Category Archives: Takashi Miike

A Hyperbolic Review Of The Avengers, For The Benefit of My Nerd Brethren

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(FYI, this review is pretty much specific-spoiler-free, with no real plot details that aren’t given away by the trailers. As for character interactions or descriptions of their general awesomeness as written by Joss Whedon, there’s a bit of that, plus hints about dramatic moments. For those who don’t want to risk it, this capsule review should be enough of a recommendation: there’s a lot of funny stuff as the heroes meet and bicker, and then there’s a huge set-piece finale as intense, as prolonged, and as exciting as the end of Takashi Miike’s action masterpiece 13 Assassins, but with superheroes fighting aliens and laying waste to most of New York in doing so. If that doesn’t make you want to see it, I’m never going to be able to convince you.)

To those who have yet to see The Avengers (or to give it its British title, Marvel’s Avenging Heroes of Great Power Who Don’t Wear Bowler Hats But Do Like Leather Catsuits A Bit), the tidal wave of unrestrained praise from early screenings may seem like overkill, the perspective-free hysterical screaming of a gaggle of kidults whose arrested development has prevented them from putting away childish things. There’s been talk of this being the best superhero movie yet made, a flawless jewel, which has given cynics a brand new opportunity to roll their eyes derisively. Let me puncture the babble of praise quickly and then move on from there; this is by no means perfect. It is flawed. It may not be the best superhero movie yet made; that accolade still may rest with The Dark Knight or Richard Donner’s Superman.

To those who, like me, grew up reading Marvel comics, and thrilled at the complexity of the Marvel Universe with its crossovers, relatively consistent continuity, mixture of light and dark dramatic tones, and its thematic clash between gloomy real-world drama and stirring fantastical heroism, those people who have read that same geyser of enthusiasm, that torrent of ZOMG blasting out of the Internet to such an extent that it seems the only possible response to the movie must be to feel inevitably disappointed when you finally see this, I tell you now, you will NOT be disappointed.

Even if this isn’t the greatest superhero movie, it’s the ultimate cinematic expression of the genre so far, one not tempered by caveats about how it’s really a crime thriller a la Heat, except with a mad rich bloke in a Kevlar onesie. This is a hit of pure 100% unexpurgated genre. It features movie stars in daft suits having rucks with bad guys and flying through the air and calling each other names that just shouldn’t work, played with total conviction, and even Joss Whedon’s trademark witty dialogue doesn’t dilute the heroics on display. He believes, and if you believe too, then you’re going to fall deeply in love.

On the other hand, if you dislike the superhero genre for whatever reason — it’s childish, it’s not serious, it’s a fantasy for people who don’t fit in or don’t obsess over the culturally accepted forms of nerdery such as sports or politics or fashion or any other thing where being interested in it means you accumulate a large amount of data about trivial things that are only of interest to other people who share your fascination — then please, don’t see The Avengers. In fact, just for this month, do me a favour. Don’t talk to me about it at all.

Whedon has done a great job of making a funny, exciting, eye-popping spectacle that thunders along at a well-paced clip, featuring the mother of all blow-outs. For most people, this is an enormously entertaining ride. However, if you have even a shred of cynicism about the genre, its trappings and the passion of its fans, then be warned that I’m operating a zero-tolerance policy on this. Last night a random Tweeter responded to my ecstatic post-screening tweets with, “you should get out more”, which led to me writing my first intentionally mean response-tweet; a terrible act in contravention of the Brony Code, which actually kept me up all night feeling rotten about it. Nevertheless, I’m just not interested in hearing about how stupid I am for liking this movie, or for being excited about it, or for anything in general. Why should I quell that enthusiasm? To fit in with the majority of people? But I don’t really like the majority of people. Who does? Nobody, that’s who.

So what does Whedon do wrong? Let’s get that out of the way first. Some of my fears about his direction stand; he’s not as strong with visuals as he would like to be, and anyone who has listened to one of his commentaries will know that he sweats about this more than most directors. He’ll comment exhaustively about long takes and long tracking shots and will talk about technical stuff to such an extent that you wonder if he thinks he has something to prove. He really doesn’t, and his work would benefit from him relaxing about it. There’s not much showing off in Avengers, and there are so many action scenes in it it’s hard to tell what he handled and what was dealt with by the second-unit, but if you’ve learned to look for his authorial stamps, they stand out like a sore thumb (see also Joe Wright and Tom Hooper, whose tics are far far worse and do even more damage to their movies).

The sheer amount of stuff in Avengers can also be problematic. For the most part, Whedon juggles the large cast of characters brilliantly, and gives everyone a chance to shine, even SHIELD agents like Hill and Coulson (especially Coulson). Nevertheless, that massive finale features some unavoidable ellipses, shrinking a larger battle down into a 20-25 minute set-piece that can be accomodated by the budget (which is huge, but when you see the scale of what Whedon and Marvel have attempted here, you’ll still wonder how they did it all). The result is that flow is too often sacrificed in order to keep every ball in the air, with Cap checking in on Black Widow, hurrying off to hit some aliens in the face, then reappearing next to a slightly more tired Black Widow to check in again.

These little updates almost smack of parody, and even I, a fan of the genre, had a feeling of discombobulation at some moments with Cap, in his new and not-really-that-great costume, turning to Thor and saying, “Thor, what do you think of such-and-such?” It’s all played without a cynical nod, and even as a believer it’s hard to swallow that. Or maybe I was reflexively thinking, “Oh God, the haters are gonna have a field day with this scene.” Thankfully, those little breath-intakes of panic, triggered by fear that the movie is teetering on the brink of disaster, are very quickly over, usually because Whedon cleverly punctures the moment with a well-timed joke. His use of humour to leaven the proceedings is timed so perfectly I forgave all of his other trespasses.

And that’s the most important thing I want to convey. Yes, the scale of the proceedings, and the speed with which it was made, and the daunting number of elements to do justice to, and the pressure from the fanbase and Disney and the paying public; all of these things must have been a nightmare to deal with. And yet Whedon has succeeded, beyond the wildest dreams of any of his fans. The audience I saw the movie with last night roared with laughter at the big jokes, cheered at the hero moments, applauded at the end. There were members of the Nerd Community there, four young women in Captain America t-shirts who hollered and yelped with pleasure. Normally this would bug me but I envied them their unabashed, infectious glee. As the movie ended I joined in with their ecstatic applause, helpless to resist.

The list of things Whedon does right is much longer than the wrong-list. His jokes work like gangbusters, his direction of action is mostly clear and precise, and he gets superb performances from his cast. The look of the movie is perfunctory but the sets are pleasingly grandiose, especially the vast control room of the SHIELD helicarrier, which gets a hefty workout. Also pleasing is how Whedon portrays different scales within the movie, from the intimate confessional moments between characters, to the epic finale, and beyond even that into the Cosmic, with imagery here evoking the work of both Jack Kirby and Jim Starlin. The whole Marvel Universe is here; only the grouchiest nitpicky fans will fail to be awed by Whedon’s respect for the source material.

He even gets to improve on the character work from other Marvel movies, adding new tones or enhancing familiar ones that didn’t get a proper workout in the others. His Thor is markedly sadder than the blustery fool who dominates his first outing, and his Cap is a bit jollier. He even gets to enhance one of the things the first Captain America movie hinted at but failed to convey with enough oomph; here we truly see Cap inspiring those around him, which is played both as punchline and stirring example of pure heroism (regular readers will know that unironic heroism is my catnip).

Whedon also cleverly links Black Widow and Hawkeye on an emotional level, allowing the two unpowered characters to back each other up. Hawkeye’s out of the movie for a while, sadly, but he more than makes up for it by the end, with Jeremy Renner effortlessly playing cooler-than-thou and more than justifying his presence on the team. Black Widow has fewer cool moments, but she’s arguably more interesting. There’s a sly build-up of backstory for her as the movie progresses, and by the end she’s the most emotionally open member of the team while still remaining an enigma; some nifty work from a better-than-expected ScarJo. It’s doubtful we’ll get a Hawkeye movie — Renner has enough franchises on his plate as it is — but a Black Widow movie, or a SHIELD movie starring her, is an enticing proposition now.

Even better, he corrals Robert Downey Jr.’s exhibitionism brilliantly; though Stark dominates many scenes with his traditional obnoxious bluster, he plays very well with others, butting heads with Cap and bonding with Bruce Banner. His arc is a little too familiar, maybe, running through the surrender to the idea of sacrifice from the first Iron Man movie and the rejection of solitude from the second, but a big dramatic event in the middle of the movie gives both of those emotional beats enough energy to make them count again. It’s something most filmmakers would shy away from, but it’s arguably Whedon’s masterstroke, heightening the stakes and changing the tone of the movie.

Actually no. The masterstroke is casting Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner and allowing him to play the Hulk in mo-cap form. I’m not a fan of the Hulk particularly, but this version is good enough to make me rethink my lack of engagement. It’s obvious I’m not alone on this. A large number of The Avengers‘ best moments come courtesy of the green giant, earning rapturous responses from the audience. Ruffalo is perfect as the hesitant scientist, rarely making eye contact with anyone, ashamed of his curse, quietly sarcastic about others but terrified of hurting anyone. It’s a sympathetic performance, beautifully shaded. Ed Norton will likely watch this and weep.

It also helps that a lot of the work in making Loki function as a villain was done so well in Thor. Whedon honours Branagh’s movie — and Tom Hiddleston’s fantastic embodiment of the God of Mischief — by making Loki both monumental asshole and vulnerable fool trying to find a place to call home. Some have questioned his motivations for attempting to subjugate humanity, or for bringing the alien force to Earth (no spoilers on the name of the alien race), but it makes sense from where he was at the end of Thor; a silly impetuous boy, hurt by those he was once close to and too bitter to understand that he is loved. Some of the most powerful moments in Avengers are between Thor and Loki, with our Asgardian hero desperate to appeal to the brother hidden behind the villain.

And yet to many viewers, myself included, it’s hard to slice the movie apart to pick out what works and what doesn’t work due to emotional overload, which is why the start of this review is so focused on separating out really passionate die-hard fans from critics, both armchair and professional, though obviously the vast majority of viewers will fall in between these diametrically opposed viewpoints. Come at this movie from the perspective of someone who doesn’t respond to the tropes of the superhero genre, or the Cinema of Spectacle, and more than likely this will leave you cold. And though I’m wary of sneering, personal dismissal I have absolutely no problem with reasoned criticism or subjective disinterest. We all have our own individual criteria for success, and that’s why it’s impossible to please all of the people all of the time. I’m hip to that, daddy-o.

But for some of us, The Avengers isn’t just a movie. It’s a dream come true, a childhood fantasy a long time coming true, and I find it impossible to apologise for that without betraying something fundamental about who I am and how I interact with the rest of the world. For a significant portion of the audience, this is the culmination of an idea growing in our minds since we first read a copy of Marvel Team-Up and got excited because Spider-Man was hanging out with Black Panther, or The Thing was suddenly stuck on a spaceship, out of his depth, chasing Moondragon with the help of Starhawk (Marvel Two-In-One Volume 1 Issue 62, fact fans!). It was too much to hope that this could ever really happen but it has, and it’s even better than we could ever have imagined.

Say it’s clumsy and maybe ugly at times, or trivial and nothing more than pyrotechnic bombast. None of that matters. Whedon’s done an amazing job of making a movie accessible to all; a real crowdpleaser with big drama, action, and more jokes than most comedies. But more amazingly he’s added notes to this symphony of visual and aural overkill that only a few of us will pick out, because we’ve been humming this tune in our heads for a long time. This movie spoke to me, and will speak to others, who have thrilled to the tales told by Kurt Busiek, Roger Stern, Mark Waid, Walt Simonson and so many others. It might even win over some of the haters, and help explain what it is about this genre that means so much to so many.

It celebrates heroism, and courage, and the marvels of world-building unbound by fear of censure from those who feel safer hiding behind a carapace of disdain. It evokes the same inspiring messages about doing the right thing, about believing in better, that comics conveyed when we were young. There were moments in this that made me hyperventilate with excitement, and by the end, as I slumped exhausted in my seat, reeling from the final mid-credit shot and all of the incredible possibilities it opens up for future Marvel movies, I realised what Whedon’s ultimate achievement was; he made me feel like a child again, lost in a Proustian revery of imagination and hope. That means more to me than 2606 words could ever hope to convey.

BFI LFF 2011: Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai / Martha Marcy May Marlene

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Last year’s London Film Festival featured the first UK screenings of Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins, a movie so exciting that 24 people were carried out during the final hour due to exhaustion of the adrenal gland. It was the acme of action cool; nothing released since has featured anything as thrilling as the sight of Kōji Yakusho unfurling a scroll before bringing on the mother of all beatdowns against a small army. With that in mind, this year’s inclusion of Miike’s follow-up Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai was a must-see, even with a number of reviews expressing bemusement at its slow pace.

These same concerns were levelled at 13 Assassins, which had a beautifully paced first hour that meticulously set up the stakes. Miike’s judgement was a welcome change from his traditional unpredictability, but some seemed to pine for the madness of his earlier movies. In that case they’ll dislike Hara-Kiri even more. It begins at the same pace as 13 Assassins before taking a disastrous turn, overstating its case at such length that I offered up a prayer to Nyarlathotep to rend the projector asunder with his tentacles.

Talking about the problems with Hara-Kiri is difficult without spoiling some of its surprises — for those who haven’t seen Masaki Kobayashi’s 1962 original, of course — but the conceit of the movie is that a lone samurai, Hanshirô Tsugumo (a haunting performance from Ebizō Ichikawa), arrives at the House of Li to demand the right to commit seppuku in that place of great honour in order to restore his name, after being made… well, I don’t know the correct word for it. Redundant will have to do, I guess. Kageyu, the head of the house (played by the amazing Yakusho, here cast as the opposite of the noble Shinzaemon from 13 Assassins) accuses the samurai/ronin of attempting a “suicide bluff” in order to persuade the house to take him on or pay him off to prevent the ritual disembowelment, and tells the tale of another samurai, Motome, who approached Kageyu the year before. The young samurai was shamed into killing himself as an example to others hoping to make money out of their “compassion”.

Miike then presents the movie’s first flashback, which is the closest he comes to providing a grisly setpiece to match his other work. He shows this death without much gore — another example of Miike’s newly restrained style — but even without that it’s nigh-unwatchable. The young samurai is made to humiliate himself and commit a grisly, protracted suicide with a blunt object. The scene feels like it will never end. The audience visibly squirmed in its seat throughout the long scene, taking solace in the burst of violence that ends it. It’s a bravura sequence that lingers in the memory long after the movie finishes.

That’s quite an achievement considering the length of the second flashback, which is excruciating for an entirely different reason. Even if it wasn’t already way too long, the second flashback shows the lead-up to Hanshirô’s arrival at the House, which involves poverty, humiliation, death, rain, snow, death, poverty, and just endless, endless misery. It’s a trial to sit through, especially if, like me, you are absolutely mortally terrified of being destitute or unemployed or broke. We are shown Hanshirô’s battle to survive his downsizing from the Samurai Department of Feudal Japan (or whatever it’s called) as he struggles to make money selling umbrellas. At one point a character manages to scrape up enough money to buy three eggs, and then promptly drops one and eats it off the floor. Grim.

I’ll be honest, I have a really tough time watching anything like this at the moment. Terror over the state of the economy, and the possibility of being made redundant again, have made me an absolute basket case (see also my terrified whining in my Take Shelter review), and Hara-Kiri‘s enormous wallow in broad melodramatics was a miserable experience. To other viewers it might not seem so long, but in my eyes it completely unbalanced the movie, which thankfully rallied in the final ten minutes as Hanshirôo’s motives become clear. Nevertheless, even taking into account the objectivity-distorting nature of my phobia, the structure of the movie causes its own problems.

As far as I can see, the only good thing to come from the flashback structure is that there are a couple of surprises in the plot that generate enough narrative energy to carry the movie through its considerable longueurs. If it was told linearly instead, we would have a very very long and tedious melodramatic first act that lasts over half of the movie, followed by a heavily loaded second act that introduces the antagonist too late and then shows two acts of violence in a row with barely any room to breathe between them.

No viewer would be able to make it through that overblown miserabilist opening hour to get to the juicy stuff later; it’s just too ridiculous to follow, and contains little surprises. Instead of dealing with the problems of that act, the writers and Miike have jumbled the plot to hide its problems, but no amount of shuffling of index cards can save it. This decision looks even worse when you consider that Pedro Almodovar’s The Skin I Live In has a similar structure — with a couple of very long flashbacks coming in the second half of the movie — but uses that narrative trick to far better effect.

The first half of the movie is perplexing, as Almodovar hides the motives of Doctor Robert Ledgard and throws in clues about the identity of his mysterious lodger/captive Vera Cruz. Almodovar is brave enough to make a completely obtuse hour of cinema before pulling out a series of jawdropping twists and revelations in the main flashback (though this viewer felt the denouement was disappointingly flat; a shame as for the most part it’s a terrific movie). Whereas Miike places his surprises and shock moments in the first half, Almodovar puts them closer to the end. It’s arguable that Almodovar is playing the same trick to hide narrative weakness, but the difference is that his shuffling makes The Skin I Live In work, for the most part. Hara-Kiri contains a fatal flaw — that endless boring scene — that could never be fixed. It’s a great shame.

Sean Durkin’s Martha Marcy May Marlene has a more conventional flashback structure, alternating between two time-frames to dramatise a young woman’s indoctrination and escape from a small cult. Elizabeth Olsen makes one of the most memorable debuts in recent memory as Martha, who flees a patriarchal cult to stay with her sister and brother-in-law (Sarah Paulson and Hugh Dancy), neither of whom seem happy to see her. Durkin crosscuts between her disastrous attempts to fit in with her well-off, liberal relatives and her past with the cult, where she goes by the name Marcy May, so given her by its leader Patrick (a memorably vile John Hawkes).

The great sadness of the movie is that no matter where she goes, Martha / Marcy May is treated poorly. She’s relatively safe with her family, but she has lost the social skills necessary to fit in, and won’t explain what has happened to her, leading to a total breakdown in her relationship with them. At the compound she was accepted, but was the victim of a drug-assisted rape; a “tradition” in the cult. Her inability to strike out on her own creates a sense of awful claustrophobia, and as the movie progresses, and we see more evidence of her behaviour at the compound, her motives become more ambiguous. Will she accept the freedom of the outside world, or will the cult win out?

That oppression of Martha’s spirit by her past — which begins to surface again by the end of the movie — resembles the same crushing hopelessness as experienced by Hanshiro and his family in Hara-Kiri. There are barriers in your life that conspire to keep you down, and as someone who grew up in financially restricted circumstances, the weight of Hanshiro and Martha’s baggage felt familiar. Caitlin Moran recently wrote a column about poverty that I think ranks as her best and most important work. Poverty is something you feel will always be there, affecting every decision you make, altering the way you see the world and respond to it. No matter where you go or what you do to better your life, you dread a return to that state.

Hanshiro is powerless to prevent his sacking, and Martha’s ignorance prevents her from seeing beyond her narrow horizons. Though Hara-Kiri does a reasonable job of dramatising this situation, Durkin’s movie perfectly captures that sense of hopelessness, from the brilliant, baffled performance by Olsen to the gloomy photography of Jody Lee Lipes.* Durkin does a superb job of depicting the strained relationship between Martha and her sister, but his premiere achievement is building such a bleak atmosphere, photographing nature as a source of both comfort and menace. The shadows that loom over Martha occur with greater frequency as the movie progresses. It’s a dark blanket that swallows the cult up, most memorably in a skinny-dipping scene in a pool, and a grim scene featuring a gun and a cat, which signals an escalation in the cult’s malevolence.

And yet it’s arguable that Martha is not the passive protagonist it seems, considering the “identity” of “Marlene”. Beware: from this point on there are plot spoilers and possible interpretation spoilers too. Martha spends much of the movie doing very little other than being picked on, abused or exploited by those around her, and it’s arguable that Durkin has done little other than create a Dickensian orphan-type to be pitied by the audience. Her major act of agency seems to be running away from the cult in the opening scene of the movie, and then deflecting attempts to bring her back by fellow cultist Watts (Brady Corbet, whose trademark creepy / sympathetic stare is used as well here as in Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia). After he leaves her alone Martha calls her sister, who picks her up and takes her back to her lakeside holiday home, which is as opulent as the cult’s base is delapidated.

Later we find out that the cultists regularly raid the homes of their family members, and burglarise nearby houses. They’re also willing to kill anyone unfortunate enough to be home; these revelations are timed beautifully by Durkin to maximise our unease, as Martha begins to suspect that her sister’s home is being monitored by the cult. The key moment for Martha comes late in the movie when, after the tension between her and her family reaches an uncomfortable peak, she calls the cult and speaks to “Marlene”. It’s not until a later flashback that we find out that “Marlene” is a kind of codename used when answering the phone. We see Martha / Marcy May do this, asking three questions in accordance with a rule written on the wall next to her.

So did Martha escape from the cult at the start, and have second thoughts near the end of the movie, thus dooming her family? Or was she always meant to contact them, giving a code to say “all clear”, but then had second thoughts after that (her paranoia in the final few scenes of the movie show she is violently opposed to the notion of returning to the cult)? Though I’m curious to know what Durkin intended here, I almost don’t want to know; the ambiguous ending of Take Shelter has been partially ruined for me after finding out that the writer / director Jeff Nichols intended no such ambiguity and was making a very specific point. I think both movies benefit from remaining unclear. Spoilers end!

But even if Martha is a victim, there’s nothing wrong with that interpretation. Sometimes you can’t change your fate, and the choices you’ve made can end up dooming you and those around you. It’s a bleak message, but then Martha Marcy May Marlene is the best kind of horror movie; the one where there is no hope of escape. The final shot of the movie will haunt you long after the credits finish, especially if you’re the kind of person who has been running from the past all your life, but you feel that the life you once lived is in your DNA, your soul, and the only thing you can hope to do is delay the inevitable.

* Embarrassingly, during the post-movie Q&A I asked Durkin whether he had used different cameras for different scenes, as some shots looked like photographs from the 70s, but he said no, and seemed a bit perplexed at my boring technical question. Ah well, John Hawkes was a gent about it. I love him.

BFI LFF 2011: Take Shelter / The Artist

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Times are tough. The economy looks like a dessicated version of its former self, waiting for rehydration that won’t ever come if our right-wing overlords have anything to do with it. The planet’s surface is hayzum-jayzum; all the water seems to be going to the wrong places. We’re just waiting on collapse. The experience of modern life often seems to be nothing more than bracing for impact, futilely attempting to protect ourselves from oblivion by padding ourselves with information about how bad it’s going to get, how secretly everything is going to be okay; info, misinfo, disinfo, facts that don’t do what you want them to. It’s all fuel for fear, and it’s exhausting.

It’s tempting to think that the pressure of modernity is affecting just you alone, that the constant stressful suppression of the fight-or-flight instinct is something you’re going through on your own, but a shift in the cultural landscape can prove this isn’t a pit of despair for one. Horrible though it might be to think that the collective unconscious is broadcasting waves of doubt and fear, there’s also a kind of solace to be taken from it. You’re not alone in being scared all the time, of dreading the future instead of running toward it with open arms. We’re all in this together, after all.

Dear reader, I ask that you bear with me as I discuss Jeff Nichols’ Take Shelter, because any objective appraisal is impossible. The 2011 London Film Festival featured a number of movies that featured scenes of poverty (Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai), hopelessness (Martha Marcy May Marlene, Dendera), and existence-shattering threats from within (Shame) and without (The Monk, We Need To Talk About Kevin), while existential threats from the environment loomed large in other movies seen recently (Melancholia, Contagion), but nothing in recent times has shaken me as much as Take Shelter. I’m not using that phrase lightly; as the credits rolled I found myself having the equivalent of a subdued but nonetheless terrifying panic attack. Nichols reached into my brain and squeezed until I broke.

Take Shelter depicts the gradual meltdown of Curtis LaForche (Michael Shannon), who begins to experience vivid nightmares hinting at a forthcoming ecological disaster. Visions of terrifying cloud formations and a thick, oily rain that transforms people into something akin to rage zombies haunt him, lingering so long that the sense of foreboding he experiences begins to affect his ability to function. As friends and family begin to appear in his visions as menacing versions of their true selves, Curtis becomes isolated from others, and embarks on a mission to build a storm shelter in his backyard with which he will protect his wife (Jessica Chastain) and daughter. It is this mission that begins to jeopardise his job and social standing, bringing about a disaster in his life less dramatic than the end of the world, but one just as dangerous.

Shannon does blistering, career-best work as a man struggling to cope with the horror of impending doom brought on by circumstances he cannot control. Nichols wisely makes Curtis an active participant, giving him an antagonist to rail against in the form of his genetic family’s history of mental illness. His mother has spent much of her life in sanitariums, and as soon as he begins experiencing the visions he tries to come to terms with them as manifestations of some internal breakdown. He seeks help, reads up on the subject, and refuses to think of his visions as anything other than evidence that the thing he has most feared has finally arrived.

Curtis’ situation gradually worsens as the movie progresses, and Nichols has paced this descent into mania and terror perfectly. There’s nothing flashy about Take Shelter; even the subtle effects work by Hydraulx is cleverly inserted into the movie in an unassuming way. Curtis’ visions are filmed with restraint, but they’re no less efficient for all that. By framing both reality and vision identically, the viewer is wrongfooted constantly. Are the visions bleeding into his reality? Are they coming true? The tension this decision generates is considerable, aided by the slow disintegration of Curtis’ relationships, and the increasingly dire effect it has on his body; one scene involving a seizure is particularly disquieting.

This movie is soaked in dread. As the controversial final scenes come around, the film’s grip on my psyche became oppressive and terrifying. Curtis’ breakdown, and his tragic awareness of the hopelessness of his situation, is so brilliantly realised by Shannon that the movie becomes hard to watch, made even more painful by the stunning empathic work by Jessica Chastain, here required to be more than the saintlike mother of Malick’s Tree of Life or the cliched, almost omnipresent shrewish obstacle-wives of so many lesser movies. The pain that this family suffers — emotionally, physically and psychically — is rendered with a careful eye by Nichols, though never dispassionately.

This is a powerful movie, an emotionally devastating experience given greater significance by its perceptive channeling of wider societal concerns. As the credits rolled I realised I was breathing way too hard, shaking and even crying. As I say, this is a purely subjective reaction and I don’t expect anyone else to react in the same way, but Nichols’ superb control over the unravelling narrative, and his subtle but disturbing use of nightmare imagery reminded me of the most upsetting works of David Lynch. That’s not to say he does anything to ape or even reference the great surrealist’s art, but he has an affinity for disturbing atmospherics, depicted here with clinical rigour, that brought about the same existential terror I felt during Lost Highway, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me or Mulholland Drive.

Spoilers between these bold sentences: read at your peril! I also reacted strongly to Curtis’ desire to take responsibility for his problems. He’s not content to let this terror just sweep him away; he rails against it as hard as he can, seeking out help and questioning the nature of his affliction for as long as he can, but it’s not enough. He succumbs when confronted by his former friend Dewart (Shea Whigham, giving one of his customary brilliant performances), loudly proclaiming that a storm is coming. It’s an electrifying moment; the careful build-up of tension is suddenly gone and Curtis gives in with something that looks almost like relief, taking on the role of apocalyptic preacher with gusto. It only lasts a moment, though, and he then realises how much he has lost by revealing his madness/clairvoyance, and how far he has strayed into the landscape of the insane.

But has he? The final scene of the movie seems ambiguous, though Nichols has said in an interview that it isn’t meant to be. Nevertheless, his intention with the final moment matched up to my interpretation, which is that Shannon’s fight to fix his own problem is lost, but he gains something more profound. His visions have led him to reject the love and support of his wife, but at the end, no matter whether the finale is a dream or reality, his wife is still there for him, and he accepts her completely. He’s no longer alone, and in that there is hope. That’s all that matters.

This is the inspirational message I’ve taken from it. Curtis can do nothing to deflect what’s coming, be it madness or apocalypse. He tries and fails, because there are always outside threats we can do nothing about. Agonising over the economy or the environment or the imminent destruction of compassionate policy thanks to the demented obstructionism and selfishness of the right-wing forces that seek to punish the unfortunate; none of this accomplishes anything. Curtis is fighting a losing battle, and for those of us who feel similarly terrified of what’s on the horizon, it’s hard to watch someone go through the same thing.

And yet we’re not alone. Take Shelter spoke to me more than almost any other film released in the past few years, because it presented me with the nightmare I’ve been having for a long time, and just as Curtis has Samantha by his side, I have my wife, and my friends, and Jeff Nichols and everyone who sees and responds to this magnificent movie. It’s small consolation, but it’s enough. Spoilers end!

Take Shelter might be the best movie I saw at the festival; it’s certainly the one that elicited the strongest negative reaction from me (not necessarily a bad thing). However, my lack of objectivity makes me wonder if this is the right choice. It felt as if it had been made for me (please forgive my arrogance), and I can’t predict what others think. The Artist, on the other hand, is easy. This is a movie that can make a sourpuss fall in love. It’s impossible to convey, with words, the power of Michel Hazanivicius’ delightful love letter to the silent era, because he has managed to capture sheer happiness with his camera, and the experience of seeing it in a roomful of people is one of the purest joys a filmgoer can experience.

The gala presentation of The Artist was attended by stars Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo, producer Thomas Langmann, and Mr. Harvey Weinstein himself. He, of course, did most of the talking, giving a long speech that seemed to consist of an epic anecdote about how brave he is for deciding to distribute the movie. I’m not sure this qualifies as brave; yes it’s a silent black and white movie set in the Twenties and Thirties, but choosing to pick this film up is an absolute no-brainer. I’m sure there were many UK distributors in the audience that night, and by the time the final credits rolled, they would all have been clamouring to pick it up.

Hazanavicius’ homage to the silent movie era pays tribute to the format, but also to the aesthetic of the time, mixing broad humour and melodramatics in perfect harmony. The plot, drawn from A Star Is Born and Singin’ In The Rain, involves preening superstar George Valentin (the delightful Dujardin, channeling Gene Kelly) at the moment that silent movies become a thing of the past. We see him just as his star is about to wane, though he remains as oblivious to the imminent success of the talkies as he does to the disintegration of his marriage to Doris (Penelope Ann Miller).

It’s at this moment that he meets Peppy Miller (Bejo, also a delight), who luckily capitalises on their chance encounter to become a star in her own right. She is young and eager enough to embrace the new filmmaking technology, and her star ascends as George’s fades, but her love for him remains a constant. Only his bitterness and stubbornness keeps them apart, just as it isolates him from others and brings about a dark period of self-pity. The parallels with Take Shelter, and Takashi Miike’s Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai — which also features a lengthy melodramatic sequence in which poverty threatens to destroy our protagonist — are notable. There have been complaints that the section of The Artist showing George’s fall is too long; they obviously haven’t seen the seemingly endless misery-porn segment of Hara-Kiri, which destroys any audience sympathy and patience.

But whereas those two movies depict a grim vision of a fate that is impossible to escape, The Artist is uplifting, showing how a stubborn, proud man can be transformed by love, and how there is always something hopeful just around the corner. I won’t give away too much about the glorious finale, other than to say it lifted my spirits and made me want to dance out of the cinema. I know I wasn’t alone in this; the audience applauded throughout. It’s the ultimate crowdpleaser, a true celebration of the magic of the communal experience of cinema.

More than that, it reaffirms a belief I hold, but often forget thanks to my naturally pessimistic nature. George sows the seeds of his resurrection by being open to new experiences, even though that openness is a consequence of his flirtiness and not anything more noble. He helps Peppy, giving her the beauty spot that makes her famous (in her first starring role in Beauty Spot, which was the working title of this movie). George might not learn to be open to new experiences early on, but it is this behaviour, initially displayed accidentally and eventually intentionally, that saves him. It matches up with this recent, brilliant Derren Brown experiment which shows that we make our own “luck” just by altering our mental state. It’s a kind of low-level magical thinking, to embrace the world and its opportunities; truly preferable to my default negativity.

It also shows how an idea can flourish over time, how artists influence other artists and create a self-generating flow of culture that they can dip back into whenever necessary. It’s George’s idea for the beauty spot that pushes Peppy into the limelight; he selflessly donates something to her, and eventually reaps the rewards for his generosity. Art begets art; culture grows from what came before, and if you’re smart enough to adapt to it, then you can keep contributing. George’s only failing is short-sightedness. Once he opens his eyes, and accesses another part of his personality, he comes back stronger than ever. The greatest artists of our time have benefited from this flexibility; The Artist is a beautiful depiction of this truth.

I cannot recommend The Artist highly enough. It’s possible to dismiss it as fluff, as some already have, or to say that there’s very little to it that hasn’t been done before, but it’s commendable even if only for Hazanavicius’ clever use of the format; one title card toward the end of the film is one of the best jokes of recent times, and brought the house down. And please, if you’re the sort of person who doesn’t respond to pretty much the greatest performance by a dog in years — God bless Uggie, who plays George’s onscreen partner The Dog — then you’re taking things way too seriously.

More importantly, it’s worth noting that sometimes a homage is more than just empty posturing; it can also be a statement of intent. The Artist might be a beautiful, pitch-perfect homage, but Hazanavicius is obviously aware that cinema is in the throes of a similar transformation to that which occurred in the 30s, and has made a timely movie that wears its period clothing lightly. As Anne Billson said to me this morning, “It’s pastiche, but transformed by a modern sensibility.” We see an industry in tumult, and know that the same thing is happening now. The Artist celebrates cinema of both eras, and acts as a connective tissue between both timeframes.

As talkies changed cinema then, 3D and IMAX and digital projection is changing cinema now. A cynic might say that The Artist is just cinema looking at itself in the mirror, but it’s not gazing with narcissistic and empty adoration. It’s chanting an affirmation, sending out a rallying cry to filmmakers and audiences to prepare for a new era. Embrace the new technology, re-engage with the idea of a collective audience, use the new tools to tell new stories, or tell the old ones better. The best is yet to come.

Listmania ‘10! Crew Contributions Of The Year

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It’s weird how Black Swan and Inception completely took over 2010, to the extent that I’ve barely thought about any other movies. In the Best Movies list I finished last week, I intended to make a comment about how the enjoyment-gap between them was almost non-existent: my memory of both of them is that they were like really very loud out-of-body experiences, but with trains, lesbian sex, nail-clipping, Winona Ryder clutching a glass of some expensive drink and looking very angry, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s tight buns (a pair of buttocks I didn’t actually notice, what with him running across the ceiling in his most memorable scene, but I have since found out from some of his lady-fans that his bum was very nice). I liked everything in the Best Movies list (obvs), but the leap from number three to number two was pretty large.

As you can see from these categories, Black Swan and Inception keep cropping up. It’s hard to exaggerate how impressive they both were on a technical level. The pleasure I derived from seeing two films as well crafted as this make me wonder if I’m really just a sucker for pretty things onscreen: certainly a conversation I had about Tron: Legacy just a couple of hours ago — which saw me make an unconvincing case for it by just pointing out how much my eyes and ears enjoyed it — makes me think I’m shallow.

But balls to it. Black Swan and Inception moved my heart as well as my two primary face-sensors. They’re near-perfect film experiences that left me breathless with joy in their final moments, and deserve all the praise I can throw at them. In the meantime, see below for some compliments for other films as well. They are not intended to be scraps from the table: all the work mentioned below is exemplary.

Best Director: Darren Aronofsky – Black Swan

Honorable Mentions:

Christopher Nolan – Inception

David Fincher – The Social Network

Lisa Cholodenko – The Kids Are All Right

Lee Unkrich – Toy Story 3

Takashi Miike – 13 Assassins

Best Screenplay: Lisa Cholodenko & Stuart Blumberg – The Kids Are All Right

Honorable Mentions:

Christopher Nolan – Inception

Nicole Holofcener – Please Give

Aaron Sorkin – The Social Network

Noah Baumbach and Jennifer Jason Leigh – Greenberg

Michael Arndt – Toy Story 3

“Where Have You Been?” Director of the Year: Joe Dante – The Hole

Best Visual Effects: Digital Domain / Prana Studios Inc. / Ollin Studio / Mr. X Inc. / Prime Focus Vancouver – Tron: Legacy


Honorable Mentions:

Double Negative / Asylum Visual Effects / Method / Rising Sun Pictures / Ghost VFX - The Sorceror’s Apprentice

SPI / CafeFX / Matte World Digital / In-Three Inc. - Alice in Wonderland

Hydraulx – Skyline

C.O.R.E. Digital Pictures / Buf / Image Metrics - Splice

Double Negative – Inception

Best Cinematography - Shelly Johnson - The Wolfman

Honorable Mentions:

Matthew Libatique – Black Swan

Robert Richardson – Shutter Island

Wally Pfister – Inception

Christopher Doyle – Ondine

Martin Ruhe – The American

Best Editing: Lee Smith – Inception

Best Sound Design – Craig Henigan – Black Swan

Honorable Mentions:

Ren Klyce - The Social Network

Leslie Shatz – Meek’s Cutoff

Eugene Gearty and Philip Stockton - Shutter Island

Richard King – Inception

Akritchalerm Kalayanamittr and Koichi Shimizu – Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

Best Soundtrack (of the century, let’s face it) – Hans Zimmer – Inception


Honorable Mentions:

Clint Mansell – Black Swan

Daft Punk – Tron: Legacy

Alexandre Desplat – The Ghost Writer

Anton Sanko – Rabbit Hole

Kjartan Sveinsson – Ondine

Best Individual Song: Derezzed by Daft Punk - Tron: Legacy

Best Production Design: Kevin Ishioka – Tron: Legacy

(Image taken from Steve Jung’s lovely website.)

Honorable Mentions:

Dante Ferretti – Shutter Island

Thérèse DePrez – Black Swan

Albrecht Konrad - The Ghost Writer

Guy Hendrix Dyas – Inception

Robert Stromberg – Alice in Wonderland

Best Costume Design: Penny Rose - Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

Honorable Mentions:

Lindy Hemming - Clash of the Titans

Michael Wilkinson / Quantum Creation FX - Tron: Legacy

Bruce Yu – Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame

Janty Yates – Robin Hood

Michael Kaplan – The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

Worst Director: Paul W.S. Anderson - Resident Evil: Afterlife

Dishonorable Mentions:

Kevin Smith – Cop Out

Alexandre Aja – Piranha 3D

Tim Burton – Alice in Wonderland

Tom Vaughan – Extraordinary Measures

Chris Columbus – Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief

Worst Screenplay: Linda Woolverton - Alice in Wonderland

Dishonorable Mentions:

Paul W.S. Anderson - Resident Evil: Afterlife

Robert Nelson Jacobs – Extraordinary Measures

Rob and Mark Cullen – Cop Out

M. Night Shyamalan – The Last Airbender

Pete Goldfinger and Josh Stolberg – Piranha 3D

Worst Cinematography – Andrew Dunn – Extraordinary Measures

Dishonorable Mentions:

Michael Watson – Skyline

Robert Richardson – Eat, Pray, Love

David Klein – Cop Out

Oliver Bokelberg – The Bounty Hunter

Michel Abramowicz - From Paris With Love

Worst Editing: Kevin Smith – Cop Out

One more to go: miscellaneous gubbins of the year, where I pick the best hair, creepiest poster, and most debonair badass, among other things.

Listmania ‘10! The Best Movies Of The Year

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A last mad dash to the end of the year, watching as many movies as I can, and I still don’t catch everything I wanted to see. It’s always the way, and I don’t see any other way to beat it other than to become independently wealthy and watch everything the day it is released. As a result, consider this list incomplete for 2010. How can it be complete if I haven’t see True Grit, which promises to be great, or The Fighter, which promises to be gritty and/or great, or Burlesque, which promises to be not as great and therefore potentially eligible for the worst movies list that will follow this?

Another caveat for new readers of the blog, some of whom I have met this year via Twitter, and include some people whose views on cinema I have come to respect and trust. If you don’t know me well either in the real world or via the internet, you might not yet realise just how heavily my tastes skew towards populist cinema. It has been my preference for many years now, and even in this fallow year for big-budget, wide-appeal movies, I’ve still managed to find a lot that to enjoy. The list will also feature a lot of American movies, which is more to do with the amount of US product released. That’s not to say I haven’t seen some fine movies from around the world. It’s just that they didn’t move me enough for inclusion here.

As you can see, I’m riven with worry that my tastes will be considered gauche, but I really shouldn’t. After all, taste is dependent on your criteria for the success of an artistic endeavour, and with films this is merely that a film do what it sets out to do, doesn’t take the audience for a fool, and shows some evidence that the filmmakers have an ability to make their movies work on both the micro and macro-scale: are they aware of how each scene — either well-crafted or fudged — fits in with the whole? Get something basic like that right and I’m going to be a lot nicer to your movie. The bad movies list is littered with movies that could have been fixed in the editing room: it’s a simple thing to get at least slightly right but too many filmmakers don’t even know how to do it properly. As for my taste, I’ve come to expect that my unending and vocal support for despised “failures” like Hudson Hawk (never forget!!!) and Speed Racer has burned my cred already.

Right. Caveats over. Let’s list this mammajamma.

25. [Rec]2

Would it have been possible for Jaume Balaguero and Paco Plaza to top their original zombie horror classic? For those of us who are still waking in the middle of the night with the memory of those terrifying final moments, it seems impossible. [Rec]2 might not feature anything that horrific, but its writer/directors are smart enough to take a step sideways, jumping off from the end of the original in an Aliens-esque way while skipping back into the timeline and geography of the first film, cleverly sketching new details in the margins. Even better, they flesh out the mythology, revealing that their horror franchise has more in common with The Exorcist than Dawn of the Dead, though this franchise features a badass action Priest, which is none-more-cool. Other than that it’s more of the same, but this is no dismissal. Some of the setpieces here are as breathtakingly staged as in the original: one early scene in a ventilation shaft is a nerve-wracking highlight. Best of all, it’s proves the [Rec]-niverse has legs. The next two movies cannot come soon enough.

24. Reign of Assassins

Chao-Bin Su’s eccentric wuxia romp is apparently co-directed by John Woo, though there is no hint of the master’s unironic hero-worship here. There is only the giddy sense that you’re not going to guess what’s coming next: a rarity these days. At first it seems like Chao-Bin is making a historical martial arts version of Johnny Handsome or The Long Kiss Goodnight, with Michelle Yeoh as the deadly assassin on the run from her past with a new face, but we’re instead treated to a dazzling final act filled with delirious plot twists and hysterical action. Very little else this year has the impact of the reveal of The Wheel King’s demented motivation for chasing the movie’s bizarre MacGuffin (half of a corpse), nor the sight of flaming sword fights, sex assassins and zipping death-needles in the final fights. It is also essential viewing for fans of the amazing Yeoh, who once more excels as the woman who cannot escape those she has wronged. Vibrant, colourful, and unapologetically sentimental and sincere, it’s an irresistible experience.

23. Megamind

It’s been another good year for Dreamworks Animation. How To Train Your Dragon was a delightful, highly detailed and exciting adventure, fully deserving of its success. Shades of Caruso recommends it, but can’t help preferring Megamind. The clever script by Alan J. Schoolcraft and Brent Simons plays with expectation, adding enough variations to a straight-forward premise to surprise audiences: something that eluded the makers of the similar but inferior Despicable Me. Tom McGrath’s direction shines too, getting the most from his starry cast, while raising the stakes impressively in the final act. It’s also a 3D triumph: Metro City (Metrocity?) truly boggles the eyes, those concrete canyons fading off into the distance while the superpowered protagonists battle it out on the vast stage. This might not reach the heights of Kung Fu Panda, or Sony Pictures Animation’s Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, but it’s still an entertaining and surprisingly affecting romp.

22. A Serbian Film

Satire might be the rapier that elegantly stabs at society’s hypocrisies, but apparently blunt-force-trauma porn/horror depictions of unimaginable cruelty can serve as commentary as well. Srđan Spasojević’s unforgettable nightmare vision contains zero cynicism: accusations that A Serbian Film is merely provocative exploitation are entirely false. It’s a bone-rattling scream of horror from the gut, a gauntlet thrown in the face of the Serbian government for turning the populace into puppets without agency, controlled from birth to death by forces beyond their control — here depicted as the almost unwatchable degradation of a family for the sake of meaningless, depraved entertainment. Even the strongest stomach will be turned by the toxic images pouring from the screen, but it’s the honesty and fury of Spasojević’s message that will linger longest, and make this a cause celebre for years to come.

21. Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame

The US action movie roster was deeply disappointing this year. With the exception of a handful of films, most of this year was taken up with unconvincing nostalgia (The A-Team, The Expendables), fun but slight comic adaptations (Red, The Losers), or genre crossovers (sci-fi – Repo Men: horror – Daybreakers: romance – Killers). Meanwhile, Reign of Assassins and Tsui Hark’s berserk Detective Dee mystery set the screen alight with crazed invention, whirling movement, and abstract plotting worth a dozen feeble CGI-heavy shoot-outs. Hark’s fictionalised retelling of the tale of 7th-Century courtier Di Renjie is a fantastical concoction, with Dee reimagined as a philosophical man of action, a Zen version of Guy Ritchie and Robert Downey Jr.’s Sherlock Holmes, except that movie didn’t feature Ninja puppeteers, deranged reindeer attacks, spontaneous human combustion and face-altering acupuncture. You never quite know what madness will be thrown at you. While the garbling of the real and controversial historical legacy of Empress Wu is troubling, as a slice of entertainment this ranks with Zu Warriors and The Butterfly Murders as one of Hark’s brightest fantasies.

20. Green Zone

This mixture of Bourne-style intensity and United-93-style reportage failed to find an audience, and frustrating populist compromises within Brian Helgeland’s otherwise ambitious screenplay threaten to scupper the movie at every turn, but it remains a unique venture: an attempt to depict the fraudulent practices of a corrupt government in a politically unstable warzone by hiding the bitter pill inside an action movie. It very nearly succeeds, certainly enough to stir the blood and anger the mind. It’s commendable just for its seriousness of purpose, and the unobtrusive way Greengrass paints infuriating details from Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s non-fiction book into the sides of the frame, but for action fans there is also the rush of Greengrass’ perfectly staged and edited set-pieces, especially the exhausting final chase through Baghdad, a scene made poignant with the knowledge that the disastrous occupation of Iraq was not going to have a happy end. Sad that the filmmakers felt obliged to tag on such a silly coda, but still…

19. Winter’s Bone

Debra Granik’s adaptation of Daniel Woodrell’s novel crosses so many types of genre it’s hard to know where to start. It has the episodic structure of a fairy-tale, the indomitable hero and quest-arc of a detective story, the inhospitable landscape of a survival narrative, and the terrifying antagonists of a Hills-Have-Eyes-style horror movie. Granik’s control of atmosphere is such that the frozen world seems to bleed out of the screen, chilling the blood even before we get to the events depicted. Ree’s search for her no-good father takes her into the dangerous underbelly of her community, with only her menacing uncle to help her. Watching this young woman forced to endanger herself for the sake of her family is agonising, partially through some of the best storytelling of the year, but mostly through career-best performances from John Hawkes and Dale Dickey, and the memorable arrival of Jennifer Lawrence in the mainstream cultural consciousness.

18. Whip It

All hail Drew Barrymore! 2010 saw the release of Going The Distance, which was so far and away the best, most entertaining and most convincing romcom of the year that every other dashed-off failure should hang its head in shame. It also saw the UK release of her directorial debut, the utterly charming coming-of-age roller derby movie Whip It. Barrymore draws out Ellen Page’s most likeable performance yet as a young woman whose tiny rebellion against the small-town mentality of her home and family leads her to an equally tiny — yet momentous — sports career. Our hero’s direction is frenetic and fractured but invigorating, as quick and sharp as the best two-and-a-half-minute punk tune. This celebration of sisterhood is one of the most purely joyous movies about youth made in recent times. Hopefully its fanbase will grow, and its message of unsentimental female solidarity, and celebration of outsider culture, will be passed on and enjoyed for years to come.

17. Iron Man 2

It’s too long. There’s too much talking. There’s not enough action. Whine, whine, whine. Jon Favreau took the things most people seemed to love about the first Iron Man movie – Tony Stark being a smartass in formless scenes that lean heavily on the wisecracks – and multiplied them, turning the increasingly tired template of the summer blockbuster on its head. The box office was great, but no one seemed to be happy with what they got. Pish posh. The talkiness and loose nature of the Iron Man franchise has proved to be its greatest strength. This plays more as a semi-improvised comedy than a set-piece-heavy explosiongasm, a good-time free-for-all that still finds time to test Tony Stark’s character and build the Marvel Universe inbetween the rambling asides and coolly tossed-off non-sequiturs. It’s the most unconventional superhero movie yet: irksome if you’re not onboard but pure joy for the rest of us.

16. Salt

Some movies are just too crazy not to love a little. Kurt Wimmer’s screenplay – in which agent Evelyn Salt may or may not be a sleeper agent intent on destroying Russia, America, the Middle East or the whole world, depending on where you are in the movie – playfully messes with expectations, leaving the audience in a pleasurable state of confusion and doubt as to the motives of any of the main characters. Philip Noyce cranks up the action to levels far beyond those displayed in his Tom Clancy adaptations, throwing out several memorable set-pieces and brilliantly orchestrating the cast into giving broad performances pitched at the appropriate level of heightened emotional truth: some kind of miracle considering the preposterousness of the numerous plot-twists, of which the less said the better. It’s undeniably daft, but by God, it’s exciting.

15. Submarine

Those of us who have watched the career of the amazing Richard Ayoade can rejoice: his feature debut is a triumph of endearing observational comedy, empathic storytelling, and film-nerd fastidiousness. The coming-of-age story of Oliver Holt doesn’t shy away from depicting its hero as an emotionally-stunted klutz, but the masterstroke is making all of his misjudgements seem perfectly logical, magically regressing the audience’s point-of-view back to its own adolescence, when we didn’t realise we hadn’t quite figured out how the world worked. Ayoade extracts impressive performances from his cast, especially newcomers Craig Roberts and Yasmin Paige as the nervous, spiky young couple whose adventures in romance go so believably awry. Nevertheless, the director’s greatest achievement is the magical atmosphere he generates: nostalgic yet modern, bittersweet and utterly charming, even during its darkest moments.

14. Four Lions

Amazing how Chris Morris’ comedy about suicide bombers didn’t generate the torrent of controversy many of us expected: a testament to the movie’s unexpected warmth. Though the four terrorist-wannabes are obviously murderous scum, they’re also human, and the most daring thing about this magnificent farce is to give at least one character — Omar, brilliantly played by Riz Ahmed — a redemptive arc as he attempts to save dopey Waj (a hilarious turn from Kayvan Novak) from eternal damnation. This is also the movie’s greatest strength, depicting fundamentalists as people in all their fumbling, irrational glory. Playing them as nothing more than idiots would have no charge at all. It becomes more than just a film of its time, becomes a film about all of humanity. We’re all fools, all a mixture of good and bad. It’s just unfortunate that a very small minority of us are more likely to blow up others on a mission to pay tribute to an imaginary sky-god or to strike at a society that is not really that much of an enemy.

13. Dogtooth

Arguably the most upsetting horror can come from the exaggeration of normal behaviour, as displayed in Yorgos Lanthimos’ dark extrapolation of how they fuck you up, your mom and dad. A depraved couple conspire to keep their children captive within the grounds of their home, feeding them false information about the world from birth. Treated like dogs, the children — now post-adolescent adults — have a completely alien idea of what the world is: planes are toys, cats are deadly monsters, and venturing outside the compound before they lose their ‘dogtooth’ will end in disaster. Nevertheless, with adulthood comes an increased urge to escape, even without knowing what that entails. Lanthimos’ matter-of-fact direction is the perfect counterpoint to the disturbing subject matter, impassively charting the slowly-unravelling experiment. Who needs human centipedes when you have parents like this? It’s an unsettling tale – The Truman Show without the hope and uplift.

12. Meek’s Cutoff

Who would have thought that the writer and director of something as soporific as Old Joy could create something as charged with suspense as this? That’s unusual enough, but Kelly Reichardt’s masterstroke is doing that without changing her signature style in any way. Her retelling of the true story of Meek Cutoff — in which a group of settlers of the “Wild West” are pushed off course by a potentially unreliable frontiersman guide — is deceptively simple. Under the surface are tensions that inevitably spill out as water dwindles and Meek’s instructions become less certain. The introduction of a new element — a Native American who wanders too close to the group — sets the movie spinning off in a different, and even more fascinating, direction. Reichardt’s superb handling of the group dynamic and the allegorical dimensions of this survival tale is aided by notable work from sound designer Leslie Shatz, weaving a hypnotic soundtrack using nothing more than the wind, the sound of shuffling feet, and the creak of a wheel. It’s an exhausting journey, but a riveting one.

11. Agora

Alejandro Amenábar’s ambitious, big-budget biopic of philosopher Hypatia – The Passion of the Christ for atheists – struggled to find distributors around the world, was dumped into cinemas with barely any publicity, and was criticised by Catholic groups in Spain for defaming Christianity: the polar opposite of Mel Gibson’s berserk Passion Play. Who knows why audiences didn’t connect with this tragic epic: it has the requisite visual wow-factor, moves at a clip, and is easily accessible. Perhaps no one wants to be reminded of the ancient — and modern — punishment and subjugation of women by vicious misogynists whose pitiful moral shortcomings and weak-minded thuggery lead to acts of barbarous evil. Rachel Weisz’s towering performance breaks the heart, bringing to life a great thinker whose fate is decided for her by infantile monsters: a loss to the world more profound than the library she tries to save. It should be required viewing for anyone who supports reason over superstition.

10. Easy A

Much like Drew Barrymore’s Whip It, Will Gluck’s teen comedy was greeted with a shrug. It’s a crying shame: movies this clever and witty don’t come along every day. Taking Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter as an inspiration, rather than a template, Easy A treats serious subjects — sexual awakening, female empowerment, the negative effect of socially accepted and enforced codes of morality, etc. — with a lightness of touch that seems ever more rare in these fractious times, remaining good-natured and silly while driving home a welcome message: mind your own business, and I’ll mind mine. However, the sparkling wit and referential games would mean nothing without a solid central performance, and Emma Stone delivers a star-making turn. Her charm and comedic skill are the elements that push this movie from good to great, and ensure that time will be generous to this underrated gem. It’s the best movie of its kind since Clueless: the proselytising campaign to see it get its due starts here.

9. Greenberg

Noah Baumbach’s character study of an odious, self-involved shit-head who uses everyone around him and sabotages himself tests that well-known writer’s maxim — that protagonists don’t need to be likeable for you to root for their success — to the point of destruction and beyond. Ben Stiller delivers one of the finest performances of the year as the title character, cast adrift in a city he hates, surrounded by people he cannot emotionally connect with, and consistently making the wrong choices. It’s a testament to Stiller and screenwriters Baumbach and Jennifer Jason Leigh that you find yourself rooting for this douchenozzle, hoping that he will somehow figure out that he is the problem, and make some effort to rectify this. The movie succeeds admirably, regularly positioning him on a precipice of universally recognisable social failure, his empathic blindness exaggerated to unbearable levels — if this creep can find a sort of redemption, there’s hope for all of us. Kudos too for bringing the amazing Greta Gerwig to wider attention: her work as Florence Marr is one of the highlights of the movie year.

8. The Social Network

Aaron Sorkin’s voice is so distinct that no matter who adapts his work, it’s first and foremost an Aaron Sorkin project. Until now. David Fincher’s free-wheeling and zippy movie is as fast-moving as the world of social media which will probably see Facebook superseded by other sites by the time this film hits satellite (this sentence sponsored by Diaspora). His control of the material, his authorial confidence, almost completely overwhelms the various tics and habits of Sorkin – no mean feat. Which is not to denigrate Sorkin. The Social Network represents his best work since the early years of The West Wing, cleverly and bravely tinkering with fact in order to turn the prosaic origins of Facebook into a Greek tragedy as “Mark Zuckerberg” is undone by his ambition and ironically trapped in the unsatisfying world he created. It’s delirious entertainment, delivered at hyper-speed by two masters of their trade, and well played by a young and obnoxiously talented cast, with special praise due to Andrew Garfield, as good here as he is in Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go.

7. Please Give

It’s been said before, and Shades of Caruso can merely echo it: why are people squandering their time waiting for Woody Allen to find something new to say when there is a perceptive, funny, imaginative filmmaker already working in the same area, and who isn’t merely content to ape better directors while putting nubile young women into leading roles as muses to various lecherous proxys? Please Give is a vastly entertaining and thought-provoking comedy-drama, playfully addressing themes of white liberal guilt, social discomfort, distorted body-image, and the generation gap, all while delivering endearing and subtle character comedy and well-earned last-act epiphanies that are recognisably small but no less profound for that. Nicole Holofcener has been making lovable and well-crafted social commentary for years without preaching, without resting on her laurels, and without pandering to the audience. Why she isn’t more widely celebrated by critics is beyond us.

6. Kick-Ass

Kick-Ass the movie is much like Kick-Ass the character, stupidly starting fights with powerful opponents just because it feels like it. Matthew Vaughan and Jane Goldman could have toned down Millar & Romita Jr.’s super-homage for family viewing, but instead they stuck to their guns and delivered a provocative blast of bratty energy right at the tutting moral campaigners. The only downside to the tide of handbag-clutching vitriol aimed at it (because really, who gives a fuck what these idiots think?) is that it obscured the message of the movie: if someone needs help, you have a duty to provide it, whether you like it or not. Hit-Girl may kill dozens of people and say the naughty words, but it’s not about that. It’s about a new generation kicking against the pricks. As London’s streets rage and the Establishment stamps on The Kids with all its might, Kick-Ass needs immediate reappraisal. It feels more like a manifesto than an action movie, but never forget: it’s a really goddamn good action movie.

5. Toy Story 3

Finally we reach the end of Pixar’s trilogy of torment. Toy Story 3 is a gruelling and emotionally devastating trip into the dark heart of society, laying bare the compromises made by all of us as we become adults. A world where wrenching sacrifice is inevitable is here depicted, with grim irony, as a candy-coloured landscape of potential joy crushed under the jackboot of miserable conformity, with emotional attachment to anyone or anything being a surefire way to see your dreams destroyed, your friendships demolished, your life ruined. It’s a relentless assault on the soul of the viewer, a sadistic and twisted reminder that life is dust and all we can do is cherish the odd moment of connection and bliss before being cast into the abyss, unwanted and alone. Oh the tears that were shed as Lee Unkrich’s nightmarish masterpiece hurtled towards its miserable end! Oceans of sadness! Waterworlds of lachrymosity! Damn you Pixar! DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!

4. The Kids Are All Right

Lisa Cholodenko’s immensely satisfying family drama is a quiet triumph, compassionately extolling the virtues and compromises necessary to live a liberal life while frankly addressing the unavoidable urges and paranoias of us all. It’s gratifying to see a movie leap over the usual tangle of political argument to simply present a loving family in all of its flawed beauty. Annette Bening, Mark Ruffalo and Julianne Moore excel as the trio of parents whose seemingly happy exteriors hide paranoia, jealousy and sadness; feelings that are brought to the surface by the actions of their teenage children. Does it sound like faint praise to say that the reason this movie appears so high on the list is just that it gets everything right? The movie’s ace in the hole is the script by Cholodenko and Stuart Blumberg, which is a work of subtle genius. Without pandering to the audience we’re invited into the lives of some of the most exquisitely detailed characters of the year, whose actions are believable, recognisable, and revelatory. It’s a genuine crowd-pleaser in the best sense of the word.

3. 13 Assassins

It could have been a wild and tacky action extravaganza, something entertaining but disposable, a repository of empty iconography that trades in nostalgia for the long-gone heights of the action genre: i.e., it could have been The Expendables. Thankfully Takashi Miike’s startling action classic — featuring 13 outcast heroes facing off against an army protecting the insane brother of the Shogun — is anything but. At times it feels like an elegaic send-off for a period in Japanese history, as our hero Shinzaemon Shimada faces disgrace and death in order to do the right thing: literally destroying a way of life in order to save the country. As the final half of the movie kicks in, it feels more like Miike is saying goodbye to the Samurai sub-genre. The careful pace is jettisoned for 45 minutes of beautifully paced and choreographed carnage, and two final showdowns of incredible emotional power. Nothing can prepare you for the intensity of this brutal war-in-miniature, with courage giving way to insanity as the battle progresses. It will be a long time before anyone can top the director’s astonishing achievement.

2. Inception

It may not feature Batman, but Inception still swept in like the Caped Crusader to save us from a summer of lacklustre movies. Nevertheless, even in a strong year this imagination-shattering masterpiece would stand out. Christopher Nolan’s bold and befuddling puzzle mimicked the beats of a traditional action movie to tell one story that appealed on a lizard-brain level, ending in an hour-long setpiece of dazzling complexity and ambition. Nevertheless, the genius of Inception lies in its labyrinthine structure. Numerous stories/interpretations could be implied from the layers of Freudian and Jungian imagery piled on top of the heist-movie genre trappings. Much like Lost, there was more than one narrative here, and viewers could choose whichever they thought was most applicable. Such confidence in the audience’s ability to unpick a knot like this is rare enough, but to present it at the height of the summer season – a period traditionally dismissed as an intellectual dead zone by sneering cultural commentators – amounts to a statement of intent: this filmmaker is trying to single-handedly restore cinema’s confidence in itself, and justify its existence as the audience finds satisfaction elsewhere. To do that he had to construct a maze: one that takes two hours to grow in our minds, but will take years to solve.

1. Black Swan

Forget 3D. Forget the inevitable future technology of thought-transference, even. What Aronofsky has achieved using little more than empathic and artistic skill is to plant our consciousness into the mind of a deeply troubled woman: we see and hear everything she does, and slowly our grasp on reality falls apart at the same time as hers. The willing members of the audience — who allow Aronofsky’s hypnotic magic work on them — will find themselves trapped in their seats, bombarded with unreliable imagery and noise, forced to question everything they see and driven to a state of delirious euphoria. The intensity of the director’s vision has proved too much for some viewers, and caused some cineastes to cry “foul” as they denounce the movie for being “overwrought”. As if this is a bad thing. This tribute to the power of art to transform both creator and audience is exactly as heightened as it needs to be. Watching it is to experience the feeling of creating a new idea or to master an artform, with all of the emotional turmoil that that entails. Technically it is impressive: Matthew Libatique’s raw photography, Clint Mansell’s overwhelming score and the ingenious sound design by Craig Henighan create a claustrophobic atmosphere of inescapable hysteria, but it’s the emotional charge supplied by Natalie Portman’s performance that pushes this movie to the top of the list. Her total commitment to the project is the key to its success: Black Swan would be movie of the year just for her heart-wrenching turn.

Honorary Mentions:

Archipelago: Joanna Hogg’s beautifully observed and played drama about a middle class family riven with discord is heavily loaded with almost unbearable British reserve. It’s as uncommunicative as its protagonists, but says much more about class issues and familial strife than any histrionics ever could.

The Town: A muscular action flick directed with consummate skill by the great Ben Affleck, stepping in front of his own camera to give a career-best performance alongside a similarly great cast of Rebecca Hall, Jeremy Renner, Pete Postlethwaite, Chris Cooper and Jon Hamm.

Summer Wars: Mamoru Hosoda’s sci-fi movie about a family battling against a rampant AI is primarily about how the history of a warrior clan can be revisited in modern trappings, but it also struck me as a love letter to the Internet and its greatest asset: the people who populate it and defend it from marauding forces. It’s also a feast for the eyes.

Unstoppable: The traditional visual blow-out of Tony Scott remains a constant eye-sore throughout this pared-down action thriller, but this is still his best-paced film in an age, and his best overall movie since Crimson Tide. There may not be much to it, but what more do you need? It’s an runaway train! And Denzel has to stop it! Magic.

Amigo: What could have been a dry piece of historical fiction is instead both a vibrant celebration of humanity’s empathy and harsh depiction of its worst and most paranoid instincts, as the occupation of a baryo in the Philippines during the Philippine-American War flirts with success before disaster. A great cast; a great — and compassionate — movie.

Best Documentary: Tabloid

Errol Morris succeeds again with the wonderfully tawdry story of Joyce McKinney and The Case of the Manacled Mormon, which was a huge deal in tabloid newspaper culture last century. Timely points are made about how journalism can ruin lives, and how opportunistic individuals can make a living from turning their troubles into a kind of performance for the masses, but most of all it’s just a massively entertaining tale, filled with oddballs, twists and humour.

Best Fiction / Non-Fiction Hybrid: Self Made

Gillian Wearing’s feature debut is like nothing else out there, a pleasantly discombobulating method-acting experiment using non-actors. She plays with what fiction is expected to do, and how our response to it is tied up in our knowledge of the individuals involved in the making of it, while at the same time using her acting exercises as a tool to unwrap the thought-processes of her volunteers. It could have been a navel-gazing exercise, but Wearing is too smart and empathic for that. What she has woven is far deeper than some dry documentary, and more emotionally involving. It’s cathartic for those involved, and maybe for the viewer too.

Still to come: worst movies of the year, and my pick of the best performances, best crew contributions, and best miscellaneous gubbins.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Listmania ‘09! Miscellaneous Movie Observations: Part One

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I had hoped this would be the last post, but as ever, I run off at the mouth. Fingers. Whatever.

Most Underrated Movie of the Year: The Invention of Lying

It’s not a perfect movie by any stretch of the imagination. It’s poorly directed, sloppily structured, paced badly, and apparently the original script is much stronger (I have yet to read it, sadly). Nevertheless, it’s also terrific brainfood, features an incredibly ballsy middle-act satire on religion that drew gasps of surprise from the audience we saw it with, and happily skewers the idea of romantic love as depicted in the movies. As expectations of real-world romantic love are often distorted by expectations generated by the fake movie world, it was nice to see this subverted with such glee. Ricky Gervais also surprised us with an emotionally powerful scene in a hospital. Real tears flowed down my shocked face. Who knew he had it in him?

Honorable Mentions:

G-Force (A clever spoof of action movie cliches mistaken for an empty and noisy kids movie.)
A Christmas Carol (As I said before, a loyal and thoughtful adaptation with a lovely painterly look.)
Pandorum (A committed performance by Ben Foster and a consistently bleak atmosphere make this worth watching.)
Land of the Lost (Horrible final act but we laughed a lot on the way there. I also laughed a fair bit at Year One, especially at Oliver Platt. What?!??!)
Duplicity (A very entertaining con-trick movie with a ton of very entertaining performances, especially from Clive Owen, star of the also-very-entertaining The International.)

Most Overrated Movie of the Year: Up In The Air

By the end of the year it felt like only a handful of critics had seen through the glossy, heartwarming sheen of polish that coated Jason Reitman’s phony feel-good confection. A quick look at Rotten Tomatoes shows Armond White didn’t like it, and along with his rant against Precious is probably the only other time I’ve agreed with him this year. Dana Stevens, Stephanie Zacharek, J. Hoberman, Karina Longworth and Keith Uhlich also resisted its sickly charms, along with a few other choice reviewers. I’m honestly not sure what I can say to top Will Leitch’s elegant takedown of the film, except that this is the one movie this year that almost had me all the way through to the end and then just lost me completely in the final act. The ridiculous U-turn of one character — as clunky a “twist” as anything I’ve seen in poorly plotted action movies — was the final straw.

Some great work from the cast still deserves praise, and there were enjoyable moments throughout, but I cannot forgive it for all the clangingly obvious metaphorical messages, its sneering distrust of anyone’s desire for isolation (Ryan Bingham is portrayed as a kind of crazy person for not wanting to hang out with his awful family), its attempts to streamline Walter Kirn’s unorthodox (and horribly overwritten) novel, or its final message. Yes, I can attest to the fact that unemployment can indeed have the unintended consequence of allowing a person to reconnect with his family, and the support and love that they can give is a wonderful thing. I’m a better person for that experience. However, as wonderful and as welcome as that is, there is still the gnawing uncertainty and fear that remains underneath it. Unemployment is not a betterment opportunity. It’s an absolutely fucking terrible and distressing situation. The mawkish attempt to spin it as a kind of freedom — using non-actors who had in fact just been laid off — made me want to set fire to the screen. When this wins 20 Oscars later this year, I will be saying the swearwords I reserve for special occasions.

Dishonorable Mentions:

Precious: Based On The Novel Push By Sapphire (This year’s Slumdog Millionaire. I just want to forget it happened.)
Mesrine (I heard some people compare this rather average and overlong crime flick to The Godfather. Without irony! It’s a kind of madness.)
The Hangover (A comedy with a structure but no jokes. Its success has left me utterly baffled.)

“Trying Too Hard” Direction Of The Year: Tom Hooper (The Damned United)

Some great performances and a nifty script by Peter Morgan forced to contend with all kinds of tricksy and unnecessary compositional flash. A shame, as it’s a good enough movie that even someone who hates football/soccer as much as myself was riveted throughout. This “award” might not seem like it, but consider this a recommendation. Ignore the attention-seeking framing. Enjoy the performances instead.

Best Movie of 2008 That We Saw in 2009: Rachel Getting Married


Nothing I can add to this post, really. It knocked our socks off and the memory of it lingers on. Simply an instant classic.

Honourable Mention:

Synecdoche, New York (Wrenching to watch, but fascinating nevertheless. I’d rewatch it to get a better view of it, but I’m too scared to endure it again.)

Worst Movie of 2008 That We Saw in 2009: The Reader


Lest this comment turn into a profane rant, let’s just say that letting this profoundly awful and ethically dubious piece of crap go past greenlight — let alone onto screens and into awards ceremonies — is a black moment for culture in general. I watched the whole godforsaken thing in a state of apoplexy, horrified at its weak moral arguments and shitty veneer of classiness. It’s the worst kind of empty Oscar-bait. I may have hated Crash, but it’s worth ten Readers. Bury it under a mound of salt. ::spits on movie::

Dishonorable Mention:

Punisher War Zone (One of the dumbest and most tedious superhero movies of recent times. The Punisher accidentally kills a cop and mopes in his lair for 80% of the movie? Yay fun!)

Most Baffling Movie of the Year: All About Steve


Even weeks after seeing it I have just no idea what the hell this movie was supposed to be doing. Appreciation of humour might be a completely subjective thing, but even taking its “comedic” efforts off the table, I’m still just not sure what was going on from one scene to the next. Are we meant to dislike Mary? Admire her? Love her? Hate Steve? Root for them both? Root for her and DJ Qualls’ nerdy character? What the hell was the sub-plot about the three legged baby? The worst comedy metaphor for abortion ever? What the hell is funny or logical about people protesting the amputation of a baby’s vestigial third leg? What tone was it going for? Why did a tornado appear in the middle of the movie? Oh God, it made my head hurt trying to keep up with it. I doubt even a re-edit could save this pitiful mess.

Dishonorable Mention: Yatterman

Takashi Miike’s version of the old anime series was certainly garishly coloured, hyperactive, and featured several cartoonish elements. That much he got right. It also featured a giant robot dog being attacked by a giant robot woman with missiles for nipples. The robot dog then sends an army of robot ants to attack the robot woman, and they agitate the nipple missiles so much she begins to have an orgasm. This makes the robot dog horny, and he proceeds to start kissing the woman, who by this point is yelling, “I’m coming!” She then explodes. It also features a man being absorbed into the butt of a creature called the God of Thieves, much buttock-exposure from one character who is creepily obsessed with his female boss, and a completely baffling love triangle plot that bogs down the entire movie and doesn’t seem to get resolved at the end. And yet it still it makes more sense than All About Steve.

Most Obtrusive Product Placement of the Year: Up in the Air


(The photo shown above is sponsored by MacCutcheon whiskey.) When we saw Up In The Air at the London Film Festival, the screening was sponsored by American Airlines. I barely noticed this fact. Half an hour into the movie, I was convinced I was watching an extended and expensive advert for the company. And Hilton Hotels. And Travelpro luggage. I’m not railing against product placement in movies: that would be futile, and besides, though something like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is full of fetishised footage of hot cars and gadgets, it has a kind of pointless gloss and trivial air about it that the commercial nature of it can be ignored as business as usual. In Up in the Air the product placement sometimes feels like the reason the movie exists. Some might argue that this is product placement done well, but during scenes where Clooney and Farmiga compare hotel keys and executive passes in airports, it was easy to forget that the movie was an adaptation of a novel, not the outcome of some godawful synergistic meeting of minds between AA and Hilton and Paramount. The product placement is woven directly into the DNA of the movie like some kind of awful high-budget Mac and Me, with characters even eulogising those products in their dialogue. If that’s that way it’s going to be done, fine. Just don’t expect me to listen to your heartwarming tales of connectivity at the end.

Dishonourable Mention: Love Happens

Walter (John Carroll Lynch) is grieving because his son has died after falling off some scaffolding at his construction site, and he blames himself. It has stopped him working, and he is close to financial ruin. And here comes Burke Ryan (Aaron Eckhart) to get Walter out of his emotional slump by taking him and their therapy group to Home Depot, where he buys him a huge pile of tools for just under $3000, and this magically fixes his crippling emotional wound! Hey, you can kit yourself with everything a handyman needs for just under $3000 at Home Depot? Thanks, movie! That’s not at all horribly manipulative and staggeringly tasteless!

Most Disappointing Movie of the Year: The Men Who Stare At Goats

Don’t get me wrong, I thoroughly enjoyed this adaptation of Jon Ronson’s book. George Clooney is great value as the delusional Lyn Cassidy, and Jeff Bridges is even better as Bill Django. It is occasionally very loyal both to the book and the TV series Ronson also made (The Crazy Rulers of the World), and some of the setpiece moments are nicely done. However, when you go back and revisit the original materials, you realise how Grant Heslov and Peter Straughan waste a lot of energy on making the material seem wacky when it’s already mindbogglingly odd just on its own. Even worse, the final act is a complete disaster, full of childish slapstick that undercuts the two minutes of serious subtext. The hastily added battle-against-the-antagonist doesn’t help. By the end the tone wore on me. With the benefit of hindsight I’d find it hard to recommend it to anyone. Best to stick with the book and TV series. They’re funny and disturbing and rage-inducing, all in the right proportions.

Dishonorable Mentions:

Outlander (Really really long and kinda boring, though it gets some scenes really right.)
Les regrets (Well made and absorbing, but too similar to director Cédric Kahn’s earlier movie L’ennui.)
Two Lovers (Well observed and very well performed, but as with James Gray’s other movies, the emphasis on style and tone comes at the expense of dramatic oomph.)
The House of the Devil (OMG it’s the scariest movie of the year! Except it’s actually just really slow and the ending is silly rather than scary. A damn shame. I really wanted to like it.)
Franklyn (As with House of the Devil, the kind of low-budget labour of love I really wanted to support, but just couldn’t. I look forward to future films by both filmmakers, though.)

Not Disappointing, Not Great, But Still Worth Watching Movie Of The Year: Extract


As with Office Space, Mike Judge expends a lot of energy introducing a plot that gets abandoned two thirds of the way through and then just sort of gets resolved in a half-arsed manner. Also, lots of great character actors do terrific work, but often get given some rough material and unfinished arcs to work with. Nevertheless, this is the charm of Mike Judge’s work. It’s not polished or finessed, and even in this rough diamond state allows for more laughs — and satirical heft — than most comedies released. It’s just a shame that the energy peters out with such predictability (with the caveat that Ben Affleck is hilarious all the way through). Though it’s not fashionable to say it, I’m increasingly of the opinion that his strongest movie is coincidentally his angriest: Idiocracy. Every revisit to that movie makes me laugh more. Maybe in time it will be considered his best work.

Most Tediously Conservative Remake of the Year: Race To Witch Mountain


That’s right, it’s not The Taking of Pelham 123. That was indeed a terrible and pointless remake, but it at least had some awareness of what made the original memorable. Tony Scott and Brian Helgeland kept some moments that worked, threw out the rest, and added some very annoying modern accoutrements (post-Die Hard banter between villain and hero, swearing, the Internet). That sucked, but the latest remake of the Witch Mountain stories was a different kind of crappy remake. More mediocre than bad, but formed by a series of stupid and unadventurous choices. The original movie — directed by the quirky British director John Hough — was a peculiar beast, made during a period when Disney’s live-action movies felt like they were made by people who were thinking their story through instead of just glomming bits together from other films. Not all of those movies were great, but they were certainly lively. This remake dropped all of the atmosphere and ambiguous plotting in favour of a predictable Fifth Element carbon-copy complete with cab driver. It’s horribly boring, makes fun of SF fans, and completely wastes two of the hottest and most appealing lead actors ever (Dwayne Johnson and Carla Gugino, who should be running Hollywood by now). Avoid like the plague.

Okay, one more to go. It’s really trivial. That’s a warning.

Love And Violence At The London Film Festival

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Though I’ve lived in London for a decade, it was only this year that I finally joined the BFI and made an effort to attend the London Film Festival. Even when a colleague saw the original cut of Miike’s Ichii The Killer (which he maintains is far superior to the really quite tedious UK cut included on this DVD), I was not compelled to try. If the giddy joy I experienced this year is anything to go by, mark me down as a fool for not trying earlier. I’ve not been this excited about a cultural event since 2000, when Scott Walker’s Meltdown festival on London’s Southbank featured Smog, Jim O’Rourke, Elliott Smith, Jarvis Cocker, and the unforgettable Fuckhead, all in the same week.

Perhaps I’m most excited as the movies I saw were, for the most part, extremely good, not to mention impossible to see in the UK any time soon. Enter The Void, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Les regrets, White Material, Extract, Metropia and Valhalla Rising don’t have release dates yet, and some of the others are coming out slowly. The Men Who Stare At Goats is out now, with The Informant!, Un prophète, We Live in Public, and Up In The Air rolling out over the next couple of months. Getting a jump on some of these was essential, as I plan to spend the rest of the year catching up with as many movies as possible before the traditional end of year Shades of Caruso Listmania! event happens. At the moment I think I have my top ten sorted, though there are still a couple of yet-to-be-released films that could crack the list. We shall see.

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There’s no doubt in my mind that Jacques Audiard’s Un prophète is on my list. Newcomer Tahar Rahim — in one of the performances of the year — plays Malik El Djebena, an Arabic youth with a troubled past who is sent to prison for six years after assaulting a police officer. Though he is intent on keeping his head down, Malik’s stay is complicated by the arrival of an Arab prisoner (Reyeb – Hichem Yacoubi) who is to testify against Corsican gangster César Luciani (played like a kind of corpulent and manipulative spider/crook hybrid by the amazing Niels Arestrup). The Godfather-esque crime boss cannot approach Reyeb, who is surrounded by Arab prisoners, and so enlists Malik upon pain of death. The young boy has no choice but to kill Reyeb, leading to his estrangement from his brethren. Even worse, he is treated like a servant by the Corsican gang. Humiliated, powerless, and haunted by the murder he has committed, Malik begins to plan his revenge, but first he must better himself, consolidating allies and resources during his six year sentence.

After I stumbled from the screening, my jaw scraping along the floor like a broken fender, I found it impossible not to compare Un prophète to De Palma’s Scarface, but please don’t take that as a comment on the quality of Audiard’s film. Even as a fan of early career De Palma, the appeal of Scarface has baffled me for decades — it has struck me as one of his most misjudged films, half deathly serious cautionary tale, half gaudy semi-parodic nonsense. The one or two good setpieces are surrounded by kitsch, madness, and a horribly pitched central performance from some kind of demon who resembles mid-80s Al Pacino but can’t possibly be him because that kind of roaring caricature didn’t show up in his filmography until the 90s. If it was a demon taking Al Pacino’s place in Scarface, I reckon the name of the demon is Hooahhh, and is a distant relative of Pazuzu.

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Nevertheless, the similarities are there. Tony Montana and Malik El Djebena are immigrants who fall foul of the law and find their calling while in “prison” (actual for Malik, symbolic for Montana, who is kept in a camp for Cuban immigrants with criminal backgrounds in Florida). They both kill to get out of their tough situation, and undergo baptisms of blood (Montana in the notorious chainsaw scene, Malik in the soon-to-be-notorious razorblade seduction scene). They start off as enforcers but climb their way to the top using ruthlessness, opportunism, and pluck. There is even a straight homage later in the film, as Malik and his colleague Ryad are given the job of eliminating an associate of Luciani, a job which begins to go wrong almost immediately and ends with Malik taking matters into his own hands. Compare this to a similar scene in Scarface as Montana resists killing a Bolivian anti-government activist with a bomb. Despite being shot in similar styles, there are deviations. Malik’s decisions don’t doom him the way they do Montana, and both films have very different endings: there is no “Say hello to my leetle fren!” craziness in Un prophète. The most dramatic and satisfying moment in the final act is played out silently, and manages to be even more emotionally resonant than Montana’s final stand.

Audiard’s style couldn’t be further from De Palma’s, yet he generates far more cumulative power and tension through careful use of pace and composition. His only concession to stylistic excess comes with Malik’s dreams/hallucinations, as he is visited and advised by the ghost of Reyeb, who gives him glimpses of the future that, at least once, save his life. The fantastical touches are scattered so lightly through the film that they barely register. Compare that to De Palma’s near-insane overkill, all long takes, flashy Hitchcock references, and crash-zooming. In many of his other movies that’s just fine, but Scarface always looked like a red-tinged mess, and now — when compared to the spartan aesthetic of Audiard’s instant classic — it looks even sillier.

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Plus, while De Palma and writer Oliver Stone liked to play up Scarface‘s depiction of the American Dream gone awry in an attempt to add inject profundity into what would be more acceptable as an out-and-out exploitation flick, Audiard and his co-screenwriters (Thomas Bidegain, Abdel Raouf Dafri and Nicolas Peufaillit) touch on enough uncomfortable aspects of modern French life that — as Dafri explained prior to the screening — many politicians have used the movie to score points against their opponents. French prisons are notoriously overcrowded, and relations between French natives and Islamic immigrants are fractious, so a movie which deals so frankly with both issues is bound to be explosive. No matter how much Audiard protests that his movie has no message, the backdrop of his crime drama is portrayed vividly enough that it’s hard not to take the film as an indictment of the system as it stands. Scarface‘s message about the corrupting effect of greed on the human soul was crushed under tons of tacky sludge, and amounts to little. Here, Audiard tells the story of one young man bettering himself (at the expense of others, sadly), and speaks volumes about contemporary racial and economic politics in Europe. Everyone who adores De Palma’s movie should do everything they can to check out Un prophète, because this is how it’s done.

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Attending so many movies in such a short space of time left me greatly fatigued and mildly ill. Like some kind of Vitamin B injection, Audiard’s crime thriller gave me a burst of energy that lasted until I saw Cédric Kahn’s Les regrets. Kahn was responsible for L’ennui, one of my favourite films about sexual obsession. Adapted from a novel by Alberto Moravio, L’ennui depicts a philosophy teacher (Charles Berling) who falls for a young woman (Sophie Guillemin) to such an extent that his life falls apart as he pursues her, oblivious to her dark past. His efforts to stalk her and keep her interested in him become frantic, though as the object of his desire seems utterly unmoved by his devotion, there is a poignancy there too. It’s a memorable portrait of a man made into a fool by his desire.

Sadly, Les regrets feels like a retread of the same themes. Whereas the earlier film is an adaptation, here Kahn directs his own screenplay. Architect Mathieu (Yvan Attal) returns to his childhood home while visiting his dying mother, and accidentally encounters the former love of his life, Maya, played by Valeria Bruni Tedeschi (who spookily resembles Virginia Madsen). Though married to another architect with whom he owns a small company, Mathieu is compelled to sleep with Maya in an attempt to make right what once went wrong. At first Mathieu seems to be fighting against his urges, but it’s not long before his desire for Maya takes control of him, and he jeopardises his marriage and his career. Maya is similarly afflicted, unable to resist her attraction to her former lover, until eventually she realises that Mathieu’s obsession will destroy both of their lives. Though she recovers a little, Mathieu is too far gone, and his actions doom him.

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Les regrets is not without its pleasures. The three leads — Attal, Bruni Tedeschi, and Arly Jover as Mathieu’s neglected wife Lisa — are all wonderful, balancing on a line between absurdity and pathos with skill. Several scenes are simultaneously farcical and gutwrenching, with Mathieu and Maya racing around France to grab brief moments together, their desperate lovemaking becoming more passionate but less intimate. Late in the film Mathieu finally meets Maya’s daughter — a figure who has been mentioned but never seen — and yet this sobering collision does nothing to stop him, so determined is he to reclaim Maya’s love. Those regrets, those lost years, drive both characters to self-destructive lengths, and every so often Kahn captures a moment of panic or lust that perfectly reflects that experience and our own desire to turn back the clock and make things right with those we once loved, all while satirising the awful selfishness of these middle-class idiots who only occasionally give a damn about anyone else in their lives. The final ambiguous scene is especially damning.

Nevertheless, this feels more like a variation on a theme than a movie on its own, and as I’ve only seen once of Kahn’s movies it was especially disappointing. Perhaps if I had seen one of his thrillers (Roberto Succo or Feux rouges) this similarity would have seemed less bothersome, and certainly the stakes aren’t as high as in L’ennui, but the scenes of Attal and Bruni Tedeschi racing around to arrange one of their trysts were too familiar. Plus, I’m sure Kahn intended to make his protagonists so unlikeable, but for much of the movie the tone wavers between romantic tragedy and satire. Daisyhellcakes is convinced the movie is making fun of French erotic cinema, right down to the stolen moments of passion, the agonising and sub-poetic exhortations of love, and the overheated final act with characters passing out from stress and exploding with erotic rage. It certainly has its share of funny moments, but as a cultural visitor and heathen with only a passing knowledge of French cinema, I can’t help but feel that I was laughing at the tragedy and feeling empathy during the comedy.

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These reservations are, of course, entirely subjective. Consider Les regrets recommended, especially if you’ve not yet seen L’ennui, though I’d say that’s still the superior movie. Of course, similarity to other films isn’t really a killing blow. There was one other film we saw that was heavily indebted to another, but this film was inspired enough to add iguanas, abuse of the elderly, and an uncanny — and entirely random —  impression of Ed Sullivan. More to follow…