Category Archives: Shane Black

BFI LFF 2012: Dans La Maison / Seven Psychopaths

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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.

The Rock and The Diesel: Titan Clash

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Until about ten days ago I did not give a single damn about the Fast & Furious franchise, having endured the first one several years ago and finding it wanting. It was easy to dismiss yet another ropey Rob Cohen movie, especially one starring Paul Walker and which was so obviously based on Point Break (or Donnie Brasco, I guess someone could argue). Its success just seemed like one of those things that happen in the unpredictable summer season, and at the time – and I stress, at the time – could have been attributed to Vin Diesel’s apparent rise to superstardom. I watched the movie, it fed my brain with vroom for a couple of hours, and then it vanished and I didn’t really think of it again, except as That Movie With Vin That Wasn’t Riddick Or xXx.

The second movie came and went without even disturbing my poorly-styled hair, other than to note that Vin didn’t return – surely a bad sign. Nevertheless his stalled career had caught my attention, and thus the success of the first movie suddenly seemed a little more mysterious. It wasn’t Diesel that audiences flocked to see, so what was it? Paul Walker? That seemed unlikely, especially as the third movie came along, this time without Walker, and still made money. At that point I just figured, well, boys like fast cars and women in short-shorts wiggling away from the camera, so that’s that. They struck me as straight-to-DVD actioners that had just managed to catch a wave of enthusiasm, perhaps from gamers who liked that the movies so often resembled a Burnout sequel with added booty.

Suddenly a fourth movie was upon us, and I briefly considered watching the others and then watching that latest sequel, but time was so tight, what with trying to pack in every other movie going, that I decided against it. Besides, surely this was a last roll of the dice, an attempt to keep the franchise going just a little longer by bringing the full team back from the first movie. It wasn’t worthy of my time, and would merely be the end of a franchise that had commendably defied its critics by lasting longer than expected (though I did recently notice this very astute and accurate article praising the series for its commitment to racial diversity, something that has been sadly ignored until recently but has now been picked up as an interesting critical take on the franchise).

But I was massively wrong, and apparently so were the many others who have mocked the franchise and its fans. Though I will admit I only recently took an interest once my beloved Dwayne Johnson signed on, the appearance of a fifth movie made me strongly question my dismissive attitude. You don’t get to five films in a series these days by barely squeaking into profitability. This series continues because it makes fat cash and is genuinely loved by millions of people, and just treating them like idiots who must have risibly low standards because they like car movies is unacceptable. It’s like the movie equivalent of Top Gear; hated by the monocle-wearing Snootingtons of the critterati but adored by many.

So last week I took advantage of Sky Anytime’s generous streaming of Fast/Furious 1, 2 and 4 (no Tokyo Drift, which I figured was because it wasn’t part of the main plot, though please let me know if I’m wrong) and caught up. The first movie was still nothing special, from what I could tell, but I enjoyed it a bit more this time around, taking time to enjoy Diesel’s performance and the pretty cars. The end still seemed problematic; at the seventy minute mark it suddenly goes, “Heist! Accident! Shooting! Bike chase! Drag race! Accident! End!” for no reason other than those elements were always meant to be in the movie but all of the reaction shots between Brian O’Connor and Dominic Toretto ate up the second act.

It doesn’t surprise me that this mulch of action beats was cobbled together by Gary Scott Thompson, the man who eventually gave us the horrendous Knight Rider reboot that died on its wheels last year, and the amazing 88 Minutes, surely the most entertainingly bad mainstream movie of the past few years. Still, I liked it more than the second, which seemed to lack even the momentum of the first movie, with Diesel’s diverting anti-hero missing and replaced by smartarse Tyrese Gibson. No chemistry between him and Walker plus a very silly final act (featuring a weak and poorly staged resolution that reminded me of Black Dynamite, for some reason) meant I strongly considered not bothering with the fourth.

Thankfully I ignored my better judgement and dived in, and was rewarded with easily the best in the series to that point. Chris Morgan’s plot had numerous inconsistencies, as pointed out here, but it was still noticeably sharper than previous scripts, and was willing to take the main characters seriously, meaning Brian and Dominic’s adventures finally had the heft they had needed in the first movie. Even better was Justin Lin’s muscular direction. He was already in my good books for directing the truly magnificent Modern Warfare episode of Community, where his knowledge of action cinema was apparent.

Fast and Furious showed he could bring the love to the big screen, with numerous superb setpieces worthy of mwahs of affection (especially the opening petrol truck heist-gone-wrong and the mid-movie street race with Brian constantly driven off course while his satnav nags him). If previous instalments had felt a little light on dramatic oomph – often by being primarily about racing/sexy male bonding but with a crime element dolloped on top like some cheap vanilla ice cream – Fast and Furious felt like a consistent film. The fractured relationship between Brian and Dominic breathed for once; even more so than the first movie, I became invested in their reconciliation, and was rewarded with a terrific final scene where Brian finally turns his back in the law in order to help his buddy. Ace stuff.

But Holy Fanbelts, nothing – NOTHING IN THE WORLD – could have prepared me for the absolute bug-shit-nuts insanity and balls-to-the-wall brilliance of Fast Five. It’s surely a contender for action movie of the year, and is so far and away the best movie of the series that everything to this point has felt like a mere pre-amble. I’m as surprised as anyone as my snotty dismissiveness has been transformed into rapturous adoration, and I would actually recommend everyone watch the other movies – even if they don’t really like them – just to get to the point where they can watch and fully appreciate the twists and turns of this berserk epic of melodrama, action, and bromance.

Writer Chris Morgan may have been memorably lampooned by The Onion this week, and again there are a number of times during Fast Five where the only response is befuddlement (one scene shows Dominic escaping some chains by just escaping don’t overthink it OMG look a pretty car!), but credit where credit is due; the decision to make the fifth movie a hybrid of Fast/Furious, Ocean’s Eleven and The Fugitive (or more accurately, US Marshals) was a stroke of genius. The mid-section of the movie – depicting our heroes planning a robbery – is enormous fun, with Diesel and Walker the B-list Clooney and Pitt, Sung Kang as Damon, Chris “Ludacris” Bridges as Cheadle, and Tyrese Gibson as Bernie Mac. This refocusing is a far cry from trying to find new ways to make Paul Walker fall out with his co-stars before winning them over with that… that… “smile” of his.

It struck me as I goggled in disbelief at this indecently entertaining slice of summer madness that there is no other movie series ever made where the fifth movie was better than the previous instalments, at least as far as I can recall. Even the fifth Bond movie  - You Only Live Twice – is not as good as Goldfinger or From Russia With Love, though it’s still a blast. The Bond series had several high notes later on, but there was a definite sense of fatigue after a while, necessitating a total revamp. The Fast/Furious movies have just hit their fifth instalment and now finally make sense as a whole, using the same cast and plot elements as before, taking the initial concept to its natural conclusion, and basically saying, “Fuck it, it’s kitchen sink time” and ramping the franchise up to heights that are almost epic in scale without abandoning any elements.

For a long time I’ve been increasingly annoyed by the complaints from critics and pop culture pundits when they talk about the lack of new ideas out there. “Too many sequels, too many remakes, too many spin-offs; can no one come up with anything new?”, etc. Yes, I will concede that tired sequels or remakes made with no imagination or no understanding of what worked with the originals – or what didn’t work and needs to be rethought – make me despair as much as anyone. I’m not crazy. When you’re sitting in front of the third Twilight movie and the plot is resolutely stuck in a rut and you can feel your soul turning grey with boredom, it’s easy to think we’ve built a cultural Pompeii on the side of a mountain that will erupt, spewing cliches everywhere and permanently submerging the things that make storytelling matter.

But this ignores the fact – two facts if you count “there are no new ideas, only new variations” – that sometimes, if done right, stories can get better the longer they run. Look at comics; Captain America has been good in the past, but its finest hour is arguably Ed Brubaker’s run, and he’s come in really late in the day. Look at TV shows; Lost had a couple of terrific seasons, admittedly with highs and lows, but the fourth and fifth seasons were incredibly surprising. Look at The Shield or Seinfeld or The Sopranos or The Wire or Friday Night Lights; they didn’t just wow us initially and then burn away because “all the ideas ran out”. They built worlds, filled with characters we knew and understood and loved. We connected with them more the longer we lived with them, and so our interest grew along with the new possibilities being spotted by the creators and then used as narrative fuel.

When lazy critics bemoan this rampant sequelitis, they often judge before they experience. There is always a chance that a creative team will come up with some new twist or idea, or some new possibility based on the seeds sown in previous episodes/editions/movies, that will excite the audience and break new and interesting ground. This should be obvious, but it seems to pass people by, mostly because it’s easy to just get stuck repeating complaints until they eventually become “self-evident”. Fair enough; we’ve all been burned a million times before, and so it’s easy and inevitable that cynicism increases. Some stories work best when told quickly. Not everything needs a million chapters. Some in recent years have been horribly overdone and stretched too thinly (numerous horror franchises or sci-fi epics could be trimmed quite easily). I get that, and in many cases, I totally agree.

However, Fast Five is a perfect example of something that takes a step back, surveys all of the franchise’s elements, and weaves them back together in a new and thrilling way. Perhaps it works better than most because at its heart the series is about artificially created and sustained families, both in terms of the people in Brian’s life and also around the world, as this community nurtures and sustains itself on the fringe of society and protects its members from the disapproving mainstream with mutual respect and codes of honour. This in itself is a fertile ground for stories and continuity, especially as Lin and Morgan have so far proven to be versatile enough to not just make the series about racing.

It also helps that the series has been to so many different locales, with Lin making great use of Rio de Janeiro in this instalment; he stages a rip-roaring chase sequence through a favela that resembles a scene in Louis Leterrier’s Incredible Hulk, except even more exciting. So we see a this template expand in scale, and because we have now arrived at a point where our numerous heroes have become familiar to us over time, Lin and Morgan can get on with setting these characters off against each other in various combinations of friendship, love, antipathy and distrust without the audience having to be led by the hand. The variations would not be possible without this familiarity.

Another beneficial side-effect of adding new chapters onto a story is this removal of set-up; we have about three film’s worth of story in Fast Five because most of the exposition is stripped out, having been dealt with in the previous films. This movie is lean while packed with incident, but – unlike some over-reaching summer entertainments –  is not devoid of emotive impact or dramatic weight (provided you buy into it, of course). The big muscular showdown between Diesel and Johnson is not only a crisply-edited and exciting brawl, it has considerable power due to the deftly-handled in-film build-up, and finishes on a memorable and cathartic moment that has great resonance to fans who have watched the whole series. The whole is truly greater than the sum of its parts.

As for the other participants, while Paul Walker and Jordana Brewster still have difficulty generating onscreen sparks, their characters at least matter to Dominic, and therefore to me. I’ve long held that Diesel is a more interesting performer than he’s given credit, especially as he seems drawn to morally diverse characters like Dominic and Riddick, and he does some strong and surprisingly quiet work here. Tyrese Gibson is now designated comic relief and seems to relish it; what had seemed to me to be a casting misjudgement in the second movie really pays off here. Chris “Ludacris” Bridges is slowly becoming a much more confident actor the longer he stays in the game, and this movie makes me look forward to more from him.

What about my hero Dwayne Johnson? He is BUILT TO KILL in this movie, having bulked up to terrifying size. His head is bald, his chin is whiskery, and his face is coated in a sheen of freshly-spritzed sweat throughout. It’s fantastic to see him finally play something a little meatier than his recent ill-advised child-placating roles; it’s not like he’s playing anything really shocking, but his character Hobbs is a bit of a sexist, kinda mean-spirited, a cross between Sam Gerard in The Fugitive and Leonard Smalls in Raising Arizona. He’s not in the movie enough (an unfortunate consequence of that kitchen-sink spirit), but its obvious he’ll be back, and hopefully he’ll have more to do. As previously mentioned before, the fight between him and Diesel – a fight I didn’t realise I needed in my life until just last week –  is as good as you would hope, but the best thing is the grudging rapprochement between hunter and hunted.

Allow me to explain. If there is any single relationship arc I love more than any other in all of written or filmed storytelling in the history of our world or any other, it’s the eventual thawing of hostilities between two diametrically opposed characters who hate each other or who cannot possibly ever be friends and yet somehow do because that’s how strong their love is. Midnight Run, Heat, the many buddy-comedy-dramas of Shane Black; these movies have moments that absolutely shake me to my core. Nothing makes me happier than seeing enemies become allies, and let’s just say, without spoilers, there is a moment in Fast Five that made me want to take off all my clothes and run around the cinema screaming “YEEEEEESSSSSS!” while sobbing and jumping and generally getting way too excited.

So yes, Fast Five is the business. For my previous ignorance on the Fast/Furious front, I humbly apologise (to no one in particular, as before today no one knew what I thought and will likely never care). The setpieces are amped up a thousand-fold, the bromance is intensified, the cars are still lovely, and what do you know, the final act throws out some major surprises that I wouldn’t dream of spoiling – I strongly advise fans of the series to stay in their seats until the traditional ropey CGI racing credits finish to see a terrific set-up for the next movie. I’d say it’s a guilty pleasure, if I believed in the concept. Screw that; everyone involved can be proud of themselves for making an action classic that gives the audience more bang for its buck than anything else in cinemas right now.

I might – I should stress might – even go so far as to say I enjoyed this more than I enjoyed Thor, and I really really really enjoyed Thor, though that might be because I’m still basking in the post-viewing glow, or perhaps the shock that something I had been so sniffy about could be so good. Who knew I would have this good a time just by dropping my sense of superiority and giving myself over to the love of two burly men rolling around on the floor and sweating over each other? Five more movies, please! Ten!

Coming of Age, With The Help Of Cathartic Violence

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

30. The Bourne Ultimatum

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

29. The Insider

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

28. Unbreakable

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

27. Magnolia

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

26. The Fountain

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

25. Kung Fu Panda

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

24. Rushmore

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

23. Three Kings

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

22. Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang

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

21. Galaxy Quest

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

20. X2: X-Men United

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

19. Rachel Getting Married

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

18. Zodiac

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

17. Memento

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

16. Elephant

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

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

The Last Action Rodent

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Shades of Caruso makes no bones about its enjoyment of truly bad movies, and our search for the right kind of cinematic dreck means we watch a lot of movies that are dismissed by critics. This approach has pros and cons. While something that feels like it was made in a kind of mass delirium (e.g. Obsessed, My Sister’s Keeper) can be a real source of pleasure, films that are merely formulaic and boring (e.g. Bangkok Dangerous, The Boat That Rocked) can really defeat us. Nevertheless, while our hunt for something terrible is a pretty cynical way of watching films, there is another reason to do it. Critics watch even more films than we do, and as a kind of cerebral shortcut will make assumptions about movies — especially genre movies — before seeing them.

I’ll happily give any genre movie a chance, hoping to stumble upon something that has been dismissed en masse which contains some purpose or highlight that has been overlooked. Occasionally, we watch a movie that got shortshrift for hiding a greater ambition under generic trappings, and this makes the effort of watching the chaff of cinema worthwhile. That said, though I’m obviously some kind of wonderful saint for doing this, it’s easy to aim my anger at critics who treat childrens’ movies with this kind of frustrated huffing and puffing, as I don’t have to put up with the same amount of cynical, poorly thought-through tripe that clogs multiplexes during holidays. It’s all well and good going to see Pixar movies or my beloved Speed Racer, but what about the rest?

In the interest of fairness, I recently subjected myself to Dragonball Evolution, the caucasian-ised live-action version of Akira Toriyama’s manga. Directed by James Wong of X-Files fame, it tells the hackneyed tale of a nerd boy with a secret past and no parents trying to find a series of MacGuffins before they are claimed by a poorly sketched bad guy who will use the MacGuffins to destroy the world or enslave it or maybe both depending on who is re-telling the expositional bits about evil magicians and aliens and monsters and dragons etc. Much as I try to give every film a fair shake, and will admit that even really terrible movies have some redeeming qualities, when something is lazy and pointless, I’ll grant that. Dragonball Evolution certainly qualifies as the biggest waste of time I’ve subjected myself to in a long while, and even managed to make me temporarily not like Chow Yun Fat. Unacceptable!

Any critic who had just had to see that feeble collection of cliches and cheap effects would have been forgiven for groaning at the thought of an incredibly expensive and aggressively marketed spy movie aimed at kids. Hoyt Yeatman’s guinea-pig spy action epic G-Force has several strikes against it immediately. It’s a kid’s movie not made by Pixar. It has a premise — intelligent guinea pigs working as spies against an evil corporation — that sounds unworkable. It has a starry cast, which is often a way of adding clout to a movie that might otherwise be some cookie-cutter money-making exercise. It’s full of CGI. It’s the sort of movie that’s built to create a line of merchandising to further bankrupt parents everywhere. The trailer is full of awful jokes and crashing explosions. Nic Cage is in it and the received wisdom, lazily trotted out by people who don’t have the time to inspect this claim, is that he’s crap nowadays. What could be more unappealing than this?

Worst of all, it’s produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, who — in the eyes of much of the critical community — is the enemy of good taste and art, a galumphing unsubtle populist who doesn’t care about educating audiences or giving them breathing space between hectic, orange-tinted action scenes. His movies cost millions and make billions, and that lowest-common denominator approach to filmmaking has debased our culture to such an extent that no one learns anything any more. Bruckheimer is a name now automatically attached to any discussion about the soul-deadening dreadfulness of contemporary commercial filmmaking, a one-man blame-magnet. While Michael Bay destroys the art of direction, Bruckheimer destroys the possibility of thought-provoking adult cinema with his roller-coaster ride ethos and relentless tide of tightly plotted fireworks displays. Never forget, he once made a movie based on a theme park ride.

Of course, it’s best we forget that the theme park movie — Pirates of The Caribbean — was enormously entertaining and not to mention made with real skill and love of the swashbuckling movies of old. It’s also best to forget that while it’s undeniable that a lot of Bruckheimer movies are not that great, he has also been responsible for the first Beverly Hills Cop — a pacy comedy-thriller that still holds up well — as well as the excellent Fail-Safe-esque Crimson Tide, prescient surveillance thriller Enemy of the State, and the endearing bombast of The Rock. The ratio of bad movies to good is probably not something I should think about too hard while constructing an argument for his movies, but even though he has delivered some awful, lazy movies, he has also given us some gems. These are never considered when rushing to denounce him as the worst thing to ever happen to popular cinema.

Of his previous movies Con Air might well be my favourite, though this is treated like the absolute bottom of the barrel by many. Those who do praise it usually refer to it as a guilty pleasure movie, “so bad it’s kinda good”. Those who hate it consider it especially tasteless and garish, the dumbest film Bruckheimer has produced. Perhaps it deserves a slot beside Starship Troopers as a satire that many people didn’t get, though Troopers had a higher aspiration than Simon West and Scott Rosenberg’s action comedy. It’s plainly obvious that the movie is making fun of action movie memes and expectations, with a cast of supervillains standing between our whiter-than-white hero (Cameron Poe, played by a hilarious Nicolas Cage) and a reunion with the daughter he has never met.

Very nearly every scene is played for broad laughs, with a nice compliment of sly gags running in the background. It makes fun of movies that fetishise serial killers — Steve Buscemi’s character is awful, but not much worse than the widely-adored Hannibal Lecter — not to mention the moral equivalence of good and bad. For instance, Poe might be a hero, but he’s also a killer himself, as are many “heroes” in action movies. We also get to see an action-liberal (as Bruckheimer is a Republican, it’s amusing to see a sandal-wearing pencil-pusher saving the day several times), and one of the most extreme and hilariously protracted “Bad-Guy-Deaths” ever, as John Malkovich’s Cyrus Grissom is stabbed, thrown through a building, electrocuted, and then has his head crushed. This play on the delightfully ghoulish tradition in action movies to have the villain killed in outrageous fashion might be my favourite moment in all of Bruckheimer’s movies.

This interest in picking apart the conventions of his own movies is similar to that shown by 90s action producer Joel Silver, whose movies were so formulaic he could afford to make fun of that template three times over. The Last Action Hero is exactly the kind of genre deconstruction Shane Black does better than anyone, and the movie managed to pull of the difficult trick of showing its plot machinery while still working as an exciting and hilarious crowd-pleaser. Demolition Man had as much fun playing with action movie tropes as it did with the idea of a joyless politically-correct world gone mad.

More notoriously, Hudson Hawk set those conventions in a deeply absurd world that paid homage to 60s spoofery (e.g. The Pink Panther, the Flint movies) as well as Silver’s actioners. Both movies suffered the same fate as Con Air, their satire missed or ignored by audiences and critics alike. Making fun of these solid conventions is a tough trick to pull off. Trey Parker and Matt Stone had to use puppets to make sure the comedic point of Team America: World Police wasn’t missed.

To this list of action satires can be added G-Force. Though it’s not as successful at making fun of the stable it comes from as the other movies mentioned above, it is still silly and self-lacerating enough to stand alongside them. The film opens with a team of secret agents infiltrating the home of Leonard Saber (Bill Nighy, excellent as usual), the shady owner of electronics and appliances firm Saberling Industries (is this a nod to director Brad Silberling? And if so, why?). Though the mission is successful, their mentor — FBI scientist Ben (a subdued Zach Galafianakis) – has operated without authorisation from the supervisor he is trying to impress (Will Arnett, not given enough to do), and the team is disbanded. Separated from Ben, team leader Darwin (Hott Sam Rockwell) rallies his colleagues and tries to prove the nefariousness of Saber while eluding Arnett’s agent goons, who seek to capture the team to use in experiments.

Bit harsh, but then the team is made up of guinea-pigs (and Nicholas Cage’s mole computer expert Speckles). As you can imagine, a lot of the comedy in the movie comes from the sight of well-animated guinea-pigs wise-cracking and getting into various scrapes involving grappling hooks, skateboards and motorised exercise balls. There are also almost unbearable wisecracks and cultural catchphrases quoted at depressing length as in the worst kind of sub-par cheap-skate animation: if there is anything that made my enjoyment of the movie drop to worrying depths, it was the stream of unfunny puns from Blaster (Tracy Morgan).

The movie is at is funniest when it plays things as straight as possible, with the team of tiny mammals acting like stereotypical covert spies and computer experts, spewing tech-speak as if they were action movie archetypes. Such straight-faced chatter is overused in modern movies and usually bears only a passing resemblance to real life: many of my favourite moments in 24 come from hearing CTU computer experts panicking over opening sockets and tasking satellites. Nevertheless, we take it for granted that this is how these people speak, until these words come out of the mouths of CGI guinea-pigs. Re-contextualised, the absurdity of these action movies — and the oeuvre of Bruckheimer — is exposed to the light of scrutiny.

Better than that is the flirty sparring between Darwin, Blaster, and female guinea pig Juarez (Penélope Cruz). Not only does she rebel against a young girl’s attempts to feminise her with dresses and make-up (a refreshing change to see a female character unsoftened by this kind of brainwashing), she also plays both men off each other in order to win their affection on her terms.  It genuinely sounds like a romantic sub-plot from another movie drafted in without alteration. The effect is discombobulating.

I wasn’t the only person delighted by this playfulness. The Guardian’s David Cox (the only critic working on that paper who seemed to understand what Tarantino was trying to do with Inglourious Basterds) wrote an excellent piece about G-Force‘s satirical bent, while pretty much every other critic waved it away with a bleat about how it was mere summer-movie kids fodder with not a thought in its mind. Tasha Robinson of the AV Club stated:

Pointing out G-Force’s plot holes would be redundant; it’s more hole than plot, and more videogame commercial and exhausted-old-trope clearinghouse than film. Events follow each other with a sublime disregard for coherence or story continuity.

Thus missing the point. Her comments about the plot are especially aggravating as screenwriters Cormac and Marianne Wibberley have done a good job of emulating the tried-and-true action plots of recent times, and from where I was sitting it seemed watertight.

Even more surprising was the considerable emotional charge therein. While I was less invested in the sub-plot involving team leader Darwin and his brother Hurley (Jon Favreau), the final act revelations about the villain and the true reason for his evil plotting is unexpectedly powerful. Though even I would baulk at claiming the movie is some kind of classic, or even one of the year’s best, I cannot lie about the effect the final fifteen minutes had on me. In those moments what had been a fun diversion with a cunning sense of its own absurdity became a real dramatic triumph, helped by first-time director Yeatman’s nifty handling of the final act action scenes. The sight of an enormous robot rising out of Bill Nighy’s estate and raining space debris down on FBI officers is an image I won’t be forgetting any time soon.

I strongly feel a little gem has been ignored in the rush to damn a movie for wasting the time of critics who would much rather be watching L’Avventura. Bruckheimer is man enough to know that the product he churns out has a formula. Here he has given Yeatman and the Wibberleys permission to have fun with that template, and we’re all the better for it. Even the seemingly lazy witticisms could be seen to be digs at the usual macho catchphrases of action heroes, though I’ll admit they truly do test the patience.

Nevertheless, even if that is a satirical dig too far, the voicework is spirited enough to dispel the audience’s annoyance. I’m tempted to say this is worth renting just to listen to an almost unrecognisable Nicolas Cage, channeling his Charlie Bodell voice. His work is almost solely responsible for G-Force‘s most satisfying moments and, along with his turn in Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, signals a real return to form. For that, and for exceeding my expectations so completely, I shall seek to defend G-Force from lazy criticism from now until someone comes up with an equation proving me wrong.

Yet Another Sad Day, This Time For Nerds And Film Buffs

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The first bit of news I heard today was that Stan Winston, animatronics pioneer and monster/alien design genius, has sadly passed away. While yesterday’s sad news about Esbjörn Svensson upset me as I had only just discovered his music, this hits me differently. There is no way I could accurately quantify the effect Winston’s incomparable work has affected my psyche, as his golden period covered my adolescence, during which time my mind was boggled by Aliens, Predator, Terminator, and many others. My God, I even went to see George P. Cosmatos’ risible Leviathan just because I knew he had worked on it.


Like many people, my bedroom wall was covered with posters and movie stills when I was younger, and my favourites were the ones showing his designs. The Predator, possibly his most imaginative creation, burned a hole into my head, though credit should be given to John McTiernan for leaving the final reveal of the alien’s hideous visage until the end of the movie. Those tiny glimpses of the creature’s real face, followed by a slow unveiling of the actual face, are hilariously retained in later Predator movies, even though we now all know what it looks like. Still, familiarity has not made that design any less impressive, a real classic fit to stand alongside H.R. Giger’s nightmarish Alien design. Speaking of which, further kudos are due Winston, for managing to adapt that biomorphic image and create the Queen from James Cameron’s Aliens. Not only is it a beautiful adaptation of the original design, but the animatronic realisation of it is even more impressive. The final fight with Ripley in the powerloader is utterly convincing. When I was a teenager, that scene fried my mind to a charred crisp. Look at the damn thing! BTW, the image on the right is of the evil Sarris from Galaxy Quest, a hugely complicated combination of costume and animatronics. Can you believe that underneath all of that is Robin Sachs, aka Ethan Rayne from Buffy?


In much the same way that the Universal monster movies inspired a generation of filmmakers, Winston’s creations seemed to appear in almost every significant movie of my childhood, existing as an alternate universe supergroup of monsters, aliens, robots, undead serial killers, and demons. His monsters either enhanced good movies (Terminator, Predator), or were the best thing about bad movies (his bizarre brain creature and backwards walking Martians from Tobe Hooper’s Invaders From Mars remake were way better than everything else in it). I always thought of those creatures (or should I say characters) existing in parallel in much the same way Dracula, Wolfman and Frankenstein‘s monster did years before. Considering the proliferation of material written since then, with those characters facing off against each other, I know I’m not the only one. Of course, Winston also got a crack at paying homage to those Universal monsters with Fred Dekker and Shane Black’s hugely entertaining Monster Squad, which was nicely circular. Check out the amazing Gillman design (on the left, with the Martian Intelligence from Invaders From Mars on the right). Just gorgeous.


While some of his work was dramatic and vivid, he could also be more subtle. He did animatronic animals that were utterly convincing (the lions in The Ghost and The Darkness, as well as the apes in Congo and Instinct) or playful (the mischievous mouse in Mousehunt). That of course led to his studio making the incredible dinosaurs in the Jurassic Park movies, which are often sadly overlooked when people discuss the admittedly impressive CGI FX in that trilogy. How cool would it have been to see his work on the long-rumoured Jurassic Park Meets The Dirty Dozen, with humans interacting with commando-saurs? He was also responsible for one of the most affecting non-monster images of recent times; poor Edward Scissorhands, the Emo King, with his bladey hands and scarred face. So basically, Stan Winston has made me laugh, cringe, hide behind my hands, put me on the edge of my seat, and also made me cry. That’s good going. (Eddie Scissormitts is seen here with the nasty Pumpkinhead, who appeared in Winston’s directorial debut.)


With CGI now almost ubiquitous and demand for animatronic creatures seemingly dropping, Winston Studios has had to branch out into producing, though he was still working on set even while suffering from myeloma. His recent Iron Man suit (designed, if I recall correctly, with Adi Granov) was so lovely I have lost probably hours of my life just staring at it. He has also done some work on James Cameron’s Avatar, so we still have that to look forward to. I can imagine his team of FX experts (some of whom have been working with him for twenty five years now) will be able to carry on his legacy, as long as there is a call for real world effects or character designs, but that doesn’t remove the sadness. Ain’t It Cool News is receiving tributes from some of Winston’s colleagues, including one from James Cameron that deeply upset me this morning. Forgive me for seemingly losing my sense of perspective, but as a film buff, and a nerd, and as someone who once was lifted out of himself by the incredible vision of the man, Winston’s death is a hugely significant and upsetting event. He will truly be missed.