There are difficult films to review, and there are easy ones, and I worry the easy ones yield the least interesting post-screening thoughts. Allow me to test that hypothesis by comparing two movies from the festival, one of which was as hard to love as a Basilisk, and the other as easy to get along with as a particularly affectionate and adorable kitten. At the core of each is the power of performance to transmute the world, but while one is about the artifice of the mainstream and the compelling power of cinematic glamour, the other is about the ways in which a life in the arts is as much a journey for the performer as it is for the artist.
Shades of Caruso has to make a confession: the films of Alain Resnais are an unknown quantity to me. A shameful admission, yes, but the holes in my filmwatching are always terribly embarrassing. Full confession; it was only last year that I finally saw a film by Ingmar Bergman: The Virgin Spring. I think you’ll agree that this was a good starting point. As the film’s breathtaking, cathartic final moments occurred, I was wracked with sobs. Such artistry! Such incredible storytelling prowess! This was art, made by an artist, as powerful as everyone had said. I chastise myself for not enriching my life with the works of Bergman before then. What myopia on my part.
As for Resnais, I can’t imagine a worse starting point than this. The movie begins with a veritable who’s who of French cinema and theatre receiving a phone call proclaiming that the (fictional) playwright Antoine d’Anthac has died, and his last wish was that these actors, his friends in life, would come to his home in the mountains to enact one last request for him. This scenario is similar to that of Jean Anouilh’s play Cher Antoine ou l’amour raté, in which the family and friends of playwright Antoine de Saint-Flour are trapped in a castle in the Bavarian Alps after arriving for the reading of his will. It’s no coincidence that many of the actors summoned here have appeared in Resnais’ films before, including his wife Sabine Azéma.
This phonecall sequence, and the subsequent arrival of the actors at the house, is extremely repetitive, and what little I know about Resnais’ previous films is that repetition is something he has used in a narrative sense, fracturing time and rebuilding it into a non-linear narrative. Here it seems more to denote an acting exercise; the obvious fakeness of the back projection through the main door and the feeble puff of air blowing leaves in with them, contrasted with the theatrical expressions from the actors as they enter, selling us on the illusion of the set and the effect. After the third or fourth entrance, the artificiality of the situation becomes laughable.
The performers, joyful in their reunion and sad over the death of d’Anthac, gather in a screening room in comfortable sofas, ashtrays at the ready, to watch a film recorded by their friend, in which he reveals that La Compagnie de la Colombe has asked if it can put on a performance of his play Eurydice. d’Anthac wants the actors, who have all appeared in versions of this play before, to judge whether this new version is worthwhile. They settle down to watch a film of the performance, which is directed not by Resnais but by French filmmaker and actor Bruno Podalydès, brother of Denis Podalydès, who plays d’Anthac. Plays within plays, familial relations between filmmakers and actors, theatre and film and real life converging nicely.
The play we see resembles Anouilh’s Eurydice. I say resembles; a quick look at the Wikipedia page shows many details are different in the version shown here but I have no idea how much of the dialogue remains thanks to my ignorance of French theatre and literature. The actors are young, the performance set in an abandoned warehouse with a few items of furniture denoting a railway cafe and hotel room, with the only embellishment being an enormous pendulum that swings through the middle of the scene. I have a feeling that this symbolises something, but for the life of me I just cannot figure out what it could be. Something to do with politics?
Meanwhile the actors in d’Anthac’s house, including two generations of actors playing Orphee and Eurydice (Azéma and Pierre Arditi as the older versions, Anne Consigny and Lambert Wilson as the middle-aged version) watch this new version of the play, transfixed, until they spontaneously begin to recite the dialogue as it happens onscreen. The rest of the actors, who played the other characters there, join in, while Mathieu Amalric, who is the only one to play the mysterious M. Henri, sits in the background, with his nefarious nature passing over between himself and the character he plays. Or perhaps not. It’s impossible to look at him in repose and not think he’s being nefarious. For all I know this is my misunderstanding.
As the film progresses the actors begin to wander around the house, the background changing to become the sets of the play. Or at least, poorly done CGI versions of these imaginary rooms, now cavernous and ill-choreographed in relation to the actors. The technical errors here would at any other time be inconsequential, but as the movie is about the illusions created by theatre, as transposed to the medium of cinema, and then again into the world of virtual cinema using green screen technology, it’s hard to say whether this is an intentional choice or a result of cheap FX. It’s probably the latter, but even so, without meaning to, the aesthetics of this choice affect one level of the movie’s meaning. The vaulting fake rooms, unstable and flat, symbolising the unreliability of memory, perhaps?
Because surely the main point being made here is the ways in which a memory can be provoked, and how the process of interpreting a story either through adaptation or theatrical performance will pin something to a time in our lives. The actors here, as they are meant to have performed d’Anthac’s Eurydice, have experienced these moments dozens, hundreds of times, and they have been changed by the process as surely as the characters have by the narrative. At least that’s what Resnais seems to be saying, that the memories of a life lived can be revived by going through it once more, and by using actors and techniques and tropes and composers from his other movies (the score is by Shades of Caruso bête noire Mark Snow, of X-Files fame), this too becomes a Proustian trigger for his fans.
The play itself deals with the foolishness of Orphee, twisted by jealousy, as possibly false reports of Eurydice’s sexual history conspire to taint his love for her. She dies in a contrived accident, and he makes a deal with M. Henri to bring her back from the dead. The only catch is that he cannot look at her until sunrise, or she will return to death (a la the myth of Orpheus), but his cruel, selfish fury over her past and possible manipulation of him means he must look her in the eye to find out whether she loved him or not, causing her death. Later he is given the chance to meet her in death. Is this Resnais’ message that trying to pin down emotion or memory is bound to corrupt or kill it? Or did he just like the play?
Coming to this with so few facts at my disposal makes interpretation goddamned hard, so all I can go on is my visceral reaction to it, and that is that despite the flicking between different performers at each point in the play, it’s a retelling of that play with very little variation. Perhaps the choice of Wilson and Consigny for this scene, or Azéma and Arditi for this one, or the actors from La Compagnie de la Colombe, will have some significance in terms of what the play is trying to say at that moment, but without a greater awareness of the symbolism or history of Eurydice, the effect is dramatic stasis. If Resnais is merely saying that revisiting fond memories is nice, he achieves that quickly. Little else happens until the finale, all of it accompanied by Snow’s amorphous, buzzing music.
And that’s probably the bit that annoyed me the most. As the play finishes, and the actors warmly discuss the experience in memory-jogging they have just had, in walks d’Anthac, who was not dead at all. Cue a weedy synth fanfare from Snow and no emotion from the audience, who couldn’t give a damn about a fake playwright and his dumb joke, which was to see whether his friends and colleagues really loved him. If this wasn’t an obnoxious twist enough, we cut with almost comical haste to the next scene in which d’Anthac commits suicide in a similar forest locale to the one in which Orphee is expected to kill himself; d’Anthac looks his friends in their eyes, finds they loved him all along, and kills himself anyway.
So this is just a shaggy dog story? A joke about the impossibility of fulling appreciating what you have in the world while you live in it? A movie about Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, but with love instead of particles? Hopefully this won’t be Resnais’ final movie (he’s 90 this year), and though I’m willing to take him at his word when he says this was not meant to be a testament to his career, you have to wonder whether this was a game for him. In that sense I salute his cheek, while at the same time feeling pretty cheated that I sat there through two hours of ugly CGI and miserable Mark Snow music while Resnais frolicked, filmicly, in order to make a brazen tribute to himself. The reaction from the audience I saw it with was muted; I was livid and couldn’t wait to get out of the room.
In my review of Carlos Reygadas’ Post Tenebras Lux I commented that it’s time the curent wave of hyper-critical filmwatchers made more of an effort to meet artists halfway, to give them the benefit of the doubt. A choice that might seem like an error can be assessed as an intentional choice on their part that we just don’t understand immediately, and dismissing something without consideration is damaging our dialogue with artists. It’s the same request I’d make of anyone who feels justified in dismissing, say, Lena Dunham’s Girls because the characters are unlikeable (they’re meant to be), or Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia because Kirsten Dunst’s character’s behaviour is random (it’s not; she’s depressed and her friends refuse to accept this obvious explanation).
These are just two common criticisms I’ve heard numerous times over the past year, both of which have annoyed me to distraction. And yet here I am about to dismiss You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet because the choices made by Resnais were either inexplicable to me or seemed to very quickly achieve what they set out to do before being laboriously repeated throughout the movie’s length. How quickly I abandon my principles because engaging with this work of art is too much hassle. My initial reaction to the movie was curiosity followed by concern and eventually boredom, leaving an after-taste of betrayal and a hangover comprised of self-recrimination and disappointment.
The problem is, You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet seems like an insular work, something that could only be parsed by Resnais experts or, as with Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, something that is essentially only comprehensible to the filmmaker. With the latter, it’s not as big a deal because of the unique atmospherics surrounding the mysterious events therein, but Resnais’ movie feels even more indulgent for being so one-note. I wasn’t even a fan of Boonmee (as I pointed out at the bottom of this post, fully owning my philistinism and displaying exactly the impatience that I have railed against), but that was more interesting than this, an experiment that feels insubstantial.
To make matters worse, this inert exercise was screened while London cinemas were showing Leos Carax’s Holy Motors, a complex and ambitious art movie that shows exactly how this kind of thing should be done. Where You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet doodles in the margins of someone else’s work, Carax’s magnificent, uncategorisable work springs from his mind (a la Boonmee) and then expands to encompass cinema, culture, religion, the world. It contains everything within itself, so much so that watching it felt like a two-hour trailer for humanity. Where Nothin’ is static and frustrating, Motors is puckish, joyous, inclusive. Walking out of Resnais’ movie felt like I had escaped; Holy Motors felt like it was itself an escape from the troubles of the world. It is glorious.
And yet Resnais’ film has inspired me to complain for over 2000 words, whereas I struggle to find things to say about Argo, which is relatively simple but more interesting, more prosaically filmed but more thrilling, less ambitious but far more successful. Regular readers may already know that I’m totally in the bag for Maestro Affleck, and have been a fan ever since he sent himself up in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. His two previous directorial efforts are strong thrillers (can people kindly strip off the patronising addendum “for a Ben Affleck film”?) and he’s been turning out impressive performances for years. Hollywoodland, Changing Lanes, Extract; get thee hence if you disagree. Argo is his finest moment yet, but there’s little I can add to Todd Van Der Werff’s Twitter review:
Argo is oddly weightless but very entertaining. Its greatest joke is that it complains about Hollywood artifice, then devolves into it.— Todd VanDerWerff (@tvoti) October 20, 2012
I’m tempted to just stop writing here, because that perfectly captures how I felt about Argo, but just for the sake of putting some effort into celebrating this vigorously entertaining thriller, here are some more words (90% of which will be adjectives). Argo details an elaborate rescue attempt made during the Iran hostage crisis of 1979; an event I dimly remember, from a decade which otherwise would just matter to me as the decade in which Star Wars was released, six years after I was born (that’s the correct order of importance, in my mind). While Iranian protesters stormed the US Embassy in Tehran and captured 52 Americans, six others escaped and hid in the Canadian Embassy, their presence unknown, at least for a little while.
The precise details of what happened next were classified until recently; the original story stated that their escape was solely the work of Canada, which did not endear that country to the radical forces in Iran. The full story, here embellished and turned into a glossy thriller, is that CIA operative Tony Mendez concocted a plan to fake a sci-fi movie called Argo, convince Iranian officials that he was coming to the country to scout for locations, then rescue the six escaped Embassy workers by claiming they were the crew of the film. With Iranian gunmen closing in on them, Mendez had to work fast to get them out. At least, that’s what the film depicts, with all of the close calls and last-minute escapes you could hope for.
Post-movie discussions about the plausibility of Argo, or its solidity as a movie, may have led to me dropping a few points off its SoC Quality Total Score Number Quotient, but while sitting in a packed room, Affleck’s taut direction and the uniformly superb cast meant any concerns about Hollywood artifice or audience manipulation were easily ignored. Yes, Argo is a confection; alarmingly so considering the seriousness of the situation even now, as tensions between the US and Iran continue to this day. And yet it’s all done with such slick, confident authority, and such deftly handled sensitivity to the aggravated situation both then and now, that Affleck holds the audience in the palm of his hand. The resolution of the escape earned a surprise round of applause from the audience, and I’ve heard others say it happened at their screenings too.
The pleasures of this lightweight entertainment are legion, but special credit is due to the cast. Affleck gathered possibly the most impressive set of performers of 2012, including numerous SoC favourites such as Alan Arkin, Bryan Cranston, Titus Welliver, Željko Ivanek, Kyle Chandler and Keith Szarabajka. Even actors I’m agnostic about, like Chris Messina and Scoot McNairy (whose weaselly voice in Killing Them Softly violated my soul) do well here, with solid material and the presence of such an instinctively talented director. It’s a great ensemble picture, though this diverse cast makes Affleck’s decision to step in as lead and play the Latino Mendez more questionable than it already was, but as an example of his increased confidence as an actor, it’s good enough.
As for its “weightlessness”, I should stress that this is not a comment on the subject matter, or the heart of the story itself. After the bravura opening sequence — a clever recap of America’s appalling involvement in Iran’s history told via storyboards, followed by a nerve-wracking setpiece in which the Embassy is stormed by a gun-toting mob while the Embassy staff race to destroy sensitive documents — the bizarre story of the fake Argo pre-production kicks in. Comedy after drama, beautifully weighted and correctly dropped as soon as Mendez reaches Iran. Yes, it’s a crowdpleaser, but as I said in my long, fawning review of The Avengers, that isn’t easy to do, and filmmakers who get it as right as Affleck or Whedon should get way more credit.
That said, Affleck’s lucky that he’s working with such an amazing historical event. My reaction was similar to that when watching Ron Howard’s Apollo 13; how the hell can something this incredible have happened in my lifetime? Argo skips quickly through the politics, enough to give factual weight and perspective to the events, before bringing in Planet of the Apes make-up artist John Chambers (John Goodman on top form) and even all-time comics legend Jack “King” Kirby (Michael Parks, sadly only around for one scene). If all of this seems too much to take, the credits feature images of the real participants in this drama, and even a quick comment from President Jimmy Carter, who signed off on the operation, grounding the incredible tale in real detail.
Perhaps I’m more forgiving of Argo‘s lightness because this comes from the George Clooney/Grant Heslov stable that gave us such almost-interesting films as Leatherheads, The Ides of March, The Men Who Stare At Goats and Good Night, and Good Luck; films that usually feel about three drafts away from greatness, that stumble before the final act, that sometimes seem like they’re missing another few pages of script. This series of films from Clooney and Heslov are exactly the kinds of films I want to love but just can’t. Argo is the first thing from their production company that sticks the landing. Any concerns about its ephemerality or factual inaccuracy are easily dismissed because at least this ends, and ends well. I’ll take “rousing bullshit finale” over “will this do?” any day of the week.
But even if you take the final, exciting act of this thrilling movie as a journey too far into the realms of Hollywood contrivance, and not as a witty joke about the compulsive need to over-dramatise a story already fascinating, it’s worth remembering that the people involved really would had to perform as if their lives depended on it. As the Wired article that inspired Chris Terrio’s script says, the six escapees had to take on new roles and make them work, or they would have died. You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet‘s achievement is that it highlights how acting shapes the lives of the actors. Argo shows us that in a world in which truth can be your worst enemy, performance, imagination and that act of subterfuge that is taking on a new persona can be the thing that keeps you alive. Perhaps Argo‘s not as trivial as it seems.
Why am I doing this? There was once a time I would dazzle all those around me as I applied an almost precognitive talent for award prediction to numerous hastily organized Oscar ballots. Oh how I was feted, carried high on the shoulders of friends and enemies alike, given ambrosial liquor to sup on from jewel-encrusted golden goblets. They were glorious times, my friends, and those efforts were the stuff of legend. But since making my predictions via this blog, my hit rate has dropped into the low fuckalls. Once Shades of Caruso was described as “usually fairly reliable“. Well, not in terms of Oscar predictions. So why put myself through this ordeal again? Why humiliate myself when my former predictive talents as a modern-day Cassandra have suddenly and inexplicably morphed into those of just some random lass called Sandra?
To be honest it’s only to justify having sat through the combined clusterfuck-a-thon of War Horse, The Iron Lady and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; three movies so wretched they should be investigated as hate crimes against my very soul. And yet here they are, given baffling nominational attention from the various elders who constitute the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The anguish caused by this triumvirate of terribleness, and their baffling inclusion on the Oscar shortlist, is the fuel that powered this epic post, so if you get bored to extinction by the time you get halfway down the page, blame Stephen Daldry, Eric Roth, Abi Morgan, Phyllida Lloyd, Lee Hall and Richard Curtis (Spielberg gets a free pass for Tintin, which was aceballs).
Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role
Who Will Win: George Clooney – The Descendants
Jean Dujardin may have been winning awards by smiling a smile that honestly looks like it could melt through steel like Superman’s heat vision, but I think the Academy members are ready to give Gorgeous George the big prize at last, mostly just to get it out of the way. There are worse things that could happen; though I’d be more than happy to see the thoroughly handsome Dujardin win and do a little tap-dance or something, Clooney was the best thing about The Descendants (other than Shailene Woodley, who was also very good). It’s odd to look at the mostly quiet work he does here, the way he balances light comedy and heavy tragedy, and think back to the way his performances were merely an amalgamation of irksome tics when he was on E.R. and not-massively-popular action extravaganza The Peacemaker. Now look at him. He’s really very good. And still handsome. An Oscar win here is no bad thing.
Who Should Win: Gary Oldman – Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
But of these five candidates, surely it’s Oldman’s prize. He’s survived the fallow years caused — I’m sure — by appearances in two Luc Besson movies with only Airforce One and Lost in Space to separate them, and has proved cynics (such as myself) wrong time and again. By now even his shaky appearances in crap like Red Riding Hood are usually worth watching. It’s enough to make me think he will take over from Sir Anthony Hopkins in the Endlessly-Entertaining-Actor-Shaped extra chamber in my heart once the great Welshman has sadly entered the Odinsleep. Tinker Tailor was an impeccably performed movie; picking out individual acting highlights is hard, but pretty much every moment Oldman is onscreen, like a shade sucking all of the light from the room, it’s as if everyone else has faded into the awful period-appropriate wallpaper. His voicework in Kung Fu Panda 2 was good too. We take Oldman for granted; time we stopped doing that.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Michael Fassbender – Shame
Maybe it’s a good thing Fassbender didn’t get nominated. The outrage generated by that stupid-but-expected decision will power his career for a while longer as he comes to work on projects to be filed under the heading True Quality, as opposed to the gilded, establishment-approved version of art represented by the Academy’s often-mystifying choices. It also means that the inevitable dirty tricks campaign could dig up some pretty unpleasant stuff about Fassbender, and at this point in his career (or at any point, really) that’s not a good thing. Best he sits this one out until a year when a very driven producer doesn’t have a dog in this fight.
Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role
Who Will Win: Christopher Plummer – Beginners
Beginners was a good enough movie, one that made it okay to like Ewan McGregor again, but without the storming performance from Plummer I think it would be forgotten fairly quickly. His energy levels here are remarkable, and make an average movie unmissable. Hopefully people won’t go on about how he’s bound to win because he plays a terminally ill gay man who finds a new lease of life in his final years, thus completing some kind of Oscar-Worthiness Bingo card. He deserves to win because he deserves to win. It’s that simple.
Who Should Win: Christopher Plummer – Beginners
Though a spanner was thrown into the works when Max Von Sydow got nominated as “The Renter” in Stephen Daldry and Eric Roth’s monumentally awful Extremely Insensitive and Incredibly Corny. The great man has been acting for nearly 700 years now and has never won an Oscar, so surely he’s due one. Hell, make it a retroactive award for The Virgin Spring. Despite this, and despite the fact that he’s the only good thing to come of Daldry and Roth’s wretched miasma of relentless sentiment, it has to be Plummer who wins this. He’s been cranking out great performances for the past few years (he should’ve won for The Insider, to be honest), and if he gets this, he’ll have a BEGOT (not just your Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony quadfecta, but also a Bafta as well). If you don’t want to root for such an achievement, please fill out the order form below to request a new, fully-functional soul.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Sir Ben Kingsley – Hugo
Lots of folks complained about the numerous snubs in this nomination list, with much of the justifiable frustration directed at the miserable lack of Albert Brooks, but I’ve only seen a couple of people point out that leaving Sir Ben off the list for his superb work in Hugo was an egregious omission. Maybe Best Supporting Actor is the wrong category, as Uncle Georges is arguably the protagonist of this movie, but there’s more room for him here than in the crowded Best Actor slot (ahem Jonah Hill ahem). Sir Ben is in the same category as Sir Anthony Hopkins; he’s usually the most interesting thing in whatever movie he appears in, and Hugo is no exception. If it works at all, it’s because of his skill in bringing to life the sweet-and-sour mystery at the heart of the film.
Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role
Who Will Win: Meryl Streep – The Iron Lady
A horrible inevitability has descended upon this category. Many are talking up the relative lack of Oscars Meryl has received despite being in the list of top twenty most awesome people in the history of the world, and I’m sure many people are aggrieved that she didn’t win anything for her impersonation of Dan Aykroyd in Julie and Julia, but even so, the thought of her playing a real live actual person is just too much. The Academy must have written this winner on their scorecards without even seeing the movie. She truly embodied the pluck and lovability of Margaret Thatcher completely (i.e. it was correctly completely absent from the movie). Plus there was a lot of make-up on her face. The assorted critics of the Daily Telegraph plumped for Viola Davis en masse, but I still think this is Meryl’s to win.
Who Should Win: Michelle Williams – My Week With Marilyn
And it would be the worst crime of the night. Don’t get me wrong; I genuinely adore Meryl Streep. She might even be my favourite actor, if not vying for joint fave with Jeff Bridges. Nevertheless, the obnoxious fractured editing by Phyllida Lloyd — which is obviously meant to mirror Mrs. Thatcher’s current unfortunate medical situation — means the movie never settles down long enough for us to have any idea what Meryl’s performance is like. As I tweeted after the godawful mess finally came to a close, it feels like a 100 minute trailer for a 17-hour-long movie, mostly made up of stock footage. It makes W.E. look like a coherent film, which I thought would be impossible. The glimpses we get of Meryl in excelsis suggest she did good work but I honestly can’t attest to that. So I say it should have gone to Michelle Williams. Cheeky of me, as I haven’t seen My Week With Marilyn; I’m burned out on such things thanks to The King’s Speech. But MW was unfortunate to have given a performance of such brilliance in Blue Valentine in the same year that Natalie Portman brought her A-game in Black Swan. Williams deserves to unlock the Reversal of Fortune Achievement for that. (1000 Gamerpoints)
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Tilda Swinton – We Need To Talk About Kevin
What else do I need to say? Excise the horrible cartoonish display by the otherwise excellent Jessica Chastain in The Help, and put Tilda in where she belongs. She’s said she’s happy to avoid going to the ceremony, but what about her fans, who look forward too seeing her appear in white dresses before being described as “androgynous” by every fashion expert? An essential part of the award season is now sadly missing. Plus she was phenomenal in WNTTAK. That too.
Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role
Who Will Win: Octavia Spencer – The Help
This was a movie that made me very uncomfortable, much as The Blind Side did a couple of years ago, but at least The Help had great performances (and not-so-great, Jessica Chastain and Bryce Dallas Howard) on its side. Octavia Spencer managed to out-act Viola Davis without having to do that snotty nose thing Davis does in so many movies; Davis even managed it again in Extremely Long and Incredibly Offensive, probably because she knew that disappointing us by not featuring it would have ruined hundreds of Extremely Twee and Incredibly Pretentious drinking games. This is another of the most predictable wins of the ceremony, and one I back almost 100%.
Who Should Win: Melissa McCarthy – Bridesmaids
Except that it would be so nice for a comedic performance to get an Oscar nod, and Melissa McCarthy’s much-loved work is the most likely possibility for many a year. Admittedly if she won over the other candidates there’s a possibility that in time she would be given the same treatment Marisa Tomei got when she won for My Cousin Vinny, but as someone who likes Marisa Tomei and My Cousin Vinny, and who has done a complete 180° on McCarthy now that I know she has more about her than was shown in Gilmore Girls (shudder), I’d back this win also. Not gonna happen, though.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Charlotte Gainsbourg – Melancholia
Fair to say that Uncle Lars’ Bedtime For Hitler storytelling at the Cannes Film Festival sank any chance that either Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg would get a nomination. I suspect the screeners for this sat unwatched on many an Academy member’s coffee table. A pity, as it was one of the highlights of the year. Gainsbourg was just as good in Antichrist, but maybe this kind of soul-baring work isn’t ever going to find favour with the assorted old white men who vote for these things. “Why, she’s just got the vapours,” they would say into their mug of restorative potions made from the tears of discarded Hollywood dreamers. “Just buy her an ironing board and be done with it.” And that, my friends, is why the Oscars mean jack shit.
Best Animated Feature Film of the Year
What Will Win: Rango
Ha ha ha ha ha ha Cars 2 didn’t get nominated ha ha ha ha ha. Reap the merchandising whirlwind, Pixar, and thanks for pissing on your legacy (until your next incredible film comes along and makes me forgive you for temporarily misplacing your soul). Anyway, Rango was the frontrunner over a year ago and nothing has changed since.
What Should Win: Rango
Seriously, why are we even talking about this? Rango‘s a masterpiece. End of.
What Should Have Been Nominated: The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn
Of course, there was the amusing upset during the Golden Globes when Spielberg’s much-maligned performance-capture movie won the animation award, but then it didn’t get in here. There are lots of theories why, from “is it animation?” to “it’s not animation“, to “it wasn’t good enough”. Whatever the reason, its omission here is pretty bizarre, made all the worse by the nominations dropped into War Horse‘s trough. This vibrant, manic blast of imagination gets nothing while that risible failure gets a bunch of nods? Shocking. But it still wouldn’t deserve to win. Why? Because Rango. Like I just said a paragraph ago.
Achievement in Cinematography
Who Will Win: Robert Richardson – Hugo
I have a theory, for which I have absolutely no proof, that if the movie with the most nominations doesn’t win Best Picture, it will be given Best Cinematography as a consolation prize. The Artist might or might not not win many awards this year but I believe it’ll win Best Picture at the very least, which would leave Hugo wanting. As a result, I think Robert Richardson’s 3D cinematography will win out. Or Ludovic Bource will win for The Artist because he isn’t using that new-fangled technology? No, it’ll definitely be Richardson. Unless that lovely, clear, monochrome photography persuades the oldsters. ::is utterly undecided::
Who Should Win: Emmanuel Lubezki – The Tree of Life
If there is one word I could use to describe Malick’s meditation on cosmic gubbins and personal strife — other than pretentious, or powerful, or intricate, or unsubtle, or preposterous, or profound, or overlong, or ambitious, or breathtaking, etc. etc. — it would be luminous. Thanks to Emmanuel Lubezki’s work, this film glowed. It throbbed with the very life its titular tree is full of. Maybe it was just that we saw this on a good screen, brightly lit and digitally projected (a rarity nowadays), but it was so gloriously shot that I felt I was looking straight through a window into another world, or at least into the mind of Malick, and it was as beautiful a place as I had hoped.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Sean Bobbitt – Shame
In the past Bobbitt filmed a lot of Ye Olde Worlde settings for some of the seemingly infinite number of period adaptations made by the BBC, so it must have been a nice change for him to capture the most memorable images of New York in recent memory. Not that that mattered to the Academy, who don’t care about his ability to paint the city with terrifying reds, soft golds, and rainy greys. All they think is, “But he pointed the camera at a dong”, and that’s your lot. Sorry Sean. Maybe some day you’ll make a movie set during the first quarter of the 20th Century and the Academy members will be falling out of their bath chairs to give you a nod. Fingers crossed, eh?
Achievement in Art Direction
Who Will Win: Laurence Bennett and Robert Gould - The Artist
It’s in these technical categories that the two love letters to silent cinema will fight their most fraught battles, where the majority winner will be decided. As a result it’s hard to deduct who will win using my usual scientific rigour. Instead I have to rely on guesswork, and the thought that last year the Weinsteins managed to strongarm the Academy into giving Tom Hooper — TOM HOOPER — the award for Best Director. I’m sure Harvey has been going door-to-door this year, telling more anecdotes about how clever he was to acquire the rights to this, buying bunches of grapes for the voters and promising to give them back-rubs and what-not. Even though half of my brain is convinced the voters will be more charmed by the charming charming super super charming charm of Hugo (an excellent read, that), I think Harvey’s carpet-bombing techniques will win again. Plus the art direction on The Artist was very nice.
Who Should Win: Dante Ferretti and Francesca Lo Schiavo - Hugo
That said, the art direction on Hugo was even better. Dante Ferretti’s collaborations with Scorsese are always a feast for the eyes and his interpretation of what a semi-fantastical Parisian railway station would look like — with toy shops, overstocked bookshops and clockwork labyrinths included — is some of the best work he’s done. Plus he’s on a roll, having won his last two nominations for Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barberof Fleet Street and The Aviator. So I could well be wrong here.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Maria Djurkovic, Tom Brown and Zsuzsa Kismarty-Lechner – Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Friend-of-the-blog Beggar So’s Hat wisely noted that the shockingly grim production design of this was horribly snubbed. I hadn’t even noticed that. I think I tried to blot the miserable look of the film from my brain rather than be reminded once more of the horrors within. It made me think of my childhood, which now feels like it happened in the 50s and not the 70s like it actually was. It’s as if England was frozen in time for fifty years, and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was just a snapshot of that. Which is to say, Mr. Hat was right. The production design on TTSS was worthy of many awards, especially this one, but also Grimmest Evocation of the Cigarette-Smoke-Stained Dilapidation of 20th Century Britain.
Achievement in Costume Design
Who Will Win: Mark Bridges – The Artist
Again, it’s all down to who will be the overall winner. If it’s going to be The Artist I have to go all in and give it to Mr. Bridges…
Who Should Win: Sandy Powell – Hugo
…while thinking that Sandy Powell’s work is more deserving. By now I must seem like a guy who hated The Artist, but I didn’t. I adored it. Hugo was the movie that left me cold, even though it’s obviously a thing of great precision, as intricate and lovely as the clockwork contraptions that litter it. But all that effort from Scorsese was futilely expended trying to shift the enormous rock that is my heart, and it wasn’t going to work. ::hands in film buff card::
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Eiko Ishioka – Immortals
Nevertheless, that’s not as big a crime as neglecting Eiko Ishioka’s brain-maddening work which so dominated Tarsem’s latest empty trinket. It’s especially frustrating as the world is now bereft of her singular genius. Creating works of art for ill-received genre movies directed by someone with… shall we say, a questionable grasp of narrative… means her work wasn’t really seen enough. When we see Mirror, Mirror later this year, it’ll be a bittersweet experience. And not just because it’ll almost certainly be desperately boring crap. #Uncharitable
Best Documentary Feature
What Will Win: Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory
As usual I haven’t seen any documentaries this year, not even depressing ones about how the economy is about to explode with the force of a million megaprolapses, so I can’t really talk with any authority here, but I’d wager Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky will get the nod for campaigning successfully for the West Memphis Three. Unless the Academy is still mad at Berlinger for Blair Witch 2, which is understandable.
What Should Win: IDK SMDH
As I can’t say anything authoritative here, I’ll keep my fat mouth shut.
What Should Have Been Nominated: Tabloid
Yep, I didn’t even see Senna, the most critically acclaimed documentary of the year, but everyone I know who has seen it adores it. Nevertheless, I would’ve loved to have seen Errol Morris’ crazily entertaining Tabloid get some recognition. Perhaps because it’s so much fun it never stood a chance of getting any Oscar love; that old “comedy is too frivolous to be worthy of recognition” thing again. Which is a shame, because I’d say Tabloid has some pretty hefty points to make about news cycles, journalistic arrogance and human venality. It just also happens to be very amusing while it makes those points.
Best Documentary Short Subject
What Will Win: God Is The Bigger Elvis
Best Animated Short Film
What Will Win: La Luna
Best Live Action Short Film
What Will Win: The Shore
Okay, I’ll come clean. I haven’t got a clue about any of the nominees in any of the three categories clustered here, as was the case last year, so I’m just going to pick for the stupidest reasons. I just read about God Is The Bigger Elvis a few hours ago, La Luna because I like the name of the director (Enrico Casarosa), and The Shore because it’s made by Terry and Oorlagh George, and I always get annoyed that I confuse Terry George and Terry Southern even though their surnames and careers are completely different so I guess that’s an omen or something. Sorry to all of the nominees in these categories; I should give you respect, and instead I give you this excrement-soaked corsage. You deserve so much better.
Achievement in Film Editing
Who Will Win: Thelma Schoonmaker – Hugo
It’s arguable that Hugo was a bit slack, to be honest, and could have done with a bit of tidying up, but you’re a fool if you bet against Schoonmaker, who has won three of the six Academy Awards she has previously been nominated for (can you believe she didn’t win for Goodfellas? WT actual F?).
Who Should Win: Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall – The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
As I said last year, David Fincher’s editing team on The Social Network did a fantastic job of wrestling a ton of footage and talking to the ground and making it work as a narrative. they’re here again with a movie that’s less talky but just as complex (if not more so) than that. Dragon Tattoo may not have blown my socks off the way Fincher’s best work does, but it’s a great thriller, perfectly paced and seemingly effortlessly compelling. Baxter and Wall deserve this win twice over now.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Paul Hirsch – Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol / Hank Corwin, Jay Rabinowitz, Daniel Rezende, Billy Weber and Mark Yoshikawa – The Tree of Life / Joe Bini – We Need To Talk About Kevin
Quick run through of my reasons here. 1) The best action movie of the year deserves a nod, especially when the action scenes are so clearly drawn and beautifully constructed. It was a joy to watch, and much of that was down to veteran Hirsch’s command of the AVID. 2) A team of five head editors wrestling with what was probably 65,000,000 miles of footage featuring kids running down alleys or Brad Pitt standing on a lawn, and in the end we get an impressionistic collage of mood and image as powerful as this? I may complain that Hugo was slack but any flabbiness here was probably intentional. The longueurs are as important as the moments of emotion, and the superb judgement of this team — and Malick — will probably become more apparent with each rewatch. 3) It’s as if Nicolas Roeg is making major motion pictures again, and Bini is as important as Lynne Ramsay in creating a fractured but exhaustingly scary like Kevin. Again, a major omission for this exceptional artistic accomplishment.
Best Foreign Language Film of the Year
What Will Win: A Separation
Of course the Academy has a talent for arsing this category up, which could be good news for Agnieszka Holland — I’d think of it as an award given in honour of her stunning Treme pilot; one of the best episodes of TV ever made – but honestly, how on earth could anything beat Asghar Farhadi’s magnificent family drama? I would’ve like to have seen it do a Crouching Tiger and get a Best Picture nomination as well, it’s that good (yes, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was nominated for both Best Foreign Language Film and Best Picture, a fact that seems to elude many professional Oscar prognosticators each year).
What Should Win: A Separation
Time spent thinking about this masterpiece since seeing it right at the end of last year has made it seem even more profound, even more exciting. I may not have seen any of the other films nominated here but still it seems only right that this wins.
What Should Have Been Nominated: The Skin I Live In
To be honest, though I enjoyed Pedro Almodovar’s macabre thriller, it still left me a little cold. I’m sure there’s some arcane reason why this wasn’t included (that’s usually the case; did Spain even offer it as a nominee?), but if that’s not the case then I guess its omission here is pretty surprising. Other than that, the majority of the foreign language movies I saw last year just weren’t good enough to warrant inclusion here. Even Peter Chan’s Wu Xia — a film which made it onto my best-of-2011 list — would seem out of place. The closest thing I can think of for inclusion would be Andrea Molaioli’s Il Gioiellino, the fictionalised dramatisation of the Parmalat fraud scandal, but even that’s too dry to really pass muster. ::shrug::
Achievement in Makeup
Who Will Win: Mark Coulier and J. Roy Helland – The Iron Lady
I almost feel like I’m saying this because it had the most make-up, mostly on Meryl’s chin for Thatcher’s later years…
Who Should Win: Mark Coulier and J. Roy Helland – The Iron Lady
…but as Daisyhellcakes said when we tried to stay awake during this possibly endless collision of stock footage and poorly shot comedic shenanigans, “That’s a really convincing wattle”. And she’s right. It’s a really convincing wattle.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Contagion
The most startling physical transformation of the year was a digital effect; the enfeeblenising of Chris Evans in the first third of Captain America: The First Avenger is a baffling, seamless effect that convinces so completely that post-super-serum Evans looks somehow more wrong than the wimp. I’m tempted to say this should have been nominated just for the wicked Red Skull make-up on Hugo Weaving, but I think Contagion may be a more worthy nominee, for the nasty sweaty death pallor on the victims of MEV-1, Jude Law’s pasty face and rotten tooth, and one very fun autopsy scene.
Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures (Original Score)
Who Will Win: Howard Shore – Hugo
I can’t actually remember a single note of it, even though I’m a big fan of Mr. Shore (his score for A Dangerous Method was particularly lovely; he does his best work for Maestro Cronenberg), but I doubt either of Williams’ scores will win (vote splitting), and there’s the possibility that Kim Novak really does have some insider information about how the soundtrack to The Artist did something unspeakable and illegal to Bernard Hermann’s Vertigo score. That leaves Shore’s score.
Who Should Win: Alberto Iglesias - Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Of course, this wonderful score by Alberto Iglesias should be the frontrunner here for anyone who has ears. It’s an absolute corker, sinister and peppered with smokey-jazz moments; perfect for the film and powerful in its own right. And yes, I know this won’t be a consideration for the Academy, but the inclusion of this great, nerd-funky version of La Mer just shows how much care was put into the music. It’s such a great choice for the scene it accompanies that I did a joy-pirouette without leaving my super-comfy Odeon-Swiss-Cottage seat.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Michael Giacchino – Super 8
My favourite soundtrack of last year was Cecile Corbel’s delicate score for Arrietty, but as the movie wasn’t released in the US until this year, it wasn’t eligible. I’d like to say Hans Zimmer’s score for Rango should’ve got in, but considering the fuss over Ludovic Bource’s The Artist soundtrack, Zimmer’s re-appropriation of The Blue Danube and Ride of the Valkyries — not to mention similarities with Carter Burwell’s Raising Arizona score — mean it’s better off out of it. Giacchino’s Super 8 score managed to conjure up memories of some of John Williams’ work with Spielberg while remaining recognisably his own work. It might not be the best thing he’s done, but it played an important part in conjuring up the air of nostalgia that made J.J. Abrams’ homage work.
Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures (Original Song)
What Will Win: Man or Muppet (Bret McKenzie) – The Muppets
I’ve not heard the Rio song, but is there any doubt?
What Should Win: Man or Muppet (Bret McKenzie) – The Muppets
It’s just what a musical number should be. It’s thematically relevant, perfectly judged on a tonal level, it signals a big plot moment, it’s full of clever lyrical tricks, and it’s a proper showstopping earworm. It brought the house down at the BFI a month ago and I reckon this happens everywhere this movie plays. Is this the most assured winner of the night?
What Should Have Been Nominated: Star Spangled Man (Alan Menken / David Zippel) – Captain America: The First Avenger
Still, the feeble number of nominees here means there’s no real reason why Menken and Zippel’s entertaining pastiche of WWII propaganda songs didn’t get a nod. It’s not as good as Bret McKenzie’s song, but it’s still a witty and catchy tune. I guess the Academy members didn’t want to be reminded of the war that took place during their middle age. Yeah, I went there!
Achievement in Sound Editing
Who Will Win: Richard Hymns and Gary Rydstrom – War Horse
It might be a load of old chuff but I think War Horse will get at least one Oscar just because Spielberg and the rest strained so damn hard to make something timeless and noble that I bet someone will feel sorry for him. That’s not to say the work of Hymns and Rydstrom isn’t worthy of an award. The movie has a wide array of excellent whinnies, clip-clops, and gunfire.
Who Should Win: Ren Klyce – The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
Normally I’d pick Transformers: Dark of the Moon for two reasons: 1) to annoy everyone by continuing to not crap all over Bay’s carnage-laden doomfuck, and 2) because there were about one zillion sound effects in this movie, and I’m sure there was a small army of sound recorders trying to find the material for this movie’s sonic tapestry of boom. Nevertheless, I’ll pick Ren Klyce’s work on Fincher’s bleak midwinter tale for two different reasons: 1) I always tend to pick Ren Klyce because Ren Klyce is ace, and 2) the sound of Lisbeth Salander’s steel-toed boot clanging noisily against a very large metallic anus-seeking dildo has haunted me for two months. That counts for something.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Oliver Tarney and Mark Taylor – Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
My two picks here (Nicholas Becker for Andrea Arnold’s glorious Wuthering Heights and Koji Kasamatsu for Arrietty) are again not eligible because of US release dates. Instead I’ll pick the team behind the sound effects in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. There’s some lovely work done during the action scenes, but also the thrum of Victorian London is captured as well as in the first movie, which was also deserving of a nomination.
Achievement in Sound Mixing
Who Will Win: Tom Fleischman and John Midgley – Hugo
Big noisy setpieces in a train station where every individual, important noise is clearly picked out? It’s a lock.
Who Should Win: Greg P. Russell, Gary Summers, Jeffrey J. Haboush and Peter J. Devlin – Transformers: Dark of the Moon
The soundscapes of Michael Bay’s noisiest movies are widely loathed as merely a wash of explosions and screaming, but when blasted at with a good THX sound-system, it’s likely that the volume will deafen you to the amount of intricate work done here. It’s not just queueing up a bunch of banging and sticking it all in a blender; there’s more layering of sound than you’d think. Then again, I’ve always been a fan of percussion, so I’m more likely to enjoy an extended drum solo than the finely-picked notes of a symphony. Make of that what you will.
What Should Have Been Nominated: Peter Miller, Adam Kopald, J.R. Grubbs and Addison Teague - Rango
Among the many joys of this astounding triumph of animation is the lovely audio track, evoking the eerie silences of Sergio Leone’s classics while changing gears for some huge, complicated action scenes. Truly a feast for the ears as well as the eyes.
Achievement in Visual Effects
Who Will Win: Joe Letteri, Dan Lemmon, R. Christopher White and Daniel Barrett - Rise of the Planet of the Apes
I’m tempted to say Hugo will win this too, but the furore over Andy Serkis’ performance and the technology used to capture it means this might have a shot, as a sop to the campaigners.
Who Should Win: Scott Farrar, Scott Benza, Matthew Butler and John Frazier - Transformers: Dark of the Moon
Once more I’m picking complexity and logistical madness over subtlety or beauty, but the scale of the FX work in this movie is simply breathtaking. It’s also seamlessly integrated with reality; you’ll really believe Chicago had its arse kicked by robotic dickwads. The only caveat here is that they’re not really breaking new ground; we’ve seen this kind of thing before, just not on this scale. Nevertheless, my eyes boggled at the monumental mechanical madness, and I really appreciate that.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Douglas Trumbull, Dan Glass, Peter and Chris Parks – The Tree of Life
What a lovely welcome back for the legendary Doug Trumbull; a snub by his peers that probably would have stung if he had even noticed them, bearing in mind he is a colossus who bestrides the discipline of visual effects and probably thinks Digital Domain is little more than an interesting ant-farm. Bear in mind, this is a man who, while everyone else in the FX business was learning how to use a mouse, was either working on IMAX and Showscan technologies or trying to fix the BP oil-spill. Does he need an Oscar? If the FX industry members of the Academy can’t find it in their hearts to give this visionary the award he deserves, he can get over the insignificant pain by inventing another world-changing doohickey. Trumbull does not need your baubles.
Adapted Screenplay
Who Will Win: Alexander Payne and Nat Faxon & Jim Rash – The Descendants
Hugo should win this considering the overwhelming critical praise for it in the US, but I have a feeling the sentimental Academy members will be more drawn to The Descendants, which is a very writerly movie with big dramatic beats, terminally ill people, confrontations that play out in unexpected ways, and speeches that run on for perhaps a bit too long. It also has a terrible voiceover in the first half of the movie that should make invalidate it, but I doubt that that’s a dealbreaker. Or maybe this is just wishful thinking because I want to see Dean Pelton win an Oscar? If so, can Magnitude come on stage for a celebratory “Pop pop!“?
Who Should Win: Bridget O’Connor & Peter Straughan – Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Much as I enjoyed Moneyball, mostly because Sorkin’s worst excesses were curtailed by the low-key performances and direction, I don’t think it’s the best script here. I also don’t think that honour belongs to The Ides of March; yet another Clooney / Heslov disappointment that feels four drafts away from completion. Surely Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is the only logical choice here. It’s a labyrinth of words and actions and information but there’s emotion here, real aching pain. It’s a magnificent achievement.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Christopher Hampton – A Dangerous Method
As is Christopher Hampton’s expansion of his play The Talking Cure. Its absorption and translation of the ideas and theories of Freud, Jung and Spielrein into dramatic forms is breathtaking, made all the more memorable for its puckish wit and satisfying emotional charge. Though I’d resigned myself to seeing this underrated movie get little Oscar love I held out hope for this screenplay as the sole nominee, but no. What a pity.
Original Screenplay
Who Will Win: Woody Allen – Midnight in Paris
Remember all those days ago when The Artist won the Bafta for best screenplay and amateur comedians and film critics said, “How can it win best screenplay when there’s no words in it duhhhhh duuuuuuh a-duuuuuhhhhhhh?” Well I guess that won’t happen here, but only because the truly sentimental choice is to give Woody another Oscar for his latest self-indulgent wallow in nostalgia. Usually that yearning for simpler times is a subtext to his usual light middle-class semi-intellectual drama, but here it’s right at the fore-front. Who was the Twitter wag who said that this movie was like Woody’s “Things I like” list made celluloid flesh? Because well done, that person, you got it in one.
Who Should Win: Asghar Farhadi – A Separation
That victory for a second-rate script would be a crime when Asghar Farhadi’s brilliantly constructed, humane, intelligent, complex, multi-faceted screenplay has also been given a nod. In a perfect world this would’ve been the only nominee. If ever anyone asks me what screenplay I would pick as an example of brilliant screenwriting, I’ll pick George Gallo’s script for Midnight Run. If they couldn’t find that, I’ll pick this.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Kenneth Lonergan – Margaret / Scott Z. Burns – Contagion
That said, I would’ve liked it if Kenneth Lonergan had received any kind of recognition for his notorious movie, but I guess there was no chance of that happening with the lawsuits flying back and forth like flaming buzzards of doom. Also, we’ve not even seen the full movie; I long for the director’s cut of this challenging and audacious movie. I also would’ve liked it if Scott Z. Burns got nominated for Contagion, but that’s because I’m a big Scott Z. Burns fan and I think he’s great so there.
Achievement in Directing
Who Will Win: Martin Scorsese – Hugo
Okay, hear me out. Yes, I think The Artist will win Best Picture. Yes, I know that Michel Hazanavicius won the Director’s Guild Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Feature Film Award, and that’s usually a pretty reliable marker of who will win the Academy Award, but I think Scorsese has played a blinder here; making a homage to the birth of cinema, eoo-goog-alising one of the earliest pioneers of the medium, and passionately campaigning for the virtues of film preservation within the film itself. A pretty ballsy move, to turn a children’s movie into a two-hour lecture about archiving and storage technology. The Artist might be a love letter to silent cinema, but Hugo is a billet-doux attached to a heart-shaped box of chocolate cherries with a bit of sexy lingerie hidden under the crepe-paper tray. There’s no way the assorted dodecagenarians of the Academy will be able to resist giving Scorsese his second director’s gong for this.
Who Should Win: Terrence Malick – The Tree of Life
Even though I really loved The Artist (I did! Honest!), and thought Scorsese did a good job of methodically stripped the magic from his children’s film by the time the final reel arrived just so he could prove a point, this category belongs to Malick. Alexander Payne served up a curiously listless dramedy, and Woody Allen woke up for a little while; not really work worth lauding. But Malick’s bold vision was even more daring than his usual work, happily comparing the travails of a family to the beginning and end of life. What brass balls. It’s the best thing he’s done since Days of Heaven, and more than deserving of some Oscar love. If they don’t do it now, they’ll only regret it in future when he suddenly starts making action movies starring Channing Tatum (mark my words, this will happen).
Who Should Have Been Nominated: David Cronenberg – A Dangerous Method
The great man can’t win. When he makes a genre movie — albeit a genre movie with an intellectual ambition that dwarfs almost everything else around — clueless critics proclaim that he’s little more than a provocateur debasing his better instincts. When he makes a movie that’s sober and thought-provoking, everyone whines that there’s not enough parasites or inappropriate vaginal images in it. So when he makes something as crystalline as this, so perfectly hewn and formally precise, critics say it’s too dry. “It’s too dry,” they say, drawing attention to what they think is an excessive dryness. Seriously, that’s all anyone could say. Well bollocks to that. It’s exactly what it needs to be, and Cronenberg is the only filmmaker in the world smart enough to get that right. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; one day critical opinion will swing back Cronenberg’s way. Sadly, not before voting ended.
Best Motion Picture of the Year
What Will Win: The Artist
Critical mass has been reached for The Artist. I don’t think anyone on the planet expects another movie to win, except Stephen Daldry, probably; a conclusion I’ve reached after enduring Extremely Bad And Just Generally Incredibly Incredibly Dire And Awful Jesus What A Stinker, which seems to have been directed by someone who has absolutely no self-awareness whatsoever. I was tempted to predict a Hugo surprise here, but I think we all know that’s not happening. Harvey Weinstein has been prowling the streets of Hollywood like a cross between Batman, Wilson Fisk and P.T. Barnum, pimping out that movie for all he’s worth. It’s a foregone conclusion.
What Should Win: The Artist
And I’m absolutely fine with that. Not just because it’s the best movie of the nine nominees, but because I still think so fondly of it a victory in this category would make my night. I’m sure in time the numerous haters will multiply like mogwai under a waterfall, but for now a big win would almost feel like an extension of the movie’s deliriously happy vibe. Like a 4D experience for its fans. Plus it’s a last chance to see Jean Dujardin charm us with another impromptu dance. Vous dansez comme un nuage enthousiaste, vous bel homme!
What Should Have Been Nominated: Take Shelter / A Dangerous Method
If that vile… vile… thing with the obnoxiously precious title can get nominated, then surely anything can. Two of my favourites of last year are more than good enough to get in here, usurping Daldry’s slimy ode to sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-McSweeney’s-style precocity and Spielberg’s admittedly hilarious and Dadaesque World War One comedy The Adventures of War Horse: The Siren-Centaur Hybrid of Death, not to mention The (Wonderful Way White People) Help(ed Those Relatively Unimportant Black Folks). Put these two brilliant movies in there, dammit, and why not add Fast Five while you’re at it. That movie was better than at least seven, arguably eight of the movies in that list, even if only for the moment when The Rock and Vin Diesel crash through a wall during a fight. Better than Malick’s dinosaurs, I reckon.
That”s enough making a fool of myself in front of the entire internet. See you on the other side of the award ceremony, and what will likely be a really cozy opening monologue from Billy Crystal featuring at least one — maybe five — jokes about the lacklustre box office takings of Mr. Saturday Night. Mazel tov!
Ever more aware that this is taking way too long, I shall keep this short but sweet, and note that yes, I am indeed posting something while websites with far fewer hits than me (such as Wikipedia and Google) are protesting the evils of SOPA/PIPA with a blackout. Part of me feels like a scab crossing a picket line but then I think to myself no, I have to do this. I have to tell the world just how much I loved the costume design on Conan the Barbarian. The world needs this information. Without it, however would our civilisation cope? This is the kind of thing that the internet was invented for. Seriously! Tim Berners-Lee was just saying the other day how glad he was that he had the chance to read what I said about Green Lantern, though he seemed disappointed that I wasn’t as enthusiastic as he was about Mark Strong’s interpretation of Sinestro.*
Besides, if Congress goes ahead with its plan to give itself the power to censor great swathes of the internet in order to prevent citizen activism during times of social strife which are probably around the corner… erm, I mean, combat the ev0l of piracy, obvs… then I’d better get this shit up now because most of this post is made up of publicity photos and clips from YouTube and I’ll have to “police” myself in future to make sure none of this stuff ever appears again. Thanks for ruining the best thing in the world, Overlords. Like you haven’t done enough damage already.
DOWN WITH SOPA! DOWN WITH PIPA!
* This is a lie. He wasn’t crazy about Strong really.
Best Director: David Cronenberg – A Dangerous Method
Honorable Mentions:
Andrea Arnold – Wuthering Heights
Steve McQueen – Shame
Lars Von Trier – Melancholia
Jeff Nichols – Take Shelter
Asghar Farhadi - A Separation
Best Directorial Debut: Joe Cornish – Attack The Block
Honorable Mention: Sean Durkin – Martha Marcy May Marlene
Best Screenplay: Asghar Farhadi – A Separation
Honorable Mentions:
Kenneth Lonergan – Margaret
Christopher Hampton – A Dangerous Method
Scott Z. Burns – Contagion
Bridget O’Connor / Peter Straughan - Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
John Logan / Gore Verbinski / James Ward Byrkit – Rango
Best Cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezki – The Tree of Life
Honorable Mentions:
Robbie Ryan – Wuthering Heights
Anthony Dod Mantle - The Eagle
Sean Bobbitt – Shame
Amelia Vincent – Footloose
Rodrigo Prieto – Water For Elephants
Best Digital Photography: Roger Deakins – Rango
Best 3D Photography: Robert Richardson – Hugo
Best Editing: Paul Hirsch – Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol
Best Soundtrack: Cécile Corbel – Arrietty
Honorable Mentions:
Hans Zimmer - Rango
Harry Escott – Shame
John Powell / Hans Zimmer – Kung Fu Panda 2
Cliff Martinez – Drive
Michael Giacchino – Super 8
Best Original Song: Star Spangled Man (Alan Menken / David Zippel) – Captain America: The First Avenger
Best Costume Design: Eiko Ishioka – Immortals
Honorable Mentions:
Alexandra Byrne – Thor
Wendy Partridge - Conan The Barbarian
Anna B. Sheppard - Captain America: The First Avenger
Paco Delgado / Jean Paul Gaultier – The Skin I Live In
Trish Summerville – The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
Best Visual Effects: Digital Domain, ILM, Legend 3D and many many more - Transformers: Dark of the Moon
Honorable Mentions:
Modus FX, Tippett Studio, Scanline VFX and again, many more – Immortals
Prime Focus, Animal Logic, Pixomondo and… you know what I’m going to say – Sucker Punch
ILM, Hammerhead, Entity FX, and dear God, how many FX houses are there in the world? - I Am Number Four
Digital Domain, Buf Studios, Stereo D, etc. etc. etc. sorry guys – Thor
Douglas Trumbull, Prime Focus, Double Negative, but mostly hey check it out, it’s Doug Trumbull! – The Tree of Life
Best Sound Design: Nicolas Becker – Wuthering Heights
Honorable Mentions:
Erik Aahdahl / Ethan Van der Ryn – Transformers: Dark of the Moon
Koji Kasamatsu – Arrietty
Oliver Tarney / Mark Taylor – Sherlock Homes: A Game of Shadows
Ren Klyce - The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
Peter Miller / Adam Kopald – J.R. Grubbs / Addison Teague – Rango
Best Production Design / Art Direction: DanteFerretti – Hugo
Honorable Mentions:
Mark “Crash” McCreery – Rango
Bo Welch / Maya Shimoguchi – Thor
Chris August – Conan The Barbarian
Scott Chambliss / Christopher Burian-Mohr / Daniel T. Dorrance - Cowboys and Aliens
Tom Foden / Michele Laliberte - Immortals
Worst Director: Paul Johansson - Atlas Shrugged: Part I
Dishonorable Mentions:
Madonna – W.E.
Rob Marshall – Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides
Lone Scherfig - One Day
Paul W.S. Anderson – The Three Musketeers
Ivan Reitman – No Strings Attached
Worst Screenplay: Madonna and Alex Keshishian – W.E.
Dishonorable Mentions:
John Aglioloro / Brian Patrick O’Toole – Atlas Shrugged Part I
David Nicholls – One Day
Elizabeth Meriweather / Michael Samonek - No Strings Attached
Jason Lew - Restless
Tom Hanks / Nia Vardalos – Larry Crowne
Worst Cinematography: Dion Beebe – Green Lantern
Dishonorable Mentions:
Hagen Bogdanski – W.E.
John Mathieson – X-Men: First Class
Masanobu Takayanagi – Warrior
Adriano Goldman – 360
Ross Berryman – Atlas Shrugged Part 1
Worst Editing: Danny Tull – W.E.
Still more to come even after all of this excessive listmaking. Hey, I can’t help it if I don’t get a chance to write for the rest of the year. There was a huge build-up of opinion inside me and this is the slow release, like air leaking out of a zeppelin.
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.
I technically started writing these lists months ago, when I began compiling a list of all of the movies we had seen in 2009 that had been released that year. In my head I was trying to assess where everything was going to go before the year ended, so I could save myself the problem I had in 2008 when writing these posts took forever despite their lack of actual content. And yet here I am, over a week into 2010, and I’m still going. At least this miscellaneous bunch of observations represents the last of it. And most of it is pictures, so it will only take about three minutes to read. Go crazy, dear reader…
Scene of the Year: Lt. Archie Hicox makes the mistake of holding a meeting in a basement bar (Inglourious Basterds)
Honorable Mentions:
Carl and Ellie Frederickson share a wonderful life (Up)
Det. Terrence McDonagh is visited by a couple of Iguanas (Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans)
Jake Sully tames an Ikran and flies it around the Hallelujah Mountains (Avatar)
Mark Bellison reveals his “Ten Commandments” (The Invention of Lying)
The Demon haunting Katie finally gets a little handsy (Paranormal Activity)
Action Scene of the Year: Space Dragons + Space Tigers + Space Rhinos + Blue Giants vs. Rapacious Capitalism (Avatar)
Honorable Mentions:
Clive Owen vs. assassins in the Guggenheim (The International)
Sniper vs. sniper in the desert (The Hurt Locker)
Optimus Prime vs. three Decepticons in a forest (Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen)
Christian Bale raids Johnny Depp’s forest hiding place (Public Enemies)
Wikus Van Der Merwe dons a “Prawn” Battlesuit (District 9)
Most Satisfying Ending:Inglourious Basterds
Honourable Mentions:
A Prophet
District 9
Public Enemies
Enter The Void
G-Force
Least Satisfying Ending:Terminator Salvation
Dishonorable Mentions:
All About Steve
The Boat That Rocked
The Brothers Bloom
The Box
Twilight: New Moon
Best Hero of the Year: Carl Fredericksen (Ed Asner - Up)
Honorable Mentions:
Neytiri (Zoe Saldana - Avatar)
Captain James T. Kirk (Chris Pine – Star Trek)
Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington – Terminator Salvation)
Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson – Zombieland)
Sam Sparks (Anna Faris – Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs)
Best Villain of the Year: Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz – Inglourious Basterds)
Honorable Mentions:
César Luciani (Niels Arestrup – A Prophet)
Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang – Avatar)
Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer – Up)
Tae-ju (Ok-bin Kim - Thirst)
Linton Barwick (David Rasche – In The Loop)
Worst Hero of the Year: Chun-Li (Kristin Kreuk – Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li)
Dishonorable Mentions:
Goku (Justin Chatwin – Dragonball Evolution)
Duke (Channing Tatum – G.I. Joe – The Rise of Cobra)
Jimmy (Mathew Horne – Lesbian Vampire Killers)
Wolverine (Hugh Jackman – X-Men Origins: Wolverine)
Roger (Vincent Gallo – Metropia)
Worst Villain of the Year: Bison (Neal McDonough – Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li)
Dishonorable Mentions:
Sir Alistair Dormandy (Kenneth Branagh - The Boat That Rocked)
Sabertooth (Liev Shreiber – X-Men Origins: Wolverine)
Piccolo (James Marsters – Dragonball Evolution)
Ryder (John Travolta – The Taking of Pelham 123)
Nero (Eric Bana – Star Trek)
Best Ambiguous Hero/Villain of the Year: Mia (Katie Jarvis – Fish Tank)
Most Passive Character of the Year: Bella Swan (Kristin Stewart – Twilight: New Moon)
Sean (“S.J.”) Tuohy, Jr. (Jae Head – The Blind Side)
Phil Wenneck (Bradley Cooper – The Hangover)
Mary (Beth Grant – Extract)
Eric Powell (Chris Messina – Julie and Julia)
Micah (Micah Sloat – Paranormal Activity)
Highest Concentration of Guptas of the Year:Away We Go
Only Maya Rudolph’s Verona de Tessant survives the film as a likable protagonist, coming to terms with her familial strife without histrionics, just noble acceptance. Everyone else in the film is a dreadful caricature, and that’s on Sam Mendes, Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida more than on the talented actors, who are forced to do some terrible things. I still wake up in the middle of the night after terrifying nightmares about how Allison “Wonderful” Janney was made to play a squawking redneck shrew. Horrible.
Badass of the Year: Black Dynamite (Michael Jai White – Black Dynamite)
Honorable Mention: One Eye (Mads Mikkelsen – Valhalla Rising)
Honorary Happy-Go-Lucky Award For Services To Unbearable Characters Whose Optimism Is Actually A Kind Of Mental Illness: Mary Horowitz (Sandra Bullock – All About Steve)
“What Was Your Name Again? Oh Well, Doesn’t Matter. He’s Only Along As A Chauffeur And Potential Husband” Character of the Year: Gordon Silberman (Thomas McCarthy – 2012)
Best Talking Animal of the Year: Dug the Dog (Bob Peterson – Up)
Honorable Mention: Steve the Monkey (Neil Patrick Harris – Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs)
Worst Talking Animal of the Year: Mr. Fox (George Clooney – Fantastic Mr. Fox) (He’s a really selfish dick, if we’re being honest here.)
Dishonorable Mention: The Chaos Reigns Fox (Antichrist)
Best Non-Talking Animal of the Year: Kevin the bird (Up)
Honorable Mention: The various ratbirds plaguing Swallowfalls (Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs)
Worst Non-Talking Animal of the Year: The yappy dog in 2012 that gets saved in a moment robbed from all of Roland Emmerich’s other movies.
Best Lizard Cameo:Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans
Best Alligator Cameo:Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans
Best Crack Pipe:Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans
Best Couple of the Year: Julia and Paul Child (Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci – Julie and Julia)
Honorable Mention: Brian Clough and Peter Taylor (Michael Sheen and Timothy Spall – The Damned United)
Worst Couple of the Year: Julie and Eric Powell (Amy Adams and Chris Messina – Julie and Julia)
Dishonorable Mention: Sara and Brian Fitzgerald (Cameron Diaz and Jason Patric – My Sister’s Keeper)
Most Doomed Couple of the Year: He and She (Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg – Antichrist)
Honorable Mention: Micah and Katie (Micah Sloat and Katie Featherston – Paranormal Activity)
Least Convincing Couple of the Year: Leonard Kraditor and Michelle Rausch (Joaquin Phoenix and Gwyneth Paltrow – Two Lovers)
Dishonorable Mention: Leonard Kraditor and Sandra Cohen (Joaquin Phoenix and Vinessa Shaw – Two Lovers)
“I Hope These Guys Make It” Couple of the Year: James Brennan and Emily Lewin (Jesse Eisenberg and Kristin Stewart – Adventureland)
Honorable Mention: Columbus and Wichita (Jesse Eisenberg and Emma Stone – Zombieland)
“God, Just Split Up, Will You?” Couple of the Year: Derek and Sharon Charles (Idris Elba and Beyonce Knowles – Obsessed)
Dishonorable Mention: Mathieu Liévin and Maya (Yvan Attal and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi – Les regrets)
Most Tedious Love Triangle of the Year: Bella Swan, Edward Cullen and Jacob Black (Kristin Stewart, Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner - Twilight: New Moon)
Dishonorable Mention: Kate Curtis, Jackson Curtis, and thingy. You know, the guy. The one who flew all those planes. With the glasses. (Amanda Peet, John Cusack and Thomas McCarthy – 2012)
Best Manic Pixie Dream Girl of the Year of All Time: Ellie Frederiksen (Elie Docter – Up)
Worst Manic Pixie Dream Girl of the Year: Summer Finn (Zooey Deschanel – (500) Days of Summer) (ETA: With caveats. See comments for further discussion.)
Funniest Apparition of the Year: Wayne Mead (Michael Douglas – Ghosts of Girlfriends Past)
Least Funny Apparition of the Year: Whatever the hell was haunting Katie (Door-Opening Grip #3 - Paranormal Activity)
Sort of Funny, Sort of Horrifying Apparition of the Year: The Chaos Reigns Fox (Antichrist)
Most Convincing Lust Object of the Year: Michael Fassbender (Inglourious Basterds, Fish Tank)
Honorable Mention: Anna Friel (Land of the Lost)
Least Convincing Lust Object of the Year: Megan Fox (Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen)
Runner-Up: Gerard Butler (The Ugly Truth)
Most Pallid Lust Object of the Year: Robert Pattinson - Twilight: New Moon
Worst Wig of the Year: Taylor Lautner - Twilight: New Moon
Most Improved Hair of the Year: Amy Adams’ pixie-cut – Julie and Julia
Scourge Of Cinema in 2009 – Sandra Bullock
Best Insult of the Year:In The Loop (comes at 0:36)
Running Joke of the Year: Det. Terrence McDonagh (Nicolas Cage) mentioning the name “G” (Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans)
Honorable Mention: “Steve!” (Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs)
And that, my friends, is that. Thank you for all the comments and discussions. The blog will be taking a bit of a break, becoming more sporadic in 2010 while I deal with other things, though I’m sure once the Oscar nominations are announced I’ll be back to complain about the inevitable nods for Precious and Up In The Air. So at least there’s that to look forward to, eh?
For the longest time it seemed like 2009 would be a truly dreadful year in film, perhaps as a consequence of the writers’ strike last year. By the end of it I felt like we’d had a pretty good run, once the summer was over. The early months were a desert with only Coraline making a dent in my memory, but by the time December rolled around with the release of Avatar, it felt like a more rounded experience. Even better, though we had a few horribly delayed releases (such as Up, which was disgracefully held back from UK release for six months), there are only a few movies that have yet to be released over here that have attracted our attention, and even then we’re not that bothered. The most frustrating omissions were our own fault. Jane Campion’s Bright Star came and went so quickly we missed out on seeing it, as did Lone Scherfig’s An Education. Sherlock Holmes came out this week but illness and schedule clashes mean we will be seeing it in 2010. It’s frustrating, but compared to last year’s maddening delays in seeing Rachel Getting Married and Synecdoche, New York, it’s nowhere near as bad.
So anyway, here are my top 25 movies of 2009, in order. Hopefully soon I will get to post my bottom 25. It was depressingly easy to complete that list.
Best Movies of the Year:
25. Adventureland
Greg Mottola’s coming-of-age story is good enough to make me forgive it for being a coming-of-age story (a sub-genre I have little time for). Sensitive performances and a perfectly judged tone set it apart, and I expect second and third viewings will cement it as a favourite in the future.
24. A Christmas Carol
Though Charles Dickens’ novel suffers from being adapted too many times, this version was loyal enough to the source material to stand above the rest. Robert Zemeckis cleverly used his performance capture technology to create a world that looks like a living painting, and — for the most part — his thoughtful direction and stately command of pace are refreshingly old-fashioned.
23. Red Cliff: Part Two
A crushing disappointment after the genius of the first installment, John Woo’s epic finale to the Three Kingdoms story was hobbled by tedious subplots about the horrors of war, as well as an unsatisfying final confrontation with evil Prime Minister Cao Cao. Still, there were enough superb moments to save it, including an enormous conflagration, hardcore badassery from the heroes, and entertaining cunning from Zhuge Liang.
22. White Material
Working as a comment on racial identity, colonialism, and the guilt that attends it, Claire Denis’ movie is a fascinating and thought-provoking experience. It also serves as a fantastic thriller, with its air of imminent collapse building to a nerve-wracking conclusion. Isabelle Huppert is mesmerising as the plantation owner who dooms all around her with her arrogance.
21. Zombieland
While vampires became a singularly obnoxious cinematic plague, zombies went from flavour-of-the-month to pariahs. Nevertheless, Ruben Fleischer’s apocalyptic comedy was a delightful surprise, perfectly cast and thoroughly entertaining. It also featured the cameo appearance of the year, and one best left unspoiled.
20. The Brothers Bloom
For a few minutes Rian Johnson’s con-trick drama seems like a precious and finicky conglomeration of obnoxious post-Anderson tricks and tics, but thankfully it becomes a warm and humane antidote to David Mamet’s cerebral dominance of the sub-genre. The key to its appeal is an endearing central performance from Rachel Weisz, whose enthusiastic embrace of the brothers’ tricksiness grounds the film even while the plot spirals off in unexpected directions and Johnson’s camera flies around with such exuberant unpredictability. Despite faltering slightly in the final act, its ambition and seriousness of purpose were a resounding success.
19. A Serious Man
The Coens excel at taking on unorthodox projects and surprising their fans, but they also rely on a set of narrative tricks that repeat from movie to movie. A Serious Man was no different, with their familiar exploration of our cosmic insignificance coming into play again. Nevertheless, here their tricks felt fresh again, matched as they were to a plot revolving around morality and heavenly punishment. Casting unknown actors was possibly the masterstroke: it certainly made the movie feel like nothing else out there. It ranks as their most entertaining and most challenging film since The Big Lebowski.
18. Ponyo on a Cliff by the Sea
Remarkable to think that Hayao Miyazaki is capable of making movies even lighter and more whimsical than anything he has previously offered us. At times Ponyo can feel too fluffy, and longueurs plague the second half of the film, but these minor errors are easily forgiven in the rush of incredible images. Ponyo’s mid-movie escape from the clutches of her misguided father is among the most visionary and exhilarating setpieces of recent times, aided by the Wagnerian stings of Joe Hisaishi’s beautiful score.
17. Coraline
Henry Selick’s stunning adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s book is a feast for the eyes, as technically impressive as anything committed to film this year by Digital Domain, ILM or BUF. It’s also one of the scariest films of the year, one of those rare childrens’ movies that is unafraid to terrify its audience. Some of the imagery lingers in the memory with the upsetting persistence of the worst nightmares. Also great was the delicate use of Digital 3D. In the year of Avatar, it’s worth remembering that Selick and his team figured out how to use the technology to subtly enhance the viewing experience before anyone else.
16. The Hurt Locker
By the midpoint of 2009, it honestly felt as if the writers’ strike of 2008 had left us in the middle of a drought. Nothing truly exceptional had been released, and so when Kathryn Bigelow’s superb war thriller came out it was leapt upon as if it were a fusion of Paths of Glory and Apocalypse Now. Third act problems drain some of the energy from it, but even so, no other movie about the Iraq war has done so much to capture the futile stupidity of it, nor made such a pointed comment about the deranging effect it has had on our psyche. That it is also a nerve-wracking thriller is a welcome bonus.
15. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
Expectations for Werner Herzog’s crime thriller were low, with only those few of us who revel in the unpredictability of Nicolas Cage holding out any hope. Thankfully Herzog surprised everyone with this demented triumph. Though it could have been turned into a conventional tale of depravity and redemption, Herzog, Cage, and writer William Finkelstein have little interest in following a traditional path, sketching all kinds of entertaining madness in the margins. It helps that Cage was let off the leash. His intense level of commitment to the project is the key to Bad Lieutenant: POCNO‘s success. Welcome back, you mad bastard.
14. Drag Me To Hell
While Sam Raimi’s gleeful homage to EC Comics-style moralising concerned one young woman’s efforts to avoid being sent to hell, this felt like Raimi had escaped from the kind of big-budget purgatory that he had once railed against. Though still obviously made with more money than he had once had at his disposal, Drag Me To Hell was a return to Raimi’s anything-goes ethos. No other movie made this year tried so hard to generate a response in the audience, and it was almost entirely successful. A regression for the genre, maybe, but an incredibly entertaining one.
13. Where The Wild Things Are
It looked like we would never get to see Spike Jonze’s unconventional adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s book. When it finally arrived, critical and popular opinion seemed to split right down the middle. Post-release discussion seemed to focus on subjective accounts of how the movie resurrected very specific memories of childhood, with those who were unmoved by the movie stating that it just didn’t speak to them personally. The vision of Jonze and Dave Eggers is certainly gloomy, repetitive, unfocused and pretty unappealing, but I cannot lie: early scenes brought back horrible memories from my youth, and the unflinching depiction of Max’s confused rage rocked me to my core.
12. District 9
Viewed as an allegory about apartheid-era South Africa, Neill Blomkamp’s low-budget SF action film gets tangled up in clumsy metaphorical dead-ends and ill-judged racial stereotyping that blunts the message. Seen as a misanthropic denunciation of venality across all races and species, it becomes far more palatable. Blomkamp’s exciting and imaginative tale takes the audience down unexpected paths, skillfully building to a finale of surprising emotional resonance. I won’t lie: the final sacrifice of one character made me sob.
11. Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs
The most pleasant surprise of 2009. Clone High creators Phil Lord and Chris Miller did the same as Spike Jonze — take a beloved but slight children’s book and adapt it into a new format with a drastic change of tone — but veered off in a different direction. Perhaps Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs accomplished less than Where The Wild Things Are in terms of illuminating the mental turmoil of childhood, but while it “merely” sets out to entertain, it did that with amazing success. Gleefully irreverent, pro-nerd, and willing to poke fun at every awful convention of lazy cookie-cutter filmmaking, it is also arguably the funniest comedy of the year.
10. Up
It’s tempting to leave Up off the list as punishment for manipulating adult audiences into crying miserable tears of mourning for an adorable animated couple and, by extension, ourselves. Nothing else this year moved us as much as that magnificently rendered and utterly devastating opening montage. The level of storytelling talent on display was humbling. The rest of the movie was wonderful too, building on that resonant set-up to deliver a winning adventure, featuring the funniest animal characters of the year. An emotionally exhausting film, but a life-affirming one.
9. Fish Tank
Avoiding the tawdry cultural voyeurism of the works of overrated ghouls such as Mike Leigh or Lee Daniels is the least of Fish Tank‘s many achievements, though one we can be most grateful for. It is also a compelling exploration of youth culture as seen through the eyes of a confused child on the cusp of adulthood. Katie Jarvis’ Mia is a fascinating and sympathetic character, aware that she is trapped in a life that offers her nothing, but eager to escape with her dignity intact. Unfortunately, she’s incapable of avoiding making some terrible mistakes along the way. It also has the grip of a thriller, cleverly changing tone in the final act without sacrificing believability. Yet another classic from Andrea Arnold.
8. Public Enemies
It’s possible to reduce Michael Mann’s adaptation of Bryan Burrough’s exploration of the 1930′s crimewave to just a period retelling of Heat, with Johnny Depp’s Dillinger and Christian Bale’s Melvin Purvis as dapper versions of McCauley and Hanna, but that would miss out on his deft commentary on the narcissism of these criminals and how new technologies increased popular fascination with the outlaw. Mann marks the moment where demand for titillation grew to the extent that public attention began to fuel the events that it demanded, and this fine, exciting crime thriller ends on a memorable moment where popular culture begins to eat itself.
7. Antichrist
Lars Von Trier has finally appeared to let his obnoxious mask of superiority drop long enough to tell a tale informed by his recent nervous breakdown, and the result is one of the most affecting and disturbing horror films of recent times. Conjuring an atmosphere of dread even more upsetting than anything that master of mood Hideo Nakata could create, Von Trier pits man against woman, and humanity against nature. No one wins, except anyone brave enough to endure this remarkable and starkly beautiful nightmare vision of a world — and a grief-stricken mother — gone mad.
6. Fantastic Mr. Fox
How bold of Wes Anderson to take the work of a respected author and bolt his own style of preppy, fussy humour onto it, and your acceptance of this depends fully on your acceptance of his shtick. To those of us in love with that viewpoint — and that obsessive attention to amusing detail — Fantastic Mr. Fox was yet another success, playing with the same themes of redemption and forgiveness as his previous movies while being just as sassy and fleet-of-foot as his non-animated work. It also works as a satire on the habitual anthropomorphism of the usual animated fare, with these characters being both more human and more bestial than anything populating the movies of Disney and Dreamworks.
5. A Prophet
No matter how much Jacques Audiard maintains he was not making a political statement with this movie, his rousing prison thriller proved to be as multi-layered as the best crime movies of recent times. Malik El Djebena’s growth from callow youth to crime kingpin is fascinating and weirdly inspirational, while the world he lives in is filled with detail about identity politics, French correctional failings, and racial tensions in Europe. It’s also nail-biting, beautifully judged, and performed to perfection.
4. Avatar
While armchair critics fall over themselves to dismiss this movie for being too predictable – a criticism that is being applied with more force than with any other movie released this year – the story is told with enough energy to forgive its clunkiness. James Cameron has always been a master with pace, and here he succeeds in manipulating the audience with a magician’s touch, delivering a groundbreaking visual tour de force into the bargain. Viewing it in Digital 3D IMAX is an unforgettable and thrilling experience.
3. Enter The Void
What James Cameron aimed to do in 3D, Gaspar Noé managed in 2D just months before. His tale of one man’s journey through death is the joint most immersive movie experience of the year, a terrifying and exhilarating cinematic experiment of enormous emotional power, and a technical marvel to boot. Any reservations about its pacing problems are swept away as Noé brings an obsessive rigour to his visual template: a first-person viewpoint that doesn’t falter at any point. That this brave experiment still has no distributor is criminal. If it ever becomes the Midnight Movie phenomenon it deserves to be, make every effort to see it on the biggest screen possible.
2. In The Loop
Armando Iannucci and the Thick of It gang brought their wonderful TV show to the big screen in style, expanding its scope to include the bureaucrats and fools of America, complete with the same venality, paranoia, and incompetence. Funnier even than the original series, it was also densely plotted but lighter than air: a feat of screenwriting to match that of Martin McDonagh with In Bruges last year. None of that would matter if the new cast members were not as talented as the original crew, but the US contingent adapts to the semi-improvisational style with aplomb. A triumph that rewards repeated viewings.
1. Inglourious Basterds
More than any other movie made this year, Inglourious Basterds surprised us all with its piercing intelligence, seriousness of purpose, and deft gameplaying, all of which are applied to an emotionally complex revenge plot that confounds the viewer at every turn. Much has been made of Tarantino’s effort to make a movie in which cinema has the last laugh and reality is forced to bow to its power, but less has been said about his continued facility with character. To the immaculate roll-call that includes Jules Winnfield, Vincent Vega, Jackie Brown, Mr. White, The Bride and Stuntman Mike can be added Shosanna Dreyfus and Hans Landa, the most compelling and haunting characters of the year. Tarantino has every right to be proud of this movie: it is, quite simply, his masterpiece.
Best Documentary:Soul Power
Considered as a sister project to Leon Gast’s When We Were Kings, Jeffrey Levy-Hinte’s documentary about the music festival that ran alongside the Rumble in the Jungle offers up yet more fascinating footage of Muhammad Ali in his prime, sparring with mouthy opportunists and talking about the potential impact of the forthcoming event. It also shows how the festival almost sinks under a tide of ego and bureaucracy. The worst thing that can be said about the movie is that it doesn’t show enough of the festival itself, but even then you still get to see thrilling performances by The Spinners, BB King, Miriam Makeba, and James Brown at the height of his powers. Stingy though the amount of concert footage is, it’s still some of the best music you will ever hear.
Most Embarrassing Admission of the Year: Okay, Soul Power was actually the only documentary I saw this year. Nevertheless, don’t let that put you off seeing it. Even if I’d seen a dozen documentaries this year, I doubt any of them would have been as fun or fulfilling as that one.
No time to dally with small talk: on with the listmaking! More to come when I get the time…
For the first time in a long while, Halloween was a real event at Shades of Caruso HQ. Sure, we’ve had pumpkins and decorations before, which were fun, and absolutely no Trick-or-Treaters, which was even better, but this year I was hit with the sense that the day was imbued with some kind of unholy significance, far more so than usual. A pumpkin was carved…
…and horror movies were watched. Twitter greatly helped. Scary videos, photos of costumes, and blog articles celebrating Samhain were linked to, creating a real sense of event. Twitter does a few things really well, and being a sort of mini-aggregator of topical observations and relevant information is top of that list. It really tied the night together.
The one thing that let the whole experience down were the movies we decided to watch, which were either thoroughly awful or distractingly inconsistent. The best of them was the insane mega-hit Paranormal Activity, which has become the most profitable movie of all time after grossing $85m on a $15000 budget. It’s a terribly flawed movie, filled with banal dialogue and repetitive arguments, not to mention tortuous plot contrivances that keep the conceit floating. Some of the best moments are punctured by the behaviour of Micah, whose defiantly obnoxious confidence — a plot requisite, sadly — doesn’t sit well with the really quite terrifying events surrounding him. Special mention here to the amusement he greets an EVP recording of his girlfriend’s demon. As someone who has long been utterly terrified of the sound of unearthly events captured on tape (this book fucked me up as a kid), the moment should have been chilling, but having this doofy jerkbag giggling and goading the demon on ruined the moment.
And yet, and yet… Let’s just say that there are several moments in the film that gave me the fear, and one in particular nearly made me give up on the film entirely, it was so scary. Writer-director Oren Peli has hit on a magic formula that is effective and durable enough to survive the distracting necessities of the plot mechanics that hobble the movie, with help from committed performers Katie Featherston (this year’s Scream Queen for sure) and Micah Sloat. Who cares about the contrivance, or the unpleasant behaviour of Micah, or the late-movie YouTube exorcism silliness that complicates the hair-thin plot? None of that matters. When Micah’s camera switches on at night, and the creaking starts, you forget every annoying thing that you had to go through to get there, and you instantly put yourself in their position. You’re going to be asleep later, and you’re going to be unaware of what’s going on. The scares in the movie — manifested with absolute mastery of the craft — are one thing. What makes the movie so terrifying is knowing that you are going to bed later. It’s impossible not to imagine yourself in the same situation, and that’s the scariest thing of all.
Luckily for my sanity, the resolution of the film is more mundane than the build-up, which blunted the effect of the film. For most of the running time we can’t understand the motives of the demon haunting Katie. Terrorising her from childhood is one thing, and the thought that Katie will never be able to escape her psychic torture is more upsetting than the actual resolution, but as this is a movie with a finite running time, we have to have a resolution. I’m not sure what Peli could have done to fix this problem, and the fact that the movie has three different endings suggests he wasn’t sure either. A disappointment, then, but a disappointment that touches greatness at times, and lingers in the mind far longer than you would like.
Though Paranormal Activity invites comparison with 1999′s The Blair Witch Project, it’s still very much of its time. When considered alongside Matt Reeves’ Cloverfield and Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza’s magnificent [Rec], this kind of faux-subjective horror — with the line between onscreen participant and viewer blurred — has become one of the most significant innovations in horror cinema of the past twenty years, and has surprisingly been used rarely enough to still feel fresh. Certainly, though the genre seemed to be in a rut during that period, Blair Witch and [Rec] are two of the most effective horror movies around, arguably more so than almost all others, and have revitalised the traditional horror sub-genres (ghost story, zombie movie, monster attack).
That’s not to say the genre has been completely moribund. The other horror movies that have stood out – certainly in my view — are partially most effective for playing off real-world fears that have been ignored by numerous tedious slasher films, remakes of Japanese techno-ghost stories or “torture” movies. In a world where increasing automation and computerised interaction has made us less likely to wander out of our comfort zones, the best horror movies of recent times have worked on our fear of other people, where stressful situations make us turn on each other. While a lot of horror concerns the Fear of the Other, as the groups we ally ourselves with shrink in size we find The Other is not that alien any more. The Descent, The Ruins and The Mist all feature characters trapped in horrific environments, surrounded by unthinkable horror, but ultimately these movies are upsetting because of the way the protagonists react to these threats. In all three the most dangerous thing you can encounter is the person standing next to you, who is probably someone you have known all your life.
The thought that it is not the Other that could provide the horror, but maybe even you yourself if pushed the wrong way — by betrayal in the case of The Descent, politics and religious intolerance in The Mist, and allegorical Idiocracy-style selfishness and ignorance in The Ruins — is where the real horror lies. My other favourite horror movie of the past few years — James Watkins’ gut-wrenching Eden Lake — is as topical as The Ruins or The Mist, with two well-to-do UK city-folk undone by their inability to respect their countrified brethren. Their fate is sealed when they antagonise some children — The Other — but protagonist Jenny’s ultimate doom is provided by people who should be on her side. Hell really is other people. As we increasingly use the Internet to interact, and often realise that being physically present with other people is a mixed blessing, it’s tempting to think that the current popularity of the zombie genre is down to the cathartic pleasure of seeing hordes of “people” mown down. It’s the most misanthropic of horror sub-genres, and increasingly the one where the appeal of it seems to be watching the violence we can perpetrate upon surrogate humans without worrying about morality getting in the way as much as it is the thrill of being menaced by something unpleasant.
During our weekend of horror we also watched some endearing throwbacks to previous horror eras, though sadly they left us even more cold. Ti West’s House of The Devil has been attracting attention and rave reviews for its intentionally retrograde approach. Set in the 80s, West fills his movie with period detail: feathered haircuts, synth soundtrack, clunky Walkman etc. He also spends much time setting up an atmosphere instead of throwing a bunch of youngsters into a rusty basement to have their teeth pulled out. About 75% of the movie shows college student Samantha (played by Saffron Burrows lookalike Jocelyn Donahue) walking around a creepily deserted campus and an even creepier isolated house, as she babysits an old woman for Tom Noonan and Mary Woronov. We’re talking about half an hour of walking around a campus, and then half an hour of walking around a house, with as little plot as a short movie expanded to feature length.
Though I certainly didn’t take against West’s movie, and though it had several pleasurable things to recommend it (casting Noonan and Woronov certainly makes up for a lot of the movie’s flaws), I suspect a lot of the praise heaped on House of the Devil is for what it isn’t, rather than for what it is. It’s not torture porn. It’s not a shitty remake of a slasher classic. It’s not edited into an incomprehensible, staccato mess. It generates atmosphere instead of relying too much on turning the volume up to jolt the viewer. It’s paying its respects to the horror movies adored by a certain sub-set of movie critics. It has charm and is made with reverent love, and never once feels like a cheap cash-in. For those reasons, it is to be applauded.
For the most part there is little dialogue and a couple of shock jump moments (in their defence, they’re earned), but also lots and lots of longueurs. West goes the extra mile in setting up an atmosphere of eerie stillness before things kick off in the final act, but as with a lot of average horror movies from the past, that involves having very little happen very slowly. The 95 minute running time feels a lot longer, and by the time the scares arrive, there’s a good chance you’ll be bored. Is this a result of eroded attention spans? Or has West balanced the film wrong? It doesn’t help that the finale is overplayed to the point of not being that scary after all, shooting past “effectively scary” to settle at the total opposite end of the horror spectrum.
As for West’s influences, sometimes they seem to have inspired him too literally. Like the runty child of Rosemary’s Baby and The Dunwich Horror (with a pinch of The Medusa Touch), it serves up something we’ve seen a million times before which, after the long wait to get there, is just not enough. I’d even argue that it’s got its eras mixed up. While the film goes out of its way to add 80s period details, the pace and subject matter of the movie feel more suited to the 70s, like something Roger Corman and Samuel Z. Arkoff would have made before The Exorcist and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre came along and changed the rules of the genre. 80s horror movies were pacier and often sillier than this, and if you’re going to pay homage to that era, you need to have more going on.
As in Michael Dougherty’s Trick ‘r Treat, which was a proper 80s horror homage right down to its bones. Ostensibly an anthology of tales linked by a couple of common threads, Dougherty pays tribute to numerous horror classics while playfully subverting expectations. Hoary horror conventions that are given a sprucing up include the sexuality of the vampire, the vulnerability of young virgins, townsfolk trying to kill a group of undesirables who then come back from the grave, the pillar of the community who has a terrible secret, the Bad Seed, and the unstoppable killing machine seemingly intent on enforcing some bizarre rules. By the end of the film, the nods to other films were keeping me more entertained than the narrative tricks or the lacklustre scares: The Howling, The Thing, Fright Night, Pumpkinhead, The Evil Dead, Nightmare on Elm Street 1 and 2, Creepshow, Pet Sematery, The Company of Wolves, Halloween (obviously)… There’s almost too many to count. While House of the Devil serves up the familiar and hopes it will still scare us, here Dougherty simply tries to pay respectful homage.
This approach has its pros and cons. On the plus side Dougherty captures the look of 80s cinema with images full of rich golds, reds and oranges, not to mention leaf-strewn suburban streets, Bacchanalian fire-lit orgies of violence, and use of the frame that calls to mind vintage Carpenter and Dante. It’s a gorgeous movie, despite its low-budget, but as with House of the Devil it’s low on scares. The balance of the movie falls too heavily on the lighter side, which wouldn’t really be a problem at any other time of the year, but after seeing something as soil-yourself-scary as Paranormal Activity it couldn’t help but feel like a bit of a letdown. While the intertwined stories and narrative surprises are cleverly unravelled by the end, all four tales (and the two linking arcs) feel underdeveloped, even taking into account the bigger picture. It’s Love Actually Syndrome. Four two-act tales linked together do not replace one tale with three acts. As much fun as Trick ‘R Treat is (and it is a lot of fun), it can leave the viewer unsatisfied. Consider it recommended, however, especially if you grew up loving any of the movies listed above.
All three movies feel like throwbacks in one way or another (if you’re ungenerous and take Paranormal Activity to be a straight rip of Blair Witch), but the fourth movie we watched over the Halloween weekend was very much a modern mainstream horror movie. Jaume Collet-Serra’s demented Orphan was probably more thriller than horror movie, but with the various Catholic orphanages, wintery settings, bloody carnage and concerned nuns — not to mention that it is a Dark Castle Entertainment picture — it felt very much of a piece with everything else we had seen. Except terrible. Vera Farmiga and Peter Sarsgaard (resembling a pudgy, effeminate Keifer Sutherland with a bad case of narcolepsy) adopt a Russian child after Farmiga’s third pregnancy ends in disaster. Haunted by this, a previous alcohol dependence, and an accident that left her second child deaf, Farmiga puts all her hopes of recovering from her past on the new child, who sadly turns out to be a murderous psychopath who tears the family apart with psychological games, a can of lighter fluid, and a big hammer.
The movie starts unpleasant and stupid, and gets more unpleasant and stupid than you can possibly imagine. During its initial theatrical release, an internet meme appeared that claimed the murderous child (Esther, played with astonishing eerie skill by 12-year old Isabelle Fuhrman) was actually a Lithuanian hooker born with dwarfism. This rendered the movie impossible to take seriously, though the actual reveal at the end is just as silly and possibly even tackier, especially when taken with some absurd third-act loose-end-tying of breathtaking clunkiness (I’m thinking of the frozen pond, here).
It certainly seems odd… nay, depressing that something this catastrophic and tasteless can be made with a cast of talented actors such as Farmiga, Sarsgaard (in a career-worst performance filled with drowsy histrionics), Margo Martindale and poor CCH Pounder. What’s worse is that a far superior movie with a similar plot was released in 2007 to massive indifference. George Ratliff’s Joshua starred Hott Sam Rockwell and Farmiga as — again — parents dealing with the psychological manipulations of a devious child, and again hamstrung by their inability to deal with this threat due to the perceived vulnerability of their nemesis (echoes of Watkins’ Eden Lake there). Ratliff created an atmospheric and disturbing tale with almost no tricksiness, relying instead on talented actors portraying people at the end of their tether. Collet-Serra — who, let us not forget, is part of the Pointless Remake Brigade thanks to his astonishingly tedious Paris Hilton vehicle House of Wax — has no interest in creating something as challenging as this, despite his excellent cast, relying instead on cheap shock tricks, over-direction, gothic lighting and unsubtle musical cues. Luckily, it’s hilariously wrong, and littered with bizarre tonal and directorial mistakes. It’s not quite a failure along the lines of, say, Shyamalan’s The Happening, but it’s damn close.
When critics praise House of the Devil for being a breath of fresh air, it is garish, tawdry nonsense like Orphan that they’re comparing it to. After seeing it the other movies of the weekend seemed much better by comparison. It was particularly amusing to note that the frenetically edited Orphan generated not even a fraction of the tension created by Paranormal Activity which contains hardly any cuts at all, in defiance of Hitchcock’s theories on editing. Sadly none of these Halloween movies thrilled me as much as the movies I linked to a horror renaissance in this post (scroll down). Pastiche can be fun, but unless it has something else there, it can be little more than an empty exercise in playing off nostalgic feelings, and suggests a lack of imagination in the filmmaker. A working knowledge of the various developmental stages of a genre, allied with a vivid imagination, can give us something as respectfully constructed as Juan Antonio Bayona’s The Orphanage – which is a classic ghost story in the mold of The Haunting and The Innocents that pays homage to its forebears and then becomes its own thing — or something that bursts conventions like Tomas Alfredson’s Let The Right One In. This year, pastiche had its pleasures, but didn’t take the next step. The closest we got was seeing Sam Raimi return to what he does best with Drag Me To Hell. It was pure joy, yet another wonderful amalgam of disturbing comedy and silly horror from the man who gave us Evil Dead II. Of course, when you’re making a pastiche of a sub-sub-genre of horror that you yourself invented, it’s going to be hard to fuck it up.
So is there cause for concern? I’d argue no. This year the only completely satisfying straight horror movie I’ve experienced is Lars Von Trier’s harrowing Antichrist, which is one of the most astonishing sensory assaults in recent memory. Doused in unpleasant atmosphere and featuring imagery that will probably haunt me for years to come, even if Von Trier’s intent was not to make a great horror movie — he’s more interested in parsing his recent depression, and exploring recurrent themes like violent misogyny and humanity’s destructive urges — he managed to create something that disturbs more than anything else released this year. That’s not just because of the now-notorious genital mutilation scene. That one moment — which is utterly horrifying but not exploitative — would not be anywhere near as effective if it were not for Von Trier’s command of mood up to that point.
While it certainly doesn’t look or feel like anything in the mainstream of the genre, there’s the hope that other filmmakers will see what Von Trier has done with the conventions of the genre, mixing fairy tale imagery, nightmarish atmospherics a la David Lynch, sustained suspense, extreme body horror, and an oppressive, Hideo-Nakata-esque dread to create something new, something chilling and unforgettable. Maybe Von Trier, who operates outside the sometimes claustrophobic and relentlessly self-referential confines of the world of horror cinema, will accidentally influence other horror filmmakers and bring about another evolution in the genre. It’s that or someone very very smart comes up with a new approach, just like Carpenter once did with Halloween. One can only hope.
Note: This blogpost was not written in an attempt to exorcise the memory of Paranormal Activity from my branes so I can get a decent night’s sleep. Anyone suggesting this is the case is dead wrong. ::whimpers::
The 2009 London Film Festival is still going, though it’s over for me. I’ll admit to feeling pretty burnt out. Illness has made my voice as deep as Dr. Mrs. the Monarch, and my brain as mushy as overcooked Maris Piper potatoes. How I managed to make it through three films on Monday is beyond me, with an imminent coughing fit scratching away at my uvula for most of the day. I trust that every festival-goer in those three rooms will be glad to know I didn’t ruin their entertainment, even the latecomers who kept swapping seats throughout, driving me into an almost murderous rage.
It took until last Friday to realise that the latecomers who had plagued me throughout the festival were return-ticket-holders who were being allowed in at the last minute — a theory postulated by fellow festival-attendee and friend of the blog Mr. Millan. He’s a more understanding person than I am, but even so, when people were still stepping over us twenty minutes after the lights had dimmed, all sympathy vanished. While the audiences at the festival were generally wonderful, attentive and respectful, this late attendance and the inability of some patrons to sit in their allocated seats really ruined some movies. It’s hard to concentrate on the really rather important opening scenes of movies when people on either side of you are arguing over who gets what seat.
One selfish person who seemed affronted by the suggestion they get the hell out of someone else’s seat managed to completely distract me during the opening moments of Nicholas Winding Refn’s gruelling Viking Grrrr-a-thon Valhalla Rising. A title card flashed up with something on it about clans going to the ends of the Earth and killing each other with a variety of gruesome implements. I think it did, anyway. For all I know it could have been talking about Viking couture and ancient Scandinavian infrastructure investment, so annoying were the lady’s adamant pronouncements that she was not going to move. She did, though. And then sat in someone else’s chair, meaning she put up the same struggle three minutes later. This second disturbance was during a series of moody shots of some gruff looking gents huddling on the side of a hill, so it wasn’t so bad.
If there was any image that summed up Valhalla Rising, it would be of gruff looking gents huddling on the side of a hill. There was a lot of it. The thin story follows the final journey of mute Viking warrior One Eye, played with silent intensity and motherfucking epic badassery by Mads Mikkelsen. Disclosure: he only gets to dole out a bit of ultraviolence here and there as Winding Refn’s carefully paced movie grinds toward its inevitable conclusion. The movie has been marketed as a Viking combat actioner like The 13th Warrior or the deeply tedious and offensively stupid Pathfinder, but it’s much more meditative than that. Audiences may not be prepared for the funereal pace of the actual film. That said, when it kicks off between our taciturn anti-hero and some gruff gent who had just been huddling on the side of a hill, One-Eye is a riveting protagonist, effortlessly and brutally destroying all foes. He’s the Viking Brock Samson, and very fetching he looks in his leather jacket and trews.
After escaping from capture by some folk whose identity might have been revealed in that title card I didn’t get to read thanks to the annoying lady, One-Eye and a tag-along boy (Are, played with mischievous charm by Maarten Steven) come across a band of idiot Christian Vikings, who think they can reach the Holy Land — from Scotland, mind — via teeny boat, in order to crush the infidels in the name of Christ. This does not go well. A long stretch of the movie shows the band of zealots — plus One Eye and his adopted companion — sitting in a boat surrounded by thick fog, desperate for water. When they eventually land it seems they are in Hell, but in fact they have found the endpoint that One Eye — who appears to be psychic, considering his rather accurate visions of doom and misery — has been heading towards all along. Does his journey doom them, or do they accidentally doom themselves? One-Eye appears to be the only person who has any idea of what is going on. He is yer actual one-eyed man who is king in the land of the blind.
As with Von Trier’s Antichrist, nature is the enemy here, even more so than the various warriors dispatched by One-Eye. Though our hero and the annoying band of treacherous Christian Viking jerk-offs come up against a very real antagonist in their final destination, the thing that finishes them off is their inability to comprehend and adapt to their surroundings, or to move past their ignorant superstitions and suspicions. Though One Eye’s feelings are unclear, it’s likely he does think he has reached the afterlife, which is a forest where only predators lurk. The Christians, on the other hand, bicker about whether it’s the Holy Land or Hell, and their foolishness and fear of the landscape is the end of them. One Eye is lucky. He soon realises what his visions have been showing him: the moment of his death, which he embraces gladly. I didn’t get to see John Hillcoat’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road at the festival, but I’ve heard troubling rumours that the final act is more reassuring than the one in the book. Funnily enough Valhalla Rising has an even darker final act than McCarthy’s book. In this world there is only madness, loneliness, and death. It’s worse than having your movie-going experience disrupted by thoughtless Londoners.
It’s not all death and misery. Valhalla Rising is staggeringly beautiful, with Refn and cinematographer Morten Søborg filling the screen with terrifying close-ups of rugged tough guys contrasted with imposing hillsides, dark forests, overwhelming mists and breathtaking skies, almost exclusively depicted in murky greens, blues and shocking reds. Along with Enter The Void, it’s the film festival choice I’m most pleased with getting to see on the big screen: both movies would be greatly damaged by being seen first on a small screen. Though much of the movie is taken up with aimless wandering and muttered conversations, the atmospherics are perfectly handled by Refn. The imagery looms down at you, as if choking you. At times I felt like I had a mute Viking badass standing on my chest, it was so oppressive. If the narrative leaves you unimpressed, I can’t imagine the grimy precision of the mood mechanics won’t make an impression. I left the room annoyed by the longueurs but unable to shake the memory of the experience. It’s possibly the best deeply flawed movie I’ve seen in a while, something I can’t in good conscience rave about but want to recommend to everyone.
Unlike Metropia, which is just deeply flawed. As with Gerald McMorrow’s Franklyn, I would love to be able to praise Metropia unreservedly for being so defiantly odd and ambitious, but the unsatisfying narrative, murky visuals, and deathly pace are hurdles too big to jump. As far as I could tell it was set in the future, in a Europe suffering from oil shortages. That’s what it says on the film’s Wikipedia page, so I’m going with that. The title cards that set up the background were obscured by — yes — several people coming in late. Seriously! You thought I was over-reacting in the first half of this post? No! We’re talking about a screening that was delayed by about twenty minutes so the director could introduce it! This was going on all the time, and I seemed to be the douchebag-magnet. God!
Roger — The protagonist of Metropia – is a paranoid loser who resists using the underground rail system run by yer bog-standard sinister post-dystopic corporation Trexx (not named after the brand of vegetable fat). This same corporation — which, wouldn’t you know it, is totes ev0l — is using a microchip-laden shampoo called Dangst to monitor and control the minds of those who use the product. Well, I say control, but in fact Roger just seems to be plagued with chatter from Trexx worker Stefan — voiced by Alexander Skarsgård — who gives him vague suggestions and listens in on Roger’s dreary thoughts, which revolve around his fear of the underground trains, his potentially adulterous girlfriend Anna, and the woman featured on the side of the mind-controlling shampoo bottle. And I thought I’d had shitty jobs in the past.
As with much post-PKD SF, the potentially schizophrenic protagonist is manipulated by forces greater than him to do something something [vagueness supplied by movie, not by blogger]. In fact, Roger’s complicity in some kind of shareholder battle between Trexx CEO Ivan Bahn and his daughter Nina (voiced, respectively by Udo Kier and Juliette Lewis) seems more accidental than anything, and has barely any effect on him. At the start of the film he’s cowardly and having relationship troubles, and in the final scene he doesn’t seem any less plagued by his nervousness, and his relationship has been saved by events outside his control. I’m not saying a movie has to follow rules of narrative, but if you’re going to try something different, make sure it’s worth doing that. Bring something new to the narrative melange. I couldn’t care less about Roger at the start of the film, and that opinion didn’t change one jot by the end. Plus he looked like a creepy-ass bobble-head and he freaked me out.
I’m a sucker for visually innovative movies, so none of that would matter if the film looked great, but even though Metropia is certainly distinctive the animation is an additional turn-off. As the Wikipedia page details, the bizarre characters are actually photos of random people manipulated using Photoshop and Adobe After Effects, then animated in front of photos of European locations. I doff my cap to director Tarik Saleh, lead animator Isak Gjertsen and art director Sesse Lind for creating something this distinctive, but the murky visuals have the unintended consequence of being soporific. Saleh talked about the movie, and his charming anecdotes about the movie energised the room, but by the mid-point it felt like the audience was flagging. The biggest obstacle is the inexpressive facial animation. Vincent Gallo and Juliette Lewis’ dialogue is already mumbled (as per), making comprehension an issue, and with the fleshy bobble-head faces being animated as minimally as they are it’s all but impossible to become emotionally invested in what’s going on. The cluttered absurdist plot doesn’t help.
Responding in such a negative way to a movie when the director is in the room is something I never thought would happen to me. Throughout Metropia I was annoyed and frustrated, but a little voice was telling me, “Dude, the guy that made this is behind you. Have some respect.” And I should, really. Unlike the really unforgivably dreadful movies I’ve seen this year — such as Lesbian Vampire Killers, The Proposal, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li — this was made with passion and love by a group of individuals who obviously believed in what they were doing. It’s not a lazy cash-in or tacky exploitation flick, but sadly it’s also a rote SF movie with a unique aesthetic that gets in the way of telling the story. Nevertheless, as with Franklyn, I wish all those who worked on the movie the best of luck in the future.
Nope, saying that doesn’t make me feel any better about criticising the film. ::sigh::
The great controversialist Gaspar Noé appears to be a very nice, softly spoken man who keeps making films that polarise audiences. Seul contre tous and Irréversible are notorious enough that I already have a very distinct idea of what Noé’s movies are like without having seen them. This is an embarrassing admission. An attempt to see Irréversible was abandoned through lack of backbone, leading me to see Confessions of a Dangerous Mind instead. Nice enough movie. Nothing particularly memorable about it, other than Hott Sam Rockwell’s performance. Still, it irks me that I didn’t see Noé’s movie, that I thought it would be too much for my sensitive constitution.
Before the first London Film Festival screening of his latest movie — Enter The Void — Noé chatted to us via a typically British mic (i.e. unreliable and sporadically malfunctioning), briefly describing his battle to get the movie made, before doing something a filmmaker will rarely do: he gave us the key to understanding the movie. “Watch the expression of the woman in the final shot. The very final shot. Keep looking at her. It changes everything. It’s very important.” I assume with great confidence that everyone in the audience did keep their eye on that final face, but it did not answer anything. It’s possible to watch that scene and have wildly divergent ideas of what just happened, as evidenced by the muted chatter of my fellow filmgoers as they filed out of the screening.
That expression is viewed by Oscar (or rather “The Soul That Was, At One Point, Within Oscar’s Body), a drug-dealer making a paltry living in Tokyo, and portrayed by Nathaniel Brown in the very few shots we see of him. His only goal in life is to protect his sister — Linda, played by a seemingly drowsy Paz de la Huerta — after they are both orphaned in a car crash, but in doing so he seems to have effectively damned them both. While making what seems to be a simple drug transaction, Oscar is killed by the police, and then leaves his body to go on a journey through the afterlife that tallies with a description of The Tibetan Book of the Dead given early in the film by Oscar’s best friend Alex (Cyril Roy). However, is this death, or a DMT hallucination? And if it is death, where does the journey begin and end? There’s enough ambiguity here to fuel discussions for years.
My own interpretation (which I won’t include here, in order to keep this as spoiler-free as possible) seems to differ from others I’ve heard. All that can be said with certainty is that if you’re willing to give yourself over to it, Enter The Void is a revelatory experience, and the most immersive expression of a person’s viewpoint ever made. Noé’s dedication to presenting lead character Oscar’s point of view is already impressive enough — even down to adding blinking and breathing in early scenes — without then killing him and showing his afterlife experience from the same perspective, albeit now with the laws of physics being no obstacle. The camera floats over the characters, flies through the air above Tokyo, flows through walls, dips into people’s head’s to experience their perspective, and bursts back and forth through time. It’s disorienting, terrifying, liberating.
Comparisons have been made to Kubrick’s 2001 — there is even a direct reference to the Stargate sequence in one throwaway shot — but Noé’s visuals also invite comparison to Ken Russell’s Altered States, and especially Doug Trumbull’s Brainstorm. Trumbull’s attempts to create a hallucinogenic post-death sequence to end all such sequences was scuppered by budgetary troubles and technological restrictions. Enter The Void manages to do what Trumbull dreamed of, to the point that one visual conceit employed by Noé — having the camera move from one light to another to convey a passage of time from one nightmare vision of the future to another — is very similar to the way the camera reviews moments from Louise Fletcher’s life in Brainstorm, passing through a lattice of lights, each containing a single memory.
Before the movie began, Noé described his experiences with hallucinogenic drugs, which he believed had never been replicated properly onscreen, and had been trying to make Enter The Void for years. Until now no one had the technology to accurately depict the experience, but also no one had the single-mindedness to film something as ambitious as this. His formal daring — unmatched by anything else I’ve seen in a while — sadly overwhelms his story, which is as dreary as his presentation is beautiful. The humdrum couplings and binges, indifferently acted, are written with depressing inarticulacy. As the audience’s eyes and ears are hypnotised by everything else, the heart is left unmoved for large stretches, particularly during the long nightmare sequence. It doesn’t help that this is one of the worst performed movies I’ve seen since 300. Perhaps that’s the regrettable downside of filming in such a way that for much of the movie you can only see the tops or the backs of the actors’ heads.
These flaws could have wrecked the movie, but it is saved by the relentless visual flow, beautifully rendered by Buf, and the hypnotic sound design by Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter. If you let it, this throbbing ebb and flow of sound and vision will carry you through any longueurs, dazzling you with astonishing model work that makes Tokyo look like a tilt-shifted playground that gives off its own ambient thrum. All of these atmospherics pay off with a bravura final act that fully engages all senses and emotions. Tipping over completely into pure visual fantasy, Oscar completes his journey through death, and Noé – with endearing sentimentality, not to mention the use of an image that drew amused gasps from the very British audience — brings us to a conclusion at once expected and surprising. Perhaps understanding that the experience of watching the movie is liable to leave his audience in a state of mental disarray, Noé cares enough to bring you out of his dreamstate with a final image and two title cards that act as a slap in the face. Very thoughtful of him.
It’s doubtful that Gaspar Noé would appreciate the comparison, but last year’s Speed Racer was another formal experiment in replicating a particular experience — the Wachowskis with the visual conventions of Japanese anime, Noé with his subjective hallucinatory experiences — which managed to transcend its mundane plot by sheer effort. The Wachowskis and Noé found their movies treated with indifference or hostility by the critical community, and had difficulty finding audiences for their projects: literally in the case of Enter The Void, which has no US distributor at the moment.
The subject matter of this movie is liable to alienate many people for very different reasons than those that made Speed Racer the pariah of 2008′s summer season. While that was a candy-coloured action movie containing a sweetness and innocence that failed to connect with critics. Enter The Void is excessively unpleasant for much of its running time, featuring violent death, graphic sex, and a scene in an abortion clinic destined to achieve notoriety. This kind of unflinching visceral imagery is relentless enough to fuel criticism that Noé isnothing more than a provacateur. To do so would be to ignore the very specific plot structure that is set up early in the movie, as Alex explains to Oscar the distinct stages of the post-death experience as detailed in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. If you’re going to endure a vile nightmare after death, Noé is going to make you experience it. And then some. This point seems to have flown over some critics’ heads, as well as the very obvious fact that the PoV never shifts from Oscar. We experience what his consciousness experiences in one unbroken 155 minute blast, not a melange of images, as some seem to think.
Whenever something as purely sensory as this comes along, it’s easy to complain that the flash hides an empty core, but even if it did — which I don’t believe it does — why should we dismiss something that succeeds so completely at generating a mood, or a mental state, or a new form of telling a story, just because it offends our sensibilities, or celebrates sub-cultures that are considered beneath contempt? The mundanity of the subject matter is easily forgiven when a filmmaker goes to such extreme lengths to bombard your senses, or has such loyalty to his vision that he will change the language of cinema to do it. This is a movie to feel and experience, much as Lars Von Trier’s Anti-Christ achieves such complete mastery of mood that any reservations are swept away. Save the pondering for later, once you’ve reached the end of Noé’s trip. Last year my exhortations to see Speed Racer on the biggest screen possible — preferably IMAX — fell on deaf ears, but — if this gets an international release — the imagery of Enter The Void demands to be seen in a cinema with the best projection and sound system possible. Sit in the middle of the cinema. No popcorn. Take a bottle of water and a catheter. Drop a tab (actually, don’t drop a tab. It will probably negate the hallucinatory properties of the movie and make you think you’re watching something mundane, like a Mike Leigh movie). Keep your eyes open like Alex in A Clockwork Orange. Prepare for awe.
It’s been over a week since I saw The Dark Knight, and yet I have not blogged about it, mostly because of the bizarre reactions to the movie as expressed all over the internet. It’s the fastest backlash I’ve ever seen, which garnered an equally fast backlash against the backlash. As of now, with a worldwide box office gross that stands at the approximate figure of $597,387,000 after seventeen days (after being released in only a few countries), and IMDb users voting it the best movie of all time (as of today’s date), there are seemingly only two available opinions about it: “it’s a masterpiece”, and “no it’s not”.
Warning to the four people who have yet to see The Dark Knight: Spoilers ahoy!
From my obsessive trawl through the heated debate which is popping up everywhere like weeds in a poorly tended garden, the opinion of the blogospherical joint consciousness seems to be bouncing back to an overall negative view of the movie’s merits. Over the last couple of days I’ve seen The Dark Knight lambasted for not featuring enough Joker, for showing too much Joker and not enough Batman, for rushing Harvey Dent’s transformation, for being too violent, for not being violent enough, for spending too much time on Dent at the expense of the Joker, for being too long, for not developing its ideas far enough, for not explaining the Joker properly, for smelling of rotten eggs, for being too loud (because Christopher Nolan is going from screen to screen adjusting the volume), for being badly lit (!!!!!), for not generating genital-obliteringly powerful spontaneous orgasms in those who see it like we were all promised, etc. etc. etc.
The question I pose myself, though, is can I do that? If some critics had an overwhelmingly negative reaction to the movie, then that’s the experience they had. Obviously there’s nothing wrong with that. And yet, my gut response to these criticisms, from paid reviewers and unpaid bloggers, is “What the fuck is wrong with these people? It’s a work of unbelievable integrity, vision, and genius!!!” I’m not leaving insulting and poorly written comments on people’s blogs, but still, I’ve been pissed. It’s only once I’ve stopped gripping my Batman action figures with all the force of my frustration that I realise I’ve gone fucking crazy. What is going on here? Why have I taken leave of my senses in the same way that the Batman fanbase has? And why would I do that when Batman isn’t even my favourite superhero? Or even in my top ten? It’s deeply worrying, and a few days ruminating on it leads me to believe we (the fanboys) are all being silly, losing our perspective, but that we do have reason to be irked by some of the negative remarks, i.e. those that have been made from either a position of ignorance or snobbery. The problem with that is, how can I tell genuine, justifiable dislike from expressions of that critic’s bias against movies of this type?
First, I’ll address my craziness. One of my fears (an unprovable one) is that the negativity is just a reaction to the crazy praise it was getting prior to release. If this is one explanation, I understand, considering Peter “Shill” Travers was first out of the gate with the line “the haunting and visionary Dark Knight soars on the wings of untamed imagination”, which is beyond parody. The IMDb vote craziness certainly justifies a slapped forehead of horror, even if you really loved the movie. Not that it matters much in the scheme of things, but it can make a viewer predisposed to disliking the film just because the fanboys are crazy (I gather this is one of the reasons people reject Joss Whedon; his fans are often seen as too enthusiastic). As I say, there’s no way I can prove this, but it happens.
Another part of my frustration is definitely rooted in my nerdiness, and the reflexive defensiveness I have towards myself and those of my ilk (I make it sound like we’re a put-upon ethnic group, for crying out loud), hoping for some validation from the critical establishment that the superhero genre (or the sci fi genre, or the horror genre, etc.) that I love so much is not just treated as the low-quality flotsam and jetsam of modern culture, that they are understood to be tools and canvasses for telling stories and exploring modern life, and not just whizz-bang-zoom spectacles that overload the eye but avoid the heart and brain. I realise that that defensiveness is my problem, not anyone else’s. However, how can I take the thoughts of a critic seriously is his or her dislike of a genre is not backed up by anything other than a sense that it is not worthy of serious appraisal?
I get that critics might have biases against filmmakers; hell, I get angered to the point of localised space/time warpage at Lars Von Trier’s experiments in audience baiting. But an entire genre? Canyon and I once had a long conversation about romantic comedies, and she made me see how crazy it is to dismiss every movie in a genre just because it doesn’t appeal to me. She was right. We both think the genre has been ill-served over the last few years, but that’s not the genre’s fault. The movies have just often been uninspiring. That’s not a criticism that can be levelled at the superhero genre (which bleeds into the action and sci fi genres, or the crime genre as in The Dark Knight). This year has already seen the vastly entertaining Iron Man and the bold failure Hancock (which tried to approach the genre from a different angle, though it didn’t really succeed the way I had hoped), though the unambitious but amusing Incredible Hulk didn’t help my argument. Luckily, The Dark Knight reaches higher than all of them. Which is where the difference of opinion seems to fall most often.
Sure, a lot of people are down on the movie for the filming of the action. To be honest, I only had a problem in the hostage sequence toward the end of the movie, though that could have been because I was trying to get my head around the moral quandary at the heart of the scene and I was freaking out a little (because, emotionally, I’m like a small child). Others think some actors didn’t get much to do (I’d say Gyllenhaal definitely got the short end of the stick), and that Batman was sidelined (I’m not sure about that, but if that’s your take on it, then… well… that’s your take on it, I guess). Some hated the palette (totally! It really needed some garish reds and oranges and maybe some lemon yellows!). I’m sure someone out there hated it because the Scarecrow didn’t get enough to do, or Killer Croc wasn’t introduced, or because Batman contradicted something he said in a Denny O’Neil issue from the 70s. I would be crazy to have a problem with any of that opinion (except the palette criticism).
That’s not the kind of thing I want to rail against, though. I don’t agree with much of that, but it’s someone else’s opinion. However, what really does gall me is that UK critics seem to hate the movie mostly for trying to expand its ambition beyond the parameters of the superhero genre that they have decided upon, thinking it incapable of being more than a reductive and nuance-free depiction of a black and white battle between opposing forces. If you think no critic would ever dismiss an entire genre like that, read this wilfully nasty and unfair review by Michael Atkinson.
Somehow the entirety of American culture, young and middle-yeared and old, is embracing the childish universe of superheroes – which is structured around the easily-distracted worldview of kids, not around the reasoned, complex worldview we would hope children would grow into. Does America need that badly a post-post-9/11 big Daddy to vanquish danger so we can slumber in our cradles? The much-lamented infantilization of the mass populace continues, and at what cost?
As you can imagine, I have no truck with that opinion, nor with the rest of his pissy review, especially his comments about there being no story there, which baffle me. He must have been scribbling “HATE HATE HATE” in his notebook during it and forgot to watch it. That said, fair play to him for nailing his colours to the mast. UK critics exhibit similar bias, but don’t go as far in expressing their hatred. Superhero movies represent the most obvious example of dumbing-down in modern culture? Is he serious? The wish-fulfilment aspect of the genre is definitely an important part of it, but it’s not the most important, especially when a movie like The Dark Knight comes along and challenges that specific notion. Is he angry because once the genre is legitimised by this and, hopefully, Watchmen, he will have to go to the trouble of finding a new knee-jerk enemy of culture to hate on (I doubt this would happen, somehow)?
If you have read this blog before, you’ll know that I have a bee in my BatBonnet about possible bias against genre movies (and all of the Shades of Caruso team has a problem with the possible bias against genre TV). I had hoped that The Dark Knight, directed by a Brit, would avoid that kind of thoughtless dismissal, but sadly not. I’m not saying the UK reviews are proof of a definite bias, and I’m certainly not saying it amounts to any more than a hill of biased beans in this crazy mixed-up world, but if I’m ever going to take the work of a critic seriously, I don’t want to have to work around their preconceptions about an entire genre. Michael Atkinson in particular is someone I cannot bring myself to read again, not because he insulted me and my brethren, but because he is incapable of seeing the merits of a large proportion of popular culture, the best examples of which often become cultural signifiers or benchmarks of artistic quality over time. It’s not I’m having a hissy-fit just because his worldview doesn’t tally with mine 100%; whose does? It’s that he refuses to grapple with these pop-culture phenomena in a serious manner. I may not like comedies that do little more than spoof other movies in the most flat and obvious way possible, but I’ll at least engage with them, a position that once led to an unexpected fit of giggles experienced while watching Scary Movie 4 (bravo, Anna Faris. Bravo).
Anyway, here are some examples of what I see as an obnoxious bias against the superhero genre in the UK press, which was far more negative than the US press. Sukhdev Sandhu, in the Daily Telegraph, liked the movie, and yet still had to get a dig in [from this point on, italics mine]:
anyone who prefers their entertainment with less rather than more of a message may wish to shield their ears during the dialogue about the “cost of power”… Other reservations: shouldn’t Nolan, marvellous as his directing here is, be creating original films rather than rebooting and retooling franchise fare? Why can’t Hollywood put a tenth as much of the craft and vim into its average releases as it does into what is ultimately only a superhero movie?
The Dark Knight is a clever, loud, technically brilliant film, superbly designed by Nathan Crowley and dramatically lit by Wally Pfister. Whether such a movie can bear the increasing moral weight imposed upon it is another matter.
Peter Bradshaw, whose Iron Man review annoyed me earlier this year, seemed to thoroughly enjoy The Dark Knight, but even so, is under the impression Christopher Nolan is doomed to do nothing but make nothing but summer superhero movies for the rest of his life:
Nolan has made an enormously profitable smash with the Batman franchise, but at the risk of sounding priggish, I can’t help thinking it may be a bit of a career blind-alley for the talented director who gave us brilliant and disquieting movies like Following (1998) and Memento (2000), whose inventions still linger in the mind. The Dark Knight’s massive box-office success has surely given Nolan the means to write his own cheque, and in addition something sweeter still – clout. I hope that he will use it to cultivate movies that are smaller and more manoeuvrable than that great armoured Batmobile.
Art and entertainment feel locked in a deadly struggle, which accounts for the movie’s peculiar schizoid personality. Just when it poses its most heart-stopping question – how do you tell a loved one facing imminent death that “everything’s going to be all right”? – it swerves into a maniacal car chase, with our hero now hot-rodding a vehicle known as a Batpod, a kind of monster-truck tyre with a seat. The ear-lacerating volume and the automotive mayhem that attend these action sequences seem to be doing everything possible to shake whatever subtleties that may have entered one ear straight out of the other.
Dude! The shots of the BatPod racing through the streets are not part of a chase, but a tension-cranking cross-cut between the imminent death of two characters and Batman’s attempts to save one of them. Surely this is self-evident, unless you’re trying to score points against it. Fellow Independent reviewer Jonathan Romney also seems to have not been paying attention:
Played again by Christian Bale, he now speaks, when masked, in a gravelly synthetic bass; he also has an eerie habit of suddenly appearing out of and vanishing into shadows.
He now speaks and hides in shadows? What was he doing in the first movie, then? His comments about the Batmobile in the next paragraph suggest he didn’t see Batman Begins at all:
This is an impressive film in many ways, and Nolan directs with real confidence, yet the overall result feels cumbersome. The tenor is set by Nolan’s conception of the Batmobile – a clanking all-terrain engine of war, a chunk of brutalist engineering that manifestly weighs tons. There’s something comparably tank-like about the film, and despite several genuinely head-spinning moments, it all comes to feel grimly overwhelming, a vision of total war you fear will never end.
For goodness’ sake, no one expected a return to Adam West and bad puns, but this cocktail of ultraviolence, artillery and pessimism makes for a gruelling, even depressing experience. Perhaps Warner Bros could offer the next episode to Werner Herzog, just to cheer things up a bit.
You can take a character out of a comic-strip, but you can’t take the comic-strip out of the character. Batman is not a tragic hero at all, but an adolescent action-figure with the kind of problems most of us can only dream of having. This may make him good box-office – especially among males who feel ineffectual, impoverished and lacking in even one personality – but it doesn’t give him the depth of Hamlet.
Oh Tookey, you little bitch!
This summer blockbuster explores grand themes: whether it can be right to use torture on terrorists; the conflict between public and private morality; and whether the public prefers to be told lies rather than deal with the truth. The Nolan brothers are clearly determined not to be confused with the Nolan Sisters [ZING!]. I appreciate their ambition, but they’ve over-reached – and lost their sense of humour… Their film is compromised by the perceived demands of its audience. It’s grimly sadistic. It doesn’t fight terror, it embraces it. Ledger becomes, in a curiously twisted way, the moral centre of the film, and this makes The Dark Knight an unintentionally sick spectacle, pretending to justify law and justice, but in reality celebrating violence and chaos.
Perhaps when you’re a critic sitting in the dark with a bunch of similarly disgruntled men and women whose heads have been filled with talk of movie genius, it’s easy to think that, but how does that account for the reaction of the audience I saw it with, comprising a demographic of men and women of differing ages, ethnicities, and cultural expectations, who reacted most strongly to Tiny Lister’s disposal of the detonator during the ferry scene. I know I choked up at his decision, and the room erupted into applause and cheering. Sorry, Tookey. The Joker actually lost completely, both in Gotham and the real world. Rail against the Hypothetical Idiot all you like, but he/she is HYPOTHETICAL! Get used to it.
This is essentially an adult action thriller, in which the action itself is often difficult to discern from the darkened screen, a roaring tangle of crashes and explosions and muttered imprecations. Added to this is a jumbled sprinkling of philosophy on the nature of heroism, villainy and the necessary lies it takes to keep the public believing in something grander than selfish survival.
If the meaning behind the mayhem is difficult for an adult to perceive, it would be well nigh impossible for a child. But then, despite the heavy marketing and the almost inconceivably indulgent 12A rating (meaning that any under-12 can see it with an adult) this is not a film that pre-adolescent children should watch.
The Independent ran a piece about the rating that put the BBFC’s decision in a clearer light, but I’m still pissed that the BBFC chose to do that (either in a fit of liberalism or due to pressure from Warner Bros.), if only because this adult movie now ends up being treated as Public Enemy No. 1 Child Corrupter (knocking Grand Theft Auto IV off its perch of evil) when it is plain to see it is not a movie for children. It’s an adult movie dealing with adult themes (in a manner I found easy to follow, UK film critics, and I’m not alone in that judgment, I’m sure), and that it came during the summer months, when film critics froth at the mouth at the lack of substance to Hollywood movies, has served to confuse panicky critics who were expecting nothing more than BOOM BANG.
Yet what do we get? Relief that it is possible to fuse serious subject matter with the expected number of WOW moments? Of course not. Just anger that something from such a tawdry genre, designed merely to appeal to children, would be crazy enough to try to address a serious subject in a thoughtful manner, when it should only be full of explosions and bright colours and two-dimensional motivations and not be seen by anyone who has the complete Bergman collection at home, because liking genre movies means you are a simpleton and emotional retard who is incapable of seeing more than two sides to a conflict.
Of course, if The Dark Knight was like that it would be hated for not having any ambition, but what are you going to do? American culture is morally corrupt and intellectually dead, anyway. Oh, if only Christopher Nolan could return to the country that recognised his talent and threw money at it all those years ago! Then he could make another version of Northanger Abbey or Jane Eyre! Or a comedy about two mis-matched Islington professionals trying to find love in the middle of a multicultural city that conspicuously fails to show any significant characters of non-white ethnicity! Or Happy-Go-Fucking-Lucky!
Even worse than all of that, some writers are reading the film as a pro-Bush, pro-rendition, pro-phone-tapping argument. It’s not pro-phone tapping or rendition. These actions undertaken by Batman are shown to have negative effects. Lao, captured by Batman and dragged back to Gotham to testify against Maroni, is brought into immediate danger and killed by The Joker. Batman raises the game with his bold actions and loses the love of his life, the way out of his psychic torment (though he was deluding himself all along with that), and even his support from the world, having to paint himself as a villain, a martyrdom that must have been borrowed from the little bits of messianic symbolism left over from Wall*E.
Yes, Batman prevails, but the Joker is still around, and to just capture him he has to betray himself and isolate himself from everyone, symbolised by the switching off of the phone-tapping program (which I thought was a nice nod to Brother Eye). If it is a straight reading from this to America and the War on Terror, it’s saying, “if you’re going to play as dirty as the bad guys, you’re going to have to give up everything that you are and everything that you have, and even then you’re not going to win. The only way the battle can be won is if we all agree to not lose our heads, to remember on an individual level that we are human”. The battle rages between two men high above the city, but it is won with two simple choices by two “mortal” men, one “evil”, one “good”.
That’s how it is done. We’re not meant to approve of Batman’s actions; Morgan Freeman, as the audience surrogate, proves that with his displeasure over “Brother Eye”. Critics seem to have missed that point, thinking that because it’s a superhero, he is the one we should be automatically applauding, which means the Nolans are expecting us to accept his immoral tactics, but that’s not the case. We’re meant to be horrified. Considering all of this talk about the movie not being as deep as people thought, it seems it was too deep for those who couldn’t appreciate that glaringly obvious fact. The only writer who seemed to understand that the movie was loosely playing with War on Terror tropes without actually transposing them directly from our world to the world of Batman was Moriarty’s customarily excellent take from AICN. Some of the other cultural commentators would do well to read that.
Why should I care what anyone else thinks? Why would I get so monstrously obsessed with the experiences of people I’ll never meet, and I regularly both agree and disagree with? And, perhaps most pertinently, why would I doubt the opinions of others, thinking them the product of some innate snobbery or inherited bias, and not just their actual opinion made from a point of view that is merely different from mine and not caused by some form of voluntary cultural myopia? Possibly because of all of the films I’ve seen recently, this was the one that moved me the most, more than almost any movie I have seen in the last few years. Believe me, I was as annoyed by the relentless hype as anyone, and tried to keep as open a mind as possible, fully expecting to like the movie but not love it, especially after a pre-Dark Knight viewing of Batman Begins revealed that I had increased reservations about it since it was first released.
Those efforts were futile. The Dark Knight amazed me more than I could ever have hoped, leaving me emotionally drained even before the final, heartbreaking scene. The escalation of The Joker’s campaign of psychological torture, the city’s response to it, and Batman’s final sacrifice shattered me. Is that merely because I love superheroes and superhero movies? Maybe, but for the most part I forgot I was watching one. It was more like watching L.A. Confidential than a “popcorn flick”.
Was it because I saw it in IMAX? Possibly. We were lucky enough to see it at the Leows IMAX in New York, with a mostly fantastic audience (except for the shrieky woman sitting in front of us who refused to turn off her phone and tried to kill the guy who asked her). Every big moment in the movie was greeted with laughter or applause; the pencil trick, the BatPod, the end of the big chase sequence, The Joker shuffling out of the hospital, and best of all, Tiny Lister and the detonator. I’m not ashamed to say that made me cry. What I suspect would have already been an overwhelming moment was made even more moving by the elation around me.
While critics have carped about the action scenes and what they consider to be faux-profundity, the only flaw in the movie that I could see was that Heath Ledger’s performance was of such an otherworldly nature that it overshadowed Aaron Eckhart’s excellent work as the inspirational Harvey Dent, and the twisted psychotic Two-Face. In the middle of a superb cast taking the subject matter as seriously as possible, he was a stand-out. Even better, those incredible IMAX shots of Gotham, shot with glorious precision by Wally Pfister, took our breath away. On that vast screen it was like looking through a window at a real world (I know it was filmed in Chicago, but surely there were buildings added in post-production). As we left Loews and walked around New York, it felt like we were still in the movie, so much so that I expected Batman to zoom past at any moment.
That feeling lasted all day, keeping the movie running through my head long after we left, riding past a construction site covered in signs featuring the word Gotham, and on to the Lincoln Tunnel, with its art deco spires. I didn’t just see a movie; I had an amazing experience, and New York was only half of it. I’ve proselytised about IMAX before, and been obnoxious about it on message boards, but really, if you want to see The Dark Knight in such a way as to make it hard to care about the flaws or shortcomings of the film, you need to see it on a bigass screen. Maybe it won’t work for me on a small screen. Maybe in time my high opinion of it will fade over time just as it has for Batman Begins. Perhaps critics who were agnostic about it would love it in IMAX, seen with an enthusiastic audience, especially one that isn’t baying for blood like The Hapless Tookey imagines. Who can say? All I know is that for now at least, it might not be the best film I’ve ever seen, but I can’t imagine 2008 offering up anything superior. It was everything I had hoped for and much much more. Now we have to see if it holds up to further viewings, as soon as IMAX Waterloo has some tickets spare.
