Listmania ’12! Miscellaneous Movie Observations: Part One

Posted on January 17, 2013 by admiralneck

The first four parts of Listmania! 2012 might seem to be pretty exhaustive, but having seen well over 100 films last year (a small number for a film critic, but a hefty number for someone such as myself, who spent most of the year playing Halo) there are inevitably going to be a few films that slip through the cracks, being neither brilliant or terrible. They were often films that inspired frenetic note-taking for blogposts that never got written, or films seemingly condemned to be forgotten about but which lingered either like a pleasant perfume on a spring morning, or a kebab fart in a friend’s bathroom, depending on the movie. Much as I’d like to think I can move on without talking about them, often my reaction to them speaks to my state of mind during and after experiencing them, so for the sake of clearing the clutter out of my head, the last posts in this series will be my attempt to close the door on 2012 so I can get on with enjoying 2013.

Biggest Disappointment of the Year: Cosmopolis

After the unendurable famine that starved David Cronenberg’s fanbase of his singular genius for four years — FOUR YEARS — we got half a feast with 2011′s brilliantly realised adaptation of Christopher Hampton’s A Dangerous Method, which thrilled this blog enough to place it at number 6 in SoC’s previous Best Films Listmania! extravaganza. While critics seemed mystified, mistaking the great man’s precision for bloodlessness, or by exposing their ignorance of his work by complaining that a film about the schism between the mind and the body was a departure from his previous films – merely because there was no gore and therefore lacked the one thing they lazily knew about him – for some of us this was a late-career classic, the kind of thrillingly intellectual work we’ve come to expect. This excitement was enhanced by the knowledge that we’d only have to wait another year to get the second half of this feast. Could he strike twice this quickly and maintain that quality?

The plunging enthusiasm I felt during his adaptation of Don DeLillo’s novel has only ever occurred once before while watching one of his films, midway through my only viewing of Eastern Promises, but while that seemed like a weird misfire attributable to the script – which he wasn’t responsible for – Cosmopolis‘ problems stem from the fact that Cronenberg hasn’t done anything particularly drastic with the novel, which was already a rambling, overly-ambitious and unfocused book that tried desperately to capture a snapshot of the world that was moving so rapidly past the writer’s window that all we got for his efforts was a meaningless smudge. When reading it in preparation for the movie I could see hints of what Cronenberg found interesting enough to adapt it – man and/versus machine, symbiosis between the mind and an artificial system that transforms the world, sexual deviance and emotional stasis, mental collapse and physical decay – but hoped that he would temper DeLillo’s worst excesses; the arch dialogue, the preachiness, the desperation of his attempt to make a touchstone for our times.

This was not to be. In fact, some of Cronenberg’s choices exacerbate the problems of the novel, primarily the curiously stagy performances from the majority of the cast, Robert Pattinson aside. While Cronenberg deserves praise for drawing such promising work from the previously unconvincing actor, he makes great actors like Samantha Morton and Juliette Binoche deliver dialogue regrettably translated from the novel almost verbatim as if they are the most precocious self-help gurus at the world’s worst staff training day. Their pronouncements about the state of the world, and the ways in which our protagonist can affect the systems he is hooked up to, are deeply uncomfortable viewing for a fan, because the reasons for this choice are mystifying. Are these displays for a king residing in his mobile, air-conditioned throne? This is the only thing I could come up with to explain it.

And believe me, I tried for a long time to justify this film’s unexpected cluelessness, hoping to convince myself that Cronenberg’s adherence to such risible source material was some brilliant choice that I just didn’t understand properly yet. My growing discomfort with critics who second-guess artists who have a proven intellectual capacity and transparent mastery of their chosen form meant that I was eager to find a way to blame myself for my instinctive rejection of this, especially as the critical reaction to A Dangerous Method had irked me so much. I took notes for a blogpost that would probably have been ten times as long – and one hundred times more apologetic – than my defence of Prometheus, but I didn’t have the heart to write it. Instead I just gave up on the film. There’s nothing to pick apart that isn’t contained in the book, at least not much, other than Cronenberg’s ability to keep the film interesting when it’s mostly spent in a limo. And he does a good job of that, even if the rambling monologues drain the enthusiasm from the viewer, and despite occasional moments like the scene in which Mathieu Amalric berates protagonist Eric Packer; possibly the worst blocked and staged scene in a movie released last year.

Is it a total disaster? No Cronenberg movie could ever be considered as such, it’s just not possible. Pattinson is impressive, as is Paul Giamatti, whose appearance at the end crystallises the film’s “plot” in a way even the book didn’t. The confrontation between the protagonist and his until-then hidden antagonist fires the imagination in the way I had hoped the rest of it would, and makes a mockery of the decision to make the rest of the film so damnably stagy. Also Cronenberg removes some cluttering ideas from DeLillo, turning his protagonist from the man who may have crashed the financial system – and robbed his wife of her riches – in a series of nihilistic actions into the victim of what seems to be a day-long panic attack that may or may not have led to his death. Cronenberg seems more interested in making the man a victim instead of the instigator of the world’s financial doom, which makes sense; he’s usually interested in the idea of people losing control, not in having too much power.

And there are touches that link this to his other films; that symbiosis is there, expressed in the anecdotes from Packer’s employees, who think fondly of the machines they use as tools or extensions of themselves. We also get sexual complications, prostate examinations, intercourse with a bodyguard still wearing her kevlar; this is the mind/body/machine stuff we want from the man. But throughout there are too many wrong choices, too much hesitance, from a man I thought would have relished the idea of scrambling DeLillo’s book into a new and exciting form the way he played with Bari Wood and Jack Geasland’s Twins for Dead Ringers, or his thrilling adaptation of Naked Lunch, which turned intentional incomprehensibility into disgusting and coherent fantasy. I’d hesitate to call it a failure, and certainly wouldn’t write the genius off, but it just stumped me. All the reflection it created in me had nothing to do with parsing his message, but more in wondering why he made something so boring. This was not what I signed up for.

Pleasant Surprise of the Year: Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted

A year ago, looking at lists of 2012′s most anticipated films, there’s no way I would have even selected this for viewing, let alone expected to write anything about it. The first two Madagascar films are, as far as I could tell from seeing clips and hearing accounts, everything that is wrong with modern animation, channeling the wrong kind of wacky humour from years past, trying too hard to keep the eye busy with all manner of tired visual cues (crash zooms on characters posing; a crime in any film but especially in cartoons where it’s used so damn much) and pop culture references. When people started praising this third installment, I figured it must be worth a shout, especially after finding out that it was co-written by Noah Baumbach, of all people. I couldn’t help but be curious about this mash-up. But first I had to watch the other two, because continuity or something.

And god help me I hated them. HATED them. They were exactly as I had feared; tired and shouty, lazily written, obnoxiously directed, witless and charmless and unbearably loud. It took all of my will to get through them, resisting the temptation to count the number of times an instantly dated pop culture reference cropped up, or a character reacted to another’s display of joy with a mute expression of horror (surely the most overused comedic sting of the last fifteen years, and particularly so in animated movies). Their appeal with kids made sense; they’re silly and noisy and restless (the first two Madagascar movies, not kids. Well, kids too, but… you get me). But for a fan of animation, it hurt to see what Dreamworks was willing to put out before finding its feet with How To Train Your Dragon and SoC’s beloved Kung Fu Panda franchise; two elegant examples of what animation can achieve with imagination and passion, compared to the Tex Avery-aping forced wackiness of Madagascar 1 and 2.

So was it Noah Baumbach who made Madagascar 3 such a delight? Who knows how much input he had into the development of this berserk threequel. It’s tempting to think not much, as the film shares two directors from the previous movies – Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath, with Darnell on co-writing duties – so you’d expect more of a continuity in terms of tone, even with a new writer onboard, especially as Idiocracy co-writer Etan Cohen joined the team for the second film and that turned out to be as annoying as the first. And yet here we are, with a similarly frenetic comedy, admittedly still committing some of the crimes of the first two, but this time tempered with a bit of grace among the hectic setpieces and ever-expanding cast of characters, notes of sadness and reflection that make the characters come alive more than the mechanical arcs of the previous movies.

But more than that, Madagascar rise far far above the first two installments by completely abandoning any semblance of restraint, launching itself without fear of audience alienation in a dizzying new direction. Where the franchise had occasionally hinted at being more ambitious than I thought, the temptation to rely on rote jokes and set-ups – hell, the second movie is basically an enormous Lion King pastiche – hadn’t been surmounted. But what the hell is going on in this movie, with its “nukular”-powered vans, banana-guns, reality-bending circus tigers, an eye-melting mid-movie Cirque-De-Soleil homage that reaches the level of breathtaking surrealistic uplift, and best of all, a demented antagonist voiced by an obviously merry Frances McDormand who is half-Terminator, half-Edith Piaf? Suddenly this franchise made perfect sense, and instead of being the resident idiot of the Dreamworks stable became its most anarchic pleasure. Also, it inspired this. Dammit.

While Tim Burton continued to rest on his laurels and gave us the entirely unsurprising Frankenweenie, Madagascar 3 proved it’s possible to make something that honours the expectations of the franchise’s fans while also refining the finished product, and while it’s not quite in the same league as SoC’s beloved Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, it will inevitably end up on our repeat-watch list. Will Madagascar be able to maintain this kind of invention through further installments? If they don’t get Baumbach back who knows, but you’d hope that Darnell will realise that holding back on the pop culture references and amping up the invention and lack of respect for convention is the key to this latest sequel’s immense financial – and critical – success. A return to its previous form will be a disappointment, but even so, this enormous surprise remains, and provides hope where there was none before.

Best Documentary of the Year: The Central Park Five. Or West of Memphis. Or Room 237, The Imposter, Or The Queen of Versailles

To those who don’t visit this site whenever I post something, you probably don’t know that Listmania! is an ongoing project with a format I try to follow annually. I suspect even my regular readers haven’t spotted that my award for Hammiest Performance by Michael Sheen award has been going for four years, and that I’m terrified that he won’t provide us with another crazy performance in 2013 (the one year he wasn’t in a Twilight movie was the year of Tron: Legacy, oh joy of joys: see below for further elucidation). What looks like a splurge of random comments and awards is actually done with a level of consistency that’s pretty much unwarranted, I’ll happily admit, but it gives me some pleasure to attempt that kind of fidgety anal continuity.

But for two years I’ve had to break that format, and it has greatly irked me. My Best of 2012 list didn’t feature my usual Best Documentary nomination for the second year running, but while the first omission was because I didn’t see any documentaries in 2011 (for shame!), this time it was because I’d seen five and they were all very good-to-excellent and I couldn’t make my mind up which would win out. The Central Park Five and West of Memphis are probably the ones on the bottom, but I honestly can’t decide between The Imposter, Room 237 or The Queen of Versailles. All three astonished me for various reasons; choosing a favourite has led to a long internal debate that wasn’t resolved by New Year’s Eve.

I’m tempted to say Room 237 is my choice for all the reasons laid out here; in short I find it easier to love this over attempts to depict real-world controversies as I don’t have to agonise over the difficulty in interpreting reality in a form that will inevitably fall prey to authorial distortion, especially as Room 237 is pretty much about differing interpretations. It’s also a beautifully edited work which even, in its best moments, creates an ominous atmosphere in keeping with the tone of its subject matter (The Shining for those who haven’t yet enjoyed it). It was easily one of the highlights of the 2012 London Film Festival, and I’m looking forward to seeing it again, but does that mean I should make it my pick of the year?

Of course, The Imposter is another film about interpretation of reality, though I don’t want to say too much about that for fear of spoiling some of its most delightfully shocking moments. Very little else this year has made me gasp in amazement as loudly as this, both during the movie and at the end, when I realised that the excellent score was by an acquaintance who I met when she was about to embark on her career scoring films. Though I’ve seen interesting Twitter interpretations of Bart Layton’s movie — both in terms of meaning and execution — by Mike D’Angelo and Geoff LaTulippe that have transformed my initial enthusiasm into doubt, I still regard this film incredibly highly. Some might not like how he manipulates the audience, but even taking into account my usual concerns over veracity and dramatisation it was an unforgettable experience at the time. I can’t deny that the showmanship of both Layton and the subject, Frédéric Bourdin, left me breathless.

Which was also what The Queen of Versailles managed too, but not in a particularly pleasurable way. Much as I don’t want to succumb to the reflexive class-warfare fury that I carry within myself like a briefcase full of bees, every so often you hear something about the rich that makes it almost impossible. Be it a story about executive bonuses, cruelty against underpaid employees, erosion of workers’ rights, or profligate and wasteful expenditure on extravagant and useless fripperies, I will allow myself an expletive-splurge and then try to move on without thinking that this human race is fucked, and the oncoming post-apocalyptic reboot might be a good thing.

So you can imagine that The Queen of Versailles was simultaneously very very hard to endure while also being a chance to totally indulge in frothing, screaming, ferocious anger; a Hundred-Minute Hate that I barely survived. Lauren Greenfield stumbled upon what could be The Story Of Our Age, a tale of hubris and disgusting lack of empathy, arrogance and cruelty and the price of the justice that the angriest of us pray for. This tale of the Siegel family shows them as vile, thoughtless parasites but also as recognisably flawed humans, greedy but lost, giving an extra dimension to the 2D villains we conjure up in our heads when we think of the rich and powerful.

And yet despite this skillfully rendered picture of the 1%, I still loathed them, even when I understood them, even when I thought, “Their loss is experienced by their employees a thousand-fold and I shouldn’t hope for their failure”, even when I realised they’re just the tip of an enormous Botox-filled iceberg and there are so many other dysfunctional, grasping, clueless rich scumbags in the world, happily throwing the rest of us into a landfill site in order to justify their comfort. No other movie has made me futilely scream so many epithets at the screen. Good job I watched it at home; if I’d seen it in public I would’ve been arrested for inciting a riot. These fucking assholes!

So which is my favourite of these movies? Probably The House I Live In by Nicholas Jarecki. Okay, I haven’t seen it yet, even though it was on BBC4 a few days ago (I love you, BBC’s Storyville, you’re the best thing in the world), but in the interests of resolving a tie-breaker, and in possibly supporting what would otherwise have been a confusing metaphor by Quentin Tarantino when discussing his Golden Globe Award for Best Screenplay, it’ll do. Next year hopefully I’ll see some actually bad documentaries, because right now they’re such a novelty to me I have very little understanding of what makes them work or not work, which makes it hard to talk about them objectively.

Okay, my next Listmania! entry is a bit of a grumpy one, and much of it rests on my frustration with not only the cinematic output of 2012, but also my relationship with the online critical consensus, and the war that rages within me as I attempt to figure out how to tell a story by looking at the efforts of others. Please bear with me as I try to work this confusing introspective shit out.

Listmania ’11! The Best Movies Of The Year

Posted on December 30, 2011 by admiralneck

A major caveat needs to be applied to this exhaustively thought-through list of the year’s best cinema, and I don’t mean the usual caveat I add about missing some key movie. The number 4 film on this list is so fresh in my mind (I watched it about 5 hours ago) that I’m not entirely sure it belongs in that place. It’s such a rich movie, such a complex and challenging piece of drama that there’s a good chance it should feature even higher, and yet I cannot place it where I think it will belong in future. Listmania is about how I feel at the moment I hit Publish, for better or worse. This means that sometimes I make almighty fuck-ups like including Megamind on last year’s list instead of How To Train Your Dragon, or putting Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs and Up below Michael Mann’s Public Enemies in ’09. As a result, it’s at 4, and if I decide that’s wrong in future, I’ll mention it somewhere.

Another thing to note; this year’s list doesn’t include a Best Documentary entry as I broke my new year’s resolution by not watching a single one. The Interrupters is on my Sky+ box, and I really wish I’d seen Senna even though I have next to no interest in Formula One. The one big documentary highlight of the year that I have seen — Errol Morris’ Tabloid — was shown during the 2010 London Film Festival and I wrote about it then, so my arbitrary rules demand I can’t add it this year. Those rules are very important, I’ll have you know. Contravention of the rules requires flagellation and right now I’m already feeling sorry for myself after one of our cats decided to use my face as a scratching post. ::sigh:: It’s been a long day.

As for the movies we traditionally didn’t get to see, the only possible contender for this list was The Descendants, which we could’ve seen at the 2011 London Film Festival if we’d been able to afford £25 each for gala tickets (which… no). Other than that I bet there was a ton of great stuff out there that would have surprised us and warranted inclusion, but I really doubt The Iron Lady (January release over here, rather perversely), Harry Potter and the End of the Franchise, or Jack and Jill would have made the cut. So, for about ten minutes at least, I feel pretty satisfied with this list. Yes, even the placing of Fast Five. You have no idea how much I enjoyed that movie. No idea. #ActionMovieBoner #CrushingOnTheRock

25. Wu Xia

How to describe this thrilling curio, other than to list the mashed-up elements: CSI, A History of Violence / Reign of Assassins, One-Armed Swordsman, Seven, and a dash of Raising Cain meld together to create a unique modern martial arts classic. Donnie Yen, Takeshi Kaneshiro and the legendary Wong Yu-lung face off in a relentlessly surprising tale of hidden identity, suspicion, and obsession. Yen is especially good as a family man thrust into a situation that jeopardises the lives of those he loves, but Kaneshiro matches him in the acting stakes as a possibly-demented detective who suspects he is on the brink of arresting a notorious and deadly killer. All the while, his distorted view of justice threatens to trigger a chain of events that could destroy an entire town. The battle for his soul, and the innocents of Yen’s village, is thrilling and unpredictable, aided by assured direction from Peter Chan, and beautifully photography by Yiu-Fai Lai and Jake Pollock. The well-controlled madness culminates in a final battle of epic intensity that is well worth the wait. Ignore critics who complain that Wu Xia is too much of a slow burn; the build-up contains pleasures too, before paying off in memorable fashion.

24. The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn

Two legendary filmmakers experimented with new technology this year, following in the pioneering footsteps of James Cameron and Robert Zemeckis. Those men made movies that have been critically shunned; perhaps Scorsese and Spielberg would have better luck. Hugo was embraced by film buffs for its loving homage to the works of a revolutionary filmmaker, but while Scorsese’s use of 3D and CGI FX was beautifully handled, the result was a little indulgent, too long, too personal to really breathe. Spielberg’s adaptation of the works of Herge was, on the other hand, derided by many. But it does more than just breathe; it hyperventilates with enthusiastic abandon as it leaps and gambols and sprints in an effort to entertain. The first half is less involving as it introduces beloved characters with too much reverence, but around the halfway mark Spielberg takes his new toy out for a real test drive, and from then on the audience is treated to a whirl of inspired choreography, unbridled imagination and sheer filmmaking genius. The series of setpieces that close out the film – especially the dizzying chase sequence through the elaborate Escher-like maze of Bagghar – are trademark Spielberg; beautiful, unconventional, technical marvels that left me giggling like a drunkard. The promise of further installments is enough to make this former Tintin-sceptic giddy with joy. More! Now!

23. Kung Fu Panda 2

This year’s crop of animated features was pretty disappointing, but that’s not to say there weren’t gems there. The blaze of publicity – and anxious online concern – for Pixar’s car-crash Cars 2 meant that attention was directed away from this Dreamworks sequel. The oddly dismissive reaction to the original might have contributed to the muted response but, for those of us who think the original is an underrated masterpiece of both computer animation and martial arts cinema, this was a cause for celebration. While not as thrilling and powerful as the first movie, KFP2 did the most important thing; it honoured that original, finding new ways to build Po’s character that followed on from his first arc, both by giving him a new source of inner pain to conquer, and by providing an antagonist whose own pain echoes that of our hero. Even the nigh-perfect Toy Story movies trod the same ground from one end of the franchise to the other; to see the KFP franchise show new facets of its central character was most welcome. On top of that, Jennifer Yuh Nelson – who provided the magnificent opening of KFP1 – does stunning work here too. Her direction is hectic but clear, packing giddy setpieces alongside well-judged character moments and perfectly timed gags. If this level of quality can be maintained, let’s hope Jeffrey Katzenberg’s pledge for a dozen sequels will come true.

22. Rise of the Planet of the Apes

What seemed like the most unnecessary movie of the summer season turned out to be one of the year’s highlights. It’s probable that no one thought we needed another Apes movie after Tim Burton’s woeful remake hurled scat bombs at the franchise, but hallelujah, Peter Chernin figured there was enough juice left to be squeezed out, and the result was a rousing triumph. Director Rupert Wyatt took the brilliantly “simple” script by Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver and treated it with respect, conjuring up some breathtaking setpieces more thrilling than any amount of crazy Bayhemian pyrotechnics. The fully realised cast of ape characters may have made the humans seem dull in comparison, but that’s only fair; this is a story about the emancipation of our poorly-treated simian brothers, after all. There’s lots to love about RotPotA, but special praise and garlands must be thrown at the amazing Andy Serkis. He’s terrific in Spielberg’s Tintin, but he’s even better here, bringing to life a truly great character. Caesar’s arc from innocent companion to vengeful freedom fighter is the key to this movie’s considerable success, and Serkis does thrilling performance capture work that deserving of award recognition. This summer may have opened with light mocking about RotPotA‘s existence, but the season ended with millions of us impatient for further installments. Who could’ve seen that coming?

21. We Need To Talk About Kevin

The formal daring of Lynne Ramsay’s long-awaited return to cinema is almost frightening, but welcomed gratefully. This adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s novel could, in less intelligent hands, have been reshaped into a run-of-the-mill thriller, but thankfully Ramsay is an artist of the highest order. Her crimson vision of cruelty and misplaced guilt washes over the audience like a wave, playing elliptical games with time and sensory input to create a sense of bafflement similar to that experienced by poor mistreated Eva. As with her previous movies, We Need… is an epic ambient hum compared to the three-minute manufactured ditties that we are usually served up. However, it would have been higher up this list were it not for the character of Kevin, here portrayed as a ludicrous force of pure malevolent evil, not a human being, whose actions are so dreadful as to unbalance the film. As a metaphor for the guilt and pressures placed on women as mothers, and a way to dramatise the vile rejection of Eva by a society that has yet to learn how to process grief, the demonic Kevin works brilliantly. As a believable person, less so. That means the movie’s higher allegorical purpose lacks the human core that would allow it to work on two levels, but even so, there is greatness here. Cinema needs Ramsay’s purity of vision; let’s hope she doesn’t stay away so long next time.

20. The Tree of Life

Terrence Malick’s semi-autobiographic cosmic meditation not only divided critical opinion but has such a split personality that viewer sympathies can change wildly from one moment to the next. Is this too self-indulgent, even for a Malick movie? Is it transcendental? Is it profound or profoundly stupid? The truth almost certainly lies somewhere in the middle, but for fans of the great man’s formless musings and pro-nature fixations, this triggered epiphanies that dwarfed the frustrations. Brad Pitt excels as the cold father who alienates his son, driving him to flirt with feelings of isolation that haunt him for the rest of his life. The microcosm of this transference is given an extra dimension by Malick’s startling decision to present a view of the macrocosm, an infinity of randomness and loneliness that seemingly extends beyond our lives. Tree of Life is arguably more compelling in its wilder moments; Sean Penn’s sojourn into what might be a barren and baffling afterlife, and the early Doug Trumbell-hewn effects sequences, are unexpectedly moving, grandiose bookends to a story of tainted childhood that can’t help but pale in comparison. Nevertheless, this peek into what makes Malick tick is also worth the effort. A filmmaker who for so long has been an enigma opened his heart to his audience, and in its finest moments, his honesty makes that journey worthwhile.

19. Arriety

There have been a number of adaptations of Mary Norton’s Borrowers novels — just this week the BBC showed a new version that featured lots of familiar Beeb-approved actors screaming and shouting and getting into all sorts of hi-velocity scrapes. Studio Ghibli’s version couldn’t be more different; it’s so relaxed that the only antagonist in the movie is revealed late in the movie and barely presents a credible threat. Hiromasa Yonebayashi and Hayao Miyazaki’s tale of dislocated family is disarmingly gentle, and focuses more on the details of life within the walls of our houses than the possibility of danger. The gloriously rendered background paintings and exquisite animation reintroduce us to our world from this new perspective, helped by stunning sound design that turns the ambient noise of a house into something alien. There is no need for empty histrionics; the tale of Arrietty’s growth into an adult, and the strain that puts on her overprotective parents, is drama enough. Arrietty’s friendship with Shô provides the rest of the narrative force; against all caution she befriends this potential enemy and inadvertently saves him from despair. This delicate, achingly lovely movie might not have the flights of imagination that other Ghibli movies have, but its grounded nature works in its favour. There is magic and beauty in this ode to friendship, this instant classic of pastoral fantasy.

18. Friends With Benefits

The profitability of cheap, bawdy comedies has led to a glut of films unafraid to depict gross-out bodily humour or frank discussions of the literal ins and outs of heteronormative sexuality (and its unfortunate homosexual partner, high-larious gay panic jokes). This year we’ve had the good (Bridesmaids), the bad (Bad Teacher), the lazy (The Hangover Part II), and the underrated (What’s Your Number?). Only one truly verged on greatness. Friends With Benefits trounces its other fuck-buddy rival No Strings Attached thanks to a good heart that is never swamped by the hilarious sex chat, rampant irreverence, and high energy hijinx, as well as a winning co-starring combo of Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake at their most charming. Will Gluck provides the same enthusiastic movie-referencing nerdery as he did with last year’s exemplary Easy A, this time drawing attention to the conventions of the romcom genre. Quite rightly, our cynical heroes, hurt by past lovers and eager to strip relationships of their romantic baggage, gleefully mock those conventions, and yet are unable to escape their draw when they finally, inevitably fall in love. Some have said Gluck is having his cake and eating it. I say he’s depicting the emotional arc of his protagonists. Honestly, what are critics paid for these days? Not enjoying transparently wonderful comedies? SADFACE.

17. Thor

It doesn’t have to be all Nolan-esque sourness in the superhero movie world, and Thor is the best example of the sheer fun that can be had within this maligned genre. Kenneth Branagh’s remarkably confident experiment with caped heroics does almost everything right, from introducing an audience to an alien world and unfamiliar hero, to using that new world to expand a recently established one, to matching its tone to its predecessors. The Marvel Film Universe has now been established as a place of high adventure and sneaky humour, both of which Thor has in spades. The perfect cast bring the ambitious script to life with infectious verve, with special honours going to scenestealers Anthony Hopkins and Kat Dennings, new star Chris Hemsworth, and especially the amazing Tom Hiddleston. His work here as the tragic and tortured Loki, “God” of Mischief – the year’s best villain – is a revelation. Branagh was right to think of this movie in Shakespearean terms; Loki’s anguish over his birth and insecurity over the love of the King Lear-ean Odin has shades of Richard III with a touch of Don John’s malevolence as he tries to undermine his brother by exploiting his Prince Hal-esque hubris. Thor takes the comic subject matter simultaneously lightly and seriously; it’s that balance between the two states that makes the best superhero movie of the year such a triumph.

16. Drive

For the majority of its running time, Nicholas Winding Refn and Hossain Amini’s pared-down crime thriller features the purest kind of cinematic iconography, using classic elements from the past thirty years of movies to create their simple tale of a getaway driver doing the wrong thing to protect the wholesome girl. It’s a glorious painting done in primary colours, depicting a luminous LA in which our near-silent anti-hero – a professional from the Michael Mann / Walter Hill school of perfectionists – performs miracles, but is undone and/or saved from solitude by a connection to the human world. File this alongside Refn’s previous movie, Valhalla Rising, as a portrait of a man whose singular purpose cannot change his inevitable future, as all around him complicate their lives with suspicion and misguided ambition. Refn’s pure imagery and purposefulness was revelatory, and his playful use of 80s-style imagery went some way to redeeming that ugly decade’s bad reputation. What a shame that overplotting in the last half hour had to tarnish this almost crystalline object. It’s a frustrating final act stumble that dampens the impact of what came before, but even taking that into account, Drive‘s mixture of innocence and grotesque violence is still remarkable, all the more so thanks to thrilling work from Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, and an unexpectedly terrifying Albert Brooks.

15. Martha Marcy May Marlene

Much like Jennifer Lawrence won a legion of fans with her appearance in Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone, Elizabeth Olsen’s debut performance in this dark drama is one of the highlights of the year. Her titular character is a mystery, an uncomfortable presence in our world and a sympathetic one when trapped in her cult. John Hawkes is the link between Bone and Marlene; his menace crosses over, but here he adds a layer of messianic charisma, controlling his minions and compelling them to commit terrible crimes. The question at the heart of this remarkable and bleak movie is whether Martha (Marcy May / Marlene) is a victim or a participant, and Olsen’s achievement here is to never tip us off. Sean Durkin’s directorial debut may feature a pleasingly ambiguous protagonist, but the one thing that’s not in doubt is his skill at using the natural world to generate an oppressive atmosphere of dread, one which curls over our anti-heroine from the first frame to the last like a closing fist. That gradual darkening, brilliantly evoked by the photography of Jody Lee Lipes and paced to perfection by editor Zachary Stuart-Pontier, is more effective than any horror movie made this year; when combined with the humanity of Olsen’s work, the result is unforgettable.

14. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Tomas Alfredson’s dour adaptation of John Le Carre’s classic novel is the kind of movie that gets plaudits just for being so out of sync with modern populist tastes; all of those garish loud movies that no one will admit to enjoying. Luckily there’s another reason for the critical praise; Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a riveting and intelligent thriller, made with exacting care by Alfredson, here proving that he is a major talent. The complex novel is cleverly condensed by Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan (redeeming himself for the mess he made of The Men Who Stare At Goats), wasting no time in feeding the audience swathes of information. Full attention is necessary, aided by the anti-distracting spartan visuals and authentically glum mise-en-scene; there’s an argument to be made that Tinker… captures Britain’s damp melancholic soul better than any other movie. Every performance is pitch-perfect, with special praise to be given to Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hardy and a never-better Gary Oldman. Their task is to take something that seems dry and clinical and show that the espionage element of the plot rests on subdued and submerged emotions. They leak out at times, giving us a peek into a world of immense, unaddressed grief. The result is a quietly devastating movie about betrayal and compromise, and the toll it takes on the secret guardians of society.

13. Fast Five

The summer season kicked off with Thor and Fast Five hot on each other’s tails around the globe, bringing with them the possibility that this could be the best summer season of them all. Sadly it was not to be. Nevertheless, at least we got this. Fast Five may be “just” an action movie, something that attracts derision from the criterati, but this “lowest-common denominator” action movie was like mainlining adrenaline. Embracing its humble origins, Justin Lin and Chris Morgan’s cacophonous action extravaganza is unapologetically crazy, doing everything it can to entertain its target audience, exceeding all expectations. It’s a perfect example of what a late entry into a series should do; it expands the franchise’s world without abandoning its roots, it adds new elements to enhance what we already have, and it pays off emotional beats that have been lying around for years. It also atomises most of Rio de Janeiro thanks to a joyous disregard for the laws of physics. No one here will win any awards, except for awards in my head, such as Best Movie Uniting Underrated Action Icons. Fast Five is Ocean’s 11 in cars mixed with The Fugitive, and the big showdown in the movie pits a sweat-spritzed Rock against an angst-ridden Diesel. If Shades of Caruso believed in the concept of guilty pleasures it’d file this in that category, but fuck that. This is just pure, delirious pleasure, a classic of the genre.

12. Wuthering Heights

Odd to think that this project has been in the works since 2008, considering the regular TV adaptations of Charlotte Bronte’s novel. There’s an industry at work doing nothing but churning out movies and TV dramas that try to depict the surface of Bronte’s story without capturing its essence. Adaptations need to break their source material apart to get at the meat within, and this version by Andrea Arnold and Olivia Hetreed does just that. By casting black actors to play young and “old” Heathcliff, they have done the impossible; they have breathed life into characters who have long lived as alien icons trapped in amber. With the rejection of Heathcliff here caused by ignorant bigotry due to his ethnicity, the motivations of all involved make sense in an instant, and from there we can empathise with them as people and not as tragic romantic caricatures. For the first time in my life I now understand Cathy and Heathcliff, feel their pain, ache for their tragic loss. This single move is a miraculous bravura flourish made even more profound by depicting this world as a kind of hell, in which Heathcliff can only rage and suffer. Arnold and Hetreed show how he brings everyone down into the depths with him, but they never lose sight of his humanity, inhumanity, and aching soul. Aesthetically perfect, atmospherically oppressive and thematically precise; this is the definitive visual adaptation.

11. Contagion

Doomsday fiction usually has to operate on a fantastical plane to generate a menace large enough to threaten all of society, but the plague subgenre doesn’t have to fake it. Which is why Contagion is so welcome, after years of Cassandra Crossing / Outbreak-style wackiness. Only Robert Wise’s Andromeda Strain ever got close to depicting the uniquely fascinating world of virology / epidemiology with any real rigour before, but Soderbergh and Burns’ terrifying vision of societal meltdown knocks even that terrific movie into a cocked biohazard mask. A brilliant cast tamps down its emotions to dramatise humanity’s reaction to imminent pandemic horror; muted emotions, delayed sadness, dutiful conscientiousness. Where lesser plague movies have succumbed to melodramatics, Soderbergh has made a forensic experience, using multiple narrative arcs to cover a lot of ground, all depicted with his trademark neat visuals. There are no pyrotechnics here, no races against time or miracle cures; there is only bureaucracy, panic, stupidity, and venality. Nevertheless, these qualities are balanced by the scientific minds that dispassionately work to prevent calamity. Contagion will probably scare the bejeezus out of you, but there is hope there too, because Soderbergh and Burns show that the connective web that threatens to destroy us is also the thing that will keep us alive.

10. Shame

They should call 2011 Annus Fassbenderis. After being the best thing about Jane Eyre, X-Men: First Class, and almost every movie he’s been in for the past five years, Michael Fassbender proved fans like SoC right by giving us the year’s most memorable performance, one that would send shockwaves through the culture if it wasn’t about that icky sex that people don’t want to reveal that they’re thinking about. His depiction of a sex addict’s psychological meltdown is mesmerising and courageous, and is enhanced by Steve McQueen’s evocative portrait of night-time New York, lit by the remarkable Sean Bobbitt to match Fassbender’s calm facade, all sterile, gleaming perfection hiding a darker core. Abi Morgan’s script wisely avoids providing explicit information about what made the protagonist, Brandon, the way he is. This isn’t about a journey into darkness. It’s about the arrival, and we are invited to look at ourselves without excuses or reasoning. It’s not an anti-internet message either, or a political statement about an over-sexualised culture. McQueen, Morgan and Fassbender may be trying to trigger a conversation about how we’ve all arrived at the point we’re at, alone and scared of opening up to others, without making facile assumptions. A problem doesn’t get fixed until we recognise it; perhaps that’s Shame‘s purpose, as well as to grip us, and horrify us.

9. Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol

The thought of Brad Bird following Ratatouille — one of the most profound meditations on art and creativity ever made — with another attempt to justify the existence of cinema’s most malfunctioning franchise made SoC depressed. It’s like hearing David Cronenberg is going to adapt a Robert Ludlum novel. And yet while that project was so deformed and weird that it never happened, Bird’s Ghost Protocol blasted onto IMAX screens in a flurry of confidence, taut suspense, and epic audience satisfaction. Bird’s beautifully designed and filmed setpieces are rightly attracting praise from even the most critical of viewers, with the Burj Khalifa scene on its way to becoming a new star in the action pantheon, maybe eclipsing even De Palma’s Topkapi homage in the first Mission Impossible. Supporting those thrilling highlights is a strong framework of improved character work (only Ving Rhames has registered in previous installments), propulsive pacing, and a giddy sense of silliness that compliments the drama. These touches, which turn a good spy movie into a great one, bear Bird’s fingerprints, more than justifying the decision to bring the great man on board. Yes, the villain’s terrible. Yes, the threat’s outdated. But Bird knows this genre so well, and can transmute the basest elements into gold, so what could’ve been another boring MI movie becomes 2011′s best action movie.

8. Melancholia

It’s a dark thought to have midway through Lars Von Trier’s brilliant end-of-the-world movie, but his recent awful experience with depression may have brought about a renaissance in his art, replacing his petty taunting of the audience with a greater awareness of himself, and his ambivalence toward himself. The result of this redirection has been the remarkable Antichrist and now Melancholia, which depicts the crushing weight of Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg’s depression as the inevitable end of the world due to collision with a metaphor in the shape of a planet. As blunt as this metaphor is, it’s effective in capturing the scale of a depressive episode within a person’s life, and is mitigated by subtler details that express with devastating accuracy society’s exasperating and uncaring attitude to those who suffer from mental health problems; the first half of the movie, with Dunst’s bride pushed and pulled by meaningless social obligations that she has become unable to comprehend or care about, is especially good. Dunst is mesmerising as the woman who dissolves into her depression, reaching something like a state of grace as her sister (Gainsbourg, also phenomenal) succumbs to her own version of this dread. Von Trier’s frank and honest exploration of his experience is an invaluable aid for those of us fortunate enough to escape its misery, and for that he should be thanked.

7. Margaret

Kenneth Lonergan’s long-delayed movie-as-novel is here presented with approximately a sixth of itself missing, and who knows how the restoration of that chunk would alter the movie. But what multitudes are already contained here, what glorious truths, what immense joy and anger. Lonergan has weaved a tale about perception and interpretation by making a movie that is intentionally opaque and misleading, but his primary achievement is to transcribe the fractured, confusing experience of PTSD into disorienting dramatic beats and unpredictable explosions of emotion. This unconventional approach is especially apparent during the final hour, as precocious student Lisa tries to mitigate her feelings by lashing out at everyone. Anna Paquin gives the performance of a lifetime as a young woman who believes she knows herself and her place in the world, despite all evidence to the contrary. What Lonergan has done is perceptively capture the exasperation of those adults who have stepped aside to let their progeny find their feet, only see watch in horror as they founder and then fall back on obnoxious bluster. Many commentators decry this as “merely” an outdated movie about 9/11, but it’s as much about how parents can fuck up their children, while offering hope that eventually those children will come to realise and accept they are a part of society, not above it.

6. A Dangerous Method

The accumulated works of David Cronenberg have shown his fascination with the life of the mind, and how our inner selves contain secret things that can bring us low. This metaphysical horror has been overtly addressed by him many times, but this is a more subtle exploration of the threat of our hidden self poses to ourselves. The Carl Jung here brought to us by Cronenberg, Christopher Hampton and Michael Fassbender is an enthusiastic man of high ideals and loyalty who is undone by a lust he could not have anticipated, one which erodes his marriage, his public reputation, his friendship with father-figure Sigmund Freud, and eventually his expectations for his future. But this superb film keeps this torrent of disappointment and longing out of sight; Cronenberg’s subtle direction means only Keira Knightley’s explosive catalyst Sabina Spielrein gets to unleash her emotions, often against her will. Jung’s yearning for such freedom, and Freud’s reaction to the young man’s ambitions, leak out in occasional moments of recognisable childish weakness at odds with our image of them as great men. These relationships are the engine for this masterful dramatisation of their theories in action; psychoanalysis as psychodrama. Though this hasn’t landed with as big a splash as Cronenberg’s most recent movies, SoC suspects time will be kind to it. One day it will be ranked among his best.

5. Attack The Block

It’s rare that a British filmmaker has enough control over his urge to emulate his directorial heroes that he can pay homage to them without making a hollow copycat exercise, and Joe Cornish deserves plaudits for his expert handling of suspense and pace. But this is more than just a proficient sci-fi homage. The real-life mugging that inspired Attack The Block has been transformed through Cornish’s compassionate and questioning approach into a treatise on the ethnic and social tensions that exist between the victims of our unjust economic system and those who glamorise it. There’s no patronising here; Cornish is aware of the wrongness of his protagonist’s crimes, and doesn’t excuse them, but he at least tries to understand what drives those who are sickeningly referred to as “the feral underclass” to such lows. This curiosity and empathy is almost unheard-of in British culture, especially after the recent riots that caused a shudder of sneering disgust to ripple through our media. That it has taken so long for someone fortunate enough to not sit at the bottom of Britain’s socio-economic ladder to sympathetically wrestle with these themes is a black mark on our country. AtB isn’t just a thrilling horror-action movie; it’s an attempt to communicate something about the UK that no one wants to think about, a time-capsule representation of who we are and what we’re doing to our disenfranchised youth.

4. A Separation

Proof, if proof was needed, that a movie about a simple gamble within a marriage could create the dramatic equivalent of a train crash. Asghar Farhadi’s riveting drama begins simply as the tale of an Iranian couple considering divorce, with Simin (Leila Hatami) testing the resolve of her stubborn husband Nader (Peyman Maadi), before becoming a cross between Kramer Vs. Kramer and Rashomon. Farhadi’s stunning movie becomes complicated with such stealth that it’s not until you’re an hour in that you find yourself engaged in a kind of dialectic with the movie, questioning everything you have seen in an effort to keep up with the shifting narratives of the protagonists. The stubbornness of Simin and Nader, which causes such damage to those around them including their daughter and the tragic figure of Razieh (Sareh Bayat), should make them unsympathetic but Farhadi’s humanity means we recognise every stupid, selfish thing they do. His direction is forensic, his cast uniformly impressive, and his script is the screenwriting highlight of the year. This is a movie to watch and study to in order to pick up all of its subtleties and surprises, and that’s before you consider its allegorical richness. But it’s not necessary to know the intricacies of Iranian politics to get the most from A Separation. All you need to do is be a human, with all the understandable flaws so perceptively captured here.

3. The Artist

There are numerous arguments against Michel Hazanavicius’ silent movie homage:” it’s too light”; “the melodrama is overplayed”; “there’s not much to it”; “it’s too derivative of several movies”; “the dog’s not in it enough”; “why is it black and white and why are there no words”; “there’s no way I could possibly enjoy this as being happy is anathema to me and my very serious ways”. It’s all a load of stuff and nonsense. Experiencing this ode to joy, this gratifyingly weightless and ecstatic love letter to the power of populist art, is the best time you will have in the cinema at the moment, and being a part of the collective audience experience – as depicted very pointedly in the opening moments of this modern classic – is an unforgettable treat. Jean Dujardin and Berenice Bejo are delightful as lovers separated by pride and fear of the future; their infectious joy and indestructible attraction to each other is the secret of The Artist‘s considerable success. As opined here, it’s also a tribute to the artists who have been part of the tapestry of culture that is still being woven, and the way in which an idea generously given can flourish. One act of flirtatious kindness pays dividends in the future, with the recipient paying it back in order to save a loved one’s soul. But forget about that; see it, succumb to its delirious, enthusiastic embrace of cinema and romance, and don’t forget to bring your dancing shoes.

2. Rango

Who would have believed that Gore Verbinski had this in him? Shades of Caruso is proud to call itself a pro-Gore blog, having been one of the five audience members to have enjoyed the determinedly peculiar Mousehunt on release. Even taking that early oddity into account, Rango is a startling leap into the weird for Verbinski. A Chinatown homage that mangles the Western genre and goes out of its way to alienate the audience it needs to be a success? Just for taking that risk it deserves to be praised, but tokenism like that isn’t necessary when the end product is this much fun. As SoC tweeted at the time — in a state of some shock and joy — it’s like a Grant Morrison Animal Man comic directed by Sergio Leone, breaking the fourth wall and probably even a hypothetical fifth wall as Rango seeks to define his personality by pulling our new modern cinematic mythology into his world to form a path of self-discovery. Much of the rambling discourse on how we define ourselves makes it seem like the recording of the dialogue – done by Verbinski with all the cast present, acting out their parts on a soundstage – was actually an informal group therapy session. There’s structure within this berserk adventure, and Verbinski stages a couple of delirious action sequences too, but it’s the doodling in the margins, the asides and self-inspection of Rango himself that make this one of the most exciting and lovably deranged movies of the new century. It’s also a vision of beauty; thanks to the stellar production design of Mark “Crash” McCreery and the lighting design of consultant Roger “King” Deakins it’s almost too much to take in on first viewing.

1. Take Shelter

For far too many of us, the world has become a buzzing, unpredictable maelstrom of doubt and fear, as established institutions crumble and threaten to take everything familiar with them. A combination of things beyond our control have conspired to alter the world too quickly for us to keep up with, so that we’re assailed by external and internal strife that manifests in global pessimism about the future; there was too much news this year, too many things going wrong. The earth shifted beneath our feet metaphorically and literally in 2011, and no other cultural experience captured that terrifying feeling like Jeff Nicholl’s magnificent end-of-days movie. Expertly combining a sense of imminent world-shattering event and the personal story of one man’s battle to overcome his seemingly inevitable mental collapse, Take Shelter is suffused with the sense that devastating things can happen to us and there’s nothing we can do can stop them.

The final scene can be seen as either hopeful or not, but for anyone who feels their stomach drop every time they turn on the TV or look at Twitter or read a newspaper, and hear that the world as we know it has become alien and newly fragile, it’s the slow build of dread that makes this the most immersive and upsetting cinematic experience of recent times. Nicholls has put his finger right on the synapse that controls our terror; watching this exhausting experience, and marveling at the mesmerising performances from Jessica Chastain and Genius-Level firebrand Michael Shannon is to see your fears realised before you. For those of an optimistic bent, there is still much to enjoy here, but for the rest of us, this is the movie of our time, the touchstone and representation of our psyche.

Honorable Mentions:

Children Who Chase Lost Voices From Down Below: Makoto Shinkai’s magical trip into the underworld is an afterlife myth for our time, as a young girl and a shady operative both seek to deal with their feelings of loss and loneliness by embarking on a death-thwarting journey into Agartha. CWCLVFDB‘s epic sweep and honesty make this a visual and emotional success.

Weekend: Comparisons to Before Sunrise are inevitable, but this depiction of a brief encounter is transformed into something different due to the inevitable political element within. Andrew Haigh is to be commended for not making this romance specifically about gay politics, but addressing it cleverly provides an extra emotional level. It’s also just very romantic.

Footloose: More to come on this Craig Brewer remake in a forthcoming post. Suffice it to say, it did everything right, nothing wrong, and fixed everything wrong with the beloved but heavily flawed original. A hugely underrated crowdpleasing treat.

Super 8: 2011 was a year in which our best filmmakers were eager to plunder the history of cinema, and J.J. Abrams’ homage to the golden years of Spielberg’s Amblin so accurately captured the look and feel of those movies that all structural flaws could be forgiven. To those who grew up watching the movies referenced here, Super 8 was a glorious reminder of their power and beauty.

Moneyball: Brad Pitt co-produced this, and it’s pretty much his show. Eschewing the usual mythologising of baseball (at least until its final act), Bennett Miller, Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin use a dry tale of statistical manipulation to depict the slow awakening of a man to life’s possibilities. Pitt “knocks it out of the park”. (UK readers note that this is a baseball metaphor.)

Coming up, once I’ve harnessed my considerable grumpiness — Listmania ’11: Worst Movies of the Year. There will be grump.

BFI LFF 2011: Bernie / The Monk

Posted on December 6, 2011 by admiralneck

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Top One Hundred and Six Movies of the Oughts (5-1)

Posted on December 15, 2009 by admiralneck

The last installment of this epic list-making enterprise comes a day after the Times ran their own 100 movies of the decade list, and as expected, within moments of looking at it I regretted missing out two fantastic films: Battle Royale and School of Rock. Actually, the first movie is one I’ve only seen once, and though I remember loving it it’s been so long I’d like another chance to reappraise it at some point.

This is something that has come up frequently in our house, which contains two hardcore fans of Suzanne Collins’ fantastic Hunger Games series. Though Battle Royale — itself based on a novel by Koushun Takami — has high dementedness value, it’s arguable that Collins’ YA novel features a similarly hardline ethos. When I read it I was surprised by Collins’ willingness to take her characters to some extremely dark places. That said, Battle Royale does have one thing over Hunger Games: Chiaki Kurigama as the deadly Takako Chigusa, in a performance so eerily amoral that Tarantino hired her to play GoGo Yubari in Kill Bill Part 1. She is terrifying.

There’s a good chance watching that again might convince me it should have reached the top 100, but I already know for sure I screwed up with School of Rock. It’s one of my all-time favourite movies, and one I had only just recently had a chat about with friends of Daisyhellcakes, so there really is no excuse for missing it off. I’m a fan of Jack Black and tend to ignore criticisms of him, especially when he has recently excelled as my beloved Po in Kung Fu Panda: a role that he was born to play. I even liked him in the not-great-but-not-terrible-either Year One, and thought pairing him with Michael Cera was an inspired choice that needed to have been made on a better movie. So yeah, considering School of Rock is the perfect vehicle for him, mixing his endearing/obnoxious immaturity and his sincerity better than almost anything he has been involved with.

I’ve heard some people criticise Richard Linklater for selling out and making a mainstream movie, but the level of commitment from everyone involved — and Linklater’s surprising facility with the most likeable cast of teenagers ever assembled for a movie — marks this as a triumph for dedicated filmmaking no matter what studio it was made for. I’m so pissed that I missed this off: it would definitely have been in the top 30, maybe even top 20. This omission tells me it’s been too long since I’ve seen it.

And what do you know, Jack Black appears in one of the top five movies as a very angry biker, and Richard Linklater directed another of them. It’s as if it was meant to be. Remember, this list has been built with one important caveat: I’m not including movies from this year as I’ve not yet had time to get acquainted with them. As a result I’m going from 1999 – 2008. This might seem silly considering everyone else is doing it from 2000 – 2009, but I feel safer sticking with movies I know well instead of including stuff from this year that I’ll just go off in time, and if I started it in 2000 I’d only be considering 9 years of films. Also this timeframe matches my arrival in The Big Smoke, and so has subjective value. The reason why this special list-ruining rule is important now will become clear very soon…

5. Anchorman

What had seemed, before release, to be little more than a one-joke movie about 70s fashion and workplace sexual prejudice was something much, much more than that: a Dada-esque parody of a vast number of cinema and TV cliches, racing past the dreary pastiche of the 70s that it could have been, and coming to rest in a parallel universe where all bets were off. Ferrell and director/co-writer Adam McKay slaved over the script and rehearsed with their incredible cast for months before shooting began to come up with as many alternate lines as possible, and even had two B-plots, allowing them to construct a “sequel” — Wake Up, Ron Burgundy — from the leftover scraps. Freed of storytelling logic, and willing to play with audience expectations, the viewer has no idea what will come next. A crazed Yazz Flute solo? A huge fight between rival news teams? A dog talking to a bear? No matter what they threw at you, it made a kind of twisted sense in this baffling world. At the risk of sounding like boring nerds, it’s a rare day when we don’t quote Anchorman in some capacity, which is either testament to our lameness, or the almost infinite genius of this film. It deserves a place in the Comedy Hall of Fame alongside Blazing Saddles, Duck Soup, Sleeper, This Is Spinal Tap, and Airplane!

Best Moment: There are countless wonderful scenes and lines in this, but this moment from a deleted scene shows how even the alternate versions of the finalised movie featured incredible moments. Not only is Ferrell’s hysteria inspired, check out how Brian Fantana (Paul Rudd) races into the studio. Perhaps that’s what I like about this: every time there is an opportunity for a stupid joke, Ferrell and co. take it.

4. Before Sunset

Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise was the perfect romantic movie for those who shared the ages of the onscreen couple of Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. Their impulsive and idealistic romance would most appeal to those who had not yet reached a point in life where hopping off a train in Vienna to spend time with a complete stranger would seem like a terribly risky idea. Going back to that movie as I grew older, its appeal remained, but more and more it seemed like a fantasy. The sequel came at exactly the right moment, just as I had suddenly decided to take an impulsive step of my own, and so my first experience of seeing it was already ripe with subjective emotion. Even to those who were not embarking on their own journey of romantic discovery when first seeing this, surely its intelligence and careful expansion of the themes of the first movie would impress them. Bravely showing how Jesse and Céline have changed and matured in the nine years since their first meeting, Linklater uses its real-time format to cram in as much discussion about the nature of love, regret, and the effect of time on memory as he possibly can, with his two leads improving on their already impressive work from the first movie. Without a doubt, it’s the most profound and most life-affirming romantic movie ever made.

Best Moment: For much of its length it feels like a realistic riposte and negation of the flighty romanticism of the original, pitching it perfectly at an audience that had been optimistic when seeing the first film, but were maybe feeling less romantic when seeing the second. Linklater’s masterstroke comes in the final moments, where he shows those who might have “grown up” that maybe that impulsiveness was still something to aspire to. Objectively, an amazing note to end on. Subjectively, it was an unnervingly accurate depiction of what I was going through there and then. I will be eternally grateful to all who worked on it.

3. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

If ever a movie was crying out to be made into a franchise, it’s this one. Peter Weir’s phenomenally entertaining adaptation of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series is pure joy from beginning to end. Russell Crowe was criticised by fans of the series as being wrong for the role, but he is utterly believable as a man who is a fool on land but a genius at sea. Paul Bettany as the stiff Maturin is less of a stretch, but his work is just as endearing, and the relationship between them both is perfectly played. With Aubrey as Kirk and Maturin as an amalgam of Spock and Bones, it’s almost like watching an episode of Star Trek, though easily the best one ever made. With a humbling attention to detail only matched by Peter Jackson, a mastery of mood and pace borne of years of making underrated classics, and the understanding of cinema’s power that would drive even the most cynical audience to the edge of its seat, director Weir has created a modern marvel with seeming effortlessness. A repeated refrain — from myself, Daisyhellcakes, film critic Anne Billson, and several other people who I have seen this movie with and watched their indifference transformed into awestruck adoration — is that it could have continued for another two hours and it wouldn’t have been a chore. On the contrary. I, and many others, would love to see this series go on for as many movies as can be made from O’Brian’s books, and have leaped on every scrap of sequel news as if it were a liferaft. If I ever win a EuroMillions rollover, bankrolling a new movie will be my first — and biggest — splurge.

Best Moment: Too many to mention, with multiple high notes including Crowe’s bluff performance, Bettany’s lovable snootiness, exquisitely rendered battle scenes, and an amusing side-trip to the Galapagos for Stephen Maturin, here portrayed as a proto-Darwin. It’s impossible to find clips that haven’t been tampered with, so let this review from Roger Ebert and Richard Roeper stand in their place. Basically, what they said, and then some. It’s a magnificent adventure.

2. The Incredibles

The only bad thing I can say about Brad Bird’s superhero movie is that it renders moot any attempt to make a Fantastic Four movie, which of course didn’t stop 20th Century Fox from trying and failing to do just that. Twice. In the space of a single movie Bird showed us how flexible Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s original creations were by adapting the “Superfamily” metaphor into the tale of an actual family of Supers, forced (like the JSA) to hide their powers from an increasingly hostile public. From there Bird is free to satirise our litigious culture, paralysed by bureaucracy, all while providing entertainment on a level even the best of Pixar had yet to achieve. Though criticism has been levelled at him for making a movie that seemed to celebrate Ayn Rand’s Objectivist philosophy — with the exceptional people of the world forced to curb their efforts to change the world by those who are less exceptional — as with Ratatouille Bird is merely interested in seeing people using their knowledge and skills to help others instead of taking shortcuts and chasing fame and fortune (Syndrome and Linguini both over-reach, misunderstanding the importance of experience and intelligence, though at least Linguini learns his lesson and finds a way to excel in the final act).

What could be more inspirational than saying you should be true to yourself and then use your talents to make the world a better place? And what could be more thrilling than Bird’s staging of some of the greatest superhero moments ever committed to film? With the help of Michael Giacchino’s rousing, playful score, and some of the best voicework of recent times (No surprise that Craig T. Nelson’s best performance is found here, but could this be Holly Hunter’s finest moment too?), Bird delivers a series of bravura setpieces, respectfully paying homage to early James Bond movies and classic 50s and 60s superhero tales while still keeping things fresh. As I’ve said before, this was the decade in which the superhero genre came into its own, but it was The Incredibles that represented the ultimate expression of the things that make superheroes appealing: it’s inspiring, it’s fun, and it’s spectacular. Pixar will struggle to top this beautiful moment. If I was compiling a list of movies released between 2000 and 2009, it would be number one with a bullet.

Best Moment: An early trailer for The Incredibles made it seem like a mere superhero spoof. Though those movies can be fun (Kinka Usher and Neil Cuthbert’s entertaining adaptation of Bob Burden’s Mystery Men was another movie that could have found a place on this list), I had hoped for more from Pixar. As it progressed a seriousness of purpose became apparent beneath the brightly-coloured surface, but when Helen Parr and her children Dash and Violet are fired upon by Syndrome it becomes clear that the stakes here are deadly serious. At that moment, The Incredibles went from being a good movie to a truly great one, something that touched on every emotion in the spectrum. I was utterly smitten, and have been ever since.

1. The Matrix

For those who know me, this is no surprise (and before anyone accuses me, my fudging of the parameters of this list was not an intentional move to allow me to wax rhapsodic about it). However, to anyone who has come through this list expecting a more respected movie, this might come as a disappointment. Though it was admired on release, familiarity and two unloved sequels have made it easy to forget how groundbreaking this was. SF fans who were once thrilled to see a cerebral and exciting science fiction film have long since decided that this is as embarrassing and soft-SF as other unloved and bone-headed mainstream efforts. It’s not hard-SF, I have heard. It’s just a pastiche of Philip K. Dick’s ideas, a brainless and shallow action flick that pisses faux-profundities down its leg like a village idiot dressed like a goth. Admitting to loving this movie has proved as fraught as saying I loved Titanic. Which I didn’t. But I’ve heard enough anti-Matrix complaints to last a lifetime, and that’s before we get to the knee-jerk criticisms about how Keanu can’t act. Yes yes, that’s very perceptive of you all.

None of this matters to me. Seeing The Matrix for the first time was an epiphany. The Wachowskis collected ideas about the nature of reality, society-as-form-of-oppression, anarchic resistance to control structures, and the power of self-belief, and then mixed them up with cutting-edge visual effects, explosions, and martial arts action. It was as if they had made the movie I had been waiting my whole life to see, and since then nothing has matched that feeling of awestruck recognition, something akin to a waking dream. It was as if a movie had ravished my brain and injected my heart with adrenaline. I walked on air for months after.

Ten years later, it might be time to give The Matrix another chance. The Wachowskis might be amateur philosophers giving Cliff’s Notes abbreviations of challenging philosophical ideas, but as a primer for further exploration, it can’t be beat. It’s no coincidence that after seeing this I read Baudrillard and Debord and Chomsky, my interest in political and moral philosophy finally overtaking my previous fascination with epistomology. This may not have turned me into Christopher Hitchens (thank God), but it made me — and many others — take note of the injustices intrinsic to the structure of our society, and how it has become increasingly difficult to escape that Black Iron Prison. It deepened my appreciation of PKD as well, and the rest of the decade saw me expanding my reading habits. In that way it is laid the groundwork for Lost, probably the most thematically complex pop culture artifact ever. Another reason to love it.

It’s no exaggeration to say it changed cinema. Many of the visual conventions that the Wachowskis borrowed from anime have since been “borrowed” from them and overused to the point of cliche, but we should only blame the brothers for being smart enough to recognise the appeal of these images. It was probably the first time famous actors were expected to undergo intensive martial arts training in order to perform many of the stunts themselves. Its visual effects were not just technically impressive but also looked unlike anything else, and represented a break from the traditional SF conventions of space battles and giant monsters. And it also featured some of my favourite characters ever: treacherous Cypher, lovestruck Trinity, naive Neo, deadly Mr. Smith, and — best of all — Morpheus, the man who sets it all in motion, played by the coolest cat in cinema, Mr. Laurence Fishburne. As with many other movies on this list it technically doesn’t belong in this decade, but to me this decade started the moment I saw this, and everything since has been a post-script. Even the sequels cannot ruin it.

Best Moment: I’m sure this cod-Buddhist speechifying will make a lot of people cringe, but when I first saw this, and Morpheus says the big line, it took all of my energy to not leap to my feet and scream “YES!” at the top of my lungs.

And that’s that. A big big thank you to all of those who have checked out these posts and sent me kind comments on Facebook and Twitter. Hopefully, though a lot of my choices were pretty obvious, there have been a couple of mentions here or there that have inspired you to go back and check out a movie you’ve forgotten or avoided, and I certainly hope that you enjoy whichever film it is you end up watching. There are more lists to come at the end of the year as I go over the movies I’ve seen in 2009. Fingers crossed those don’t get out of hand, though I already suspect they will.

The Top One Hundred and Six Movies of the Oughts (30-16)

Posted on December 11, 2009 by admiralneck

As I approach the end of this project that was meant to be over in a day (it kinda ran out of control), I find that more and more of my choices are populist crowdpleasers, mostly because I’ve watched them with greater frequency and taken them into my heart. Nevertheless, even though they’re frowned upon, I don’t think they should be missed off lists like this. It’s no easy feat to create movies that can entertain large groups of people without heading for the bottom of the barrel, and in fact, I’d argue that aiming for the lowest common denominator fails to please crowds any way. G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra was meant to be a big dumb action flick for big crowds of hooting boys of all ages, but it didn’t set the world alight. I’d like to think it was because people have more discerning tastes than they’re credited with. And now, someone somewhere is thinking, “But what about the success of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen?” I got nothing. [/sheepish]

And now, the movies I missed off part of this list business. Yes, I didn’t put Pan’s Labyrinth in the list. It honestly left me cold first time I saw it, though I did like it a lot, and thought Ivana Baquero and Sergi López were excellent. For the record, Daisyhellcakes loved it enough for both of us. My reservations were the same as I always have for Guillermo Del Toro’s movies, that for all his incredible flights of fantasy and attention to detail, they often feel like the work of a very talented adolescent who has not quite reached maturity. Pan’s Labyrinth is the closest he has come to this, but still it struck me that maybe Del Toro had bitten off more than he could chew. He also has terrible problems with pacing, choosing slow and steady but occasionally shooting off on tangents that make his movies grind to a frustrating halt.

That said, his eye is incredible, and all of the movies he has made this decade are staggeringly beautiful. For that alone I should give him some list props, but if I was honest, the movie I would choose would either be Hellboy 2: The Golden Army (which I praised here), or Blade 2. Both of them were more fun and filled with memorable images, but lacking the critical cachet that his homage to Spirit of the Beehive did. No matter. They both rocked my socks off. Consider them honorary mentions. And if I get to see Pan’s Labyrinth again, there’s always the chance that it will win me over. I hope so.

That brings me to the penultimate part of this list. Hopefully I can finish it all off today just so I can chill out over the weekend.

30. The Bourne Ultimatum

There is no slack in the rousing conclusion to the Bourne trilogy. Has there ever been a movie this propulsive, this energetic, this exhausting? Paul Greengrass strips every shot down to its essence, his camera focusing on every salient detail like a laser. Even better, he brings Bourne’s story to a satisfying close, turning the deadly assassin into a Spy Jesus who “dies” for the sins of his brothers. Arguably the best action movie since Die Hard.

29. The Insider

Featuring Russell Crowe’s first great US performance and Al Pacino’s last, Michael Mann’s 21st Century masterpiece pitches two men on the side of truth against the unfeeling machine of modern capitalism. As thrilling as the most hectic action movie you can imagine, and beautifully shot by Dante Spinotti, it’s also the best corporate thriller of recent times.

28. Unbreakable

M. Night Shyamalan’s best movie was treated like a failure upon release, but as his work becomes more erratic with every year, we can now look back on this love letter to comics with clearer eyes. His stately aesthetic was never used better than in telling the tale of a reluctant superhero and his hidden nemesis, and he deserves praise for extracting such a sensitive and quiet performance from Bruce Willis.

27. Magnolia

Paul Thomas Anderson’s sprawling patchwork might be self-indulgent, but it was also playful, emotional, and performed to perfection by a magnificent cast. Anderson has always been confident, but here he found a vehicle for his storytelling ideas that matched that ambition, something loose enough to allow for all the meta-narrative trickery. It also featured this jarring but unforgettable moment:

26. The Fountain

On first viewing, Darren Aronofsky’s meditation on life and death seems like an over-ambitious but impressive failure. Repeated viewings reveal its depth, its thematic strength, its perfect fusion of sound and image, building to a finale of terrifying and humbling power. In decades to come, it will be rightly hailed as a masterpiece.

25. Kung Fu Panda

An exhilarating rush of lovable enthusiasm from a company who had previously made nothing but forgettable chaff. Dreamworks Animation paid homage to Chinese culture with respect and style, aided by a never-better Jack Black playing a fanboy given a chance to live his dream. It’s pure escapist joy from start to finish.

24. Rushmore

Wes Anderson’s second movie was the one that turned his name into a adjective used to describe whimsical, cutesy indie nonsense. Thankfully his movies are cleverer than most, plus he has a weapon that many critics ignore in favour of whining about his formalism: crackerjack comic timing. Though I love all of Anderson’s movies, this was my introduction to that skewed universe, delivering the Shock of the New with a smirk and discerning use of Who songs.

23. Three Kings

David O. Russell manages to capture some of the genius of Catch-22 in his tale of soldiers hustling to steal Saddam’s gold as the first Gulf War winds down. It’s also a work of almost avant-garde oddness that bends cinema convention while providing laughs, pathos and action. A near-miraculous mixture of genres and tones.

22. Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang

Ignored on first release, Shane Black’s hard-boiled detective homage is slowly gathering a following of fans in love with its word games and playful distortion of genre expectations. It’s also a perfect showcase for the talents of Robert Downey Jr. and Val Kilmer, who prove to be one of the great movie double-acts.

21. Galaxy Quest

Half satire of genre convention, half love letter to the genre and its fanbase, Dean Parisot, David Howard, and Robert Gordon’s hybrid of Star Trek and The Magnificent Seven is quite possibly a perfect movie, and qualifies as the best work many of its cast has ever done. For example, is this moment Alan Rickman’s finest?

20. X2: X-Men United

Bryan Singer’s first X-Men movie was good enough to kickstart the superhero genre’s domination of the decade’s box office, but his sequel was on a whole new level. The satisfyingly complex narrative is a great starting point, but Singer then adds a series of bravura action setpieces that would only fail to melt the heart of the most obstinate and aggrieved fanboy. I may have yelped like a joyful puppy more than once during my first viewing.

19. Rachel Getting Married

The triumphant return of Jonathan Demme to filmmaking greatness. Even though he had not used it in a mainstream movie for a while, his loose aesthetic proved to be a perfect fit for Jenny Lumet’s piercing script about a family trying to enjoy a wedding while Anne Hathaway’s Kym — the living reminder of an awful tragedy — shows up and tries to bring everyone down.

18. Zodiac

David Fincher’s movie about the San Francisco Zodiac killings pretty much ate itself here, as he turned his obsession with the case into an exploration of how it possessed all those who tried to solve it. Is this as close as we’ll get to a personal movie from this impersonal perfectionist? No matter. What counts is his total mastery of mood and mise en scene, and his ability to make crowd-pleasing entertainment out of such dark material.

17. Memento

This mindbending crime thriller had a brilliant conceit that attracted all of the attention. The tale of vengeance-seeking Leonard (Guy Pierce) cleverly mimics his neurological disorder, and is told backwards and forwards simultaneously, meeting in the middle. Nevertheless, as with Christopher Nolan’s Prestige, it’s really a tragic story of how a man’s dark heart will bring him to destroy himself and others for the stupidest reasons.

16. Elephant

The award-winning centrepiece of Gus Van Sant’s Béla-Tarr-period is a hypnotic and gut-wrenching cinematic experience, and the best depiction of youthful nihilism since Tim Hunter’s River’s Edge. Harnessing long tracking shots, a fractured narrative, and the amazing soundwork of Leslie Shatz to discombobulate the viewer, Van Sant’s movie captures only a fraction of the horror of the Columbine school shootings, but that fraction is enough to chill the blood.

And now I embark on the final leg of this journey, with exhaustion gripping my branes. Wish me luck.

It’s Burke’s Law!

Posted on November 9, 2009 by admiralneck

Last Friday, while attempting to write yet another lengthy post about the London Film Festival, I was repeatedly distracted by Twitter. This is nothing new. However, one of the people I follow whose name escapes me now (sorry) linked to an article posted on the film discussion site The Auteurs. I’d heard of it before but stayed away as I thought it had something to do with the dreary Luke Haines band, but in fact it’s a nice way to completely waste hours of your time, rating and “favouriting” movies to create a Profile for yourself, complete with representative movie still selection so you can have an iconic image next to your name (I went with Gene Hackman in The Conversation). It was pleasantly pointless, though I did take enormous pleasure in giving Slumdog Millionaire and Happy-Go-Lucky one star each, and Kung Fu Panda the five stars it so richly deserves. Take that, Sight and Sound subscribers.

The article that directed me to this site via Twitter was this lovely little prose poem half-heartedly giving Michael Bay some credit while referring to “fascism” and suchlike. This is possibly the only even vaguely positive critique of Bay’s work I’ve seen on the Internet that hasn’t been written by a teenager with an apostrophe allergy, and as such deserves to be preserved in amber. It might never happen again. As I said earlier this year, my opinion of Bay is torn between fascination and revulsion, the latter becoming more pronounced after the casual (but no less odious) racial insensitivity of Transformers — with the breakdancing jive-talking African-American parody known as Jazz getting killed in the final act, as is sadly the norm in movies — “transformed” into the full-on indefensible racial stereotyping of Skids and Mudflap. Shades of Caruso reader and former Transformers fan Lindywasp (one of her noms de Net) once sent me a very passionate disavowal of the sequel after an upsetting experience at a screening where the audience went from excited to silence once the extent of the caricature settled in. I was concerned by Bay’s decision before, but after reading her heartfelt condemnation, I became furious.

Though I’ll not be able to think of Bay without thinking about that incredible cloth-eared arrogance, I have still long been fascinated — as Daisyhellcakes can attest, having listened to me go on about it at length — by his public persona as the Fratboy DeMille, a man who stomps around like an over-excited teenager while making canny backroom deals for profit points, keeping the cost of his (sill expensive) movies down with obnoxious product placement, and buying effects houses such as Digital Domain. This bravado is ripe for parody, most brilliantly by the faux-Twitterer Fake Michael Bay (sample tweet: “Dammit, if I had a dollar for every time I dropped my iphone out of a helicopter doing a barrel roll…”), though I suspect he’s in on the joke.

Even more fascinating to me than Bay the Man/Douchebag is that signature style of his. Like haphazardly edited two-hour-long trailers, his films are plot-light endurance tests; a relentless swarm of images that he hurls at the audience, seemingly not caring why image B must follow image A. As long as the barrage of glowing, flashing, swirling pictures and the cacophony of multi-tracked sound effects keeps audiences pinned to their seats, Bay seems to think “Job done!” and then returns to his swanky Bay-Cave to drink Crystal and watch Total Wipeout. Is this good filmmaking? Hell no, and as I’ve attempted to explain before, I would never be able to argue that it was (though Danny Boyle’s similar everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach wins critical approval and Oscars). However, he does create an experience that no one else has the studio backing, the technical know-how, and the obnoxious confidence to be able to pull off.

Examples: Transformers ends with a city being pulverised, complete with epic firefights on a main street that totals buildings and blows up cars. The destruction-gasm setpiece in Pearl Harbor — a wretched film of enormous ethical dubiousness — contains the single most expensive shot caught on film, which is ghoulish, wasteful, and logistically impressive all at the same time. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is capped off with a huge scene where an Egyptian village gets mashed into the ground, pretty much (I’m sure it was not a real village, but if it’s fake he still managed to get it built before blowing bits of it up). He shows aircraft carriers getting split in half as if it ain’t no thing. These are stereotypically big and dumb crowd-pleasing moments that I’m sure Eric Rohmer’s fanbase would consider utterly vulgar, but they look impressive in slices. It’s not in Bay’s interest to coral these images into a coherent narrative other than “Man go from point A to point B while the world explodes.” It’s enough for him to hint that there is a goal that his heroes are trying to achieve, and as long as it seems there is some kind of forward momentum while he stages bravura visual orgasms containing complicated visual and physical effects, that’s enough for him.

Again, I’m aware that this is not technically artistically valid on a large-scale level, but on a micro-level, I cannot look away. Every dumb populist miscalculation like his nasty treatment of women, or his blindness to the wrongness of using racial stereotypes for stupid lowest-common denominator jokes, or his infantile reliance on slapstick and screaming instead of nuance and character growth, or any number of other admittedly dreadful habits, run parallel to his facility with composition. There are so many shots he has created that make my eyes wobble with pleasure that I cannot forget them. His reliance on patriotic button-pushing aside, he can create stirring moments just through imagery in a way that would probably make propagandists salivate. That ability to capture an emotion through manipulative visuals, aided by the pounding music of Hans Zimmer or Steve Jablonsky, is unparalleled. He truly is Leni Riefenstahl with a baseball cap and a collection of sports-cars in his Beverly Hills mansion.

And yet, despite this facility with imagery — perhaps the one thing I think even his detractors should accept, even if really really really grudgingly — he is treated like the Boogeyman. Numerous people accuse Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen of being the worst film of the year. Granted, it’s not very good, but I’ve seen far far far worse movies released this year. Just a cursory flick through the Auteurs site sees a number of forum threads based around hating him, including Why is Michael Bay on Criterion?, Is Michael Bay the worst director of all time?, and Reasons to *HATE* Michael Bay. The thread NAME THE FILM MAKERS YOU THINK SHOULD RETIRED OR SHOULD NOT BELONG TO THIS INDUSTRY AT ALL is filled with calls for Bay’s immediate withdrawal from the film industry. I get the feeling that this is a running joke, though it is borne of genuine frustration at his movies and his success.

They’re not the only ones who dislike him, of course. Mainstream critics are revolted by his movies, and even on a site oft-visited by the people you would think comprise his most ardent fanbase (Ain’t It Cool News), Bay is treated like a pariah. “Damn You Michael Bay” is a long-running Internet joke that has become a mantra. Bay hatred appears to be reflexive, the last word in an argument. Why accuse any other filmmakers of crimes against decency? Isn’t it obvious that Bay is the worst of the worst, representing everything that is debased and evil about modern cinema? He’s an unpleasant man with poor taste who appeals to the slack-jawed yokels and the hoodies and the youths with their popcorn and their knives and their mobile phones and suchlike and so on and so on etc. ad infinitum.

He’s the Hitler of films. Mike Godwin postulated that the overuse of mentioning Hitler in online arguments was sadly inevitable (“As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.”) Well, I reckon that there is another law we can accept as fact by now. “As an online discussion about film or culture grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Michael Bay approaches 1.” I don’t think this law should be associated with my real life name, which doesn’t have the Ooomph that “Godwin” has (that’s the kind of name that belongs in front of the word “law”). Therefore I propose we refer to this as Burke’s Law, named after the TV series from the 60s that was revived in the 90s. Why Burke’s Law? Because I always hear that phrase said in the same way as in the 90s title sequence, i.e. with this voice…

…and there is nothing more awesome than that. Sex up that show title, Sexy-Voiced Lady. (Here’s the first part of a full episode, just to show it in amazing context.)

So yeah, whenever a discussion about sucky film directors inevitably begins to focus almost exclusively on the vapidity of Bay’s destructo-porn epics, feel free to mention Burke’s Law. If Bay is what people think represents the true nadir of modern filmmaking, that’s up to them, but if they’re not willing to expand their search to other far less talented individuals out there, then I just can’t take them seriously. I see Dr. Uwe Boll get mentioned a lot, and he’s certainly a candidate. He’s made a shit-ton of laughably awful movies in the past — many more than Bay — and he has now tried to make himself seem classier by making a film about Darfur. However, he’s filming real rape victims re-enacting their own rape for his camera. Making fun of his shitty output suddenly doesn’t seem so funny.

If we’re going to talk about directors who create deafening, poorly storyboarded and edited action scenes that substitute crashing, clashing cacophony for flow and plot momentum, how about Stephen Sommers? He combines Bay’s inability to understand the clear, unambiguous narrative progression of a movie or an action scene with a flat eye for visuals, as evidenced by the busy but tedious G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra? Or Rob Cohen, a man who has yet to make even a half-way decent action movie? Though I’ve not seen his most recent movie — Fast and Furious — I did endure Stealth (where some of the best visual effects ever committed to film were wasted on a farrago of galactic proportions) and The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, which actually managed to be the worst film in the Mummy franchise. It takes a special kind of witless hack to out-Stephen-Sommers Stephen Sommers. I’d rather watch a Bay action scene than something by either of these guys any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

I’d also like to make the case for Robert Luketic, who keeps pumping out the most artless dreck, seemingly with no understanding of what cinema can do. His last three films were lifeless committee-borne crowd-pleasers that couldn’t even be bothered to do anything pleasurable, rendered even more unbearable by being presented in a lifeless cavalcade of wretchedly awful compositions. As a bonus they also featured either reductive, retrograde gender-politics (Monster-In-Law and The Ugly Truth) or ethnic white-washing (the utterly worthless 21). Or what about Jon Avnet, aka the modern day Ed Wood? His last two movies — Righteous Kill and the incredible 88 Minutes — were among the most catastrophically misjudged movies I have ever seen, made by someone without a single artistic bone in his body. It’s so bad that I suspect he doesn’t even understand the scripts he adapts. No matter how hard he tries, he will never be able to come up with a single memorable or inspiring image in his entire career. Not counting this one with Leelee Sobieski taking aim, that is.

If you’ve thought long and hard about it and have come to the conclusion that Bay is less talented than these directors, or that he represents something far greater than just bad filmmaking (i.e. he’s a mascot for the debasement of the culture at large), or that his Platinum Dunes production company is committing a terrible crime by making bland remakes of great horror movies, or that the compositions I love are just ugly but shiny commercialised parodies of actual art, or that he’s the worst kind of patriotism-spouting pro-military arrested adolescent, or even that he’s just an obnoxious douchebag (James Cameron without the brains or the talent), that’s perfectly understandable. I’m cool with that, if you show me your calculations. But don’t just say, “Michael Bay is the worst director ever” because that’s the accepted wisdom. That’s not film criticism. That’s letting someone else do your thinking for you.

Hello WordPress, Got Room For One More?

Posted on September 14, 2009 by admiralneck

Wow, the dashboard is so pretty. It’s like Functionality Porn in here…

First, an explanation of what the hell is going on for anyone showing up here for the first time. Shades of Caruso has been going for a couple of years now, during which time we have criticised Slumdog Millionaire and Mike Leigh, praised Michael Emerson and Kung Fu Panda, obsessed about Rock Band, and listened to Seth Lakeman, Jens Lekman, and Animal Collective. As the over-used phrase would have it, good times. Nevertheless, in its previous incarnation Shades of Caruso was in a rigid — and ugly — Blogger template. So, as of today, we (we being contributors Canyon and Masticator as well as me, Admiral Neck) are going to be trying out a WordPress format for a while. I’ve transferred our previous blogposts over, but some of them didn’t seem to work properly. Consider the old blog an archive, which we shall refer to from time to time, and consider this blog to be in a state of constructiony-flux.

And yes, even though we’ve not said it on this new blog, we still support James “Sawyer” Ford.

Now, time to go on and on about The Shield, Lost, and the woeful Torchwood. Business as usual, it seems.

Where I Am Felix To The Academy’s Oscar

Posted on February 22, 2009 by admiralneck

Tonight is the night when we feeble schlubs get to dip our toes in the lake of glamour that is the Academy Awards, staring in disbelief at the staggering beauty of our betters. I say this without sarcasm, as I am powerless to resist it. The award period is like my Christmas (with the summer season of robots, monsters, superheroes and explosions being my extended birthday). This year, though, has been particularly frustrating, as the likely winners seem more predictable than ever. It’s obvious that, by now, Slumdog Millionaire is going to win most awards. That frustrates me enough as I’m on record as hating the damnable thing, but also because it has robbed us of some speculation fun. Last year I might have had a terrible time picking winners, but it was a lot more fun guessing.

Before revealing my picks (can you bear the suspense?), first the results of our poll to find out the most popular longshot Oscar winner from this year’s nominations. It was pretty clear who was the favourite.

Kung Fu Panda (Animated Feature Film) – 6 (50%)

Martin McDonagh (Original Screenplay – In Bruges) – 3 (25%)

Richard Jenkins (Actor- The Visitor) – 2 (16%)

Melissa Leo (Actress – Frozen River) – 1 (8%)

Michael Shannon (Supporting Actor – Revolutionary Road) – 0 (0%)

Viola Davis (Supporting Actress – Doubt) – 0 (0%)

Gus Van Sant (Director – Milk) – 0 (0%)

Thomas Newman (Soundtrack – Wall*E) – 0 (0%)

Peter Morgan (Adapted Screenplay – Frost/Nixon) – 0 (0%)

Wally Pfister (Cinematography – The Dark Knight) – 0 (0%)

The Baader Meinhof Complex (Foreign Language Film) – 0 (0%)

Milk (Picture) – 0 (0%)

Iron Man (Visual Effects) – 0 (0%)

Hellboy II: The Golden Army (Makeup) – 0 (0%)

The Dark Knight (Sound Editing) – 0 (0%)

Wanted (Sound Mixing) – 0 (0%)

Kung Fu Panda‘s win in this most insignificant of polls warms my heart. KFP has been damned with faint praise since its release (“It’s surprisingly good for a Dreamworks movie!” “It’s a lot of fun, but it’s not profound like the Pixar film!” etc.), though that didn’t stop it sweeping the board at the Annies, recently. Recently I rewatched Wall*E, hoping I would like it more second time around, but sadly no. As usual, I offer the usual caveats. It’s beautiful, it’s got a lot of incredible ideas and imagery, and the sound design is stunning, but the second half is flat, and Wall*E spends far too much of the movie falling over or having things land on him. In Kung Fu Panda the slapstick has a purpose (Po’s clumsiness is the source of his kung fu strengths, as his unpredictability makes him unstoppable), whereas in Wall*E it’s more like punctuation at the end of scenes, something I have a real problem with. The analogy I ended up with was that Kung Fu Panda was a Buster Keaton movie (it’s all about the story and the spectacle), and Wall*E was a Charlie Chaplin movie (convinced of its own importance, and deeply unfunny). Keaton beats Chaplin any day of the week. Sorry, Pixar.

The votes for Martin McDonagh, Richard Jenkins (who had a really good year with great work in Burn After Reading and Step Brothers as well), and Melissa Leo were cool too, but the latter two are in categories that seem decided already. Martin McDonagh has a better chance, as his category of Best Original Screenplay is kinda weak, but even so, In Bruges was too filthy and odd to win votes from the staid Academy members. Shame. No one else got a single vote. Maybe I chose badly, or maybe readers of this blog haven’t seen the movies I picked. No matter. Thanks to everyone who participated.

And now, my picks for this year. Except for a couple of categories, it was a no-brainer. Even if the Weinsteins have been trying to turn people against Slumdog, it’s just not going to happen. To be honest, I may have hated Slumdog, but I might hate The Reader more. Not only is it of questionable value as a comment on post-Nazi German guilt (I think these comments and these reviews sum up my feelings far better than I could express), it’s also a really stupid and pompous movie, filled with wall-to-wall cliches and laughable dialogue. David Hare and Stephen Daldry should hang their heads in shame. The list of nominees seems even worse now that I’ve seen that fucking appalling exercise in static worthiness. And so, I think the Oscars will, should, and can’t (due to stupidity) go to the following…

Best Picture:

Will Win: Slumdog Millionaire
Should Win: Milk
Should’ve Been Nominated: The Dark Knight / Rachel Getting Married / The Wrestler

I may have had some reservations about Milk, but it’s far and away the best movie of a really poor bunch, and by an order of magnitude in the case of Slumdog and The Reader. The snubs for the three films I have listed truly grate on me. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again; this is the worst nominations list I can remember, which is another thing that has robbed me of my enthusiasm.

Best Director:

Will Win: Danny Boyle – Slumdog Millionaire
Should Win: David Fincher – The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Should’ve Been Nominated: Christopher Nolan – The Dark Knight / Jonathan Demme – Rachel Getting Married

An easy pick, though I chose Fincher as the Should Win as there was so much work done on Benjamin Button that I thought he edged it over Van Sant, who also did excellent work on Milk (though, as I’ve said before I would have liked a bit more unconventionality in it). None of this matters, though. Boyle will win it for the worst film of his career. Yuk.

Best Actor:

Will Win: Mickey Rourke – The Wrestler
Should Win: Mickey Rourke – The Wrestler
Should’ve Been Nominated: Robert Downey Jr. – Iron Man

This has to happen. If someone else won it would be the biggest upset of the night. And by upset, I mean, I would turn off the TV and not bother watching to the end. Come on, Mickey!

Best Actress:

Will Win: Kate Winslet – The Reader
Should Win: Anne Hathaway – Rachel Getting Married
Should’ve Been Nominated: Kate Winslet – Revolutionary Road / Julianne Moore – Blindness

I love Winslet and think she’s one of the great actors of our time (seriously), but for The Reader? Nuh-uh. She’s good in it, but that movie deserves no reward. Having her nominated for that and not the far superior (and not despicable) Revolutionary Road is testament to the efficacy of the Weinstein’s strong-arming tactics, but that’s little consolation to us. I’d love for Anne Hathaway to win instead, just to rob the Weinstein’s of their little victory, but that would also rob Winslet, who has deserved Academy recognition for about ten years at least.

Best Supporting Actor:

Will Win: Heath Ledger – The Dark Knight
Should Win: Heath Ledger – The Dark Knight
Should’ve Been Nominated: Aaron Eckhart – The Dark Knight / Bill Irwin – Rachel Getting Married

Another no-brainer. And deservedly so.

Best Supporting Actress:

Will Win: Penélope Cruz – Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Should Win: Marisa Tomei – The Wrestler
Should’ve Been Nominated: Rosemarie DeWitt – Rachel Getting Married

I would have plumped for someone else in this category, but Tomei isn’t winning (even though the Academy might like to legitimise her Vinny award), and Cruz will get it for losing out on a justified award for Volver.

Best Original Screenplay:

Will Win: Milk – Dustin Lance Black
Should Win: In Bruges – Martin McDonagh
Should’ve Been Nominated: The Wrestler – Robert D. Seigel

See above for my feelings on this. Milk wasn’t a bad screenplay, but it was pretty unimaginative, and filled with clunky exposition. Seigel’s work on The Wrestler, on the other hand, was feather-light. It would have been nice for a former Onion employee to get a nod.

Best Adapted Screenplay:

Will Win: Slumdog Millionaire – Simon Beaufoy
Should Win: Frost/Nixon – Peter Morgan
Should’ve Been Nominated: The Dark Knight – Christopher Nolan / Jonathan Nolan / David Goyer

A particularly weak field. Beaufoy’s script is shockingly poor, a stream of one-dimensional characters, contrivance, phony uplift, and childish humour. That said, David Hare’s adaptation of Bernard Schlink’s novel is equally vapid. I would love for them both to lose to Peter Morgan, even if his screenplay was also loaded with some silly Cliff Notes-style exposition to help the viewer along (though the amount of contextual information in that film has to go somewhere if it’s going to be less than fifteen hours long).

Best Animated Feature:

Will Win: WALL-E – Andrew Stanton
Should Win: Kung Fu Panda – Mark Osborne and John Stevenson
Should’ve Been Nominated: Fear(s) of the Dark – Various

I’ve not even seen Fear(s) of the Dark, but it sounds great, and it would be fun to see Charles Burns getting a nomination (read Black Hole; it’s awesome). That would have meant Bolt misses out, which is a shame, as it’s a lot of fun, and the nomination is a nice present to Disney Animation, which has had a difficult couple of years.

Best Foreign Language Film:

Will Win: The Class (France) in French – Laurent Cantet
Should Win: Waltz with Bashir (Israel) in Hebrew – Ari Folman
Should’ve Been Nominated: Gomorrah (Italy) – Matteo Girrone

I suspect The Class will win as much for its quality as for not being the far more controversial Waltz With Bashir. I’ve not yet seen The Class, and it might be amazing, but I can vouch for the incredible Bashir, a film that moved me to horrible tears. I just can’t see something that bleak winning an Oscar. Though it would ruin my spread, I’m hoping for a Bashir win here.

Best Animated Short:

Will Win: This Way Up – Alan Smith and Adam Foulkes

As I’ve not seen anything in this category, I don’t feel right commenting on what should or shouldn’t have been nominated, but I will make this prediction, based on my super-scientific method of picking the one I’ve heard of (this short was profiled in the Times this week). Besides, it looks pretty cool.

Best Art Direction:

Will Win: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – Donald Graham Burt, Victor J. Zolfo
Should Win: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – Donald Graham Burt, Victor J. Zolfo
Should’ve Been Nominated: Hellboy II: The Golden Army – Stephen Scott

The wide-range of time periods for this movie, and the amount of work in replicating them, ensures this win. Either that or The Duchess will win for Removal of Contemporary Items From Stately Homes. Yawn.

Best Cinematography:

Will Win: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – Claudio Miranda
Should Win: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – Claudio Miranda
Should’ve Been Nominated: The Spiderwick Chronicles – Caleb Deschanel / The Fall – Colin Watkinson

It was ravishing! How can it lose? It won’t win anything not in the non-technical categories, so this is a sure thing (he said with obnoxious over-confidence).

Best Costume Design:

Will Win: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – Jacqueline West
Should Win: Milk – Danny Glicker
Should’ve Been Nominated: The Fall – Eiko Ishioka

As in the previous category, an egregious snub for The Fall. I know the movie wasn’t seen by many people, but even just looking at the trailer should be enough of a showreel to get some attention. It was one of the most beautiful movies ever made, and no one noticed. I’d feel sorry for the director, for which this was a work of great personal significance, but I imagine worldly things do not matter to the mighty… TARSEM!

Best Documentary Feature:

Will Win: Trouble the Water
Should Win: Man on Wire
Should’ve Been Nominated: Standard Operating Procedure

Boy, I was looking forward to watching Trouble The Water on More4 this week, but our Sky+ record function has gone kerflooey, so that’s not happening any time soon. I would think that will win over Man On Wire due to the subject matter, no matter how good it is (I hear it’s wonderful, but I wouldn’t know). Maybe I’m being too cynical. I’ll happily eat my words later, if necessary.

Best Documentary Short:

Will Win: The Conscience of Nhem En – Steven Okazaki

As with the animation short, I’ve not seen any of the nominees in this category, so I won’t insult everyone here, and will plump for this nominee as I have heard of it as well.

Best Film Editing:

Will Win: The Dark Knight – Lee Smith
Should Win: The Dark Knight – Lee Smith
Should’ve Been Nominated: Speed Racer – Roger Barton, Zach Staenberg

There is an awful error in The Dark Knight, during the Batpod sequence, where Batman shoots a glass door, drives through a building, shoots another glass door, and then is back in the building even though it should have driven out. GAH! It drives me crazy every time I watch it. Even so, the editors do an amazing job of cutting a big complex movie down to a manageable size (it should have been a lot longer).

Best Live Action Short:

Will Win: On the Line (Auf der Strecke)

Here is where my foolproof method for selecting the hard-to-find nominees fails. I’ve not heard anything about any of these movies. ::sigh:: Sorry, short film filmmakers. I’m going for On The Line as it’s the top of the list. Oy, that’s some crappy motivation.

Best Makeup:

Will Win: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – Greg Cannom
Should Win: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – Greg Cannom

I didn’t select a film that should have been nominated, as I think they picked the best three films of the year, though I will say I suspect Tropic Thunder didn’t get picked for Robert Downey Jr.’s blackface makeup as the Kodak theatre would explode from the white liberal confusion over it. I think Ben Stiller et al have a good defense when they say that the character of Kirk Lazarus is a lampoon of actorly pretension, and it’s a hilarious turn, but I really don’t think we’re ready to be handing out awards for that kind of divisive and explosive makeup just yet.

Best Original Score:

Will Win: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – Alexandre Desplat
Should Win: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – Alexandre Desplat
Should’ve Been Nominated: The Dark Knight – Hans Zimmer, James Newton Howard

Doesn’t it seem ironic now that The Dark Knight‘s ineligibility caused so much fuss, and all for nothing? Repeated viewings have shown how complex, unorthodox, and stirring that soundtrack is. The eventual snub is deeply frustrating. And why did I choose Desplat’s soundtrack over A.R. Rahman? Because Desplat is super-awesome and I just don’t want Slumdog to keep winning things. Please?!

Best Original Song:

Will Win: “Down to Earth” from WALL-E – Peter Gabriel and Thomas Newman (music), Peter Gabriel (lyrics)
Should Win: “Down to Earth” from WALL-E – Peter Gabriel and Thomas Newman (music), Peter Gabriel (lyrics)
Should’ve Been Nominated: “The Wrestler” from The Wrestler – Bruce Springsteen

This category is utter bullshit this year. I can understand Slumdog and Wall*E getting a nomination each, but leaving out Springsteen makes absolutely no sense. It’s good news for Peter Gabriel, though. Slumdog should, again, win, but I suspect (as does Richard Corliss in his picks) that the Slumdog vote will be split, leaving Gabriel free and clear to win.

Best Sound Editing:

Will Win: WALL-E – Ben Burtt and Matthew Wood
Should Win: WALL-E – Ben Burtt and Matthew Wood
Should’ve Been Nominated: Speed Racer – Dane A. Davis, Mike Chock, Drew Yerys

Big no-brainer. Burtt’s work is the main reason Wall*E works at all.

Best Sound Mixing:

Will Win: The Dark Knight – Lora Hirschberg, Gary Rizzo, Ed Novick
Should Win: The Dark Knight – Lora Hirschberg, Gary Rizzo, Ed Novick
Should’ve Been Nominated: Speed Racer – Felix Andriessens, Christian Wegner

The Dark Knight is the big action film of the year. This is the way this kind of voting goes.

Best Visual Effects:

Will Win: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – Eric Barba, Steve Preeg, Burt Dalton, Craig Barron
Should Win: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – Eric Barba, Steve Preeg, Burt Dalton, Craig Barron
Should’ve Been Nominated: Speed Racer – John Gaeta

The last no-brainer, though I’m still upset with the FX voters for yet again snubbing John Gaeta’s work. The same thing happened with the two Matrix sequels. No matter what you think of those films, the effects were ground-breaking and beautiful. Who has this guy pissed off in the FX community to keep getting snubbed like this? I’d put Speed Racer above the competent Iron Man work any day of the week.

And that’s that. Sorry for going on at such great length. After tonight I hope to stop thinking about this for at least eight months. Getting annoyed by something so trivial is exhausting.

I Semi-Promise This Will Be The Last Oscar-Related Poll…

Posted on January 31, 2009 by admiralneck

One last poll before the big day (Feb 22nd), when some really mediocre movies get handed awards, and hopefully, just to make the whole thing not a total disaster, Mickey Rourke and the FX teams on Benjamin Button get their gold-plated just desserts too. By now it’s probable that even though Slumdog has mysteriously been hit with all sorts of unsavoury accusations of child exploitation and dismissal by India, it’s going to romp home. Though I am on record as not being best pleased about that, I’ll just be happy if people stop referring to it as the longshot. It really isn’t. By now people desperately want it to succeed, and it will. Benjamin Button will go home with some technical stuff, and Slumdog will get the biggies, a decision that will be the sanity-twisting equivalent of this…

…and, eventually, just as regrettable and embarrassing for the Academy members and the folks at home as this.

That inevitability aside, there are some actual longshots in that list. The ones no one thinks to bet on. In some awards the longshot occasionally wins (no one expected Bryan Cranston to get an Emmy for his Breaking Bad work as there were other, better known nominees there), but with the Oscars it pretty much never does. That doesn’t mean they should be ignored though. Hence this new poll. Which longshot nominee would you most like to see score an upset and win?

Richard Jenkins (Best Actor for The Visitor)

Melissa Leo (Best Actress for Frozen River)

Michael Shannon (Best Supporting Actor for Revolutionary Road)

Viola Davis (Best Supporting Actress for Doubt)

Gus Van Sant (Best Director for Milk)

Thomas Newman (Best Soundtrack for Wall*E)

Martin McDonagh (Best Original Screenplay for In Bruges)

Peter Morgan (Best Adapted Screenplay for Frost/Nixon)

Wally Pfister (Best Cinematography for The Dark Knight)

Kung Fu Panda (Best Animated Feature Film)

The Baader Meinhof Complex (Best Foreign Language Film)

Milk (Best Picture)

Iron Man (Best Visual Effects)

Hellboy II: The Golden Army (Best Makeup)

The Dark Knight (Best Sound Editing)

Wanted (Best Sound Mixing)

I will admit, I have no idea if Wanted really had amazingly well mixed sound. I just want to know if anyone out there is eager for a movie featuring a Loom of Fate, bullet-curving, and bomb-rats to win an Oscar. If anyone votes for it, I’ll assume Mark Millar popped by. Anyway, have at it, my pretties.

Another List, This Time Featuring A Lot Of Wishful Thinking

Posted on January 11, 2009 by admiralneck

It’s Golden Globes time! The world is waiting for glamour, and so far we’ve got a red thing on Eva Longoria, some awesome gray hair on Alec Baldwin (sporting a very fetching bit of chewing gum he used to intimidate The Vile Seacrest), and way too much eyeliner on Debra Messing (who, according to Canyon, keeps doing her “sexy face”, which sounds unpleasant). Anyway, remember when I said I was done with lists? WRONG! Why not one more? Here is who I would love to win tonight, though I really don’t think any of them actually will. We’re avoiding the actual award results tomorrow (we’re taping the awards on Sky Movies Premiere and won’t get to watch it until tomorrow night), so there will be a long period with this completely inaccurate speculation sitting here without comment from us. Bear in mind, many of these are not my real favourites of the year. For instance, Frost/Nixon is not my favourite of the year (see posts passim), but compared to Slumdog Millionaire, or The Curious Case of Benjamin Buttons (as the idiots as E! called it a little while ago), it was easily the tops. My choice for each is in italics.

BEST MOTION PICTURE, DRAMA

* The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
* Frost/Nixon
* The Reader
* Revolutionary Road
* Slumdog Millionaire

BEST MOTION PICTURE, COMEDY

* Burn After Reading
* Happy-Go-Lucky
* In Bruges
* Mamma Mia!
* Vicky Cristina Barcelona

ACTOR, DRAMA

* Leonardo DiCaprio, Revolutionary Road
* Frank Langella, Frost/Nixon
* Sean Penn, Milk
* Brad Pitt, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
* Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler

ACTRESS, DRAMA

* Anne Hathaway, Rachel Getting Married
* Angelina Jolie, Changeling
* Meryl Streep, Doubt
* Kristin Scott Thomas, I’ve Loved You So Long
* Kate Winslet, Revolutionary Road

ACTOR, COMEDY OR MUSICAL

* Javier Bardem, Vicky Cristina Barcelona
* Colin Farrell, In Bruges
* James Franco, Pineapple Express
* Brendan Gleeson, In Bruges
* Dustin Hoffman, Last Chance Harvey

This is a tough category. I’d be happy if either of the In Bruges actors won as well, and I wouldn’t cry if Javier won either. The sexy bastard.

ACTRESS, COMEDY OR MUSICAL

* Rebecca Hall, Vicky Cristina Barcelona
* Sally Hawkins, Happy-Go-Lucky
* Frances McDormand, Burn After Reading
* Meryl Streep, Mamma Mia!
* Emma Thompson, Last Chance Harvey

A win for Rebecca Hall would also be cool. She was the best thing about that inexplicably adored movie.

SUPPORTING ACTOR

* Tom Cruise, Tropic Thunder
* Robert Downey Jr., Tropic Thunder
* Ralph Fiennes, The Duchess
* Philip Seymour Hoffman, Doubt
* Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight

SUPPORTING ACTRESS

* Amy Adams, Doubt
* Penélope Cruz, Vicky Cristina Barcelona
* Viola Davis, Doubt
* Marisa Tomei, The Wrestler
* Kate Winslet, The Reader

I’ve not seen Doubt, but I’d also like Viola Davis to win, because she’s so amazing in everything and should win awards on a regular basis.

DIRECTOR

* Danny Boyle, Slumdog Millionaire
* Stephen Daldry, The Reader
* David Fincher, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
* Ron Howard, Frost/Nixon
* Sam Mendes, Revolutionary Road

I didn’t like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button(s), but Fincher’s direction, despite the odd peculiar choice, was still the most impressive of the candidates in this category. I am astonished by the scope of the movie even as I am annoyed by its narrative slightness.

SCREENPLAY

* Simon Beaufoy, Slumdog Millionaire
* David Hare, The Reader
* Peter Morgan, Frost/Nixon
* Eric Roth, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
* John Patrick Shanley, Doubt

FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM

* The Baader Meinhof Complex (Germany)
* Everlasting Moments (Sweden)
* Gomorrah (Italy)
* I’ve Loved You So Long (France)
* Waltz With Bashir (Israel)

I don’t know if the subject matter is too dark, but Gomorrah should walk this. It’s a breathtaking movie.

ANIMATED FEATURE FILM

* Bolt
* Kung Fu Panda (Obviously!!!)
* WALL-E

ORIGINAL SCORE

* Alexandre Desplat, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
* Clint Eastwood, Changeling
* James Newton Howard, Defiance
* A.R. Rahman, Slumdog Millionaire
* Hans Zimmer, Frost/Nixon

ORIGINAL SONG

* “Down to Earth,” WALL-E; music by Peter Gabriel, Thomas Newman; lyrics by Peter Gabriel
* “Gran Torino,” Gran Torino; music by Clint Eastwood, Jamie Cullum, Kyle Eastwood, Michael Stevens; lyrics by Kyle Eastwood, Michael Stevens
* “I Thought I Lost You,” Bolt; music & lyrics by Miley Cyrus, Jeffrey Steele
* “Once in a Lifetime,” Cadillac Records; music & lyrics by Beyoncé Knowles, Amanda Ghost, Scott McFarnon, Ian Dench, James Dring, Jody Street
* “The Wrestler,” The Wrestler; music & lyrics by Bruce Springsteen

TELEVISION

TELEVISION SERIES, DRAMA

* Dexter
* House
* In Treatment
* Mad Men
* True Blood

ACTRESS IN A TELEVISION SERIES, DRAMA

* Sally Field, Brothers & Sisters
* Mariska Hargitay, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit
* January Jones, Mad Men
* Anna Paquin, True Blood
* Kyra Sedgwick, The Closer

I only watch Mad Men of these shows, but I want anyone other than January Jones to win. Give it to Mariska Hargitay as a consolation for being in The Love Guru.

ACTOR IN A TELEVISION SERIES, DRAMA

* Gabriel Byrne, In Treatment
* Michael C. Hall, Dexter
* Jon Hamm, Mad Men
* Hugh Laurie, House
* Jonathan Rhys Meyers, The Tudors

TELEVISION SERIES, COMEDY OR MUSICAL

* 30 Rock
* Californication
* Entourage
* The Office
* Weeds

ACTRESS IN A TELEVISION SERIES, COMEDY OR MUSICAL

* Christina Applegate, Samantha Who?
* America Ferrera, Ugly Betty
* Tina Fey, 30 Rock
* Debra Messing, The Starter Wife
* Mary-Louise Parker, Weeds

ACTOR IN A TELEVISION SERIES, COMEDY OR MUSICAL

* Alec Baldwin, 30 Rock
* Steve Carell, The Office
* Kevin Connolly, Entourage
* David Duchovny, Californication
* Tony Shalhoub, Monk

If Alec wins I hope he’s still chewing gum.

MINISERIES OR MOTION PICTURE MADE FOR TELEVISION

* A Raisin in the Sun
* Bernard and Doris
* Cranford
* John Adams
* Recount

ACTRESS IN A MINISERIES OR MOTION PICTURE MADE FOR TELEVISION

* Judi Dench, Cranford
* Catherine Keener, An American Crime
* Laura Linney, John Adams
* Shirley MacLaine, Coco Chanel
* Susan Sarandon, Bernard and Doris

I actually haven’t seen John Adams, but I love Laura Linney. Terrible bias, I know.

ACTOR IN A MINISERIES OR MOTION PICTURE MADE FOR TELEVISION

* Ralph Fiennes, Bernard and Doris
* Paul Giamatti, John Adams
* Kevin Spacey, Recount
* Kiefer Sutherland, 24: Redemption
* Tom Wilkinson, Recount

Why Kiefer? Because DAMMIT!!!!

ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE IN A SERIES, MINISERIES OR MOTION PICTURE MADE FOR TELEVISION

* Eileen Atkins, Cranford
* Laura Dern, Recount
* Melissa George, In Treatment
* Rachel Griffiths, Brothers & Sisters
* Dianne Wiest, In Treatment

ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE IN A SERIES, MINISERIES OR MOTION PICTURE MADE FOR TELEVISION

* Neil Patrick Harris, How I Met Your Mother
* Denis Leary, Recount
* Jeremy Piven, Entourage
* Blair Underwood, In Treatment
* Tom Wilkinson, John Adams

I chose Denis because he’s the only performance I’ve seen of those this year, but of course it would also shut out Doctor Mercury (aka Piven). That would be sweet.

Tracey Morgan was just on extolling the virtues of collard greens, which was the perfect moment to sign of and go to bed. I look forward to finding out how much the Golden Globes judges disagree with me (i.e. by voting for Slumdog Millionaire over and over again).

Shades of Caruso

Circuit interruptus.

Category Archives: Kung Fu Panda