For regular visitors to the Land of Caruso-Shades the realisation that Listmania! isn’t even halfway over yet won’t be too much of a surprise, but for everyone else who stumbles across this, I’ll wager the emotion is something akin to what it would be like if your soul wanted to vomit ectoplasm. Listmania! never ends! As soon as I finish the next ::checks WordPress dashboard:: ::winces:: three to four posts I’ll be thinking about the next series of Listmania! posts, wondering if the movies I see at the start of 2013 will still impress me by the end (fyi The Grey was one of the first films I saw in 2012 and I was still in love with it twelve months later. Good work, @Carnojoe.)
Of course this list took longer to do than I’d planned, as we were catching up on movies I’d wanted to watch for the main lists. Django! Zero Dark Thirty! The Paperboy! And two of them were very good, while one of them was… ::thousand-yard stare::, but whaddayaknow, I was right to put Avengers at the top of the best list. I honestly thought Django would easily beat it but to do that it would also have to beat Inglourious Basterds, and it doesn’t, at all, and I should have realised that because Basterds is a goddamn masterpiece. I liked Django all right but I didn’t flip for it, even despite the righteous carnage inflicted upon Whitey by the brilliantly realised hero.
In fact I think I liked Zero Dark Thirty more, which I didn’t expect. And yet even that wasn’t better than The Avengers. Yes, Jessica Chastain is very impressive and Kathryn Bigelow’s direction is forensically precise and admirable, and the entire cast is fantastic, full of SoC favourites from supernaturally charismatic Jason Clarke to Chris Pratt (utterly incapable of not giving a funny spin to every line) to Kyle Chandler and his Parted-Hair-of-Efficient-Bureaucracy, but it doesn’t feature the God of Thunder holding his arm out for a scarily long time, summoning Mjolnir through a flying helicarrier’s wall, and then twatting the Hulk with it. Nothing tops that.
Okay, here are the performances of the year, both good, bad and miscellaneous. I’ve spent way longer than usual on this but as ever I just know I’ve forgotten something. Sorry, whoever you were that I loved / hated. Quick caveat, as ever! When I say “Worst Performance” that is meant to direct my ire at the work in this performance alone, and is not a value judgement on them in general. Some of the people on those lists are actors / actresses I really like, but they were poorly directed or made poor choices and ruined or negatively affected the movie they were in. I’m sure they will understand.
Best Performance by an Actress: Marion Cotillard – Rust and Bone
Honorable Mentions:
Jennifer Lawrence – The Hunger Games
Andrea Riseborough – Shadow Dancer
Meryl Streep – Hope Springs
Emmanuelle Riva – Amour
Anna Kendrick – Pitch Perfect
Best Performance by an Actor: Joaquin Phoenix – The Master
Honorable Mentions:
Liam Neeson – The Grey
Denis Lavant – Holy Motors
Toby Jones – Berberian Sound Studio
Michael Fassbender - Prometheus
Tommy Lee Jones – Hope Springs
Best Supporting Performance by an Actress: Dame Judi Dench – Skyfall
Honorable Mentions:
Doona Bae (as Sonmi-451) – Cloud Atlas
Olivia Thirlby – Dredd
Linda Bright Clay – Seven Psychopaths
Mia Wasikowska – Lawless
Ann Dowd - Compliance
Best Supporting Performance by an Actor: Christopher Walken – Seven Psychopaths
Honorable Mentions:
Michael Shannon – Premium Rush
Leonardo DiCaprio – Django Unchained
James Gandolfini – Killing Them Softly
Philip Seymour Hoffman – The Master
Gary Oldman – The Dark Knight Rises
Most Likable Ensemble Cast: The Avengers
Best Individual Voice Work: Hugh Grant – The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists
Best Voice Cast/Direction: Chris Fell / Sam Fell – ParaNorman
Breakthrough Performance by an Actress: Quvenzhané Wallis - Beasts of the Southern Wild
Breakthrough Performance by an Actor: Ernst Umhauer – Dans La Maison
Best Performance by a Singer (Female): Kylie Minogue - Holy Motors
Best Performance by a Singer (Male): Tom Waits – Seven Psychopaths
Best Performance by a Film Director: Werner Herzog – Jack Reacher
Best Cameo: Harry Dean Stanton – The Avengers
Honorable Mention: Vincent Gallo – 2 Days in Paris
Franchise-Saviour of the Year: Josh Brolin – Men in Black III
Best Recasting of the Year: Edward Norton (a not-quite-convincing Bruce Banner in The Incredible Hulk) becomes Mark Ruffalo (charming but dark, funny but tragic; the definitive Bruce Banner, in The Avengers)
Most Improved Performance Of The Year, Which Isn’t A Surprise As He Was Working With David Cronenberg And He’s Never Made A Movie That Didn’t Have An Excellent Lead Performance: Robert Pattinson – Cosmopolis
“I Think You Should Work Exclusively With The Wachowskis And / Or Tom Tykwer From Now On Because They Made You Raise Your Game 1000% For This” Performances of the Year: Halle Berry (as Luisa Rey and Meronym) – Cloud Atlas
Best Performance That Doesn’t Really Match The Tone Of The Film, Thus Leading To A Weird, Discombobulating Effect Where You Think, “This Is Really Good But I Kinda Hate It”: Tom Cruise - Rock of Ages
“See? I Told You He Could Act, But I Still Kept Getting Pushback Even After I Said He Was Amazing In The Lincoln Lawyer And Bernie Which, I Get It, Nobody Saw, But Now This Year Everyone’s Acting Like They Always Liked Him And I Call Bullshit On That, Cuz I Have A Very Long Memory For Shit Like This, You Have No Idea, So Don’t Come Around Here Acting Like You’re His Biggest Fan When He Starts Getting Oscar Buzz For Jeff Nichols’ Mud, I’m Fucking Serious” Performances of the Year: Matthew McConaughey - Magic Mike / Killer Joe / The Paperboy
“You’re So Much More Interesting As An Actor When You’re Not Just Shrieking ‘OPTIMUUUUUUUUS’ At A Gaffer Holding A Cardboard Cut-Out Of A Big Robot” Performance Of The Year – Shia LaBoeuf – Lawless
“You’re So Much More Interesting As An Actress When You’re Not Having To Wastefully Bounce Your Personality Off A Charisma Tar-Pit Like Gerard Butler And You Get To Work With A Director / Writer Who Trusts You And Gives You Funny Material” Performance Of The Year – Jennifer Aniston – Wanderlust
Honorary McConaughey Award For Being So Much Better Than People Give Him Credit For, Especially In This: Seann William Scott – Goon
“I Really Hope You Get To Have The Career My Hero Chiwetel Ejiofor Almost Got Before Ending Up Playing Second Fiddle To Actors Significantly Less Talented And Appealing Than Him Because Dammit, You’re Just As Good” Performances of the Year: David Oyelowo – Jack Reacher / The Paperboy (and Lincoln and Red Tails, which I haven’t seen yet)
“Good Work Making This Undistinguished Movie Seem Better Than It Was, But I Do Hope You Get To Diversify Soon Because Even Though This Incremental Step Away From Your Stock Character Is A Promising Move You Need To Really Push It Now, IMO, Or You’ll End Up Like Ken Jeong, Just Doing The Same Thing Over And Over Again, And Look Where That Got Him, I Mean He’s Been In Two Michael Bay Movies In A Row, And I Don’t Think That’ll Ever Happen To You, Because Bay Only Ever Recognises Women If They’ve Been In Their Smalls In FHM, But Something Similarly Restrictive Might Happen, And We Don’t Want That” Performance of the Year: Aubrey Plaza – Safety Not Guaranteed
Scenestealing Actress of the Year: Anne Hathaway - The Dark Knight Rises
Scenestealing Actor of the Year: Bill Nighy – Wrath of the Titans
Best Career Moves of the Year (Actress): Marion Cotillard - The Dark Knight Rises / Rust and Bone
Honorable Mention: Emily Blunt - Looper / Your Sister’s Sister (and less so, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen / The Five-Year Engagement)
Best Career Moves of the Year (Actor): Channing Tatum - Magic Mike / The Vow / Haywire / 21 Jump Street
Honorable Mention: Scoot McNairy - Argo / Killing Them Softly
Worst Performance by an Actress: Rosamund Pike – Jack Reacher
Dishonorable Mentions:
Julia Roberts - Mirror, Mirror
Reece Witherspoon – This Means War
Jennifer Westfeldt – Friends With Kids
Milla Jovovich – Resident Evil: Retribution
Katherine Heigl - One For The Money
Worst Performance by an Actor: Tyler Perry – Alex Cross
Dishonorable Mentions:
Ben Stiller – The Watch
Chris Pine – This Means War
John Cusack – The Raven
Ryan Reynolds – Safe House
Adam Scott – Friends With Kids
Worst Supporting Performance by an Actress: Chelsea Handler – This Means War
Dishonorable Mentions:
Alice Eve – The Raven
Elizabeth Banks – What To Expect When You’re Expecting
Rebel Wilson – Pitch Perfect
Famke Janssen – Taken 2
Eva Green – Dark Shadows
Worst Supporting Performance by an Actor: Vince Vaughn – The Watch
Dishonorable Mentions:
Ed Burns – Alex Cross
Dev Patel – The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
Ben Mendelsohn – The Dark Knight Rises
Rhys Ifans - The Five-Year Engagement
Luke Evans – The Raven
Least Likeable Ensemble Cast: Project X
Worst Individual Voice Work: Ed Helms – The Lorax
Worst Voice Cast /Direction: Chris Renaud / Kyle Balda – The Lorax (Bonus fuck-you’s for video linked to Mazda’s YouTube account)
Franchise-Doomer of the Year: Taylor Kitsch – John Carter / Battleship
Worst Performance by a Singer (Female): Macy Gray – The Paperboy
Worst Performance by a Singer (Male): Ben Drew (aka Planb, whatever the hell that means) – The Sweeney
Worst Performance by a Film Director: Seth McFarlane – Ted
Worst Cameo: Chuck Norris - The Expendables 2
Most Wasted Actress: Naomie Harris - Skyfall
Most Wasted Actor: Brendan Gleeson - Safe House / The Raven
Most Entertaining Performance by an Actress in a Bad Movie: Erika Sawajiri – Helter Skelter
Honorable Mention: Rosemary DeWitt – The Watch
Most Entertaining Performance by an Actor in a Bad Movie: Nicolas Cage – Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance
Honorable Mention: Will Forte – The Watch
Most Bafflingly Busy Actress of the Year: Maggie Grace (Taken 2 / Lockout / The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2)
Most Bafflingly Busy Actor of the Year: Mark Duplass (Safety Not Guaranteed / People Like Us / Your Sister’s Sister / Zero Dark Thirty)
Oddest Recasting Of The Year, As I Didn’t Know They Had Hair Dye In The Greece Of Ancient Myth: Andromeda in Clash of the Titans (played by brunette Alexa Davalos) becomes Andromeda in Wrath of the Titans (blonde Rosamund Pike)
Best Accent: Emily Blunt – Looper
Worst Accent: Alison Brie – The Five-Year Engagement
Worst Accent in Cloud Atlas: Tom Hanks (as Dermot Huggins) - Cloud Atlas
Dishonorable Mention: Jim Sturgess (as “Highlander”) - Cloud Atlas
Other Dishonorable Mentions: Seriously, we could be here all day – Cloud Atlas
Most Offensive Accent / Dodgy Impersonation Of Peter Sellers In The Party: Dev Patel – The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
Dishonorable Mention: Lockout (solely due to the presence of Joe Gilgun)
“Where Have You Been?” Actor of the Year: R. Lee Ermey - The Watch
Best Performance By Hott Sam Rockwell: Seven Psychopaths
Best Performance By Bruce Willis: Moonrise Kingdom
Worst Performance By Bruce Willis: The Cold Light of Day
Best Performance By A Chin: Karl Urban – Dredd
Good Enough Performance That I Now Have To Forget My Usual Antipathy, Without Which I Feel A Bit Lost: Jim Sturgess (as Adam Ewing and Hae-Joo Chang) – Cloud Atlas
“Okay, Everybody Loves You Again Now, So Don’t Fuck It Up This Time” Performance of the Year: Jamie Foxx – Django Unchained
“More Of This And Less Of This, Please” Actress of the Year: Jessica Biel (More dramas like The Tall Man where she gets to challenge herself, less formulaic actioners like Total Recall which require her to do precisely nothing except be rescued by the male protagonist over and over again.)
“More Of This And Less Of This, Please” Actor of the Year: Chris Rock (More actual attempts at creating a character — or excellent beard growth, whichever makes you happier — in movies like 2 Days in New York, less paycheck-cashing in offensive dogshit like What To Expect When You’re Expecting.)
Hammiest Performance By Michael Sheen: The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part Two
Hammiest Performance By Charlize Theron: Snow White and the Huntsman
Hammiest Performance By Russell Crowe: The Man With The Iron Fists
Hammiest Performance By Nicole Kidman: The Paperboy
Next up: crew contributions of the year. I’m hesitantly predicting we’re past the halfway mark, and it’s not February yet. This is progress.
(WARNING! Massive spoilers for Prometheus and all six seasons of Lost. Contains inessential footnotes that can be ignored if you want to leave this page with your sanity intact.)
It took about thirty seconds from the end of the first public screening of Sir Ridley Scott’s Prometheus before co-writer Damon Lindelof shared this tweet from an Alien fan:
And there were many more to come, which he “kindly” RTd to his followers. Those quote marks are there because Mr. Lindelof’s Twitter behaviour often feels like a self-flagellatory performance piece, as he attempts to engage with the many aggrieved fanboys who despise him for Lost, the Star Trek reboot and now this. With Lost at least he created his own accusatory and gallumphing anti-fanbase, but by working on the other two franchises he’s surely leaping into the path of endless butt-hurty bullets. I can’t help but respect that kind of courage. It’s testament to his inner nerd, that he would risk the barbs and complaints of the most easily-irked subcultures on Earth just to work on the things he loves. [1]
Going into Prometheus last Friday, days after it had aired for many of the critics I follow, as well as in some European countries, there were already rumblings that it was a failure, or a partial failure, or a “waste”, as Mr. Beaks from AICN bluntly put it on Twitter. I didn’t look any closer as I didn’t want to spoil the movie any more than the obscenely spoilery trailers had already done (wanna give a fuck you shout-out to Fox’s promotional campaign which effectively stripped every bit of mystery from this movie in a way even Robert Zemeckis would have considered extreme), but my concern was that even if there were legitimate concerns about the quality of Prometheus, some of the criticisms were evidence that the boring old rift between Alien and Aliens fans was being reopened.
There are many nerd debates that will never be resolved. Marvel vs. DC, Star Trek vs. Star Wars, Hunger Games vs. Twilight; none of them are as boring as the Alien wars. There are factions within the Alien fanbase who prefer the long, slow takes and exquisitely-paced suspense of the first Alien movie to the bombastic, militaristic rollercoaster of James Cameron’s sequel, and there are vicey-versa types who think Cameron’s beautifully structured sexy machine of kill is better than Ridley’s hesitant original. There are those who think David Fincher got close with his mangled but bold third installment, and there are even those who think Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s French sensibilities reinstalled some of the original’s perversity back into the series. I’d like to think no one believes the two Alien Vs. Predator movies are on the same level as even the fourth movie. [2]
So was the initial burst of grumbling about Prometheus borne of the scars caused by this war, one that should have been ditched the moment Paul W.S. Anderson stepped behind a camera on the AVP set? Because seriously, fighting over the deckchairs on the Titanic while the iceberg that is PWSA’s monolithic ineptitude, crossed with the desperate short-sightedness of Fox, gets us nowhere. Alien and Aliens are different approaches to similar material; the very simple template for this series – space monster terrorises humans – is blank enough to be used as a canvas for experiments in differing tone and narrative approach. AVP, on the other hand, was a blunt knife that stabbed right through the canvas so nothing could ever be painted there again.
Even if this would end up fueling a new round of arguing about which approach was better, it would at least mean an objective viewer might enjoy Prometheus; the alternative was that the complaints were justified. Sadly, as the fans said, Prometheus has problems, mostly caused by its attempts to connect to the franchise, but there is still much to like in it, most significantly that it definitively removes the AVP movies from the canon. Even if Prometheus isn’t as innovative and beautifully-wrought as the original Alien, fan predictions that Scott would restore dignity to the Alien universe have proved true, just by excising the banal AVP and idiotic fratboy b-movie AVP: Requiem like a surgeon removing a tumour. For that alone, Prometheus should be lauded.
What else is there to love? Certainly some of the lead performances, especially Noomi Rapace as Dr. Elizabeth Shaw, the most resilient human being since John McClane, who spends much of the movie in either extreme emotional or physical turmoil. It’s arguable that her character is sidelined too often to act as a real centre, and her relationship with atheist Logan Marshall-Green isn’t as developed as it could have been; surely some room could have been found for it. This is a shame as her damaged faith, shredded by ill fortune and nauseating, psyche-shattering body horror is meant to be one of the central planks of the movie’s structure, but even if she’s not given enough screentime, she’s still good enough to be memorable.
Michael Fassbender is arguably even better as David, the Weyland Corporation android who tends to the crew of the Prometheus. As with Ash and Bishop in the other movies, David’s agenda is mysterious, setting up many of the movie’s most interesting moments and calling back to one of Lindelof’s finest creations, Ben Linus, as well as the infamous AI Hal 9000. Is David malevolent? Mischievous? Innocent? Vengeful? Badly programmed? It’s likely that much of the forthcoming debate about Prometheus will focus on his motives. Lindelof has a real talent for creating such ambiguous characters and situations which, if the tenor of his treatment online and elsewhere is anything to go by, annoys many who want certainty from their fiction.
The rest of the cast are fine enough, though many of them have little to do. Nice to see Red Road‘s Kate Dickie here, though she generally just imparts exposition, while Rafe Spall plays another eccentric. His reliability is a bit of a coin-toss, and for this movie we sadly got the “tails” that gave us his excruciating performance in One Day, and not the “heads” of The Shadow Line. Fans of DJ Big Driis will likely enjoy his performance as Captain Janek, with his accordion, scamp-like charm and fine habit of standing on the bridge, legs akimbo, like a big sexy legend; classic Elba typecasting. Guy Pearce is also in it, buried under so much latex I wasn’t sure what he was up to. I think I found him amusing? Certainly incongruous. A perpetual snarl on Charlize Theron’s face is also in it. Make of that what you will.
On a technical level the movie is astounding, as you’d expect from the infamous stylist and detail-obsessive Sir Ridley, though the creatures in the movie are a mite disappointing, looking like waxy and unimaginative first drafts; passable in any other movie but unacceptable when sharing a universe with HR Giger’s nightmarish vision. One particularly annoying design failure has Noomi’s disgusting squid baby connected to her by an umbilical cord that juts out of the side of its head. The lengthy sequence in which Shaw gives herself a grisly automated abortion is unarguably the highlight of the movie, but I couldn’t stop looking at that stupid dangling umbilical cord. Who signed off on that distracting touch?
That said, the horror is already undercut by the confusing threat. Is the crew of the Prometheus threatened by a deadly virus? Zombies? A Lovecraftian Old God? A mutated version of the Trash Compactor monster from Star Wars? All of those things are upsetting on their own, but by not settling on any one thing it dissipates some of the tension as the viewer tries to match them up. Here’s where the Alien comparisons do the most damage. The elegant and rigorously thought-through reproductive cycle in Alien is now muddled, evolving from some ill-defined matter to become the Apexiest of Apex Predators, though it’s perversely pleasing to think that at some point in the evolutionary timeline of the Xenomorph, one of the most diabolical and primally terrifying creatures ever imagined, is a devout human woman struggling to hold onto her faith in the face of indescribable horrors.
There’s also the fact that this movie feels so familiar; something noted by Daisyhellcakes as we left the IMAX. [3] That’s mostly due to the central conceit regarding our origins that’s been used in other movies or books; At The Mountains of Madness, Chariots of the Gods, Stargate etc. have dealt with the same idea in differing ways. Additionally, David’s impenetrable behaviour evokes memories of 2001; not just his HAL-like unreliability but early scenes with him puttering around the ship and busying himself with chores resemble Dave Bowman’s relaxed moments on Discovery One. The weird alien special sauce that dooms the crew is, of all things, reminiscent of the organic meteor matter in Ivan Reitman’s Evolution. Its purpose is the biggest mystery of all. It accelerates evolution? It breaks down DNA?
Further muddying the waters, the Alien movies are overtly referenced throughout, thus making it hard to separate this from the previous films no matter how hard we’re told not to. The look of the movie directly reflects the other films, with the (remarkable) production design by Arthur Max evoking memories of Syd Mead’s work, but the script is where the main resemblances occur. Lindelof has peppered familiar scenarios and lines of dialogue from the previous Alien movies throughout Prometheus; so much so that Sir Ridley’s comments that the movie “shares Alien‘s DNA” is a wry comment on the DNA / RNA manipulations in the plot as well as an acknowledgement that this often feels like a rehash. The structure, apart from some significant diversions, is identical to the other movies:
Discovery of message > waking from cryo-sleep > introduction of characters > arrival on planet > visit alien object > find unpleasant things > attempt to return during storm > things go wrong on the ship involving unpleasant births > android / corporate stooge has shady agenda > chaos ensues > lifepod ejects in which a showdown with the antagonist occurs.
It’s worth noting that Prometheus also borrows thematic material from Blade Runner, to such a degree that for a confusing moment I wondered if Blade Runner also occurred in the Alien universe, and Weyland Corporation’s androids were merely following in the footsteps of Tyrell Corporation’s replicants. Prometheus feels more like the third part of a thematically-connected series a la Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance trilogy than the fifth/first part of a franchise, thanks to these concerns. The main characters are searching for answers to questions about their origins, and Weyland is also looking for extended longevity, just like the replicants in Scott’s other sci-fi favourite. The showdown with the Engineer is as disastrous as Roy Batty’s encounter with Eldon Tyrell, with a popped-off android head and some vanilla butt-kicking replacing Tyrell’s crushed noggin.
And what answers do the team find? Nothing satisfying, of course, because nothing can truly satiate the whole audience, even if the movie ended falling either on the side of Shaw (faith) or Holloway (science). Those of us who forgave Lost its “trespasses” will recognise Lindelof’s approach. Prometheus asks the question, “who made us, and who made the race that made us?”, but instead of God or benevolent celestial beings we’re given the possibility that we might be the subject of an experiment, the organic components of a long-played terraforming operation, or the accidental biological waste product of a botched suicide by an alien trapped on Earth after missing his ride. That Carl Sagan line, “We are all made of star stuff,” is only half right here. We’re also just clever human-shaped sludge. (In fact Prometheus is the anti-Contact. They’d make an interesting double bill.)
Viewers of Lost were led to believe that its central mystery – what the hell is going on with this crazy island, and what has it got to do with these chosen ones – would be answered by one of the regularly introduced characters who seemed to have the answers. This was not to be. The Oceanic survivors, especially poor Locke, expected answers from the leader of the Others – Ben Linus – but he too was in the dark. So the audience waited for his mentor Richard Alpert to provide answers, but he had none either. In fact, as a result of a time-travel accident he thinks it’s Locke who has answers; a brilliant joke played by Lindelof and co-showrunner Carlton Cuse, highlighting the point that we make fools of ourselves for looking to others — Messiahs — for answers.
After Richard we expect Jacob has the answers, or the Man in Black, or their “Mother”, but none of them had a clue. They only had their own humanity, for better or worse. The layers could be peeled back forever, and all we would ever find were more confused, stupid people bringing their own baggage to the mysterious island, which contained a glowing thingy that was basically a magical Maltese Falcon. Over the course of six seasons Lindelof and Cuse could fully explore this idea, and some people even seemed to get it, though most complained that with no answers the show was a failure, instead of the slyly subversive success it actually was. Prometheus, with a running time of only two hours and a lot of info to get through, can only suffer in comparison.
So why ask these questions if you have no interest in answering them? Because there are other things you can dramatise with these questions, and the late-movie revelation that the Engineers were actually on their way back to Earth to eradicate our species using toxic goop wrong-foots the audience in a way that is reminiscent of Lost‘s games with expectations, as well as being a nicely mundane counterpoint to the grandiose first half of the movie. This resembles the way Lost teased epic and supernatural answers to its mysteries that were almost always caused by trivial but recognisably human things like confusion, venality, greed, delusion and the hilariously panicky reactions of characters who feared that they would soon lose their tiny allotment of power. [4]
The juxtaposition of the importance of the questions and the triviality of the human drama was one of the most pleasurable aspects of Lost, creating an unexpected frisson that transformed what could have been a simple mystery show into a Vonnegut-inspired treatise on the absurdity and arrogance of the human quest for knowledge it cannot handle. Prometheus does a similar thing, but that comment on the futility of our quest for truth is wrapped up in the tropes of a horror movie, which threatens to overpower the cosmic joke. Perhaps there’s another story they could tell that fits squarely into the sci-fi genre without the need to adopt Alien‘s horrific genetics, giving that commentary on our hubris more room to breathe and/or be recognised.
That said, the thought that humanity is a mistake that needs to be eradicated by beings more powerful than us is a chilling one, and the atmosphere of existential dread experienced by the Prometheus crew as they realise they have have been rejected by their creator is its own reward. It even thematically matches the responses of David, daily reminded of — and seemingly disgusted by — the flawed nature of his creators. Does he poison Holloway because he wants to punish his creators, as Shaw does re: the Engineers in the film’s final moments, or is David hurt by Holloway’s dismissal of his sentience? The fact that he invades Shaw’s dreams suggests Holloway’s racist behaviour arrived too late to affect David’s actions. David may have been broken all along.
Is this a consequence of his programming by Weyland or Vickers, a flaw in his construction (as suggested by Burke in Aliens), or that he has manifested a dark soul of his own accord? [5] These questions are as interesting now as they were when first asked in Blade Runner, and are given extra power by Fassbender’s brilliant work and Lindelof’s commendable restraint in explaining things away. I’d expect nothing else from the man who created Ben Linus and Charles Widmore, though I wonder if pointing out that Prometheus is yet another tale of children struggling to understand, placate, or wreak vengeance upon their fathers will make former Lost fans turn against this as fiercely as they turned against the island show.
It can be argued that Prometheus strengthens Lost and vice versa. It’s easy to assume that Lindelof truly is the bad writer of popular myth, a man smart enough to ask big questions but too stupid to answer them. Some ugly exposition and leaden dialogue does little to dispel that argument, though this could be down to necessary editing choices. There are other complaints ready to be levelled at the filmmakers that don’t fit within my forgiving parameters, and my defence is not meant to be a blanket dismissal of reasonable, non-trolling complaints, or an excuse for the film’s flaws. But what if Lindelof’s actually smart enough to know there’s no satisfactory way to settle the science / faith debate, to understand that drama that aspires to profundity demands that these questions be asked despite the inevitable disappointment that follows when the answer given falls short of expectation?
The drama here isn’t resolving “Why?” It’s in showing how people react when given a chance to find the answers. Lindelof’s done this twice now. Why is it beyond the realms of possibility that he’s not just some idiot who doesn’t know how to end a story, but is making a point about the ineffable mysteries of the world, and the possibility that matters of great significance are actually mistakes or trivial events that show up the absurd randomness of existence? [6] Vonnegut and Philip K Dick would enjoy the cosmic jokes of Lindelof’s worldview, and how he uses the gulf between our expectations and the truth to illuminate the failings of humans when they believe that they are in the position to acquire the greatest commodity of them all — truth — showing us up as cowards, fools, villains or, occasionally, noble heroes willing to sacrifice themselves to prevent the extinction of what they love.
Most other creators would be given a break at this point but ill feeling towards him for not ending Lost the way people wanted [7] will probably follow him forever now (check out this terrific, revelatory interview where Lindelof reveals he suggested to Scott that they make the ending clearer as he was “still eating shit a year on from the end of Lost“). As a result Prometheus is viewed as a mistake, with him taking all of the blame; convenient that he gets all the flak when Sir Ridley is notorious for changing the direction of projects and, if that interview is anything to go by, was developed with much input from the great director who was, never forget, considered for the longest time to be the only one who could save a franchise sullied by pretenders to his crown.[8]
What a shame that this couldn’t be a blank slate, to be approached with open minds [9], instead of being a failure for not being an Alien movie, a failure for being as inconclusive as Lost, a failure for appropriating beloved sci-fi tropes and treating them with a populist’s unsubtle touch, a failure for lacking the beautifully judged stillness and artistic tableaux of Blade Runner, a failure for not being as classically-wrought – or as gloriously obscure – as 2001; I’m not dismissing these points as automatically wrong or worthless but I don’t think they qualify as sufficient reason to reject a movie which should be considered on its own terms. It doesn’t matter. Fans love a big raging debate, and given years of practice arguing over the merit (or lack thereof) of each Alien film many will launch themselves at Prometheus with great hunger. New flesh to tear apart! Why isn’t this Alien? How dare they? Sellout Ridley! All movies suck now! I hate 3D! At least it’s better than Robin Hood I suppose! Etc. etc. ad infinitum.[10]
Hopefully this will all settle down and people will eventually engage with it without baggage. Maybe further editions of it – and maybe even sequels, if its apparent success inspires Fox to fund more – will provide a clearer idea of Lindelof and Scott’s vision, and improve what even I, a fledgling defender of Prometheus, think of as an imperfect project that nevertheless doesn’t deserve to be thrown out of an airlock. The breathtakingly spoilery trailer also shows a moment in which Shaw prays after her grisly abortion scene. The film is already ill-served by the conflict between its lofty thematic goals and the need for distracting, grotesque horror; perhaps that scene – or other scenes about religion / science – would have unbalanced the film further, and maybe for the better.
But these possibilities, and the new battles over Prometheus‘ worth, are at least an evolution of those long-running skirmishes mentioned earlier. The fighting over the previous movies feels like quibbling over the individual threads in the tapestry of this surprisingly diverse franchise; Alien is classy/cold, Aliens is tacky/exhilarating, Alien 3 is uncompromising/cruel, Alien: Resurrection is inept/stupid, Alien 3 should’ve been the William Gibson version, Aliens should’ve been made by Ridley, Newt should’ve lived, Ripley should’ve stayed dead, Jean-Pierre Jeunet should not be allowed to direct movies ever again… The arguments are only about the movies as cinematic artefacts and not as narratives with metaphorical purpose, spats that are only of interest to cineastes, to be futilely rinsed-and-repeated forever, accomplishing nothing, changing no minds.
Prometheus, on the other hand, offers up a text that can be interpreted and debated on its own.[11] Sure, fans of the franchise are raging about it, whether it should’ve been made or not, whether to build a guillotine for Lindelof, whether the design is a failure as HR Giger was not asked to participate, whether it’s just total shit and a shallow insult to the ambitious speculative ambitions of genuine hard sci-fi, etc. But, as with Lost, there are mysteries within the film that can be discussed by even those who don’t agonise about that loathsome fantasy, the “childhood raped by the uncaring creator”.[12] Dear God/Grouchy Space Engineer, how do we impose a moratorium on that insensitive and ridiculous sense of entitlement?
Whether even those mysteries are worthy of discussion is another debate to be had, though as someone who greatly enjoyed thrashing out theories about Lost with fellow fans I think my mind about Prometheus is already made up, but it’s worth noting that Scott and Lindelof have intentionally given us something different than The Greatest Space Monster Series Of All Time; a puzzle box that may or may not become more complex and more interesting as time goes by. As Mr. Lindelof himself has said…
Dude, have a rest. You’ve earned it.
Return 1. Who knows what Sir Ridley thinks, as he doesn’t have a Twitter account, shockingly. I assume his response to the kind of abuse Lindelof is getting would be a pithy, “Go fuck yourselves”. I believe he doesn’t suffer fools gladly.
Return 2. And yes, I admit that these paragraphs, were they to appear on Wikipedia, would be covered in “Citation needed” warnings, but these wars are fought as much in pubs and nerd gatherings and comment sections and forums etc. as they are in scholarly publications or blogs. Stick two nerds in a room together and there will come a moment when this debate begins and immediately descends into acrimony and deeply-held opinion blurted out as fact. This paragraph, which asks you, the reader, to just go with me on it, is my tribute to that ephemeral dark cloud that hovers over fandom. [13]
Return 3. Warning: never sit in the front row for a 3D IMAX performance; the miserable trailer for The Amazing Reboot Of The Spider-Man was a black and red blob wiped across my eyeball, and the ickiest bits of Prometheus were thrust aggressively right into my face as if I was being assaulted by a cross between a drunken football fan and Yog-Sothoth itself.
Return 4. There are other aspects of Prometheus that seem familiar to a Lost fan. The black toxic sludge, when seen within its ampoule, floats within a green fluid; when tipped up it floats down like a black cloud. This substance must never reach Earth, much as the Man in Black, aka The Smoke Monster, must never escape the island or he/it would cause an event that would signal “the end of everything good”. Jack sacrifices himself to prevent this, as Holloway, Janek and, to a lesser extent Shaw, also do. Meredith is obviously horrified to think her father, Weyland, considers his mechanical son David to be more of an heir than she does, much as The Man in Black is jealous of Mother’s love of Jacob. Holloway and Shaw are a man of science and a woman of faith; Lindelof choosing to make them lovers here may be his way of getting some unpleasant Jack/Locke slash out of his system. I’m sure there are dozens of other parallels between the two tales.
Return 5. And does this evolution within David echo our own development beyond that which the Engineers had planned, thus prompting their decision to destroy us? What does the Engineer’s reaction to David mean? Is his burst of violence triggered by David’s use of his language, proving that we have the potential to become a threat to them?
Return 6. On this point, I’d like to stress that yes, it could be argued that this assumption — that Lindelof has no idea what he’s doing and is bluffing his way through these stories like a faker — is valid if you consider Lost‘s finale on its own, but the show made this point over and over again throughout its six season run, so we have enough evidence for this theory to at least consider it, instead of dismissing it because of Occam’s Razor or something. We’re talking about one of the main themes of the show, not just a couple of incidents. Who knows, perhaps if we look back through his other TV shows we might find further evidence for this theory, though somehow I can’t see Nash Bridges being a treatise on the unknowability of the great questions pondered by philosophers and scientists of times past, no matter how potent the chemistry between Don Johnson and Cheech Marin.
Return 7. Here’s yet another fantastic interview with Lindelof, who seems to be one of the most approachable and friendly of creators despite the torrent of bullshit that keeps getting poured over his head. Lots of good stuff there, but the comments made by the interviewer, asking why all the characters in Lost had been dead all along [14], and his hypothetical argument that a concrete answer at the end of the show along the lines of, “they were being experimented on by aliens all that time,” would have been more satisfying gives a depressing insight into the extent to which many of the show’s naysayers were prepared to engage with it. Seeing the interviewer talking about gadgets on a recent edition of Late Night With Jimmy Fallon made me so pathetically angry I pitched an undignified shitfit and nearly threw one of our cats through the TV.
Return 8. Note that Jon Spaihts, who was the original writer on the project, is also free from opprobrium, at least as far as I can see, even though he’s already been treated like a mound of bear scat by sci-fi fans for making the not-well-liked alien-invasion movie The Darkest Hour. That’s how much people hated Lost. Seriously, admitting that I love that show in public often makes me fear that it’ll trigger a flurry of movement and then suddenly everyone will be pointing a gun at my face like they do in the movies.
Return 9. I include myself in this assessment. Watching Prometheus was a horribly confusing experience as my own expectations kept getting in the way. Much as I’m frothing away throughout this epic post about the — as I see it — unfair criticism Prometheus is receiving, I can’t honestly justify my anger at fans for judging this movie in relation to the others, as the promotional material and the unconvincing statements by Scott and Lindelof did little to prevent the growth of these assumptions. There are no words for how inept the marketing onslaught of the past few months has been, though I can’t figure out a way they could have promoted this without making the same mistakes.
Return 10. Funny that Scott includes footage from Laurence of Arabia, in what is one of the movie’s most endearing moments. For a while it might have seemed that a filmmaker with such a feel for composition and epic scale, indeed a man who made Kingdom of Heaven (which is heavily indebted to David Lean’s movie), might be the next in line to claim Lean’s crown as King of Classical British Cinema, even despite beginning his days as a lowly commercial director, but that seems far less likely now, and some of the criticism of Prometheus is that it’s not as restrained as Alien. Perhaps not, but it’s made with commendable skill, and now he has more money that he can use fill the original movie’s money-saving suspenseful longueurs with cacophony and event, for better or worse. I guess once Jerry Bruckheimer’s had his claws in you, you can never go home.
Return 11. Three months after Lost finished, once I had recovered from the dehydration caused by my uncontrollable sobbing, and removed my black armband, I wrote these three posts — part 1, part 2 and part 3 — which outlined my theories about the show’s ultimate meaning (i.e. as a primer for atheists about what it is to experience faith in something for which there is no proof). In the midst of that was my rather pompous, meta-fanwanky description of the show’s “plotholes” as “interactive plot gaps” (yes I did, and I’m very serious about this being a real and good thing), which are basically intentionally positioned blank spaces within a story which can be filled in by the audience with theories and / or non-meta-fanwank. Prometheus has plenty of these holes, which have this week been the focus of much of the ire of those viewers in my Twitter timeline who were appalled at the movie’s “mistakes”. As I said earlier, there are plenty of things wrong with the movie that deserve censure, and I wouldn’t accuse anyone of being wrong for holding a negative opinion, but I do think what some see as errors or first-draft fuck-ups might be something more interesting and justifiable on second viewing.
Return 12. How about this for another take on the film. Is it also a sly commentary on the inevitable sense of dismay felt by the fanbase, as humanity / Alien fans return to the source of their existence and find something there that doesn’t live up to expectation, causing all kinds of aberrant behaviour? Maybe this is all just Lindelof’s response to the long-running anger directed at him over Lost, and his experience with being verbally assaulted by the angry former fans is akin to wrestling with a Lovecraftian proto-Facehugger and then getting an inseminating tentacle shoved down your throat, leading to the birth of a proto-Chestburster, which in the case of this strained metaphor would be Prometheus.
Return 13. I also appreciate that this post reads like a very direct assault on pretty much anyone who has ever held an opinion on the Alien movies, and might even seem like a declaration of war against anyone who didn’t like Prometheus, making my concerns about the creation of a new front in the Alien Wars seem rather cheeky. That’s not my intention at all, especially as I have spent literally years of my life arguing the toss over the first two movies.[15] The inspiration for this post, the thing that has compelled me to write over 6000 words (my God!), is not so much the criticism of Prometheus, much of which I agree with to some extent or another, but the increasingly hostile attacks on the filmmakers for daring to sully something as perfect as Alien. We fans all bring baggage to this movie no matter what we say, and anyone else’s reactions are not necessarily invalid even if they dare to be different to my perfect opinion, obvs (joke). What galls me is that we are now in a post-”wow Internet” period, where the use of the net has become such a familiar way of life that we can finally settle down and inspect our behaviour. Unfortunately this means we’ve found that many people here are so badly brought-up that they feel it’s acceptable to direct untold splenetic rage and disgusting hatred upon others for putting their hearts and minds into creative endeavours. What’s most upsetting is that many of the worst offenders are those I would ordinarily consider my Nerd Brethren, people whose passion I can understand on some level, but whose love of these cultural objects and events has mutated until they become compelled to bombard a guy with cruel messages when all he did was, at worst, write a movie that isn’t as good as another movie. He didn’t rape any childhoods (yuk), he didn’t erase all copies of Alien, he didn’t mock the fanbase or set out to diminish the originals in any way. He just wrote something, with the input of some other people, that he thought was cool. He doesn’t deserve to be hunted across the Internet like a rat, for fuck’s sake. And that goes for George Lucas too. I don’t like the Star Wars prequels either but they didn’t ruin my life in any way.
Return 14. I mean really? There was a VERY CLEARLY EXPRESSED SPEECH by Christian that made it VERY CLEAR that the events on the island, everything we had seen outside of the season 6 afterlife HAD HAPPENED exactly the way we saw it, that they had NOT been dead all along, that nothing we had experienced as viewers was rendered meaningless by some moronic final St. Elsewhere-esque twist. This is why I’m continually spouting off about Lost, and why I decided to write this ridiculously long review of Prometheus, that will most probably only be read by about 12 people, many of whom will think I should just get over this and move on instead of having a serious of life-threatening embolisms over something that almost everybody has forgotten about by now, because if fans such as myself don’t take the time and effort to restate facts about stories that are rushed past by storytellers who don’t want to belabour a point for fear of burdening their work with extraneous explanations that would take more attentive audience members out of the story-experiencing spell they have worked so hard to create, then we end up with the “official” take on something being, “You haven’t seen Lost? Oh man, don’t bother. They were dead all along. How lame is that?” or, “You haven’t seen Prometheus? Oh man, don’t bother. They don’t really explain how the Xenomorphs were created. There’s just a bunch of plotholes and then it ends on this weird inconclusive note because the writer is some kind of idiot who doesn’t understand how to tell stories.” When did it become unfashionable to surrender yourself to a work of art? To have faith that maybe the creator has a greater awareness of his or her work than someone experiencing it for the first time? To just go with the flow and stop with the, “Well, I’d have done it differently because I know these things more deeply,” thoughts until the work is over and you’ve had time to process it? Jesus Christ, sometimes it feels like we have to retrain audiences to just shut the fuck up and absorb something in one go without thinking that any plot event that isn’t identical to a million other plot events from a million other stories is a mistake or evidence of “ignorance of storytelling rules” (my own personal bugbear), instead of an intentional choice to tell a story that’s different to all the carbon copy stories cluttering up the world. [/crazy rant over]
Return 15. For the record, just so you, the reader, can better frame my feelings about this franchise, my favourite of the two is Aliens, but the difference in preference between the two is infinitesimally small, like, a micron thick, and the only reason I argue so vehemently for Aliens against the literally psyche-changing cinema-shaking brilliance of the original is because many of the arguments against the sequel — it’s garish and manipulative and stupid — are arguments used to dismiss many of my favourite films, and I just happen to like movies like Aliens that wear their heart on their sleeves, especially as I honestly believe that those criticisms are wrong. Aliens is as hard as nails. It has a beautiful structure used in other notable action movies such as Assault on Precinct 13, 13 Assassins, and even future beloved classic The Avengers. It is also very loud, but it has an emotional charge more powerful than about 99.999999% of movies made to date. Loving something that makes me sit on the edge of my seat screaming at characters to move faster even though I’ve seen it 100 times is not a problem for me. I also don’t think James Cameron is the enemy of cinema that many others do, mostly because Aliens is perfect so there INFINITY no comebacks. #Iwin
Why am I doing this? There was once a time I would dazzle all those around me as I applied an almost precognitive talent for award prediction to numerous hastily organized Oscar ballots. Oh how I was feted, carried high on the shoulders of friends and enemies alike, given ambrosial liquor to sup on from jewel-encrusted golden goblets. They were glorious times, my friends, and those efforts were the stuff of legend. But since making my predictions via this blog, my hit rate has dropped into the low fuckalls. Once Shades of Caruso was described as “usually fairly reliable“. Well, not in terms of Oscar predictions. So why put myself through this ordeal again? Why humiliate myself when my former predictive talents as a modern-day Cassandra have suddenly and inexplicably morphed into those of just some random lass called Sandra?
To be honest it’s only to justify having sat through the combined clusterfuck-a-thon of War Horse, The Iron Lady and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; three movies so wretched they should be investigated as hate crimes against my very soul. And yet here they are, given baffling nominational attention from the various elders who constitute the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The anguish caused by this triumvirate of terribleness, and their baffling inclusion on the Oscar shortlist, is the fuel that powered this epic post, so if you get bored to extinction by the time you get halfway down the page, blame Stephen Daldry, Eric Roth, Abi Morgan, Phyllida Lloyd, Lee Hall and Richard Curtis (Spielberg gets a free pass for Tintin, which was aceballs).
Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role
Who Will Win: George Clooney – The Descendants
Jean Dujardin may have been winning awards by smiling a smile that honestly looks like it could melt through steel like Superman’s heat vision, but I think the Academy members are ready to give Gorgeous George the big prize at last, mostly just to get it out of the way. There are worse things that could happen; though I’d be more than happy to see the thoroughly handsome Dujardin win and do a little tap-dance or something, Clooney was the best thing about The Descendants (other than Shailene Woodley, who was also very good). It’s odd to look at the mostly quiet work he does here, the way he balances light comedy and heavy tragedy, and think back to the way his performances were merely an amalgamation of irksome tics when he was on E.R. and not-massively-popular action extravaganza The Peacemaker. Now look at him. He’s really very good. And still handsome. An Oscar win here is no bad thing.
Who Should Win: Gary Oldman – Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
But of these five candidates, surely it’s Oldman’s prize. He’s survived the fallow years caused — I’m sure — by appearances in two Luc Besson movies with only Airforce One and Lost in Space to separate them, and has proved cynics (such as myself) wrong time and again. By now even his shaky appearances in crap like Red Riding Hood are usually worth watching. It’s enough to make me think he will take over from Sir Anthony Hopkins in the Endlessly-Entertaining-Actor-Shaped extra chamber in my heart once the great Welshman has sadly entered the Odinsleep. Tinker Tailor was an impeccably performed movie; picking out individual acting highlights is hard, but pretty much every moment Oldman is onscreen, like a shade sucking all of the light from the room, it’s as if everyone else has faded into the awful period-appropriate wallpaper. His voicework in Kung Fu Panda 2 was good too. We take Oldman for granted; time we stopped doing that.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Michael Fassbender – Shame
Maybe it’s a good thing Fassbender didn’t get nominated. The outrage generated by that stupid-but-expected decision will power his career for a while longer as he comes to work on projects to be filed under the heading True Quality, as opposed to the gilded, establishment-approved version of art represented by the Academy’s often-mystifying choices. It also means that the inevitable dirty tricks campaign could dig up some pretty unpleasant stuff about Fassbender, and at this point in his career (or at any point, really) that’s not a good thing. Best he sits this one out until a year when a very driven producer doesn’t have a dog in this fight.
Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role
Who Will Win: Christopher Plummer – Beginners
Beginners was a good enough movie, one that made it okay to like Ewan McGregor again, but without the storming performance from Plummer I think it would be forgotten fairly quickly. His energy levels here are remarkable, and make an average movie unmissable. Hopefully people won’t go on about how he’s bound to win because he plays a terminally ill gay man who finds a new lease of life in his final years, thus completing some kind of Oscar-Worthiness Bingo card. He deserves to win because he deserves to win. It’s that simple.
Who Should Win: Christopher Plummer – Beginners
Though a spanner was thrown into the works when Max Von Sydow got nominated as “The Renter” in Stephen Daldry and Eric Roth’s monumentally awful Extremely Insensitive and Incredibly Corny. The great man has been acting for nearly 700 years now and has never won an Oscar, so surely he’s due one. Hell, make it a retroactive award for The Virgin Spring. Despite this, and despite the fact that he’s the only good thing to come of Daldry and Roth’s wretched miasma of relentless sentiment, it has to be Plummer who wins this. He’s been cranking out great performances for the past few years (he should’ve won for The Insider, to be honest), and if he gets this, he’ll have a BEGOT (not just your Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony quadfecta, but also a Bafta as well). If you don’t want to root for such an achievement, please fill out the order form below to request a new, fully-functional soul.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Sir Ben Kingsley – Hugo
Lots of folks complained about the numerous snubs in this nomination list, with much of the justifiable frustration directed at the miserable lack of Albert Brooks, but I’ve only seen a couple of people point out that leaving Sir Ben off the list for his superb work in Hugo was an egregious omission. Maybe Best Supporting Actor is the wrong category, as Uncle Georges is arguably the protagonist of this movie, but there’s more room for him here than in the crowded Best Actor slot (ahem Jonah Hill ahem). Sir Ben is in the same category as Sir Anthony Hopkins; he’s usually the most interesting thing in whatever movie he appears in, and Hugo is no exception. If it works at all, it’s because of his skill in bringing to life the sweet-and-sour mystery at the heart of the film.
Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role
Who Will Win: Meryl Streep – The Iron Lady
A horrible inevitability has descended upon this category. Many are talking up the relative lack of Oscars Meryl has received despite being in the list of top twenty most awesome people in the history of the world, and I’m sure many people are aggrieved that she didn’t win anything for her impersonation of Dan Aykroyd in Julie and Julia, but even so, the thought of her playing a real live actual person is just too much. The Academy must have written this winner on their scorecards without even seeing the movie. She truly embodied the pluck and lovability of Margaret Thatcher completely (i.e. it was correctly completely absent from the movie). Plus there was a lot of make-up on her face. The assorted critics of the Daily Telegraph plumped for Viola Davis en masse, but I still think this is Meryl’s to win.
Who Should Win: Michelle Williams – My Week With Marilyn
And it would be the worst crime of the night. Don’t get me wrong; I genuinely adore Meryl Streep. She might even be my favourite actor, if not vying for joint fave with Jeff Bridges. Nevertheless, the obnoxious fractured editing by Phyllida Lloyd — which is obviously meant to mirror Mrs. Thatcher’s current unfortunate medical situation — means the movie never settles down long enough for us to have any idea what Meryl’s performance is like. As I tweeted after the godawful mess finally came to a close, it feels like a 100 minute trailer for a 17-hour-long movie, mostly made up of stock footage. It makes W.E. look like a coherent film, which I thought would be impossible. The glimpses we get of Meryl in excelsis suggest she did good work but I honestly can’t attest to that. So I say it should have gone to Michelle Williams. Cheeky of me, as I haven’t seen My Week With Marilyn; I’m burned out on such things thanks to The King’s Speech. But MW was unfortunate to have given a performance of such brilliance in Blue Valentine in the same year that Natalie Portman brought her A-game in Black Swan. Williams deserves to unlock the Reversal of Fortune Achievement for that. (1000 Gamerpoints)
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Tilda Swinton – We Need To Talk About Kevin
What else do I need to say? Excise the horrible cartoonish display by the otherwise excellent Jessica Chastain in The Help, and put Tilda in where she belongs. She’s said she’s happy to avoid going to the ceremony, but what about her fans, who look forward too seeing her appear in white dresses before being described as “androgynous” by every fashion expert? An essential part of the award season is now sadly missing. Plus she was phenomenal in WNTTAK. That too.
Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role
Who Will Win: Octavia Spencer – The Help
This was a movie that made me very uncomfortable, much as The Blind Side did a couple of years ago, but at least The Help had great performances (and not-so-great, Jessica Chastain and Bryce Dallas Howard) on its side. Octavia Spencer managed to out-act Viola Davis without having to do that snotty nose thing Davis does in so many movies; Davis even managed it again in Extremely Long and Incredibly Offensive, probably because she knew that disappointing us by not featuring it would have ruined hundreds of Extremely Twee and Incredibly Pretentious drinking games. This is another of the most predictable wins of the ceremony, and one I back almost 100%.
Who Should Win: Melissa McCarthy – Bridesmaids
Except that it would be so nice for a comedic performance to get an Oscar nod, and Melissa McCarthy’s much-loved work is the most likely possibility for many a year. Admittedly if she won over the other candidates there’s a possibility that in time she would be given the same treatment Marisa Tomei got when she won for My Cousin Vinny, but as someone who likes Marisa Tomei and My Cousin Vinny, and who has done a complete 180° on McCarthy now that I know she has more about her than was shown in Gilmore Girls (shudder), I’d back this win also. Not gonna happen, though.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Charlotte Gainsbourg – Melancholia
Fair to say that Uncle Lars’ Bedtime For Hitler storytelling at the Cannes Film Festival sank any chance that either Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg would get a nomination. I suspect the screeners for this sat unwatched on many an Academy member’s coffee table. A pity, as it was one of the highlights of the year. Gainsbourg was just as good in Antichrist, but maybe this kind of soul-baring work isn’t ever going to find favour with the assorted old white men who vote for these things. “Why, she’s just got the vapours,” they would say into their mug of restorative potions made from the tears of discarded Hollywood dreamers. “Just buy her an ironing board and be done with it.” And that, my friends, is why the Oscars mean jack shit.
Best Animated Feature Film of the Year
What Will Win: Rango
Ha ha ha ha ha ha Cars 2 didn’t get nominated ha ha ha ha ha. Reap the merchandising whirlwind, Pixar, and thanks for pissing on your legacy (until your next incredible film comes along and makes me forgive you for temporarily misplacing your soul). Anyway, Rango was the frontrunner over a year ago and nothing has changed since.
What Should Win: Rango
Seriously, why are we even talking about this? Rango‘s a masterpiece. End of.
What Should Have Been Nominated: The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn
Of course, there was the amusing upset during the Golden Globes when Spielberg’s much-maligned performance-capture movie won the animation award, but then it didn’t get in here. There are lots of theories why, from “is it animation?” to “it’s not animation“, to “it wasn’t good enough”. Whatever the reason, its omission here is pretty bizarre, made all the worse by the nominations dropped into War Horse‘s trough. This vibrant, manic blast of imagination gets nothing while that risible failure gets a bunch of nods? Shocking. But it still wouldn’t deserve to win. Why? Because Rango. Like I just said a paragraph ago.
Achievement in Cinematography
Who Will Win: Robert Richardson – Hugo
I have a theory, for which I have absolutely no proof, that if the movie with the most nominations doesn’t win Best Picture, it will be given Best Cinematography as a consolation prize. The Artist might or might not not win many awards this year but I believe it’ll win Best Picture at the very least, which would leave Hugo wanting. As a result, I think Robert Richardson’s 3D cinematography will win out. Or Ludovic Bource will win for The Artist because he isn’t using that new-fangled technology? No, it’ll definitely be Richardson. Unless that lovely, clear, monochrome photography persuades the oldsters. ::is utterly undecided::
Who Should Win: Emmanuel Lubezki – The Tree of Life
If there is one word I could use to describe Malick’s meditation on cosmic gubbins and personal strife — other than pretentious, or powerful, or intricate, or unsubtle, or preposterous, or profound, or overlong, or ambitious, or breathtaking, etc. etc. — it would be luminous. Thanks to Emmanuel Lubezki’s work, this film glowed. It throbbed with the very life its titular tree is full of. Maybe it was just that we saw this on a good screen, brightly lit and digitally projected (a rarity nowadays), but it was so gloriously shot that I felt I was looking straight through a window into another world, or at least into the mind of Malick, and it was as beautiful a place as I had hoped.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Sean Bobbitt – Shame
In the past Bobbitt filmed a lot of Ye Olde Worlde settings for some of the seemingly infinite number of period adaptations made by the BBC, so it must have been a nice change for him to capture the most memorable images of New York in recent memory. Not that that mattered to the Academy, who don’t care about his ability to paint the city with terrifying reds, soft golds, and rainy greys. All they think is, “But he pointed the camera at a dong”, and that’s your lot. Sorry Sean. Maybe some day you’ll make a movie set during the first quarter of the 20th Century and the Academy members will be falling out of their bath chairs to give you a nod. Fingers crossed, eh?
Achievement in Art Direction
Who Will Win: Laurence Bennett and Robert Gould - The Artist
It’s in these technical categories that the two love letters to silent cinema will fight their most fraught battles, where the majority winner will be decided. As a result it’s hard to deduct who will win using my usual scientific rigour. Instead I have to rely on guesswork, and the thought that last year the Weinsteins managed to strongarm the Academy into giving Tom Hooper — TOM HOOPER — the award for Best Director. I’m sure Harvey has been going door-to-door this year, telling more anecdotes about how clever he was to acquire the rights to this, buying bunches of grapes for the voters and promising to give them back-rubs and what-not. Even though half of my brain is convinced the voters will be more charmed by the charming charming super super charming charm of Hugo (an excellent read, that), I think Harvey’s carpet-bombing techniques will win again. Plus the art direction on The Artist was very nice.
Who Should Win: Dante Ferretti and Francesca Lo Schiavo - Hugo
That said, the art direction on Hugo was even better. Dante Ferretti’s collaborations with Scorsese are always a feast for the eyes and his interpretation of what a semi-fantastical Parisian railway station would look like — with toy shops, overstocked bookshops and clockwork labyrinths included — is some of the best work he’s done. Plus he’s on a roll, having won his last two nominations for Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barberof Fleet Street and The Aviator. So I could well be wrong here.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Maria Djurkovic, Tom Brown and Zsuzsa Kismarty-Lechner – Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Friend-of-the-blog Beggar So’s Hat wisely noted that the shockingly grim production design of this was horribly snubbed. I hadn’t even noticed that. I think I tried to blot the miserable look of the film from my brain rather than be reminded once more of the horrors within. It made me think of my childhood, which now feels like it happened in the 50s and not the 70s like it actually was. It’s as if England was frozen in time for fifty years, and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was just a snapshot of that. Which is to say, Mr. Hat was right. The production design on TTSS was worthy of many awards, especially this one, but also Grimmest Evocation of the Cigarette-Smoke-Stained Dilapidation of 20th Century Britain.
Achievement in Costume Design
Who Will Win: Mark Bridges – The Artist
Again, it’s all down to who will be the overall winner. If it’s going to be The Artist I have to go all in and give it to Mr. Bridges…
Who Should Win: Sandy Powell – Hugo
…while thinking that Sandy Powell’s work is more deserving. By now I must seem like a guy who hated The Artist, but I didn’t. I adored it. Hugo was the movie that left me cold, even though it’s obviously a thing of great precision, as intricate and lovely as the clockwork contraptions that litter it. But all that effort from Scorsese was futilely expended trying to shift the enormous rock that is my heart, and it wasn’t going to work. ::hands in film buff card::
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Eiko Ishioka – Immortals
Nevertheless, that’s not as big a crime as neglecting Eiko Ishioka’s brain-maddening work which so dominated Tarsem’s latest empty trinket. It’s especially frustrating as the world is now bereft of her singular genius. Creating works of art for ill-received genre movies directed by someone with… shall we say, a questionable grasp of narrative… means her work wasn’t really seen enough. When we see Mirror, Mirror later this year, it’ll be a bittersweet experience. And not just because it’ll almost certainly be desperately boring crap. #Uncharitable
Best Documentary Feature
What Will Win: Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory
As usual I haven’t seen any documentaries this year, not even depressing ones about how the economy is about to explode with the force of a million megaprolapses, so I can’t really talk with any authority here, but I’d wager Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky will get the nod for campaigning successfully for the West Memphis Three. Unless the Academy is still mad at Berlinger for Blair Witch 2, which is understandable.
What Should Win: IDK SMDH
As I can’t say anything authoritative here, I’ll keep my fat mouth shut.
What Should Have Been Nominated: Tabloid
Yep, I didn’t even see Senna, the most critically acclaimed documentary of the year, but everyone I know who has seen it adores it. Nevertheless, I would’ve loved to have seen Errol Morris’ crazily entertaining Tabloid get some recognition. Perhaps because it’s so much fun it never stood a chance of getting any Oscar love; that old “comedy is too frivolous to be worthy of recognition” thing again. Which is a shame, because I’d say Tabloid has some pretty hefty points to make about news cycles, journalistic arrogance and human venality. It just also happens to be very amusing while it makes those points.
Best Documentary Short Subject
What Will Win: God Is The Bigger Elvis
Best Animated Short Film
What Will Win: La Luna
Best Live Action Short Film
What Will Win: The Shore
Okay, I’ll come clean. I haven’t got a clue about any of the nominees in any of the three categories clustered here, as was the case last year, so I’m just going to pick for the stupidest reasons. I just read about God Is The Bigger Elvis a few hours ago, La Luna because I like the name of the director (Enrico Casarosa), and The Shore because it’s made by Terry and Oorlagh George, and I always get annoyed that I confuse Terry George and Terry Southern even though their surnames and careers are completely different so I guess that’s an omen or something. Sorry to all of the nominees in these categories; I should give you respect, and instead I give you this excrement-soaked corsage. You deserve so much better.
Achievement in Film Editing
Who Will Win: Thelma Schoonmaker – Hugo
It’s arguable that Hugo was a bit slack, to be honest, and could have done with a bit of tidying up, but you’re a fool if you bet against Schoonmaker, who has won three of the six Academy Awards she has previously been nominated for (can you believe she didn’t win for Goodfellas? WT actual F?).
Who Should Win: Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall – The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
As I said last year, David Fincher’s editing team on The Social Network did a fantastic job of wrestling a ton of footage and talking to the ground and making it work as a narrative. they’re here again with a movie that’s less talky but just as complex (if not more so) than that. Dragon Tattoo may not have blown my socks off the way Fincher’s best work does, but it’s a great thriller, perfectly paced and seemingly effortlessly compelling. Baxter and Wall deserve this win twice over now.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Paul Hirsch – Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol / Hank Corwin, Jay Rabinowitz, Daniel Rezende, Billy Weber and Mark Yoshikawa – The Tree of Life / Joe Bini – We Need To Talk About Kevin
Quick run through of my reasons here. 1) The best action movie of the year deserves a nod, especially when the action scenes are so clearly drawn and beautifully constructed. It was a joy to watch, and much of that was down to veteran Hirsch’s command of the AVID. 2) A team of five head editors wrestling with what was probably 65,000,000 miles of footage featuring kids running down alleys or Brad Pitt standing on a lawn, and in the end we get an impressionistic collage of mood and image as powerful as this? I may complain that Hugo was slack but any flabbiness here was probably intentional. The longueurs are as important as the moments of emotion, and the superb judgement of this team — and Malick — will probably become more apparent with each rewatch. 3) It’s as if Nicolas Roeg is making major motion pictures again, and Bini is as important as Lynne Ramsay in creating a fractured but exhaustingly scary like Kevin. Again, a major omission for this exceptional artistic accomplishment.
Best Foreign Language Film of the Year
What Will Win: A Separation
Of course the Academy has a talent for arsing this category up, which could be good news for Agnieszka Holland — I’d think of it as an award given in honour of her stunning Treme pilot; one of the best episodes of TV ever made – but honestly, how on earth could anything beat Asghar Farhadi’s magnificent family drama? I would’ve like to have seen it do a Crouching Tiger and get a Best Picture nomination as well, it’s that good (yes, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was nominated for both Best Foreign Language Film and Best Picture, a fact that seems to elude many professional Oscar prognosticators each year).
What Should Win: A Separation
Time spent thinking about this masterpiece since seeing it right at the end of last year has made it seem even more profound, even more exciting. I may not have seen any of the other films nominated here but still it seems only right that this wins.
What Should Have Been Nominated: The Skin I Live In
To be honest, though I enjoyed Pedro Almodovar’s macabre thriller, it still left me a little cold. I’m sure there’s some arcane reason why this wasn’t included (that’s usually the case; did Spain even offer it as a nominee?), but if that’s not the case then I guess its omission here is pretty surprising. Other than that, the majority of the foreign language movies I saw last year just weren’t good enough to warrant inclusion here. Even Peter Chan’s Wu Xia — a film which made it onto my best-of-2011 list — would seem out of place. The closest thing I can think of for inclusion would be Andrea Molaioli’s Il Gioiellino, the fictionalised dramatisation of the Parmalat fraud scandal, but even that’s too dry to really pass muster. ::shrug::
Achievement in Makeup
Who Will Win: Mark Coulier and J. Roy Helland – The Iron Lady
I almost feel like I’m saying this because it had the most make-up, mostly on Meryl’s chin for Thatcher’s later years…
Who Should Win: Mark Coulier and J. Roy Helland – The Iron Lady
…but as Daisyhellcakes said when we tried to stay awake during this possibly endless collision of stock footage and poorly shot comedic shenanigans, “That’s a really convincing wattle”. And she’s right. It’s a really convincing wattle.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Contagion
The most startling physical transformation of the year was a digital effect; the enfeeblenising of Chris Evans in the first third of Captain America: The First Avenger is a baffling, seamless effect that convinces so completely that post-super-serum Evans looks somehow more wrong than the wimp. I’m tempted to say this should have been nominated just for the wicked Red Skull make-up on Hugo Weaving, but I think Contagion may be a more worthy nominee, for the nasty sweaty death pallor on the victims of MEV-1, Jude Law’s pasty face and rotten tooth, and one very fun autopsy scene.
Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures (Original Score)
Who Will Win: Howard Shore – Hugo
I can’t actually remember a single note of it, even though I’m a big fan of Mr. Shore (his score for A Dangerous Method was particularly lovely; he does his best work for Maestro Cronenberg), but I doubt either of Williams’ scores will win (vote splitting), and there’s the possibility that Kim Novak really does have some insider information about how the soundtrack to The Artist did something unspeakable and illegal to Bernard Hermann’s Vertigo score. That leaves Shore’s score.
Who Should Win: Alberto Iglesias - Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Of course, this wonderful score by Alberto Iglesias should be the frontrunner here for anyone who has ears. It’s an absolute corker, sinister and peppered with smokey-jazz moments; perfect for the film and powerful in its own right. And yes, I know this won’t be a consideration for the Academy, but the inclusion of this great, nerd-funky version of La Mer just shows how much care was put into the music. It’s such a great choice for the scene it accompanies that I did a joy-pirouette without leaving my super-comfy Odeon-Swiss-Cottage seat.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Michael Giacchino – Super 8
My favourite soundtrack of last year was Cecile Corbel’s delicate score for Arrietty, but as the movie wasn’t released in the US until this year, it wasn’t eligible. I’d like to say Hans Zimmer’s score for Rango should’ve got in, but considering the fuss over Ludovic Bource’s The Artist soundtrack, Zimmer’s re-appropriation of The Blue Danube and Ride of the Valkyries — not to mention similarities with Carter Burwell’s Raising Arizona score — mean it’s better off out of it. Giacchino’s Super 8 score managed to conjure up memories of some of John Williams’ work with Spielberg while remaining recognisably his own work. It might not be the best thing he’s done, but it played an important part in conjuring up the air of nostalgia that made J.J. Abrams’ homage work.
Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures (Original Song)
What Will Win: Man or Muppet (Bret McKenzie) – The Muppets
I’ve not heard the Rio song, but is there any doubt?
What Should Win: Man or Muppet (Bret McKenzie) – The Muppets
It’s just what a musical number should be. It’s thematically relevant, perfectly judged on a tonal level, it signals a big plot moment, it’s full of clever lyrical tricks, and it’s a proper showstopping earworm. It brought the house down at the BFI a month ago and I reckon this happens everywhere this movie plays. Is this the most assured winner of the night?
What Should Have Been Nominated: Star Spangled Man (Alan Menken / David Zippel) – Captain America: The First Avenger
Still, the feeble number of nominees here means there’s no real reason why Menken and Zippel’s entertaining pastiche of WWII propaganda songs didn’t get a nod. It’s not as good as Bret McKenzie’s song, but it’s still a witty and catchy tune. I guess the Academy members didn’t want to be reminded of the war that took place during their middle age. Yeah, I went there!
Achievement in Sound Editing
Who Will Win: Richard Hymns and Gary Rydstrom – War Horse
It might be a load of old chuff but I think War Horse will get at least one Oscar just because Spielberg and the rest strained so damn hard to make something timeless and noble that I bet someone will feel sorry for him. That’s not to say the work of Hymns and Rydstrom isn’t worthy of an award. The movie has a wide array of excellent whinnies, clip-clops, and gunfire.
Who Should Win: Ren Klyce – The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
Normally I’d pick Transformers: Dark of the Moon for two reasons: 1) to annoy everyone by continuing to not crap all over Bay’s carnage-laden doomfuck, and 2) because there were about one zillion sound effects in this movie, and I’m sure there was a small army of sound recorders trying to find the material for this movie’s sonic tapestry of boom. Nevertheless, I’ll pick Ren Klyce’s work on Fincher’s bleak midwinter tale for two different reasons: 1) I always tend to pick Ren Klyce because Ren Klyce is ace, and 2) the sound of Lisbeth Salander’s steel-toed boot clanging noisily against a very large metallic anus-seeking dildo has haunted me for two months. That counts for something.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Oliver Tarney and Mark Taylor – Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
My two picks here (Nicholas Becker for Andrea Arnold’s glorious Wuthering Heights and Koji Kasamatsu for Arrietty) are again not eligible because of US release dates. Instead I’ll pick the team behind the sound effects in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. There’s some lovely work done during the action scenes, but also the thrum of Victorian London is captured as well as in the first movie, which was also deserving of a nomination.
Achievement in Sound Mixing
Who Will Win: Tom Fleischman and John Midgley – Hugo
Big noisy setpieces in a train station where every individual, important noise is clearly picked out? It’s a lock.
Who Should Win: Greg P. Russell, Gary Summers, Jeffrey J. Haboush and Peter J. Devlin – Transformers: Dark of the Moon
The soundscapes of Michael Bay’s noisiest movies are widely loathed as merely a wash of explosions and screaming, but when blasted at with a good THX sound-system, it’s likely that the volume will deafen you to the amount of intricate work done here. It’s not just queueing up a bunch of banging and sticking it all in a blender; there’s more layering of sound than you’d think. Then again, I’ve always been a fan of percussion, so I’m more likely to enjoy an extended drum solo than the finely-picked notes of a symphony. Make of that what you will.
What Should Have Been Nominated: Peter Miller, Adam Kopald, J.R. Grubbs and Addison Teague - Rango
Among the many joys of this astounding triumph of animation is the lovely audio track, evoking the eerie silences of Sergio Leone’s classics while changing gears for some huge, complicated action scenes. Truly a feast for the ears as well as the eyes.
Achievement in Visual Effects
Who Will Win: Joe Letteri, Dan Lemmon, R. Christopher White and Daniel Barrett - Rise of the Planet of the Apes
I’m tempted to say Hugo will win this too, but the furore over Andy Serkis’ performance and the technology used to capture it means this might have a shot, as a sop to the campaigners.
Who Should Win: Scott Farrar, Scott Benza, Matthew Butler and John Frazier - Transformers: Dark of the Moon
Once more I’m picking complexity and logistical madness over subtlety or beauty, but the scale of the FX work in this movie is simply breathtaking. It’s also seamlessly integrated with reality; you’ll really believe Chicago had its arse kicked by robotic dickwads. The only caveat here is that they’re not really breaking new ground; we’ve seen this kind of thing before, just not on this scale. Nevertheless, my eyes boggled at the monumental mechanical madness, and I really appreciate that.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Douglas Trumbull, Dan Glass, Peter and Chris Parks – The Tree of Life
What a lovely welcome back for the legendary Doug Trumbull; a snub by his peers that probably would have stung if he had even noticed them, bearing in mind he is a colossus who bestrides the discipline of visual effects and probably thinks Digital Domain is little more than an interesting ant-farm. Bear in mind, this is a man who, while everyone else in the FX business was learning how to use a mouse, was either working on IMAX and Showscan technologies or trying to fix the BP oil-spill. Does he need an Oscar? If the FX industry members of the Academy can’t find it in their hearts to give this visionary the award he deserves, he can get over the insignificant pain by inventing another world-changing doohickey. Trumbull does not need your baubles.
Adapted Screenplay
Who Will Win: Alexander Payne and Nat Faxon & Jim Rash – The Descendants
Hugo should win this considering the overwhelming critical praise for it in the US, but I have a feeling the sentimental Academy members will be more drawn to The Descendants, which is a very writerly movie with big dramatic beats, terminally ill people, confrontations that play out in unexpected ways, and speeches that run on for perhaps a bit too long. It also has a terrible voiceover in the first half of the movie that should make invalidate it, but I doubt that that’s a dealbreaker. Or maybe this is just wishful thinking because I want to see Dean Pelton win an Oscar? If so, can Magnitude come on stage for a celebratory “Pop pop!“?
Who Should Win: Bridget O’Connor & Peter Straughan – Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Much as I enjoyed Moneyball, mostly because Sorkin’s worst excesses were curtailed by the low-key performances and direction, I don’t think it’s the best script here. I also don’t think that honour belongs to The Ides of March; yet another Clooney / Heslov disappointment that feels four drafts away from completion. Surely Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is the only logical choice here. It’s a labyrinth of words and actions and information but there’s emotion here, real aching pain. It’s a magnificent achievement.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Christopher Hampton – A Dangerous Method
As is Christopher Hampton’s expansion of his play The Talking Cure. Its absorption and translation of the ideas and theories of Freud, Jung and Spielrein into dramatic forms is breathtaking, made all the more memorable for its puckish wit and satisfying emotional charge. Though I’d resigned myself to seeing this underrated movie get little Oscar love I held out hope for this screenplay as the sole nominee, but no. What a pity.
Original Screenplay
Who Will Win: Woody Allen – Midnight in Paris
Remember all those days ago when The Artist won the Bafta for best screenplay and amateur comedians and film critics said, “How can it win best screenplay when there’s no words in it duhhhhh duuuuuuh a-duuuuuhhhhhhh?” Well I guess that won’t happen here, but only because the truly sentimental choice is to give Woody another Oscar for his latest self-indulgent wallow in nostalgia. Usually that yearning for simpler times is a subtext to his usual light middle-class semi-intellectual drama, but here it’s right at the fore-front. Who was the Twitter wag who said that this movie was like Woody’s “Things I like” list made celluloid flesh? Because well done, that person, you got it in one.
Who Should Win: Asghar Farhadi – A Separation
That victory for a second-rate script would be a crime when Asghar Farhadi’s brilliantly constructed, humane, intelligent, complex, multi-faceted screenplay has also been given a nod. In a perfect world this would’ve been the only nominee. If ever anyone asks me what screenplay I would pick as an example of brilliant screenwriting, I’ll pick George Gallo’s script for Midnight Run. If they couldn’t find that, I’ll pick this.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Kenneth Lonergan – Margaret / Scott Z. Burns – Contagion
That said, I would’ve liked it if Kenneth Lonergan had received any kind of recognition for his notorious movie, but I guess there was no chance of that happening with the lawsuits flying back and forth like flaming buzzards of doom. Also, we’ve not even seen the full movie; I long for the director’s cut of this challenging and audacious movie. I also would’ve liked it if Scott Z. Burns got nominated for Contagion, but that’s because I’m a big Scott Z. Burns fan and I think he’s great so there.
Achievement in Directing
Who Will Win: Martin Scorsese – Hugo
Okay, hear me out. Yes, I think The Artist will win Best Picture. Yes, I know that Michel Hazanavicius won the Director’s Guild Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Feature Film Award, and that’s usually a pretty reliable marker of who will win the Academy Award, but I think Scorsese has played a blinder here; making a homage to the birth of cinema, eoo-goog-alising one of the earliest pioneers of the medium, and passionately campaigning for the virtues of film preservation within the film itself. A pretty ballsy move, to turn a children’s movie into a two-hour lecture about archiving and storage technology. The Artist might be a love letter to silent cinema, but Hugo is a billet-doux attached to a heart-shaped box of chocolate cherries with a bit of sexy lingerie hidden under the crepe-paper tray. There’s no way the assorted dodecagenarians of the Academy will be able to resist giving Scorsese his second director’s gong for this.
Who Should Win: Terrence Malick – The Tree of Life
Even though I really loved The Artist (I did! Honest!), and thought Scorsese did a good job of methodically stripped the magic from his children’s film by the time the final reel arrived just so he could prove a point, this category belongs to Malick. Alexander Payne served up a curiously listless dramedy, and Woody Allen woke up for a little while; not really work worth lauding. But Malick’s bold vision was even more daring than his usual work, happily comparing the travails of a family to the beginning and end of life. What brass balls. It’s the best thing he’s done since Days of Heaven, and more than deserving of some Oscar love. If they don’t do it now, they’ll only regret it in future when he suddenly starts making action movies starring Channing Tatum (mark my words, this will happen).
Who Should Have Been Nominated: David Cronenberg – A Dangerous Method
The great man can’t win. When he makes a genre movie — albeit a genre movie with an intellectual ambition that dwarfs almost everything else around — clueless critics proclaim that he’s little more than a provocateur debasing his better instincts. When he makes a movie that’s sober and thought-provoking, everyone whines that there’s not enough parasites or inappropriate vaginal images in it. So when he makes something as crystalline as this, so perfectly hewn and formally precise, critics say it’s too dry. “It’s too dry,” they say, drawing attention to what they think is an excessive dryness. Seriously, that’s all anyone could say. Well bollocks to that. It’s exactly what it needs to be, and Cronenberg is the only filmmaker in the world smart enough to get that right. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; one day critical opinion will swing back Cronenberg’s way. Sadly, not before voting ended.
Best Motion Picture of the Year
What Will Win: The Artist
Critical mass has been reached for The Artist. I don’t think anyone on the planet expects another movie to win, except Stephen Daldry, probably; a conclusion I’ve reached after enduring Extremely Bad And Just Generally Incredibly Incredibly Dire And Awful Jesus What A Stinker, which seems to have been directed by someone who has absolutely no self-awareness whatsoever. I was tempted to predict a Hugo surprise here, but I think we all know that’s not happening. Harvey Weinstein has been prowling the streets of Hollywood like a cross between Batman, Wilson Fisk and P.T. Barnum, pimping out that movie for all he’s worth. It’s a foregone conclusion.
What Should Win: The Artist
And I’m absolutely fine with that. Not just because it’s the best movie of the nine nominees, but because I still think so fondly of it a victory in this category would make my night. I’m sure in time the numerous haters will multiply like mogwai under a waterfall, but for now a big win would almost feel like an extension of the movie’s deliriously happy vibe. Like a 4D experience for its fans. Plus it’s a last chance to see Jean Dujardin charm us with another impromptu dance. Vous dansez comme un nuage enthousiaste, vous bel homme!
What Should Have Been Nominated: Take Shelter / A Dangerous Method
If that vile… vile… thing with the obnoxiously precious title can get nominated, then surely anything can. Two of my favourites of last year are more than good enough to get in here, usurping Daldry’s slimy ode to sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-McSweeney’s-style precocity and Spielberg’s admittedly hilarious and Dadaesque World War One comedy The Adventures of War Horse: The Siren-Centaur Hybrid of Death, not to mention The (Wonderful Way White People) Help(ed Those Relatively Unimportant Black Folks). Put these two brilliant movies in there, dammit, and why not add Fast Five while you’re at it. That movie was better than at least seven, arguably eight of the movies in that list, even if only for the moment when The Rock and Vin Diesel crash through a wall during a fight. Better than Malick’s dinosaurs, I reckon.
That”s enough making a fool of myself in front of the entire internet. See you on the other side of the award ceremony, and what will likely be a really cozy opening monologue from Billy Crystal featuring at least one — maybe five — jokes about the lacklustre box office takings of Mr. Saturday Night. Mazel tov!
Finishing this in February feels so wrong it’s almost right. By now I’ve actually seen movies released in 2012 and I’m still posting about last year (the movies from this year being The Muppets, which the UK got obscenely late, and Chronicle, which is fantastic stuff and well worth a watch). The Oscar nominations have also been announced, with the deeply-average The Descendants and the deeply-awful War Horse getting a few nods while Fassbender, Swinton and Brooks are snubbed. Disgusting. If ever proof was needed that the Academy doesn’t know what the hell it’s doing.
Anyway, I’m sure I’ll have a whine about that before the award ceremony, so without any further ado, let’s end Listmania! with a bang. The only other posts that have taken me this long were my Lost finale posts, which took three months to write. This only took a month and a half, so I’m getting better at this. If you’re a fan of pointless miscellania, you’ve come to the right place.
Best Scene: Rango walks through the desert during a crisis of confidence (Rango)
Honorable Mentions:
Tom Cruise climbs up the side of the Burj Khalifa (Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol)
Matthew Broderick attempts to teach a class of precocious kids about King Lear and it doesn’t go well (Margaret)
Michael Shannon and his family attend a meal with their fellow townsfolk and it doesn’t go well (Take Shelter)
Jung tries to tell his new buddy Freud about synchronicity and it doesn’t go well (A Dangerous Method)
Kristin Wiig gets drunk on a plane and it doesn’t go well (Bridesmaids)
Best Action Scene: Tintin and Captain Haddock chase a hawk through the streets of Bagghar (The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn)
Honorable Mentions:
The final physics-mangling car chase in Rio De Janeiro, including some serious hardcore badassery from The Rock and Vin Diesel (Fast Five)
The longest and most explosives-packed train in the history of the world crashes for a long time (Super 8)
The Revolutionary Army of Apedom makes a break for freedom through San Francisco (Rise of the Planet of the Apes)
Alex Pettyfer, Teresa Palmer and a big alien dog wreck a high school using telekinesis and big lasers (I Am Number Four)
Guy Ritchie goes crazy with ramping and cameras attached to people running and all sorts of tricks in a forest (Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows)
Best Hero: Caesar – Rise of the Planet of the Apes
Honorable Mentions:
Captain America – Captain America: The First Avenger
Thor – Thor
Moses – Attack The Block
The Driver – Drive
Rango – Rango
Best Villain: Loki – Thor
Honorable Mentions:
Bernie Rose - Drive
Society’s indifferent or vexed reaction to those unfortunate enough to be afflicted with mental illness – Melancholia
The oppressive horror of modern life – Take Shelter
Rattlesnake Jake – Rango
Chris Cleek – The Woman
Best Couple: David Norris and Elise Sellas (Matt Damon and Emily Blunt) – The Adjustment Bureau
Worst Couple: Emma and Adam (Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher) – No Strings Attached
Most Doomed Couple(s) of the Year: Justine and Michael and Claire and John (Kirsten Dunst, Alexander Sarsgaard, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Keifer Sutherland) - Melancholia
“I Hope These Guys Make It” Couple Of The Year: Russell and Glen (Tom Cullen and Chris New) – Weekend
“Please Bite Them And Get It Over With, Evil Colin Farrell” Couple of the Year: Charley Brewster and Amy Peterson (Anton Yelchin and Imogen Poots) – Fright Night
“Okay, I Really Don’t Think He Should Be Attracting These Improbably Hot High School Hotties In These Movies, What With Looking Like A Surly Child Half The Time” Couple of the Year: Porter and Norah (Anton Yelchin and Jennifer Lawrence) – The Beaver
Greatest Disparity In Energy Levels Between Partners of the Year: Hal Jordan and Carol Ferris (Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively) – Green Lantern
Most Improbable Couple of the Year: Ernesto Botta and Laura Aliprandi (Toni Servillo and Sarah Felberbaum) – The Jewel
“Only In The Movies” Adorable and Romantic Couple of the Year: George Valentin and Peppy Miller (Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo) - The Artist
“Only In The Movies” Twee Asshole Couple of the Year: Enoch and Annabel (Henry Hopper and Mia Wasikowska) – Restless
“Rather Raunchy For A PG-13 Movie, Eh What?” Couple of the Year: Ren McCormack and Ariel Moore (Kenny Wormald and Julianne Hough) – Footloose
Most Adorable Fuckbuddies of the Year: Dylan Harper and Jamie Rellis (Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis) – Friends With Benefits
Most Inappropriate Couple of the Year: Robert Ledgard and Vera Cruz (Antonio Banderas and Elena Anaya) – The Skin I Live In
Worst Love Triangle of the Year: Bella Swan, Edward Cullen and Jacob Black (Kristin Stewart, Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner) – The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part One for the third year running
Best Love Triangle of the Year: Brian O’Conner, Dominic Toretto and Luke Hobbs (Paul Walker, Vin Diesel and Dwayne Johnson) – Fast Five
Most Satisfying Finale: The Artist
Honorable Mentions:
Attack The Block
Melancholia
Real Steel
Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol
Arriety
Best Finale in a Bad Movie: You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger
Least Satisfying Finale: Green Lantern
Dishonorable Mentions:
The Adjustment Bureau
I Don’t Know How She Does It
Blitz
In Time
Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides
Worst Finale in a Good Movie: Source Code
Badass of the Year: Lisbeth Salander – The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
Best Double Act: Tucker and Dale (Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine) - Tucker and Dale vs. Evil
Worst Hero: D’Artagnan – The Three Musketeers
Dishonorable Mentions:
Hal Jordan - Green Lantern
Mater – Cars 2
Theseus – Immortals
Joey the Super-Special Horsey – War Horse
Dagny Taggart – Atlas Shrugged: Part I
Worst Villain: Karl Hendricks – Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol
Dishonorable Mentions:
The concept of generosity – Atlas Shrugged Part I
Hector Hammond – Green Lantern
The Red Skull – Captain America: The First Avenger
That sinful sexuality in any form it’s SO SINFUL – The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part One
Blackbeard – Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides
Most Likeable Cast: Thor
Least Likeable Cast: Blubberella
Most Annoying Character of the Year: Sid – The Descendants
Dishonorable Mentions:
Moberg - The Rum Diary
Kate Reddy – I Don’t Know How She Does It
Dexter – One Day
Sean Cassidy (aka Banshee) – X-Men: First Class
Homer Yannos – Tomorrow, When The War Began
Best Live Action Animal: Uggie The Dog – The Artist
Best Animated Animal: Snowy – The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn
No photo of it will do it justice, but the poster for Shame that we saw outside the London Film Festival screening had a reflective surface, but with the word “Shame” printed at the bottom. Because the movie speaks for all of us who have shame, do you see? Something to think about.
Most Misleading and Tonally Inaccurate Poster: We Need To Talk About Kevin
Nicest Photography In A Headshot Poster: Martha Marcy May Marlene
Most Defiantly Wrongly-Angled-By-90° Poster of the Year: Super 8
Most Out-Of-Control Trend In Posters: Character variants (::deep breath:: The Adjustment Bureau; Arthur Christmas; Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked; Bridesmaids; Cars 2; Conan the Barbarian; Contagion; Cowboys and Aliens; Crazy, Stupid, Love; Drive; Footloose; Friends With Benefits, Fright Night, Gnomeo and Juliet; The Green Hornet; Green Lantern; Hall Pass, The Hangover Part Two; Happy Feet Two; Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part Two: Hop; Horrible Bosses; Hugo; Immortals; In Time; Johnny English Reborn; Killer Elite; Kill The Irishman; Mars Needs Moms; Margin Call; Martha Marcy May Marlene; Melancholia [!!!!!]; Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol; The Muppets; Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides; Priest; Puss in Boots; Real Steel; Red State; Rio; Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows; The Smurfs; Snow Flower and the Secret Fan; Spy Kids 4: All The Time In The World; Straw Dogs; Sucker Punch; Super; 30 Minutes or Less; Thor; The Three Musketeers; Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy; Tower Heist; Transformers: Dark of the Moon; A Very Harold and Kumar Christmas; Warrior; Water For Elephants; Winnie The Pooh; X-Men: First Class; Your Highness; The Zookeeper)
How many of these posters ever make it into cinemas? How many of them convince people to go and see these movies? Do casual cinemagoers see any of these and think, “Well, I wasn’t going to see Green Lantern but now that I know Tomar-Re is in it I’m IN”? Will people really be excited at the array of not-really-that-well-known actresses in the cast of Bridesmaids before they see how funny they all are (scroll down for the full selection)? Do we really need 31 posters for The Three Musketeers? Do we need more than one poster for Melancholia? It’s not harming anyone, obviously, but it still seems like a waste of resources. If anyone can explain why we need so many variants, please let me know.
Best Publicity Campaign: Paranormal Activity 3
Usually SoC likes to praise a publicity campaign that successfully promotes a tough sell, but this year I have to give huge props to the makers of Paranormal Activity 3 for doing something that should’ve been done a long time ago. However, to do that I have to spoil, so please consider all of the text between these two scary-as-fuck trailers a huge spoiler for PA3‘s best trick.
I won’t lie. That first trailer for this franchise scared the absolute shit out of me when I first saw it, and it deserves some credit for making even this cynic forget about the overwhelming familiarity of the Paranormal Activity template and vow to see the third one as soon as it came out. In that sense, job done. However, what’s really great is that that scene doesn’t happen in the movie, and neither do almost all of the biggest shock moments in the trailer below.
Seeing that at home and getting annoyed at all of the spoilers is one thing; I switched it off halfway through as I was horrified at the amount of spoilage. But if you’re in a cinema and can’t escape, you’re going to absorb all of that information, and more than likely you’re still going to see it (because these movies make money hand-over-fist without even breaking a sweat). And yet all of that stuff you’re expecting won’t happen. Instead you’ll get a bunch of other scary stuff. And even better? You still got scared by those trailers, as if you’re watching a very very short horror movie for free. I’ve waited for a long time to see this done so well. The movie was okay too. That’s a bingo, I reckon.
Worst Publicity Campaign: X-Men: First Class / Green Lantern
Nerds are hard to please; I know because I am one. Thor and Captain America did a mostly good job of introducing two less well-known characters, with the non-mainstream Thor making $450m worldwide and the super-patriotic Cap overcoming some of the anti-American prejudice that could’ve prevented it making any money at all ($370m’s okay. Green Lantern wishes it made that much). If they’re an example of how to do it right, the other two big superhero releases of the year show how to do it wrong, thus squandering all of the nerd energy they needed to stay alive.
Each campaign commits a different crime that has the same result; underwhelming box office. X-Men: First Class‘ promotional crime was to destroy a lot of good will towards a franchise that desperately needed it, even more than the previous X-Men movie did. Wolverine should have killed X-Men dead but Fox wasn’t going to let the franchise go to waste when it could release yet another movie and maybe resurrect it for another few sequels. A lot of good decisions were made regarding casting and crew choices, but all of that was hobbled by some terrible promotional errors.
One was to have the only convention appearance take place at the inaugural London Comic-Con, with an appearance by co-writers Ashley Miller and Zack Stentz. Other than that, the production and release schedule meant they unfortunately missed out on those opportunities, and had to rely on trailers and posters. While all of the trailers are good enough, if a little calm, the first leaked picture of the cast was a disaster. Even worse were the posters: the ones above were two separate teasers, with little heads gestating inside shadowmen; the one below is an advert for X-Men-themed bobbleheads. I can’t understand why someone would sign off on it.
Only one of the posters was any good, but if you look at the bottom of the page you’ll see even more awful examples, including some shocking Japanese ones. XM:FC was considered enough of a success to warrant a sequel (it made less than Cap and cost a bit more, but it’s not a dramatic difference), but that success was only because of the (bafflingly) good reviews and the fact that it had the weekend to itself. Though it’s not a representative sample, there were a number of X-Men fans of my acquaintance who were burned out on the franchise after Wolverine and even the raves for this couldn’t persuade them. Who knows what that opening weekend would have looked like if Fox had done a better job of getting my nerd brethren off their sofas?
Warner Bros., on the other hand, couldn’t do anything to get anyone into the cinema to see Green Lantern. I only went because I try to see as many films as possible, and we’re talking about my favourite superhero of all time here. To be fair to the folks responsible for promoting GL, they were dealing with a (relatively) obscure character with a mythology that’s hard to explain in posters and short trailers, plus it was saddled with a cast and team of writers that didn’t excite the fans either, so they were trying to ice-skate uphill from the start. The posters were okay, I guess. They were nice and colourful enough, though that fucking stupid mask really doesn’t help.
The mainstream audience doesn’t love Ryan Reynolds or Blake Lively enough to take a risk on a movie that looks like the adventures of a rubber-bodied space man versus a creature made of sentient dreadlocks, but readers of the comic weren’t likely to show up either. Most of the initial reports on the movie made it seem like the filmmakers were trying to be loyal to the comics while getting the tone entirely wrong. There was also barely any sight of Oa or the Corps early on (most likely because the FX weren’t finished), so the fans felt even more nonplussed. When footage was released at Wondercon the fans justifiably went nuts. Sadly, that was almost all of Oa / Corps footage that appeared in the finished movie. WB shot their wad in desperation. The movie opened to at best, indifference; at worst, derision. Was that the fault of the promotional campaign? Well, it certainly didn’t help.
Best Hair: The assorted period-appropriate ‘dos in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Worst Hair: Daniel Craig – The latter half of Dream House
Most Appropriate Hair For A Cancer Patient: Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s unnerving shaved head – 50/50
Least Appropriate Hair For A Cancer Patient: Mia Wazikowska’s tasteful pixie-cut – Restless
Best Facial Hair: Dominic Purcell - Killer Elite
Worst Facial Hair: Clive Owen - Killer Elite
Scariest Hair/Make-Up Combo: Tom Hanks - Larry Crowne
Best Wig (Actor): Nicolas Cage – Season of the Witch (possibly borrowed from the set of last year’s winner The Sorceror’s Apprentice)
Best Wig (Actress): Emily Browning – Sucker Punch
Worst Wig (Actor): Logan Lerman - The Three Musketeers (actually they were glued-in extensions but you get my point)
Worst Wig (Actress): Cate Blanchett – Hanna
Wig I’m On The Fence About: Justin Theroux – Your Highness
Best Hats: The Adjustment Bureau
Honorable Mention: Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
Best Dressed Chap in Sweden: Daniel Craig – The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
Worst Casting: Sensible Reese Witherspoon as a PG-13-raunchy and unpredictable acrobat in Water For Elephants
Most Scatological Movie of the Year: Spy Kids 4D: All The Time In The World
I’m kinda glad I didn’t see this at the cinema with the Smell-O-Vision scratch card; if the middle section of this movie is anything to go by, I’d just be sniffing a piece of cardboard soaked in Essence of Fart. But I’ll be honest; the cavalcade of poop, barf and fart jokes made me laugh more often than most adult comedies released this year. Shame about that incoherent final act, though.
Most Weather:Wuthering Heights
Best Recasting: The mostly awake and reasonably charming Rosie Huntington-Whiteley replacing orange-hued erotic rabbitbot Megan Fox on Transformers: Dark of the Moon
Messiest Eater: Mickey Rourke - Immortals
Most Expressive Fist: Ryan Gosling - Drive
Biggest Build-Up For Least Payoff: The appearance of Kominsky – New Year’s Eve
Midway through Garry Marshall’s fractured compendium of schmaltz, Hilary Swank decides she needs to hire the legendary Kominsky to fix the broken new year ball in Times Square, and this causes a ripple of excitement to run through the extras clumsily assembled around the set. Kominsky, they whisper with amazement, she’s getting Kominsky. There is much fuss, palaver and hullabuloo about the imminent arrival of Kominsky. It’s infectious. This is, after all, a movie that features a dazzling array of cinema legends like Lea Michele and Josh Duhamel, while filling the smaller roles with yer DeNiros and Pfeiffers. So what legend will they get to play Kominsky? Pacino? Cruise? Hanks? No, silly! It’s Hector Elizondo! For fans of Garry Marshall I’m sure this was a big deal. For the rest of us? Even those of us who have nothing against Hector Elizondo? Not so much.
Most Admirable Commitment To Onscreen Skeeviness: Ben Foster (duplicitous assassin in The Mechanic, wheelchair-bound substance-abusing snitch in Rampart, convicted sex offender and possible murderer in 360)
Most Convincing Lust Object of the Year: Michael Fassbender – Shame (And also X-Men: First Class, A Dangerous Method and Jane Eyre)
Honorable Mention: Hayley Atwell – Captain America: The First Avenger
Least Convincing Lust Object of the Year: January Jones – X-Men: First Class
Dishonorable Mention: Ryan Reynolds - The Change-Up
Most Obscenely, Depressingly Beautiful Cast: Immortals
Ugliest Contact Lenses: The Rum Diary
Honorary Manuela Velasco Award for Services to Scream-Queen Culture: Florencia Colucci - The Silent House
Most Depressing Mise-en-Scène: Tyrannosaur
Honorable Mention: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Best Use Of Split Screen: The Green Hornet
Worst Use Of Split Screen: 360
Most Depressing Depiction of a Sexually Aggressive Woman: Jennifer Aniston – Horrible Bosses
Dishonorable Mention: Marisa Tomei – Crazy, Stupid, Love
Cheapest But Most Effective Device In A Horror Film: The swiveling camera in Paranormal Activity 3
It’s just a camera on the bottom half of an oscillating fan, but that simple trick, with the camera panning back and forth very slowly, amps up the tension more than any expensive CGI trick. Kudos to Henry Joost, Ariel Shulman and Christopher Landon for coming up with it.
Worst Product Placement: New Year’s Eve, because nothing says New Year’s celebrations like those joy-embodying products from Toshiba, Phillips and Nivea.
Worst Manners: Jason Statham – Blitz
Weirdest Impersonation of What Sounds A Bit Like Ray Winstone: Mel Gibson – The Beaver
Weirdest Impersonation Of What Sounds Like Jennifer Jason Leigh In The Hudsucker Proxy: Andrea Riseborough – W.E.
Most Logistically Impressive Movie: Transformers: Dark of the Moon
Honorable Mention: Battle: Los Angeles
Most Unusual Fighting Implement Wielded by Zoe Saldana In An Otherwise Forgettable Luc Besson/Robert Mark Kamen C-Movie Actioner: A toothbrush (Columbiana)
Transformers: Dark of the Moon (Chicago and many other parts of America)
A Dangerous Method (Germany, Austria)
Wuthering Heights (Yorkshire)
Thor (Asgard)
Worst Cinematic Trend of 2011: Underwhelming third acts – Insidious, Captain America: The First Avenger, Thor, The Ides of March, Hugo, The Silent House, The Eagle, Dendera, Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil, Warrior, Paul, Cowboys and Aliens, The Adjustment Bureau, The Skin I Live In, Source Code, The Descendants, War Horse, Super 8, Drive, In Time, Trespass
Anne Billson wrote this great article on the problem of the bungled third act, and though I enjoyed a couple of her examples, there are a few there that cannot be argued with. Too many movies this year fell apart in the last 20-30 minutes, sometimes so badly that the rest of the movie was irreparably damaged. I’m not sure what the reason for this is, other than that too often films aren’t rewritten often enough before reaching the set, but whatever it is, three-quarters of each of the films above were reasonably-good-to-great, and that’s a very frustrating fraction.
Most Publicity Pictures of a Director: Paddy Considine – Tyrannosaur
Last year (scroll down to the bottom) I noticed the IMDb page for Biutiful‘s images featured a lot of shots of Iñárritu (aka The Director Formerly Known As Alejandro Gonzales Iñárritu), most of them featuring him pointing and looking very thoughtful on set. It struck me that he was going for the title of Most Pictures Of A Director Pointing And Looking Very Thoughtful on IMDb, a title currently held by Michael Bay. And yet this year there’s a new potential winner in the shape of Paddy Considine, with four pictures on IMDb, more than co-star Eddie Marsan (he gets one), and as many as Olivia Colman. Bear in mind, Considine’s not even in the movie.
Even more shocking, Bay only has three on-set photos from Transformers: Dark of the Moon on IMDb this year, the other 600 pictures being 67% shots of Rosie Huntington-Whiteley getting out of cars, and 33% images of smoking rubble. Considine even manages two more shots of himself than Bay got on his debut movie Bad Boys, though none of the shots of Considine are as moving as this ferociously erotic pic of Bay’s torso. So this race to the bottom of the ego continues, but with a new contender around, THIS SHIT OFFICIALLY JUST GOT REALER.
And with that, I’m finally done. Thanks to all who have contacted me about this epic series of posts, and to everyone who has made their way through this mass of opinion and bad jokes, I doff my cap, and say, until next time. ::theme tune plays me out:: ::collapses::
Yet again my blogging schedule is thrown into disarray by what can only be described as a waking coma. A combination of night work, lack of sleep due to warring cats, and god know what else — probably some hex cast on me by some anti-blogging warlock — meant that last week I felt like I was trapped under a fog of confusion as thick as the thickest Greek yogurt. I’m not fully out of it yet, so this prologue might become a little off-kilter. Please bear with the blog until normal services are restored.
Not really much to say about this post other than that I’m watching a recording of the Golden Globes and seriously, this blog is more composed than this goddamn mess. It’s an uncomfortable experience made even more hard to bear by the fact that we’re watching it on the UK’s E! channel which has bleeped out every vaguely risque comment or mention of a product, thus rendering it unintelligible. Also in our favour; SoC hasn’t spent all year talking about last year’s Listmania as if it was easily the most shocking and daring blogpost of the year, and how we don’t care about the controversy it caused, and holy shit wait until you see what shocking jokes we’ve got in store for you this year; a build-up somewhat ruined by being followed with a couple of Kim Kardashian jokes.
No. We’ll be honest. This is merely a blogpost, one of millions. And yet we have our integrity, and our annual awards for Sam Rockwell and Michael Sheen, no appearances by Sofia Vergara’s Voice, and no awards for The Iron Lady. That, somehow, is enough. Please enjoy, and imagine them being read out in the voice of a slightly tipsy Ricky Gervais, punctuated by some cozy jokes about Johnny Depp and that faux-sneering thing he does to make out that he doesn’t really worship the people he is mocking (with, I’ll admit it, a bit of skill). The atheism is also implied.
Best Performance by an Actress: Tilda Swinton – We Need To Talk About Kevin
Honorable Mentions:
Anna Paquin – Margaret
Olivia Colman – Tyrannosaur
Jessica Chastain – Take Shelter
Carey Mulligan – Shame
Kirsten Dunst – Melancholia
Best Performance by an Actor: Michael Fassbender – Shame
Honorable Mentions:
Michael Shannon – Take Shelter
Gary Oldman – Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
Jean Dujardin - The Artist
Brendan Gleeson – The Guard
Woody Harrelson – Rampart
Best Supporting Performance by an Actress: Charlotte Gainsbourg – Melancholia
Honorable Mentions:
Jennifer Lawrence – X-Men: First Class
Anna Kendrick – 50/50
Ellen Page – Super
Déborah François – The Monk
Emily Mortimer – Our Idiot Brother
Best Supporting Performance by an Actor: Christopher Plummer – Beginners
Breakthrough Performance by an Actress: Elizabeth Olsen - Martha Marcy May Marlene
Breakthrough Performance by an Actor: John Boyega - Attack The Block
Best Career Moves of the Year (Actress): Jessica Chastain - The Tree of Life / Take Shelter / The Help / The Debt / Texas Killing Fields / Coriolanus
Honorable Mention: Carey Mulligan - Drive / Shame
Best Career Moves of the Year (Actor): Michael Fassbender - Shame / Jane Eyre / X-Men: First Class / A Dangerous Method
Honorable Mention: Ryan Gosling - Drive / The Ides of March / Crazy, Stupid, Love
“See? I Told You He Could Act” Performances of the Year: Matthew McConaughey - The Lincoln Lawyer / Bernie
“Wow, He Actually Can Act?” Performance of the Year: Jake Gyllenhaal - Source Code
“My God, I’m Even Angrier About The Uselessness Of Gilmore Girls Now Because You Deserve So Much Better Than The Bog-Standard ‘Pathetic Best Friend Of The Protagonist Who Is Only There To Make Her Look Better’ Stereotype And Look What Happens When You Get A Chance To Let Your Freak Flag Fly” Performance of the Year: Melissa McCarthy - Bridesmaids
“Dude, Where Have You Been? This Is The Best Thing You’ve Done In Ages. Oh Man, I Really Missed You, You Know. Jesus, X: Men Origins: Wolverine Sucked, But I’ve Got No Hard Feelings And This Kind of Commitment To Your Craft — Enhanced By Your Effortless Charm — Is Why We’ll Always Have A Place For You In Our Hearts” Performance of the Year: Hugh Jackman - Real Steel
Scenestealing Actress of the Year: Kat Dennings - Thor
Scenestealing Actor of the Year: Stanley Tucci - Captain America: The First Avenger
Most Wasted Actress: Robin Wright - Rampart / Moneyball / The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
Most Wasted Actor: Walton Goggins - Straw Dogs / Cowboys and Aliens
Most Fearless Performance of the Year: Keira Knightley – A Dangerous Method
“Look, Can We Just Stop Acting Like He’s Some Anonymous Beefcake And Accept He’s Got Smarts And Range On Top Of His Looks And Is Actually A Very Charming, Committed and Talented Actor, FFS” Performances of the Year: Chris Evans - Captain America: The First Avenger / Puncture / What’s Your Number?
Best Cameo: James Franco - The Green Hornet
“Holy Shit, You’re Seriously Scaring The Bejesus Out Of Me” Performance of the Year: Pollyanna McIntosh - The Woman
“Please Let Him Become A Huge Star And Use His Clout To Bring Friday Night Lights To The Big Screen” Performance of the Year: Kyle Chandler - Super 8
“I Bet All Those Critics Who Used To Think You Were Nothing But A Pretty Boy Feel Real Stupid Now” Performances of the Year: Brad Pitt – The Tree of Life / Moneyball
“Now Can You Please Do Me The Favour Of Shutting The Fuck Up, Assorted Whiners Hiding At The Bottom Of The Internet Like The Tiresome Trolls You Are?” Performances of the Year: Kristen Wiig – Paul / Bridesmaids
Worst Performance by an Actress: Cate Blanchett – Hanna
Dishonorable Mentions:
Natalie Portman – No Strings Attached
Milla Jovovich – The Three Musketeers
Taylor Schilling - Atlas Shrugged: Part I
Julia Roberts – Larry Crowne
Blake Lively – Green Lantern
Worst Performance by an Actor:Jim Sturgess – One Day
Dishonorable Mentions:
Colin O’Donoghue - The Rite
Paul Rudd – How Do You Know
Ashton Kutcher – No Strings Attached
Henry Hopper – Restless
Grant Bowler – Atlas Shrugged: Part I
Worst Supporting Performance by an Actress: January Jones – Unknown
Dishonorable Mentions:
January Jones – X-Men: First Class
Lucy Punch – You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger
Lucy Punch – Bad Teacher
Juno Temple – The Three Musketeers
Lake Bell – No Strings Attached
Worst Supporting Performance by an Actor: James Corden – The Three Musketeers
Dishonorable Mentions:
Richard Coyle – W.E.
James D’Arcy – W.E.
Rami Malek – Larry Crowne
Rafe Spall - One Day
Ken Stott - One Day
Worst Individual Voice Work: James McAvoy - Gnomeo and Juliet
Worst Voice Cast /Direction: Gnomeo and Juliet
Actress in Most Dire Need of a New Agent: Naomi Watts - Dream House / You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger / Fair Game
Dishonorable Mention: Olivia Wilde - Cowboys and Aliens / The Change-Up / In Time
Actor in Most Dire Need of a New Agent: Jason Bateman - The Change-Up / Paul / Horrible Bosses
Dishonorable Mention: Ryan Reynolds - Green Lantern / The Change-Up
Actor/Actress Duo With The Worst Luck in 2011: Abbie Cornish and Oscar Isaac – Sucker Punch and W.E.
Performance Most Likely To Make Fans Think Some Consciousness-Altering Substances Were Involved Though I’m Sure That’s Not The Case And I’m Certainly Not Suggesting He Was As High As Voyager 1 When He Slurred His Way Through This Piece Of Shit: James Franco - Your Highness
“Hmmm, Okay, You Were Actually Okay This Year, And Thus Deserve Recognition And A Temporary Reprieve From My Usual Derision” Performances of the Year: Cameron Diaz – The Green Hornet / Bad Teacher
Most Entertaining Performance by an Actress in a Bad Movie: Andrea Riseborough - W.E.
Honorable Mention: Mindy Kaling - No Strings Attached
Most Entertaining Performance by an Actor in a Bad Movie: Anthony Hopkins – The Rite
Honorable Mention: Anthony Hopkins – 360
Most Bafflingly Busy Actress of the Year: Frieda Pinto - You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger / Rise of the Planet of the Apes / Immortals
Most Bafflingly Busy Actor of the Year: Billy Burke - The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 / Drive Angry / Red Riding Hood
Worst Cameo: Convicted rapist Mike Tyson, again – The Hangover Part II
“Where Have You Been?” Actor of the Year: Fred Ward - 30 Minutes Or Less
Best Accent: Chloe Grace Moretz – Hugo
Worst Accent: Anne Hathaway – One Day
Most Entertaining Acccent: Gary Oldman – Red Riding Hood
Most Disconcerting Accent: Jeffrey Wright – Source Code
Best Performance By Hott Sam Rockwell: Cowboys and Aliens
Best Argument For The Use Of Performance-Capture Technology And The Freedom It Gives To Actors Performance of the Year: Andy Serkis - Rise of the Planet of the Apes
Best Argument To Destroy All Performance-Capture Technology To Prevent Such A Crime Ever Being Committed Again Performance of the Year: Seth Green – Mars Needs Moms
“More Of This And Less Of This, Please” Actress of the Year: Rose Byrne (More comedies like Bridesmaids as she has a real gift for comedy, less dramatic roles like X-Men: First Class and Insidious.)
“More Of This And Less Of This, Please” Actor of the Year: Bradley Cooper (More dramatic roles in unexpectedly entertaining movies like Limitless, less fratboy bullshit in odious crap like The Hangover Part II.)
Hammiest Performance By Michael Sheen: The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part One
Hammiest Performance By Chow Yun Fat: Let The Bullets Fly
Next up: crew contributions of the year. Best screenplay is a lock but I’m going back and forth on best director. Who will it be? #HitchcockianSuspense
A major caveat needs to be applied to this exhaustively thought-through list of the year’s best cinema, and I don’t mean the usual caveat I add about missing some key movie. The number 4 film on this list is so fresh in my mind (I watched it about 5 hours ago) that I’m not entirely sure it belongs in that place. It’s such a rich movie, such a complex and challenging piece of drama that there’s a good chance it should feature even higher, and yet I cannot place it where I think it will belong in future. Listmania is about how I feel at the moment I hit Publish, for better or worse. This means that sometimes I make almighty fuck-ups like including Megamind on last year’s list instead of How To Train Your Dragon, or putting Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs and Up below Michael Mann’s Public Enemies in ’09. As a result, it’s at 4, and if I decide that’s wrong in future, I’ll mention it somewhere.
Another thing to note; this year’s list doesn’t include a Best Documentary entry as I broke my new year’s resolution by not watching a single one. The Interrupters is on my Sky+ box, and I really wish I’d seen Senna even though I have next to no interest in Formula One. The one big documentary highlight of the year that I have seen — Errol Morris’ Tabloid — was shown during the 2010 London Film Festival and I wrote about it then, so my arbitrary rules demand I can’t add it this year. Those rules are very important, I’ll have you know. Contravention of the rules requires flagellation and right now I’m already feeling sorry for myself after one of our cats decided to use my face as a scratching post. ::sigh:: It’s been a long day.
As for the movies we traditionally didn’t get to see, the only possible contender for this list was The Descendants, which we could’ve seen at the 2011 London Film Festival if we’d been able to afford £25 each for gala tickets (which… no). Other than that I bet there was a ton of great stuff out there that would have surprised us and warranted inclusion, but I really doubt The Iron Lady (January release over here, rather perversely), Harry Potter and the End of the Franchise, or Jack and Jill would have made the cut. So, for about ten minutes at least, I feel pretty satisfied with this list. Yes, even the placing of Fast Five. You have no idea how much I enjoyed that movie. No idea. #ActionMovieBoner #CrushingOnTheRock
25. Wu Xia
How to describe this thrilling curio, other than to list the mashed-up elements: CSI, A History of Violence / Reign of Assassins, One-Armed Swordsman, Seven, and a dash of Raising Cain meld together to create a unique modern martial arts classic. Donnie Yen, Takeshi Kaneshiro and the legendary Wong Yu-lung face off in a relentlessly surprising tale of hidden identity, suspicion, and obsession. Yen is especially good as a family man thrust into a situation that jeopardises the lives of those he loves, but Kaneshiro matches him in the acting stakes as a possibly-demented detective who suspects he is on the brink of arresting a notorious and deadly killer. All the while, his distorted view of justice threatens to trigger a chain of events that could destroy an entire town. The battle for his soul, and the innocents of Yen’s village, is thrilling and unpredictable, aided by assured direction from Peter Chan, and beautifully photography by Yiu-Fai Lai and Jake Pollock. The well-controlled madness culminates in a final battle of epic intensity that is well worth the wait. Ignore critics who complain that Wu Xia is too much of a slow burn; the build-up contains pleasures too, before paying off in memorable fashion.
24. The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn
Two legendary filmmakers experimented with new technology this year, following in the pioneering footsteps of James Cameron and Robert Zemeckis. Those men made movies that have been critically shunned; perhaps Scorsese and Spielberg would have better luck. Hugo was embraced by film buffs for its loving homage to the works of a revolutionary filmmaker, but while Scorsese’s use of 3D and CGI FX was beautifully handled, the result was a little indulgent, too long, too personal to really breathe. Spielberg’s adaptation of the works of Herge was, on the other hand, derided by many. But it does more than just breathe; it hyperventilates with enthusiastic abandon as it leaps and gambols and sprints in an effort to entertain. The first half is less involving as it introduces beloved characters with too much reverence, but around the halfway mark Spielberg takes his new toy out for a real test drive, and from then on the audience is treated to a whirl of inspired choreography, unbridled imagination and sheer filmmaking genius. The series of setpieces that close out the film – especially the dizzying chase sequence through the elaborate Escher-like maze of Bagghar – are trademark Spielberg; beautiful, unconventional, technical marvels that left me giggling like a drunkard. The promise of further installments is enough to make this former Tintin-sceptic giddy with joy. More! Now!
23. Kung Fu Panda 2
This year’s crop of animated features was pretty disappointing, but that’s not to say there weren’t gems there. The blaze of publicity – and anxious online concern – for Pixar’s car-crash Cars 2 meant that attention was directed away from this Dreamworks sequel. The oddly dismissive reaction to the original might have contributed to the muted response but, for those of us who think the original is an underrated masterpiece of both computer animation and martial arts cinema, this was a cause for celebration. While not as thrilling and powerful as the first movie, KFP2 did the most important thing; it honoured that original, finding new ways to build Po’s character that followed on from his first arc, both by giving him a new source of inner pain to conquer, and by providing an antagonist whose own pain echoes that of our hero. Even the nigh-perfect Toy Story movies trod the same ground from one end of the franchise to the other; to see the KFP franchise show new facets of its central character was most welcome. On top of that, Jennifer Yuh Nelson – who provided the magnificent opening of KFP1 – does stunning work here too. Her direction is hectic but clear, packing giddy setpieces alongside well-judged character moments and perfectly timed gags. If this level of quality can be maintained, let’s hope Jeffrey Katzenberg’s pledge for a dozen sequels will come true.
22. Rise of the Planet of the Apes
What seemed like the most unnecessary movie of the summer season turned out to be one of the year’s highlights. It’s probable that no one thought we needed another Apes movie after Tim Burton’s woeful remake hurled scat bombs at the franchise, but hallelujah, Peter Chernin figured there was enough juice left to be squeezed out, and the result was a rousing triumph. Director Rupert Wyatt took the brilliantly “simple” script by Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver and treated it with respect, conjuring up some breathtaking setpieces more thrilling than any amount of crazy Bayhemian pyrotechnics. The fully realised cast of ape characters may have made the humans seem dull in comparison, but that’s only fair; this is a story about the emancipation of our poorly-treated simian brothers, after all. There’s lots to love about RotPotA, but special praise and garlands must be thrown at the amazing Andy Serkis. He’s terrific in Spielberg’s Tintin, but he’s even better here, bringing to life a truly great character. Caesar’s arc from innocent companion to vengeful freedom fighter is the key to this movie’s considerable success, and Serkis does thrilling performance capture work that deserving of award recognition. This summer may have opened with light mocking about RotPotA‘s existence, but the season ended with millions of us impatient for further installments. Who could’ve seen that coming?
21. We Need To Talk About Kevin
The formal daring of Lynne Ramsay’s long-awaited return to cinema is almost frightening, but welcomed gratefully. This adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s novel could, in less intelligent hands, have been reshaped into a run-of-the-mill thriller, but thankfully Ramsay is an artist of the highest order. Her crimson vision of cruelty and misplaced guilt washes over the audience like a wave, playing elliptical games with time and sensory input to create a sense of bafflement similar to that experienced by poor mistreated Eva. As with her previous movies, We Need… is an epic ambient hum compared to the three-minute manufactured ditties that we are usually served up. However, it would have been higher up this list were it not for the character of Kevin, here portrayed as a ludicrous force of pure malevolent evil, not a human being, whose actions are so dreadful as to unbalance the film. As a metaphor for the guilt and pressures placed on women as mothers, and a way to dramatise the vile rejection of Eva by a society that has yet to learn how to process grief, the demonic Kevin works brilliantly. As a believable person, less so. That means the movie’s higher allegorical purpose lacks the human core that would allow it to work on two levels, but even so, there is greatness here. Cinema needs Ramsay’s purity of vision; let’s hope she doesn’t stay away so long next time.
20. The Tree of Life
Terrence Malick’s semi-autobiographic cosmic meditation not only divided critical opinion but has such a split personality that viewer sympathies can change wildly from one moment to the next. Is this too self-indulgent, even for a Malick movie? Is it transcendental? Is it profound or profoundly stupid? The truth almost certainly lies somewhere in the middle, but for fans of the great man’s formless musings and pro-nature fixations, this triggered epiphanies that dwarfed the frustrations. Brad Pitt excels as the cold father who alienates his son, driving him to flirt with feelings of isolation that haunt him for the rest of his life. The microcosm of this transference is given an extra dimension by Malick’s startling decision to present a view of the macrocosm, an infinity of randomness and loneliness that seemingly extends beyond our lives. Tree of Life is arguably more compelling in its wilder moments; Sean Penn’s sojourn into what might be a barren and baffling afterlife, and the early Doug Trumbell-hewn effects sequences, are unexpectedly moving, grandiose bookends to a story of tainted childhood that can’t help but pale in comparison. Nevertheless, this peek into what makes Malick tick is also worth the effort. A filmmaker who for so long has been an enigma opened his heart to his audience, and in its finest moments, his honesty makes that journey worthwhile.
19. Arriety
There have been a number of adaptations of Mary Norton’s Borrowers novels — just this week the BBC showed a new version that featured lots of familiar Beeb-approved actors screaming and shouting and getting into all sorts of hi-velocity scrapes. Studio Ghibli’s version couldn’t be more different; it’s so relaxed that the only antagonist in the movie is revealed late in the movie and barely presents a credible threat. Hiromasa Yonebayashi and Hayao Miyazaki’s tale of dislocated family is disarmingly gentle, and focuses more on the details of life within the walls of our houses than the possibility of danger. The gloriously rendered background paintings and exquisite animation reintroduce us to our world from this new perspective, helped by stunning sound design that turns the ambient noise of a house into something alien. There is no need for empty histrionics; the tale of Arrietty’s growth into an adult, and the strain that puts on her overprotective parents, is drama enough. Arrietty’s friendship with Shô provides the rest of the narrative force; against all caution she befriends this potential enemy and inadvertently saves him from despair. This delicate, achingly lovely movie might not have the flights of imagination that other Ghibli movies have, but its grounded nature works in its favour. There is magic and beauty in this ode to friendship, this instant classic of pastoral fantasy.
18. Friends With Benefits
The profitability of cheap, bawdy comedies has led to a glut of films unafraid to depict gross-out bodily humour or frank discussions of the literal ins and outs of heteronormative sexuality (and its unfortunate homosexual partner, high-larious gay panic jokes). This year we’ve had the good (Bridesmaids), the bad (Bad Teacher), the lazy (The Hangover Part II), and the underrated (What’s Your Number?). Only one truly verged on greatness. Friends With Benefits trounces its other fuck-buddy rival No Strings Attached thanks to a good heart that is never swamped by the hilarious sex chat, rampant irreverence, and high energy hijinx, as well as a winning co-starring combo of Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake at their most charming. Will Gluck provides the same enthusiastic movie-referencing nerdery as he did with last year’s exemplary Easy A, this time drawing attention to the conventions of the romcom genre. Quite rightly, our cynical heroes, hurt by past lovers and eager to strip relationships of their romantic baggage, gleefully mock those conventions, and yet are unable to escape their draw when they finally, inevitably fall in love. Some have said Gluck is having his cake and eating it. I say he’s depicting the emotional arc of his protagonists. Honestly, what are critics paid for these days? Not enjoying transparently wonderful comedies? SADFACE.
17. Thor
It doesn’t have to be all Nolan-esque sourness in the superhero movie world, and Thor is the best example of the sheer fun that can be had within this maligned genre. Kenneth Branagh’s remarkably confident experiment with caped heroics does almost everything right, from introducing an audience to an alien world and unfamiliar hero, to using that new world to expand a recently established one, to matching its tone to its predecessors. The Marvel Film Universe has now been established as a place of high adventure and sneaky humour, both of which Thor has in spades. The perfect cast bring the ambitious script to life with infectious verve, with special honours going to scenestealers Anthony Hopkins and Kat Dennings, new star Chris Hemsworth, and especially the amazing Tom Hiddleston. His work here as the tragic and tortured Loki, “God” of Mischief – the year’s best villain – is a revelation. Branagh was right to think of this movie in Shakespearean terms; Loki’s anguish over his birth and insecurity over the love of the King Lear-ean Odin has shades of Richard III with a touch of Don John’s malevolence as he tries to undermine his brother by exploiting his Prince Hal-esque hubris. Thor takes the comic subject matter simultaneously lightly and seriously; it’s that balance between the two states that makes the best superhero movie of the year such a triumph.
16. Drive
For the majority of its running time, Nicholas Winding Refn and Hossain Amini’s pared-down crime thriller features the purest kind of cinematic iconography, using classic elements from the past thirty years of movies to create their simple tale of a getaway driver doing the wrong thing to protect the wholesome girl. It’s a glorious painting done in primary colours, depicting a luminous LA in which our near-silent anti-hero – a professional from the Michael Mann / Walter Hill school of perfectionists – performs miracles, but is undone and/or saved from solitude by a connection to the human world. File this alongside Refn’s previous movie, Valhalla Rising, as a portrait of a man whose singular purpose cannot change his inevitable future, as all around him complicate their lives with suspicion and misguided ambition. Refn’s pure imagery and purposefulness was revelatory, and his playful use of 80s-style imagery went some way to redeeming that ugly decade’s bad reputation. What a shame that overplotting in the last half hour had to tarnish this almost crystalline object. It’s a frustrating final act stumble that dampens the impact of what came before, but even taking that into account, Drive‘s mixture of innocence and grotesque violence is still remarkable, all the more so thanks to thrilling work from Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, and an unexpectedly terrifying Albert Brooks.
15. Martha Marcy May Marlene
Much like Jennifer Lawrence won a legion of fans with her appearance in Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone, Elizabeth Olsen’s debut performance in this dark drama is one of the highlights of the year. Her titular character is a mystery, an uncomfortable presence in our world and a sympathetic one when trapped in her cult. John Hawkes is the link between Bone and Marlene; his menace crosses over, but here he adds a layer of messianic charisma, controlling his minions and compelling them to commit terrible crimes. The question at the heart of this remarkable and bleak movie is whether Martha (Marcy May / Marlene) is a victim or a participant, and Olsen’s achievement here is to never tip us off. Sean Durkin’s directorial debut may feature a pleasingly ambiguous protagonist, but the one thing that’s not in doubt is his skill at using the natural world to generate an oppressive atmosphere of dread, one which curls over our anti-heroine from the first frame to the last like a closing fist. That gradual darkening, brilliantly evoked by the photography of Jody Lee Lipes and paced to perfection by editor Zachary Stuart-Pontier, is more effective than any horror movie made this year; when combined with the humanity of Olsen’s work, the result is unforgettable.
14. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
Tomas Alfredson’s dour adaptation of John Le Carre’s classic novel is the kind of movie that gets plaudits just for being so out of sync with modern populist tastes; all of those garish loud movies that no one will admit to enjoying. Luckily there’s another reason for the critical praise; Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a riveting and intelligent thriller, made with exacting care by Alfredson, here proving that he is a major talent. The complex novel is cleverly condensed by Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan (redeeming himself for the mess he made of The Men Who Stare At Goats), wasting no time in feeding the audience swathes of information. Full attention is necessary, aided by the anti-distracting spartan visuals and authentically glum mise-en-scene; there’s an argument to be made that Tinker… captures Britain’s damp melancholic soul better than any other movie. Every performance is pitch-perfect, with special praise to be given to Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hardy and a never-better Gary Oldman. Their task is to take something that seems dry and clinical and show that the espionage element of the plot rests on subdued and submerged emotions. They leak out at times, giving us a peek into a world of immense, unaddressed grief. The result is a quietly devastating movie about betrayal and compromise, and the toll it takes on the secret guardians of society.
13. Fast Five
The summer season kicked off with Thor and Fast Five hot on each other’s tails around the globe, bringing with them the possibility that this could be the best summer season of them all. Sadly it was not to be. Nevertheless, at least we got this. Fast Five may be “just” an action movie, something that attracts derision from the criterati, but this “lowest-common denominator” action movie was like mainlining adrenaline. Embracing its humble origins, Justin Lin and Chris Morgan’s cacophonous action extravaganza is unapologetically crazy, doing everything it can to entertain its target audience, exceeding all expectations. It’s a perfect example of what a late entry into a series should do; it expands the franchise’s world without abandoning its roots, it adds new elements to enhance what we already have, and it pays off emotional beats that have been lying around for years. It also atomises most of Rio de Janeiro thanks to a joyous disregard for the laws of physics. No one here will win any awards, except for awards in my head, such as Best Movie Uniting Underrated Action Icons. Fast Five is Ocean’s 11 in cars mixed with The Fugitive, and the big showdown in the movie pits a sweat-spritzed Rock against an angst-ridden Diesel. If Shades of Caruso believed in the concept of guilty pleasures it’d file this in that category, but fuck that. This is just pure, delirious pleasure, a classic of the genre.
12. Wuthering Heights
Odd to think that this project has been in the works since 2008, considering the regular TV adaptations of Charlotte Bronte’s novel. There’s an industry at work doing nothing but churning out movies and TV dramas that try to depict the surface of Bronte’s story without capturing its essence. Adaptations need to break their source material apart to get at the meat within, and this version by Andrea Arnold and Olivia Hetreed does just that. By casting black actors to play young and “old” Heathcliff, they have done the impossible; they have breathed life into characters who have long lived as alien icons trapped in amber. With the rejection of Heathcliff here caused by ignorant bigotry due to his ethnicity, the motivations of all involved make sense in an instant, and from there we can empathise with them as people and not as tragic romantic caricatures. For the first time in my life I now understand Cathy and Heathcliff, feel their pain, ache for their tragic loss. This single move is a miraculous bravura flourish made even more profound by depicting this world as a kind of hell, in which Heathcliff can only rage and suffer. Arnold and Hetreed show how he brings everyone down into the depths with him, but they never lose sight of his humanity, inhumanity, and aching soul. Aesthetically perfect, atmospherically oppressive and thematically precise; this is the definitive visual adaptation.
11. Contagion
Doomsday fiction usually has to operate on a fantastical plane to generate a menace large enough to threaten all of society, but the plague subgenre doesn’t have to fake it. Which is why Contagion is so welcome, after years of Cassandra Crossing / Outbreak-style wackiness. Only Robert Wise’s Andromeda Strain ever got close to depicting the uniquely fascinating world of virology / epidemiology with any real rigour before, but Soderbergh and Burns’ terrifying vision of societal meltdown knocks even that terrific movie into a cocked biohazard mask. A brilliant cast tamps down its emotions to dramatise humanity’s reaction to imminent pandemic horror; muted emotions, delayed sadness, dutiful conscientiousness. Where lesser plague movies have succumbed to melodramatics, Soderbergh has made a forensic experience, using multiple narrative arcs to cover a lot of ground, all depicted with his trademark neat visuals. There are no pyrotechnics here, no races against time or miracle cures; there is only bureaucracy, panic, stupidity, and venality. Nevertheless, these qualities are balanced by the scientific minds that dispassionately work to prevent calamity. Contagion will probably scare the bejeezus out of you, but there is hope there too, because Soderbergh and Burns show that the connective web that threatens to destroy us is also the thing that will keep us alive.
10. Shame
They should call 2011 Annus Fassbenderis. After being the best thing about Jane Eyre, X-Men: First Class, and almost every movie he’s been in for the past five years, Michael Fassbender proved fans like SoC right by giving us the year’s most memorable performance, one that would send shockwaves through the culture if it wasn’t about that icky sex that people don’t want to reveal that they’re thinking about. His depiction of a sex addict’s psychological meltdown is mesmerising and courageous, and is enhanced by Steve McQueen’s evocative portrait of night-time New York, lit by the remarkable Sean Bobbitt to match Fassbender’s calm facade, all sterile, gleaming perfection hiding a darker core. Abi Morgan’s script wisely avoids providing explicit information about what made the protagonist, Brandon, the way he is. This isn’t about a journey into darkness. It’s about the arrival, and we are invited to look at ourselves without excuses or reasoning. It’s not an anti-internet message either, or a political statement about an over-sexualised culture. McQueen, Morgan and Fassbender may be trying to trigger a conversation about how we’ve all arrived at the point we’re at, alone and scared of opening up to others, without making facile assumptions. A problem doesn’t get fixed until we recognise it; perhaps that’s Shame‘s purpose, as well as to grip us, and horrify us.
9. Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol
The thought of Brad Bird following Ratatouille — one of the most profound meditations on art and creativity ever made — with another attempt to justify the existence of cinema’s most malfunctioning franchise made SoC depressed. It’s like hearing David Cronenberg is going to adapt a Robert Ludlum novel. And yet while that project was so deformed and weird that it never happened, Bird’s Ghost Protocol blasted onto IMAX screens in a flurry of confidence, taut suspense, and epic audience satisfaction. Bird’s beautifully designed and filmed setpieces are rightly attracting praise from even the most critical of viewers, with the Burj Khalifa scene on its way to becoming a new star in the action pantheon, maybe eclipsing even De Palma’s Topkapi homage in the first Mission Impossible. Supporting those thrilling highlights is a strong framework of improved character work (only Ving Rhames has registered in previous installments), propulsive pacing, and a giddy sense of silliness that compliments the drama. These touches, which turn a good spy movie into a great one, bear Bird’s fingerprints, more than justifying the decision to bring the great man on board. Yes, the villain’s terrible. Yes, the threat’s outdated. But Bird knows this genre so well, and can transmute the basest elements into gold, so what could’ve been another boring MI movie becomes 2011′s best action movie.
8. Melancholia
It’s a dark thought to have midway through Lars Von Trier’s brilliant end-of-the-world movie, but his recent awful experience with depression may have brought about a renaissance in his art, replacing his petty taunting of the audience with a greater awareness of himself, and his ambivalence toward himself. The result of this redirection has been the remarkable Antichrist and now Melancholia, which depicts the crushing weight of Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg’s depression as the inevitable end of the world due to collision with a metaphor in the shape of a planet. As blunt as this metaphor is, it’s effective in capturing the scale of a depressive episode within a person’s life, and is mitigated by subtler details that express with devastating accuracy society’s exasperating and uncaring attitude to those who suffer from mental health problems; the first half of the movie, with Dunst’s bride pushed and pulled by meaningless social obligations that she has become unable to comprehend or care about, is especially good. Dunst is mesmerising as the woman who dissolves into her depression, reaching something like a state of grace as her sister (Gainsbourg, also phenomenal) succumbs to her own version of this dread. Von Trier’s frank and honest exploration of his experience is an invaluable aid for those of us fortunate enough to escape its misery, and for that he should be thanked.
7. Margaret
Kenneth Lonergan’s long-delayed movie-as-novel is here presented with approximately a sixth of itself missing, and who knows how the restoration of that chunk would alter the movie. But what multitudes are already contained here, what glorious truths, what immense joy and anger. Lonergan has weaved a tale about perception and interpretation by making a movie that is intentionally opaque and misleading, but his primary achievement is to transcribe the fractured, confusing experience of PTSD into disorienting dramatic beats and unpredictable explosions of emotion. This unconventional approach is especially apparent during the final hour, as precocious student Lisa tries to mitigate her feelings by lashing out at everyone. Anna Paquin gives the performance of a lifetime as a young woman who believes she knows herself and her place in the world, despite all evidence to the contrary. What Lonergan has done is perceptively capture the exasperation of those adults who have stepped aside to let their progeny find their feet, only see watch in horror as they founder and then fall back on obnoxious bluster. Many commentators decry this as “merely” an outdated movie about 9/11, but it’s as much about how parents can fuck up their children, while offering hope that eventually those children will come to realise and accept they are a part of society, not above it.
6. A Dangerous Method
The accumulated works of David Cronenberg have shown his fascination with the life of the mind, and how our inner selves contain secret things that can bring us low. This metaphysical horror has been overtly addressed by him many times, but this is a more subtle exploration of the threat of our hidden self poses to ourselves. The Carl Jung here brought to us by Cronenberg, Christopher Hampton and Michael Fassbender is an enthusiastic man of high ideals and loyalty who is undone by a lust he could not have anticipated, one which erodes his marriage, his public reputation, his friendship with father-figure Sigmund Freud, and eventually his expectations for his future. But this superb film keeps this torrent of disappointment and longing out of sight; Cronenberg’s subtle direction means only Keira Knightley’s explosive catalyst Sabina Spielrein gets to unleash her emotions, often against her will. Jung’s yearning for such freedom, and Freud’s reaction to the young man’s ambitions, leak out in occasional moments of recognisable childish weakness at odds with our image of them as great men. These relationships are the engine for this masterful dramatisation of their theories in action; psychoanalysis as psychodrama. Though this hasn’t landed with as big a splash as Cronenberg’s most recent movies, SoC suspects time will be kind to it. One day it will be ranked among his best.
5. Attack The Block
It’s rare that a British filmmaker has enough control over his urge to emulate his directorial heroes that he can pay homage to them without making a hollow copycat exercise, and Joe Cornish deserves plaudits for his expert handling of suspense and pace. But this is more than just a proficient sci-fi homage. The real-life mugging that inspired Attack The Block has been transformed through Cornish’s compassionate and questioning approach into a treatise on the ethnic and social tensions that exist between the victims of our unjust economic system and those who glamorise it. There’s no patronising here; Cornish is aware of the wrongness of his protagonist’s crimes, and doesn’t excuse them, but he at least tries to understand what drives those who are sickeningly referred to as “the feral underclass” to such lows. This curiosity and empathy is almost unheard-of in British culture, especially after the recent riots that caused a shudder of sneering disgust to ripple through our media. That it has taken so long for someone fortunate enough to not sit at the bottom of Britain’s socio-economic ladder to sympathetically wrestle with these themes is a black mark on our country. AtB isn’t just a thrilling horror-action movie; it’s an attempt to communicate something about the UK that no one wants to think about, a time-capsule representation of who we are and what we’re doing to our disenfranchised youth.
4. A Separation
Proof, if proof was needed, that a movie about a simple gamble within a marriage could create the dramatic equivalent of a train crash. Asghar Farhadi’s riveting drama begins simply as the tale of an Iranian couple considering divorce, with Simin (Leila Hatami) testing the resolve of her stubborn husband Nader (Peyman Maadi), before becoming a cross between Kramer Vs. Kramer and Rashomon. Farhadi’s stunning movie becomes complicated with such stealth that it’s not until you’re an hour in that you find yourself engaged in a kind of dialectic with the movie, questioning everything you have seen in an effort to keep up with the shifting narratives of the protagonists. The stubbornness of Simin and Nader, which causes such damage to those around them including their daughter and the tragic figure of Razieh (Sareh Bayat), should make them unsympathetic but Farhadi’s humanity means we recognise every stupid, selfish thing they do. His direction is forensic, his cast uniformly impressive, and his script is the screenwriting highlight of the year. This is a movie to watch and study to in order to pick up all of its subtleties and surprises, and that’s before you consider its allegorical richness. But it’s not necessary to know the intricacies of Iranian politics to get the most from A Separation. All you need to do is be a human, with all the understandable flaws so perceptively captured here.
3. The Artist
There are numerous arguments against Michel Hazanavicius’ silent movie homage:” it’s too light”; “the melodrama is overplayed”; “there’s not much to it”; “it’s too derivative of several movies”; “the dog’s not in it enough”; “why is it black and white and why are there no words”; “there’s no way I could possibly enjoy this as being happy is anathema to me and my very serious ways”. It’s all a load of stuff and nonsense. Experiencing this ode to joy, this gratifyingly weightless and ecstatic love letter to the power of populist art, is the best time you will have in the cinema at the moment, and being a part of the collective audience experience – as depicted very pointedly in the opening moments of this modern classic – is an unforgettable treat. Jean Dujardin and Berenice Bejo are delightful as lovers separated by pride and fear of the future; their infectious joy and indestructible attraction to each other is the secret of The Artist‘s considerable success. As opined here, it’s also a tribute to the artists who have been part of the tapestry of culture that is still being woven, and the way in which an idea generously given can flourish. One act of flirtatious kindness pays dividends in the future, with the recipient paying it back in order to save a loved one’s soul. But forget about that; see it, succumb to its delirious, enthusiastic embrace of cinema and romance, and don’t forget to bring your dancing shoes.
2. Rango
Who would have believed that Gore Verbinski had this in him? Shades of Caruso is proud to call itself a pro-Gore blog, having been one of the five audience members to have enjoyed the determinedly peculiar Mousehunt on release. Even taking that early oddity into account, Rango is a startling leap into the weird for Verbinski. A Chinatown homage that mangles the Western genre and goes out of its way to alienate the audience it needs to be a success? Just for taking that risk it deserves to be praised, but tokenism like that isn’t necessary when the end product is this much fun. As SoC tweeted at the time — in a state of some shock and joy — it’s like a Grant Morrison Animal Man comic directed by Sergio Leone, breaking the fourth wall and probably even a hypothetical fifth wall as Rango seeks to define his personality by pulling our new modern cinematic mythology into his world to form a path of self-discovery. Much of the rambling discourse on how we define ourselves makes it seem like the recording of the dialogue – done by Verbinski with all the cast present, acting out their parts on a soundstage – was actually an informal group therapy session. There’s structure within this berserk adventure, and Verbinski stages a couple of delirious action sequences too, but it’s the doodling in the margins, the asides and self-inspection of Rango himself that make this one of the most exciting and lovably deranged movies of the new century. It’s also a vision of beauty; thanks to the stellar production design of Mark “Crash” McCreery and the lighting design of consultant Roger “King” Deakins it’s almost too much to take in on first viewing.
1. Take Shelter
For far too many of us, the world has become a buzzing, unpredictable maelstrom of doubt and fear, as established institutions crumble and threaten to take everything familiar with them. A combination of things beyond our control have conspired to alter the world too quickly for us to keep up with, so that we’re assailed by external and internal strife that manifests in global pessimism about the future; there was too much news this year, too many things going wrong. The earth shifted beneath our feet metaphorically and literally in 2011, and no other cultural experience captured that terrifying feeling like Jeff Nicholl’s magnificent end-of-days movie. Expertly combining a sense of imminent world-shattering event and the personal story of one man’s battle to overcome his seemingly inevitable mental collapse, Take Shelter is suffused with the sense that devastating things can happen to us and there’s nothing we can do can stop them.
The final scene can be seen as either hopeful or not, but for anyone who feels their stomach drop every time they turn on the TV or look at Twitter or read a newspaper, and hear that the world as we know it has become alien and newly fragile, it’s the slow build of dread that makes this the most immersive and upsetting cinematic experience of recent times. Nicholls has put his finger right on the synapse that controls our terror; watching this exhausting experience, and marveling at the mesmerising performances from Jessica Chastain and Genius-Level firebrand Michael Shannon is to see your fears realised before you. For those of an optimistic bent, there is still much to enjoy here, but for the rest of us, this is the movie of our time, the touchstone and representation of our psyche.
Honorable Mentions:
Children Who Chase Lost Voices From Down Below: Makoto Shinkai’s magical trip into the underworld is an afterlife myth for our time, as a young girl and a shady operative both seek to deal with their feelings of loss and loneliness by embarking on a death-thwarting journey into Agartha. CWCLVFDB‘s epic sweep and honesty make this a visual and emotional success.
Weekend: Comparisons to Before Sunrise are inevitable, but this depiction of a brief encounter is transformed into something different due to the inevitable political element within. Andrew Haigh is to be commended for not making this romance specifically about gay politics, but addressing it cleverly provides an extra emotional level. It’s also just very romantic.
Footloose: More to come on this Craig Brewer remake in a forthcoming post. Suffice it to say, it did everything right, nothing wrong, and fixed everything wrong with the beloved but heavily flawed original. A hugely underrated crowdpleasing treat.
Super 8: 2011 was a year in which our best filmmakers were eager to plunder the history of cinema, and J.J. Abrams’ homage to the golden years of Spielberg’s Amblin so accurately captured the look and feel of those movies that all structural flaws could be forgiven. To those who grew up watching the movies referenced here, Super 8 was a glorious reminder of their power and beauty.
Moneyball: Brad Pitt co-produced this, and it’s pretty much his show. Eschewing the usual mythologising of baseball (at least until its final act), Bennett Miller, Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin use a dry tale of statistical manipulation to depict the slow awakening of a man to life’s possibilities. Pitt “knocks it out of the park”. (UK readers note that this is a baseball metaphor.)
Coming up, once I’ve harnessed my considerable grumpiness — Listmania ’11: Worst Movies of the Year. There will be grump.
Hello, bloglings. Quick post to cover my next big poll for the next year, after the last one became a bigger project than I had expected. Every year I run a poll of the best movies of the past 12 months, and the 2010 one ended up staying up in the sidebar until now solely because I figured it was only fair to give participants time to catch up with everything on there, and not because I totally flaked out at the start of the year and almost gave up on blogging about three times because of mild mental trauma, faltering side-projects, ennui and suchlike. Nothing like that at all. It was all for you, my assorted fragrant lovelies.
So anyway, this is what you thought, and I have to say, I’m surprised:
Scott Pilgrim’s Unwatched Adventure: 6 votes = 18%
Sorkin Vs Facebook = Ten Million Word Count: 4 votes = 12%
A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Jihad: 4 votes = 12%
How Creepy Was My Ballet?: 3 votes = 9%
Ben Stiller’s The Human Zoidberg: 3 votes = 9%
Uncle Boonmee and the Deathly-Boring Hallows: 2 votes = 6%
Im In Ur Dreamz Killin Ur D00dz: 2 votes = 6%
The Kids Are All Right But Their Parents Are Fucked: 2 votes = 6%
The Impoverished Hottie And The Quest For The Redneck: 2 votes = 6%
Another Year, Another Grim Mike Leigh Movie: 2 votes = 6%
Robert Altman’s Iron Man: 1 vote = 3%
The Most Expensive Daft Punk Video Imaginable: 1 vote = 3%
Pixar’s The Neverending Guilt Trip: 1 vote = 3%
Harry Potter and the Unguent of Perspicacity: 0 votes = 0%
The Execrables: 0 votes = 0%
Twilight: Eternal Narrative Stasis: 0 votes = 0%
Proto-Robin Hood And His Quasi-Merry Men: 0 votes = 0%
Prince of Parkour: The Absence of Entertainment: 0 votes = 0%
Scott Pilgrim? I think I have a good idea who voted for that; there is a large pro-Pilgrim element among my Twitter clique, and that’s cool. Sadly, I might have been on the fence last year but watching it again this year made me realise how much it annoys me. But I’m glad it has a following, and I suspect it will only grow. Congratulations, Edgar Wright and your lovable cast. I trust this epic victory makes up for the non-existent box office.
Some surprises there. Two votes for Inception? Three for Greenberg? Tron: Legacy gets the same amount of votes as Toy Story 3? How peculiar. I worry that Tron: Legacy got a vote because of the new name I gave it. Anne Billson complemented me on the joke but I think I stole it from Roger Ebert. When they say “Talent borrows, genius steals” I really don’t think they meant to say I’m a genius because I plagiarised a tweet. But anyway, it has been interesting to see how the votes land, and as you can see from the huge voting pool here this qualifies as actual statistical science, so please be sure to refer to Scott Pilgrim as officially the film of 2010 from now on. Thank you to everyone who voted, and if you’ve stumbled across this again, please vote once more for your favourite movie of 2011.
Mission Unpossible: Goat Prototype
Harry Potter and the Dirty Pillows, Part 12
Lynne Ramsay’s One Colour: Red
We Need To Talk About Thor’s Lickable Deltoids
Twilight: The One With The Werepaedo
Cheer Up, Kirsten Dunst, It Might Never Happen
Tarsem’s Immortale, Pour Homme
It’s a Tree, Yeah, And It’s, Like, A Metaphor For Life, Man
Drive, He Didn’t Say
Pirates Of The Caribbean: A Lovely Nap
We Need To Talk About Captain America’s Ripped Abs
Rise and Rise Again, Until Apes Become BrainApes
Cheer Up, Michael Shannon, It Might Never Happen
Zack Snyder’s What’s Wrong With Being Sexy?
Therapeutic: Freud Vs Jung
The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly Lizard Thingy
Jean Dujardin Is: L’Artiste Adorable
We Need To Talk About Green Lantern’s Shitty CGI Onesie
Hey Kids! It’s Uncle Marty’s “Fun With Film Preservation!”
Cheer Up, Michael Fassbender’s Penis, It Might Never Happen
Transformybots: Bang of the Boom
The Adventures of Tintin: The Whiny of the Butthurt
Tinker, Typist, Souljah, Spelunker
We Need To Forget About Charles Xavier’s Thinkyfingers Gesture
Thanks in advance. Get clicking (the poll should be in the sidebar) and if you get a chance, please send the link around. And remember, a vote for Steve McQueen’s Shame is a vote for penis.
As mentioned before, buying tickets for the 2011 BFI London Film Festival was a miserable clusterfuck; the pilot light on the single gas-powered server the institute uses must have gone out, resulting in an almost total shutdown. We refreshed the BFI website more often in five hours than Tom Ford refreshes himself in the average decade. That’s a lot of F5-ing. We actually managed to buy tickets to Rampart and A Dangerous Method without even realising it. When we found out that our requests had broken through we felt like we were characters in a William Gibson Cyberpunk novel, sneaking through digital ICE in order to hack into an AI.
And yet, even though we got tickets for 13 films, there was a sense of unavoidable failure, as Shame, the follow-up to Steve McQueen’s remarkable debut Hunger, was sold out even before the members priority booking opened. This was one of two movies both me and Daisyhellcakes were determined to see (the other was A Dangerous Method) that wouldn’t be released in the UK until next year. Yes, even though we had already seen Michael Fassbender in X-Men: First Class and Jane Eyre this year, we selfishly demanded more of him, preferably naked and tortured by the consequences of his own irresistibility. That’s how deeply Fassbender Fandom penetrates our souls.
But worry not, we got the tickets, no thanks to the website which crashed again on the day that extra tickets were released; once more a big thank you to the incredibly helpful staff at the BFI Southbank who dealt with my hyperventilation with great understanding. Even better, Shame was worth the humiliations of my pathetic, petulant sturm-und-drang complaints, and became an early highlight of the festival. Quick synopsis; Brandon (Fassbender, obvs) is a sex addict on a downward spiral which accelerates as he is visited by his sister Sissy (the luminous Carey Mulligan) with whom he shares a dark past. Brandon has sex. A lot of it. He’s mean to his sister. He has more sex. And on and on and on…
It’s hard to convey the visceral impact of McQueen’s formally bold and beautiful depiction of Brandon’s descent into self-negating eroticism, certainly without spoiling what happens, but it is easy to recommend, and for one very good reason; Fassbender is breathtakingly good in what has to be the best performance of the year. On a technical level the man is on peak form, once more reunited with his muse McQueen; we’re talking DeNiro/Scorsese levels of cinematic harmony here. You can feel an electrifying alchemy being created as you watch.
However, the brilliance of Fassbender’s performance goes beyond mere talent. It’s the fearlessness of his work, the ability to allow the audience to peek into a tortured soul as naked as his body. McQueen makes a bold statement very early on by showing Fassbender fully nude for long shots, with the camera defiantly set at groin height. As Fassbender passed back and forth in front of the lens from one room of his spartan New York apartment to another, the audience started to petrify into its seats with horror, made even more uncomfortable by the knowledge that the owner of the penis ticking past our faces like a large metronome was in the building.
It sounds lascivious, but it’s not. It’s startling, but it’s also alienating. We stop seeing this as a sexual organ, something to be leered at. It’s an organ for fucking and pissing; by the end of the opening montage of Brandon’s life, any erotic charge is eliminated. This is a grind of a life as miserable as any other. At this point he looks like a functioning addict, but all it takes is for the sudden introduction of his exasperating and impulsive sister to throw him into a tailspin from which he may or may not recover, which requires Fassbender to bare his soul and his body in ways that are startling and darkly beautiful.
It also allows McQueen to add some of his now trademark long-shots, all as exciting to experience as the setpiece conversation between Fassbender and Liam Cunningham in Hunger. The first is the already notorious scene with Mulligan singing New York, New York in some high-end bar while a testy Fassbender and an excitable James Badge Dale (also very good) watch from their table in front of a gloriously lit Manhattan backdrop. Sean Bobbitt captures a radiance that seems to pour from Mulligan’s delicate face as she sings the most excruciatingly drawn-out version of the song; it’s as if McQueen has captured the tension of the movie’s ever-present promise of eventual collapse in an excruciating microcosm. There’s one significant cut away from Mulligan, which I won’t spoil, other than to say it’s devastating.
There follows a tracking shot of Brandon running along a New York street to get away from his apartment, which has now been colonised by the people he has tried to hide away from. It’s a relatively simple shot made more complicated by being filmed in the busiest city on earth, but it’s riveting nonetheless, and represents the absolute opposite of this shot from Mauvais Sang by Leos Carax. After that we see a dinner date between Brandon and co-worker Marianne (Nicole Beharie) that is either his attempt at normality, or an example of his seduction attempts. Prior to this women seem to just throw themselves at Brandon, but Marianne is warier. It’s a riveting scene, partially because of the ambiguity of Brandon’s motives, but also due to the choreography of everyone in the restaurant. It’s Hunger‘s conversation scene, but with a meddling waiter and a lot of sexual tension.
These aren’t McQueen’s finest hour, though. That comes in the final act, turning what might have been some disappointing redemptive notes from writer Abi Morgan into a bravura sequence of degradation and misery, so beautifully shot and disturbing that the viewer is hypnotised, much as I was during the final minutes of Darren Aronofsky’s majestic Black Swan (or, more aptly, Requiem For A Dream). The final graphic sex scene in the movie is a wash of image and sound — thanks to an ominous score by Harry Escott — but it’s terrifyingly unerotic and haunting, as Brandon tries to lose himself in orgasmic oblivion. Instead he looks like a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown; dead eyes, agony, desperation all painted on his face. That Fassbender, you guys. Seriously.
Morgan’s script is, for the most part, ambiguous and pared down, clever and funny and only at the end a little rote. That’s the difficulty with character studies like this. As with any straight version of a genre type, there’s very little room for manoevre, and post-screening my initial feelings were that I was less engaged with it than I had hoped simply because the arc of a character study tends to be a straight line with the possibility of an uptick or downtick at the end. Biopics have the same problem; we’re ostensibly being told the story of a person’s life, either as an overambitious whole or a mere slice that illuminates their whole being. In the wrong hands this can lead to clumsy attempts to dramatise an inner life, usually through awkward exposition (the worst problem with biopics).
And yet even though Shame isn’t a bad character study, my misgivings about the sub-genre spoiled my experience. The momentary clunkiness of a couple of scenes at the end of Shame (not counting the final shot, which I won’t spoil) conspired to sully my opinion. How could I really like Shame, an example of that miserable sub-genre that I’ve never really had time for (confession: I’ve never truly loved Taxi Driver, despite its many good points)? Luckily for McQueen’s movie, a couple of days later we saw Oren Moverman and James Ellroy’s Rampart, a character study that has numerous parallels and similarities with Shame except that while that is a truly superb and exciting piece of cinema, Rampart is a cluttered failure, a waste of your time.
Okay, there is one very good reason to watch Rampart. Woody Harrelson is on fire as Dave Brown, a corrupt cop with the LAPD at the time of the Rampart scandal, who is videotaped beating an African-American. This slip — if you can call it that; the man is obviously on the edge of some kind of breakdown — sends him down a long path to oblivion. Harrelson’s bewildered and paranoid reaction to the slow unraveling of his life is mesmerising, and powers the movie through what would otherwise be crippling longueurs, but it doesn’t change the fact that while Shame avoids being nothing more than a simplistic morality tale through the use of ambiguity and the skill of McQueen and his cast, Rampart is little more than an empty box being carried around desolate LA scenery by a very talented and underrated performer.
Much of the problem with Rampart is that the story has been told before, with enormous detail and complexity, in The Shield. SoC likes The Shield. A lot. If you’re going to play in The Shield‘s back yard, you’re going to have to bring something new to the table, and Rampart has nothing. Dave Brown is a morally compromised jerk, but if you’ve experienced the fluctuating fortunes of Vic Mackey — one of the great characters of the modern age, whose fall from grace is positively Shakespearean in scope and power — then being a dick to the mothers of your children and getting a bit grumpy with Ice Cube pales in comparison.
That familiarity is made more noticeable due to the connections with Ellroy’s other work. Police corruption has been a constant theme in his books, and approaching it from this angle — as a real example of wrongdoing that was exposed to the light — is perfectly valid. However, confusingly, Dave Brown’s personality is very similar to that of Ellroy’s Lloyd Hopkins, immortalised by James Woods in the nifty James B. Harris thriller Cop. Both are men who bend or break the law, profess to venerate women, have messy home-lives, and have been notoriously involved in the suspicious deaths of rapist-murderers. That one point made me think that Rampart was intended to be some kind of follow-up to the Lloyd Hopkins trilogy, that we were seeing the ignominious end of his career.
That’s apparently not the case. To be honest, Rampart is so ramshackle and loosely plotted that it often doesn’t feel as if Ellroy had much input, though this could well be the assumption that makes an ass out of me and mption. The flabby plotting isn’t helped by the seemingly improvisational dialogue in many scenes. Without Ellroy’s precision, we’re left with rambling actorliness, especially between Harrelson and Ben Foster, here playing a wheelchair-bound lowlife. They only appear in two scenes together but it feels like you’re getting approximately 50 hours of intense staring, babbled words, tics, gestures and conversational dead-ends, all filmed by a camera crew positioned across the road for extra verite.
Moverman should have been more ruthless in the editing room, or more focused when preparing to shoot. As an actor’s showcase Rampart does the job, but it’s indulgent to think this passes muster as a movie. It was doomed, being screened so soon after Shame, which is a gleaming, precision-tooled Faberge egg compared to Rampart‘s clumsily assembled clay ashtray. Every directorial decision made by Steve McQueen either makes sense in the moment or comes to take on greater meaning afterward. Some might argue that such care makes for a bloodless movie, but rather that than the rambling incoherence and ugly hand-held look of Rampart.
This popular aesthetic of our age, the gritty faux-documentary mode of filming (that, oddly enough, seemed to be a new and edgy thing back when The Shield began) has really begun to seem played out. When Philip Pullman wrote this article criticising the overuse of present-tense narrative voices and hand-held cameras, I thought he was being a bit of a whiner, but now I’m beginning to think he had a point. The worst recent offender is Gavin O’Connor’s Warrior, starring Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton. At least I think it was Tom Hardy; the camera never focused on him long enough for me to tell. As for Edgerton, I still don’t know what he looks like. For all I know he genuinely looks like Metal Beak the Nazi Owl.
Rampart is not nearly as bad as Warrior, which situates the camera either one hundred feet from the actors, with numerous obstructive objects between them, or places the camera so close that you can’t understand what anyone is doing. This modish grittiness only serves to render the movie unwatchable; I long for the day when it becomes unfashionable. Sadly Rampart‘s power is diminished by this approach, not to mention memories of both Bad Lieutenants, which were directed in such a way as to allow for improvisation or unpredictability while still exerting control over the tone and the narrative. Moverman’s film is a poor cousin to those fine movies; a shame, as Harrelson here operates almost on a par with Harvey Keitel and Nicolas Cage. Of all the actors, he seems to have the best bead on what the movie needs from him.
I’m not crazy. On-set experiments with dialogue and camerawork can deliver moments of great power and emotion, I’ll happily admit that. Just picking the best example off the top of my head, Friday Night Lights was built on this format, and for the most part it was truly magical. Nevertheless, except for the odd moment of frisson, Rampart doesn’t hold together, and certainly doesn’t hold the attention. And yet I’m almost grateful to it for crystallising something that has been brewing in my mind for a while now. Shame belongs in the same category of movie experiences that includes Black Swan, Inception, 13 Assassins, Inglorious Basterds, and to a lesser extent 2011′s Drive, We Need To Talk About Kevin and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; movies that are finely wrought and made with proper care and fastidious design.
Those were some of the most rewarding and pleasurable movies I’ve experienced in recent years. These are the things that excite me. Rampart‘s failing, and Shame‘s considerable success, has made this clear. Going forward with this knowledge may make me harder to please, but the happiness I’ll feel when I witness something as beautifully made as McQueen’s memorable portrait of psychic confusion and loneliness will be all the greater.
Objective assessment of A Dangerous Method — the first movie by David Cronenberg since Eastern Promises — was rendered impossible in the minutes before it started. Regular readers will recall that I am notoriously bad at dealing with these brushes with the great and the good. For all the complaints I make about the anti-glamour of the London Film Festival — held as it is in the most crowded and commercial part of London — as soon as a famous or semi-famous creator appears prior to a screening, I’m usually rendered insensible with joy.
Now take that absurd emotional response and multiply it by a billion, because David Cronenberg is, in my humble opinion, the most important, consistent, and intellectually ambitious director working in the world today. Perhaps of all time. His self-deprecating and funny speech before the second LFF screening almost completely passed me by as my brain fizzed and my eyes misted up. There are just no words to describe how important the man’s work has been to me since my formative years, how much his ideas and his intellectual curiosity have shaped my worldview. To be in his presence was overwhelming (fuzzy photographic proof can be found here; he is with LFF head Sandra Hebron).
The news from previous festival screenings was that Cronenberg had frozen a potentially interesting subject in amber. The dread word “tasteful” appeared more than once. Surely it had to be false. This most transgressive of filmmakers wasn’t making Oscar bait; it just couldn’t be possible. Nevertheless, the disappointed reviews rolled in, talking about the man’s glory days as if they were long past. For those of us who love his work, this was a dark time. And yet, contrary to those reports, Cronenberg throws caution to the wind with one of his boldest openings ever, and to do that he had to reinvent Keira Knightley.
Cronenberg’s facility with actors is nothing short of miraculous. Though he tends to work with already brilliant performers, the work he draws from them is often the best of their career. James Woods, Jeff Goldblum, Viggo Mortensen, Ralph Fiennes, and Christopher Walken have all shone for his camera, with special praise due to Jeremy Irons, whose dual role in the masterpiece Dead Ringers might be the finest performance(s) of the last 30 years. Here he is reunited with Viggo following the departure of Christoph Waltz, and gets to work with the imminently famous / notorious Michael Fassbender. How many actors have had a year as packed with diverse and brilliant performances as Fassbender has over the past 12 months?
Knightley was the wild card. Often derided by critics and cinemagoers, she has yet to make an impression as an actress rather than as a film star, though her work in Joe Wright’s Atonement was solid, and she held her own with a mostly underwritten role in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies (with an uptick of responsibility in the third installment). Cronenberg places her front and centre in the very first scene of the movie, and she does not hold back. Gurning, growling, rocking back and forth, barely able to communicate due to the extreme nature of her tics, Knightley’s startling introduction is a gauntlet thrown in our face. Just as Cronenberg once challenged the commitment of his audience with exploding heads or compound fractures, now he’s affronting our sense of reserve by presenting a fearless, unrestrained demonstration of acting pyrotechnics.
This explosion of acting tics has proven to be the most divisive element in the critical response to A Dangerous Method. Knightley plays Sabina Spielrein — patient, collaborator and lover of Carl Jung — as a broken woman partially healed by the pioneering technique known as The Talking Cure. This first appearance depicts her as barely functional, and it’s from here that we gauge the success of Jung’s treatment as he nurses her towards something akin to “normality”. Anything less from Knightley would make the early achievements of psychoanalysis seem less impressive; as Cronenberg says here, the birth of psychoanalysis transformed the human condition completely, and Knightley’s depiction of Spielrein as an almost alien being is intentional and wholly correct.
Her performance calms down soon after this startling opening as she is slowly healed by Jung, but the eye is drawn to Knightley in every scene as she fights against this unpredictable force within. It’s a perfect visual metaphor for the tumult in all of us, hidden behind our civil face, here brilliantly personified by Fassbender and Mortensen as buttoned-down, constrained Jung and Freud. Cronenberg’s masterful decision to restrict his camera and his actors is perfectly judged. The movie is bound so tightly that it almost squeaks as it tries to move; vertical lines dominate almost every scene, faces appear in the middle of the frame, dialogue is delivered in clipped, almost emotionless tones.
Into this precise world comes Knightley, barging in over and over again to unsettle the delicate world. Those vertical lines tip over onto the diagonal, Fassbender’s eyes begin to flicker with doubt and fear, and with that comes a sexual impulse that he finds impossible to resist. It isn’t long before Jung falls under her spell, taking on the role of dominant in a D/s relationship inspired by her admission that abuse by her father excited her sexually. Cronenberg’s camera finds them in flagrante delicto as if coming across them in secret, our POV catching furtive glimpses of them from around corners and through doorways as they hide from public view. In these moments Spielrein seems utterly transported, while Jung’s involvement seems more hesitant.
Some bright spark on Twitter noted that Spielrein serves the same purpose here as Marilyn Chambers did in Rabid, infecting two men with the unpredictable virus of doubt. She also resembles Genevieve Bujold’s Claire Niveau in Dead Ringers, unsettling the equilibrium of the Mantles’ filial framework, or even the Videodrome signal that rewrites Max Renn into an amalgam of man, woman and machine. Spielrein’s intrusion into Jung’s mental space transforms him too. She contributes to the idea of the Anima and Animus within us all, and to the concept of the Death Drive postulated by Freud, who becomes aware of her theories later in the movie. They are men of the mind, and their minds are mutated by this invading agent, for better or worse.
The conflict between the public and the private, most dramatically shown through Jung’s secret unethical behaviour, is amusingly drawn. With the exception of forthright Knightley, the cast play guarded roles that obscure their baser impulses, all of which subtly leak out for the benefit of Cronenberg’s camera. He brilliantly dramatises the competitiveness between the ambitious Jung and the defensive Freud; the deterioration of their father-son/mentor-pupil relationship, triggered by generational envy and ethnic frisson, is funny and painful. By the end of their friendship, Freud pointedly draws more and more attention to Jung’s Aryan heritage and the way this taints his relationship with both himself and Spielrein, who are both Jewish (see this brilliant, perceptive review by Amy Taubin for more on ethnic identity, Cronenberg’s mastery of composition, and Knightley’s bold performance; many thanks to @DarkEyeSocket for introducing me to that wonderful critique).
My understanding of Freudian and Jungian theory is negligible, I must admit. Most of what I know about Jung’s work concerns his interest in parapsychology. Cronenberg and Christopher Hampton (the screenwriter, adapting his own play The Talking Cure) have dramatised the infamous moment when Jung gleefully reveals his theory of Synchronicity to Freud. The elder scientist’s cynicism is unchanged by the peculiar instance of Jung correctly predicting that a loud cracking sound will be heard in the room during their conversation. It’s a funny scene in a surprisingly amusing movie, though within this moment is the sad realisation that Jung, suddenly made confident by Freud’s companionship and his burgeoning adulterous relationship with Spielrein, has just experienced the rejection of a father figure.
Cronenberg knows more about these scientists than I ever will. Unpicking his coded references to their work is beyond me, but fortunately post-movie discussions with psychology expert Daisyhellcakes have illuminated some of the clever subtextual details littering A Dangerous Method. For instance,Vincent Cassel races into the movie at the halfway mark as Otto Gross, a libidinous, uncontrollable psychologist who helps to disrupt Jung’s psyche. He also creates a dynamic between the three male protagonists that reflects the Ego (Jung), the Superego (Freud) and the Id (Gross), a dynamic that soon dissolves, symbolically echoing the way Jung and Freud’s theories moved in different directions from the same starting point.
It could also be argued that Sabina’s development throughout the movie follows the four levels of Anima development, that we see her through Jung’s eyes, flowering as a person just as the Anima progresses from “base” desire to a position of wisdom and strength. Perhaps the version of Spielrein shown here is an ironic externalisation of Jung’s anima, just as Freud and Gross can be seen as aspects of Jung’s psyche (this also echoes Cronenberg’s earlier work, as The Brood represent an externalisation of Nola Carveth’s rage). The Anima that is Spielrein flourishes while Jung, trapped in the four stages of Animus development, is left broken and depressed, tragically incapable of benefiting from her development due to the bonds of societal expectation and duty. In this way the movie is, on a macro level, a tragic joke about a physician unable to heal himself.
Those who love Cronenberg have always expected this level of symbolic trickery. He’s unafraid to treat serious subjects with playfulness, and A Dangerous Method can be seen as either a straight biopic or a puzzle to be tinkered with. To paraphrase Bob Dylan upon meeting Alicia Keys, there’s nothing about this movie that I don’t like. Cronenberg’s mastery of the material is total. In a way he has been making this movie his whole life, and this might come to be seen as a Rosetta Stone to interpret his other works. Immaculately performed, beautifully shot and sensitively scored by his longtime collaborators Peter Suschitzky and Howard Shore respectively, it’s a funny, sad, sexually frank love story, a film with many levels of interpretation, and an important work of intellectual ambition. If you’re interested in cinema, in human nature, in the history of the modern age, this is essential viewing.
Regular readers will probably already know about my passionate hatred for X-Men Origins: Wolverine in: The Origin of The Man They Call Wolverine: The Pre-X-Men Years, which I thought was the worst major studio big-budget release OF ALL TIME, until the unforgivable Alice in Wonderland arrived and surpassed even that milestone with dispiriting ease. Many comic and superhero fans will argue that Brett Ratner’s X-Men: the Last Stand represents the franchise’s low-point, but that is at least coherent, despite its flaws, and has a sense of the operatic about it; essential if you’re adapting the legendary Dark Phoenix saga. Ratner and screenwriters Simon Kinberg and Zak Penn may have fumbled that mighty arc, but they didn’t forget the basic rules of filmmaking, which is what everyone who worked on Wolverine seemed to do.
So rejoice that Matthew Vaughn’s X-Men: First Class is better than both of those movies. It has some of the strongest acting in the franchise, some stand-out moments of undeniable superpower coolness to rival X2: X-Men United, is made with an awareness of what makes these some of these characters tick, and has some beautifully observed emotional scenes that capture the loneliness and self-loathing felt by the mutant heroes and anti-heroes – here once more standing in for all of society’s outcasts. Hell, just for casting Shades of Caruso favourite Michael “Sickeningly Hot And Talented” Fassbender as Magneto – my favourite comics supervillain, and possibly my favourite movie supervillain too – means this stands apart from the last two feeble movies.
But that doesn’t mean it’s actually good. Those praiseworthy elements are but jewels peeking out from a garbage dump composed of woeful dialogue, tonal misjudgements and surprisingly poor production values. Those few praiseworthy performances, and the emotional truth they convey, are sadly betrayed by bad editing and photography that make the whole enterprise look like it was only finished a couple of weeks ago in a mad sprint to beat the release deadline. Yet again Fox shortchanges the creatives; by now the Fox execs know the fans will watch these movies even when they’re bad (and even when they’re leaked onto the internet a couple of weeks before release). All they needed to do to make us forget the last two failures was raise expectations a little higher, and the mystifying critical praise XM:FC has received in recent weeks has ensured that.
And yet it all starts so well, mostly by focusing on Erik Lensherr’s tragic childhood and vengeful youth. Opening at exactly the same point as the first X-Men is a lovely touch, and the subsequent scene with Kevin Bacon’s evil Nazi scientist triggering Magneto’s powers with an act of horrific cruelty is brilliantly effective, evoking memories of Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds and Christoph Waltz’s magnificently horrible Hans Landa. The next few scenes, intercutting between Magneto’s quest to find the Nazi scientist – now going by the name of Sebastian Shaw – and young Charles Xavier’s first encounter and subsequent friendship with Raven Darkholme, are very promising.
This is pretty good stuff, especially Magneto’s Nazi-killing rampage, and hints that the long-considered X-Men Origins: Magneto could have been a far more interesting proposition than first thought (Sheldon Turner and Bryan Singer, who wrote the un-shot scripts for that movie, are given a story credit here, though don’t bring that up to Vaughn or he’ll cut a bitch). Giving Raven, aka Mystique, a bigger part to play in the X-Men movie mythos is a superb choice; what was previously a side-lined character in the first trilogy has now become a tragic figure along the same lines as Anna Paquin’s Rogue. Her desperate need to be loved creates an ache at the centre of this movie that generates many of its best moments.
The wheels start to come off as soon as the Hellfire Club arrive, with Kevin Bacon now dressed like Austin Powers in his groovy nightclub shagpad, and January Jones occupying a lady-shaped space on-screen in her smalls. Much has been made of the film’s retro aesthetic and vaguely Bondian plot involving the Cold War, but Vaughn pitches the tone too far towards the wacky end of the spectrum. The moment the Hellfire Club escapes from an attack in a submarine with all white interiors and an office complete with paintings evokes the Adam West Batman movie with the Joker, Penguin, and Riddler teaming up with Catwoman to dehydrate the members of the United Nations. From that moment on, the movie is, quite aptly, sunk.
The Austin Powers references in this review are entirely deliberate. As Daisyhellcakes said when we stumbled, disappointed, from the sweltering heat of Portobello Road’s Electric Cinema, “At times it felt as if it was trying to be like a comedy, but nothing in it was funny.” Vaughn seems to think he can play up to the inherent absurdity of the X-Men by making the tone silly, but his hectic, discombobulating editing from one plot thread to another makes this tonal decision utterly incomprehensible, at least early on.
For example, McAvoy plays Xavier as a lecherous and oblivious dope getting pissed in Oxford, Kevin Bacon plays Sebastian Shaw as a mustache-twirling pantomime villain complete with silly-looking henchmen, and Rose Byrne’s CIA agent Moira MacTaggart (yes, she’s not a scientist anymore) spends an excruciating scene walking around in her underwear to what is either comic effect, or… I just don’t know what. Meanwhile, Magneto is an grim, badass avenging angel of death hunting down and murdering Nazis. With no apparent narrative framework in place to connect these two differing tone, we flip back and forth between what feel like different movies, never really staying in place long enough to get comfortable or to get a sense of what the final shape of the narrative will be.
This tonal mish-mash is made worse whenever Vaughn evokes memories of Bryan Singer’s two superior franchise entries. It feels as if Singer’s achievement – balancing the unavoidable absurdity of the superhero genre with a seriousness of purpose and respect that triggered a surge in its popularity – has been forgotten or underestimated in the ten years since the first X-Men. He understood the characters, recognised their pain and made sure that even when he was puncturing the pomposity of the genre, there was a solemness to the characters that never really went away. That’s not to say he piled on the modish pain; those movies were still fun, but they were weighty.
Vaughn’s movie is the opposite of weighty for much of its length, with only the Magneto and Mystique arcs – and one final, brilliant showdown – providing respite from the shockingly daft proceedings. While this might mean the franchise now finds a new audience, it also means that what was so welcome in Singer’s movies has now been utterly eradicated. Even Ratner’s movie honoured that atmosphere of sadness more than Wolverine and First Class (by which I mean Wolverine cried again). And yes, I expect spluttering indignation at that statement, but if it makes you feel better I really did hate it.
I get that there is a vocal section of fandom (and non-fandom) that will welcome the excision of the grim dramatics, but this comes at the expense of drama; there is almost no sense within First Class that there is anything at stake until midway through the big finale, pretty much as soon as the awful wire-work chase between Angel and Banshee is finally, mercifully over. Even the mid-movie action scene with the Hellfire Club attacking the CIA compound housing the proto-X-Men is curiously unsuspenseful, feeling more like a staccato compilation of action beats than a coherent set-piece.
The woeful editing again undercuts this tension by hurrying past big moments, rarely showing the consequences of actions or emotional beats. Than again, there are also numerous narrative shortcuts taken throughout that smack of budgetary restraint or release-date haste, many of which involve shaky effects (one shot of Beast running fast made me want to walk out of the cinema and never look back) or tricks as unintentionally hilarious as rotating the frame to depict a spinning plane. I understand that Fox are not in the business of spending money on their superhero films, prefering instead to cynically rely on marketing muscle to get audiences into cinemas, but some of these choices are farcical, robbing the movie of any authority.
However we should all also be grateful to Michael Fassbender and Jennifer Lawrence, who give their all yet again, selling their tragic roles brilliantly; it’s arguable that their commitment is worth the extortionate ticket price all on their own. This is Fassbender’s highest-profile role yet, and allows him to supply young Magneto with new superpowers; insane hotness, charisma and the ability to be the only person on the planet to look good in rollneck sweaters. The man will be a star by the end of the weekend, hopefully. Lawrence proves that she’s no flash-in-the-pan with another nuanced performance. Though I was initially sceptical, the decision to cast her as Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games really seems shrewd now.
James McAvoy is okay, though the choice to make his arc a transition from tiresomely enthusiastic dope to noble martyr in a wheelchair is nowhere near as well-drawn as Erik’s transition into ruthless human-hating Magneto (and even that isn’t done as well as you would hope, with some leaps of faith required of the viewer by the final act). It doesn’t help that I could understand only about half of his dialogue. His chemistry with Fassbender is good, though; the decision to make them play chess in unusual locales, less so. That’s not as bad as his repeated gesture of pressing his fingers to his temple whenever using his powers. In keeping with this movie’s unfortunate resemblance to the Austin Powers movie, McAvoy’s gesture is now the equivalent of Dr. Evil’s pinky move (thanks to Daisyhellcakes for spotting that).
It’s the rest of the cast that let the side down badly. Poor January Jones, in her white undies, cannot even convey “I’m thinking at you with my supertelepathy” with any sense of conviction, and when required to speak everything falls apart. Less a snarky ice-maiden than a mildly bored housewife who doesn’t really like her lot in life (what a surprise!), she lets the fans down. Part of me had hoped that a combination of directorial effort and superior writing would entice a better performance from her, but one moment, where she gets some ice for her sexist boss Shaw and sighs dramatically to convey her sadness, is a contender for laziest acting choice in thespian history.
At least she gets some stuff to do. Some of the kids playing the proto-X-Men end up coming off as deeply unlikeable (Caleb Landry Jones’ Banshee is particularly irksome), but then they’re so underwritten they can’t really be blamed for that (re: Landry Jones, he was good in The Last Exorcist, so I will point blame elsewhere). Rose Byrne uses her patented Worried Face, and brandishes a gun at one point. Perhaps this is intentional; MacTaggart only really seems to be in the movie to be mocked by the other characters. Another actor, playing Matt Craven’s second-in-command, gives one of the most bizarre hammy performances I’ve ever seen in a major motion picture. I couldn’t take my eyes off him; not a compliment, I should stress. I won’t name him, as I feel bad enough about this complaining already.
The poorly-judged and frankly amateurish problems don’t stop there. The compositions are always slightly off, undercutting the tension almost as much as the imprecise editing. Jokes are attempted but fail. Scenes are cut too short to generate emotions, and those scenes that are longer often trundle along with no point – a stilted introduction scene with the proto-X-Men bonding in a cafeteria is particularly painful to watch, though that’s nothing compared to a risible late-movie training montage that lacks the dramatic gravity of the “Montage!” scene in Team America. And seriously, if you can watch the final conversation between Xavier and Moira without cringing, then you’re a sturdier person than I.
It doesn’t help that Vaughn takes on way too much for one movie. That dreadful rush to fill in the blanks that made the last half an hour of Revenge of the Sith feel so hysterically cramped lasts throughout First Class‘ entire two hour run. Two movies would have given plenty of time for Vaughn to tell every story he wants to tell here, and then some. Instead its a mad gambol from Poland to Westchester to Switzerland to Oxford to Argentina to Las Vegas back to Oxford and then to Washington and eventually Russia for about five minutes and then etc. etc. etc. Locales flash by, character moments are introduced then dropped, momentous events happen and are then left behind with no room for reflection or pause because another momentous event is right on its tail. The effect is that nothing sticks; a problem that affected Ratner’s X-Men movie. Except for odd flashes, the movie left me feeling utterly cold.
That was how Vaughn’s first two movies – Layer Cake and Stardust – made me feel. They were all surface, with enough evidence that Vaughn was obviously trying very hard to make those movies memorable but only as noble failures. Kick-Ass qualified as a pure triumph, however (at least IMO), and made this movie such an appealing prospect. Who knows what went wrong – or what addition to the equation made Kick-Ass go so right – but that doesn’t change the fact that this is not the movie we fans had hoped for. Oh sure, as a nerd it occasionally made me very happy. There are a couple of delightful cameos that prove this was made with a certain amount of love, and for that I’m grateful.
So, it’s better than X-Men: The Last Stand and Wolverine, but really only by default. Vaughn and Goldman and the Fringe writing duo of Ashley Stentz and Zack Miller (who also wrote the far superior Thor) obviously care about the characters and the franchise, but for one reason or another it just feels more like a badly-made parody than a drama. Many have claimed that this movie shows the franchise still has legs, but it really needs a far more drastic shake-up than just revisiting the old material from a different angle. It needs a Nolanising, if you will. By that I don’t mean a serious, realistic take; more that a good filmmaker needs to come along and, with the backing of his studio, commits as fully to making the X-Universe work as Nolan or Singer did – as might have happened if Darren Aronofsky did make The Wolverine. Because right now, these regrettably laughable rush-jobs just aren’t cutting it anymore.
