Category Archives: Lynne Ramsay

Listmania ’11! The Best Movies Of The Year

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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.

New Poll: What Was Your Favourite Movie of 2011?

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Hello, bloglings. Quick post to cover my next big poll for the next year, after the last one became a bigger project than I had expected. Every year I run a poll of the best movies of the past 12 months, and the 2010 one ended up staying up in the sidebar until now solely because I figured it was only fair to give participants time to catch up with everything on there, and not because I totally flaked out at the start of the year and almost gave up on blogging about three times because of mild mental trauma, faltering side-projects, ennui and suchlike. Nothing like that at all. It was all for you, my assorted fragrant lovelies.

So anyway, this is what you thought, and I have to say, I’m surprised:

  • Scott Pilgrim’s Unwatched Adventure: 6 votes = 18%
  • Sorkin Vs Facebook = Ten Million Word Count: 4 votes = 12%
  • A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Jihad: 4 votes = 12%
  • How Creepy Was My Ballet?: 3 votes = 9%
  • Ben Stiller’s The Human Zoidberg: 3 votes = 9%
  • Uncle Boonmee and the Deathly-Boring Hallows: 2 votes = 6%
  • Im In Ur Dreamz Killin Ur D00dz: 2 votes = 6%
  • The Kids Are All Right But Their Parents Are Fucked: 2 votes = 6%
  • The Impoverished Hottie And The Quest For The Redneck: 2 votes = 6%
  • Another Year, Another Grim Mike Leigh Movie: 2 votes = 6%
  • Robert Altman’s Iron Man: 1 vote = 3%
  • The Most Expensive Daft Punk Video Imaginable: 1 vote = 3%
  • Pixar’s The Neverending Guilt Trip: 1 vote = 3%
  • Harry Potter and the Unguent of Perspicacity: 0 votes = 0%
  • The Execrables: 0 votes = 0%
  • Twilight: Eternal Narrative Stasis: 0 votes = 0%
  • Proto-Robin Hood And His Quasi-Merry Men: 0 votes = 0%
  • Prince of Parkour: The Absence of Entertainment: 0 votes = 0%

Scott Pilgrim? I think I have a good idea who voted for that; there is a large pro-Pilgrim element among my Twitter clique, and that’s cool. Sadly, I might have been on the fence last year but watching it again this year made me realise how much it annoys me. But I’m glad it has a following, and I suspect it will only grow. Congratulations, Edgar Wright and your lovable cast. I trust this epic victory makes up for the non-existent box office.

Some surprises there. Two votes for Inception? Three for Greenberg? Tron: Legacy gets the same amount of votes as Toy Story 3? How peculiar. I worry that Tron: Legacy got a vote because of the new name I gave it. Anne Billson complemented me on the joke but I think I stole it from Roger Ebert. When they say “Talent borrows, genius steals” I really don’t think they meant to say I’m a genius because I plagiarised a tweet. But anyway, it has been interesting to see how the votes land, and as you can see from the huge voting pool here this qualifies as actual statistical science, so please be sure to refer to Scott Pilgrim as officially the film of 2010 from now on. Thank you to everyone who voted, and if you’ve stumbled across this again, please vote once more for your favourite movie of 2011.

  • Mission Unpossible: Goat Prototype
  • Harry Potter and the Dirty Pillows, Part 12
  • Lynne Ramsay’s One Colour: Red
  • We Need To Talk About Thor’s Lickable Deltoids
  • Twilight: The One With The Werepaedo
  • Cheer Up, Kirsten Dunst, It Might Never Happen
  • Tarsem’s Immortale, Pour Homme
  • It’s a Tree, Yeah, And It’s, Like, A Metaphor For Life, Man
  • Drive, He Didn’t Say
  • Pirates Of The Caribbean: A Lovely Nap
  • We Need To Talk About Captain America’s Ripped Abs
  • Rise and Rise Again, Until Apes Become BrainApes
  • Cheer Up, Michael Shannon, It Might Never Happen
  • Zack Snyder’s What’s Wrong With Being Sexy?
  • Therapeutic: Freud Vs Jung
  • The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly Lizard Thingy
  • Jean Dujardin Is: L’Artiste Adorable
  • We Need To Talk About Green Lantern’s Shitty CGI Onesie
  • Hey Kids! It’s Uncle Marty’s “Fun With Film Preservation!”
  • Cheer Up, Michael Fassbender’s Penis, It Might Never Happen
  • Transformybots: Bang of the Boom
  • The Adventures of Tintin: The Whiny of the Butthurt
  • Tinker, Typist, Souljah, Spelunker
  • We Need To Forget About Charles Xavier’s Thinkyfingers Gesture

Thanks in advance. Get clicking (the poll should be in the sidebar) and if you get a chance, please send the link around. And remember, a vote for Steve McQueen’s Shame is a vote for penis.

The Top One Hundred and Six Movies of the Oughts (45-31)

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On with the many many movies I stupidly missed off the Top 106 Movies list (which could well be a Top 165 by the time I get through with it). I’ve gone on about Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf before, and so won’t waste time doing the same here, but I will confirm — much to my delight — that it still works well even when not seen in IMAX Digital 3D. Most of that is down to the thoughtful script by Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary, which cleverly addresses myth and religion. The visuals still work well in 2D, much better than in Zemeckis’ The Polar Express but not as well as in A Christmas Carol, which veers further away from the not-quite-there realism of Beowulf. This is a good thing: Christmas Carol looks more like a living painting than a flawed rendition of reality, and it’s good to see that the technology has come along enough to add this kind of texture to the imagery. The quality of Zemeckis’ adaptation is one of the most pleasant surprises of this year, as was Beowulf in 2007. Perhaps I should stop assuming he’s going to make bad movies and just learn to look forward to them.

Speaking of Christmas movies, I’ve also missed off Jon Favreau’s Elf. To be honest I’m not sure it belongs on this list: the third act is really underwhelming, and some of the casting is a bit suspect. Nevertheless, it’s become a real favourite here, with our annual rewatch a Christmas tradition (we do the same with Robert Benton’s lovely Nobody’s Fool on Christmas Day). Though Elf falls flat a couple of times, Will Ferrell’s insanely committed performance is essential viewing. For those who avoid him because of his reliance on arrested development characters — and I know there are a lot who feel that way — I’d say that Elf is a lovable enough variation on that stock character to win anyone over. There are countless perfectly timed moments in it, as Ferrell races around New York in a whirl of manic energy. Maybe it doesn’t deserve to crack the Top 106, but it warrants a mention, especially at this time of year.

Actually, I’ll be honest. It should’ve got on the list just for this moment:

And now, fifteen movies that don’t feature Will Ferrell or performance-captured monstah-huntah Ray Winstone.

45. Capturing The Friedmans

Andrew Jarecki’s documentary about a family accused of involvement in child pornography would already be fascinating, but it is Jarecki’s examination of the effect of time on memory and perspective that sets this movie apart. How far are we willing to deceive ourselves and others in order to prevent awful truths from coming to light, and can we ever trust our subjective interpretations?

44. Infernal Affairs

Scorsese’s remake of Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s imaginative crime thriller was terrific, and filled with entertaining performances, but the original version is the truly exciting one. Within minutes the tension is ratcheted up, and never flags. Andy Lau and Tony Leung Chiu-Wai have never been better.

43. Lady Vengeance

The final part of Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance trilogy is less flashy than Oldboy, but it may say more about human behavior than its hyper-stylised predecessor. After two relatively low-key acts, Chan-wook unveils the perfect capper — not just for this movie, but for the trilogy as a whole — as vengeance is visited upon a truly terrible person in a tense and intelligent denouement. Praise is also due Lee Young-ae, who is stunning as the haunted Lee Geum-ja.

42. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

In the hands of Julian Schnabel what could have been grueling and bland becomes an immersive visual masterpiece, just by applying intellectual rigour to the problem of how to make a movie from a story so resolutely uncinematic. Devoid of cynicism and dismissive of despair, Diving Bell has the power to recharge even the most empty heart. Essential viewing.

41. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Released in the same year as No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood, Andrew Dominick’s re-telling of the Western myth was initially praised then forgotten by year’s end. For giving us such a breathtakingly luminous vision of desperate man trapped by their infamy — and for showing us that Casey Affleck was capable of actual greatness — we hope time will be kind to it.

40. In Bruges

Martin McDonagh’s wonderful debut feature is profane, scatalogical, and surprisingly moving. A superb cast — including a shockingly funny and lovable Colin Farrell — attacks his superbly constructed screenplay with palpable relish, and McDonagh handles the gradual tonal shift like a seasoned pro. The first two acts may have made me laugh, but the final one made my pulse race.

39. Morvern Callar

Lynne Ramsay’s gorgeous adaptation of Alan Warner’s novel showed youthful disaffection and alienation against a backdrop of blistering, unforgettable images, with a never-better Samantha Morton creating a mysterious protagonist whose motives defy easy explanation. Ramsay’s next project (an adaptation of We Need To Talk About Kevin starring Tilda Swinton) cannot come soon enough.

38. Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter… and Spring

Kim Ki-duk tells a deceptively simple tale of a man whose journey through life takes him from Buddhist training to tragedy to atonement and peace, but every frame vibrates with emotion. The reflective pace and cinematography are hypnotic, the ambitious scope and depiction of spiritual awakening are profoundly moving.

37. Princess Mononoke

Spirited Away might be Hayao Miyazaki’s most celebrated movie, but this was my introduction into the world of Studio Ghibli. Its unfamiliar structure, dismissal of Manichean conflict, and air of infinite possibility were even more appealing at first sight, even considering the terrifying, discordant atmosphere of imminent disaster.

36. Team America: World Police

Trey Parker and Matt Stone may not have hit every target they aimed at (such as celebrity culture, repulsive jingoism, and clueless liberalism), but they hit many of them hard enough to justify a declaration of victory. They also included yet more great songs (“America, Fuck Yeah” might have been obnoxious if it wasn’t so much fun to sing), and filmed the funniest third act character turnaround ever:

35. Black Book

Only Paul Verhoeven could have made a movie as trashy — and classy — as this. Leaving behind the dimishing returns of his Hollywood period, the master of provocation conjured up a morally complicated tale of Nazism, collaboration, and resistance that thrilled and appalled in equal measure. He also introduced us to the magnificent Carice Van Houten, who should be a superstar by now. I’m waiting, Hollywood.

34. Brokeback Mountain

A cultural touchstone, a political statement, a punchline to a million bad jokes. Ang Lee’s love story is also, quite simply, a heartbreaking tale of a man who realises too late that he has wasted his life because of crippling fear. Heath Ledger’s final, devastating scene is burned into my heart, his last promise the best final line of the decade.

33. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

The romcom Philip K. Dick would have written were he still alive. Charlie Kaufman supplies the delirious concept, Michel Gondry brings the lo-fi visual wizardry, and Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet bring the soul. A thrilling combination of narrative trickery, philosophical curiosity, and flighty romanticism, and another fascinating exploration of the connection between memory and identity.

32. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Tim Burton’s best film since Ed Wood is also the best screen musical of the decade. His thoughtful tweaks to orchestration and plot transform Stephen Sondheim’s original into a Gothic masterpiece. It helps that his cast — not known for their singing voices — give such committed performances and belt out those beautiful songs with such gusto. This might be Johnny Depp’s best performance to date, playing Todd as a force of nature, almost completely irredeemable but still a tragic figure in the devastating final scene.

31. The Descent

The best British movie of the decade was not a period drama or kitchen-sink wallow from lauded, overrated establishment-approved fakes. It was a balls-to-the-wall, technically perfect rollercoaster. It was also the scariest horror movie since Blatty’s Exorcist III, and that’s even before the monsters appear. Director Neil Marshall remembered that for the horror to work, we had to see humanity at its worst, and it is the final act of protagonist Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) that pushes this movie into classic status.

By now, with the end of the list approaching, I’m beginning to second-guess my choices even more. Should Eternal Sunshine have been higher? I’ve only seen it once and loved it, but from this point on I’ve seen most of the movies numerous times, and so they have had a bigger impact on me. Of course, second-guessing means I’ll never get this done. Best to just finish it as soon as I can. Tomorrow, hopefully. Until then…

The Most Wonderful Newspaper Article Of Our Age

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In my line of work I have to read a lot of newspaper articles. Seriously, a lot. Many of them are vicious and unpleasant right-wing shrieks of terror as the world slowly disassembles their medieval belief systems. The likes of Peter Hitchens, Amanda Platell, Charles Moore, Melanie Phillips, Richard Littlejohn, Kelvin McKenzie, Leo McKinstry, and many many more yank handfuls of hair from their scalps in an effort to out-selfish each other, demonising everything and everyone that would look vaguely out-of-place in a 1950s Somerset country house. Reading their nauseating bilewords smeared across the page like a mental skidmark has been one of the more upsetting things I have had to do in this life, and tends to make me forget that not all Fleet Street pundits are Mannequins of Lazy-Thinking Evil.


This week, thanks to a link from, of all people, The Internet Commenter Formerly Known As Moriarty, I have found my favourite piece of UK journalism of the decade. Anne Billson, novelist and Buffy fan, has said the unsayable about the British film industry; it is in a terminal state, and the causes have been there all along.

I agree with so much of what she wrote that I could just copy and paste the whole thing here and just finish off this post with multiple exclamation points of joy, especially with her catty single-sentence drubbing of Mike Leigh. I love it so much I’ll pretend I don’t mind that she didn’t give some praise to John Boorman, who made one of the most visually innovative movies of all time (as well as three of the battiest and most lovable), though I suspect she’s more concerned with the recent crop of British film directors than the old guard. Of all the targets she hit, this in particular struck me as a salient point:

I once heard a British film director say in an interview that he wasn’t interested in telling a story visually (why were you directing a bloody film then?), and it’s clear he’s not the only one. Historically, Britain has produced more world-class writers than painters, and words tend to be valued far above visual imagery, if only because reading and listening apparently require more effort than looking, and so are deemed to be worthier pursuits.

Later on Billson mentions the UK directors who emulate shots from American directors for no other reason than that they liked that shot, not because it is the right shot for the scene. It’s funny that she mentions Atonement earlier in the piece. Though there were some shots there that were admirable, the big setpiece single take shot of the Dunkirk evacuation is one of the most overrated shots of the past few years. I take my hat off to Joe Wright for managing the logistical nightmare of it, but what was the point of it? On a narrative level it was meaningless, even though a lot of extraneous information was handed to us.


While I understand that Wright was making a visual reference to the Dunkirk passage in McEwan’s novel, it still looked stupid, with the characters wandering around the beach in circles in order to show everything off while Dario Marianelli’s music did a lot of the heavy lifting. Compare that to single takes like the nightclub scene in Goodfellas, or the opening long takes from The Player, or Snake Eyes, or The Bonfire of the Vanities. Story happens in those scenes. We discover things about the characters. In Atonement, we’re just checking out a beach.

This is not to say there are no British directors who have an amazing eye. Sadly, they’re often not lauded in the UK and their careers stall. My favourite British style-genius of the past decade — Lynne Ramsay — created two distinctive and brilliant films, almost got to adapt The Lovely Bones, and then disappeared to work on un-named projects. Garth Jennings has spent so long getting Son of Rambow made and promoted that he doesn’t even seem to have anything else in the pipeline. Michael Winterbottom once made movies I couldn’t wait to see, though that has sadly changed over time. Peter Greenaway buggered off to the Netherlands a while back and his movies retreated to the kind of Matthew-Barney-esque obscurity they always should have had, that weird successful period back in the 80s notwithstanding. We’re still waiting for the next movie by Pawel Pawlikowski. Terence Malick is now more prolific than he is, shockingly enough.


Many other UK directors who understand what to do with a camera (to varying degrees) have hopped over to America as soon as they could; Paul Greengrass, Martin Campbell, Edgar Wright, Roger Michell, Mike Newell, Stephen Frears, Kevin MacDonald, Pete Travis, etc. etc. The other conspicuous style-addict in British cinema, who won an Best Director Oscar this year and whose name I’m sick of reading everywhere, is probably going to spend some time in Hollywood making worthy films for a while. In fact, the only British director who wants to keep filming in the UK is Neil Marshall, bless him. His next film, Centurion, already sounds unmissable.


Still, I’m tempted to think Billson doesn’t mention the Scott Brothers because they barely register as British filmmakers any more, so completely have they been absorbed into the American world of film. They are surely two of the most influential directors of the past twenty years even if they have made movies that many people consider beneath contempt. Their style has been adapted and ripped-off more than almost any other filmmakers around; surely that’s something the patriotic UK film buff can be pleased about. That said, I can understand why she doesn’t mention other style-heavy filmmakers from the same background (i.e. advertising), such as Alan Parker and Adrian Lyne, who barely have a good film between them.


Sadly for the UK, Ridley and Tony Scott stayed away while their films became more interesting. Tony Scott had a run of fun action movies in the early 90s, and Ridley makes a lot of flat but ambitious films I feel compelled to see, such as Kingdom of Heaven and Black Hawk Down. Meanwhile, we get Alan Parker to run the UK Film Council. Disastrous. It would have been the worst of all worlds if Adrian Lyne had made anything in the last seven years. I will never forgive him for his disastrous adaptation of Lolita, which remains one of the five worst films of the decade. Yes, worse than Fatal Attraction, Nine and a Half Weeks, and Indecent Proposal glommed together into a big lump of misogynistic Silly Putty, and then bounced off our eyeballs for over two hours. The man is a menace to society.

Why am I dragging up all of this bile? Because last week I saw possibly my favourite British movie of the last ten years, and what’s most horrible is that I don’t think Billson would like it, primarily because it’s not that visual. More on that presently…

Adventures In Awesome: Want! Now! (4)

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While wasting time farting about on AV Club last night, the subject of Brasseye and The Day Today came up during a discussion of UK comedy, as it usually does. Understandable, considering the massive effect it had on pretty much everyone who saw it and clasped it to their bosom. Even though it was broadcast over a decade ago, I can’t think of any other UK comedy that has come close to that level of brilliance except The Thick Of It. Don’t get me wrong, I have loved many shows made since then; Father Ted and Black Books, The Office, Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, Big Train, and Outnumbered spring to mind immediately, and my DVDs of those shows comprise almost the entirety of my UK TV collection amid swathes of US boxsets. Even so, none of those shows have had the same effect on me as Chris Morris’ work. Here is the great man hanging around at CERN, which he apparently visited recently.


During the AV Club chat, I remembered the radio predecessor to The Day Today; On The Hour, four episodes of which had previously been released by the BBC. My cassette copy bit the dust a while back from overuse, leaving me bereft. But now my pain is over. Inspired by that seemingly pointless chat, a quick search revealed that I had been horribly oblivious to Warp Records’ release of the complete On The Hour in two CD boxsets (and on iTunes).


My life is a little more complete now. Finally I can find out what happened to Alan Partridge and his zombie wife after all these years (On The Hour was possibly even more willing to indulge in flights of fancy than the TV version, which was hobbled by budget restrictions, obviously). This revelation – which is old news to fans, I’m sure – comes after the recent screening of Armando Iannucci’s feature debut, In The Loop, the feature version of The Thick of It, at Sundance.


This is probably the movie I’m most excited about this year (and have already gone on about it at length), a fact made even more remarkable by the fact that it’s made by BBC Films, who had seemed to have abandoned their boldness (see their previous support for Lynne Ramsay and Pawel Pawlikowski as a kind of proof) in favour of endless costume dramas and literary navel-gazing. A new version of Brideshead Revisited? An out-of-date adaptation of Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road? The love life of Dylan Thomas? It’s been a crummy 2008 for them, especially as the other major film investor in the UK, FilmFour, had returned from financial collapse to bring us In Bruges, Hunger, and Slumdog Millionaire. Yes yes, I might not like that film, but it’s way more daring than some turgid, poorly-cast adaptation of The Other Boleyn Girl.


Luckily for BBC Films, they now have a roster containing In The Loop, An Education (starring Carey “Sally Sparrow” Mulligan and Peter Sarsgaard sans his recent egregious Trigorin beard that he had cultivated for his run in The Seagull), Grant Heslov’s directorial debut Men Who Stare At Goats, the Churchill-tastic Into The Storm, Bright Star (yes, a historical drama about literary figures, but it’s by Jane Campion so I’m bound to be interested), Martin Campbell’s remake of his rightly celebrated Edge of Darkness, and Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank, which will hopefully be as good as her excellent feature debut Red Road. Fair to say things are looking up. Those first two movies, Loop and Education, have been shown at Sundance, and according to Storyville editor Nick Fraser and Indie journo Gaynor Flynn, they have been rapturously embraced by audiences. It’s rare that I endorse UK culture on this blog, but when it’s promising, or distinct, or truly wonderful, it needs to be praised to the highest of high heavens.

Happiness Is A Warm Gun

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As I said on Tuesday, it’s Anger Week here on the international network of computer people (abbr. InterNetComPeeps), and on that day I figured I should offer an alternate perspective by jumping up and down on the spot about yet another book about how the Republicans have spent the past eight years secretly carving chunks out of the planet so that it resembles a big Space Dollar Sign. Though these books are ten a penny, if they’re written by Thomas Frank they are essential reading. His humour and intelligence set them apart from the rest.

However, after seeing posters for Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky in almost every Tube station in London (that I have visited), it has now become too much effort to appear jolly or attempt to hold off the tidal wave of heated commentary and subsequent opprobrium that has replaced the internet’s usual blend of celebrity schadenfreude, leaked pictures from Transformerators 2, and George W. Bush blooper updates.


Time to add a little drop of Grouch Juice to the indifferent ocean that is the Internet. A couple of weeks ago we were unfortunate enough to watch Happy-Go-Lucky (which is coming to DVD in the UK next week and opening in the US soon), and though I will admit we were watching it on a flight that was running nearly two hours late, with the seats in front of us pulled so far back they were almost inside our heads, and the air conditioning drying my eyes out so much they squeaked when I blinked, I’d like to think that I was still able to objectively assess Leigh’s experiment in testing audience patience to destruction.

I may have said in my overlong Dark Knight post that seeing it in such uplifting conditions may have influenced my feelings towards it, but I’ve enjoyed several movies in similarly cramped and unpleasant circumstances, such as Ghost In The Shell 2: Innocence, Breach, Kung Fu Hustle, and, on the last two transatlantic flights I’ve taken, The Brave One and The Spiderwick Chronicles. Chronicles in particular is a beautiful movie, with autumnal colours lovingly captured by Godlike Genius Caleb Deschanel, and the intricate detailing on Phil Tippett’s character designs apparent even on a tiny screen, so Dick Pope’s bright photography was going to be perfectly fine.

I’ve sat through some stinkers on planes too, but nothing of the magnitude of Happy-Go-Lucky. I can sit through real dreck, really dire films made by people with no understanding of how to tell a story or approach a subject from a new and interesting perspective, and merely shrug. Happy-Go-Lucky, on the other hand, might not be as bad as Cassandra’s Dream or the flabbergasting 21 (a film that is 100% recycled and utterly dishonest), but it made me angrier than any movie I’ve seen in a long time. Yes, even angrier than Southland Tales.


It seems pointless to give a rundown of the minimal plot, which is summed up with pith at IMDb, but it’s worth looking at several key scenes. The movie follows the adventures of a primary school teacher called Poppy, whose relentless upbeat twitterings are exhibited in the first few minutes as she parks her bike outside a bookshop, wanders in, makes insipid, content-free comments to the shop owner (who is either rude and dismissive or probably busy and could do without someone ruining his concentration, depending on your interpretation of the scene), and finally walks out to find her bike gone. Her response? “Oh, I never got to say goodbye!” This, my friends, is not the reaction of a sane person.

I’m not saying looking on the bright side of life is not a healthy way of approaching this setback. I’m saying that the human being, built as it is, would react to the theft with a mixture of emotions, the majority of which would be negative, and not a sentimental anthropomorphisation of the lost object. To react like that instead of being flushed with anger that someone had made a conscious decision to steal an object that belonged to you, with all of the feelings of frustration, disappointment, and violation that go along with that anger, would take a conscious effort to suppress those negative emotions which, as I’m sure anyone who reads this post will have experienced, flash up instantly with no cognitive effort involved. If Leigh is saying we should replace those feelings with acceptance, then I agree, it almost certainly is healthier than stewing over it indefinitely, but if he is saying we should never feel like the nasty feelings and must suppress them immediately, he doesn’t understand human beings, and is touting a pure fantasy, and a cloying one at that. In fact, he does say that explicitly.

Q. How much of Poppy’s happy-go-lucky philosophy do you take on yourself? If someone stole your bike, would you shrug your shoulders?
Mike Leigh: Oh, yeah actually I suppose I would if I’m honest. If they’ve nicked something, there you go basically. What are you going to do about it? But I wouldn’t want to make too much of that.

Thankfully he then follows that up by admitting he also shares character traits with Scott, the furious driving instructor, otherwise I would have to think of him as some kind of saint. In a revealing Guardian Q&A that I shall be going back to later in this post which has expanded way out of control like a big blob of Oobleck, host Sarfraz Manzoor asks:

SM: I found Poppy slightly annoying at the beginning – sort of unnecessarily and overly perky. Even when her bike gets stolen that doesn’t faze her.

ML: Why is that “unnecessarily, overly perky”? She’s cool, philosophical. The bike gets nicked, but what else can you do about it, life goes on. So defend your statement.

[Audience laughs]

SM: Initially, I thought she came across as a bit one-note – as in she’s perky and nothing fazes her. But over the course of the film, she does become more complicated and reveals different levels.

ML: As far as I’m concerned, you could be forgiven, especially with the scene where they’ve gone clubbing and they’re being silly having had a few drinks, you could be forgiven for thinking at that point, “Can I actually spend a couple of hours with this person?”

SM: You almost agree with me then?

ML: I am agreeing, but I’m saying that it’s pretty much straight away that you start to get the hang of what she’s actually about, and I don’t think there’s any real reason to go on thinking that [she's one-note]. When she gets into the car with Scott – I mean, he’s so ludicrous that she just deals with it, her sense of humour takes over.

SM: He’s a fascinating character – he comes across as somebody who’s just a joke but ends up like the love-child of Richard Littlejohn and Melanie Phillips.

ML: I don’t know them.

SM: Probably better off that way.

Beyond his snippiness (yes, the audience laughed, but the rest of the interview features other instances of him losing his patience with his adoring fans), and his ignorance of those hateful columnist scum mentioned by Manzoor –which must be a joke — the fact that he says there is nothing you can do about having your bike stolen startles me. You could report it to the police, obviously. Will that get results? Almost certainly not. Will it be a waste of your time? Very probably. However, we’re talking about the loss of property, the violation of your space by some ne’er-do-well, and you’re just supposed to shrug it off? Though I understand that forgiveness is far healthier than seething over a slight and becoming a bitter jerk (I speak from experience), doing nothing is a dereliction of your duties to yourself and those around you. Though the odds are against the return of your property, there is still some chance your actions following the theft will generate some chain of events that might be beneficial to many, not just yourself. Perhaps Leigh thinks this because, oh well, it’s just a bike. If you can afford to just lose one, congratulations. How about if your car was stolen? Or your house broken into and an item of personal significance was taken? What about if Leigh finished a movie and the only print of it got stolen? Would he shrug then?

As for the later points he makes after fronting on Manzoor, he admits to making Poppy hard to like in those opening scenes. In this interview he reiterates the point that Poppy is meant to be irritating at first, and he succeeded at that by making her seem like a parody of a human whose personality is one step away from some awful form of mental aberration. But this refrain that audiences find her lovable by the end of the movie? I think not. Here is the trailer. If this annoys you, avoid avoid avoid.

I will say this in the movie’s defence. Sally Hawkins plays Poppy with an impressive method dedication, but sadly that eradicates every vestige of actual humanity from the character. Many of Poppy’s exploits drove us to paroxysms of fist-clenching fury, and if that wasn’t bad enough, Leigh throws in a few more caricatures for good measure, my least favourite being her older sister Helen (played by Caroline Martin). Settled down and pregnant, lumbered with a mortgage and immature husband (this immaturity expressed as a wish to play on his Playstation, a machine that is demonised throughout as if responsible for the dreadful state of The Youth Of Today), Helen is quite obviously miserable, and takes this out on Poppy. In one of the most poorly performed and written scenes of the year, the sister needles Poppy with talk of babies and mortgages and responsibility and growing up, talking of them as duties that all adults must face. When Poppy laughs that off and says she’s perfectly happy as she is, her sister screeches, “You don’t have to rub it in!” and storms out of the room. Thank you, Mike Leigh and his repertory of actors, for illuminating the malaise of those who follow the mandatory rules of life laid down by The Man in such elegant and eye-opening terms. It is truly a lesson I would have to have been in some kind of suspended animation to have not absorbed. This is the great British artist Mike Leigh at work? I could have sworn it was an amateur dramatics group run by pre-teens.


That angered me enough, but the final scene was the one that, in retrospect, irked me the most. As the anti-plot reaches its natural denouement, Poppy realises that her driving instructor Scott (an excellent performance from Eddie Marsan) has been stalking her. His addled and paranoid brain is unable to recognise that her depthless chirpiness is an automatic and unthinking state of mind and not a come-on, and he rails against her for “leading him on” with terrifying intensity. Marsan’s performance lends conviction to a pretty basic speech, not helped by his character seemingly being a lazily constructed (but brilliantly performed) hybrid of the unpleasant men played by David Thewlis in Naked and Mark Benton in Career Girls. For a moment, I let the movie in, relieved something concrete had finally happened, and pleased to see what seemed to be a blip in Poppy’s outlook as she ponders his reaction to her personality. Sadly, after about 30 seconds of shots of Poppy looking ruminative, the film ends on her reverting to type, merrily rowing a boat with her equally silly flatmate and blithering on about her usual nonsense, unchanged and determinedly jolly to the last oompah-oompah drenched frame.

Before I continue to discuss the movie in Shouty Mode, I have to address the opinion of its many fans. Lots of people have been warmed and uplifted by the film, and of course that’s great for them, and it makes me happy to know others are happy. Obviously. However, critics of the movie have been painted as unduly negative and riven with fashionable cynicism, nothing more than cranky-pants who have forgotten the simple pleasures in life. Daring to suggest that the film is muddled, poorly made, vapid, cloying and pointless is considered evidence of a malfunction of the joy chips that Leigh and Hawkins have kickstarted in the rest of the audience. While I will admit to a mostly negative worldview, and a personality that just last night Daisyhellcakes compared to that of Cartman (it was his rant against Family Guy that triggered the comparison, though I wish I had been able to articulate my feelings for that show so eloquently), I am capable of joy, and sometimes my critical faculties can be so overwhelmed by the experience of a work of art or popular culture that I turn into a leaping, gurning Poppy-esque parody of a human being (such as my annoying enthusiasm after experiencing The Dark Knight or Kung Fu Panda).

Disliking Happy-Go-Lucky and the character of Poppy might well be a matter of personal taste and disposition, but that doesn’t mean I can’t have an objective, unemotional response to her and the movie as well. Though I’m a believer in a lot of what McKee says about story structure, I’m not so firmly wedded to it that I blindly think all stories have to follow some formula to be considered artistically valid. Happy-Go-Lucky might start with what could be seen as an inciting incident (the theft of her bike), and it might feature a showdown with an antagonist who exactly mirrors her, but otherwise the plot, such as it is, meanders back and forth, sometimes for little apparent reason. Again, though I could see little point in that other than the possibility that Leigh was being purposely obstreperous, it’s certainly not a strike against the film, and I would never argue that it was.


However, Poppy’s ultimate reaction to Scott’s meltdown — to ponder it for a couple of minutes before blithely returning to her default position of chirpy simpleton — was a step too far. Once more, I’ll stress that the antagonist doesn’t necessarily have to learn a lesson at the end of a movie, or undergo much in the way of change, but it certainly helps, and doesn’t have to be a big, “My God, this adventure has shown me how to love!” revelation either. What Poppy does is remain the same throughout, even when faced with evidence that her behaviour, innocent though it may seem, might have a negative impact on the world. Scott’s psychosis is certainly not Poppy’s fault, but a moment of reflection earlier on in the story might have shown her that purposely goading the man, making unfunny quips, and ignoring his instructions — the instructions of a very volatile man who is excessively anal about the following of said instructions and has shown a propensity for intemperate flashes of hostility — would eventually lead to a confrontation.

She also upsets her sister, disrupts a flamenco class, and generally pesters people who are just trying to go about their day without being hassled by a hippy with a mouthful of witless banalities. Surely an actual human being would finally realise upon being confronted by Scott that having a happy outlook is one thing, but this obliviousness to the reactions anyone would have to this mannered persona — reactions that might be negative as often as they are positive — is an entirely different matter, just as the expression of any other personality type would potentially have a range of consequences between positive and negative. That she laughs it all off as less than an inconvenience shows monstrous arrogance on the part of Leigh. We’re being asked to side with someone who is oblivious to the feelings of those around her, other than to note that they are different from hers and must be altered immediately, preferably through the insistent and reflexive use of trivial, wit-free quips and cloying, unthinking platitudes. How is this laudable? I’m all for a bit of cheering up now and again, but if this half-wit tried to make me smile with her eye-rolling and intrusive questioning I would be calling the constabulary in a trice.


Such an confounding ending and ultimately impenetrable character reminds me of the far superior Morvern Callar, with Samantha Morton at the height of her power as the blank and amoral eponymous heroine. Whereas Poppy is compelled to interact with everyone she meets, Morvern is utterly uninterested in the world, preferring to grab any advantage life gives her while hiding from almost all interaction, ears filled with headphones, becoming little more than a self-sufficient anonymous clubber on the continent. She’s a perfect encapsulation of modern isolationist tendencies in some anti-social section of The Youth Of Today, and remains an enigma even after repeated viewings (or readings). Though I think Hawkins deserves praise for her total commitment to the role of Poppy, on an aesthetic level I’d much rather watch Morton’s icy, enigmatic performance than sit through Leigh’s endurance test. Morvern Callar is a work of art by a true artist, one who is sadly undervalued. Now that I think about it, Lynne Ramsay’s movie is the perfect antidote to the forced chirpiness of Leigh’s film, with its perplexing and compelling main character. Plus, that soundtrack, inspired by the tracklistings contained within Alan Warner’s remarkable book, is a lot better than the upbeat comedy farty noises that pass for a score in Happy-Go-Lucky. Can + Boards of Canada + Lee Hazlewood > random cloying hurdy-gurdy any day of the week. I wish it had been on Virgin Atlantic’s roster of films so that I could cleanse my mental palette.


Just as Morvern Callar appears to be a character study of a person whose motives and emotions are as mysterious to us at the end of the movie as they are at the start, Happy-Go-Lucky could be taken merely as a portrait of an alien being, the eternal optimist, a Pangloss wearing lipgloss, a hypothetical state of mind given form but no reason just to show what would happen if someone had a brain malfunction that made them perpetually chirpy. There’s even an argument that the movie is a study of psychosis. If I were to be uncharitable about her — which I intend to be — Poppy certainly seems to be unhinged. Unable to comprehend the consequences of her actions or the ramifications of things that happen to her, she’s like a sociopath overdosing on Prozac. On the other side of the spectrum, Scott is paranoid, racist, and so socially stunted by his own self-loathing that he cannot understand what others are thinking. Leigh has had characters like this in his movies before, so there’s a possibility he thinks all men (of a certain class and background, which I will charitably leave hanging in the air for fear of offending his fans) are prone to fantasising about women and/or the Illuminati, but I’m willing to grant that he does think this behaviour is evidence of mental health issues and not just what men are like (Neil LaBute, take note).

The tramp that Poppy meets midway through the movie, in a scene that many people thought was superfluous, is another broken human who cannot function in society. It’s debatable that Poppy’s attempts to communicate with the tramp are successful, which is a good thing. Having her even partially cure him would turn it from a character study into a weird Camden-based messiah tale. Poppy heals the sick and teaches man and woman to embrace happiness! I would have hated to see her Sermon on the Mount, filled as it would be with tic-like eye-rolling, reflexive chuckling, and exhortations to just cheer up, it might never ‘appen, innit! We can be grateful for small mercies.


However, though that alternate interpretation is a potentially interesting take on what is otherwise a Sesame Street song about happiness dragged out to feature length, I’m unsure about whether Leigh really is trying to paint a picture of what a fractured, unfriendly society has done to us and the differing ways our brains have tried to cope with it, as only a handful of characters show any signs of mental malfunction. That is, unless you add Poppy’s elder sister and husband, who have turned their back on pure anarchic, heedless joy for that most poisonous of mind afflictions — Leigh’s pet peeve since Abigail’s Party – class-jumping aspiration! Look at them in their grotty suburban home, with their grotty suburban mortgage, arguing about Playstations and resisting Poppy’s stream of unconsciousness which would save them from their pit of misery! Burn the bastards at the stake!

These alternate explanations, giving Leigh the benefit of the doubt, might work if Leigh didn’t insist on claiming that Poppy’s manner was admirable. While I am not so desensitised by playing Grand Theft Automatic on my Gamebox and listening to that modern Gangster Ramp stuff with the witches and ho-bags that I can’t see the benefit of maintaining a brighter outlook, Poppy’s blinkered viewpoint is not an option anyone should consider. Being a flighty gurning happiness machine might work out okay if you’re a primary school teacher, but I don’t want a policeman or a doctor to be incapable of serious interaction.

::rolls eyes:: I dunno, getting mugged for your phone? Who needs ‘em anyway? More trouble than they’re worth, eh? Hur hur! All that money you’ll save, not paying for calls, save up and buy yourself a nice sweater, innit! Hur hur! Or a wheelchair, seeing as how you’ve been terribly injured by your attacker. Still, mustn’t grumble! You can still play basketball in one. I seen it on the telly! Ooooh, it was dead exciting! Hur hur!

::rolls eyes:: Yeah, we got your x-rays back, and look, it’s your bones! The left bone’s connected to the right bone! Hur hur! Look at ‘em! Look at how many there are! Millions of bones! Wow! Bloody brilliant, innit. So yeah, that smashed-up one there, that’s called a vertebra. Ooh! Big word! Hur hur!

And yes, I appreciate she does have the nous to recognise that a bully at school has been abused, but whereas many critics have pointed this out as evidence of a greater wisdom and maturity in Poppy than we had previously assumed, it’s not backed up by any other displays of seriousness anywhere else in the movie, and tends to suggest it was slotted in as a means to prove her capacity to be high-functioning and capable of constructive compassion, as a pre-emptive riposte to arguments that she’s just a halfwit who doesn’t understand the hardships and cruelties of the world. Even if I bite, and accept that, she’s still reckless and thoughtless in other contexts, as I complained earlier, like the miserable life-hating bastard I am.


Plus, the other alternative explanation for that scene is that Leigh added it so that she could meet someone in a professional manner who she could have a cloying and sappy relationship with, the alternative being meeting someone at one of the nightclubs she goes to with her raucous friends. Leigh would never have countenanced for fear of making Poppy seem like one of those tawdry working class hussies having a drunken shag like the Daily Mail says they do. And hey, Leigh surely wouldn’t want to come across as someone making uncharitable comments about entire classes of people that are dissimilar to his own, now would he.

Of the many comments Leigh has made about the film, the one I find the most interesting is this, from that Telegraph article linked to earlier:

It’s about education: how we learn and how we teach. It’s about responsibility. About trust, about men and women, and about commitment. I felt it would be a good time to make a film that would be, in some way, anti-miserabilist. These are tough times we’re in; we are destroying ourselves and the planet, but there are some people who care enough about the future to be teaching kids.

Ignoring the fact that I don’t think the human race has become so suicidal and reckless that it has decided not to even bother teaching kids anymore, thus making anyone who decides to do it part of some dying breed, the movie does hint at some interest in exploring what education is. Scott has some things to say about it that, when stripped of their crazy conspiracy trappings, might amount to a rare moment of insight, but I do think a lot of his grumbling about modern education concerns gaming and gadgetry, and how kids are reacting to them. There are numerous other problems with modern education beyond that, which is the sort of feeble argument trotted out by the handbag-clutching readers of the Mail who have no understanding of what the technological age can offer. There is a place for Leigh’s Ye Olde Worlde thinking, and I would never argue it doesn’t. However, saying “those games is bad for the kids” is not an intellectual position, at least as expressed in Happy-Go-Lucky. There are grave problems with education in England, but lumping the blame almost exclusively on gaming is intellectually lazy.

Speaking of which, remember the obvious connection I made earlier between Scott and David Thewlis’ character Johnny in Naked? As you can imagine, I was not the only one who thought there was a similarity between the biblical rants spouted by both misanthropic characters, and this poor chap tried to ask Leigh about it at a Guardian Q&A.

Question 10: The taxi driver, Scott …

ML: He’s not a taxi driver, he’s a driving instructor. Loads of people keep calling him a taxi driver, but there’s nothing that suggests he is that. It’s a very strange thing. You’re about the 70th or 75th person who’s said that. However, please continue.

Q10 add: Well, the way Scott made reference to 666 conspiracy theories, it just made me think of Johnny in Naked talking about a similar thing. Just wondering if there was a connection at all.

ML: There is, only in so far as they’re talking about the same thing. But the huge difference between Scott and Johnny and Brian, the night security guard in Naked, is about as massive a difference as between Poppy and Beverly in Abigail’s Party, I would say. Johnny, and indeed Brian, understand what they’re talking about. They’ve made connections, they’ve got ideas on the go, and they’re perceptive. Scott is none of those things. He doesn’t understand anything that’s in his head at all. It’s all this stuff slopping around in the tank of his brain but he hasn’t added it up at all. It’s a very superficial experience for him, which isn’t the case at all for Johnny.

But how are we supposed to know that? One biblical rant sounds much like another, and never really seem to be connected or unconnected, sounding more like a series of shouty quotes from old books linked in with some contemporary references. Scott sounded no more or less connected than anyone else, and the movie gives no hint that Scott is having a “superficial experience”. While many critics and Leigh fans are quick to praise him for his method of generating “plot” and character by getting his actors together and thrashing out ideas prior to writing a script (though only a few seem to think the actors should get more credit for their contribution, weirdly enough), that process is not available for us to view.

While Leigh can bat away criticisms by commenting on the true feelings of his characters, it seems to me he is not remembering the events of the movie, but remembering the inner life of the characters that he and the actors have constructed. Though I understand the movie is open for interpretation, I can see no evidence in the movie that would lead me to believe what he is saying is correct, and not just a way of avoiding critical comment (or an inaccurately retrieved memory). Even worse than that, his rude comment to this questioner beggars belief. [Italics mine]

Question 5: I was looking at Poppy’s character in that scene with her sister and brother-in-law. Should she have gone down the path of being a proper adult, having a family and so forth, do you think she would have any similarity to Beverly in Abigail’s Party?

ML: I think Poppy’s extremely grown-up, but she’s being measured about it. There’s no way, as I read her, or indeed as Sally Hawkins read her, that she’s somebody that’s going to stay juvenile forever. She’s not. She’s simply a mature but measured person who’s taking life steadily and enjoying it and being fulfilled. It’s only her sister Helen’s perception of her that she’s not being responsible, that she’s not being sensible. I hate to say this, and don’t take it personally, but it’s really a silly question, and I say it with the greatest respect. [Translation: "You're an idiot. I say it with all due respect, and please don't take it personally, but you're a drooling imbecile who can never understand my art."] She won’t stop being an intelligent, sensible person with a sense of humour, politics, life and a sense of values and a love of children – none of which is Beverly. Beverly hates children, and hasn’t got any of the perception or applied intelligence or education or the ability to care that Poppy has. They’re absolutely chalk and cheese.

There are two options: Leigh is lying and being a bit of a jerk about it, or Leigh and Hawkins really attributed these inner feelings to their creation during rehearsals. If it is the latter, that’s perfectly fine, and I’m curious to see the DVD extra that shows them creating Poppy. However, in the film, there is no hint that she is going to mature. Saying that she is and treating his audience like fools for not reading his and Hawkins’ minds and understanding that is sheer arrogance. If he wants us to interpret the movie any way we want, let us do that. If not, then don’t be so rude about it. Cheer up Mike, it’s all gonna be alright in the end, innit? Hur hur.

Still, it was not such a traumatic experience that I have not become immune to happiness in film form. Just yesterday I suddenly remembered my deep and abiding love for Theodore Flicker’s satirical hodge-podge The President’s Analyst, with James Coburn playing Dr. Sidney Schaefer, on the run from various evil-doers after giving up his job as the psychoanalyst of the President of the United States, and coming across a wide selection of 60s cultural icons, all of which are mercilessly lampooned. Coburn, who could portray joy with more enthusiasm than almost any other actor (and not just because he had an incredibly bright and wide smile) is the perfect person to play the doctor who tunes in and drops out, set free to just go crazy on stage with his beloved gong.


Now that’s happiness I can get behind.