Listmania ’12! The Best Movies Of The Year

Posted on January 1, 2013 by admiralneck

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

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

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

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

25. Your Sister’s Sister

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

24. Killer Joe

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

23. Moonrise Kingdom

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

22. Premium Rush

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

21. Killing Them Softly

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

20. Berberian Sound Studio

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

19. Sightseers

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

18. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

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

17. Rust and Bone

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

16. Compliance

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

15. Painless

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

14. Jack Reacher

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

13. Argo

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

12. The Bourne Legacy

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

11. John Carter

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

10. Dans La Maison

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

9. Seven Psychopaths

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

8. The Dark Knight Rises

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

7. Cabin in the Woods

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

6. Cloud Atlas

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

5. The Grey

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

4. Wolf Children

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

3. The Master

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

2. Holy Motors

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

1. The Avengers

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

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

Honorable Mentions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

BFI LFF 2012: The Central Park Five / West of Memphis / Room 237

Posted on October 23, 2012 by admiralneck

Shades of Caruso does not watch many documentaries. It’s nothing personal; it just doesn’t happen that often. You can attribute it to a greater interest in the mechanics of fictional storytelling if you want; that sounds about right. But I suspect the other reason, certainly when selecting films at the London Film Festival, is that I just never know what to say about them. Most documentaries I’ve seen are the critically acclaimed ones that everyone raves about, so without seeing poorly-made or researched ones, I don’t have an awareness of the quality spectrum which allows me to judge fairly. All I can say is, “That seemed extremely factual. Good work on recording all of that information.”

And yet this year’s line-up saw us pick three documentaries. Perhaps we were emboldened by the pleasure of seeing Bart Layton’s The Imposter earlier this year. Perhaps it was the allure of the star names behind two of the films; ironic considering it was the unstarry one that made the deepest impression on me. That’s not to say the others weren’t fascinating, and filled with many high-quality facts. The Central Park Five, from the famed Ken Burns, his daughter and author Sarah Burns, and regular collaborator David McMahon, revisits the notorious case of the Central Park Jogger, a crime which shocked New York and led to the arrest and conviction of five boys whose confessions — which they later maintained were coerced — trumped the total lack of physical evidence.

The filmmakers paint a fascinating picture of the state of New York at the time; a crime-ridden city divided by racial tensions and money, the powder-keg world that Tom Wolfe turned into a Dickensian fable with Bonfire of the Vanities. The five men of the documentary’s title – Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, Raymond Santana, Yusef Salaam and Kharey (Corey) Wise — were in Central Park on the night of the vicious rape and assault of a jogger, a young woman who worked as an investment banker. As the group they had travelled with had been involved in other crimes in the park that night, they were arrested over the course of two days, during which time they confessed to the crime on videotape.

The Central Park Five casts doubt (a lot of doubt) on the way in which the confessions were elicited, accusing the police of the Central Park precinct of coercing the young men, setting them against each other and shepherding their testimony until it vaguely resembled the facts of the case, before proudly claiming that the crime had been solved (one person interviewed by the filmmakers notes with amazement that two days after the crime was committed, the cops who were assigned to the case were celebrating in Elaine’s). The five men were treated like animals by a horrified, racist press, who latched onto the misheard word “wilding” to describe the behaviour of the group of 25 men they were with, and referred to them as a “wolf pack”.

Eventually the five men had their convictions vacated once Matias Reyes, a convicted rapist and murderer, confessed to the rape and assault, but the filmmakers note that they were portrayed as vicious scum for months at the time of the crime and trial, while the revelation of their innocence was barely noticed, turning this film into a monument to their innocence, the failures of the justice system, the corruption of the police, as well as a snapshot of what the city of New York once was before a raft of crime-fighting tactics began to turn the tide against the lawlessness of the 80s. The message is that the city might be cleaner and happier now, but that might have been built at least in part on an injustice that no one wants to talk about.

However, real life events have sadly constrained the filmmakers, and what could have been an expansive movie of even greater power is restricted due to the lack of interaction with the police involved. The filmmakers attempted to get the policemen and district attorneys to give their side of the story, but due to an ongoing lawsuit by three of the five men against the city, there was no chance of that happening. What’s worse is that now the movie has been completed, the police are trying to get the directors to hand over their footage to help their defense. The movie has no choice but to portray these legal forces as opportunistic and devious; it would have added untold layers of meaning to an already interesting movie if we could get their input, even if the movie’s depiction of them as crooked and opportunistic is entirely convincing.

When watching the Burns and McMahon carefully paint this fascinating picture of New York at the time of the crimes, the other documentary that came to mind was Hoop Dreams, Steve James’ masterpiece of social commentary. Though ostensibly about two young men trying to make it as basketball players, the movie (for those of you unlucky enough to have not seen it) becomes a portrait of much of what America is. Its education system, its obsession with spectacle and competitiveness, the racial and economic injustices that taint the American dream; all of these things and more are addressed without fanfare. Seriously, if you haven’t seen Hoop Dreams just put down this dumbass blog and WATCH IT.

Part of the astonishing power of Hoop Dreams comes from James’ ability to talk to everyone involved in the lives and careers of the two protagonists, William Gates and Arthur Agee. This includes some shady motherfuckers who don’t come off well at all, but whose honest accounts for their own actions are almost as illuminating as James’ insight into the privations of inner city life. This extra element is sadly lacking from The Central Park Five, and though the reasons are obvious and understandable, and the movie is still powerful, essential viewing, it’s frustrating to have part of the puzzle missing, especially as it could have led to these men and women incriminating themselves. Even if the cops gave us nothing but obnoxious bluster, it would be relevant obnoxious bluster.

But as I say, the movie is an important piece of journalism, a counterpoint to the slurs of the tabloid press at the time (how grim to see the New York Post’s offensive headlines flashing up over and over again). Interestingly enough, at the Q&A for West of Memphis, Amy Berg painted a depressing picture of the state of investigative journalism in the era of austerity. Having previously worked for CNN and CBS News, since 9/11 she had seen the budget for news segments shrink until 20 minute films became 2 minutes, losing nuance and complexity. Frustrated at this, she quit and opted to make feature documentaries, the format which she feels is the future for investigative journalism.

This is telling, as her movie about the Memphis Three is as much about the media’s role in holding the judicial system to account as it is about the case itself. Already the subject of three films by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinovsky, the Memphis Three — Damien Echols, Jesse Misskelly and Jason Baldwin — were convicted of the sexual abuse and murder of three boys in their hometown of West Memphis, but public attention was drawn to the inconsistencies in the prosecution’s case by the first of those movies. High-profile celebrities took up the cause of getting the three young men off Death Row and out of jail, something that happened during the course of making this film. As such this story is partially about them too; a real crime and the media that reports on it and reacts to it, inextricably linked.

Sadly I haven’t seen the well-known Paradise Lost trilogy that has exhaustively documented the struggle to release the Memphis Three, which at one point presented a possible case against John Mark Byers, stepfather to one of the murdered boys. However I am aware of the controversy surrounding the various documentaries and scripted adaptations of this story. Such conflicts over who gets to control the telling of this story are not addressed within West of Memphis, which nevertheless mentions the importance of the Paradise Lost trilogy in raising the profile of the case, while also selecting shots from the second Paradise Lost documentary that makes it look lurid and sensationalist. Or maybe that’s just me.

West of Memphis is as complex and rigorous as the best of this genre, but perhaps the most interesting thing about it, other than the often astonishing details of the case’s long history, is that this is produced by Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh. Much as it might seem that this is some kind of vanity project for them interferin’ liberal types (Eddie Vedder and Henry Rollins are also highly visible here), they in fact helped fund new investigations and DNA tests that create even more doubt in the prosecution’s case. Yes, the New Zealand filmmakers come off looking like saints because of the movie, but rightly so. Without their intervention, and that of the other high-profile celebrities who have lobbied for their release, the three men could still be in jail, or dead.

Berg’s comments about investigative journalism (which in most cases won’t be as fortunately well-funded as here; something that complicates her claims) make more sense when you realise this is not meant to be a historical document like The Central Park Five, which feels more like a belated corrective to the previous poor coverage. It’s a brisker look at the long-running investigation than the Paradise Lost trilogy (check out the Wikipedia page for more info about the case). But it does do one thing The Central Park Five couldn’t; the men who opposed the Memphis Three at the original trial and subsequent appeals speak honestly about their belief in the Three’s guilt, their testimony captured prior to a lawsuit that would likely have seen them withdraw their interviews. Their bluster and cockiness adds that extra level of information.

As the movie progresses, you realise Berg, Jackson and Walsh are more interested in making a case that the real culprit was another of the stepfathers of the children, Terry Hobbs. The last hour or so of the movie focuses on his movements at the time of the killings, and shows footage from testimony he made during his lawsuit against Natalie Maines, the Dixie Chicks singer he sued for making claims about his guilt. Once more a celebrity took an active role in the case, resisting his lawsuit in order to get his testimony on the record. We see Hobbs struggle to answer the simplest questions about the day of the killings; it’s powerful stuff.

Happily the three men were released during the course of filming, though they were only freed by making a guilty plea, meaning they have yet to have their innocence accepted. A case is made that political pressure ensures this will never happen; many of those who fought to put them in jail remain on the scene and their careers would be at stake if the original verdict was overturned. This means WoM feels like a victory lap for the three, especially Echols, who co-produced the movie, and is seen at the end of the film with his wife Lorri Davis (who he married while in jail). But it’s a bittersweet victory, and as with The Central Park Five the feeling you’re left with at the end is that it’s great their stories are told, but they’re not ever going to be over.

They’re also arguably, unavoidably problematic, in that no account can ever avoid questions of objectivity, interpretation and agenda. The testimony of some of the innocent men in The Central Park Five begins with an admission that they were with the group of 25 who assaulted some people in the park that night, but their denials of involvement with those crimes are quickly offered and then the movie passes on by. Do I think they committed crimes that night? Not at all, but the necessary editing jump past this to the meat of the case, perhaps done to ensure their subsequent testimony isn’t tainted, has the unfortunate effect of making it look like they’re hiding something; an editorial choice that causes complications.

As for West of Memphis, a case is made against Terry Hobbs, but then one was once also made against John Mark Byers by Berlinger and Sinovsky, and that negatively affected his life. At the post-film Q&A someone asked Berg about this, and whether she felt she would be making the same mistake, and she stated that they worked very hard on ensuring that evidence backed up their claims, and testimony was correctly recorded and backed up. The case they make seems compelling, but cannot be followed up by a judiciary that has a vested interest in sticking to its belief that the Memphis Three did it. So for now we don’t know, and so we are stuck contemplating the awful possibility — remote but troubling — that Berg, Jackson and Walsh are wrong about Hobbs.

Perhaps it’s fatigue from hearing stories like this — compelling arguments made that nevertheless make one anxious that the truth will still remain cloudy despite that preponderance of rigorously researched facts, or the message that the justice system is so inherently flawed and easily manipulable that we’re effectively living in a Kafka novel and could become the hapless protagonist at any time — that the documentary that affected me the most during the festival was the one with the least stakes, and the one that relied the least on those facts which, as a wise man once said, all come with points of view, and don’t do what you want them to. Room 237 is merely a testament to the relationship between artists and their audience; without the weight of history on its shoulders, it’s immense fun.

Filmmaker Rodney Ascher and his colleague Tim Kirk came up with the idea for Room 237 after stumbling across the Internet subculture that has sprung up around Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining, where many theorists and film buffs have attempted to pick apart the acclaimed horror movie, convinced that this — at least to my mind — fairly straightforward horror movie was in fact a repository for some kind of message or complex meta-narrative by the great filmmaker. Instead of it being merely a film about a haunted hotel, it is argued here that it is in fact a metaphor for the genocide of the Native American population by the European settlers, or a statement about the Holocaust, or many other possibilities.

Ascher wisely keeps the theorists off-screen, with their voices and peculiar theories layered over a montage of images from numerous other films, as well as key scenes from The Shining that play and replay over and over again, hypnotically repeating, each time with new meaning, becoming a cumulative exercise in deconstruction. Even without the humour and ideas on the soundtrack, the montage is compelling and expertly edited, like an Adam Curtis-ian melange of meaning and un-meaning. By the end many of the arguments which seem absurd suddenly make a kind of sense, even if only in a dream-like way.

I’ve never seen a movie like this before, and the pleasure I took from it was immense. By the mid-point of the documentary I was practically in a blissful state of delirious confusion, lulled by the voices and their suddenly persuasive (and occasionally really not-at-all persuasive) arguments, bamboozled by the barrage of imagery so cleverly stitched together. My mind raced with its own insights and possibilities, as well as a greater appreciation of the relationship between audiences and works of art. Though some of the theories here are daft, the passion with which they are explained, springing off from Kubrick’s meticulous control, are nevertheless intoxicating.

Even better, the movie becomes a creepy artifact in its own right. The droning, bizarre score and conspiratorial passion of the participants creates an atmosphere in which anything is possible, especially when it is opined that The Shining is Kubrick’s confession that he was involved in filming a front-projected hoax film of the moon landing, something with enormous real-world significance. Another theory posits that the geography of the Overlook Hotel is a physical impossibility, a spacial anomaly intentionally designed to discombobulate the viewer, which brought back memories of the terrifying segments of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves.

Of all the theories, Bill Blakemore’s idea that the film is about the Native American genocide is possibly the most compelling, helped by his fascinating comments made during the post-film Q&A (one of the most entertaining and interesting ones I’ve been lucky enough to attend), but all of them are fascinating even when likely wrong. But this is because Room 237 is as much about the audience as it is the movie, the fanbase that takes these works of art on board and endlessly rotates them in our heads, trying to see into them like some kind of puzzle (as someone who once wrote an enormous explanation of Lost based on a three second shot of a chocolate bar in a vending machine, I can empathise with everyone who contributed to this movie).

So no, there are are very few of those ever-important facts in Room 237, and it may not seek to change the world, improve it or document it or correct a flaw in society, and so it is “trivial” compared to the other movies. But to those of us who live our lives less in the world of the real, with its delusions of objective solidity, and more in the infinitely malleable world of the unreal, Room 237 is a call to arms, a paean to the possibilities of complex narrative to inspire thought and debate, and an expression of faith in the ability of artists to understand their own work better than the viewer, who have thought through every aspect to such an extent that “mistakes” in a film might be an intentional choice we just don’t understand at first.

After months becoming fatigued by endless, pointless bickering over the mistaken belief that the “quality” of various films or books or TV shows can be objectively argued for or against while often ignoring the actual thing argued over, this movie is a tonic, urging the viewer to engage with the text, not the things that surround it. The Central Park Five and West of Memphis ask us to strip away layers of conjecture to witness a single, undeniable truth; Room 237 celebrates the rejected layers and their defendants, and argues that even if there is nothing under those layers, there is worth in the act of discovery. This engagement is precisely what culture is for. Even with differing opinions, we’re connected by the search, and we forget that at our peril.

Taylor Kitsch Returns In: Water For Aliens

Posted on April 13, 2012 by admiralneck

First things first. There will be NO REFERENCES to the phrase “You sank my battleship!” during this review, except for just now in the middle of this sentence when I did it to illustrate a point. This joke will no doubt be used in every single review of Peter Berg’s Battleship, though I will award a troublemaking, furniture-wrecking, sleep-disrupting but very pretty cat to the critic who makes the most original play on the phrase. All I could come up with after sitting through it was, “The only thing Battleship sank was my enthusiasm for Peter Berg movies.”* I almost tweeted it, but it’s just so painful to say. Because I love Peter Berg, as long as I ignore Very Bad Things, aka the proto-Hangover. After all, this is the man who brought us Friday Night Lights, one of the finest TV shows ever made, for which he earns a deserved Shades of Caruso Free Pass.

And yet I’m increasingly troubled. The Kingdom was politically dubious but professionally made; the final fifteen minutes are lizard-brain-thrilling to the max. However Hancock was a mystifying, garbled mess in search of a point, marketed as a simple parody of superheroics while actually being a continuity-heavy franchise opener that made lots of money but seemingly no fans. People say Seven Pounds was the movie that halted Will Smith’s physics-defying career momentum, but I think it was the general annoyance over Hancock‘s failings that slowed it down enough for that to happen.

Battleship will most likely be the movie that does the same to Berg. It’s already been relentlessly mocked since it was announced; seeing Berg defend the movie over and over again is painful for a fan, because no matter what justification or defence he uses, all anyone wants to say is, “I wonder if anyone says, ‘You sank my battleship!’” as if they’re the only ones who thought of it. (Sorry, I said it again to illustrate that new point.) And for once it’s not just the critics who think it’s boneheaded; everyone seems to be scratching their heads. How can you adapt a board game into a story?

Anyone who has ever played a board game should realise by now that each iteration of that game has something that could be considered a narrative flow, just not a three-act one. Events happen in sequence and there is an ebb-and-flow of power throughout as players make decisions, attack or sabotage other players, or find themselves at a disadvantage as other players move against them. The idea of adapting a rulebook is worthy of derision, but the power plays that occur within a game are surely the kind of thing that can inspire an idea. They can be triggered by anything, and what is story but a way to interpret events, emotions, and relationships within the framework of a manipulated world?

Sadly Battleship only occasionally tries to make something of the interesting dynamic between players within the famous location-guessing gameplay, preferring instead to allude to the game with references to the shape of the pegs, or the invisibility of your opponent, or the grid with its familiar location codes. Critics will be thrilled with the late-movie action sequence with characters calling out grid references for strikes against two alien battlecruisers. They can base a whole derisory paragraph on that scene, with the only complication being that it’s arguably the only sequence in the movie that generates even a smidgen of tension, and to be honest the sheer brass balls of doing that in the middle of a blowout summer blockbuster should be applauded.

Additionally, Berg’s insistence that this is not just a lazy cash-in is very true. It’s apparent that a lot of effort has gone into making something that has some kind of dramatic or emotional heft. There is a very strong central character arc involving Alex Hopper (Taylor Kitsch) turning from feckless charmer into a naval genius and captain of men in the space of a single day. There is an alien force with technology that feels consistent from one scene to the next, an interesting design, and an ambiguous motivation. Naval battle tactics are outlined well and have obviously been given some thought. There are a couple of reasonably orchestrated setpieces. There is an attempt at creating a range of character archetypes. Liam Neeson’s in it and everyone loves Liam Neeson, right? The camera is mostly in focus. Erm…

Okay, I’ll get to the point. There is effort expended, but the movie is ruined by weird decisions and shoddy editing, especially in the dull mid-section. Scenes feel like they’ve been plonked in at the last minute, or added in the wrong order, or shot after focus-group complaints showed serious structural faults. The result is a baffling half hour where nothing makes any sense. Big whirring balls of fire and metal wreck an airbase (makes tactical sense), demolish a random freeway (makes no sense) and terrorise a kid playing baseball (a waste of FX money). Meanwhile, some characters die off screen and an alien is captured. Both times we’re treated to exposition to cover up the cracks, but it just makes it look like a low-budget movie with cut corners, not a huge potential tentpole with a $200m budget.

Just as annoying, the decision to make the motivation of the aliens unknown is a grave error, and having someone very loudly proclaim, “This is an extinction level event!” at one point without prompting doesn’t help. They obviously have more going on than the plunderers of Battle: Los Angeles or Cowboys and Aliens; they make decisions about who to attack or ignore, and do things like waft their alien hands over machines while their HUDs show battery-filling bars like in a video game, but none of it is explained. It’s obvious that someone thought, “Making your antagonist a ship is a bad idea,” and so the alien invaders have more character than usual. We see their eyes through their visor, we see them make choices, but without knowing what they’re doing this characterisation feels like half a solution. Has this information been shifted to the sequel that won’t happen?

That said, they do better than most of the humans. Only Alex Hopper has an arc; everyone else is there to provide help or hindrance on that arc, or to be sassy (Rihanna) or dopey (Jesse “Landry” Plemons; a welcome sight for FNL fans). It’s all archetype and cultural representation. Liam Neeson (underused) plays a grouchy father figure to appease. Alexander Skarsgård (tall) plays the disapproving family member. Tadanobu Asano plays Iceman (by way of Yokohama) to Kitsch’s Maverick. Yes, Battleship is Top Gun on boats, with a dash of Battle: Los Angeles and a hefty dollop of Transformers. If you dislike any of those movies, you’re gonna dislike this.

The Transformers comparison is the hardest one I have to make. Midway through Battleship, as the characters suddenly exclaim, “They’re on the boat!” before scuttling down hallways with guns in a scene that looks like it was added after principal photography wrapped, I realised what was bugging me. Berg is a better director than the material here, and could have been off doing something far more interesting. Though everyone hates Michael Bay, he would have been perfect for something as mechanical as this, and in fact would have made a better, dumber movie, much as it pains me to say it.

In fact, it feels like an amalgamation of his movies. It’s set in Pearl Harbor, and features the elaborate sinking of one ship that is reminiscent of the unwieldy but technically dazzling centrepiece of his epic pile of WWII crap. The machines don’t turn into cars but they do clank about and change shape in a way that’s meant to evoke the movement of the robots in Transformers. Steve Jablonsky did the score. There’s also a lot of jingoism and military fetishism, though Berg approaches this in a more interesting way, which I’ll get to in a bit.

And yet what Battleship lacks that Transformers 1-3 have is clarity. I don’t mean in editing; I’ve said many a time before that Bay’s action scenes are not edited with the eye in mind, but the ear. They’re drum solos, not ballet. If you happen to like that kind of thing, as I do, then it can be exhilarating to experience that bewildering mash of image and cacophony. But within that garbled and clumsy tumble of event, the imagery is relatively clear, considering the Bayhemian tumult. You can see things within the syncopated cuts. Some of Bay’s imagery is piercing, even stirring at times. Despite his misogyny and racism (and never let us forget those despicable flaws), he’s good at that.

Battleship, on the other hand, is quite ugly. The palette of the movie is almost entirely blue, green or battleship grey; at least Bay throws a lot of orange in there as well to mix it up. The effects here are used mostly to obscure what’s going on. Thematically that makes sense, as the game is about not being able to see what’s going on, but it’s a pain in the eyes. There are also enough lens flares to make JJ Abrams run to the box he keeps his lens flares and start wailing in horror at the horrible theft of ALL THE LENS FLARES. Even his use of ramping and slow motion is disappointing. Though I’m not one to dismiss CGI altogether, and in fact take a great deal of pleasure in well-executed computer effects, the worst thing a director can do is not choreograph his action properly, instead expecting the FX guys to fix things in post.

The result of this is ugly distortions of image through energy effects such as the blast from engines, water vapour in the nautical scenes, so many lens flares, or just general smearing of the image. During shooting (not just in Battleship but in many modern SF movies) the camera is whipped around to denote the frenetic darting movements of objects not present on set, and the FX guys have no choice but to work with that clumsily-shot footage, with the result that the objects have to move with no connection to the world they’re supposed to be in. Even objects from a technologically advanced civilisation would be hamstrung by momentum, inertia, gravity or atmosphere. Instead movies too often feature poorly-choreographed scenes with no awareness of how the final product will look.

Berg has not yet mastered this; Hancock was similarly poorly shot on an FX level. Battleship features far too many moments where the FX work isn’t integrated properly. Compare the action scenes here to the bug scenes in Starship Troopers, or anything by Peter Jackson, or even Transformers 3, where there are many more physical effects than you would think, allowing Bay to choreograph the subsequent CGI better. These filmmakers, and guys like Spielberg or James Cameron understand this — especially Cameron, whose action scenes are clear, choreographed with care and feature imaginary objects designed with an engineer’s rigour. Too many other directors have yet to understand that FX can’t fix everything.

Of course Berg is a much better filmmaker than Bay, especially in terms of his facility with actors and his treatment of women and ethnic minorities. He’s also better at filming action than Battleship would have you believe. As mentioned earlier, the end of The Kingdom is truly nail-biting stuff, and his early action classic The Rundown / Welcome To The Jungle shows that he knows what he’s doing, and has an imaginative approach to the staging of an action scene. As an actor he also knows how to get quirky performances from his actors; Rundown and both film and TV versions of Friday Night Lights are perfect examples of this.

However the demands of something as vast as Battleship has forced his attention from the small and onto the vast, meaning the only scene with any real life to it comes right at the start, as Kitsch attempts to woo Brooklyn Decker (given nothing to do except be blonde in some short shorts, even Rosie Huntington-Whitely gets more agency in Transformers 3). It’s a terrifically funny and likeable meet-crazy scene, with Kitsch evoking a dopier Tim Riggins in a way that made me think I was in for a treat. It also showcases Kitsch’s charms — and potential movie-star charisma — way better than John Carter; a far far superior movie but one that regrettably couldn’t tap into the source of the absurdly handsome actor’s best attributes (no, I’m not talking about his finely-chiseled musculature).

Sadly, much as military life crushes the individual, as soon as he ships out that sense of fun mostly vanishes, which moves the burden of making us laugh onto Plemons (a good choice) and Hamish Linklater (an excruciatingly unfunny scientist). The strictness of naval protocol saps much of the movie’s energy and robs Berg of chances to goof off. It’s not entirely laugh-free, but Bay’s awful shouty-jokes approach would, again, have done much to save Battleship from its doldrums. The tone of the movie hints at funnier things to come; it’s a box that says “funny” on the outside but inside only has packing peanuts and not one but TWO instances of someone saying, “motherfucker” with the soundtrack prudishly cutting away halfway through. And that’s just unacceptable.

But it’s not all bad. While Berg has made a movie praising the glory of the military-industrial complex, in which the only thing that can make a man out you is military service, he’s not just about the Ooorahs and “Bring the rain” nonsense of most of those paeons to the penis. While this sub-genre of action cinema is filled to the brim with gallons of stinky testosterone and troubling patriotism, Berg is thankfully more thoughtful than that, and while we get the requisite pro-armed forces message, it’s tempered by an awareness of military history, tradition and international comity that would baffle Bay.

For a start, the presence of Tadanobu Asano would never happen in a Transformers movie. In Battleship Asano’s Nagata is noble but impulsive, the only vaguely interesting character next to Alex Hopper. In Transformers 4: Metal Machine Music he would be a shrill fool who gets trapped in a toilet. Twice. I guess this is part of the international strategy for Battleship; it opens worldwide over this week, then eventually appears in the US in the middle of May. Studios are finally committing to chasing international dollars first on a movie that’s so expensive a slow US opening weekend would likely taint it with seeming failure. Nevertheless, it’s gratifying to see the rapprochement between the US and Japan dramatised in this way, especially in the historically significant locale.

That’s one of the more interesting things about the movie. Additionally, there’s a sizeable role for Gregory G. Gadson, Director of the U.S. Army Wounded Warrior Program. Bay’s military fetishism has so far found no room for the war-wounded, but Battleship features a significant sub-plot for Gadson’s character getting over the terrible injuries he received in Afghanistan. It’s an entirely predictable arc, but for highlighting this aspect of war in the middle of a populist action movie about killing aliens, Berg deserves some credit. [Spoilers coming up in the next paragraph.]

Even more interesting is the final act, in which the crew of the USS John Paul Jones are forced to go analogue and commandeer the USS Missouri, the decommissioned battleship currently standing as a museum in Pearl Harbor (“You recommissioned my battleship!”) (Sorry). Along with the old ship comes a crew of old-timers, former navy crewmen who get their own walking-in-slow-motion moment that made the audience I saw it with burst into laughter. (Ugh, kids today. No respect for their elders and betters.) With this crew of expert seamen helping them, they take the Missouri out to sea one more time to take on the main alien superbattleship that conveniently appears in an end-of-game big boss stylee. [Spoilers end]

This awareness of naval history was entirely unexpected, and while it’s no less patriotic than anything else in this sub-genre, it’s also quite touching to see something modern pay tribute to the fighting men of the past. Who would have thought that a dumb sci-fi movie about alien invasion could take the time to comment on the real world with a more respectful manner than Bay and Bruckheimer had when making a film about the actual attack on Pearl Harbor? It’s one of the reasons why the movie rallies in its last 15 minutes. It doesn’t suddenly become good, but the set-ups pay off better than anyone could have hoped.

Yes, the battles depend on the belief that enormous ships can manoeuvre as nimbly as jet-skis, and one particular move made by Kitsch in order to defeat the final ship is… how can I put this delicately… fucking bonkers? But it was at that moment that I realised what the movie could — and should — have been. Naval battle is slow and thoughtful. It’s strategic and smart and doesn’t depend on dexterity or speed, like a video game. It’s a crawl to victory, like a board game. Battleship shouldn’t have tried to mimic Transformers, which is influenced by the pace and power of a first person shooter. It should have emulated the greatest movie about naval warfare ever made: Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.

That’s a movie that owes a lot more to Battleship the game than anyone seems to want to admit. It honors naval history, it is filled with detail and character and fun, it revolves around a cat-and-mouse chase between two vessels, and is exciting even when things move slowly. If Berg had been able to fully commit to making a modern Master and Commander instead of hinting at a link between the two, I would have dedicated my life to making a case for it to be the biggest film of all time. Instead I say this; despite being one of the few people who looked forward to this, and despite being its target audience, while I very strongly doubt it’ll be the worst movie I see this year, I just as strongly doubt it won’t be the best movie I see this week, and I only intend to watch one other one. No one is more upset or disappointed about this than I am.

*Actually, at the moment of finishing this review I also thought of “You spunked my crappleshit” but that’s just gross, and too mean. It’s a 3-5/10 movie at worst.

Can Someone Please Buy Kenny Branagh A Spirit Level?

Posted on April 26, 2011 by admiralneck

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BFI LFF 2010: Never Let Me Go / Archipelago / 13 Assassins

Posted on November 30, 2010 by admiralneck

Never Let Me Go achieves something almost unique: it’s a movie whose artistic achievement arguably dooms it. Directed by Mark Romanek and adapted from Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel by Alex Garland, the movie depicts an alternate timeline in which organ donation technology was perfected in England in the 1950s. In order to provide organs for harvesting, donors are bred and raised in schools, where they are prepared for a short, perfunctory shadow of a normal life and an inevitably protracted and grisly death. This process is shown through the eyes of Kathy (Carey Mulligan, on fire as usual), a donor whose love for Tommy (Andrew Garfield: even better here than in Social Network) is thwarted by the machinations of Ruth (Keira Knightley), a betrayal which Kathy stoically endures for several years before their unavoidable fate brings them back together for a reckoning.

Writing it out like that makes it seem as if the movie is a melodramatic and emotional rollercoaster, but Romanek – whose first movie, way back in the 80s, was the similarly clinical Static – has been given the unenviable task of dramatising the tale of three people whose emotional spectrum is compromised to the point of frigidity, and whose range of action is necessarily restricted. A snap decision by Kathy midway through the movie to become a “carer” is possibly the only action in the movie that passes for agency: even Tommy’s insistence that he can convince his former teachers of the existence of his soul through the use of art is presented as an almost indifferent act, though this could be a side-effect of the demands placed on the actors.

Dissecting the movie afterwards shines a light on Romanek and Garland’s choices, and it’s apparent that the mysterious nature of the donors is intentional. There is no explanation of the logistical and medical processes behind the programme (are they clones or test tube babies?), and as we experience this alternate world through the eyes of three people whose knowledge of their predicament is incomplete it makes sense to keep us in the dark as well. Nevertheless, if we’re meant to empathise with these people, it doesn’t help that the audience has to expend so much energy attempting to ignore all of the questions thrown up by the scenario. One particularly egregious act change happens abruptly, with the events of the next few years – events that radically change the relationships of the three “protagonists” – are brushed away with a quick burst of expositionary voiceover. Choices like that make the movie so slippery it’s hard to hold on to it, or to connect.

As time has passed since seeing it, I’ve come to appreciate many of the narrative decisions made here, while being resigned to not really caring about the finished product much. I wish I’d read Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel just to know how many of Romanek and Garland’s choices were out of loyalty to the author or were experiments that went awry. There’s so much to commend about the movie, especially the breath-taking performances from Andrew Garfield and Carey Mulligan, both of whom are good enough that I will happily recommend the movie just for them alone. It’s thought-provoking, beautifully shot and sensitively scored, but in dramatising the emptiness of these “people” and leaving out so much backstory, the experience rings frustratingly hollow. It really doesn’t help that after two hours of commendably/annoyingly spare storytelling, the final scene of the film features a little voiceover speech that explicitly spells out one of the major themes of the movie. Imagine if The Godfather ended with a voiceover from Michael Corleone saying, “As the door shut on my wife Kay, it occurred to me that the terrible choices I had made and the events that led to me becoming the head of a crime family have estranged me from the woman I loved and corrupted my soul.” It’s that bad.

The single strongest emotion I experienced while watching it was horrible futile anger at the society that had created these people and asked them to live an empty life before being butchered for the sake of others, especially as the donors accept their fate with such glum resignation. As others have commented, this makes the story a companion to Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day, in which James Stevens refuses to leave the societal box he was born into even though this prevents him from finding true happiness. Britons certainly love their immobile class strata, or rather Britons resent it terribly but don’t seem to have a problem watching people “beneath” them trapped in their amber of their upbringing. On that level Never Let Me Go is almost a success: it pushed that class-conscious button in my soul about as hard as it ever has, and American director Romanek deserves recognition for capturing the frozen nature of British society — and the miserable country-wide decision to treat it as an immutable fact — so well.

Regrettably, the necessary narrative gap that keeps us from understanding the true predicament of the protagonists also makes it hard to equate with them. Are they accepting of their fate because of some hardwired conditioning? Because they have been taught to be this way? Is there something missing from their chemistry as a result of the process that created them? How much of this story is directly related to the ways in which societal strata are enforced by the education and culture in the real world? If it’s a biological amendment to people who would have developed to be humans with agency, is this an allegory for something else? The technical details of this world shouldn’t really matter, and I’m not so anal that I can’t make a few leaps of assumption, but knowing the exact purpose of the movie is inevitably stymied by the vagueness of the rules.

That means Never Let Me Go succeeds at least partially as brain food, but the sad side-effect is that it’s even harder to make an emotional connection with the often affectless characters. I can praise it as a satire on the British class system (scenes depicting working class people so overwhelmed with pity that they are unable to even look at the donors are probably the only ones that stayed with me when the movie ended), and maybe even fondly consider it some form of weirdly clinical agit-prop designed to subconsciously drive the viewer into a rebellion against the prison of their social standing, but no matter how hard I try I can’t see it as a tragic love story or fable about the fleeting nature of life itself, despite the considerable efforts of the main actors and the focus of much of the narrative. It’s a movie to admire rather than feel, though the sound of sniffing in the auditorium suggests I may be alone on this one. Is it wrong that I wanted to watch Michael Bay’s The Island as soon as I left the screening? (Please don’t answer that one.)

Strangely, the cold tone of Joanna Hogg’s Archipelago didn’t bother me at all, but then the suppressed emotional charge of her movie wasn’t at odds with the theme, as with Romanek’s film. Her second movie (the first, Unrelated, came and went so fast it only left two or three positive reviews in its wake) depicts a family getaway to the isle of Tresco that goes awry. Actually, that is probably the wrong way of looking at it. This family, comprising Edward (Tom Hiddlestone, soon to be Loki in Branagh’s Thor), Cynthia (the wonderfully unpleasant Lydia Leonard), their mother Patricia (Kate Fahy), and their absent father, is already horribly broken at the start of the holiday, and over the course of the movie they pretty much just decide to stop pretending that everything is all right. It’s the slowest of slow burns: almost nothing happens for the running time, but those little chinks in their armour, those very British stiff-upper-lip pretences, are revealed in mesmerising detail, all while the incredible scenery is battered by metaphorical tumult.

It should be exactly the sort of thing that repels me, but Hogg’s control of tone and pace is impressive, and her ability to draw convincing and naturalistic dialogue and performances from her actors is second-to-none: how gratifying to see someone picking at upper-middle-class mores and concerns with such respect and restraint, while critics are compelled to mistakenly gush praise at Mike “Snide” Leigh and his reliance on caricature and mockery. Hogg is perfectly happy dragging scenes out to almost unendurable length, the uncomfortable silences stretching out to the point that I almost ran out of the cinema to avoid them (my inability to handle such uncomfortable moments is most horribly displayed in my eagerness to ask questions at film festival Q&As. When no one seemed to want to ask Shirley Henderson a question after the screening of Meek’s Cutoff I almost rugby-tackled the guy with the microphone just to end that excruciating moment).

Just to make Archipelago even more British, Hogg adds two extra characters: a pretentious painter (the oleaginous Christopher Baker) who hovers around Patricia as her loneliness grows, while giving amusingly vague advice to Edward, and Rose (Amy Lloyd), the cook who accompanies them all, attracting the listless romantic attentions of Edward and some withering class-borne disdain from Cynthia. It’s arguable that both of them are there as temptations for Patricia and Edward, but Rose’s most important role is as counter-point to the silly concerns of the family. While they squabble about Edward’s decision to take a gap year break in Africa to battle AIDS, and pine for their absent and uncaring father, Rose is forced to travel to Tresco from far away in search of employment, and is still mourning the unexpected death of her father.

Not that anyone cares: even Edward is only interested in her as a distraction from his worries. At least he’s civil to her: Cynthia really shines in the moments when she interacts with Rose, treating her as the help, a viewpoint that initially seems uncaring and mean but eventually presents itself as arguably correct. As with Never Let Me Go, the proles know their place and accept it. Social mobility is fine as something to aspire to, but in the moment, it’s best to ignore it. Cynthia and Patricia’s treatment of Rose is cruel, but it rings with uncomfortable truth. Of course, that’s not to say that Cynthia is in the right: she spends much of the film sucking the joy out of rooms in much the same way as Anne Hathaway’s Kym from Rachel Getting Married. The best scene in the movie sees the five characters visiting a local restaurant for a mid-afternoon meal, during which Cynthia’s behaviour tips over into obnoxious tyranny, her impatience with the trip and her companions mutating into boorish behaviour. Hogg is only ever going to give us hints as to why she is behaving the way she does, but it’s enough to realise she is suppressing terrible emotional pain and acting out like a spoiled brat. The British audience visibly shrank and moaned throughout: I chewed my knuckles in anxious horror.

As Daisyhellcakes pointed out afterwards, the whole movie plays out like the Eddie Izzard routine about British movies (the first minute of this clip), but it is also genuinely insightful. As with Never Let Me Go there is no real emotional connection to be had with the characters: they’re all quite ridiculous, and we never really get to experience their emotional state in a raw way. It’s telling that both movies hide the few scenes of emotional expression: Tommy’s howl of agony is almost drowned out by the diagetic and non-diagetic soundtrack, and the outbursts of Patricia and Cynthia in Archipelago occur off-screen and are recorded by mics that reduce their words to barely recognisable gibberish. We’re British, you see. We don’t do that kind of thing. What makes Archipelago a success is that it holds its focus on this gap between inner and outer life, never needing to rely on a voiceover a la Never Let Me Go to reveal the desires of its characters. Those desires are unimportant: it’s their suppression that is key. Hogg’s skill at skewering that conflict in the British psyche is admirable: let’s hope she soon gets the following she rightly deserves.

Both movies captured the dreadful emotional stasis caused when you know your place and feel you have no choice to accept it, though neither of them were interested in expressing the pain one feels at this situation in anything other than an oblique way. Not so Takashi Miike’s mind-boggling 13 Assassins, which would’ve been my favourite movie at the festival if I hadn’t had my brain stabbed to happy death by Black Swan. Nevertheless it was a close call: Miike’s incredible achievement is essential viewing for anyone who has ever enjoyed an action movie, mostly because it isn’t a winking joke. It could have been the samurai version of Peter Jackson’s Brain Dead (no disrespect to that balls-out classic), but thankfully we get a serious-minded tale of the end of an era, as the feudal system of 19th Century Japan leads to ossification, corruption and madness.

The rigid laws – both implicit and explicit – of the Shogunate system have allowed an intolerable situation to develop: the utterly demented Lord Narigatsu Matsudaira (Gorô Inagaki) is terrorising the land and considering bringing war back to peaceful Japan. His actions — which include using a family as target practice, and the brutal maiming of a woman he then turns into a slave for his amusement — are truly deplorable, but his relation to the Shogun means no one can directly act against him without bringing great shame upon themselves. All that is left is futile gesture: the movie begins with one court member committing seppuku in protest. It’s an act of dishonour that forces his compatriots to hatch a plan: to convince one honorable man to bear that dishonour, and find a way to stop the evil lord.

Shinzaemon Shimada (a thrilling performance from Kôji Yakusho) is a lower-tier samurai, deemed expendable by those in power, but shrewd enough to grasp that while his act will be a suicidal one, it will be honorable in a way that is not formally recognised by Japanese society. Courtiers and heads of important families take turns attempting to persuade Shinzaemon to betray his loyalty to the Shogun by revealing Narigatsu’s evil deeds, his murder and rape and disfigurement of those around him, actions borne of madness and boredom. Disgusted to the point of fury, Shinzaemon forms a group of samurai and ronin who understand the importance of the insurrection, and a trap is created to dispose of Narigatsu. The main obstacle in his plan is the Lord’s protector, Hanbei Kitou (Masachika Ichimura), a former friend of our hero who is more wedded to the concept of respect for the Shogun, to the point that he is willing to defend the odious lord even at the cost of his life.

That’s the first hour of the movie: a stately and reflective series of negotiations that get to the heart of this society and the contradictions therein. The order of the Shogunate system is strong enough to bring about a period of peace in Japan, but so rigid that there is no way to correct difficulties without dooming oneself. Shinzaemon and his band of warriors are willing to break that rule of law, but the cost might not just be their lives: the samurai code could die with them, bringing about the end of the tradition, and the collapse of Japan’s feudal system. Another hour depicting that quandary would have been amazing too: Miike does an incredible job of exploring the nature of this ideological conflict. Nevertheless, what follows is on another level altogether: a 45-minute sequence set in a town that has been transformed into a deadly trap, as Shinzaemon and his 12 assassins face off against over 200 enemies in a protracted battle that is staged with the precision of a master and the energy of a maniac. Miike truly delivers, and then some.

Livestock burns, buildings and people explode, a river runs red with blood, and mutilated bodies pile up, while the battle progresses from orderly precision to chaotic skirmish through to madness. The final moments of the battle are terrifying, with characters succumbing to exhaustion and insanity before the final showdown between the best of the old order and the corrupted offspring that jeopardises everything. It’s a bravura setpiece the likes of which I’ve never seen: an attempt to find the original version by Eiichi Kudo has failed, and so I have no idea how long the final battle in that lasts. Here it is lengthy, but paced so the ebb and flow of action feels like structure. It’s a movie in itself, almost, and left me reeling in my seat and suppressing the urge to cheer throughout — one powerful moment that shows Shinzaemon unfurling a scroll nearly made my brain combust with joy (you’ll understand when you see it). For that, and for numerous other ridiculously exciting moments, 13 Assassins is officially the Acme of Badass Cinema.

The only problem I have with it is a choice in the final moments of the film, which I won’t spoil here. I’m not really sure what Miike was trying to do with the last conversation, other than to note the passing of the feudal era and the Way of the Samurai, but his method of doing so was out of odds with every other perfectly-judged choice. Still, it’s not enough to ruin what is a remarkable achievement. It is truly the thinking person’s action movie, a flawlessly constructed band-of-warriors movie that rightly crushes Stallone’s incoherent and lazy Expendables into the dirt, and stands as the best samurai film since Yôji Yamada’s The Twilight Samurai. Whenever it comes out near you, do everything you can to ensure you see it.

The Top One Hundred and Six Movies of the Oughts (10-6)

Posted on December 14, 2009 by admiralneck

Nearing the end of this list, I still find myself remembering movies that should have been included here. A recent Twitter chat about John Woo’s Red Cliff made me re-examine my decision to leave the first half of the two-part series out of the list. I loved it dearly last year, and it made me insanely excited for the second movie this year, but I couldn’t in good conscience include it. Part of that is because of my “nothing from 2009″ rule. As half of the complete tale came out now, it can be excluded, though that’s a bit mean. The main reason is that while the first part promised much, the second didn’t deliver.

Don’t get me wrong, it still features high drama, enormous battles, cool character moments, and intimate emotional interludes, but there is a terribly annoying sub-plot featuring Sun Shangxiang, and the final act runs out of energy before the final inconclusive moments. It’s a great deal of fun, and taken together with the first is still a remarkable achievement, but there is nothing to rival the Battle of Eight Trigrams from the first half. It’s possible I will enjoy it more on second viewing, but that’s not happening any time soon. This list is taking up a lot of my time right now and after that I’ve got a full couple of weeks. Something to do with this big Hexmass thing everyone is celebrating.

Getting down to the last ten movies, it gets harder and harder to rank them. I spent about an hour on Friday just moving numbers 8, 9 and 10 back and forth, agonising over the choice as if it were a grievous error to get this wrong. By now, the difference in affection for these movies is almost insignificant: I very nearly think of all of these movies as the best of the decade, and each viewing of them would push them towards the top of the list without causing much grief. It will probably always be in flux, but these ten will almost certainly remain in some capacity, with only maybe Ratatouille usurping any of them.

10. Children of Men

Alfonso Cuaron’s thrilling adaptation of P.D. James’ novel came from nowhere and took me completely by surprise. With no advance word and only a hastily released trailer, I ended up seeing this cold and couldn’t believe my eyes. Commenting on topical concerns with an accuracy that must have been the result of some kind of supernatural prescience during its filming, this retelling of the myth of Christ’s birth says more about modern British life than any number of hand-wringing state-of-the-nation mini-series on UK TV, and certainly with more confidence than anything from the terminally ill British film industry. More than that it’s a bravura piece of cinema, with Cuaron trotting out numerous technically accomplished setpieces as if it ain’t no thing. It rewrites the rules of the action genre, strengthens the argument that SF is the genre best capable of commenting on contemporary issues, and restores your faith in humanity’s capacity for goodness.

Best Moment: Our hero (Theo, played by Clive Owen) and his pregnant companion Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey) are trapped in the decrepit Bexhill-on-Sea concentration camp when a riot breaks out. As the British army moves in to quash the rebellion, the camera follows Theo through the carnage in a single shot. Cineastes everywhere had seizures of pleasure at the technical brilliance on display, but only the ones who don’t understand how sight works, of course. [/bitter]

9. Fight Club

Apparently this was the movie that was going to be responsible for the downfall of society. Upon release David Fincher’s adaptation of Chuck Pahlaniuk’s uproarious novel was famously treated like radioactive material by Alexander Walker, but embraced by almost everyone else as a breath of fresh air. On the surface it can be taken as a celebration of empty-headed machismo and fashionable nihilism, but the surprisingly wacky tone and endearing slapstick performances by Brad Pitt and Edward Norton expose it for what it really is: a satire on anarchic impulses and male narcissism, and an exploration of how paranoia can lead disaffected men into doing terrible deeds. Until Chris Morris’ Four Lions comes out, this is the funniest movie about terrorism made. Nevertheless, I’ll be honest. The thing I love most about it is the visual imagination, with Fincher gaily tearing apart the rulebook and treating his audience to an audio-visual collage of joyful unpredictability.

Best Moment: After the reveal of Tyler Durden’s true identity, our narrator gets to indulge in a panicky race against time to thwart his evil plan. For something as potentially dark as this, it’s amazing to think that Fincher manages to create such a fun movie, and the final twenty minutes of the movie are arguably the most entertaining. Edward Norton has never been as likeable as he is here, brandishing a gun while in boxer shorts and yelling about “lead salad!”

8. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

When Ang Lee’s martial arts romance was released in the UK, there were complaints that it was nothing special. Just another wuxia movie, except this time it’s directed by a “respectable” filmmaker, which means critics suddenly suddenly take note of the genre. To martial arts fans in the West, Hong Kong productions were often rough and ready, and arguably part of their appeal was reconciling our cultural expectations with what — to us — seems like bizarre sidetracking (anyone who has seen a Chinese wuxia horror movie like Encounters of the Spooky Kind or Mr. Vampire will know what I’m talking about). Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was, to some, a betrayal of that clumsy aesthetic, but that argument is borne of madness. This emotionally rich tale of duty and love would have been an exceptional historical romance already, thanks to Lee’s elegant visuals and his command of his superb cast. The breathtaking martial arts action was the cherry on top, and to see these beautifully choreographed fight scenes filmed with such care and reverence should have delighted fans of the genre. In his review, Peter Bradshaw said, “Frankly, this is what Phantom Menace was supposed to feel like.” This sums up my post-screening euphoria perfectly. If only all five books in Wang Dulu’s Crane-Iron series had been filmed like this, I would have been first in line for each.

Best Moment: When I first saw this movie, the earliest fight scene between Zhang Ziyi’s Jen and Michelle Yeoh’s Yu Shu-lien brought gales of laughter from a cynical London audience, enraging me so much I very nearly stood up to berate the hooting idiots around me. It’s a testament to the scene’s power that a moment later I was drawn back to the battle raging onscreen. Woo-ping Yuen excelled himself with what could be the most exhilarating and thrilling fight scene of the decade.

7. Being John Malkovich

A movie about people taking over a celebrity’s body, written by a former sitcom writer, and directed by a guy famous for making videos about talking dogs? I was certainly looking forward to seeing it, but I expected little more than a fun diversion with a John Malkovich cameo. The movie I saw was possibly the biggest surprise I’ve ever had in a cinema, one that detonated a bomb inside my head. What we were given was a complex, coherent fantasy unlike anything ever made before, something with a faultless internal logic that seemed to have been beamed in from another universe. Instead of a meta-textual pop cultural frippery we got a treatise on identity, love, obsession, celebrity culture, jealousy, and control, all while Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze told a hilarious and creepy story about a group of immortals using a metaphysical bridge to colonise new bodies. Describing the crazy ideas makes it sound like a game, but it was more than just intellectual trickery for the sake of itself. There was real reflection on what humans are, telling self-lacerating truths about how awful we could be, which built to a tragic finale. Even better than the rush of ideas driven to logical but unfamiliar conclusions, or its emotional fearlessness, was the sense that the rules had been changed. Any kind of story was now fair game, if it could be done as well as this.

Best Moment: Just the short description of the central idea — a portal allows you to control John Malkovich’s mind — could fuel a movie, but Kaufman is willing to explore every possible storytelling avenue of that idea, sending the plot in directions no one could have predicted. Part way through the movie, he gives us an utterly logical variation on the portal trick, but one that surprises right until it happens. Of course Kaufman had to send Malkovich into his own mind, but you only realise he had to do that after he has done it. It’s simultaneously hilarious and terrifying, and totally unforgettable.

6. Lord of the Rings

A cheat to combine the three movies as one, but a cheat that makes a kind of sense. Peter Jackson filmed all three films back to back, and stuck together they work as a complete movie, especially in their extended forms. Considering them in this way also mitigates objections about the length of Return of the King‘s final act — with its endless goodbyes — and the compromises in structure necessary to make The Two Towers feel like a complete film. Not that those problems were ever in danger of overshadowing the successes of this project, which stands as possibly the most ambitious and thrilling movie trilogy ever made. Jackson and his co-writers Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens did such great work adapting Tolkein’s dry prose into a living, breathing vision that it’s tempting to say the books never achieved all they could until these New Zealanders came along.

It is to Jackson’s credit that he did the one thing necessary to make it all work: he had to take it seriously. Without a shred of cynicism, he portrayed numerous wrenching emotional moments with total conviction and treated his characters like the Middle-Earth heroes we always dreamed they would be. For that alone the trilogy would signify a welcome sea-change after years of half-hearted and jokey action men diluted the idea of noble heroism, but Jackson’s masterstroke was simple: he merely brought his usual intelligence and meticulous nature to the table instead of just doing the bare minimum to get the film made. He gave 100%, and 100% Jackson commitment is the nearest thing we have to a guarantee of total satisfaction. If you don’t buy into it, fair enough. If you do, the trilogy stands like the Eighth Wonder of the World. Can its spectacle ever be topped?

Best Moment: Jackson is the master of the big setpiece, usually by breaking these huge scenes down into smaller, still satisfying setpieces that add up to a greater whole. The Mines of Moria sequence features the superb cave troll fight followed by the race down crumbling stairs and then Gandalf’s showdown with the Balrog. The Siege at Helm’s Deep includes shenanigans with Aragorn and Gimli, the arrival of the elves, and Legolas going batshit. Best of all, the enormous Siege of Minas Tirith is followed immediately with the Battle for Pelennor Fields and then the Ride of the Rohirrim. When I saw this for the first time at Leicester Square Odeon, you could hear the sound of 1500 people sobbing over the thunder of hooves and clashing metal. It was a perfect moment.

A few minutes later, after Legolas did this, our cheering and applause almost brought down the roof:

And we’re almost there. If you have any complaints about my decision to take the Lord of the Rings trilogy as one movie, please address them to my ASS. (I’m kidding. The comment box beneath is just fine. Feel free to argue your cases: I welcome the debate.)

The Power Of Hellboy Compels Me (To Praise Him)

Posted on August 6, 2008 by admiralneck

I come not to bury Hellboy II: The Golden Army, but to praise it, and it comes as an enormous surprise. Don’t get me wrong, I like Guillermo Del Toro’s movies a lot, and think he is a stand-up tip-top A-1 kinda chap, with the nerdery and the vision and the amusing personality. I would like to have a beer with him and shoot the shit about pressing nerd issues. However, and this is a piddling thing to be bringing up but it has to be said, as much as I’ve liked his movies in the past, I’ve never loved one. Not even my personal favourite Del Toro movie Blade II, even though it featured Dr. Wesley T. Snipes hanging out with Donnie Muthafukken Yen and fighting a superpowered and evil version of that chap from Bros.

Of course, I appreciate his imagination and attention to detail, and love his committal to fantastical cinema, but especially with his English language films, I’ve always been unable to fully embrace them. I’ve agonised over it, as everyone fell over themselves to praise Pan’s Labyrinth, which I thought was very good but not great (on the other hand, Canyon loved it to pieces). My suspicion is that his pacing, which can be bordering on lethargic, is the key to my resistance. Slow pacing is fine, but it still has to have a proper ebb and flow, and his movies often stop when they should start, and bolt forward when the audience is ready for a rest. It’s not a total dealbreaker, but it does bug me.

With the world in his pocket following Pan‘s success, it was a pleasant surprise to see he was willing to use that cache to resurrect his Hellboy sequel project, that had languished for so long that I figured it was pointless to wait for it. Mind you, it would have been an even more pleasant surprise had Del Toro used that clout to get his At The Mountains Of Madness project up and running. Though there are some interesting film adaptations of Lovecraft’s work (especially the wondrous From Beyond), right now the best visualisation of squirming Lovecraftian gods is in Hellboy itself, hinting that Del Toro has a better grasp on what constitutes a squamous, undying monstrosity from beyond space and time than the makers of The Dunwich Horror, a filmic nightmare I endured recently that reduced the sickening and vast terror of the multitude of unholy Old Gods to a bunch of rubber snakes filmed in negative and waved at the actors. I guess Del Toro is more attached to working on Mike Mignola’s creations than those of a despicable sexist, racist Luddite fucking prick asshole of a person (who wrote a bunch of entertaining and influential novels, but still).

(Quick note: it seems The Dunwich Horror, featuring a hatstand performance from Dean Stockwell aiming the full force of his Aleister-Crowley-esque lechery at Sandra Dee, was co-written by Curtis Hanson. I am aware that this might only be interesting to me, especially as who on earth has seen The Dunwich Horror? And who else would own up to it? Wicked Les Baxter soundtrack, though.)

It’s been said many a time that Hellboy represents Del Toro’s most personal movies, which I always thought to be a bit rich seeing as how Mike Mignola created the character, but his passion for the character (of which the effort to bring the sequel to the screen is proof enough) certainly seems genuine. That still meant that I was not excited about The Golden Army. The first movie was busy but lifeless, filled with pleasing moments that amounted to not that much. It was a movie I wanted to love but just couldn’t, though I did like the casting of Ron Perlman as the titular character, and some of the imagery was stunning. At the time, prior to my realisation that Del Toro’s movies didn’t affect me as much as they seemed to affect others, I figured it was just that I wasn’t a fan of the comic, and had trouble warming to the character, whom I just could not picture as a living thing in my head. Is he humourless? Is he tough? Compassionate? Though Mignola’s art is rightly lauded, the stories lay dead on the page in front of me. (I know, heresy, right?)

Perlman’s incarnation of Hellboy as a cocky and insecure teenager in a large demon body was good enough for me to finally understand where Mignola was coming from, meaning I now read the comics with Perlman’s voice in my head in much the same way as I read Batman comics with Kevin Conroy’s voice in mind. Nevertheless, the appeal of the character eludes me. He’s big and strong, sappy and impulsive, and will probably destroy the world one day. That’s all fine, but though numerous other characters with those traits entertain me, Hellboy still strikes me as the germ of a good idea that has not yet been fully fleshed out.

To make things worse, the first movie was saddled with the distracting casting of David Hyde-Pierce as the voice of Abe Sapien (“Why does that fishman sound like Niles Crane?”), Rupert Evans as the deeply unlikeable Myers, and Selma Blair as Liz Sherman (her monotone grates on my ears). Even Jeffrey Tambor’s inclusion as the officious Manning and a lovably sincere performance by John Hurt wasn’t enough to make the difference. Just like the comics, the movie refused to come alive. I’ve seen it a number of times, and I never have the good time I am hoping for.

It was a slew of good reviews, and an early preview screening cleverly scheduled by Universal to generate word of mouth, that prompted me to try the sequel out, though I will say that even if I’m not as crazy about Del Toro’s movies, I don’t think there will ever be a time when I decide against seeing them at some point. As usual, though, I had reservations. Uninspiring jokes fall flat throughout, dialogue sounds like first-draft fill-ins instead of polished lines, the pace is stop-start (and, disastrously, grinds to an almost total halt one scene away from the big reveal of the Golden Army), too many events are packed in, and the transparent first act set-up of the final showdown doesn’t mitigate the fact that the heroes “triumph” because of a deus ex machina-like get-out clause that is desperately overused in fantasy and sci-fi cinema. The best that can be said of that is that, as Hellboy II is about the death of myth by modernity, hewing so closely to a tried-and-true folk tale plot is understandable, but that didn’t stop a groan from escaping my lips as it was introduced.

What’s worse, there are some horribly difficult choices made by the characters in the final act, and the last scene, with the BPRD coming to a decision about their future, may be intended as a response to the aftermath of their choices, but it’s not enough to balance out the consequences of their actions. Considering how overstuffed and stretched-out the movie is, it’s ironic that the final scene, which really needed time to breathe, is suddenly over almost as quickly as it started, crashing into one of the ugliest end-credit crawls I’ve seen in a long time. It was like being woken up with a bucket of hot water in the face. Plus, the amount of editing wipes used was only exceeded by the amount of times Luke Goss, as Prince Nuada, swishes his big extendy-spear around like a big show-off. Yes yes, he’s very good with his big stick thingy, but we don’t need to see him flashing it about in ever scene. He can’t even pull it out of his belt without adding some flourish or other. Stupid cocky elf-prince thing.

And yet, and yet… This might be the first Del Toro movie I love. I’m not sure yet. I need to see it again, partly to test out the hypothesis, and partly to see what the movie is like without one of the worst audiences ever assembled. If the crowd I saw The Dark Knight with was one of the best ever, this was the polar opposite, with noisy assholes, eardrum-splitting amounts of snack bag rustling, the presence of a woman wearing all the bangles in the free world walking in and out (thus generating a sound like the concept of jewellery having a fight with itself), and, best of all, the thoughtless slimecreep sitting in front of me whose phone rang four separate times about an hour into the movie and who offered to knock my face off when I poked him and told him to just, please, pretty please, just shut the fuck up goddamnit!!! Luckily he left before the end of the film, so I didn’t have to have a bigass ruck. I may not be the streetfighting kung fu panda/human hybrid I imagine myself to be at times, but I can kick balls like a motherfucker.

Why did I love it even though it frustrated me continually? It’s pretty simple. The slapstick tone of the movie, though not actually backed up by many functioning jokes, is endearing, and with Doug Jones doing an excellent job voicing Abe, Selma Blair offscreen for the majority of the movie, and Myers exiled to Antarctica (hah!), the good-natured chemistry between the non-human freaks wins out. Even better, though I am no fan of Family Guy, Seth McFarlane’s work as ectoplasmic tight-ass Johann Krauss charmed my socks off. His inclusion provides many of the film’s highpoints. Sadly Jeffrey Tambor doesn’t get much to do, and what little he does is not that amusing, but it’s enough just to have him around. Whenever the movie relaxes its grip on you, or a joke falls flat, the enthusiasm of the cast and the jovial air will win you back. At least, until things get more serious.

It’s been noted that the tone shifts a lot, and that can’t be denied, but the darkening of the film, at the end of a huge setpiece next to the Brooklyn Bridge, doesn’t overwhelm the rest of the movie, serving instead to depress Hellboy enough to make him reckless enough to battle Prince Nuada without realising he is outmatched, setting in motion the final act. That crisis of conscience also sets up a terrific scene between Hellboy and Abe, drunkenly singing along to Can’t Smile Without You. Sure, having tough hero characters crooning a Manilow song is nothing new (see also: Angel and his love of Mandy), but it still works beautifully. With this movie, you’re never far away from a light moment that will leave a smile on your face, even if it never makes you laugh all that much. And yes, I’m aware that is the most faint-praise comment either, but I mean it sincerely. If you see the movie, you might see where I’m coming from.

The thing that definitively tipped me over into affection for the film, however, was what the astonishing design, from the costumes and sets to the menagerie of incredible creatures. Yes, this is what Del Toro does best, but what Hellboy II represents is Del Toro doing what he does best about 500 times more than he usually does. I cannot believe how much there is going on in the movie, with almost every scene filled with jaw-dropping detail, all of it rendered with such love and care that it is impossible not to be drawn in. Even better, the use of physical effects and practical make-up means the world is much more appealing than the thin 2D CGI worlds we usually see. I love CGI and am excited to see it used properly, but the physical effects on display here (enhanced by some elegant CGI, of course) are utterly magnificent. You can tell those scenes have been crafted with pure love from everyone involved. I especially liked the faux-stop motion sequence in the opening fairy tale, which must have been CGI but looked hand-made. It’s an aesthetically perfect sequence.

The rightly lauded Troll Market sequence is where I stopped being annoyed and began to fall in love with the movie. The cascade of fantastical imagery is overwhelming. When I buy the DVD (yes, it’s a certainty), I’m hoping there will be a five hour documentary about the making of that scene. There are so many astonishing creature designs, flashing past the camera faster than the eye can comprehend, that I need to spend time picking out every detail. There is so much going on, much of it on set (as far as I can tell), that I cannot begin to figure out how the crew could have made it work, and that’s before we get onto the subject of the $85m budget. How did Del Toro manage this wealth of imagery on that (relatively low) budget? Every other film I’ve seen this year, many of which are far more expensive, look pitiful next to this. Only The Fall (directed by… TARSEM!!!) stands a chance of being more ravishing, but I will have to wait until 3rd October to catch that (yes, it finally has a UK release date). I’m hoping that, next year, Hellboy II sweeps the technical Oscars. I certainly think it has Visual Effects, Make-Up, and Production Design sewn up.

Speaking of CGI, the best scene in the film comes right after the Troll Market sequence, with Hellboy battling a huge and beautifully realised forest god under the Brooklyn Bridge. I had spent the majority of the Troll Market scene trying to figure out how it would be possible for me to adequately express how breathtakingly beautiful and surprising the film had suddenly become, knowing that words could never hope to sum it up. It was just as Hellboy and his team leave the market that a shorthand way to describe it came to me; it’s like a live-action Miyazaki movie. Seems I’m not the first person to make that leap; A. O. Scott said much the same thing here. The bizarre fairytale logic of Del Toro and Mignola’s world was reminiscent of the unique but seemingly familiar rules that govern the worlds of Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke, though sadly Hellboy II‘s rather formulaic plot seems all the more disappointing considering the peculiar turns Miyazaki’s movies take (at least to this Western mind).

That was okay, though. The forest god design evoked the forest spirit Daidarabocchi from Mononoke (just as the Tooth Fairies reminded me of a hostile version of Miyazaki’s design for the Kodami tree spirits), and the battle between this enormous ethereal yet deadly green monster and Hellboy is already entertaining before the misguided and murderous Prince Nuada pricks our hero’s conscience, playing off his fear of rejection by humanity, and his seemingly unstoppable loneliness. For the first time in the movie, Hellboy’s actions have real weight. It’s at that point that the movie becomes about his growing understanding of his untenable situation, torn between two worlds that don’t welcome him. It’s only fitting that he spends the next few scenes trying to get drunk, not realising that he is soon to find out that not fitting in is the least of his problems, if the beautifully realised Angel of Death is to be believed.

Hellboy II‘s wondrousness is so great that I’m strongly considering reappraising the comic and maybe even getting the second animated Hellboy DVD (even though the first was merely okay). It has made me hesitantly excited about The Hobbit, which I thought would be a flawed prequel to one of my favourite movie trilogies ever. As I said earlier, Del Toro’s scripts are never as good as his visual flights of fancy, and so I’m hoping the two movies will be scripted by the killer team of Jackson, Walsh and Boyens, which would increase its chances of being super-awesome. In the meantime, if you’re in the US, you should have seen this by now. If you’re outside the US, the movie is being released internationally at a snail’s pace. As soon as it lands on your shores, go see it immediately. Even if the narrative leaves you cold, and that exasperating pace jolts you back and forth like a bus with a faulty engine, those stunning visuals will make your eyes vibrate with joy. Hopefully the international box office is sufficient to get a third movie greenlit. I never thought I would want another Hellboy movie, but this flawed yet thrilling installment has changed my mind on that. When it is released properly, I look forward to watching it again, hopefully this time without the threat of violence from phone-wielding assholes.

Another Apology Re: Torchwood

Posted on March 18, 2008 by admiralneck

In previous posts on this thread, we may have given the impression that what had once been seemingly beyond salvaging had become a potentially interesting show. Titles such as “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Torchwood“, “Martha Makes Everything Better”, and “I May Not Like The Taste Of Humble Pie But I’ll Happily Eat It” may have given the impression that what once had been the canker sore on the lip of British TV drama had become a soilbed from which challenging and intelligent sci-fi might one day spring.

We now realise that those flawed but interesting moments were an aberration, not a newly established status quo, and the usual standards of the show would be restored as soon as an opening was found. Future post titles such as “If In Doubt, Having A Character Wave A Gun About Will Fill A Minute Of Screentime”, “Dear God, Will Someone Inject Some Dignity Into This Debacle?”, and “Does Anyone On This Show Understand The Concept Of Plagiarism?” will hopefully restore normality to this blog. Thank you for your patience. (Again, apologies to Private Eye.)

I’m in two minds about this. It was great seeing the show stretch a little during the Martha Trilogy, but it wasn’t really enough for it to become “appointment TV” (oh how I hate that phrase), so I felt like the TV village idiot had been rehabilitated Flowers-For-Algernon-style, and I had no one to laugh at and throw rocks at anymore (though we do intend to start watching CSI: Miami again pretty soon). Last week’s “terrestrial” episode, Something Borrowed, was a return to previous shoddy form, giving Meat a run for its money, and brazenly referring to its own unoriginality in its title. Well, I reckon Something Stolen and Ineptly Rehashed would be closer to the mark, but you get my point.

Any seriousness of purpose the show might have built up over the patchy but promising Martha Trilogy was stripped away, replaced with knuckle-chewingly inane comedy, staggering contrivance, a total dismissal of all logic, replacement of human motivation with plot-furthering stupidity, poorly executed Evil Dead homages, and inept action moments. I can’t decide which is worse: Meat, this, or the season opener with James Marsters and his big fat paycheck.

What was so poor about it? Perhaps it was because it was a Gwen-centric episode. I’m really not crazy about the character at all, and couldn’t give two shits for her relationship with Jack. I also find it odd that she is suddenly cast as the comedy relief in the show, being sidelined almost entirely during the ostensibly more dramatic episodes of the Martha Trilogy. Maybe it’s a temporary thing, or just because this was the comedy episode of the season, but her line-readings and gestures were very very peculiar in this, as broad as you can possibly imagine.

Comedy episodes of most dramatic shows are to be avoided, unless of course the show has a strong comedic element already (Buffy, Angel, and Firefly did this better than most). Even a very dramatic show can pull it off. Lost did it with Expose and, arguably, Tricia Tanaka Is Dead, despite the oft-humourless tone of the show. By comparison, Torchwood is obviously under the impression that it’s already very funny, but the odd comedic line is either childish, obvious, or poorly delivered, and sometimes all three at once, so imagine the pain caused by an episode that concentrates solely on this kind of broad silliness. I know appreciation of what is funny or not is subjective, but how anyone could find this ineptly staged juvenile nonsense a joy to watch is a mystery to me.

So, in a effort to ensure that the overall internet opinion about this show doesn’t skew exclusively towards the positive, I present The Ten Worst Things About Something Borrowed, by Admiral Neck, aged 5 1/4.

10. The Pointless Editing In The First Scene.

After flashing back to Jack’s bizarre reaction to Gwen’s engagement from the season opener, we cut to a depressing Cardiff nightclub and two depressingly loud and obnoxious women in cowboy hats greeting Gwen with a depressing song about her having anal sex. Yay, hen nights! Is there anything more entertaining than drunk women talking about sex at the top of their lungs and then cackling? Still, I bet there’s a stripper.

This then cuts to Gwen chasing a shapeshifting alien, which is exciting! And then back to the hen night, where a stripper arrives! And then back to the exciting chase! And then back to the hen night! And then… You get the picture.

Firstly, as Rhys points out later, Jack’s an asshole for sending her out to kill aliens on the night before her wedding. Second, Gwen has friends? When did this happen? Third, while chasing the alien she gets bitten by it, which is the inciting incident. (I can imagine it was referred to as that during script meetings.) This fact is subtly revealed when one of Gwen’s gobby friends asks her what the time is, and Gwen suddenly unveils the biggest pre-wedding bandage you’ve ever seen.

What’s that on her arm, the viewer thinks. I wonder how she got that! Like this.

Look at the size of those space gnashers! Jack shows up to save Gwen (so he was obviously available for alien hunting, which once more begs the question as to why Gwen was getting into danger), and his reaction to this enormous wound is, “Owen should take a look at that.” You think?

He obviously doesn’t check it very closely, as she ends up getting pregnant from it. Stupid dead doctor. Anyway, though there are several things about this dire opening that annoyed me, it’s the editing that irked me the most. Is it a suspense scene? No, because we keep seeing Gwen alive and relatively healthy during that scene. Is the storytelling device useful for teasing us with hints about Gwen’s night and then paying it off with reveals? No, because we don’t have to wait very long to find out. Is it used to generate the funny? Next question. Is it just another way of showing the contrast between Gwen’s social life, which is the same as most lairy boozed-up people of her age, and her secret life chasing aliens and getting knocked up by them. Almost certainly, but we spent the entire first season doing this, and getting Rhys involved in Torchwood’s affairs should have drawn a veil over that (geddit?). Instead, we’re still banging away at that point. When I realised the show was slipping back into its bad habits I started to hear warning bells about the loss of momentum from the Martha Trilogy. Time elapsed: 3 minutes 15 seconds.

9. Alien Impregnation? Really?

For an start, it’s a cliched idea. Even a show I loved, Angel, featured Cordelia getting knocked up twice by demons (okay, so the second time was a way to get around her real-life pregnancy, and it did bring about the excellent season four arc with Jasmine, but still). Even the relatively tame Star Trek: The Nextest Generation had Troy get pregnantised by a glowing light; a Hallmark Card way to have a character raped.

Just on a personal level, stories about women being impregnated by aliens don’t really appeal to me much, mostly because it reduces the woman to a reproductive system that is vulnerable to invasion, and it’s icky and tasteless and kind of insulting. Admittedly it can be done well (Alien 3 handled it with the appropriate seriousness), but most often it’s done really really badly (I’m thinking Species II here; a despicable film, and poorly made to boot). I get the “appeal” of the concept, and my love of Cronenberg should give you an idea of my stance on body horror (short version; yay!), but done wrong these stories treat something very serious in an exploitative and distasteful way. It makes me feel very uncomfortable.

So imagine how I feel when it’s played for laughs. For fuck’s sake, Gwen has an alien egg in her belly! Only when the team realise childbirth involves her evisceration do they take it seriously. No amount of over-the-top pickle-chomping and high-larious wedding-day tantrum-throwing will disguise the fact that Gwen’s body has been invaded.

She’s gorging herself on phallic objects! My sides are splitting! Because I am the host for an alien foetus, obviously.

8. Gwen’s Desperation About Getting Married Blinding Her To The Consequences Of Such A Decision.

So, Gwen is the host for the egg of a shapeshifting alien. It’s the day of the wedding. Jack is concerned for her health, obviously, as he doesn’t know what the alien gestation is like (useless former Time Agent!), and both he and Owen strongly suggest she postpone the wedding while they figure things out. But Gwen really wants to get married anyway. So they let her.

It’s very generous of everyone to let Gwen do what she wants, and certainly it’s a tradition that the wedding day, while special for everyone, is even more special for the bride, but there’s a line to be drawn there. Right across her enormous pregnant belly. Why would anyone in the world think that this was a good idea? Jack and Owen and Rhys all know this is a bad idea, but she blunders on anyway, using yelling and weird acting tics do her arguing for her.

What’s worse is we tried to give the show the benefit of the doubt, and entertained the idea that this could be explained away as possible brainwashing by the alien in her body, that in its culture the birth demands some kind of ceremony, and it was making Gwen desire a wedding so that it could be born properly. The alternative was that Gwen is a halfwit. Sadly, she really is. She’s just a girl that wants her wedding day and won’t even postpone for a couple of days to sort out the whole possibly-deadly-egg-in-the-belly thing. Even worse, later on Tosh tells her she made the right decision, which means the guys are pragmatic about the whole impregnation thing, but the women are all about the pretty dresses and the wonder of the wedding day princess thing. Those dames sure do love a good wedding!

Seems like the writer, Phil Ford (more on him later) was aware that he was making Gwen do stupid things, as Gwen suddenly realises (after telling her parents that she is pregnant and then realising they’re excited about a grandchild that will never exist) that perhaps she is doing the wrong thing, but bringing attention to it doesn’t get rid of the fact that the episode was written to show a wedding framed within the format of Torchwood, using the alien pregnancy as a heavy-handed way to metaphorically dramatise the effect of Gwen’s wedding ceremony on our characters, and to get to that point it was necessary to remove all semblance of logical human behaviour from the show. It’s contrivance, pure and simple, and is utterly unforgivable. By now I realised the show was back to its usual dreadful state, and the scene that convinced me, featuring Gwen’s overjoyed parents and her sudden realisation that she’s made a mistake, is only eleven minutes into the episode, and the worst is yet to come.

7. Comedy Relief!

Gwen and Rhys’ friends are clumsily introduced (though I think I remember Rhys referring to Mervyn or Banana Boat in a previous episode. I should remember, as I usually hang on his every word), mostly to fill the cast out a bit, but also to provide laughs in this most amusing of comedy episodes.

All of them are lecherous jerks, which means they’ll probably be joining the Torchwood team very soon. It was all very depressing for the actors, especially Jonathan Lewis Owen, who plays Banana Boat as a cross between Prince William, a Welsh chav, and a lobotomised sex-addict.

He had to bumble through some awful dialogue, which wasn’t his fault, but I so dearly wanted him to die horribly. Sorry Jonathan Lewis Owen! I’m sure you’re a lovely chap in real life. However, he kept chatting up Tosh (of all people), and even managed to molest her while trapped inside a web of bin bags weaved by the alien. Here are the bin bags…

…and here is Banana Boat’s face as his genitals are crushed by Tosh in annoyance over his lechery and loudness.

Sadly, he was not to be killed in a terrible fashion. Instead it was the turn of Mervyn, the other lecherous wanker, who leered at the alien…

…and then got his genitals chomped off by her during what he thought was going to be a sexxy sex act.

So, men are mindless sex-obsessed beered-up pigs, and women want to get married despite alien inpregnation, the heartbreak of their parents, and terrible danger. They will also happily damage the gonads of any man in range. And gay men?

They buy wedding dresses. I can bet the Stonewall Awards judges will be thrilled.

(Yes yes, this is all played for laughs, and if I was going to be really generous I would say it could be an un-PC spoof of the show’s usual admirably PC stance, but I think they were just going for easy gags. Let’s not go overestimating the intelligence of anyone involved in making Torchwood, okay?)

6. Tosh.

In Mad Men, Betty Draper memorably (and anvilliciously) asked a pertinent question about her husband; “Who is Don Draper?” (The answer to which is, “Don Draper is Dick Whitman!”) Well, I ask, who is Tosh? And should I care? (The answer to which is, “no”.) Early on in the episode she stalks Owen again, in an attempt to get him to attend the wedding. She keeps on that it isn’t a date, but obviously she thinks it is, what with her continual simpering and annoying passive-aggressiveness.

Five minutes later, she’s beating up Banana Boat and mouthing tough guy dialogue.

Oh my God! It’s like McKee says! Reveal the true character through action and not dialogue! So she’s a tough guy at heart, really. Except she’s all jittery and sentimental when she’s talking to Gwen about the wedding.

So what is Tosh? Whatever the scene needs at any given point. She’s just a cipher, and as such means nothing. That’s a criticism of Tosh and the lack of show bible that I’ve already gone on about in the past, and not a criticism of Naoki Mori. Rumour has it she’s being written out at the end of the season. Hopefully in future she’ll get a chance to bring to life a coherent character instead of this nebulous gap where a recognisable human should be.

5. What To Do With Dead Owen.

Having turned Owen into the only character other than Jack that’s not just a boring human who’s obsessed with sex, the show ran riot with the concept for two episodes (one of which was okay, the other was less so but still littered with interesting moments). Now? Well, it was a Gwen episode, so there wasn’t really anything for him to do. Other than wear badges for no apparent reason.

I can understand it. I don’t really have a problem with it, and the rumour about Tosh leaving extends to him too. A shame, as Burn Gorman has been growing on us, and we won’t get to experience his gun machismo. It’s often the episode highlight.

I really have to find a way to get his Countrycide effort on here. It was the funniest thing on TV in 2007 that didn’t include Alec Baldwin or Tracy Morgan.

4. Worst. Shapechanging Carnivorous Alien Antagonist. Ever.

Annoying enough that Cap’n Jack’s alien expertise is so incomplete that he doesn’t immediately realise the nature of the creature they’re up against despite having been alive for hundreds or dozens or however many years he’s been around, thus putting Gwen and her family in danger (yet more obnoxious contrivance). It’s up to Owen and his badges to figure out that it is a Nostrovite, which will kill Gwen to get hold of the egg.

Even worse was that the first shapeshifter they go up against is easily killed by a bullet and the second one becomes enraged with an alien babycraziness that makes it almost invincible, which is the sort of empty and contrived expositional nonsense used to justify plot developments that I often refer to as Reason X (“If we’re going to save the President’s daughter we have to disguise ourselves as nuns because [Reason X]!”). It’s like a MacGuffin, but even more contrived.

Worst of all is just how crap the alien is, convenient invulnerability notwithstanding. It’s killed one person and trapped two others in its non-biodegradable web, so does it change shape in order to ensure it will not be caught? Nope. It stands around with the same face, making no effort to find the woman carrying its child, and when confronted by human intervention in the shape of Tosh, it does this. Also, note that even though Jack and Tosh are equipped with normal guns, for some reason they sound like the old toy gun I had as a kid that had four different laser sound settings.

It then gives itself away by turning into someone at the wedding, i.e. Rhys’ mother, played by Nerys Hughes, abandoning all her dignity to run around with fake gnashers and bad fingers. It would be a good ploy, to become someone that the host of its egg knows so it can get closer to her. Sadly, it doesn’t go after Gwen, choosing instead to mingle and chat with Gwen’s mother, though Jack and co. assume it would go after Gwen. Because that makes sense. Instead, it just sets up this case of mistaken identity, which might be the worst ninety seconds of TV this year.

“Come to Mama!” That, my friends, is Nostrovite for EPIC FAIL!

3. Jack And Gwen, Sitting In A Tree…

I used a hammer on my head to try to unremember the first season of Torchwood, so I might be wrong here, but did Jack and Gwen spend as much time drooling over each other as they do in the second season?

It seems to be the emotional core of the show, this love story between the human and the immortal ::coughCordyandAngelcough::, and it’s worked in other shows, so why not here? Well, because they have no chemistry, and Jack’s got a cavalier attitude to relationships anyway which undermines his sudden sadness here, and Gwen is now happily betraying her husband while pretending to be loyal which makes her seem less like a sympathetic and tortured heroine and more like a bit of a cow, and Jack is frigging immortal and should have higher standards. For God’s sake, he was in love with the Doctor! He’s the ideal man for him, because they are equally galactic. You’re telling me Jack’s been around the cosmos and he’s getting depressed because a Suzi Quatro lookalike is getting married to this guy?

No accounting for taste, I guess. Still, that’s a failure of the series in general, but in this episode she barely acknowledges her lovepain for Jack until defending her decision to get married with an egg in her belly, where she says something along the lines of, “I’m marrying Rhys because he will have me and no one else will. No one. Right? No one at all. Eh Jack? No one at all.” Rhys is standing there the whole time and misses the coded signals and thinks she’s saying nice things about him, which proves what a dope he is. Even stupider, this entire scene, where Gwen seems to forget that speech about loving Rhys with barely any prompting, which leads to this hair-eating insanity.

Best thing I can say about it is that it gives John Barrowman his best acting opportunities, as shown by his inner turmoil here.

One day you’re going to be a big head in a jar, but it’s a long time to be sulking over Gwen. Oh Captain Jack! When will you be fun again?

2. Cliche, Plagiarism, and Laziness.

I’ve already pointed out that alien impregnation has been done before, and alien shapechangers or chameleons are staples of sci-fi, so if you’re willing to be generous to the show (and I know a lot of people are), you could say it’s unfair to criticise the show for using these popular plots. Okay. I’ll grudgingly give you that. But can I please rail against the wedding sequence in the middle of the episode, where Jack, Ianto and Owen race to the wedding to save Gwen from the Nostrovite and Jack bursts in two seconds after the vicar asks if anyone has any objection to the marriage going ahead? Can I? Please? Because that shit is just unacceptable.

If only there was a Wikipedia page listing all the times that plot development has been used, though I wonder if there is enough server space in the world. Pretty much every soap wedding features this moment, as well as every crappy romantic comedy made between 1980 and 1999, at the very least. It’s like littering. Just because everyone does it every so often doesn’t make it right. (For the record, I don’t litter. Not even that one time when I hid the polybag down the side of a Tube seat. That was someone else entirely.)

Even worse than that, the show plagiarises itself! A few weeks back, in Reset, Owen has to use a nifty gadget called a Singularity Scalpel to burn away the insects infesting Martha’s body, though he is not entirely sure how to use the machine. After a couple of near misses that blow up things around him, he succeeds in destroying the lifeform without blowing out her spine. This week, because his one hand is knackered (a consequence of his continuing status as a dead person), he can’t operate the scalpel, and has to hand it over to Rhys. The set up is acceptable, and it’s a nice reference to Owen’s new shortcomings, so I have no trouble with that. What does annoy me is that this means Rhys has to go through exactly the same thing Owen did just three episodes previously, with the panic and near-misses. Does BBC Wales think we have amnesia?

Just to make things even more annoying, during the dance scene at the end, Jack cuts in on Gwen and Rhys’ dance just so he can have a moment alone with her, which is yet another convention of this kind of plot, and then Ianto shows up to cut in as well, but he doesn’t ask for Gwen’s hand. He wants to dance with his boyfriend! It’s not the most amazing moment ever, but it’s easily the episode highlight, and a pleasing twist on that cliche.

So they can do it if they try. One of the best things about Buffy and Angel is that it would set up the potentially cliched plot early on, and then subvert it at least once if not more during the episode. It amazed me that they could keep doing that on a weekly basis. If the Torchwood showrunners are going to steal anything from Mutant Enemy, why can’t they steal that philosophy? It would instantly improve the show 1000%.

2.5. Ripping Off The Evil Dead.

Connected to that complaint, another pop culture legend stolen by the show came toward the end, with Rhys preparing to attack the shapeshifter, disguised as his mother, with a chainsaw, prior to it being blown up by Jack and his big gun, leading to black blood goop flying everywhere. Sounds like The Evil Dead? Jack agrees.

It definitely seems that this episode was meant to be a homage to that hyper-real Sam Raimi style of horror comedy, as well as the big silly sci-fi B-movies I grew up with, and I’ll bet Phil Ford is a fan of such and figured this was his chance to pay homage to that with over-the-top action, sex jokes, violence and exploding bodies. Of course, that’s all well and good in practice, but 1) pointing it out in dialogue is a failure of nerve, and 2) the show might have the confidence to think it can pull something like this off, but it doesn’t have the ability.

It’s the kind of amateurish stuff teenagers dream of filming, and I know when I was young I imagined myself as a West Midlands Peter Jackson, making horror movies with lots of aliens exploding and men standing around posing with big guns, because that’s what happened in all of my favourite films. There are so many of these plagiaristic films made on shoestring budgets littering the sci-fi/horror sections of HMV’s DVD shelves that we really really don’t need any more, especially if they have nothing new to offer. This certainly didn’t. And that gun looks stupid. And even if it didn’t look stupid, no one on this show looks cool with guns.

Torchwood showrunners, watch Planet Terror to see how it’s done. I may have parted ways with Robert Rodriguez in recent years, but that was a massive return to form, and exactly the kind of crazy horror blow-out Torchwood thought it was for one whole week. The gulf in quality between the two is vast, and it’s not a consequence of the BBC show having a smaller budget. It’s the lack of imagination that dooms the show, not the lack of pounds.

1. The Retcon Finale.

At the end of the episode, much to Jack’s displeasure, Gwen finally gets to have her happy moment with Rhys, alien egg disintegrated and everything back to a semblance of normality. The families watch with joyous faces as Gwen and Rhys share their vows, and Canyon and I assumed Jack had gone around to everyone with Retcon pills and erased their memories of the terrible day. BTW, I know the Retcon pills are a dreadful ripoff of the Neuraliser from Men In Black, but boldly calling them Retcon pills made me very happy as a comic nerd, reminding me of Dan Slott’s boldly named Retroactive Cannon (AKA Ret-Can) from She-Hulk.

We then cut to everyone having the dance and meal afterwards, and everything seems hunkydory, until suddenly the assembled guests start falling asleep. Turns out Jack has administered the retcon pills after the wedding ceremony, and not before.

So what they’re saying is that once the Nostrovite was defeated and Gwen returned to non-pregnant normality, the guests just accepted this turn of events, and went about celebrating the wedding. Even though they had been terrorised by a shapechanging alien threatening to kill the mother of the bride. Even though several of the guests had been running around with guns. Even though the best man’s dismembered corpse was lying in pieces in a room upstairs!!!

To make things worse, Jack’s use of the retcon pills robs everyone of their memories of the wedding. Perhaps there is a way for them to talk to the guests and make them think they saw it, as shown in Men In Black when J and K interrogate people post-neuralisation, but still, why not do it before the ceremony so that they can still have the full memory of the wedding and forget the gunfights and shootings and aliens and half-eaten best men for fuck’s sake!?!?!? There is no reason other than monumental stupidity on the part of the writer, director and showrunner. How can this be considered logical or defensible? How is this not insulting the intelligence of the viewers? I call super-colossal-gigantic BULLSHIT on the whole thing.

The thing that makes me most angry, though, is that this was written by Phil Ford, who was pretty much solely responsible for the scripts on the recent excellent revamp of Captain Scarlet, which was the most interesting and intelligent early-teen-targeted show on TV until ITV predictably got cold feet and cancelled it. Those scripts were tight and serious and sometimes shocking. I thoroughly recommend it to everyone.

I’ll grant that this episode was obviously conceived as a way to comment on real life using the trappings of sci-fi in the same way that Buffy and Angel used horror conventions to do the same thing, and as such Something Borrowed was chock-full of metaphors for marriage-as-horror-nightmare, but they were either crashingly obvious (mother-in-law jokes), half-baked (could the shapeshifter have represented the way your friends change their opinion of you once you get into a relationship? Or am I giving the show too much credit?), or severely malfunctioning (the impregnation could have represented the second thoughts she was having about marrying Rhys because of her love for Jack, but why dramatise that as subtext when it comes up as text over and over again towards the end of the episode?). That said, even if it did work, that contrivance at the end with the retcon pill kills the episode deader than dead. It’s just unforgivable.

So, once more, any fans wandering in here will ask why I’m still watching. Well, the next episode, already screened on BBC Three, is written by P.J. Hammond, who I’ve gone on about before. The preview looked peculiar, which is what we want and what he does very very well (if you get a chance, watch his wholly original sci-fi/horror series Sapphire and Steel to see him at full quirky strength). I have high hopes for it. But the next three episodes? All written by Chris Chibnall? Let’s just say I’m looking forward to them for different reasons. Look away if you don’t want to see the spoilers from the BBC Press Office.

When a local teenager disappears, Gwen is drawn into an investigation that reveals a darker side of Torchwood, as Doctor Who writer Russell T Davies’s award-winning drama continues. Hundreds of people have disappeared without trace, but Jack is obstructing attempts to find them. The answer seems to lie in the rift – literally – and as Gwen follows the trail, she makes a shocking discovery.

That sounds intriguing, I have to say, but Chibnall will find a way to screw it up. Making it another Gwen-centric episode is already a bad start. As for the next episode…

A booby-trapped building explodes and knocks the team unconscious, as Doctor Who writer Russell T Davies’s award-winning drama continues. As each team member’s life flashes before their eyes, viewers learn how each of them was recruited to Torchwood: Captain Jack was initiated into a shocked Victorian Torchwood in 1899; Toshiko went on a daring mission to trade alien technology for her mother’s life; Ianto wooed Jack with coffee and a flair for alien-catching; and Owen had a medical revelation that changed how he saw the world.

…::coughOutofGasfromFireflycough:: Also, Ianto woos Jack with coffee? I can’t wait for that! I wonder if he will mention his girlfriend Lisa, who got cybermanned in the first season. I seem to recall him mourning her for the majority of that season. If she doesn’t get even namechecked, I will certainly poke fun of it here. Oh boy, a special treat for the finale!

Captain John Hart returns to have his revenge on Torchwood in the concluding episode of Doctor Who writer Russell Davies’s award-winning drama. Taking Captain Jack prisoner, he sends him back in time for a long overdue reunion. Without their leader, Torchwood are faced with a city flooded with Weevils, on the brink of destruction. But who is Captain John really working for? Can anyone trust him? And how great a price must Torchwood pay to save the city?

Weevils everywhere! James Marsters! A great price to be paid that might feature the removal of two major characters if the rumours I heard are true! Don’t forget, it’s on tomorrow night and Good Friday. Set your PVRs, Torchwood fans!

Temeraire and the Challenge of Ambitious Fantasy

Posted on January 27, 2008 by daisyhellcakes

We here at Shades of Caruso love dragons. We love them so much that both of us independently paid money to see Dragonheart in the theater, a movie that features Dennis Quaid playing a hero with a voice reminiscent of a man in the late stages of emphysema; a dragon played by James Bond who’s saddled with lines like “I merely chewed in self-defense, but I never swallowed”; and David Thewlis honking his way through another cringing, effeminate villain role. It might be a significantly less painful experience on mute, actually. Of course, it’s bad for lots of other reasons too: terrible writing and plotting, corny “comedy” bits, lackluster CGI, muddy production values… Sure, it’s got a talking dragon in it, but let’s face it, a dragon alone can’t save a bad plot (witness Eragon. Or don’t).

The truth is that dragon-related entertainment is hard to come by. Well, scratch that — I should say that good dragon-related entertainment is hard to come by. I have to admit that there are a lot of books about dragons out there that I haven’t read, so for all I know, there are plenty I’d love. It’s just that many of them sound so, well…silly.

I love the concept of fantasy, the incredible range of ideas it has access to. I read A Wrinkle in Time. I watched Game of Thrones like everyone else and I too want to slap Joffrey. I’ve even, God help me, listened to Yes. It’s just that the barrier to entry for fantasy is high, especially for books. Most of the covers could kindly be described as “niche.” The titles usually involve words like “untime” and “rayne.” The heroes’ names sometimes have apostrophes in them (note to fantasy authors: please stop doing this. I don’t want to read about someone named F’lar unless I’m supposed to hate him). The writing is often ponderous, and there are always twenty books in every series, and each one is a thousand pages long.

Perhaps the core audience doesn’t want publishers to pander to what’s considered acceptably mainstream, but I think a lot of genre books get unfairly ignored because non-fans see them and think, “That’s not for me.” Or worse, they’re intrigued, but they don’t know where to start. I edit children’s books for a large company, some of which are fantasy or sci-fi, so I realize the conundrum here: some stories might draw a larger audience, but they also have to appeal to the people they know are going to buy them, and be true to the stories within.

That’s where we come to Temeraire. The thing is, I don’t think I ever would have picked up these books based on the covers alone.

They look like standard-issue dragon fantasy novels. Actually, that’s what the US covers look like. The UK covers are better:

I like the dragon-and-boats thing — pretty accurate, and a bit more in the direction of “this might just be serious literature WITH DRAGONS IN IT OMFG” — but the paperback covers look a bit too much like Jane Austen-esque beast-friendly chick lit, which is schizophrenic and sexually confusing. I appreciate what a tough job the designers have, though – how do you make dragons look cool without also making them look defanged? How do you convey a blend of genres? How do you market a series like this? (I’m not going to answer those questions, by the way. Good writers know that asking questions rather proposing answers makes you sound much smarter.)

But I didn’t buy the books because of the covers – I found out about them because I read a review in Entertainment Weekly in which they were described as a kind of Patrick O’Brian with dragons, which, well, do you know me? Soon both my husband and I were both staying up until four a.m. to read them. The first three were published all at once, and at 300-400 pages each, they weren’t intimidatingly long. Neither was the world they described very different from our own. In fact, the only difference was that this alternate universe contained talking, intelligent dragons. Can you imagine anything more awesome? The only thing better would be if the dragons pooped Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.

Novik came up with an incredibly clever, simple idea — what if dragons existed, and were used as a line of England’s military defense during the Napoleonic Wars? She also starts us out with a protagonist as green to dragons as we are — Captain Will Laurence (note lack of apostrophes), a seaman in Her Majesty’s Navy, who accidentally ends up with a very valuable Chinese dragon egg when he captures a French ship. The egg hatches some weeks later, while Laurence and his crew are still out to sea, and though Laurence knows almost nothing about dragons except that they need to be harnessed when they hatch (so that they can bond with the person who will become their captain in England’s Aerial Corps), he ends up becoming the choice of captain for the egg who hatches — the dragon he will name Temeraire.

The first book in the series largely concerns Laurence’s gradual acceptance of his new fate — he was a respected captain in a prestigious profession, happy with his life, and he is at first reluctant and resentful of his duty to Temeraire. We follow the pair as they embark on training and learn about life in the Aerial Corps, which is very different from the life Laurence knew. Aviators are the shabby black sheep of the military, treated by the rest of English society as something of a joke, their dragons feared dangerous. In fact, dragons are as intelligent as humans — they show an incredible aptitude for math and science, and Temeraire in particular is something of a savant. At first Laurence thinks his growing bond with Temeraire is unusual and that the other aviators think of their dragons as mere tools, but he soon learns that the bond between a dragon and his captain is one of the closest relationships either of them will ever experience.

When we meet Laurence he could be fairly described as a stiff; he’s full of rigid ideas about what’s right and mannerly, and it’s only when he bonds with Temeraire that he starts to relax. But it’s to Novik’s credit that she doesn’t entirely soften him — though he grows to love Temeraire, he is still concerned utmost with what is good, with being an honorable man, and, above all, with following society’s strictures. Temeraire is his foil – an intelligent innocent who is forever questioning why things are the way they are, much to Laurence’s exasperation and bafflement. This interplay is never didactic; it comes from character and not as a lecture. The push and pull runs through the series as a constant, with each party softening to the other’s argument as they grow to love and depend on each other.

Subsequent books have Laurence and Temeraire being forced to go around the world on various missions – to China, Turkey, Germany, Africa, and back to England to fight Napolean, whose ominous presence runs through the books like a harbinger of impending destruction. It’s an ingenious idea to have the pair travel, not only because there’s only so much you can write about English battles against Napolean’s army but because it allows Novik to explore how dragons are treated in other countries.

This is perhaps Novik’s cleverest invention. By far the greatest strength of genre fiction is the way it refracts all the ordinary issues of domestic drama from unusual angles. Where a straight drama would tell us a standard teenage-daughter-hates-her-mother story, The Exorcist compares puberty to demonic possession. In Ginger Snaps, a young girl getting her period for the first time realizes she is also becoming a werewolf; we watch her coming to grips with her newfound power and sexuality. Buffy, of course, worked on a throughline of a high-school-as-hell metaphor, and Battlestar Galactica got us to sympathize with Iraqi insurgents by having our colonized heroes fight back against an oppressive regime.

Temeraire explores issues of feminism (a certain breed of dragon — Longwings — only accept female captains, to Laurence’s surprise and profound comic embarrassment), racism, slavery, the question of animal intelligence, and dragons as a metaphor for how we treat outsiders and minorities, all without being moralistic. In England, dragons are kept away from society at large, and are generally treated as if they were large, winged horses. Their captains and crews love them, but they have no autonomy. Laurence and Temeraire don’t realize there’s any other way to be, until they travel to China and find out that there, dragons are independent and have their own lives and professions (ferrying people from one place to the other, performing manual labor), eat cooked meals instead of raw cows and sheep, and live in sheltered, warm pavilions instead of making their beds on the ground. And some — like Temeraire, for he is an extremely rare and special breed known as a Celestial — are revered as thinkers and scholars, and spend their time in the life of the mind instead of being forced to defend the country as an unthinking tool of war.

With each book, Temeraire grows more and more anxious about the way dragons are treated in England and feels more and more that he must do something to change it. Laurence wants only the best for Temeraire, and for dragons as a whole, but he knows the harsh reality he’s afraid to confront his friend with; he knows how unlikely the possibility of change is, especially in a time of war. We don’t need to have the point underlined — it’s there, and it shades everything we see.

The most touching thing about the books — in which much is touching, as Novik has a deft hand with melodramatic but never mawkish storylines — is the relationship between Laurence and Temeraire, but also the way Laurence is changed by his love. Temeraire is part precocious child, part confidante, part comrade and colleague — a true life partner — and he gradually opens Laurence’s tightly closed and rigid personality. For me, good drama happens when we as an audience are torn between two points of view — when both sides of an argument are presented as equally valid, and we empathize with the views of those on either side. I find nothing more riveting than this three-dimensionality of character, and good drama always has it, no matter what the genre. And in this series, Laurence and Temeraire are always fascinating, and always people we want to know.

Worst Movies of 2007 Face/Off! (D-War)

Posted on January 6, 2008 by admiralneck

It’s been a good year for dragon-lovers. Naomi Novik published the fourth book in the Temeraire series (I’ve yet to read it, but Canyon seemed to like it a lot), Beowulf ended with a superb fight between the Cockney/Geat warrior and an awesome firebreathing beast, and Enchanted featured an endearingly camp purple dragon voiced by Susan Sarandon and designed by genius monster-mind Crash McCreery.

Oddly, though, the big draw for us was a big-budget Korean fantasy-action flick starring a guy off Roswell, Robert “Alligator” Forster, and Daryl from The Office. It promised huge battle scenes, a plethora of dragons, and city-wide destruction on a similar scale to Transformers. Though early word was horribly negative, I was still intrigued and psyched. Come on! Wicked awesome dragons, powered by Korean ingenuity and let loose on LA! That sounded like a perfect movie, but that’s assuming that film is made by someone who understands how to write a coherent screenplay, or how to block actors, or how to direct them, or how to pace a movie, or…

Basically, I’m saying dragon mayhem only works when you’ve got someone behind the camera who knows more about directing than that the words “action” and “cut” make the actors start and stop reciting heavy-handed, overly-complicated and incomprehensible exposition. Hyung-Rae Shim is most definitely not that man.

We should have taken as a warning the tagline on the poster above and on the D-War homepage: “Since THE DAWN of LEGEND, Absolutely UNIMAGINABLE affair OCCURS on THE HUMAN RACE. They are LOOKING for SOMEONE. SOMEONE WHO has been CHOSEN by HEAVEN…” If they’re not bothering to translate something properly, we’re in for a pretty haphazardly made film. That’s not to say Shim doesn’t have some faith in his own ability. According to this SciFi Japan review, when bragging about the scale and ambition of D-War, Shim said, “LORD OF THE RINGS was made in a field, but we’ve shot in the heart of LA.” Somewhere in New Zealand, Peter Jackson is humbled.

As if possessed by the Satanic ghost of Dr. Uwe Boll, director of the maddeningly complex Alone In The Dark, D-War opens with an animated crawl explaining the story of a race of serpent things, and the birth of a magical woman every 500 years who contains a spirit power sent from heaven that will transform creatures called Imugis into Celestial Dragons. If a good Imugi gets hold of this power, then everything is fine, but if an evil Imugi wins out, we’re screwed. This is apparently taken from Korean myth, though from the complexity of it, and the fact that it so often contradicts itself, it seems to be taken from all of Korean myth at the same time. I spent a long time trying to make out what the hell was being conveyed to me, and it was time wasted. I don’t think Shim understands what it means either.

We then cut to modern day L.A., to find an enormous gouge in the landscape. Just to confuse matters more, a Native American is shouting about how we have awakened “them”. Hey, Native American dude, stop claiming incomprehensible Korean myths as your own! Chris Mulkey and a fellow FBI flunky are investigating this disaster, at which point our journalist hero Ethan, played by blank slate Jason Behr, and his cameraman Bruce (a much livelier Craig Robinson), appear and harangue the Feds. After Mulkey and the Mulkey-Flunky rudely tell Ethan to get lost he sees a weird object being unearthed which later turns out to be a dragon scale.

After returning to his office, where he seems to be under the impression it’s a Bad Taste Fashion day for charity, Behr mulls over the events of the morning (in echoey voiceover), and suddenly remembers a visit to an antiques store he made as a kid, where he is blasted with magical energy by a similar dragon scale and then treated to a long expositional lecture from Robert Forster. Then he remembers being given a large magical amulet, even though he’s actually wearing it at the time. Is he Guy Pearce in Memento? Who forgets these kinds of things? I mean, it’s twice as big as an iPod and has pointy bits on it.

The flashback to his childhood contains even more exposition than the opening crawl, with Forster going into immensely confusing detail about the Imugi and the spirit power called the Yu I Joo, which is a gift from heaven for good Imugi, but there is a bad Imuji called Buraki who wants the Yu I Joo. Heaven sends down two guys, a warrior (called Haram) and a magician, to save the day. That’s all? Forster makes it sound like it would be a bad thing if Baraki gets the Yu I Joo, but Heaven only sends two guys, one of whom (the warrior) is next to useless? What’s worse, the Yu I Joo manifests within a woman (Narin) on her twentieth birthday, and then she has to find a good Imugi before a bad Imugi gets her. Even Royal Mail has a more reliable system that that.

Just to make things more complicated, the flashback flashes back again, to ancient Korea, where a village is destroyed by evil forces looking for Narin, the possessor of the Yu I Joo. It’s very dramatic, very silly, and very badly filmed, except for the bravura effects moments. In that respect it reminds me of Return of the Jedi. During non-effects sequences, Richard Marquand seems unable to inject any life or pace into the movie, but as soon as ILM take over, the film turns into a rollercoaster. Same here. When Shim’s effects team are responsible for what’s onscreen, the film is enormous fun for all the right reasons. When Shim is behind the camera directing actors, it all goes horribly, hilariously wrong.

Also, it’s a pointless scene. The village might be much larger than I would expect a village to be, but it’s surrounded by a flimsy wall and has a couple of cannons to protect the inhabitants. Buraki sends his evil general (who according to the press notes, goes by the name of Evil General) to retrieve the Yu I Joo, and his army comprises about 50000 soldiers and monsters who raze the village to the ground with ease. There’s some memorable carnage, but what made me laugh most was that in the middle of the explosions and villager-crushings and infantry stampedes, there’s a dramatic shot of one of the large creatures (called a Dawdler) knocking over a two foot high wall that serves no purpose, except perhaps to keep a couple of chickens from running off. It gets the same treatment as the genocide. Perhaps they’re the monarchs of the chicken kingdom.

Sadly, while that scene is very big and silly and satisfying, for the first two thirds of the movie we have to contend with numerous stilted dialogue scenes, repetitive deus ex machinas, poorly staged fight scenes and, I’m not kidding, yet more exposition. My God, at times it feels like we’re watching The Silmarillion as filmed by a teenager obsessed with Rampage and Age of Empire.

What’s worse is that the in-world rules make no sense. Why has Heaven come up with this incredibly complicated Yu I Joo delivery system? Put it in a hott girl, bake for twenty years, and then watch as the bad “guy” swoops in and eats her? What’s worse is they don’t take into account the inevitable love affair between Haram and Narin, which makes Narin not want to serve up the Yu I Joo to the good Imugi, choosing instead to kill herself (and Haram) before either Buraki or the good Imugi can get to her, meaning the whole ridiculous ordeal gets repeated 500 years later, with a girl called Sarah becoming the new holder of the Yu I Joo, and Ethan becoming the new protector thanks to some handy reincarnation, though he doesn’t inherit any combat skills or dress sense.

Basically, what Shim must have written down when he started this project is, “Find reason for big monsters to chase young couple around city so I can destroy it.” Unfortunately, he went crazy trying to make it seem like there was more plot there, and a lot of time is spent while he adds layer upon layer of exposition on the core. Seriously, if Forster had just said, “Heaven made this hott chick all powerful so she could promote a monster but another monster wants the job more so you’ve got to get her out of here otherwise we’re screwed now go and run around and get into lots of destructive scrapes!” I would have respected it a lot more.

If you think I’ve spent too long talking about a flashback scene, please bear in mind that this scene is fifteen minutes long. I’m not exaggerating; I just timed it. The only other movie I’ve seen do that is Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and this movie is not Crouching Tiger (though the dragons do miraculously remain hidden for the majority of the movie, and in the middle of L.A., no less).

For all the time spent explaining the identity of main characters (for instance, Forster turns out to be the wizard, who has been hanging around for 500 years waiting for Behr to appear, which is a massively depressing prospect), and the backstory of the dragons, none is spent explaining why the Feds hate Behr on sight, or what the gouge is (the viewer can figure it’s Buraki’s work, but you’d have to take a leap of logic to figure it), and what effect it has had on the populace. Also, as in I Know Who Killed Me, for the majority of the movie the police characters appear to have been included only because Shim thinks they have to be included, though he doesn’t know what to do with them other than have them say, “You mean it’s organic?” or “We have to find this girl!” They do nothing to further the plot and remain clueless throughout. At least, that’s what happens for the majority of the movie (see below).

When the flashback finally ends and Ethan begins to act on his memories (i.e. he tells Bruce to use his amazing Google skills to search for all of the Sarahs in LA), we’re introduced to the correct Sarah, played by Amanda Brooks. She is the reincarnation of Narin, though has also seemingly forgotten her heritage until this moment. Or perhaps she knows all about it, which is equally odd. If I knew I was the container into which Heaven has poured a mighty mystical force that must be used to give an enormous ancient serpent an upgrade, I’d probably base my whole life around it and probably try to make some money off it. Instead she just appears to be a moody valley girl who hangs out at the gym.

Maybe her relentlessly dour expression is her way of dealing with her responsibility. She doesn’t smile once during the movie, and barely registers any effort in the role. Maybe that was a direction from Shim, but how unappealing does this make her? Inexplicably she has a friend who tries to cheer her up, but all she does in return is whine about wanting to stay at home and sulk. What with Behr’s blandness and her misery, the only reason they could ever find each other attractive is by being the reincarnated spirits of two doomed losers from 16th Century Korea.

Not long after being introduced and realising she is in great danger from attack by Buraki’s forces, Sarah does the safest thing possible; going drinking with her friend to drown her seemingly epic sorrows. After leaving early with an attack of the Whiny Dullness, she’s assaulted by some random fratty muggers, and is in serious trouble until out of the blue Robert Forster appears and rescues her with some effortless (i.e. lazily filmed) martial arts moments. After saving her ass, he slopes off into the night, probably so he can listen to The Delfonics in his car.

She ends up reporting the event to the police, and while she does it a random photographer walks through the station, takes a photo of her, and is chased off. Peculiar, I thought, but then a couple of scenes later, while Ethan is moaning to Bruce that he’s a jerk for not being able to find the right Sarah out of several thousand with only the description of a Yu I Joo-brand birthmark to go on, the photographer (who works there, of course), walks past them and mentions that he just met a Sarah who got into a fight and hey, here’s a photo of her! Was the photographer called Mr. P. Lotdevice?

For various reasons too illogical to try to parse here, Sarah gets committed to a hospital (for having bad dreams about Evil General, it seems), and goes berserk with a plastic knife. Or as berserk as someone who is unable to act can get. Before she can hurt anyone Ethan arrives, but his path is blocked by an officious nurse. Fortunately a kindly doctor sneaks him into the room, meaning he and Sarah finally meet again after 500 years (romance!), just as Buraki attacks the hospital. They flee, again with the help of the kindly doctor, who waits until they’ve gone and morphs into Robert Forster! I have no idea why he hides his identity from them in this way. Maybe 500 years of waiting around has made him playful. Or shy. There follows another funky effects sequence, with Buraki chasing Sarah, Ethan, and Bruce through an underground car park, though they manage to outrun it. This happens several times; a small car outruns a 300 foot long snake. There’s asking the audience to suspend disbelief, and then there’s not giving a damn what the audience thinks.

Upon eluding Buraki, Bruce’s car slams into Evil General, who looks like he’s going for a stroll down the centre of the road. Cloaked in magical armour, he knocks Bruce around for a bit and then electrocutes him (Craig Robinson’s high-pitched yelp of pain is the only moment of actual comedy in the entire film). Ethan ineffectually stands around, allowing Evil General to almost grab Sarah and do terribly obscure magical things to her when, hilariously, another car comes out of nowhere and runs him over again.

At first I thought that this scene would go on for a few hours, with a succession of cars taking turns knocking the guy over, but no, Ethan and Sarah just get into it (leaving the electrified Bruce behind), and drive off. A bit later they are randomly dropped off near a beach (because lovers like to walk along beaches, right?), and as they walk away, the woman driving the car turns into… Robert Forster! Every movie should have Robert Forster materialise whenever they can’t think of a way to resolve a situation.

While the romantic leads sleepwalk through their lines, on the other side of town a bunch of FBI dudes sleepwalk through their own lines, and agree that Buraki is following Sarah, and is located in a cave nearby. They seem to arrive at this conclusion through divine intervention, because even though they act like there’s proof it’s following her and momentarily hiding in a cave, they don’t show it. They do have one elusive thing they can be proud of finding; a picture of Sarah smiling! It’s an endearingly goofy picture.

Thanks to this snake-finding breakthrough, a bunch of tooled up guys with guns go to the cave, though I wonder if anyone told them they would be going up against an enormous evil snake, as their reaction to Buraki’s dramatic appearance is to freak out, fire aimlessly into the air, and then get killed. Actually, I’m not sure if I remember Buraki killing any of them. Instead they get blown up by Evil General, who seems to thrive in non-road environments.

Sarah and Ethan go visit a hypnotist neuroscientist or something (played by Holmes Osborne, completing a 2007 bad movie two-fer with Southland Tales). In an echo of John Boorman’s catastrophic Exorcist II he sticks electrodes on Sarah and triggers a flashback (thankfully a short one) for no apparent reason, and Buraki finds them, for no apparent reason, before chasing them. Leaving behind Holmes Osbourne, they get away. For no apparent reason. If the overused motif of I Know Who Killed Me is making everything blue, the overused motif here is events happening because Shim has decided they have to. It’s a perfect example of inept plotting, and should be shown in film schools as a warning. I Know Who Killed Me has some clumsy plotting and dimwitted flashbacks that fill up time, but nothing on this scale.

After escaping Buraki Sarah and Ethan meet up with Bruce (who isn’t dead even though they left him behind with Evil General), and then go for a coffee to chat about their day. The scene ends with, yes, Buraki appearing out of nowhere. He/It crashes through some walls, stops them getting away by throwing a car at them, and then waits around instead of attacking them, giving a bunch of cops time to shoot at him (and no they don’t transform into a mini-army of Robert Forster, which is a shame). Their gunfire stops Buraki in his tracks, giving Ethan and Sarah time to escape. Bruce, on the other hand, gets left behind.

Luckily this confrontation triggers the best scene in the movie, an effects tour-de-force with Bulcos, Dawdlers, Shaconnes and Atrox (Atroxes? Atroxi? Erm…) attacking L.A. en masse. It means nothing, and is only there to get the punters in, but it’s great anyway.

It’s on a smaller scale than the similar scenes at the end of Transformers, and doesn’t work narratively (more as a sequence of cool shots), but it’s still worth watching the movie just for these scenes. As before, the FX shots are much more vibrant and imaginative than the rest of the movie. I would say it’s down to some second unit director’s superior understanding of filmmaking, but from that SciFi Japan feature, Shim was indeed on set in LA, firing his ADs for worrying about tanks ruining the roads. Unless he was joking. The only things that let the scene down are a couple of less than perfect effect shots, and a bad bit of editing that leaves a bunch of tanks and machine-gunners firing at an empty street.

While chaos reigns, Ethan and Sarah climb to the top of a skyscraper so they can catch a helicopter out of there, only to find that snakes can climb things, a point proved by the appearance of Buraki up in their respective grills. Stupidly they hop onto the helicopter, which is promptly grabbed by Buraki. With no hesitation, Ethan and Sarah leap out, leaving the pilot behind. He dies moments later.

While Buraki is peppered with minigun shells, our undynamic heroes get back to street level and are found by Chris Mulkey and the Mulkey-Flunky, who whisk them away to a basement somewhere. Good idea, I thought, until Mulkey pulls a gun on Sarah and threatens to kill her, stating that the only way to stop Buraki is to destroy the Yu I Joo. It’s an amazing moment. He knows about this shit? How? He’s not mentioned any of it for the entire rest of the film, but now he knows all about it? It’s… I just… Oh, what’s the use. Thankfully the Mulkey-Flunky knocks him out, or shoots him, or something. I can’t remember the details as I had my head in my hands for a few minutes. They get away, though. And leave the flunky behind.

So they escape! For two minutes, and then a bunch of Bulcos blow their car up, enabling them to capture our heroes. I have no idea how long they are meant to be unconscious, but when Ethan wakes up, he’s on the steps of an enormous structure that looks way too much like Barad-Dur. I’ve never been to LA, but I think I’d know if an enormous evil-looking obsidian castle was built nearby. Still, suck on that, Jackson. He’s filming in LA, not a field! Loser.

Buraki, Evil General, and thousands of Atroxesixi are in attendance, waiting for Sarah to cough up the Yu I Joo, but Ethan’s having none of it. Using some wondrously inept fight moves he battles Evil General, getting thrown around like the bundle of second-hand clothes he looks like, and is about to be killed when Evil General’s sword touches the amulet which had been forgotten about by everyone, and it activates, killing all of the Atroxiites and Evil General in a burst of mystical CGI whooshiness. Hooray! This seemingly summons the fashionably late good Imugi, and a battle ensues between him/her and Buraki. Taking a cue from Ethan, it is crap at fighting, and it looks bad until Sarah decides, “Fuck this, I’m bored,” and burps up the Yu I Joo.

Just as Buraki is about to grab it, she moves it with magical powers so that the good Imugi can get it, in the biggest and most dramatic “psyche!” moment in film history. With that the good Imugi becomes a Celestial Dragon, complete with funky chinese-dragon-whiskers, and the battle is won easily. It’s another terrific FX sequence. However, don’t get thinking it’s going to end well. Sarah dies in Ethan’s arms, and then appears before him as, I shit you not, a glowing fairy, promising to love him forever in Heaven. At this point, Canyon and I were torn between laughing our asses off and shouting swearwords at the screen.

The best part of that is that both the good Imugi and Sarah the Dragon Fairy both float off to Heaven, leaving Ethan behind. Yeah, how does that feel, you inconsiderate asshole? If only Bruce could feel the schadenfreude.

Shades of Caruso

Circuit interruptus.

Category Archives: Peter Jackson