Listmania ’12! The Best Movies Of The Year

Posted on January 1, 2013 by admiralneck

Here I am, living in the past as usual. It’s 2013 in London, but I’m still writing about 2012, a year that was in general better than the last (which was pretty crummy) but not particularly amazing. No lottery wins, no late-blooming development of psychic powers; just The Grind. Sadly that malaise spread to my enjoyment of films. No fear; this isn’t another end-of-year “crisis in cinema” posts, filled with dire warnings about piracy or 48fps (which I’m still undecided on) or how the kids these days don’t enjoy proper entertainment like The Dambusters or any of that shit. All that happened is that I built up a bunch of movies in my head and they didn’t live up to those expectations. No biggie, and it’s all on me, but by the end of the year this disaffection was becoming a real pain in the arse. Do I ever dare look forward to a film again? I’m gonna find that hard to do.

I’m not gonna fart around like I normally do; it’s late and I just put Anchorman on so I’m only half-paying attention to this semtance. Here’s where I traditionally complain about cinema release dates and how punitive they are if you live outside the US, so here goes: five months for Cloud Atlas? Four for Wreck-It Ralph? Dozens of other movies have been delayed this year, and to be honest I feel stupid writing up this list before seeing Zero Dark Thirty or Lincoln or especially Django Unchained. How can I think of this as definitive when films by my favourite filmmakers remain out of my reach? Will this list be invalid by the end of January?

And yes, I know, the ways in which studios are attempting to capitalise on increased revenues from overseas mean films are now starting to come out in Europe before the US, but this year the biggest examples of that were The Avengers and Skyfall, both of which were out over here a couple of weeks before the US. I hear some say there’s an equivalence here but two weeks is frustrating while a four month delay is absolute bullshit. I thought I was the only person who ever moaned about these things but even Cory Doctorow got in on the action (thanks to @catvincent for the heads-up on that piece). Everything in that makes so much sense to me but still we put up with the old ways.

Okay, moaning over. Here’s the (sadly incomplete) list. No disrespect to any of these films. Naturally, if I didn’t like them I wouldn’t have included them.

25. Your Sister’s Sister

This year Sundance came to London, complete with overpriced tickets, interesting documentaries, and a handful of fiction movies that sounded less so. As ever Shades of Caruso finds itself struggling to love the output of the US independent scene when compared to the bigger studio releases, especially when the new voices showcased at Sundance often seem to provide films as formulaic as their derided big-budget brethren. Lynn Shelton’s chamber-piece Your Sister’s Sister, in which a grieving man becomes dragged into the dramas connecting two sisters, was not on the Sundance list; more’s the pity. At times this looks and feels like every other movie of its kind, right down to casting the seemingly ubiquitous Mark Duplass as the feckless interloper, but Shelton’s a better filmmaker than most, and here does wonders with limited means, supplying all the quiet character work of the best of this genre, but with a populist’s touch for the dramatic. Seemingly sedate for the most part, Shelton saves the fireworks for a startling end-of-second-act blowout, aided by magnificent work from Emily Blunt and Rosemary DeWitt. Only an underwhelming third act prevents this from getting higher in the list, yet after the dramatic lull we at least reach a sweetly satisfying denouement, a gentle sigh of resignation and love you don’t see often enough. It left me with a glow that lasted for days.

24. Killer Joe

The one thing you can count on with a late-career William Friedkin film is that it’ll be muscular, and will likely feature at least one scene that makes your hair stand on end. Killer Joe goes one better than that; it features a final act so full on that when it was over I literally didn’t know what to think or do. To be fair the whole movie, adapted by Tracy Letts from his first play, is pitched at such a weird level of energy that the viewer should know all bets are off. As a filmed play the performances from almost everyone are heightened and emphatic in a similar way to David Cronenberg’s stagy Cosmopolis, but while that was bloodless, Killer Joe is almost dementedly provocative. Performances like this can carry a movie away into quirky irrelevance but thankfully there is a rock to hold it down; Matthew McConaughey continues his campaign to become the most interesting actor in Hollywood with a riveting portrayal of a malevolent scumbag with a baffling sense of dark morality. His final acts turn this from a neo-noir into a macabre spoof of family life, or a satirical depiction of the terrible things we would do to our loved ones to survive in a brutal world. I’m not sure I can even call this worthy of inclusion here, except that it got my pulse pounding like nothing else this year.

23. Moonrise Kingdom

Fantastic Mr. Fox might have been Wes Anderson’s children’s film, but it’s arguable that his follow-up is likely as much in tune with the viewpoint of a child as his adaptation of Roald Dahl’s tale. Like some kind of gaudy yellow reworking of the stories of Arthur Ransome and Enid Blyton, Anderson throws his two very young lovers into an adventure across a humdrum island devoid of any magic or mystery until their imaginations and new-found optimism transform the claustrophobic environs into a wonderland. It’s the clash between their defiant enthusiasm for life and the beaten-down and jaded adults that provides this film’s highlights, with Bruce Willis and Ed Norton on especially good form as two men trying to make the most of a pretty crappy hand, before finding a spark of life in their attempts to help the lovestruck couple. And yet this is the least sentimental of Anderson’s movies, while also serving as his least cynical; a miraculous juggling of tone and intent from a director whose eyebrow often seems perpetually arched. It’s also another piece of evidence for SoC’s argument that Anderson is the finest and most intuitively brilliant comedic director of the current generation. Yes yes, I know, no one agrees, whatevs. But seriously, for your consideration, the trampoline shot. Come on!

22. Premium Rush

How frustrating it must be to be seen as merely “competent” by a critical monolith that doesn’t have time or patience to appreciate the craft of a filmmaker who instinctively knows their shit. David Koepp has been writing deceptively elegant populist screenplays for years, in addition to honing his directorial skills with a number of interesting films that almost hit the spot. Premium Rush is his first directorial effort that absolutely nails it, with a confident visual style, an intoxicating sense of momentum reminiscent of Speed, and the ability to pull sprightly and appealing performances from a well-chosen cast. There’s little else to it than the thrill of a chase, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s cocky bike messenger pursued by a magnificently, hypnotically unhinged Michael Shannon, but Koepp manages the action brilliantly and has fun filling in the margins of the tale, capturing the edginess of a dangerous but vibrant New York while portraying the community of the couriers as a sub-culture with its own rules and priorities. Mid-movie pacing problems can be forgiven when everything else in this exuberantly kinetic thriller is handled so deftly. And Shannon’s work cannot be praised enough. This should have attracted a bigger audience just for him alone.

21. Killing Them Softly

Everything’s going to hell in a handbasket; that much we know for sure (even though it possibly isn’t). Andrew Dominik is more sure than most. His follow-up to the magisterial The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is not about to hold back in its portrayal of America as a morally bankrupt, soul-deadened wasteland populated by venal opportunists, depressed to the point of inactivity, educationally backward and entitled, and he certainly isn’t about to miss an opportunity to drive the point home by including footage of the 2008 election campaign. It’s the kind of point-hammering that would normally drive SoC away, but perhaps I was particularly receptive to those sentiments on the day of viewing, or perhaps I was swayed by the bravura setpieces – such as the brutal, degrading beating and murder of one character, no spoilers – or the slow descent into numbness of James Gandolfini’s morbidly depressed hitman, or Brad Pitt’s increasing frustration with a culture that doesn’t value talent and instead seeks a quick buck. The sentiment expressed in this excoriating blast of fury at a broken society might be delivered with the smugness of a disgusted outsider, but to see Pitt’s electrifying delivery of his key speech is to feel like you just got told, son. It’s the kind of electrifying scene that becomes legendary.

20. Berberian Sound Studio

As with a number of films on this list, there’s a good chance this would rank higher after a few extra viewings, certainly to see if there is some sense to be made of the exasperating third act. If you can even call it that; writer-director Peter Strickland’s fealty to the weird atmosphere conjured up earlier appears to have taken over his mind as completely as the terrifying events in the in-movie movie The Equestrian Vortex do to poor sound engineer Gilderoy, leading to a dereliction of duty right before the end. But what menace, what madness, what delirious berserk horror he provides before that. Cleverly keeping The Equestrian Vortex offscreen, we’re forced to see this film through the eyes and ears of Toby Jones’ horrified technician, a man out of his element and soon unable to cope with the unfamiliar and hostile world he has been thrust into; the typical quiet middle-Englander who thinks of Europe as being the home of insidious decadence. Strickland ratchets up the tension with all sorts of visual and aural trickery, creating a disturbing world with a few sets and well-utillised darkness; this is one of the most technically accomplished films from a British director in a long time. Kudos to all involved, but special praise for Jones, who gives one of the performances of the year, all repressed rage and confusion, sympathetic and infuriating in equal measure.

19. Sightseers

It’s hard to think of another movie in recent years that oozes Britishness as much as this one. As with Berberian Sound Studio, Ben Wheatley has made a character study of what makes the classic British underdog tick, but whereas Peter Strickland’s film isolated its protagonist in Italy and made him weak, Sightseers gives us a murderous, gradually empowered couple to rival Malick’s Kit and Holly, or Tarantino/Stone’s Mickey and Mallory. Two old-at-heart lovers find themselves on the road, travelling north through England, killing those who break their unwritten but familiar codes, becoming emboldened by their love for each other and their transgressions. At first this seems like a simple translation of American homicidal road movies into a British vernacular but by its magnificently unhinged finale it feels like its own thing; a snapshot of everything that is ugly about our nation’s soul, with resentment aimed at those around us and at ourselves, all taking place against some of the country’s most beautiful landscapes. It’s also hilarious, and as quotable as that similarly bleak national self-portrait Withnail and I. With luck this clever and strangely lovable two-hander, deftly written by its stars Alice Lowe and Steve Oram, will find as large an audience.

18. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Peter Jackson’s urge to turn every project into some kind of epic has worked against him before, which is why even the idea that he was going to transform JRR Tolkien’s relatively slender children’s tale into a trilogy created such a backlash. Seeing the first installment places that decision into context; this is no longer a six movie adaptation of four books, more a world-building exercise for the confident New Zealander as he expands upon Tolkien’s tales. There’s a persuasive argument that that’s hubris but these projects are beginning to feel like a compilation of decades of visual and emotional reactions to Tolkien’s complex world, a smorgasbord of interpretations from readers and designers that brings something new to life; a fusion of literary work and fan appropriation that lives and breathes in a way even Tolkien never imagined, reminiscent of the mix of Burroughs and Cronenberg that gave us the movie Naked Lunch. The alterations to the original text are once more shrewd and exciting, his casting insights have again paid off, and even though even this fan can see that some trimming might have helped, what we’ve been given is yet another thrilling demonstration that Jackson is the pre-eminent fantasy filmmaker on the planet, and a persuasive argument that he should fight for the rights to The Silmarillion and keep making these films for the rest of his life. I’m sure he’d hate that, but some of us would be well chuffed.

17. Rust and Bone

You can’t go from making the greatest prison drama of recent times to a love story without bringing some of that grit with you, and Jacques Audiard’s adaptation of Craig Davidson’s short story is simultaneously tender and abrasive, like its beaten-down lovers. Bare-knuckle boxer Ali and gravely-injured Stéphanie seem like they’ve never even understood love before; their slow awakening to its possibilities, in a world of distrust and casual cruelty, would seem trite were it not for Audiard’s sure hand and the remarkable work from Matthias Schoenaerts and Marion Cotillard. Their commitment to rehabilitate the critically derided love story genre and their low-key performances yield surprising dividends. Rust and Bone achieves moments of astonishing beauty amidst the grime of lives poorly lived; shadows like bruises pushed back by rays of blinding light provided by cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine. There’s even beauty in the brutality that galvanises and saves our protagonists; our rubbernecking fascination in the awful things people do to survive cheekily justified by Audiard’s eye for the transcendental, and the luminous Cotillard’s triumphant, well-earned return to life. This can be dismissed as mere melodrama, but those crimson brush-strokes, and the conviction of all involved, turn it into something more than mere potboiler, a romance for the austerity age.

16. Compliance

It’s hard to shock an audience these days, but Craig Zobel has managed it with this simple but horrifying account of the Mount Washington prank call crime of 2004. The writer-director handles the slowly escalating tension with commendable confidence, his bravest choice being to pace this movie so deliberately, taking the time to let the horror of the events (the TRUE events, don’t forget) sink in and percolate in the nerves of the audience. Watching this with a crowd of people was the most startling cinematic experience of the year, with numerous walkouts and furious tirades aimed at the screen from viewers who couldn’t handle the slow degradation of the protagonists. Very little in recent years plays on our expectations as well as this, but while some critics have attacked it for being a purposeless exercise in baiting the crowd, this remarkable thriller’s only real fault is to have come out now and not during the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib scandal in Iraq, when Zobel’s points about the ease with which people can be manipulated into doing terrible things might have seemed more timely. As it is, this is a memorable achievement, an experiment in which the events on screen are symbolically acted out by those who watch it; the ultimate in meta-narrative trickery, with our horrified reactions becoming part of the story. Seeing it at home defeats this film’s bold purpose. If you can see it in a roomful of disgusted co-voyeurs, you’ll understand its impact.

15. Painless

Juan Carlos Medina’s directorial debut, the tale of a village torn apart by the birth of several “painless” children, and a family hiding a dark secret, does many things brilliantly; it captures the agony of a country tainted by its terrible past, exorcises that pain by channeling it through metaphor, and offers hope that forgetting these terrors can lead to a new future for a generation now free of the experience of the Civil War. Just for achieving those things it would be remarkable, but for making something with such serious intent in a genre that has, for a few years, seemed to be coasting on found-footage exorcism movies and endless repetitive zombie rampages, Medina’s ambition shines even brighter. That’s before we get into his mastery of atmosphere, his skillful manipulation of the audience –especially during the almost unwatchably tense middle-section — and the bold creation of Berkano, a character surely ready to join the pantheon of horror greats. The bravura, operatic finale is a flourish well-earned; this is the best horror movie of the new decade – emotional, intellectual, and unflinching, made with an elegant touch that is easily a rival to new horror masters Del Toro and Bayona.

14. Jack Reacher

This kind of hoary thriller, based on the questionable novels that target armchair libertarian gun nuts who distrust all forms of authority except that which is dispensed by uncomplicated common-sense killing machines, is exactly the sort of thing that makes Shades of Caruso want to vomit up both lungs, and Chris McQuarrie’s adaptation of Lee Childs’ One Shot is no exception. Our hero is a macho force-of-nature full of old-fashioned values, with a dash of slut-shaming and a damsel-rescuing fetish thrown in for good measure. Everyone wants to fuck him or be him; Jack Reacher is a MAN’S MAN. This is the bad bit of the movie. The good bits? Almost everything else, from the shrewd casting (Rosamund Pike aside), to the attention to detail, to the exquisitely choreographed setpieces. The action is believably messy, the central mystery is intricate but comprehensible, and the inevitable pro-capital punishment argument is arguably tempered by the final scene. The retrograde politics repulse, but the old-school sharpness and focus of the filmmaking is undeniably thrilling to behold. To go back in time to a world of starkly shot and constructed thrillers of this calibre entails taking the rough of the past with the smooth, but considering how rarely we get smooth these days, McQuarrie deserves credit for at least taking the time to transform macho lead into cinema gold.

13. Argo

For those of us who have eagerly followed Ben Affleck’s career since he began to show promise, for those of us who pooh-poohed all of the mean gossip about how he and Matt Damon’s Oscar-winning screenplay for Good Will Hunting was really the work of William Goldman, for those of us who loved him in Changing Lanes and Hollywoodland and even Daredevil (God help us), oh my, this has been a long time coming. After Gone Baby Gone and The Town were described as being “surprisingly well-made considering it’s by Affleck”, the great man returned with his strongest and most confident movie yet and finally, FINALLY, everyone started giving him a break. To be honest this incredible tale of the rescue of six Iranian Embassy staff would be hard to screw up, considering the astonishing details about the fake sci-fi movie Argo and the crazy plot to fool the hardline regime of Iran, but Affleck goes above and beyond, offering up a riveting piece of big-screen entertainment, maintaining suspense from the first scene right through to the end while modulating the tone with a light touch. Add to that a cast packed full of beloved character actors — with special attention to lovable Bryan Cranston — and you’ve got the cheekiest film of the year; part heavily-detailed period piece with modern relevance, part adventure, with a touch of Wag The Dog thrown in.

12. The Bourne Legacy

Skyfall, and the two films before it, impressed Bond fans by taking the popular hero back to his beginnings and recasting his historical failings as consequences of his adventures, with a good man broken down and rebuilt in new form. The first three Bourne movies followed a similar path, with a lost man finding himself, ending with a journey back to the room in which he was “born”, followed by a metaphorical rebirth. The fourth Bourne movie reverses this trend, with a new character given a new lease of life by evil men, made to do evil things, but terrified of returning to his original self. As with the previous films the enemy here is the banal self-preservation instinct of venal bureaucrats, but for once they have done one good thing; delivering a man from oblivion, giving him the tools to make a future for himself; yet another example of how the Bourne movies defy expectation and complicate what could have been simple. That is pleasure enough, but Tony Gilroy also provides a masterclass in writing suspense, withholding information skilfully to build tension in the early scenes, keeping characters in the dark about others’ motivation (another convention of the series), before laying all the cards on the table with a breathtaking finale on the roads and rooftops of Manila. Dismissed as a misstep by critics during the summer, this espionage classic is due a revisit. Hopefully we’ll have time to realise that Jeremy Renner’s Aaron Cross is a worthy replacement for the franchise’s titular hero.

11. John Carter

Could it be SoC’s reflexive love of the underdog that saw this blog go out of its way to defend Andrew Stanton’s obscenely expensive love letter to pulp sci-fi? Was it sympathy that triggered a million tweets of desperate pleading for audiences to give this instantly dated old-school adventure a chance? Or was it a sense of injustice that something crafted with such affection for the source material and – at times – such storytelling skill could be dismissed with such ease by reviewers who likely got the scent of an easy kill in their nostrils? Perhaps it was just relief that, in a year where big-screen entertainments, for the most part, delivered so little, there was someone out there who was willing to put their reputation on the line to tell a tale that they loved and to do it with brio and enthusiasm and crowd-pleasing confidence. John Carter might have ended up the punchline of a million shitty jokes, but for a growing legion of fans this was the real deal; space opera with scale and imagination and spirit, light and uncynical and emotionally honest. It’s everything critics have been complaining has been missing from cinema, done with an open heart and the buccaneering spirit of the Golden Era of film; a Burt Lancaster carouser in a digital shell. This should have been loved from the moment it came out, but no matter. That love will come in time.

10. Dans La Maison

Storytellers prone to agonising over the conventions and expectations they need to consider as they practice their craft will likely find Francois Ozon’s dizzying adaptation of Juan Mayorga’s play The Boy In The Last Row a difficult film to watch, but they should swallow their pride and do it anyway. Much of this tale of a soured marriage, and how it is enlivened by tales spun by a mysteriously-motivated schoolboy, focuses on satirising the class prejudices of its smug middle-class characters, and treating the film as such is rewarding in itself, thanks to Ozon’s deft touch and witty approach. Nevertheless this is also about how we view life through the prism of expectation, either through the rigid rules of storytelling taught by Fabrice Luchini’s amusingly humourless protagonist, or the eagerness to treat the outside world as a display to sate our voyeurism; the world as stage, filled with people who forget that they are players as well as participants. If Haneke had directed this it would have been a gloomy parable; maybe better, maybe worse. Gratitude is due, then, to Ozon for whipping up something lightly entertaining yet multi-layered, critical but hopeful, cautionary but compassionate. It will reward repeat viewings for years to come.

9. Seven Psychopaths

You could see this as the typical balls-out, unrestrained debut of a director with more ideas on his mind than he knows what to do with, and in a way you’d be right. Martin McDonagh wrote this before In Bruges, before a number of his plays, and the feeling that he was running riot in his study, cramming jokes and setpieces and thoughts about writing into a screenplay that barely has time for it all. But if this doesn’t have the focus of The Pillowman or In Bruges, it does have the charm of an eager puppy. The way McDonagh picks at the mindset of the writer, the laziness of the mainstream story factory, and the process of transforming reality and previously-absorbed stories into a new form is endearingly frank; anyone who has ever written for a living would probably recognise the desperation and egotism of Colin Farrell’s brilliantly played anti-hero. Even more pleasing is the cast, all of whom are on top form, especially Shades of Caruso favourite Sam Rockwell at his very best, and Christopher Walken, here giving his strongest and most moving performance since Catch Me If You Can. McDonagh’s games with genre and narrative are a pleasing puzzle for the mind, but his craft as a director is improving; no one else could pull off the film’s surprisingly powerful final scenes while still keeping the tone this light.

8. The Dark Knight Rises

Christopher Nolan’s ambitions from one movie to the next have increased so much that surely the only thing he could do to top the scale of The Dark Knight trilogy is to cram the rise and fall of the Roman Empire into one four-hour epic. What makes The Dark Knight Rises a success, however, is not the eye-popping shots of a city at war with itself, or the image of the Bat soaring above the streets through concrete canyons, engines and rockets booming. The masterstroke is grounding the trilogy, turning what could have merely been a story about heroes and villains into the tale of a boy getting over his grief, locating the source of his unhappiness and overcoming it through sheer force of will. This simple arc would be satisfying enough, but it also serves as a warning to the audience about the consequences of giving in to despair. Bane represents a lie that the society we have built for ourselves is only a prison, a lie easily believed when the institutions we have built become corrupted by human venality. The Dark Knight trilogy has shown the people of Gotham inspired by a symbol to say that they can do better, if they say no loud enough while never losing their humanity to despair. If superheroes are meant to show the nobility of the hero, and the possibilities created by courage, then The Dark Knight Rises is possibly the ultimate example of this message.

7. Cabin in the Woods

Whoever thought Scream had the last word in deconstructing the horror genre ::says nothing but points at own chest with a look of regret:: was wrong. Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon managed to do it with even more wit and energy than we had hoped. But their greatest achievement was to take a clever idea and run with it, to run so damn far that you never think they’ll stop. For a writer to see an explosion of ideas this extreme, and yet so grounded in honouring a single core concept – that this film will link the repetitive and necessary conventions of a subset of genre to every other subset you could imagine, creating an ur-myth of horror that accepts that genre is about honouring conventions because of our psychological make-up as well as in a completely fantastical made-up sense that explains the plot of this specific story – is to fall in love with the telling of stories all over again. They put SO MUCH STUFF in this movie, you guys, and it ALL WORKS COHERENTLY. Watching this is like being a part of the greatest and most satisfying brainstorming session ever, with the bonus that the finished product is not only clever but effective as a horror movie and also still hysterically funny. It’s the complete package; a story about story that’s also just a really good story. In a year in which meta-fiction proliferated, this was the most deliriously enjoyable example.

6. Cloud Atlas

As a fan of David Mitchell’s ambitious multi-layered novel this adaptation by Tom Tykwer and Wachowskis Lana and Andy had a lot to live up to, and for the most part it succeeds. Certainly this is a masterclass in editing, penny-pinching and thematic ambition, going all out to honour the book’s ideas about pan-temporal connection by using the same actors in each of the film’s six timeframes. Perhaps on first viewing this can be seen as a mistake; picking out familiar faces obscured by layers of make-up can be distracting. But then this is a movie not afraid to risk failure, and so we swing back and forth from one tone to the other, from farce to high drama, and all the while with the same disarming, open-eyed sincerity. Anyone with even a grain of cynicism will take nothing from this film, citing its simple message of love and hope as the kind of thing a fool cherishes. But a simple idea, told with this level of narrative complexity, deserves all the praise it can get. Ignore the idea of souls passing through the ages; this is a story that heralds the accretion of ideas across the ages through the narratives of our lives, passed on to those around us, and with those ideas the possibility that courage is transferable, and goodness cumulative. To do this Tykwer and the Wachowskis had to create a story like a web, one whose connections will only become completely apparent with further viewing; a perfect film for our connected and complicated age.

5. The Grey

Marketed as part of Liam Neeson’s late-career action renaissance, audiences must have been mystified at Joe Carnahan’s survival tale, in which the actual act of enduring horrors is secondary to exploring the idea of whether it’s even worth fighting against impossible odds. There’s no wolf-punching here, merely the struggle to squeeze the last few drops out of a life before death wins; a message far less palatable than the bluntly Manichaean battles Neeson usually fights. This high-mindedness has drawn its own criticisms; how dare this pulpy B-movie try to address the most important issues facing every human? But the disparity between the macho natures of the characters and the vulnerable, terrified survivors they become is arguably the ideal way to show how imminent death can humble all of us, leading to a final act of devastating power. Mamet may have given us a similarly symbolic tale of man vs. nature in his survival epic The Edge but even that most perceptive of masculine dramatists doesn’t approach what is accomplished here. Neeson has been great value in recent years but this remarkable, grueling movie represents his finest hour. We expected an ironic diversion, but Joe Carnahan and his star managed to achieve a kind of brutal, startling profundity. It’s a game-changer for both of them; let’s hope it leads to more ambitious work in the future.

4. Wolf Children

Pixar’s Brave was an interesting attempt to dramatise the love between a mother and her child within a magical framework, at times achieving breathtaking beauty and insight, but notably complicating an otherwise simple tale with anthropomorphic transmogrifications and such like. Your opinion of the movie may vary depending on how you take such things. Mamoru Hosoda’s Wolf Children does similar things to Brenda Chapman and Mark Andrews’ Highland tale, showing the bond between a mother and her children, whose animal nature makes bringing them up even more challenging than usual. It also strikes right at the heart with a directness to equal the opening scene of Up, except stretched out to two hours. The result is exhausting; an assault on the senses and the emotions that left SoC weeping as if bereaved. With admirable honesty Hosoda — aided by a glorious score by Takagi Masakatsu — presents young motherhood as a struggle that can only end in loss, bringing pain leavened by the love and joy of family and community, while also taking time out to honour the fantastical nature of his protagonists without ever losing sight of the story’s emotional core. The delicate skill with which Hosoda dramatises young Hana’s trials is beyond doubt; whether we will ever recover from this lachrymose onslaught, this instantly cherishable masterpiece, remains to be seen.

3. The Master

Paul Thomas Anderson’s spiky movie expands on There Will Be Blood‘s loose narrative structure, presenting a tale of healing in which no one is healed, a tale of education in which no one learns anything, a tale of love in which no one finds love; a choice that has inevitably frustrated many. Freddie Quell and Lancaster Dodd’s peculiar rapport is less a meeting of minds, more the desperate embrace of two men lost in a storm, turning this into a tale of disappointment, both men holding onto a doomed relationship for selfish reasons, almost to the point of destroying each other. To tell that story, Anderson has created a drama that deflates as their friendship dissolves, a platonic love story where happy endings come from the characters realising they’re wasting each others’ time. How fitting that their only talents are for obfuscation and intoxication, in a movie that hides its purpose – the empty life of the charlatan – within scenes as brilliantly baffling as Dodd’s seemingly endless and ineffective deconstruction of his charge, or in a mise-en-scene so perfectly rendered by David Crank, Jack Fisk and Amy Wells, so luminously lit by Mihai Malaimare Jr., so energised by Phoenix and Hoffman at their very best. If There Will Be Blood is the tale of a man who loses his soul and doesn’t care, The Master is a story about two men who have lost sight of their souls but are too stupid and proud to realise it. Such desperation is rarely dramatised, and never before has it been done with such mesmerising and unpredictable immediacy.

2. Holy Motors

Is it possible to like a movie without having a concrete idea of what its intent actually is? Leos Carax’s critically adored festival crowdpleaser is a million mysteries at once, an anti-narrative sunburst of imagery, a handful of short stories that play with audience expectation in the most playful of ways. And that’s the key to appreciating Holy Motors, at least for this viewer. Carax sets his muse, the magical Denis Lavant, loose on Paris in a series of vignettes that set out to play to our expectations before dancing away in bizarre directions, all of which make a perfect dream-like sense, like an image caught at the edge of our vision. So is it a paean to the imminent death of cinema? Does it embrace the digital future? There’s enough in the movie to argue for either case, but also enough for interpretations that Carax is as interested in the stories we all live as in the ones we see on the screen. Lavant’s protagonist is a performer dancing to the tune of an unseen, possibly celestial organ grinder, but is he also just a human, transforming through a number of personas each day as we all do? Is Carax paying homage to the medium of cinema, or is he drawing attention to the audience, and how we live our lives in the light of stories remembered, where we find ourselves lost when real life takes unpredictable turns untold by our cinematic gods? Holy Motors will inevitably flourish upon further viewing, to be plundered for new ideas and interpretations, but this isn’t a barrier to immediate enjoyment. Carax’s joyous melange of image and sound, idea and mood, is welcoming, filled with a warmth and wit rare in art cinema, offering dreams within dreams within glorious dreams.

1. The Avengers

Shades of Caruso knows what it likes, and it rarely feels the urge to apologise for those likes. Yet this may be the most defensive entry in this list, simply because with all the will in the world I cannot argue that Joss Whedon’s superhero epic is a better film than Holy Motors, or The Master. It has a clumsy first hour or so. The plotline in which the team rebels against the machinations of SHIELD is underpowered. Whedon’s eye as a director is not the most reliable. The shady guys on the other end of Nick Fury’s phone feel like artificial obstacles and particularly stupid human beings. And so on, and so on. But my god, look at what it gets right. Look at the ambition of the Marvel Studios project, making these huge, gallumphing movies line up so that we could get this unifying vision at the end of it. Look at the wit on display, the dedication to bringing an entire universe of possibility to life, the effort to understand these icons as distinct and exciting viable characters. I mean, it’s like we got a movie with seven Indiana Jones’ in the lead, they’re that well drawn and likeable, and yet we take this incredible achievement for granted. Okay, I’m getting overexcited here but honestly, to most people this might be little more than a big summer event movie, one with a few nice jokes and some cool action. But to a few of us, this is the electrifying depiction of a childhood fantasy. It’s here! It’s really here! They did it!

It’s impossible to overstate how happy this movie made me. Last year I chose Jeff Nichols’ remarkable but troubling Take Shelter as my movie of the year because it perfectly captured my state of mind; desperately fearful of what is to come. This is the flipside. In times of strife we look back to the things that made us feel safe when we were children, and part of the success of The Avengers is down to its ability to make the audience feel young again, to give us unambiguous goodness and heroism versus unformed but undeniably nefarious threats and, most importantly, not to apologise for it. This is possibly the least complicated movie on this list, but for that reason I love it all the more. It’s “merely” well-wrought escapism, but the very best example of this since Back to the Future, maybe even earlier; a huge, unifying blast of populist joy that turns packed cinemas into some kind of communal dream palace cum stadium. Film lovers worry about the future of the medium, but should resist their negativity, even if it means accepting “hokum” as the solution. Whedon and Marvel Studios brought fun back to cinema this year in the most overwhelming, exhilarating manner imaginable. Nothing in 2012 has made me as euphoric as this delirious display of optimism and spectacle, nothing else left me reeling in this way. So screw the apologies, cancel the equivocation. The year belongs to Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, and so does my heart.

Honorable Mentions:

Chronicle: The only film this year to make the increasingly miserable found-footage genre seem like a viable option. Josh Trank and Max Landis’ superhero movie is actually more a supervillain saga, with Dane DeHaan’s unhappy and sympathetic lost soul becoming a force of darkness upon discovering great power. His increasing instability leads to an ending that evokes memories of Akira. Thrilling, imaginative, emotionally resonant; this is a superb debut, and an instant classic of the genre.

The Pirates: In An Adventure With Scientists!: Finally, Aardman Animations lives up to its potential as an animation powerhouse with this inventive and joke-packed crowdpleaser. For too long they’ve coasted on affection for their endearing shorts, but screenwriter Gideon Defoe, adapting from his popular children’s novel, has brought a necessary sly and snarky wit to a studio whose output can sometimes seem a little too polite. Aardman are looking for backers to fund a sequel; if I had the money I’d fund it myself.

Magic Mike: Congratulations to Steven Soderbergh for making a movie that is defiantly harder to love than the garish good-time movie promised by the ads and yet still made money and generated good word of mouth. That’s how smart and absorbing this story of thwarted entrepreneurial spirit and economic difficulty is; come for the gyrating and greased-up abs, stay for the low-key character drama. And some more abs, cuz seriously, there’s a lot of them, mostly flexing on Channing Tatum’s belly.

21 Jump Street: Regular readers will know that we’re the world’s biggest fans of Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, which dissects movie cliches with the precision of a coroner. This adaptation of the ludicrous 80s TV series looked and sounded like a misfire for Cloudy‘s directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller, but even if it’s not as good as their animated masterwork, it’s still sharp, silly, and perfectly judged, with a stand-out performance from the increasingly lovable Tatum.

The Man With The Iron Fists: If there’s a place in the world of cinema for movies made with precision, sobriety and emotional complexity, there should also be a place for balls-out enthusiasm and goofiness. The haphazard style of The Man With The Iron Fists betrays RZA’s desperate attempts to cram in as many homages to his beloved martial arts genre as possible, but goddamn it, at one point Lucy Liu kicks a guy’s head off, and later RZA punches someone’s eye out. Sometimes this is exactly what you need in your life.

And sometimes what you need in life are SHIT MOVIES and that’s what’s coming up next: my worst movies of the year list.

A Hyperbolic Review Of The Avengers, For The Benefit of My Nerd Brethren

Posted on April 27, 2012 by admiralneck

(FYI, this review is pretty much specific-spoiler-free, with no real plot details that aren’t given away by the trailers. As for character interactions or descriptions of their general awesomeness as written by Joss Whedon, there’s a bit of that, plus hints about dramatic moments. For those who don’t want to risk it, this capsule review should be enough of a recommendation: there’s a lot of funny stuff as the heroes meet and bicker, and then there’s a huge set-piece finale as intense, as prolonged, and as exciting as the end of Takashi Miike’s action masterpiece 13 Assassins, but with superheroes fighting aliens and laying waste to most of New York in doing so. If that doesn’t make you want to see it, I’m never going to be able to convince you.)

To those who have yet to see The Avengers (or to give it its British title, Marvel’s Avenging Heroes of Great Power Who Don’t Wear Bowler Hats But Do Like Leather Catsuits A Bit), the tidal wave of unrestrained praise from early screenings may seem like overkill, the perspective-free hysterical screaming of a gaggle of kidults whose arrested development has prevented them from putting away childish things. There’s been talk of this being the best superhero movie yet made, a flawless jewel, which has given cynics a brand new opportunity to roll their eyes derisively. Let me puncture the babble of praise quickly and then move on from there; this is by no means perfect. It is flawed. It may not be the best superhero movie yet made; that accolade still may rest with The Dark Knight or Richard Donner’s Superman.

To those who, like me, grew up reading Marvel comics, and thrilled at the complexity of the Marvel Universe with its crossovers, relatively consistent continuity, mixture of light and dark dramatic tones, and its thematic clash between gloomy real-world drama and stirring fantastical heroism, those people who have read that same geyser of enthusiasm, that torrent of ZOMG blasting out of the Internet to such an extent that it seems the only possible response to the movie must be to feel inevitably disappointed when you finally see this, I tell you now, you will NOT be disappointed.

Even if this isn’t the greatest superhero movie, it’s the ultimate cinematic expression of the genre so far, one not tempered by caveats about how it’s really a crime thriller a la Heat, except with a mad rich bloke in a Kevlar onesie. This is a hit of pure 100% unexpurgated genre. It features movie stars in daft suits having rucks with bad guys and flying through the air and calling each other names that just shouldn’t work, played with total conviction, and even Joss Whedon’s trademark witty dialogue doesn’t dilute the heroics on display. He believes, and if you believe too, then you’re going to fall deeply in love.

On the other hand, if you dislike the superhero genre for whatever reason — it’s childish, it’s not serious, it’s a fantasy for people who don’t fit in or don’t obsess over the culturally accepted forms of nerdery such as sports or politics or fashion or any other thing where being interested in it means you accumulate a large amount of data about trivial things that are only of interest to other people who share your fascination — then please, don’t see The Avengers. In fact, just for this month, do me a favour. Don’t talk to me about it at all.

Whedon has done a great job of making a funny, exciting, eye-popping spectacle that thunders along at a well-paced clip, featuring the mother of all blow-outs. For most people, this is an enormously entertaining ride. However, if you have even a shred of cynicism about the genre, its trappings and the passion of its fans, then be warned that I’m operating a zero-tolerance policy on this. Last night a random Tweeter responded to my ecstatic post-screening tweets with, “you should get out more”, which led to me writing my first intentionally mean response-tweet; a terrible act in contravention of the Brony Code, which actually kept me up all night feeling rotten about it. Nevertheless, I’m just not interested in hearing about how stupid I am for liking this movie, or for being excited about it, or for anything in general. Why should I quell that enthusiasm? To fit in with the majority of people? But I don’t really like the majority of people. Who does? Nobody, that’s who.

So what does Whedon do wrong? Let’s get that out of the way first. Some of my fears about his direction stand; he’s not as strong with visuals as he would like to be, and anyone who has listened to one of his commentaries will know that he sweats about this more than most directors. He’ll comment exhaustively about long takes and long tracking shots and will talk about technical stuff to such an extent that you wonder if he thinks he has something to prove. He really doesn’t, and his work would benefit from him relaxing about it. There’s not much showing off in Avengers, and there are so many action scenes in it it’s hard to tell what he handled and what was dealt with by the second-unit, but if you’ve learned to look for his authorial stamps, they stand out like a sore thumb (see also Joe Wright and Tom Hooper, whose tics are far far worse and do even more damage to their movies).

The sheer amount of stuff in Avengers can also be problematic. For the most part, Whedon juggles the large cast of characters brilliantly, and gives everyone a chance to shine, even SHIELD agents like Hill and Coulson (especially Coulson). Nevertheless, that massive finale features some unavoidable ellipses, shrinking a larger battle down into a 20-25 minute set-piece that can be accomodated by the budget (which is huge, but when you see the scale of what Whedon and Marvel have attempted here, you’ll still wonder how they did it all). The result is that flow is too often sacrificed in order to keep every ball in the air, with Cap checking in on Black Widow, hurrying off to hit some aliens in the face, then reappearing next to a slightly more tired Black Widow to check in again.

These little updates almost smack of parody, and even I, a fan of the genre, had a feeling of discombobulation at some moments with Cap, in his new and not-really-that-great costume, turning to Thor and saying, “Thor, what do you think of such-and-such?” It’s all played without a cynical nod, and even as a believer it’s hard to swallow that. Or maybe I was reflexively thinking, “Oh God, the haters are gonna have a field day with this scene.” Thankfully, those little breath-intakes of panic, triggered by fear that the movie is teetering on the brink of disaster, are very quickly over, usually because Whedon cleverly punctures the moment with a well-timed joke. His use of humour to leaven the proceedings is timed so perfectly I forgave all of his other trespasses.

And that’s the most important thing I want to convey. Yes, the scale of the proceedings, and the speed with which it was made, and the daunting number of elements to do justice to, and the pressure from the fanbase and Disney and the paying public; all of these things must have been a nightmare to deal with. And yet Whedon has succeeded, beyond the wildest dreams of any of his fans. The audience I saw the movie with last night roared with laughter at the big jokes, cheered at the hero moments, applauded at the end. There were members of the Nerd Community there, four young women in Captain America t-shirts who hollered and yelped with pleasure. Normally this would bug me but I envied them their unabashed, infectious glee. As the movie ended I joined in with their ecstatic applause, helpless to resist.

The list of things Whedon does right is much longer than the wrong-list. His jokes work like gangbusters, his direction of action is mostly clear and precise, and he gets superb performances from his cast. The look of the movie is perfunctory but the sets are pleasingly grandiose, especially the vast control room of the SHIELD helicarrier, which gets a hefty workout. Also pleasing is how Whedon portrays different scales within the movie, from the intimate confessional moments between characters, to the epic finale, and beyond even that into the Cosmic, with imagery here evoking the work of both Jack Kirby and Jim Starlin. The whole Marvel Universe is here; only the grouchiest nitpicky fans will fail to be awed by Whedon’s respect for the source material.

He even gets to improve on the character work from other Marvel movies, adding new tones or enhancing familiar ones that didn’t get a proper workout in the others. His Thor is markedly sadder than the blustery fool who dominates his first outing, and his Cap is a bit jollier. He even gets to enhance one of the things the first Captain America movie hinted at but failed to convey with enough oomph; here we truly see Cap inspiring those around him, which is played both as punchline and stirring example of pure heroism (regular readers will know that unironic heroism is my catnip).

Whedon also cleverly links Black Widow and Hawkeye on an emotional level, allowing the two unpowered characters to back each other up. Hawkeye’s out of the movie for a while, sadly, but he more than makes up for it by the end, with Jeremy Renner effortlessly playing cooler-than-thou and more than justifying his presence on the team. Black Widow has fewer cool moments, but she’s arguably more interesting. There’s a sly build-up of backstory for her as the movie progresses, and by the end she’s the most emotionally open member of the team while still remaining an enigma; some nifty work from a better-than-expected ScarJo. It’s doubtful we’ll get a Hawkeye movie — Renner has enough franchises on his plate as it is — but a Black Widow movie, or a SHIELD movie starring her, is an enticing proposition now.

Even better, he corrals Robert Downey Jr.’s exhibitionism brilliantly; though Stark dominates many scenes with his traditional obnoxious bluster, he plays very well with others, butting heads with Cap and bonding with Bruce Banner. His arc is a little too familiar, maybe, running through the surrender to the idea of sacrifice from the first Iron Man movie and the rejection of solitude from the second, but a big dramatic event in the middle of the movie gives both of those emotional beats enough energy to make them count again. It’s something most filmmakers would shy away from, but it’s arguably Whedon’s masterstroke, heightening the stakes and changing the tone of the movie.

Actually no. The masterstroke is casting Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner and allowing him to play the Hulk in mo-cap form. I’m not a fan of the Hulk particularly, but this version is good enough to make me rethink my lack of engagement. It’s obvious I’m not alone on this. A large number of The Avengers‘ best moments come courtesy of the green giant, earning rapturous responses from the audience. Ruffalo is perfect as the hesitant scientist, rarely making eye contact with anyone, ashamed of his curse, quietly sarcastic about others but terrified of hurting anyone. It’s a sympathetic performance, beautifully shaded. Ed Norton will likely watch this and weep.

It also helps that a lot of the work in making Loki function as a villain was done so well in Thor. Whedon honours Branagh’s movie — and Tom Hiddleston’s fantastic embodiment of the God of Mischief — by making Loki both monumental asshole and vulnerable fool trying to find a place to call home. Some have questioned his motivations for attempting to subjugate humanity, or for bringing the alien force to Earth (no spoilers on the name of the alien race), but it makes sense from where he was at the end of Thor; a silly impetuous boy, hurt by those he was once close to and too bitter to understand that he is loved. Some of the most powerful moments in Avengers are between Thor and Loki, with our Asgardian hero desperate to appeal to the brother hidden behind the villain.

And yet to many viewers, myself included, it’s hard to slice the movie apart to pick out what works and what doesn’t work due to emotional overload, which is why the start of this review is so focused on separating out really passionate die-hard fans from critics, both armchair and professional, though obviously the vast majority of viewers will fall in between these diametrically opposed viewpoints. Come at this movie from the perspective of someone who doesn’t respond to the tropes of the superhero genre, or the Cinema of Spectacle, and more than likely this will leave you cold. And though I’m wary of sneering, personal dismissal I have absolutely no problem with reasoned criticism or subjective disinterest. We all have our own individual criteria for success, and that’s why it’s impossible to please all of the people all of the time. I’m hip to that, daddy-o.

But for some of us, The Avengers isn’t just a movie. It’s a dream come true, a childhood fantasy a long time coming true, and I find it impossible to apologise for that without betraying something fundamental about who I am and how I interact with the rest of the world. For a significant portion of the audience, this is the culmination of an idea growing in our minds since we first read a copy of Marvel Team-Up and got excited because Spider-Man was hanging out with Black Panther, or The Thing was suddenly stuck on a spaceship, out of his depth, chasing Moondragon with the help of Starhawk (Marvel Two-In-One Volume 1 Issue 62, fact fans!). It was too much to hope that this could ever really happen but it has, and it’s even better than we could ever have imagined.

Say it’s clumsy and maybe ugly at times, or trivial and nothing more than pyrotechnic bombast. None of that matters. Whedon’s done an amazing job of making a movie accessible to all; a real crowdpleaser with big drama, action, and more jokes than most comedies. But more amazingly he’s added notes to this symphony of visual and aural overkill that only a few of us will pick out, because we’ve been humming this tune in our heads for a long time. This movie spoke to me, and will speak to others, who have thrilled to the tales told by Kurt Busiek, Roger Stern, Mark Waid, Walt Simonson and so many others. It might even win over some of the haters, and help explain what it is about this genre that means so much to so many.

It celebrates heroism, and courage, and the marvels of world-building unbound by fear of censure from those who feel safer hiding behind a carapace of disdain. It evokes the same inspiring messages about doing the right thing, about believing in better, that comics conveyed when we were young. There were moments in this that made me hyperventilate with excitement, and by the end, as I slumped exhausted in my seat, reeling from the final mid-credit shot and all of the incredible possibilities it opens up for future Marvel movies, I realised what Whedon’s ultimate achievement was; he made me feel like a child again, lost in a Proustian revery of imagination and hope. That means more to me than 2606 words could ever hope to convey.

Can Someone Please Buy Kenny Branagh A Spirit Level?

Posted on April 26, 2011 by admiralneck

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Super Or Not-Super? That Was The Question, Ages Ago

Posted on November 14, 2008 by admiralneck

I hate it when a plan doesn’t come together. This poll, which was originally meant to end several months ago, got dragged beyond its natural endpoint by me because it seemed to keep attracting votes from netsurfers randomly sent here by such Google search terms as “sexxy women boobs”, “January Jones bad actor”, “Seth Lakeman”, and, of course, “Moon Bloodgood”. Of all the things that we have done on this blog, be it incurring the wrath of Torchwood fans, incurring the wrath of Bible fans, or incurring the wrath of friends of super-actor Jesse Plemons, the response to that poll, although small compared to bigger, more professional sites, was significant for us. The temptation was there to keep it up until the next wave of superhero movies comes out, which could be a while, thanks to the writers’ strike.

However, Blogger decided to fuck me. Right now the poll states 65 votes have been counted, when last week that number stood at 74. Nine votes lost to the ether! WTF is that about? Perhaps that’s a glitch that can be explained on Blogger forums, but I’m too distraught to check. As far as I can tell Blogger hates democracy. Someone should call Greg Palast.

Robert Downey Jr. (Iron Man) – 24 (36%)

Christian Bale (Batman) – 16 (24%)

Ron Perlman (Hellboy) – 7 (10%)

Huge Ackman (Wolverine) – 7 (10%)

Tobey Maguire (Spider-Man) – 3 (4%)

Jennifer Garner (Elektra) – 3 (4%)

Brandon Routh (Superman) – 2 (3%)

Halle Berry (Not-Catwoman) – 1 (1%)

Ben Affleck (Daredevil) – 1 (1%)

Patrick Warburton (The Tick) – 1 (1%)

Chris Evans (Human Torch) – 0 (0%)

Thomas “Homeless Dad” Jane (The Punisher) – 0 (0%)

The Shaq (Steel) – 0 (0%)

Nicolas Cage (Ghost Rider) – 0 (0%)

Wesley Snipes (Blade) – 0 (0%)

Ang Lee In A Motion Capture Suit (Hulk) – 0 (0%)

Anyway, before any more votes can go missing, I might as well shut it down now, and reveal the final tallies. Unsurprisingly (at least to me) the clear winner is Robert Downey Jr., who did what only a couple of other superhero actors have been able to do, i.e. take a character we thought we knew and add another dimension to them. Christopher Reeve showed Superman’s fear and vulnerability, Nicholas Cage revealed that Johnny Blaze loves monkey documentaries, and Robert Downey Jr revealed that Tony Stark is funny. For too long the character has seemed like little more than an intense cypher in a suit, but Downey Jr. found the spark that brought him to life.

Of course Stark is a show-off and narcissist, traits that don’t really go away even when he comes to realise what a negative effect Stark Industries has on the world. That balancing act, between playing Stark as a charming but aloof playboy and as a committed but humorless crusader, is what makes Downey Jr’s performance so perfect. It’s such a complete and satisfying incarnation of everyone’s favourite Registration Act-supporting dickbag that, upon seeing it, I immediately hoped that he would get Oscar attention next year. Just like Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl, he was so great and entertaining and instantly transformed into A-list superstar material that people came to see the movie to see him as much as they did the superheroics. Add to that his amazing work on the otherwise disappointing Tropic Thunder, and it’s so much his year that I’d bet his chances are higher than you’d expect. Of course, Tropic Thunder is too offensive to get a nomination for anything other than technical Oscars, so the buzz will transfer to Iron Man. The campaign is apparently in full swing, and though I still harbour natural doubts, there’s hope.

Second place goes to Christian Bale, who did something subtly different than Robert Downey Jr. by showing how the character was meant to work. It’s repeatedly stated in Batman comics that the character is meant to be terrifying, but the image of a guy dressed as a bat and unable to turn his head has never seemed scary to anyone. Bale (and Christopher Nolan) finally cracked how to make Batman as fearsome as his reputation demands, and while some find Bale’s Batvoice ridiculous, I totally bought it, so much so that when reading the comics, I now hear Batman’s dialogue in that insane raspy growl. That said, while I give multiple props to Bale’s intense and customarily intelligent performances, I still hear Kevin Conroy’s voice for Bruce Wayne. Fans of the legendary animated series will know what I’m talking about, especially one regular reader who loves him some Mask of the Phantasm.

Coming joint third, (unless, of course, those nine missing votes went to Shaq for his sensitive portrayal of Steel) Ron Perlman also brought his character to life, but maybe only for me. As I’ve said before, the character of Hellboy never worked on the page (subjectively), but once Perlman appeared onscreen, I finally understood what his appeal was. With the talented Perlman usually relegated to gruff bad guy roles, I’m immensely grateful to Guillermo Del Toro for giving him a chance to show how charming he can be, though I think it would go a lot smoother if he wrote Hellboy some funnier dialogue.

Even though joint third place is a good showing, I expected more votes for Hugh Jackman, whose fanboy-appeasing performance as Wolverine was the instant star-making role that gave the superhero genre its big break in film. More than anything else, the massive popular acceptance of this almost unknown song-and-dance guy as a feral killing machine with leaky tear ducts and a heart of gold made everyone who saw it realise there was a way to make superheroes work in serious movies. Without him and his fantastic hott torso (and the guiding hand of Bryan Singer), I doubt any of the subsequent superhero movies would have been possible.

Speaking of Bryan Singer, his random casting of Brandon Routh as Superman ended up paying off brilliantly, which makes the mediocrity of that movie all the more galling. With The Man of Steel seemingly stalled as of this moment, it’s a source of almost infinite annoyance that Routh, who managed to convince many fans that he could embody the nobility and vulnerability of Kal-El, will probably not get another shot at playing the role. When DC and Warner Brothers announced the Justice League movie, they caused me much sorrow by announcing he wouldn’t reprise the role, made up for it a lot by hinting that he would be replaced by Scott Porter (who is often the moral centre on Friday Night Lights), then pissed me off again by casting some other guy instead. Then they cancelled the film altogether. Whatevs. Seemingly forgotten, Routh only gets two votes, one of them from Canyon.

Though it appears to be an unpopular opinion on the net, I think Jennifer Garner is the tops. I’m pleased she got a few votes, expecting the dreadful nature of Rob Bowman’s Elektra to dissuade voters. I’m not as enthused about Tobey Maguire’s votes, as my initial glee at the casting of yet another serious actor as a popular superhero has waned over the course of three Spidey movies as Maguire seems to be doing almost no other work (nothing on this planet will make me watch Seabiscuit, so don’t even go there), so I can’t even tell whether I think he’s a talented actor any more. He’s just the guy who’s too old to play a young loser with powers, dances badly for no reason other than to make the audience put their hands over their faces in embarrassment, and looks like a stack of wet flappy pancakes when he cries. And he’s coming back for three more movies? Oy.

I can only assume that the single vote for Halle Berry as Not Catwoman was an ironic statement, because even someone utterly transfixed by her infamous beauty couldn’t ignore the ineptitude and total misunderstanding of the character on display here. A lot of fanboys complain about several recent Marvel adaptations, but even the real disasters cannot compare with DC’s run of terrible movies. Daredevil has its detractors, though I still maintain Affleck, with his single vote, was better than the haters say, and it at least made an effort to honour the characters. Ghost Rider was appalling but Nic Cage’s total commitment to the weird saves the film from total fail. The Fantastic Four movies might be kiddie versions of the bonkers science fiction adventures we FF fans love, but even when it’s hard to watch Reed Richards dancing, or Doctor Doom played like a bad guy from some 80s cheap-ass 8 frames-per-second animated shite, you’ve still got Michael Chiklis and Chris Evans (who received one votes in this poll, though I’m sure he had more at one point) honouring Ben Grimm and Johnny Storm with their valiant efforts.

What do DC offer us at their worst? The nigh-unwatchable Supergirl, with Peter “Go! High-Ah! Gehhhhlll!” O’Toole’s career worst performance? Steel, which remains the only superhero adaptation I’ve been unable to finish due to overwhelming psychic pain and disappointment? Batman and Fucking Robin? I’d rather rewatch Jonathan Hensleigh’s The Punisher any day, especially as Thomas “Homeless Dad” Jane is my hero, and to be honest the worst crime of the movie is to be a homage to Don Siegel-style economy in the age of Michael Bay-style excess (not that I think emulating Don Siegel is a crime, just a question of misjudging a mood). I predict a wave of reappraisal when the forthcoming sequel is finally released.

Batman and Robin would be the worst DC adaptation so far, except that it at least gave the world the line “You’re not sending me to da coolah!”, which is still in constant rotation in our house. It’s not much, but that vaults it above the complete failure that is Catwoman. Her weakness is insensibility upon exposure to catnip? Her nemesis is an insane cosmetics entrepreneur (played with an offensive lack of skill by Sharon Stone, no less)? That this anti-feminist fiasco was made while Daniel Waters’ brilliantly subversive script sits on a metaphorical shelf would make me doubt the existence of God if I didn’t already doubt the existence of God. A lesser blogger than I would probably write something pun-tastic like, “It was a purr-fectly hair-i-ball cat-astrophe that you should make a fe-line to avoid.” An even lesser blogger might refer to it as Scatwoman. However that kind of dismissal isn’t enough for a failure this total. It’s diarrhoea in the middle of the night. It’s vomit in a pile of freshly washed clothes. It’s nappy rash, poison ivy, tennis elbow, insomnia, and anaphylactic shock all at the same time. Never let it be spoken of again.

Zero votes for Nicolas Cage (which will sadden Johnny Blaze-fan Canyon, I’m sure), Ang Lee in a Motion Capture Suit (even after the blank Hulk Smash performance on the most recent movie failed to generate even a fraction of the character that Ang Lee did), and, most shocking of all, zero votes for Dr. Wesley T. Snipes, who kicked so much vampire bottom in the Blade trilogy? How soon we forget. Or perhaps people thought they would get hassled by the IRS for supporting him. Wimps! Haven’t superheroes shown we should stand up to tyranny? I’m tempted to hand those nine votes to him, giving the Dr. of Asskicking a third place spot. Oh, and kudos for noticing poor Patrick Warburton at the bottom of the poll. I’m glad someone threw him some one vote worth of love for his heroic blue-suited silliness.

Right. I’m done. Happy now, Blogger? ::pouts::

Everyone Should Drink The Gamma-Irradiated Kool-Aid

Posted on June 14, 2008 by admiralneck

While being a comic nerd can be way more fun than the cool kids will admit (those assholes!), it also has its share of frustrations. Loving lists as much as I do, I was recently inspired by a Comic Book Resources feature to compile a tally of my favourite Marvel and DC comic characters, and the first list featured a bunch of cool villains (Magneto, Thanos, Kang), some obvious ones (The Thing, Spider-Man, though only in his Ultimate incarnation, and not the much-compromised 616 version), and the less popular ones (She-Hulk, Adam Warlock).

Most of those characters are still turning up in current continuity, so I still get to enjoy their adventures, but when it comes to movies, I suffer grievously. We get Elektra, three Punishers, and two Hulk movies, but no Adam Warlock? Gah! The movie world would be improved immensely by 70s-era Jim Starlin-esque madness, with Pip, Gamorra, and the faux-Elric Warlock flitting around the cosmos and getting into brain-bending fights with The In-Betweener. Why can no one else see this? I should adapt the damn thing myself and get some of that sweet Marvel/Merrill Lynch bank for myself.

So yeah, instead of getting the long-discussed Captain America or Thor, we get another Hulk movie. I’ll be honest, I’m not a fan of the green lump, preferring the post-modern silliness of his endearing and inspiring cousin, She-Hulk, to his ponderous adventures. There’s a place for mega-strong characters, and for anti-heroes, and characters with a light and dark side battling within them, and yet even though he has all three characteristics I still don’t find Hulk compelling, except in rare circumstances. Greg Pak’s recent Planet Hulk series was terrific (and World War Hulk was okay too, though perhaps not as impressive overall), but that was as much because of the interesting supporting cast and peculiar scope of it than because it gave the main character something more interesting to do than merely evade capture and then get into repetitive scrapes.

I look forward to reading Peter David’s run on it, expecting a lot after hearing so much praise for it, but I doubt I will be converted by the end of it, especially knowing it was truncated against his wishes. As for the TV show, sorry, but if you’re going to have to restrict the adventures of an enormous, superstrong green giant to defending the rights of factory workers who have been exploited by greedy managers on a weekly basis, even as a kid with even lower standards than I do now, I’m going to be unimpressed. Late appearances by Thor and Daredevil didn’t help either, especially when Daredevil is played by the guy from StreetHawk. StreetHawk, people! Bearing that in mind, will you now please give The Man Affleck a break? Please?

So I don’t like Hulk, but then I was never crazy about Iron Man, and I went nuts with anticipation about that movie, mostly because I love the four main cast members (and again, I won’t apologise for thinking Gwynnie Paltrow is a very talented woman), and the director, and director of photography Matthew Libatique, whose work on The Fountain featured some of my favourite lighting of the decade so far. The Incredible Hulk couldn’t hope to match up to that. As I’ve said before, I’m not a big fan of Edward Norton, though he is obviously a very talented actor. As are William Hurt and Tim Roth, but I’ve never warmed to them either. Their involvement did not excite me, even though it was nice to see character actors getting cast instead of giving the roles to whatever hott young actor is seen as bankable nowadays. I’ll give Hurt a break for starring in Altered States, one of my all-time favourite films. Plus, even Roth gave one of the worst performances in film history (his “comedy” turn in Four Rooms, which almost put me off him for life), I did think he was so good in Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes that I’ve actually recommended the silly lumpen thing to people just on the strength of his work alone. He really was amazing in it, way better than the movie deserved.

To make things worse, Betty Ross was to be played by Liv Tyler, an actress whose appeal utterly eludes me. She is referred to as a great beauty, but that’s in the eye of the beholder, and this beholder don’t see it. Sorry, Liv. (Canyon pointed out to me during the film that she looks like she should be a Simpsons character, and I can’t argue with that.) Beyond that, I’ve never been convinced by her performances, except for maybe Lord of the Rings, though even then she seemed to give the least interesting performance in the trilogy. It gives me no pleasure to diss her, but this is how down I was on the new Hulk project. And who was writing it? Zak Penn, who has writing credits on X-Men 3, Elektra, Behind Enemy Lines, and Inspector Gadget. That he appears to be Marvel Studios’ go-to guy with scripts annoys me almost as much as the news that exec David Maisel won’t pay Jon Favreau a proper wage for Iron Man 2. Dude, Favreau is a brother to all nerds, who you rely on. Better play nice, or it won’t just be Ed Norton avoiding your movies. And I’m not counting this jokey Jimmy Kimmel movie as Norton doing proper publicity for the movie, the primadonna dope.

In fact, the only thing that made me interested in seeing The Incredible Hulk was the presence of Louis Leterrier behind the camera. A lot of fanboys were upset about that, mostly because The Transporter movies are kinda cheap Euro-actioners that didn’t set the world on fire, but hell, I like them enough (I love that the hero has such high-functioning OCD that it becomes a benefit to him), and besides, Unleashed (aka Danny The Dog) is fantastic, so I was interested to see him do something outside his normal boundaries.

We caught it yesterday, and though it unfortunately stands in the shadows of the far superior Iron Man, it is certainly deserving of more attention from the nerd massive, and hopefully from a wider audience than that, and yes, I’m saying this because I want Marvel to do well enough to get me that damn Avengers movie I’m looking forward to so much (the Thursday/Friday gross is estimated at about $21m, which is not that bad, seeing as how even Iron Man‘s Thursday gross was only $5m). It’s got nerd cachet (even Rick Jones gets a mention if you watch the opening credits closely enough), it’s got romance and action and even a couple of jokes, and Leterrier pulls off some memorable setpieces, especially an early scene in a darkened factory, with Hulk striking from the shadows. It’s beautifully lit and choreographed, and comes after a crisply edited chase scene through a breathtakingly shot favela of seemingly infinite size.

Though the second half of the film drags compared to the opening hour, there are still memorable moments. Though I don’t like Tim Blake Nelson’s form of quirk, his final fate in the movie made me very very happy in a nerdy way, and actually eager for further appearances of Dr. Samuel Sterns in future Marvel movies. Even better, the final battle between the mutated Emil Blonsky and Hulk is totally thrilling, sending the audience we saw it with into paroxysms of joy. We were both very enhappied by the big finale, not to mention the much-vaunted appearance by Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark (obviously dragged out of its logical place after the credits to sit right after what would be the natural final shot of the movie). Though she seemed to enjoy the big action ending, Canyon pointed out something after we came out, that much of the cool Hulk moments during the finale bore a similarity to my favourite Hulk-related item, the hugely underrated Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, which remains possibly the best superhero-related game yet devised.

Though superhero games often find it hard to balance the challenge of the gaming experience and the potentially overpowerful superhero, with most games artificially hobbling the main character in silly ways (such as the Nintendo 64 Superman game that took place in a virtual reality universe, with Superman’s powers relying on collecting power-ups), IH:UD did a great job of matching the threat with your immense powers. The sandbox element of the game wasn’t perfect, but the thrill of leaping around the city and dealing out vast amounts of damage was just right. The finale of the movie features some moments that come straight out of the game, with Hulk leaping up the sides of buildings, Abomination jumping onto a helicopter, and Hulk doing one of his signature attacks (also featured in the comics) in order to save Betty. I won’t spoil it, but it involves fire, and got a “WOW!” from both of us.

Unfortunately, while there are many pleasures to the movie, the pacing is awful, with many non-action scenes running on for way too long. Though Zak Penn does a better job here than on any movie he has been involved with before, the plot is anything but propulsive unless Hulk is onscreen, with Ed Norton’s Banner not being interesting enough to care about, which is a problem that resides in the character, and not in Norton’s professional but cold performance. It defeated Eric Bana too, remember. As Banner is all about avoiding passion, the time spent with William Hurt’s furious General Ross resonates far more, as his guilt and anger is much more cinematic than Norton’s panic. At first Hurt is a bit one note, but eventually he manifests the ethical battle at the heart of the character better than Sam Elliott, who is simply too likeable to play someone with the ambiguous motivation of Thunderbolt Ross. You can hiss at Hurt, but also appreciate why he is the man he is. With Elliott, you just wanted to stroke his amazing mustache.

Even better, Roth is on excellent form as the weaselly Blonsky, driven by what seems to be self-hatred and ambition to endure an agonising series of Super-Soldier Serum injections (and yes, the stage is set for the Captain America movie with great skill). He is as much an unstoppable force as Hulk himself, even before he goes too far and becomes The Abomination. He also has the most shocking moment of the movie to himself, as Hulk dispatches him during the university battle scene with brutal efficiency. It’s quick, shocking, and blackly funny.

All of that is for naught when Liv Tyler appears, her line readings unintentionally hilarious, ruining any emotional power in her scenes with breathy, melodramatic misinterpratations of the film’s tone. One awful scene, with her in conversation with Bruce Banner on the night he shows up in her life again, made both of us cringe. Even in a small scene like that, featuring some really flat dialogue, Norton manages to bring to it a variety of emotions; intensity, pain, shyness, love. Tyler just intones her lines with little feel for how to bring them to life, and our hearts went out to Norton. It was embarrassing seeing him effortlessly bring depth to the emptiest of moments, while she could barely even be convincing holding a pile of pyjamas.

The big emotional scene in the film, with Hulk and Betty hiding from the Army in a cave, is obviously meant to have an epic King-Kong-esque sweep to it, but it is ruined by both the performances of Tyler, hooting her dialogue at a tennis ball on the end of a stick held by an AD with all of the emotional intensity of a woman pouring her heart out to a tennis ball on the end of a stick held by an AD, and the CGI Hulk, which never really convinces.

That’s not to say it’s a bad effect; it’s about as good as it gets on a rushed big-budget movie like this (notably the Transformatrons in Michael Bay’s Transformatronicers are far more interesting to look at than Hulk, and better integrated into the real world imagery). People will carp at the FX (and some already have), but it never really bothered me on a technical level. What did annoy me is that even though I preferred most of the casting on Leterrier’s Hulk over Lee’s (with the exception of Tyler as Betty, though I didn’t like Jennifer Connelly that much either), I really loved Lee’s Hulk performance, and thought this was a huge step down.

While fanboys and critics agonise over the use of CGI in superhero movies, and bitch about how both Hulks are not photo-realistic (what. EVER!), Lee’s decision to don a motion capture suit and act out Hulk’s movements was inspired. Instead of the repetitive and generic throw-arms-back-and-roar performance in the new Hulk movie, with Lee in the skintight black mo-cap costume we got real character, real quirkiness, almost realistic movements. Hulk falls over, fails to grab things, reacts with frustration at his surroundings; it’s a fascinating and entertaining choice.

The facial work is fantastic too. Possibly my favourite scene in the whole film comes when Hulk lands in a desert oasis and stops to look at his surroundings, finally finding a kind of peace. His eyes flicker from object to object, and his face relaxes. It’s such a perfect, and weird, moment, in the middle of all that hectic editing and action. In the second Hulk movie, all the green shoutyman does is roar, though at the end he manages to express tetchiness tinged with regret whenever his facetime with Betty gets interrupted by hi-tech weaponry trying to kill him. Though I’m glad the FX guys and Leterrier managed to get around to adding that reaction, it’s nowhere near as interesting a CGI performance than that of the Lee original.

That said, I did enjoy this version of the Hulk more than the Lee original, which was hard to take seriously, but even though I anticipate watching this conventional version of the character more often, and think the Lee version was way too sure of its own profundity and importance when in fact that portentousness kept tripping the movie up, at least that version had some beauty and weirdness, existing as an original exploration of a familiar character, while this new version feels like everything we have seen before and expected from a Hulk movie with little to surprise us. While we gain coherence and enjoyable spectacle, we lose oddness, eccentricity, originality. I got a huge kick out of seeing Hulk use a police car as boxing gloves, but I also liked seeing bombs silently exploding in the air above Hulk, and watching him earning some peace while leaping across the desert, and blasting through a cloud in freezeframes, carried by the electrified essence of his insane father, prior to overloading that man with the infinite rage that powers him. Yes, that ending was inherently silly, but it was bold and breathtaking. Even though the big fight with The Abomination was awesome, it was never going to be as peculiar as that madness, with Nick Nolte eating the scenery (literally).

Perhaps that’s the best thing I’ve gained from watching the Leterrier Hulk. It gave me the movie I (naively) thought I would be seeing when I watched the Lee Hulk, and though I still enjoyed it a lot, it also made me look back at that original version with new eyes. It was a film I wavered on for a long time, before realising I didn’t think it was all that, and now I can go back to it with a calmer outlook. Now we have had another chance to see a smash-filled Hulk movie just like the ones we saw in our heads when reading comics during our childhoods, maybe now we can be grateful to Ang Lee, James Schamus, and the rest of the original Hulk team for giving us a cinematic experience unlike anything else that ever existed before and ever will again, instead of thinking that we’ve forever missed our shot to see a big green monster fending off StarkTech sonic beams using big sheets of metal. Now we have both versions, and finally I see why Marvel Studios decided to film this instead of Adam Warlock: Elric in Space. And, despite my initial reservations, I am grateful.

Iron Man FTW!!!

Posted on May 4, 2008 by admiralneck

This morning, prior to seeing Iron Man, we caught a Sky Movies preview show that featured Robert Downey Jr. (who we love) commenting on how bloggers can wreck a $165m movie if they disapprove of how comic characters are portrayed. Well, luckily for Marvel Studios, this is merely one of many blogs that adored Iron Man, not only for its fealty to the subject matter, either introducing elements straight from the comics or cleverly redefining them, as with Jarvis (wonderfully voiced by Paul Bettany) or the Ten Rings of The Mandarin, and not only because the cast was uniformly wonderful, and yes, not only because it was an absolute hard-rocking blast of an action movie, perfectly mixing humour and drama, but also for making something both light and dark, entertaining and serious, and all of it based around the main character arc and laced with real-world relevance.

I was impressed that the film is set in a world where the War On Terror has occurred but the conflict is something that informs the overarching story, is an element that is a fact of life and not a metaphorical touchstone in place of a story (which is something that has threatened to overwhelm a lot of recent fiction). We’ve finally moved on from pointing out that we are in a new century with a new kind of war and then patting ourselves on the back for it, and are now telling stories that are set in that world without making a big deal about it. It’s a lot easier to swallow and, even though this film touches on serious issues, is a lot more fun as well.

Though it might seem like these newly unpretentious storytellers have become blasé about the war, I see it as artists now attempting to figure out ways to live in this world instead of trying to figure out what went wrong and who we should blame, which gets us nowhere. Iron Man concerns one man willing to take responsibility for the way the world is, and tries to right that wrong. It’s fair to say Ayn Rand would be disgusted with it.

All of this would mean nothing if the film was trying to address these issues metaphorically, so we’re lucky that Jon Favreau and his team of writers are willing to do that old school trick of making the surface story and character arc reinforce each other, which all stories should do, but often don’t nowadays, and yes I realise that makes me sound like David Thompson or Leslie Halliwell or something. Sorry.

The core of the story is something universal: coming to a realisation of what it is to be heroic, and then flying in the face of universal disapproval in order to be a hero when all around you are threatened by your idealism. In the face of values so distorted that expansion of territory, exploitation of resources, and dominance of worldview can be spun until they appear to be heroic endeavours, Iron Man dares to say that’s bullshit. It can be something as simple as saving people from murderous bullies, especially when they are empowered by the byproducts of our society, and if we don’t even do that, then we really are lost.

As I’ve said before, in superhero movies there is not enough heroics, with heroes fighting supervillains because of some disagreement between them instead of being super-citizens improving our world. In Iron Man Stark sets out to improve the whole world, to right a wrong that he had never noticed before, and for which he felt a responsibility. It’s a character story brilliantly realised on a global scale, a fight to save a soul that, as the opposite of collateral damage, might save the world.

I loved one small scene in the middle of the film, with Stark flying to Afghanistan to save the village of his own saviour, Yinsen (played by Shaun Toub, given much better material here than in that most mealy-mouthed of worthy movies, Paul Haggis’ Crash). His interest is in destroying his own weaponry, which has fallen into the hands of the Ten Rings terrorists, but while doing that he saves the villagers from forcible relocation and murder and repays his debt to his murdered ally. In one of the few moments that might be seen as being a message related to the War on Terror, Stark disarms one of the Ten Rings lieutenants, and instead of dealing with him himself, leaves him to the villagers and flies away.

Certainly that could be seen as a comment on the Iraq situation, but it’s also a moment that originates in who Stark is. He won’t kill an unarmed man, and the outcome of that stance is that he will leave the situation to be dealt with by those who should deal with it. Perhaps once the playing field is levelled by taking away the weaponry made by the powerful who have a vested interest in maintaining conflict, then we might be able to truly step back from these international conflicts instead of making them worse. That said, I really don’t think the Ten Rings terrorist was easily forgiven for his sins and then let go. Which sucks, but apparently freedom is messy! (And yes, hopefully that’s the last time I’ll ever quote Donald Rumsfeld.)

Not only does he save the villagers, but he also saves a pilot endangered by his own clumsy mid-air antics, again taking responsibility for what he does (another great visualisation of the arc Tony moves along). I’d have liked more of that random heroism, but there’s a lot to get through, and the point is made. He is a real hero trying to help everyone. Marc Guggenheim and Paul Gulacy’s excellent Squadron Supreme: Hyperion vs. Nighthawk mini set in the Sudan might have been a more realistic portrayal of what happens when superheroes get involved in real world troubles (in that complex geopolitical issues cannot be resolved by people who merely have the ability to punch things very hard), but Iron Man is smart enough to avoid having our hero attempt to stop the war altogether. He can only deal with the terrifying weaponry he has built, which, as I said above, might be good enough, certainly for his own redemption. And yes, in our world that might seem idealistic and naïve, but in the world of the film, it echoes and reinforces that character arc from ignorance and arrogance to humility and responsibility, which is very satisfying.

Peter Bradshaw, in a review I think was written moments after he stubbed his toe, so needlessly dismissive is it, carps that…

Iron Man, for all its disposability, makes a cheerful and unpretentious change to the current crop of war movies. At least at first. But I am sorry to say that it is guilty of the sneaky chauvinist trick of making the ultimate villain an American: a mannerism common to many Hollywood movies that cannot quite bring themselves to accord foreigners the status of effective enmity.

But the whole point of the movie is that Stark is responsible for the warfare he grows to despise, and that is dramatised in the conflict with his other half, Obadiah Stane. Making the villain an outsider would dilute the arc to pointlessness. Besides, the scene is set for blowback in the second movie, with The Mandarin seeking revenge for his betrayal by Stane. Maybe then Bradshaw will be happy.

Of course, this is all well and good, and is merely my way of saying how pleased I was that the film feels like it was crafted from the ground up and not just cobbled together. Marvel Studios doesn’t need my praise, as figures just in show that the film is an enormous hit, earning $200m worldwide since Thursday. That it didn’t earn as much as the appalling Spider-Man 3 is the only bad thing about that, but then let’s hope that this marks the beginning of a trend, with superhero movies made by people who understand how the genre works and funded by those same people. Or course, Iron Man‘s huge box office is good news for the studio, but this Financial Times interview with Marvel Studios chairman David Maisel shows that this hopefully fruitful period of nerdvana might still not last long.

Most studios in Hollywood have offset the risks of film production by raising money from private equity groups and hedge funds. Marvel has taken a different route, using the film rights to its characters as collateral for a loan without forsaking any equity in its films.

Since Marvel tends to be a “fiscally conservative company”, Mr Maisel had to work hard to come up with a financing package that did not expose the comics group to undue risk. After convincing Marvel to launch the studio in 2003, he spent two years structuring a $525m loan financing deal, which was underwritten by Merrill Lynch and secured against the theatrical rights to films that would be produced by the studio.

The financing covers Marvel’s releases until 2012 but does not give the banks any equity in the films. Instead, the banks will receive the capital plus interest and will have the right to make future films using the 12 comic-book characters included in the deal in the event of the company defaulting on its payments. The financing structure guarantees the release of Marvel’s first four films and will be followed by an evaluation period. Assuming the films have performed well, Marvel will retain the theatrical rights to the 12 characters.

The message is, even if the trailer for The Incredible Hulk looks really boring, we fans have a duty to see it at the cinema. Why? Because if you’ve not yet seen the film, the final pre-credits line of the film and the post-credits cameo appearance by Sam Jackson will make your head explode with pure nerd joy. At our screening, the nerds who stayed behind for that final scene burst into applause at it, even though they knew what was coming. Marvel Studios must succeed, and keep hold of those twelve characters. Our nerd dreams depend on it.

Shades of Caruso

Circuit interruptus.

Category Archives: Marvel Studios