First things first. There will be NO REFERENCES to the phrase “You sank my battleship!” during this review, except for just now in the middle of this sentence when I did it to illustrate a point. This joke will no doubt be used in every single review of Peter Berg’s Battleship, though I will award a troublemaking, furniture-wrecking, sleep-disrupting but very pretty cat to the critic who makes the most original play on the phrase. All I could come up with after sitting through it was, “The only thing Battleship sank was my enthusiasm for Peter Berg movies.”* I almost tweeted it, but it’s just so painful to say. Because I love Peter Berg, as long as I ignore Very Bad Things, aka the proto-Hangover. After all, this is the man who brought us Friday Night Lights, one of the finest TV shows ever made, for which he earns a deserved Shades of Caruso Free Pass.
And yet I’m increasingly troubled. The Kingdom was politically dubious but professionally made; the final fifteen minutes are lizard-brain-thrilling to the max. However Hancock was a mystifying, garbled mess in search of a point, marketed as a simple parody of superheroics while actually being a continuity-heavy franchise opener that made lots of money but seemingly no fans. People say Seven Pounds was the movie that halted Will Smith’s physics-defying career momentum, but I think it was the general annoyance over Hancock‘s failings that slowed it down enough for that to happen.
Battleship will most likely be the movie that does the same to Berg. It’s already been relentlessly mocked since it was announced; seeing Berg defend the movie over and over again is painful for a fan, because no matter what justification or defence he uses, all anyone wants to say is, “I wonder if anyone says, ‘You sank my battleship!’” as if they’re the only ones who thought of it. (Sorry, I said it again to illustrate that new point.) And for once it’s not just the critics who think it’s boneheaded; everyone seems to be scratching their heads. How can you adapt a board game into a story?
Anyone who has ever played a board game should realise by now that each iteration of that game has something that could be considered a narrative flow, just not a three-act one. Events happen in sequence and there is an ebb-and-flow of power throughout as players make decisions, attack or sabotage other players, or find themselves at a disadvantage as other players move against them. The idea of adapting a rulebook is worthy of derision, but the power plays that occur within a game are surely the kind of thing that can inspire an idea. They can be triggered by anything, and what is story but a way to interpret events, emotions, and relationships within the framework of a manipulated world?
Sadly Battleship only occasionally tries to make something of the interesting dynamic between players within the famous location-guessing gameplay, preferring instead to allude to the game with references to the shape of the pegs, or the invisibility of your opponent, or the grid with its familiar location codes. Critics will be thrilled with the late-movie action sequence with characters calling out grid references for strikes against two alien battlecruisers. They can base a whole derisory paragraph on that scene, with the only complication being that it’s arguably the only sequence in the movie that generates even a smidgen of tension, and to be honest the sheer brass balls of doing that in the middle of a blowout summer blockbuster should be applauded.
Additionally, Berg’s insistence that this is not just a lazy cash-in is very true. It’s apparent that a lot of effort has gone into making something that has some kind of dramatic or emotional heft. There is a very strong central character arc involving Alex Hopper (Taylor Kitsch) turning from feckless charmer into a naval genius and captain of men in the space of a single day. There is an alien force with technology that feels consistent from one scene to the next, an interesting design, and an ambiguous motivation. Naval battle tactics are outlined well and have obviously been given some thought. There are a couple of reasonably orchestrated setpieces. There is an attempt at creating a range of character archetypes. Liam Neeson’s in it and everyone loves Liam Neeson, right? The camera is mostly in focus. Erm…
Okay, I’ll get to the point. There is effort expended, but the movie is ruined by weird decisions and shoddy editing, especially in the dull mid-section. Scenes feel like they’ve been plonked in at the last minute, or added in the wrong order, or shot after focus-group complaints showed serious structural faults. The result is a baffling half hour where nothing makes any sense. Big whirring balls of fire and metal wreck an airbase (makes tactical sense), demolish a random freeway (makes no sense) and terrorise a kid playing baseball (a waste of FX money). Meanwhile, some characters die off screen and an alien is captured. Both times we’re treated to exposition to cover up the cracks, but it just makes it look like a low-budget movie with cut corners, not a huge potential tentpole with a $200m budget.
Just as annoying, the decision to make the motivation of the aliens unknown is a grave error, and having someone very loudly proclaim, “This is an extinction level event!” at one point without prompting doesn’t help. They obviously have more going on than the plunderers of Battle: Los Angeles or Cowboys and Aliens; they make decisions about who to attack or ignore, and do things like waft their alien hands over machines while their HUDs show battery-filling bars like in a video game, but none of it is explained. It’s obvious that someone thought, “Making your antagonist a ship is a bad idea,” and so the alien invaders have more character than usual. We see their eyes through their visor, we see them make choices, but without knowing what they’re doing this characterisation feels like half a solution. Has this information been shifted to the sequel that won’t happen?
That said, they do better than most of the humans. Only Alex Hopper has an arc; everyone else is there to provide help or hindrance on that arc, or to be sassy (Rihanna) or dopey (Jesse “Landry” Plemons; a welcome sight for FNL fans). It’s all archetype and cultural representation. Liam Neeson (underused) plays a grouchy father figure to appease. Alexander Skarsgård (tall) plays the disapproving family member. Tadanobu Asano plays Iceman (by way of Yokohama) to Kitsch’s Maverick. Yes, Battleship is Top Gun on boats, with a dash of Battle: Los Angeles and a hefty dollop of Transformers. If you dislike any of those movies, you’re gonna dislike this.
The Transformers comparison is the hardest one I have to make. Midway through Battleship, as the characters suddenly exclaim, “They’re on the boat!” before scuttling down hallways with guns in a scene that looks like it was added after principal photography wrapped, I realised what was bugging me. Berg is a better director than the material here, and could have been off doing something far more interesting. Though everyone hates Michael Bay, he would have been perfect for something as mechanical as this, and in fact would have made a better, dumber movie, much as it pains me to say it.
In fact, it feels like an amalgamation of his movies. It’s set in Pearl Harbor, and features the elaborate sinking of one ship that is reminiscent of the unwieldy but technically dazzling centrepiece of his epic pile of WWII crap. The machines don’t turn into cars but they do clank about and change shape in a way that’s meant to evoke the movement of the robots in Transformers. Steve Jablonsky did the score. There’s also a lot of jingoism and military fetishism, though Berg approaches this in a more interesting way, which I’ll get to in a bit.
And yet what Battleship lacks that Transformers 1-3 have is clarity. I don’t mean in editing; I’ve said many a time before that Bay’s action scenes are not edited with the eye in mind, but the ear. They’re drum solos, not ballet. If you happen to like that kind of thing, as I do, then it can be exhilarating to experience that bewildering mash of image and cacophony. But within that garbled and clumsy tumble of event, the imagery is relatively clear, considering the Bayhemian tumult. You can see things within the syncopated cuts. Some of Bay’s imagery is piercing, even stirring at times. Despite his misogyny and racism (and never let us forget those despicable flaws), he’s good at that.
Battleship, on the other hand, is quite ugly. The palette of the movie is almost entirely blue, green or battleship grey; at least Bay throws a lot of orange in there as well to mix it up. The effects here are used mostly to obscure what’s going on. Thematically that makes sense, as the game is about not being able to see what’s going on, but it’s a pain in the eyes. There are also enough lens flares to make JJ Abrams run to the box he keeps his lens flares and start wailing in horror at the horrible theft of ALL THE LENS FLARES. Even his use of ramping and slow motion is disappointing. Though I’m not one to dismiss CGI altogether, and in fact take a great deal of pleasure in well-executed computer effects, the worst thing a director can do is not choreograph his action properly, instead expecting the FX guys to fix things in post.
The result of this is ugly distortions of image through energy effects such as the blast from engines, water vapour in the nautical scenes, so many lens flares, or just general smearing of the image. During shooting (not just in Battleship but in many modern SF movies) the camera is whipped around to denote the frenetic darting movements of objects not present on set, and the FX guys have no choice but to work with that clumsily-shot footage, with the result that the objects have to move with no connection to the world they’re supposed to be in. Even objects from a technologically advanced civilisation would be hamstrung by momentum, inertia, gravity or atmosphere. Instead movies too often feature poorly-choreographed scenes with no awareness of how the final product will look.
Berg has not yet mastered this; Hancock was similarly poorly shot on an FX level. Battleship features far too many moments where the FX work isn’t integrated properly. Compare the action scenes here to the bug scenes in Starship Troopers, or anything by Peter Jackson, or even Transformers 3, where there are many more physical effects than you would think, allowing Bay to choreograph the subsequent CGI better. These filmmakers, and guys like Spielberg or James Cameron understand this — especially Cameron, whose action scenes are clear, choreographed with care and feature imaginary objects designed with an engineer’s rigour. Too many other directors have yet to understand that FX can’t fix everything.
Of course Berg is a much better filmmaker than Bay, especially in terms of his facility with actors and his treatment of women and ethnic minorities. He’s also better at filming action than Battleship would have you believe. As mentioned earlier, the end of The Kingdom is truly nail-biting stuff, and his early action classic The Rundown / Welcome To The Jungle shows that he knows what he’s doing, and has an imaginative approach to the staging of an action scene. As an actor he also knows how to get quirky performances from his actors; Rundown and both film and TV versions of Friday Night Lights are perfect examples of this.
However the demands of something as vast as Battleship has forced his attention from the small and onto the vast, meaning the only scene with any real life to it comes right at the start, as Kitsch attempts to woo Brooklyn Decker (given nothing to do except be blonde in some short shorts, even Rosie Huntington-Whitely gets more agency in Transformers 3). It’s a terrifically funny and likeable meet-crazy scene, with Kitsch evoking a dopier Tim Riggins in a way that made me think I was in for a treat. It also showcases Kitsch’s charms — and potential movie-star charisma — way better than John Carter; a far far superior movie but one that regrettably couldn’t tap into the source of the absurdly handsome actor’s best attributes (no, I’m not talking about his finely-chiseled musculature).
Sadly, much as military life crushes the individual, as soon as he ships out that sense of fun mostly vanishes, which moves the burden of making us laugh onto Plemons (a good choice) and Hamish Linklater (an excruciatingly unfunny scientist). The strictness of naval protocol saps much of the movie’s energy and robs Berg of chances to goof off. It’s not entirely laugh-free, but Bay’s awful shouty-jokes approach would, again, have done much to save Battleship from its doldrums. The tone of the movie hints at funnier things to come; it’s a box that says “funny” on the outside but inside only has packing peanuts and not one but TWO instances of someone saying, “motherfucker” with the soundtrack prudishly cutting away halfway through. And that’s just unacceptable.
But it’s not all bad. While Berg has made a movie praising the glory of the military-industrial complex, in which the only thing that can make a man out you is military service, he’s not just about the Ooorahs and “Bring the rain” nonsense of most of those paeons to the penis. While this sub-genre of action cinema is filled to the brim with gallons of stinky testosterone and troubling patriotism, Berg is thankfully more thoughtful than that, and while we get the requisite pro-armed forces message, it’s tempered by an awareness of military history, tradition and international comity that would baffle Bay.
For a start, the presence of Tadanobu Asano would never happen in a Transformers movie. In Battleship Asano’s Nagata is noble but impulsive, the only vaguely interesting character next to Alex Hopper. In Transformers 4: Metal Machine Music he would be a shrill fool who gets trapped in a toilet. Twice. I guess this is part of the international strategy for Battleship; it opens worldwide over this week, then eventually appears in the US in the middle of May. Studios are finally committing to chasing international dollars first on a movie that’s so expensive a slow US opening weekend would likely taint it with seeming failure. Nevertheless, it’s gratifying to see the rapprochement between the US and Japan dramatised in this way, especially in the historically significant locale.
That’s one of the more interesting things about the movie. Additionally, there’s a sizeable role for Gregory G. Gadson, Director of the U.S. Army Wounded Warrior Program. Bay’s military fetishism has so far found no room for the war-wounded, but Battleship features a significant sub-plot for Gadson’s character getting over the terrible injuries he received in Afghanistan. It’s an entirely predictable arc, but for highlighting this aspect of war in the middle of a populist action movie about killing aliens, Berg deserves some credit. [Spoilers coming up in the next paragraph.]
Even more interesting is the final act, in which the crew of the USS John Paul Jones are forced to go analogue and commandeer the USS Missouri, the decommissioned battleship currently standing as a museum in Pearl Harbor (“You recommissioned my battleship!”) (Sorry). Along with the old ship comes a crew of old-timers, former navy crewmen who get their own walking-in-slow-motion moment that made the audience I saw it with burst into laughter. (Ugh, kids today. No respect for their elders and betters.) With this crew of expert seamen helping them, they take the Missouri out to sea one more time to take on the main alien superbattleship that conveniently appears in an end-of-game big boss stylee. [Spoilers end]
This awareness of naval history was entirely unexpected, and while it’s no less patriotic than anything else in this sub-genre, it’s also quite touching to see something modern pay tribute to the fighting men of the past. Who would have thought that a dumb sci-fi movie about alien invasion could take the time to comment on the real world with a more respectful manner than Bay and Bruckheimer had when making a film about the actual attack on Pearl Harbor? It’s one of the reasons why the movie rallies in its last 15 minutes. It doesn’t suddenly become good, but the set-ups pay off better than anyone could have hoped.
Yes, the battles depend on the belief that enormous ships can manoeuvre as nimbly as jet-skis, and one particular move made by Kitsch in order to defeat the final ship is… how can I put this delicately… fucking bonkers? But it was at that moment that I realised what the movie could — and should — have been. Naval battle is slow and thoughtful. It’s strategic and smart and doesn’t depend on dexterity or speed, like a video game. It’s a crawl to victory, like a board game. Battleship shouldn’t have tried to mimic Transformers, which is influenced by the pace and power of a first person shooter. It should have emulated the greatest movie about naval warfare ever made: Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.
That’s a movie that owes a lot more to Battleship the game than anyone seems to want to admit. It honors naval history, it is filled with detail and character and fun, it revolves around a cat-and-mouse chase between two vessels, and is exciting even when things move slowly. If Berg had been able to fully commit to making a modern Master and Commander instead of hinting at a link between the two, I would have dedicated my life to making a case for it to be the biggest film of all time. Instead I say this; despite being one of the few people who looked forward to this, and despite being its target audience, while I very strongly doubt it’ll be the worst movie I see this year, I just as strongly doubt it won’t be the best movie I see this week, and I only intend to watch one other one. No one is more upset or disappointed about this than I am.
*Actually, at the moment of finishing this review I also thought of “You spunked my crappleshit” but that’s just gross, and too mean. It’s a 3-5/10 movie at worst.
Why am I doing this? There was once a time I would dazzle all those around me as I applied an almost precognitive talent for award prediction to numerous hastily organized Oscar ballots. Oh how I was feted, carried high on the shoulders of friends and enemies alike, given ambrosial liquor to sup on from jewel-encrusted golden goblets. They were glorious times, my friends, and those efforts were the stuff of legend. But since making my predictions via this blog, my hit rate has dropped into the low fuckalls. Once Shades of Caruso was described as “usually fairly reliable“. Well, not in terms of Oscar predictions. So why put myself through this ordeal again? Why humiliate myself when my former predictive talents as a modern-day Cassandra have suddenly and inexplicably morphed into those of just some random lass called Sandra?
To be honest it’s only to justify having sat through the combined clusterfuck-a-thon of War Horse, The Iron Lady and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; three movies so wretched they should be investigated as hate crimes against my very soul. And yet here they are, given baffling nominational attention from the various elders who constitute the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The anguish caused by this triumvirate of terribleness, and their baffling inclusion on the Oscar shortlist, is the fuel that powered this epic post, so if you get bored to extinction by the time you get halfway down the page, blame Stephen Daldry, Eric Roth, Abi Morgan, Phyllida Lloyd, Lee Hall and Richard Curtis (Spielberg gets a free pass for Tintin, which was aceballs).
Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role
Who Will Win: George Clooney – The Descendants
Jean Dujardin may have been winning awards by smiling a smile that honestly looks like it could melt through steel like Superman’s heat vision, but I think the Academy members are ready to give Gorgeous George the big prize at last, mostly just to get it out of the way. There are worse things that could happen; though I’d be more than happy to see the thoroughly handsome Dujardin win and do a little tap-dance or something, Clooney was the best thing about The Descendants (other than Shailene Woodley, who was also very good). It’s odd to look at the mostly quiet work he does here, the way he balances light comedy and heavy tragedy, and think back to the way his performances were merely an amalgamation of irksome tics when he was on E.R. and not-massively-popular action extravaganza The Peacemaker. Now look at him. He’s really very good. And still handsome. An Oscar win here is no bad thing.
Who Should Win: Gary Oldman – Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
But of these five candidates, surely it’s Oldman’s prize. He’s survived the fallow years caused — I’m sure — by appearances in two Luc Besson movies with only Airforce One and Lost in Space to separate them, and has proved cynics (such as myself) wrong time and again. By now even his shaky appearances in crap like Red Riding Hood are usually worth watching. It’s enough to make me think he will take over from Sir Anthony Hopkins in the Endlessly-Entertaining-Actor-Shaped extra chamber in my heart once the great Welshman has sadly entered the Odinsleep. Tinker Tailor was an impeccably performed movie; picking out individual acting highlights is hard, but pretty much every moment Oldman is onscreen, like a shade sucking all of the light from the room, it’s as if everyone else has faded into the awful period-appropriate wallpaper. His voicework in Kung Fu Panda 2 was good too. We take Oldman for granted; time we stopped doing that.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Michael Fassbender – Shame
Maybe it’s a good thing Fassbender didn’t get nominated. The outrage generated by that stupid-but-expected decision will power his career for a while longer as he comes to work on projects to be filed under the heading True Quality, as opposed to the gilded, establishment-approved version of art represented by the Academy’s often-mystifying choices. It also means that the inevitable dirty tricks campaign could dig up some pretty unpleasant stuff about Fassbender, and at this point in his career (or at any point, really) that’s not a good thing. Best he sits this one out until a year when a very driven producer doesn’t have a dog in this fight.
Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role
Who Will Win: Christopher Plummer – Beginners
Beginners was a good enough movie, one that made it okay to like Ewan McGregor again, but without the storming performance from Plummer I think it would be forgotten fairly quickly. His energy levels here are remarkable, and make an average movie unmissable. Hopefully people won’t go on about how he’s bound to win because he plays a terminally ill gay man who finds a new lease of life in his final years, thus completing some kind of Oscar-Worthiness Bingo card. He deserves to win because he deserves to win. It’s that simple.
Who Should Win: Christopher Plummer – Beginners
Though a spanner was thrown into the works when Max Von Sydow got nominated as “The Renter” in Stephen Daldry and Eric Roth’s monumentally awful Extremely Insensitive and Incredibly Corny. The great man has been acting for nearly 700 years now and has never won an Oscar, so surely he’s due one. Hell, make it a retroactive award for The Virgin Spring. Despite this, and despite the fact that he’s the only good thing to come of Daldry and Roth’s wretched miasma of relentless sentiment, it has to be Plummer who wins this. He’s been cranking out great performances for the past few years (he should’ve won for The Insider, to be honest), and if he gets this, he’ll have a BEGOT (not just your Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony quadfecta, but also a Bafta as well). If you don’t want to root for such an achievement, please fill out the order form below to request a new, fully-functional soul.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Sir Ben Kingsley – Hugo
Lots of folks complained about the numerous snubs in this nomination list, with much of the justifiable frustration directed at the miserable lack of Albert Brooks, but I’ve only seen a couple of people point out that leaving Sir Ben off the list for his superb work in Hugo was an egregious omission. Maybe Best Supporting Actor is the wrong category, as Uncle Georges is arguably the protagonist of this movie, but there’s more room for him here than in the crowded Best Actor slot (ahem Jonah Hill ahem). Sir Ben is in the same category as Sir Anthony Hopkins; he’s usually the most interesting thing in whatever movie he appears in, and Hugo is no exception. If it works at all, it’s because of his skill in bringing to life the sweet-and-sour mystery at the heart of the film.
Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role
Who Will Win: Meryl Streep – The Iron Lady
A horrible inevitability has descended upon this category. Many are talking up the relative lack of Oscars Meryl has received despite being in the list of top twenty most awesome people in the history of the world, and I’m sure many people are aggrieved that she didn’t win anything for her impersonation of Dan Aykroyd in Julie and Julia, but even so, the thought of her playing a real live actual person is just too much. The Academy must have written this winner on their scorecards without even seeing the movie. She truly embodied the pluck and lovability of Margaret Thatcher completely (i.e. it was correctly completely absent from the movie). Plus there was a lot of make-up on her face. The assorted critics of the Daily Telegraph plumped for Viola Davis en masse, but I still think this is Meryl’s to win.
Who Should Win: Michelle Williams – My Week With Marilyn
And it would be the worst crime of the night. Don’t get me wrong; I genuinely adore Meryl Streep. She might even be my favourite actor, if not vying for joint fave with Jeff Bridges. Nevertheless, the obnoxious fractured editing by Phyllida Lloyd — which is obviously meant to mirror Mrs. Thatcher’s current unfortunate medical situation — means the movie never settles down long enough for us to have any idea what Meryl’s performance is like. As I tweeted after the godawful mess finally came to a close, it feels like a 100 minute trailer for a 17-hour-long movie, mostly made up of stock footage. It makes W.E. look like a coherent film, which I thought would be impossible. The glimpses we get of Meryl in excelsis suggest she did good work but I honestly can’t attest to that. So I say it should have gone to Michelle Williams. Cheeky of me, as I haven’t seen My Week With Marilyn; I’m burned out on such things thanks to The King’s Speech. But MW was unfortunate to have given a performance of such brilliance in Blue Valentine in the same year that Natalie Portman brought her A-game in Black Swan. Williams deserves to unlock the Reversal of Fortune Achievement for that. (1000 Gamerpoints)
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Tilda Swinton – We Need To Talk About Kevin
What else do I need to say? Excise the horrible cartoonish display by the otherwise excellent Jessica Chastain in The Help, and put Tilda in where she belongs. She’s said she’s happy to avoid going to the ceremony, but what about her fans, who look forward too seeing her appear in white dresses before being described as “androgynous” by every fashion expert? An essential part of the award season is now sadly missing. Plus she was phenomenal in WNTTAK. That too.
Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role
Who Will Win: Octavia Spencer – The Help
This was a movie that made me very uncomfortable, much as The Blind Side did a couple of years ago, but at least The Help had great performances (and not-so-great, Jessica Chastain and Bryce Dallas Howard) on its side. Octavia Spencer managed to out-act Viola Davis without having to do that snotty nose thing Davis does in so many movies; Davis even managed it again in Extremely Long and Incredibly Offensive, probably because she knew that disappointing us by not featuring it would have ruined hundreds of Extremely Twee and Incredibly Pretentious drinking games. This is another of the most predictable wins of the ceremony, and one I back almost 100%.
Who Should Win: Melissa McCarthy – Bridesmaids
Except that it would be so nice for a comedic performance to get an Oscar nod, and Melissa McCarthy’s much-loved work is the most likely possibility for many a year. Admittedly if she won over the other candidates there’s a possibility that in time she would be given the same treatment Marisa Tomei got when she won for My Cousin Vinny, but as someone who likes Marisa Tomei and My Cousin Vinny, and who has done a complete 180° on McCarthy now that I know she has more about her than was shown in Gilmore Girls (shudder), I’d back this win also. Not gonna happen, though.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Charlotte Gainsbourg – Melancholia
Fair to say that Uncle Lars’ Bedtime For Hitler storytelling at the Cannes Film Festival sank any chance that either Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg would get a nomination. I suspect the screeners for this sat unwatched on many an Academy member’s coffee table. A pity, as it was one of the highlights of the year. Gainsbourg was just as good in Antichrist, but maybe this kind of soul-baring work isn’t ever going to find favour with the assorted old white men who vote for these things. “Why, she’s just got the vapours,” they would say into their mug of restorative potions made from the tears of discarded Hollywood dreamers. “Just buy her an ironing board and be done with it.” And that, my friends, is why the Oscars mean jack shit.
Best Animated Feature Film of the Year
What Will Win: Rango
Ha ha ha ha ha ha Cars 2 didn’t get nominated ha ha ha ha ha. Reap the merchandising whirlwind, Pixar, and thanks for pissing on your legacy (until your next incredible film comes along and makes me forgive you for temporarily misplacing your soul). Anyway, Rango was the frontrunner over a year ago and nothing has changed since.
What Should Win: Rango
Seriously, why are we even talking about this? Rango‘s a masterpiece. End of.
What Should Have Been Nominated: The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn
Of course, there was the amusing upset during the Golden Globes when Spielberg’s much-maligned performance-capture movie won the animation award, but then it didn’t get in here. There are lots of theories why, from “is it animation?” to “it’s not animation“, to “it wasn’t good enough”. Whatever the reason, its omission here is pretty bizarre, made all the worse by the nominations dropped into War Horse‘s trough. This vibrant, manic blast of imagination gets nothing while that risible failure gets a bunch of nods? Shocking. But it still wouldn’t deserve to win. Why? Because Rango. Like I just said a paragraph ago.
Achievement in Cinematography
Who Will Win: Robert Richardson – Hugo
I have a theory, for which I have absolutely no proof, that if the movie with the most nominations doesn’t win Best Picture, it will be given Best Cinematography as a consolation prize. The Artist might or might not not win many awards this year but I believe it’ll win Best Picture at the very least, which would leave Hugo wanting. As a result, I think Robert Richardson’s 3D cinematography will win out. Or Ludovic Bource will win for The Artist because he isn’t using that new-fangled technology? No, it’ll definitely be Richardson. Unless that lovely, clear, monochrome photography persuades the oldsters. ::is utterly undecided::
Who Should Win: Emmanuel Lubezki – The Tree of Life
If there is one word I could use to describe Malick’s meditation on cosmic gubbins and personal strife — other than pretentious, or powerful, or intricate, or unsubtle, or preposterous, or profound, or overlong, or ambitious, or breathtaking, etc. etc. — it would be luminous. Thanks to Emmanuel Lubezki’s work, this film glowed. It throbbed with the very life its titular tree is full of. Maybe it was just that we saw this on a good screen, brightly lit and digitally projected (a rarity nowadays), but it was so gloriously shot that I felt I was looking straight through a window into another world, or at least into the mind of Malick, and it was as beautiful a place as I had hoped.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Sean Bobbitt – Shame
In the past Bobbitt filmed a lot of Ye Olde Worlde settings for some of the seemingly infinite number of period adaptations made by the BBC, so it must have been a nice change for him to capture the most memorable images of New York in recent memory. Not that that mattered to the Academy, who don’t care about his ability to paint the city with terrifying reds, soft golds, and rainy greys. All they think is, “But he pointed the camera at a dong”, and that’s your lot. Sorry Sean. Maybe some day you’ll make a movie set during the first quarter of the 20th Century and the Academy members will be falling out of their bath chairs to give you a nod. Fingers crossed, eh?
Achievement in Art Direction
Who Will Win: Laurence Bennett and Robert Gould - The Artist
It’s in these technical categories that the two love letters to silent cinema will fight their most fraught battles, where the majority winner will be decided. As a result it’s hard to deduct who will win using my usual scientific rigour. Instead I have to rely on guesswork, and the thought that last year the Weinsteins managed to strongarm the Academy into giving Tom Hooper — TOM HOOPER — the award for Best Director. I’m sure Harvey has been going door-to-door this year, telling more anecdotes about how clever he was to acquire the rights to this, buying bunches of grapes for the voters and promising to give them back-rubs and what-not. Even though half of my brain is convinced the voters will be more charmed by the charming charming super super charming charm of Hugo (an excellent read, that), I think Harvey’s carpet-bombing techniques will win again. Plus the art direction on The Artist was very nice.
Who Should Win: Dante Ferretti and Francesca Lo Schiavo - Hugo
That said, the art direction on Hugo was even better. Dante Ferretti’s collaborations with Scorsese are always a feast for the eyes and his interpretation of what a semi-fantastical Parisian railway station would look like — with toy shops, overstocked bookshops and clockwork labyrinths included — is some of the best work he’s done. Plus he’s on a roll, having won his last two nominations for Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barberof Fleet Street and The Aviator. So I could well be wrong here.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Maria Djurkovic, Tom Brown and Zsuzsa Kismarty-Lechner – Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Friend-of-the-blog Beggar So’s Hat wisely noted that the shockingly grim production design of this was horribly snubbed. I hadn’t even noticed that. I think I tried to blot the miserable look of the film from my brain rather than be reminded once more of the horrors within. It made me think of my childhood, which now feels like it happened in the 50s and not the 70s like it actually was. It’s as if England was frozen in time for fifty years, and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was just a snapshot of that. Which is to say, Mr. Hat was right. The production design on TTSS was worthy of many awards, especially this one, but also Grimmest Evocation of the Cigarette-Smoke-Stained Dilapidation of 20th Century Britain.
Achievement in Costume Design
Who Will Win: Mark Bridges – The Artist
Again, it’s all down to who will be the overall winner. If it’s going to be The Artist I have to go all in and give it to Mr. Bridges…
Who Should Win: Sandy Powell – Hugo
…while thinking that Sandy Powell’s work is more deserving. By now I must seem like a guy who hated The Artist, but I didn’t. I adored it. Hugo was the movie that left me cold, even though it’s obviously a thing of great precision, as intricate and lovely as the clockwork contraptions that litter it. But all that effort from Scorsese was futilely expended trying to shift the enormous rock that is my heart, and it wasn’t going to work. ::hands in film buff card::
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Eiko Ishioka – Immortals
Nevertheless, that’s not as big a crime as neglecting Eiko Ishioka’s brain-maddening work which so dominated Tarsem’s latest empty trinket. It’s especially frustrating as the world is now bereft of her singular genius. Creating works of art for ill-received genre movies directed by someone with… shall we say, a questionable grasp of narrative… means her work wasn’t really seen enough. When we see Mirror, Mirror later this year, it’ll be a bittersweet experience. And not just because it’ll almost certainly be desperately boring crap. #Uncharitable
Best Documentary Feature
What Will Win: Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory
As usual I haven’t seen any documentaries this year, not even depressing ones about how the economy is about to explode with the force of a million megaprolapses, so I can’t really talk with any authority here, but I’d wager Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky will get the nod for campaigning successfully for the West Memphis Three. Unless the Academy is still mad at Berlinger for Blair Witch 2, which is understandable.
What Should Win: IDK SMDH
As I can’t say anything authoritative here, I’ll keep my fat mouth shut.
What Should Have Been Nominated: Tabloid
Yep, I didn’t even see Senna, the most critically acclaimed documentary of the year, but everyone I know who has seen it adores it. Nevertheless, I would’ve loved to have seen Errol Morris’ crazily entertaining Tabloid get some recognition. Perhaps because it’s so much fun it never stood a chance of getting any Oscar love; that old “comedy is too frivolous to be worthy of recognition” thing again. Which is a shame, because I’d say Tabloid has some pretty hefty points to make about news cycles, journalistic arrogance and human venality. It just also happens to be very amusing while it makes those points.
Best Documentary Short Subject
What Will Win: God Is The Bigger Elvis
Best Animated Short Film
What Will Win: La Luna
Best Live Action Short Film
What Will Win: The Shore
Okay, I’ll come clean. I haven’t got a clue about any of the nominees in any of the three categories clustered here, as was the case last year, so I’m just going to pick for the stupidest reasons. I just read about God Is The Bigger Elvis a few hours ago, La Luna because I like the name of the director (Enrico Casarosa), and The Shore because it’s made by Terry and Oorlagh George, and I always get annoyed that I confuse Terry George and Terry Southern even though their surnames and careers are completely different so I guess that’s an omen or something. Sorry to all of the nominees in these categories; I should give you respect, and instead I give you this excrement-soaked corsage. You deserve so much better.
Achievement in Film Editing
Who Will Win: Thelma Schoonmaker – Hugo
It’s arguable that Hugo was a bit slack, to be honest, and could have done with a bit of tidying up, but you’re a fool if you bet against Schoonmaker, who has won three of the six Academy Awards she has previously been nominated for (can you believe she didn’t win for Goodfellas? WT actual F?).
Who Should Win: Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall – The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
As I said last year, David Fincher’s editing team on The Social Network did a fantastic job of wrestling a ton of footage and talking to the ground and making it work as a narrative. they’re here again with a movie that’s less talky but just as complex (if not more so) than that. Dragon Tattoo may not have blown my socks off the way Fincher’s best work does, but it’s a great thriller, perfectly paced and seemingly effortlessly compelling. Baxter and Wall deserve this win twice over now.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Paul Hirsch – Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol / Hank Corwin, Jay Rabinowitz, Daniel Rezende, Billy Weber and Mark Yoshikawa – The Tree of Life / Joe Bini – We Need To Talk About Kevin
Quick run through of my reasons here. 1) The best action movie of the year deserves a nod, especially when the action scenes are so clearly drawn and beautifully constructed. It was a joy to watch, and much of that was down to veteran Hirsch’s command of the AVID. 2) A team of five head editors wrestling with what was probably 65,000,000 miles of footage featuring kids running down alleys or Brad Pitt standing on a lawn, and in the end we get an impressionistic collage of mood and image as powerful as this? I may complain that Hugo was slack but any flabbiness here was probably intentional. The longueurs are as important as the moments of emotion, and the superb judgement of this team — and Malick — will probably become more apparent with each rewatch. 3) It’s as if Nicolas Roeg is making major motion pictures again, and Bini is as important as Lynne Ramsay in creating a fractured but exhaustingly scary like Kevin. Again, a major omission for this exceptional artistic accomplishment.
Best Foreign Language Film of the Year
What Will Win: A Separation
Of course the Academy has a talent for arsing this category up, which could be good news for Agnieszka Holland — I’d think of it as an award given in honour of her stunning Treme pilot; one of the best episodes of TV ever made – but honestly, how on earth could anything beat Asghar Farhadi’s magnificent family drama? I would’ve like to have seen it do a Crouching Tiger and get a Best Picture nomination as well, it’s that good (yes, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was nominated for both Best Foreign Language Film and Best Picture, a fact that seems to elude many professional Oscar prognosticators each year).
What Should Win: A Separation
Time spent thinking about this masterpiece since seeing it right at the end of last year has made it seem even more profound, even more exciting. I may not have seen any of the other films nominated here but still it seems only right that this wins.
What Should Have Been Nominated: The Skin I Live In
To be honest, though I enjoyed Pedro Almodovar’s macabre thriller, it still left me a little cold. I’m sure there’s some arcane reason why this wasn’t included (that’s usually the case; did Spain even offer it as a nominee?), but if that’s not the case then I guess its omission here is pretty surprising. Other than that, the majority of the foreign language movies I saw last year just weren’t good enough to warrant inclusion here. Even Peter Chan’s Wu Xia — a film which made it onto my best-of-2011 list — would seem out of place. The closest thing I can think of for inclusion would be Andrea Molaioli’s Il Gioiellino, the fictionalised dramatisation of the Parmalat fraud scandal, but even that’s too dry to really pass muster. ::shrug::
Achievement in Makeup
Who Will Win: Mark Coulier and J. Roy Helland – The Iron Lady
I almost feel like I’m saying this because it had the most make-up, mostly on Meryl’s chin for Thatcher’s later years…
Who Should Win: Mark Coulier and J. Roy Helland – The Iron Lady
…but as Daisyhellcakes said when we tried to stay awake during this possibly endless collision of stock footage and poorly shot comedic shenanigans, “That’s a really convincing wattle”. And she’s right. It’s a really convincing wattle.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Contagion
The most startling physical transformation of the year was a digital effect; the enfeeblenising of Chris Evans in the first third of Captain America: The First Avenger is a baffling, seamless effect that convinces so completely that post-super-serum Evans looks somehow more wrong than the wimp. I’m tempted to say this should have been nominated just for the wicked Red Skull make-up on Hugo Weaving, but I think Contagion may be a more worthy nominee, for the nasty sweaty death pallor on the victims of MEV-1, Jude Law’s pasty face and rotten tooth, and one very fun autopsy scene.
Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures (Original Score)
Who Will Win: Howard Shore – Hugo
I can’t actually remember a single note of it, even though I’m a big fan of Mr. Shore (his score for A Dangerous Method was particularly lovely; he does his best work for Maestro Cronenberg), but I doubt either of Williams’ scores will win (vote splitting), and there’s the possibility that Kim Novak really does have some insider information about how the soundtrack to The Artist did something unspeakable and illegal to Bernard Hermann’s Vertigo score. That leaves Shore’s score.
Who Should Win: Alberto Iglesias - Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Of course, this wonderful score by Alberto Iglesias should be the frontrunner here for anyone who has ears. It’s an absolute corker, sinister and peppered with smokey-jazz moments; perfect for the film and powerful in its own right. And yes, I know this won’t be a consideration for the Academy, but the inclusion of this great, nerd-funky version of La Mer just shows how much care was put into the music. It’s such a great choice for the scene it accompanies that I did a joy-pirouette without leaving my super-comfy Odeon-Swiss-Cottage seat.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Michael Giacchino – Super 8
My favourite soundtrack of last year was Cecile Corbel’s delicate score for Arrietty, but as the movie wasn’t released in the US until this year, it wasn’t eligible. I’d like to say Hans Zimmer’s score for Rango should’ve got in, but considering the fuss over Ludovic Bource’s The Artist soundtrack, Zimmer’s re-appropriation of The Blue Danube and Ride of the Valkyries — not to mention similarities with Carter Burwell’s Raising Arizona score — mean it’s better off out of it. Giacchino’s Super 8 score managed to conjure up memories of some of John Williams’ work with Spielberg while remaining recognisably his own work. It might not be the best thing he’s done, but it played an important part in conjuring up the air of nostalgia that made J.J. Abrams’ homage work.
Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures (Original Song)
What Will Win: Man or Muppet (Bret McKenzie) – The Muppets
I’ve not heard the Rio song, but is there any doubt?
What Should Win: Man or Muppet (Bret McKenzie) – The Muppets
It’s just what a musical number should be. It’s thematically relevant, perfectly judged on a tonal level, it signals a big plot moment, it’s full of clever lyrical tricks, and it’s a proper showstopping earworm. It brought the house down at the BFI a month ago and I reckon this happens everywhere this movie plays. Is this the most assured winner of the night?
What Should Have Been Nominated: Star Spangled Man (Alan Menken / David Zippel) – Captain America: The First Avenger
Still, the feeble number of nominees here means there’s no real reason why Menken and Zippel’s entertaining pastiche of WWII propaganda songs didn’t get a nod. It’s not as good as Bret McKenzie’s song, but it’s still a witty and catchy tune. I guess the Academy members didn’t want to be reminded of the war that took place during their middle age. Yeah, I went there!
Achievement in Sound Editing
Who Will Win: Richard Hymns and Gary Rydstrom – War Horse
It might be a load of old chuff but I think War Horse will get at least one Oscar just because Spielberg and the rest strained so damn hard to make something timeless and noble that I bet someone will feel sorry for him. That’s not to say the work of Hymns and Rydstrom isn’t worthy of an award. The movie has a wide array of excellent whinnies, clip-clops, and gunfire.
Who Should Win: Ren Klyce – The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
Normally I’d pick Transformers: Dark of the Moon for two reasons: 1) to annoy everyone by continuing to not crap all over Bay’s carnage-laden doomfuck, and 2) because there were about one zillion sound effects in this movie, and I’m sure there was a small army of sound recorders trying to find the material for this movie’s sonic tapestry of boom. Nevertheless, I’ll pick Ren Klyce’s work on Fincher’s bleak midwinter tale for two different reasons: 1) I always tend to pick Ren Klyce because Ren Klyce is ace, and 2) the sound of Lisbeth Salander’s steel-toed boot clanging noisily against a very large metallic anus-seeking dildo has haunted me for two months. That counts for something.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Oliver Tarney and Mark Taylor – Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
My two picks here (Nicholas Becker for Andrea Arnold’s glorious Wuthering Heights and Koji Kasamatsu for Arrietty) are again not eligible because of US release dates. Instead I’ll pick the team behind the sound effects in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. There’s some lovely work done during the action scenes, but also the thrum of Victorian London is captured as well as in the first movie, which was also deserving of a nomination.
Achievement in Sound Mixing
Who Will Win: Tom Fleischman and John Midgley – Hugo
Big noisy setpieces in a train station where every individual, important noise is clearly picked out? It’s a lock.
Who Should Win: Greg P. Russell, Gary Summers, Jeffrey J. Haboush and Peter J. Devlin – Transformers: Dark of the Moon
The soundscapes of Michael Bay’s noisiest movies are widely loathed as merely a wash of explosions and screaming, but when blasted at with a good THX sound-system, it’s likely that the volume will deafen you to the amount of intricate work done here. It’s not just queueing up a bunch of banging and sticking it all in a blender; there’s more layering of sound than you’d think. Then again, I’ve always been a fan of percussion, so I’m more likely to enjoy an extended drum solo than the finely-picked notes of a symphony. Make of that what you will.
What Should Have Been Nominated: Peter Miller, Adam Kopald, J.R. Grubbs and Addison Teague - Rango
Among the many joys of this astounding triumph of animation is the lovely audio track, evoking the eerie silences of Sergio Leone’s classics while changing gears for some huge, complicated action scenes. Truly a feast for the ears as well as the eyes.
Achievement in Visual Effects
Who Will Win: Joe Letteri, Dan Lemmon, R. Christopher White and Daniel Barrett - Rise of the Planet of the Apes
I’m tempted to say Hugo will win this too, but the furore over Andy Serkis’ performance and the technology used to capture it means this might have a shot, as a sop to the campaigners.
Who Should Win: Scott Farrar, Scott Benza, Matthew Butler and John Frazier - Transformers: Dark of the Moon
Once more I’m picking complexity and logistical madness over subtlety or beauty, but the scale of the FX work in this movie is simply breathtaking. It’s also seamlessly integrated with reality; you’ll really believe Chicago had its arse kicked by robotic dickwads. The only caveat here is that they’re not really breaking new ground; we’ve seen this kind of thing before, just not on this scale. Nevertheless, my eyes boggled at the monumental mechanical madness, and I really appreciate that.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Douglas Trumbull, Dan Glass, Peter and Chris Parks – The Tree of Life
What a lovely welcome back for the legendary Doug Trumbull; a snub by his peers that probably would have stung if he had even noticed them, bearing in mind he is a colossus who bestrides the discipline of visual effects and probably thinks Digital Domain is little more than an interesting ant-farm. Bear in mind, this is a man who, while everyone else in the FX business was learning how to use a mouse, was either working on IMAX and Showscan technologies or trying to fix the BP oil-spill. Does he need an Oscar? If the FX industry members of the Academy can’t find it in their hearts to give this visionary the award he deserves, he can get over the insignificant pain by inventing another world-changing doohickey. Trumbull does not need your baubles.
Adapted Screenplay
Who Will Win: Alexander Payne and Nat Faxon & Jim Rash – The Descendants
Hugo should win this considering the overwhelming critical praise for it in the US, but I have a feeling the sentimental Academy members will be more drawn to The Descendants, which is a very writerly movie with big dramatic beats, terminally ill people, confrontations that play out in unexpected ways, and speeches that run on for perhaps a bit too long. It also has a terrible voiceover in the first half of the movie that should make invalidate it, but I doubt that that’s a dealbreaker. Or maybe this is just wishful thinking because I want to see Dean Pelton win an Oscar? If so, can Magnitude come on stage for a celebratory “Pop pop!“?
Who Should Win: Bridget O’Connor & Peter Straughan – Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Much as I enjoyed Moneyball, mostly because Sorkin’s worst excesses were curtailed by the low-key performances and direction, I don’t think it’s the best script here. I also don’t think that honour belongs to The Ides of March; yet another Clooney / Heslov disappointment that feels four drafts away from completion. Surely Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is the only logical choice here. It’s a labyrinth of words and actions and information but there’s emotion here, real aching pain. It’s a magnificent achievement.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Christopher Hampton – A Dangerous Method
As is Christopher Hampton’s expansion of his play The Talking Cure. Its absorption and translation of the ideas and theories of Freud, Jung and Spielrein into dramatic forms is breathtaking, made all the more memorable for its puckish wit and satisfying emotional charge. Though I’d resigned myself to seeing this underrated movie get little Oscar love I held out hope for this screenplay as the sole nominee, but no. What a pity.
Original Screenplay
Who Will Win: Woody Allen – Midnight in Paris
Remember all those days ago when The Artist won the Bafta for best screenplay and amateur comedians and film critics said, “How can it win best screenplay when there’s no words in it duhhhhh duuuuuuh a-duuuuuhhhhhhh?” Well I guess that won’t happen here, but only because the truly sentimental choice is to give Woody another Oscar for his latest self-indulgent wallow in nostalgia. Usually that yearning for simpler times is a subtext to his usual light middle-class semi-intellectual drama, but here it’s right at the fore-front. Who was the Twitter wag who said that this movie was like Woody’s “Things I like” list made celluloid flesh? Because well done, that person, you got it in one.
Who Should Win: Asghar Farhadi – A Separation
That victory for a second-rate script would be a crime when Asghar Farhadi’s brilliantly constructed, humane, intelligent, complex, multi-faceted screenplay has also been given a nod. In a perfect world this would’ve been the only nominee. If ever anyone asks me what screenplay I would pick as an example of brilliant screenwriting, I’ll pick George Gallo’s script for Midnight Run. If they couldn’t find that, I’ll pick this.
Who Should Have Been Nominated: Kenneth Lonergan – Margaret / Scott Z. Burns – Contagion
That said, I would’ve liked it if Kenneth Lonergan had received any kind of recognition for his notorious movie, but I guess there was no chance of that happening with the lawsuits flying back and forth like flaming buzzards of doom. Also, we’ve not even seen the full movie; I long for the director’s cut of this challenging and audacious movie. I also would’ve liked it if Scott Z. Burns got nominated for Contagion, but that’s because I’m a big Scott Z. Burns fan and I think he’s great so there.
Achievement in Directing
Who Will Win: Martin Scorsese – Hugo
Okay, hear me out. Yes, I think The Artist will win Best Picture. Yes, I know that Michel Hazanavicius won the Director’s Guild Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Feature Film Award, and that’s usually a pretty reliable marker of who will win the Academy Award, but I think Scorsese has played a blinder here; making a homage to the birth of cinema, eoo-goog-alising one of the earliest pioneers of the medium, and passionately campaigning for the virtues of film preservation within the film itself. A pretty ballsy move, to turn a children’s movie into a two-hour lecture about archiving and storage technology. The Artist might be a love letter to silent cinema, but Hugo is a billet-doux attached to a heart-shaped box of chocolate cherries with a bit of sexy lingerie hidden under the crepe-paper tray. There’s no way the assorted dodecagenarians of the Academy will be able to resist giving Scorsese his second director’s gong for this.
Who Should Win: Terrence Malick – The Tree of Life
Even though I really loved The Artist (I did! Honest!), and thought Scorsese did a good job of methodically stripped the magic from his children’s film by the time the final reel arrived just so he could prove a point, this category belongs to Malick. Alexander Payne served up a curiously listless dramedy, and Woody Allen woke up for a little while; not really work worth lauding. But Malick’s bold vision was even more daring than his usual work, happily comparing the travails of a family to the beginning and end of life. What brass balls. It’s the best thing he’s done since Days of Heaven, and more than deserving of some Oscar love. If they don’t do it now, they’ll only regret it in future when he suddenly starts making action movies starring Channing Tatum (mark my words, this will happen).
Who Should Have Been Nominated: David Cronenberg – A Dangerous Method
The great man can’t win. When he makes a genre movie — albeit a genre movie with an intellectual ambition that dwarfs almost everything else around — clueless critics proclaim that he’s little more than a provocateur debasing his better instincts. When he makes a movie that’s sober and thought-provoking, everyone whines that there’s not enough parasites or inappropriate vaginal images in it. So when he makes something as crystalline as this, so perfectly hewn and formally precise, critics say it’s too dry. “It’s too dry,” they say, drawing attention to what they think is an excessive dryness. Seriously, that’s all anyone could say. Well bollocks to that. It’s exactly what it needs to be, and Cronenberg is the only filmmaker in the world smart enough to get that right. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; one day critical opinion will swing back Cronenberg’s way. Sadly, not before voting ended.
Best Motion Picture of the Year
What Will Win: The Artist
Critical mass has been reached for The Artist. I don’t think anyone on the planet expects another movie to win, except Stephen Daldry, probably; a conclusion I’ve reached after enduring Extremely Bad And Just Generally Incredibly Incredibly Dire And Awful Jesus What A Stinker, which seems to have been directed by someone who has absolutely no self-awareness whatsoever. I was tempted to predict a Hugo surprise here, but I think we all know that’s not happening. Harvey Weinstein has been prowling the streets of Hollywood like a cross between Batman, Wilson Fisk and P.T. Barnum, pimping out that movie for all he’s worth. It’s a foregone conclusion.
What Should Win: The Artist
And I’m absolutely fine with that. Not just because it’s the best movie of the nine nominees, but because I still think so fondly of it a victory in this category would make my night. I’m sure in time the numerous haters will multiply like mogwai under a waterfall, but for now a big win would almost feel like an extension of the movie’s deliriously happy vibe. Like a 4D experience for its fans. Plus it’s a last chance to see Jean Dujardin charm us with another impromptu dance. Vous dansez comme un nuage enthousiaste, vous bel homme!
What Should Have Been Nominated: Take Shelter / A Dangerous Method
If that vile… vile… thing with the obnoxiously precious title can get nominated, then surely anything can. Two of my favourites of last year are more than good enough to get in here, usurping Daldry’s slimy ode to sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-McSweeney’s-style precocity and Spielberg’s admittedly hilarious and Dadaesque World War One comedy The Adventures of War Horse: The Siren-Centaur Hybrid of Death, not to mention The (Wonderful Way White People) Help(ed Those Relatively Unimportant Black Folks). Put these two brilliant movies in there, dammit, and why not add Fast Five while you’re at it. That movie was better than at least seven, arguably eight of the movies in that list, even if only for the moment when The Rock and Vin Diesel crash through a wall during a fight. Better than Malick’s dinosaurs, I reckon.
That”s enough making a fool of myself in front of the entire internet. See you on the other side of the award ceremony, and what will likely be a really cozy opening monologue from Billy Crystal featuring at least one — maybe five — jokes about the lacklustre box office takings of Mr. Saturday Night. Mazel tov!
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.
Forgive me for this, but my final report on this year’s London Film Festival requires a bit of a digression. A crisis of confidence paralysed me after seeing two mystifying movies, and it’s affected the way I see movies in a way that’s not entirely positive, and I feel like it’s something that I need to work through. It’s partially caused by my visceral hatred of travel. Though I’d love to visit China and Japan, home of my favourite non-Western cinema, it’s not about to happen. Daisyhellcakes is the one with the Wanderlust; I’d rather just sit here and pick up snacks from the table using one of those robotic grippy hands. As a result all I know about both countries I’ve picked up from rumour and gossip, much of which sounds kinda general and probably skewed by empathy-gaps in the gossiper, or from what I see in their culture.
It goes without saying that this is unreliable. If I were to believe the cultural output of the UK was accurate I’d think the country has two halves: one prevented by law from progressing past a technological or historical level that would offend the average Amish, with courtly manners being the only distraction from all the handsome but grumpy men riding around on black horses; the other a modern urban hellscape populated by grizzled Cockneys called Roy “The Aardvark” Bulletface or Danny “The Damson” McScrofula, all of whom have passionate love affairs with their shotguns only matched in intensity by their loyalty to their “mam”. It comes to something when the movie that I think most speaks to the state of modern England is Attack The Block.
For all I know China isn’t a country where 50% of the population can fly through the air and do twenty roundhouse kicks in the time it takes to reload a gun, and the other 50% are cowering bureaucrats wearing oversized glasses. And Japan isn’t a place where the populace is dealing with a terrible epidemic of sinister dark-haired schoolgirls appearing in doorways. I should go there and check this out, but it’s not on the cards. Too late for that, and I hate travelling further than this sofa. Sadly that means that understanding the culture of both countries leaves little room for the small details, the cultural and historical tidbits that provide a better idea of what it is to be Chinese or Japanese. Even without the language barrier, there are times when being a tourist in the cinematic world of China and Japan is as baffling as being dropped into Kowloon with no money and no guide.
Which brings me to Jiang Wen’s Let The Bullets Fly, currently the highest grossing domestically produced film in China’s history, and second only to Avatar overall. The majority of the LFF movies that drew my initial attention were the big ticket events (Shame, A Dangerous Method, The Artist), or films by artists I liked and trusted, for better or worse (Bernie, Restless). Let The Bullets Fly (and Daisuke Tengan’s Dendera) were wildcards, picked in the hope that they would surprise me. Ticket prices for the LFF are pretty reasonable (£7 for an afternoon ticket for BFI members is better than the normal afternoon prices for the West End Vue, and a bargain if you take into account the prices of other cinemas in the area, e.g. the Leicester Square Odeon, whose cheapest afternoon tickets for Tintin in 3D were nearly £20). Nevertheless, the cost stacks up, and lack of time and cash meant I had to carefully select just a sprinkling to add variety.
In that case a Hong Kong action movie starring Chow Yun Fat seemed like a no-brainer, but it was not to be. Any attempt to summarise the plot here would be futile, other than to say that Jiang Wen plays an outlaw who may or may not be the infamous Robin-Hood-esque “Pocky” Zhang, who teams up with conman Tang to trick corrupt mobster Master Huang (Chow Yun Fat, in fine form) into thinking he is a newly arrived mayor come to collect tithes. Zhang’s plans end up enraging Huang to the point that they end up in a war of attrition, double-, treble-quadruple- and quintuple-crossing each other until most of the cast is either dead or maimed, and some viewers are lying in their chairs in a state of frustrated stupefaction, their brains tangled into knots trying to deal with the constantly twisting narrative.
To be honest, as long as you’re paying attention it’s not so bad; thank Buddha for a movie that actually expects the audience to pay attention. The trouble is that I can’t help but think that it’s my ignorance of those tidbits of Chinese culture that made the experience baffling and annoying, as so many moments in the movie seemed to make no sense. An early scene with Zhang’s godson Number Six being accused of theft was an early warning that I was out of my depth. Six proves his innocence in a way that, shall we say without spoiling, stretches believability to breaking point, certainly from a Western perspective. It seems unlikely that anyone would go to the lengths that he does to prove that he’s not a thief, at least from the way I saw it.
This was only the beginning. A scene with Zhang, Huang and conman Tang bartering for a share of Huang’s fortune, all the while debating the existence of the mythical Pocky left me utterly baffled. At various stages of the conversation I became convinced that Huang knew that Zhang wasn’t a Mayor, but was in fact Pocky, but then two seconds later I thought the opposite. At one point I thought Zhang had admitted he was Pocky, and for the next five minutes just got more and more exasperated. It just got worse. One double-cross involving a bunch of dead soldiers made absolutely no sense whatsoever, if you take into account the laws of physics. By the time Zhang and his men were shooting question marks and exclamation marks into an iron gate for no apparent reason I just gave up. Was this a joke? A mistake with the translation? A cultural reference I would never understand?
It’s tempting to say I thought it was great and just move on from there, but I honestly can’t. This confusion completely ruined Let The Bullets Fly for me, even though I was never bored during it, and certainly enjoyed many scenes. Jiang Wen is particularly good as Zhang; this is the first time I’ve seen him since he appeared in Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum, and he effortlessly holds the screen while Chow Yun Fat goes overboard as Huang and his hapless comedy-relief body double. Nevertheless, as the incomprehensible and overlong finale finally came to an end after what felt like hours of repetitive feints by protagonist and antagonist, all that mattered was that this movie, so popular in its country of origin, just made no damn sense on a narrative or filmmaking level.
Friend of the blog and prolific B-Movie Message Board poster Beggar So’s Hat saw a subsequent performance and reported that he greatly enjoyed it (N.B. The very excellent Mr. So’s Hat has kindly left a mini-review in the comments beneath this review; please skip down and absorb his considerable knowledge of Hong Kong cinema). I trust him; he’s a bigger fan of Hong Kong cinema, and has more experience of untangling these befuddling Eastern plots, which sometimes bear as much resemblance to a McKee three-act structure as James Corden does to Donnie Yen. Perhaps I’m just too sensitive about this, and how my response to Hong Kong cinema is selective — e.g. I’ve seen 30 minutes of Jackie Chan’s Police Story about 100 times, and the other 70 minutes twice, and I’ll leave you to guess what happened in those 30 minutes. It’s also the case that Eastern cinema is often edited into international cuts that drop stuff that doesn’t translate well. Even my beloved 13 Assassins has chunks missing, including this awful scene that would have wrecked the meticulous set-up to that final battle.
My concern over my culturally-ignorant responses was exascerbated when I saw the Rotten Tomatoes page for Benny Chan’s unexpectedly compassionate historical drama Shaolin, which mixes bursts of action and melodrama with a message of Buddhist optimism. Chan focuses on the redemption of some pretty unapologetic villains, and takes the time to show their passage from callousness to empathy. That makes for a longer movie than most, but it’s time that’s well spent. Nevertheless, even though it has a Fresh rating, the consensus seems to be that there isn’t enough action in it.
This surprised me. I can’t imagine a Western movie being criticised for that. In fact, as soon as a movie stops being about themes and starts being about chases and fights, critics usually complain that it has abandoned story in favour of dull crashing pyrotechnics. Why is non-stop action a requirement of Eastern cinema but not Western cinema? Is it because ::gulp:: many Western critics don’t get those movies either? Or is that an unintended consequence of the predominance of action releases around the world, that expertly choreographed fighting has now become an expected element in Eastern movies in the way the first thing that comes to mind when people mention Bollywood are extravagant musical numbers?
Is it possible to ever assess a different culture with a measure of objectivity? Almost certainly not, but then I’m quite happy to admit that I’ll give a bad movie with some funky FX and pyrotechnics an easier ride just because those are two things I like. Even so, my biases and ignorance sometimes talk too loud, and drown out a fairer voice, as with Dendera, which was the last movie I saw during the festival. It’s a sequel to Shohei Imamura’s The Ballad Of Narayama, which depicted a village that consigns its elderly to the nearby snow-swept mountain to die in order to conserve the minimal resources in the area. Dendera takes that idea further; what if one woman refuses to die when it’s her time, and prevails for so long that she ends up building a village of her own, filled with the women she saves from certain death?
This woman (Mei, played with fearsome intensity by Mitsuko Kusabue) wants nothing more than to destroy the village which discarded her, and sees the arrival of Kayu (Ruriko Asaoka) as a sign that the time for her vengeance has come. Kayu challenges her on this, maintaining that it was their time to die and such thoughts of survival have upset the order of things, not to mention preventing them from passing into the afterlife that has been promised them. The debate between Mei and Kayu rages until the village is attacked by a bear which threatens their very existence, derailing their plans for much of the latter half of the film.
Pretty much as soon as Kayu is rescued by the women of Dendera and begins arguing for death and obedience, my cultural ignorance about Japan took over. I began thinking about the legendary Japanese respect for the elderly, here turned on its head, and the depictions of societal deference in Western tales about Japan (I blame Michael Crichton). It was impossible to watch this movie — a movie with some feminist meaning, mixed with action — with clear eyes; all I could see was myself. That and a terribly unconvincing fake bear. Any suspense in the final hour is undone by the image of a man in a bear suit galloping through the woods; Mamet and Tamahori’s The Edge by way of Neil LaBute’s The Wicker Man.
Of the two movies, Dendera is a more solid piece of work than Let The Bullets Fly. Tengan elicits strong performances from the entire cast, especially Kusabue and Mitsuko Baisho as the leader of the town’s pacifist group, derisively referred to as the Cowards. It’s a movie that promises many things; it’s ripe with metaphorical power which dwindles as the movie trudges toward the final showdown between Kayu and the bear. Subplots are dropped and points are obscured, with only the unexpected finale to wrap things up in a reasonably satisfactory way.
Not that any of that mattered to me by the end. The confidence-sapping poison that had been injected into me during Let The Bullets Fly began to take hold during Dendera, so that by the end I wasn’t sure I could ever have a reliable opinion on it. The last half of the movie, which seemed to have veered so far from what I had enjoyed about the first half, made no sense to me on a narrative or emotional level. I became restless and annoyed; why wasn’t the movie doing anything logical? Why were the set-ups of the first hour abandoned like this? I thought the movie was going to fit in a box, but by the end the 3D shape I had imagined had liquefied and started to leak out of the sides.
Was it the movie, or was it me? Can I really be expected to understand all of the subtleties of a movie made in this alien culture? And who’s to say I can understand my own culture? As mentioned earlier, I loved Attack The Block, but my interpretation of what it meant might have been based on my incomplete misunderstanding of youth culture. My experiences with modern youth culture are restricted to trying to understand dubstep, which ended ignominiously during my third listen to Benga’s Diary of an Afro Warrior — a good album but Jesus Christ, I get that it’s called Diary of an Afro Warrior, Benga, and you don’t have to remind me with the phrase, “You are listening to Benga, Diary of an Afro Warrior,” inserted between every goddamn song! #GrouchyOldMan
In that case, can I ever get it right? Are these reviews just ways for me to broadcast to everyone that I’m an ignoramus? They’re meant to be my attempts to work out my feelings and theories about narrative, but perhaps I’m just setting myself up for a fall. Are my thoughts as unreliable as Chris Tookey’s, whose inability to see movies from any viewpoint other than that of anti-modernity, anti-political-correctness Middle England means he has pretty much zero worth as an objective, insightful critic (see his recent slating of Andrea Arnold’s remarkable reinvention of Wuthering Heights)?
The experience of watching Dendera suddenly became a whirlpool of doubt and recrimination, in which I came to an awful conclusion; I’m just not cut out for this game. It has long been my hope that I would make something of this writing malarkey, but as I struggled to interpret Dendera on a deeper level than just, “Pretty photography, bit muddled thematically, lots of snow,” I began to question everything I’ve ever said about films. Maybe the negative comments I’ve received calling me an idiot and saying I’m full of shit were right. Maybe this recent article about how blogging has ruined film criticism had a point. Maybe I should give up.
The fact that these London Film Festival reviews are here should give you a clue as to how I feel now, though it’s not as simple as that. I’m sticking with it for a while longer, but the doubts remain. It was only the experience of seeing The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn that put me back on track. As soon as Dendera finished I rushed out to see the latest Spielberg movie, still shaken by my crisis of confidence but eager to give this movie a try. This was a risk. While most folks seem to have grown up reading Hergé’s books, I was more of a 2000AD kind of guy, and tasteful Belgian comics moved me not a jot. The only reason Tintin appealed to me was because it was the first Spielberg movie in way too long, and I was curious to see what he would do with the performance-capture.
So wasn’t watching this movie while feeling fragile a bad idea? I had no frame of reference here, other than to think Tintin was a dull character. Would I be mystified again? Would this be the nail in the coffin of my blogging career? Thankfully, no. I have no idea whether Speilberg’s movie honours Hergé’s creation or insults him, as pretty much everyone working at the Guardian seemed to think. What I do know is that my initial scepticism about the movie vanished at the halfway mark, as it became obvious that this filmmaker, who has meant so much to me since childhood, was reinvigorated by the use of this new performance-capture toy, and was using it in a way that no one else had before. The succession of eye-boggling action set-pieces pinned me to my chair like an amazed butterfly. It’s a miraculous achievement just for the “one-shot” chase through the streets of Bagghar; it’s one of the most important action scenes in the history of cinema, one which film scholars will be studying for years to come.
But what do I know? I’m not a Tintin fan, so I can’t be trusted on this. Well, in a sense, yes, but as someone who adores Spielberg, who isn’t averse to performance-capture in movies, who doesn’t immediately pull a disgust face every time someone says the word “Hollywood”, I think my viewpoint has some worth. Everyone’s does, because their tastes have been shaped by the things they have seen and enjoyed in the past, and they can articulate something specific about every movie from that angle. I might not be able to tell the difference between the Thompson Twins but I can spot a lovely bit of Spielberg’s kinetic framing a mile off. While others have interpreted Spielberg’s Tintin as a cultural insult, I experienced a breathtakingly fluid experiment gone right, a triumphant meshing of technology and innovative storytelling that demands to be seen, no matter what the massed ranks of the Guardian say. This is the gift that Spielberg gave to me; the gift of shutting up the voice of my doubt, at least for now.
As statements of intent go this isn’t much of one, but for what it’s worth I’ll keep doing this for the time being, explaining why movies or TV shows moved me or repulsed me, in the hope that this connects with others. My reviews are obviously subjective, and I don’t have the gift of cultural omniscience, so there’s bound to be a lot of things I miss out or misunderstand. But this is what I have to offer. Thank you to everyone who contacted me about this series of blogposts; all comments were appreciated and received gratefully. I’ll be back soon for my Listmania! picks of the best and worst of the year, in which I will praise Kenneth Lonergan and make some mean-spirited jokes about what a nutjob Ayn Rand was.
I’d hoped to finish the final installment of this list today, but ongoing problems with cranky computers and the impossibility of getting WordPress to work faster than a cart dragged by a three-legged horse has scuppered me, so I’ll just add these five now and finish the rest over the next few days. I had originally planned to write one quick post about how I wasn’t going to compile a list, and look what happened. Of course I rushed it, and in the process missed some movies off and had to make quick decisions on others. Two that I considered for inclusion but ended up making a strict decision against were Steven Spielberg’s SF collaborations with Tom Cruise: Minority Report and War of the Worlds. Both movies contained some of Spielberg’s strongest filmmaking as well as displaying his terrible impulse control, as both suffered from poor endings that undermined a lot of what had come before.
Minority Report was a brilliant redefinition of Philip K. Dick’s short story, with Scott Frank taking Dick’s ideas and running with them, as well as providing Spielberg to indulge his new-found fascination with the joys of the Weird Segue. What could have been a very conventional chase movie became sidetracked with bizarre slapstick, eccentric performances, and crazy ideas. It also showcased some amazing futurism, pre-empting concerns about targeted advertising and giving us wonderful motion-recognition setpieces with a Voguing Tom Cruise that have made me long for the time I never have to use a keyboard or remote control ever again. I want this future right now!
Sadly the oddness and imagination made way for a deeply unsatisfying final act that hinged on that hoariest of thriller conventions: the secretly taped confession. What could have been a bleak movie about fate became a dull crime thriller, and as a result missed this list. Only just, though. The same happened with his adaptation of H.G. Wells’ novel about alien invasion. For the most part it’s a commendably bleak depiction of the end of civilisation, told in Spielberg’s trademark small-scale style. Focusing on three characters, he is able to depict the devastating effect of the breakdown of society just by showing how it affects them. This is best shown in the scene in which the family are separated from their car by a mob, and a terrified Cruise has a breakdown in a diner.
More effective than any number of admittedly terrifying and beautifully choreographed scenes of FX carnage, that scene would get into a top ten of my favourite scenes of the decade. Of course, Spielberg fluffs it. As soon as Justin Chatwin disappears over a hill top, you just know that Spielberg is going to orchestrate a reunion at the end of the movie, and even though the movie’s darkest sequence is yet to come — Cruise protecting his daughter by killing the crazy man they are forced to take shelter with — the knowledge that Spielberg is unable to kill off a family member for fear of bringing the audience down too far neuters the movie. I don’t think any other movie I’ve seen this decade has frustrated me so much. It was so close, and yet so far. As for AI, I wasn’t crazy about it when I first saw it and have yet to revisit it.
One day I will, and hope to get over my objections to the final ten minutes. At the very least, even though all three movies irked me, I am grateful to Spielberg for making such unique SF movies. Their rough edges do not completely invalidate them, and the genre has benefited greatly from their existence. I suspect time will be kinder to them than I have.
Right, no more vacillation. Here is the next installment of the list. As I’ve said each time, there are no movies from this year, although there is at least one movie from 2009 that I think would crack the top fifteen. I’ll see how I feel about it in a few weeks.
15. Oldboy
The middle installment of Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance trilogy is based — unlike the other two movies — on a manga by Nobuaki Minegishi and Garon Tsuchiya, concerning the quest of a loathsome man for vengeance and redemption after being held captive by a mysterious nemesis for fifteen years. It owes much of its power to Choi Min-sik, whose iconic presence and unhinged commitment to his role is utterly riveting. Without him the dazzling puzzle plot would still draw you in. With him (and his crazy hair), it achieves true greatness. A shattering masterpiece with a truly horrifying final act.
Best Moment: The revelations in the final act are shocking, and the notorious scene where Oh Dae-su devours a live octopus certainly shocks, but who can forget the brutal one take fight scene in a cramped corridor:
14. United 93
The terrible events of September 11th, 2001, defined the decade. The scale of the horror, and the manner in which it unfolded before our eyes, was unprecedented. It scarred everyone who experienced it. Paul Greengrass’ project to document the events of that day horrified many, eliciting the cry of “Too soon!”, but this story needed to be told as soon as possible. It’s lucky Greengrass — who had a documentary background and had already done a magnificent job cataloguing the horrific Bloody Sunday massacre — chose to take on this task, as his meticulous attention to detail led him to interview every relevant living person involved in the hijacking of United 93. Time dulls these memories, and the urge to derive some hope from 9/11 meant the story was already being manipulated to suit political ends by the time Greengrass started work. Not long before he had finished, a TV film about the same events was aired, but this was more than just a cash-in. It was an attempt to create a definitive historically accurate account of that moment, free of emotional distortion.
Best Moment: Something as sensitive as this doesn’t have any moment that makes you want to cheer. It just attacks your soul and wrenches your heart from your chest. On a personal level it has been important to me simply because I slept through that day (night work does that to you), and so I can attest to its value as a document of the day’s events. The nausea and emotions I would have felt on that awful day hit me as I watched this. I completely understand why many won’t want to watch it: it’s the most harrowing experience I have ever had in a cinema, and I’ve not been able to rewatch it since. Nevertheless, I’m glad I did see it.
13. Munich
Steven Spielberg has spent much of his career exploring the events of WWII, at first as a backdrop for shenanigans (1941, Raiders of the Lost Ark), then as the setting for commentaries on the darkness that conflict exposed both in our enemies and ourselves (Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan). It seemed likely that this fascination with the era was a consequence of his Jewish upbringing, and in biographies his late-career interest in Judaism certainly informed his work on Schindler’s List. He wasn’t finished exploring his cultural and ethnic heritage, though. As you can imagine, his effort to depict the dark side of Jewish history was not received with as much acclaim as his movie about Schindler. Munich‘s nightmarish vision of the awful moral corruption faced by a group of former Mossad agents — given the task of wreaking vengeance on the men behind the Munich Olympics massacre — is unflinching, a sentiment definitely not shared by many right-wing supporters of Israel’s foreign policies. Arguments rage over the veracity of the movie, but Spielberg is obviously expressing anger at the way this ongoing conflict is poisoning all of our lives, and to do that he has taken liberties with facts to create a warning to us all that “an eye for an eye” is not a viable policy.
Best Moment: As with United 93, this is not a triumphalist movie, but Spielberg is too much of a showman to make something that completely eschews manipulation of the audience. Early in the movie the team of assassins place a booby-trap inside a phone in the hope of killing a Palestinian translator, but in a nerve-wracking scene they realise they are about to kill his daughter as well. It’s a thrilling suspense setpiece with dark undertones that come to the fore as the movie progresses.
12. The Dark Knight
The praise-backlash-praise cycle for The Dark Knight seemed to flash past quicker than usual. Blame the Internet. Now that things have settled down, and debates about whether it should have qualified for a Best Picture Academy Award nomination have become moot (though it should have), one can look back with fresher eyes and see if Christopher Nolan’s crime epic stands up to scrutiny. Concerns over some of the editing remain, but it still manages to do several things better than almost any other purely fictional movie released this decade: it addresses contemporary concerns over the effect of terrorism on society, it condemns recent foreign policy and domestic security mistakes using crystal-clear metaphors, and it finds a way to make the fantastical superhero genre work in a contemporary setting without losing what makes that genre so appealing. It’s also ridiculously exciting, and features two of the most thrilling performances of recent times from Heath Ledger and Aaron Eckhart.
Best Moment: As Batman battles to stop a SWAT team from killing a group of innocents, the occupants of two booby-trapped boats have to make a terrible decision. The deadlock is broken by a convict whose actions show that, despite the terror caused by The Joker and his minions, the people of Gotham will not buckle under the pressure. I saw this in an IMAX cinema in New York, and the applause that broke out at this moment was more than just an acknowledgement of good cinema. It was defiant approval. Terror won’t win out. We won’t let it.
11. Ratatouille
It’s a film about a talking rat who loves cooking. In the hands of a lesser filmmaker it could have been nothing more than a fun diversion, but in the hands of Jan Pinkava and Brad Bird, it is instead a treatise on what it is to be an artist. Celebrating self-knowledge, commitment to excellence, and thoughtful artistic criticism, it’s one of the most profound movies about the creative impulse ever made, all while being artistically accomplished in its own right. No mean feat. It’s also a love letter to Paris and to great cuisine (choosing Thomas Keller as a consultant shows Brad Bird knew what he was doing), not to mention a wonderful comedy. In other words, a pure triumph.
Best Moment: Curmudgeonly critic Anton Ego finally arrives at Gusteau’s ready to destroy its reputation once and for all. What happens next might be my favourite scene of the entire decade.
As I’m going a bit bigger with these last fifteen, might as well split this into three sets of five too. Apologies for dragging this out even further: it was beyond my control. Next two parts will materialise either over the weekend or on Monday.
Blogs have many uses, and some of those uses might actually benefit humanity. Compared to Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science, or the very wonderful Daily Hate Myself, this blog often feels like it does little more than allow me to list my likes and dislikes at painful length, when not harping on about Rock Band. Last week, I whined about Stephen Sommers movies. This week, I will be rather boring about Michael Mann.
Though I don’t want to do a Harry Knowles and spend the next fifteen paragraphs talking about how I’m the biggest Michael Mann fan ever so there, there’s no way I can talk about Public Enemies and not admit that I am, as Canyon called me yesterday, a Mann apologist. I liked Miami Vice. I forgave Collateral its flaws. The Keep is a misunderstood and flawed classic that deserves to be seen in its full glory. Heat is the best crime film of the last twenty years. Yes, I like it more than Goodfellas, though not by much. Tracking the practically incremental alterations in his style is as fascinating to me as assessing Spielberg’s late-period career reinventions, or Zemeckis’ technological experiments, or Scorsese’s slow descent into what would be termed irrelevance in any other filmmaker.
And yet Public Enemies didn’t excite me that much. Middling reviews and a boring trailer did little to increase my enthusiasm, though part of it was disappointment with the film year so far. Only a couple of films have really impressed me: In The Loop, Kathryn Bigelow’s haunting Iraq movie The Hurt Locker, the few minutes of Up I could concentrate on between disturbances by the kids behind me. Public Enemies was on my must-see list just because of Mann and Depp, but the played-out subject matter and my annoying ennui conspired against it. Case in point: it was released weeks ago, and I only saw it yesterday. This is not my usual behaviour.
For the first hour, I struggled to commit to it. Much comment has been made about Mann’s decision to use the same digital processes he used in Collateral and Miami Vice (That piece being one of the most interesting articles about it), with criticism aimed at it for being muddy and ugly. Personally, I love the look of Mann’s digital movies, but am aware that debate about his use of this technology in his previous films has sometimes come down to a matter of personal taste. In Public Enemies, the argument has altered slightly. It’s no longer a debate about whether it looks nice or not. It’s more about why Mann would use what some see as alienating and anachronistic digital photography in a period piece.
If anachronism is meant to be avoided, then surely it should be filmed in black and white on analogue film, but I do get the point. This technology is modern enough that only a few filmmakers are committing to it, and the novelty of seeing this startling and textured imagery has not yet disappeared. Shots of Depp and Cotillard (playing Dillinger’s lover Billie Frechette) together in bed are dizzying, with cinematographer Dante Spinotti getting the camera in so close you can see every pore on their faces, lighting the scene with one stark light mimicking the brightness of the moon. The look of the movie is a world away from even John Milius’ Dillinger, let alone the monochrome of William Wellman and Raoul Walsh.
So why do it? Partially because Mann is attempting to create a continuum between now and then. The movie already explores contemporary issues, such as the use of torture and technology to fight a threat to the nation, the march of progress leaving behind those who are unwilling to adapt, the cult of celebrity, and the narcissism of those who become addicted to the limelight. Instead of cracking out old film, Mann is saying that was then and then was now. We’ve barely moved on from those times, a point that is especially affecting considering that we’re watching a film set during the Great Depression while teetering on the brink of our own economic collapse. The timing of this film’s release couldn’t have been better.
If you’re going to use a historical crime setting to highlight failings in our own modern culture, why not use a visual template that is utterly modern? Plus, it is one of many aspects of the movie that connects with Mann’s other movies. The visuals remind one of Mann’s last two projects. The look of Billie’s cell in the final scene, the reliance on technology to pursue lawbreakers, and the beautifully shot night-time raid scene are all reminiscent of Manhunter. The portrayal of a man who ended up shaping the world around him comes from Ali. Elliot Goldenthal’s stirring soundtrack is occasionally reminiscent of the more grandiose moments of Last of the Mohicans. And then, of course, there are the myriad similarities with Heat.
A friend of the blog has already made an arch comment to me about how Mann has been making the same movie for the past twenty years, which is harsh but obviously not far from the truth. The parallels between Public Enemies and Heat are many, with Mann showing two “professionals” engaged in a battle against each other from opposite sides of the law. As with Heat, they have similarities. Hanna and McCauley are both perfectionists, surrounding themselves with similar professionals, whose personal lives are affected by their determination to do what they do as well as they can do it.
Dillinger and Purvis (Christian Bale’s ambitious and ultimately deluded crime fighter) have a similar attitude to their work, and surround themselves with a tight group of compatriots, but they are also forced to work with people who cannot match up to their standards. Though McCauley is brought low by the failings of his team, Dillinger distances himself from the losers in his crew, and is eventually undone by events outside his influence. More surprisingly, while Hanna is never compromised by his team, Purvis is forced to watch as his team becomes ever more desperate and foolish. Billie is tortured, innocent civilians are gunned down (he is directly responsible for at least two grisly deaths), and it is late in the movie before he realises how low he is willing to sink in order to get his man.
Heat also shows the toll this life takes on a man. The most memorable scene is the beautifully played meeting between Hanna and McCauley, a scene so powerful that not even the wretched Righteous Kill could not retroactively fuck it up. (Note that Pacino and De Niro share the frame, wearing similar grey suits, though with different coloured shirts).
Their realisation that they are so similar is enough to create a bond between them. At the end, Hanna guns down McCauley, and the final shot has them sharing the frame again, Hanna comforting McCauley as he dies (and yes, I cry every time I see it). From the beginning of Heat to the end, the two characters converge. Public Enemies is different enough that the criticism that it is a remake of Heat can be dismissed, though I appreciate there is enough similarity there to raise eyebrows. While McCauley and Hanna become closer in spirit, Purvis and Dillinger start off similar and become more different, and never reach that moment of reconciliation.
In the first half of the film Dillinger is a shallow popinjay who thrives on public approval, and Purvis, who is more buttoned-down, is more than happy to milk the attention he gets after shooting Pretty Boy Floyd by attaching himself to J. Edgar Hoover, quickly adapting to his role as Eliot-Ness-style G-Man hero. At film’s end, Dillinger has lost the love of his life, but has achieved a kind of immortality. He infiltrates (with no effort at all) the Dillinger Squad office in the Chicago Police Department building, and sees first-hand the efforts made to capture him. He walks through the room in what looks like a state of rapture, delighted by his importance and his ability to dodge capture even at the heart of the web. Following that, the superb finale shows him watching Clark Gable playing a Dillinger-esque gangster in Manhattan Melodrama, a smug grin spreading across his face.
Purvis, on the other hand, has seen the law compromised and broken, his own morality dented, and his partner murdered. He too is alone, but doesn’t even have someone who would sacrifice their own freedom for him, and though his team is responsible for catching Dillinger, it is Charles Winstead who fires the killing shot, and he is forced to watch as this event unfolds in front of him. The look of misery on Bale’s face is ambiguous. Is he sad to see Dillinger die, as Hanna is to see McCauley die? Is he jealous that he didn’t get to kill his nemesis? Or is he selfishly thinking about how he has lost everything, and all he has to show for it is the tawdry sight of a corpse on a high street, a brokenhearted but noble woman left loveless by his actions, and a career that forces him to be the stooge of a boss who doesn’t believe in him?
Unlike Heat, criminal and cop do not share the screen in the final moments. Whereas Mann used colour to show play up the similarities between Hanna and McCauley, in Public Enemies he uses it to show the contrast. Bale’s scenes are almost exclusively rendered in gun-metal grey, filmed in impersonal concrete buildings filled with drab, unglamorous furniture. Depp’s scenes are mostly brown, occasionally rich and warm, but mostly muted, as if the glamour and lushness has been drained from the screen. One short scene at a racetrack is almost sepia tone, evoking memories of the past as Bale, surrounded by metal, machinery, and flashing lights, references the inevitable future.
Nevertheless, Dillinger is aware that by maintaining the public image of a dashing outlaw he will become a legend, and Depp plays up to that subtly, walking with a confident swagger and adding an Elvis-like twinkle to his speech. In one of the film’s highlights, we see how thrilled he is, after being captured by Purvis’ men midway through the film, to be transported from a flare-lit airport along a gauntlet of adoring bystanders, lauded by the public as a man of the people fighting against the monolithic banks. That confident mask only ever slips when members of his gang screw up (Mann’s protagonists are perfectionists, as ever), or when he loses Billie and cannot get her back without jeopardising himself. Tragically, he never finds out that she protects him from capture at the risk of her own life.
These little glimpses of the scared boy inside the man leak out more as the film progresses, just as we see Bale’s frustration and confusion manifest in expressions of despair and panic. Even as his quarry lies dead on the floor, Bale’s face shows no relief, merely pain, lit by another flare as Dillinger’s notoriety generates one last media frenzy, the same kind of berserker rage from a public who never cared if Dillinger was alive or dead, just that the outlaw tale was being told right in front of them.
As I mentioned earlier, it took me a while to settle. Parsing Mann’s choices distracted me so much I foolishly lost track of the plot and performances. After an hour the movie began to grip, but even so, I didn’t expect what happened next. Good movies can make me forget my troubles, but great movies transport you out of your body. Closer to the end of the film, Mann’s visuals become ever more abstract, and his lighting more and more stark. The third act begins with a motel raid that ranks with the bank raid and subsequent street battle in Heat, or the nightclub shootout from Collateral. Its impact is visceral and terrifying, battering the audience with beautifully edited sound: one gunshot was so loud and clear that it rattled my chair and drew a shriek of terror from someone sitting behind me. During this scene we see Purvis crack. Losing his partner sends him momentarily over the edge, and he abandons his search for Dillinger to go after the truly awful Baby Face Nelson. Their showdown is breathtaking.
By that point, my previous qualms were forgotten. As Dillinger and Purvis approach their destiny outside the Biograph theatre, all of the careful set-up that I had mistaken for distraction pays off with astonishing cumulative power. As the final scene unravels, with Goldenthal’s beautiful soundtrack rising over Marion Cotillard’s moment of heartbroken revelation, I succumbed to awestruck tears. Mann did it to me again, that talented bastard.
In a parallel with my experience during the film, opinion might be swinging back in its favour. This brilliantly perceptive second look is far more in step with my own experience (and contains way more insight than this blogpost, so do yourself a favour and check it out), and these reviews by Nigel Andrews and Manohla Dargis make me wonder whether it will be reappraised by the end of the year.
I hope so. In a year that has provided so little of interest, and some thoroughly contentious toy-movies, this is one of a very small group of films that has generated passion in me. More than that, Public Enemies actually overwhelmed me in a way nothing else has since I saw Rachel Getting Married earlier this year. If things go right, by the end of 2009 critics will have had a chance to mull over this intellectually stimulating and emotionally engaging work of art, and will shower garlands and rose petals over Depp, Cotillard, and Bale, co-stars Jason Clarke and Branka Katic, writers Ronan Bennett and Anne Biderman, and especially Mann, who just made his best film since Heat. My head is still ringing like a bell 28 hours later. Goddamn, I love cinema.
Daisyhellcakes once asked me if I defend Michael Bay just to be difficult and controversial, and I admitted that the most all-caps-boldiest exclamations that I trot out are just nonsense. If I were to rank directors in a huge list from good to bad (don’t tempt me to do that. I probably would if prompted), he’d be nowhere near the top, but more importantly he’d be nowhere near the bottom either. He’s lazily blamed for everything that is stupid and awful about spectacular Hollywood product, and for tainting the cultural well so much that the whole world suffers. The hatred aimed at him is startling. I halfheartedly defended him on the AV Club once, and was told by another commenter that I obviously knew nothing about cinema, and should keep my opinion about everything else to myself. I’ll admit I’m no Bordwell or Thompson, but my opinion on Bay is a little more nuanced than, “Me like when hot broads dance and the house blow up”.
Any filmmaker who becomes successful enough to achieve name recognition status is bound to attract critical dismissal, and that will intensify if the filmmaker has annoying quirks that are overused. For example, Paul Haggis’ inability to keep subtext subtextual, instead making his characters voice motivation or revelation out loud, drives me up the wall. Even his rewrite work on Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace makes that mistake. Tarantino’s magpie tendencies irk a lot of critics, especially when he steals from disreputable pop culture artifacts that they already dislike. Spielberg has had his knocks many times in the past. I can imagine he’s never going to invite Henry Jaglom around for dinner, as the guy has been bitching about him being a poor filmmaker for decades now.
Bay is a different beast altogether. He’s directing movies by a set of rules he has made up for himself, and that style bears only a passing resemblance to the work of others. As if brought up watching nothing but early Tony Scott movies, he seemingly has no idea of how the big picture will flow, choosing instead to focus on each individual shot, making them pop as much as he can. As a result, it’s not just the whole movie that doesn’t flow. Even relatively short scenes are haphazardly paced. This car chase from The Rock has great individual moments, but stops and starts with no understanding of how jarring that must be for the viewer.
I would never think to defend Bay as a man who makes great films in entirety. Even my favourite Bay movie, Armageddon, is full of embarrassing, and indefensible, flaws. Even so, he’s no Robert Luketic, or Shawn Levy, or Jon Avnet, three directors right off the top of my head who have never been responsible for even a single memorable shot, let alone scene or film. Of course, he’s also not James Cameron (I make this point because True Lies is on ITV2 right now, and, as shaky as that film is, the action scenes are almost perfection). I think Bay’s movies are fascinating, and with regards to the criticism he draws, Drew McWeeny brilliantly (and, obviously, accidentally) summed up how I feel about him in a Tweet I just spotted.
[To another Twitterer] How can you rail against the excess? Bay is what we have PAID Hollywood to evolve into. We reward the escalation of the absurd, then cry about it when it reaches its logical conclusion.
In the interest of not misrepresenting McWeeny, I’ll point out that he later adds that he doesn’t think he’s the best action director in Hollywood. Neither do I, but he is the most spectacular director in the whole world, a Cecil B. DeMille with subscriptions to Guns & Ammo and FHM. When Bay gets to do his thing right, you are getting to see something that no other filmmaker on Earth would or can do. He shoots fast and loose and spends his money on the outrageous stuff, and can conjure up images that sear themselves into your brain.
As McWeeny says, this is not the same as saying he’s a good filmmaker. He’s just a unique one, and I feel an obligation to articulate my conflicted feelings, especially considering almost all critics are dismissing his movies with such kneejerk vehemence that they’re not even bothering to fact-check, which is often a sign that the reviewer considers the movie beneath contempt. I’ve reviewed films in an almost professional capacity before, and I’ve had press packs, so I know most of these errors can be avoided*. (Though being annoyed by overly complex plots that make little sense are another thing: see below for my own problems with T:ROTF.)
So I was desperate to see Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, mostly because I was hoping he would get right the things he got wrong in the first one. As those flaws were the usual things (pacing mistakes, clunky humour, Jazz being a terrible racial stereotype, etc.), I was basically hoping that this would be Bay’s best movie, removing some of the clutter but keeping the crazy. That’s the key: keeping the stuff that he does better than anyone. Even though I want other filmmakers to create coherent movies with a steady, escalating pace, I want Bay to do what Bay does best. The worst thing he could do would be to play into the hands of those critics who say his movies are all BOOM and no plot, racing from one scene to another without a pause, doing nothing more than amping up every moment with no concern for character development. Sadly, that’s exactly what he has done with T:ROTF, and the result is a deeply frustrating experience.
For the first ninety minutes, I was absolutely amazed at what I was seeing. Even more so than the shocking and ramshackle Bad Boys II, Bay is throwing the kitchen sink at the audience (and then shooting it with a sabot round). The first scene in the movie features a tribe of Cro-Magnon fighting early Cybertronians, for crying out loud. Okay, so they look more like they should be hanging out with Zoolander than hunting bison, but still, kudos to the man. For the next section of the movie, the film throws so many peculiar and outrageous visuals and concepts, that I drove Canyon crazy with my various quiet exclamations of joy. By the time Megatron and Starscream hang out on one of the moons of Saturn (seriously), I was convinced that this was going to be my favourite movie of the summer.
And then it all goes horribly wrong. The moment that the action abruptly shifts to Egypt, the movie slams into neutral, with scene after scene falling flat. The novelty of the early scenes disappears, replaced by a tedious crawl across numerous deserts, seemingly to showcase the cars that have been mostly missing by this point. Several scenes could be excised completely, and should have. It was nice to see Deep Roy as the ha ha ha so tiny border guard, but the movie would have been so much better without it. This is not the first time he’s made this mistake, but usually he doesn’t put so many of these extraneous and excruciating scenes in the final hour.
In fact, the endless trek from Egypt to Jordan and back again (I think that was the route) seems to only be there because, for some baffling reason, Bay and the writers thought that having the characters just appear at the Pyramids for the big finish would somehow be unbelievable, so we have to see their full trip. Why is he getting squeamish about this now? I don’t care how they get there, especially if the trip seems to have been filmed in real time. If I want a travelogue, I’ll watch a Michael Palin show. This is a Bay movie. If you’re going to use a “Space Bridge” to teleport the main characters to Egypt, then teleport them to the exact spot needed to maximise the action. And yet no. Because audiences have been clamouring to see National Lampoon’s Egyptian Vacation.
The desert setting also steps on the toes of the earlier film. Transformers had a perfectly fine and short action scene set in a desert, as the survivors of the opening base attack fight against Scorponok. It was about five minutes long, had Tyrese bellowing “BRING THE RAIN!” into a walkie-talkie, and featured a bunch of exploding buildings. Those wide open spaces worked well for a mid-movie action scene, and made the final city scenes even more exciting, as we got to see a bunch of robots fighting in contrasted dark and cramped streets with no respite. That scene remains one of my all-time favourites.
The finale of Transformers 2 just looks like a bigger version of that desert scene, with little of the original’s intensity, though it does have some fun stuff involving the Pyramids¹. Sam and Mikaela make their way very slowly through a village, with intercutting of Josh Duhamel looking frustrated. No one says BRING THE RAIN!, though it does crop up on a napkin or something earlier on. Everything seems to move at normal film speed, which is like half Bay-speed. At this point in the movie my ass was really hurting from sitting in the crappy Waterloo IMAX seats, and instead of being riveted I just kept fidgeting. Yes, I use my ass as a guide to how exciting a movie is.
More exasperating than the inappropriate locale, even though Bay’s movies have not been known for their well sketched character arcs, the finale is littered with momentum-robbing scenes such as the whole “I love you” thing between Sam and Mikaela (really? This is a big deal?), Kevin Dunn telling his son to go and do the right thing (an emotional beat that makes no sense as Dunn, at the start of the film, couldn’t care less about his son leaving), and Sam’s “death”, which reflects the big “death” midway through the movie (I won’t spoil it). Why does Bay suddenly care about these things? I can barely remember The Island, and maybe there was an arc in that, but I don’t even think there was one in Pearl Harbor, the most conventional movie he has made. I expect tonal errors from Bay, but this was worse than usual.
Only after leaving the cinema with a deflated heart (it sounds like a deadly condition, but the only symptom is whining on the internet) did I realise that there was a lot more wrong with the movie than just the broken finale. McWeeny recently hinted that the first sentence in his forthcoming HitFix Motion/Captured review would be, “I have never felt more like a third nipple than I did, as a screenwriter, while watching Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen.” I can’t wait to find out what he means by that, though I think it might have something to do with how the excessive plot — and I do mean excessive — is crammed into about three five minute-long scenes filled beyond breaking point with insane amounts of exposition, while huge stretches of the movie would probably, on paper, look like a list of fight scenes. It’s that rare kind of movie that is simultaneously overcomplicated and embarrassingly simplistic.
Instead of just trying to come up with a simple way to orchestrate some robot fighting, we get tons of backstory. Cybertronians have visited Earth before, and one of them was going to destroy us in order to harvest energy, but a civil war broke out and then there were a bunch of Primes, and they are magic or something, and the All-Spark is in Sam’s head, or it’s something else, and there is a key, and a cipher, and a Matrix of Awesomeness, and an afterlife, and probably a bunch of elves, and… It’s absurdly complicated stuff, with one very silly plot-thread (Megatron demanding the world hand over Sam so he can extract his brain, or something) that takes over the latter half of the movie. For every quirky moment and fun concept, there’s ten stupid complications that mean nothing. By the time Jetfire turned up for his shot at the Exposition Of The Year award, I had completely lost the plot, not helped by my efforts to guess the identity of the British actor playing the elderly robot².
To me, these are big problems, even when taking Bay’s singular style into account. However, it’s becoming clear that the biggest problem people are going to have with the movie are Mudflap and Skids, the comedy relief duo who shuck and jive through much of the finale. Why am I using this outdated African-American phrase? It seems apt considering that these two robots are the most startling racial stereotypes I’ve seen on the big screen since Crash, only this time they’re meant to be funny and not “educational”.
While sitting in the cinema I had huge difficulty reconciling what I was seeing with what I thought Bay was trying to do (have a couple of affable idiots break up the tedium of the cross-country trek with their wacky exploits), and for a while after I wondered if they were meant to be a spoof of Will Smith and Martin Lawrence from Bad Boys (a Bad Boys II poster is on display in one character’s room, and their banter is as forced as that between Smith and Lawrence). Now, with hindsight, that I realise that’s even worse than just two racist caricatures. Is he personally attacking two people he has worked with before? And the guy doing the voices for them is white? We’re talking about Jar-Jar Binks-esque wrongness on an epic scale.
The disconnect I suffered during the movie was similar to the shock I felt during Star Wars: The Clone Wars when Ziro the Hutt appeared, but my overall opinion of that character is astonishment that Lucas could have thought that was all right. With Mudflap and Skids, I was uncomfortable during the movie, and now I’m outright pissed off. It’s made the dreadful caricaturing of Jazz in the first movie (a black Transformer that breakdances and then gets ignominiously killed in the final act) seem even more glaring. Bay deserves the shitstorm that’s heading his way.
I mean, it’s becoming fairly obvious that he has a real problem with women, so much so that you could almost forget it’s happening until the camera shoots so far up plastic “hottie” Alice‘s skirt that it qualifies as a proctological exam. Megan Fox does little more than pout and get dragged around the desert by LaBeouf and Duhamel, not even getting a hero moment like she did in the first film³. Other than Fox and Isabel Lucas, the only other female characters with any dialogue are the holographic women on the transforming motorbikes (ZOMG is Bay saying women are bikes?), and Sam’s mother, played by Julie White.
Being the only non-simpering non-hottie in the film, she has to do several unglamorous things, usually involving pratfalls. One scene with her getting high on hash brownies is particularly uncalled-for. Nevertheless, she deserves all the credit in the world for managing to make these stupid moments work. She might give the best performance in the film. Maybe, in future, Bay should consider giving more roles to women who have talents beyond looking orange and pouty.
So, it was a washout, right? Except that for a while, as I said earlier, the film flies. Even with the inclusion of the awful Alice subplot, and lots of shenanigans involving kitchenbots, there is a lot to enjoy. The new set-up for the Autobots, working in conjunction with the humans to fight rogue Decepticons, is hugely promising, and the opening in Shanghai is astonishing and ambitious. Even better, the forest fight between Optimus and three Decepticons is one of the film highlights of the year, especially as it is filmed in full IMAX.
Seeing Optimus to actual scale is something I won’t forget any time soon. Much is made of Bay’s direction of action, and how the rapidly moving camera and quick cuts serve to render all of his scenes incomprehensible, but there are many worse action directors out there. Considering how overwhelmed I was by the terrible action in Eagle Eye, or by the much better but still swooshy Star Trek (both of which I saw on IMAX), this didn’t upset me at all. That was something I was not expecting.
There is even some evidence of playfulness from the notoriously grouchy man. Considering his parodic sense of patriotism, it amuses me greatly that he manages to destroy Paris again (the first time was at the end of Armageddon, a scene that got a cheer here in England each time I saw it on the big screen), and I can imagine all sorts of noses being put out of joint by his destruction of a library about an hour in. If you’re responsible for some of the most successful movies of the past fifteen years, you can afford to poke fun at your image like that.
As I’ve said, I did like a lot of it. I saw one person lazily Tweeting this morning that they thought this was as bad as Batman and Robin. Don’t believe it for a second: this has much much more to recommend it, even if just as an occasionally exhilarating aural and visual assault. Also great: Glenn Morshower returning, this time as General Morshower (seriously); Tony Todd doing some great voicework as The Fallen, a robot with a fantastic gangly design; trying to catch sight of the cast on poor Shia’s hand in early scenes; terrific sound editing, far better than critics are saying; a greater sense of the robots as actual characters, especially Starscream and Megatron. Plus, even if the finale is not perfect, it does feature some mind-boggling moments. I’m really hoping that the previous Academy snub of the Transformers effects team is not repeated. They’ve topped themselves this time out, especially as they’re operating in IMAX for some of the most complicated moments.
Even so, it’s a movie that wouldn’t let me like it as much as I wanted to. If I’m going to defend Bay in future, the guy has got to meet me halfway. The awful Ebonicbots and the Auton women have got to go. Right now, I’d rather he tried to make another movie in the more sober style of The Island than keep this lower-than-lowest common denominator stuff going. It’s becoming hard work waiting for him to grow up, but then, if we lose the racism and misogyny (which I’m sure he doesn’t see as such), will we lose the rest? And is “the rest” worth keeping if the man is going out of his way to perpetuate bullshit jock philosophy like this? All of a sudden those Bay films in my collection look a little less appealing. Let’s hope his next movie is either an adaptation of The Beauty Myth or a remake of Amistad.
* In fact, one of the first movies I ever saw at a press screening was Bad Boys. Maybe that’s why I’m forgiving of Bay’s films.
¹ Full disclosure. As soon as I saw the first trailer with shots of the Pyramids, my heart sank. A project I have been working on for some time had a big finale in the shadow of the Pyramids, and so I guess I have to scrap all of that. A shame, as it would have been so awesome that brains would have melted while watching it, even though the project involved a C-list comic character that no one likes. Nevertheless, my disappointment with the finale was not rooted in this, as I got over that frustration a long time ago.
² Amazingly, it’s Jon Turturro.
This means he spends a lot of his screentime arguing with himself.
³ Though, to be honest, LaBeouf gets little more to do other than run into danger and get blown up. Another flaw of the film: adding human characters and not really knowing what to do with them, which particularly irks when you like LaBeouf, as I do.
ETA: Here is McWeeny’s review of T:ROTF. Of all the reviews I have read in the past few days, this might be the only one that actually addressed specifics of what the film is like. Trust someone as perceptive and fair as McWeeny to watch the movie and review what he is seeing instead of just scribbling “Michael Bay is a douchebag” in his Moleskine a thousand times.
With my brain fully occupied with compiling my Films of the Year list (I’m taking this as seriously as Jonas Salk took his polio vaccine research), and the various critic circles announcing their awards of the year, it’s time to deep six the two polls I’ve run since the summer, asking our readers for their favourite and least favourite films of the summer. Interestingly, the poll for least favourite got half the votes of the favourite. I guess people either made a point of avoiding watching terrible movies, or we attract a lot of people who feel uncomfortable ragging on the accomplishments of others. A noble sentiment, but I just watched The Mummy 3 – Yetis on Parade, and I feel like my soul has been frozen in carbonite, so IT IS ON. I’ll get to that in a moment. First, the results from both polls:
What Was Your Favo(u)rite Summer Movie?
The Dark Night Of Gotham’s Soul – 10 (31%)
Super Kung Fu Fighting Action Panda – 4 (12%)
Iron-Clad Billionaire – 4 (12%)
Wall*E – The Adorable Robot Messiah – 3 (9%)
Man Walk On Wire – 2 (6%)
Hellboy 2: The Surprising Awesomeness – 2 (6%)
Indiana Jones And The Impregnable Fridge of Safety – 2 (6%)
M. Night Shyamalan’s Attack Of The Sentient Plants! – 1 (3%)
Won’t Someone Love Poor Speed Racer? – 1 (3%)
Hulk 2: Not As Good As Iron Man – 1 (3%)
Dope + Guns + James Franco = Hilarity – 1 (3%)
X-Files – Battle Of The Belief Systems – 1 (3%)
The Mummy: Franchise Of The Diminishing Returns – 0 (0%)
Sexuality In An Urban Environment – 0 (0%)
Star Wars: The Kinda Boring Years – 0 (0%)
Narnia II: How Many More Tedious Sequels? – 0 (0%)
Meet A Robotic Version Of Eddie Murphy – 0 (0%)
The Fresh Prince In: Depressed Superhero – 0 (0%)
Wanted: Assassins Fluent In Loom Binary – 0 (0%)
Ben Stiller Bites The Hand That Feeds Him – 0 (0%)
Streep And Brosnan Sing! – 0 (0%)
Jack Bauer vs. Some Evil Mirrors – 0 (0%)
What Was Your Least Favo(u)rite Summer Movie?
Meet A Robotic Version Of Eddie Murphy – 2 (12%)
Sexuality In An Urban Environment – 2 (12%)
The Fresh Prince In: Depressed Superhero – 2 (12%)
M. Night Shyamalan’s Attack Of The Sentient Plants! – 2 (12%)
Won’t Someone Love Poor Speed Racer? – 2 (12%)
The Dark Night Of Gotham’s Soul – 1 (6%)
Hellboy 2: The Surprising Awesomeness – 1 (6%)
Indiana Jones And The Impregnable Fridge of Safety – 1 (6%)
Star Wars: The Kinda Boring Years – 1 (6%)
Streep And Brosnan Sing! – 1 (6%)
The Mummy: Franchise Of The Diminishing Returns – 1 (6%)
Iron-Clad Billionaire – 0 (0%)
Narnia II: How Many More Tedious Sequels? – 0 (0%)
Wall*E – The Adorable Robot Messiah – 0 (0%)
Hulk 2: Not As Good As Iron Man – 0 (0%)
X-Files – Battle Of The Belief Systems – 0 (0%)
Super Kung Fu Fighting Action Panda – 0 (0%)
Dope + Guns + James Franco = Hilarity – 0 (0%)
Wanted: Assassins Fluent In Loom Binary – 0 (0%)
Ben Stiller Bites The Hand That Feeds Him – 0 (0%)
Man Walk On Wire – 0 (0%)
Jack Bauer vs. Some Evil Mirrors – 0 (0%)
It stands to reason that the most watched and most hyped movie of the summer gets big votes in the Love category, and a desultory single vote in the Hate one. I’m actually surprised it didn’t get more Hate, as I’ve seen some real venom directed at it, either in kneejerk attention-seeking Fanboyese or in eloquent prose. Nevertheless, Love is where my own vote went. We saw it again in IMAX recently, and it still holds up, even without the excited audience and New-York-inspired brainmelt of our first viewing. That said, even though I maintain it’s my favourite movie of the year so far (things can change in the final couple of weeks), I was sorely tempted to cast my vote for Kung-Fu Panda, which still delights after four viewings. Canyon placed her vote here, as she adores it without measure, even though her antipathy toward the martial arts genre means she resists the lure of my Jet Li collection. Why do you resist? Once Upon A Time In China is the wuxia nuts, my dear wife.
Also great after repeated viewings is Iron Man, which especially pleases me as those damnable fanboys were crowing about imminent FAIL throughout its production, shutting the fuck up as soon as the first trailer came out. Though Favreau’s direction on Elf was occasionally shaky (and that final act remains disappointing no matter how often we see it), I still had hope, especially when Robert Downey Jr. got cast. So yeah, I’m smug about it.
That smugness is punctured, however, by my regrettable semi-apathy towards Wall*E, which I wanted to like much more than I did. Though it’s obviously an amazing achievement, and kept me thoroughly entertained throughout, I do wish Andrew Stanton would resist the urge to make his films so ingratiatingly cutesy. He has very little impulse control for adding populist touches to his films, which is why Finding Nemo ended on about fifty-three climaxes with each character in the film having doubts about themselves and then overcoming those doubts in order to save the day, and why Wall*E, which heroically features very little dialogue, a bleak anti-consumer message laying the blame for the world’s ills on the audience, and nods to sci-fi classics such as 2001 and Silent Running, goes and ruins it all with overlong romantic scenes of robots flying in space, obvious slapstick, and more Christ metaphors than Superman Returns (no mean feat).
It’s the sort of film I expected would be my favourite of the year and ended up being much less interesting than I had hoped even though I was constantly impressed and brought to tears from time to time. In other words, a frustrating thing I will almost certainly go back and forth on for years to come (another example: Excalibur was on Sky Movies the other day and watching bits of it made me realise I love it now, after years of hate). Compare that to Ratatouille, which remains a glorious and thought-provoking entertainment that never compromises its message by winking at the audience. Stanton may be Pixar’s money machine, but Bird remains their greatest artist (unless Up is as good as I hope it will be and Pete Docter gives him a run for his money).
Next up is the unimpeachable Man On Wire, one of the best documentaries I’ve seen in a long time, and one that made me burst out crying with zero warning. I’m a sucker for emotional manipulation in films, I will admit, but Man On Wire does nothing to tug the heartstrings, making the emotional impact of the final third even more profound. Kudos to James Marsh for making the most cinematic documentary I can think of, other than Wisconsin Death Trip which, I only found out afterwards, Marsh also made.
What a hero. His only fictional feature, The King, is on our Sky+ box, and once I’ve finished watching the various copies of this year’s movies I have littering the house, I’ll check it out, and in the meantime, I heartily recommend this film to all readers (as it’s a Storyville documentary, there’s a good chance it will be on BBC Four or BBC2 soon).
Hellboy II gets the same amount of love as Indiana Jones IV, which is good news for Mike Mignola and Guillermo Del Toro, and bad news for Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. I know which one I preferred, and it was a big surprise. Despite the continuing debate about whether it’s okay to like Spielberg or not (of course it is. God!), and even though this film was good for the first hour and boring for the last, it was not a debacle, certainly when compared to other summer action movies made by hacks with no understanding of how to craft a scene or frame a shot (::cough::Rob Cohen::cough::). That said, it contained no sense of wonder, which Hellboy II did. This is a big deal for me as I usually resist Del Toro’s movies a little, thinking them pretty but lifeless. This time it was Spielberg’s film that left me unmoved, while Del Toro’s film made me giddy with joy.
Funny how at this point in the poll, the movies getting one or two Love votes also get one or two Hates as well. Hellboy, Indy, The Happening, and Speed Racer split the audiences they got (big for Indy, relatively small for everything else). I’ve already dissedThe Happening (twice, in fact) and praised Speed Racer, so I won’t go into it again, other than to say I’m so happy someone else liked the Wachowski Siblings’ crazed experimental race movie, which holds up to rewatching as well as Iron Man and Kung-Fu Panda. And I still cry at the end. Oh Matthew Fox, you’ll be getting a few mentions in my end of year list, both pro (Speed Racer) and affectionate con (the demented Rashomon-meets-Bourne histrionics-fest Vantage Point).
Solitary votes for The Incredible Hulk(which I liked) and Pineapple Express(which I loved, and enjoyed even more second time around), and then a single vote for X-Files: I Want A Cruller With That Venti Mocha, from regular Shades of Caruso reader and commenter Johnilf. Though I wouldn’t say I thought the film was actually good, it wasn’t deserving of the critical drubbing it got. The argument that it was a long TV episode shown on the big screen was pretty accurate (though would the TV version feature performances from international megastars Amanda Peet and Xzibit? I don’t think so!), but beyond its limitations as a film, it was also a powerful trip down memory lane for a lot of fans, and while watching it I found it hard to resist those nostalgic feelings. Plus, Billy Connolly was terrific as the psychic pedophile priest or whatever he was. OMG! It really is just like an average episode of the show, because I’ve completely forgotten the plot a few months after seeing it!
Nothing else gets a good vote, but there were some other bad ones. Two people saw Meet Dave, amazingly, and they weren’t happy. I’ll avoid and hold onto the memories of Billy Ray Valentine, thank you very much. Sex and the City: The Movie Experience gets two votes, one from Canyon, who saw it solo (I was asleep, is my defence), and was utterly dismayed by it while compelled to stay in her seat as the ridiculous clothes-wearing montages unfurled. Hancock gets two votes also, and while I was disappointed by it, I’ll still be checking out the sequel. Seriously. The first one’s problems were borne of the bass-ackwards exposition, and so a sequel exploring this mythology will maybe make the whole enterprise worthwhile.
Star Wars: The Low-Budget Clone Wars (which I was almost fond of until seeing the dreary TV series it was wrenched from) and Mamma Monstrosity! both get a vote each, but the final vote cast, yesterday afternoon, was for The Mummy 3: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, which made me absolutely livid, so much so that I think I’m going to have to rant about it some other time, as it’s wrapped up in some things Canyon and I have been chatting about during recent weeks. After that debacle, no votes for or against Tropic Thunder (a crushing disappointment), Wanted (ditto), Narnia II, or Mirrors, either due to the small sample of votes we got, or just because no one saw them or cared about them. In the case of Narnia I can understand that. I don’t think I’ve ever been less interested in seeing a movie in my life, and not just because of the obnoxious religious propaganda. I’d rather see Sex and the City than this. I know!
Okay, another poll coming up, this time based around the Oscars (because if it’s not lists, I’ll obsess about award nominations). Once I’ve figured out the candidates, I’ll stick that up.
In all my time on the internet tube system, I’ve never seen a flurry of horror, speculation, rumour, sadness, recrimination, spite, misinformation, grief, and bad taste jokes as last night at 23:15 GMT, when we finished watching Julie Delpy’s sour but funny culture-clash movie Two Days In Paris and logged on to find a maelstrom of news surrounding the tragic death of Heath Ledger. Though obviously we don’t know him personally, our reaction was one of total shock and disbelief, followed by much sadness. Lots of holier-than-thou jerks on AICN and AV Club took people to task for grieving for someone as lowly as a mere actor when no one laments the millions who die every day of disease, famine, warfare, terrorism, crime, and meteor landings.
They are all tragic losses too, but those people often have no name, and have not made an impression on my life. I can have a detached feeling of sadness for all deaths, but someone whose personality, face, voice, and talent has impinged upon my consciousness is going to feel more real than any of those people, and it’s pointless to apologise for that. The news of a deadly plane crash horrifies me. Seeing Ledger’s face on the Guardian homepage last night did something more visceral; it made me freeze in my seat, made me ill, made me hope it was a hoax gone wrong. That was Ennis Del Mar. I cried for him once. It’s a connection. It might not be as real as that between me and my friends, and family, or even my legion of enemies who plot against me in their dungeon lair every Thursday night, but it’s still a connection.
The other thing it made me do is despair for Terry Gilliam. Not on the same scale I felt for Michelle Williams and her daughter Miranda, obviously, but it did cross my mind that yet again his career is scuppered by events beyond his control. Which inspired me to write a post about Terry Gilliam, a man I idolised when I was young, and then kinda gave up on.
At first I fell in love with his magnificent Monty Python animations, but it was when he became a live-action director that I fell in love to the point of obsession with his vision. I remember making one of my beloved lists when I was a kid, of my all-time favourite movies. It was about as unimaginative and as typical a list as you can imagine. All the Star Wars movies to that point, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T., Jaws: you get the point. The only film that wasn’t by Lucas or Spielberg was Time Bandits, a film that had given me nightmares and freaked me out but fascinated and delighted me nonetheless. I had no reason to think that admiration would grow until he became my favourite director, but seeing Brazil (which made it to the UK pretty much intact) sealed the deal. It upset me so profoundly that I could barely cope with it, but just like you poke at a painful tooth, I went back over and over again.
One of the things I loved most was his imaginative use of the frame. The Crimson Permanent Assurance, the short film before Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, is usually dismissed as a frivolity, but for a one-joke short, it not only pushes that joke as far as it can, it also shows off his distorted compositions and command of movement. Not just the beautifully sculpted progression of the action, but the movement of the characters from the beginning of a shot to the end. Check it out, in two parts.
Now, I love fast editing too, especially when it’s done well, but old school control of pace within a single shot prior to being added to other equally well-designed shots is lovely too. I’m no film scholar (can you tell?), but I know what I like, and Gilliam had that in spades. And that’s before we get to his prodigious imagination, his outrageous flights of fantasy, his angry humour.
Unfortunately, he also has the shittiest luck of any major filmmaker. Not to mention the best chronicled. If you’ve seen the Criterion Collection DVD of Brazil or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, or seen Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe’s The Hamster Factor and Other Tales of Twelve Monkeys or Lost in La Mancha, or read Andrew Yule’s upsetting chronicle of the Munchausen debacle (Losing The Light, which is highly recommended), then you know what I’m talking about. For years I despaired as his vision was compromised by the foolish choices of producers and moneymen, and ignored by the imagination-deprived masses. Why was his genius not recognised? Why did he have to toil so hard for so little attention and praise? It made me unhappy, and just as rooting for the underdog makes you associate with them more, I almost felt his failures as if they were my failures too.
And then came The Brothers Grimm, and I suddenly stopped watching his movies. I’m still not sure why. I will see it eventually, and Tideland as well, which seems to have split opinion right down the middle. It’s not even like Fear and Loathing put me off him. I loved the damn thing, and think it’s due some serious critical reappraisal. I just suddenly thought, “You know what? All this time, thinking Gilliam was the victim of the financial shortsightedness of robotic accountants, thinking his vision was just too pure and radical to be appreciated by the blinkered peoples of the world, and yet now I find myself wondering if he’s just a bit of a dick and cannot even be bothered to try to get on with anyone. No one is that unlucky. There has to be something else at play.” It was a weird epiphany, coming without warning.
I’m kinda torn. He has so much difficulty getting his own work going that I understand him wanting to get some work, any work, especially something that might have been a success. However, acting like it was a hardship to make it is a dick move. And so I started to look back at his career and think, perhaps these villains who have compromised his work are not as bad as I thought. Perhaps they were pushed into being careful with their money because he was so unhinged! Oh my God, what have I done with my life? Why couldn’t I idolise Ron Howard instead of this difficult maniac?
And then last night, when the shock of hearing about Ledger’s death had subsided and my heart had relaxed to its usual beat, I thought, “Damn, Gilliam isn’t a dick. He’s just jinxed.” It’s not him, it’s what happens when you make films. People die (and some die way too soon), floods ruin sets, producers get cold feet and cut the budget, studio heads think they know better than artists and impose their own ideas on the director; it happens to every filmmaker, but it happens to Gilliam more than most. I should have kept giving him the benefit of the doubt.
Who knows what will happen to The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus now that Ledger is dead. Will it be dropped altogether? Was enough footage filmed to be able to salvage the movie? Will the insurance pay for the film to be reshot with a new actor? I’m sure people will tut-tut at me for thinking about this when someone has just died, but, you know, I can have two thoughts at the same time. The mind is a complex thing. Yes, even mine.
Okay, I’ve rambled. The short version of all of this is that I have exorcised myself of my sudden distrust of Gilliam for entirely irrational reasons, and will now go and find The Brothers Grimm and Tideland, even if they are as bad as people have said. I will continue to support him and his career, because even if he never recaptures his old mojo (or finishes another movie, which always seems possible), his work was important to me during my formative years and is partially responsible for who I am and what I think. Hopefully this tragedy won’t be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, and he gets back on his feet soon.
One last thing, apropos of nothing. An actor I think would work well in Gilliam’s movies is King of Charisma Sam Rockwell. Today I found this picture, that made me smile while flicking from gossip site to gossip site looking for news of Ledger’s death.
Enjoy this gratuitously goofy image, my lovely readers.
ETA: It’s not looking good for Dr. Parnassus. From that article, it’s interesting to note that Ledger was planning a chess movie, starring Ellen Page. Yet more sadness that we would never get to see that film.
ETA again: IMDb and AICN are running this rumour, that Gilliam is going to have many actors playing Ledger’s character. The character passes from world to world and could conceivably be played by different actors each time. Sounds great to me. The alternative is we never get to see Ledger’s final performance, and that’s not something anyone wants.
