Listmania ’11! Miscellaneous Movie Observations: Part Three
Oh blogging. You are the occasional pastime that makes me absurdly unhappy, for the most part. That’s because I don’t do it as often as I would like, and so when I do I over do it and write posts large enough to choke Cthulhu. And this last post in Listmania metastasised as soon as I started complaining about something; griping posts tend to run out of control. Friend of the blog @Beggarsoshat said to me after my Listmania! Crew Contributions post that he looked forward to me listing my favourite dolly grip of 2011, and after I had stopped crying because of how much he had cut me to the core, I wondered if there was maybe something in that. Why not keep spinning this out? I’m scratching my blogging itch even though all I’m doing is lazily transcribing the thoughts I’ve had lying around in my “mind palace” for months anyway.
But how could I? How could I keep talking about last year’s movies when I’d only seen 120 of them? Simple; why not talk about movies released in 2010? People love reading reviews of movies released 14 months ago. I traditionally do this during Listmania! season as an aside in the last post, but as this post had already gone all top heavy, why not post this section on its own without all of the other photo-heavy stuff I had planned on posting (and which will turn up in Listmania ’11: Miscellaneous Movie Observations: Part Four, and probably Five, Six and Seven too)? And so here we are, with a couple of thousand words on three movies that I’m sure only a handful of people have already talked about. After all, the first movie here was a pretty obscure little number.
Best Film(s) From 2010 That We Saw In 2011: True Grit / Tangled
Both of these movies were released in the UK just after SoC finished its last Listmania (which was done a lot quicker and with less baloney than this one, I can tell you), but would have radically changed the state of my Best Movies of ’10 completely. Both would have breached the top ten, with True Grit possibly making it into the hallowed and legendary top five of that year. The Coens were coming off the back of one of their least accessible — but most highly regarded — films with A Serious Man, and True Grit represents one of their “crowdpleasers”, if that’s the right word, as they did with No Country For Old Men and Burn After Reading. This is a slightly different beast, too dramatic to qualify as one of their comedies, but too funny to be a tragedy. It’s the most successful blending of their two different “flavours” to date.
The pleasures of this magnificent Western are numerous, but the best thing about it is the precise dialogue, which evokes the Wild West in a way only David Milch has ever come close to achieving. This poetry — so often evident in their writing but at its most striking here — is matched by the photography by Roger “King” Deakins, who does career best work with shadows and darkness; the night-time ride to save Mattie is one of the most haunting scenes in recent cinema, a dream painted almost solely with black. Hailee Steinfeld shines in her first role, perfectly riding the line between charmingly forward and obnoxiously precocious. I can picture her playing The Hunger Games‘ Katniss Everdeen far more readily than Jennifer Lawrence — an actress I admire but who is too old for the character, as are co-stars Liam Hemsworth and Josh Hutcherson.
She’s matched by Jeff Bridges and Matt Damon, who both have their own balancing acts to do, between humour and drama. While Bridges has the flashier character to work with, Damon has a harder job, playing a dandified and ridiculous ranger LaBeouf who wins over Mattie and the audience despite being an awful blow-hard. Obviously, he succeeds; with each performance SoC realises how lucky we all are to have such a thoughtful, charming actor working today. This is not to take away from Bridges, though, who is as good here as he is in The Big Lebowski. This was already a late-career classic from the Coens, but his vastly entertaining turn pushes True Grit up there with Lebowski, Miller’s Crossing, and A Serious Man.
But I’ve had trouble figuring out whether I love it more than Disney’s Tangled, which so completely fried my brain at IMAX that I became a fervent and boring proselytist for it for months after. If you’re a 3D sceptic, this is the movie to change your mind. Seeing this in 3D, on that vast screen, was a memorable, tear-inducing experience I shall cherish forever. The whole film is great fun and filled with lovable characters (none more so than defiant horse Maximus), but the most memorable scene is also the single greatest use of 3D I’ve ever seen. Being in that room, dwarfed by the vast IMAX screen, was the most immersive cinema experience I’ve ever had. The illusion of being surrounded by floating lanterns was utterly convincing; when I wasn’t distracted by wiping tears from my eyes, that is.
The songs by Alan Menken feature lyrics from his sometime collaborator Glenn Slater; a happier fit than Stephen Schwartz, at least on this small sampling. They’re rich and funny and charming, reminiscent of his best work with the late, much-missed Howard Ashman. They’re the cherry on top of a superbly well-designed movie, that matches its symbolism (the light motif is present throughout) with its story so deftly that I wanted to applaud throughout. I’ll even go so far as to say… ::deep breath:: …I think I like it more than Beauty and the Beast, and I really loved Beauty and the Beast. It’s a triumph for Disney; a thrilling modernisation of their animation technique that pays humble tribute to the studio’s history, and possibly a portent of great things to come. SoC can’t wait to see what comes next.
Worst Film From 2010 That We Saw In 2011: Morning Glory
Until last year it looked like the movie output of Bad Robot Productions was going to be less diverse than their TV division, which has tried (and failed) to tap non-nerd audiences with Six Degrees and What about Brian? It’s worth praising them for adding Morning Glory to a roster that so far contains only sci-fi and spy movies (not counting Joy Ride), but the addition of something this unchallenging makes you wonder if Bad Robot’s other movies are as cynically produced as this. Even with a terrific cast (including Harrison Ford, in his liveliest performance since The Fugitive) and an interesting director, it has an enormous handicap: a rote script by dreaded screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna.
If Michael Bay is a cinematic villain for aiming all of his movies at the same Mountain-Dew-drinking, FHM-absorbing, Call-Of-Duty-playing fratboy demographic, then can we add Brosh McKenna to Hollywood’s rogues gallery for making numerous movies from the same template in which a doofy woman — with work skills so brilliant and yet so poorly depicted that she almost appears to have mystical powers — has trouble finding a man due to a habit of occasionally bursting with an emotion-geyser like all the normal people don’t. So far ABM has churned out 27 Dresses, The Devil Wears Prada, I Don’t Know How She Does It, and now Morning Glory; it’s almost impossible to tell the difference between them as they come tumbling down the conveyor belt like malformed Barbie dolls.
Among its crimes: trying to make us believe that Rachel McAdams’ awkwardness is representative of some large cross-section of the female audience, and that bagging Patrick “Saintly and Uncomplicated Love Interest” Wilson is some kind of victory for these mythical klutzy women; making Diane Keaton rap with 50 Cent in a display of cinematic desperation unmatched by anything else released in the past four years; punishing McAdams by making her run in high heels in almost every scene, which just makes her look like a lunatic with superhumanly strong ankles; inadvertently making Anchorman — a Dada-esque comedy — the superior comment on the treatment of women in the TV industry; setting up Harrison Ford as a villain with the AWFUL crime of criticising McAdams’ fringe/bangs; making me pine for another Bridget Jones sequel just to stop Brosh McKenna from going back to that dried-up well.
Worst of all, it attempts to make a case for breakfast news as something worthwhile, something as necessary as serious investigative journalism. Ford’s Mark Pomeroy is portrayed as a conceited horse’s ass who has a snooty attitude to the fripperies of breakfast TV, objecting to the clowning of Daybreak’s jokiest segments. We’re meant to be excited when he abandons his serious self in order to make a frittata in an effort to magically summon McAdams from her job interview with NBC (because all job interviews are done in the morning while you’re supposed to be at work).
This character moment, which shows what he is willing to sacrifice in order to placate his producer McAdams, softens him — a nice twist on the romcom trope where a romantic interest humbles himself in order to win the girl. And yet no matter what side-effects this final act has, we can’t escape the fact that this is a betrayal of a good point personified by the grizzled old news hound pining for his old career. All the way through the movie he’s right about the importance of investigative journalism, and McAdams is so averse to his philosophy that he has to lie to her to get her to cover the scandal story he’s been trying to tell her about for weeks, and only seems to recognise its value for the sake of plot convenience. And to stop her looking like a complete idiot.
This is similar to the scene in Devil Wears Prada in which Meryl Streep defends fashion from criticisms that it isn’t important. It’s a very well-acted speech by a great actress, but her claims that high fashion is what eventually trickles down to the lowest forms of clothing — that the Cerulean blue she celebrates in haute couture one month becomes the blue that everyone wears later — isn’t really the answer to the question “why should we care about fashion”, because if we weren’t wearing that shade of blue we’d just wear another. What she’s arguing for is the influence of fashion journalism, which is fine, but it’s a bit disingenuous to assume that without Vogue we wouldn’t know how to dress ourselves. Though I will say InStyle is a fine publication (one for @Ms_RH there).
So here we’re meant to swallow the line that breakfast TV is an essential component of the news cycle, that it acts as the “sugar” that sweetens the “fibre” that constitutes news. As if the world isn’t awash with sugar, while fibre is rarely present in our news diet. Anyone who watches, say, BBC Breakfast (which SoC has railed against before), will note that what little serious news is shown inbetween puff pieces and appearances by the magnificently oleaginous Chris DeBurgh is poorly researched, biased, and revealing of the presenters’ poor preparation. Any time the show covers matters of popular culture more racy than Midsomer Murders, or youth issues, will know that this is less fibre, more asbestos.
So to see a movie attempt to make excuses for something inconsequential, when in actual fact it’s salty and challenging investigative journalism that needs to be celebrated, is like hearing the self-defensive and unconvincing justifications of someone caught watching something frowned upon by others — say for example, a cliche-ridden Aline Brosh McKenna movie that sets back gender politics about 20 years. If you want to watch a breakfast show that spends more time covering Al Roker being a clown than it does serious issues, that’s your prerogative. If you want to argue that this is important, do it by making your case, not by belittling serious journalism. And Bad Robot? Stick to what you know best (i.e. lens flares).
Will this ever end? Can I keep this going forever? If not, I’m taking a break from it as soon as Listmania! is finally brought to heel, which will either be by mass reader apathy or a typing coma.
Austin Superpowers In: The Mutant Who Shagged Me
Regular readers will probably already know about my passionate hatred for X-Men Origins: Wolverine in: The Origin of The Man They Call Wolverine: The Pre-X-Men Years, which I thought was the worst major studio big-budget release OF ALL TIME, until the unforgivable Alice in Wonderland arrived and surpassed even that milestone with dispiriting ease. Many comic and superhero fans will argue that Brett Ratner’s X-Men: the Last Stand represents the franchise’s low-point, but that is at least coherent, despite its flaws, and has a sense of the operatic about it; essential if you’re adapting the legendary Dark Phoenix saga. Ratner and screenwriters Simon Kinberg and Zak Penn may have fumbled that mighty arc, but they didn’t forget the basic rules of filmmaking, which is what everyone who worked on Wolverine seemed to do.
So rejoice that Matthew Vaughn’s X-Men: First Class is better than both of those movies. It has some of the strongest acting in the franchise, some stand-out moments of undeniable superpower coolness to rival X2: X-Men United, is made with an awareness of what makes these some of these characters tick, and has some beautifully observed emotional scenes that capture the loneliness and self-loathing felt by the mutant heroes and anti-heroes – here once more standing in for all of society’s outcasts. Hell, just for casting Shades of Caruso favourite Michael “Sickeningly Hot And Talented” Fassbender as Magneto – my favourite comics supervillain, and possibly my favourite movie supervillain too – means this stands apart from the last two feeble movies.
But that doesn’t mean it’s actually good. Those praiseworthy elements are but jewels peeking out from a garbage dump composed of woeful dialogue, tonal misjudgements and surprisingly poor production values. Those few praiseworthy performances, and the emotional truth they convey, are sadly betrayed by bad editing and photography that make the whole enterprise look like it was only finished a couple of weeks ago in a mad sprint to beat the release deadline. Yet again Fox shortchanges the creatives; by now the Fox execs know the fans will watch these movies even when they’re bad (and even when they’re leaked onto the internet a couple of weeks before release). All they needed to do to make us forget the last two failures was raise expectations a little higher, and the mystifying critical praise XM:FC has received in recent weeks has ensured that.
And yet it all starts so well, mostly by focusing on Erik Lensherr’s tragic childhood and vengeful youth. Opening at exactly the same point as the first X-Men is a lovely touch, and the subsequent scene with Kevin Bacon’s evil Nazi scientist triggering Magneto’s powers with an act of horrific cruelty is brilliantly effective, evoking memories of Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds and Christoph Waltz’s magnificently horrible Hans Landa. The next few scenes, intercutting between Magneto’s quest to find the Nazi scientist – now going by the name of Sebastian Shaw – and young Charles Xavier’s first encounter and subsequent friendship with Raven Darkholme, are very promising.
This is pretty good stuff, especially Magneto’s Nazi-killing rampage, and hints that the long-considered X-Men Origins: Magneto could have been a far more interesting proposition than first thought (Sheldon Turner and Bryan Singer, who wrote the un-shot scripts for that movie, are given a story credit here, though don’t bring that up to Vaughn or he’ll cut a bitch). Giving Raven, aka Mystique, a bigger part to play in the X-Men movie mythos is a superb choice; what was previously a side-lined character in the first trilogy has now become a tragic figure along the same lines as Anna Paquin’s Rogue. Her desperate need to be loved creates an ache at the centre of this movie that generates many of its best moments.
The wheels start to come off as soon as the Hellfire Club arrive, with Kevin Bacon now dressed like Austin Powers in his groovy nightclub shagpad, and January Jones occupying a lady-shaped space on-screen in her smalls. Much has been made of the film’s retro aesthetic and vaguely Bondian plot involving the Cold War, but Vaughn pitches the tone too far towards the wacky end of the spectrum. The moment the Hellfire Club escapes from an attack in a submarine with all white interiors and an office complete with paintings evokes the Adam West Batman movie with the Joker, Penguin, and Riddler teaming up with Catwoman to dehydrate the members of the United Nations. From that moment on, the movie is, quite aptly, sunk.
The Austin Powers references in this review are entirely deliberate. As Daisyhellcakes said when we stumbled, disappointed, from the sweltering heat of Portobello Road’s Electric Cinema, “At times it felt as if it was trying to be like a comedy, but nothing in it was funny.” Vaughn seems to think he can play up to the inherent absurdity of the X-Men by making the tone silly, but his hectic, discombobulating editing from one plot thread to another makes this tonal decision utterly incomprehensible, at least early on.
For example, McAvoy plays Xavier as a lecherous and oblivious dope getting pissed in Oxford, Kevin Bacon plays Sebastian Shaw as a mustache-twirling pantomime villain complete with silly-looking henchmen, and Rose Byrne’s CIA agent Moira MacTaggart (yes, she’s not a scientist anymore) spends an excruciating scene walking around in her underwear to what is either comic effect, or… I just don’t know what. Meanwhile, Magneto is an grim, badass avenging angel of death hunting down and murdering Nazis. With no apparent narrative framework in place to connect these two differing tone, we flip back and forth between what feel like different movies, never really staying in place long enough to get comfortable or to get a sense of what the final shape of the narrative will be.
This tonal mish-mash is made worse whenever Vaughn evokes memories of Bryan Singer’s two superior franchise entries. It feels as if Singer’s achievement – balancing the unavoidable absurdity of the superhero genre with a seriousness of purpose and respect that triggered a surge in its popularity – has been forgotten or underestimated in the ten years since the first X-Men. He understood the characters, recognised their pain and made sure that even when he was puncturing the pomposity of the genre, there was a solemness to the characters that never really went away. That’s not to say he piled on the modish pain; those movies were still fun, but they were weighty.
Vaughn’s movie is the opposite of weighty for much of its length, with only the Magneto and Mystique arcs – and one final, brilliant showdown – providing respite from the shockingly daft proceedings. While this might mean the franchise now finds a new audience, it also means that what was so welcome in Singer’s movies has now been utterly eradicated. Even Ratner’s movie honoured that atmosphere of sadness more than Wolverine and First Class (by which I mean Wolverine cried again). And yes, I expect spluttering indignation at that statement, but if it makes you feel better I really did hate it.
I get that there is a vocal section of fandom (and non-fandom) that will welcome the excision of the grim dramatics, but this comes at the expense of drama; there is almost no sense within First Class that there is anything at stake until midway through the big finale, pretty much as soon as the awful wire-work chase between Angel and Banshee is finally, mercifully over. Even the mid-movie action scene with the Hellfire Club attacking the CIA compound housing the proto-X-Men is curiously unsuspenseful, feeling more like a staccato compilation of action beats than a coherent set-piece.
The woeful editing again undercuts this tension by hurrying past big moments, rarely showing the consequences of actions or emotional beats. Than again, there are also numerous narrative shortcuts taken throughout that smack of budgetary restraint or release-date haste, many of which involve shaky effects (one shot of Beast running fast made me want to walk out of the cinema and never look back) or tricks as unintentionally hilarious as rotating the frame to depict a spinning plane. I understand that Fox are not in the business of spending money on their superhero films, prefering instead to cynically rely on marketing muscle to get audiences into cinemas, but some of these choices are farcical, robbing the movie of any authority.
However we should all also be grateful to Michael Fassbender and Jennifer Lawrence, who give their all yet again, selling their tragic roles brilliantly; it’s arguable that their commitment is worth the extortionate ticket price all on their own. This is Fassbender’s highest-profile role yet, and allows him to supply young Magneto with new superpowers; insane hotness, charisma and the ability to be the only person on the planet to look good in rollneck sweaters. The man will be a star by the end of the weekend, hopefully. Lawrence proves that she’s no flash-in-the-pan with another nuanced performance. Though I was initially sceptical, the decision to cast her as Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games really seems shrewd now.
James McAvoy is okay, though the choice to make his arc a transition from tiresomely enthusiastic dope to noble martyr in a wheelchair is nowhere near as well-drawn as Erik’s transition into ruthless human-hating Magneto (and even that isn’t done as well as you would hope, with some leaps of faith required of the viewer by the final act). It doesn’t help that I could understand only about half of his dialogue. His chemistry with Fassbender is good, though; the decision to make them play chess in unusual locales, less so. That’s not as bad as his repeated gesture of pressing his fingers to his temple whenever using his powers. In keeping with this movie’s unfortunate resemblance to the Austin Powers movie, McAvoy’s gesture is now the equivalent of Dr. Evil’s pinky move (thanks to Daisyhellcakes for spotting that).
It’s the rest of the cast that let the side down badly. Poor January Jones, in her white undies, cannot even convey “I’m thinking at you with my supertelepathy” with any sense of conviction, and when required to speak everything falls apart. Less a snarky ice-maiden than a mildly bored housewife who doesn’t really like her lot in life (what a surprise!), she lets the fans down. Part of me had hoped that a combination of directorial effort and superior writing would entice a better performance from her, but one moment, where she gets some ice for her sexist boss Shaw and sighs dramatically to convey her sadness, is a contender for laziest acting choice in thespian history.
At least she gets some stuff to do. Some of the kids playing the proto-X-Men end up coming off as deeply unlikeable (Caleb Landry Jones’ Banshee is particularly irksome), but then they’re so underwritten they can’t really be blamed for that (re: Landry Jones, he was good in The Last Exorcist, so I will point blame elsewhere). Rose Byrne uses her patented Worried Face, and brandishes a gun at one point. Perhaps this is intentional; MacTaggart only really seems to be in the movie to be mocked by the other characters. Another actor, playing Matt Craven’s second-in-command, gives one of the most bizarre hammy performances I’ve ever seen in a major motion picture. I couldn’t take my eyes off him; not a compliment, I should stress. I won’t name him, as I feel bad enough about this complaining already.
The poorly-judged and frankly amateurish problems don’t stop there. The compositions are always slightly off, undercutting the tension almost as much as the imprecise editing. Jokes are attempted but fail. Scenes are cut too short to generate emotions, and those scenes that are longer often trundle along with no point – a stilted introduction scene with the proto-X-Men bonding in a cafeteria is particularly painful to watch, though that’s nothing compared to a risible late-movie training montage that lacks the dramatic gravity of the “Montage!” scene in Team America. And seriously, if you can watch the final conversation between Xavier and Moira without cringing, then you’re a sturdier person than I.
It doesn’t help that Vaughn takes on way too much for one movie. That dreadful rush to fill in the blanks that made the last half an hour of Revenge of the Sith feel so hysterically cramped lasts throughout First Class‘ entire two hour run. Two movies would have given plenty of time for Vaughn to tell every story he wants to tell here, and then some. Instead its a mad gambol from Poland to Westchester to Switzerland to Oxford to Argentina to Las Vegas back to Oxford and then to Washington and eventually Russia for about five minutes and then etc. etc. etc. Locales flash by, character moments are introduced then dropped, momentous events happen and are then left behind with no room for reflection or pause because another momentous event is right on its tail. The effect is that nothing sticks; a problem that affected Ratner’s X-Men movie. Except for odd flashes, the movie left me feeling utterly cold.
That was how Vaughn’s first two movies – Layer Cake and Stardust – made me feel. They were all surface, with enough evidence that Vaughn was obviously trying very hard to make those movies memorable but only as noble failures. Kick-Ass qualified as a pure triumph, however (at least IMO), and made this movie such an appealing prospect. Who knows what went wrong – or what addition to the equation made Kick-Ass go so right – but that doesn’t change the fact that this is not the movie we fans had hoped for. Oh sure, as a nerd it occasionally made me very happy. There are a couple of delightful cameos that prove this was made with a certain amount of love, and for that I’m grateful.
So, it’s better than X-Men: The Last Stand and Wolverine, but really only by default. Vaughn and Goldman and the Fringe writing duo of Ashley Stentz and Zack Miller (who also wrote the far superior Thor) obviously care about the characters and the franchise, but for one reason or another it just feels more like a badly-made parody than a drama. Many have claimed that this movie shows the franchise still has legs, but it really needs a far more drastic shake-up than just revisiting the old material from a different angle. It needs a Nolanising, if you will. By that I don’t mean a serious, realistic take; more that a good filmmaker needs to come along and, with the backing of his studio, commits as fully to making the X-Universe work as Nolan or Singer did – as might have happened if Darren Aronofsky did make The Wolverine. Because right now, these regrettably laughable rush-jobs just aren’t cutting it anymore.
The Top One Hundred and Six Movies of the Oughts (5-1)
The last installment of this epic list-making enterprise comes a day after the Times ran their own 100 movies of the decade list, and as expected, within moments of looking at it I regretted missing out two fantastic films: Battle Royale and School of Rock. Actually, the first movie is one I’ve only seen once, and though I remember loving it it’s been so long I’d like another chance to reappraise it at some point.
This is something that has come up frequently in our house, which contains two hardcore fans of Suzanne Collins’ fantastic Hunger Games series. Though Battle Royale — itself based on a novel by Koushun Takami — has high dementedness value, it’s arguable that Collins’ YA novel features a similarly hardline ethos. When I read it I was surprised by Collins’ willingness to take her characters to some extremely dark places. That said, Battle Royale does have one thing over Hunger Games: Chiaki Kurigama as the deadly Takako Chigusa, in a performance so eerily amoral that Tarantino hired her to play GoGo Yubari in Kill Bill Part 1. She is terrifying.
There’s a good chance watching that again might convince me it should have reached the top 100, but I already know for sure I screwed up with School of Rock. It’s one of my all-time favourite movies, and one I had only just recently had a chat about with friends of Daisyhellcakes, so there really is no excuse for missing it off. I’m a fan of Jack Black and tend to ignore criticisms of him, especially when he has recently excelled as my beloved Po in Kung Fu Panda: a role that he was born to play. I even liked him in the not-great-but-not-terrible-either Year One, and thought pairing him with Michael Cera was an inspired choice that needed to have been made on a better movie. So yeah, considering School of Rock is the perfect vehicle for him, mixing his endearing/obnoxious immaturity and his sincerity better than almost anything he has been involved with.
I’ve heard some people criticise Richard Linklater for selling out and making a mainstream movie, but the level of commitment from everyone involved — and Linklater’s surprising facility with the most likeable cast of teenagers ever assembled for a movie — marks this as a triumph for dedicated filmmaking no matter what studio it was made for. I’m so pissed that I missed this off: it would definitely have been in the top 30, maybe even top 20. This omission tells me it’s been too long since I’ve seen it.
And what do you know, Jack Black appears in one of the top five movies as a very angry biker, and Richard Linklater directed another of them. It’s as if it was meant to be. Remember, this list has been built with one important caveat: I’m not including movies from this year as I’ve not yet had time to get acquainted with them. As a result I’m going from 1999 – 2008. This might seem silly considering everyone else is doing it from 2000 – 2009, but I feel safer sticking with movies I know well instead of including stuff from this year that I’ll just go off in time, and if I started it in 2000 I’d only be considering 9 years of films. Also this timeframe matches my arrival in The Big Smoke, and so has subjective value. The reason why this special list-ruining rule is important now will become clear very soon…
5. Anchorman
What had seemed, before release, to be little more than a one-joke movie about 70s fashion and workplace sexual prejudice was something much, much more than that: a Dada-esque parody of a vast number of cinema and TV cliches, racing past the dreary pastiche of the 70s that it could have been, and coming to rest in a parallel universe where all bets were off. Ferrell and director/co-writer Adam McKay slaved over the script and rehearsed with their incredible cast for months before shooting began to come up with as many alternate lines as possible, and even had two B-plots, allowing them to construct a “sequel” — Wake Up, Ron Burgundy — from the leftover scraps. Freed of storytelling logic, and willing to play with audience expectations, the viewer has no idea what will come next. A crazed Yazz Flute solo? A huge fight between rival news teams? A dog talking to a bear? No matter what they threw at you, it made a kind of twisted sense in this baffling world. At the risk of sounding like boring nerds, it’s a rare day when we don’t quote Anchorman in some capacity, which is either testament to our lameness, or the almost infinite genius of this film. It deserves a place in the Comedy Hall of Fame alongside Blazing Saddles, Duck Soup, Sleeper, This Is Spinal Tap, and Airplane!
Best Moment: There are countless wonderful scenes and lines in this, but this moment from a deleted scene shows how even the alternate versions of the finalised movie featured incredible moments. Not only is Ferrell’s hysteria inspired, check out how Brian Fantana (Paul Rudd) races into the studio. Perhaps that’s what I like about this: every time there is an opportunity for a stupid joke, Ferrell and co. take it.
4. Before Sunset
Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise was the perfect romantic movie for those who shared the ages of the onscreen couple of Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. Their impulsive and idealistic romance would most appeal to those who had not yet reached a point in life where hopping off a train in Vienna to spend time with a complete stranger would seem like a terribly risky idea. Going back to that movie as I grew older, its appeal remained, but more and more it seemed like a fantasy. The sequel came at exactly the right moment, just as I had suddenly decided to take an impulsive step of my own, and so my first experience of seeing it was already ripe with subjective emotion. Even to those who were not embarking on their own journey of romantic discovery when first seeing this, surely its intelligence and careful expansion of the themes of the first movie would impress them. Bravely showing how Jesse and Céline have changed and matured in the nine years since their first meeting, Linklater uses its real-time format to cram in as much discussion about the nature of love, regret, and the effect of time on memory as he possibly can, with his two leads improving on their already impressive work from the first movie. Without a doubt, it’s the most profound and most life-affirming romantic movie ever made.
Best Moment: For much of its length it feels like a realistic riposte and negation of the flighty romanticism of the original, pitching it perfectly at an audience that had been optimistic when seeing the first film, but were maybe feeling less romantic when seeing the second. Linklater’s masterstroke comes in the final moments, where he shows those who might have “grown up” that maybe that impulsiveness was still something to aspire to. Objectively, an amazing note to end on. Subjectively, it was an unnervingly accurate depiction of what I was going through there and then. I will be eternally grateful to all who worked on it.
3. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
If ever a movie was crying out to be made into a franchise, it’s this one. Peter Weir’s phenomenally entertaining adaptation of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series is pure joy from beginning to end. Russell Crowe was criticised by fans of the series as being wrong for the role, but he is utterly believable as a man who is a fool on land but a genius at sea. Paul Bettany as the stiff Maturin is less of a stretch, but his work is just as endearing, and the relationship between them both is perfectly played. With Aubrey as Kirk and Maturin as an amalgam of Spock and Bones, it’s almost like watching an episode of Star Trek, though easily the best one ever made. With a humbling attention to detail only matched by Peter Jackson, a mastery of mood and pace borne of years of making underrated classics, and the understanding of cinema’s power that would drive even the most cynical audience to the edge of its seat, director Weir has created a modern marvel with seeming effortlessness. A repeated refrain — from myself, Daisyhellcakes, film critic Anne Billson, and several other people who I have seen this movie with and watched their indifference transformed into awestruck adoration — is that it could have continued for another two hours and it wouldn’t have been a chore. On the contrary. I, and many others, would love to see this series go on for as many movies as can be made from O’Brian’s books, and have leaped on every scrap of sequel news as if it were a liferaft. If I ever win a EuroMillions rollover, bankrolling a new movie will be my first — and biggest — splurge.
Best Moment: Too many to mention, with multiple high notes including Crowe’s bluff performance, Bettany’s lovable snootiness, exquisitely rendered battle scenes, and an amusing side-trip to the Galapagos for Stephen Maturin, here portrayed as a proto-Darwin. It’s impossible to find clips that haven’t been tampered with, so let this review from Roger Ebert and Richard Roeper stand in their place. Basically, what they said, and then some. It’s a magnificent adventure.
2. The Incredibles
The only bad thing I can say about Brad Bird’s superhero movie is that it renders moot any attempt to make a Fantastic Four movie, which of course didn’t stop 20th Century Fox from trying and failing to do just that. Twice. In the space of a single movie Bird showed us how flexible Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s original creations were by adapting the “Superfamily” metaphor into the tale of an actual family of Supers, forced (like the JSA) to hide their powers from an increasingly hostile public. From there Bird is free to satirise our litigious culture, paralysed by bureaucracy, all while providing entertainment on a level even the best of Pixar had yet to achieve. Though criticism has been levelled at him for making a movie that seemed to celebrate Ayn Rand’s Objectivist philosophy — with the exceptional people of the world forced to curb their efforts to change the world by those who are less exceptional — as with Ratatouille Bird is merely interested in seeing people using their knowledge and skills to help others instead of taking shortcuts and chasing fame and fortune (Syndrome and Linguini both over-reach, misunderstanding the importance of experience and intelligence, though at least Linguini learns his lesson and finds a way to excel in the final act).
What could be more inspirational than saying you should be true to yourself and then use your talents to make the world a better place? And what could be more thrilling than Bird’s staging of some of the greatest superhero moments ever committed to film? With the help of Michael Giacchino’s rousing, playful score, and some of the best voicework of recent times (No surprise that Craig T. Nelson’s best performance is found here, but could this be Holly Hunter’s finest moment too?), Bird delivers a series of bravura setpieces, respectfully paying homage to early James Bond movies and classic 50s and 60s superhero tales while still keeping things fresh. As I’ve said before, this was the decade in which the superhero genre came into its own, but it was The Incredibles that represented the ultimate expression of the things that make superheroes appealing: it’s inspiring, it’s fun, and it’s spectacular. Pixar will struggle to top this beautiful moment. If I was compiling a list of movies released between 2000 and 2009, it would be number one with a bullet.
Best Moment: An early trailer for The Incredibles made it seem like a mere superhero spoof. Though those movies can be fun (Kinka Usher and Neil Cuthbert’s entertaining adaptation of Bob Burden’s Mystery Men was another movie that could have found a place on this list), I had hoped for more from Pixar. As it progressed a seriousness of purpose became apparent beneath the brightly-coloured surface, but when Helen Parr and her children Dash and Violet are fired upon by Syndrome it becomes clear that the stakes here are deadly serious. At that moment, The Incredibles went from being a good movie to a truly great one, something that touched on every emotion in the spectrum. I was utterly smitten, and have been ever since.
1. The Matrix
For those who know me, this is no surprise (and before anyone accuses me, my fudging of the parameters of this list was not an intentional move to allow me to wax rhapsodic about it). However, to anyone who has come through this list expecting a more respected movie, this might come as a disappointment. Though it was admired on release, familiarity and two unloved sequels have made it easy to forget how groundbreaking this was. SF fans who were once thrilled to see a cerebral and exciting science fiction film have long since decided that this is as embarrassing and soft-SF as other unloved and bone-headed mainstream efforts. It’s not hard-SF, I have heard. It’s just a pastiche of Philip K. Dick’s ideas, a brainless and shallow action flick that pisses faux-profundities down its leg like a village idiot dressed like a goth. Admitting to loving this movie has proved as fraught as saying I loved Titanic. Which I didn’t. But I’ve heard enough anti-Matrix complaints to last a lifetime, and that’s before we get to the knee-jerk criticisms about how Keanu can’t act. Yes yes, that’s very perceptive of you all.
None of this matters to me. Seeing The Matrix for the first time was an epiphany. The Wachowskis collected ideas about the nature of reality, society-as-form-of-oppression, anarchic resistance to control structures, and the power of self-belief, and then mixed them up with cutting-edge visual effects, explosions, and martial arts action. It was as if they had made the movie I had been waiting my whole life to see, and since then nothing has matched that feeling of awestruck recognition, something akin to a waking dream. It was as if a movie had ravished my brain and injected my heart with adrenaline. I walked on air for months after.
Ten years later, it might be time to give The Matrix another chance. The Wachowskis might be amateur philosophers giving Cliff’s Notes abbreviations of challenging philosophical ideas, but as a primer for further exploration, it can’t be beat. It’s no coincidence that after seeing this I read Baudrillard and Debord and Chomsky, my interest in political and moral philosophy finally overtaking my previous fascination with epistomology. This may not have turned me into Christopher Hitchens (thank God), but it made me — and many others — take note of the injustices intrinsic to the structure of our society, and how it has become increasingly difficult to escape that Black Iron Prison. It deepened my appreciation of PKD as well, and the rest of the decade saw me expanding my reading habits. In that way it is laid the groundwork for Lost, probably the most thematically complex pop culture artifact ever. Another reason to love it.
It’s no exaggeration to say it changed cinema. Many of the visual conventions that the Wachowskis borrowed from anime have since been “borrowed” from them and overused to the point of cliche, but we should only blame the brothers for being smart enough to recognise the appeal of these images. It was probably the first time famous actors were expected to undergo intensive martial arts training in order to perform many of the stunts themselves. Its visual effects were not just technically impressive but also looked unlike anything else, and represented a break from the traditional SF conventions of space battles and giant monsters. And it also featured some of my favourite characters ever: treacherous Cypher, lovestruck Trinity, naive Neo, deadly Mr. Smith, and — best of all — Morpheus, the man who sets it all in motion, played by the coolest cat in cinema, Mr. Laurence Fishburne. As with many other movies on this list it technically doesn’t belong in this decade, but to me this decade started the moment I saw this, and everything since has been a post-script. Even the sequels cannot ruin it.
Best Moment: I’m sure this cod-Buddhist speechifying will make a lot of people cringe, but when I first saw this, and Morpheus says the big line, it took all of my energy to not leap to my feet and scream “YES!” at the top of my lungs.
And that’s that. A big big thank you to all of those who have checked out these posts and sent me kind comments on Facebook and Twitter. Hopefully, though a lot of my choices were pretty obvious, there have been a couple of mentions here or there that have inspired you to go back and check out a movie you’ve forgotten or avoided, and I certainly hope that you enjoy whichever film it is you end up watching. There are more lists to come at the end of the year as I go over the movies I’ve seen in 2009. Fingers crossed those don’t get out of hand, though I already suspect they will.
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Shades of Caruso Mini-Blog- Listmania ’11! The Best Movies Of The Year December 31, 2011
