009 That Were Released In 2010 And Got On A Few Best Ofs And Thus Make My Exclusion Of Them Look Like I Didn’t Like Them Which Just Isn’t True, And Just To Prove It You Can Follow The Hyperlinks To My Reviews Of Them: Enter The Void / A Prophet / Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans / White Material

Ranking Decision Made In Last Year’s Best Movies List That I’ve Come To Regret: Placing Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet at number five in the list behind Avatar at number four has dogged me ever since I did it. That’s not to say I now dislike James Cameron’s slightly successful space opera: after seeing it a few times since I stand behind my glowing review 100%. Nevertheless, I suspect seeing it in IMAX just a couple of weeks before finishing my list may have pushed it a little higher than it deserves. I’m retroactively knocking it down to number five, and putting Audiard’s peerless prison classic up to four, because this shit is important to me. I wonder which of this year’s choices I’ll regret next year…

Best Hero: Shinzaemon Shimada (Kôji Yakusho) - 13 Assassins

Honorable Mentions:

Quorra (Olivia Wilde) - Tron: Legacy

Olive Penderghast (Emma Stone) – Easy A

Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) – Winter’s Bone

Robin Hood (Russell Crowe) – Robin Hood

Kick-Ass (Aaron Johnson) – Kick-Ass

Best Villain: Lotso (Ned Beatty) - Toy Story 3

Honorable Mentions:

Lord Narigatsu (Gorô Inagaki) – 13 Assassins

Fergus ‘Fergie’ Colm (The late, great Pete Postlethwaite) - The Town

Mal / The overwhelming guilt felt by Cobb that has forced an intervention by his therapist [Delete according to your theory of Inception's meaning] (Marion Cotillard) – Inception

Cheng (Zhenwei Wang) - The Karate Kid

Godfrey (Mark Strong) - Robin Hood

Worst Hero: Percy Jackson (Logan Lerman) – Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief

Dishonorable Mentions:

Milo Boyd (Gerard Butler) - The Bounty Hunter

Bazil (Dany Boon) – Micmacs

Barney Ross (Sylvester Stallone) – The Expendables

Soren (Jim Sturgess) – Legends of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole

Aang The Avatar (Noah Ringer) – The Last Airbender

Worst Villain: Arnold Wesker (Shawn Roberts) – Resident Evil: Afterlife

Dishonorable Mentions:

Other people’s feelings and needs / the concept of working for a living / the world just being SO MEAN and not, like, totally spiritual and stuff – Eat, Pray, Love

William (Aaron Johnson) – Chatroom

Ilosovic Stayne, the Knave of Hearts (Crispin Glover) - Alice in Wonderland

God (Played by nothing) – Legion

Fitzgerald (Peter Sarsgaard) - Knight and Day

Best Hero… OR IS SHE??!?!!?: Evelyn Salt (Angelina Jolie) – Salt

Worst Hero… OR IS HE?!?!??!: Roy Miller (Tom Cruise) – Knight and Day

Worst Nazi Owl: Metalbeak (Joel Edgerton) – Legends of the Guardian: The Owls of Ga’Hoole

Most Passive Character: Bella Swan - Twilight: Eclipse (second year running, and still spending most of the movie being protected by the big strong men in her life UGGGHHH.)

Douchiest Crimefighter of the Year: FBI S.A. Adam Frawley – The Town

Most Annoying Character(s) of the Year: Those goddamn squeaky minions in Despicable Me

Dishonorable Mentions:

Rashid (Amit Shah) – The Infidel

Rhiannon “Rhi” Abernathy (Aly Michalka) - Easy A

Captain H.M. Murdoch (Sharlto Copley) - The A-Team

Lou Dorchen (Rob Corrdry) – Hot Tub Time Machine

Paul Hodges (Tracy Morgan) - Cop Out

Unluckiest Character of the Year: Rafael Dacanay (Joel Torre) – Amigo

I won’t go into the details of what happens to the hapless town leader in John Sayles’ excellent historical drama, but let’s just say, if you think you’re having a bad day, this character’s troubles might make you feel better about your life. Poor guy.

Most Entertaining Scumbag: Stans (Walton Goggins) - Predators

Honorable Mention: Jason Patric (Max) - The Losers

Least Entertaining Psychic: Uxbal (Javier Bardem) - Biutiful

Badass of the Year: Hitgirl (Chloe Moretz) – Kick-Ass

Most Surprising Badass of the Year: “The Tough Guy” (Adrien Brody) – Predators

Most Debonair Badass of the Year: Eames (Tom Hardy) – Inception

Best Couple of the Year: Erin (Drew Barrymore) and Garrett (Justin Long) – Going The Distance

Best Parents of the Year: Dill (Stanley Tucci) and Rosemary Penderghast (Patricia Clarkson) – Easy A

“I Hope Those Crazy Kids Make It” Couple of the Year: Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts) and Jordana Bevan (Yasmin Paige) – Submarine

“Dear God, Just Split Up Already” Couple of the Year: Nick Twisp (Michael Cera) and Sheeni Saunders (Portia Doubleday) - Youth In Revolt

“I Realise Now That I’ve Never Really Cared Whether Or Not You Make It Work” Couple of the Year: Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) and Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) – Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World

Most Tedious Couple of the Year: Samantha Wynden (Whitney Able) and Andrew Kaulder (Scoot McNairy) – Monsters

Most Improbable Couple of the Year: Mahmoud (Omid Djalili) and Saamiya Nasir (Archie Panjabi) – The Infidel

Least Credible, Charming, Sexy, Appealing or Tolerable Couple of the Year: Milo Boyd (Gerard Butler) and Nicole Hurley (Jennifer Aniston) – The Bounty Hunter

Best Scene: The hour-long setpiece finale of Inception, from the “beginning” of the dream to the end.

Honorable Mentions:

Annette Bening and Mark Ruffalo temporarily bond over Joni Mitchell in The Kids Are All Right.

MacGruber creates a fiendish trap using water, string, a cup and a corpse.

The heartbreaking sack of the Alexandrian Serapeum in Agora.

Jonah Hill strokes the furry wall while Diddy goes berserk in Get Him To The Greek.

The first sighting of “Space Dad” in Megamind.

Best Action Scene: 13 Assassins vs over 200 warriors in a town filled with traps. For 45 minutes. 45 unbelievably exciting minutes.

Honorable Mentions:

The Wheel King’s assassins’ attempt to kill Drizzle is deflected by her protector (spoiler obscured there) in Reign of Assassins.

Matt Damon, Jason Isaacs and Khalid Abdalla race across war-torn Baghdad at the end of Green Zone.

Iron Man and War Machine in a Genndy-Tartakovsky-choreographed blitz of orchestrated chaos against evil drones at the end of Iron Man 2.

Angelina Jolie and her stuntperson chase the President down a lift shaft in Salt.

Jason Statham destroys a pier with machine guns and a flare gun in The Expendables.

Cruellest Moment In Cinema History: The toys chase Lotso through a trash incinerator in Toy Story 3

Most Excruciating Moment in Cinema 2010: Futterwacken – Alice in Wonderland

Most Exciting Scene Involving Rampaging Bulls: 13 Assassins

Least Exciting Scene Involving Rampaging Bulls: Knight and Day

Most Satisfying Finale: Black Swan

Honorable Mentions:

Inception

Kick-Ass

Toy Story 3

The Karate Kid

The Ghost Writer

Least Satisfying Ending: The Infidel

Dishonorable Mentions:

Remember Me

Twilight: Eclipse

Jonah Hex

Resident Evil: Afterlife

Knight and Day

Best Twist of the Year: There’s a corker about halfway through The Disappearance of Alice Creed. I shall say no more about that, or all of the other almost-as-good twists. Good work, J Blakeson.

Worst Twist of the Year: The end of The Book of Eli is not only nonsensical, but I’m really not sure it adds anything to the movie, either narratively or thematically. I’d go back and rewatch to see how well it’s set up, but I really can’t be that bothered.

Satisfying, Unhistrionic and Beautifully Performed Ending That Made Me Sob And Sob And Sob: Rabbit Hole

Most Batshit Crazy Ending of the Year: The Killer Inside Me / Skyline

Directorial Debut of the Year: Richard Ayoade – Submarine

Honorary Mention: J Blakeson – The Disappearance of Alice Creed

Most Egregious Waste of a Musical Resource: Mastodon – Jonah Hex

Most Appropriate Use of David Byrne and Brian Eno’s Album Everything That Happens Will Happen Today As A Soundtrack Choice: Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, as Oliver Stone added a couple of tracks from their previous collaboration — My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts — to the first and far, far inferior Wall Street movie. It’s, like, a homage or something.

Best Trailer: Clash of the Titans

Best Poster: Black Swan

Worst Poster: Death at a Funeral (Bad though the Photoshop is, it’s the exclamation point at the end of the tagline that sealed it.)

Creepiest Poster: Cats and Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore

Most Misleading Poster: The Last Exorcism (Nothing like this happens in the movie.)

Least Informative Poster: Knight and Day

Best Promotional Campaign: Inception

Remember the first trailer for Inception, the one that came out in 2009? What the hell is this?, we all thought as we rewatched it for the twenty-hundredth time. It makes no sense but is so pretty and sounds so nice, what with that cool booming thing going on. I can’t recall the last time I got so excited for a movie on such little information. Keeping the plot a secret for so long was a brilliant move. With no recognisable characters or source material to look at, there was no way anyone could have known what Christopher Nolan had in store for audiences. The next trailer almost drove me out of my mind. The sight of Paris folding over was like a mindbomb going off. Had Nolan made something completely unprecedented in popular cinema? You know a promotional campaign has hit paydirt when something as innocuous as the booming noises in Zack Hemsey‘s Mind Heist end up being mimicked and mocked over and over again.

That noise seemed to soundtrack the entire year, but credit where credit is due, it’s also down to possibly the best poster campaign I’ve ever seen for a major movie. Despite no one knowing what the movie was going to be before release, the campaign rested on cryptic but epic-scale posters featuring flooded or folding cities and characters listed as The Shade and The Extractor. It was utterly baffling and incredibly exciting. A week before the movie was released, almost to the hour, a flood of reviews washed across the internet as Warner Bros. embargo ended. The sense that a genuine event was about to occur was palpable. Seeing it a week later at the IMAX near Waterloo was one of the most thrilling experiences I’ve ever had in a cinema, and much of it was due to the audience. Primed for the cerebral narrative to come, we raced through Nolan’s maze and came to that divisive and bold final shot, and greeted it with shouts of “NO!” and “What the fuck!” And then the applause. The campaign worked. Dismiss it as hype, but there’s almost an art to hype if it’s done right and used to promote something of actual merit. I doff my cap to everyone involved.

Worst Promotional Campaign: The Bounty Hunter

One of the most dispiriting sights of the year was watching the cynical promotional campaign for this lifeless romactioncom spill out across the pop-culture spectrum. Seemingly aware that there was nothing interesting to say about the punch-card-generated tale of a bounty hunter on the hunt for his ex-wife (LOL), the publicists were forced to play the weakest hand in their deck: the are-they-aren’t-they “romance” between stars Jennifer Aniston and Gerard Butler. Not only was it lazy, but the actors obviously wanted nothing to do with it. Their fidgety non-commitals and attempts to brush aside questions from chat-show hosts and E! reporters were not just an attempt to create ambiguity: they looked genuinely embarrassed. The weak box office shows that no one else was interested either. Luckily once the movie was gone everyone could just forget about it, as if it was a drunken fumble between cousins that no one wants to talk about ever again.

Bravest Promotional Campaign of the Century: MacGruber

This notoriously unsuccessful but hysterical comedy — arguably the funniest of the year — featured one of the boldest performances of all time. Will Forte is utterly shameless as the hapless, cowardly mercenary, but the depths to which he was willing to plunge in order to generate a laugh happened offscreen, with this series of NSFW images. Maybe this was the reason the film sadly only made about $14, a half-full Starbucks loyalty card, and a poorly coloured-in photocopy of a $20 bill.

Best Hair: Pretty much everyone in Inception

Worst Hair: Scoot McNairy – Monsters

Best Wig (Male): Nicolas Cage – The Sorceror’s Apprentice

Best Wig (Female): Mary Elizabeth Winstead – Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World

Most Eclectic Collection of Wigs: Thekla Reuten – The American

Honorary Manuela Velasco Award for Services to Scream-Queen Culture: Rooney Mara – A Nightmare on Elm Street

Most Comfortable Actor of the Year: Denzel Washington, who gets to sit down for most of Unstoppable

Most Convincing Lust Object of the Year: Danny Fucking Trejo – Machete

Honorary Mention: Mila Kunis – Black Swan

Least Convincing Lust Object of the Year: Bradley Cooper – The A-Team

Dishonorable Mention: Megan Fox – Jonah Hex

Best Use of a Gun To Intensify Usual Levels of Hottness to Almost Unbearable Levels: Helen Mirren – Red

Best Value For Money of the Year: Alfred Molina

As you would hope, Molina takes a couple of underwritten roles in two Bruckheimer misfires and makes the most of them. In both movies he gives the liveliest performances of the entire cast, saving both movies from being consigned to the bottom half of my 2010-movie-quality-spectrum. Long may he get cast to add some spice to underwhelming action comedies. Or, you know, get the lead in a really good movie. That would be nice, HOLLYWOOD!

Lamest Contribution to a Major Battle: The end of Sir Ridley of Scott’s Robin Hood: The Puffy Years features a big pitched battle on a beach between the English and French. Midway through Maid Marian rocks up with her Feral Boys in an attempt to help repel the French using ponies and sticks. There’s about 12 of them, they do nothing, and then Marian ends up getting smacked around by Sir Godfrey until Robin saves her. Not sure what the point of this was other than to have Robin do something heroic for his suddenly useless lady. Not cool, Sir Ridley.

Best Movie Featuring Liam Cunningham as a Fearless Badass From Ancient Times: Centurion

Worst Movie Featuring Liam Cunningham as a Fearless Badass From Ancient Times: Clash of the Titans

Best Robot: Madd Chadd in Step Up 3D

Most Listless Movie: Somewhere

A half-asleep arse-poot of a movie that says nothing about life other than it’s easy to get a bit bored when you have a lot of money. Makes Sofia Coppola’s previous movie – Marie Antoinette — look like Trainspotting. Consider this half-hearted critique my homage to Coppola’s work ethic.

Most Unsuspendable Mountain of Disbelief: Legends of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole

I tried so hard — SO HARD — to buy into this movie’s central conceit, but I could not get past the fact that it was a movie about warrior owls, no matter how beautiful it looked (and trust me on this, it’s one of the most beautiful computer-animated movies yet made: almost every shot is breathtaking). The killing blow was the shot of an owl blacksmith hammering away at a hot piece of metal, sparks flying everywhere. It’s an owl blacksmith. An owl, working as a blacksmith, with its tiny little talons gripping a huge hammer and smacking at a hot piece of metal it had just pulled from a furnace made by other owls in a tree village designed by owl architects and built by owl builders carrying little hods in their tiny owl hands. Maybe in the book this could work. Onscreen? Not so much.

Most References To Other Movies: Repo Men

Controversy surrounded this reasonably entertaining sci-fi movie after it became apparent that it bore some similarity to Repo! The Genetic Opera, though according to this HuffPo article this has been amicably resolved by all involved. Certainly the increased possibility of artificial organs being developed and then sold on by private insurance companies in the US is bound to get many writers’ minds working: I wonder how many thousands of potential novels and screenplays withered on the vine as Repo! and The Repossession Mambo (the novel on which Repo Men was based) were released. Nevertheless, the makers of Repo Men certainly owe huge debts to Martin Scorsese and Nick Pileggi for the framing device and freeze-frames they incorporated from Goodfellas, Chan-wook Park for the Oldboy-esque action scene that occurs close to the end of the movie, and Terry Gilliam for… well, let’s just say the ending seems rather familiar. As I say, I kinda liked it: the gore was plentiful and amusing, and the leads (Jude Law, Forest Whitaker and Liev Schreiber) were very entertaining. It did feel like it ran down some well-trod paths, though.

Most Amusing Number of Publicity Photos of a Director Pointing And Thinking And Holding A Camera: Alejandro González Iñárritu

While looking for publicity shots of the dirge-like Biutiful, I noticed that director Iñárritu (as he now prefers to be called — thanks to ace Tweeter and film blogger @iambags for spotting that) crops up in a surprising number of pictures looking all handsome and directory. Almost as many as lead actor Javier Bardem in fact. Not as many as Michael Bay, but then Bay has made more movies, so you’d expect that. I’m going to keep an eye on this race to become IMDb’s most photographed and photogenic director.

Most Frustrating Directorial Decision of the Year: The Last Exorcism

This Eli-Roth produced horror “documentary” featured a terrific breakout performance from Patrick Fabian — a familiar face who has had recurring roles on Veronica Mars and Big Love but has never headed up a film before — but sadly director Daniel Stamm let him down after an hour of commanding the screen. Whether through poor editing or a lack of money or some other unforeseen and unavoidable problem, the final half an hour, with all of its craziness and weird reveals, happen in a blur of badly-chosen camera angles and looping. The biggest emotional moments come at the end, and hopefully would have shown Fabian at his best, but the camera barely focuses on his face in the last act, with his moment of revelation seemingly shot from under his armpit and his final lines almost inaudible due to some muddy sound design. It’s a shame, as up to that point he had made a huge impression. Let’s hope the success of this low-budget movie convinces someone else to give Fabian another chance at the prize.

Worst Loss Of Superproducer Mojo: Jerry Bruckheimer

Two expensive potential tentpoles (Sorcerer’s Apprentice and Prince of Persia, obvs) crawled towards the edge of profitability thanks to worldwide box office, but it’s fair to say Bruckheimer won’t be trying to keep these frankly half-hearted franchises going. What’s worse is he only seems to have Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides lined up for next year, and though the Captain Jack Sparrow fan in me is excited (perhaps not as excited as the Elliott & Rossio fan in me, but still), it’s directed by Rob Marshall. I honestly don’t know what Jer (as he likes me to call him) was thinking. Let’s hope the main man gets his mojo back soon. Or hires Elliott and Rossio to write all of his movies, what with them being totes awesome and all that.

And with that little expression of hope, that we can see a franchise come back on track just through the power of the writer, I’ll leave it there. Thanks to everyone who has responded to these posts: your contributions and comments have been greatly appreciated. Let’s hope we have a thrilling 2011 in movies.

Romanes Eunt Domus!

Posted on April 28, 2010 by admiralneck

Though I will happily admit to a bias against the UK film industry that might make any patriots passing through want to throw me out of the country, Shades of Caruso is a big supporter of British filmmaker Neil Marshall, as I mentioned during this review of his third movie, Doomsday. All of my positive feelings towards Marshall are included there, where I praise him for his sly sense of humour, his sense of pace, his love of action cinema history, and his technical know-how. Doomsday may not have set the world alight, and it may have been damned by faint praise from even those critics who enjoy action cinema, but even if it’s not a patch on The Descent — probably my favourite British film of the last decade — I maintain it’s a thoroughly entertaining movie, well worth everyone’s time and patience.

Marshall’s latest, Centurion, is a step back, unfortunately. It revolves around Quintus Dias (Michael “Abs of Steel” Fassbender), a Roman Centurion stationed at the very Northern edge of the Roman Empire, on a line that defends against guerrila attacks from the Picts. Any attempt to invade Scotland/Caledonia has failed by this point, meaning Dias has been stationed there for over two years, long enough to learn the language of his foe. After being captured during an assault on the fort, Dias escapes and meets up with the Ninth Legion, who have been instructed to bring the battle to the Picts instead of merely holding the line. Their secret weapon is a Pict traitor, Etain — played by a mute and scary Olga Kurylenko — who promises to guide them to their enemy. Suffice to say, this does not go according to plan, and soon Dias is left in the company of a small band of Roman soldiers, who are forced to battle their way back to the line before the landscape, wildlife, and indigenous people of Scotland kill them all.

The tale of the Ninth Legion’s disappearance is so low on detail that it is ripe for exploration and redefinition, even more so than other infamous historical tales which have been picked over and explained in greater detail. I’m sure no two tales of the Ninth Legion will be the same, while the battle of Thermopylae leaves far less wiggle room. Marshall has said, in interview, that he fully intended to pitch Centurion as a movie in the same epic mould as Gladiator and 300, though on a much smaller budget. To be honest, though it does feel of a part with those movies, he still seems to be primarily channeling the movies he grew up with. If I were to pitch this movie to a studio, the frame of reference would be Aliens meets Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid meets The Warriors meets Southern Comfort.

Those last two films are key to figuring out what makes the best moments of Centurion work so well. It’s not to Ridley Scott or Zack Snyder/Frank Miller that Marshall owes the greatest debt. The small scale, slow-burning pace and quick, brutal action scenes make this feel more like a Walter Hill movie than anything else I’ve seen in a long time, as the small band of survivors bond and then race through hostile territory with a group of Pict hunters on their tail the whole way. As in many of Hill’s movies the group is made up of badasses and cowards who look out for each other, speak as little as possible, and make quick decisions when backed into a corner. Selling this as an epic is a non-starter, no matter how many aerial shots of macho men running over hills take up the latter half of the movie. The best and most interesting moments echo those clenched-fist ’80s classics, with the big action finale being a well-choreographed and exciting brawl, not a tedious FX blowout between two enormous armies. The decision to spend time getting to know the characters in the otherwise slack mid-section of the movie pays off and makes these showdowns more involving, just as it did in Hill’s films.

Unfortunately, while Marshall borrows the character dynamics and punchy action-style from a master, he also borrows (intentionally or unintentionally, I do not know) his visual template from Marcus Nispel’s woeful Pathfinder, delivering a tedious palette of cold blues, washed-out greens, and the occasional fiery orange. It’s a relief that Marshall doesn’t borrow Nispel’s other awful visual trick: seemingly endless slow-motion action sequences that make your average John Woo dovegasm look like the last ten minutes of Speed Racer. His action scenes play out fast, brutal, and gloriously gory, with axe-to-face being one of his favourite visual motifs. Nevertheless, those miserable colours wear on the eyes: by the end of the movie you’re glad every time a fire is lit just to give your senses a break from the monotony. Admittedly, that could have something to do with the terrible projection at the Cineworld in the West End’s chaotic Trocadero centre — a building where good movies go to die.

The pace of the movie is off as well, slackening to a crawl once the movie turns into an extended chase sequence between the surviving Legionnaires and the vicious Picts. By the time three of our heroes show up at the hut of an exiled Pict (Imogen Poots, sadly without the awesome-name-assistance of her 28 Weeks Later co-star Mackintosh Muggleton), the tension has almost entirely dissipated. It never really recovers, with even a terrific final showdown — featuring some total badassery from Liam Cunningham — feeling like an afterthought. Considering how strongly Marshall has ended his previous movies, this is an unwelcome surprise, though I’m not sure how well a chase movie works when played out on such a large geographical canvas. Claustrophobia and a sense of forward propulsion tends to make these things work better: The Warriors works beautifully because of the gang’s progression through a well-defined New York City towards a definite endpoint. In contrast, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid used this plot and a similar landscape to great effect as it was more about the passing of an age than about action and pace, with several digressions from the chase plot before it kicks in again at the end. Centurion includes some of the notes of George Roy Hill’s movie, and these work well enough, but they betray that original tone of excitement without really adding anything else to the tale.

While some of Marshall’s directorial choices irked, it’s worth praising him for the stuff he got completely right. Most importantly, he pitched the tone at exactly the right level of seriousness: there’s no irony or knowingness here. He’s helped by an excellent cast, who treat the subject matter with sufficient gravitas to give the drama enough extra heft to carry it through the regrettable second act longueurs. The litmus test for this is Dominic West’s performance, which completely dials down the godawful hamminess he showed in Punisher: War Zone and 300. Though he’s not in the movie much, his turn as badass Virilus is good enough that you wish he was onscreen throughout. Ulrich Thomsen chooses to play Gorlacon, king of the Picts, as a quiet man, devoid of blustering histrionics. It’s a choice that pays off later in the movie when you realise the Picts are not the villains of the piece, though his hunters are to be feared. Kurylenko’s mute killer is a memorable foil for our heroes, ably backed up by the equally menacing Dave Legeno and Axelle Carolyn, while Paul “Belloq” Freeman shows up and makes the most of his screentime as the slippery British governor Agricola.

It’s the band of Roman survivors that carry the movie, though. Other than Quintus Dias, the most visible are Bothos and Brick, two lightly sketched characters that are given life by David Morrissey and Liam Cunningham: very clever casting right there, as both actors excel at humanising the otherwise underwritten soldiers. Noel Clarke is surprisingly good as the marathon runner Macros, again making the most of his scant screentime, and JJ Feild deserves praise for selling the duplicitous nature of Thax, even though the writing on that character is a little suspect. Without getting into spoilers, I’m not sure if his under-developed character was a fault of rushed writing or unavoidable editing issues. Whatever it is, the importance of Thax to the plot engine is underplayed a bit too much. It’s one of the main problems with the final act, which is a mixture of mechanical contrivance and fortunate happenstance, all of which leads to a heavily signposted denouement. A shame, when the rest of the movie had played with our expectations so well.

Nevertheless, many of the flaws of Centurion are easily forgotten thanks to the conviction of Michael Fassbender, who really really really should be an enormous star by now. His work as the unblemished hero is strong enough to power the movie past its problems, and proves he can carry an action movie with ease. Though Quintus Dias is a relatively humourless individual (in the classic Hill mode), Fassbender’s charisma and commitment to the role should win audiences over. Marshall is a canny man, and should be commended on getting these serious performances from his cast and leading man, but their good work highlights some script problems. Though his aversion to bombast is notable, his decision to hit certain script beats as delicately as he does is peculiar. Early on we find out that Dias’ father was a gladiator who won his freedom, a point that is a key to his character but is never mentioned again. While I commend Marshall for not ramming this fact down our throats with further exposition, it’s a character element that isn’t put into play thereafter, even though it could make the final scenes of the film more resonant. It’s a shame to see Fassbender not get to play out a heavily-accented arc, even if that would require him to shoot beyond the movie’s often measured tone.

It makes me wonder if we’re seeing Marshall’s own final cut, or something mandated by producers. It wouldn’t surprise me if this happened, as the film has already been treated pretty shoddily. Getting to see it was harder than expected, as it is currently only showing on eleven screens in London, and only one in the West End: the cinematic dumping ground that is the Cineworld Trocadero. Meanwhile, Cemetary Junction and It’s a Wonderful Afterlife both get a 42-screen release through London. If this were the middle of the summer season I could understand a small-scale action movie being released on a few screens, but it was released a week before Iron Man 2 come out. That’s a week where it might have done better business if it were promoted with any kind of effort: what it got was a few invested nerd-sites carrying interviews with Marshall and a quick bit on Sky Movies’ 35mm. There’s an audience out there for this kind of thing, though predominantly male. Yesterday there were only two women in the room preventing it from becoming a total sausage-fest. The UK Film Council backed the movie in production, but as is often the case they have no say in how widely it gets distributed, which just leaves Pathé to do the work. I don’t know why they decided this small release was a good idea: maybe they have an amazing algorithm that explains it perfectly. At least it’s getting better treatment by passionate promoters in the States.

Considering my praise is faint, why would I worry about its treatment in the UK? Despite reservations, I would still recommend it: Marshall’s action scenes are effectively staged, the cast are superb, and the location shooting generates an impressive atmosphere of desolation. Even more importantly, I’m glad that Marshall is continuing to make movies in the action genre that are inextricably tied to British history and culture, and think this is something that audiences and filmmakers in the UK would appreciate and respond to. By now you would expect that Marshall would decamp to America, and yet he stays and makes two quintessentially British action movies that nevertheless have a production gloss and editing style that mimics that of our American cousins. News that he is making Burst with Sam Raimi suggests he’s finally been lured away, but his next movie after that is possibly the most British thing he could possibly do: adapting The Professionals for the big screen. Fingers crossed he doesn’t cast Danny Dyer as Bodie.

Marshall seems to be a believer in the potential of the British film industry, something I have a very hard time with when much of it has so little ambition, or relies too heavily on the usual period trappings or the same old source material. It grieves me to hear that the excellent Andrea Arnold is making yet another adaptation of Wuthering Heights, though — as Daisyhellcakes pointed out to me — there’s more than a good chance that Arnold will really be able to play up the narrative complexity and bleak atmosphere, avoiding the two awful extremes of tourism industry video or sub-gothic Twilight homage. Most other truly talented British filmmakers are getting out of here and doing great work elsewhere, but Marshall is sticking to his guns, taking tropes from US films and reworking them to tell British stories for a British audience. It’s a commitment that is to be commended even when the results are not entirely successful, and to see this latest project rushed into a handful of screens just to have some critic quotes to put on the DVD is utterly disheartening.

Well I Love In The Loop Anyway ::pouts::

Posted on March 8, 2010 by admiralneck

Yeah, the In The Loop team didn’t win, sadly. A group of us last night attempted to sway events, watching the movie again as a kind of spell-casting ceremony, but our eldritch energies missed the target and Precious won for stating its points about the terrible effects of poverty with great, clanking obviousness. Nevertheless, the winners were often justified. The night was bracketed by the highlights: Christoph Waltz’ win and lovely, gracious acceptance speech at the start, and Kathryn Bigelow’s historic triumph at the end, complete with emotional speeches. She was shaking so much it looked like she was hyperventilating. A thoroughly deserved win from a fantastic filmmaker who has been thrilling me with excellent movies for decades now. I was so excited for her I got giddy, though that might have also been because of the sense-crippling fatigue. (N.B. Everyone should read Mary Elizabeth Williams’ piece on Bigelow’s win.)

Inbetween there were awful technical hitches and badly judged comedy moments: Neil Patrick Harris’ big number was undone by a low-volume mic that muffled his singing, cameras wandered around getting in everyone’s way, and the inept director kept cutting to blackness or random people milling around, though we did enjoy the way the camera cut to Joel Coen when someone mentioned Jews, or every black person in the room during Geoffrey Fletcher and Mo’Nique’s acceptance speeches. Even worse, Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin were lumbered with utterly risible jokes, and Martin in particular seemed lost. The only moments that made me (intentionally) laugh were the inspired pairing of Tina Fey and Robert Downey Jr. (why weren’t they the hosts?), Colin Farrell’s endearing monologue about Jeremy Renner’s awesomeness, everything the wonderful Gabourey Sidibe did all night long (she is much <3′d here now: I ended up rooting for her over Sandra Bullock by the end of the night), and the Paranormal Activity spoof.

Jeff Bridges’ win was treated as so overdue he was given a chance to run long on his speech. A whole extra couple of minutes, which enraged countless Oscar tweeters into 140 characters of SHEER HATE. Okay, so the ceremony ran long, but American audiences had it easy. In the UK we had to endure the shouty nonsense of four empty, ignorant twerps: Claudia Winkleman, Ronni Ancona, Mark Dolan and David Baddiel, none of whom seemed to even know what was nominated, let alone what the movies were like. When lizard/human hybrid Dolan is the most knowledgeable person in the room, you know you’re in trouble. @guardianfilm was particularly disgusted by his presence, and maintained a stream of amusing invective throughout.

Lowlights of their idiotic commentary included Baddiel’s new catchphrase, “I haven’t seen it, but…”, Ronni Ancona expressing confusion and surprise when someone mentioned that Sandra Bullock had been nominated for Best Actress, Baddiel not knowing who Neil Patrick Harris was (for fuck’s sake), Ancona praising the “stop-gap” animation in Fantastic Mr. Fox and Coraline, and Winkleman shutting up Mark Dolan who had been wittering on about “The elephant in the room” for half an hour (without seeming to know what the phrase means) with the mad segue, “I love elephants. Moving on…” Whenever Sky Movies cut back to the four of them, a groan erupted from all of us. They represent all that is wrong with the way UK TV treats cinema, and it depressed me to see it.

Having hoped that a big loss for James Cameron would silence the endless whining from anti-Avatar forces, I was also disappointed to see the level of hatred aimed at it from film buffs all around the world didn’t drop in volume. I guess by now it’s the received wisdom that it it is the enemy, an “avatar” representing all that is terrible about modern culture and the unwashed masses who endorse it. I know from many thought-provoking reviews or respectful conversations with critics of Avatar that a lot of this is people really not liking the movie, having genuine reservations about Cameron’s vision and how he articulated it, and that’s cool, as even this fan is fully aware that it has big problems. However, enough people are pontificating on it without seeing it that much of the vitriol seems borne of dislike of its monolithic status as Biggest Thing Ever, or residual feelings of hate for Cameron’s arrogance and obnoxiousness from his Titanic days. I saw a lot of people crowing about how he was obviously crushed when Bigelow won the directing Oscar, which is funny because I saw a guy who looked delighted for her. Their divorce was – reportedly – amicable, and he was the guy who alerted her to Mark Boal’s Hurt Locker script, so I’m not about to dismiss those reports just to hold onto some weird artificial narrative about how she bested her asshole ex-husband ha ha ha. If anything, it was Tarantino and Lee Daniels who looked pissed off.

Even more exasperating is the new narrative that Avatar only really deserved the visual effects Oscar, and the photography and art direction Oscars were a baffling mistake because the movie was made in a computer, DUH! This dismissal – which could well be borne of distrust of the New Digital Frontier making the previous analogue age obsolete, a charge I think is nonsensical – is an insult to all who worked on the look of the film, and the work of pretty much anyone working in virtual environments today, be they in films or games. We’re talking about people who are designing everything onscreen from the ground up, who designed the foliage and landscape and vehicles and props and creatures, and then created a lighting scheme that was admittedly more manipulable than an actual environment but still required an understanding of light and its effect on our understanding of the events onscreen and our emotional response to the mood of the movie.

As I said before, Mauro Fiore (here profiled in Vanity Fair) had limited options here, as 3D technology requires brighter lighting for the effect to work, and even with this restriction he managed to create a complex palette (funky neon-black-light effects at night, bright and smoky colours during the day). The lighting in CGI movies is not just arbitrarily decided by some guy disinterestedly clicking around a Maya menu screen with no understanding of how light reflects off virtual objects. There was real thought put into this by very experienced and talented individuals, and that’s the case in all thoughtfully-rendered CGI environments. Fiore’s win is thoroughly deserved, and it represents a historic win that might be as important as Bigelow’s, in the long run.

Anyway, there were no real surprises all night, no Crash/Sean Penn-style upsets to wake us up (if you thought The White Ribbon or A Prophet would win best foreign language film has never seen an Academy Award ceremony before). As a result, no one got to be excited by a left-field victory for a favourite. Remember my latest poll, asking which Oscar longshot you are most rooting for? Here are the results:

Best Director – Quentin Tarantino (Inglourious Basterds): 4 (44%)
Best Actor – Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker): 2 (22%)
Best Original Screenplay – Up: 1 (11%)
Best Animated Picture – Fantastic Mr. Fox: 1 (11%)
Best Original Song – Almost There (The Princess and the Frog): 1 (11%)
Best Picture – District 9: 0 (0%)
Best Adapted Screenplay – In The Loop: 0 (0%)
Best Supporting Actress – Anna Kendrick (Up In The Air): 0 (0%)

Sorry, nine people who voted. No happiness for you.

Listmania ‘09! The Best Movies Of The Year

Posted on December 31, 2009 by admiralneck

For the longest time it seemed like 2009 would be a truly dreadful year in film, perhaps as a consequence of the writers’ strike last year. By the end of it I felt like we’d had a pretty good run, once the summer was over. The early months were a desert with only Coraline making a dent in my memory, but by the time December rolled around with the release of Avatar, it felt like a more rounded experience. Even better, though we had a few horribly delayed releases (such as Up, which was disgracefully held back from UK release for six months), there are only a few movies that have yet to be released over here that have attracted our attention, and even then we’re not that bothered. The most frustrating omissions were our own fault. Jane Campion’s Bright Star came and went so quickly we missed out on seeing it, as did Lone Scherfig’s An Education. Sherlock Holmes came out this week but illness and schedule clashes mean we will be seeing it in 2010. It’s frustrating, but compared to last year’s maddening delays in seeing Rachel Getting Married and Synecdoche, New York, it’s nowhere near as bad.

So anyway, here are my top 25 movies of 2009, in order. Hopefully soon I will get to post my bottom 25. It was depressingly easy to complete that list.

Best Movies of the Year:

25. Adventureland

Greg Mottola’s coming-of-age story is good enough to make me forgive it for being a coming-of-age story (a sub-genre I have little time for). Sensitive performances and a perfectly judged tone set it apart, and I expect second and third viewings will cement it as a favourite in the future.

24. A Christmas Carol

Though Charles Dickens’ novel suffers from being adapted too many times, this version was loyal enough to the source material to stand above the rest. Robert Zemeckis cleverly used his performance capture technology to create a world that looks like a living painting, and — for the most part — his thoughtful direction and stately command of pace are refreshingly old-fashioned.

23. Red Cliff: Part Two

A crushing disappointment after the genius of the first installment, John Woo’s epic finale to the Three Kingdoms story was hobbled by tedious subplots about the horrors of war, as well as an unsatisfying final confrontation with evil Prime Minister Cao Cao. Still, there were enough superb moments to save it, including an enormous conflagration, hardcore badassery from the heroes, and entertaining cunning from Zhuge Liang.

22. White Material

Working as a comment on racial identity, colonialism, and the guilt that attends it, Claire Denis’ movie is a fascinating and thought-provoking experience. It also serves as a fantastic thriller, with its air of imminent collapse building to a nerve-wracking conclusion. Isabelle Huppert is mesmerising as the plantation owner who dooms all around her with her arrogance.

21. Zombieland

While vampires became a singularly obnoxious cinematic plague, zombies went from flavour-of-the-month to pariahs. Nevertheless, Ruben Fleischer’s apocalyptic comedy was a delightful surprise, perfectly cast and thoroughly entertaining. It also featured the cameo appearance of the year, and one best left unspoiled.

20. The Brothers Bloom

For a few minutes Rian Johnson’s con-trick drama seems like a precious and finicky conglomeration of obnoxious post-Anderson tricks and tics, but thankfully it becomes a warm and humane antidote to David Mamet’s cerebral dominance of the sub-genre. The key to its appeal is an endearing central performance from Rachel Weisz, whose enthusiastic embrace of the brothers’ tricksiness grounds the film even while the plot spirals off in unexpected directions and Johnson’s camera flies around with such exuberant unpredictability. Despite faltering slightly in the final act, its ambition and seriousness of purpose were a resounding success.

19. A Serious Man

The Coens excel at taking on unorthodox projects and surprising their fans, but they also rely on a set of narrative tricks that repeat from movie to movie. A Serious Man was no different, with their familiar exploration of our cosmic insignificance coming into play again. Nevertheless, here their tricks felt fresh again, matched as they were to a plot revolving around morality and heavenly punishment. Casting unknown actors was possibly the masterstroke: it certainly made the movie feel like nothing else out there. It ranks as their most entertaining and most challenging film since The Big Lebowski.

18. Ponyo on a Cliff by the Sea

Remarkable to think that Hayao Miyazaki is capable of making movies even lighter and more whimsical than anything he has previously offered us. At times Ponyo can feel too fluffy, and longueurs plague the second half of the film, but these minor errors are easily forgiven in the rush of incredible images. Ponyo’s mid-movie escape from the clutches of her misguided father is among the most visionary and exhilarating setpieces of recent times, aided by the Wagnerian stings of Joe Hisaishi’s beautiful score.

17. Coraline

Henry Selick’s stunning adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s book is a feast for the eyes, as technically impressive as anything committed to film this year by Digital Domain, ILM or BUF. It’s also one of the scariest films of the year, one of those rare childrens’ movies that is unafraid to terrify its audience. Some of the imagery lingers in the memory with the upsetting persistence of the worst nightmares. Also great was the delicate use of Digital 3D. In the year of Avatar, it’s worth remembering that Selick and his team figured out how to use the technology to subtly enhance the viewing experience before anyone else.

16. The Hurt Locker

By the midpoint of 2009, it honestly felt as if the writers’ strike of 2008 had left us in the middle of a drought. Nothing truly exceptional had been released, and so when Kathryn Bigelow’s superb war thriller came out it was leapt upon as if it were a fusion of Paths of Glory and Apocalypse Now. Third act problems drain some of the energy from it, but even so, no other movie about the Iraq war has done so much to capture the futile stupidity of it, nor made such a pointed comment about the deranging effect it has had on our psyche. That it is also a nerve-wracking thriller is a welcome bonus.

15. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

Expectations for Werner Herzog’s crime thriller were low, with only those few of us who revel in the unpredictability of Nicolas Cage holding out any hope. Thankfully Herzog surprised everyone with this demented triumph. Though it could have been turned into a conventional tale of depravity and redemption, Herzog, Cage, and writer William Finkelstein have little interest in following a traditional path, sketching all kinds of entertaining madness in the margins. It helps that Cage was let off the leash. His intense level of commitment to the project is the key to Bad Lieutenant: POCNO‘s success. Welcome back, you mad bastard.

14. Drag Me To Hell

While Sam Raimi’s gleeful homage to EC Comics-style moralising concerned one young woman’s efforts to avoid being sent to hell, this felt like Raimi had escaped from the kind of big-budget purgatory that he had once railed against. Though still obviously made with more money than he had once had at his disposal, Drag Me To Hell was a return to Raimi’s anything-goes ethos. No other movie made this year tried so hard to generate a response in the audience, and it was almost entirely successful. A regression for the genre, maybe, but an incredibly entertaining one.

13. Where The Wild Things Are

It looked like we would never get to see Spike Jonze’s unconventional adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s book. When it finally arrived, critical and popular opinion seemed to split right down the middle. Post-release discussion seemed to focus on subjective accounts of how the movie resurrected very specific memories of childhood, with those who were unmoved by the movie stating that it just didn’t speak to them personally. The vision of Jonze and Dave Eggers is certainly gloomy, repetitive, unfocused and pretty unappealing, but I cannot lie: early scenes brought back horrible memories from my youth, and the unflinching depiction of Max’s confused rage rocked me to my core.

12. District 9

Viewed as an allegory about apartheid-era South Africa, Neill Blomkamp’s low-budget SF action film gets tangled up in clumsy metaphorical dead-ends and ill-judged racial stereotyping that blunts the message. Seen as a misanthropic denunciation of venality across all races and species, it becomes far more palatable. Blomkamp’s exciting and imaginative tale takes the audience down unexpected paths, skillfully building to a finale of surprising emotional resonance. I won’t lie: the final sacrifice of one character made me sob.

11. Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs

The most pleasant surprise of 2009. Clone High creators Phil Lord and Chris Miller did the same as Spike Jonze — take a beloved but slight children’s book and adapt it into a new format with a drastic change of tone — but veered off in a different direction. Perhaps Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs accomplished less than Where The Wild Things Are in terms of illuminating the mental turmoil of childhood, but while it “merely” sets out to entertain, it did that with amazing success. Gleefully irreverent, pro-nerd, and willing to poke fun at every awful convention of lazy cookie-cutter filmmaking, it is also arguably the funniest comedy of the year.

10. Up

It’s tempting to leave Up off the list as punishment for manipulating adult audiences into crying miserable tears of mourning for an adorable animated couple and, by extension, ourselves. Nothing else this year moved us as much as that magnificently rendered and utterly devastating opening montage. The level of storytelling talent on display was humbling. The rest of the movie was wonderful too, building on that resonant set-up to deliver a winning adventure, featuring the funniest animal characters of the year. An emotionally exhausting film, but a life-affirming one.

9. Fish Tank

Avoiding the tawdry cultural voyeurism of the works of overrated ghouls such as Mike Leigh or Lee Daniels is the least of Fish Tank‘s many achievements, though one we can be most grateful for. It is also a compelling exploration of youth culture as seen through the eyes of a confused child on the cusp of adulthood. Katie Jarvis’ Mia is a fascinating and sympathetic character, aware that she is trapped in a life that offers her nothing, but eager to escape with her dignity intact. Unfortunately, she’s incapable of avoiding making some terrible mistakes along the way. It also has the grip of a thriller, cleverly changing tone in the final act without sacrificing believability. Yet another classic from Andrea Arnold.

8. Public Enemies

It’s possible to reduce Michael Mann’s adaptation of Bryan Burrough’s exploration of the 1930′s crimewave to just a period retelling of Heat, with Johnny Depp’s Dillinger and Christian Bale’s Melvin Purvis as dapper versions of McCauley and Hanna, but that would miss out on his deft commentary on the narcissism of these criminals and how new technologies increased popular fascination with the outlaw. Mann marks the moment where demand for titillation grew to the extent that public attention began to fuel the events that it demanded, and this fine, exciting crime thriller ends on a memorable moment where popular culture begins to eat itself.

7. Antichrist

Lars Von Trier has finally appeared to let his obnoxious mask of superiority drop long enough to tell a tale informed by his recent nervous breakdown, and the result is one of the most affecting and disturbing horror films of recent times. Conjuring an atmosphere of dread even more upsetting than anything that master of mood Hideo Nakata could create, Von Trier pits man against woman, and humanity against nature. No one wins, except anyone brave enough to endure this remarkable and starkly beautiful nightmare vision of a world — and a grief-stricken mother — gone mad.

6. Fantastic Mr. Fox

How bold of Wes Anderson to take the work of a respected author and bolt his own style of preppy, fussy humour onto it, and your acceptance of this depends fully on your acceptance of his shtick. To those of us in love with that viewpoint — and that obsessive attention to amusing detail — Fantastic Mr. Fox was yet another success, playing with the same themes of redemption and forgiveness as his previous movies while being just as sassy and fleet-of-foot as his non-animated work. It also works as a satire on the habitual anthropomorphism of the usual animated fare, with these characters being both more human and more bestial than anything populating the movies of Disney and Dreamworks.

5. A Prophet

No matter how much Jacques Audiard maintains he was not making a political statement with this movie, his rousing prison thriller proved to be as multi-layered as the best crime movies of recent times. Malik El Djebena’s growth from callow youth to crime kingpin is fascinating and weirdly inspirational, while the world he lives in is filled with detail about identity politics, French correctional failings, and racial tensions in Europe. It’s also nail-biting, beautifully judged, and performed to perfection.

4. Avatar

While armchair critics fall over themselves to dismiss this movie for being too predictable – a criticism that is being applied with more force than with any other movie released this year – the story is told with enough energy to forgive its clunkiness. James Cameron has always been a master with pace, and here he succeeds in manipulating the audience with a magician’s touch, delivering a groundbreaking visual tour de force into the bargain. Viewing it in Digital 3D IMAX is an unforgettable and thrilling experience.

3. Enter The Void

What James Cameron aimed to do in 3D, Gaspar Noé managed in 2D just months before. His tale of one man’s journey through death is the joint most immersive movie experience of the year, a terrifying and exhilarating cinematic experiment of enormous emotional power, and a technical marvel to boot. Any reservations about its pacing problems are swept away as Noé brings an obsessive rigour to his visual template: a first-person viewpoint that doesn’t falter at any point. That this brave experiment still has no distributor is criminal. If it ever becomes the Midnight Movie phenomenon it deserves to be, make every effort to see it on the biggest screen possible.

2. In The Loop

Armando Iannucci and the Thick of It gang brought their wonderful TV show to the big screen in style, expanding its scope to include the bureaucrats and fools of America, complete with the same venality, paranoia, and incompetence. Funnier even than the original series, it was also densely plotted but lighter than air: a feat of screenwriting to match that of Martin McDonagh with In Bruges last year. None of that would matter if the new cast members were not as talented as the original crew, but the US contingent adapts to the semi-improvisational style with aplomb. A triumph that rewards repeated viewings.

1. Inglourious Basterds

More than any other movie made this year, Inglourious Basterds surprised us all with its piercing intelligence, seriousness of purpose, and deft gameplaying, all of which are applied to an emotionally complex revenge plot that confounds the viewer at every turn. Much has been made of Tarantino’s effort to make a movie in which cinema has the last laugh and reality is forced to bow to its power, but less has been said about his continued facility with character. To the immaculate roll-call that includes Jules Winnfield, Vincent Vega, Jackie Brown, Mr. White, The Bride and Stuntman Mike can be added Shosanna Dreyfus and Hans Landa, the most compelling and haunting characters of the year. Tarantino has every right to be proud of this movie: it is, quite simply, his masterpiece.

Best Documentary: Soul Power

Considered as a sister project to Leon Gast’s When We Were Kings, Jeffrey Levy-Hinte’s documentary about the music festival that ran alongside the Rumble in the Jungle offers up yet more fascinating footage of Muhammad Ali in his prime, sparring with mouthy opportunists and talking about the potential impact of the forthcoming event. It also shows how the festival almost sinks under a tide of ego and bureaucracy. The worst thing that can be said about the movie is that it doesn’t show enough of the festival itself, but even then you still get to see thrilling performances by The Spinners, BB King, Miriam Makeba, and James Brown at the height of his powers. Stingy though the amount of concert footage is, it’s still some of the best music you will ever hear.

Most Embarrassing Admission of the Year: Okay, Soul Power was actually the only documentary I saw this year. Nevertheless, don’t let that put you off seeing it. Even if I’d seen a dozen documentaries this year, I doubt any of them would have been as fun or fulfilling as that one.

No time to dally with small talk: on with the listmaking! More to come when I get the time…

A Much Longer Review of Avatar

Posted on December 17, 2009 by admiralneck

Warning: Avatar spoilers litter this review like Ikran droppings across the rocks of the Hallelujah Mountains.

As I mentioned earlier, Avatar is a movie made almost specifically for me. It’s directed by a man whose obsessive attention to detail and fanatical devotion to technology has provided us with some of the most clearly designed and thrillingly executed movies of recent times. It’s about exploration of alien worlds and has an anti-imperialist message of clunking obviousness but surprising emotional power. It features the most startling visual effects ever committed to the big screen, and constantly pulls the rug out from under you with its dedication to outdoing itself. It’s filmed in beautifully rendered and cleverly composed 3D, and for once puts paid to criticisms that the format is a gimmick (even the sceptical Roger Ebert has been won over). It’s got a big battle between space marines and space monsters, and features a world that looks like a Yes album cover come to life (thanks to Anne Billson for the apt comparison). Basically, if it was going to make me hate it, it would have to try hard.

Luckily for me, after all of that anticipation, it didn’t piss me off — at least on first viewing, which was an overwhelming experience — but I can’t praise it without addressing some of the concerns raised by it. In the post-experience discussion I had with Daisyhellcakes, we kept coming back to the depiction of the Na’vi as a race of Native Pandorans treated so poorly by the colonial humans that they weren’t even offered beads for the rights to their sacred grounds. It’s problematic, to say the least. They are portrayed as simple, honest folk who hunt (but apologise to their prey before stabbing them in the heart, so that’s okay) and pray to a tree-god, and need to be rescued by one of the oppressors who just happens to be smarter and even more in tune with nature than they are. Scenes where the Na’vi cede control over their destiny to Jake Sully’s avatar make for queasy viewing, even if he did just land in their sacred space on the biggest, baddest, coolest multi-coloured dragon thingy you could imagine.

As Daisyhellcakes said after seeing it, she didn’t want to admit to liking the movie as much as she did because the wrongness of Cameron’s attitude to his noble alien race was so glaring. As Charlie Jane Anders points out here, this is a race that is so unfailingly noble they come across as a clumsy patronisation of the Real-World indigenous races that Cameron wants them to metaphorically represent. Apart from some douchebaggery from one guy early on, they’re all so great that they treat the imminent death of a human with the same amount of grieving and solemnity that greeted the destruction of their home and the death of their leader. Hey, I’ll bow to no man in my admiration for the eternally awesome Sigourney Weaver, but if I was an alien who had just lost the cornerstone of my culture and my civilisation, I’d be a bit more concerned about that than the death of some missionary who had been nice enough to hand out useless medicine that one time.

Still, as we talked we came to a sort of conclusion that although it made us uncomfortable, what the hell else was Cameron supposed to do? It’s tempting to think he is not up to the task of adding subtlety to any story he tells, but then he’s telling stories that fall apart when subtlety is introduced. He has his work cut out getting a lot of story and scene-setting out of the way, and at times the rush of exposition — either via voiceover or clumsy explanations by the various scientists studying the planet — means we’re really getting broad strokes already. This superb “nature documentary” about Pandora contains almost as much information about the planet and the creatures on it than is found in the movie.

As well as the Na’vi culture, some of the human relationships are sketched so lightly that their progression feels like a hint rather than an arc. Cameron was obviously ruthless in the editing room, and it stands to reason that he was already aware that portraying internecine battles within the Na’vi clan that embraces Jake would just bog the movie down further. We lose something to gain something else, and your enjoyment of the movie will likely depend on which you would rather have: sensitivity or bombast. If you think Cameron missed a trick not giving us tales of the ascerbic Na’vi arrow-maker or the cranky Na’vi mother who longs to join her lifemate on the hunt and is annoyed by his retrograde gender politics, you’re watching the wrong movie. This is good versus evil, and he’s going to make damn sure you know which is which.

Also, he might oversimplify the Na’vi, but so much thought has gone into the creation of the world and the people and their intertwined relationship that he can’t be accused of not giving a damn about the small stuff. Kudos to the production designers and astrobiologists and astrobotanists who came up with the convincing flora and fauna of Pandora. Their work is the most impressive thing about Avatar, and makes it feel like a real place. Even when doubts about the effectiveness of Cameron’s story began to itch at my brain, the secondary story — of Pandora and its ecology — was far more successful. I suspect that repeat viewings might make the problems of Cameron’s plotting seem more glaring. This morning Mr. Beaks from AICN quoted Kenneth Turan, who said Avatar would be the Jazz Singer of the 21st Century, a movie that changed everything but was widely disliked ten years after release. I expect my considerable affection for this movie will follow a similar trajectory to my opinion of Titanic, which I loved on first viewing, but disliked more and more with each revisit. Nevertheless, while the narrative clumsiness will likely annoy in time, the level of detail in this stunningly realised world will continue to hold my interest, and seeing new interconnections between them will become more interesting to me.

Of course his interest in creating a complex faux-eco-system is part-and-parcel of his environmental message, which is heavily pro-nature and anti-strip-mining. This too has come under scrutiny, especially by those who think a movie that features this much CGI has been burning through rainforests worth of energy to keep its computers humming along. The pro-tree message is rammed home with such relentlessness that the mid-movie action scene is the lengthy destruction of a single tree, though to be fair it’s a pretty goddamn awesome tree. Complaining about how Cameron paints his political pro-environment message is fair enough, but where were these complaints last year when Andrew Stanton’s Wall-E told a similarly unsubtle story? That got a free pass, but Cameron gets pilloried. Not everyone has done that, and I speak as someone who was pleased to see Stanton’s messages stated so clearly, but the double-standard still irks. I guess that’s what you get when you make an action movie instead of a Pixar movie.

Besides, Cameron’s ideas about why Pandora should be left untouched are far more interesting than mere tree-hugging. The central idea of the movie is that all lifeforms on Pandora are linked together in a way that expands even upon James Lovelock’s Gaia theory, or Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere concept. Pandora is a kind of brain, and the creatures that live upon it can access that brain through a neural connection. The Na’vi are also able to connect to the minds of the creatures around them, and control them in much the same way the humans connect themselves to their machines, except the Na’vi also form emotional bonds with the creatures and treat them as equals. It might just be an expansion of the idea that we are connected to all other living things, but when taken literally like that it is enormously appealing and deepens what might have initially seemed like a wishy-washy justification for the Na’vi’s special nature.

It also means that the “God” they worship is actually a kind of world-mind/flesh-internet that allows them to upload and download memories. Note that their culture doesn’t seem to have a history told via words or pictures: it’s stored inside the network of life on the planet. I’ve heard the movie referred to as Luddite as it praises New-Age-style philosophy over reliance on technology, but the biotech of Pandora works as a metaphor for the connectivity we currently enjoy thanks to the Internet. Though some scenes with the Na’vi plugged into the ground and radiating outwards from the Tree of Souls look kinda dippy, they have an unexpected emotional charge. The great revelation of our age is that we work better when we’re aware of each other, and seeing this network of co-operation represented in glowing visual style is a powerful reminder of how lucky we are.

It’s an idea that makes Avatar more nuanced than a mere Dances-With-Space-Wolves and more like Dune-In-A-Forest, especially as Sully can be seen as a Space Marine/Kwisatz Haderach hybrid. That said, no matter which pop cultural artifact Cameron was influenced by most, when necessary he pulls out all the stops and tops the action work he has done in the past. With the goodness of the good guys and the badness of the bad guys clearly explained, he can go all out with an emotionally satisfying final act where heroes are forged, villains are killed, and revenge is taken. This is what Cameron does best, and the final half an hour is some of the most thrilling cinema I’ve ever been lucky enough to witness. Any reservations we had earlier melted away in an onslaught of last minute rescues, defiant last stands, and tragic slow-motion deaths. Cameron’s facility with action serves him well, with skillfully handled set-ups paying off in a series of sub-setpieces that are layered together with a master’s touch.

Praise is also due for an earlier scene where Sully captures and tames a wild Ikran on top of the Hallelujah Mountains, and then goes on his first flight with Neytiri. It’s a stunning sequence, featuring visual effects of such complexity and clarity that I choked up. At that moment I knew I loved the movie with very nearly all my heart. It also helps that Cameron has elicited such strong work from his cast. Stephen Lang and Giovanni Ribisi are deliriously evil but enjoyably hissable, with Lang’s Quaritch getting a couple of cool moments in the finale that drew murmurs of great pleasure from the audience. You expect Sigourney Weaver to be great — and she is — but I was surprised at how good Joel “Hottie and the Nottie” Moore and Michelle “Ana-Lucia” Rodriguez were. Even better were the heads of the Na’vi clan, played by the ever-reliable CCH Pounder and Wes Studi. Praise is also due Laz Alonso as cuckolded Tsu’tey, and Sam Worthington makes good on the promise shown in Terminator Salvation with an impassioned and charismatic turn.

Best of all is Zoe Saldana, who gives an astonishing performance as Neytiri. With the performance-capture technology now developed to the level Robert Zemeckis has always aspired to, it feels as if there is no intervening layer of CGI between us and the actor, and of the entire alien cast, it is Saldana who seizes the moment with the greatest relish. Her manifestation of this serious and tragic character was the heart of the movie. If she had failed, our suspension of belief would have fatally faltered, but thankfully she exceeds beyond our wildest dreams. About twenty minutes after her introduction, I was amazed to find that I believed with all of my heart that Neytiri was real, and it is as much a testament to her skill as to the effects chaps at WETA that this mental conversion occurred. Thanks to this — and her entertaining work as Uhura in this summer’s Star Trek — I now look forward to her future work with much enthusiasm.

It’s an unfashionable statement to say I gave myself over to Cameron’s sincerity, especially as we’re dealing with a filmmaker who is considered to be a crass populist who can only bombard audiences with glossy imagery that hide a hollow core. I’d argue that Cameron believes deeply that the message of his movie is meaningful, and will be happy to have touched the hearts of millions rather than appealed to the refined intellects of a handful of joyless twerps. If so, I reckon he’s right. As for Avatar‘s status as the most advanced display of CGI wizardry yet made, and whether this is enough to qualify it as a great movie rather than one that is just okay but pretty, my own bias intrudes. Artistic merit is attributed to movies for many reasons, many of them nebulous. Such concrete things as effects work or production design are often not included among these criteria, as it’s surely obvious that they are base and do nothing to reveal human truth (often considered the least thing that great art should do).

In my eyes, though, the technical work done on Avatar in bringing to life an entire world filled with believable creatures in a series of interlocking relationships is as close to perfection as we’re going to get at the moment. If the breathtaking design work and detailed effects work displayed here isn’t allowed into the leather-and-mahogany drawing room called Art, then no design or effects work ever will be. At its best this is a moving sculpture, a dynamic tapestry, a web of interlaced speculative concepts and exquisitely rendered visual representations that literally dazzle. Ignore the faults, and forgive it for being clumsy. You need to see Avatar so you can experience the feeling of having your point-of-view float through the most beautiful landscape painting you’ll ever see.

A Short Review of Avatar

Posted on December 17, 2009 by admiralneck

Shades of Caruso

Circuit interruptus.

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A Short Review of Avatar

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