Listmania ’12! Miscellaneous Movie Observations: Part One

Posted on January 17, 2013 by admiralneck

The first four parts of Listmania! 2012 might seem to be pretty exhaustive, but having seen well over 100 films last year (a small number for a film critic, but a hefty number for someone such as myself, who spent most of the year playing Halo) there are inevitably going to be a few films that slip through the cracks, being neither brilliant or terrible. They were often films that inspired frenetic note-taking for blogposts that never got written, or films seemingly condemned to be forgotten about but which lingered either like a pleasant perfume on a spring morning, or a kebab fart in a friend’s bathroom, depending on the movie. Much as I’d like to think I can move on without talking about them, often my reaction to them speaks to my state of mind during and after experiencing them, so for the sake of clearing the clutter out of my head, the last posts in this series will be my attempt to close the door on 2012 so I can get on with enjoying 2013.

Biggest Disappointment of the Year: Cosmopolis

After the unendurable famine that starved David Cronenberg’s fanbase of his singular genius for four years — FOUR YEARS — we got half a feast with 2011′s brilliantly realised adaptation of Christopher Hampton’s A Dangerous Method, which thrilled this blog enough to place it at number 6 in SoC’s previous Best Films Listmania! extravaganza. While critics seemed mystified, mistaking the great man’s precision for bloodlessness, or by exposing their ignorance of his work by complaining that a film about the schism between the mind and the body was a departure from his previous films – merely because there was no gore and therefore lacked the one thing they lazily knew about him – for some of us this was a late-career classic, the kind of thrillingly intellectual work we’ve come to expect. This excitement was enhanced by the knowledge that we’d only have to wait another year to get the second half of this feast. Could he strike twice this quickly and maintain that quality?

The plunging enthusiasm I felt during his adaptation of Don DeLillo’s novel has only ever occurred once before while watching one of his films, midway through my only viewing of Eastern Promises, but while that seemed like a weird misfire attributable to the script – which he wasn’t responsible for – Cosmopolis‘ problems stem from the fact that Cronenberg hasn’t done anything particularly drastic with the novel, which was already a rambling, overly-ambitious and unfocused book that tried desperately to capture a snapshot of the world that was moving so rapidly past the writer’s window that all we got for his efforts was a meaningless smudge. When reading it in preparation for the movie I could see hints of what Cronenberg found interesting enough to adapt it – man and/versus machine, symbiosis between the mind and an artificial system that transforms the world, sexual deviance and emotional stasis, mental collapse and physical decay – but hoped that he would temper DeLillo’s worst excesses; the arch dialogue, the preachiness, the desperation of his attempt to make a touchstone for our times.

This was not to be. In fact, some of Cronenberg’s choices exacerbate the problems of the novel, primarily the curiously stagy performances from the majority of the cast, Robert Pattinson aside. While Cronenberg deserves praise for drawing such promising work from the previously unconvincing actor, he makes great actors like Samantha Morton and Juliette Binoche deliver dialogue regrettably translated from the novel almost verbatim as if they are the most precocious self-help gurus at the world’s worst staff training day. Their pronouncements about the state of the world, and the ways in which our protagonist can affect the systems he is hooked up to, are deeply uncomfortable viewing for a fan, because the reasons for this choice are mystifying. Are these displays for a king residing in his mobile, air-conditioned throne? This is the only thing I could come up with to explain it.

And believe me, I tried for a long time to justify this film’s unexpected cluelessness, hoping to convince myself that Cronenberg’s adherence to such risible source material was some brilliant choice that I just didn’t understand properly yet. My growing discomfort with critics who second-guess artists who have a proven intellectual capacity and transparent mastery of their chosen form meant that I was eager to find a way to blame myself for my instinctive rejection of this, especially as the critical reaction to A Dangerous Method had irked me so much. I took notes for a blogpost that would probably have been ten times as long – and one hundred times more apologetic – than my defence of Prometheus, but I didn’t have the heart to write it. Instead I just gave up on the film. There’s nothing to pick apart that isn’t contained in the book, at least not much, other than Cronenberg’s ability to keep the film interesting when it’s mostly spent in a limo. And he does a good job of that, even if the rambling monologues drain the enthusiasm from the viewer, and despite occasional moments like the scene in which Mathieu Amalric berates protagonist Eric Packer; possibly the worst blocked and staged scene in a movie released last year.

Is it a total disaster? No Cronenberg movie could ever be considered as such, it’s just not possible. Pattinson is impressive, as is Paul Giamatti, whose appearance at the end crystallises the film’s “plot” in a way even the book didn’t. The confrontation between the protagonist and his until-then hidden antagonist fires the imagination in the way I had hoped the rest of it would, and makes a mockery of the decision to make the rest of the film so damnably stagy. Also Cronenberg removes some cluttering ideas from DeLillo, turning his protagonist from the man who may have crashed the financial system – and robbed his wife of her riches – in a series of nihilistic actions into the victim of what seems to be a day-long panic attack that may or may not have led to his death. Cronenberg seems more interested in making the man a victim instead of the instigator of the world’s financial doom, which makes sense; he’s usually interested in the idea of people losing control, not in having too much power.

And there are touches that link this to his other films; that symbiosis is there, expressed in the anecdotes from Packer’s employees, who think fondly of the machines they use as tools or extensions of themselves. We also get sexual complications, prostate examinations, intercourse with a bodyguard still wearing her kevlar; this is the mind/body/machine stuff we want from the man. But throughout there are too many wrong choices, too much hesitance, from a man I thought would have relished the idea of scrambling DeLillo’s book into a new and exciting form the way he played with Bari Wood and Jack Geasland’s Twins for Dead Ringers, or his thrilling adaptation of Naked Lunch, which turned intentional incomprehensibility into disgusting and coherent fantasy. I’d hesitate to call it a failure, and certainly wouldn’t write the genius off, but it just stumped me. All the reflection it created in me had nothing to do with parsing his message, but more in wondering why he made something so boring. This was not what I signed up for.

Pleasant Surprise of the Year: Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted

A year ago, looking at lists of 2012′s most anticipated films, there’s no way I would have even selected this for viewing, let alone expected to write anything about it. The first two Madagascar films are, as far as I could tell from seeing clips and hearing accounts, everything that is wrong with modern animation, channeling the wrong kind of wacky humour from years past, trying too hard to keep the eye busy with all manner of tired visual cues (crash zooms on characters posing; a crime in any film but especially in cartoons where it’s used so damn much) and pop culture references. When people started praising this third installment, I figured it must be worth a shout, especially after finding out that it was co-written by Noah Baumbach, of all people. I couldn’t help but be curious about this mash-up. But first I had to watch the other two, because continuity or something.

And god help me I hated them. HATED them. They were exactly as I had feared; tired and shouty, lazily written, obnoxiously directed, witless and charmless and unbearably loud. It took all of my will to get through them, resisting the temptation to count the number of times an instantly dated pop culture reference cropped up, or a character reacted to another’s display of joy with a mute expression of horror (surely the most overused comedic sting of the last fifteen years, and particularly so in animated movies). Their appeal with kids made sense; they’re silly and noisy and restless (the first two Madagascar movies, not kids. Well, kids too, but… you get me). But for a fan of animation, it hurt to see what Dreamworks was willing to put out before finding its feet with How To Train Your Dragon and SoC’s beloved Kung Fu Panda franchise; two elegant examples of what animation can achieve with imagination and passion, compared to the Tex Avery-aping forced wackiness of Madagascar 1 and 2.

So was it Noah Baumbach who made Madagascar 3 such a delight? Who knows how much input he had into the development of this berserk threequel. It’s tempting to think not much, as the film shares two directors from the previous movies – Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath, with Darnell on co-writing duties – so you’d expect more of a continuity in terms of tone, even with a new writer onboard, especially as Idiocracy co-writer Etan Cohen joined the team for the second film and that turned out to be as annoying as the first. And yet here we are, with a similarly frenetic comedy, admittedly still committing some of the crimes of the first two, but this time tempered with a bit of grace among the hectic setpieces and ever-expanding cast of characters, notes of sadness and reflection that make the characters come alive more than the mechanical arcs of the previous movies.

But more than that, Madagascar rise far far above the first two installments by completely abandoning any semblance of restraint, launching itself without fear of audience alienation in a dizzying new direction. Where the franchise had occasionally hinted at being more ambitious than I thought, the temptation to rely on rote jokes and set-ups – hell, the second movie is basically an enormous Lion King pastiche – hadn’t been surmounted. But what the hell is going on in this movie, with its “nukular”-powered vans, banana-guns, reality-bending circus tigers, an eye-melting mid-movie Cirque-De-Soleil homage that reaches the level of breathtaking surrealistic uplift, and best of all, a demented antagonist voiced by an obviously merry Frances McDormand who is half-Terminator, half-Edith Piaf? Suddenly this franchise made perfect sense, and instead of being the resident idiot of the Dreamworks stable became its most anarchic pleasure. Also, it inspired this. Dammit.

While Tim Burton continued to rest on his laurels and gave us the entirely unsurprising Frankenweenie, Madagascar 3 proved it’s possible to make something that honours the expectations of the franchise’s fans while also refining the finished product, and while it’s not quite in the same league as SoC’s beloved Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, it will inevitably end up on our repeat-watch list. Will Madagascar be able to maintain this kind of invention through further installments? If they don’t get Baumbach back who knows, but you’d hope that Darnell will realise that holding back on the pop culture references and amping up the invention and lack of respect for convention is the key to this latest sequel’s immense financial – and critical – success. A return to its previous form will be a disappointment, but even so, this enormous surprise remains, and provides hope where there was none before.

Best Documentary of the Year: The Central Park Five. Or West of Memphis. Or Room 237, The Imposter, Or The Queen of Versailles

To those who don’t visit this site whenever I post something, you probably don’t know that Listmania! is an ongoing project with a format I try to follow annually. I suspect even my regular readers haven’t spotted that my award for Hammiest Performance by Michael Sheen award has been going for four years, and that I’m terrified that he won’t provide us with another crazy performance in 2013 (the one year he wasn’t in a Twilight movie was the year of Tron: Legacy, oh joy of joys: see below for further elucidation). What looks like a splurge of random comments and awards is actually done with a level of consistency that’s pretty much unwarranted, I’ll happily admit, but it gives me some pleasure to attempt that kind of fidgety anal continuity.

But for two years I’ve had to break that format, and it has greatly irked me. My Best of 2012 list didn’t feature my usual Best Documentary nomination for the second year running, but while the first omission was because I didn’t see any documentaries in 2011 (for shame!), this time it was because I’d seen five and they were all very good-to-excellent and I couldn’t make my mind up which would win out. The Central Park Five and West of Memphis are probably the ones on the bottom, but I honestly can’t decide between The Imposter, Room 237 or The Queen of Versailles. All three astonished me for various reasons; choosing a favourite has led to a long internal debate that wasn’t resolved by New Year’s Eve.

I’m tempted to say Room 237 is my choice for all the reasons laid out here; in short I find it easier to love this over attempts to depict real-world controversies as I don’t have to agonise over the difficulty in interpreting reality in a form that will inevitably fall prey to authorial distortion, especially as Room 237 is pretty much about differing interpretations. It’s also a beautifully edited work which even, in its best moments, creates an ominous atmosphere in keeping with the tone of its subject matter (The Shining for those who haven’t yet enjoyed it). It was easily one of the highlights of the 2012 London Film Festival, and I’m looking forward to seeing it again, but does that mean I should make it my pick of the year?

Of course, The Imposter is another film about interpretation of reality, though I don’t want to say too much about that for fear of spoiling some of its most delightfully shocking moments. Very little else this year has made me gasp in amazement as loudly as this, both during the movie and at the end, when I realised that the excellent score was by an acquaintance who I met when she was about to embark on her career scoring films. Though I’ve seen interesting Twitter interpretations of Bart Layton’s movie — both in terms of meaning and execution — by Mike D’Angelo and Geoff LaTulippe that have transformed my initial enthusiasm into doubt, I still regard this film incredibly highly. Some might not like how he manipulates the audience, but even taking into account my usual concerns over veracity and dramatisation it was an unforgettable experience at the time. I can’t deny that the showmanship of both Layton and the subject, Frédéric Bourdin, left me breathless.

Which was also what The Queen of Versailles managed too, but not in a particularly pleasurable way. Much as I don’t want to succumb to the reflexive class-warfare fury that I carry within myself like a briefcase full of bees, every so often you hear something about the rich that makes it almost impossible. Be it a story about executive bonuses, cruelty against underpaid employees, erosion of workers’ rights, or profligate and wasteful expenditure on extravagant and useless fripperies, I will allow myself an expletive-splurge and then try to move on without thinking that this human race is fucked, and the oncoming post-apocalyptic reboot might be a good thing.

So you can imagine that The Queen of Versailles was simultaneously very very hard to endure while also being a chance to totally indulge in frothing, screaming, ferocious anger; a Hundred-Minute Hate that I barely survived. Lauren Greenfield stumbled upon what could be The Story Of Our Age, a tale of hubris and disgusting lack of empathy, arrogance and cruelty and the price of the justice that the angriest of us pray for. This tale of the Siegel family shows them as vile, thoughtless parasites but also as recognisably flawed humans, greedy but lost, giving an extra dimension to the 2D villains we conjure up in our heads when we think of the rich and powerful.

And yet despite this skillfully rendered picture of the 1%, I still loathed them, even when I understood them, even when I thought, “Their loss is experienced by their employees a thousand-fold and I shouldn’t hope for their failure”, even when I realised they’re just the tip of an enormous Botox-filled iceberg and there are so many other dysfunctional, grasping, clueless rich scumbags in the world, happily throwing the rest of us into a landfill site in order to justify their comfort. No other movie has made me futilely scream so many epithets at the screen. Good job I watched it at home; if I’d seen it in public I would’ve been arrested for inciting a riot. These fucking assholes!

So which is my favourite of these movies? Probably The House I Live In by Nicholas Jarecki. Okay, I haven’t seen it yet, even though it was on BBC4 a few days ago (I love you, BBC’s Storyville, you’re the best thing in the world), but in the interests of resolving a tie-breaker, and in possibly supporting what would otherwise have been a confusing metaphor by Quentin Tarantino when discussing his Golden Globe Award for Best Screenplay, it’ll do. Next year hopefully I’ll see some actually bad documentaries, because right now they’re such a novelty to me I have very little understanding of what makes them work or not work, which makes it hard to talk about them objectively.

Okay, my next Listmania! entry is a bit of a grumpy one, and much of it rests on my frustration with not only the cinematic output of 2012, but also my relationship with the online critical consensus, and the war that rages within me as I attempt to figure out how to tell a story by looking at the efforts of others. Please bear with me as I try to work this confusing introspective shit out.

Listmania ’12: Performances Of The Year

Posted on January 8, 2013 by admiralneck

For regular visitors to the Land of Caruso-Shades the realisation that Listmania! isn’t even halfway over yet won’t be too much of a surprise, but for everyone else who stumbles across this, I’ll wager the emotion is something akin to what it would be like if your soul wanted to vomit ectoplasm. Listmania! never ends! As soon as I finish the next ::checks WordPress dashboard:: ::winces:: three to four posts I’ll be thinking about the next series of Listmania! posts, wondering if the movies I see at the start of 2013 will still impress me by the end (fyi The Grey was one of the first films I saw in 2012 and I was still in love with it twelve months later. Good work, @Carnojoe.)

Of course this list took longer to do than I’d planned, as we were catching up on movies I’d wanted to watch for the main lists. Django! Zero Dark Thirty! The Paperboy! And two of them were very good, while one of them was… ::thousand-yard stare::, but whaddayaknow, I was right to put Avengers at the top of the best list. I honestly thought Django would easily beat it but to do that it would also have to beat Inglourious Basterds, and it doesn’t, at all, and I should have realised that because Basterds is a goddamn masterpiece. I liked Django all right but I didn’t flip for it, even despite the righteous carnage inflicted upon Whitey by the brilliantly realised hero.

In fact I think I liked Zero Dark Thirty more, which I didn’t expect. And yet even that wasn’t better than The Avengers. Yes, Jessica Chastain is very impressive and Kathryn Bigelow’s direction is forensically precise and admirable, and the entire cast is fantastic, full of SoC favourites from supernaturally charismatic Jason Clarke to Chris Pratt (utterly incapable of not giving a funny spin to every line) to Kyle Chandler and his Parted-Hair-of-Efficient-Bureaucracy, but it doesn’t feature the God of Thunder holding his arm out for a scarily long time, summoning Mjolnir through a flying helicarrier’s wall, and then twatting the Hulk with it. Nothing tops that.

Okay, here are the performances of the year, both good, bad and miscellaneous. I’ve spent way longer than usual on this but as ever I just know I’ve forgotten something. Sorry, whoever you were that I loved / hated. Quick caveat, as ever! When I say “Worst Performance” that is meant to direct my ire at the work in this performance alone, and is not a value judgement on them in general. Some of the people on those lists are actors / actresses I really like, but they were poorly directed or made poor choices and ruined or negatively affected the movie they were in. I’m sure they will understand.

Best Performance by an Actress: Marion Cotillard – Rust and Bone

Honorable Mentions:

Jennifer Lawrence – The Hunger Games

Andrea Riseborough – Shadow Dancer

Meryl Streep – Hope Springs

Emmanuelle Riva – Amour

Anna Kendrick – Pitch Perfect

Best Performance by an Actor: Joaquin Phoenix – The Master

Honorable Mentions:

Liam Neeson – The Grey

Denis Lavant – Holy Motors

Toby Jones – Berberian Sound Studio

Michael Fassbender - Prometheus

Tommy Lee Jones – Hope Springs

Best Supporting Performance by an Actress: Dame Judi Dench – Skyfall

Honorable Mentions:

Doona Bae (as Sonmi-451) – Cloud Atlas

Olivia Thirlby – Dredd

Linda Bright Clay – Seven Psychopaths

Mia Wasikowska – Lawless

Ann Dowd - Compliance

Best Supporting Performance by an Actor: Christopher Walken – Seven Psychopaths

Honorable Mentions:

Michael Shannon – Premium Rush

Leonardo DiCaprio – Django Unchained

James Gandolfini – Killing Them Softly

Philip Seymour Hoffman – The Master

Gary Oldman – The Dark Knight Rises

Most Likable Ensemble Cast: The Avengers

Best Individual Voice Work: Hugh Grant – The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists

Best Voice Cast/Direction: Chris Fell / Sam Fell – ParaNorman

Breakthrough Performance by an Actress: Quvenzhané Wallis - Beasts of the Southern Wild

Breakthrough Performance by an Actor: Ernst Umhauer – Dans La Maison

Best Performance by a Singer (Female): Kylie Minogue - Holy Motors

Best Performance by a Singer (Male): Tom Waits – Seven Psychopaths

Best Performance by a Film Director: Werner Herzog – Jack Reacher

Best Cameo: Harry Dean Stanton – The Avengers

Honorable Mention: Vincent Gallo – 2 Days in Paris

Franchise-Saviour of the Year: Josh Brolin – Men in Black III

Best Recasting of the Year: Edward Norton (a not-quite-convincing Bruce Banner in The Incredible Hulk) becomes Mark Ruffalo (charming but dark, funny but tragic; the definitive Bruce Banner, in The Avengers)

Most Improved Performance Of The Year, Which Isn’t A Surprise As He Was Working With David Cronenberg And He’s Never Made A Movie That Didn’t Have An Excellent Lead Performance: Robert Pattinson – Cosmopolis

“I Think You Should Work Exclusively With The Wachowskis And / Or Tom Tykwer From Now On Because They Made You Raise Your Game 1000% For This” Performances of the Year: Halle Berry (as Luisa Rey and Meronym) – Cloud Atlas

Best Performance That Doesn’t Really Match The Tone Of The Film, Thus Leading To A Weird, Discombobulating Effect Where You Think, “This Is Really Good But I Kinda Hate It”: Tom Cruise - Rock of Ages

“See? I Told You He Could Act, But I Still Kept Getting Pushback Even After I Said He Was Amazing In The Lincoln Lawyer And Bernie Which, I Get It, Nobody Saw, But Now This Year Everyone’s Acting Like They Always Liked Him And I Call Bullshit On That, Cuz I Have A Very Long Memory For Shit Like This, You Have No Idea, So Don’t Come Around Here Acting Like You’re His Biggest Fan When He Starts Getting Oscar Buzz For Jeff Nichols’ Mud, I’m Fucking Serious” Performances of the Year: Matthew McConaughey - Magic Mike / Killer Joe / The Paperboy

“You’re So Much More Interesting As An Actor When You’re Not Just Shrieking ‘OPTIMUUUUUUUUS’ At A Gaffer Holding A Cardboard Cut-Out Of A Big Robot” Performance Of The Year – Shia LaBoeuf – Lawless

“You’re So Much More Interesting As An Actress When You’re Not Having To Wastefully Bounce Your Personality Off A Charisma Tar-Pit Like Gerard Butler And You Get To Work With A Director / Writer Who Trusts You And Gives You Funny Material” Performance Of The Year – Jennifer Aniston – Wanderlust

Honorary McConaughey Award For Being So Much Better Than People Give Him Credit For, Especially In This: Seann William Scott – Goon

“I Really Hope You Get To Have The Career My Hero Chiwetel Ejiofor Almost Got Before Ending Up Playing Second Fiddle To Actors Significantly Less Talented And Appealing Than Him Because Dammit, You’re Just As Good” Performances of the Year: David Oyelowo – Jack Reacher / The Paperboy (and Lincoln and Red Tails, which I haven’t seen yet)

“Good Work Making This Undistinguished Movie Seem Better Than It Was, But I Do Hope You Get To Diversify Soon Because Even Though This Incremental Step Away From Your Stock Character Is A Promising Move You Need To Really Push It Now, IMO, Or You’ll End Up Like Ken Jeong, Just Doing The Same Thing Over And Over Again, And Look Where That Got Him, I Mean He’s Been In Two Michael Bay Movies In A Row, And I Don’t Think That’ll Ever Happen To You, Because Bay Only Ever Recognises Women If They’ve Been In Their Smalls In FHM, But Something Similarly Restrictive Might Happen, And We Don’t Want That” Performance of the Year: Aubrey Plaza – Safety Not Guaranteed

Scenestealing Actress of the Year: Anne Hathaway - The Dark Knight Rises

Scenestealing Actor of the Year: Bill Nighy – Wrath of the Titans

Best Career Moves of the Year (Actress): Marion Cotillard - The Dark Knight Rises / Rust and Bone

Honorable Mention: Emily Blunt - Looper / Your Sister’s Sister (and less so, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen / The Five-Year Engagement)

Best Career Moves of the Year (Actor): Channing Tatum - Magic Mike / The Vow / Haywire / 21 Jump Street

Honorable Mention: Scoot McNairy - Argo / Killing Them Softly

Worst Performance by an Actress: Rosamund Pike – Jack Reacher

Dishonorable Mentions:

Julia Roberts - Mirror, Mirror

Reece Witherspoon – This Means War

Jennifer Westfeldt – Friends With Kids

Milla Jovovich – Resident Evil: Retribution

Katherine Heigl - One For The Money

Worst Performance by an Actor: Tyler Perry – Alex Cross

Dishonorable Mentions:

Ben Stiller – The Watch

Chris Pine – This Means War

John Cusack – The Raven

Ryan Reynolds – Safe House

Adam Scott – Friends With Kids

Worst Supporting Performance by an Actress: Chelsea Handler – This Means War

Dishonorable Mentions:

Alice Eve – The Raven

Elizabeth Banks – What To Expect When You’re Expecting

Rebel Wilson – Pitch Perfect

Famke Janssen – Taken 2

Eva Green – Dark Shadows

Worst Supporting Performance by an Actor: Vince Vaughn – The Watch

Dishonorable Mentions:

Ed Burns – Alex Cross

Dev Patel – The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

Ben Mendelsohn – The Dark Knight Rises

Rhys Ifans - The Five-Year Engagement

Luke Evans – The Raven

Least Likeable Ensemble Cast: Project X

Worst Individual Voice Work: Ed Helms – The Lorax

Worst Voice Cast /Direction: Chris Renaud / Kyle Balda – The Lorax (Bonus fuck-you’s for video linked to Mazda’s YouTube account)

Franchise-Doomer of the Year: Taylor Kitsch – John Carter / Battleship

Worst Performance by a Singer (Female): Macy Gray – The Paperboy

Worst Performance by a Singer (Male): Ben Drew (aka Planb, whatever the hell that means) – The Sweeney

Worst Performance by a Film Director: Seth McFarlane – Ted

Worst Cameo: Chuck Norris - The Expendables 2

Most Wasted Actress: Naomie Harris - Skyfall

Most Wasted Actor: Brendan Gleeson - Safe House / The Raven

Most Entertaining Performance by an Actress in a Bad Movie: Erika Sawajiri – Helter Skelter

Honorable Mention: Rosemary DeWitt – The Watch

Most Entertaining Performance by an Actor in a Bad Movie: Nicolas Cage – Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance

Honorable Mention: Will Forte – The Watch

Most Bafflingly Busy Actress of the Year: Maggie Grace (Taken 2 / Lockout / The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2)

Most Bafflingly Busy Actor of the Year: Mark Duplass (Safety Not Guaranteed / People Like Us / Your Sister’s Sister / Zero Dark Thirty)

Oddest Recasting Of The Year, As I Didn’t Know They Had Hair Dye In The Greece Of Ancient Myth: Andromeda in Clash of the Titans (played by brunette Alexa Davalos) becomes Andromeda in Wrath of the Titans (blonde Rosamund Pike)

Best Accent: Emily Blunt – Looper

Worst Accent: Alison Brie – The Five-Year Engagement

Worst Accent in Cloud Atlas: Tom Hanks (as Dermot Huggins) - Cloud Atlas

Dishonorable Mention: Jim Sturgess (as “Highlander”) - Cloud Atlas

Other Dishonorable Mentions: Seriously, we could be here all day – Cloud Atlas

Most Offensive Accent / Dodgy Impersonation Of Peter Sellers In The Party: Dev Patel – The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

“Why Australian?” Accent: Quentin Tarantino – Django Unchained

Most Incomprehensible Cast: The Expendables 2

Dishonorable Mention: Lockout (solely due to the presence of Joe Gilgun)

“Where Have You Been?” Actor of the Year: R. Lee Ermey - The Watch

Best Performance By Hott Sam Rockwell: Seven Psychopaths

Best Performance By Bruce Willis: Moonrise Kingdom

Worst Performance By Bruce Willis: The Cold Light of Day

Best Performance By A Chin: Karl Urban – Dredd

Good Enough Performance That I Now Have To Forget My Usual Antipathy, Without Which I Feel A Bit Lost: Jim Sturgess (as Adam Ewing and Hae-Joo Chang) – Cloud Atlas

“Okay, Everybody Loves You Again Now, So Don’t Fuck It Up This Time” Performance of the Year: Jamie Foxx – Django Unchained

“More Of This And Less Of This, Please” Actress of the Year: Jessica Biel (More dramas like The Tall Man where she gets to challenge herself, less formulaic actioners like Total Recall which require her to do precisely nothing except be rescued by the male protagonist over and over again.)

“More Of This And Less Of This, Please” Actor of the Year: Chris Rock (More actual attempts at creating a character — or excellent beard growth, whichever makes you happier — in movies like 2 Days in New York, less paycheck-cashing in offensive dogshit like What To Expect When You’re Expecting.)

Hammiest Performance By Michael Sheen: The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part Two

Hammiest Performance By Charlize Theron: Snow White and the Huntsman

Hammiest Performance By Russell Crowe: The Man With The Iron Fists

Hammiest Performance By Nicole Kidman: The Paperboy

Next up: crew contributions of the year. I’m hesitantly predicting we’re past the halfway mark, and it’s not February yet. This is progress.

Listmania ’12! The Worst Movies Of The Year

Posted on January 3, 2013 by admiralneck

Rather worryingly, it was a lot easier to get this list up to thirty than the best movies list, and I even had to stop watching bad movies because otherwise I’d never have finished. There were so many candidates this year that I ended up having to force myself to kinda sorta like some of them just to get them out of contention. As I said in the Best Movies list, this has been a shaky year for me with movies. I found myself becoming very disillusioned with the medium at one point, possibly because I’ve been writing and have found my patience for over-familiar storytelling tricks waning. It has caused much brow-furrowing, and as anyone who has met me knows, I have a lot of brow to furrow.

An important thing I want to say before I get into this. A lot of internet debate this year has concerned the politics of popular art (or maybe it’s always like this and I only just started following the people who talk about it the most). Much of it has been fascinating and illuminating, shaping the way I understand the responsibilities of storytellers, to the point that even more than in previous years I now respond very strongly to negative portrayals of women, persons of colour, members of the LGBT community, or anyone differently abled. However, one thing hasn’t changed, and that’s that I come to these movies as someone interested in the mechanics of story first. Some readers may think I should do it the other way around, but this is how I’m built, how I’ve been doing this for years, and it’s the approach that suits my (privileged white male) outlook the best.

Which is not to say I don’t care about such matters; I do, very much. However, I’ll always watch a film for the film first, and deal with the rest later, mostly because I’m more confident in assessing something through the storytelling lens than the political one, as I’ve been thinking as a storyteller for a lot longer than I have as an analyst of political messages (and I’m always going to be in the process of learning more about both). If a film does interesting or worthy things on a story level, I won’t automatically ignore or excuse its political problems; my praise will be tempered, but I’ll still feel compelled to commend what works.

For example, Jack Reacher has massive problems in how it treats women, which made me livid, but in terms of directorial approach and storytelling tricksiness I loved it, so I’m on the fence about it. Only when we become fixated on binary love/hate reactions would such a thing be a problem, but I’ve always tried to see films as an aggregation of different variables, so I can like something for one reason, hate it for another. The truncated nature of social media, and the subsequent removal of nuance, means it often feels like no one does that any more, though I’m sure I’m wrong on that one. Right?

As for the movies on this list, they’re here because I think they failed on a storytelling or artistic level, and all deserve to be here for that reason alone, but the top ten especially seemed to fill up very quickly with movies that committed both crimes against storytelling and people. I will inevitably come across as a humourless, overthinking, fun-averse chide during this post, but as I wrote it I realised how angry some of these films made me, so my usual chirpiness vanished. This is where trying to have an open mind gets me; watching everything in the hope that I’ll find a misunderstood gem means I have to wade through an ocean of fecal matter to get the odd gem.

Anyway, apologies for the traditional caveats. Two more quick ones before I get into it: sadly I haven’t seen Atlas Shrugged Part 2 in time for this, which is a shame as it’s supposed to be worse than the first one and that topped last year’s list with ease. This is the Bad Movie List equivalent of not seeing Django Unchained or Zero Dark Thirty before finishing the Good Movie List. Also, please don’t be offended by any selections here that you liked. Nothing here is meant as a judgement on anyone other than the people who made the films, and even then their failure is often the result of a badly-tossed coin rather than anything more worrisome. If you liked any of the movies here, then it fit your Criteria For Success, as I’ve taken to calling it, which is obviously fine as no two people have the same ones. And that’s cool. These just really weren’t for me, and that means nothing in the scheme of things. Though really, number two in this list is just flat-out fucking horrible.

25. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part Two

It wouldn’t be a worst of the year list if it didn’t include a Twilight movie at some point, though from next year onwards Shades of Caruso will have to figure out a way to cope without our least favourite supernatural bores. Our long, international ordeal is over. Bella and Edward are together, like they were pretty early on in the first film and continued to be for the majority of the series; a perfect example of that depressing narrative stasis I’ve been complaining about for half a decade. So, considering how high these films have been on each year’s worst list, why is this at no. 25 and not, say, no. 1, like when Return of the King won all those Oscars? Because this one was actually sporadically entertaining, with a bit more Michael Sheen than usual, a crazy mid-movie sequence involving some hastily introduced story-padding vampire eccentrics, one undead ghoul with the brilliant super-power of “PARALYSING VAPOURS” which made me laugh for a week, and a fantastic big finale fight that left me reeling with shock. But in that case, I hear you cry, why is it on the list if you liked it so much? Because of one choice made right at the end that invalidates everything that has happened, meaning that once more we get absolutely no narrative progression at all. It’s two hours of waiting for something to happen, only for that thing not to happen. The book contains no dramatic impetus and the only way the movie can get around that is by lying to the audience. It’s a very entertaining lie, but it’s still unacceptable. Goodbye. Twilight, thanks for the laughs. But I won’t miss you. Not really.

24. [REC]³ Génesis

Since Evil Dead 2 a lot of horror comedies have hewed to a very familiar template; while Kevin Williamson, Joss Whedon, Drew Goddard, and Robert Rodriguez have tried to break open the genre to figure out how it works, most filmmakers have been content to mimic Raimi’s groundbreaking work by throwing some monsters at a group of protagonists in order for them to be dispatched in as grisly a way as possible. It’s the easiest kind of transgressive cinema, with slapstick taken to the logical, unpleasant extreme; tread on a rake in one of these films and your head will fly off and land in a nun’s lap, probably. The third in the [Rec] series eschews the intensity of the previous installments in favour of laughs; a promising way to inject new life into a franchise that was finding it hard to maintain its found footage format. Sadly the result is an underpowered and overfamiliar gross-out comedy that often resembles the execrable Torchwood episode Something Borrowed, itself guilty of mimicking Raimi’s horror-comedy landmark. Juxtaposing the horror of a demonic zombie plague with a wedding ceremony sounds promising but instead all we get is some depressing wacky hijinks from some of the guests and a bit of unimaginative gore. Less scary than Lamberto Bava’s Demons, to which it bears passing resemblance, and disappointingly low on laughs, this might only be as underwhelming as every other horror comedy clogging up the shelves, but considering the pedigree, and the damage it might do to the integrity of the ongoing [Rec] saga, it’s especially annoying. Let’s hope [Rec]: Apocalypse gets the franchise back on track.

23. The Five-Year Engagement

Many of the films on this list are by writers and directors with previous form. If you haven’t looked further down the list you’ll see that some of Shades of Caruso’s many bêtes noire are coming up. More depressingly, then there are misfires by people we like, and these entries are no fun to write. Nicholas Stoller and Jason Segel have, between them, been responsible for three films we think of very fondly; Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Get Him To The Greek and The Muppets are a big deal in SoC HQ. You can imagine how excited we were when we heard they were collaborating again, this time on what they trumpeted as the ultimate romantic comedy. They studied the classics, they analysed the conventions, they stuck to the rules, and yet this is what we got; two hours of contrived stasis, with a malfunctioning and unconvincing premise as its spine. And where were the jokes? Even the Reality-Bending Charisma Storm that is Emily Blunt (future Monarch of the post-apocalyptic Human Alliance of Planets; you heard it here first) can do nothing here other than make you wince in horror at the indignities poured upon her. It’s rote, it’s mechanical, it’s absurdly drawn-out, much like the titular engagement. Only a spirited final scene registers in the memory, but what a slog to get there. God knows what it was like before the reshoots that occurred before release. What should have been one of the best examples in this genre has turned out to be one of the worst; a how-to manual that unexpectedly ends up showing future storytellers how-not-to instead.

22. Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance

How to disappoint Shades of Caruso part 2. When I heard that Neveldine / Taylor were going to make a sequel to Ghost Rider – one of our favourite bad movie indulgences – I was thrilled. With money and support there was a chance that their chaotic and ballsy visual approach would yield dividends, a suspicion bolstered by a trailer showing Johnny Blaze pissing fire. This was what we wanted; some honest-to-god madness, and none of Mark Steven Johnson’s hesitance. But again, this weirdness of this character defied the attempt to translate him / it to a new medium. Neveldine / Taylor’s madness only really works when the stakes in their movies don’t matter. We don’t give really give a shit about Chev Chelios’ survival, except that his death would mean the end of the movie. As N / T don’t care either, and are only interested in throwing more random imagery at the camera in the weirdest ways possible, it works. But Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance has a sympathetic protagonist and attempts to create a goal for him to achieve, people to protect. Fine, except that this ends up feeling like scenes from two movies shuffled together, and we see how hollow it truly their approach is. N / T don’t know how to make us care, but even worse they don’t seem to realise that they’re meant to. The result is truly disheartening, and hints that early suspicions about N / T are true; they don’t actually know what they’re doing. It’s on them to prove me wrong. This boring, ugly mess is not the way to go about it. That said, my main men Cage and DJ Big Driis are awesome in it, at least.

21. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

Movies set in India tend to make me nervous, with Western filmmakers treating the country like some kind of magical spiritual wonderland. I blame The Beatles. Slumdog Millionaire annoyed me for its flaws as a film, more than anything, and Darjeeling Limited walked a fine line, falling mostly on the side of satirising the idiocy and ignorance of its rich protagonists rather than making some patronising argument about the virtues of the country. Eat, Pray, Love‘s trivialisation of issues like poverty and depression, on the other hand, were unforgivable, and while watching Best Exotic Marigold Hotel I held onto the thin argument that at least John Madden and Ol Parker’s adaptation of Deborah Moggach’s novel wasn’t as clueless as that. But the depiction of the honest poor of India is still wince-inducing and overly sincere, most horribly seen in Dev Patel’s gallumphing performance as the cowering simpleton running the old folk’s home. Even worse is the pandering, shallow guff about living life to the full even when old, reducing the characters to two-dimensions, their arc a binary switch which will be flicked during the final act in a tornado of predictable uplift. The cast contains many of my favourite actors, doing their best with the weak source material, but compared to Hope Springs, which dealt with the complications of old age in a more sensitive and measured way, this comes across as just yet another mechanical British movie about overcoming adversity, devoid of genuine warmth and humanity despite the great performances from almost everyone involved.

20. Taken 2

The first Taken was one of the most surprising box office hits of recent years. Why this movie? Films about action men killing swarthy foreigners are a dime a dozen and have been for years. Liam Neeson wasn’t a huge box office draw, and neither was Maggie Grace. It didn’t have anything that seemed to be a hook and yet it made $145m in the US. The uncharitable reading is that it appealed to an undercurrent of xenophobia in a sub-section of the populace, but thanks to Pierre Morel’s taut direction it is at least, for all its faults, a compelling action movie, and Neeson’s re-emergence as an action hero makes a lot of sense as the film powers towards its conclusion. So how to explain Taken 2‘s popularity? This time let’s chalk it up to familiarity with the format, and the now-justified position of Neeson as box office powerhouse, because this doesn’t even have competence as a variable. Morel did wonders with Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen’s traditionally tin-eared dialogue and threadbare plotting, but Oliver Megaton is unable to bring anything to the table other than straight-to-DVD-level mundanity and brain-scrambling editing used to hide the thin, unappealing footage. Without lizard-brain appeal this franchise’s shortcomings are laid horribly bare, and Neeson and villainous Rade Sherbedzija, both men with inbuilt gravitas, can do nothing to save it. Back in the day we had Silver Pictures to churn out a series of cheap but wry and appealing action movies; Besson and Kamen should stay in and watch a bunch of them one weekend to see how high the bar is really set.

19. One For The Money

Funny that this came out at the beginning of the year, and Jack Reacher came out at the end. Both are about characters in popular novels, both were turned into star vehicles by actors who desperately needed a new tentpole franchise to call their own, both were rejected by the fans as entirely wrong for the part. And yet, while Jack Reacher is made with care and attention to detail – while preserving the worst and most beloved aspects of its source material – One For The Money is one of the laziest films in recent memory. It all hinges on Katherine Heigl’s charms, and if you’re resistant then this is a tough slog, but to be fair her spiky personality is better matched with protagonist Stephanie Plum’s brassy NJ persona than fans of Janet Evanovitch’s novel would accept. Sadly Heigl struggles to inject any life into this still-born project, which neither amuses or excites. On top of that there’s a tedious romantic subplot that makes the recent atrocious The Bounty Hunter look like a Hepburn / Tracy classic. If this mini-review seems to lack detail that’s because this eminently forgettable film left my mind within minutes of the credits rolling. All I can recall with full confidence is that 90 minutes felt like 16 hours, and the only thing I got from it was a rage headache at all that wasted time.

18. Snow White and the Huntsman

As if we didn’t already have enough reason to hate Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, still the most maddening piece of cultural vandalism that this blog has seen in its time on the net. Its incredible, baffling success means “fairy tales” are in, triggering the genesis of Jack The Giant Killer and Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters. ::pauses to sigh wearily:: It also gave us two Snow White movies. Mirror, Mirror is merely a leaden star vehicle for Julia Roberts, with Tarsem’s usual visual business curiously lacking in oomph this time around. Rupert Sanders’ Huntsman, on the other hand, is one of the more depressing films of the summer, finding its own success despite offering nothing but a listless mishmash of tones in search of a unifying idea. It’s got a bit of Twilight, not just in the casting of Kristen Stewart as Bella Swan with a sword, but also the love triangle between her, the Prince of the original tale and the Huntsman who searches for her, his role in the tale beefed up past breaking point. It’s got lots of Lord of the Rings too, not realising that expanding the original Grimm tale with courtly drama and big action scenes means empty spectacle without a complex and well-imagined world to build on. There’s even some faux-Miyazaki stuff about the spirit of the forest lifted almost directly from Princess Mononoke. But this is no light-footed genre mish-mash. It’s just the lining of a magpie’s nest, shot like an advert by a man who doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing, with only an over-thought, noted-to-death script as a guide. The dead-end of the genre; next to this even mad shit from the 80s like Hawk The Slayer looks visionary.

17. Take This Waltz

Sarah Polley’s second movie may not have won as many critical plaudits as her first movie — Away From Her — but it still got multiple award nominations and festival raves. Certainly Polley does something very welcome in taking on a thorny subject with a refreshingly non-judgemental approach, detailing the slow and regrettable dissolution of a marriage as the protagonist, Margot, makes a choice to take control of her life and allow herself to fall for another man. Affairs in films are usually used to make “slut-shaming” judgements on women for their wanton ways, so Polley’s decision to make this choice an empowering one for Margot is commendable. However, to do this means we get a full 90 minutes walking on the spot as Margot, played as a cutesy child-woman by Michelle Williams, agonises over her choice in scene after scene of overplayed, near-unwatchable stasis, eroding the sympathy of any audience member with a low-threshold for meandering storytelling. Take This Waltz spends so much time justifying Margot’s choice, clearing her of any possible audience negativity, that the whole film seems like a defensive argument, blunting the drama of her choices and making her seem more a fool for taking so long than a brave woman taking control of her destiny. It leads to a lopsided film that lacks the courage of its convictions, made worse by its unbearable mopey characters and their self-consciously twee behavior; to endure Luke Kirby’s drawn-out-beyond-the-limits-of-endurance café seduction scene is to know burning, soul-deep agony.

16. What To Expect When You’re Expecting

The thought that movies are being made of pregnancy guides and relationship advice manuals has caused much hilarity and/or despair among the critical community, but as I argued in this review of Battleship, it doesn’t really matter where you find your inspiration from as long as the end product is worthwhile. This is not worthwhile. Using a similar structure to Garry Marshall’s Valentines Day / New Year’s Eve ensemble pieces, WTEWYE addresses a number of different scenarios involving childbirth, from adoption to miscarriage to the long road to birth, but while the book offers advice and tips on how to cope, this has nothing but cheap jokes, clumsy slapstick, and a strange balance in which there seems to be more time spent dealing with how the fathers will cope than the mothers, who are only really present to be hysterical. That’s not its main crime, and neither is the depiction of one character’s miscarriage, which is as movie-convenient and insultingly sugar-coated as you’d imagine in a light comedy. The true horror comes when J-Lo’s childlessness triggers a tearful rant during which she says of herself, “I’m the one who can’t do the one thing that a woman is supposed to be able to do.” Yes. The one thing — THE ONE THING — that a woman is supposed to do. Of all the things I saw in 2012, that probably generated the most vocal reaction of disgust. Good job I didn’t see it in a cinema, or I’d have gone Shoshanna Dreyfus on the building.

15. Intouchables

Kicking this feel-good movie about a paraplegic and his carer feels like torturing a puppy, but sometimes needs must. While sincerity in films is a big plus point as far as we’re concerned, when it tips over into oleaginous sentimentality we close the door and never look back. Olivier Nakache and Éric Toledano’s dramatisation of their documentary A la vie, à la mort looks like it’s on solid ground, transcribing reality into life-affirming cinema, but once separated from reality the temptation to coat this tale in sugar seems to have been irresistible. Much of the movie is spent presenting Philippe’s depression as being easily cured by the intervention of Driss, but this eagerness to show the efficacy of all that dancing and lovable hamminess from Omar Sy means the film is dangerously lopsided, and the second act crisis – in which Driss quits for plot convenience – is so feeble they might as well have not bothered. It’s inert on a dramatic level and cutesy to an intolerable degree; two terrible strikes against it. But then we have the deeply questionable decision to change the real life carer – an Algerian – to an African who is pathologically lazy and thoughtless. So we have the stereotype of the lazy black man transformed by the benevolence and friendship of the cultured and affluent white male, compounded by the also-included trope of the square middle-class guy learning to live life thanks to a Magical Negro. And France chose this as their Foreign Language Academy Award nominee instead of the far-superior Rust and Bone? FFS.

14. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

There are two ways to make a movie based on a gimmicky idea like Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter; make a dumb joke out of it or go serious. Comedy would be an insult to the people who fought and died in the Civil War and the fight against slavery, so you don’t want to do that. Of course, pretending that it was vampires that almost split America down the middle, and caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people is also an insult to the people who fought and died in the Civil War and the fight against slavery, but Seth Grahame-Smith and Timur Bekmambetov seem to see no problem in trivialising the issue in this manner. Quentin Tarantino has received considerable flack for addressing slavery in the context of a Spaghetti Western homage but from all accounts he goes all out in depicting the horror of the South’s treatment of African-Americans, whereas this spectacularly misjudged debacle barely drew any criticism for saying, “yeah, the enslavement of over four million slaves by Americans was bad, but hell, it could have been vampires doing it.” SERIOUSLY, WHY WAS NO ONE BOTHERED BY THIS? Is it just because it’s a metaphorical use of vampires? Why bother doing that when the thought that humans would commit this crime is more potent than adding supernatural elements? This doesn’t illuminate the issue, or bring a new perspective to it. It just takes tragedy and turns it into an instantly forgettable Syfy-worthy one off, not even making up for its redundancy by being exciting, or funny, or even alive on screen. Now that I think about it, there’s actually a third way to tell this tale; don’t make a movie about it, just treat it as the mildly amusing idea for a Halloween costume that it actually is and leave it at that.

13. Dark Shadows

You can show me a hundred interviews with Tim Burton in which he claims that this adaptation of the quirky supernatural ABC soap opera is a dream project borne of his childhood love of the show, but that won’t make it seem any less like a movie Burton felt obligated to make, like he woke up one morning and said, “I guess it’s time to do that one,” before letting out a weary sigh and storyboarding the whole thing while his morning pot of coffee finished brewing (FYI he takes his coffee black because he’s a fucking Goth, you might have noticed). The realisation that this fantasy scenario might be accurate comes when you finally endure the desperately dreary movie and it occurs to you that Burton would have phoned his producer and sold it on the strength of the wacky sex scene, and his producer would have exclaimed, “Holy crap, I can see it now! Or rather, I can see the trailer!” And that’s because there’s nothing here we haven’t seen before. Dark Shadows is so perfunctory, so devoid of life or vibrancy, that it feels like you’ve already endured it before you have, but even then, with this dearth of imagination on display, you will still be astonished by the ill-thought-out plot that tries to mimic the soap opera format of the show by writing characters out after one or two key scenes — meaning the film never seems to settle down — or the seemingly endless first act in which Barnabas goes around the Collins household meeting people. Just meeting them. For, like, fifteen minutes. This isn’t cinema. It’s not even old TV. It’s just shit.

12. The Sweeney

While the James Bond franchise busies itself with the job of turning its out-of-date misogynistic asshole into a tortured, justifiably hateful shitbag we can all love – three dimensions of worthy but highly entertaining odiousness – this reboot of the beloved original doesn’t even bother to address the problematic 70s-era politically incorrect Jack-The-Lad hijinx, presenting it with no commentary as business as usual. Perhaps it should be commended for trying to remain faithful to its origins, but even to a target audience that has a Sweeney boxset at home and lectures its friends dahn the boozah abaht them PC wankahs will find this to be pretty thin gruel. Nick Love and co-writer John Hodge – yes, the man behind Trainspotting and Shallow Grave – do an unconvincing job of updating the original, taking a bunch of cliches and adding in the names “Carter” and “Regan” every so often, ladling in some excruciatingly dated banter about them birds and making sure the bad guy is a Serb for extra Guardian-baiting fun. Ian Kennedy Martin would likely look at this metallic blue machine and weep. Not even for a moment does this feel like anything other than a rote retelling of a million other stories, yet another cash-in, hoping to make some money from the kind of incurious twerp who thinks Garry Bushell is a man of insight and courage. Watching a cast this good (well, Damian Lewis, Hayley Atwell and Ray Winstone) swallow their pride is enough to make you pray for the British film industry to immolate itself; we’ve got the accelerant right here.

11. Friends With Kids

Anyone reading this list of the year’s most horrible movies could end up thinking that Shades of Caruso is populated by terrible prudes, what with all the necklace-clutching over those off-colour comedies. Nothing could be further from the truth, but considering the glut of adult comedies released into the post-Apatow world like cum-scented Kudzu, someone has to take a stand. This shift from numb acceptance to active annoyance occurred midway through Jennifer Westfeldt’s Friends With Kids, an off-putting adult comedy about a woman who decides to have a child with her platonic best friend. Westfeldt wrote Kissing Jessica Stein, which I recall was frank about sex and relationships but never became unpleasant. This, on the other hand, seems to be overly aggressive in its urge to shock the audience with swearing and “daring” jokes. This might be the kind of thing a prude would say, but the crime here is not to be offensive but to drive past the point of acceptability, beyond where transgression is funny, to end up in a place where the tone is uncomfortably, relentlessly sour. It’s bad enough that Westfeldt’s premise is so unbelievable; the protagonists decide to go through with their plan on what feels like a whim, and are then required to snottily dismiss everyone around them in a whirlwind of misanthropic complaints. None of it rings true, and the convenient final act muting of that inappropriate voice to show growth comes out of nowhere. I’m sure Westfeldt would cry foul if I said the crass dialogue spouted by her hateful characters was a cynical choice, but even so, it feels like she jumped on a bandwagon and tragically misjudged how far she could go before alienating the viewer.

10. The Expendables 2

Perhaps the worst thing about the Expendables franchise – and with the second installment making $300 million, it’s fair to say that this is a franchise, not an anomaly – is that the idea behind it is so compelling to a sub-section of film fandom, so ripe with promise, that the dreary first movie is especially disappointing. But that movie is like a peak-era Silver Pictures film compared to this, something that even Golan and Globus would consider dumping in a lake and never talking about again. Eschewing the poorly dramatised double- and treble-crosses of the first film, Simon West’s sluggish sequel relies solely on the goodwill of the audience to ignore the threadbare plot, the underwritten villain, the overly familiar scenarios and flatly-shot action scenes. Because look! It’s everyone’s favourite birther, Chuck Norris, slowly walking into shot and referring to himself as a Lone Wolf! And look! Arnie and Bruce swap catchphrases! “Will this do?” screams the film, as we cut once more to Stallone looking like his batteries are about to run out. Apparently it will, if it’s going to make this much money. Less a homage to the best of the genre, more an out-of-date nightmare mutated through the introduction of irradiated dollars into a lumbering beast crushing the genre underfoot. Don’t put a copy of this on your DVD/Blu-Ray shelf; your copies of Die Hard, Predator, Lethal Weapon, The Killer, First Blood, Demolition Man, The Last Boy Scout, 48 Hours, Con Air, The Rock – even Action Jackson – will jump down and beat you to death for the insult.

9. The Lorax

At the forefront of culture, where sentiment’s free,
There’s a well-meaning well-spring of sanctimony.
A clattering chatter of serious chaps
Come to warn us of doom; Eco-horror collapse!
And plastic doohickeys that suck out the soul
Of we miserable fools, our dead hearts black as coal.

“Oh woe, these poor dopes — grasping, ignorant saps
With their claptrap and waffle and counterfeit crap.
Don’t they see,” cry the men, their hands wringing in fear,
“What dire fate lies in wait if our cries they don’t hear?”
So they commenced their project, to adapt a great book,
Spent ALL OF THE DOLLARS, begged, “Please, you must look!”

And what did they give us? A veritable onslaught
Of ads and promotions, TV spots with a cohort
Of fabulous faces; An orgasmical sight!
Taylor Swift and Zac Efron! Ed Helms! Betty White!
And there’s Danny DeVito, who was chosen to play
The thing they call LORAX, nature’s orange Sensei.

The Lorax was unleashed but, a curious thing;
We heard rumblings and mumblings; “Oh this movie doth ming!
It’s so garish and ugly and much more than a tad
Hypocritical and lousy and vapid and bad.
We know that the future holds horrible trials
For our kids and our kids’ kids; We’re not in denial.

“Yet you treat us as if we’re all deaf, dumb, and blind,
Preaching ‘caring for nature makes you virtuous, kind.
And also buy Mazda! Our corporate sponsor who
Makes cars that don’t run on splut-splatter goo.
No no no, someone else commits those crooked acts.
Mazda’s cars run on wishes, fairy farts; check the facts!’

“We see through your flim-flam, this insult to the truth
You exploit to justify selling trash to our youth.
This far, no further! (Oh yes, we went there). No more, please!
Our next generation knows it’s gotta save trees.
Admit it, you made this because of the guilt
At the towering shower of turds you have built.”

“So now,” say the victims of this loud, joyless screech,
“To those midwives who birthed it, of you we beseech:
It’s time that you ended this endless abuse
Of beloved and gentle and saintly Doc Seuss.
UNLESS filmmakers like you give up making this rot,
Nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”

8. The Watch

As time passes you realise that big summer movies that work are as rare as hen’s teeth, or sober compositions in a Tom Hooper movie. This means you cherish the ones that work; Ghostbusters, Raiders, Back to the Future; they all look better now than ever, while the underpowered nature of a half-competent sequel like Men in Black 3 casts the inventive original in an even better light. Those were movies that sweated the details, polishing a promising idea, adding layers of detail to create an immersive world. The makers of The Watch figured you can just turn Invasion of the Body Snatchers into a bitter comedy about empowering under-achieving men and then pile on the popular actors until the jokes just spontaneously happen. Watching actors like Vaughan and Stiller – men who once showed up on set to do a job instead of sending life model decoys programmed with all of their previously endearing stock personality traits – go through the motions, unwilling to be prodded into life by their director Akiva Schaeffer, is this misfire’s most disheartening spectacle. Well, second most. Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, whose script work until now has been mostly very entertaining, do nothing to bring this 90-minute ad for Costco to life, choosing instead to turn it into another of their now patented meditations on male friendship, except without the insight or jokes or sincerity of their previous films, and betraying a lack of interest in the female worldview that limits their range. It’s tempting to say it couldn’t have been any lazier, but then I think, “They could have removed Richard Ayoade, Rosemary DeWitt and Will Forte from it,” and I realise that’s the version they play on a loop in Hell.

7. Resident Evil: Retribution

Notorious performance artist Armond White’s most provocative review of the year saw him denigrate Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master while praising Paul W.S Anderson’s latest installment of the Resident Evil franchise; how thrilled he must have been when he realised they were being released in the same week, thus giving him a hook for his latest exercise in peer-trolling. The sentence that betrays his lack of conviction is the last, where he says that RE: R “transforms a genre franchise with visionary newness,” suggesting that he wrote the review without even seeing it. Because this is the total opposite of new or visionary. As with all of PWSA’s films, RE: R is a compilation of moments from other films that he remembers, transcribed with low-budget creakiness, cobbled together into a barely coherent and emotionally empty collage, but without the enthusiasm or glowing adoration of Tarantino’s genre pastiches. It’s just another money-maker from a man with no urge to innovate or communicate a point, and while SoC is happy to watch unambitious B-movies, PWSA’s cynicism and lack of imagination is especially dispiriting. This is perfect for anyone who enjoys watching Milla Jovovich, wearing her “Determined Face” expression, yet again posing stiffly in front of a green screen with co-stars who mechanically utter characterless exposition, safe in the knowledge that they don’t have to go to the trouble of making the cyphers they’re playing come to any recognisable kind of life, while PWSA recycles not only shots from his other movies but from this one too; numerous action beats are replicated over and over again, almost defiantly rubbing the audience’s face in it. Here’s a sobering thought, though; considering the persistent, viral success of this franchise, perhaps games will spell the end for cinema, just not in the way we thought. (NB: Worth noting that this is the only film in the top ten that treats women as human beings, so massive, sincerely-meant kudos for that.)

6. The Devil Inside

If the case against Found Footage ever went to trial, the defence lawyers, with Blair Witch Project, [Rec], Paranormal Activity and Chronicle at their side, would weep with horror at their imminent defeat when the prosecution calls just this catastrophic failure into evidence. There are dozens of lazy exorcism movies out there, so William Brent Bell’s low energy home movie has company, but compared to a qualified success like Daniel Stamm’s The Last Exorcism, you realise just how little effort was put into this. Bad enough that the premise doesn’t even work logically – two rogue exorcists scared that their secret work will be revealed to the Vatican allow a documentary film crew to follow them around – and bad enough that the last 20 minutes of this 70-minute-long film are basically filled with people screaming incoherently at each other, the biggest insult is the incomplete finale that directs the viewer to a website that explains what happens next. Considering that the movie rests on the archaic and disgusting idea that the protagonist is being punished by the Devil for daring to have an abortion when it turns out her baby won’t carry to term, it’s probably not worth the effort of typing the URL which, let’s face it, is about as much effort as has been expended by the filmmakers. Unconvincing, cynical, histrionic, The Devil Inside single-handedly sets the horror genre back fifty years. And yet it made millions. Abandon hope, all ye who love horror films, and despair.

5. Act of Valor

This bare-bones actioner should be seen by everyone interested in cinema or storytelling, but not for the reasons the directors and writers would like. Famously shot originally as a video for the military, it was expanded into a film by Scott Waugh, Mouse McCoy and Kurt Johnstad with real soldiers playing the main characters. Well, I say characters, but basically they’re the equivalent of NPCs in a video game, holding guns and moving about the screen but doing very little in the way of coming across as sentient beings, with the two “protagonists” leaving me with the impression that one of them is called Steve, the other isn’t, and the only things they can say to each other is, “bland comment about family,” followed by “awkward laugh”. The comparison between this and games like Call of Duty has been made numerous times – after all it features a lot of POV shots from behind guns, and vapid quotations from military thinkers to add gravitas so they’re practically identical, right? — but games have plots. Oft-derided games like CoD at least have an emotional charge, much as critics would like to pretend they don’t. Sure, sometimes they don’t work but when they do they have compelling protagonists and antagonists, arcs and momentum and event and all of the things that good stories should. This has nothing other than a string of firefights and a threat to be vanquished. Act of Valor is How Not To Make Movies 101; indifferently-directed action wrapped around a hollow core, plus lazy sentiment replacing meaning. Even worse, despite the heavily-signposted death of Steve (or not-Steve, I couldn’t tell who was who), it still serves as an advert for the Navy. It’s the equivalent of a giant erection pointing at a bloodied corpse.

4. Ted

Credit to Seth McFarlane for coming up with this great idea — like a twisted version of AI in which David somehow grows up and gets stuck with a sociopathic Teddy — with which to explore the ways in which child-men resist the responsibilities of adulthood. It’s such a great visual, the man accompanied everywhere by the visual representation of his infantile attitude. Which makes McFarlane’s traditional lack of effort even more frustrating than usual. The man is a machine cranking out very basic material on an industrial basis, and thus Ted goes through the motions much like his irksome TV shows, except this time he can add profitable and fashionable R-rated jokes about sex to his repertoire, which usually just consists of pop-culture references and hastily tossed-off non-sequiturs. Getting into a discussion about what is and isn’t funny is a waste of time; I think McFarlane’s a one-note huckster, but he has passionate fans who would be annoyed at my dismissal of his work. I get that. But what makes Ted truly worthless, aside from the cracks about Muslims and “sluts”, and the obnoxious nods and winks he throws at the crowd to “excuse it all”, is that I don’t believe, not even for a femtosecond, that McFarlane means a thing in this film. Not the moral ending, in which the slacker hero gets everything — including a Hallmark-card lesson about responsibility that McFarlane figures constitutes an arc because he saw it in an Apatow movie — and his girlfriend gets nothing. Not his supposed love for Flash Gordon, which I bet he watched once before making this film, knowing that a section of the audience would respond favourably. Not even the filth. He just knows what makes a buck, and he shovels it into our faces without a second thought. He’s P.T. Barnum with dick jokes. If this guy’s really the cultural powerhouse he seems to be, then we need to find the reset button, and pronto.

3. This Means War

Remember Mr. and Mrs. Smith? That was a curious film. Kinda hateful, but with a central conceit that might have worked, with a few dozen rewrites and a complete change of cast and director. I don’t know how you’d go about getting it into full fighting shape but it’s conceivable. Now along comes This Means War, a film that treads in the same footsteps (and shares a writer in Simon Kinberg) in which relationship troubles are dramatised via the conventions of the espionage genre. That’s an unusually good match, the consequences of secrecy being the most compelling aspects of both kinds of story. It’s telling, then, that only James Cameron got close to getting it right with True Lies, but even then had that massively problematic middle act. Imagine an entire movie of that and you’ve got this… thing… from McG, a film in which we’re meant to root for two colossal fuckbags who manipulate and spy on the ditzy heroine, a film in which the only choice she gets to make is which of these maladjusted fratboy scumbags she will end up with. If Mr. and Mrs. Smith had some possibility of working out with some tweaking of the material, or the tone, or some goddamn thing, there’s nothing that could be done to save this vile mistake. It’s nasty, it’s devoid of jokes, it’s unexciting, it has no insight, no verve, no wit, no purpose other than to fill a gap in a studio’s release schedule and to further chip away at the possibility that women’s lot in life will ever improve; to watch it is to feel all hope of parity between the genders evaporate. Its other big crime? Surgically removing Tom Hardy’s continent-sized SuperMojo to prevent him rightly showing up everyone else in it. I suspect Christian Bale’s infamous Terminator: Salvation rant was an EMP that wiped all sense from McG; we’ll get nothing competent from him ever again.

2. Project X

The recent American elections saw a phrase enter the lexicon: The War on Women. Republicans eager to restrict the lives and opportunities of women by making it hard to get on in this world by removing their rights cynically refused to accept that their policies were motivated by a distrust or hatred of women, but the wave of bitterness coming from the Right was impossible to ignore. But then it’s no wonder legislators figured women were fair game. If there’s anything this list of the worst films shows, it’s that men still think it’s perfectly acceptable to treat women as baby-incubators or, in their teens, as a reward men deserve for being bold. Nima Nourizadeh’s Project X might pretend to be another film in a lineage including Porky’s, Animal House, American Pie and Superbad, but this isn’t fit to be mentioned in the same breath. Three nerdy teen boys hold the biggest teen party imaginable in the hopes of getting “pussy”. And they do. That’s the movie right there. The most odious teenagers ever committed to film are rewarded for their sociopathic disregard for everyone around them with the respect of their peers, the adoration of numerous mute naked girls, and barely any censure from the law. Only the ostensibly sympathetic protagonist is prosecuted, but that’s okay, because his dad secretly thinks he’s a bad ass and the virginal girl who he previously cuckolded with a “slut” (here punished for her sexual activity by being secretly filmed naked) still loves him and forgives him, but then she would, as she’s practically a dudebro so she’s okay. This was written by Michael Bacall, the guy who co-wrote 21 Jump Street and Scott Pilgrim? This was co-produced by Joel Silver? It’s by far the worst thing he has ever been involved with, a fuck you to half of the population of the world, a diseased window into the worst of what Western civilisation is. Everyone involved should be fucking ashamed of themselves, and forced to wear a scarlet A (for Asshole) on their chests.

1. Alex Cross

This blog’s Best of 2012 Movies list was topped not by the intellectually challenging movies we saw but by the one that made us happiest; a choice made necessary by a desire to honour the intensity of that joy. Let us carry that on into this list. Instead of placing one of the loathsome, misogynistic insults to humanity in the top spot — for surely Project X or This Means War would be right at home there — it only seems right to pick a bad movie that made me so happy, so sore from mocking laughter, that all I wanted to do was run around all the social networks quoting lines and posting clips and basically just worshipping at the altar of the most haphazard, clumsy, ugly and stupid movie since Madonna’s brilliantly dreadful W.E. In other words, Alex Cross is the perfect cinematic representation of James Patterson’s galactically monstrous novels, with its lead character — a grab-bag of contrived tics and dull virtue fighting to save the world from exhaustively-described maniacs who murder or violate every woman he loves — now brought to life not by Morgan Freeman, a man far too charismatic to embody this thinly-written void, but by his living equal; Tyler Perry, giving what is easily 2012′s most hilariously awkward performance, almost the match of SoC’s recent favourite, Chris Klein in Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li.

It’s impossible to encapsulate the myriad ways in which this colossal sack of shit entertained us recently, the sheer number of gaffes and howlers and WTF moments that poured from the screen like a deluge of rainbow-coloured diarrhoea. Suffice to say Rob Cohen has now jumped past Paul W.S. Anderson, Jon Avnet, and Robert Luketic to become SoC’s pick as the worst director currently working in cinema, a man who has channeled the spirit of Ed Wood to bring us a film of such hysterically wooden and ugly imperfection that the Rifftrax guys might have to take two or three runs at it to cover all of its nigh-infinite incompetence. From its clumsy blocking (actors stepping in front of each other so we can’t see them half the time) to its 100% pure-cliche screenplay (in other words, a totally accurate adaptation from the source material) to its woeful compositions and photography (easily worse than anything else in 2012); this goes beyond Lifetime movie or rejected TV pilot to find its own slot on the quality spectrum. It’s a distillation of every shitty cop drama you’ve ever seen, a compilation of the worst aspects of our culture, but done with such a straight face, with such cluelessness, that I loved it. And in case you think I should have picked one of the three previously-mentioned misogynistic films instead of something that’s just bad, that I’m being finicky for going after something for little more than being a bit shoddy, don’t worry; three of the five women in this film are murdered — two of them mutilated horribly — because that’s all cinema seemed to be this year. Just a never-ending bellow of horror at the mere existence of women, and even when a movie is dumb enough to be relatively harmless, we still have to endure the presence of this disgusting bullshit, because that’s apparently just the way it is now. Fuck you, cinema! FUCK YOU, WORLD!

Dishonorable Mentions:

The Raven: A transparent attempt to tap into the success of Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes, sadly this is reminiscent of the Hughes Brothers’ misfiring From Hell more than anything else. James McTeigue never gets a grip on the material or the tone; John Cusack’s obnoxious Edgar Allen Poe is overplayed, performances misfire and tension fails to materialise. I asked a passing raven if it thought McTeigue had a chance of making another movie; it said, and I quote, “NEVERMORE!” Bit harsh.

Chernobyl Diaries: Oren Peli continued to scramble to consolidate the slice of industry power provided by the success of Paranormal Activity with this Wrong Turn-esque horror film set in Chernobyl. Yes, that Chernobyl, the one in Russia, the one that was irradiated by a horrifying accident that changed the world. A perfectly tasteful location for a dumb exploitation flick, I’m sure you’ll agree. It’s not even a good dumb exploitation flick; there’s no tension, no plot, just a long wait in some really interesting (non-Chernobyl) locations until everyone’s dead.

Step Up Revolution: SoC loves Step Up 3D, a movie with very little to recommend it other than the dancing, the one thing good enough that we recommend it constantly. This is worse, and the dancing’s so poorly shot that it lacks even that saving grace. Extra points for the heroes’ plot being remarkably stupid, using their incredible dance skills to gain enough YouTube hits to win a competition, staging flash mobs that could get them arrested, instead of trying to get jobs as dancers that would pay all of them, cumulatively, probably more than the prize money. Genius.

The Cold Light of Day: Hitchcock would have wept to see the state of the thriller genre today. This weirdly bland North By Noroeste plants bland Henry Cavill into a classic thriller template, trying to figure out who killed his somnabulent dad (Bruce Willis, between naps) while avoiding the police through touristy Spain. But the ramshackle plotting means characters only do things for convenience, not recognisable motivations, so even when it wakes up you don’t really care. I think in the end it was something to do with Mossad? In Euro-set thrillers it’s usually Mossad.

Ruby Sparks: A brilliant idea, indifferently brought to life with one great moment and a cop-out ending. At least, that’s the movie I saw. Friend-of-the-blog @DarkEyeSocket has passionately argued to me that the ending that so offended me (no spoilers, but from where I sat it seemed to invalidate the lesson learned by the odious protagonist) has a deeper meaning. Sadly, on first viewing I don’t agree, meaning I’m left with an bold idea about male expectations of relationships and the manipulation of partners that ultimately amounts to nothing. Sorry DES.

More to come, as ever. For anyone who has come to Listmania! for the first time, you should know I really milk this for all its worth. You’ve been warned.

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.

New Poll: What Was Your Favourite Movie Of 2012?

Posted on December 27, 2012 by admiralneck

Good afternoon – or morning — you slubberdegullions and ne’er-do-wells. It’s that time of the year again – a time of lists and polls and agonising over the ordering of films that really you’re not that crazy about if you’re going to be honest, but for the sake of neatness and getting the list up to a big enough number you have to figure out if you preferred Resident Evil: Retribution to This Means War (I can imagine a lot of film bloggers have been fretting over that one for the past few months). Shades of Caruso’s traditional Listmania! blow-out is still under construction, but until that moment, I can at least gather together the findings of the poll to find my readership’s favourite film of 2011, and I have to say, considering all the talk about the girthy Fassmember or the return of Lynne Ramsay, the result is not what I expected…

Tinker, Typist, Souljah, Spelunker (10 votes = 16.95%)
Drive, He Didn’t Say (8 votes = 13.56%)
Rise and Rise Again, Until Apes Become BrainApes (7 votes = 11.86%)
Cheer Up, Kirsten Dunst, It Might Never Happen (5 votes = 8.47%)
It’s a Tree, Yeah, And It’s, Like, A Metaphor For Life, Man (5 votes = 8.47%)
We Need To Talk About Thor’s Lickable Deltoids (4 votes 6.78%)
Jean Dujardin Is: L’Artiste Adorable! (4 votes = 6.78%)
Harry Potter and the Dirty Pillows, Part 12 (3 votes = 5.08%)
Mission Unpossible: Goat Prototype (2 votes = 3.39%)
Cheer Up, Michael Fassbender’s Penis, It Might Never Happen (2 votes = 3.39%)
We Need To Talk About Captain America’s Ripped Abs (2 votes = 3.39%)
Pirates Of The Caribbean: A Lovely Nap (2 votes = 3.39%)
Cheer Up, Michael Shannon, It Might Never Happen (1 vote = 1.69%)
Lynne Ramsay’s One Colour: Red (1 votes = 1.69%)
Twilight: The One With The Werepaedo (1 votes = 1.69%)
We Need To Talk About Green Lantern’s Shitty CGI Onesie (1 vote = 1.69%)
We Need To Forget About Charles Xavier’s Thinkyfingers Gesture (1 vote = 1.69%)
Tarsem’s Immortale, Pour Homme (0 votes)
Zack Snyder’s What’s Wrong With Being Sexy? (0 votes)
Therapeutic: Freud Vs Jung (0 votes)
The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly Lizard Thingy (0 votes)
Hey Kids! It’s Uncle Marty’s “Fun With Film Preservation!” (0 votes)
Transformybots: Bang of the Boom (0 votes)
The Adventures of Tintin: The Whiny of the Butthurt (0 votes)

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy wins! It even beat Drive, which I suspect was the pick of many of my American readers, while the Le Carre adaptation appealed more to the Brits. I’d be able to study this theory with more data if I was willing to pay for Polldaddy Pro, but fuck that, it’s more than I can afford even to pay for the blog URL and we’re talking pennies there. Or maybe it’s just a Cumberbatch thing. I know what you guys are like. The other big surprises in that poll are the surprisingly strong showing for Rise of the Planet of the Apes — a summer crowdpleaser that hold up to repeated viewings — and the single vote for Green Lantern, which I’m convinced is some son-of-a-bitch trolling me, because that film stank even worse than I wrote a year ago and knowing someone chose that is like a badly rendered CGI dagger to my heart.

And now to the new poll, which should be up in the left-hand column of this new blog template (yes, I decided grey on grey, font size 0.5 was a bit hard on the eyes). Once more I shall keep this open all year to give people a chance to catch up to everything from 2012 as 2013 progresses. The choices are:

Michael Haneke’s Stop The Pigeon!
Marvel Presents Marvel’s The Assemblers In: Marvel’s Assemblers Avengle
Twilight: Paralysing Vapours Part The Seventeenth
Hanks on Hanks on Hanks (on Hanks on Hanks on Hanks)
A Film About Tiger Pie? I Don’t Get It
The Adventures of Teddy Fuxpin
DC Presents DC’s The Bat Man In: Fun With DIY Orthopedics
2 Expendable, 2 Tedious
It’s Like Disco Beetlejuice But With Vampires, You See? Will This Do?
The Limo, The Actor, His Penis, and Eva Mendes In A Niqaab
Little Jackie Reacher’s Big Manly Adventure
(Don’t Fear) The Reaper (If You Are Liam Neeson) (See Also: Wolves)
The Spy Who Loved Those Space-Agey Brain Pills They Have Now
Sony Pictures Re-Presents: Marvel’s The Unappealing Spider-Grouch
Channing Tatum In: School of Cock
The Hoooooooooooooooobbiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit
Farty Phoenix And The Philosophy Of Bollocks
The Bond Introspection
Alien Vs. Fanboys: Mortem Ad Lindelof
Spike Lee Presents: Spike Lee’s Old Beef Against Quentin Tarantino – A Spike Lee Joint
Yay / Boo For CIA Torture (Delete According To Political Affiliation)
Katniss Luvs Gale Or GTFO
Les (Photographie) Misérable (Et Importun)

So there you have it. If your favourite film isn’t up there, I’m sorry, but I have too much pride to add Snow White and the Huntsman to this list no matter how much money it made through some kind of dark sorcery. In the event of a missing film, please choose one anyway; your votes are appreciated even if it’s not your first pick and the thought of selecting something else makes you kinda furious at me. As for my choice of these films? We’re getting closer to Listmania! 2012, where I shall reveal my choice; a pick that is so predictable that anyone who has spent more than two minutes talking to me this year will already know what it is. Keep checking back this week, as well as for my galaxy-distorting Spotify Playlist Of Annual Brilliance (feat. Grimes and that Dan Deacon fellow).

BFI LFF 2012: Dans La Maison / Seven Psychopaths

Posted on October 26, 2012 by admiralneck

Regular readers will be fully aware/entirely sick of my repeated references to #TheProject, my in-progress stupidly ambitious tale of events, happenings and things (all plot deets embargoed for now) which has taken a backseat while I attempt to earn a crust writing this blog (if WordPress ever sends me my royalties, that is). Cryptic comments about #TheProject have taken the place of actually doing anything to complete #TheProject; troubling, but it at least makes me feel like it’s going to get completed, despite the massive plot cavity I’m currently trying to fill with word-caulk. One consequence of this mental struggle means I’m more aware of narrative theories presented by writers I follow, some of which make sense (though I’d prefer a dose of NZT, thanks).

However, I’m starting to get alarmed at the focus on “The Rules”, which at their best can be interesting ideas about how to enhance your stories, but at worst can be absurdly prescriptive constraints that can, if misunderstood, make every story basically a different flavoured version of all other stories. This focus on how stories fail when they wander outside the lines of what constitutes a “univerally-agreed” successful plot has led to some surprising critical reactions to stories that I thought were doing some fun, bold things. Even if only in terms of novelty or ambition, I think that’s worthwhile, but more importantly we all benefit when those rules are stretched, or shattered intentionally to generate emotion, make a point, or experiment with new techniques.

This is what has been on my mind for months now, making me more attuned to navel-gazing conversations about creators and their approach to art. The conversation between Arthur Krystal of the New Yorker and novelist Lev Grossman has been particularly fascinating in terms of what fiction is capable of. Krystal’s first paywalled article is here, Grossman’s response is here, and the latest installment is here. Thanks to friend-of-the-blog and excellent genre writer Sam Binnie for pointing me at that most recent, rage-inducing article (buy her book!). Yesterday saw The Wachowskis promoting Cloud Atlas, which they co-directed with Tom Tykwer. Their response to a question about why they resist interviews about their work really chimed with me:

Andy Wachowski: It’s four years on Cloud Atlas, and so I sort of resent the fact that now I have to sit down and explain it to people. It’s like the whole dialogue has been lost about… When I was a kid, we would go to movies as a family, and then we’d sit down and talk about them. I feel like this is the instantaneous-gratification generation, where they can just look it up and say, “Oh, well, this is what it means.” Our movies require a little bit of effort.

Lana Wachowski: And you feel it in a lot of critics’ approach today toward cinema. As soon as they encounter a piece of art they don’t fully understand the first time going through it, they think it’s the fault of the movie or the work of art. They think, [dramatic voice] “It’s a mess.”

Andy: [Dramatic voice] “This doesn’t make sense.”

Lana: “This doesn’t make any sense.” And they reject it, just out of an almost knee-jerk response to some ambiguity or some gulf between what they expect they should be able to understand, and what they understand.

As someone who has passionately, lengthily, exhaustively argued many times with many people over the quality of the Matrix trilogy and Speed Racer (or lack thereof; I’m no opinion-Nazi), I know what they mean. Just this week I tried to grapple with Post Tenebras Lux, though of course I was lucky to be writing blogposts for WordPress instead of being forced to write to a website or newspaper/magazine deadline (seriously, WordPress are going to be sending me a cheque soon, right?). Some critics argued it was a waste of time. With the space afforded to me, I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t an incomprehensible jumble of images, and tentatively gave it a sort of thumbs up. Yay me, I guess.

Which brings me to two movies shown at the London Film Festival which deal with the process of telling a story, and how expectations of what stories should do to be a success conflicts with ambition and intention. François Ozon’s Dans La Maison, adapted from Juan Mayorga’s play The Boy in the Last Row, concerns a jaded teacher, M. Germain (an fabulously grouchy performance from Fabrice Luchini), who discovers a talented pupil in his literature class. Claude (Ernst Umhauer) engages with a standard “What did you do last weekend?” essay question to a degree no one else in the class does, by relating a tale of how he has insinuated his way into a family that he has been interested in for at least a year.

Germain and his wife Jeanne (Kristin Scott Thomas) are electrified by Claude’s peculiar and unpredictable tale, and the teacher urges his pupil to continue under the pretence of improving his writing, but also because of the voyeuristic thrill of this stealthy invasion. Claude’s tale is at first laden with class-based envy, leading to a caricatured portrayal, but under Germain’s guidance he begins to approach the “Rapha” family with greater compassion, leading to a richer download of information for his delighted audience-of-two, but also affecting his growth as a person. As the film progresses, though his spirit returns, Germain becomes compromised in his urge to receive more of these exciting updates, and Claude’s friendship with the family becomes precarious.

Ozon masterfully plays with the levels of fiction and “reality” here, creating a symbiosis between the art of storytelling and the act of living, from Germain and Jeanne’s feeble justifications for their almost prurient fascination with Claude and his adolescent crush on Esther (Emmanuelle Seigner), to Claude’s clever manipulation of his teacher and ever-shifting accounts of what goes on in the Rapha household. The audience is given an unreliable view of his actions, shown through the eyes of a boy not only fantasising about his importance within the family, but also his self-worth, his rationalisation for his actions, and his relationship with Germain, who he regards with a fascinating mixture of respect and disdain.

Everyone’s intentions and desires are obscured, but Germain’s questionably-motivated tutoring has other consequences. Germain becomes so intoxicated with the chance to live vicariously through his student that he too becomes entwined with Claude and the Raphas, both in reality and fiction. Once he becomes part of the story, no amount of writerly knowledge can protect him from the ramifications; either a consequence of his hubris or his prosaic talents as a writer. On first viewing I found the finale a little unsatisfying but the more I think about it I see Ozon, as well as offering a kind of open ending for Germain and Claude, has also contrasted the neatness of narrative and the mess of life. Not an original idea, but one entertainingly depicted.

It also calls into question the efficacy of Germain’s advice, which while solid enough also “tames” Claude. There’s a chance that the story he would have told would be sour, bizarre, even dangerous; his motives are unclear at first, which leads to some suspense early on, and accounts for part of Germain and Jeanne’s curiosity. The teacher’s interference channels Claude’s intentions, and creates a tension between the irrepressible spirit of the untamed teenager possibly giving in to his impulses (for better or worse), and Germain’s instinct to create a more conventional tale of a young boy falling in love with an older woman. Of course, while Germain focuses on this story, he ignores an unpredictable threat from another “character” who won’t play by the expected rules.

Story rules as the taming of ideas, real life as the chaos that surrounds it. At the same time Jeanne tries to keep her art gallery afloat as the philistine twins who fund it consider closing it. Jeanne’s ideas for generating publicity include lazily transgressive fusions of sexual imagery and fascist iconography, and bland computer-generated artworks or interactive installations, while at the same time finding pompous comfort in the thought that the family whose experiences they have been vampirically living off are the kind of ignoramuses who have Klee prints on their walls but don’t understand them. The only person who seems to genuinely want to learn about himself through art is Claude, and Germain’s prodding threatens to blunt this innocent eagerness.

At least, this is how I saw it. It would have been nice to have spent more time dissecting it, but after the screening off I raced to meet a friend prior to another screening, and if anything can wipe a mind’s blackboard it’s a trip on the Victoria line. There is so much to ponder in this complex story about story that it’s easy to forget that it’s also deliciously funny and lightly played. This isn’t a stuffy exercise in navel-gazing; though it tackles ideas about authorial intent, the impossibility of creating something without imposing yourself onto it, and the negative effect of pandering to an audience, it’s a delight from start to finish, even if I thought the final act went on too long. See? Even I can’t help interfering. WordPress should be proud to have me on the payroll.

If Ozon is curious about the interplay between artist, art, and audience, and unconsciously references genteel tales of middle-class ennui and yearning such as Six Degrees of Separation and Manhattan Murder Mystery, Martin McDonagh’s approach to exploring the constraints imposed on story by genre is feistier, and Seven Psychopaths is a much more flamboyant trip through layers of narrative, cliche, and viewer expectation. His follow-up to In Bruges shares some DNA with his play The Pillowman, as he uses the tale of a blocked screenwriter and his feckless dog-napping best friend to lampoon the well-worn tropes used in traditionally “male” genres — basically the kinds of tales that feature gangsters, buddy relationships, gun fights, and psychopaths.

Colin Farrell plays Marty Faranan, a screenwriter attempting to write a tale about seven psychopaths which will somehow convey a message of love and hope not traditionally found in stories about psychopaths — a commendable intention, to transcend the rules of the genre as I would hope all writers would aspire to do, at least to some degree. Hopelessly blocked on how to do this — and now writer’s block! McDonagh was speaking right to me — Marty takes on board plot and character suggestions from his friend Billy (possibly Sam Rockwell’s most entertaining performance yet), but withholds credit from him, selfishly pretending that he is the sole author of a story that is actually being influenced by real world events he doesn’t fully understand.

A series of bad choices by Billy leads to the two men and companion Hans (Christopher Walken’s best work since Catch Me If You Can) eluding a vengeful mobster (Woody Harrelson), before trying to save their lives and finish the screenplay that echoes their predicament. Their solutions conform to and transcend the conventions of the action genre, with Marty’s noble ideas hijacked by Billy’s cliched suggestions as well as the deadly impositions of the “real” world, which has its own demented film-based rules. By placing this in a familiarly illogical setting, where for example “psychopaths” have the convenient symptoms found in lazily researched narratives, this love letter to genre ends up with a lot of critical footnotes, and questions whether writing rules can be broken without breaking the story, and whether we should just embrace them for what they are.

Notably the movie barely features is women, with the two lead actresses in the credits — Abbie Cornish and Olga Kurylenko — barely getting anything to do, and the one well-drawn female character being Hans’ wife Myra (Linda Bright Clay — a scenestealer in her short time onscreen). Without seeking to derail this post, it’s worth addressing this absence, which became quite a talking point after the movie ended, primarily because of a line in the movie about the fact that male-oriented action movies regularly dismiss, ignore or under-represent its female characters; a self-aware line in a movie that, to that point, had sidelined its two female leads into near-invisibility, and gives a better idea of McDonagh’s satirical intention.

McDonagh and producer Graham Broadbent appeared after the movie with LFF director Clare Stewart for a Q&A during which he responded to a question about the treatment of the female characters. At first he seemed (this is my impression; I could be wrong) that he’s been asked this question before, and no one had given him enough credit for creating Myra (who is indeed a terrific character). He revealed that there were more scenes with Cornish, but they were dropped for various reasons in post-production (Kurylenko may also have had more to do; the image below is not in the film). He then vowed that his next project would feature many “strong female characters”, a comment that got a laugh, mostly because it was delivered with a weariness that made it clear he’s said it before.

Despite the arguably dismissive reply (as I say, this is my impression of his tone but others found his response unsatisfactory) I think the deliberate choice to make Abbie Cornish’s girlfriend character a cypher who is treated like absolute shit by Rockwell’s insecure best friend archetype was the right thing to do, simply because it is done with such unapologetic vigour. Marty and Billy come off as assholes for treating her poorly; they’re the symbolic buddies you find in any number of lazily-scripted action movies, and they’re called on their crap by Hans, the most sympathetic and noble character in the film, the only male adult in a film full of pathetic children. The line gets a laugh, but it also sends the audience back to earlier scenes for reappraisal.

Answering another question, McDonagh referred to his interest in Sam Peckinpah’s movies; a telling comparison considering how the notoriously macho director used his movies to work through his issues with aggressive masculinity and his own relationships with women. I talked about Peckinpah’s struggle with his masculine nature in this end-of-year review of the Straw Dogs remake (scroll down). Straw Dogs was an expression of his ambivalence toward the stress between his public image and his inner nature, with the character Amy reduced to pawn status in the middle of a battle between Alpha and Beta males, though Amy is arguably more complex than most female characters in movies, as shown by the “stronger” less-interesting Amy in Rod Lurie’s remake.

To display the misogynist tendencies of the genre, and formulaic Hollywood product in general, McDonagh excludes the women closest to Marty and Billy to the most extreme degree, and only gives agency to Hans’ wife Myra, both of whom don’t correspond to the traditional action movie protagonist template (e.g. they’re old, they’re an interracial couple). The homoerotic overtones of the buddy sub-genre are mixed with the casual disposability of story-complicating women in action movies, a trope McDonagh makes fun of while using it to great effect. Much as I don’t want to admit it, the most upsetting scene in the film, in terms of shifting the audience’s allegiance behind one of the protagonists involves exactly the trope being mocked (and references Scott and Tarantino’s similarly violent tale True Romance), which makes the audience question their acceptance of this convention.

McDonagh may note the efficacy of these dramatic choices, but through Hans’ line he also expresses a hope that female roles in this genre will be improved in order to give a voice to the voiceless, an admission that the emotional impact of using female characters as a narrative tool comes with a cost that is only recently being debated. Look at the recent uproar over the new Tomb Raider game, in which Lara Croft is given an origin story that includes the threat of sexual assault. The discussion of the treatment of women in narratives is rightly addressing these issues, and statements about “strong female characters” mean nothing if all that means is better-defined biceps and abs on women who are still victimised, sidelined, or used as motivational tools in a male-led narrative.

I suspect your mileage may vary on whether McDonagh is lazily casting aside criticisms of poorly-written women in macho cinema with one well-timed laugh line, or whether he is forcefully iterating his objection to it by reducing Cornish and Kurylenko’s roles to almost nothing in favour of scenes in which his male characters, who mistreat or ignore them, are portrayed as pitiful child-men scrabbling to survive in a world more dangerous than they realised. I’m willing to give McDonagh the benefit of the doubt because he brought it up, but I understand and support concerns about disappointing representations of women in the media, and hope that future works by him do branch out past his interest in what it is to be a man as he sort of promised, to focus on what it is to be human.

As for McDonagh’s games with storytelling, he does an excellent job of playing with our expectations of what these movies require to be considered satisfying by less questioning audiences, most notably in a superb sequence in which Billy, finally given free reign to participate in Marty’s writing process, gives his version of how the ending (of the screenplay but also their predicament) should unfold, which conforms to every boneheaded cliche about action movies you can imagine, including absurd levels of cartoonish violence. The way the movie ends, playing against and with these cliches, is one of its most enjoyable aspects, topped with a graceful final note that I can’t spoil, other than to say this writer gaped in awestruck appreciation of McDonagh’s talent.

I spent the movie’s running time in a state of bliss, thrilled by its depiction of the struggle between the writer and his material, his ambition and the constraints of genre, not to mention how our stories are affected by all the stories in our past and what we think are the essential components of them. Genre conventions are only recognisable once we’ve experienced numerous tales with a certain structure and consistent components. The good thing about such exposure is you absorb these important elements and can deploy them without thinking about them too deeply. The bad thing is you take the elements for granted or see them as unchangeable, leading to stagnation. A million identikit stories, all making the same mistakes as those that came before.

Seven Psychopaths is a response to the stifling expectations of genre storytelling, addressing the genre limitations while providing a film as entertaining and wittily written as the best movies of this kind, in much the same way Shane Black did in Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. McDonagh highlights our lazy acceptance of these elements and then offers them up to us again to show how silly they seem in a new context; the “Rules” suffering a judo assault from a master storyteller, using their power against them, showing their flexibility when tested by an ambitious artist. The result is invigorating, and, to those of us with a vested interest in working in genre writing, inspiring. Man, I gotta get back to #TheProject. That’s it, WordPress, I’m handing in my notice.

Abraham Lincoln: WTF Generator

Posted on June 21, 2012 by admiralneck

If you’re a subscriber to this blog, there’s a chance you wince whenever you get an email saying there’s a new post, or when you click the link to the main page and then scroll down to see how long it is, and scroll, and scroll, and scroll again, and head past a few images that haven’t even started to load yet, and then keep scrolling, and by now you feel like Ed Harris at the end of The Abyss, because you keep scrolling and Jesus Christ, the space-age lung goop is drying up or something, where are the glowing aliens with their magical water technology? Well worry not. You won’t have to dive too far. There’s not going to be much in this review of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, because there’s not much in the movie.

Based on Seth Grahame-Smith’s novel of the same name, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter creates an alternate history in which Abraham Lincoln becomes a vampire hunter. Now, I want you to ponder that idea. I want you to think beyond your initial reaction, which is probably, “I wonder what the hashtag game is”. Imagine now that you have to expand that, and come up with a story with three acts, antagonist/protagonist relationships, an inciting incident, and all the other important storytelling elements, extrapolating from that initial absurd collision of history and fantasy fiction.

I bet you come up with a story involving a tragic past, a quest for vengeance, a mentor with a dark secret, and some smattering of historical elements, adding plenty of winking references to the absurdity of the premise because it’s just so silly. You’ll start to write a synopsis down, and it’ll go okay for a bit, but after a while you’ll feel like you’re wasting an opportunity to do something with some oomph, and you’ll think that there’s possibly more to this idea than just some daft jokes. Perhaps there’s something deeper to be said, drawing a parallel between the mythical relationship between vampires and their prey, and the real-world relationship between Southern plantation owners and their slaves. Maybe there’s more to this story. Out go the jokes, in come the metaphors.

Which is what has happened here, though this can only be said with a million caveats. AL:VH has been reshot and recut so extensively that it’s impossible to judge it accurately with any confidence, because any clues to the filmmakers’ original intentions have been lost somewhere in the editing room. Alarm bells ring early on with some clumsy time-skipping and conveniently expositional voiceovers; they become klaxons midway through when Lincoln’s narration fills in large character arcs with a single line, and we go from Senate-debating Lincoln to president to civil war in the space of approximately 30 seconds.

So perhaps a longer cut, or an earlier cut, exists in which the connection between slavery and vampirism is made clearly, instead of here alluded to at times as some kind of equivalence, with slave traders sharing space with monsters who feast on the blood of the slaves — the merest hint of an idea, and not a particularly interesting one — but usually ignored in favour of generic monstery evil. Nevertheless, even if this metaphor worked more clearly — the repeated line, “as long as one man is a slave, no man is free”, is obviously meant to bear the weight of the imagined comparison — it’s still a miscalculation that cannot be fixed, at least as far as I can see.

This is not to say genre fiction cannot represent complicated and controversial themes. I’ve previously argued that genre fiction is often the best way to tackle such things. Artists freed of the obligation to depict real situations accurately — which never works out well and only creates discord between opposing sides of an issue — can tackle complex themes through metaphors that speak more forcefully than mere hectoring. Blade Runner‘s commentary on slavery, X-Men‘s metaphorical portrayal of the effects of racism and/or homophobia, The Handmaid’s Tale‘s horrific and timely parable about the subjugation of women, Attack The Block‘s depiction of protagonists ignored by society until they can only find self-respect through criminality, before finding a real cause by defending their neighbours against a force that, as one character says, “is so black you almost can’t see it” (I’m paraphrasing a bit from memory).

The genre fiction-as-gateway-to-truth argument doesn’t apply with AL:VH, and in fact detracts from it. The real Lincoln fought against slavery already (I think that’s a well-known fact), but instead of this being Abe’s own ideological conviction, albeit a more complicated position than is often depicted, now we’re presented with some needless alternate history in which he hates vampires more. Lincoln’s position, one which was controversial enough that it tore a country apart, was a brave one, and to depict it here as being as much an act of revenge against the vampires who killed Lincoln’s mother as an effort to right a disgusting injustice is incredibly problematic.

Even worse, it recasts real world tragedies as the consequences of inconsequential fictional events. The battle of Gettysburg is almost lost because of the presence of Confederate vampires who burst through the lines and massacre Union soldiers. The trade and abduction of slaves into the South is merely an appeasement gesture to keep vampires from invading the North. Lincoln’s mother Nancy died of “milk sickness”, and his son Willie died of typhoid, but here it’s because of vampires; in the latter case the boy’s death is an act of vengeance from the vampires who want to strike at Lincoln for opposing their plans to subjugate all of America.

Yes, not only is the actual death of the actual son of an actual president of the actual United States used as a manipulative plot point, his murder is avenged by Mary Lincoln, who shoots the murderous vampire with a silver bullet. A woman who in real life suffered from clinical depression caused by her grief is here cast as a vengeance-stricken action-hero-in-waiting, who gets to re-balance the scales of right and wrong with yet another tedious slow-motion mini-action scene. These people may be dead and may have no descendants, but even so, this was real tragedy, turned into a predictable dramatic beat in an undistinguished action movie. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding,” doesn’t even cover it. ^[1]

AL:VH is wrong on so many levels that by the middle of the movie I was openly saying, “What the fuck?” out loud at the screen in the hope that the manager would notice my anguish and set fire to the projector. ^[2] It’s possible that the movie would be easier to swallow if it played the premise for laughs, even though the central conceit would struggle to fill out a College Humor skit. That might mitigate the gratuitous co-opting of real-world tragedy, replacing the tasteless dabbling in humourless social commentary with plays on the action-horror genre, or by appropriating Grindhouse exploitation tropes in much the same way Tarantino managed with Inglourious Basterds — a cheeky riff on real-world events that so obviously existed within an alternate universe beholden to cinematic rules that Tarantino could shockingly assassinate Hitler at the end and miraculously pull the moment off.

But Timur Bekmambetov and Seth Grahame-Smith (and the one known re-writer, Simon Kinberg, credited on the poster but not in the film) don’t seem interested in trying to derive any fun out of that thin jokey idea, and instead doubles-down on the seriousness. Again, theoretically this approach could work, but only if dealing with a fictional premise. Grahame-Smith kickstarted this sub-genre of fiction with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and that may be easier to swallow. But it doesn’t matter that this doesn’t present itself as historically accurate (only an idiot would think it was, of course); using tragic historical events as raw material for a frivolous action movie made by people deluded enough to think they’re making a statement is a colossal misjudgement.

The end result is ponderous, derivative, dull, and nauseating. It’s not even interesting as a Timur Bekmambetov movie. He’s never made anything good, but he has a visual imagination that has its own pleasures. He specialises in hollow treats, but what treats they can be. Anyone hoping for something as delightfully silly as the Loom of Fate or bullet-bending a la miserable nerd wank-fantasy Wanted will be very disappointed. Those signature moments are few and far-between here, likely a consequence of the (relatively) low budget. Instead of his usual bravura set-pieces, there’s so much ramping that it should immediately be retitled Abraham Lincoln: Rampire Hunter.

And yet this could become the most beautiful unnecessary movie of the year. Whoever decided to hire Caleb Deschanel as the cinematographer deserves a medal, or censure; I’m not sure which yet. The last thing he worked on was Jim Sheridan’s appalling Dream House; two movies before that the ethically muddled My Sister’s Keeper. Both terrible, both luminously shot. It’s heartbreaking seeing him squander his talent on this chaff, and I hope that William Friedkin’s Killer Joe is a break from this trend. Deschanel’s work on AL:VH is flashier than his stunning, ASC Award-winning work on Roland Emmerich’s The Patriot ^[3], but there is pleasure to be derived from these autumnal colours, the American past repainted with a palette of auburn and rust, piercing blue moonlight serving as contrast.

It doesn’t matter, though, and neither does the commendably focused work from star Benjamin Walker ^[4], co-stars Mackie and Simpson, and underused acting titan Alan Tudyk. Even if you’re not troubled by the misappropriation of real events, there’s nothing else going on here. It’s not educational ^[5], it’s repetitive, and the use of vampire mythology is confounding. The vampires have magical rules about not killing each other that exist only to power a silly mid-movie twist (involving that hoary old trope, the vampire hunter’s trainer), they can be hurt by silver, and can walk around in daylight, meaning there’s no reason they can’t just take over the world. They’re barely even vampires, merely inhuman cannon fodder to be dispatched by our axe-spinning hero.

This is the kind of soul-deadening guff that defies mockery, though one outburst by Mary Elizabeth Winstead is a bad-movie-hall-of-famer. Otherwise it’s just an Underworld prequel with a silly punchline gimmick, less interesting than even the second Blade sequel, as competent as Scott Charles Stewart’s Priest but with a dodgy historical aspect, as poorly edited as an Uwe Boll Bloodrayne movie; just another crappy vampire movie that has no reason to exist, and probably no audience to desire it. The reason this one stings the eyes more than the others is that it thinks it has the right to play with tragic events that haven’t quite scarred America, because in order for the wounds of slavery and civil war to be scars they’d have to heal first.

Return 1. One example among many: the character of Joshua Speed, one of Lincoln’s circle of friends, is obviously meant to have mixed feelings about Lincoln’s urge to stop slavery; there are hints that this version of Speed (played by future Old Dependable Jimmi Simpson) has similar doubts to the real Speed, but this sub-plot has been utterly removed so that at one moment he’s seemingly hostile to Lincoln’s African-American friend William Johnson (played by current Old Dependable Anthony Mackie), and the next they’re besties. Ten seconds later, he’s gone from being oblivious to vampires to being a member of Lincoln’s mysteriously efficient vamp-killing gang, with one hasty line of exposition to paper over the poorly edited excision.

Return 2. For those clutching their pearls, don’t worry; the rushed release of this movie, which betrays the studio’s shame at making it in the first place, meant there was nobody sitting anywhere nearby. Or maybe the room filled up after I got in and they were struck dumb by the hypnotic monotony of this film’s familiar rhythms.

Return 3. A movie that also distorts history but only just enough to seem like truth, which is even more insidious and despicable than this gallumphing failure’s gauche error.

Return 4. I look forward to seeing Benjamin Walker play Young Bryan Mills in Taken Begins, because dang, he’s the spitting image of Liam Neeson in this, making me even sadder that the aging pretend-pugilist isn’t playing the actual non-vampire-hunting Abraham Lincoln in Spielberg’s forthcoming biopic.

Return 5. Actually, there is evidence that some effort has been put into depicting some elements of Lincoln’s life in a new context. In real life Lincoln put off marrying Mary, which some have thought to be proof that the president was gay, but here Lincoln’s reticence is borne of his fear of involving the woman he loves in his vampire hunting. As for William Johnson, the free African-American who acted as Lincoln’s personal valet, he just fills the role of Falcon to Abe’s Captain America, on duty for exposition-delivering needs, providing proof of Abe’s liberal credentials, and getting in a little bit of vampire hammering at the end. His actual history isn’t mentioned, and even his past is fictionalised; here he features in Abe’s past in order to dramatise the future president’s first encounter with slavery and vampires. The stories of slaves and even free men once more sidelined.

Coming of Age, With The Help Of Cathartic Violence

Posted on April 15, 2010 by admiralneck

Of all the sub-genres still being explored by filmmakers, the coming-of-age tale is the one that interests me the least. Far too often we see the worst kind of growing-pains tale, a personal vision that substitutes insight with universalities and sentimentality. When such a tale hews closely to the standard coming-of-age template, I tend to tune out, with extra indifference if it’s obvious the tale is autobiographical. Sometimes, though, it feels as if critics and audiences are unable to resist the lure of those rose-tinted glasses, leading to some baffling praise. Earlier this year I watched with confusion as An Education was showered with plaudits for pushing an electrifying yet wasted Carey Mulligan along a pre-set track of moral quandaries and difficult life choices before we got to a final scene that would only have been worse if she had turned to the camera and said, “So you can see, my experiences with that fey and needy art thief, and those terrible choices I once made were certainly… An Education!” This is the kind of clanging nonsense that passes for quality drama these days? Dearie me…

Pretty much every coming-of-age tale I’ve seen has rubbed me up the wrong way, possibly because my childhood was infinitely tedious to a degree that makes romanticising an impossibility. Films like The Secret Life of Bees, Cinema Paradiso, or My Life as a Dog might pretend there was something precious about crossing a line from innocence to adult rapture, with golden photography and swelling music, but my own memories of childhood were of listening to a lot of terrible music on Radio 1, riding my bike into very hard objects, repeatedly re-reading issues of 2000AD and Star Wars Weekly (featuring StarLord, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Adam Warlock!), avoiding punches thrown by bullies of both genders, and waiting for Battle of the Planets to start. What is there to reminisce about? Being a kid was the worst.

Which is not to say I’m completely immune to the genre’s charms, when it’s done right and the urge to romanticise the past is resisted. Gregory’s Girl is as unambitious a film as you can imagine, but Bill Forsyth’s superb comic timing, and the excellent casting, make it a classic of the sub-genre. Last year’s Adventureland was another beautifully judged example, with writer/director Greg Mottola keeping things low-key, even managing to keep Ryan Reynolds’ japery in check so that he could deliver his best and most winning performance, even though he was ostensibly playing the “villain” of the piece. Usually, though, my ADHD brain can only cope with this semi-autobiographical, navel-gazing genre when things are amped up past the point of universal recognition. Previous favourites include Alexander Mackendrick’s A High Wind in Jamaica (coming-of-age on a pirate ship), Heavenly Creatures (coming-of-age with added murder), and Léon (coming-of-age while working as an assassin’s apprentice).

To this list I can happily add Drew Barrymore’s lovable Whip It, and Matthew Vaughn’s frankly astonishing Kick-Ass. Whip It is a film you have to try hard not to like. Its ambling pace, low-key crises and endearing cast make it a joy to watch, helped by a performance of such easy charm from Ellen Page that her cooler-than-thou shenanigans in Juno are easily eradicated from memory. Playing frustrated teen Bliss Cavendar, Page’s quiet sadness, resigned as she is to a life living out her mother’s dreams of a good life, and her eventual triumphant rebirth as roller derby champ Babe Ruthless are beautifully layered, her transition between the two states done with such delicacy and charisma that any reservations I’ve had about her in the past have been blown away.

She’s not alone. Director Barrymore knows enough about acting to give her excellent cast room to breathe, which means the quirks of each character seem to have grown out of smart acting choices, not the contrivances of some fourth-draft script-polisher jamming jokes in to liven up the script (which was solely written by roller derby athlete Shauna Cross, aka Maggie Mayhem). It reminded me of Peter Berg’s Welcome To The Jungle, where stock characters were played by character actors who knew enough about the craft to play around on set, bringing things to life in a way no amount of on-set revisions or post-production reshoots can ever do. It’s hard to single out anyone for extra credit on Whip It: from Daniel Stern as Bliss’ content but attentive father, to Alia Shawkat as her confident best friend, to the rollergirls including the superb Kristin Wiig, bad-ass Zoe Bell, Barrymore herself, and a wonderfully vicious Juliette Lewis. They’re all great.

Among the many things Barrymore does right is finding out how to use Andrew Wilson and Jimmy Fallon. Wilson’s stoner dude should lapse into parody, but his canny sense of tactics, belief in his team, and focus on the game save him from being some loser with long hair, and Wilson plays his frustration and eventual elation just right. Even more surprising is Fallon, a performer who usually seems unable to focus on what he is supposed to be doing, staring off into the distance or barely suppressing giggles (a recent rewatch of Taxi was rendered unbearable by his hapless mugging). Here he manages to make the lamest sporting cliches or come-ons funny by playing them absolutely straight, while somehow twisting them. Augh! It’s impossible to accurately describe what he brings to the table here: you just have to see it.

Even better than that is the ever-reliable Marcia Gay Harden, cast as the mother figure that Bliss rebels against. It’s a part that could so easily devolve into cartoonish unsubtlety, which Harden can play about as well as it can be done, as shown in Frank Darabont’s The Mist. Here she dials it back, in keeping with the genial tone, and manages to make her character frustrating, believable, and ultimately admirable, as she comes to realise that the small town pleasures she once had will not suffice for her restless daughter. As someone who could not wait to get out of my own hometown, and was supported by a mother who found my departure painful but necessary, this hit me hard in the gut. Tears were shed at several points.

Perhaps the most heartening thing about Whip It is the feminist tone, which is reinforced by truly inclusive sisterhood, strong independent women, supportive men who mostly take a back seat, and zero tolerance for bullshit from anyone. Many happy reviews have already pointed this out (at Feministing, fbomb, Equal Writes, and Yoruba Girl Dancing for a start), so I won’t go into it much, other than to say it was refreshing to see a movie get on with broadcasting this message with no hesitations or caveats. Women rock, they do what they want, they get a kick out of all of it, and they can compete with each other on a professional level without it being about impressing the hot guy. It’s pretty simple. How depressing that Whip It feels more like a happy accident than the normal state of affairs.

Most of the praise Barrymore deserves is for making a movie that is paced in such a peculiar and unique way. Despite the inclusion of hipster songs from Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and Jens Lekman, much of the film outside the game is quiet and reflective, meandering and unforced. Stephanie Zacharek and Scott Tobias liked the movie but felt Barrymore could have made the movie cohere more, but the pace struck me as dreamlike rather than accidentally slack. Lovely scenes like the underwater seduction scene or the chaotic party felt unforced, which is a godsend as Cross’ screenplay bangs on the coming-of-age buttons with all of its force. Finally I can see this as a plus: the blend of cozy familiarity and off-beat execution make the movie more than the sum of its parts. It should be a slight diversion, but its positive energy, quirky atmosphere and committed performances transform it into a triumph.

Much as I loved Whip It (and I did love it a whole heck-of-a-lot), it was inevitable that Matthew Vaughn’s adaptation of the comic by Mark Millar and John Romita Jr. was going to elicit an even more visceral response. Whip It managed to triumph over my apathy towards both coming-of-age movies and sports movies, and thus deserves praise, but Kick-Ass was already cross-breeding the first of those genres with superheroics, which automatically raises the stakes for someone who has lived with comics all his life. Riding on a wave of praise, Kick-Ass was nevertheless hobbled by my frustrations with Millar’s obsession with base wish-fulfilment fantasies, and my equal disdain for Vaughn’s lifeless directorial style. Layer Cake and Stardust were both professionally made films that generated not a single erg of emotional electricity, and the previous Millar adaptation – Wanted – was an annoying failure hiding behind shiny visuals. I was either going to be impressed by Kick-Ass, or left to futilely point out the nakedness of the Emperor.

It never occurred to me that I could be turned into a shaking, sobbing, ecstatic mess, eagerly and breathlessly proselytising about this movie to all and sundry, so desperate to see it again that I almost walked out of the cinema to buy a ticket for the next performance. Not since The Matrix has a film hit every single crowd-pleasing beat with such confidence and such good humour, resulting in a final act of such joyous, rousing energy that it took every bit of strength to not give the movie a round of applause as the credits rolled. How did Vaughn get it so right? Or his co-screenwriter Jane Goldman? It’s as if he sucked some of the life out of their previous collaboration Stardust, and injected it into this film. It’s like a rocket going off in your face, it’s so vibrant.

Those wish-fulfilment buttons are pushed with even less subtlety than in Whip It, and again the film is better for it. Protagonist Dave Lizewski is a loser who decides to become a superhero after being mugged one time too many, but it’s not revenge that powers him: it’s an urge to do some good in the world. While critics and moralisers froth at the mouth about the violence in Kick-Ass, they miss that the film is a clarion call to citizens to take more care of each other, to endeavour to do some good for our fellow man. Regular readers will know that heroes who never even seem to be interested in doing anything heroic, preferring instead to just obsess over their antagonist, often drive me into steaming rages.

And yes, Kick-Ass is coming under attack by those who fret about the effect this terrible, immoral piece of trash will have on the behaviour of an infinite league of Hypothetical Idiots, those imaginary dullards who are unfortunately primed by nature to respond to violent visual stimuli with an orgy of terrifying horror unleashed upon all of the village greens and duck ponds in all of mighty Albion (or baseball diamonds and apple pies in all of the U.S. of A.). We hear over and over again about how arms and legs are lopped off in the movie, how childhood has been perverted for cheap and easy laughs, how black humour has now progressed to a point where empathy has all but evaporated and society is on the brink of catastrophe just because a little girl says the C-word, but the beating heart of this movie is not lying on the floor in a pool of blood: it’s inside the chest of an inspirational person who seems as happy to look for lost cats as he is willing to risk his life for complete strangers. Every movie I love has a moment that makes me realise I’ve fallen for it, and Kick-Ass’ speech to three muggers – dissuading them from attacking him and the man he is trying to protect – is that moment. I did the little clapping thing I do when I get excited.

Roger Ebert’s disappointing, judgemental review (WARNING: BIG SPOILERS!) seems to be written from the point of view of someone so desperate to point a finger of horror at the film and scream at it for crimes against childhood that he has decided against even paying attention to the film: the worst kind of moralistic, thought-lite thinking imaginable. You expect it from a lemon-sucking, addle-brained twit like Christopher Tookey, but I expected more from Ebert. His sneering dismissal of the motivations of all the major characters, as well as one of the most important plot-threads in the film (the battle for Hit-Girl’s soul, painted with light touches that nevertheless do not render that battle trivial), show him up as someone who just could not be bothered to give the movie a chance, or to see if there was a message there at all.

Even if there wasn’t one, the plotting and character work is airtight. The motivations of every character are believable and human while also recognisable as the beats of the action and superhero genres. Much of the joy of the film is seeing the old made new again by looking at it from this slightly skewed perspective. The final act reckoning between the “good” guys and the “bad” guys is such a perfect homage-to and joke-at-the-expense-of the action genre that somewhere in Hollywood Shane Black’s heart grew three sizes. It helps that wonderful performances and an excellent grasp of the adolescent mindset make the characters so likeable, even the villains. These are humans in a cartoon world, and every choice and mistake and desire is recognisable and tragic.

Much of the last hour was excruciating to watch, as you fear for the safety of everyone involved in the misunderstandings and unfortunate betrayals of the clockwork plot, especially as many of the characters are utterly incompetent. Kick-Ass himself is no fighter. He has good intentions and no way of acting out on them. Watching him come to understand this is painful for him and the viewer. More than anything else, this makes you empathise with him, because no matter what he gets hit with, he keeps coming back for more, powered by righteousness and the desire to do better. Also great is how all of these characters are saved by each other, with loneliness being the worst threat to their sanity. It’s thrilling to see a movie embrace the insane concept that maybe, just maybe, kids today are equally at home using social media AND actually socialising with their friends, and are actually quite healthy and empowered by these twin modes of companionship.

None of this matters to our moral guardians. If Ebert’s review is a disappointment, Tookey’s is an abomination. Though it’s not unexpected that he not only dislikes all of the icky violence and “uncalled-for” profanity, or that he assumes the movie is a satire on comics and thus judges it a failure for not being one (which is, of course, easily explained away as the movie isn’t a satire and never ever sets out to be), his disgust at the character of Hit-Girl is extravagantly hyperbolic even for him. Railing against what he sees as the “sexualisation” of the character, he claims she is “sexually aggressive”, “sexy, like an even younger version of the baby- faced Oriental assassin in Tarantino’s Kill Bill 1″, “made to look as seductive as possible”, “shown in a classic schoolgirl pose, in a short plaid-skirt with her hair in bunches, but carrying a big gun”, and “one of the male teenage characters acknowledges that he’s attracted to her”. Awful big accusations from the Mail’s “film critic”.

Well, yes, she does dress like a schoolgirl at one point, but this is not a sexualised image, as she is meant to be playing innocent to fool some bad guys (in fact, if she were to play a “sexy schoolgirl” at this point, her plan would fail utterly, so from a plot and character standpoint, there is absolutely no reason to do this). And yes, a character claims to be attracted to her, though it’s more because she is a badass than because she is a sex object, as revealed in the exchange that follows in which his claim is ridiculed by his friend because of her young age. As to her sexualised image, let’s just say that the formless costume she wears looks more like ill-fitting body armour than some fetish-gear fantasy. Her comments about “sex” are mere swearwords divorced from any sexualised context, spoken as if she doesn’t truly know what she’s saying.

As with Ebert, Tookey has brought his own preconceptions into the cinema with him, seeing Hit-Girl as sexually attractive even though there is nothing onscreen to suggest anything of the sort. Not that I’m saying Tookey found an eleven-year-old actress sexually attractive, of course, or that he’s projecting all of his confused feelings about schoolgirls onto this character. That would be a terrible misunderstanding on my part. It’s obvious that he’s thinking of the Hypothetical Idiots out there who don’t have his moral fiber. To paraphrase Chris Morris, Tookey is thinking of those less stable, less educated, less middle-class than him. He, of course, was too busy tutting at the depravity onscreen to pay any real attention to the goings-on.

Anyway, enough about the hand-wringing. I need to praise everyone involved, especially Chloe Moretz, whose turn as Hit-Girl might make our moral guardians weep into their roast dinners, but will ensure her position as an icon and cult figure for years to come. Moretz is simply amazing, playing both the invincible bad-ass and the doting daughter, brainwashed into operating as a killing machine and only vaguely aware that there is a normal life out there if she is willing to go for it. Everyone else in the film is terrific, especially the brilliant Nicolas Cage (A proper Full-On Cage Experience even though he’s not in the film much) and an impressive Christopher Mintz-Plasse, but it’s Moretz’ show. Her work here is the real deal.

As for Vaughn, I can only hold my head in shame for doubting him. His control of the movie is masterful, wringing every drop of emotional charge out of every moment, playing to our memories of childhood hopelessness, dashed dreams, and eagerness to make the world a better place in order to make the final act play out with clockwork precision. Not only does he get the tone exactly right, and treat the subject matter with the correct amount of seriousness, he also makes it incredibly fun. Part of that is his inspired music choices. Many of the pieces included are familiar or populist (Morricone’s scores for Leone, Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy, Joan Jett’s Bad Reputation), but the context they are used in is always perfect. Even better are the choices you don’t expect, including Elvis’ American Trilogy (a moment that nearly made me dance around the room with sheer joy) and best of all, the wonderful cover version of the Banana Splits theme by The Dickies. It comes in at exactly the right moment, and totally fits the scene.

Vaughn’s direction of action is also exemplary, editing clearly, using geography cleverly, and adding enough little tricks and jokes to make it more than just another John Woo pastiche. His imaginative staging offers up two highlights: a first-person-shooter moment in a darkened room that becomes a strobe-lit nightmare of suspense, and a methodical takedown of numerous goons by Big Daddy that looks like it was filmed in one shot and then, perversely, edited into a staccato series of time-slices. It’s less weird than it sounds, but the effect is dizzying. Vaughn also knows enough about the iconography of the superhero genre, and some of the finest moments come from his subversion of those, none of which ever make fun of the subject matter. It’s a fine line he walks between parody and realistic reinvention, and he gets it just right all of the time.

I think I just used up all of the hyperbole. Just go see these two wonderful films. They do one thing that all coming-of-age movies should aspire to: they made me want to go back to my childhood and experience it again. For that, I am oddly grateful. And glad that I don’t actually have to.

Well I Love In The Loop Anyway ::pouts::

Posted on March 8, 2010 by admiralneck

Yeah, the In The Loop team didn’t win, sadly. A group of us last night attempted to sway events, watching the movie again as a kind of spell-casting ceremony, but our eldritch energies missed the target and Precious won for stating its points about the terrible effects of poverty with great, clanking obviousness. Nevertheless, the winners were often justified. The night was bracketed by the highlights: Christoph Waltz’ win and lovely, gracious acceptance speech at the start, and Kathryn Bigelow’s historic triumph at the end, complete with emotional speeches. She was shaking so much it looked like she was hyperventilating. A thoroughly deserved win from a fantastic filmmaker who has been thrilling me with excellent movies for decades now. I was so excited for her I got giddy, though that might have also been because of the sense-crippling fatigue. (N.B. Everyone should read Mary Elizabeth Williams’ piece on Bigelow’s win.)

Inbetween there were awful technical hitches and badly judged comedy moments: Neil Patrick Harris’ big number was undone by a low-volume mic that muffled his singing, cameras wandered around getting in everyone’s way, and the inept director kept cutting to blackness or random people milling around, though we did enjoy the way the camera cut to Joel Coen when someone mentioned Jews, or every black person in the room during Geoffrey Fletcher and Mo’Nique’s acceptance speeches. Even worse, Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin were lumbered with utterly risible jokes, and Martin in particular seemed lost. The only moments that made me (intentionally) laugh were the inspired pairing of Tina Fey and Robert Downey Jr. (why weren’t they the hosts?), Colin Farrell’s endearing monologue about Jeremy Renner’s awesomeness, everything the wonderful Gabourey Sidibe did all night long (she is much <3′d here now: I ended up rooting for her over Sandra Bullock by the end of the night), and the Paranormal Activity spoof.

Jeff Bridges’ win was treated as so overdue he was given a chance to run long on his speech. A whole extra couple of minutes, which enraged countless Oscar tweeters into 140 characters of SHEER HATE. Okay, so the ceremony ran long, but American audiences had it easy. In the UK we had to endure the shouty nonsense of four empty, ignorant twerps: Claudia Winkleman, Ronni Ancona, Mark Dolan and David Baddiel, none of whom seemed to even know what was nominated, let alone what the movies were like. When lizard/human hybrid Dolan is the most knowledgeable person in the room, you know you’re in trouble. @guardianfilm was particularly disgusted by his presence, and maintained a stream of amusing invective throughout.

Lowlights of their idiotic commentary included Baddiel’s new catchphrase, “I haven’t seen it, but…”, Ronni Ancona expressing confusion and surprise when someone mentioned that Sandra Bullock had been nominated for Best Actress, Baddiel not knowing who Neil Patrick Harris was (for fuck’s sake), Ancona praising the “stop-gap” animation in Fantastic Mr. Fox and Coraline, and Winkleman shutting up Mark Dolan who had been wittering on about “The elephant in the room” for half an hour (without seeming to know what the phrase means) with the mad segue, “I love elephants. Moving on…” Whenever Sky Movies cut back to the four of them, a groan erupted from all of us. They represent all that is wrong with the way UK TV treats cinema, and it depressed me to see it.

Having hoped that a big loss for James Cameron would silence the endless whining from anti-Avatar forces, I was also disappointed to see the level of hatred aimed at it from film buffs all around the world didn’t drop in volume. I guess by now it’s the received wisdom that it it is the enemy, an “avatar” representing all that is terrible about modern culture and the unwashed masses who endorse it. I know from many thought-provoking reviews or respectful conversations with critics of Avatar that a lot of this is people really not liking the movie, having genuine reservations about Cameron’s vision and how he articulated it, and that’s cool, as even this fan is fully aware that it has big problems. However, enough people are pontificating on it without seeing it that much of the vitriol seems borne of dislike of its monolithic status as Biggest Thing Ever, or residual feelings of hate for Cameron’s arrogance and obnoxiousness from his Titanic days. I saw a lot of people crowing about how he was obviously crushed when Bigelow won the directing Oscar, which is funny because I saw a guy who looked delighted for her. Their divorce was – reportedly – amicable, and he was the guy who alerted her to Mark Boal’s Hurt Locker script, so I’m not about to dismiss those reports just to hold onto some weird artificial narrative about how she bested her asshole ex-husband ha ha ha. If anything, it was Tarantino and Lee Daniels who looked pissed off.

Even more exasperating is the new narrative that Avatar only really deserved the visual effects Oscar, and the photography and art direction Oscars were a baffling mistake because the movie was made in a computer, DUH! This dismissal – which could well be borne of distrust of the New Digital Frontier making the previous analogue age obsolete, a charge I think is nonsensical – is an insult to all who worked on the look of the film, and the work of pretty much anyone working in virtual environments today, be they in films or games. We’re talking about people who are designing everything onscreen from the ground up, who designed the foliage and landscape and vehicles and props and creatures, and then created a lighting scheme that was admittedly more manipulable than an actual environment but still required an understanding of light and its effect on our understanding of the events onscreen and our emotional response to the mood of the movie.

As I said before, Mauro Fiore (here profiled in Vanity Fair) had limited options here, as 3D technology requires brighter lighting for the effect to work, and even with this restriction he managed to create a complex palette (funky neon-black-light effects at night, bright and smoky colours during the day). The lighting in CGI movies is not just arbitrarily decided by some guy disinterestedly clicking around a Maya menu screen with no understanding of how light reflects off virtual objects. There was real thought put into this by very experienced and talented individuals, and that’s the case in all thoughtfully-rendered CGI environments. Fiore’s win is thoroughly deserved, and it represents a historic win that might be as important as Bigelow’s, in the long run.

Anyway, there were no real surprises all night, no Crash/Sean Penn-style upsets to wake us up (if you thought The White Ribbon or A Prophet would win best foreign language film has never seen an Academy Award ceremony before). As a result, no one got to be excited by a left-field victory for a favourite. Remember my latest poll, asking which Oscar longshot you are most rooting for? Here are the results:

Best Director – Quentin Tarantino (Inglourious Basterds): 4 (44%)
Best Actor – Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker): 2 (22%)
Best Original Screenplay – Up: 1 (11%)
Best Animated Picture – Fantastic Mr. Fox: 1 (11%)
Best Original Song – Almost There (The Princess and the Frog): 1 (11%)
Best Picture – District 9: 0 (0%)
Best Adapted Screenplay – In The Loop: 0 (0%)
Best Supporting Actress – Anna Kendrick (Up In The Air): 0 (0%)

Sorry, nine people who voted. No happiness for you.

Give That Lady A Strudel With Extra Cream

Posted on February 28, 2010 by admiralneck

Recently I asked you, my fragrant readers, what was the Oscar snub that irked you the most, and this was how the strudel crumbled: 17 votes, and a definite winner.

Best Supporting Actress: Mélanie Laurent (Inglourious Basterds) – 8 (47%)

Best Actor: Hott Sam Rockwell (Moon) – 2 (11%)

Best Writing – Original Screenplay: Greg Mottola (Adventureland) – 2 (11%)

Best Picture: In The Loop – 1 (5%)

Best Director: Jacques Audiard (A Prophet) – 1 (5%)

Best Supporting Actor: Michael Fassbender (Inglourious Basterds) – 1 (5%)

Best Actress: Charlotte Gainsbourg (Antichrist) – 1 (5%)

Best Costume Design: Jim Henson’s Creature Shop (Where The Wild Things Are) -1 (5%)

Best Writing – Adapted Screenplay: Scott Z. Burns (The Informant!) – 0 (0%)

Best Visual Effects: 2012 – 0 (0%)

Best Original Score: Elliot Goldenthal (Public Enemies) – 0 (0%)

Best Cinematography: Anthony Dod Mantle (Antichrist) – 0 (0%)

Best Animated Feature: Ponyo on a Cliff By The Sea – 0 (0%)

Here’s an embarrassing admission: I wasn’t going to add Mélanie Laurent to this poll. I figured she was the lead actress in Inglourious Basterds, and adding her to that category meant I would miss out Charlotte Gainsbourg’s work in Antichrist, which was the most impressive and startling performance of last year, in my eyes. It was the eternally wise Daisyhellcakes who convinced me to add her to a different category, thus knocking out my previous supporting actress candidate (sorry, Diane Kruger).

Good job I did. Her superb performance as the preternaturally calm and devious Shosanna Dreyfuss was rightly loved by SoC readers, and ignored by an Academy that obviously doesn’t think a woman applying war paint to her face while Bowie croons in the background qualifies as sufficiently awesome. I maintain she should have been given a best actress nomination, knocking out Sandra Bullock. That blank-faced, charisma-lite caricature isn’t fit to stand alongside the thrilling work by Gabourey Sidibe, Carey Mulligan, and Queen Meryl (I’ve not seen The Last Station, but I would be surprised if I liked Bullock’s performance more than Dame Helen’s).

Saying all that, I’m very surprised Hott Sam Rockwell didn’t get more votes. Considering the tide of support for Duncan Jones’ grassroots Twitter/Facebook campaign to get Rockwell nominated, I thought he would walk it. It’s even more surprising to see Greg Mottola get two votes for his screenplay, a delicate piece of work that managed to take (what I see as) the weaknesses of the Coming-Of-Age genre and turn them into lovable strengths. I’d like to think the single vote for Michael Fassbender was for his performance in Tarantino’s movie, and not because of the lingering memory of that moment in Fish Tank when he comes down the stairs and the camera drools all over him, that square-jawed basterd.

With only a week to go, I reckon I’ve got time for another quick poll. By now many categories have frontrunners, with one or two seemingly decided already (having seen – and enjoyed – Crazy Heart this morning I reckon the other four best actor nominees might as well not turn up, as good as they were in their respective roles. Nevertheless, if Academy-Award history has proved anything it’s that there is always room for a surprise. Most years there is at least one big shock, and so I ask, if there is one this year, which one would thrill you the most?

Best Director – Quentin Tarantino (Inglourious Basterds)

Best Picture – District 9

Best Adapted Screenplay – In The Loop

Best Original Screenplay – Up

Best Actor – Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker)

Best Actress – Carey Mulligan (An Education)

Best Supporting Actor – Stanley Tucci (The Lovely Bones)

Best Supporting Actress – Anna Kendrick (Up In The Air)

Best Animated Picture – Fantastic Mr. Fox

Best Original Song – Almost There (The Princess and the Frog)

I’ll end this in just a few days, to give me time to get ready for the big night.

Shades of Caruso

Circuit interruptus.

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Well I Love In The Loop Anyway ::pouts::

Give That Lady A Strudel With Extra Cream

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