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.

Listmania ’11! The Best Movies Of The Year

Posted on December 30, 2011 by admiralneck

A major caveat needs to be applied to this exhaustively thought-through list of the year’s best cinema, and I don’t mean the usual caveat I add about missing some key movie. The number 4 film on this list is so fresh in my mind (I watched it about 5 hours ago) that I’m not entirely sure it belongs in that place. It’s such a rich movie, such a complex and challenging piece of drama that there’s a good chance it should feature even higher, and yet I cannot place it where I think it will belong in future. Listmania is about how I feel at the moment I hit Publish, for better or worse. This means that sometimes I make almighty fuck-ups like including Megamind on last year’s list instead of How To Train Your Dragon, or putting Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs and Up below Michael Mann’s Public Enemies in ’09. As a result, it’s at 4, and if I decide that’s wrong in future, I’ll mention it somewhere.

Another thing to note; this year’s list doesn’t include a Best Documentary entry as I broke my new year’s resolution by not watching a single one. The Interrupters is on my Sky+ box, and I really wish I’d seen Senna even though I have next to no interest in Formula One. The one big documentary highlight of the year that I have seen — Errol Morris’ Tabloid — was shown during the 2010 London Film Festival and I wrote about it then, so my arbitrary rules demand I can’t add it this year. Those rules are very important, I’ll have you know. Contravention of the rules requires flagellation and right now I’m already feeling sorry for myself after one of our cats decided to use my face as a scratching post. ::sigh:: It’s been a long day.

As for the movies we traditionally didn’t get to see, the only possible contender for this list was The Descendants, which we could’ve seen at the 2011 London Film Festival if we’d been able to afford £25 each for gala tickets (which… no). Other than that I bet there was a ton of great stuff out there that would have surprised us and warranted inclusion, but I really doubt The Iron Lady (January release over here, rather perversely), Harry Potter and the End of the Franchise, or Jack and Jill would have made the cut. So, for about ten minutes at least, I feel pretty satisfied with this list. Yes, even the placing of Fast Five. You have no idea how much I enjoyed that movie. No idea. #ActionMovieBoner #CrushingOnTheRock

25. Wu Xia

How to describe this thrilling curio, other than to list the mashed-up elements: CSI, A History of Violence / Reign of Assassins, One-Armed Swordsman, Seven, and a dash of Raising Cain meld together to create a unique modern martial arts classic. Donnie Yen, Takeshi Kaneshiro and the legendary Wong Yu-lung face off in a relentlessly surprising tale of hidden identity, suspicion, and obsession. Yen is especially good as a family man thrust into a situation that jeopardises the lives of those he loves, but Kaneshiro matches him in the acting stakes as a possibly-demented detective who suspects he is on the brink of arresting a notorious and deadly killer. All the while, his distorted view of justice threatens to trigger a chain of events that could destroy an entire town. The battle for his soul, and the innocents of Yen’s village, is thrilling and unpredictable, aided by assured direction from Peter Chan, and beautifully photography by Yiu-Fai Lai and Jake Pollock. The well-controlled madness culminates in a final battle of epic intensity that is well worth the wait. Ignore critics who complain that Wu Xia is too much of a slow burn; the build-up contains pleasures too, before paying off in memorable fashion.

24. The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn

Two legendary filmmakers experimented with new technology this year, following in the pioneering footsteps of James Cameron and Robert Zemeckis. Those men made movies that have been critically shunned; perhaps Scorsese and Spielberg would have better luck. Hugo was embraced by film buffs for its loving homage to the works of a revolutionary filmmaker, but while Scorsese’s use of 3D and CGI FX was beautifully handled, the result was a little indulgent, too long, too personal to really breathe. Spielberg’s adaptation of the works of Herge was, on the other hand, derided by many. But it does more than just breathe; it hyperventilates with enthusiastic abandon as it leaps and gambols and sprints in an effort to entertain. The first half is less involving as it introduces beloved characters with too much reverence, but around the halfway mark Spielberg takes his new toy out for a real test drive, and from then on the audience is treated to a whirl of inspired choreography, unbridled imagination and sheer filmmaking genius. The series of setpieces that close out the film – especially the dizzying chase sequence through the elaborate Escher-like maze of Bagghar – are trademark Spielberg; beautiful, unconventional, technical marvels that left me giggling like a drunkard. The promise of further installments is enough to make this former Tintin-sceptic giddy with joy. More! Now!

23. Kung Fu Panda 2

This year’s crop of animated features was pretty disappointing, but that’s not to say there weren’t gems there. The blaze of publicity – and anxious online concern – for Pixar’s car-crash Cars 2 meant that attention was directed away from this Dreamworks sequel. The oddly dismissive reaction to the original might have contributed to the muted response but, for those of us who think the original is an underrated masterpiece of both computer animation and martial arts cinema, this was a cause for celebration. While not as thrilling and powerful as the first movie, KFP2 did the most important thing; it honoured that original, finding new ways to build Po’s character that followed on from his first arc, both by giving him a new source of inner pain to conquer, and by providing an antagonist whose own pain echoes that of our hero. Even the nigh-perfect Toy Story movies trod the same ground from one end of the franchise to the other; to see the KFP franchise show new facets of its central character was most welcome. On top of that, Jennifer Yuh Nelson – who provided the magnificent opening of KFP1 – does stunning work here too. Her direction is hectic but clear, packing giddy setpieces alongside well-judged character moments and perfectly timed gags. If this level of quality can be maintained, let’s hope Jeffrey Katzenberg’s pledge for a dozen sequels will come true.

22. Rise of the Planet of the Apes

What seemed like the most unnecessary movie of the summer season turned out to be one of the year’s highlights. It’s probable that no one thought we needed another Apes movie after Tim Burton’s woeful remake hurled scat bombs at the franchise, but hallelujah, Peter Chernin figured there was enough juice left to be squeezed out, and the result was a rousing triumph. Director Rupert Wyatt took the brilliantly “simple” script by Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver and treated it with respect, conjuring up some breathtaking setpieces more thrilling than any amount of crazy Bayhemian pyrotechnics. The fully realised cast of ape characters may have made the humans seem dull in comparison, but that’s only fair; this is a story about the emancipation of our poorly-treated simian brothers, after all. There’s lots to love about RotPotA, but special praise and garlands must be thrown at the amazing Andy Serkis. He’s terrific in Spielberg’s Tintin, but he’s even better here, bringing to life a truly great character. Caesar’s arc from innocent companion to vengeful freedom fighter is the key to this movie’s considerable success, and Serkis does thrilling performance capture work that deserving of award recognition. This summer may have opened with light mocking about RotPotA‘s existence, but the season ended with millions of us impatient for further installments. Who could’ve seen that coming?

21. We Need To Talk About Kevin

The formal daring of Lynne Ramsay’s long-awaited return to cinema is almost frightening, but welcomed gratefully. This adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s novel could, in less intelligent hands, have been reshaped into a run-of-the-mill thriller, but thankfully Ramsay is an artist of the highest order. Her crimson vision of cruelty and misplaced guilt washes over the audience like a wave, playing elliptical games with time and sensory input to create a sense of bafflement similar to that experienced by poor mistreated Eva. As with her previous movies, We Need… is an epic ambient hum compared to the three-minute manufactured ditties that we are usually served up. However, it would have been higher up this list were it not for the character of Kevin, here portrayed as a ludicrous force of pure malevolent evil, not a human being, whose actions are so dreadful as to unbalance the film. As a metaphor for the guilt and pressures placed on women as mothers, and a way to dramatise the vile rejection of Eva by a society that has yet to learn how to process grief, the demonic Kevin works brilliantly. As a believable person, less so. That means the movie’s higher allegorical purpose lacks the human core that would allow it to work on two levels, but even so, there is greatness here. Cinema needs Ramsay’s purity of vision; let’s hope she doesn’t stay away so long next time.

20. The Tree of Life

Terrence Malick’s semi-autobiographic cosmic meditation not only divided critical opinion but has such a split personality that viewer sympathies can change wildly from one moment to the next. Is this too self-indulgent, even for a Malick movie? Is it transcendental? Is it profound or profoundly stupid? The truth almost certainly lies somewhere in the middle, but for fans of the great man’s formless musings and pro-nature fixations, this triggered epiphanies that dwarfed the frustrations. Brad Pitt excels as the cold father who alienates his son, driving him to flirt with feelings of isolation that haunt him for the rest of his life. The microcosm of this transference is given an extra dimension by Malick’s startling decision to present a view of the macrocosm, an infinity of randomness and loneliness that seemingly extends beyond our lives. Tree of Life is arguably more compelling in its wilder moments; Sean Penn’s sojourn into what might be a barren and baffling afterlife, and the early Doug Trumbell-hewn effects sequences, are unexpectedly moving, grandiose bookends to a story of tainted childhood that can’t help but pale in comparison. Nevertheless, this peek into what makes Malick tick is also worth the effort. A filmmaker who for so long has been an enigma opened his heart to his audience, and in its finest moments, his honesty makes that journey worthwhile.

19. Arriety

There have been a number of adaptations of Mary Norton’s Borrowers novels — just this week the BBC showed a new version that featured lots of familiar Beeb-approved actors screaming and shouting and getting into all sorts of hi-velocity scrapes. Studio Ghibli’s version couldn’t be more different; it’s so relaxed that the only antagonist in the movie is revealed late in the movie and barely presents a credible threat. Hiromasa Yonebayashi and Hayao Miyazaki’s tale of dislocated family is disarmingly gentle, and focuses more on the details of life within the walls of our houses than the possibility of danger. The gloriously rendered background paintings and exquisite animation reintroduce us to our world from this new perspective, helped by stunning sound design that turns the ambient noise of a house into something alien. There is no need for empty histrionics; the tale of Arrietty’s growth into an adult, and the strain that puts on her overprotective parents, is drama enough. Arrietty’s friendship with Shô provides the rest of the narrative force; against all caution she befriends this potential enemy and inadvertently saves him from despair. This delicate, achingly lovely movie might not have the flights of imagination that other Ghibli movies have, but its grounded nature works in its favour. There is magic and beauty in this ode to friendship, this instant classic of pastoral fantasy.

18. Friends With Benefits

The profitability of cheap, bawdy comedies has led to a glut of films unafraid to depict gross-out bodily humour or frank discussions of the literal ins and outs of heteronormative sexuality (and its unfortunate homosexual partner, high-larious gay panic jokes). This year we’ve had the good (Bridesmaids), the bad (Bad Teacher), the lazy (The Hangover Part II), and the underrated (What’s Your Number?). Only one truly verged on greatness. Friends With Benefits trounces its other fuck-buddy rival No Strings Attached thanks to a good heart that is never swamped by the hilarious sex chat, rampant irreverence, and high energy hijinx, as well as a winning co-starring combo of Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake at their most charming. Will Gluck provides the same enthusiastic movie-referencing nerdery as he did with last year’s exemplary Easy A, this time drawing attention to the conventions of the romcom genre. Quite rightly, our cynical heroes, hurt by past lovers and eager to strip relationships of their romantic baggage, gleefully mock those conventions, and yet are unable to escape their draw when they finally, inevitably fall in love. Some have said Gluck is having his cake and eating it. I say he’s depicting the emotional arc of his protagonists. Honestly, what are critics paid for these days? Not enjoying transparently wonderful comedies? SADFACE.

17. Thor

It doesn’t have to be all Nolan-esque sourness in the superhero movie world, and Thor is the best example of the sheer fun that can be had within this maligned genre. Kenneth Branagh’s remarkably confident experiment with caped heroics does almost everything right, from introducing an audience to an alien world and unfamiliar hero, to using that new world to expand a recently established one, to matching its tone to its predecessors. The Marvel Film Universe has now been established as a place of high adventure and sneaky humour, both of which Thor has in spades. The perfect cast bring the ambitious script to life with infectious verve, with special honours going to scenestealers Anthony Hopkins and Kat Dennings, new star Chris Hemsworth, and especially the amazing Tom Hiddleston. His work here as the tragic and tortured Loki, “God” of Mischief – the year’s best villain – is a revelation. Branagh was right to think of this movie in Shakespearean terms; Loki’s anguish over his birth and insecurity over the love of the King Lear-ean Odin has shades of Richard III with a touch of Don John’s malevolence as he tries to undermine his brother by exploiting his Prince Hal-esque hubris. Thor takes the comic subject matter simultaneously lightly and seriously; it’s that balance between the two states that makes the best superhero movie of the year such a triumph.

16. Drive

For the majority of its running time, Nicholas Winding Refn and Hossain Amini’s pared-down crime thriller features the purest kind of cinematic iconography, using classic elements from the past thirty years of movies to create their simple tale of a getaway driver doing the wrong thing to protect the wholesome girl. It’s a glorious painting done in primary colours, depicting a luminous LA in which our near-silent anti-hero – a professional from the Michael Mann / Walter Hill school of perfectionists – performs miracles, but is undone and/or saved from solitude by a connection to the human world. File this alongside Refn’s previous movie, Valhalla Rising, as a portrait of a man whose singular purpose cannot change his inevitable future, as all around him complicate their lives with suspicion and misguided ambition. Refn’s pure imagery and purposefulness was revelatory, and his playful use of 80s-style imagery went some way to redeeming that ugly decade’s bad reputation. What a shame that overplotting in the last half hour had to tarnish this almost crystalline object. It’s a frustrating final act stumble that dampens the impact of what came before, but even taking that into account, Drive‘s mixture of innocence and grotesque violence is still remarkable, all the more so thanks to thrilling work from Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, and an unexpectedly terrifying Albert Brooks.

15. Martha Marcy May Marlene

Much like Jennifer Lawrence won a legion of fans with her appearance in Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone, Elizabeth Olsen’s debut performance in this dark drama is one of the highlights of the year. Her titular character is a mystery, an uncomfortable presence in our world and a sympathetic one when trapped in her cult. John Hawkes is the link between Bone and Marlene; his menace crosses over, but here he adds a layer of messianic charisma, controlling his minions and compelling them to commit terrible crimes. The question at the heart of this remarkable and bleak movie is whether Martha (Marcy May / Marlene) is a victim or a participant, and Olsen’s achievement here is to never tip us off. Sean Durkin’s directorial debut may feature a pleasingly ambiguous protagonist, but the one thing that’s not in doubt is his skill at using the natural world to generate an oppressive atmosphere of dread, one which curls over our anti-heroine from the first frame to the last like a closing fist. That gradual darkening, brilliantly evoked by the photography of Jody Lee Lipes and paced to perfection by editor Zachary Stuart-Pontier, is more effective than any horror movie made this year; when combined with the humanity of Olsen’s work, the result is unforgettable.

14. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Tomas Alfredson’s dour adaptation of John Le Carre’s classic novel is the kind of movie that gets plaudits just for being so out of sync with modern populist tastes; all of those garish loud movies that no one will admit to enjoying. Luckily there’s another reason for the critical praise; Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a riveting and intelligent thriller, made with exacting care by Alfredson, here proving that he is a major talent. The complex novel is cleverly condensed by Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan (redeeming himself for the mess he made of The Men Who Stare At Goats), wasting no time in feeding the audience swathes of information. Full attention is necessary, aided by the anti-distracting spartan visuals and authentically glum mise-en-scene; there’s an argument to be made that Tinker… captures Britain’s damp melancholic soul better than any other movie. Every performance is pitch-perfect, with special praise to be given to Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hardy and a never-better Gary Oldman. Their task is to take something that seems dry and clinical and show that the espionage element of the plot rests on subdued and submerged emotions. They leak out at times, giving us a peek into a world of immense, unaddressed grief. The result is a quietly devastating movie about betrayal and compromise, and the toll it takes on the secret guardians of society.

13. Fast Five

The summer season kicked off with Thor and Fast Five hot on each other’s tails around the globe, bringing with them the possibility that this could be the best summer season of them all. Sadly it was not to be. Nevertheless, at least we got this. Fast Five may be “just” an action movie, something that attracts derision from the criterati, but this “lowest-common denominator” action movie was like mainlining adrenaline. Embracing its humble origins, Justin Lin and Chris Morgan’s cacophonous action extravaganza is unapologetically crazy, doing everything it can to entertain its target audience, exceeding all expectations. It’s a perfect example of what a late entry into a series should do; it expands the franchise’s world without abandoning its roots, it adds new elements to enhance what we already have, and it pays off emotional beats that have been lying around for years. It also atomises most of Rio de Janeiro thanks to a joyous disregard for the laws of physics. No one here will win any awards, except for awards in my head, such as Best Movie Uniting Underrated Action Icons. Fast Five is Ocean’s 11 in cars mixed with The Fugitive, and the big showdown in the movie pits a sweat-spritzed Rock against an angst-ridden Diesel. If Shades of Caruso believed in the concept of guilty pleasures it’d file this in that category, but fuck that. This is just pure, delirious pleasure, a classic of the genre.

12. Wuthering Heights

Odd to think that this project has been in the works since 2008, considering the regular TV adaptations of Charlotte Bronte’s novel. There’s an industry at work doing nothing but churning out movies and TV dramas that try to depict the surface of Bronte’s story without capturing its essence. Adaptations need to break their source material apart to get at the meat within, and this version by Andrea Arnold and Olivia Hetreed does just that. By casting black actors to play young and “old” Heathcliff, they have done the impossible; they have breathed life into characters who have long lived as alien icons trapped in amber. With the rejection of Heathcliff here caused by ignorant bigotry due to his ethnicity, the motivations of all involved make sense in an instant, and from there we can empathise with them as people and not as tragic romantic caricatures. For the first time in my life I now understand Cathy and Heathcliff, feel their pain, ache for their tragic loss. This single move is a miraculous bravura flourish made even more profound by depicting this world as a kind of hell, in which Heathcliff can only rage and suffer. Arnold and Hetreed show how he brings everyone down into the depths with him, but they never lose sight of his humanity, inhumanity, and aching soul. Aesthetically perfect, atmospherically oppressive and thematically precise; this is the definitive visual adaptation.

11. Contagion

Doomsday fiction usually has to operate on a fantastical plane to generate a menace large enough to threaten all of society, but the plague subgenre doesn’t have to fake it. Which is why Contagion is so welcome, after years of Cassandra Crossing / Outbreak-style wackiness. Only Robert Wise’s Andromeda Strain ever got close to depicting the uniquely fascinating world of virology / epidemiology with any real rigour before, but Soderbergh and Burns’ terrifying vision of societal meltdown knocks even that terrific movie into a cocked biohazard mask. A brilliant cast tamps down its emotions to dramatise humanity’s reaction to imminent pandemic horror; muted emotions, delayed sadness, dutiful conscientiousness. Where lesser plague movies have succumbed to melodramatics, Soderbergh has made a forensic experience, using multiple narrative arcs to cover a lot of ground, all depicted with his trademark neat visuals. There are no pyrotechnics here, no races against time or miracle cures; there is only bureaucracy, panic, stupidity, and venality. Nevertheless, these qualities are balanced by the scientific minds that dispassionately work to prevent calamity. Contagion will probably scare the bejeezus out of you, but there is hope there too, because Soderbergh and Burns show that the connective web that threatens to destroy us is also the thing that will keep us alive.

10. Shame

They should call 2011 Annus Fassbenderis. After being the best thing about Jane Eyre, X-Men: First Class, and almost every movie he’s been in for the past five years, Michael Fassbender proved fans like SoC right by giving us the year’s most memorable performance, one that would send shockwaves through the culture if it wasn’t about that icky sex that people don’t want to reveal that they’re thinking about. His depiction of a sex addict’s psychological meltdown is mesmerising and courageous, and is enhanced by Steve McQueen’s evocative portrait of night-time New York, lit by the remarkable Sean Bobbitt to match Fassbender’s calm facade, all sterile, gleaming perfection hiding a darker core. Abi Morgan’s script wisely avoids providing explicit information about what made the protagonist, Brandon, the way he is. This isn’t about a journey into darkness. It’s about the arrival, and we are invited to look at ourselves without excuses or reasoning. It’s not an anti-internet message either, or a political statement about an over-sexualised culture. McQueen, Morgan and Fassbender may be trying to trigger a conversation about how we’ve all arrived at the point we’re at, alone and scared of opening up to others, without making facile assumptions. A problem doesn’t get fixed until we recognise it; perhaps that’s Shame‘s purpose, as well as to grip us, and horrify us.

9. Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol

The thought of Brad Bird following Ratatouille — one of the most profound meditations on art and creativity ever made — with another attempt to justify the existence of cinema’s most malfunctioning franchise made SoC depressed. It’s like hearing David Cronenberg is going to adapt a Robert Ludlum novel. And yet while that project was so deformed and weird that it never happened, Bird’s Ghost Protocol blasted onto IMAX screens in a flurry of confidence, taut suspense, and epic audience satisfaction. Bird’s beautifully designed and filmed setpieces are rightly attracting praise from even the most critical of viewers, with the Burj Khalifa scene on its way to becoming a new star in the action pantheon, maybe eclipsing even De Palma’s Topkapi homage in the first Mission Impossible. Supporting those thrilling highlights is a strong framework of improved character work (only Ving Rhames has registered in previous installments), propulsive pacing, and a giddy sense of silliness that compliments the drama. These touches, which turn a good spy movie into a great one, bear Bird’s fingerprints, more than justifying the decision to bring the great man on board. Yes, the villain’s terrible. Yes, the threat’s outdated. But Bird knows this genre so well, and can transmute the basest elements into gold, so what could’ve been another boring MI movie becomes 2011′s best action movie.

8. Melancholia

It’s a dark thought to have midway through Lars Von Trier’s brilliant end-of-the-world movie, but his recent awful experience with depression may have brought about a renaissance in his art, replacing his petty taunting of the audience with a greater awareness of himself, and his ambivalence toward himself. The result of this redirection has been the remarkable Antichrist and now Melancholia, which depicts the crushing weight of Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg’s depression as the inevitable end of the world due to collision with a metaphor in the shape of a planet. As blunt as this metaphor is, it’s effective in capturing the scale of a depressive episode within a person’s life, and is mitigated by subtler details that express with devastating accuracy society’s exasperating and uncaring attitude to those who suffer from mental health problems; the first half of the movie, with Dunst’s bride pushed and pulled by meaningless social obligations that she has become unable to comprehend or care about, is especially good. Dunst is mesmerising as the woman who dissolves into her depression, reaching something like a state of grace as her sister (Gainsbourg, also phenomenal) succumbs to her own version of this dread. Von Trier’s frank and honest exploration of his experience is an invaluable aid for those of us fortunate enough to escape its misery, and for that he should be thanked.

7. Margaret

Kenneth Lonergan’s long-delayed movie-as-novel is here presented with approximately a sixth of itself missing, and who knows how the restoration of that chunk would alter the movie. But what multitudes are already contained here, what glorious truths, what immense joy and anger. Lonergan has weaved a tale about perception and interpretation by making a movie that is intentionally opaque and misleading, but his primary achievement is to transcribe the fractured, confusing experience of PTSD into disorienting dramatic beats and unpredictable explosions of emotion. This unconventional approach is especially apparent during the final hour, as precocious student Lisa tries to mitigate her feelings by lashing out at everyone. Anna Paquin gives the performance of a lifetime as a young woman who believes she knows herself and her place in the world, despite all evidence to the contrary. What Lonergan has done is perceptively capture the exasperation of those adults who have stepped aside to let their progeny find their feet, only see watch in horror as they founder and then fall back on obnoxious bluster. Many commentators decry this as “merely” an outdated movie about 9/11, but it’s as much about how parents can fuck up their children, while offering hope that eventually those children will come to realise and accept they are a part of society, not above it.

6. A Dangerous Method

The accumulated works of David Cronenberg have shown his fascination with the life of the mind, and how our inner selves contain secret things that can bring us low. This metaphysical horror has been overtly addressed by him many times, but this is a more subtle exploration of the threat of our hidden self poses to ourselves. The Carl Jung here brought to us by Cronenberg, Christopher Hampton and Michael Fassbender is an enthusiastic man of high ideals and loyalty who is undone by a lust he could not have anticipated, one which erodes his marriage, his public reputation, his friendship with father-figure Sigmund Freud, and eventually his expectations for his future. But this superb film keeps this torrent of disappointment and longing out of sight; Cronenberg’s subtle direction means only Keira Knightley’s explosive catalyst Sabina Spielrein gets to unleash her emotions, often against her will. Jung’s yearning for such freedom, and Freud’s reaction to the young man’s ambitions, leak out in occasional moments of recognisable childish weakness at odds with our image of them as great men. These relationships are the engine for this masterful dramatisation of their theories in action; psychoanalysis as psychodrama. Though this hasn’t landed with as big a splash as Cronenberg’s most recent movies, SoC suspects time will be kind to it. One day it will be ranked among his best.

5. Attack The Block

It’s rare that a British filmmaker has enough control over his urge to emulate his directorial heroes that he can pay homage to them without making a hollow copycat exercise, and Joe Cornish deserves plaudits for his expert handling of suspense and pace. But this is more than just a proficient sci-fi homage. The real-life mugging that inspired Attack The Block has been transformed through Cornish’s compassionate and questioning approach into a treatise on the ethnic and social tensions that exist between the victims of our unjust economic system and those who glamorise it. There’s no patronising here; Cornish is aware of the wrongness of his protagonist’s crimes, and doesn’t excuse them, but he at least tries to understand what drives those who are sickeningly referred to as “the feral underclass” to such lows. This curiosity and empathy is almost unheard-of in British culture, especially after the recent riots that caused a shudder of sneering disgust to ripple through our media. That it has taken so long for someone fortunate enough to not sit at the bottom of Britain’s socio-economic ladder to sympathetically wrestle with these themes is a black mark on our country. AtB isn’t just a thrilling horror-action movie; it’s an attempt to communicate something about the UK that no one wants to think about, a time-capsule representation of who we are and what we’re doing to our disenfranchised youth.

4. A Separation

Proof, if proof was needed, that a movie about a simple gamble within a marriage could create the dramatic equivalent of a train crash. Asghar Farhadi’s riveting drama begins simply as the tale of an Iranian couple considering divorce, with Simin (Leila Hatami) testing the resolve of her stubborn husband Nader (Peyman Maadi), before becoming a cross between Kramer Vs. Kramer and Rashomon. Farhadi’s stunning movie becomes complicated with such stealth that it’s not until you’re an hour in that you find yourself engaged in a kind of dialectic with the movie, questioning everything you have seen in an effort to keep up with the shifting narratives of the protagonists. The stubbornness of Simin and Nader, which causes such damage to those around them including their daughter and the tragic figure of Razieh (Sareh Bayat), should make them unsympathetic but Farhadi’s humanity means we recognise every stupid, selfish thing they do. His direction is forensic, his cast uniformly impressive, and his script is the screenwriting highlight of the year. This is a movie to watch and study to in order to pick up all of its subtleties and surprises, and that’s before you consider its allegorical richness. But it’s not necessary to know the intricacies of Iranian politics to get the most from A Separation. All you need to do is be a human, with all the understandable flaws so perceptively captured here.

3. The Artist

There are numerous arguments against Michel Hazanavicius’ silent movie homage:” it’s too light”; “the melodrama is overplayed”; “there’s not much to it”; “it’s too derivative of several movies”; “the dog’s not in it enough”; “why is it black and white and why are there no words”; “there’s no way I could possibly enjoy this as being happy is anathema to me and my very serious ways”. It’s all a load of stuff and nonsense. Experiencing this ode to joy, this gratifyingly weightless and ecstatic love letter to the power of populist art, is the best time you will have in the cinema at the moment, and being a part of the collective audience experience – as depicted very pointedly in the opening moments of this modern classic – is an unforgettable treat. Jean Dujardin and Berenice Bejo are delightful as lovers separated by pride and fear of the future; their infectious joy and indestructible attraction to each other is the secret of The Artist‘s considerable success. As opined here, it’s also a tribute to the artists who have been part of the tapestry of culture that is still being woven, and the way in which an idea generously given can flourish. One act of flirtatious kindness pays dividends in the future, with the recipient paying it back in order to save a loved one’s soul. But forget about that; see it, succumb to its delirious, enthusiastic embrace of cinema and romance, and don’t forget to bring your dancing shoes.

2. Rango

Who would have believed that Gore Verbinski had this in him? Shades of Caruso is proud to call itself a pro-Gore blog, having been one of the five audience members to have enjoyed the determinedly peculiar Mousehunt on release. Even taking that early oddity into account, Rango is a startling leap into the weird for Verbinski. A Chinatown homage that mangles the Western genre and goes out of its way to alienate the audience it needs to be a success? Just for taking that risk it deserves to be praised, but tokenism like that isn’t necessary when the end product is this much fun. As SoC tweeted at the time — in a state of some shock and joy — it’s like a Grant Morrison Animal Man comic directed by Sergio Leone, breaking the fourth wall and probably even a hypothetical fifth wall as Rango seeks to define his personality by pulling our new modern cinematic mythology into his world to form a path of self-discovery. Much of the rambling discourse on how we define ourselves makes it seem like the recording of the dialogue – done by Verbinski with all the cast present, acting out their parts on a soundstage – was actually an informal group therapy session. There’s structure within this berserk adventure, and Verbinski stages a couple of delirious action sequences too, but it’s the doodling in the margins, the asides and self-inspection of Rango himself that make this one of the most exciting and lovably deranged movies of the new century. It’s also a vision of beauty; thanks to the stellar production design of Mark “Crash” McCreery and the lighting design of consultant Roger “King” Deakins it’s almost too much to take in on first viewing.

1. Take Shelter

For far too many of us, the world has become a buzzing, unpredictable maelstrom of doubt and fear, as established institutions crumble and threaten to take everything familiar with them. A combination of things beyond our control have conspired to alter the world too quickly for us to keep up with, so that we’re assailed by external and internal strife that manifests in global pessimism about the future; there was too much news this year, too many things going wrong. The earth shifted beneath our feet metaphorically and literally in 2011, and no other cultural experience captured that terrifying feeling like Jeff Nicholl’s magnificent end-of-days movie. Expertly combining a sense of imminent world-shattering event and the personal story of one man’s battle to overcome his seemingly inevitable mental collapse, Take Shelter is suffused with the sense that devastating things can happen to us and there’s nothing we can do can stop them.

The final scene can be seen as either hopeful or not, but for anyone who feels their stomach drop every time they turn on the TV or look at Twitter or read a newspaper, and hear that the world as we know it has become alien and newly fragile, it’s the slow build of dread that makes this the most immersive and upsetting cinematic experience of recent times. Nicholls has put his finger right on the synapse that controls our terror; watching this exhausting experience, and marveling at the mesmerising performances from Jessica Chastain and Genius-Level firebrand Michael Shannon is to see your fears realised before you. For those of an optimistic bent, there is still much to enjoy here, but for the rest of us, this is the movie of our time, the touchstone and representation of our psyche.

Honorable Mentions:

Children Who Chase Lost Voices From Down Below: Makoto Shinkai’s magical trip into the underworld is an afterlife myth for our time, as a young girl and a shady operative both seek to deal with their feelings of loss and loneliness by embarking on a death-thwarting journey into Agartha. CWCLVFDB‘s epic sweep and honesty make this a visual and emotional success.

Weekend: Comparisons to Before Sunrise are inevitable, but this depiction of a brief encounter is transformed into something different due to the inevitable political element within. Andrew Haigh is to be commended for not making this romance specifically about gay politics, but addressing it cleverly provides an extra emotional level. It’s also just very romantic.

Footloose: More to come on this Craig Brewer remake in a forthcoming post. Suffice it to say, it did everything right, nothing wrong, and fixed everything wrong with the beloved but heavily flawed original. A hugely underrated crowdpleasing treat.

Super 8: 2011 was a year in which our best filmmakers were eager to plunder the history of cinema, and J.J. Abrams’ homage to the golden years of Spielberg’s Amblin so accurately captured the look and feel of those movies that all structural flaws could be forgiven. To those who grew up watching the movies referenced here, Super 8 was a glorious reminder of their power and beauty.

Moneyball: Brad Pitt co-produced this, and it’s pretty much his show. Eschewing the usual mythologising of baseball (at least until its final act), Bennett Miller, Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin use a dry tale of statistical manipulation to depict the slow awakening of a man to life’s possibilities. Pitt “knocks it out of the park”. (UK readers note that this is a baseball metaphor.)

Coming up, once I’ve harnessed my considerable grumpiness — Listmania ’11: Worst Movies of the Year. There will be grump.

BFI LFF 2011: Six Degrees of Jude Law (360 + Contagion)

Posted on December 7, 2011 by admiralneck

My first experience of the 2011 London Film Festival was attending 360, the instantly derided new project from Fernando Meirelles and Peter Morgan, who were in attendance for the movie’s second screening following the opening night gala. Sadly the second experience of the festival was watching a fight almost break out between the guy sitting next to me and the couple sitting in front of us who conducted a phone conversation with an unseen third party through the first five minutes of the movie; a little gift to the audience that included some calisthenics from the guy who stood up, turned around, sat down, got back up, all while chattering away as if he was the only person in the room. I’ve whined about the unusually poor behaviour of festival attendees before, but this was on a whole new level. It didn’t bode well.

One miserable consequence of this was that I missed the opening of 360, in which Mirkha (Lucia Siposová), a young woman preparing to begin work as a high-end escort, is photographed by a sleazy pan-European pimp. As this happens we hear a voiceover which I suspect is from her sister, Anna (Gabriela Marcinkova) who, as far as I could see past Mr. Inconsiderate Twirling Guy, was talking about things coming full circle which, if you think about it, is super-apt considering the fact that the movie, named 360, is a loose adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde. Annoying that I couldn’t see the subtitles, but then I knew, just from the format of the movie, that I would get another chance to read them again at the end of the film, when it inevitably finished with the same speech. And what do you know, I was right. This is not a movie that contains a multitude of surprises, then.

Maybe it’s delayed fatigue brought on by exposure to Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel, which hopped around the globe from story to story, showing how connected we are, or maybe it’s my belief that this kind of linked anthology story has already been written definitively by David Mitchell (dedicated Cloud Atlas fan here), but 360 felt tired almost from the very first shot. Mirkha leaves the Grimy Room of Depravity™ to begin her escorting career by travelling across Europe to meet with Jude Law, a seemingly inept businessman hoping to have a sexual encounter while away from his wife. An unfortunate encounter with one of the pushy men he has travelled to see stymies his sexcapade, and from this moment on, a wave of accidental meetings, misunderstandings and revelations sweeps across the globe, changing the lives of a number of otherwise unconnected characters.

Meirelles’ critical stock appears to have fallen precipitously over the years, and for a while it felt like I was the only person still banging a drum for him. From critical adoration (City of God) to bemused grumbling (Blindness), his reputation has lost its lustre. Personally I liked Blindness, thought the performances were strong and the movie’s aesthetic appealing enough that I ignored the obviousness of the tale’s metaphorical conceit, but there’s hardly any way to defend 360. It’s a disappointingly ugly movie, rendered in washed-out tones, while the sludgy pace caused by its stop-start anthology structure means Meirelles struggles to generate any tension. The final scenes attempt to create some suspense but so little time has been spent with the characters the only way to make it work at all is to throw some pretty cheap melodramatics at the audience.

It’s possible that the version we saw was incomplete; it’s so flatly shot there’s a chance it hadn’t even been colour-coded, and the subtitles contained spelling and grammatical errors. And I’ll admit 360‘s plotting is mostly drum-tight, with only an occasional unrealistic fudge to help the narrative along. It’s also a surprisingly optimistic film, which gives it an edge over the modish, unconvincing dourness of Iñárritu’s work. In the Q&A following the movie Morgan happily admitted that he’s a jolly person at heart and didn’t feel it necessary to add any bleakness to the tale. It’s refreshing to see something so cheerful and life-affirming, especially considering the stream of huge downer movies I subjected myself to over the next two weeks.

Unfortunately it also means that 360 has little bite, except for a mid-movie sequence sullied with the most startling tonal inconsistency imaginable. Most of the movie’s indiscretions involve adultery, here seen as a chain of infidelity that spreads across Europe. Through a number of linked events we see heartbroken Laura (Maria Flor) leave London to head back to her native Brazil. On the plane she meets kindly Anthony Hopkins, a lonely bereaved father who helps her out, and during a layover in the States she encounters Tyler (Ben Foster), a sex offender struggling with an almost overwhelming urge to rape her and who may have been responsible for the death of Hopkins’ daughter and eh what hold on?

Foster (on admittedly fine form) is just dropped into the movie without any previous connection. A quick discordant scene establishes that he has been released to travel across the States to a halfway house thanks to the intervention of an apparently blind and delusional care worker. That’s very nice, but considering how jumpy he is, how easily tempted he is and how much he is still struggling to overcome his urges, it seems utterly inconceivable that he would be allowed to do this alone. Upon meeting this twitchy, unpleasant, antisocial mess of grunts, Laura is instantly, insanely smitten and drags him back to her room, thus brushing off Anthony Hopkins, who has agreed to meet her in the airport diner because he’s such a lovely and friendly old man but fuck that, eh? Who wants to hang around with someone like that when you can attempt to get over your heartbreak by trying ineptly to seduce a redneck whose body language screams “rapist/murderer” (or should I say “Actor who thinks rapist/murderers act like rapist/murderers”)?

The upshot of this is that we see a ridiculous split-screen suspense sequence seemingly directed by a mogodon-dosed De Palma in which a number of bureaucrats and jobsworths slowly realise that maybe letting someone as transparently dangerous as Tyler out to roam the world might not have been a good idea after all. We also, in the middle of a movie that gaily skips between light drama and broad comedy, get to see Foster in a bathroom frenetically masturbating and miming violent abusive sex acts in an attempt to stop himself from accosting poor oblivious selfish Laura. It’s so bizarrely inappropriate, compared to the rest of the movie, that I felt like asking if the reels had been switched. The fact that this is the only sequence in the movie to generate any kind of frisson complicates matters further. It’s desperately manipulative, almost comically so, but I guess it worked. Insert sadface here.

This wasn’t my favourite sequence, however. I will not hide the fact that I’m a fan of every single one of Anthony Hopkins’ brilliant acting tics; the gabbled run-on sentences, the oddly creepy smile, the constant leaning, and that rich, commanding voice. In drunken moments I have attempted to imitate him, so dearly do I love him. This has been a great year for fans of the thespian colossus. He was brilliantly unhinged in the otherwise unwatchable exorcism movie The Rite, magnificent in Kenny Branagh’s vastly entertaining Thor, and endearingly dopey in Woody Allen’s You Will Meet A Tall, Dark Stranger where, sadly, he had to share a lot of screentime with Lucy Punch, hammily playing the worst chav caricature imaginable. Yes, worse than Mira Sorvino in Mighty Aphrodite and Patricia Clarkson in Whatever Works. Nice work Woody, you massive fucking snob.

In 360, however, we get to see what happens when a writer and director completely indulge him. Morgan gives him a long speech about his dead daughter, delivered at an AA meeting, that goes on for what feels like about five minutes. I’m not sure what guidance Meirelles gave him, but the result is a long, unbroken slice of pure Hopkinia, and it took all of my power not to hoot with joy throughout. There is SO MUCH ACTING in this scene. The great man throws in every single tic and technique you can imagine, but goddamn it, the scene works like gangbusters, at least for me. Hell, I’d watch a whole movie of this. Someone get on that shit immediately.

It would certainly be more entertaining that this bitty hodge-podge of promising but underdeveloped short stories. For something that supposedly spans the globe and pays tribute to the hoary old idea that we’re all part of the same great human melange, 360 feels small and inconsequential. There’s no great truth here, and while it passes the time well enough, it’s disconcerting to see something so half-hearted come from Meirelles, who previously seemed to have a better grip of what it is to be alive in the modern age. This is a pick-and-mix bag compiled by someone who doesn’t understand you; there’s probably something in there you’ll like, but there’ll also be far too much licorice, and some of those unappetising-looking fried egg sweets with that nasty foamy texture.

I feel bad saying any of that because 360 is kinda sweet, and both Meirelles and Morgan were utterly charming in the post-movie Q&A. While looking for info about this movie online just now, I spotted here that Morgan’s inspiration for 360 includes the viral contagion that also, regrettably, connects us with each other. Jude Law also showed up in Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion, which takes that idea and runs with it, and though Contagion wasn’t included on the London Film Festival roster, I saw it while the festival was happening and it struck me as such a perfect companion piece with 360 that I have to talk about it. Also, because I think Soderbergh’s movie has been given an unfairly rough ride by critics.

Contagion has been described in the same damning way as David Cronenberg’s superb A Dangerous Method; too clinical, too sterile, not fluffy and crazy and melodramatic enough. Just as I strongly believe that such criticism of A Dangerous Method is wide of the mark, and will eventually be consigned to a dustbin once people have seen it more times and have come to appreciate its subtlety, I think Contagion will be treated with greater respect over time (coincidentally, the critic who seemed to value Contagion most was Amy Taubin, whose incisive and similarly enthusiastic review of A Dangerous Method can be found here). Nevertheless, it irks me to hear this gripping, serious drama compared negatively to Wolfgang Peterson’s ridiculous — though admittedly entertaining — plague movie Outbreak.

Written by the brilliant Scott Z. Burns (who was responsible for the exquisitely scripted The Informant!), Contagion follows a number of people affected by a global outbreak of a deadly new virus, MEV-1. Burns and Soderbergh focus mainly on the scientists struggling to find a vaccine, but also show the effect of the pandemic via bereaved citizen Matt Damon and blogger Jude Law. There are multiple strands here, but unlike 360, which parcels its stories out in discrete lumps, Contagion‘s stories run parallel to each other as the virus flourishes, triggering vast societal changes as humanity struggles to cope with impending disaster.

And yes, it is clinical. Soderbergh avoids melodramatics — there are only a couple of histrionic flare-ups during the movie, mostly from poor, terrified Damon, struggling to protect his daughter from the fate that befell other members of the family. But this approach, eschewing easy drama, is entirely appropriate for a movie dedicated to celebrating the best of the human intellect. What might seem like an oddly subdued movie about apocalypse is teeming with suppressed emotion, most of which is tamped down in order to maintain scientific objectivity to prevent the death of almost 10% of humanity. This is a paean to the great minds toiling away to prevent global catastrophe, a testament to the unsung experts who try to save us from our hostile world.

Many years ago I was lucky enough to read Laurie Garrett‘s The Coming Plague, which triggered a fascination with epidemiology and virology. Contagion is the first movie to successfully channel these fascinating subjects in an a serious fashion, but then this is probably because Ms. Garrett was one of the consultants who helped Burns write his authoritative screenplay (Dr. Larry Brilliant and Dr. Ian Lipkin were also among the contributors). The movie screams authenticity; there’s no synthesis of barrels of vaccine in a couple of minutes, there’s no temporary stupidity gaps among the scientists in order to generate fake tension or emotion, there’s no plucky maverick saving the day, and no applause for anyone who isn’t a professional. This is a movie that loves the intelligent, objective elites that know their shit. For this novel approach alone Contagion should be heralded as a major success.

I may rail against Aaron Sorkin as often as I praise him, but his love of the smartest of the smart — most often expressed by giving his characters speeches where they reel off their CVs to a clearly stunned audience of drooling lesser-folk — is refreshing, when not distorted by his personal bias against anyone who dares to question his brilliance. Too often the template for movies is to provide a little man to cheer on as he does battle against the know-it-alls who dare to order the rest of us around. It’s this glorification of the plucky ignoramus that has led to the rise of ideologically motivated idiots like Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter, Melanie Phillips, Peter Hitchens, Jon Gaunt, Amanda Platell and the rest of their malevolent small-minded ilk. This is most definitely not a good thing.

Meanwhile the quiet brains that make the world better or safer are drowned out by this frothing torrent of anti-knowledge, best shown in Contagion via Jude Law’s financially-motivated blogger Alan Krumweide. There have been some grumblings that Contagion is tarring all bloggers with the same brush, but I don’t think Soderbergh and Burns mean to use the vile Krumweide as a critical tool against those of us who write online without the seal of honour provided by a paid job by the official media (see also: Sorkin and his mean-spirited complaints against amateur writers). There are a number of comments made by Krumweide that plainly show their satirical target is the kind of corrupt individual who seeks to alter public perception of scientific endeavours for financial gain.

Their target is almost certainly Dr. Andrew Wakefield, who campaigned against the MMR vaccine. There is dispute over whether his now-discredited claims about links between the vaccine and a rise in autism diagnoses have caused a surge in measles cases around the world, but nevertheless his motives for arguing against MMR closely align with the motives of Krumweide, who promotes the use of Forsythia as a cure for the MEV-1 virus in order to capitalise on the inevitable run on the false remedy. He is a pitiful, unpleasant character, but he is at least given a few moments of what seems to be doubt and pity. I usually react negatively to unrepentant villainy in movies, but my own sense of anger at such venal behaviour in the real world meant Krumweide seemed almost insufficiently evil.

Contagion doesn’t deny that there is a political element to public health provisions, governmental disaster response, or the financial, social and religious reactions to outbreaks, but it strenuously lobbies for a cessation of needless complicating actions when faced with the death of millions. There is a sense of great anger against such behaviour in this movie, and the way in which attempts to capitalise on crisis inevitably obstruct the nobler work of scientists. This is a hero-worship movie, and how you respond to that will be linked to how much you think the CDC is trying to help humanity or exploit it. As someone who thinks these guys are to be trusted, Contagion is the movie I’ve been waiting for since discovering their humbling, courageous work.

And for those who feel Contagion is a heartless movie that denies any expression of emotion, I direct you to the final act of the movie, where we see the assorted characters get a moment to pause for breath. It is in these final scenes that we see them find time to react to the global — and personal — shift caused by the pandemic. There is humanity here in spades. It just had to be put on hold for a while. How rare it is to see something in popular culture praise reflection and professionalism, to take a break from severing Gordian knots with an slashing knife instead of taking the time to unravel it, before exhaling and embracing the horror that the characters have survived.

360 may have tried to tell a story about the wonder of humanity in the connected 21st Century but it rarely rises above the level of potboiler. Contagion is the movie that eulogises the best of our species, by showing how, even when the majority panic and try to make things worse, we were once at least smart and civilised enough to have prepared the safety net that will save us. There is fear here, and raging frustration, and Soderbergh and Burns dramatise both brilliantly, but they also offer a vision of hope. Their cleverest trick comes in the very last minute, in which we see just how fragile we are as a species, and how much we can jeopardise ourselves if we’re not careful. We can be almost entirely undone by the smallest fluke moment, but still we prevail. That last note is haunting, but even as it hangs in the air we can still hear the minimalist symphony of hope played just before. We will prevail, no matter what gets thrown at us. We’re going to be just fine.

The Top One Hundred and Six Movies of the Oughts (90-76)

Posted on December 9, 2009 by admiralneck

As I said in my previous post, this list has been kinda rushed, due to initial reservations about the project. This has meant that I’ve missed some great movies off, and now that I’m committed to doing the list, these movies have to remain excluded so that I don’t invalidate the previous part of the list. Oh, it’s all so confusing! I shall endeavour to cover those missed movies as I go along.

Actually, my decision to leave off Hideo Nakata’s Ringu and Gore Verbinski’s US remake The Ring is because I can never decide which version is my favourite. I go back and forth on this one a lot. Nakata is better at generating an atmosphere of dread, and was the guy who kickstarted the popularity of the J-Horror genre. Nevertheless, Verbinski’s version is stronger than it has any right to be — partially because Naomi Watts is so good in it — and his interpretation of the dreaded video and the effect it has on its victims is more unsettling. Actually, that’s putting it mildly. The first time you see a victim slumped inside a closet, it’ll put the fear of God into you, it’s so horrifying. Unable to decide which version should be included, I chickened out and didn’t put either in. Terrible cowardice, really. Consider both movies “included”, in a sub-category or in some list-tesseract or something.

Anyway, here are the next 15 films in the list. As before, some of these movies are a little low because I’ve only seen them once and never really got to grips with them the way other people have. As my experience of them is limited I cannot figure out if this is because I don’t like them as much as everyone else or my initial opinion was adversely affected by the chatter surrounding them. In time, they may move up or down, but for now, as this is a snapshot of my opinion now, this is where they stay. Again, there are no movies from 2009 on here. I need some distance from them to know if they would qualify. Even the year’s worth of leeway I’ve given myself is not enough. While compiling this list The Dark Knight (my favourite movie of 2009) has jumped up and down the high end of the list several times. I won’t be able to make a firm decision on that for a while. And so, with those caveats, here are numbers 90-76.

90. Spartan

Before co-creating The Unit with Shawn Ryan, David Mamet made this, a clenched fist pretending to be a movie. Val Kilmer is brutally effective as a man doing a job no one wants him to do, spitting Mamet’s truncated, macho dialogue with withering and riveting intensity. A manly, manly movie.

89. South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut

The TV show still cranks out occasional classic episodes (Red Sleigh Down, Cartoon Wars, Imaginationland), but the big screen expansion of Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s satirical universe might still be its finest hour. Brilliantly making fun of censors, prudes, and warmongers, it even manages to give us some of the best showtunes of the decade.

88. Curse of the Golden Flower

Critics seemed baffled by the lack of martial arts action in Zhang Yimou’s courtly drama, but who needs it? There’s enough intrigue, betrayal, madness and riotous colour here to fuel a dozen movies. Just for Gong Li’s incredible performance, this movie demands reappraisal, and that’s before we get to the ninja action and Chow Yun-Fat in Furious-Anger-mode.

87. Syriana

It’s a toss-up between this and Traffic for inclusion on this list. Stephen Gaghan’s complex multi-strand exploration of how our demand for oil affects all our lives does have a weak sub-plot featuring Jeffrey Wright, but that’s better than the ill-judged Michael Douglas thread in Soderbergh’s movie. Both are great, but Syriana – with its thrilling final act – just edges it. (Consider Traffic no. 107.)

86. The Matrix Reloaded

The Wachowski Siblings managed to alienate the majority of their fans by attempting to expand the initial Matrix movie beyond its resonant but uncomplicated monomythic plot. Though the franchise ran out of steam in the third installment, for the length of this hallucinogenic movie it still seemed like they were telling the best story ever told. Plus, you know, Morpheus used a katana.

85. Hot Fuzz

Enormously entertaining on first viewing, Edgar Wright’s pitch-perfect homage to hyper-aggressive US cop movies gets better with every rewatch. The effort put into its intricate plotting is a joy to behold, and the casting could not be more impressive. A Who’s Who of British character actors having the time of their lives = film heaven.

84. Jindabyne

Taking the same starting point as one of the threads from Altman’s Short Cuts (Raymond Carver’s short story So Much Water So Close to Home), Ray Lawrence spins a tale of marital discord and touches on themes of racial and gender politics with a deft hand. Gabriel Byrne and Laura Linney give two of their most complex performances.

83. Once

The most grounded, unspectacular musical ever made, John Carney’s tale of two musicians making music amid the urban isolation of Dublin won the hearts of audiences across the world. Its ambitions were slight, but Hansard and Irglová’s gorgeous music gave Once an emotional heft that dwarfed almost everything else released that year.

82. The Hunted

Before Bourne, there was this William Friedkin-helmed cat-and-mouse actioner, pared down to the bone in much the same way as Walter Hill’s action classics. Tommy Lee Jones and Benicio Del Toro are near-silent killing machines destined to fight to the death, with all other considerations ignored. Easily Friedkin’s best film since The Exorcist.

81. The Orphanage

Conjuring the same atmosphere of impending dread as Robert Wise and Jack Clayton did with classic ghost movies The Haunting and The Innocents, Juan Antonio Bayona’s directorial debut managed to provide chilling scares and heartbreaking tragedy in equal measure.

80. The Constant Gardener

On the surface Fernando Meirelles’ environmental thriller was just another tale of corporate intrigue, but Rachel Weisz’s Oscar-winning performance — and Ralph Fiennes’ superb turn as her bereaved husband — turned it into something more interesting and melancholic: a meditation on how love can ruin a life once the object of adoration has gone.

79. [Rec]

Of all the camcorder horror movies of this decade, perhaps the most successful was Jaume Balaguero and Paco Plaza’s claustrophobic virus-zombie effort. Though less wide-ranging than Cloverfield, Blair Witch, or the thematically similar 28 Days/Years Later movies, it did one thing better than all of them: it was scary throughout, and utterly terrifying at the end.

78. No Country For Old Men

The Coens hewed so close to their source material that it would have been hard to mess it up, but even so, their direction was exemplary, conjuring up numerous exhausting setpieces and an iconic representation of chaotic evil from Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh. It managed something you would think impossible: improving on the work of Cormac McCarthy.

77. There Will Be Blood

Paul Thomas Anderson deserves plaudits for taking such overwhelming thematic material and boiling it down into a tale of how greed can ruin one man’s soul. What makes Daniel Day Lewis’ work as Daniel Plainview so special is not the pyrotechnics, but the hint that by the end of his life he is so lost that he doesn’t care. It’s as chilling as a horror movie plot.

76. The Darjeeling Limited

A trek across India by three estranged brothers tested the patience of many viewers, either by presenting a view of American obliviousness abroad that lacked necessary satirical pointers, or by relying on too many Andersonian tics. To this viewer, the jokes, the narrative gameplaying, and Robert Yeoman’s gorgeous photography, were enough.

Okay, that was a bit less overwrought. More to come, if WordPress will ever stop crashing. ::grumble grumble::

The Top One Hundred and Six Movies of the Oughts (106-91)

Posted on December 9, 2009 by admiralneck

Longtime readers will know that I’m a fiend for lists the way Sonny Crockett is a fiend for mojitos. Don’t believe me? Check out this blurry video:

My Best of 2009 movie list has been percolating for a while now, with only a few contenders for best or worst film to come before I shut things down at the end of December (oh yes, I won’t stop watching until I’m sure I have it right). Meanwhile, even though I’m uncomfortable with the idea of this decade being 1999-2009, I’ve been pondering my own best of the decade list. This should be something to be excited about, and yet until last week I just couldn’t muster any enthusiasm for it. When I search my soul I come to the uncomfortable but inescapable conclusion that it’s because any list I would come up with would both be horribly incomplete and would betray my populist taste. What makes me more uncomfortable than that is realising that such an admission makes me uncomfortable at all.

Any list I could make for this decade is already off to a bad start when I admit that I’ve yet to see many of the best reviewed and most beloved movies of recent times. The gaps in my viewing history include Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Syndromes and a Century, Edward Yang’s Yi Yi, Andrey Zvyagintsev’s The Return, and anything by Wong Kar Wai, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, or the Dardennes. I’ve also only seen a couple of (terrific) movies by Claire Denis and a single, memorable one by Michael Haneke. Some film buff I am. This short list is merely the tip of the iceberg. According to this list, I might as well not consider myself a film lover at all, as I’m not looking for movie excellence in the right places (though the entire list is invalidated by the praise for Woody Allen’s technically disastrous and intellectually vapid Cassandra’s Dream: surely one of the ten worst films of the decade).

All of that shame over my taste is wrapped up in feelings of mortification over class and intellectualism and authenticity and so many other things. I know that none of it is important but the expression of some kind of discernment in my opinion helps to legitimise my amateur film criticism, something I take very seriously even when I talk about things that readers might consider beneath contempt (my defence of Michael Bay, for instance, or my enthusiasm for The Dark Knight). Therefore it scares me to openly admit that I’m a sucker for a well-choreographed action scene with some pretty explosions included. No one wants to admit to enjoying those movies without losing their credibility, so why should I be the one to stick my neck out?

Maybe it’s time to get over those silly fears and say it loud: I’m a fan of populist cinema. Yes, I can appreciate works of cinematic art on many levels, though perhaps I might have greater difficulty expressing that appreciation or placing those works in context with works by other artists. However, when I talk about how much I love Joel Silver movies of the 80s and 90s, or Bruckheimer’s output in the late 90s to the current day, I’m on firmer ground. Perhaps this is why Shades of Caruso concentrates on those movies: it’s safer to talk about the joy I get from seeing a movie by the Wachowski Siblings than it is to attempt to unpick the works of Abbas Kiarostami. Any list I would make for the past decade would skew heavily towards populist movies, partially because most of the movies I’ve seen were major releases by Western writers and directors, but also because these are the movies that speak directly to me.

It was upon staring at that shame, and the shame I feel for having that shame, that I said bollocks to it and compiled this list. I hereby reject that shame, expel it from my soul, and embrace the movies that filled my soul with joy or heart-ache. The construction of this list is helped by the clear cut-off point in my past: 1999 was the year I moved out of my hometown for the second time and headed to London, where I found enough time and opportunity to attend more movies. As a result my enthusiasm increased, until I had no choice but to start a blog to use as a pressure valve for this energy. I’ve seen hundreds of movies in that time, and so I expect this list to be incomplete and filled with egregious misses, plus some movies have been missed off (Pan’s Labyrinth) or put low on the list (No Country For Old Men, There Will Be Blood) because I’ve only seen them once. I’ll need to revisit them with a clear head, free of hype, to do them justice.

One more caveat: I’ve not included films from this year. I know, this seems to make the whole process pointless, but I like to have at least a little gap between seeing a movie and putting it in a list this big. The End-Of-Year lists are made with the proviso that I understand how my opinion will change over time, and watching films right up until Dec 31st means I will be cramming in movies even though my opinion of them has yet to settle. Who knows whether time will be kind to these movies or not. I’ve certainly been surprised with how some movies I initially loved have dropped out of my favour, and others that I enjoyed well enough on first viewing are not breaking into the top fifty. For the record, at least three from my forthcoming 2009 list would definitely qualify for inclusion here, but I don’t want to add them now as the year has yet to finish, and I’m hoping two or three more will qualify. Perhaps when I’ve finished compiling my 2009 lists, I will write an addendum explaining where they would go in this list.

And so, here is the first part of my list of the best 106 movies of the period 1999-2008. Why 106? Because I just couldn’t leave the last six movies off without writing a little bit about them, as I enjoyed them greatly and felt they would never in a million years get any list love otherwise. As this post has already run on, I’ll only list the first 16 here, and the next 90 films will be revealed as the week progresses. Yes yes, there are simpler ways of doing this, but anyone who knows me will understand that when there is an easy way and a hard way to do anything, I will ignore both and then do something completely self-indulgent that makes a mockery of my original goal. Just play along. I’ve kept my explanations for why I love these movies as short as I can. I hope I’ve lauded a secret favourite of yours, dear reader, one that has been snubbed by every critic in the land.

Honorary Bad Movie Inclusion — The Room

It is quite simply the worst movie ever made, but its rewatch value, its quotability, and the fearless depiction of the dreadful inner life of its emotionally immature writer and director make it almost infinitely fascinating. Its inclusion here is no reflection of its quality, but of the hold it has over anyone who watches it. It’s a true curio.

106. Avalon

After leaving a screening of Avalon, my viewing companion commented that there is good boring and bad boring, and this was a perfect example of the former. Starkly beautiful and glacially paced, Mamoru Oshii’s ode to the power of gaming predicts a future where our desire to transcend our mundane world will drive us to abandon it.

105. Kung Fu Hustle

What made me love Stephen Chow’s madcap martial arts comedy wasn’t the expertly choreographed actions scenes, great though they were. Neither was it the broad humour, though I enjoyed that too. The best thing about it was how the wacky tone morphed into effective dramatic energy. At first you laugh at the caricatures, but by the final act you fear for their safety.

104. The Mothman Prophecies

Poorly marketed as a bog-standard X-Files-esque alien abduction flick, this dread-soaked thriller is more interested in dramatising our insignificance in the face of supernatural forces that move us around like game pieces. Strong performances and meticulous direction from Mark Pellington help to ground the potentially silly project.

103. Moulin Rouge

At his worst, Baz Luhrmann is a vulgar artiste who has zero impulse control, but when his approach works, it can wrench your heart open. This fearlessly sincere musical is the most successful example of the Luhrman effect. Though many have resisted its garish onslaught, my cynicism melted twenty minutes in and stayed that way.

102. The Rundown (aka Welcome To The Jungle)

What should have been the gateway drug to the paradise that is Loving The Rock instead faltered at the box office, but who cares? For its sheer exuberance and demented asides — not to mention a totally hatstand performance by Christopher Walken — this Midnight Sprint shall be remembered and adored.

101. Solaris

Though Steven Soderbergh’s adaptation of Stanislav Lem’s SF classic fails to capture the essence of that novel (as does the previous version by Andrei Tarkovsky), the result explores equally interesting philosophical questions. Clooney excels as a bereaved astronaut forced to confront living memories of his dead wife, a celestial manifestation distorted by his yearning and twisted perceptions of reality.

100. Mushishi

Katsuhiro Otomo’s live-action adaptation of Yuki Urushibara’s manga is a curious beast. Though overlong, the tale of Mushi master Ginko’s journey through a polluted and hostile pastoral land is a feast for the eyes. The gloomy atmospherics and cascade of ideas more than make up for any flaws.

99. Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back

Kevin Smith’s low-budget comedies often fail to fly thanks to their self-imposed parochial restrictions. His ambitious and controversial religious satire Dogma was an improvement upon those early movies but this self-lacerating road-movie was the one that really worked, and well enough to finally make me appreciate his scatological shtick.

98. I Heart Huckabees

It achieved an awful notoriety as the movie where director David O. Russell lost his mind on set and bollocked Lily Tomlin, but I Heart Huckabees was also a disorienting blend of philosophy and Dada-esque nonsense, often incomprehensible but almost always entertaining. However, unlike many chaotic cult movies (ahem, Richard Kelly), this actually made sense if you unfocused your brain while watching.

97. Shanghai Knights

Shanghai Noon was fun, and the pairing of Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson was more successful than the tiresome team-up of Chan and Chris Tucker in the Rush Hour movies. The London-set sequel was a massive improvement, mostly because helmer David Dobkin was the only US director who seemed willing to spend time with Chan to create fights almost as complex and funny as his classic Hong Kong work.

96. Michael Clayton

Clooney again in full force, this time as a corporate fixer who gets messed around once too often. What could have been a rote corporate thriller instead becomes a fascinating character study, one where terrible decisions are made in good faith, and good decisions happen for the wrong reasons. It also propelled Tilda Swinton into stardom: for this I am eternally grateful.

95. Mulholland Drive

Is it poor form to admit that upon first viewing I didn’t understand anything about David Lynch’s tinsel-town nightmare? All that I knew was that the final scene was almost unwatchably terrifying. Days later, the mood of dread still lingered. That residual horror — and Naomi Watts’ excellent star-making performance — is enough to justify inclusion on this list.

94. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl

Easy to forget how big an impact this movie had on first release. Even though the final installment of the trilogy ripped all of the fun from the franchise, the first is still a near-perfect swashbuckler. The first appearance of Captain Jack Sparrow is a contender for Best Entrance of the Decade.

93. The Prestige

Initially the blatantly obvious “twist” at the end of Christopher Nolan’s adaptation soured an experience that had been extremely pleasurable. Upon repeated viewings, it becomes apparent that the Transported Man trick is not the point of the movie. Instead, Nolan is more interested in painting a picture of a man driven to unthinkable acts because of his thirst for revenge. Compared to dreadful fallout of that psychological damage, magic is nothing.

92. The Chronicles of Riddick

Many choose to focus on the flaws and hubris of David Twohy’s Space-Conan-meets-Lord-of-the-Rings hybrid, but that occasionally inspired vision – and that amazing twist ending — are enough to justify the entire ambitious, galaxy-hopping project. Another film where the cult grows every year, with the prospect of a continuation of the saga now tantalisingly close.

91. eXistenZ

Arriving between the reality-warping brain food of Alex Proyas’ Dark City and The Wachowski’s Matrix, Cronenberg’s only self-scripted film of the decade was greeted with an initial burst of excitement and then seemed to be forgotten. A shame. It’s his most playful movie since Naked Lunch, skipping gleefully between levels of reality and throwing in traditionally unpleasant body horror with abandon.

Okay, that’s enough for now. Keep checking back to see more updates as the week progresses.

What I Did At The London Film Festival (So Far)

Posted on October 21, 2009 by admiralneck

We walked on a red carpet on Monday. I felt like an interloper, especially clad in hobo jacket, Converse, and Green Lantern T-Shirt, but it was still a weirdly thrilling moment. Getting tickets to the first UK performance of Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant! (oh, that infuriating exclamation point…) was an accident of timing, not an attempt to rubberneck at a glamour collision, but it’s fine. The London Film Festival seems to be pretty casual. Only Soderbergh, writer Scott Z. Burns and producer Gregory Jacobs were dressed to the nines, and even then they seemed relaxed. Seeing Soderbergh delighted daisyhellcakes, who has had terrible luck spotting celebrities in the past (so far she’s seen Johnny Vegas, Bill Bailey, Jeffrey Archer and Queen Nigella), but refused to take a picture of the great man, stating that it would be gauche. As I’d seen the Enter The Void audience eagerly snapping away at Gaspar Noé last week, I figured it would be okay, but after taking this blurry picture…

…I convinced myself that the final stutter in Soderbergh’s short speech was caused by him spotting me and thinking, “Dude, that’s totes gauche.” For the record, I’m sorry Mr. Soderbergh. I liked Solaris, if that’s any consolation.

The lack of a distribution deal for Enter The Void is making me unbelievably sad. Attending that screening was something I did on a whim after seeing Drew McWeeny become so enthusiastic, and now I realise that if I hadn’t gone I might never have had the chance to see it on the big screen. Just yesterday Edgar Wright was tweeting his frustration at having missed it, and it threw my good fortune into perspective. Is there any way to start a campaign to save it from oblivion on DVD, when the only distribution deal it has seems to be getting a release in Finland next April? As the version I saw was seemingly different from those at Cannes and Toronto, perhaps it’s still being fine-tuned, and then it will be put on the market again. Certainly there are longueurs at about the 100 minute mark, but I’m not sure what could be removed without ruining the flow.

The one thought I had would be for the Prince Charles Cinema to stump up for their very own print. Despite its punishing length, this is the perfect midnight-screening cult movie in waiting, with massive appeal to counter-cultural audiences and cinephiles who can understand what Noé is trying to achieve (a group that excludes J. Hoberman and Variety’s Rob Nelson, who completely missed the point of the movie). It would take time for them to get their money back, as the buzz on this film has yet to grow properly, but it would be a wise investment. Unless it did suddenly get a distribution deal and the film turned up elsewhere, but still, right now, it’s not looking too good.

Sadness over the fate of that one movie aside, the festival has been extremely enjoyable so far. Even the one movie I’ve not liked — Jason Reitman’s disappointing Up In The Air, which I hope to write about soon — has its pleasures, especially the terrific performances from George Clooney and Anna Kendrick. For the most part audiences have been great too, with enthusiastic responses to The Men Who Stare At Goats and The Informant! reminding me why seeing movies at the cinema can be a rewarding experience, though Mr. Honking McOverlaugh who sat behind us during The Informant! was a bit of a trial. Yes yes, it’s a very funny film, but Mr. Soderbergh is sitting at the back of the room and even your guffaws cannot reach that far, especially when my eardrums are absorbing 90% of the sound energy.

It’s not all roses, though. If you’re a new reader visiting this site after searching for info about London Film Festival screenings, please can I beg you to do the right thing and arrive at the screenings with plenty of time to spare? If you’ve not already picked up your tickets, there can be terrible queues, and that’s after navigating the barriers, security guards, and photographers blocking the pedestrianised roads of Leicester Square. The movies have tended to start a few minutes late, but there are no trailers or adverts, so if a film is supposed to start at, say, 16:15, the film will be on the screen at around 16:20, and arriving at 16:30 is going to piss a lot of people off. Oh, and the tickets have allocated seat numbers on them FOR A REASON. This message is directed at the numerous people who seem to love sitting wherever they want, and then look put out when they are evicted from their seats by ushers not long after the film has already started. I’m looking at you, selfish idiots who figured sitting by me was the thing to do and then ruined the start of Enter The Void and White Material, with extra bonus fuck you’s to the couple who turned up late at White Material and then left their phones on. Assholes.

I’ve had fun with the odd connections between the movies I’ve seen so far. The Informant! and Claire Denis’ White Material are centred by main characters (played with great skill by Matt Damon and the incredible Isabelle Huppert respectively) whose inability to see the dire consequences of their behaviour dooms them. In Soderbergh’s movie Mark Whitacre’s insanity is played for laughs for the most part, though those laughs run out by the end as you realise the man is so deeply embedded in his fantasy life that he doesn’t even seem capable of keeping track of it. Maria Vial — the protagonist of White Material — is in just as much denial, but perhaps even to the extent of not recognising her own cultural and ethnic background. Her ambiguous actions in the final moments of the film could be the product of derangement or berserk revenge, but whatever their origin, they were enough to deeply upset the lady sitting next to me. She seemed traumatised, poor dear.

Other connections abound. Jason Bateman teams up with Jason Reitman again for Up In The Air, and also features in Extract, which I’m hoping to see tomorrow. Melanie Lynskey appears in Up In The Air and The Informant!, and is similarly weak in each movie. Clooney appears in The Men Who Stare At Goats and Up In The Air, and co-produced The Informant! Up In The Air and Up (which I saw again on Sunday, though it was not part of the festival) is about men who find escape in flying, and learn to connect with others. The protagonists of White Material and Enter The Void are often filmed from behind: in White Material as a representation of how Maria is hiding her true face from herself and others, and in Enter The Void as a consequence of the PoV conceit. Enter The Void and The Men Who Stare At Goats features talk of esoteric beliefs, as well as the use of hallucinogens.

That was one of the things that annoyed me most about Goats. While Enter The Void took the use of hallucinogenic compounds seriously, Goats used it as a stupid punchline, with characters acting as if they were drunk and high-lariously falling over a lot and talking about how hungry they are. Goats was a lot of fun, but the relentlessly silly tone made it hard for the film to shift gears in the final act when we see the negative consequences of letting a bunch of insecure New Age dipsticks into the army. What was, in Jon Ronson’s excellent book, a sobering portrait of US psy-ops torture techniques gone weird is here transformed into a slapstick romp with one minute of “Oh noes, war is bad” added to give the protagonists something to fight for. The book still manages to be funny, but Ronson’s a skillful enough writer to juxtapose the wacky with the awful. Here it’s shoehorned in, and seemingly only to give a dramatic edge to the Larry Hooper (Kevin Spacey) character arc that suddenly appears midway through the movie. Writer Peter Straughan does some good work in translating the oddness of Ronson’s book into movie form, and keeps the funniest material mostly intact, but the artificial three-act structure and neatness of the final few minutes smack of laziness. Still, it remains very entertaining, and what it gets right it really gets right. Jeff Bridges — as New Earth Army leader Bill Django — perfectly channels the craziness of First Earth Battalion leader Jim Channon…

…and first-time director Grant Heslov is good enough to recreate the pictures shown in Channon’s manifesto: a lovely touch. It feels like the film will touch on all aspects of the insanity of war in a similar way to Clooney’s previous Gulf War film Three Kings, but even with the addition of warring Blackwater-esque security forces and asides showing Clooney and Ewan McGregor wandering through Iraq getting into scrapes, it never fully takes off. I’d still recommend it, though. As with Up In The Air, Clooney does miracle work holding everything together. It’s easy to forget what a great film star he is. He does comedy and drama equally well, and now he’s removed almost all of his tics, he can excel at both over-the-top dopey comedy or subtle and moving character work. We’re lucky he’s around.

My recommendation for The Informant! is much stronger. Though we were exhausted while watching, and were sitting in the Odeon West End which — unlike the Vue West End which is showing the majority of films — is not air-conditioned, it turned out to be almost as good as we had hoped. Spoilery trailers and press releases have given away the delusional nature of Mark Whitacre, but Soderbergh and ace writer Burns hide the depth of his craziness until a wonderful final act where everyone involved in the Lysine price-fixing investigation is shocked by his slowly unravelling web of lies. The cast doesn’t have a single weak link, with an unexpectedly complex performance from Matt Damon at the heart of the movie, but I have to give special props to Scott Bakula, who is particularly affecting as the enthusiastic FBI agent whose career goes awry thanks to Whitacre’s deceptions. His increasingly heartbroken face adds a bittersweet note to the zany proceedings. Props also to Joel McHale in his first dramatic role: weird seeing the snarky Soup host playing straight man to Damon.

I also heartily recommend White Material, but I’m still processing that one, so I won’t go on about it too much, except to say that a) Claire Denis has a mastery of pace and atmosphere that would shame other directors, but then you probably already knew that, and b) Christopher Lambert was good enough to make me partially forgive him for his dire performance in Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales. I can lay the blame for that on Kelly, I guess. He doesn’t really know what he’s doing, after all.

Adventures In Awesome: Want! Now! (2)

Posted on May 14, 2008 by admiralneck

And no, I’m not talking about Kablamo (1) again, and I’m not talking about the obscenely expensive Rock Band (2). I’m talking about this.

I’ve gone on about The Matrix a lot lately, and my love of the Wachowskis (3), but I never go on about Alex Proyas’ Dark City, mostly because I keep forgetting about it. The Matrix, which shared some similarities with Dark City, came later but was so unlike everything I’d seen before that it eclipsed the previous film. Plus, you know, the fighting. The wonderful, wonderful fighting.

It’s a shame, as Dark City is excellent, dealing as it does with issues of memory and identity, and features at least two things I’ve always wanted to see (4) for every one thing I didn’t (5). Plus, lots of pre-Jack-Bauer panting from Keifer Sutherland. It’s a corker, and an interesting companion piece to writer Lem Dobbs’ other forgotten mindbender, Kafka, which I always felt was given a hard time for no other reason that Steven Soderbergh was due a kicking from critics (6).

Alex Proyas is one of those directors I also tend to forget exists, but he’s three for three in my book (7), and I’ll always be interested in his work, even when it looks like he’s put Nicolas Cage in another movie about knowing the future, which worked out really badly last time (8). That this is a director’s cut intrigues me. I think it’s a fine movie, but the first hour moves at such a hectic clip (compared to the perfectly judged final hour) that I often wondered if there had been some tinkering done to get us to the really crazy stuff. It goes so fast Graeme Revell’s music doesn’t pause for a second. It makes the first forty minutes or so feel like a single scene. Very odd. Perhaps that might be different with a new cut. We shall see.

So, anyway, we want this. On Blu-Ray. Which would mean we would have to buy a Blu-Ray player. And then re-buy my entire DVD collection on the new format. ::cries:: Please consider this installments 2-145 of Want! Now! Or maybe I’ll just wait for holo-players and/or cortex downloads.

————————

(1) Not to be confused with the popular Psychlo beverage Kerbango.

(2) Okay, I do want it, but unless I find a competition I can enter soon, I’m going to have to forget about it. If anyone hears of any UK competitions to win it, please leave a comment directing me to it so I can win it and ease my pangs.

(3) I’ve talked Canyon into seeing it at the IMAX this Friday. Yes, I am personally committed to saving this movie from oblivion/infamy!

(4) Richard O’Brien as a bad guy! Exciting psychic thinkoffs between floating people!

(5) Rufus Sewell with an unconvincing American accent.

(6) Turns out I was on the right track, and Soderbergh knew it. In Down and Dirty Pictures (which is essential reading for anyone interested in movies), Soderbergh says (on p.79):

I was going to get my head handed to me on my second film, pretty much no matter what I did. That’s what I was prepared for. In a way I decided I would go out in flames by making a movie that had a really big bull’s-eye on its chest.

That’s probably his low self-esteem talking, because otherwise it’s a bit of a smack in the mouth to Dobbs. Anyway, there are some mild similarities between the two, and I recommend you catch it if you get a chance, though apologies if the presence of Keith Allen gives you nightmares or episodes of nausea.

(7) Yes yes yes, I, Robot is not perfect, but it features some amazing set-pieces, and it ~~bludgeoned me into acquiescence~~ inspired me to buy some black leather Converse sneakers that I love, so it gets a free pass.

(8) He’s also rumoured to be the number one pick to direct a Silver Surfer movie. Shades of Caruso approves!

Shades of Caruso

Circuit interruptus.

Category Archives: Steven Soderbergh