Important Notice Pt. 2

My new blog can be found here:

http://lostincelluloid.wordpress.com/

I'll be carrying on exactly the same as before there, only hopefully better.

An Important Notice

As of tonight, this blog will no longer be in use. I've become a traitor and decamped to Wordpress. By tomorrow it should be up and running and I'll post the link to it on here. There will be a shiny Les Miserables review waiting for you.

Thanks for reading, and please don't stop.

Top Twenty of 2012

Christmas is going, the geese are presumably losing weight and it's the end of another year. Which means it's time for me to cast my eye back over the year in film and pick out twenty of my favourites.

But first, a New Years Resolution

Over the past few months, several (okay, about three) people have asked me what happened to this blog, and even told me to start writing again. Unfortunately over the last semester I was swamped by university work and ran out of time for blogging. I want to apologise for anyone who feels they've been unable to attend the cinema without my guidance (indulge me) and I promise I will be back to wasting my life writing about things I've seen on a screen very shortly. We're heading into awards season now, so I'll have plenty to chew one. Sorry for the absence, and thanks for reading.

And now back to the list...

A few disclaimers:

• This is not an attempt to make a definitive 'Best of the Year' list. Neither is it entirely down to personal preference. Instead it is an attempt to bridge those two, although it ended up being a completely arbitrary list of films that tumbled into an order that looked about right.
• All entries are based on UK release date.
• I tried hard to catch up with as much as possible, but here are a few films that I wasn't able to see in time to be considered: Argo, Rust & Bone, The Grey, Tabu, 5 Broken Cameras, The Innkeepers, This Is Not a Film, Silver Linings Playbook, Goodbye First Love, Life of Pi, Room 237

20. Into The Abyss- The year wouldn't be complete without anything from Werner Herzog. His documentary on the American death penalty found time for small moments of humanity and compassion while still tackling the big questions of what drives a person, and indeed a state, to kill. Although the sense that he's preaching to the choir makes this something of a lesser Herzog film, he makes clear his objection to the death penalty early on and remains objective throughout.

19. Magic Mike- One of the most unexpected surprises of the year came from Steven Soderbergh's ageing male-stripper drama that took its cake, then decided to eat it anyway. It's an exploitation film that doesn't exploit and a film with morals that doesn't moralise. Soderbergh never once seems to be excusing his subject matter, and it's the sort of film where a group of male strippers sit on a beach discussing share prices and the economy.

18. Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai- Takashi Miike has never been a director know for his restraint, which makes this slow burning remake of a Japanese classic (which I'll confess to never having seen) all the more surprising. It's an elegantly bleak peeling back of the Samurai myth to reveal the gangrenous flesh beneath. If there's a problem, it's that after the ominous opening, the middle is so restrained that it almost grinds to a halt, but it finds its feet again for a stunning finale.

Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai

17. Cosmopolis- A surprisingly low showing for Cosmopolis, given my love for David Cronenberg and my endless gushing about it after leaving the cinema. Perhaps in hindsight it's a little too cold for its own good, lacking in re-watchability. Still, it's an intelligent and razor sharp offering from the Canadian auteur, and it proves there's more to Robert Pattinson than sparkly vampires.

16. The Hunt- Thomas Vinterberg mainly has old ideas to put forward in his tale of an innocent man accused of child abuse, but he screams them with a forceful sincerity that's impossible to fault. It's a disturbingly timely release, and the magnificently downtrodden central performance from Mad Mikkelsen takes you into the heart of a community gripped by hysteria.

The Hunt

15. Skyfall- Skyfall seems to contain all the usual building blocks of a Bond film, but they're carefully slid into place to show off their unexplored angles in one of the most solidly enjoyable entries in the entire franchise. Maybe it's goodwill after the awful Quantum of Solace, the foregrounding of the formidable Judi Dench, or the titanic presence of a scenery chewing Javier Bardem. Even the usually portentous Sam Mendes seems to be enjoying himself as he blows the cobwebs off a creaky old skeleton of a franchise, and it's hard not to share in his enthusiasm.

14. Killer Joe- 2012 marked the resurgence of Matthew Mcconaughey, and nowhere was he better than as the title character in William Friedkin's Southern-fried noir. His blood-freezing performance gave an icy core to the swampy waters of the rest of the film, but less obvious is the brilliant Juno Temple. It does for fried chicken what Reservoir Dogs did for Stuck In the Middle With You.

Killer Joe

13. Berberian Sound Studio- Toby Jones remains one of the most dependable character actors working today, and it's his solid presence that holds Peter Strickland's not-quite-horror down where otherwise it might blow away. It's a magnificently creepy film about the insidious possibilities of sound, but it has a third act that goes up one gear too many. Strickland pogos head first off the diving board of narrative sense, but overshoots his mark and ends up further out in uncharted waters than he probably intended.

12. Beasts of the Southern Wild- It falls short of the poetic masterpiece status thrust upon it at it's festival showings, but this debut from Benh Zeitlin is still packed with a creativity and imagination that's hard to fault. Its amateur cast rise to the challenge admirably, with the impossibly young Quvenzhané Wallis proving to be a miniature force of nature. Its reach ultimately exceeds its grasp, but its ambition is admirable. 

11. Marth Marcy May Marlene- Of all the films I was forced to leave out of my top ten, this was the most heartbreaking decision. But in the end, it had to be done, even if it is a beautifully constructed horror story of shifting identities, and the central performance by Elizabeth Olsen is one of the year's very best. Take it then not as a failure for this film, but as a testament to just how good a year 2012 really was.

10. The Cabin in The Woods- There's no shortage of writers and directors trying to be the new wild child of cinema. Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon seem content to be Hollywood's resident smart-arses. The Cabin in the Woods is at once a loving tribute and a parentally concerned satire of horror that pokes around in its very mechanics with a pair of rusty, blood-stained tweezers. It is also, quite possibly, the funniest film I saw all year, and features the finest use of a unicorn ever.

9. Sightseers- There's something sick at the heart of Britain in this perfect storm from director Ben Wheatley and stars/writers Steve Oram and Alice Lowe as the couple on a caravan killing spree. Like Mike Leigh making Video Nasties, it's a delicate balancing act between icy black humour, mean spirited horror and some delicate social commentary. It's a testament to the three main talents that it never once falters. It doesn't have the sheer disarming weirdness of Wheatley's Kill List, but it will ensure that you never hear The Power of Love in quite the same way again.

The Imposter

8. The Imposter- 2012 was a brilliant year for documentaries, and few were finer than Bart Layton's The Imposter. Its 'so mad it must be true' story sees the missing child of an American family miraculously returned to them, albeit the wrong age, hair colour and with a French accent. Could it be that he's not who he says he is? (Hint: he isn't) It could be a film about the fluidity of identity or the elusivity of truth, but mostly its worth the watch for the moments where you wonder if it's all a hoax.

7. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia- Once again we find ourselves watching a search for the truth. This time it's a long dark night of the soul as a group of police, a doctor, a prosecutor and a murder suspect search aimlessly for a body on the Anatolian steppe. Unfolding at a languorous pace, we slowly come to learn more about these disparate characters, and that all of them hold their own secrets. It's the kind of film you can watch over and over again, picking up new layers of meaning from the tiniest of nuances every single time. Even now I'm wondering if it should be slightly higher. Perhaps time will see it slowly creeping past the next few titles.

6. Searching for Sugarman- It seems that all the best documentaries this year were concerned with finding the truth. Searching for Sugarman was about the search for the truth behind the myth of Sixto Rodriquez; an American singer from the 60s who faded into obscurity everywhere except South Africa. There he became a hero to anti-apartheid liberals, who assumed he was as big as Dylan or The Beatles in America. It's a powerful and uplifting exploration of the necessary building of a myth, and it will introduce you to the poetic protest-folk of Rodriguez himself.

5. The Raid- Some films make you consider the infinite possibilities of life, the universe and everything. And then there are some where people get their heads smashed to a pulp and their shins kicked into splinters. The Raid is one of the finest, most blood-splatteringly violent action movies I have ever seen. The feats of physicality are more impressive than a dozen histrionic Oscar-bait performances and director Gareth Evans puts Hollywood to shame with his demonstration of the way great action should be shot. Perhaps the best praise I can give to The Raid is that I can imagine it still being passed around by word of mouth many years from now.

The Raid

4. Amour- The title is in no way ironic. Haneke may have spent his career lambasting bourgeois complacency, but this is a painfully frank and honest depiction of love in the twilight of life. It helps that the performances by Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva are so rounded and beautifully understated. But its refusal to look away from their suffering makes it a hard film to watch. A perfect film then, a beautiful one and a truly great one. But I don't think I can ever watch it again.

3. Moonrise Kingdom- No one could ever doubt Wes Anderson's formal brilliance or his off-kilter humour, but with Moonrise Kingdom he finally found what he seemed to have lost: a heart. He clearly cares about his lovestruck young runaways just as much as the adults searching for them, making this his warmest and funniest dissection of American dysfunction in a long while. An esteemed cast inlcuding Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, Frances McDormand and Tilda Swinton bring their deadpan best, but this is a film that belongs to its child stars. There's no smugness of precociousness here, just brilliant performances and rounded characters trying to find there place in a world of skewed wonders. Is it a better film than Amour? No, but this is my personal list, and I say it goes here.

Moonrise Kingdom

Which brings us to the top spot. That's right, after making you read through the whole list I still haven't given you a simple Number 1. I found it impossible to choose between these two, and so here are my joint first films of the year:

1. Holy Motors & The Master

The Master

The Master- I have to confess first that I'm an unashamed, card carrying member of the cult of Paul Thomas Anderson. He's one of the bravest filmmakers working today, continuously casting off the shackles of his influences as he expands upon his own mercurial vision. With The Master, he continues forward on the journey into America's heart of darkness that he began with There Will Be Blood. This is a post-war America of shattered lives and aimless souls, bathed in the glow of stunning cinematography as they desperately search for meaning and for the comfort of the past. It features three of the year's best performances from Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams, but it's as much a triumph for Anderson himself. He's assembled it in an almost collage manner, free-wheeling between disconnected scenes of character study. I fully understand why this put so many people off, but personally I'd be happy to sit through every second that Anderson shot.

Holy Motors

Holy Motors- What can I tell you about Leos Carax' Holy Motors? That it's a kaleidoscopic, surreal, pyschogenic fugue of myriad meanings? All that is true, but it would only serve to make it sound horribly portentous, and to make you stop reading. It would fail to take into account just how enjoyable, how funny and how full of life Holy Motors really is. The extraordinary Denis Lavant plays Oscar, an enigmatic man ferried around Paris in a limousine, adopting a series of disguises for his increasingly surreal encounters. It is strange and it might well be meaningful, but it also has a gleeful wit and brio as it pinballs from one bizarre scenario to another. Perhaps we're supposed to read meaning into this jumble. Or perhaps we're supposed to sit back and enjoy the ride as Oscar becomes a mad vagrant, a disapproving father, a violent thug, a smooth businessman. It's cinematic spectacle without the restraint that comes with making sense, and it's all the better for it. Oscar tells us this himself, when asked what makes him continue: “What made me start”, he replies “the beauty of the act.”

The Master (2012)

The Master is not a film about Scientology. It is neither the cult expose or the thinly veiled L. Ron Hubbard biopic that so many were expecting back when it was first announced. Instead it sees director Paul Thomas Anderson returning to the marginal lives and restless souls of his 1997 breakthrough Boogie Nights. Joaquin Phoenix plays Freddie Quell, a WWII veteran and deeply troubled alcoholic drifter who finds himself drawn to writer Lancaster Dodd and his faith based movement The Cause. If There Will Be Blood was a dark fable of the men who built America on a foundation of greed and brutality, then The Master is about the attempts to reassemble it in a shattered, post-war world.

Anderson abandons conventional narrative almost completely in favour of character drama as Dodd's creation grows and he attempts to locate and heal the source of Freddie's unrest. As the ambiguously intentioned Dodd, Philip Seymour Hoffman reassures everyone that he's still one of the finest actors of his generation, his charmingly arrogant demeanour and explosions of startling rage a mixture of Hubbard and Orson Welles. One of the film's biggest surprises is his steely wife Peggy, played entirely against type by a Machiavellian Amy Adams. The implication that she is the real mastermind behind The Cause is one of the film's many avenues left tantalisingly unexplored.

Nobody is anything less than perfect, but Phoenix is beyond extraordinary. Freddie is a fascinating creation, demanding and deserving of comparisons to the great outsiders of cinema; to the likes of Travis Bickle, Randle McMurphy and Jim Stark. It's a performance of both jaw-dropping magnitude and heartbreaking subtlety. Phoenix's entire body is bent out of shape, and his remarkable face is twisted into a permanent mask of inscrutable pain and regret. Whenever his anger bursts out in acts of physical violence, as it often does, it's easy to believe that Anderson simply set Phoenix loose and pointed a camera at the ensuing chaos. No matter how the rest of The Master fares with audiences, critics or awards ceremonies, I have little doubt that Phoenix's performance will go down as a truly great one.

These characters dominate the screen, and Anderson gives them suitable scenery to chew. The cinematography is without a doubt the most breathtakingly stunning that you will see all year, and the period detail is beyond reproach. It is set in a perfectly recreated world, and yet it may as well take place on Mars. There's a surreal, disconnected feel to this world that is as unrecognisable and dreamlike as Freddie's hazy recollections of his past. How much of this is his memories? How much of it is even real? Anderson isn't telling.

It's hard not to admire the bravery of Anderson's technique. In many ways he has become the anti-Quentin Tarantino. Whereas the once great Tarantino has retreated further into his fortress of movie geek references with every film, Anderson has shot off the rails of conventional cinema completely and is now ploughing his own trail through uncharted territory. Undoubtedly brave, but certainly not something that will impress everyone.

Whether you like the film or not will depend entirely on your response to its endless hall of mirrors approach. It is an ideal film for debate, but certainly not one that all will find engaging. It's a defiantly unfathomable work, shot through with a deep core of sadness. But ultimately it is a film about two men: one whose arrogance and brilliance birth something that grows far beyond his control, and one broken beyond repair. Freddie is a man in thrall to the search for his very own Rosebud; a past that may never have existed and that can never be reclaimed.

Berberian Sound Studio (2012)

Rupert Brooke famously wrote that there is “some corner of a foreign field that is for ever England”. It's a sentiment that seems particularly fitting for Toby Jones in Peter Strickland's not-quite-horror Berberian Sound Studio. Jones is Gilderoy, a man whose tweed suits and maladroit demeanour are the walking, breathing embodiment of Dorking. He's a sound engineer for pastoral nature documentaries who has been brought to the dimly lit studios of an Italian horror studio to provide the sounds for a giallo: the kind of glossy, gory pulp chillers perfected by Dario Argento in the 1970s. Tasked with aurally recreating the sadistic, sexually explicit violence of a trashy horror and surrounded by bullish producer Francesco and sleazy studio head Santini, Gilderoy attempts to immerse himself in his work, unable or unwilling to realise that his ordered world is falling apart.

Strickland's film is never quite a horror film. We are never shown the horrific footage that Gilderoy is providing the soundtrack for. Instead the film seems more interested in the sounds of horror; or perhaps more accurately, the horrors of sound. The hermetically sealed world of the sound studio, where no scream or stabbing sound effect can be escaped, drips with a very palpable malevolence, like a dial and wire filled room of The Shining's Overlook Hotel. Much has been made of the film's similarities to the work of Lynch or Bergman, and while it's true that it shares Mulholland Dr's sense of unspeakable dread and Persona's shifting identities, what is most impressive is that Berberian Sound Studio seems always to be its own beast. Strickland has learnt his lessons from these film makers without ever relying on their formulas. Some have complained about the lack of a definitive third act, but for the movie to increase gears in its final third would be to drag it too far into territory derivative of film makers like Lynch. Berberian Sound Studios takes it's time. It is patient, it waits, and it ends when it wants to end. Anything else would be cheapening.

Without anything to hold the movie down, it would be easy for it to get carried away with its own cleverness. Fortunately Toby Jones provides just such an anchor. Jones is surely one of the best character actors working, and here he gives what may be the performance of his career. Like Gene Hackman in The Conversation, Gilderoy tries to escape into a world of sound as he descends further into paranoia. Never could a fish be more out of water, and Strickland even rings several moments of brilliantly icy black humour out of his predicament. His pudgy, crumpled face moves through an entire spectrum of emotions with the movement of an eyeball or a twitch of a muscle. Strickland gives us many reasons to admire Berberian Sound Studio, but Jones gives us a reason to care. Together they have created one of the most distinctive, bold and memorable films of the year.

I'm back

I took a break from the blog over the summer, but now I intend to start writing again. Bear with me, it may take a while to get back into the habit.

Joe.

Cosmopolis (2012)

Cosmopolis must surely rank as one of the slowest road movies ever made. It follows the gradual crawl of a white limousine as it moves from one side of Manhattan to the other. Inside is Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson), an insanely rich and staggeringly young billionaire who simply wants a haircut. Packer is the pinnacle of the ultra-rich 1%, one of Tom Wolfe's self styled Masters of the Universe; in this case, a portable, self contained universe. We see Packer's self engineered financial and personal downfall as he is ferried ever closer to a climactic confrontation with Unabomber-like former employee Benno Levin (Paul Giamatti), the nadir of the other 99%.

In terms of it's place in the oeuvre of director David Cronenberg, the easiest and most obvious connections would be with his other automotive nightmare, Crash. Both films create a glacial, hermetically sealed world, but whereas Crash allows us to peer in at this world through the glass, Cosmopolis places us inside of it. The interior of Packer's limo, bathed in the blue light of the screens bringing him news of his financial destruction, is scarily silent. Whenever the door is opened, the sounds of the city are almost deafening. His succession of advisers and analysts all speak in stilted sentences and strangely hollow sound bites, Samantha Morton in particular being disarmingly blank and angular as Packer's personal theoretician. As the cold and vulpine Packer, Pattinson undoubtedly has the hardest job, being on screen for almost every second of the movie, but he adds further proof of Cronenberg's canny eye for casting. He plays Packer as someone who has done too much, too young, and has nothing left but the thrill of losing it all. When we first see him holding court in his limo, he's dwarfed by his throne like chair. And when he exits the limo to confront an attacker, a gun tucked into his trousers, he does so with the cocky strut of a schoolboy trying to act harder than he feels. It's a pitch perfect performance that proves there is more to Pattinson than an army of screaming and swooning fans.

Paul Giamatti, on the other hand, has nothing to prove. The final twenty minutes of the movie, where Packer finally exits his universe and enters that of Giamatti's balding, dishevelled Levin, are the real triumph of Cosmopolis. The likes of Levin, those who have fallen through the cracks, have no place in Packer's world; “Do you think people like me can't happen?” Levin demands. He's the abandoned chickens of rampant capitalism come home to roost, desperation in his eyes and a gun in his hand. It's a gold standard of naturalistic scenery chewing, and armed with Cronenberg's style and Don DeLillo's words, he doesn't put a foot wrong.

Those looking for grand, damning statements on the evils of capitalism may not find Cosmopolis entirely satisfactory. Cronenberg seems more interested in showing modern society stretched to breaking point, threatening to snap at any moment. It's an incredibly easy film to admire, and an extremely hard one to love. It's certainly not a film for everyone, but then there's no fun in films that aim to be for everyone, and by extension are for no one. Cosmopolis is a film for some, and on those grounds it is almost flawless. And that's just fine by me.

Prometheus (2012)

Prometheus is not Alien. It seems necessary to make this clear. In fact, thematically it bears more relation to Ridley Scott's own Blade Runner. Both films ask what it means to be human. Blade Runner asks these questions indirectly, and even comes close to giving answers; Prometheus goes straight ahead and asks the questions, then never fully answers them. In this case, they are raised by a team of scientists travelling to a distant planet to find the beings responsible for life on Earth. The name of their ship is Prometheus, and the implications are clear: you don't mess with the gods. Whether or not you like the film will probably depend on how much you care about it's lack of satisfying answers.

Speaking for myself, I have no problem with remaining mystified. Too many films are lacking a sense of awe and mystery, and in several key scenes Prometheus delivers just this. The breathtaking design of the film alone is worth the price of admission; it has to be the most visually beautiful film I've seen all year. The problem lies with it's failure to succeed on a human level. The embarrassingly weak script and a disjointed story struggle against a strong cast who have to work hard to keep us interested. Noomi Rapace is a strong leading presence in her first English speaking lead role, with Scott opting for more than a simple Ripley re-tread. Her unshaken religious faith, even in the face of possible answers to life's great questions, is surprisingly original and refreshing. She's helped by a solid supporting cast, but even their combined strengths are overshadowed by the presence of Michael Fassbender. His performance as David, the ship's android, has been receiving so much acclaim that praising him has almost become a cliché. It's justified however, and in many ways David is the central crux of the movie, providing the same function as Rutger Hauer's Roy Batty in Blade Runner. They both share an Aryan flawlessness that manifests as veiled contempt of the humans around them, as well as a vague yearning to be as 'human' as them. There is a nice touch as David is seen modelling his appearance and speech pattern on Peter O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia. Later he offers a quote from that film to hint at the futility of the mission: “There is nothing in the desert, and no man needs nothing”. 

Ultimately, Prometheus doesn't hold together. It's fails to come as close as Blade Runner to answering any of it's central questions, and to describe the plot and script as messy would be far too kind. It is so staggeringly ambitious that it's failure to succeed is almost inevitable. It never works as a whole, but there are several moments when it soars.

Reviews in a Nutshell

As I've mentioned, I'm right in the middle of my exams and so haven't been able to write full reviews for the films I have seen recently.


Instead, here's a very quick run through, in the order that I saw them:


The Pirates! In an Adventure With Scientists- As charming and witty as you would expect from Aardman, if not their most memorable.

The Cabin In The Woods- Rarely have I had this much fun in the cinema. A smart satire made by people who love the genre, and a lot more enjoyable than the similarly self-referential Funny Games (which I hate).


The Avengers- less than the sum of it's parts, but brilliantly enjoyable and funny while you're watching it.


Jeff, Who Lives At Home- Sweet, warm and funny, but ultimately rather forgettable.


The Raid- If I see a more brilliantly thrilling, hyper-violent film all year, I'll be mightily impressed. I'll also be surprised if it doesn't sneak into my top ten of the year.