Today’s A Good Day To Die, Die Hard

Posted on February 15, 2013 by admiralneck

It’s tempting to say that Die Hard changed my life, but that would be exaggerating even too much for my hyperbolic tastes. The original film didn’t trigger a lifelong love of films; that would be Star Wars, which I saw at the Gaumont in Birmingham in what might have been December, 1977, if IMDb is to be believed (the UK got Star Wars eight months after the US? Such bullshit). Die Hard also didn’t make me see the possibilities of the action genre, and the effect that a cleanly-shot and designed action sequence could have on my adrenal glands; Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Terminator and Aliens had already done a number on me, changing my conception of what excitement was, and what were the possibilities of the genre.

What it did do was legitimise large-scale action cinema, at least in my mind, and stop me from feeling guilty for deriving more pleasure from this genre than all the canonical films in the pantheon of cinema history. No longer did I feel like claiming my favourite film was something high-falutin’ out of guilt or concern that I would appear intellectually empty for finding perfection in a commercial, mainstream movie, and this realisation is something that has been a guiding principle for this blog ever since I started it; celebrating the artistry involved in creating populist art. You can stuff your Dogme films in a recycling bin for all I care; the moment the lens flare bursts next to Hans Gruber’s head as the vault opens, Ode to Joy blaring out, I was done for life. That was beauty, transcendent and perfect, located in a Joel Silver-produced action film starring that guy off Moonlighting. If it could be found there, it could be found anywhere.

But as much as Die Hard is good enough — no, magnificent enough — to suspend concerns about falling in love with a “dumb” action film (and please, the last thing Die Hard is is dumb), there is no way to ignore that this rough-cut diamond is a commodity, a summer schedule filler that just happened to attract a number of highly-gifted artists and technicians all at the top of their game who rose to their material, back in a time when people still thought that the best way to attract an audience was to give them something attractive, instead of just bludgeoning them into accepting the inevitability that they would have to swallow a product out of some weird sense of obligation. It was talent that made Die Hard incredible, but it was money that eventually made the franchise mundane.

And yet for a time, Die Hard still managed to surprise. Die Hard 2 is no one’s idea of a great movie, but if it hadn’t followed the greatest pure action spectacular of the late 20th century it would have been one of Silver Productions’ best films. As sequels go, it’s still pretty entertaining, thanks to some canny casting — Fred Dalton Thompson, Jon Amos and Dennis Franz are great value — and some fun action, not to mention a fealty to Die Hard‘s audience-sating blend of drama and comedy. If it has a real flaw it’s that it hews too closely to the first film’s structure, to the point of distractingly trying to find things for Holly, Thornburg and Al to do, but it was made back in the 1990s, when the idea of creating a longform story throughout a franchise, with the same characters in new forms of adventure, was only just beginning to become popular. Carbon-copies of successful films were a dime-a-dozen.

Which is one of the reasons why the third Die Hard film is such a success. This is a movie that starts with two explosions, one visual and one narrative. The John McClane that we grew to love in the first two movies has become a bitter wreck, estranged from his wife and hated by his colleagues. This time, instead of accidentally falling into trouble, he is dragged into it as a consequence of his actions in the first movie. Placing McClane in a new type of danger, and exploring the consequences of his actions years before, is one of the most satisfying plot choices in any franchise of recent years, creating a sense of progression from what has gone before, the feeling that we are following a real person in an unreal world. For a short time, the Die Hard series felt like it lived and breathed.

Honouring the character of John McClane is the key to this. Though this sequel sees a return to McClane’s arc in the first film, it’s shown as being one aspect of his increasingly irascible nature, and pairing him up with a similarly aggravated companion — Samuel L. Jackson’s brilliantly realised Zeus; possibly the only likeable racist in cinema history — is a great way of exploring the idea that the Die Hard franchise is based not around a noble white knight but actually a complete asshole, or perhaps just a once-decent, idealistic man who is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (his wisecracks could actually be a coping mechanism); a borked Übermensch who appeals to the audience as an ordinary person who just happens to have flashes of incredible courage. While this dire psychological break means we’re only ever going to get temporary fixes to the man, for the purposes of the series this works fine.

There’s a strong argument that the final reshot ending of Die Hard 3 is a failure; certainly, it seems disappointing that we end up with a form of mano-a-mano showdown between protagonist and antagonist even when we’re taken out of New York and the ticking clocks of Simon’s games – the geographic claustrophobia of the first (and, to a lesser extent, the second) replaced with a temporal form that constrains our hero even as he is given an entire city to explore — but all of that is forgiven by the elegance of the final shot; McClane redeemed by the new friend’s prompting, his broken soul fixed with little more than a quarter and a payphone. The outcome of his call is not important; he has swallowed his pride, made friends with someone as spiky as him, and taken a step towards rehabilitation.

This might be the last grace note in a franchise that has to amp up its threats in order to justify its existence. Die Hard 4.0 (or Live Free Or Die Hard) is the first in the series that isn’t good enough to make you forget the fact that the franchise is just being kept afloat to squeeze a few more drops out of the original, but even though it’s oft-derided, it’s better than it has any right to be, and it signalled an evolution in Len Wiseman’s directorial style for the better. It’s doubtful he’ll ever become as thoughtful and unpredictable as peak-career John McTiernan, or as able to harness the power of the image and the cut as current action-blockbuster champion Justin Lin (a Justin Lin Die Hard movie would be cinematic nirvana), but Die Hard 4 has enough charge, pace, and humour to please at least this cynic.

Part of the charm of Die Hard 4 is the replication of some of the beats necessary for this to register as a Die Hard film, especially as by this point the series has transformed into something that could easily go completely awry, as I will get to in a moment. Yes, there is an escalation in spectacle in this one that dwarfs the first, which featured huge action moments but from a human point-of-view that acknowledged the scale of those events. Wiseman doesn’t really worry about that, as he blows up a power plant and sets a F-35B Lightning II on our hero, destroying a freeway in the process, but through Willis and Justin Long’s self-effacing recognition that some cray shit’s going down, it stays just on the right side of absurdity.

It also wisely keeps the other films’ focus on secondary characters; one of the great joys of the Die Hard series is that each film contains a sub-cast of well-sketched protagonists and antagonists who just happen to have this other guy, this unstoppable wreck, show up to act as “the monkey in the wrench”, whatever that means. Die Hard had the best cast of characters: noble but heartbroken Al, magnificently stupid Dwayne T. Robinson, tragic Takagi, alpha-douchebag Ellis, archetypal headstrong wife Holly, comic relief Argyle, Agents Johnson and Johnson, shitbag Thornburg. And that’s before we get into the villains; cocky Theo, vengeful Karl and his hapless brother Tony with his tiny feet, greedy Uli (Al Leong’s theft of a candy bar prior to a firefight shows more character than most films can muster during their entire running time), galumphing James (aka VIGO from Ghostbusters 2), “Huey Lewis” aka Eddie down in reception, and of course Hans Gruber, the king of action movie bad guys, a Teutonic Basil Rathbone, regal and venal in equal measure. My God, this movie is near-miraculous.

But the other films do a good job of filling out their casts too. Die Hard 2 has three bad guys, none of whom are as memorable as Hans Gruber, but traitorous Major Grant is particularly vile. It also features a group of meddling bureaucratic cowards who are slowly won over by McClane; tetchy Barnes, officious Trudeau, delta-male Carmine, and eccentric Marvin. We also get a slightly more respectable journalist in Sam Coleman, not to mention a roster of villains played by character actors like John Leguizamo, Robert Patrick, Vondie Curtis-Hall, Don Harvey and, of course, Robert Sadler. Die Hard 3 has Sam Jackson taking up most of the screentime, but we still get a set of initially sceptical side-players in McClane’s court; colleagues Cobb, Walsh, Kowalski and Lambert, courageous bomb disposal expert Weiss, FBI jerk Andy Cross and Jarvis From Another Organisation, plus four great villains in sneaky Simon Gruber, man-mountain Targo, vile oaf Otto, and the frankly terrifying Katya.

Die Hard 4 is smart enough to keep this tradition going. Justin Long’s Matt takes on the Zeus role here, working as a surrogate son for McClane’s reluctant father. The cops are represented by Bowman and Molina (Cliff Curtis and Željko Ivanek), the bad guys include Thomas Gabriel (a sadly underpowered Timothy Olyphant), nigh-superhuman Mai Linh, parkour badass Rand, and hapless hacker Trey, while Kevin Smith appears as the fanbase-splitting hacker Warlock (for what it’s worth, I thought he was kinda funny). Yes, this is not on the same level as previous Die Hard films, and Wiseman isn’t about to give them all delightful character moments like the ones that litter the first three films, but the conventions of the series are at least being honoured. He has recognised that they exist, and has included them. This is more than we could have hoped.

The best thing I can say about the fourth Die Hard sequel, John Moore’s awkwardly-titled A Good Day To Die Hard, is that it too seems to have noticed this thread, even if it doesn’t really make the most of it. The villains are multitudinous; a consequence of its unnecessarily complex plot involving incriminating files and double-treble-quadruple crosses that makes one wonder if the movie should be about the dealings of the deeply boring Komarov and Chagarin, with no need for John McClane and his estranged son Jack. The post-Vengeance convention of a female antagonist is honoured by the inclusion of Irina, the heavy is a tap-dancing clown whose japes completely undercut his menace, the comic relief is provided by the un-named cab driver (The New Girl‘s Pacha Lychnikoff), and Jack’s partner is Collins, played by Cole Hauser in what amounts to a cameo during which we get absolutely no sense of who he is.

But A Good Day To Die Hard is not interested in creating rounded characters, or to even acknowledge that the Die Hard films are about actual recognisable humans put into absurd situations which are played as much for laughs as they are for thrills. Even at its worst Die Hard 4 recognised that, and thus honoured the previous films despite being the least memorable film in the series by that point. The latest film, on the other hand, is everything the fourth could have been; an empty, soulless cash-in on the franchise, made by people who couldn’t give a damn about the fanbase, the legacy of this series, or even fundamentally necessary elements of a successful film such as coherence, aesthetic pleasure, or even lizard-brain level spectacle. In short, it is a farrago and a disgrace.

Why did I just go to such obnoxious lengths to list the things that make the Die Hard films so distinct? Because A Good Day To Die Hard is such an insult to the other four films that while watching it I could only hold onto those fond memories in order to make it through. As someone who loves or likes all four films to one degree or another, it was like a mantra in my head, listing all of the great things in order to keep the insidious, sanity-sapping badness away; the SWAT guy pricking his hand on a rose in DH1, McClane trying desperately to signal a 747 landing in the middle of a snowstorm in DH2 and then sobbing when his efforts prove futile (and then saying “Motherfucker!” with such menace and hatred it boils the blood), the two bad guys disguised as cops in DH3 who get into an argument about leaving a block of C4 in the street for kids to find, the parkour villain in DH4 leaping out of a helicopter moments before a cop car crashes through it. There are dozens upon dozens of these moments in the series; DH5 has nothing. Just nothing.

There are so many things wrong with this film that it’s hard to know where to start, but perhaps it’s best to begin with what has happened to John McClane, who we see here as a barely conscious force of sheer unpleasant negativity, finally reconciled with his daughter (Mary Elizabeth Winstead returning in a franchise-solidifying cameo as Lucy), suddenly deciding to chase down his errant, possibly criminal son Jack (played by a non-curly-haired Jai “Varro from Spartacus” Courtney). This takes him to Moscow, where John manages to stumble across Jack in the process of breaking Russian whistleblower Komarov out of jail. Komarov’s plot is pointlessly labyrinthine, while John’s is simple; reconcile with his son, who detests him. Which makes sense, because this incarnation of the previously-witty John McClane is a glum mannequin, animated by the promise of millions and millions of easy dollars. He can’t support anything more than that.

This is perfectly in keeping with the other McClane arcs, which were all about redemption, but by now the well is dry, and Skip Woods’ script — which feels like an unpolished first draft — doesn’t even bother to dramatise the reconciliation in any imaginative ways. Relying on hoary old plot elements — like sceptical Jack having second thoughts when he overhears his father talking about how he has failed his family, or the fact that he calls his dad “John” until a key moment, much like Lucy does in DH4 — is one thing, but to try to echo this familial strife within Komarov’s sub-plot only really works if Komarov’s plot doesn’t take any right turns. You get the sense that Woods was trying to do something smarter than expected here, but certain third act twists render this character work moot, even as they notably continue the trend of including unexpected secret motivations of the Die Hard villains from previous installments.

At least that thematic reflection shows some kind of life in the process of creating the film. Other than that we get very little sense that any effort was expended. Perhaps part of that lies in the genesis of this film. Greenlit prior to the release of DH4, this is the first sequel in the series that started out as a Die Hard project; Die Hard 2 was based on the non-McClane novel 58 Minutes by Walter Wager, Die Hard 3 was originally a non-McClane spec script by Jonathan Hensleigh called Simon Says which was meant for Brandon Lee before almost becoming Lethal Weapon 4, and Die Hard 4 was originally a script called WW3.com based on a Wired article about cyber-terrorism. Die Hard 5 is merely Die Hard 5, and as a result feels like an undistinguished straight-to-DVD actioner that just happens to have John McClane in it. Instead of finding exceptional source material for our hero, they crafted something for him; the cart before the horse.

It’s bad enough that John’s arc is almost identical to the one in DH4, with him estranged from his angry son the way he was with his angry daughter. It’s worse that this time he gets to partner up with the person he’s trying to win back, meaning his growth is too directly connected with the character he bounces off. In DH3 and DH4 McClane learns to accept the ones he loves by being taught how to bend by characters he’s not related to (Zeus and Matt), but here he is already healthy enough to merely want to save his son, who ends up having to bend instead. In previous films the choice to almost accidentally resolve McClane’s character issues by having him chase one thing and in the process give him the thing he really wants is deftly done. Here the resolutions are clunkily sign-posted, and means John McClane is just there as a guy who shoots things. He’s not a character, and his son Jack isn’t drawn well enough to fill this gap.

The worst thing that could happen to this franchise has finally happened; McClane doesn’t really feel like McClane, and not just because this is easily Bruce Willis’ worst work as the put-upon hero. Not only can he barely muster any enthusiasm for the part, he’s sorely underwritten, with almost no wit apparent in his reaction to his predicament. Instead he keeps banging on about how he’s on vacation, which isn’t even accurate, as he starts the movie by looking for his son and then travels to Moscow with only one intention; to find out why Jack is in jail (it’s for shooting someone for some poorly explained reason, which has something to do with him being in the CIA though it’s not clear how shooting someone and being arrested helps him in his goal of saving Komarov).

It also doesn’t help that this McClane actively seeks trouble, goading his son on in the middle of the movie whereas in all previous installments he is obviously only getting involved in these troublesome events because he is forced to by a desire to save his loved ones or by the machinations of a villain. Other than the final act of Die Hard 3, where he chooses to chase Simon into Canada (which completes his redemption plot for that film), or Die Hard 4, where he finds himself chaperoning the most important hacker in the US, in all of the other movies he is obviously really annoyed that he has to do anything. He’s the ultimate reluctant hero of Campbellian theory, resisting the Call To Adventure over and over again, only ever becoming a pro-active character when his family is threatened or he’s just really really pissed off.

Die Hard 4 started this pro-activity by having him teach Matt how to be brave, but then the threat they face is all around them, and he is being tested by Gabriel throughout. In contrast, in the middle of DH5 he could easily walk away and take his son with him, but he doesn’t. To this McClane fan, even though this was a heroic choice on McClane’s part, the moment clanged. Even worse, there’s no growing tension here. In all of the other films there is some form of ticking clock urging McClane on. There’s nothing like that here. Some lines are added about a threat of weapons-grade uranium falling into the wrong hands but it smacks of convenience; no one in the film seems to even buy it. McClane is the one thing standing in the way of disaster in 1-4. Here he’s a guy who courts danger, possibly because he likes the idea of teaching his son some things (there’s a nice reference to “Bill Clay”‘s attempt to get a gun from the roof of the Nakatomi Plaza but even this doesn’t work as McClane doesn’t even know Clay is Gruber at that point, so it’s yet another empty reference solely for the audience).

This is all bad enough, betraying the conventions of the series or mimicking them bluntly without weaving them into the sub-plots of each previous film. It’s enough to make the heart sink, and look back on DH4 as a greater success than we had realised at the time; a rewatch last night showed that it’s much funnier and pacier than I had remembered. But while I cast aspersions on the script, and Willis’ performance (Jai Courtney is fine with the little he’s given, I guess), the real problem with Die Hard 5 is John Moore’s direction. I’ve never been a fan, I’ll admit, though I liked one sequence in Behind Enemy Lines (the insanely detailed plane-ejection setpiece) and thought Flight of the Phoenix wasn’t terrible. Nevertheless, The Omen remake and Max Payne were quite dreadful and unlovable, with the videogame adaptation being particularly painful.

A Good Day To Die Hard, on the other hand, should not have been released into cinemas in this form. Early scenes display Moore’s obnoxiously tricksy compositions, but it’s not the kind of thing that could ruin a movie, being merely irksome. A couple of crash zooms during a scene in which McClane’s cab gets stuck in traffic are jarring, but again, no biggie. A couple of impressively large explosions follow, and a clumsily shot scene with Bruce Willis staggering about in a cloud of budget-shortfall-obscuring smoke is not great, I’ll admit, but it’s still not the end of the world. He then stumbles upon his son, and the camera’s either too far away from the action or too close, or not looking at the right thing. Pretty shoddy, not helped by the relentlessly blue palette, but again I let it slide. I was trying to be nice.

And then the car chase happened, and all bets were off. How do I explain this sequence using words and not clips? How do I conjure up all of the feelings I had without merely resorting to obscenity? Even though Moore has not bothered to take my feelings into account with this infinitely awful sequence, maybe I should respect his feelings, so as to prevent the miserable possibility of being transformed into a mere troll by the grueling experience of watching that scene. And yet the car chase sequence in A Good Day To Die Hard is so far and away the worst and most ineptly shot and edited sequence in action cinema — nay, ALL cinema — that I think it’s incumbent on me to go hell for leather here, to state exactly how astonished and upset I was as it unfurled, in the hope that it will deter people from wasting their time and money on this film.

The aesthetics of action cinema have become a bone of contention with action fans over recent years, with numerous filmmakers receiving censure for their lack of visual clarity (Paul Greengrass, Christopher Nolan) or haphazard editing (Michael Bay specifically, though a number of other filmmakers have emulated him). Both crimes are terrible, I will agree, though I don’t think Greengrass or Nolan are anywhere near as bad as critics make out, and will even go so far as to say that Greengrass’ photography is actually very clear, almost startlingly so, with the camera choreographed along with the stuntmen, anticipating every move or stunt in order to capture them in entirety before being clipped down as much as possible in the editing bay, while still giving you the sense of what is going on in each shot.

I’d even defend Bay (and have done before), while stressing MOST VIGOROUSLY that I do not enjoy his action scenes as pure action scenes, with characters exploring geographically-clear spaces and achieving in-sequence sub-goals that include surviving attacks through evasion or suppressing enemies through force, like real action directors do. As I’ve said before, a really good action scene is like a really punchy pop song or a classical symphony, with all the parts working together to create a melodious whole, a break within the film that has a beginning, middle and end, as well as a kind of intrinsic harmony, if I can use that word to describe the camera’s recording of these action events. Bay’s action scenes are often syncopated drum solos without melody and harmony or even a structure, but I quite like drums so I don’t mind that so much. I’m not pretending they are something they’re not; I’m enjoying them for what they are; noisy, ostentatious exercises in self-indulgence. (I’ve seen Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen a dozen times and even I don’t know what the hell is going on in this shot.)

Nevertheless, even if I were to hate Bay, Greengrass or Nolan for all the reasons that many others hate them (not counting Bay’s sexism and racism, which I DO hate), what John Moore has accomplished in the car chase in A Good Day To Die Hard is to create an action scene of such cancerous awfulness, such baffling incoherence, such cornea-scraping criminality, as to render all arguments about other action filmmakers moot. This is without a doubt the nadir of action cinema; not just a drip of poison into the old king’s ear but a full fireman’s hose of ichor right in the face at such force it blasts the eyes from their sockets. It’s an insult to my soul so egregious that I very nearly leapt from my chair to vocally denounce it the way a devout old crone in a religious horror movie would react to the presence of a possessed child. It is an abomination.

All of the things you have ever hated about modern action cinema are here; lazy witticisms, cackling villains, no awareness of geography, the shakiest of shakycams, staccato editing that nullifies every beat and shuffles all of the events into a baffling montage, camera placement that misses every stunt and hides the key elements from the viewer, zero sense of pace or escalation, crash zoom after crash zoom after crash zoom, and cacophonous music that batters the viewer into thinking he or she is witnessing something vital and exciting when what you’re seeing is a total lack of effort smeared across the screen like snot wiped on a handrail. The stunt work is great, though. If I were a stuntman on this film I’d be livid at seeing my hard work ruined, at the risks taken wasted in this vomitous sequence. (This clip shows the most clearly edited sub-section, though the footage is taken from random moments throughout.)

In all the years I’ve been watching films I’ve never once walked out of a cinema in disgust but yesterday I very nearly did. Moore’s utter disregard for how films work was like a fuck you to anyone who has ever expended any effort on a film only to see their careers falter. How is this man still working? Max Payne crawled into the shadow of profitability, and apparently that’s all that matters even though that film satisfied no one. Say what you like about Brett Ratner, but even if you hate X-Men: The Last Stand, if Moore — who was once in contention for the job — had made it we would have been even unhappier with what we got. Ratner isn’t particularly competent or imaginative but he at least knows that putting about ten crash zooms into a car chase is just not on.

The rest of the film isn’t as bad as that one scene, but it’s all so tossed off that it never redeems it either. The stink of laziness pervades the film, enough to make Len Wiseman look like a tyro McTiernan in comparison (seriously, there’s some good stuff in DH4; the shot where the camera follows the parkour guy from rooftop to fire escape and then down is astonishing). Those anamorphic shots from Die Hard that thrilled me so when I was young are replaced here by irritatingly garbled compositions and clumsy camera-placements (one shot sees McClane temporarily shoved into the corner of an otherwise black frame, and it doesn’t seem like it was intentional), not to mention the most binary teal-and-orange colour scheme ever; it makes Transformers: Dark of the Moon look like a rainbow-riot of multicoloured joy in comparison.

Anyone not particularly interested in this kind of thing will naturally accuse me of being too precious, but I guarantee that this film will offend your eyes, be it by the endless shakiness of the camera operation, the pointless cutting from medium shot to retina-shattering close-up and back again, or by the inability to actually get the subjects of each shot into focus. The only movie I’ve seen recently that got basic stuff as wrong as this was in Rob Cohen’s dire Alex Cross, but that was at least funny. This is just depressing. I’ve railed against Tom Hooper’s awful visual direction a number of times but his worst crimes are arguably borne of out-of-control enthusiasm and puppy-dog eagerness to impress his master/peers. Moore just doesn’t seem to know what he’s doing. During that car chase it’s as if he took a photo of a car’s bumper and just flapped it in front of the camera for four minutes.

If the action scenes were even choreographed or designed in an interesting way then perhaps there would be a way to salvage this. As Moore showed in Behind Enemy Lines, he obviously likes the idea of the discrete and intricate setpiece made up of heavily-detailed elements (the plane crash sequence I mentioned earlier is a great example of that, breaking down the ejection of a pilot into tiny slices of time). But by now it’s easier to just rely on his favourite action trope; men running through a hail of bullets, either fired by bad guys or by flying machines. He used that shot a number of times in Behind Enemy Lines, again in Max Payne, and here has both McClanes running through a hellstorm of bullets fired by a helicopter not once but twice. And no one said to him that maybe he should change it up. If he could have engineered a way to shove this shot into The Omen he would have.

Perhaps I’ve been spoiled recently. The three big action scenes in this film are not well-thought-through or shot cleanly, and while these are possibly the worst examples I’ve seen of this, it’s not like Moore’s the only filmmaker farting out disappointing action scenes. However all is not lost, and I have a feeling action cinema is about to undergo a transformation. Christopher McQuarrie’s Jack Reacher might be a gamechanger in the same way The Bourne Identity and The Bourne Supremacy were — friend-of-the-blog @T_Lee recently referred to the subsequent deluge of Bourne-aping brawls as “pat-a-cake fights”, but at the time those minutely choreographed fights were a new thing in action cinema, as were those intensely edited car and foot chases. It didn’t take long for everyone to wear those tricks out, so it’s time for a change, and McQuarrie’s adaptation of Lee Childs’ novels might usher a new era of action cinema.

In Jack Reacher McQuarrie takes the “realism” of the Bourne fights and chases to their logical extreme, doing his best to remove cinematic artifice (though not entirely, of course). His fist fights are strategic and swift, with every contact creating new challenges for our diminutive hero; whoever thought we’d see a film in which the characters get smacked in the face and then take a few seconds to recover, instead of absorbing every blow like an impact-sponge? His car chases are full of errors, stalls, oversteers and reverses, all while sustaining the flow and tension. His shoot-outs are precise and focused mainly on cover, not firing; a logical continuation of the staging of the gunfights in his brilliant anti-heroic crime movie Way of the Gun. All of these action scenes are like nothing you’ve ever seen before, and are utterly thrilling and, most importantly, comprehensible without sacrificing energy.

McQuarrie has rewritten the rules of action staging, merely by looking at them dispassionately and intelligently, stripping away as much bullshit as possible and writing characters who think before they fight. The results are astonishing, and helped eradicate any difficulties I had swallowing the unfortunate thriller-novel bullshit tropes that McQuarrie was required to add, such as Little Jackie Reacher’s hilarious philosophy of lonerdom vs societal contraints, or his White Knight mansplaining and patronising of women, and his inhuman and reader-flattering sexual magnetism. All of that was pure chuff, but Jack Reacher remains a milestone in the evolution of the genre, a fact that will become apparent when fans embrace it on its DVD release. Though to be honest, that should have happened after Way of the Gun. (Check out this scene from WotG: the only gunshots occur off-screen, but it’s still 100 times more exciting than any of Die Hard 5‘s garbled and hysterical pyrotechnics.)

After that, it’s hard not to look at previous “geological eras” of action cinema with anything but a kind of annoyed pity. Most of the classics, the ones that defined the visual rules for each stage of the genre like Aliens, Die Hard, The Killer, Bourne 1 and 2; they’re all fine. It’s the knock-offs, the indifferently-made and identikit ones, that will suffer the most, and pure tripe like this suffers most of all. It’s kinda funny that Jai Courtney was in both Die Hard 5 and Jack Reacher, as The Zec’s right-hand man, and also amusing to note that McQuarrie gives him more personality as a henchman than Skip Woods does as co-lead. It’s as if he’s the bridge that action cinema had to cross to reach The New World. This is not to say that Jack Reacher will lead us into a land full of hard-edged and brilliantly conceived action classics, but it does give us an alternative to the mechanical and uninvolving rote staging of Moore’s farrago.

And it really is the laziness that kills this film, and not just in the way that it’s shot. Missed opportunities abound. Michael Kamen’s scores for the first three films are a pure delight, playfully mixing well-known musical classics into his chiming and rambunctious soundtracks; the “Ode to Joy” fourth movement from Beethoven’s 9th in the first, Sibelius’ Finlandia in the second, and Louis Lambert’s When Johnny Comes Marching Home in the third. Marco Beltrami took over for the next two after Kamen’s tragic, too-early death, and while he does enough in terms of replicating some of Kamen’s signature stings amid all the musical tumult, this trend of including classical music vanished. It’s not a big deal in the fourth film, but in the fifth film? Set in Moscow? Imagine what Kamen could have done with Prokofiev’s Dance of the Knights, or Tchaikovsky’s Waltz of the Flowers.

But then there would have had to have been moments of grace within Die Hard 5 to accommodate such a musical flourish, and Moore has no interest in doing that when he can shoehorn in another crash zoom or fussy composition or grinding conversation devoid of subtext (the moment when the McClanes declare their love for each other is just them saying they love each other; whatever happened to “show, don’t tell”?). Would Moore have taken a cue from McTiernan with his casting, choosing Broadway veterans for supporting roles in DH3 (including playwright Michael Christofer) so that every minor character feels like they have a backstory and inner life? No. Moore’s actors are all straight out of central casting, and attempts to make them stand out, like the bad guy who dances for no particular reason, or the needlessly objectified Irina (Yuliya Snigir, who strips to her underwear in an early scene for no reason other than empty titillation) just look lazy.

All of these complaints are, I realise, finicky and probably not the kinds of things that would bother most viewers. I get that. When I wrote about the awfulness of Alex Cross I went on about how thrillingly inept it was, how every moment in it was slightly off, so much so that the finished product is a classic example of exactly how not to make a film. Most other people who have endured it seemed to think it was just a generic thriller, making me wonder if I’m taking all of this far too seriously. This could well happen with A Good Day To Die Hard. While I rail against it as a chancre on the tongue of cinema, I’ll wager most people will just think that this is an underwhelming sequel, the inevitable lowpoint of a franchise flogged to death by a studio who saw the opportunity of making a quick buck.

Nevertheless, I defy anyone to remain agnostic about this film’s quality when they see the mid-car-chase insert in which Jack calls his bosses at Langley as the camera wobbles from side to side and zooms and shakes as if the room is on the epicentre of an earthquake, before pulling out for a moment to show every monitor in the room has a little red light on it to add dramatic strobes to their faces. Or the close-up of a target on a shooting range on which you can see part of the squib that blew it up, an error no one could be bothered to fix in post (a piddling error but indicative of a lack of care overall). Or the stupendously moronic twist at the end which [SPOILER] means that the villanous Komarov has been chased for most of the movie by a miniature army of people in his employ pretending to be his enemies, led by one guy who didn’t know any of this who is then killed. [END SPOILER]

Or the fact that it ends in Chernobyl, in a building that is made non-radioactive using enormous Radiation-Negating Wands Of Magic, so that no one needs protective gear; lucky for the McClanes — who drive from Moscow to Pripyat in just slightly more time than it took a helicopter (it actually takes 12 and a half hours to drive but whatevs). Our heroes don’t have any protective gear, but that doesn’t matter; when they fall into a pool of water Jack says, “It’s okay, it’s rainwater!” so that’s okay then even though the pool is indoors so this is actually impossible. And what does happen to all the uranium that gets stolen? Was it in the helicopter that crashes at the end? If not, was it taken by the bad guy’s mini-army? And as the McClanes don’t kill them I guess they just leave? That’s not cool. Oh, and can we PLEASE retire the “Girl From Ipanema Elevator Music” joke please? That shit got tired decades ago.

Even taking into account those awful moments, many people will think I’m just being overdramatic about this, that my Twitter rating for this film of 1/10 was melodramatic, and that’s okay. This is inevitably personal to me because these films are so important to me, and I don’t expect everyone to see it the same way that I do. Die Hard fired my imagination and made me treat cinema as a reliable source of joy that would continue to excite me for decades to come. And, barring some hiccups, this is still the case. Even better, the original Die Hard — my favourite film of all time — is still a wondrous thing, still breathlessly exciting, still a pitch-perfect example of how to make a crowd-pleasing, emotionally-resonant slice of populist cinema that looks breathtaking.

Die Hard 5, on the other hand, is so poor that it makes me want to take up a baton that seems to have been dropped, to actually make a movie myself that rights these wrongs. Anyone who knows how unconfident I am in real life will be surprised to hear me make a bold statement like that but just by avoiding every visual error and plot cliche here, anyone could make something that honours the genre’s greats in exactly the way this latest film doesn’t. That’s not going to happen, obviously, so instead I find myself, horribly, hoping that this tanks. Because right now, if this film’s final image — a freeze-frame of three McClanes, rictus-smiling in front of an orange sunset — is the last we see of John McClane, I’m absolutely fine with that. Unless the franchise gets a massive reboot, something that brings it back to basics the way Casino Royale saved the Bond series, it’s better off abandoned, choked to death on this gargantuan, unflushable turd.

Listmania ‘10! The Best Movies Of The Year

Posted on December 29, 2010 by admiralneck

A last mad dash to the end of the year, watching as many movies as I can, and I still don’t catch everything I wanted to see. It’s always the way, and I don’t see any other way to beat it other than to become independently wealthy and watch everything the day it is released. As a result, consider this list incomplete for 2010. How can it be complete if I haven’t see True Grit, which promises to be great, or The Fighter, which promises to be gritty and/or great, or Burlesque, which promises to be not as great and therefore potentially eligible for the worst movies list that will follow this?

Another caveat for new readers of the blog, some of whom I have met this year via Twitter, and include some people whose views on cinema I have come to respect and trust. If you don’t know me well either in the real world or via the internet, you might not yet realise just how heavily my tastes skew towards populist cinema. It has been my preference for many years now, and even in this fallow year for big-budget, wide-appeal movies, I’ve still managed to find a lot that to enjoy. The list will also feature a lot of American movies, which is more to do with the amount of US product released. That’s not to say I haven’t seen some fine movies from around the world. It’s just that they didn’t move me enough for inclusion here.

As you can see, I’m riven with worry that my tastes will be considered gauche, but I really shouldn’t. After all, taste is dependent on your criteria for the success of an artistic endeavour, and with films this is merely that a film do what it sets out to do, doesn’t take the audience for a fool, and shows some evidence that the filmmakers have an ability to make their movies work on both the micro and macro-scale: are they aware of how each scene — either well-crafted or fudged — fits in with the whole? Get something basic like that right and I’m going to be a lot nicer to your movie. The bad movies list is littered with movies that could have been fixed in the editing room: it’s a simple thing to get at least slightly right but too many filmmakers don’t even know how to do it properly. As for my taste, I’ve come to expect that my unending and vocal support for despised “failures” like Hudson Hawk (never forget!!!) and Speed Racer has burned my cred already.

Right. Caveats over. Let’s list this mammajamma.

25. [Rec]2

Would it have been possible for Jaume Balaguero and Paco Plaza to top their original zombie horror classic? For those of us who are still waking in the middle of the night with the memory of those terrifying final moments, it seems impossible. [Rec]2 might not feature anything that horrific, but its writer/directors are smart enough to take a step sideways, jumping off from the end of the original in an Aliens-esque way while skipping back into the timeline and geography of the first film, cleverly sketching new details in the margins. Even better, they flesh out the mythology, revealing that their horror franchise has more in common with The Exorcist than Dawn of the Dead, though this franchise features a badass action Priest, which is none-more-cool. Other than that it’s more of the same, but this is no dismissal. Some of the setpieces here are as breathtakingly staged as in the original: one early scene in a ventilation shaft is a nerve-wracking highlight. Best of all, it’s proves the [Rec]-niverse has legs. The next two movies cannot come soon enough.

24. Reign of Assassins

Chao-Bin Su’s eccentric wuxia romp is apparently co-directed by John Woo, though there is no hint of the master’s unironic hero-worship here. There is only the giddy sense that you’re not going to guess what’s coming next: a rarity these days. At first it seems like Chao-Bin is making a historical martial arts version of Johnny Handsome or The Long Kiss Goodnight, with Michelle Yeoh as the deadly assassin on the run from her past with a new face, but we’re instead treated to a dazzling final act filled with delirious plot twists and hysterical action. Very little else this year has the impact of the reveal of The Wheel King’s demented motivation for chasing the movie’s bizarre MacGuffin (half of a corpse), nor the sight of flaming sword fights, sex assassins and zipping death-needles in the final fights. It is also essential viewing for fans of the amazing Yeoh, who once more excels as the woman who cannot escape those she has wronged. Vibrant, colourful, and unapologetically sentimental and sincere, it’s an irresistible experience.

23. Megamind

It’s been another good year for Dreamworks Animation. How To Train Your Dragon was a delightful, highly detailed and exciting adventure, fully deserving of its success. Shades of Caruso recommends it, but can’t help preferring Megamind. The clever script by Alan J. Schoolcraft and Brent Simons plays with expectation, adding enough variations to a straight-forward premise to surprise audiences: something that eluded the makers of the similar but inferior Despicable Me. Tom McGrath’s direction shines too, getting the most from his starry cast, while raising the stakes impressively in the final act. It’s also a 3D triumph: Metro City (Metrocity?) truly boggles the eyes, those concrete canyons fading off into the distance while the superpowered protagonists battle it out on the vast stage. This might not reach the heights of Kung Fu Panda, or Sony Pictures Animation’s Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, but it’s still an entertaining and surprisingly affecting romp.

22. A Serbian Film

Satire might be the rapier that elegantly stabs at society’s hypocrisies, but apparently blunt-force-trauma porn/horror depictions of unimaginable cruelty can serve as commentary as well. Srđan Spasojević’s unforgettable nightmare vision contains zero cynicism: accusations that A Serbian Film is merely provocative exploitation are entirely false. It’s a bone-rattling scream of horror from the gut, a gauntlet thrown in the face of the Serbian government for turning the populace into puppets without agency, controlled from birth to death by forces beyond their control — here depicted as the almost unwatchable degradation of a family for the sake of meaningless, depraved entertainment. Even the strongest stomach will be turned by the toxic images pouring from the screen, but it’s the honesty and fury of Spasojević’s message that will linger longest, and make this a cause celebre for years to come.

21. Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame

The US action movie roster was deeply disappointing this year. With the exception of a handful of films, most of this year was taken up with unconvincing nostalgia (The A-Team, The Expendables), fun but slight comic adaptations (Red, The Losers), or genre crossovers (sci-fi – Repo Men: horror – Daybreakers: romance – Killers). Meanwhile, Reign of Assassins and Tsui Hark’s berserk Detective Dee mystery set the screen alight with crazed invention, whirling movement, and abstract plotting worth a dozen feeble CGI-heavy shoot-outs. Hark’s fictionalised retelling of the tale of 7th-Century courtier Di Renjie is a fantastical concoction, with Dee reimagined as a philosophical man of action, a Zen version of Guy Ritchie and Robert Downey Jr.’s Sherlock Holmes, except that movie didn’t feature Ninja puppeteers, deranged reindeer attacks, spontaneous human combustion and face-altering acupuncture. You never quite know what madness will be thrown at you. While the garbling of the real and controversial historical legacy of Empress Wu is troubling, as a slice of entertainment this ranks with Zu Warriors and The Butterfly Murders as one of Hark’s brightest fantasies.

20. Green Zone

This mixture of Bourne-style intensity and United-93-style reportage failed to find an audience, and frustrating populist compromises within Brian Helgeland’s otherwise ambitious screenplay threaten to scupper the movie at every turn, but it remains a unique venture: an attempt to depict the fraudulent practices of a corrupt government in a politically unstable warzone by hiding the bitter pill inside an action movie. It very nearly succeeds, certainly enough to stir the blood and anger the mind. It’s commendable just for its seriousness of purpose, and the unobtrusive way Greengrass paints infuriating details from Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s non-fiction book into the sides of the frame, but for action fans there is also the rush of Greengrass’ perfectly staged and edited set-pieces, especially the exhausting final chase through Baghdad, a scene made poignant with the knowledge that the disastrous occupation of Iraq was not going to have a happy end. Sad that the filmmakers felt obliged to tag on such a silly coda, but still…

19. Winter’s Bone

Debra Granik’s adaptation of Daniel Woodrell’s novel crosses so many types of genre it’s hard to know where to start. It has the episodic structure of a fairy-tale, the indomitable hero and quest-arc of a detective story, the inhospitable landscape of a survival narrative, and the terrifying antagonists of a Hills-Have-Eyes-style horror movie. Granik’s control of atmosphere is such that the frozen world seems to bleed out of the screen, chilling the blood even before we get to the events depicted. Ree’s search for her no-good father takes her into the dangerous underbelly of her community, with only her menacing uncle to help her. Watching this young woman forced to endanger herself for the sake of her family is agonising, partially through some of the best storytelling of the year, but mostly through career-best performances from John Hawkes and Dale Dickey, and the memorable arrival of Jennifer Lawrence in the mainstream cultural consciousness.

18. Whip It

All hail Drew Barrymore! 2010 saw the release of Going The Distance, which was so far and away the best, most entertaining and most convincing romcom of the year that every other dashed-off failure should hang its head in shame. It also saw the UK release of her directorial debut, the utterly charming coming-of-age roller derby movie Whip It. Barrymore draws out Ellen Page’s most likeable performance yet as a young woman whose tiny rebellion against the small-town mentality of her home and family leads her to an equally tiny — yet momentous — sports career. Our hero’s direction is frenetic and fractured but invigorating, as quick and sharp as the best two-and-a-half-minute punk tune. This celebration of sisterhood is one of the most purely joyous movies about youth made in recent times. Hopefully its fanbase will grow, and its message of unsentimental female solidarity, and celebration of outsider culture, will be passed on and enjoyed for years to come.

17. Iron Man 2

It’s too long. There’s too much talking. There’s not enough action. Whine, whine, whine. Jon Favreau took the things most people seemed to love about the first Iron Man movie – Tony Stark being a smartass in formless scenes that lean heavily on the wisecracks – and multiplied them, turning the increasingly tired template of the summer blockbuster on its head. The box office was great, but no one seemed to be happy with what they got. Pish posh. The talkiness and loose nature of the Iron Man franchise has proved to be its greatest strength. This plays more as a semi-improvised comedy than a set-piece-heavy explosiongasm, a good-time free-for-all that still finds time to test Tony Stark’s character and build the Marvel Universe inbetween the rambling asides and coolly tossed-off non-sequiturs. It’s the most unconventional superhero movie yet: irksome if you’re not onboard but pure joy for the rest of us.

16. Salt

Some movies are just too crazy not to love a little. Kurt Wimmer’s screenplay – in which agent Evelyn Salt may or may not be a sleeper agent intent on destroying Russia, America, the Middle East or the whole world, depending on where you are in the movie – playfully messes with expectations, leaving the audience in a pleasurable state of confusion and doubt as to the motives of any of the main characters. Philip Noyce cranks up the action to levels far beyond those displayed in his Tom Clancy adaptations, throwing out several memorable set-pieces and brilliantly orchestrating the cast into giving broad performances pitched at the appropriate level of heightened emotional truth: some kind of miracle considering the preposterousness of the numerous plot-twists, of which the less said the better. It’s undeniably daft, but by God, it’s exciting.

15. Submarine

Those of us who have watched the career of the amazing Richard Ayoade can rejoice: his feature debut is a triumph of endearing observational comedy, empathic storytelling, and film-nerd fastidiousness. The coming-of-age story of Oliver Holt doesn’t shy away from depicting its hero as an emotionally-stunted klutz, but the masterstroke is making all of his misjudgements seem perfectly logical, magically regressing the audience’s point-of-view back to its own adolescence, when we didn’t realise we hadn’t quite figured out how the world worked. Ayoade extracts impressive performances from his cast, especially newcomers Craig Roberts and Yasmin Paige as the nervous, spiky young couple whose adventures in romance go so believably awry. Nevertheless, the director’s greatest achievement is the magical atmosphere he generates: nostalgic yet modern, bittersweet and utterly charming, even during its darkest moments.

14. Four Lions

Amazing how Chris Morris’ comedy about suicide bombers didn’t generate the torrent of controversy many of us expected: a testament to the movie’s unexpected warmth. Though the four terrorist-wannabes are obviously murderous scum, they’re also human, and the most daring thing about this magnificent farce is to give at least one character — Omar, brilliantly played by Riz Ahmed — a redemptive arc as he attempts to save dopey Waj (a hilarious turn from Kayvan Novak) from eternal damnation. This is also the movie’s greatest strength, depicting fundamentalists as people in all their fumbling, irrational glory. Playing them as nothing more than idiots would have no charge at all. It becomes more than just a film of its time, becomes a film about all of humanity. We’re all fools, all a mixture of good and bad. It’s just unfortunate that a very small minority of us are more likely to blow up others on a mission to pay tribute to an imaginary sky-god or to strike at a society that is not really that much of an enemy.

13. Dogtooth

Arguably the most upsetting horror can come from the exaggeration of normal behaviour, as displayed in Yorgos Lanthimos’ dark extrapolation of how they fuck you up, your mom and dad. A depraved couple conspire to keep their children captive within the grounds of their home, feeding them false information about the world from birth. Treated like dogs, the children — now post-adolescent adults — have a completely alien idea of what the world is: planes are toys, cats are deadly monsters, and venturing outside the compound before they lose their ‘dogtooth’ will end in disaster. Nevertheless, with adulthood comes an increased urge to escape, even without knowing what that entails. Lanthimos’ matter-of-fact direction is the perfect counterpoint to the disturbing subject matter, impassively charting the slowly-unravelling experiment. Who needs human centipedes when you have parents like this? It’s an unsettling tale – The Truman Show without the hope and uplift.

12. Meek’s Cutoff

Who would have thought that the writer and director of something as soporific as Old Joy could create something as charged with suspense as this? That’s unusual enough, but Kelly Reichardt’s masterstroke is doing that without changing her signature style in any way. Her retelling of the true story of Meek Cutoff — in which a group of settlers of the “Wild West” are pushed off course by a potentially unreliable frontiersman guide — is deceptively simple. Under the surface are tensions that inevitably spill out as water dwindles and Meek’s instructions become less certain. The introduction of a new element — a Native American who wanders too close to the group — sets the movie spinning off in a different, and even more fascinating, direction. Reichardt’s superb handling of the group dynamic and the allegorical dimensions of this survival tale is aided by notable work from sound designer Leslie Shatz, weaving a hypnotic soundtrack using nothing more than the wind, the sound of shuffling feet, and the creak of a wheel. It’s an exhausting journey, but a riveting one.

11. Agora

Alejandro Amenábar’s ambitious, big-budget biopic of philosopher Hypatia – The Passion of the Christ for atheists – struggled to find distributors around the world, was dumped into cinemas with barely any publicity, and was criticised by Catholic groups in Spain for defaming Christianity: the polar opposite of Mel Gibson’s berserk Passion Play. Who knows why audiences didn’t connect with this tragic epic: it has the requisite visual wow-factor, moves at a clip, and is easily accessible. Perhaps no one wants to be reminded of the ancient — and modern — punishment and subjugation of women by vicious misogynists whose pitiful moral shortcomings and weak-minded thuggery lead to acts of barbarous evil. Rachel Weisz’s towering performance breaks the heart, bringing to life a great thinker whose fate is decided for her by infantile monsters: a loss to the world more profound than the library she tries to save. It should be required viewing for anyone who supports reason over superstition.

10. Easy A

Much like Drew Barrymore’s Whip It, Will Gluck’s teen comedy was greeted with a shrug. It’s a crying shame: movies this clever and witty don’t come along every day. Taking Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter as an inspiration, rather than a template, Easy A treats serious subjects — sexual awakening, female empowerment, the negative effect of socially accepted and enforced codes of morality, etc. — with a lightness of touch that seems ever more rare in these fractious times, remaining good-natured and silly while driving home a welcome message: mind your own business, and I’ll mind mine. However, the sparkling wit and referential games would mean nothing without a solid central performance, and Emma Stone delivers a star-making turn. Her charm and comedic skill are the elements that push this movie from good to great, and ensure that time will be generous to this underrated gem. It’s the best movie of its kind since Clueless: the proselytising campaign to see it get its due starts here.

9. Greenberg

Noah Baumbach’s character study of an odious, self-involved shit-head who uses everyone around him and sabotages himself tests that well-known writer’s maxim — that protagonists don’t need to be likeable for you to root for their success — to the point of destruction and beyond. Ben Stiller delivers one of the finest performances of the year as the title character, cast adrift in a city he hates, surrounded by people he cannot emotionally connect with, and consistently making the wrong choices. It’s a testament to Stiller and screenwriters Baumbach and Jennifer Jason Leigh that you find yourself rooting for this douchenozzle, hoping that he will somehow figure out that he is the problem, and make some effort to rectify this. The movie succeeds admirably, regularly positioning him on a precipice of universally recognisable social failure, his empathic blindness exaggerated to unbearable levels — if this creep can find a sort of redemption, there’s hope for all of us. Kudos too for bringing the amazing Greta Gerwig to wider attention: her work as Florence Marr is one of the highlights of the movie year.

8. The Social Network

Aaron Sorkin’s voice is so distinct that no matter who adapts his work, it’s first and foremost an Aaron Sorkin project. Until now. David Fincher’s free-wheeling and zippy movie is as fast-moving as the world of social media which will probably see Facebook superseded by other sites by the time this film hits satellite (this sentence sponsored by Diaspora). His control of the material, his authorial confidence, almost completely overwhelms the various tics and habits of Sorkin – no mean feat. Which is not to denigrate Sorkin. The Social Network represents his best work since the early years of The West Wing, cleverly and bravely tinkering with fact in order to turn the prosaic origins of Facebook into a Greek tragedy as “Mark Zuckerberg” is undone by his ambition and ironically trapped in the unsatisfying world he created. It’s delirious entertainment, delivered at hyper-speed by two masters of their trade, and well played by a young and obnoxiously talented cast, with special praise due to Andrew Garfield, as good here as he is in Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go.

7. Please Give

It’s been said before, and Shades of Caruso can merely echo it: why are people squandering their time waiting for Woody Allen to find something new to say when there is a perceptive, funny, imaginative filmmaker already working in the same area, and who isn’t merely content to ape better directors while putting nubile young women into leading roles as muses to various lecherous proxys? Please Give is a vastly entertaining and thought-provoking comedy-drama, playfully addressing themes of white liberal guilt, social discomfort, distorted body-image, and the generation gap, all while delivering endearing and subtle character comedy and well-earned last-act epiphanies that are recognisably small but no less profound for that. Nicole Holofcener has been making lovable and well-crafted social commentary for years without preaching, without resting on her laurels, and without pandering to the audience. Why she isn’t more widely celebrated by critics is beyond us.

6. Kick-Ass

Kick-Ass the movie is much like Kick-Ass the character, stupidly starting fights with powerful opponents just because it feels like it. Matthew Vaughan and Jane Goldman could have toned down Millar & Romita Jr.’s super-homage for family viewing, but instead they stuck to their guns and delivered a provocative blast of bratty energy right at the tutting moral campaigners. The only downside to the tide of handbag-clutching vitriol aimed at it (because really, who gives a fuck what these idiots think?) is that it obscured the message of the movie: if someone needs help, you have a duty to provide it, whether you like it or not. Hit-Girl may kill dozens of people and say the naughty words, but it’s not about that. It’s about a new generation kicking against the pricks. As London’s streets rage and the Establishment stamps on The Kids with all its might, Kick-Ass needs immediate reappraisal. It feels more like a manifesto than an action movie, but never forget: it’s a really goddamn good action movie.

5. Toy Story 3

Finally we reach the end of Pixar’s trilogy of torment. Toy Story 3 is a gruelling and emotionally devastating trip into the dark heart of society, laying bare the compromises made by all of us as we become adults. A world where wrenching sacrifice is inevitable is here depicted, with grim irony, as a candy-coloured landscape of potential joy crushed under the jackboot of miserable conformity, with emotional attachment to anyone or anything being a surefire way to see your dreams destroyed, your friendships demolished, your life ruined. It’s a relentless assault on the soul of the viewer, a sadistic and twisted reminder that life is dust and all we can do is cherish the odd moment of connection and bliss before being cast into the abyss, unwanted and alone. Oh the tears that were shed as Lee Unkrich’s nightmarish masterpiece hurtled towards its miserable end! Oceans of sadness! Waterworlds of lachrymosity! Damn you Pixar! DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!

4. The Kids Are All Right

Lisa Cholodenko’s immensely satisfying family drama is a quiet triumph, compassionately extolling the virtues and compromises necessary to live a liberal life while frankly addressing the unavoidable urges and paranoias of us all. It’s gratifying to see a movie leap over the usual tangle of political argument to simply present a loving family in all of its flawed beauty. Annette Bening, Mark Ruffalo and Julianne Moore excel as the trio of parents whose seemingly happy exteriors hide paranoia, jealousy and sadness; feelings that are brought to the surface by the actions of their teenage children. Does it sound like faint praise to say that the reason this movie appears so high on the list is just that it gets everything right? The movie’s ace in the hole is the script by Cholodenko and Stuart Blumberg, which is a work of subtle genius. Without pandering to the audience we’re invited into the lives of some of the most exquisitely detailed characters of the year, whose actions are believable, recognisable, and revelatory. It’s a genuine crowd-pleaser in the best sense of the word.

3. 13 Assassins

It could have been a wild and tacky action extravaganza, something entertaining but disposable, a repository of empty iconography that trades in nostalgia for the long-gone heights of the action genre: i.e., it could have been The Expendables. Thankfully Takashi Miike’s startling action classic — featuring 13 outcast heroes facing off against an army protecting the insane brother of the Shogun — is anything but. At times it feels like an elegaic send-off for a period in Japanese history, as our hero Shinzaemon Shimada faces disgrace and death in order to do the right thing: literally destroying a way of life in order to save the country. As the final half of the movie kicks in, it feels more like Miike is saying goodbye to the Samurai sub-genre. The careful pace is jettisoned for 45 minutes of beautifully paced and choreographed carnage, and two final showdowns of incredible emotional power. Nothing can prepare you for the intensity of this brutal war-in-miniature, with courage giving way to insanity as the battle progresses. It will be a long time before anyone can top the director’s astonishing achievement.

2. Inception

It may not feature Batman, but Inception still swept in like the Caped Crusader to save us from a summer of lacklustre movies. Nevertheless, even in a strong year this imagination-shattering masterpiece would stand out. Christopher Nolan’s bold and befuddling puzzle mimicked the beats of a traditional action movie to tell one story that appealed on a lizard-brain level, ending in an hour-long setpiece of dazzling complexity and ambition. Nevertheless, the genius of Inception lies in its labyrinthine structure. Numerous stories/interpretations could be implied from the layers of Freudian and Jungian imagery piled on top of the heist-movie genre trappings. Much like Lost, there was more than one narrative here, and viewers could choose whichever they thought was most applicable. Such confidence in the audience’s ability to unpick a knot like this is rare enough, but to present it at the height of the summer season – a period traditionally dismissed as an intellectual dead zone by sneering cultural commentators – amounts to a statement of intent: this filmmaker is trying to single-handedly restore cinema’s confidence in itself, and justify its existence as the audience finds satisfaction elsewhere. To do that he had to construct a maze: one that takes two hours to grow in our minds, but will take years to solve.

1. Black Swan

Forget 3D. Forget the inevitable future technology of thought-transference, even. What Aronofsky has achieved using little more than empathic and artistic skill is to plant our consciousness into the mind of a deeply troubled woman: we see and hear everything she does, and slowly our grasp on reality falls apart at the same time as hers. The willing members of the audience — who allow Aronofsky’s hypnotic magic work on them — will find themselves trapped in their seats, bombarded with unreliable imagery and noise, forced to question everything they see and driven to a state of delirious euphoria. The intensity of the director’s vision has proved too much for some viewers, and caused some cineastes to cry “foul” as they denounce the movie for being “overwrought”. As if this is a bad thing. This tribute to the power of art to transform both creator and audience is exactly as heightened as it needs to be. Watching it is to experience the feeling of creating a new idea or to master an artform, with all of the emotional turmoil that that entails. Technically it is impressive: Matthew Libatique’s raw photography, Clint Mansell’s overwhelming score and the ingenious sound design by Craig Henighan create a claustrophobic atmosphere of inescapable hysteria, but it’s the emotional charge supplied by Natalie Portman’s performance that pushes this movie to the top of the list. Her total commitment to the project is the key to its success: Black Swan would be movie of the year just for her heart-wrenching turn.

Honorary Mentions:

Archipelago: Joanna Hogg’s beautifully observed and played drama about a middle class family riven with discord is heavily loaded with almost unbearable British reserve. It’s as uncommunicative as its protagonists, but says much more about class issues and familial strife than any histrionics ever could.

The Town: A muscular action flick directed with consummate skill by the great Ben Affleck, stepping in front of his own camera to give a career-best performance alongside a similarly great cast of Rebecca Hall, Jeremy Renner, Pete Postlethwaite, Chris Cooper and Jon Hamm.

Summer Wars: Mamoru Hosoda’s sci-fi movie about a family battling against a rampant AI is primarily about how the history of a warrior clan can be revisited in modern trappings, but it also struck me as a love letter to the Internet and its greatest asset: the people who populate it and defend it from marauding forces. It’s also a feast for the eyes.

Unstoppable: The traditional visual blow-out of Tony Scott remains a constant eye-sore throughout this pared-down action thriller, but this is still his best-paced film in an age, and his best overall movie since Crimson Tide. There may not be much to it, but what more do you need? It’s an runaway train! And Denzel has to stop it! Magic.

Amigo: What could have been a dry piece of historical fiction is instead both a vibrant celebration of humanity’s empathy and harsh depiction of its worst and most paranoid instincts, as the occupation of a baryo in the Philippines during the Philippine-American War flirts with success before disaster. A great cast; a great — and compassionate — movie.

Best Documentary: Tabloid

Errol Morris succeeds again with the wonderfully tawdry story of Joyce McKinney and The Case of the Manacled Mormon, which was a huge deal in tabloid newspaper culture last century. Timely points are made about how journalism can ruin lives, and how opportunistic individuals can make a living from turning their troubles into a kind of performance for the masses, but most of all it’s just a massively entertaining tale, filled with oddballs, twists and humour.

Best Fiction / Non-Fiction Hybrid: Self Made

Gillian Wearing’s feature debut is like nothing else out there, a pleasantly discombobulating method-acting experiment using non-actors. She plays with what fiction is expected to do, and how our response to it is tied up in our knowledge of the individuals involved in the making of it, while at the same time using her acting exercises as a tool to unwrap the thought-processes of her volunteers. It could have been a navel-gazing exercise, but Wearing is too smart and empathic for that. What she has woven is far deeper than some dry documentary, and more emotionally involving. It’s cathartic for those involved, and maybe for the viewer too.

Still to come: worst movies of the year, and my pick of the best performances, best crew contributions, and best miscellaneous gubbins.

The Top One Hundred and Six Movies of the Oughts (15-11)

Posted on December 12, 2009 by admiralneck

I’d hoped to finish the final installment of this list today, but ongoing problems with cranky computers and the impossibility of getting WordPress to work faster than a cart dragged by a three-legged horse has scuppered me, so I’ll just add these five now and finish the rest over the next few days. I had originally planned to write one quick post about how I wasn’t going to compile a list, and look what happened. Of course I rushed it, and in the process missed some movies off and had to make quick decisions on others. Two that I considered for inclusion but ended up making a strict decision against were Steven Spielberg’s SF collaborations with Tom Cruise: Minority Report and War of the Worlds. Both movies contained some of Spielberg’s strongest filmmaking as well as displaying his terrible impulse control, as both suffered from poor endings that undermined a lot of what had come before.

Minority Report was a brilliant redefinition of Philip K. Dick’s short story, with Scott Frank taking Dick’s ideas and running with them, as well as providing Spielberg to indulge his new-found fascination with the joys of the Weird Segue. What could have been a very conventional chase movie became sidetracked with bizarre slapstick, eccentric performances, and crazy ideas. It also showcased some amazing futurism, pre-empting concerns about targeted advertising and giving us wonderful motion-recognition setpieces with a Voguing Tom Cruise that have made me long for the time I never have to use a keyboard or remote control ever again. I want this future right now!

Sadly the oddness and imagination made way for a deeply unsatisfying final act that hinged on that hoariest of thriller conventions: the secretly taped confession. What could have been a bleak movie about fate became a dull crime thriller, and as a result missed this list. Only just, though. The same happened with his adaptation of H.G. Wells’ novel about alien invasion. For the most part it’s a commendably bleak depiction of the end of civilisation, told in Spielberg’s trademark small-scale style. Focusing on three characters, he is able to depict the devastating effect of the breakdown of society just by showing how it affects them. This is best shown in the scene in which the family are separated from their car by a mob, and a terrified Cruise has a breakdown in a diner.

More effective than any number of admittedly terrifying and beautifully choreographed scenes of FX carnage, that scene would get into a top ten of my favourite scenes of the decade. Of course, Spielberg fluffs it. As soon as Justin Chatwin disappears over a hill top, you just know that Spielberg is going to orchestrate a reunion at the end of the movie, and even though the movie’s darkest sequence is yet to come — Cruise protecting his daughter by killing the crazy man they are forced to take shelter with — the knowledge that Spielberg is unable to kill off a family member for fear of bringing the audience down too far neuters the movie. I don’t think any other movie I’ve seen this decade has frustrated me so much. It was so close, and yet so far. As for AI, I wasn’t crazy about it when I first saw it and have yet to revisit it.

One day I will, and hope to get over my objections to the final ten minutes. At the very least, even though all three movies irked me, I am grateful to Spielberg for making such unique SF movies. Their rough edges do not completely invalidate them, and the genre has benefited greatly from their existence. I suspect time will be kinder to them than I have.

Right, no more vacillation. Here is the next installment of the list. As I’ve said each time, there are no movies from this year, although there is at least one movie from 2009 that I think would crack the top fifteen. I’ll see how I feel about it in a few weeks.

15. Oldboy

The middle installment of Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance trilogy is based — unlike the other two movies — on a manga by Nobuaki Minegishi and Garon Tsuchiya, concerning the quest of a loathsome man for vengeance and redemption after being held captive by a mysterious nemesis for fifteen years. It owes much of its power to Choi Min-sik, whose iconic presence and unhinged commitment to his role is utterly riveting. Without him the dazzling puzzle plot would still draw you in. With him (and his crazy hair), it achieves true greatness. A shattering masterpiece with a truly horrifying final act.

Best Moment: The revelations in the final act are shocking, and the notorious scene where Oh Dae-su devours a live octopus certainly shocks, but who can forget the brutal one take fight scene in a cramped corridor:

14. United 93

The terrible events of September 11th, 2001, defined the decade. The scale of the horror, and the manner in which it unfolded before our eyes, was unprecedented. It scarred everyone who experienced it. Paul Greengrass’ project to document the events of that day horrified many, eliciting the cry of “Too soon!”, but this story needed to be told as soon as possible. It’s lucky Greengrass — who had a documentary background and had already done a magnificent job cataloguing the horrific Bloody Sunday massacre — chose to take on this task, as his meticulous attention to detail led him to interview every relevant living person involved in the hijacking of United 93. Time dulls these memories, and the urge to derive some hope from 9/11 meant the story was already being manipulated to suit political ends by the time Greengrass started work. Not long before he had finished, a TV film about the same events was aired, but this was more than just a cash-in. It was an attempt to create a definitive historically accurate account of that moment, free of emotional distortion.

Best Moment: Something as sensitive as this doesn’t have any moment that makes you want to cheer. It just attacks your soul and wrenches your heart from your chest. On a personal level it has been important to me simply because I slept through that day (night work does that to you), and so I can attest to its value as a document of the day’s events. The nausea and emotions I would have felt on that awful day hit me as I watched this. I completely understand why many won’t want to watch it: it’s the most harrowing experience I have ever had in a cinema, and I’ve not been able to rewatch it since. Nevertheless, I’m glad I did see it.

13. Munich

Steven Spielberg has spent much of his career exploring the events of WWII, at first as a backdrop for shenanigans (1941, Raiders of the Lost Ark), then as the setting for commentaries on the darkness that conflict exposed both in our enemies and ourselves (Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan). It seemed likely that this fascination with the era was a consequence of his Jewish upbringing, and in biographies his late-career interest in Judaism certainly informed his work on Schindler’s List. He wasn’t finished exploring his cultural and ethnic heritage, though. As you can imagine, his effort to depict the dark side of Jewish history was not received with as much acclaim as his movie about Schindler. Munich‘s nightmarish vision of the awful moral corruption faced by a group of former Mossad agents — given the task of wreaking vengeance on the men behind the Munich Olympics massacre — is unflinching, a sentiment definitely not shared by many right-wing supporters of Israel’s foreign policies. Arguments rage over the veracity of the movie, but Spielberg is obviously expressing anger at the way this ongoing conflict is poisoning all of our lives, and to do that he has taken liberties with facts to create a warning to us all that “an eye for an eye” is not a viable policy.

Best Moment: As with United 93, this is not a triumphalist movie, but Spielberg is too much of a showman to make something that completely eschews manipulation of the audience. Early in the movie the team of assassins place a booby-trap inside a phone in the hope of killing a Palestinian translator, but in a nerve-wracking scene they realise they are about to kill his daughter as well. It’s a thrilling suspense setpiece with dark undertones that come to the fore as the movie progresses.

12. The Dark Knight

The praise-backlash-praise cycle for The Dark Knight seemed to flash past quicker than usual. Blame the Internet. Now that things have settled down, and debates about whether it should have qualified for a Best Picture Academy Award nomination have become moot (though it should have), one can look back with fresher eyes and see if Christopher Nolan’s crime epic stands up to scrutiny. Concerns over some of the editing remain, but it still manages to do several things better than almost any other purely fictional movie released this decade: it addresses contemporary concerns over the effect of terrorism on society, it condemns recent foreign policy and domestic security mistakes using crystal-clear metaphors, and it finds a way to make the fantastical superhero genre work in a contemporary setting without losing what makes that genre so appealing. It’s also ridiculously exciting, and features two of the most thrilling performances of recent times from Heath Ledger and Aaron Eckhart.

Best Moment: As Batman battles to stop a SWAT team from killing a group of innocents, the occupants of two booby-trapped boats have to make a terrible decision. The deadlock is broken by a convict whose actions show that, despite the terror caused by The Joker and his minions, the people of Gotham will not buckle under the pressure. I saw this in an IMAX cinema in New York, and the applause that broke out at this moment was more than just an acknowledgement of good cinema. It was defiant approval. Terror won’t win out. We won’t let it.

11. Ratatouille

It’s a film about a talking rat who loves cooking. In the hands of a lesser filmmaker it could have been nothing more than a fun diversion, but in the hands of Jan Pinkava and Brad Bird, it is instead a treatise on what it is to be an artist. Celebrating self-knowledge, commitment to excellence, and thoughtful artistic criticism, it’s one of the most profound movies about the creative impulse ever made, all while being artistically accomplished in its own right. No mean feat. It’s also a love letter to Paris and to great cuisine (choosing Thomas Keller as a consultant shows Brad Bird knew what he was doing), not to mention a wonderful comedy. In other words, a pure triumph.

Best Moment: Curmudgeonly critic Anton Ego finally arrives at Gusteau’s ready to destroy its reputation once and for all. What happens next might be my favourite scene of the entire decade.

As I’m going a bit bigger with these last fifteen, might as well split this into three sets of five too. Apologies for dragging this out even further: it was beyond my control. Next two parts will materialise either over the weekend or on Monday.

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

Posted on December 11, 2009 by admiralneck

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

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

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

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

30. The Bourne Ultimatum

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

29. The Insider

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

28. Unbreakable

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

27. Magnolia

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

26. The Fountain

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

25. Kung Fu Panda

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

24. Rushmore

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

23. Three Kings

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

22. Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang

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

21. Galaxy Quest

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

20. X2: X-Men United

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

19. Rachel Getting Married

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

18. Zodiac

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

17. Memento

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

16. Elephant

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

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

The Most Wonderful Newspaper Article Of Our Age

Posted on April 13, 2009 by admiralneck

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Large List Of Movies I Enjoyed This Year (Updated With Canyon’s Picks So It’s Even Larger!)

Posted on January 2, 2008 by admiralneck

Happy New Year, denizens of the internet! The holiday season is over, unhappy workers are returning to their nasty offices, and I’m cleaning the house. But, before I get into the rest of it, here is an absurdly long list that has missed off a million things either because we’ve not seen certain films that stand a good chance of getting on here (Michael Clayton, There Will Be Blood, Tekkon Kinkreet, Rescue Dawn, etc.), and because I’m forgetful. There was a supporting actor performance this year that I loved but I can’t remember who it was now. That’s as annoying as later remembering that I wanted to give music of the year shout-outs to Tenacious D’s Master Exploder (song of the decade) and Steven Seagal’s album Mojo Priest (not the hilarious hubristic disaster people expected it to be; I actually quite like it).

Anyway, here is as complete a list as I can make. Note that the worst film winner is not yet decided. Over the next few days I intend to decide who should win this coveted prize with a Worst Film of 2007 Face/Off special! So stay tuned. Also, I’m hoping that at some point Canyon will include her best and worsts of the year. I’m not 100% sure what her list will look like, though I get the feeling it will be fairly different. I look forward to reading it.

Favourite movies of the year:

1=: Zodiac – A perfect movie about an obsessive quest made by an obsessive perfectionist.
1=: Ratatouille – A perfect movie about a perfectionist and the obsessive quest for perfection.
2: The Bourne Ultimatum – Like being beaten up by a film. But in a good way. Best threequel ever, best action film of the decade.
3: Black Book – Moral quagmires, betrayal, sex, death, twists, violence, blonde women being mistreated by the world but keeping their dignity even when doused in shit. Hitchcock would have loved it.
4: Once – My favourite romantic movie in ooooh, aeons. Lovely soundtrack too.
5: The Darjeeling Limited – Wes Anderson triumphs again! Yeah, I said it.
6: Grindhouse – Sorry to say it, but only the full version gives you the full effect. Fuck you, Weinsteins.
7: Exiled – Johnnie To’s gangster masterpiece. The most unpredictable film of the year (other than I’m Not There, but who knows what the hell Todd Haynes was thinking with that).
8: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford – Possibly the best ensemble cast of the year, certainly the best photographed. Hypnotic brilliance.
9: Paprika – A feast for the eyes, and featuring a heroine that I want to see return in a billion sequels.
10: The King of Kong – Best documentary I’ve seen since the magnificent Capturing the Friedmans. No other documentary I’ve seen has made me so angry and so overjoyed. Who’d have thought real life could be this interesting?

Honourable mentions:

I Am Legend
Jindabyne
Hot Fuzz
Superbad
3:10 to Yuma

Honourable honourable mentions (there were a lot of good films out this year):

Gone Baby Gone
The Mist
Sunshine
Transformers
Black Snake Moan

Honourable honourable honourable mentions (I mean, seriously, a lot):

The Lives of Others
Beowulf
Charlie Wilson’s War
Knocked Up
The Lookout

Favourite movies released in the US in 2006 but then released in the UK in 2007 and were good enough to get a mention here anyway:

The Fountain, Curse of the Golden Flower

Movies that are not getting included because I need to see them a couple more times before I know whether I was crazy about them or not:

No Country For Old Men, I’m Not There

Movie that I didn’t want to like because the director is an asshole but damn it’s a lot of fun:

Apocalypto

Worst movie:

To be decided between I Know Who Killed Me and D-War (Runners-up: Bubble Fiction Boom or Bust, Spider-Man 3, Southland Tales, The Reaping, Next)

Most pointless movie:

Ocean’s Thirteen

Best actor:

Chris Cooper – Breach / Casey Affleck – The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and Gone Baby Gone (Runner-up: Will Smith – I Am Legend, Kurt Russell – Death Proof, Viggo Mortenson – Eastern Promises)

Best actress:

Laura Linney – Jindabyne (Runner-up: Gong Li – Curse of the Golden Flower, Carice Van Houten – Black Book, Marketa Irglova – Once)

Best supporting actor:

John Carroll Lynch – Zodiac (Runner-up: Chris Evans – Sunshine / Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, Sam Rockwell – The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Anthony Wong Chau-Sang – Exiled) (ETA: OMG how could I forget! James Marsden’s hilarious performance in Enchanted! Easily the best thing about the movie.)

Best Supporting Actress:

Robin Wright Penn – Beowulf (Runner-up: Marcia Gay Harden – The Mist, Amara Karan – The Darjeeling Limited, Sairse Ronan – Atonement)

Most entertaining performance in a bad movie:

Nicholas Cage – Ghost Rider

Worst actor:

Patrick Dempsey – Enchanted (Runner-up: Jason Behr – D-War)

Worst actress:

Lindsay Lohan – I Know Who Killed Me (Runner-up: Amanda Brooks – D-War, Claire Danes – Stardust)

Best hero:

Remy the Rat – Ratatouille (Runner-up: Rachel Stein – Black Book, Paprika – Paprika, McLovin – Superbad, King Leonidas – 300)

Best villain:

Anton Chigurh – No Country for Old Men (Runner-up: Billy Mitchell – The King of Kong, Stuntman Mike – Death Proof, Anton Grubitz – The Lives of Others, Mrs. Carmody – The Mist)

Worst hero:

Ghost Rider – Ghost Rider (Runner-up: Elizabeth Swann – Pirates of the Caribbean 3, Ethan Kendrick – D-War, “Jack” – D-War)

Worst villain:

Thomas Gabriel – Die Hard 4.0 (Runner-up: Venom – Spider-Man 3, Doctor Doom – Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, Evil General – D-War)

Biggest badass of the year:

Zoe Bell – Death Proof

Best Director:

Brad Bird – Ratatouille (Runner up: Paul Greengrass – The Bourne Ultimatum, David Fincher – Zodiac)

Worst Director:

To be decided between Chris Sivertson – I Know Who Killed Me and Hyung-Rae Shim – D-War) (Runner-up: Mark Steven Johnson – Ghost Rider, Richard Kelly – Southland Tales, Lee Tamahori – Next)

“Stop perving, Grandad!” director of the year:

Mike Nichols – Charlie Wilson’s War. We get it, Mike, Charlie Wilson was a big perv, but that doesn’t excuse the leering shots of boobs and butts, nor does it even begin to explain why you cast Emily Blunt and then made her sit around in next to no clothes for five minutes and then not have her appear for the rest of the film. (Runner-up: Michael Bay – Tranformers. Megan Fox is not that hot, so please stop staring at her oiled midriff, kthx)

Best cinematographer:

Roger Deakins – The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and No Country For Old Men (Runner-up: Harris Savides – Zodiac, Robert Yeoman – The Darjeeling Limited)

Best sound design:

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Runner-up: I Am Legend, Tranformers)

Best visual effects:

Transformers (Runner-up: The Fountain, Pirates of the Caribbean 3: At World’s End)

Most improved director:

Danny Boyle – Sunshine. I’ve always been frustrated by the lionisation of Boyle, whose movies feature pretty shots and no overall coherence or concept of how one shot has to link into another (Michael Bay gets accused of this yet I think he’s much better at creating a whole movie than Boyle, and yes, I know that is considered heresy. Whatever!). Sunshine is the first film where he gets it totally right. The whole movie is an perfectly sustained audio-visual assault. He can be proud of it.

Runner-up: Len Wiseman – Die Hard 4.0. I’ve found Wiseman to be a hack with a bland visual style and little imagination, but even though Die Hard 4.0 shared the same monochrome look of his vampire movies, the action scenes featured some wonderfully imaginative moments, not counting the Jurassic Park 2 rip-off with the car in the elevator shaft. I was very pleasantly surprised. Still got a shit villain, though. Did Hans Gruber have no more brothers?

Most precipitous drop in directorial ability:

Sam Raimi – Spider-Man 3. Jaredan maintains Raimi purposely sabotaged the movie as a screw-you to Sony for making him include Venom, and I can’t argue with him. I can’t believe someone as talented and conscientious as Raimi could poop out something as dreadful as this. Let’s hope he improves soon, as he’s still top of the list of directors capable of pulling off The Hobbit.

Disappointment of the year:

Spider-Man 3 (Runner-up: Pirates of the Caribbean 3: At World’s End, Eastern Promises)

Most overrated film of the year:

Atonement. Stately, respectable, well-crafted, pretty. It’s all of those. It’s also empty, features some really dodgy acting, and makes no sense until the final twist comes into play. Then it’s all very affecting, but for an hour, the movie is filled with head-scratchers and logical leaps. (Runner-up: 28 Weeks Later)

Most underrated film of the year:

Hot Fuzz. Has none of the respectable cachet of Atonement, but is possibly the most carefully crafted British film in decades. Repeat viewings unearth a wealth of detail and beautiful structure. If only critics loved Point Break and the films of Michael Bay the way they should, they would have appreciated its genius. (Runner-up: Curse of the Golden Flower)

Best comic adaptation of the year:

300. I don’t even like it that much, but the competition (Spider-Man 3, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, Ghost Rider) is pitiful. Persepolis is almost certainly going to be better, even though Marjane Satrapi is not really a comic writer/artist, more like a writer who draws the odd picture.

Best schadenfreude:

The Brothers Affleck prove to a sceptical world that they are awesome, to the massive happiness of myself.

Best comeback of the year:

Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay for Charlie Wilson’s War was his best in ages; smart, funny, irreverent, and only a bit pompous. It went a long way towards making up for Studio 60.

Best action scene of the year:

Jason Bourne vs. Desh – The Bourne Ultimatum (Runner-up: Autobots and humanity vs. Decepticons vs. a city – Transformers, motoring ladies vs. Stuntman Mike – Death Proof, Viggo’s genitalia vs. hitmen – Eastern Promises)

Best non-action scene of the year:

Anton Ego eats a meal – Ratatouille (Runner-up: Cops interrogate John Carroll Lynch – Zodiac, every conversation between Simon Pegg and Nick Frost in Hot Fuzz)

Best musical moment of the year:

Marketa Irglova sings on her way back home – Once (Runner-up: Samuel L. Jackson sings Stack-O-Lee to a writhing sweaty mass of people – Black Snake Moan, Justin Timberlake lipsynchs to All These Things That I’ve Done by The Killers – Southland Tales)

Most WTF ending of the year:

The Mist – I cannot spoil it, and am still not sure whether I liked it or not, but I will say this: once seen, never ever forgotten.

Most bullshit death of the year:

Jazz going out like a punk in Transformers. Okay, so Megatron is five times taller, but still, that was not acceptable. (Runner-up: the various “tragic” moments at the end of Spider-Man 3)

Most wasted actors of the year:

Chow Yun Fat – Pirates of the Caribbean 3: At World’s End (Runner-up: Emily Blunt – Charlie Wilson’s War, Thomas Haden Church – Spider-Man 3)

Biggest jerks of the Year:

The Weinsteins’ decision to block the international release of Grindhouse may have been borne of their fears of financial ruin, but the dismissive attitude they have towards international audiences, and the lack of understanding they have of the movie itself (individually hardly anyone likes the films, but together they are perfect entertainment) is notable. Just remember, next time they push for a film to win an Oscar with their bully tactics, it’s got nothing to do with championing the film. They’re only in it for themselves.

Best screw-you of the year:

Kurt Russell mouthing off against the Weinsteins at the Cannes Film Festival. Just like Snake Plissken would! Now go appear in a bunch of movies next year because you are so awesome, okay?

************

Canyon’s Mostly Redundant End-of-Year List

Though you might have caught on that Admiral Neck is very fond of end-of-year list-making, I myself am not. I do love reading other people’s lists, I have to admit, and I appreciate the opportunity to step back, think about the year as a whole, and organize your thoughts. The problem for me is that I often don’t feel there are ten movies made every year that I will remember and really love as time goes on (the same goes with books and music and tv shows — most years will produce maybe three or four of each). With most movies I enjoy in a given year, “Oh yeah, that’s a good movie” is the first thought that springs to mind when I think about them later — not “Wow, what a haunting, life-changing masterpiece that was.”

I get that it’s probably the same for everybody, but I feel wrong memorializing merely good movies in a top-ten list when they probably won’t matter much to me in the long run. I guess this is kind of unfair to the very good movies I leave off, but it’s my list and I’ll do what I want. Also, Admiral Neck and I have very similar tastes, so I mostly have the same movies on as he does, and I liked all the other movies he mentioned mostly as much as he did (except The Darjeeling Limited, because I have been burned by Wes Anderson too many times and refused to see what was by all accounts another dollhouse whimsy-fest). Okay, enough clearing-of-throat preamble: my seven favorite movies of the year (I could stretch this to ten, but I feel a bit wrong doing it, so I won’t).

Top Seven

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford — One of the most gorgeous movies I’ve ever seen (the visuals in the train-robbery scene will stay with me a long time); the comparisons to Terrence Malick are apt, but this film is no rip-off (as if that would even be a bad thing). The narration was moving and elegiac and wonderfully literary, the pace was perfect, many scenes were incredibly haunting (especially the fantastic ending), and Casey Affleck needs awards shoved between his tiny Chiclet teeth immediately.

Ratatouille -- I adore The Iron Giant but was disappointed with The Incredibles (apparently I was the only person on earth who was), but this movie had Admiral Neck and I sobbing like little babies. I would have cried more if we hadn’t been in public. Gorgeous animation, wonderfully funny, with a turn by Peter O’Toole that made me choke up over a discourse on the role of critics. That’s some writin’, Brad Bird! And damn you, by the way, for making me cry more at your movies than even one of Joss Whedon’s.

Zodiac — Another one that stayed with me for weeks afterward. A meta-comment on obsession that was scary, funny, thought-provoking, and ended perfectly.

(Note: All three of the movies above are what I’d consider the haunting-masterpiece variety.)

I Am Legend — Yeah, I said it. I think the movie was very unfairly derided as being a typical Will Smith flashy blockbuster, a sci-fi FX-extravaganza with no brain and no heart. (And it almost was — Admiral Neck got hold of the original script, and it’s absolutely terrible, and the kind of movie you can imagine would have been perfect for Michael Bay [he was previously attached to direct].) Instead, it’s a quiet, thoughtful, incredibly moving meditation on isolation and loneliness, and the main character’s slow descent into madness. I don’t often agree with Salon’s Stephanie Zacharek (though I love reading her reviews), but I think she was mostly on the mark about this one. I don’t agree with the complaint I’ve often heard about the ending — I think it flows very well with what came before, and while I think the God stuff and the very end were missteps, those aren’t the moments that stayed with me. The shots of a deserted New York are incredible, the action set-pieces are brilliant, and I haven’t been able to get some scenes out of my mind since I saw it. There might have even been more sobbing during this than during Ratatouille (though I blame Admiral Neck for being a big crier himself and dragging me down with him).

Once — My favorite musical of the year (though who knows if Sweeney Todd would have bested it; that doesn’t come out here till January, thanks distributors!!!!!). Wonderful performances, beautiful songs — I went on about it earlier this year so won’t belabor it, but it was absolutely lovely.

3:10 to Yuma — The second-best Western of the year — perhaps a bit too neatly wrapped up at the end, but that’s kind of what I liked about the ending, that even though Russell Crowe’s actions are seemingly out of character, they make perfect sense in the context of the movie. I don’t know if that makes sense to anyone but me, but I loved the symmetry of it.

Grindhouse — Planet Terror was a perfect spoof — mocking grindhouse movies with hilarious accuracy but incredibly clever in its own right. Death Proof wasn’t a grindhouse spoof by any stretch of the imagination — it was more of a Tarantino movie badly filmed and scratched up — but it was brilliant in its own right (people moaned about it, but would they really want two back-to-back straight spoofs?).

Black Book — Straight up Verhoevenly goodness. In Dutch!

Best Coen brothers movie I’ve seen, but which still left me a bit cold: No Country for Old Men

Movie I thought I’d hate and, much to Admiral Neck’s gloating joy, I really, really liked: The Bourne Ultimatum

Favorite bad movie: Ghost Rider, mostly because of the weird character quirks Nicolas Cage adds to his performance

Biggest disappointment: Eastern Promises (I loved History of Violence and consider it one of those elusive masterpieces, so it was a huge disappointment to find that this barely felt like a movie)

Movies I liked but am a bit ashamed to admit to: Music and Lyrics, Hairspray, Transformers (and potentially Dan in Real Life, as it’s supposed to be a lot better than the mawkish trailer makes it seem)

Movies that would probably be on my list if they came out in the UK in %#$($# December like they should have: Walk Hard, There Will Be Blood, Juno, Sweeney Todd, Into the Wild, Away From Her, National Treasure 2: Book of Seeeeeecrets, No End in Sight

The Bourne Perfection

Posted on August 17, 2007 by admiralneck

(Warning: Bourne spoilers ahead.)

This week the UK finally got a chance to see the final installment of the Bourne trilogy, and Orc hordes couldn’t keep me from seeing it at the first available opportunity. If you’re thinking of seeing it, and have access to the first two movies, I advise you make a big deal of it and watch those first, as Paul Greengrass and Tony Gilroy (along with Scott Z. Burns and George Nolfi) have added several visual and narrative cues to make it all feel like a very intense 6 hour movie. That is, scenes from the first two movies that acted as payoffs now in fact seem like set ups for payoffs in this movie. Certainly the cleverly expanded role for Julia Stiles makes the viewer reappraise her character (and her ability as an actress. She does a lot here by doing what seems like very little).

Apologies for any spoilers, but it’s hard to gush about the movie without giving something away. The final few moments of the film are immensely satisfying, with Bourne’s story coming full circle at last with the revelation of the terrible act he committed in order to end his previous life as David Webb, and the passive act he makes to end “Bourne”‘s life. His final mini-speech on the roof to his would-be killer is somewhat heartbreaking and moving; now that he has found a way to move on, perhaps now he has the chance to help others do the same. He’s like the Spy Messiah, cleansing the souls of those who followed in his footsteps. That the movie ends the same way the first starts is not just clever storytelling, it’s also a way to include that hoary old visual metaphor of immersion in water as rebirth and baptism in a way that makes it fresh. And, at the risk of sounding confrontational, I defy you not to feel the urge to cheer as Bourne springs back to life, with that Moby track bleeping away in the background. I know I did a pathetic little air-punch. What? WHAT?

At some point I’m sure I’ll whitter on about how glad I am that storytelling trends are favouring the longform (TV as visual novel, film franchises that require the viewer to have knowledge of the previous installments instead of being able to drop in and out a la old skool Bond), but for now I will say that Bourne Ultimatum represents the best example I can remember of using the resources of the previous installments to create an emotional resonance. As has been noted elsewhere, Julia Stiles’ scene in the bathroom, dying her hair in a deliberate echo of the scenes with Franka Potente in The Bourne Identity, worked beautifully.

Also pleasing was the final car chase that seemed about to reverse the outcome of the chase at the end of Supremacy, with Bourne trapped at the business end of an imminently crashing car in the same way as Karl Urban, only to prevail through his quick wits. Not only that, but it proves he is learning not to kill. His involvement in the chase is a consequence of him trying to get away, which may have also been the situation in Supremacy, but in that case he aggressively destroys Karl Urban’s SUV and kills him. Here, he allows the chase to end in a crash (or is forced to; I couldn’t tell as I was chewing my knuckles with terror), and then spares the life of his pursuer. By this point, he’s no longer the assassin he was turned into, but a victim, albeit a victim who will break your bones if you mess with him.

The movie has been well received by the UK critics, but their bias against any kind of genre movies has come through. James Christopher of the Times, Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian, and Anthony Quinn of the Independent all seemed to love it but only gave four stars. I can imagine the use of the Guardian as a plot-point would irritate the other papers, but Bradshaw had no excuse. Funnily enough, he has fun pretending that all Guardian journalists are as tough and glamourous as Paddy Considine’s character, which is in direct conflict with what I saw. Greengrass is obviously making fun of his own journalistic background, as well as the reputation of the Guardian. Considine is useless, ignoring Bourne’s advice, continually getting himself into trouble, and seeing danger where there is none. Compared to all of the CIA agents, even the less capable ones, he looks like a hapless idiot. Plus, how does Considine elude capture? By hiding in an off-licence. Very nicely played, Mr. Greengrass.

Shades of Caruso

Circuit interruptus.

Category Archives: Paul Greengrass