Dennis Cozzalio is at it again with one of his famously fun film quizzes for the ages. As he has selected one of my favorite ogre school teachers to ask the questions, how could I not participate?
1) The classic movie moment everyone loves except me is
The “We’ll always have Paris” scene from Casablanca. I like it, but it is more a speech than a tender moment.
2) Favorite line of dialogue from a film noir.
That’s what noir is all about, the incredibly quotable lines. Well, I’ll pick one I like: “Match me, Sidney.” (Sweet Smell of Success)
3) Second favorite Hal Ashby film.
The Last Detail. Shampoo has a very slight edge because of Julie Christie’s hair.
4) Describe the moment when you first realized movies were directed as opposed to simply pieced together anonymously.
No idea.
5) Favorite film book.
At the moment, Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, edited by Patricia Erens.
6) Diana Sands or Vonetta McGee?
Vonetta McGee. She has an unforgettable face.
7) Most egregious gap in your viewing of films made in the past 10 years.
Recent films of Kathryn Bigelow, soon to be remedied.
8) Favorite line of dialogue from a comedy.
“The mayor of Canada possibly?” (Ruggles of Red Gap).
9) Second favorite Lloyd Bacon film.
So many films I haven’t seen. But Boy Meets Girl takes the second spot of the ones I have seen. Gotta go with Here Comes the Navy as #1.
10) Richard Burton or Roger Livesey?
Roger Livesey. On the whole, he made better films and an unforgettable Colonel Blimp.
11) Is there a movie you staunchly refuse to consider seeing? If so, why?
I’ll consider anything, but I can staunchly refuse to see a film anyway.
12) Favorite filmmaker collaboration.
Powell and Pressburger. None is better.
13) Most recently viewed movie on DVD/Blu-ray/theatrical.
Bye Bye Birdie (1995). Not very good, unfortunately.
14) Favorite line of dialogue from a horror movie.
From the 1931 Dracula: “Come here.” It’s not the line but how you say it that’s so much fun.
15) Second favorite Oliver Stone film.
Platoon. I like The Doors the best.
16) Eva Mendes or Raquel Welch?
Raquel Welch. I bought her yoga VHS tape, but I don’t own anything with Mendes in it.
17) Favorite religious satire.
Nazarin (Luis Buñuel).
18) Best Internet movie argument? (question contributed by Tom Block)
I recently defended Armond White (yes, how did that happen?) in his defense of Seth MacFarlane throwing Hollywood’s tastelessness with regard to women back in the face of the Academy. It was a lively argument that needed to happen.
19) Most pointless Internet movie argument? (question contributed by Tom Block)
Anything to do with “best” lists. It’s a pointless pitting of taste against taste.
20) Charles McGraw or Robert Ryan?
With apologies to my friend Alan K. Rode, Robert Ryan.
21) Favorite line of dialogue from a western.
From Shane: “Mother wants you. I know she does!” Something about it always gets me.
22) Relatively unknown film or filmmaker you’d most eagerly proselytize for.
Lebanese filmmaker Rania Stephan whose film The Three Disappearances of Soad Hosni absolutely floored me. She’s an up-and-coming filmmaker whom I would gladly promote any hour of any day.
24) Ewan McGregor or Gerard Butler?
Ewan McGregor. I’ve been a fan for ages.
25) Is there such a thing as a perfect movie?
Is anything perfect?
26) Favorite movie location you’ve most recently had the occasion to actually visit.
San Francisco, two months ago. I even did the Vertigo tour.
27) Second favorite Delmer Daves film.
Dark Passage. Demetrius and the Gladiators is my favorite. I’m a sucker for sword & sandal movies. (Yes, I know I should have put up a picture of Bogey and Bacall, but isn’t this one much more fun?)
28) Name the one DVD commentary you wish you could hear that, for whatever reason, doesn’t actually exist.
Daisies. I need some help walking through parts of that one.
29) Gloria Grahame or Marie Windsor?
Very, very hard choice. Very slight edge to Marie Windsor because she made every low-budget film she was in so much better.
30) Name a filmmaker who never really lived up to the potential suggested by their early acclaim or success.
Lisa Cholodenko. Real tragedy about the the loss of truth in her films.
31) Is there a movie-based disagreement serious enough that it might cause you to reevaluate the basis of a romantic relationship or a friendship?
None of the usual arguments, like Pauline Kael dismissing anyone who does not love McCabe and Mrs. Miller. I would have to rethink relationships with people who enjoyed or cheered on rape scenes in movies.
Wait, let me get the familiar motifs of my yearly confession out of the road. Many films overrated, blah blah. Many good films vilified, blah blah. Bloody distributors, blah blah. Okay. Let’s go.
Several critics this year took the time and effort to declare this the year cinema died. This suggested, in part, a symptom of solipsism, as what’s much closer to the truth is that film criticism as a tenured profession with major newspapers and magazines is fading, if not dying. So it’s tempting to do as the Vikings do and burn the ship along with the corpse of the fallen warrior. The proposition that because more people watch certain TV shows than certain well-reviewed, but aesthetically difficult films and that, therefore, the art form is dying, could well have been clipped verbatim from a newspaper column in 1962. Granted, film is going through an upheaval at the moment in terms of the nature of the medium itself and the kinds of audience it can draw out of their homes. Like every other art form and entertainment at the moment that isn’t Xbox or You Tube, it has to fight for its survival and status.
The Master
From a personal perspective, 2012 did not prove a repeat of 2011, a vintage year for cinema. It seems like I spent most of this year waiting—waiting for good movies. I beat my own record for viewings of films released in the calendar year, which entailed increasing the amount of mediocrity and missed opportunities I willingly exposed myself to. Of course, several of this year’s most “important” films have been held back until the very last moment, or have received such listless distribution (e.g. Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master‘s cursory Australian release), that I find myself genuinely bereft for not being able to comment here on several (but the lists are updated as time progresses). Only sheer luck and a helping hand allowed me to catch a couple more that grace my lists below.
Holy Motors
I had hoped this year I might be able to curb my contrarian tendencies a little, but I instead find them stronger than ever. A lot of highly regarded films left me frigid if not bored, many quality works carried a distinct and quietly disturbing aspect of déjà vu or ambition without the strange heat of real creativity, and several of the handful of films I felt any true affection for have been treated with outright contempt by the cultural apparatchiks. There were many films I anticipated watching enthusiastically, perhaps too much so, like Holy Motors, The Deep Blue Sea, and Oslo, 31 August, where I admired them and saw their specific beauty, and yet in the end felt something lacking; perhaps it was the lack of true penetration of the inner life of the dramatic protagonists or, in the case of the occasionally very brilliant Holy Motors, a final sense of the often strained conceptual stunt truly adding up.
Return
After watching the diptych of Australian-directed, American-set gangland dramas, Killing Them Softly and Lawless, I became afflicted by the knowledge that I’ve been watching the same scuzzball crime flick in variations since about 1990, a blend of detailed criminal argot, showy grit, method-inflected overacting, and gunshots to the head. This sensation sharpened to a point where both films proved to have one particular moment in common, a thug getting pissed off and delivering an even worse beating when the victim has the temerity to get bodily fluids on the thug’s clothes. Many films with potential seemed to lack that extra inspiration to break themselves out of the ruts of Good Little Movie or Nice Try, to whit Liza Johnson’s Return or Lynn Shelton’s Your Sister’s Sister. It was sad and frustrating to watch a film brimming over with unruly life like Bachelorette take refuge in the cosy clichés of the chick flick brand it seemed to be attacking.
Cloud Atlas
Others, like Rian Johnson’s Looper and Zal Batmanglij’s Sound of My Voice, tried on the other hand to be a bit too clever, failing to juggle all of the many balls they threw in the air. Looper also exemplified a breed that includes films like Sleepless Night, The Grey, and Haywire in setting up magnificently and failing to bring it all home. 2012 was overloaded with self-serious action films and spectacles with pretensions to substance, films like Looper, Skyfall, The Dark Knight Rises, Prometheus, The Amazing Spider-Man, Cloud Atlas, The Grey, Chronicle, The Hunger Games, Haywire, and The Bourne Legacy. These often received glowing reviews and filmgoer enthusiasm, and some of them were genuinely good films. But there must be something wrong with me: most of these felt half-baked, failing to measure up to what a good craftsman, like Joseph H. Lewis, Andre De Toth, or Richard Thorpe, could invest in a pulp narrative 60 years ago. Skyfall was a case in point, sporting a great and intelligent core idea: to walk James Bond back through his half-mythical past only to bring him to a new beginning. But the idea was squandered through a listless and derivative story that finally left the film exposed, stripped of the pop-art exuberance that made the series interesting in the first place. By comparison, I found myself responding far more to the buoyant inanity in films like The Avengers, Wrath of the Titans, The Flying Swords of Dragon Gate, and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, films that do not try for a second to fake meaning. And there are few words fit for polite company I can think of to address those critics who have put the marvellous John Carter on their worst-of-year lists.
The Grey
Yet, after all this, cinematic excellence still accumulated, like the gentle rain from heaven, as a better writer than I said about something completely different. In films of 2012, characters seem splintered off from the bulk of humanity like rubble flung off from some great collision. And indeed that’s how many people at large feel—I know I do. Look at the protagonists of films like Cosmopolis and Holy Motors, contained by their universe-unto-themselves limousines, travelling the cityscapes in search of a moment of transcendent creation/destruction, their immediate psychic and physical reality redesignated as an extended piece of performance art. Their bond with the actor-therapist heroes of Alps was inescapable: the Alps troupe filled in as simulacrums of the dead, as their own existences become voids to be fled no matter how painful the consequences. The wandering nonhero of The Day He Arrives, a film director entrapped by those long, improvised takes known as life, was surrounded by doppelgangers and numbing repetitions, elliptical events, and hazy, half-remembered epiphanies. The aged, haggard, aching characters share a dolorous existence in contemporary Portugal in Tabu, and the revelation of a past finds an exotic netherworld where melodramatic passion flared and died and led them to this end, the former colonial tended to a bitter grave by the former colonised. The alienated protagonists of the great diptych of unabashed horror films released early in the year, The Innkeepers and Kill List, were driven to distraction and despair by looming financial crisis and finding avatars for their own folly in the strange id-emanations that torment them. The ragged and bloodied survivors of The Grey fended off armies of wolves and the perishing cold, poised as onanistic avatars for the reality of trying to retain masculine self-respect in modern working-class life. The intergalactic swashbucklers of The Avengers had one of the most amusing and telling single shots of the year’s cinema, coming after the end credits of their own movie and added like a little supernal signature flourish by mastermind Joss Whedon, showing them exhaustedly and silently chewing over ethnic cuisine: saving the world is just another shit job.
Haywire
Speaking of shit jobs, the victims and abusers of Compliance swam in the same reeking, overused frying fat. The physically broken and fiscally pummelled lovers of Rust and Bone hung off the edges of their society with what was left of their bodies and wits. The aging, exhausted cops trudging around the wastelands of rural Turkey in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia were haunted by the broken idols of the past and the accusing eyes of the living. The readily brutal heroes of Sleepless Night, The Grey, Kill List, Haywire, and Savages fought tooth and nail to keep their narrow foothold in the prosperous human community above chasms of existential fear. Hell, even the dwarfish band of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey were looking for a way to get their home back off the dragon/finance company. Miss Bala’s titular wannabe beauty queen attempts to use her looks and body to escape poverty and gains her prize through the most ironically horrifying of entrapping nightmares, her body turned into a far more immediate commodity, peeling off the skin of her society and discovering the chaos and hypocrisy beneath.
Damsels in Distress
Batman found himself the thin black line between pseudo-revolution and toothless authoritarianism in The Dark Knight Rises, the richest vigilante in town engaged in a tango of toey flirtation with the most supine of criminals and recovering from having a back snapped by the most uppity of plebeian radicals. The übermensch antihero of Cosmopolis could be a distant relative of Bruce Wayne’s but without the altruistic delusions, glimpsed at one point splayed on all fours whilst receiving a rectal examination, gilded by sweat, and flirting with an employee. Later he casually shoots his bodyguard and revisits his childhood in a seeming quest to pull apart the fibres of his life one by one, before eagerly finding his opposite in life in Paul Giamatti’s pathetic assassin, luckless agent of a devoutly wished extinction. Even in the gentler parts of town, eccentrics had to fight to claim their space and right to exist. The protean boy and girl of Moonlight Kingdom, the collegiate, depressive do-gooders of Damsels in Distress, the Norwegian teens of Turn Me On, Dammit!, the bizarre family of Dark Shadows: all looked for redemption in love and fellowship, but still always faced the oncoming day when anomie would turn to crisis.
Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter
Heroes exhumed from classical texts and history for this year’s films seemed to share this outsider-looking-in quality: the hopped-up holy anarchists of On The Road, rushing at a hundred miles per nowhere, were the characters in Moonlight Kingdom a few years older and a bit more damaged. The final day in the life of the protagonist of Oslo, 31 August, wandering the city disgusted with his failures and himself. Anna Karenina’s eponymous heroine alternating between stage and audience in wrestling between her moral and sensual sides. The princess of Snow White and the Huntsman, the living lodestone for a natural order degraded and exiled by a grotesque caricature of celebrity culture. Even Abraham Lincoln, in Steven Spielberg’s crucial film, attempts to leaven a great good at the price of surveying the wasteland his efforts wreaked, a sense of the moral cost of even supposedly moral struggle accounted for by corpse-strewn battlefields, blazing cities, and piles of rudely amputated limbs—and that’s to say nothing of his vampire-hunting sideline.
Oslo, 31 August
But for many, the unceasing battery of a world gone wrong gave way to moments of grace and epiphany: even the doomed hero Anders of Oslo, 31 August found fleeting moments of joy and beauty in his odyssey, even if he remained as repelled as he was compelled by things from which he felt himself eternally severed. He represented a striking inversion of last year’s number of peacefully conceding heroes, unable to escape a downward spiral that finally announced the rupturing of logic in the jarring cessation of a beautiful piano tune. Anna Karenina’s similar self-induced end came at the end of a life lived as a headlong rush of pleasure and pain. The triumph of the last seconds of Alps finally sees life and performance converge in a moment of perfection. Eruptive celebration momentarily breaks the mood of oppressively weighty and corrosive choices in Lincoln. There was surreal beauty in Rust and Bone, as Marion Cotillard’s character went from broken remnant to the carnal ferocity of her self-induced reinvention as a tattooed, hard-rutting fight promoter.
Declaration of War
And everywhere were fragments of insane beauty—images, images, images, the soul of cinema, laced with the muscle of sound, and sculpted by the edit. The ecstatic abandon of On the Road’s uncouth scallywags, their momentous dawns and fraying nocturnal revels. The dawn-light epiphany of Levin in Anna Karenina and the obscene beauty of Anna’s death, the thunder of the horses riding through the theatre and the abandon in her dance floor surrender to physical ardour. The swooning drug-dreams and hideous violence of Savages. The raging protest outside the limousine whilst within savants converse about how the external chaos is governed by mathematical certainties and inevitable defeat. The cross-edited visions of the equally phony Victoria Winters and Alice Cooper in straightjackets in a lucid game of accusation and anger essayed in playful pop cultural terms in Dark Shadows. The insane smile of Angelique Bouchard in the same film, still planted on her face even as she plucks out her heart and hands it over to the man who disdains her amour fou and collapses from within, revealing the lacquered mannequin her obsessiveness made of her. The teeming magnificence of the alien cities and the gorgeous desolation of Mars in John Carter, captured and contained in the redemptive lustre of Dejah Thoris’ sea-blue eyes. The awesome one-shot survey in The Avengers of the team in action that crossed the breadth of the city. The dawn-light swim of Oslo, 31 August where Anders watches his young and pretty companions with the descending pall of a man with no sense of the future. Cotillard saluting the whale that crippled her and the mammal gesturing back in Rust and Bone, and Matthias Schoenaerts punching the ice over his drowning son with raw, injurious desperation. The perplexingly magnificent dread landscapes of Tartarus and the Labyrinth in Wrath of the Titans. The sight of the duelling hero and villain of The Flying Swords of Dragon Gate being sucked up into a hurricane to continue their battle whirling in the eye of the storm. Valérie Donzelli’s distraught run through the hospital in Declaration of War.
Sleepless Night
The ecstatic thunder of the accordion band in Holy Motors’ entr’acte and the mystique of Edith Scob donning her Eyes Without a Face mask. In Tabu, the black-and-white, soundless sex scene that ruptures the film’s air of physically manifest decay and remoteness, the prayer shot through with rapturous poetry that punctuates the stolid modern pieties of a protest march, and the idiot enthusiasm of the frontier pop band. The egglike, bloodied remnant of the once-smug physiognomy of Aksel Hennie in Headhunters, touched by the grace of his wife’s forgiveness. The perpetual motion machine that is the hero of Sleepless Night eluding his pursuers by diving into a cotillion of clubbers grooving to Queen, enacting a primal drama against a backdrop of entitled hedonism. The racing intercut stories of Cloud Atlas, that incredible, pounding cyberpunk chase of the futuristic lovers, and the beatific suicide ritual of the young composer. The stone idol, carved by a forgotten society in the midst of a wilderness illuminated by lightning to shock a man into sudden awareness of his mortality, in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, and the hovering, mysterious, marvel-provoking beauty of the peasant girl who astounds the tired, dessicated menfolk. The lost beatitude of romantic haven in the sight of Rachel Weisz and Tom Hiddleston in tipsy ebullience before the inevitable fall in The Deep Blue Sea, and the communal nostalgia dream of the sing-along in the tube station. The sinking ship and springing whale of Life of Pi, twinned moments of gleaming leviathans depicting the folly of humankind and the power of nature. The characters of The Day He Arrives shivering in a snowy, slushy dawn after a night of revels, departing to their separate, lonely abodes.
Miss Bala
That moment in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey when Bilbo stands in his house, suddenly bereft, before his charge to join his new friends in an adventure; the swashbuckling charge of the dwarves through the kingdom of the goblins; and the gang’s dangling cliffhanger peril, saved by a feathered deus ex machina. The dazzling, terrible whirlwinds of violence that Miss Bala has to charge through repeatedly, and the strange semi-rape that sees her awkwardly trying to mount an injured, saurian beast of a drug lord who is both her protector and tormentor. The dark god’s hand erupting from the earth as the apocalyptic punchline of The Cabin In the Woods’ jokey generic play, after a menagerie of horror cinema’s icons have been released to commit gorgeous carnage. The liberated teens spinning high in the sky in Chronicle. In Lincoln, Thaddeus Stevens and his black housekeeper/lover reading the 13th Amendment in bed together in celebration of a future made possible; the blazing buildings of Confederate cities; the arcane melodrama that evokes Manichaeistic struggle just before a titan’s death is announced to his son. The dying Goody of Vamps standing amidst Times Square, aging by the second even as she passes through a rapturous peeling back of the years and transformations of the beloved space to its once-quaint, cobbled self. The rage of the killer paterfamilias in Kill List, stoked to a world-melting heat by obscenity revealed, pounding in a paedophile’s head with a hammer, only to later be chased through stygian woods and hellish tunnels by masked demons determined to implicate him in the reckoning he thinks he can buy off with too-late righteousness.
Cinema is dead, my arse!
Actor Appreciation
I don’t know if I saw a better-acted film this year than The Day He Arrives, purely by dint of the fact that the human behaviour it depicted seemed to flow with the happenstance energy and gestural concision of real life. This quality of extreme, almost invisible naturalism was shared by the cast of Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, who all seemed to have been born in the clothes they wear and in the space they inhabit. But, of course, that’s not the only standard for great acting, which can also be the alchemical art of display that sometimes risks excess for the sake of finding something more finite and compelling. In that regard, one of the year’s most inevitably well-regarded acting efforts, Daniel Day-Lewis’ incarnation of Abraham Lincoln, was a surprising pirouette for the actor who had delivered two of the last decade’s greatest performances in a grandiose key (Bill the Butcher, Daniel Plainview): Day-Lewis offered not just the eloquence and folksiness of Honest Abe but also the shrewd lawyer, dry, bordering on parched, struggling against a subtly conveyed terror to hold together the remnants of his family and self-respect even in the throes of being transformed into an icon by his final successes, even reduced at one point to glaring out of the shadows of a window bay with baleful anger and sorrow at his accusatory wife. The incredible roster of support Day-Lewis has in Spielberg’s film emerged as a Dickensian roster of precisely illuminated, ever-so-slightly magnified portraiture, including Sally Field’s Mary Todd Lincoln, brittle and intelligent and tragic in her self-crucifying anxiety, Tommy Lee Jones’s Thaddeus Stevens, the most unprepossessing of ideologues revealed as a brutally witty moral swashbuckler, Gloria Reuben’s careful, but crucial, small part, and David Strathairn’s dusty, crafty William Seward. Michael Stuhlbarg, who helped fill out Lincoln’s cast with a memorably John Ford-esque, timorous congressman, also contributed the only performance in Sacha Gervasi’s lamentable rubbish Hitchcock, as crafty agent extraordinaire Lew Wassermann, that didn’t look like a mobile waxwork exhibit.
Well, all right, Scarlett Johansson made for a tolerably perky Janet Leigh in Hitchcock, too. She also continued her recent run of films suggesting she’s finally growing into the movie star zone into which she was thrust prematurely after Lost in Translation (2003) with her contribution to one fairly popular film this year, which sported a generally marvellous collection of character turns by actors playing emotionally crippled, physically misshapen, neurotically talkative misfits engaged in group dysfunction and rampant physical comedy. Wait, was The Avengers a Woody Allen film and nobody told me? I always grudgingly enjoy being forced to change my mind about an actor, and one I had dismissed as an asinine pretty boy quite genuinely impressed me with his gall this year in a diptych of roles: Robert Pattinson’s performances in Bel-Ami and Cosmopolis were received with disparate levels of interest and recognition, but in both, he cleverly played off his signature role as a beautiful bloodsucker, as the former film allowed him to play a conflicted and frightened man lusted after and idealised by the women around him in a fashion usually reserved for the opposite situation, and the latter let him play a smarmy billionaire driven by forces within to try to smash apart his own pharaohic hegemony as part of a masochistic experiment in system decay. In both films, Pattinson was nimble enough to depict the turmoil, even foolishness, under the surface of superficially purposeful cads. His Twilight costar, Kristen Stewart, weathered storms of scandal and popular opprobrium to expand her increasingly impressive resume with a lead performance in Snow White and the Huntsman that was sturdy and restrained until it finally bloomed in butch glory. Charlize Theron was splendidly arch playing Stewart’s wicked queen enemy. Stewart was also an affecting addition to the vigorous cast of On the Road as the blazing-eyed, jailbait bohemian Marylou. But the film properly belonged to Sam Riley, all doe-eyed naivete mismatched to a prematurely lived-in voice, and Garret Hedlund, the garrulous, but shark-eyed rough trade byproduct of a juvie hall education in a rougher, bleaker, but paradoxically freer America.
Denis Lavant was the glue that held the fractured pieces of Holy Motors together, at once a study of acting itself whilst sustaining a coherent characterisation of an actor as a character: it was impossible, of course, to miss Lavant’s physical dynamism and chameleonic talents, because the film was about those very talents so long in need of a vehicle, and the result was very much an exploration of the traditional symbiosis of filmmaking talent behind and in front of the camera. Kylie Minogue’s beguiling cameo and song likewise buoyed the film’s flagging second half like a visitation from another, classier planet. Aggeliki Poupolia led the cast of Alps, equally multitudinous, except, of course, where Lavant was playing the epitome of acting talent, the Alps team were the opposite, deliberately awful actors filling in for real people: as in Dogtooth (2009), but essayed in a subtler fashion, Poupolia’s genius at slow burns arriving at incendiary climaxes shook continents with its force. Amongst the manifold offhand pleasures of Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows, with the customary Johnny Depp grotesque front and centre, the real battle for acting honours fell to Michelle Pfeiffer as haughty matriarch and Eva Green playing her cabalistic minx as an undead Joan Crawford heroine. Green shifted to completely different register of soulful resignation opposite Ewan McGregor in David Mackenzie’s odd but occasionally striking parable Perfect Sense. Jennifer Lawrence underplayed her lead role in a film that made her exponentially more famous, The Hunger Games, to an extent that inspired some internet mockery, but it was a performance consistent with her breakthrough role in Winter’s Bone (2010) in trying to embody a heroine given to simply accepting the evil inherent in any situation and proceeding for the sake of survival.
Greta Gerwig’s star turn in Damsels in Distress was very much the key to the film’s seemingly insufferably arch, blithely self-impressed façade, cleverly shading into modes of honest pain, sly self-critique, and finally, pure goofy charm. Brit Marling might have committed the ultimate actress-writer faux pas in having someone else in the film she wrote describe her as beautiful, and yet her capacity to animate her character in Sound of My Voice as both radiant and yet, with suggestions of serpentine evil constantly lurking behind an ambiguous smile, was the work of someone who knows her stuff, and Christopher Denham was as impressive opposite her as he was wasted in Argo. Anne Hathaway may well get herself an Oscar this year for Les Misérables, but the role most people saw her in this year was, of course, Selina Kyle in The Dark Knight Rises, a ringer who successfully kept the ball in play with sufficient insouciant wit and poise to make up for the turgid, incoherent pseudo-epic around her. Her costar and rival for the listless affections of Bruce Wayne was Marion Cotillard, wasted in her second Christopher Nolan film. But Cotillard’s superlative performance alongside the equally impressive Matthias Schoenaerts in Rust and Bone was her artistic compensation, and much more than just the mischievously clever CGI that made her look like a double amputee: rage and grief and erotic force have rarely been presented together and with such force, especially without a trace of actorly showboating. Keira Knightley’s Anna Karenina was, on the other hand, showboating with careful and compelling modulation, playing a self-dramatist for whom everything is, on some level, a theatrical gesture. Her befuddled, tortured husband was played with career-best pathos by Jude Law, who turns his fading matinee idol looks into an aesthetic weapon.
Another star who, like Law, emerged in the late ’90s and whose career had seemed to be slowing, had a suddenly incandescent year: everyone’s talked about the second coming of Matthew McConaughey, and I can’t really argue with it, though I wish it had been in better films. The best of the bunch was William Friedkin’s broad and excessively theatrical, but impressively seedy Killer Joe, which, of course, culminated in his forcing Gina Gershon to fellate a chicken drumstick, one of the most memorable single moments of 2012: Gershon’s own feral force, finally tamed by the cruellest of methods, was equally impressive. In Magic Mike, McConaughey provided the meaty, muscly, wolfish smarm to offset Channing Tatum and Alex Pettyfer’s well-exploited physiques and pleasant lack of acting talent. Bruce Willis, still an unflappably laid-back presence, was affecting as the dopey, but affectionate sheriff in Moonrise Kingdom, and sported an amazing manga hairdo for a couple of minutes in Looper. His confrontation with a weirdly convincing Joseph Gordon-Levitt as his youthful alter ego in Looper saw two generations of male movie stars share a diner breakfast in by far the best moment in the film, presenting the amusing conceit of the older and younger versions of the same violent dipshit in different phases of self-deception. Emily Blunt, who backed them up, was the year’s most accommodating female movie star, handling thankless roles with class, including being surprisingly convincing as the besotted third wheel in Your Sister’s Sister, opposite Rosemarie DeWitt, who was, in turn, the only thing worthwhile about Promised Land. Their male costar in Sister, Mark Duplass, was also in Safety Not Guaranteed, playing exactly the same character in each, a slightly more lunky, blue-collar version of the smart, loquacious, but fragile boy-men so popular in modern comedy. Two films provided more than enough of that, so, of course, now he’ll be in everything.
Indie veteran Ann Dowd was the engine of Compliance, communicating middle-aged anxiety and quiescent vindictiveness without entirely losing her façade of amiable managerial politeness; full marks as well to her costar Dreama Walker for playing the year’s most hapless character. Pat Healy, as the villain of the piece, ably sustained the necessary, slippery, verbal wit and also appeared, completely unrecognisable, as the feckless coworker of Sara Paxton’s assailed, flaky hero/victim, one of the year’s most underappreciated lead turns, in The Innkeepers. Similarly strong in a low-key, quietly engaging indie film was Linda Cardellini in Return as a returned servicewoman beset by alienation and unable to live in the present; Michael Shannon and John Slattery gave her good support. Stephanie Sigman as the human ping-pong ball who temporarily becomes Miss Bala was a study in sustained terror, with gifts of bravery and loyalty occasionally showing through an otherwise wisely maintained mantle of acquiescence. At the other end of the scale, Cloud Atlas was hurt almost irreparably by its excruciating conceit of using its actors in recurring roles, with Tom Hanks delivering two or three of the worst performances of his career. But Jim Broadbent held his own in two segments, particularly in a peerless comedic turn as the editor stranded in an old folks’ home by his brother’s conniving. Doona Bae managed to imbue her part as a sagacious clone with sensuality and suggestions of spiritual grace that transcended the compilation of stereotypes and clunky axioms she represented. Ben Whishaw’s perpetual air of spidery intelligence likewise buoyed the film, as did his brief appearance in Skyfall as a Q for the new millennium. Noomi Rapace was intelligent and gutsy in Prometheus alongside the impressive, but extremely ill-utilised Michael Fassbender and Idris Elba, providing, in that immortally queasy robotic abortion scene, the only real reason to watch that unholy mess of a movie. Although they did not say a word, Ana Moreira and Carloto Cotta as the doomed lovers in the flashback sequences of Tabu, proved you don’t always need dialogue to deliver hypnotic performances, and Teresa Madruga as the saintly but solitary Pilar was the soul of the film’s first half.
I know that Rachel Weisz, Tom Hiddleston, and Simon Russell Beale were very good in The Deep Blue Sea; in fact, it was impossible to miss, as if heavyweight dramatic acting had been included as an event in this year’s London Olympics. Come on, Rachel, one more sobbing moan for Britain. By contrast, Anders Danielson Lie’s excellence in Oslo, 31 August was predicated on a difficult part, as his namesake character only occasionally emerged from his position as melancholy observer to reveal his anger and despair, as well as self-mortifying impulses. Eddie Redmayne, also getting good notices for Les Misérables, offered a startling performance cast against type as a sociopath slowly but inevitably giving in to his worst impulses in weird and uneven Hick, which also featured another of Chloë Grace Moretz’s protean turns as the teenaged heroine who finally and fatally could not get out of his clutches. Blake Lively backed them up and also appeared in Oliver Stone’s Savages, cumulatively making a case for herself as a bonafide actress playing characters easy to dismiss as airheaded parasites who prove to have hidden depths and reefs. Amidst the wobbly satire and shenanigans of the chicks-behaving-badly epic Bachelorette, the key threesome of Kirsten Dunst, Lizzy Caplan, and particularly, Isla Fisher were game in inducing hilarity, empathy, and convulsive vomiting. In a similar vein, Alicia Silverstone was smart and endearing as the vampire long past pop culture expiry date fed up with playing the modern game of feigning eternal youth in Vamps. I dare say more people feel sympathy with her character’s plight than are willing to let on.
Favourite Films of 2012
Alps (Yorgos Lanthimos)
Alps feels, at first glance, too much like another entry from the now familiar school of mordant Greek absurdist cinema exemplified by Lanthimos’ first film, Dogtooth, and Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Attenberg (2011). Like those films, it’s a through-a-glass-darkly portrait of socially normative behaviour studied like an alien scientist watching humanity through a telescope held the wrong way around. But it holds together with greater integrity as both a story—though still infused with jolts of surrealism and enigma—and as a personal odyssey for its disintegrating heroine’s efforts to slot herself into other people’s realities. In other words, a distinctive filmmaker retaining his distinction whilst visibly and intelligibly evolving.
Joe Wright’s second appearance in two years on my list confirms me as a resolute Wright fanboy, I suppose, but Wright seems to me to speak in a cinematic language once fairly commonplace but now almost freakish—poised, yet expressive; smart, but emotional; showy and semi-experimental, but rooted in a passion for the material and a desire to engage the audience. Few others directors on the scene seem able or willing to be as formally animated and innovative without being precious to the point of irritation. The result shakes up a moribund subgenre, but also realises the inherent beauty and brilliance of Leo Tolstoy’s novel.
Cosmopolis (David Cronenberg)
David Cronenberg continues on his recent roll, recasting Don DeLillo’s admired novel as his late-career critique of his very first movie, Shivers (1975), substituting the immobile trap of an apartment building for a self-sufficient limousine, and humans threatened not by parasites, but humans turning into parasites, feeding off larger, incorporeal organisms. Eric Packer, well-played by a cleverly exploited Robert Pattinson, is the wizard of high finance who’s conquered his piece of the world, but, now bored, does not so much give himself up to fate or primal experience as conduct another of his studies in systems, being this time the dynamics of disintegration, observing and even creating his own downfall with the same bewildered, semi-human fascination.
A delicious, if uneven emporium of droll absurdity from Burton, Dark Shadows did not escape the stored-up disdain for some of Burton’s profitable, but weaker recent efforts. Nonetheless, this was one of the year’s liveliest mainstream releases, a blend of retro psychedelia and good-natured satire at once deeply acerbic and perversely earnest in its investigation of retro obsessions, familial bonds and maladies, post-’60s liberation, and the joys of hate-sex on the ceiling. (See also Amy Heckerling’s delightfully screwball, accidental companion piece, Vamps.)
Some people complain that Sang-soo Hong makes the same movie over and over again, and that could well be true, but so do a lot of other directors, and very few with the same beguiling mixture of formal artistry and improvised elan. Hong digs so cleverly and yet subtly into the more melancholy aspects of modern life with its stripped illusions, trashed niceties, and collapsed hierarchies.
The Flying Swords of Dragon Gate (Tsui Hark)
Less beautiful and controlled than Hark’s comeback film Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (2010), this follow-up nonetheless saw Hark perhaps surpass it by going totally for broke, in a breakneck ride of multiple factions, heroes and villains, deceptions, double-crosses, sand-dancing battles, and sky-riding duels. Result: Hark proves he still has a capacity to make even close Hollywood avatars like The Avengers look nearly anaemic by comparison.
Ti West’s bare-boned, classical horror aesthetic builds on the intoxicating minimalism of The House of the Devil (2009) for a slightly more traditional, but no less sustained tale of factotum depression shading into supernatural terror.
This year’s Sucker Punch (2011), with a twist: whereas Zack Snyder’s film from last year was flagrantly postmodern and cool in its take on CGI spectacle, John Carter is a reinvention of the yarn-spinner’s wheel, resolutely traditional cowboys vs. aliens stuff realised with more class, visual spectacle, and actual entertainment value than 50 dark knights rising. The big multiplex screens were bathed in all the lush, absurd splendour of turn-of-the-century scientification; just a pity so few people were sitting in the audience to see it. (See also another critically underrated spectacle, although likely in the end to be a far bigger popular success, Peter Jackson’s simultaneously grand and mischievous The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.)
Kill List (Ben Wheatley)
A restless, unsettling, mercilessly potent vision of contemporary angst, be it financial, military, or familial, churning the uneasy mindset of the millennium’s first decade into a great British horror film. Images as stark and appalling as any in classic genre cinema rub against a hazy, paranoid parable for the cost of maintaining a prosperous western lifestyle, whilst everywhere, demons wait.
Lest things get too grim in a time in which the political venality on display across the world will echo in infamy for decades, Lincoln reminds us of the potential nobility of the human condition, as manifest both in leaders reputed, like the title character, and in the lesser, or merely less-remembered, mortals around him. The way politics is an accumulation of, rather than a force upon, individual feeling and perspective has rarely been described with such ardour and intensity, nor stuffed historical countenances reanimated with such relish for the expressivity of words and the concise power of images. (See also Timur Bekmembetov’s trash-mash edition of the same tale.)
Cruelly but not surprisingly received with dismissal by many critics, this is youth culture mythology’s bleary awakening and its night-after hangover and self-critique. Walter Salles’ film of the Beat bible strips the material of legend and finds human foible, failings, and hope still rudely alive. It’s a film for people who both fondly regard the novel, but also hold it in perspective, and for people who know that life often requires looking disaster dead in the eye and then looking past it.
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
What was perhaps most impressive about this work by Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan was the way in which it manages to bridge several different kinds of movie-making without apparent effort or violating its quiet, ambling, deceptively deadpan façade. It’s an historical rumination. It’s as realistic a portrait of police and policing as you’re ever likely to see. It contains fragments of magic realism and eerie, almost expressionistic beauty and dread. It’s an oft-hilarious situation comedy. It’s a desolating study in time, age, and fate.
Rust and Bone (Jacques Audiard)
Jacques Audiard has a cunning capacity to make far-out melodrama tropes and weird afflictions for his characters work in deceptively realistic, everyday contexts, which makes him often seem like the last of the great Victorian Naturalist novelists, the Zola of the banlieus. In part a nongenre remake of his romantic thriller Read My Lips (2001) as a raw, modern epic of sex and money, with damaged souls rendered literal in limited and injured bodies, Rust and Bone swerves a couple of times too many, but its boldness and vivacity linger large.
Tabu also directly contrasts the pettiness of modern life and the way age reduces everyone to less than they truly are with the outsized passion of yesterday’s youthful folly, with everyday depressive longing segueing into period melodrama, but with a constant, morally serious eye on the shifting vicissitudes of history and personal nature. Gomes’ masterful formal conceits constantly evoke another phase in cinema and life—black-and-white photography and a long, semi-silent segment—and yet avoids any hint of self-satisfied stunt.
Would Be on This List If I’d Seen It in Time
Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino) Farewell My Queen (Benoît Jacquot) The Master (Paul Thomas Anderson)
Honourable Mention
The Avengers (Joss Whedon) Damsels in Distress (Whit Stillman) The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (Peter Jackson) Miss Bala (Gerardo Naranjo) Oslo, 31 August (Joachim Trier) Savages (Oliver Stone) Sleepless Night (Frédéric Jardin) Snow White and the Huntsman (Rupert Sanders) Sound of My Voice (Zal Batmanglij) Vamps (Amy Heckerling) Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow)
Reserved Approval
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (Timur Bekmembetov) Bel-Ami (Declan Donnellan, Nick Ormerod) The Cabin in the Woods (Drew Goddard) Cloud Atlas (Lana and Andy Wachowski, Tom Tykwer) Compliance (Craig Zobel) Declaration of War (Valérie Donzelli) Haywire (Steven Soderbergh) Holy Motors (Leos Carax) Killer Joe (William Friedkin) Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson) Return (Liza Johnson) Turn Me On, Dammit! (Jannicke Systad Jacobsen)
Disappointing/Overrated
The Amazing Spider-Man (Marc Webb) Argo (Ben Affleck) The Bourne Legacy (Tony Gilroy) The Dark Knight Rises (Christopher Nolan) The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies) The Hunger Games (Gary Ross) The Grey (Joe Carnahan) Killing Them Softly (Andrew Dominik) Looper (Rian Johnson) Prometheus (Ridley Scott) Magic Mike (Steven Soderbergh) Skyfall (Sam Mendes)
Crap
Goodbye First Love (Mia Hansen-Løve) Hitchcock (Sacha Gervasi) Hyde Park on Hudson (Roger Michell) The Impossible (Juan Antonio Bayona) Lawless (John Hillcoat) Les Misérables (Tom Hooper) Life of Pi (Ang Lee) Promised Land (Gus Van Sant)
Significant Blind Spots
Almayer’s Folly, Amour, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Bernie, Detachment, Flight, Frankenweenie, Girl Walk//All Day, Keep the Lights On, The Loneliest Planet, Lore, Monsieur Lazhar, Seven Psychopaths, Sister, Take This Waltz, The Turin Horse
My Year of Retro Wonders: Great Older Films I Saw First in 2012
All The King’s Men (Robert Rossen) A Bell for Adano (Henry King) Berlin Express (Jacques Tourneur) Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks) Countdown (Robert Altman) The Cranes Are Flying (Mikhail Kolatozov) Dark Waters (Andre de Toth) The Day the World Ended / Not of This Earth (Roger Corman) Die Nibelungen / The Tiger of Eschnapur & The Indian Tomb (Fritz Lang) Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder) The Earth Dies Screaming / Revenge of Frankenstein / Frankenstein Created Woman / Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (Terence Fisher) Elevator to the Scaffold / Viva Maria! (Louis Malle) Farewell to the King (John Milius) Faust / Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (F. W. Murnau) Flowers of Shanghai (Hsiao-hsien Hou) Gate of Hell (Teinosuke Kinugasa) Gilda (Charles Vidor) Hell’s Angels (Howard Hughes, James Whale, Edmund Goulding) Hercules in the Haunted World / I Tre Volti Della Paura / Knives of the Avenger (Mario Bava) Jeremiah Johnson (Sydney Pollack) Judex (Georges Franju) The Knack…and How to Get It / Royal Flash / Robin and Marian (Richard Lester) La Frissons du Vampires / Les Démoniaques (Jean Rollin) Laura (Otto Preminger) Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner / The French Lieutenant’s Woman (Karel Reisz) The Looking Glass War (Frank R. Pierson) Modesty Blaise (Joseph Losey) Mountains of the Moon (Bob Rafelson) Ms. 45 (Abel Ferrara) No Regrets for Our Youth (Akira Kurosawa) The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Dreyer) The Phantom Carriage (Victor Sjöstrom) The Phenix City Story (Phil Karlson) Phantom of the Paradise/ Obsession / Blow Out / Mission to Mars (Brian De Palma) Sorcerer / Cruising (William Friedkin) The Stars Look Down (Carol Reed) Sword of Doom (Kihachi Okamoto) Tattooed Life / Story of a Prostitute (Seijun Suzuki) A Time to Love and a Time to Die (Douglas Sirk) Torment (Alf Sjöberg) Track of the Cat / Blood Alley (William A. Wellman) When a Woman Ascends a Staircase (Mikio Naruse) Young and Innocent / Under Capricorn / Topaz (Alfred Hitchcock) Young Mr. Lincoln / Three Godfathers (John Ford) Zatoichi Monogatari (Kenji Misumi)
More than 20 years since the end of the Cold War, and nearly a half-century since the film was released, why is Stanley Kubrick’s seventh feature, a modish fantasia dealing with the perverse id and assailed mentality of its specific era, still so lauded, so beloved, so vital? How can a film with such subject matter still be considered a titanic work of cinematic comedy? Why does it stand tall when attempts to update it or reproduce its unstable blend of elements usually fall very, very short? Some answers: a great filmmaker at the height of his craft. A great comic actor also at his height, backed up by other superlative talents. A screenplay possessed of a pitiless intelligence and ornery wit. A time when taking risks in cinema was rapidly becoming more permissible, even necessary. Over and above all this, Dr. Strangelove helped to define something about the modern world that has survived even as the Cold War has faded. The apocalyptic anxiety it diagnosed and treated with mockery and gallows humour has hardly vanished, but has rather faded to the background static in our daily lives. Dr. Strangelove is a purgative rather than a wallow, however, a work of fatalistic fervour that is nonetheless perversely cheering precisely because it considers the worst the world had to offer and yet still finds the joie de vivre in it.
Dr. Strangelove began evolving when Kubrick, interested in dealing with the threat of nuclear war, had a book recommended to him credited to the pseudonym of former RAF officer Peter Bryan George. George’s novel, variously titled Two Hours to Doom or Red Alert, was a sober thriller depicting Armageddon almost brought about by a combination of human frailty and technological estrangement. Kubrick had been pushed close to the summit of Hollywood success in helming Kirk Douglas’ earnest projects Paths of Glory (1957) and Spartacus (1960) only a few years after the precocious former photographer had broken into the industry with self-financed films. But frustrating experiences making Spartacus and One-Eyed Jacks (1961), from which he was fired, soured him on Hollywood. Kubrick had recently made what proved a permanent move to Britain to shoot Lolita (1962), a movie that established him as a more eccentric and individualistic director than anyone had realised, gifted at tackling taboo subjects whilst maintaining an ironic but fervent empathy for tragically human protagonists.
Kubrick was, at this time, also gravitating towards the burgeoning fringe comedy scene, and had been exploring the possibility of collaborating with edgy comic talents like Lenny Bruce and Jules Feiffer. Impressed by the raw material of Red Alert, Kubrick began working on a screenplay with George, but as he laboured, realised that there was a lode of dark, inchoate, innate absurdity beneath the surface of this seemingly sober assessment of nuclear strategy, a realm where supposedly sensible men talked in terms of “megadeaths,” politicians whose posturing endangered billions, and military leaders stuck in an earlier era could not give up the idea of winning conflicts with weapons that could raze cities to the ground in the blink of an eye and poison the earth beyond habitation many times over. The Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 had seen a two-week stand-off where the fate of the world seemed literally in the balance. The emotions this time stoked in people—rage, disgust, horror, fear, the despair of impotence—were primal, yet radically at odds with the post-war world’s most cherished goals of pacified insulation.
The gulf between those who had come of age before the destruction of Hiroshima and those who grew up after it exacerbated a generational disparity. A new strain of satire arrived in the late ‘50s, moving out of the coffee bars, student mags and revues, art and cult novels and onto television and movie screens. Pop culture was thus infiltrated by the influence of Dadaism, Surrealism, the Theatre of the Absurd, and other avant-garde art movements that drew power from the century’s earlier tragedies, emphasising the impudent deconstruction of cultural maxims. Humourists, satirists, and quick-witted artists like Bruce, Feiffer, Tom Lehrer, Terry Southern, and Joseph Heller were rapidly defining the new taste for critical humour with an undertaste of blood and cyanide. Kubrick was about to bring hip comedy to the big screen properly with his adaptation of George’s novel. He hired Southern to help complete the travesty he had set in motion.
Some thought Kubrick was overreaching. His regular producer Robert Harris broke up their partnership, convinced Kubrick was headed for disaster. Bosley Crowther, the dean of mainstream cinematic taste for The New York Times, denounced the resulting film. But the howls of opprobrium were quickly drowned out by the howls of laughter and admiration. War is tragedy, the film seemed to say, but nuclear war is so inimical it lies beyond morality and human sensibility, and is thus absurd and might as well be laughed at. Dr. Strangelove, whilst moulding a definitive form of satire in cinema, clearly owed as much to slapstick tradition as to anything else, and sustained within its modish, anarchic immediacy is a strong sense of filmic tradition. In spite of its scope, intent, and the force of its impact on pop culture, Dr. Strangelove is also the cinema’s longest, most sustained banana peel gag: something goes wrong, the dumb boobs slip up, try to stay on their feet, but only succeed in bringing everything down with an almighty crash. The resulting film, whilst almost sui generis as a whole, had many progenitors: there’s a lot of the despairing joviality of Catch-22, the anarchic tilts of Duck Soup (1933) and Spike Milligan’s radio programme The Goon Show, a surrealist-slapstick pastiche on imperial-era melodrama and pulp fiction. Southern, who knew the tradition he worked in, slipped in an obscure reference to Jonathan Swift, and concludes the film with his own Modest Proposal.
Dr. Strangelove unfolds very close to real time, and this adds to the nauseating sensation of watching events that cannot be stopped, imbuing the action with a feeling of free-fall, a feeling actualised in the immortal plunge of Maj. T. J. “King” Kong (Slim Pickens), riding the bomb that brings about the end of the world. Taking advantage of a training operation that brings U.S. B-52 bombers within striking distance of the Soviet Union, Gen. Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden), commander of Burpelson Air Force Base, who has gone insane and intends to start World War III, sends out an obscure battle order, Wing Attack Plan R. This allows him to order his planes to attack in case a Soviet attack has already wiped out Washington, disrupting the chain of command. The airmen in their stratosphere-cruising tin cans, tethered to humanity only by radio and with this contact strictly limited to a prearranged code to tune out false enemy messages, can only accept their orders at face value and proceed.
One plane, the Leper Colony, commanded by Maj. Kong, survives a missile attack that leaves communications cut off, but Kong proceeds regardless with determined bravado. Ripper order his XO, Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake (Peter Sellers), a British officer present through an exchange program to ready the base for an attack and to cut off all contact with the outside world, to ensure that any attempt to capture him and halt his plan will be staved off as long as possible. Ripper hopes to force the government to commit to all-out war, but President Merkin Muffley (Sellers again), resists the ministrations to do just that from his military advisor Gen. ‘Buck’ Turgidson (George C. Scott) and instead contacts the Soviets to warn them and offer aid in repelling the attackers. But as the Russian ambassador De Sadesky (Peter Bull) explains in horror, even one bomb falling would be too many, as the Soviets have constructed the Doomsday Device, which will automatically detonate and poison the entire planet, as the ultimate nuclear deterrent.
One aspect vital to appreciating Dr. Strangelove is the degree to which it is not a comedy at all. The grounded detail and informed perspective of George’s novel remained an important aspect of the film, and Kubrick’s insistence on tangible verisimilitude is apparent throughout in Gilbert Taylor’s cinematography, at once artfully expressionistic and harshly realistic, and particularly Ken Adams’ production design. Adams, who was to a certain extent inventing a lexicon of modernity in design through his work in this film and in the James Bond series, rendered sets like the interior of the Leper Colony and the War Room as spaces where functional technology has infused décor, and even the psyche, to become a denaturalised way of life where humans are mere aspects of the mechanism. The story is essentially believable, and plays out with thriller-like compression and logic. The notion that a U.S. Air Force general, a lunatic with a mind poisoned so fervently against Communist threats that he might abuse his authority and plunge the world into a nihilistic war, contained a note of quiver-inducing anxiety, suggested by the bellicosity of Douglas MacArthur and Curtis LeMay and their conflicts with presidential authority. The secret root of Gen. Ripper’s rancour is, for all its hilarious paranoia, based on a genuine conspiracy theory once propagated by the John Birch Society that water fluoridation was a Communist plot.
The combat sequences and the bombing run of the Leper Colony feign a scrupulous procedural intricacy. Long before it became a compulsory aspect of cinematic pseudo-realism, Kubrick and Taylor employed handheld camerawork to give portions of the film a jerky, haphazard, grainy vibrancy, as if it’s all really happening, televised live and uninterrupted. Kubrick milks the interminable complexity and rigour of the procedures the airmen follow to build tension, like steps on some long, manual-dictated march to Calvary. The claustrophobic tightness of the Leper Colony’s interior is emphasised with camerawork where the actors’ breath all but fogs the lens. Minor technical details become the stuff of apocalyptic drama. The actual moments of violence in the film, in the battle for Burpelson and the suicide of Ripper, come without ironic distancing or farcicality.
Where the serious, orthodox elements edge into comedic style is in precisely the strange territory where the nuclear age infrastructure is revealed as both a by-product of, and new soil for, the perversities of the human condition. The most basic binary of all is constantly in evidence throughout: sex and death. The equation of fetishized military power and infrastructure with phallic sexuality wasn’t new in 1964 and is even more clichéd now, but Dr. Strangelove turns it into a key, recurring gag, and the root motive for the drama. The “Arms Race, the Space Race, and the Peace Race” are boiled down to a dick-size competition. Machismo is seen as the not-so-secret meaning of the Cold War, as the military men of the United States, a nation steeped in the mythology of manliness and exemplified by Stetson-clad Texan Kong and secretary-boffing Turgidson, suffer acute anxieties over loss of potency in the insulating and softening qualities of modern life. They’re doomed to fret that they’ll never be as real men as the Russians who have proved themselves in fire and battle, for, as Turgidson puts it, “Look at all them Nazis you killed!”
Muffley, the feminised liberal archetype, offends this type utterly with his recidivist cockblockery. Turgidson, introduced in a tryst with his leggy staffer Miss Scott (Tracy Reed, the only woman actually featured in the film soon outclassed by all those sexy, sexy missiles and curvaceous bombers), promises he’ll be back in time for “blast-off!”—a conflation of explosion and orgasm that the film later reiterates in the most spectacular terms. Indeed, everyone has their sex life interrupted by the erupting crisis, from the Leper Colony airmen leafing through their girly mags to Soviet Premier Kissoff being interrupted by Muffley’s call during a drunken debauch. Buck has to handle an irritated phone call from Miss Scott at the War Room table (“I thought I told you never to call me here!”), forced to mollify her in an excruciatingly funny vignette that conflates philandering executive and naughty schoolboy both in Buck’s ample frame: “Someday I’m gonna make you Mrs. Buck Turgidson!” he declares in a skewering of the era’s chauvinist mentality sharper than a dozen Mad Men episodes. But all are soon distracted by the promise of the ultimate climax.
The correlation deepens as Dr. Strangelove unfolds, as the dualities of life and death, sex and murder, chaos and creation, begin to infuse the visual and thematic substance of the entire work, expostulating the concept of the death instinct as inextricable from the sexual instinct, only now, the destructive element has become infinitely more powerful than sex. The carnal awareness never far from the surface in Kubrick’s cinema finds a partner here in Southern’s love for suggesting powerful, but queasily displaced erotic underpinnings to many a contemporary obsession. Here, the sex, like humanity itself, has become inextricable from technology. The opening credits, scored to a wryly lilting version of “Try a Little Tenderness,” present footage of a B-52 refuelling in mid-air, with the music transforming it into a gentle dance of aerial coitus: even the planes are doing it now. Hal 9000’s psychopathic hissy fit is only a stone’s throw away; Strangelove himself, contained in a wheelchair with self-animated limbs, is the misbegotten median of the process. Whereas in Paths of Glory (1957) and Spartacus (1960), Kubrick had studied the frantic rage of a ruling class in their inability to make individuals into mechanisms that obey their will and desires, here the process is far closer to completion. But the order is fraying from the other end: leadership in the modern world, both political and military, has devolved into a tangled skein of ass-covering, partisan piety, psychic fragmentation, and propagandistic fig leaves. The first breakdown of the system is the greatest, the ultimately irreparable one, that of Ripper’s sanity. The source of his breakdown? The onset of middle-aged impotence.
Dr. Strangelove is the crux of Kubrick’s career. Whereas the raw, humanist howl of Paths of Glory was obvious enough to let Jean-Luc Godard mistake him for an heir to Stanley Kramer as a cooker of cultural vegetables, Dr. Strangelove confirmed Lolita’s promise that Kubrick was now in the game for the antiheroes, misanthropes, and rogues. He would engage with macrocosmic concerns with an increasingly rarefied style that seemed, by the standards of commercial cinema, a detached, analytical, even misanthropic affectation. But what truly distinguishes Kubrick’s oeuvre, and Dr. Strangelove in particular, is the way the methodical filmmaking and the coolness of the director’s regard offsets the compulsion, the messiness, and the pathos of the human state.
Apart from a couple of minor excursions, Dr. Strangelove unspools as three extended, interlocking, cross-edited scenes, taking place in locales which are crucially, fatefully separated by space and communication, but which are also conjoined in cause and effect: the War Room, the Leper Colony, and Burpelson Base. In each locale, according to the classic rules of farce and also to the natural rules of intense situations, a slow-burning urgency, shading into hysteria, develops. What results is a tragicomedy of cross-purposes. Perhaps just as alarming as Ripper’s insanity is the way the other characters refuse to give into disintegration, trying until the last moment to do their jobs, and indeed refusing to waver from their roles, their world-views and presumptions, myopia continuing even past the point when it’s destroyed the world. The Leper Colony’s airmen (including James Earl Jones in his first film), though pushed to the limit, continue to operate with stoic professionalism. Muffley and Mandrake are linked not only by being played by Sellers, but by the fact that they each try to deal with the situation as best as they can, and resist the people around them who represent variations on a theme of martial lunacy and a love/hate relationship with the idea of mutually assured destruction. Muffley sacrifices his soldiers for the sake of peace. Mandrake is confronted by a lunatic who might possibly shoot him if he becomes too troublesome, and sways from meekness to forced bonhomie to exasperated clumsiness, but still tries constantly to find a way to save the world. De Sadesky continues to sneak photos of the War Room as it becomes clear the Cold War will now go underground.
Dr. Strangelove’s modernity is written into the textures of the film, in the chitinous flash of technocratic infrastructure, the chiaroscuro duplicity of the lighting where fluorescent glare and recessed glows illuminate the actors with unflattering harshness against enveloping darkness, the interplay of Taylor’s studiously framed and balanced photography and Anthony Harvey’s propelling edits. Kubrick had from the first balanced twin poles of realism and expressionism in his work. Dr. Strangelove is defined on many levels by the push and pull of these divergent impulses, adding to its power, as characters like Ripper, Kong, and Strangelove seem to lurch out of the shadows of the psyche, distorted and rendered hyper-real in their caricatured menace, into the studied authenticity of the rest of the film. Here, too, the later Kubrick, the notoriously spare and measured imagist, began to appear. Kubrick encodes messages of power and attitude in his visuals. Consider the framing of Scott’s Turgidson as he explains the situation for the President’s benefit. He is filmed from a low angle that emphasises Turgidson’s stolid turgidness, with a folder on the desk before him just edging its way into the frame labeled “World Targets in Megadeaths.” Kubrick maintains the same shot for much of the scene, in interchange with Muffley, who is shot almost at eye level but further away and framed between two foreground listeners, at once more reasonable-seeming but also smaller, pettier, his ineffectiveness plain. And Ripper, the animator of this situation, is shot in looming, dominating close-up from below, a glowering, inescapable death’s head, savage and unremitting. The basic technique serves its purpose in depicting the relations of these men and their characters in themselves, and resembles other moments in Kubrick’s canon, like the early exchanges of The Shining (1980), that perceive characters on their best behaviour but straining to keep cool, with a sense of quietly composing forces that will shatter the surface tension. In contrast, and yet without any sense of aesthetic disparity, the battle scenes are a maelstrom breaking up the film’s fastidious visual language, shot from the perspective a grunt or war correspondent hunkering behind a machine gun and crawling through the weeds.
Kubrick’s most obvious desire here was to achieve a documentary immediacy, compounding the film’s commitment to tactile realism. Death and carnage are rendered at once spectacular and remote, as Kubrick’s control of perspective makes space and distance an important aspect of fighting, reproducing the intent of Ripper’s orders in rendering the warring forces as an alien threat, distant moving things to be shot at. The nature of the action they’re engaged in is confused on both sides, as Ripper’s men assume the approaching force is Communist, whilst the attackers, as exemplified by Maj. “Bat” Guano (Keenan Wynn), have no idea what’s at stake. The suggestion that a politicised lie animates this action, and perhaps all such action, becomes inescapable, whilst the fact that the fighting soldiers are actually on the same side evokes the warrior doppelgangers of Kubrick’s first film, Fear and Desire (1953). They assault blocklike structures with a minimalist blandness and prefab look; Burpelson could be a school or a hospital or any other institution. The prominently featured signs proclaiming the USAF’s motto “Peace Is Our Profession,” could well be one of Kubrick and Southern’s satirical coups, except, of course, that it really was the USAF’s motto. The film’s most famous line, barked by Muffley to the wrestling Turgidson and De Sadesky, “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here, this is the War Room!”, simply restates this discrepancy more immediately, and echoes again through to the root premise of Ripper’s plot. His mantra of peace on Earth represents a conundrum quite understandably maddening to a warrior like him, for the only complete, guaranteed peace is that of complete annihilation, that Roman desert.
Dr. Strangelove’s connection to silent comedy was to be confirmed with a climactic pie fight, but Kubrick decided, probably for the best, that this element was best left restrained: Dr. Strangelove never gives into farce entirely. Classic slapstick comedy of early cinema heroes like Keaton, Chaplin, and Lloyd has clawed back ground from being considered the lowest of comedic arts, thanks to analyses of the implicit drama of circumstance, of human fallibility and ingenuity at war with a happenstance world. If the root of all slapstick was the banana peel gag, such comic artists inflated that basic principle into a systematology wherein individual ingenuity and striving faces a world that conspires against them, be it through social perversity, personal maladjustments, economic troubles, unruly inanimate objects, or machines that both perfect human abilities but also mimic and metastasize their faults. Such highbrow conceptual prisms might seem like gilding the lily, and yet they did return lustre to such arts that had for a long time been lost, particularly in the mid-20th century. That’s when slapstick was largely regarded as child’s play, and satire was ennobled as the intellectual, artistic end of the comedy pantheon. As Pauline Kael became fond of complaining, for a long time after the impact of Dr. Strangelove, it was not enough for a comedy to be a comedy: it had to have a satirical edge. Pricking pomposity, assaulting authority figures, mocking retrograde values and social pillars, insulting consumerism and capitalism and militarism: these became the worthy targets for the comic mind. Satire had long been subject to that old joke: it’s what opens on a Friday and closes on a Saturday. That was largely true in cinema as in the theatre, though filmmakers like Chaplin, Rene Clair, Jacques Tati, and Frank Tashlin had attempted over the years to dovetail it neatly with more familiar comic business in their films, combining their jaundiced appreciations of modern life with character comedy and good old-fashioned pratfalls.
To a certain extent, Dr. Strangelove only inverted the focus of such filmmakers, reducing the farcical to a supernal flourish that underlines the lunacy of the supposedly serious events on screen. When Turgidson tumbles head over heels in his frantic distress when Muffley proposes bringing the Russian ambassador into the War Room to prove his sincerity, or when Guano, hesitant to damage the property of corporate power to save the world, gets a face full of Coca-Cola, all divisions between slapstick and satire dissipate. Appropriately, Turgidson’s tumble was actually an accident that Scott refused to let shake him from character, and Kubrick saw how it suited the film. The characters’ names give obvious clues to their functions in this farce: Jack D. Ripper, obsessed with sex and slaughter, the dark heart of the Freudian taxonomy. Merkin Muffley, the girly-man with a wig where his privates should be. Kong, the chest-beating ape. ‘Buck’ Turgidson, talking macho manure and military guff a mile a minute. Mandrake, named for a natural aphrodisiac that’s also a slow poison, evoking the officer’s flailing mix of tenacity and ineffectualness. “Bat” Guano, fearsome, dim, and totally batshit. The specific tenor of these names is very Terry Southern, but it’s also one of the oldest tricks in satirical writing, going back to Aristophanes—the use of a name that’s based in a pun or an assignation that reduces an individual to a type, an exemplar, a singular quality that stretches across social groups: where tragedy evokes the apotheosis of the individual even in the face of annihilation, satire details the ignominy of the species, especially in the face of annihilation.
Of course, Dr. Strangelove, as well as being a Kubrick film, is also a Peter Sellers film. Sellers had played multiple roles in films before, including in two films that seem distinctly prototypical for Dr. Strangelove, The Mouse That Roared and I’m Alright, Jack (both 1959). But not since Alec Guinness in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) had a comic actor dominated a film so completely and provided a display of such effervescent, chameleonic wit. Sellers sustains the film’s central sequence, in which Muffley must call Kissoff to warn him of the impending danger. He finds the Soviet Premier not hard at work ploughing the fields whilst dictating foreign policy memos as propaganda might have it, but ensconced with a mistress and completely soused. Muffley has to communicate with a careful mix of brotherly affection, paternal cajoling, and plaintive appeal. Sellers’ verbal brilliance here is uncontained, as his intonations signal every register of his conversation with the unseen, unheard opposite. Muffley’s way of handling people and the character of the person he’s dealing with come through, as we gather the Premier is boozy and good-humoured, delighted to hear from his Yankee friend, but with the volatility of a drunk, a volatility Muffley’s used to dealing with, surrendering all affectation of command in favour of a housewife’s wheedling. An extended parody on the popular perception of Adlai Stevenson and Nikita Khrushchev, and a variation on a gag style popularised by Bob Newhart, this scene is both the linchpin of the movie’s warped humour, whilst also peeking under the metaphorical skirts of the Cold War to find the very human protagonists behind the monolithic facades. Dr. Strangelove constantly suggests those facades are desirable for both sides, a construction that justifies their paranoia, their raison d’etre, whilst constantly revealing the permeability of these monoliths. De Sadesky scoffs at the Americans’ denial of plans to build a Doomsday Device when the Soviets learnt about it from The New York Times, and Kissoff advises Muffley that he can get in touch with the USSR’s super-ultra-maxi secret defence command through Omsk Information.
Mandrake, Sellers’ second and most fully realised character, is a bittersweet anachronism, the last proper British officer of the WWII generation, assuming a fraternal joviality whilst nursing grim memories of war and torture, operating according to a code in an age that sees him play second fiddle to bellicose Americans and clattering computers. Sellers’ talent for physical as well as verbal comedy is subtly but beautifully revealed as Mandrake contends with the crisis, from his forced good humour in displaying the working radio playing pop music to Ripper, a sign that the world outside is continuing as normal, then working himself to a peak of officious indignation in trying to order Ripper to unlock his office door, which Ripper had locked right in front of Mandrake without him noticing, the General’s psychopathic cool completely stymieing Mandrake’s gentlemanly forbearance. Mandrake is at first the embodiment of the stiff upper lip, responding to news that “we’re in a shooting war” with the driest English perturbation (“Oh hell.”), but is driven to ever more frustrated, vibrant anger as he contends with the obtuse suspicion of Guano, who takes him prisoner after Ripper’s suicide: “Shoot it off!” he commands the Major, needing the change from a Coca-Cola machine to make a world-saving phone call to the White House, his patience finally severing and speech reduced to staccato fragments, “Shoot! With a gun! That’s what the bullets are for, you twit!” Mandrake is, in spite of being as much a satirical type as Turgidson or Kong, also the audience’s essential figure for identification, a reasonable, all-too-human individual who operates according to the necessity of the moment. Whether deciding discretion is the better part of valour in dealing with Ripper or trying to establish authority over Guano when the moment demands, Mandrake experiences every moment like a trial by ridiculous ordeal, and Yeats’ classic line about the best lacking all conviction whilst the worst have passionate intensity is depicted in all its agonising truth.
Sellers’ third characterisation as the eponymous nuclear strategist confined to a wheelchair is the even more alarming counterpart to Ripper. Whereas Ripper plots Armageddon because he’s mad and seems, in his very last moments, to regain a certain lucidity, even nobility, in his confrontation of the darkest abyss of fate, Strangelove is the spirit of pure, malicious delight in a destruction that will sweep away the world and give him a chance to rebuild it according to his own perverted proclivities. Strangelove, the title character, is actually only central to two scenes, and yet he fixates the attention and haunts the mind as a kind of laughing devil. Sellers’ most bizarre and inspired grotesque, Strangelove, with grating Germanic accent overlaid on helium tones, snaps at words with toothy eagerness like an intellectual barracuda. He’s a compendium of some of the Germanic men involved with Cold War exigencies, including Wernher Von Braun, rocket scientist to the Nazis; atomic bomb designer Edward Teller; strategist Herman Kahn; and the coiner of the phrase “mutually assured destruction” John von Neumann. Strangelove’s shallow allegiance to democratic ideals and his inner, fixated ardour for the idea of a glorious Gotterdammerung is hinted by his literally Anglicised name, changed from Merkwuerdigliebe. He also, not coincidentally, calls to mind the great mad savants of Fritz Lang’s Expressionist films: Caligari, Mabuse, and especially Rotwang.
Whilst Dr.Strangelove was in the editing room, the recently premiered TV show Doctor Who was just introducing its iconic villains, the Daleks, the next stage of Strangelove, mutants created by atomic war completely encased now in their wheelchairs, speaking with an electronic version of the same harsh, grating, savage voice. Strangelove, it becomes clear, actually embodies the nuclear age, a twisted, semi-human remnant forged by one political culture joyfully obsessed with mass murder and now having found a new one to feed off of. His weird, leering pleasure in discussing all things apocalyptic rhymes with that look of feral joy displayed by so many of Kubrick’s antiheroes. But whereas with the likes of Ripper, Alex DeLarge, Jack Torrance, Pvt. Pyle et al., that savage smile signalled the shattering of the civilised veneer by the beast within, in Strangelove they work in perverse synchronicity; Strangelove is the ultimate result, as much as the Star Child of 2001, of human evolution, its fusion with its own works and wares, into a monstrosity.
Whilst Sellers dominates, Scott, Hayden, and Pickens are the invaluable back-up. Pickens treads a fine line in presenting Kong as a broad stereotype who is, nonetheless, not excessively buffoonish, possessed of a certain level of humour and determination that could be admirable in other circumstances, but who’s also blind on the most vital levels. Hayden’s Ripper is played deadly straight even as what he says seems innately silly. Hayden had almost disappeared from movie screens in the 1960s, sick of Hollywood and ashamed of his HUAC testimony during the McCarthy era, but here he brought effortless class to a role that could have been easy to overdraw. Actor and director collaborate in rendering the character genuinely frightening in his dead-eyed stare and vicious-looking teeth biting a cigar. When the pathetic side of Ripper emerges, and he explains in evasive terms the impotence that afflicts him, Hayden slows Ripper’s confident bark down to a slightly sluggish, peevish drawl, the faintly shambolic fool of fortune under the man’s fearful veneer glinting through. Ripper maintains a sickly paternal affection mixed with a weird sexualised threat for Mandrake, who listens as if every inch of his body is puckered in discomfort. Ripper embodies the splintered psyche of the age, panicked over his waning masculinity and conceiving it in political terms. Scott’s Turgidson, an avatar for LeMay, is unassailed by such anxieties, as obtuse, myopic bigotry incarnate, his pose of professional responsibility soon peeled back to reveal the garrulous, zealous, Commie-hating, bug-eyed big kid, one for whom nuclear annihilation is rarely more real than a football match. He reaches a soaring flight of lunatic enthusiasm in his rave about the talents of the American air force pilot that concludes with sudden realisation of the meaning of what he’s talking about, smacking his forehead and cringing. Turgidson soon rediscovers his balance as he listens to Strangelove’s plan for repopulating the Earth, almost panting with enthusiasm as he questions whether this would mean abandoning the “so-called monogamous sexual relationship,” like a kid about to given the key to a candy store.
All of Kubrick’s films are driven by the same fundamental dynamic, the friction between the primal and the civilised, and pushes towards extremes in either direction discovers antitheses latent within: the deadening effect of order provokes explosions of id-welling expression, and combat with primitive forces sometimes reinforces essential human qualities. Just as the evolved ape-men of 2001 have to combat their own devices to achieve transcendence, so, too, do these characters—except, of course, they fail this time around, but discover a strange delight in the notion. Similarly, the odyssey is another Kubrickian motif here, as the flight of the Leper Colony mirrors that of the Discovery and, later, the pod used by Dave Bowman in 2001, as technical disasters must be overcome and a mysterious world penetrated. The icy, forested, mountainous wastes of Siberia (actually Canada) they fly over are as vast, alien, and spectacularly strange as the hallucinogenic oceans and continents Bowman soars across, and conjoined by a similar sensation of lurching headlong into the unknown toward an event that cannot possibly be survived, at least not in the usual way. The scene in which the Leper Colony is nearly destroyed by a Russian missile is rendered vivid without visual effects, as the pursuing missile is registered only on a radar screen, and its explosion appears as a flash, whilst the navigator’s panicky voice is drowned by a wave of eerie interference before the shockwave wallops the bomber. Kubrick gets around the limitations of his budget through the simplest, yet most audio-visually impactful of means here, and more, as it captures the keenest sensation that 2001 would be far more committed to—the sensation of danger in isolation, far from home, tethered to a machine that might be the death of you.
Dr. Strangelove is, like many like-minded films that would follow, as much at war with its own cinematic genre as with any real-world concerns. Kubrick repurposes manipulative aesthetic tricks, usually employed in celebrating martial heroism in both life and cinema, to turn them back on the war story and mock its presumptions. The only incidental music in the film is a driving employment of Laurie Johnson’s spare variations on the Civil War anthem “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” a choice that strikes at the mythology of American martial values as it accords with, but also mocks, Kong’s gung-ho purpose, and Ripper’s cry to Mandrake whilst wielding machine gun, “The Redcoats are coming!” The tune eventually drops away, leaving only driving martial drums to underscore Kong’s warlike zeal and race against time. Turgidson crows about the instilled ability of an American air force pilot to defy any obstacle, natural or military, to reach his target and fulfil his mission, only then to cringe in realisation of what this means: achievement of a goal in ignorance of the meaning and outcome of his efforts, dooming everyone else to oblivion. And indeed, the Leper Colony’s crew act just like they’re supposed to, and more; they exhibit brilliance and bravery in the course of their duty. If this were a WWII tale and they were trying to knock out a Nazi base, we’d be cheering them every step of the way, thrilling as they overcome every challenge, tearing up as the commander gives his life to make sure the payload drops. But here, it’s a horror show of nerveless proficiency and detachment from reality, with a laugh-yourself-sick punchline. Kong is so oblivious to the likely results of what he’s doing that he eggs on his men with promises of “important promotions and personal citations” once they get back. The Leper Colony crew’s resourcefulness means that even when they can’t bomb any of their assigned targets, they can try for another, which fatally takes them away from the areas Muffley has advised the Russians to cover.
Of course, at the very last second, Kong gets his bomb bay doors to open, and he plunges with the payload to the earth, whooping with joy every inch of the way, the bomb suddenly the ultimate bucking bronco and the greatest phallic substitute ever, the blast that results in redneck apotheosis and orgasmic eruption. This is the film’s most famous moment, and indeed one of the most iconic in the history of cinema, partly for its starkly beautiful reduction of the film’s themes to one singularly powerful image. Kubrick’s visualisation is perfect, camera affixed to the end of the bomb, gazing down at the yee-hawing Kong as the bomb tips and plunges toward its target with vertiginous rapidity, with only the rushing air and Kong’s bellows audible. Kong’s cries are inimitable and funny, but also unnerving in their exultant violence, and the scene, barely a few seconds long, seems to last forever. The bomb hits the ground in a flash of obliterating white, rendering this vision at once hilarious and almost heart-stopping in its force and strangeness. The concluding montage of atomic explosions, signalling the annihilation of the world, is scored to Vera Lynn’s “We’ll Meet Again.” This choice of song is the film’s final, smirking coup, recalling its anthemic power and nostalgic meaning for the WWII era, repudiating the fatuous self-satisfaction of how-I-won-the-war types, and making an obvious point: that the notion that nuclear war can be survived is a fairy tale and the event impossible to liken to any previous conflict. Yet, Kubrick also invites us to revel in the sing-along cosiness, the communal affection and power the song communicates, as it feels like a last hug before the dark plunge, a final carouse with humankind, and an exhausted, conciliatory concession to the irrational. At its most ruthless, Dr. Strangelove is also at its warmest.
But even the end is not the end, as, faced with the certain destruction of life on earth, the cabal in the War Room listen with increasingly responsive and wrapt fascination to Strangelove’s proposal that they move a nucleus of human society underground to wait out the time it will take the Doomsday Device’s effect to dissipate. Not only does Strangelove’s idea give hope to the seemingly hopeless situation, it actually sounds like an Eden for the white middle-aged males left to repopulate the world with a potential smorgasbord of females. Whilst the world is being pummelled to pieces by atomic horrors, the men in the War Room are worrying about a future arms race and glowing with enthusiasm for living out the rest of their lives underground with a harem. Strangelove is finally unbound, his seemingly paralytic arm now taking on a life of its own, snapping as he speaks into Heil Hitler salutes with the involuntary passion of an erection, and grasping his crotch in auto-erotic frenzy. Strangelove is forced to wrestle and bite it into submission as he continues to expostulate his plan, and it becomes plain this Frankenstein’s Monster is erotically thrilled by the situation now before him, as. As he rises from his chair, restored to full working order, his final cry (“Mein Fuhrer! I can walk!”) confirms that Hitler’s dream is nigh complete. Emblematic of the film it concludes, Strangelove’s last line is weird and scary, and yet capable of wrenching the loudest of laughs from me every time I hear it. As Lynn sings, nuclear blasts, all real, rupture oceans and burn in infernal power, spreading fire in the night sky like a false dawn, poetic in their dread. In spite of all, we can still laugh at Dr. Strangelove’s vision. For the time being.
It was a happy day for this cinephile when I got on the radar screen of Mimi Brody. Mimi’s official title is Pick-Laudati Curator of Film at Northwestern University, which means that she is in charge of Northwestern’s film-related programming. While she can take the credit for the many and varied screening choices that occur throughout the year, it is with her approach to special events that she really shines. In 2011, she put together a three-day conference on, of all things, film criticism that brought me together with my cohort in film preservation, Farran Nehme, for the very first time (Farran was on the panels; I was an enthusiastic audience member). When there was some unfinished business from that conference, she booked an additional panel for this year that brought renowned film critic and scholar Adrian Martin to my neck of the woods. It’s rare that any university in the United States not only would take contemporary film criticism seriously enough to devote considerable time and resources to bringing together the best critics to talk about their endeavors, but also include panelists from academia, print journalism, and online blogs and digital magazines. The conference was named “Illuminating the Shadows,” and it did much to bring online criticism out of the shadow of perceived inferiority and put it on an equal footing with more traditional vehicles for film criticism.
Mimi made it a point to introduce herself to me at the conference, and has kept me up to date on other film doings that might interest me and this blog’s readers. I was very excited when she sent me an e-mail announcing “Rethinking Film Preservation: Implications and Inspirations for the 21st Century,” booked by the Preservation Department at the Northwestern University Library. Again, the approach to thinking about film looks to the future with open arms, and if there ever was a discipline in need of a gentle, but firm nudge into the future, it is film preservation and archiving. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve talked with film collectors and buffs about the Chapter 11 filing of Kodak and the demise of celluloid, with the hand wringers and outraged mixing with the genuinely nervous repertory programmers who wonder what will happen to their ability to get and show high-quality 16mm and 35mm prints. Greedy corporations are blamed for failing to understand the aesthetic quality and purity of celluloid, forcing independent exhibitors like Chicago’s 85-year-old Patio Theater to ask Kickstarter investors to help fund the purchase of a $70,000 digital projector just so they can stay in business.
Bringing a knowledgeable, practical, and forward-thinking preservationist and archivist like Dr. Caroline Frick to speak to a diverse audience was another brilliant stroke. Dr. Frick is an enthusiastic, intelligent, and funny individual who is the president of the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA), a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and founder and executive director of the Texas Archive of the Moving Image (TAMI). Because I attended her presentation, I now have a clearer picture of where we are and where we might be going in our continuing efforts to save our audiovisual heritage.
Frick began with a fascinating fact about a list that even the most diehard film buff probably hasn’t heard of or voiced an opinion about (that might change right now!): the UNESCO Memory of the World Register. The vision and mission of this program are below:
The vision of the Memory of the World Programme is that the world’s documentary heritage belongs to all, should be fully preserved and protected for all and, with due recognition of cultural mores and practicalities, should be permanently accessible to all without hindrance.
The mission of the Memory of the World Programme is:
* To facilitate preservation, by the most appropriate techniques, of the world’s documentary heritage.
* To assist universal access to documentary heritage.
* To increase awareness worldwide of the existence and significance of documentary heritage.
Of interest to film fans is the fact that the first of only two American films to be placed on the register (the second is an ethnographic study) is The Wizard of Oz. The film was promoted over several decades as an important representation of America’s cultural heritage, but was regarded with suspicion because it is the product of a commercial enterprise. It only made the list in 2007 because George Eastman House archives the print from which commercial products and exhibitions emanate, thus providing a link to a nonprofit organization that UNESCO seems to need to declare something in the public interest. Thus, Frick established that the peculiar public/private nature of U.S. film preservation and distribution is as American as apple pie.
David Woodley Packard; Wohelo Camp (10 minutes, 1919)
Frick set up the landscape of film preservation funding as well. David Woodley Packard, son of the cofounder of Hewlett-Packard, is responsible for the lion’s share of grants for film preservation. Preservation of films like The Wizard of Oz (aka, Hollywood films) constitute the only projects his foundation will fund. The National Film Preservation Foundation, for which For the Love of Film blogathoners have raised funds in two separate years, does the heroic work of providing funds to archives like TAMI to restore and preserve everything else, from industrial films to vintage television commercials. One film Frick is especially excited about finding, and is working to restore and preserve now, is an interview with 96-year-old “Uncle” Jeff Hamilton, who was Sam Houston’s slave. The film was literally a solid brick that had to be put in a sauna to relax.
At the same time, a big challenge to the film preservation community, including funders, is to evolve the definition of what constitutes preservation. Frick was trained in the photochemical restoration of nitrate and other film-based materials, and celluloid has been fetishized by many parts of the film community. Until recently, even the great NFPF provided funds for restoration to film, not to DVD. Frick said AMIA members are struggling to come to terms with the digital present and future, but she doesn’t see this as an either/or process. “Many copies make films safe” is her mantra, and the digital revolution has made it possible to save thousands of audiovisual artifacts that otherwise would be languishing and possibly dying waiting for their turn in the few photochemical labs still in existence—or deemed not worth the trouble at all. I commented to her after the presentation that people might not be so unforgiving of digital projection if they’d had my experience of sitting through eight time-eating film breaks during a theatrical showing of Jean Renoir’s French Cancan that forced me to abandon the screening to make an appointment. Just last night at the 13th annual Silent Summer Film Festival, impresario/organist Jay Warren did something he has never done before—he asked for donations to the Silent Film Society of Chicago to defray the sky-rocketing costs of acquiring films for the festival. If a high-quality, high-definition digital transfer of last night’s Sherlock Holmes (1922) had been available, a lot of the money spent on the festival could have been diverted to more screenings throughout the year.
Farran’s recent post on Self-Styled Siren, “The Kid with the Citizen Kane Tape,” showcased the flagging interest in our film heritage. Perhaps ironically, Frick mentioned that YouTube has created a huge appetite among the college students she teaches for vintage home videos, commercials, and industrial films—the no-copyright audiovisual artifacts that are freely available on YouTube that we cinephiles generally pay little or no attention to. Imagine if we could get more of these kids to consume films like The Wizard of Oz (which, unbelievably, Frick says more and more of her students have never seen or even heard of) online or through their cable TV provider or some other way that hasn’t even been invented yet, but will be, and soon. I am happy to say that by emphasizing access, our fundraising blogathon this year was a small step into the future for the many feature films that have been lovingly restored, preserved, and locked away in an archive waiting for someone to pay all the fees associated with showing them.
Finally, Frick shared her enthusiasm for the hundreds of films shot by director Melton Barker, of which perhaps only six or seven are still in existence. Before you run off to your film encyclopedias to figure out why you’ve never heard of this prolific director, let me explain that Barker was an itinerant filmmaker/businessman who traveled from town to town from the late 1930s through the 1970s with one script only, Kidnappers’ Foil, and induced ordinary families to pay $10 a head (more if the child had lines) to have their children appear in it. Barker is the perfect icon of American films as a populist form. Vintage audiovisual artifacts will live on to inform, entertain, and enlighten us only when we can all see and hear them.
Amongst film genres, some are defined by links to a specific time and place, like Westerns, or essential elements and gimmicks, like the futuristic setting or advanced gadgets in science fiction. Others are defined by the emotion they are supposed to inspire: comedies make you laugh, whilst horror and thriller films work as advertised (or try to). Genres are, of course, never impermeable things: Westerns have moved into outer space, comedies can revolve around profound fears, and the adventure film can cross the borders of many other genres.
Today, the adventure film might be considered an adjunct of the action film, but in truth, it’s more the other way around: the action film is the specifically contemporary version of the adventure film, defined by an essential need for kinetic movement and violence, utilising the props of the world as is, an ethic purely of the present tense. The adventure film, on the other hand, is uniquely ancient, possibly the most ancient genre of storytelling in existence, with links to bardic songs, campfire tales, cave paintings. The adventure movie, whilst usually retaining an action element, is defined as much or more by a sense of physical movement not necessarily involving violence, but rather travel and globetrotting, or a sense of having reached and become trapped in the world’s extreme and hostile locales, living on the edge in places of desperate straits. Such adventure tends to take place in settings that old-world, often pretechnological, or at least set in periods where technology is not so tyrannous or has been neutered as a world-ordering force. The adventure can, however, also be futuristic, set in times and worlds where technology restores a level of elasticity to personal freedom and heroism. The adventure film is politically difficult: it can invoke the rise and fall of nations, and stands squarely on the resilience of its heroes and the people they encounter. The meeting of cultures, violence between the two, and also their mutual acceptance and blending, is a constant frontier of the adventure film.
Men are usually the heroes of adventure films, but not always, and if it can be said that the genre is not necessarily one of violence, then some of the hardiest venturers into psychic and physical extremes are women, for example, the cast of William Wellman’s Westward the Women (1951) and the entrapped ambassadors of western culture in John Ford’s 7 Women (1966). The genre can tread the edge of the utterly fantastical, and yet, as with the likes of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s and William Friedkin’s diptych of films based on Georges Arnaud’s novel The Wages of Fear or Mikhail Kalatozov’s depiction of the ill-fated true-life Italia expedition The Red Tent (1969), it can also depict extremely simple, grindingly realistic scenarios. Adventure films are often built around motifs for transmitting knowledge that have roots in human prehistory: the riddle, the map, the quest, the search. Whilst action films are often seen as containing elements that pander to social conservatism, with an emphasis on law enforcers and authoritarian solutions, the adventure film can have links to colonialism and imperialism but just as often can have antiauthoritarian, even radical narratives, often encompassing, sometimes incidentally but also often directly, the establishment (or reestablishment) of legitimate government, or the fight against tyrannies. Such a scenario can be seen as far back as the myth of Jason and the Argonauts, where the hero embarks on his long voyage in order to bring down the usurping tyrant back home, and flows through the adventure swashbucklers of Errol Flynn and the struggles of Indiana Jones and Alistair Maclean’s pulpy heroes against Nazis, or George Lucas’ rebels against the Galactic Empire. The adventure film is also more fundamentally romantic than the action film: indeed, the modern genre has roots in romance, the broad name for all early fiction, and in courtly ballads and poems extolling the knight and lady fair. Saving the damsel, or more rarely but occasionally, the dude in distress is oft a key element of the adventure genre’s ideals.
One reason I’m engaging with this topic is my general frustration with how few great and actual adventure films there are, particularly in the modern pantheon. Recent attempts to revive subgenres like the pirate movie, with the increasingly intolerable Pirates of the Caribbean films, and the find-the-buried-treasure tale, like the National Treasure movies, raked in money but left a bitter aftertaste at their incapacity to develop coherent narratives. Instead, they compiled tropes and gimmicks harvested from a range of predecessors and hurled them onto the screen without even the clear-minded organising principles behind earlier examples of the process, like Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981).
Much of the thunder of both the classic action film and the adventure film has been stolen in the past few years by the superhero flick. Superheroes, by dint of their extraordinary gifts, are able to keep aspects of the classic swashbuckler alive in the age of drones, rockets, armour-piercing bullets, and nuclear weapons. Superheroes certainly have links to the more-than-human heroes of Greek, Jewish, Indian, and Chinese myth, but in being superhuman and barely vulnerable to all but the most absurd dangers, they cannot really channel the sure reality of physical stamina and witticism, the sense of being merely human even whilst contending with terrible forces, necessary for the swashbuckler. Beginning in the early ’50s, with the likes of The Crimson Pirate (1953), the genre became increasingly comic and self-mocking, with some stronger examples emerging from France, like Philippe de Broca’s giddy duo of Cartouche (1962) and That Man from Rio (1964), and Louis Malle’s Viva Maria! (1965); in Britain, Richard Lester’s series of seriocomic deconstructions of the form in the mid ’70s managed to both critique and satirise the genre whilst still engaging it on its own terms.
A question then arises: is the adventure film fundamentally just a mode for playful divertissement, or can it be more serious than is often allowed? Action films are often caricatured as Pavlovian, anti-intellectual fodder for the mindless masses, not without reason, but also often in ignorance of the deft balance of the aesthetic and mechanical ingenuity necessary to make the genre work. Adventure films require similar gifts, and yet it can also be said that the adventure film stands at odds with the action film in that it can more easily be thoughtful, even philosophical, as some advanced examples like Richard Brooks’ Lord Jim (1965), Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954), or Peter Weir’s Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003) testify. Adventurers can be intellectual, scholarly, like Indiana Jones or Sir Richard Burton in Mountains of the Moon (1989), or meditative or even self-destructive: Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, The Wrath of God (1972) and Fitzcarraldo (1983) and John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972) and Zardoz (1974) both push the genre to its physical limits whilst also engaging its deepest meanings in terms of both the psyche and the world where Conradian heroes disintegrate in trying to face down the primal, and civilisation becomes a death-dream from which the adventurers need to be awakened.
Many war films cross the line into adventure film territory: The Guns of Navarone (1961) and The Great Escape (1963) take place in World War II, and yet they elide the usual brutal realism of the combat genre in presenting neo-swashbucklers, and Apocalypse Now (1979) grafts the Conradian adventure onto a wartime setting. Westerns, too, often cross paths with the genre, particularly the likes of Raoul Walsh’s The Big Trail (1930), Sam Peckinpah’s Major Dundee (1965) and The Wild Bunch (1969), and Sergio Leone’s The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (1966): these films involve a scope of action and character beyond the familiar parameters of the horse opera.
And what about films from cultures beyond Europe and the US? The likes of Atarnarjuat (2001), the first Inuit cinema epic, certainly tell adventure stories, and, indeed, document the sorts of folk myth from which the genre evolved. Asian cinema’s classic genres of wu xia and jidai geki are tantalisingly close in nature to the swashbuckler, and though defined by certain specific rules of structure, the kind of action they depict, and their settings, Tsui Hark, Kihachi Okamoto, Akira Kurosawa and so many others have pushed into the realm of the adventure genre.
Can adventure films even be chamber pieces, or purely psychological? The likes of Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010), Satoshi Kon’s Paprika (2006), Joseph Ruben’s Dreamscape (1984), and Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall (1990) all take place in their hero’s headspaces. But how about the psychedelically derived adventure, as in Roger Corman’s The Trip (1967)? Dennis Hopper, who cowrote that film, was a kind of adventure filmmaker, expanding on the notion through his definitive hipster odysseys Easy Rider (1969) and The Last Movie (1971). How about sexual adventures? Philip Kaufman’s Henry & June (1990) described itself as “A True Adventure More Erotic Than Any Fantasy,” and, indeed, erotica has always had a certain structural affinity with the adventure tale, with wandering, assailed, curious individuals delving into realms far beyond the normal. So what about Emmanuelle, or Deep Throat? Okay, now I’m just teasing, but you get my drift.
In any event, this series is going to look at both iconic and some less well-known works of adventure cinema: I am open to requests and petitions for works to be covered, and I’ll be interested in whatever suggestions you have. Please keep in mind that I won’t be dealing with films Marilyn or I have already written about here or at This Island Rod.
I don’t make lists, though somehow one slipped out of me last year. More precisely, I posted a list of favorite movies I viewed in 2010 by any means at all as a way of giving them more exposure. I am assured that such opinions do matter to filmmakers and distributors of arthouse and independent films, as the media tornado swirling around the firing of Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman spits out a number of pronouncements about the causes and repercussions of this action.
This Is Not a Film
Of course, this “end of an era” at the Village Voice is only one front on which the world has changed—whether for the better or worse depends upon who is making the judgment. The year in film also had this valedictory quality to it, as many older filmmakers turned a nostalgic gaze on their own life’s work. Monte Hellman ended a 20+-year absence from feature films to present us with a skillful, entertaining look at his own career in Road to Nowhere. Claude Lelouch, long consigned to the ash heap by the French, made a similar survey of his own history, both personal and professional, in the criminally overlooked What Love May Bring. Martin Scorsese paid homage to the father of his industry, Georges Méliès, in Hugo. Sadly, two Iranian filmmakers said farewell to their vocation—Mohammad Rasoulof with his film Good Bye and Jafar Panahi with This Is Not a Film—as the iron fist of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his regime banned and imprisoned them both. Finally, the late Raúl Ruiz made, as Rod said, “a classic example of a grace-note film from an aging director,” with his final film Mysteries of Lisbon.
King of Devil’s Island
A number of films had a retro aspect to them. The extremely entertaining Madame X, a first feature from Indonesian director Lucky Kuswandi, wore its love of 60s pop action films on its sleeve. The new silent film The Artist not only paid its respects to the silent era literally, but also quoted from such classic films as Citizen Kane and A Star Is Born. King of Devil’s Island from Norwegian filmmaker Marius Holst was crafted with a classic style and care that reminded me of Howard Hawks. Even Terrence Malick’s much-lauded The Tree of Life made comparisons to 2001: A Space Odyssey all but inevitable.
Martha Marcy May Marlene
I watched many more current releases than I have in many a year thanks to the screeners sent “for your consideration.” Despite numerous fine performances from a bevy of talented actors, was it really necessary for Michelle Williams, Michael Fassbender, and Jessica Chastain to be in so many of them? I like and admire these artists, but their multiple appearances seem retro as well, as though the Hollywood dream factory were still pressing contract stars into assembly-line service. Certainly, the paucity of any really imaginative or mold-breaking films from Hollywood (aside from pop/fantasy films well covered by Rod here) and the continued use of the 3D gimmick to get butts in seats signal that the business of show hasn’t changed much in decades. I much preferred the American independent films I was able to find: Without and Monogamy were two relationship movies from first-time feature directors Mark Jackson and Dana Adam Shapiro that perfectly captured the seductive terror of aloneness the new generation faces. First-time feature director Sean Durkin echoed this unease in Martha Marcy May Marlene, a studio film with a credible indie feel that, in condemning cults, actually reinforced the conformity of mainline living Durkin said he was trying to critique.
My Week with Marilyn
Rod and I discussed whether this was “the year of” anything. For him, it was the year of the ensemble, and given how many of his favorite films were ensemble-driven, that is entirely reasonable. I saw many more chamber dramas, and for me, it was the year of the star turn. Albert Nobbs, Shame, Martha Marcy May Marlene, My Week with Marilyn, The Iron Lady, and to a lesser extent Jane Eyre, Drive, J. Edgar, and The Artist all contained dominant central characters that largely drove the films. Some of these films were complete successes, and some were a triumph of acting over incompletely realized material, some bordering on vanity project (e.g., Albert Nobbs).
South Side Projections’ Mike Phillips at the projector
The Chicago front saw some new players enter the scene, some established players retrench, and others break out and work wonders. My good friend Mike Phillips founded South Side Projections, which became an instant treasure to underserved audiences on Chicago’s working class and African-American South Side. Mike’s protégé Julian Antos and Becca Hall launched the Northwest Chicago Film Society, moving the popular Bank of America classics series from the now-demolished home it had for more than 40 years to the nearby Portage Theater. Fans of the series worried about the change of venue and day (from Saturday to Wednesday), but Julian and Becca’s valuable and eclectic programming has seen them through a very successful year and a strong opening in 2012. Roger Ebert relaunched At the Movies at WTTW, the public television station where he and Gene Siskel started their television careers; financial trouble has sent the series, hosted by Christie Lemire of the Associated Press and local critic Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, into a limbo from which it may not emerge.
Finally, Ferdy on Films and The Self-Styled Siren hosted the second For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon, to benefit the Film Noir Foundation. We raised $5,700 to help restore the Cy Endfield film The Sound of Fury, just in time to learn that the major studios are abandoning celluloid forever. Future preservation efforts will need to take a new focus, but we intend to continue the battle to save our film heritage with a third blogathon.
“We’re going to need more holy water!” – Ron Perlman, Season of the Witch (2011)
It’s been a hell of a year. One of rage and anarchy, sloth and pathos, calamity and continuity. Our world reminds us every day now of both how close we are and yet also how far apart.
And our cinema—is our cinema keeping pace and reflecting our interesting times? Not if you’re looking for Godardian agitprop aesthetics, obviously. But perhaps, on another level, a psychological level, a mythopoeic level?
Regular readers of my end-of-year confessions will know I usually finish up feeling disappointed, cheated, frustrated, and generally bewildered by my cinema going, especially once awards season is in full swing. So many Oscar-hungry puff pieces, so many overstuffed fanboy epics, so much faux-auteurist pap clad in the new imperial clothes! Usually my frustration tends to stem from being denied a chance to see important movies, and this year there are, as ever, a few real nagging gaps in my viewing, and also quite a few that I refuse to care about. Amongst the year’s biggest movies are some I’ll probably never see, including Transformers: Dark of the Moon and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, desperate franchise-wringers from people who barely know how to make movies, but know all about getting bums on seats.
Film itself, the actual physical medium, is dying, or at least bound to be valued only by niche obsessives, retronauts, and historians. Like many things, this stirs a debate between my practical yin and my romantic yang: for filmmakers it means both a liberation from the cost of the medium, helping level the playing fields a little more in the always-expensive world of movie production, and yet it threatens also a potential loss of craft, of care in shooting and assembling those fragments of arranged reality which we call films. Major, well-proven filmmakers like Spielberg and Scorsese have this year made large-budget films with personal themes that are intended for the broadest audiences possible, yet these have been characterised, and to a certain extent received, as some kind of retrograde, risky perversity. Does such fretting count as evidence of how deeply we have been brainwashed by the carefully niche-marketed, incessantly hip zeitgeist?
Paul
Yet there’s little doubt in my mind that this has been the best year for cinema since at least 2007, and possibly since 1999. Of course, “year” is always a problematic categorisation, given the channels of distribution that many films, particularly indie films and movies from non-English-speaking markets, have to flow though. In any event, any time frame that brings us cinema on the level of The Tree of Life, Uncle Boonmee, and Mysteries of Lisbon on their own would be a memorable window in movie history. Even some of this year’s outright disasters had at least a perverse ambition going for them. Whatever else you can say about the likes of Michel Gondry’s The Green Hornet and David Gordon Green’s Your Highness, both ramshackle attempts to crossbreed geeky genre satire with slacker-stoner humour (with Greg Mottola’s Paul as a third, though far superior, entry), they had an eccentricity and, occasionally, a sheer sense of anarchy that made them far more engaging than such bathwater-flavoured square-deal fare as Captain America: The First Avenger or Contagion, if not, in the end, any better.
Submarine
Yet I’m surprised at how much bitching I’ve encountered about the year’s low quality of movies amongst mainstream moviegoers. Even there I’m at odds: the multiplexes have seen such lively fare as X-Men: First Class, Thor, Fast Five, Scream 4, Hanna, Super 8 (not a sequel!), Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part Two, and Sucker Punch flitter across the screens in sprawls of pixels and pummelling. I’ve certainly had some powerful disappointments, many of which weren’t even bad, and yet which are bundled together in my mind for seeming to offer far more than they really give: the sophomoric insights of Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff, the aggressively, turgidly oddball angst of Richard Ayoade’s Submarine; the overwrought mustiness of Rowan Joffe’s Brighton Rock; the hollow, New Age parent-baiting of Lynne Ramsey’s We Need to Talk About Kevin; the shrill conscience-movies clichés of Robert Redford’s The Conspirator; the clogged and dreary Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy; the blundering wastage of Cowboys & Aliens and Captain America: The First Avenger, etc., etc. But even in such disappointments, good moments hold the memory, like the scene in Submarine where the young hero is left alone at the dinner table whilst his girlfriend’s family have a crisis hug, a penetrating and all too tangible moment.
So, I’m really still impressed with the breadth of energy evident in cinema, both mainstream and tributary. I’m left with a patina of sensations and textures, visual and emotional and intellectual: the symphonic natural landscapes and macro- and microcosmic attentiveness of The Tree of Life, the dense jungle populated by id-welling monkey men, black caves, easeful waters, and starlight of Uncle Boonmee, the alien, rectilinear universe perforated by proofs of jagged humanity in Drive. The soaring visions of an alien Asgard where matter and dream hang on the edge of eternity in Thor. Hugo’s Belle Époque neverland. The Moses-as-sociopath vision of X-Men: First Class’s Erik Lensherr hauling a submarine from deep in the sea and hurling a sky full of rockets back at Pharaoh’s army for the sake of liberating his people from bondage. The dreamy thickets of nocturnal suburbia where protean teens venture out and evolve into new beings in The Myth of the American Sleepover and Super 8, the globe-trotting of Hanna, the snowy mountain fringes where the monks of Of Gods and Men are marched to meet their fate, already touched with the otherworldly and the purified.
Rampart
The sombre desert limbo and the nocturnal jazz of Passion Play and the stygian, drug-fuelled nightclub rampage of the anti-hero in Oren Moverman’s Rampart. The bleak forest halls and the eerie, totemic wind farms that guard the edge of the darkly enchanted village in Wake Wood, littered with corpses as nature is thrown fatally out of balance by human arrogance. The wistful chamber music of Mysteries of Lisbon where time and tales’ edges blur and congeal and reverse upon themselves. The wonder of the perfectly formed small baby’s limbs in The Tree of Life and Womb; the foggy, bleary oedipal plains of that second film. The ethereal, noir-soaked frames of Monte Hellman’s Road to Nowhere, where murder and muse coalesce into a fabric of both eroticised yearning and alienation. Rivers of gore spilled by the heroes of 13 Assassins and Drive in their divergent quests to defend the weak. The anticipated nightmarish blood-tide of the future permeating the uptight adventurers of A Dangerous Method. Endless armies of the psychic war in Sucker Punch warded off by its singular warrior amazons in landscapes that suggest a nerd’s busted hard drive in hell. Harry Potter and friends standing before the blazing ruins of their alma mater, releasing quietly relieved breaths of victory and survival.
The Ward
Last year, I waxed excessive about some linking themes I had noticed preoccupying the minds of filmmakers, as they offered a raft of variations on the theme of the maladapted survivor searching desperately for their humanity. This year, many films expanded upon such a motif to ask almost cosmic-scaled questions: What makes us what we are? Do the events that shape us truly make us, or do such things only give us tools and vices that enable our expression? Where are we going and what things we have learnt help us when trials come? Such questions permeate movies as seemingly different as The Tree of Life, X-Men: First Class, Hugo, A Dangerous Method, Womb, Sucker Punch, Hanna, Mysteries of Lisbon, Attenberg, Drive, The Ward, and Jane Eyre. I was fascinated by the powerful images of parents with children, and those of the hazy fringes of civilisation where there is a kind of spirituality even in the act of corporeal extermination, repeating throughout many. Several films evoked the trappings of psychotherapy and depicted adventures in the inner space. One of the more conscious, recurrent themes was that of generational torch passing, messy and fraught as it always is. Sex and violence are eternal presences in movieland, of course, but imbued so often of late with aspects of the genuinely primal, parsed through dream states, myth, and frantic hunger, from the Freudian fever-dreams of Womb, to the masochistic heroines of Leap Year and A Dangerous Method, needing physical shock to suture together sex and spirit. Heroes have come sometimes beaten, commonly bloodied, often falling with feet of shattered clay. Villains have often been hard to discern from heroes, with characters who bundle together what we love most and fear most within their frames. Hell, even the mysterious alien beast of Super 8 is both a terrible monster and a desperate, forlorn prisoner.
Margin Call
Children and adolescents have been peculiarly powerful protagonists throughout the year, fighting off alien invasions, saving cinema history from the rubbish heap, battling off superpowers and secret armies, even committing mass murder with admirable focus. Simultaneously, the older men are older and more tired, beaten about by life and watching hopes fade, from Ben Kingsley’s tragic Georges Méliès in Hugo to Kevin Spacey’s and Stanley Tucci’s bruised company men in Margin Call, Antonio Luz’s swashbuckling but haunted Father Dinis in Mysteries of Lisbon, Vangelis Mourikis’s dying idealist in Attenberg, and even the collapsing dignity of Kristen Wiig’s oddly tragicomic heroines in Paul and Bridesmaids. All perhaps could hope for an ounce of the dignity, even nobility, which the monks of Of Gods and Men and Uncle Boonmee himself can take to their respective graves. By contrast, many heroines have been frantically trying to hold together the shape of their world and give it meaning by sheer will, from the fantasy monster slayings by the girls of Sucker Punch to the atavistic rituals of Attenberg’s Marina, Keira Knightley’s Sabina Spielrein knitting neurosis into theory, and Jane Eyre’s rectitude in the face of degradation.
13 Assassins
Is there a keynote to any of this? Certainly not one that encompasses so many films, with their manifold aims and qualities. And yet, throughout such experiences as those of the adventuring youths of Hugo and Super 8, their more thoughtful kin across town in The Tree of Life, and their (spiritual) older siblings in The Myth of the American Sleepover and the survivalist fantasias of Hanna, Sucker Punch, 13 Assassins and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part Two, the old men on their final pilgrimages in Of Gods and Men, Attenberg, and Uncle Boonmee, and the Driver giving his lady one life-encompassing kiss just before stamping out another man’s life entirely: all see their protagonists unable to escape their limited selves, and yet all finding a kind of perfection in fellowship and moments of strange serenity remaking an often dull, sometimes cruel world into a place of raptures. Perhaps the figure who could encompass them all is the hapless filmmaker of Monte Hellman’s Road to Nowhere, the end product of evolution up from the magician Méliès is presented as in Hugo, hurrying his naïve dreams past the camera lens, where Hellman’s protagonist is constantly reaching towards the past, the present, to other people, to a story to be told, and always seeing them retreat into amorphous unknowns and unanswerable longings.
Snowtown
PS: I only saw two current Australian films this year. One was Snowtown, which started off well, with a compelling portrait of seedy hate mongers in a poverty-stricken environment, but devolved into “droning psychopath browbeats fearful youngster” shtick well-exhausted by The Boys (1997) and Animal Kingdom (2010). The second was A Heartbeat Away, a film that filled me with incoherent rage and made me turn it off less than 20 minutes in. This may be an unfair sample of the year’s local cinema.
Some Favourite Performances
Whilst I found it wore out its welcome pretty quickly, I will give Michael Winterbottom’s The Trip this: it captures something convincingly, even affectingly insufferable and doleful about actors thanks to Steve Coogan’s and Rob Brydon’s deft performances. They offered, in between Michael Caine impressions, authentic portraiture of the second-tier male celebrity as show-off, restless consumer, feckless egotist, and occasionally, very familiar figures of middle-aged pathos, angry and bewildered at the sometimes tiny quirks and infinitesimal vagaries of luck that can rule a career. Many actors and other creative people can, I suspect, discover of shiver of self-recognition. Similarly, although the film actively pissed me off, it’s hard to ignore how Tilda Swinton sustains We Need to Talk About Kevin purely and literally by the sweat of her brow. Other famous actors lose and gain weight and slap on the prosthetics to gain awards, but Swinton belongs to a small breed who really does seem to use her own strangely textured flesh as a palate for her artistry, even if directors keep casting her in the same part over and over. Indeed for me it’s been mostly a year of actresses. One of my favourite performances, Shannyn Sossamon’s in Road to Nowhere, was a meditation on the idea of the actress, mutable, inaccessible yet exposed, duplicitous yet laid bare, multitudinous and yet tethered to a single constant image. Sossamon, like Megan Fox, whose low-key, well-textured performance as the angel so bruised by the male gaze in Passion Play that she can barely meet anyone’s eyes, also represents the former It-girl as case study, foiled in the attempt to walk the line between teen-boy masturbation fodder and capital-A actress, diffused through a prism of punch-drunk fantasy.
Perhaps a claim for future It-girl status was Claire Sloma’s magical performance in The Myth of the American Sleepover, the pixie-haired, nose-studded individualist feeling her way through a night of epic debauchery, coming into focus for a jazz ballet routine which, like the film itself, manages to capture something glorious yet painfully transient about the changeling age. Elle Fanning, following up her performance in last year’s Somewhere, made a marvellous contribution to Super 8, standing out amongst a strong cast of youngsters as she shocks her young male friends with real acting talent, and in the scene of the young hero falling in love with her as she’s slathered in zombie make-up, a moment alive with layers of adolescent Eros and transformational strangeness. A couple of years older but no less protean, Saoirse Ronan’s star turn in Hanna possessed a singular grace in playing a character who’s both a casual killer and an utterly bewildered innocent. Polar opposite in temperament, if not homicidal capacity, was Emma Roberts’ delicious psychopathic teen narcissist in Scream 4, avatar of everything suspect about Gen Y, managing to be both hilarious and alarming as she shreds her own body to convincingly inhabit the role of media hero, and later walloping David Arquette to jelly with a bedpan. I’m not sure if I enjoyed a moment in 2011 cinema more. Similarly, memorably ballsy and occasionally unhinged, Amber Heard strode through her two-for-one trashterpiece year of Drive Angry and The Ward with the feral pride of a lioness who considers the cinema screen her private patch of veldt.
Words of praise for some Aussie girls who seem to move from strength to strength: Mia Wasikowska, who inhabits her role in Jane Eyre as if no one else has ever played the part before. Emily Browning, whose supple emotional register gave Sucker Punch both its grit and its emotional intensity. Rose Byrne, who made trying to spy in her underwear seem just another day on the job in X-Men: First Class and managed to make her bitch role in Bridesmaids convincing in her chichi pathos. Speaking of which, Kristen Wiig’s excellence in her self-penned vehicle was most apparent when the film kept to its true brief—portraying a woman in a flailing midlife crisis, riddled with class rage and emotional resentment—rather than the limp attempts to match the frat boy hijinks of Judd Apatow. Wiig was also a gas playing the lazy-eyed, foul-mouthed, new-minted atheist in Paul. Eva Green’s reptilian cool was beautifully exploited in Womb, as was Matt Smith’s rubbery intensity and Lesley Manville’s wizened brilliance. Brighton Rock at least had Andrea Riseborough’s engaging portrait of dim but dogged rebellion against the fetid drear of post-austerity England. Jodie Whittaker left Venus well behind with her similarly sleek impersonation of a put-upon yet heroic nurse in Attack the Block. Kathy Burke was almost my lone salvaging grace for the train wreck of a film version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy in playing her aged, exhausted she-geek with a still-bubbling edge of randy gaucheness. Robin Wright’s retention of dignity buoyed The Conspirator. Keira Knightley and Monica del Carmen shared, if little else, a taste for masochistic extremes in A Dangerous Method and Leap Year, and both lived up to playing difficult, intransigent, inchoate personalities whose very pain and fragmentation made them more powerful than anyone close to them. The year’s most genuine breakout star, insofar as a year ago no one had even heard of her, was Jessica Chastain, in her ethereal impersonation of Terrence Malick’s idea of earthbound grace, and her gutsy, emotionally well-shaded semi-lead role in The Debt.
Amongst the male of the species, Christoph Waltz might have been disappointed with his first follow-up to Inglourious Basterds, but, considering that he provided most of the few actual laughs in The Green Hornet (“I am ungassable!”), we can’t be disappointed in him. Attack the Block was similarly given some saving zest by the flip wigger cynicism of Alex Esmail, the drolly stoned college boy filled out by Luke Treadaway, and the posturing yet actually befuddled masculinity of Joe Boyega. Ryan Gosling’s thousand-yard-stare-of-the-sensitive-hunk acting has generated a wealth of amusing internet memes, but it’s a great part of the power of Drive, enticing and yet puzzling in his silent, seemingly open demeanour that hides a soul filled with great and terrible wrath. Similarly cunning was Albert Brooks’ justly acclaimed casting as the unlikely force of evil Gosling is fated to meet. Oscar Isaac contributed to the film’s peculiar textures with his evasive performance as Gosling’s foil, but his major part of the year was his alluring, villainous ham in Sucker Punch, shooting hapless ladies in the head and crooning Roxy Music with equal aplomb.
James McAvoy had an excellent year after a spell of eddying post-Atonement, playing conscientious, whip-smart young heroes in The Conspirator and X-Men: First Class: anyone who can make the line “I can’t feel my legs” sound halfway convincing deserves some sort of award. That film was also given some genuinely relishable villainy by unexpectedly dashing, sublimely sadistic Kevin Bacon, and, of course, the man who was everywhere this year, Michael Fassbender, slinked through his role as the proto-Magneto with dark wit and charm. Fassbender might get awards props for the one major role of his I haven’t caught yet, but considering that Fassbender also gave fine physical form to Rochester in Jane Eyre and inhabited Carl Jung with a smouldering brilliance in A Dangerous Method, he certainly has earned his pay. Viggo Mortensen was similarly stellar in Cronenberg’s film, wielding a crafty, authoritative intelligence in portraying Sigmund Freud that far transcended the usual look-at-me celebrity impersonations. Woody Harrelson’s excellence in Rampart sustains a meandering but occasionally ferocious journey into the dark heart of American manhood. Amongst the undoubtedly awe-endowing cast of the final Harry Potter chapter, Alan Rickman’s hyped grace note as the hapless Snape was fine indeed, but oddly enough, I came out having enjoyed Ralph Fiennes’ invocation of something pathetic in the monstrous Voldemort; in a year in which we’ve seen genuine fawned-over-but-actually-detested tyrants depart the earth, he summarised something about them, in his cringeworthy attempt to play the loving despot, not easily appended to news stories.
I’ll spare a kind word for two good actors in movies I hated, Tom Hardy, whose sullen aggression blended with irreducible pain in Warrior was genuinely rousing, and Matt Damon’s frazzled everyman mucking through disaster in Contagion. Along with costar Emily Blunt, Damon’s class also gave some solidity to the stupefyingly silly The Adjustment Bureau. Kevin Spacey, after a long spell of strange and hammy roles, finally snapped back into A-game mode in the generally well-acted Margin Call, and gave his best performance in a decade. Seasoned Hollywood leading men Sean Penn and Brad Pitt were similarly, uncannily immersed in the texture of The Tree of Life, though the film’s real star was young Hunter McCracken, voluble in his incarnation of nascent pubescent emotion and receptivity. Christopher Plummer’s lauded role as the dying gay father in Beginners is obviously an emeritus Oscar in the making, but he was also very good, giving one of his most intimate and convincing film performances in many years. But perhaps the real gem of that film was Goran Visnijc’s role as his peculiar, emotionally bewildered lover. Paul Giamatti, everyone’s pet thespian, sustained the schmaltzy duo of Win/Win and Barney’s Version, imbuing them with life their screenplays probably didn’t deserve, and meanwhile his despicable King John in the rowdy Ironclad was a nice change of pace: nobody has or ever will catapult Brian Cox into a brick wall with as much bravura. Eric Bana was incredibly good and rather underused in Hanna, which is pretty well the story of his career. Young Asa Butterfield in Hugo offered a peculiarly restrained and subtle adolescent performance, keeping pace with the ever-luminous Chloe Moretz playing perhaps her most normal character ever; standing over them literally, if not figuratively, were Ben Kingsley in a characteristically electric turn as the haunted Georges Méliès, Helen McCrory as his sadly ebullient wife, and Sacha Baron-Cohen lobbying hard to be the heir to Peter Sellers as Hugo’s tragicomic foil.
Jean Dujardin has snagged himself an almost certain Oscar nomination this year with his part in The Artist, a role that neatly sidesteps any language difficulties for a French actor in a French movie, an interesting corollary to a year filled with excellent performances in non-English-language films that will, by and large, be entirely ignored. These ranked from the entire cast of Of Gods and Men, including familiar old hands Michael Lonsdale and Lambert Wilson, to the daring of Monica del Carmen in Leap Year, and the hypnotic work of Adriano Luz, Maria João Bastos, and Clotilde Hesme in Mysteries of Lisbon, and Kseniya Rappoport as the antiheroine with a splintered psyche in the uneven The Double Hour. Sergey Puskepolis’ hulking, abusive, scary, yet strangely fatherly characterisation in How I Ended the Summer did a lot to give the film its sense of latent threat and grizzled, vodka-scented heartbreak. Ariane Labed in Attenberg provided a deliciously deadpan portrait of millennial angst and perversity and, finally, almost subliminal grief. Luis Tosar, in Even the Rain, gave a solid core to a thumpingly unsubtle piece of proselytising with his intelligent portrait of a professional jerk obeying humanitarian impulses within himself he wishes he could wish away. Kôji Yakusho gave 13 Assassins its unshakeable moral and physical core, opposite the most memorable villain of the year, the dead-eyed psychopathic princeling embodied by Gorô Inagaki.
Cronenberg’s cool, intelligent dissection of not merely the human foibles of the great and brilliant, but of an era and different ways of conceiving the world is his best film in 20 years, and a refreshingly sober study of the trial and error demanded by both scientific method and rebelling against the world that cocoons and frustrates us.
Far deeper and more genuinely affecting than its English-language equivalents, The Descendants and Beginners, and a worthy follow-up for the Dogtooth team, Attenberg was a notably astringent, yet penetrating study of an inchoate, quietly grief-stricken era where certainties slip away along with loved ones, and humans become strangers to themselves.
Refn’s second appearance on my best-of list in two years was a superficial departure from 2010’s Valhalla Rising, and yet maintained deep ties with the earlier film, as a portrait of the human capacity for psychotic rage and benevolent care cohabiting uneasily in one body, and repainting the world according to a mysterious and sometimes frightening moral and aesthetic force. A triumph for cinema craft and directorial vision.
Joe Wright’s succinctly shaped, yet reflexively epic fairytale-cum-action flick skipped nimbly through genres and continents, evoking everyone from Orson Welles to Terry Southern to the Brothers Grimm on the way. Plus, love that Chemical Brothers score.
Hugo (Martin Scorsese)
A touch distended and ungainly, there is nonetheless a genuine sense of cinematic wonder and emotional iridescence in Martin Scorsese’s first tilt at making a film for all ages, as he finds a way to pull everyone closer to his life obsession and entertain at the same time. Hugo both celebrates the communal dream of cinema and embodies it, and evokes the painful joy of leaving behind childhood even in the midst of a neo-Technicolor fantasia.
Brusquely handsome and flushed with real feeling, this surprising little gem manages to quietly ransack the settled conventions of the costumed literary adaptation and find a bleary realism in an old and settled template, without stooping to Lit Theory class gimmicks or chocolate box romanticism.
Leap Year (Michael Rowe)
A searing nugget of excellence revolving around cryptic suggestions of familial trauma and Latin American dislocation, vast realms of history and discourse channelled into the body of Laura (Monica del Carmen), trying to exculpate loneliness and crisis through inviting abuse to her body from the one guy who likes her enough to do it. Falls down right at the end, but a vital trumpet blast all the same.
The lamented Ruiz’s swan song had all the qualities one expects of both great cinema and also great literature, narratives and images flowing with perfervid beauty and rich melancholia in currents and cross-currents of cause and effect, personality, and sexuality, finally adding up to prove that history is a joke played on all of us.
The Myth of the American Sleepover (David Robert Mitchell)
So restrained and limpid in its rewriting of American Graffiti as a Prozac-infused odyssey through the mating rituals of contemporary teenagers that it begins to feel like a fever dream, this film turns its quietly poetic realism into one of the most unobtrusively authentic, yet also artistic and beguiling, portraits of being at that cusp of final adulthood I’ve ever seen.
Hellman’s first film in 22 years has its share of longeurs, as if negotiating the strange new textures of modern digital indie cinema, and yet it carefully compounds into a deceptively skillful contemplation of the directorial craft itself and a genuinely clever deconstruction of the noir film and the femme fatale/muse figure. Fittingly for one of the true fathers of independent cinema, Road to Nowhere, like Hellman’s works did 40 or more years ago, impresses with the sense of sovereign artistry wrung from a low budget.
Call it the year of the horror comeback: John Carpenter and John Landis both returned to movie screens after a decade’s absence with erratic films, the resurgence of Hammer Studios continued with the interesting, almost really good Wake Wood and the terrible The Resident, and Wes Craven returned to his famous postmodern slasher series. With original cast members obviously feeling their age and a slew of newbies of variable charm, nonetheless this, when it found its groove, became one of the most purely entertaining and refreshingly nasty mainstream films of the year, with Emma Roberts’ narcissistic psycho proving a far wittier, equally relevant rejoinder to the dolorous art-house exploitation of We Need to Talk About Kevin.
The year’s most mistreated mainstream film (amongst several) that revealed a general cluelessness and neopuritanical streak underlying much critical mentality about the possible fusion of cinema with internet and gaming culture, as well as attempts to expand the lexicon of American blockbuster cinema, Sucker Punch is a wild, crazy, irresponsible ride through the id, and a celebration and deconstruction of the 20th century’s fantasy canon, a bleak satire on institutionalised, outsider-crushing “care”, and the relationship of both with the slow but irreversible liberation from many forms of psychic tyranny. There’s hot chicks with machine guns killing dragons, too.
Super 8 (J.J. Abrams)
J.J. Abrams’ nimble-bodied attempt to recreate the early Steven Spielberg and Amblin Entertainment aesthetic also inspired a lot of surprising hostility, to the extent of crowding any serious contemplation of not only how well he recreates that aesthetic, but also how he offers a self-reflexive meditation on nostalgia, childhood awakenings, and the techniques of cinema. He considers again his recurring fascination with not only themes of familial longing and damage, but also with the act of mediating life through visual recording, and makes it work as its own piece of filmmaking to an extent very few such pieces of retro-cinema tribute ever manage. It also takes its young protagonists far more seriously and on their level than the patronising hipster snark of Attack the Block. Plus, that train wreck was the set-piece of the year.
Whilst, on balance, I didn’t think it quite lived up to the more integral, if also more prosaic, greatness of Malick’s The New World, The Tree of Life earned all its gobsmacked plaudits through sheer nerve and vision: physically ravishing, spiritually probing, and genuinely complex and observationally acute beneath the potentially dizzying pretences, it’s the sort of film that gives ambitious art movies a good name.
I’ll count these two together because they are, in a way, “last year,” and they each represent fascinating, moody meditations on how we approach a sense of the infinite in both human terms and through the natural world’s benign, embracing indifference: the explicit religious-cultural war in Of Gods and Men and the cryptic militarist repression in Uncle Boonmee each lend a background of human cruelty and irrationalism, whilst the foreground drama concentrates on the values, experiences, and binding ties of family and comrades that leaven the journey into the undiscovered country.
A caustic little Euro-sleeper with a powerhouse cast and a thorny plot, Womb is a Kubrickian scifi chamber piece with a streak of Polanski-esque psychological gamesmanship, that actually manages to investigate its singular basic idea through with nerveless logic and emotional depth, thus succeeding where many similar films pretend to try and still fail.
There were too many comic book superhero movies released this year, or at least so I’m told. But these two movies manage to take that dreary job description and do joyously different things with their respective material, pushed into different realms of Hollywood genre lore by two perpetually energetic British directors. In the case of Vaughn’s film, that meant offering a sleek, swashbuckling reinvention of the well-worn franchise that paid honourable tribute to ’60s Bond flicks and the broad neo-pulp pantheon, whereas Branagh turned the Umpteenth Avenger into the protagonist of a rousing Shakespearean power ballad, with a smart lead performance as a fairly thick hero by Chris Hemsworth and some genuinely soaring fantasy imagery. If you wanted colour and light this year—and god knows I did—then these were the ticket.
Would Have Been On This List If I Had Seen Them In Time:
A Separation (Asghar Farhadi) The Skin I Live In (Pedro Almodovar) War Horse (Steven Spielberg)
Honourable Mention
13 Assassins (Takashi Miike) The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn (Steven Spielberg) Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part Two (David Yates) How I Ended This Summer (Aleksey Popogrebskiy) Rampart (Oren Moverman) Wake Wood (David Keating) X (Jon Hewitt)
I Liked, With Reservations
Another Earth (Mike Cahill) Coriolanus (Ralph Fiennes) The Double Hour (Giuseppe Capotondi) Fast Five (Justin Lin) The Hunter (Daniel Nettheim) Margin Call (J.C. Chandor) Martha Marcy May Marlene (Sean Durkin) Paul (Greg Mottola) Source Code (Duncan Jones) Super (James Gunn) Passion Play (Mitch Glazer) Point Blank (Fred Cavayé) Take Shelter (Jeff Nichols) The Ward (John Carpenter)
Significantly Disappointing
Attack the Block (Joe Cornish) Burke and Hare (John Landis) Captain America: The First Avenger (Joe Johnston) Eye of the Storm (Fred Schepisi) The Conspirator (Robert Redford) The Green Hornet (Michel Gondry) Submarine (Richard Ayoade) Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Tomas Alfredson) Your Highness (David Gordon Green)
Crap
Brighton Rock (Rowan Joffe) Conan the Barbarian (Marcus Nispel) Contagion (Steven Soderbergh) The First Grader (Justin Chadwick) A Heartbeat Away (Gale Edwards) The Help (Tate Taylor) Immortals (Tarsem Singh) The Iron Lady (Phyllida Lloyd) Red Riding Hood (Catherine Hardwicke) The Resident (Antti Jokinen) Warrior (Gavin O’Connor) We Need to Talk About Kevin (Lynne Ramsay)
As Yet Unseen
50/50, Amigo, Bellflower, Margaret, My Week With Marilyn, Red Dog, Shame, The Sleeping Beauty, Weekend
My Year of Retro Wonders: The Best Older Films I First Encountered in 2011
Arashi Ga Oka (Kiju Yoshida) The Ascent (Larisa Shepitko) Back Door to Hell / Ride the Whirlwind / Cockfighter (Monte Hellman) The Big Trail (Raoul Walsh) The Bitter Tea of General Yen (Frank Capra) Blast of Silence (Alan Baron) The Bride with White Hair (Ronnie Yu) / The Bride with White Hair II (David Wu) Castle Keep (Sydney Pollack) Chungking Express (Wong Kar-Wai) Contraband / A Matter of Life and Death / Gone to Earth (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger) Dark of the Sun (Jack Cardiff) El Topo (Alejandro Jodorowsky) The Embryo Hunts in Secret (Koji Wakamatsu) Flash Gordon (Mike Hodges) Freud (John Huston) A Generation (Andrzej Wajda) The Hitch-Hiker (Ida Lupino) It’s a Gift (Norman Z. McLeod) Ivan the Terrible, Parts I & II (Sergei Eisenstein) Land of the Pharaohs / El Dorado (Howard Hawks) Letter from an Unknown Woman / Lola Montes (Max Ophüls) The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman) Mahler (Ken Russell) Murder by Contract (Irving Lerner) The Nanny (Seth Holt) Night Train (Jerzy Kawalerowicz) Paprika (Satoshi Kon) The Quatermass Xperiment / Quatermass II / The Day The Earth Caught Fire (Val Guest) Sebastiane (Derek Jarman and Paul Humfress) Shivers (David Cronenberg) The Sniper (Edward Dmytryk) Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky) Tess (Roman Polanski) Voyage to Italy (Roberto Rossellini) The Wedding Party / Sisters (Brian de Palma) Went the Day Well? (Alberto Cavalcanti)
In the last blog entry, my partner Rod Heath gave his year in review and 10 favorite films of 2010. He also mentioned the ongoing dialogue we’ve had about the films we’ve seen and what has worked and not worked for each of us. Here’s what he said:
Marilyn’s been hungry for films with positive and expansively humanistic sensibilities, which have, sadly, been pretty thin on the ground. I’ve found myself, on the other hand, responding enthusiastically, or, at least, with a certain empathetic recognition, to the oft-brutal and misanthropic mood exhibited in so many films.
Rod, of course, is essentially correct about the kinds of films we’ve each pursued and how we have scored our respective reactions. I have not been impervious to the misanthropy afloat in the zeitgeist—indeed, I have found myself haunted by the dead-on critique of the current state of our culture by the mockumentary I’m Still Here—the mud-wallow that is reality TV, the rise of the dilettante to meteoric heights, self-obsession projected for mass consumption by enabling home and surveillance technologies, and the sanctification of the word “fuck” as the dominant term for emotion and emphasis. Do I want to escape all that? You bet! Art has the ability to ennoble, but it seems that most filmmakers are content these days to fish in wading pools and shoot into barrels. A paucity of films with ideas or any motivation to really wrestle with them has film audiences and critics falling all over themselves to try to find some nourishment for their minds and souls—hence, the declaration that Inception is the thinking man’s blockbuster, never mind that there’s nothing to think about but the plot twists.
I find myself in the grip of a very strong desire to find a lot more that’s real in my everyday experiences. The world has gotten too virtual for me, and even the movies, whose fictional stories have always helped put real life, once lived largely face to face and in real time, into much-needed perspective, are, as Rod put it, “thin on the ground.” For example, the gay and lesbian experience, so long banished from or opaquely referenced in movies, is now everywhere, with many a straight actor looking for a same-sex tongue kiss to keep up with the times. Ironically, lesbian director Lisa Cholodenko, given the chance to show how the other half really lives in The Kids Are All Right, chose to create a sitcom highly palatable to straight audiences, putting her characters in an upper-middle-class California milieu and offering a lesbian who is made invisible under a bulky blanket while failing to arouse her lesbian partner during a silly sex scene and who is then rushed into a straight sexual relationship for the duration of the movie.
Leave it to documentaries to provide a snapshot of where we are today—ironically, still remote from the world or in despair. Marwencol shows how a hideous assault on a cross-dresser in upstate New York sent the victim, exceedingly lucky to be alive, into a fantasy world populated by dolls whose names and stories stand in for a world the man is too frightened to face. Restrepo recalls the televised Vietnam War, but unlike with Vietnam, who has really connected their own fates with the men and women sent to the other side of the world to fight yet another war? And Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work continues a trend of documenting aging celebrities (Valentino: The Last Emperor, Metallica: Some Kind of Monster); watching Rivers’ desperate bid to keep working—and surely that’s why she agreed to do this documentary—seems to continue the freak show aspects of her current celebrity, but I’m not sure what it means on a cosmic level. Waiting for Superman is union-busting propaganda and fear mongering. And documentaries like Casino Jack and the United States of Money and Countdown to Zero (“convincingly argued and extremely polished, it has theatrical potential for auds whose reservoir of worry about humanity’s future hasn’t already run dry” says the Hollywood Reporter) provide too little too late for most of us.
As distribution for films made outside the United States or official channels continues to dwindle, it is harder for fresh, world-expanding visions to be seen. And yet they are there, and I’ve been lucky enough to see them. Recognizing films officially with awards based on whether they have played theatrically during a given year is a hegemonic and, given internet distribution, archaic practice that assures these films will not join in the publicity bonanza a show like the Oscars can provide. So I’m simply going to ignore this kind of nonsense and make a list of favorite films I’ve seen this year through any means at all.
Literary adaptations don’t have to be Oscar-baiting films on a grand scale. Alejandro Chomski’s sly and winning Asleep in the Sun reinvigorates the scifi horror film with humor and wisdom. It’s a smallish film with a big heart and charm to burn.
Leave it to the brilliant Catherine Breillat to take the oft-told tale of Bluebeard and weave a grisly story of wish fulfillment that gives patriarchy its comeuppance.
Recalling the multinational, polylingual sex farces of Luis Buñuel, Abbas Kiarostami turns out a philosophical love story unlike anything I’ve ever seen—as puzzling and beautiful as love itself.
A perfectly modulated comedy, Lourdes also makes rueful comment on the desperate need and search for personal miracles that keep religion and its many brokers in business.
Marwencol (Jeff Malmberg)
Regarding Henry made poignantly real when Mark Hogancamp is beaten nearly to death, awakens from a 9-day coma with the task of relearning everything from walking to writing, and gives up his old best friend—booze—to build himself a new, safe world of doll friends in his fictional Belgian town of Marwencol. The will to survive and create art rich with sincerity and imagination is Hogancamp’s gift to everyone who sees his town and this film.
If documentarian Steve James has ever made a less-than-compelling, beautifully crafted film, I’ve yet to see it. James turns a beam on his own home town of Hampton, Virginia, where a criminal assault case against rising basketball star Allen Iverson showed the depth of the community’s racial divide, long buried, but never dead.
A bit of a rambling, loose film, but the wonderful sense of family and shared fates reminiscent of the films of Mike Leigh inform this look at an American New Burlesque troupe on tour in France.
Imagine you are at a dinner party with 112 of the most interesting, informed, out-of-the-box thinkers on the planet and they all respond to 100 pressing questions asked by people from all walks of life all over the world. Imagine, too, that you could see their answers any time you wanted by clicking on this link and that you could make your own movie out of what you found there. Open-source films are a totally new form, and I feel incredibly fortunate to be around at the moment of their birth.
The United States lost all credibility as the world’s white-hatted savior when it failed to join the International Criminal Court. The ICC truly does divine work, bringing criminals to justice and ending their reigns of terror. How the court works, what it has accomplished, and what still needs to be done form the basis for this eye-opening, compassionate documentary focusing on the real good guys in the world today.
An ordinary tale of adultery given an extraordinary treatment by master filmmaker Radu Muntean, Tuesday, After Christmas provides an allegory for Romania in a newly prosperous era.
The art of found objects advances exponentially when photographer Vik Muniz travels back to his native country of Brazil to make art with garbage from the country’s largest landfill and the people who make a subsistence living recycling some of it. Uplifting, ingenious, and a subtle critique of the social divide that keeps black Brazilians down and white Brazilians throwing away perfectly good objects and people.
I did resolve to do a more thorough and serious “confession” this year than those of previous years, in part because this piece will look at several of my favourite films for the year that, for various reasons, I’ve been unable to write up in the more traditional Ferdy on Films template. I doubt what follows lives up my lofty ambitions. It’s been a year, in terms of general quality of movies, both better than it seemed at first and yet also riddled with crushing disappointments. I doubt too many will argue with the proposition that there have been precious few great works, or ones that even tried for greatness. Greatness requires flashes of rebellion against what’s already been proven as reliable and sturdy, whereas today’s cultural centrifuges work to assert a pulverising sameness. That any art form can, and should, offer up many different paradigms of style and story at once has, oddly, never been a popular notion, and even those who claim to want something different often merely settle for repeated versions of something different. A film like The King’s Speech is no less formulaic than the average dim-witted action flick or rom com, and I’m surprised so few seem to notice.
As I’ve said in years past, I’m usually happier raking the debris of cinema culture rather than admiring its shiny new bastions. And at a time when contemporary Hollywood’s directors would benefit from relearning some rigorous classicism in their approach to storytelling and cinematic technique, I’m also finding more than ever that there’s a depressing homogeneity and surface-level pseudo-insight that’s infected the screenwriters in Tinseltown, and elsewhere, too. They’re all so reliant on the most predictable, by-rote, class-taught story structures, and producers have rarely been so fond of the notion that all you have to do is assemble certain disparate pieces in the correct order, and you’ll have a colossal hit. That sort of thing made itself particularly apparent in obscene chimeras throughout the year, in blockbuster fare like Clash of the Titans, The Wolfman, Iron Man 2, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, and Robin Hood, as well as would-be serious dramas like The King’s Speech and Hereafter. On the other hand, easily illustrated by the likes of Splice and Black Swan, self-appointed auteurs often think it’s enough that they came up with a pile of provocative ideas, and leave most of the actual work to the audience in a patent search for cult status: if you didn’t “get” the movie, then you simply weren’t the right audience for it. If Christopher Nolan’s Inception was admirable for anything, it was that it was plainly the product of a singular aesthetic and artistic sensibility that wasn’t afraid to think big; and yet it, too, belonged in all aspects to this second category, except in terms of its budget and box office. One obvious reason for the giddy reception of Black Swan in some quarters is that whilst its story basics are hackneyed and characters numbingly clichéd, as filmmaking, it’s something far beyond the everyday.
In any event, I achieved a personal record in terms of the number of films released in the U.S. or Australia in the 2010 calendar year that I’ve managed to catch, but still not all that many by the standards of a professional critic. In the past few weeks I’ve had repeated conversations with esteemed colleague Marilyn Ferdinand about the year’s well-thought-of films which we’ve been working our way through at a time when we’ve had sharply diverging tastes and expectations about them. Marilyn’s been hungry for films with positive and expansively humanistic sensibilities, which have, sadly, been pretty thin on the ground. I’ve found myself, on the other hand, responding enthusiastically, or, at least, with a certain empathetic recognition, to the oft-brutal and misanthropic mood exhibited in so many films. Movies seem to be channelling the repressed rage that many have felt in the past years of mismanaged wars and economies, the impatience with officialdom and low-burning unrest in our info-bombarded zeitgeist. Occasionally, the zeitgeist even provides its own revealingly mangled rhymes. One of the major screen heroes of the year was a bisexual Swedish female nerd fond of exposing malfeasance on the internet and brutally punishing rapists; one of the most controversial real-life figures of the year was an ambisexual Aussie nerd fond of exposing malfeasance on the internet and accused of rape in Sweden. One of the most “fun” films of 2010 featured a prepubescent girl butchering adults in a calculated but slyly passionate jab at the ever-more cloying, hermetic middle classes whose anxieties are usually the bread and butter of all big commerce, Hollywood included. Prime award-bait piece Rabbit Hole presented a great long wallow in the fallout of when the cult of suburban cocooning fails.
At the heart of that misanthropic streak, perhaps of the most interesting, continually recurring figure in this year’s more prominent works has been the antihero who, variously treacherous, criminal, reprehensible, even downright psychopathic in their war with the world, who find themselves finally, painfully, destructively tethered to their remaining human affections and emotions. Such a description roughly fits John Hawkes’ Teardrop in Winter’s Bone, Mads Mikkelsen’s One-Eye in Valhalla Rising, Eddie Marsan’s Vic in The Disappearence of Alice Creed, Casey Affleck’s Lou Ford in The Killer Inside Me, George Clooney’s Man with Many Names in The American, Olga Kurylenko’s Etain in Centurion, Ben Mendelsohn’s Pope in Animal Kingdom, Nicholas Cage’s Big Daddy in Kick-Ass, and even, in their less flashy fashions, Jesse Eisenberg’s Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network and Pierce Brosnan’s Adam Lang in The Ghost Writer. In contrast, the need and will to escape, whether it be from literal captivity, oppressive lives and crushing weights, in defiance of whole social hierarchies or merely of a daily grind or tragic memory, saw hapless but determined Everymen and women rise in counterpoint to the general run of bastards on screen. Jennifer Lawrence’s Ree Dolly in Winter’s Bone, Leonardo DiCaprio’s Teddy Daniels in Shutter Island and Cobb in Inception, Jim Carrey’s Steven Russell in I Love You Phillip Morris, Katie Jarvis’ Mia Williams in Fish Tank, Aggeliki Papoulia’s Older Daughter in Dogtooth, Gemma Arterton’s Alice Creed, Keir Gilhcrist’s Craig in It’s Kind of a Funny Story, Angelina Jolie’s Evelyn Salt in Salt, the hapless heroes of Predators and The Town and Centurion and even, in their way, Stephen Dorff’s Johnny Marco in Somewhere and the unfortunate couple in Rabbit Hole—all were fighting against things as seemingly benign as the suffocating sponginess of consumerism or an inability to find their true selves, or very real, very dangerous corporeal enemies, and dread existential abysses. Even Serge Gainsbourg, as portrayed in Johann Sfar’s Gainsbourg: vie heroique, is chased around by the literalised ogre image of the anti-Semitism that terrorises and inspires him to the end of his days.
Some of these characters fit into both categories: does not One-Eye, in his wordless way, flee the lingering ghosts of the men he’s killed in search of a transcendence he finds in the most unlikely of places? Is not Teddy Daniels both killer and victim, quarry and pursuer? Doesn’t Mia nearly kill a small girl in her anguished attempt to protest her betrayal and limited life options? The American even trundles slowly to a dead halt, painted in his own blood, in a final effort to escape a life in which he is advised not to make friends—to be, therefore, dead whilst still alive. The young walking organ bags of Never Let Me Go did not try to escape physically, but they did try to establish their own identities and make their own pathetic protests against the inevitable. Their rebellion is to be much more human than the film’s imagined alternate society expects them to be. Steven Russell flees lives, sexual identities, and law enforcement with the panicked speed of a man desperately trying to keep hold of the one thing that gives his self-destructively consumerist lifestyle some specific gravity.
Many of those cinematic monsters, walking wounded, and wayward warriors had been raised virtually since birth to be the creatures they are, sometimes obeying their ingrained purposes to the letter, others rebelling and seeking out their own raison d’être. There’s a certain irony in this theme, insofar as there’s probably never been such a time in human history in which people are less required to master certain survival arts than today. But perhaps there is both the reaction to and commentary on the growing panic in which children are shoved into the rites of growing up and preparation for an ever more paranoiacally competitive world. Mindy “Hit-Girl” Macready, Evelyn Salt, and Etain are brought up as creatures of dynamic savagery to avenge murdered family members. Teddy Daniels and the Bostonian heavies of The Town are steeped in regulation American machismo and class warfare, struggling against all ingrained presumptions to think of another way out of their jams. Ree Dolly, as a backwoods, squirrel-shootin’, back-talkin’ Lady Liberty, advises her young siblings, “There’s a lot of things you’re gonna have to learn to stop being afraid of.” Nina Sayers of Black Swan is the product of a lifetime regimen of training and preparation for a great future that may never come unless she learns to rebel against precisely what has pushed her so far. The children of Dogtooth enact a perverted version of arch patriarchal, bourgeois fantasies of keeping children socially sterilised against pernicious, uncontrolled forces. Future king Bertie (Colin Firth) in The King’s Speech has been twisted into incoherent knots by the firm upbringing designed to make him strong and resolute, yet it turns out that’s exactly what was needed to fight the dirty Hun. Harry Potter lurched ever closer to the fate awaiting him since infanthood. Even the original gangster himself, Robin Hood, made a cursory outing, passing rapidly through alternate social ranks to finally discover he is the common ancestor of Winston Churchill and Glenn Beck.
If Hit Girl’s rampaging violence represented a kind of giddy fantasy of unleashed anarchy, Never Let Me Go examined the exact opposite world of existential entrapment, and Dogtooth remained balanced precariously and thrillingly between the two, all three nonetheless presented variations on this same theme of who we were are raised to be and why. The notion that, in the end, all behaviours and actions are both futile and infinite, resounds. The notion that the mind is its own deep well that contains entrapping depths and stygian nightmares, whilst hardly novel, again rose up to swamp many of these heroes and heroines. Shutter Island and Black Swan offered up male and female archetypes—the über-macho film noir hero and the innocent, fragile maiden—who take long trips through their own psyches, becoming their own enemies, soothsayers, and spirit-guides. Teddy and Nina are both disintegrating psychos who destroy themselves for a principle, and that principle is love in differing forms. Love also vibrates beneath the harsh, violent, taciturn surface of Valhalla Rising, where One-Eye’s affection for the child he adopts leads him to sacrifice himself to a tribe of Native Americans his mind has reconfigured into avenging demons, on the edge of all human existence.
A couple of more random notes:
—It was a good year for British directors, whether overseas or at home.
—If films like Inception, Black Swan, and The Social Network, in their differing fashions, tried to choke the audience with exhibitions of their own glib brilliance, The American, Dogtooth, Valhalla Rising, and The Disappearance of Alice Creed proved how little you need to compel an audience.
—Will someone buy Leonardo DiCaprio a decent razor?
2010 in Fragments
Even if films aren’t great or even that memorable as a whole, so many offer up glorious little bits that are worthy and make being a cinephile the fun business it really is. One of the great scenes in 2010 featured former boy wonder Harry Potter having the bleakest of Christmas Eve homecomings. He finds the graves of his parents and grotesque monsters wearing the guises of helpful humans whilst locked on the frozen exterior of a cozy world, the yuletide songs of that world emerging muffled from within the warmth of civilised security and all its stable assumptions. Our heroes are enacting some dark duties indeed these days to satisfy our sense of truth.
Another great scene, in Dogtooth, presented a dialectical opposite: in the nominal balm of her family living room on a celebratory eve, a young woman brought up on a scant diet of seemingly randomly absorbed pop culture moments amidst a sea of context-warping disinformation, attempts madly to please her parents with a grotesque aping of Flashdance’s iconic dance routines.
Teddy Daniels, in one of his psychotic dreams, imagines a smiling beauty covered in blood, cheerfully asking for and receiving his help in bundling away her murdered children’s bodies. In another, he stands amidst a shower of papers, denying a hideously wounded Nazi a quick coup de grace by pushing away his gun.
Wonder warrior Hit Girl finishes up beaten to a pulp by her arch nemesis and murderer of her parents, mobster Frank D’Amico, only for the baddie to be fired out the window on the end of a rocket by Hit Girl’s adoptive brother, with the advice, “Pick on someone your own size” trailing him. Truly, love expresses itself in some strange ways.
In Somewhere, Johnny Marco and his daughter Cleo bond over Guitar Hero, competing to see who can play the worse fake rock god. In Gainsbourg: vie heroique, a genuine rock god and momentary amour Brigitte Bardot celebrate sex and life with a joyous impromptu performance of their pop-art hit “Comic Strip” in a scene straight out of an old-school musical.
In Detective Dee and The Mystery of the Phantom Flame, the titular hero and his gang of oddball aides battle their nemesis in an underground city, huge spars of wood spearing a sunless sea as our heroes enact a ballet of superhuman motion, wire-fu dynamism, and lysergic imagery in the most intricate synchronisation. In Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, Scott defeats an army of henchmen after he earns the Power of Love, sees a samurai sword spring from his body, his enemies’ bodies disintegrate into piles of arcade game-feeding quarters, leaving him standing on a field of victory decorated by piles of glittering silver. In Green Zone, Matt Damon’s all-American hero seems to defy the efforts of heaven and hell to stop the truth getting out, chasing down the Iraqi general who holds the key to Pandora’s Box and battling soldiers from both sides on the way in an astounding marathon for both actor and filmmakers.
In The Killer Inside Me, Lou Ford beats a woman’s face to a shattered pulp even as she moans, “I love you.” In Winter’s Bone, Ree’s quest to find her father leads her to the emotional and physical abyss, where she has to hold his rotting corpse’s hands out of the water so that they can be cut off with a chainsaw. The American commences with the ultimate act for a star looking to change his image: George Clooney shoots the woman he just made love to in the back of the head.
In Centurion, after killing another Roman in her unceasing quest to avenge atrocities, Etaine releases a scream of frustrated rage that echoes only with the unfillable void that endless slaughter provokes. In Never Let Me Go, Tommy (Andrew Garfield) releases a similar scream when he realises how hopeless his dream of escaping a slow death of being hacked up to keep other people alive has been. In Valhalla Rising, the lost Celtic would-be holy warriors devolve into hysterical mutual battery and desperate prayer, appealing to a God that doesn’t answer, squirming in the mud and howling at the wind. In I Love You Phillip Morris, Phillip, believing his lover Steven has died, receives a visit from his lawyer, who proves to be Steven. Faking your death from AIDS, he informs us, is quite a tricky feat.
Scott Pilgrim follows Ramona Flowers into her mystic abode, seeming to skate upon thin air. The American goes down on his favourite prostitute, to her utter surprise and swiftly captured affection. Black Swan‘s Nina, deep in a dug-addled fantasy, grasps her rival-cum-friend Lily (Mila Kunis) for the most ecstatic of erotic revels: the moment of seeing Nina give into lust with real joy made a refreshing contrast (even if it’s just a wet dream) to a spectacle like that of Greenberg’s Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller) and Florence (Greta Gerwig) fucking in so pathetically uninspired a fashion that even they can’t be bothered sticking it out to the end. Perhaps better than Black Swan’s Sapphic onanism was the moment, both hallucinogenic and tender, when The Runaways’ Joan Jett (Kristen Stewart) kisses Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning) when pumped full of drugs in an infernal nightclub, the fetishist drone of The Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog” blaring. Rarely has young lust seemed at once so innocent and so dangerous.
Some things that are remarkable about movies aren’t even so specific. The moody, hazy, blasted Beckettesque sands of coastal New England in The Ghost Writer infuses the drama of that film with an almost existential angst that almost convinces you you’re not watching a great filmmaker wasting his time on go-nowhere pulp. The equally devastated landscape of Winter’s Bone is dotted with the refuse of a civilisation that reached a high water mark and then retreated, leaving only stains and debris. The wondrous landscapes of Tsui Hark’s Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame burned with exactly the right kind of fantastic beauty, in the sort of film that the people who made the likes of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, the Clash of the Titans remake, and Iron Man 2 should be forced to watch on a constant loop until they forget their names and start speaking Cantonese.
Actors
When one talks about award-worthy performances these days, it’s hard not to take for granted that such acting usually come wrapped in crappy films. Two of this year’s best feats of acting, Natalie Portman’s in the cheesy if giddily entertaining Black Swan and Colin Firth in the stolid The King’s Speech are both elegant testimonials to both actors’ rise through wayward careers to the peak of their craft. Portman’s advance from the fetchingly sassy young outcast of Leon, The Professional to Black Swan’s anguished, ardent Nina caps off a fascinating trip, and if any human element gives material force to the trippy, dippy rush of that film, it’s her splendidly heady, overwrought presentation of a repressed girl who ruptures at the seams and learns to revel in it. Costar Mila Kunis wasn’t so far behind her, either. Firth comes across like he put himself in real physical and psychological pain to present King George VI as anything but the honourable cipher he’s always seemed to be. Just as dynamic and physically convincing was Eric Elmosnino in Gainsbourg: vie heroique, a sustained incarnation of one of pop culture’s most protean figures, even if the film around him finally proved unable to take its reinvention of the biopic quite far enough. The late Lucy Gordon’s hypnotically beautiful contribution to that film only reinforced the tragedy of her death. After years of trying to establish his credibility as a serious actor, Jim Carrey finally achieved a near-brilliant synthesis of his comic talents with a meaty role in I Love You Phillip Morris: it’s as close as he’ll ever come to his Monsieur Verdoux.
Jennifer Lawrence’s incarnation of Ree Dolly in Winter’s Bone, on the other hand, is the sort of performance that sends a fledgling career into the stratosphere. Lawrence got to speak several of 2010’s most memorable tough-guy lines, sometimes with a bloody lip. Just as important, if not more so, were John Hawkes’ and Dale Dickey’s respective contributions: both long-seasoned actors, it seemed hard nonetheless not to believe they’d been born the people they played. This year’s Hot Brit Miss, Gemma Arterton, who seemed to be in every other movie released in 2010, spent much of The Disappearance of Alice Creed tied to a bed, and yet her performance, riddled with an equal mixture of immediately engrossing fear, survivalist cunning, and spoilt party girl learning a few harsh truths, was my pick of them. Even better was Eddie Marsan’s incarnation in the same film as a gay ex-convict trying to project ferocity but ending up crucified by the one thing he loves: tossing Alice the keys that set her free was one of the most humane moments of the year. Miranda Otto’s turn in South Solitary presented a woman of advancing years and amazingly little good sense with the kind of utterly guileless quality that only the shrewdest actors can radiate. Ditto Greta Gerwig in Greenberg, whose fuzzy-headed distraction proved a defence system so resilient nuclear weapons would deflect off it. From the exact opposite end of the aggressive scale, Katie Jarvis’s excellent debut in Fish Tank provided exactly the right kind of shaded progression from jumped-up brat to newly wise existential wanderer; the clear indication that she’s older at the end of the film than her character’s mother ever will be is thanks entirely to Price’s elegant evolution. Michael Fassbender, her costar, continued moving from strength to strength, both in Fish Tank and Centurion. Mark Ruffalo likewise had a great one-two punch with Shutter Island, with his policeman’s act learnt from bad TV shows, and his unexpectedly affecting hipster douchebag in The Kids Are All Right.
Thekla Reuten’s contribution to The American as the liquid-nitrogen-cold assassin with whom the title character does business and then battle, is one of those innately convincing, utterly poised bits of acting that can make or break movies and yet rarely get noticed. George Clooney’s performance was just about as good a piece of star acting as I ever hope to see, revealing the weight of the film’s buried emotionalism almost entirely through his eyes. Similarly, Mads Mikkelsen, an intelligent actor of the highest calibre, embodied the ferocious One-Eye of Valhalla Rising with a primal grit by never speaking a word. Olga Kurylenko somehow compelled the eye with her equally wordless female equivalent in Centurion. Max Von Sydow, at age 80, actually managed to steal two huge movies this year (Shutter Island and Robin Hood) with finely pitched emeritus performances. In Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s Ramona Flowers was unique for a Dream Girl in a youth flick—she emerged as a credible, even haunted young woman with a nice line in martial arts moves. 2010 was also the year of the preternaturally mature adolescent girl: Elle Fanning’s gossamer presence in Somewhere and Chloe Moretz’s galvanising enthusiasm in Kick-Ass gave my favourite performances of the year as basically the same person in wildly different guises. Older in body, if not in mind, Aggeliki Papoulia delivered an epic performance in Dogtooth as a young woman who learns in the course of the narrative, how to bully and bribe, please and perturb, give and get orgasms, and finally, how to manipulate everything she’s been told about the world.
So, lists (stop sighing!) in alphabetical order:
My Ten Favourite Films of 2010
The American (Anton Corbijn)
Corbijn’s film version of Martin Booth’s novel “A Very Private Gentleman” was never going to win awards for originality, but it’s the film’s restrained, taciturn evocations, full of both sensuality and despair under the surfaces of the crisply described Italian setting, that made it pack a deceptive emotional punch. The American lived up to the legacy of great assassin films like Le Samourai and The Day of the Jackal it so patently wished to join.
Centurion (Neil Marshall)
There’s a lot of things wrong with Centurion—too much drive-in gore and a script awkwardly poised between providing a minimalist thrill-ride and something more meditative—but few films this year have stuck as firmly in my head. It’s a gamy, vicious, high-tensile riposte to the sloppiness of Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood as far as historical action films go, and the compelling vision of warring societies on the frontier of history actually bore the weight of parable, whilst the eccentric rhythm manages to be simultaneously cynical and yet riddled with a curious spirituality. It kicked large quantities of ass, too.
The Disappearance of Alice Creed (J. Blakeson)
I watched Alice Creed just before The Ghost Writer, and there was no mystery for me which was the superior film. In spite of Polanski’s efforts, the hints of sexual satire and emotional gamesmanship in that otherwise timid thriller remained mere hints, whereas Alice Creed, whilst losing its grip at a couple of points, constructs a fraught situation that plays out with exhilaratingly nasty, yet strange, emotionally telling twists. If, as I saw it described, The Ghost Writer is “Nabokovian”, Alice Creed would only take a few slight tweaks to become a Harold Pinter play.
Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (Tsui Hark)
Tsui Hark hasn’t made a good film in a long time, so his resurgence with this inspired action-adventure movie, apparently made after bathing in LSD and watching a bunch of his old movies, could be the pinnacle of the modern Hong Kong wu xia genre with a dash of steampunk, as the titular hero and his team of weirdo assistants battles secret supervillains and state-sponsored terrorism. It isn’t just Hark’s aesthetic riposte to Zhang Yimou’s Hero; it’s also a political one, insisting that loyalty to a society’s rulers must have its moral dimension.
Dogtooth (Giorgos Lanthimos)
Safer ground for me here, as most serious critics loved Dogtooth. I’ll point out a couple of hesitations: the basic idea, far from being unique, seems rather influenced by Australian director Rolf de Heer’s Bad Boy Bubby, if essayed in a completely different fashion. Also, there’s getting to be a bit too many of these arthouse movies that make a gag out of pathetic characters’ stilted attempts to reenact scenes out of iconic Hollywood movies. But that’s pretty minor in the face of a film that manages to be exactly grotesque, queasily funny, interpretatively ambiguous, and finally bizarrely beautiful.
Another film with a lot of things wrong with it, Kick-Ass nonetheless claims its place on this list for excellent filmmaking, and for being provocative and blissfully entertaining all at the same time.
Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World (Edgar Wright)
In years to come, Scott Pilgrim Vs The World might, I hope, look like one of the few films our era has offered that can rank with the likes of A Hard Day’s Night and Singin’ In The Rain as a film that seems perpetually, giddily in love with the possibilities of youth, art, and cinema. Edgar Wright’s third film transcends his brilliant, but comparatively familiar niche of satires that blend genre tropes and humdrum truths, to present a film high on the notion that anything might happen.
A minor film by Scorsese’s standards, nonetheless, the drenched Technicolor nightmares and the incipient hysteria that cranks up with no good place to release itself except in tortured self-realisation proved be the kind of minor film that only a great filmmaker can produce. Unfortunate enough to come out at the year’s start, 11 months later, it looks better than ever.
Valhalla Rising (Nicolas Winding Refn)
This film perhaps might also be subtitled “Where’s Werner?” But I forgive Danish-American cult director Refn’s obvious emulation of Herzog and Tarkovsky if only because that’s at least a road less travelled when it comes to homage, and because this film’s deeply weird, yet remarkably lucid final vision of the very dawn of the modern world is quite original. When a Viking killing machine and a gang of Scottish religious warriors find themselves stranded on the shores of North America, the question is not will they get home again, but, how does a human react to being confronted by their own insignificance. Stylistically vivid and thematically obscure, it nonetheless grows green in the memory.
I weighed up whether to put this or The Killer Inside Me on this list: Michael Winterbottom’s film is less uneven than Granik’s, but it’s also a more purposefully remote one. Granik’s, on the other hand, remembers the cardinal rule of the westerns and film noirs it channels: it excites.
Worthy
Agora (Alejandro Amenábar) Another Year (Mike Leigh) The Eclipse (Conor MacPherson) Carlos (Olivier Assayas) Easy A (Will Gluck) Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold) Gainsbourg: vie heroique (Johann Sfar) The Ghost Writer (Roman Polanski) Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part One (David Yates) I Love You Phillip Morris (Glenn Ficarra, John Requa) The Killer Inside Me (Michael Winterbottom) The Runaways (Floria Sigismondi) Somewhere (Sofia Coppola) Tamara Drewe (Stephen Frears)
Better Than Expected
Alice In Wonderland (Tim Burton) Green Zone (Paul Greengrass) Never Let Me Go (Mark Romanek) Predators (Nimrod Antal) South Solitary (Shirley Barrett) The Town (Ben Affleck)
When I started thinking about what I would say to wrap up this year’s Chicago International Film Festival, I knew it would not be the usual gathering of impressions, recaps, acknowledgments, and griping about being tired. I got a thorn stuck in my craw after reading an interview with Gabe Klinger about the festival. There was much Gabe said that I agreed with, particularly about the need for more outreach and new blood, which I believe an endeavor of any kind needs perhaps as often as every five years. But I also felt a stale wind blow regarding taste and who sets it and, of course, the age-old question of show vs. business and the uneasy alliance that has existed since the dawn of cinema between those with the money and those with the vision. I had to ask myself some hard questions about how I see my role, not only in covering this festival, but also as a film blogger. I’ve spent a fair amount of time reading some intelligent and cogent articles, blog posts, and comments on these and related subjects, including the contentious and enlightening post and comments on Girish Shambu’s site just prior to the opening of the Toronto International Film Festival and a look at film journalism by Chris Fujiwara.
In the spirit of the debate about Toronto, I want to say a few words about the festival I just finished covering. CIFF is not a destination film festival for making deals and apparently has no plans to become one. Nor is it one that wishes to explore cinema at the edge or educate audiences; while I liked, even loved, a lot of the films I saw, I can’t call most of them cutting edge or revelatory of new possibilities in cinema. CIFF is what its founder and staff do for a living and to give themselves the perks of hobnobbing and travel, and like most long-time employees, they do what they know how to do year after year.
The festival is a very American affair, with honorees in most years comprising American directors and actors and marquee films opening and closing the festival comprising mainstream American product. The audience for the films they program are largely middle-brow Midwesterners looking for something to do, cinephiles from small towns near Chicago who are hungry for something other than multiplex fare, or immigrants who want to see films with scenes from their old country in their native language. It offers audiences a veneer of sophistication by bringing the “big” cinephile films from Cannes in—and this festival is nothing if not Francophile, reflected enduring ties from its founding during the rise of the French New Wave. But if CIFF had not offered Uncle Boonmee, that film certainly would have shown up (and will show up again) in one of the venues around Chicago, which has a very vibrant cinematic community offering experimental, foreign, revival, and video presentations every day and more specialized film festivals and retrospectives than I can shake a stick at. CIFF doesn’t have to be more than it is—audiences won’t demand it because there’s something for everyone outside of the festival—but I never hear the end of hardcore cinephiles saying they hate CIFF.
From my reading about other festivals, it seems the conditions that persist at CIFF are not unusual. Is that really what film festivals are these days—a race to the middle? Strip malls? The hardcore cinephiles in Chicago know they’re being ignored by the “premier” cinematic event of the year. But are they snobs who can’t find value in anything that isn’t difficult or trendy? Sadly, encountering the snobs is a very distasteful part of my cinematic experience. It’s not hard to see great value in many films that offer other kinds of challenges and delights, particularly the chance to see and understand life in other parts of the world. These types of films have comprised the bulk of my viewing at the 2010 CIFF. What comprises an “important” film or national cinema is debatable, but for me, it involves finding the universal in the particular and activating archetypes that are the road to personal and global transformation. That’s why a film like Uncle Boonmee, which I can’t say I enjoyed in the usual sense, has so much power and so deserved to win at Cannes. Yet, I can imagine the snobs touting it without understanding it in the least—and CIFF did nothing to make the film accessible to casual or serious filmgoers besides show it.
My role isn’t terribly complicated, but I also feel that CIFF doesn’t “get” me either. As someone with a “general” press pass, I am able to see films for free in exchange for publicizing them through my blog, hopefully in advance of screenings to drive ticket sales. I am not considered by CIFF a top-tier member of the press and therefore am not invited to stand on the red carpet (unless they can’t fill it), attend the awards ceremony, or take screeners home to view because CIFF does not consider my audience significant enough to court—they have never asked for my “distribution” statistics, therefore they must not care how many or where my readers are located. In this stance, CIFF further reveals its isolation from the international film community that it advertises in its very name. Reporters from Chicago-centric publications like our daily and weekly newspapers and the Chicagoist website do belong to this privileged caste, reflecting the desire of organizers to promote ticket sales among locals and the assumption that these outlets are still where their audience get their film information.
Even as I see the limitations of this festival, I understand that I myself am in a privileged position. A large number of my readers and even my blog partner will never get the chance to see most or all of the films I do. I recently got into a heated debate with someone over a favorite directors list that comprised nothing but majority men we’d recognize as more-or-less the usual canon. As I told him, “Movies tell us about ourselves, but you can take for granted that you’ll have your stories told (certainly your favorite directors reflect your satisfaction with the stories they tell to some extent) whereas I cannot.” With more distribution channels opening on the Internet and in other home-viewing formats, I can only hope that my shout-outs can give some of these films a chance to deliver their ideas to more people so the universe of ideas can expand beyond the usual suspects. Although I acknowledge it as a deficit, I am not primarily a champion of the aesthetics of film; I am an activist interested in communication through word, image, and emotion of the experience of being alive. That’s what it is my responsibility to promote, and as long as I write, I’ll take it seriously. l
Previous CIFF coverage
Problema: A meeting of 112 thinkers and doers who give their answers to 100 pressing problems of our day forms the core of this open-source documentary that will be available for recutting and showing to anyone anywhere in the world. (Germany)
The Happy Housewife: A buoyant young woman falls into a dangerous depression following the birth of her son and must deal with her past. (The Netherlands)
Southern District: The decline of the Bolivian upper class gets a very personal treatment in this close examination of one La Paz family and the natives who work for them. (Bolivia)
Asleep in the Sun: Ingenious period film that shows the transformation of a troubled woman into someone whose personality her husband doesn’t recognize after a stay in a mental health clinic. (Argentina)
Tuesday, After Christmas: A beautifully photographed story of adultery poses a potent metaphor for Romania in its new prosperity. (Romania)
On Tour: A French TV producer returns from “exile” in America with a troupe of burlesque dancers to try to get back on top in this amiable, improvisational comedy. (France)
Circus Kids: The St. Louis Arches youth circus travels to Israel to join forces with the Galilee Circus to help bridge the gap between Arabs and Jews in this optimistic documentary. (Israel/USA)
The Matchmaker: Magical coming-of-age drama in which a teenage boy learns a message of love and tolerance from a Holocaust survivor. (Israel)
Ten Winters: Emotionally honest and lyrical study of a man and a woman whose initial attraction goes through many changes as they experience 10 years worth of living. (Italy)
Certified Copy: Elliptical tale of seduction by renowned director Abbas Kiarostami in which two strangers pretend to be a married couple in crisis. (Iran/Italy/France)
The Princess of Montpensier: The French Catholic persecution of Protestants forms the backdrop for this period drama about the travails suffered by a beautiful noblewoman desired by four men. (France/Germany)
Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff: Legendary British cinematographer Jack Cardiff and others who knew him discuss his career, including such highlights as The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus. (UK)
Waste Land: A moving examination of the positive transformation of workers in Brazil’s largest landfill when artist Vik Muniz comes to photograph them. (Brazil/USA)
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives: This 2010 Palme d’Or winner chronicles the final days of Boonmee using magic realism and experimental techniques to explore universal myths and symbols. (Thailand)
The Last Report on Anna: A dreamy, romantic film centering on Anna Kéthly, real-life Hungarian minister in exile, and a spy’s attempt to silence her by seducing her into returning to their communist-controlled country. (Hungary)
Among film collectors, archivists, and preservationists, Rick Prelinger has the status of movie legend. Prelinger, an archivist, writer, and filmmaker, amassed a collection of 60,000 advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur films that became the Prelinger Archives. In 2002, the U.S. Library of Congress acquired the collection, which has made a portion of it available free online to those who wish to view, download, or reuse the material. He is cofounder of the Prelinger Library (with spouse Megan Shaw Prelinger), an appropriation-friendly reference library located in San Francisco.
He wrote The Field Guide to Sponsored Films (2007) which “describes 452 historically or culturally significant motion pictures commissioned by businesses, charities, advocacy groups, and state or local government units between 1897 and 1980.” It is available as a book and as a free PDF from the National Film Preservation Foundation. From 2005 to 2007, Prelinger worked at the Internet Archive on a large-scale texts digitization project and recently helped organize the Open Content Alliance. His feature-length film Panorama Ephemera, depicting the conflicted landscapes of 20th-century America, opened in the summer of 2004.
On the heels of the NFPF announcement of its partnership with the New Zealand Film Archive to repatriate 75 American films, I thought a conversation with the founder of another important film archive was in order. Here are the results of our e-mail Q&A.
Rick, you’ve done just about as much as anyone to ensure that sponsored films remain a part of our cultural heritage. How did you get interested in this area of film making?
I was working in 1982 as a researcher on Heavy Petting, a documentary film about sexuality and romance in the years after World War II. As part of the job, I did extensive research about educational, advertising and industrial films, becoming fascinated with this rich world that no one knew much about at the time.
How did you build your collection?
When I started collecting, we were in a time of transition from film to video, just as we are now in a transition from physical to digital media. The U.S. is an incredibly media-rich nation—we throw away more media than most countries ever produce. I began approaching schools and colleges with media collections, libraries, production companies that had gone or were going out of business, and people who’d worked in the industry who had collected material. There was a great deal to choose from and my collection grew rapidly. In 1984-85, I realized that I needed to think in an archival way rather than just collecting, and began to collect original and preprint material instead of simply copies of release prints made for projection. Since there was obviously never going to be money to preserve all of these films, it seemed important to try and save these films in the best possible state.
Where is the collection now?
In 2002-03, the film collection to date went to the Library of Congress, where it is now being unpacked and processed. There will be public access to the materials sometime in the next few years, but it may take some time—they are dealing with some 200,000 cans: 60,000 completed productions plus a whale of a lot of unedited footage. Since that time, we have also continued to collect, and I mainly concentrate on home movies, amateur film, and a few commercially sponsored films. I don’t really collect educational films any more.
I’m a fan of these films, particularly “civil defense” films. The House in the Middle is a curious film that posits the unlikely idea that a fresh coat of paint will protect a house from a nuclear explosion. What are your personal impressions of this film?
The House in the Middle, to me, is a film that relies on a gimmick to get its point across. The government-run civil defense campaign was systemic and reached into many areas of life—there were films for householders, for farmers, for industrialists. In my opinion, this was simply another angle to repeat the line that preparedness would guarantee survival. In addition, the film links cleanliness and fresh paint with morality and survival. While this looks pretty ridiculous today, America’s marketers have often resorted to weird twists in order to sell their products. Compare this film to the many post-9/11 ads that use patriotic words and images to pitch specific goods and services.
Was this film an official part of the Defense Department’s informational effort?
I think it was made with the consent and collaboration of the government, who provided footage for the project, but I’ve seen no evidence that it was an official film.
Do we know anything about the people who wrote and filmed The House in the Middle?
Not really. It appears to have been made by a Washington PR film that may have contracted out production, but I haven’t done deep research yet.
Can you tell me about the physical state of extant copies of this film? What exists? How good are the YouTube and DVD copies of the film?
We have a 16mm Kodachrome print, as does the Library of Congress. Our print is not bad, though a little dark. We made a fairly decent video transfer and put it online for free at the Internet Archive. I think the YouTube version, like most YouTube archival videos, is a poorly derived, poor-quality dupe of what we offer online for free, and the DVDs are also copies of our online copy. I don’t know whether the original film materials still exist but hope to find them some day.
This film is on the National Film Registry as worthy of saving. What exactly does it mean to be on this registry and how will it affect The House in the Middle?
Films that make it onto the Registry are “artistically, culturally or historically” significant. I hope that this means the film will be preserved for posterity, but I believe we should hold off until we are as certain as we can be that original materials no longer exist. Going back to original materials would result in a film that much more closely resembles the original version. Beyond that, the Registry is a wonderful way of calling attention to films that may not be extremely well known but have the potential to enrich public understanding of cultural, social and cinema history.
Sponsored films are obvious precursors to the infomercial and the sponsored news spots that look like newsroom-produced stories. How do you compare these earlier efforts with today’s sponsored films?
Sponsored films are an ancient genre of cinema, going back to the first advertising films projected on New York City walls in 1896. While they are still being made by the hundreds of thousands, companies tend to focus more on the Web as a medium for their messages. The big difference to me between the film era and today is that the large and small production companies and studios that made sponsored films mostly no longer exist. But there’s more in common between video and Web production today and the glory days of industrial and advertising film than most of us might realize. Many of the messages and storytelling strategies are still the same.
What can people do if they want to see these films?
The best resource is the collection we’ve put online, and it’s absolutely free to download and use the films. Check out the Prelinger Collection at the Internet Archive. There are also other great collections at the Archive, including the Academic Film Archive of North America and AV Geeks. Click around!
I always awaken very early on my first morning in Cannes, just at dawn, and pull on my jeans and a sweater to walk down by the old port for a cup of coffee at the all-night cafe.
OK, so that’s not what I do on my first morning at Cannes. That’s what Roger Ebert does. Good old, Roger. He has so many memories of Cannes. I do not. I’ve never been to that fabled festival. I’ve never met jury member/critic Pauline Kael or Ken Hartford, the film “butcher” who sells movies by the pound. I’ve never gazed on the sands of the Cote d’Azur or met the original Cannes Man, bon vivant Jacques D’Azur. That last name can’t be a coincidence, can it? But then people are constantly reinventing themselves in, at, and through the movies, especially at a circus like Cannes.
Since I started covering film festivals four years ago, I’ve learned a bit about the agony and the ecstasy of these ocular orgies. There are never enough hours in the day or enough cans of Red Bull to sustain one over the long haul. The much-touted films often are not nearly as interesting or satisfying as the films one decides to see based on personal interest, unless the two happily coincide. But I have to wonder if all the Cannes hype might not sweep me away from my sensible sleep schedule and misgivings about some of the films over which more experienced observers are frothing their café au lait. Who knows, I might have been tempted to brave Antichrist. It’s so much better to be psychologically tortured in the company of chic French speakers, n’est-ce pas?
Sadly, the festival ain’t what it used to be, or so the old timers say. Cannes is so much bigger, shinier, more corporatized, less devil-may-care, they say. Maybe that’s the reason Tim Burton is heading up the jury—an attempt to put the zany back in the festival. Quite possibly a loose grouping of fan boys will descend on the resort town, perhaps dressed like Johnny Depp in Alice in Wonderland or Sweeney Todd, to outrage and entertain the jaded sophisticates of festivals past.
All I do know for sure is that the Oscars are over, and now it’s on to the next landmark of the cinephile calendar. Soon we’ll know which films will be in competition, and the entire blogosphere will be buzzing with predictions. I’m not one for speculation; I’m all about the experience.
Ferdy on Films has been hacked! Or something. Anyway, there are odd links throughout the site that encourage you to visit some Russian honeys. This is perhaps the natural extension of posting a positive review of How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman, which is a favorite on a Russian discussion board. Anyway, we’re trying to fix the problem, so please bear with us.
Out with the old, in with the same old. Like (almost) everyone else, I pinched pennies and withheld from excessive spending on frivolities in the past 12 months as we rode out the financial crisis like the ark-dwellers of Roland Emmerich’s 2012, so my trips to the cinema in 2009 were relatively limited. Fortunately, in the past couple of months, mine and Marilyn’s entry (promotion? ascension? beatification?) into the ranks of the Online Film Critics Society saw us inundated with screener discs sent by hopeful studios and independent distributors, constituting the first actual perk I’ve experienced in film critiquing. And as happy as I have generally been to have such an opportunity, then again, much like Yossarian pointedly not helping build the officers’ club, I’ve always taken pride in ignoring a lot of movies, a pride now rather threatened by having copies of films I would be happy never to see, like The Blind Side, mailed to me. Now, as my film writing has been nudged gently out of the realm of happy amateurism and into that of desperate semi-professionalism, thus joining too many of my other pursuits, I am, therefore, in search of a new hobby. I will be accepting suggestions until the end of January. The current frontrunner is fly fishing.
Call me a terminal grouch if you like, but at least amongst the films I saw, this was a weak and watery year of cinema-going indeed, with a few real gems shining out amidst the indifferent. As ever, it began with clearing away the dried-up carcasses of 2008’s crop of Oscar bait, wading through the (white) elephantine, instantly forgettable likes of Doubt, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and The Reader, the brutally disappointing Revolutionary Road, and the dispiritingly bogus “feel-good” victor, Slumdog Millionaire. Easily the best of that batch were Gus Van Sant’s slightly too pat but still dramatic Milk, and Jonathan Demme’s lively, lived-in Rachel Getting Married. I also liked the closest thing Woody Allen will ever offer to a late-period movie in the Hawks mode, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, making it the first Allen film I’ve liked in 20 years.
The year’s roster was strongest in serving up forceful, volatile action films and thrillers. Three of my four most favoured 2009 films were, to a certain extent, shoot-’em-ups: Michael Mann’s majestic Public Enemies, Quentin Tarantino’s delirious Inglourious Basterds, and Zack Snyder’s waywardly wonderful Watchmen. A few highly entertaining worthies included Pierre Morel’s smashing Taken, Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, Tom Tykwer’s soulful The International, Neil Blomkamp’s raucous District 9, Kevin Macdonald’s absorbing State of Play, and J. J. Abrams’ vivid Star Trek. Taken was the kind of high-octane crap Hollywood’s supposed to give us regularly, but now it seems the French do with the most gusto, whilst Star Trek took this year’s inaugural Iron Man Award for “The Film that Isn’t Quite as Rocking as We Wanted It to Be, but Rocks Anyway”. The International and State of Play sustained a remnant of the spirit of Fritz Lang and Alan Pakula, and District 9 energetically revived the ideals of ’80s sci-fi action.
And no, I haven’t yet seen the new work by an actual icon of ’80s sci-fi action, James Cameron’s Avatar, which, so I understand, cost enough to buy Sri Lanka, and I’m hesitant to do so until it comes out on DVD, free of the need for funny glasses. Meanwhile I’m quite glad I resisted the temptation to go see Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen, GI Joe, and a few other oversold bang-bang flicks even when the darkest days of recessionary angst made their hermetic, juvenile pleasures appealing, retaining them instead for their proper place and hour: cable TV when nothing else is on. I went instead to see the new Harry Potter flick, and strike me dead if it wasn’t the year’s most unexpectedly likeable blockbuster, and the aforementioned 2012 which, when treated rightly as comedy, I found a blast. No, I’m not ashamed.
Certainly those smarter action films continue a trend I noted last year of intelligent filmmakers being drawn to expressing themselves through material once regarded as trashy. There’s also been the intriguing phenomenon of noted directors tackling children’s movies, which resulted in Spike Jonze’s valium-soaked edition of Maurice Sendak’s hymn to the inner beast, Where the Wild Things Are, a film which successfully defined everything witless and boring about the modern alt-culture it so desperately wanted to channel. I’m also left still pondering The Hurt Locker, whose modest generic reconfigurations have been far outstripped by the rhetorical praise it’s received. It’s certain that filmic phenomena move by at a quicker pace than ever now: I watched the Twilight phenomenon go from a tolerable and intriguing opening installment in January to an excruciating disaster called New Moon by December.
Meanwhile, adult drama has been pronounced to be just about dead as far as Hollywood is concerned, which may or may not be true. The continuing dominant Clooney-Coen-Soderbergh template of deadpan, ironic comedy-drama offered up two diverting films in The Informant! and The Men Who Stare at Goats, both of which took glancing, facile lunges at defining the faults of the modern American military-industrial mindset. And I’ve still got A Serious Man and Up in the Air to look forward to, if that’s the phrase I’m after. I’ll admit to mildly enjoying Nora Ephron’s Julie and Julia, neither more nor less incisive and relevant to the state of the contemporary psyche than The Informant!
Indie cinema, it is generally believed, is in the process of imploding, and try-hard formula-squeezers like Sunshine Cleaning might indicate a certain exhaustion of ideas. But most of the truly stimulating American films still came from the outermost precincts of the mainstream: Robert Siegel’s intriguing, if finally frustrating, Big Fan, Greg Mottola’s modest, but rich and multileveled Adventureland, and James Gray’s Two Lovers, a very great film that neatly fused gritty outer-borough angst with Visconti-esque operatic flair. What I saw of British cinema this year was largely underwhelming, with the overblown, shapeless period film, The Young Victoria; the sneakily clever, if rather too silly and uncourageous Lesbian Vampire Killers; and the overrated An Education breezing in and out of my mind and leaving little to remember except for Rosamund Pike’s spiky glare. They were all a warm-up for the worst film I paid more than two dollars to see in 2009: Richard Curtis’ repulsively misogynistic and grindingly unfunny The Boat that Rocked (Pirate Radio stateside). On the other hand, there was Steve McQueen’s near-brilliant Hunger, a film that’s slowly trickled along the routes of distribution to receive the praise it deserves. I’m not sure if Jane Campion’s Bright Star counts as British or Australian filmmaking—both, I think—but either way, it was half a good film.
Such was a quality Campion’s movie shared with an entirely Aussie film, Warwick Thornton’s Samson & Delilah, the oodles of official praise which it received made it feel like an act of treason and racism to critique it honestly. It was indeed a poetic and affecting, if uncomfortably sentimental and suspiciously lightweight work of social realism. On the other hand, David Field’s The Combination was temporarily removed from cinemas over worries that the ethnic quarrels it sought to define would spill over into the audience. Field’s film was actually a solid potboiler disguised as a social-message picture, but there’s nothing new about that. I’ll admit also to having had a lousy year of keeping up with recent foreign-language releases, though I’ll blame the fact many works I wanted to see never seemed to come near a theatre near me. I did admire Philippe Claudel’s I’ve Loved You So Long, and Paolo Sorrentino’s tremendous Il Divo provided my year’s viewing with a stirring coda—on cable, undoubtedly where I’ll have to watch for many more of this year’s most well-regarded, but badly distributed works.
So, lists, and we can leave this whole sorry year behind us:
The Best Films I Saw in 2009 (Produced in and/or released in Australia in 2009)
Tie:Public Enemies (Michael Mann) and Two Lovers (James Gray) Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino) Il Divo (Paolo Sorrentino) Rachel Getting Married (Jonathan Demme) Adventureland (Greg Mottola) Watchmen (Zack Snyder) Milk (Gus Van Sant) District 9 (Neil Blomkamp) The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow)
20 Most Awesome Films I Saw for the First Time in 2009 (Not Made or Released in 2009)
Chimes at Midnight and Confidential Report/Mr Arkadin (Orson Welles) Bande à part (Jean-Luc Godard) Branded to Kill (Seijun Suzuki) Broken Blossoms; or, the Yellow Man and the Girl (D.W. Griffith) Deep Red (Dario Argento) M. Hulot’s Holiday (Jacques Tati) Nosferatu the Vampyre (Werner Herzog) The Big Parade (King Vidor) Martin (George Romero) Venus In Furs (Jesus Franco) The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy) CQ (Roman Coppola) In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-Wai) The Letter (William Wyler) Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain (Tsui Hark) Fascination (Jean Rollin) Bonjour Tristesse (Otto Preminger) The Reptile (John Gilling) The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer (Kevin Billington) Hunger (Steve McQueen)
As anyone who has read my blog partner’s 25 Essential Films of the 2000s knows, Rod concentrated on feature films in compiling his list. It’s my turn as the self-assigned documentary maven at Ferdy on Films, etc. to choose a list of notable documentaries of the 2000s. This category of filmmaking is a particular favorite of mine and one that rarely receives the kind of attention that feature films do, unless, of course, it’s a piece of docusnark by some yo-yo from Michigan who is given to channeling Mike Wallace, Geraldo Rivera, and Ub Iwerks all at the same time. Nonetheless, documentaries were on the ascent in the 2000s as a way many people could get the information and education that corporatized, downsized, and increasingly partisan media would or could no longer deliver. Consider the success of the Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s traveling show on global warming, as the official acknowledgment of the documentary as an alternative, legitimate, trusted source of news and analysis.
Yet, documentaries are also films, and the form has developed and changed over time, eschewing a strict talking-heads format for more interpretive methods of relating factual material, including the controversial reenactments that always seem to get Errol Morris in trouble but that caused no one a moment’s worry about James Marsh’s Man on Wire, though they were far more dubiously used. What once would have been considered merely “home movie” footage is now the raw material and finished product of such documentaries as Capturing the Friedmans, Tarnation, and one of my favorites listed below, Trouble the Water. This innovative use of primary-source—particularly self-referential—material has spilled into features such as The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield, and strongly influenced the “queasicam” features that have become de rigueur.
There were many worthy documentaries in the 2000s—this list could have extended much further and included the entertaining and enlightening March of the Penguins, Murderball, My Architect, Grizzly Man, The Nomi Song, and Bright Leaves, not to mention those I didn’t have the chance or the stomach to catch up with, like Taxi to the Dark Side, Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary, and No Direction Home. Ultimately, I chose films that took me places I couldn’t go myself, taught me things, and moved me with their commitment, honesty, and beauty. Here they are in alphabetical order:
Begging Naked (Karen Gehres, 2007)
This film has yet to find a distributor, but it did find a champion in Roger Ebert, who showed it at the 2009 Ebertfest. Exploring Times Square both before and after Giuliani’s “clean up,” what comes through most movingly about this film is the meaning of friendship, as director Karen Gehres films the life and times of her troubled friend, artist Elise Hill.
Beyond Ipanema (Guto Barra and Béco Dranoff, 2009)
I can’t remember when I’ve learned so much in such a short span of time. Barra and Dranoff’s pulsing exploration of Brazilian music since the 1940s is like a musical composition itself—driving, expressive, and filled with the enthusiasm to stuff as much great music into its horn of plenty as possible.
Born into Brothels (Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman, 2004)
The red-light district of Calcutta is never captured on film, so this documentary is valuable for that feat alone. But it would be nothing more without the children who did—and did not—find a way out of the cycle of poverty and prostitution through photography. Moving, memorable, and a worthy winner of the 2004 Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.
Chuck Jones: Extremes and In-Betweens, a Life in Animation (Margaret Selby, 2000)
As a big Chuck Jones fan, just about any documentary about this great animator and director would have made my day. But Margaret Selby’s documentary doesn’t leave any aspect of his career on the cutting room floor, while moving with the verve and humor of the animated world the great man himself brought to life.
Cinerama Adventure (David Strohmaier, 2002)
Another film without a distributor, this film represents the most enjoyable documentary movie experience I’ve ever had. My curious obsession with movie technology—particularly widescreen formats—was more than sated on this history of Cinerama and the technology Strohmaier created to simulate a Cinerama experience—Smilebox.
Control Room (Jehane Noujaim, 2004)
You may not like it, but Al-Jazeera is the voice of news and information for the Arab Middle East. Control Room offers a unique look at this misunderstood organization and the way that American public information workers come to see the world in a different light by watching it, and then watching what their bosses tell them to report. Essential viewing, in my opinion, with real-life drama that will stop your heart.
DAM/AGE (Aranhada Seth, 2002)
Indian writer Arundati Roy is the focus of this documentary about the proposed construction of a dam in the Narmada valley. Roy, a native of this area, protests the construction and visits communities along the river, so her odyssey is a very personal one, the nuances of which Seth captures beautifully. This affecting profile of a famous person and her fabled country can be viewed for free at the invaluable Snag Films.
Excellent Cadavers (Marco Turco, 2005)
Despite a slightly awkward framing device, Excellent Cadavers exposes and explains the complicated history of the Sicilian Mafia and two crusading lawmen who paid the ultimate price to try to bring them down. Sad, infuriating, urgent, this is a look at justice and its cost that will have you rethinking your devotion to the Sopranos.
The Gleaners and I (Agnès Varda, 2000)
Master filmmaker Varda premiered a great autobiographical documentary this year, Beaches of Agnès. But it is this minutely observed documentary on those dedicated to saving what others discard that, to me, provides the best portrait into her life and work. A beautiful exploration of aging and the mystery of life, filmed as only Varda can.
How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (And Enjoy It) (Joe Angio, 2005)
Melvin Van Peebles is the most important African-American filmmaker alive today, and perhaps of all time, but I didn’t know the half of it until I saw this energetic, humorous, and sharp documentary. I felt the kind of rush watching it that I had on viewing Van Peebles’ seminal Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song for the first time. Irreverent, caustic, and vitally important.
Lost in La Mancha (Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe, 2002)
Terry Gilliam’s loss in failing to film Man of La Mancha is our gain, as Fulton and Pepe use bits and pieces of footage of the failing production to show a train wreck in slow motion. It’s funny, horrifying, and ultimately sad when one considers the film that might have been.
Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea (Chris Metzler and Jeff Singer, 2004)
I’d never heard of the Salton Sea before viewing this documentary, and now I’ll never forget it. Archival footage of this California resort community’s heyday juxtaposes with dead fish and welfare communities that have sprung up in this real estate fiasco some still remember fondly.
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (Kim Bartley and Donnacha O’Briain, 2003)
It doesn’t get any better than this—real footage of the attempted coup against Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez shot by an Irish film crew that happened to be filming a profile of the leader at the time. A lucky break for Bartley and O’Briain and, ultimately, for us, in helping to make sense of a fast-moving event and providing a filmed record of an historic event.
Riding Giants (Stacy Peralta, 2004) Step into Liquid is perhaps the better known of modern surfing films, but Riding Giants is the more awe-inspiring. The footage is beautiful and masterfully cut for suspense and visual impact, and the score is hypnotic and inspiring. I can’t think of a better sports or nature documentary of the 2000s.
A State of Mind (Daniel Gordon, 2004)
Director Daniel Gordon was given unprecedented access to film in North Korea, chronicling school girls spending all of their spare time rehearsing for the yearly Mass Games, an enormous and lavish demonstration to honor dictator Kim Jong-il. An extremely rare look at a truly awesome event, and the mindset of North Korean youth dedicated to pleasing their leader.
Stevie (Steve James, 2002)
This is the hardest film you might ever try to watch. Hoop Dreams director Steve James looks up the man who was his charge when James was in the Big Brother program. Stevie, a difficult boy James backed away from, has become a sad, lost, and dangerous fringe dweller. James wonders if Stevie ever had a chance, and if he himself failed Stevie. Honest, brutal, unforgettable.
Tell Them Who You Are (Mark Wexler, 2004)
What’s it like to be the son of a famous director/cinematographer? Mark Wexler demonstrates as he attempts to document his father, Haskell Wexler, for posterity. It’s a fractious ride that will make you wonder why Wexler didn’t become an accountant instead of trying to follow in his father’s footsteps.
This Film Is Not Yet Rated (Kirby Dick, 2006)
We’ve all wondered about the secret workings of the Motion Picture Association of America’s rating board. Kirby Dick takes us inside the process by recording this documentary’s ratings odyssey, and by cracking the veil of secrecy by interviewing a couple of former raters who have broken their contracted silence. Dick connects the dots and helps us reach some disturbing conclusions about the agenda of censors in the film industry.
Trouble the Water (Tia Lessin and Carl Deal, 2008)
Go inside New Orleans’ Ninth Ward as Katrina approaches, hits, and recedes. Watching the waters rise higher, higher, higher through the live footage of a family of survivors, cut with follow-up footage and news reports by Lessin and Deal, brings the tragedy of Katrina and the shame of our nation vividly to life.
The True Meaning of Pictures: Shelby Lee Adams’ Appalachia (Jennifer Baichwal, 2002)
Exploiter. Artist. Appalachian insider and friend. Photographer Shelby Lee Adams is, perhaps, all of these things. But respected Canadian director Jennifer Baichwal allows everyone to have their say. What you ultimately decide is up to you.
War Photographer (Christian Frei, 2001)
James Nachtwey is one of the world’s preeminent war photographers. Why does he do it? How does he get so close to danger, grief, and anger? Why do his subjects trust him with their rawest emotions and experiences? Swiss filmmaker Christian Frei combines fly-on-wall experiences with interviews to paint a portrait of a complicated man.
The War Tapes (Deborah Scranton, 2006)
Three American soldiers in Iraq filmed their experiences. Deborah Scranton edited their footage and interviewed them and their families. Together, they created a record of the passage from civilian to survivor for two of the men, as well as the viewpoint of a career soldier. I haven’t seen all the Iraq-related docs that are out there, but I feel I understand so much more about this war than I did before because I got it right from the horse’s mouth.
When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (Spike Lee, 2006)
Spike Lee’s documentaries are as renowned as his feature films, and with When the Levees Broke, he has created his most ambitious and meaningful film to date. The four-part, 255-minute opus gives a thorough, impassioned, 360-degree view of the weather event known as Hurricane Katrina and the tragedy that followed.
Whose Song Is This? (Adela Peeva, 2003)
An exploration that rose out of a lighthearted curiosity about the origins of a popular song turns dark and deadly as Bulgarian filmmaker Adela Peeva makes her way around the Balkan countries that claim the song as their original creation. A shrewder illustration of the term “balkanization” you’ll never find.
Why the Towers Fell (Garfield Kennedy and Larry Klein, 2002)
The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were huge blocks of steel and concrete, built to withstand the impact of weather and aircraft collisions. They should have withstood the impact of the jetliners that crashed into them, bruised but unbowed. But they didn’t. This fascinating documentary shows schematics and offers penetrating analysis about the design flaws that brought them crashing to the ground. It’s not easy to watch, but it is an important look at the very heart of why this tragedy was not better contained. The documentary can be viewed here. l
Making best-of lists are always exercises in self-accusation as well as personal taste, reflecting back to you the films you didn’t see, either through choice—the latest raved-about work by that wunderkind whose last film you loathed—or the panoply of great foreign films that didn’t get enough distribution, or you couldn’t bring yourself to watch when they turned up at 2 am on cable TV. And then there are the films I saw years ago and have fine lingering memories of, but can’t properly place without another viewing.
It’s possible then that in 10 years time, my list of this decade’s must-sees will look completely different. Otherwise, the criteria I’ve used for composing this list have been pretty simple: which films have stuck with me the most vividly? Which do I think offer the richest and most lasting examples of cinema I have seen in the past 10 years? What amongst what I saw 10 years ago and what I viewed last week gives me the most pleasure and stimulation in thinking back? Films I recall admiring on release can fade away to nothingness once their appointed moment of hype is over; others that felt like misses, or hit my eyes vaguely on first glance, could sink roots into my brain and grow in glory.
I keep to my usual rules for such lists: I do not pit documentaries against feature films, and I only offer one film per director. (And although I know it could therefore be argued I’m cheating with one of the choices, well, sue me.) And I’m also determined to please nobody but myself.
2046 (Wong Kar-Wai, 2005) In the Mood for Love, Wong Kar-Wai’s airy 2000 anti-romance, gained the most immediate favour, but his follow-up, a fever dream of sleazetache-sporting journalists, masochistic call girls, black-gauntleted gamblers, and love-starved androids, is his most substantial achievement.
4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu, 2007)
Eastern bloc film noir with the lightest seasoning of message picture, Mungiu’s “shit, there’s life out past Transylvania!” revelation evoked the ruins of the recent past as well as making ever-relevant commentary on a host of human concerns—the nature of friendship, the exploitation of women—and building to a nightmarish midnight expedition to get rid of a dead foetus that made the fantastic monstrosities of No Country for Old Men look childish.
Black Book (Paul Verhoeven, 2007)
Verhoeven’s return home was, ironically, his best chance to make a classic Hollywood film, infused with his familiar brand of haute-camp and confrontational, defiant approach to dealing with touchy subjects.
The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi (Takeshi Kitano, 2004)
As Asian cinema continued to take great strides in the ’00s in outlook and cultural reach, its traditional genres took something of a beating after Ang Lee’s wildly popular Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon suddenly required every wire-fu flick have slick CG battles and operatic set pieces. Lee’s film and Zhang Yimou’s delirious twosome Hero (2003) and House of Flying Daggers (2004), set the pace for Chinese martial arts, but over in Japan, cult auteur “Beat” Takeshi Kitano took a more individualistic approach in reinventing the famed Zatoichi series, incorporating slapstick comedy, musical sequences, and a crucial humanistic sensibility.
Boarding Gate (Olivier Assayas, 2007)
Half cryptic, jet-setting thriller, half cocaine-fueled S&M reinvention of Last Tango in Paris, the best of Assayas’ wayward but fascinating ’00s oeuvre took a lingering look into the yawning pits the theoretically tight-knit modern world still offers the footloose soul.
CQ (Roman Coppola, 2001)
I notice that three films in my list deal in very different ways with the stock figure of the American in Paris, but it seems appropriate considering the infamous transatlantic arguments (Freedom Fries, anyone?) and air of dislocation that defined the cultural mood after the Global Village fantasies of the 1990s. Roman Coppola’s CQ, resembles each of the other two films with that theme in different ways; like The Dreamers, it looked backward with yearning and a wistful sense of lost opportunities, and forward with hope and trepidation, and, like Femme Fatale, bends narrative in fascinating loops, whilst offering a playful ode to creative yearning and cinematic dreaming.
The Dreamers (Bernardo Bertolucci, 2003)
One part sexy nostalgia, one part hymn to cinema buff fellowship, infused with political allegory and quiet menace, Bernardo Bertolucci’s only film of the decade was a sterling return to form, offering a terrific trio of young stars defining roles. More than this, being made in a period with more than a few similarities to the ’60s, yet far more stratified and fragmented, Bertolucci’s allegory about the desire to retreat into hermetic bubbles of hedonism, theory, and culture whilst the world burns, displayed a prognosticative insight.
Elephant (Gus Van Sant, 2002)
Van Sant’s career reinvention kicked off with a grim, yet iridescent portrait of a school massacre, filled with moments of beauty, horror, and brutal narrative dead ends.
Fat Girl (Catherine Breillat, 2001)
After the censorial hoo-ha around her wayward, essayistic commentary Romance, Catherine Breillat turned in her most corrosive and fluid work, taking an unblinkered look at coming of age, the politics of family, and nascent sexuality, finally offering a concussive finale that managed with restraint what too many other Euro-cinema provocateurs tried and failed to pull off: to leave body and soul reeling.
Femme Fatale (Brian de Palma, 2002)
This ebullient piece of cinematic fetishism, with its mind-boggling heist sequence and fragmented sense of reality, proved that De Palma could take on the post-modernist brats (Jonze, Fincher, Tykwer, Gondry, etc.) and squish them between his toes.
Gangs of New York (Martin Scorsese, 2002)
Saddled with a miscast Cameron Diaz and defiantly unconventional in its approach to the historical epic, Martin Scorsese’s long-gestating opus was nonetheless the boldest big studio release of its era, a one-time-only melding of classical myth and punk-rock tribute to Sergio Leone and Luchino Visconti.
Grindhouse: Death Proof (Quentin Tarantino, 2007)
Much more of an acquired taste than Tarantino’s two other popular, epic projects of the decade, the Kill Bill duo and Inglourious Basterds, and not really seen to best effect as the denuded half of a cockamamie double bill, in its full-length cut, Death Proof is a nigh-on perfect movie, pitting sassy she-devils against a rampaging dickless wonder in the best (and most metaphorically loaded) action scene of the decade.
The Lord of the Rings (Peter Jackson, The Fellowship of the Ring, 2001; The Two Towers, 2002; The Return of the King, 2003)
Distended and flabby in places, and yet breathtaking as a whole, Peter Jackson’s triptych reinvented fantasy and blockbuster cinema whilst remaining surprisingly true to the material’s down-home yeoman valour. It was, well, precious.
Marie Antoinette (Sofia Coppola, 2006)
Famously booed at Cannes, and proving a momentary millstone for wonder girl auteur Sofia Coppola, Marie Antoinette was still the most inventive and allusive of the decade’s prolific biopics, mixing post-punk pop and mash-up aesthetics with a subtly smart and broad-minded study of an Enlightenment party girl, as well as confronting the vital moment, so familiar to us in this post-economic meltdown world, when the parties end.
Munich (Steven Spielberg, 2005)
Spielberg’s had a terrific decade, and picking his best film out of a slew of inventive, quietly radical entertainments is actually pretty difficult: I could as easily vote for Minority Report, Spielberg’s best (and smartest) action film since romping around the Temple of Doom, or the deceptive, layered Catch Me If You Can, but I’ll go with Munich. Returning to looking at his Jewish identity without the awkward moral and stylistic flourishes of Schindler’s List, confirming his ever-darkening sense of history and humanity with a John Le Carré-esque account of an infamous Mossad assassination scheme of the 1970s and the even more infamous Munich massacre, Spielberg provides a dialogic structure that is a high point of sophistication in popular cinema, building to a moment of eruptive sexual crisis that, whether you found it startling or risible, is hard to forget.
The New World (Terence Malick, 2005)
After the frustrating The Thin Red Line (1998), Terence Malick rebounded with one of the greatest films ever made, a sinuously beautiful and conceptually brilliant exploration of the meeting of Europe and America through the tragic yet visionary tale of Pocahontas. No film of the decade looked or sounded better.
Pandaemonium (Julien Temple, 2000)
Armed with a gloriously mad, yet erudite Frank Cottrell Boyce screenplay, one-time Sex Pistols running dog Temple presented Samuel Taylor Coleridge as a proto-hippie and William Wordsworth as an energy vampire locked in a defining battle of the hip and the square.
Pan’s Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, 2006)
Evil cousin to The Lord of the Rings, del Toro’s film burrowed its way into the dark heart of both the fantastic tradition and the half-remembered pains of history.
The Piano Teacher (Michael Haneke, 2001)
Haneke has an irritating tendency to play the finger-slapping schoolmaster of contemporary European cinema, but his adaptation of Elfriede Jelinek’s novel settled for dead-eyed studiousness in an absorbing, memorable psychodrama, and letting Isabelle Huppert off the leash in a performance of staggering force.
Public Enemies (Michael Mann, 2009)
Michael Mann’s ferocious gangland epic was a happy mean between his favourite genre niche of neo-noir, essayed at its most darkly beautiful in Miami Vice, and his prestige-pic side, exhibited with mixed results at the decade’s start with Ali.
Somersault (Cate Shortland, 2004)
The superior Australian film of recent years, Somersault was an imperfect, yet affecting, menacing, ultimately gentle study of social, emotional and sexual exile, similar to and yet far more modest and deeper in its incisions than Ray Lawrence’s overblown twosome Lantana and Jindabyne. It also set Abbie Cornish and Sam Worthington on their conquering way.
Team America: World Police (Matt Stone and Trey Parker, 2004)
Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s rowdy, raunchy, ruthless assault on both sides of the culture wars was the Dr. Strangelove of the ’00s. As well as being one of the funniest films of the epoch, and sporting the best original soundtrack full of peerlessly crafted satiric songs, it also had, of course, the greatest puppet sex-scene of all time.
There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007)
Sort of like Cimarron remade as gothic horror, Anderson’s fifth feature confirmed his tremendous promise with an oil-drenched parable about American business and religion and how they render the sacred and profane indistinguishable.
Three Times (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2006)
Possibly the greatest film of the decade whilst also being one the most elusive, Hou’s tripartite evocation of love and life in Taiwan at the turn, middle, and end of the last century evokes the fatalism of oppression, the glory of yearning, and the troubling wastelands of ultimate freedom.
Y Tu Mama Tambien (Alfonso Cuarón, 2001)
American cinema south of the Rio Grande had a terrific decade, and Cuaron’s irony-laden road-movie-cum-orgy holds up thanks to the genuinely complex way it looks at solipsism, constantly asserting the way people choose and edit their realities, whilst listening out for the bell that, like, totally tolls for thee.
Others: 35 Rhums (Claire Denis, 2009); Amores Perros (Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu, 2000); Angel (François Ozon, 2007); The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik, 2007); Big Fish (Tim Burton, 2003); The Blind Shaft (Yang Li, 2003); Brick (Rian Johnston, 2005); City of God (Fernando Meirelles and Katia Lund, 2002); The Claim (Michael Winterbottom, 2000); Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story (Rawson Marshall Thurber, 2004); Dog Soldiers (Neil Marshall, 2002); Don’t Come Knocking (Wim Wenders, 2006); Downfall (Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2004); Exiled (Johnny To, 2006); Gabrielle (Patrice Chéreau, 2006); Nuovomondo (Emanuele Crialese, 2006); Good Night, and Good Luck (George Clooney, 2005); Grindhouse: Planet Terror (Robert Rodriguez, 2007); Hunger (Steve McQueen, 2008); Hot Fuzz (Edgar Wright, 2007); House of Flying Daggers (Zhang Yimou, 2004); Kingdom of Heaven (Ridley Scott, 2005); Lawless Heart (Tom Hunsinger and Neil Hunter, 2001); Lust, Caution (Ang Lee, 2007); Master and Commander (Peter Weir, 2003); Morvern Callar (Lynne Ramsay, 2002); Mysterious Skin (Gregg Araki, 2005); Pride and Prejudice (Joe Wright, 2005); Red Lights (Cédric Khan, 2004); Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (George Lucas, 2005); A Prairie Home Companion (Robert Altman, 2006); The Secret of the Grain (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2007); Secret Things (Jean-Claude Brisseau, 2002); This Is England (Shane Meadows, 2007); Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow (Theo Angelopoulos, 2004); The 25th Hour (Spike Lee, 2002); Two Lovers (James Gray, 2008); Sweet Sixteen (Ken Loach, 2003); The World (Jia Zhang-ke, 2005); Youth Without Youth (Francis Coppola, 2007)
Significant blind spots: The Wind Will Carry Us (Abbas Kiarostami, 2000); Yi Yi (Edward Yang, 2000); Time Out (Laurent Cantet, 2001); Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001); The Circle (2001), Crimson Gold (2004), and Offside (2007) (Jafar Panahi); Platform (Jia Zhiang-ke); Eureka (Shinji Aoyama, 2000); The House of Mirth (Terence Davies, 2001); The Werckmeister Harmonies (Bela Tarr, 2001); Audition (Takashi Miike, 2001); Far From Heaven (Todd Haynes, 2002); Spider (David Cronenberg, 2002); The Son (2003) and The Child (2005) (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne); Gerry (Gus Van Sant, 2003); Twentynine Palms (Bruno Dumont, 2003); The Best of Youth (Marco Tullio Giordana, 2005); Tropical Malady (2005) and Syndromes and a Century (2007) (Apichatpong Weerasethakul); The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu, 2006); Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008); Gomorrah (Matteo Garrone, 2008). l
Time again for one of Dennis Cozzalio’s three-hour tours, aka, a holiday movie quiz. This one was a doozy, with 50 questions.
1) Second-favorite Coen Brothers movie.
Believe it or not, I do like some Coen Brothers movies. My second favorite is, um, let me see. OK, why not, O Brother, Where Art Thou?. Those little girls singing are gear.
2) Movie seen only on home format that you would pay to see on the biggest movie screen possible? (Question submitted by Peter Nellhaus) Tron. I had a chance to see it projected in 70mm and blew it. I hope I get the chance again.
3) Japan or France? (Question submitted by Bob Westal)
Tough question, but I think I’ve got to go with France. I’ve seen so many more French films by choice. Even though French cinema seems to be in the doldrums right now, it’s still fascinating to me, particularly films of the Nazi occupation.
4) Favorite moment/line from a western.
Can I pick the whole of High Noon? No, then one moment—Gary Cooper walking warily through the deserted streets of town. So many emotions ran over his cracking stoicism. Truly unforgettable.
5) Of all the arts the movies draw upon to become what they are, which is the most important, or the one you value most?
The script, of course. I’m a writer.
6) Most misunderstood movie of the 2000s (The Naughties?). American Psycho. I think this 2000 movie was more misunderstood because of the crappy book on which it was based. Mary Harron burrowed into the comedy of the material, but far too many people were put off by the gore and misogyny of the book to really appreciate it.
7) Name a filmmaker/actor/actress/film you once unashamedly loved who has fallen furthest in your esteem.
Woody Allen. I loved his early films. I absolutely hate everything he does now and his early films don’t even seem funny to me anymore.
8.) Herbert Lom or Patrick Magee?
Herbert Lom. What a great face! He was killer opposite Peter Sellers in The Pink Panther.
9) Which is your least favorite David Lynch film (Submitted by Tony Dayoub) The Straight Story. I just don’t get it; it’s too obscure and elliptical.
10) Gordon Willis or Conrad Hall? (Submitted by Peet Gelderblom)
Definitely Conrad Hall! I remember hearing how he got that shot of Robert Blake talking about his father in In Cold Blood, the water pouring down the window and shadowing Blake’s face. Brilliant.
11) Second favorite Don Siegel movie. Charlie Varrick.
12) Last movie you saw on DVD/Blu-ray? In theaters?
On DVD, Sunshine Cleaning. In a theatre, Operation Danube.
13) Which DVD in your private collection screams hardest to be replaced by a Blu-ray? (Submitted by Peet Gelderblom) The Devils. The currently available DVD, though now containing great extras and the previously censor-cut scenes, is a muddy shame.
14) Eddie Deezen or Christopher Mintz-Plasse?
Who? I don’t think I’ve seen anything either of them has done.
15) Actor/actress who you feel automatically elevates whatever project they are in, or whom you would watch in virtually anything.
Bruno Ganz elevates everything he’s in. Also, when I consider some of the dreck I’ve sat through, I have demonstrated to myself that I will watch James Cagney in anything.
16) Fight Club — yes or no?
Since I’ve never seen it, no.
17) Teresa Wright or Olivia De Havilland?
Olivia De Havilland. She’s old Hollywood royalty I can’t resist.
18) Favorite moment/line from a film noir.
Annie Laurie Starr, Gun Crazy: “I’ve got a funny feeling that I want to be good. I don’t know. Maybe I can’t. But I’m gonna try. I’ll try hard, Bart. I’ll try.”
19) Best (or worst) death scene involving an obvious dummy substituting for a human or any other unsuccessful special effect(s)—see the wonderful blog Destructible Man for inspiration.
Unsuccessful special effect is my choice. Greg Ferrara’s tribute to the animatronic cat from 1936’s Murder at the Gallop cannot be missed.
20) What’s the least you’ve spent on a film and still regretted it? (Submitted by Lucas McNelly)
$2.50 on The Bourne Ultimatum. The time I wasted was worth considerably more.
21) Van Johnson or Van Heflin?
Van Johnson all the way. His smile, his dancing, his reluctant rendezvous with a “mighty strange” woman in Brigadoon.
22) Favorite Alan Rudolph film. Remember My Name. When will that gem come uncut to DVD, I wonder.
23) Name a documentary that you believe more people should see.
Wow, only about a million of them. But if I have to pick, let’s make it a double feature: the one that should have won the Oscar for 1994, Hoop Dreams, and the one that did win the Oscar for 1976, Harlan County, U.S.A.
24) In deference to this quiz’s professor, name a favorite film which revolves around someone becoming stranded. The Exterminating Angel and all the people who are stranded in the music room.
25) Is there a moment when your knowledge of film, or lack thereof, caused you an unusual degree of embarrassment and/or humiliation? If so, please share.
Yes. When I thought Bela Tarr was a woman. Oh boy!
26) Ann Sheridan or Geraldine Fitzgerald? (Submitted by Larry Aydlette)
Ann Sheridan. Geraldine Fitzgerald just isn’t very memorable.
27) Do you or any of your family members physically resemble movie actors or other notable figures in the film world? If so, who?
Fluffy resembles Donald Pleasence’s cat in You Only Live Twice.
28) Is there a movie you have purposely avoided seeing? If so, why?
Yes, Pulp Fiction. I didn’t start out avoiding it, but so many people gave me shit about not seeing it, I dug my heels in.
29) Movie with the most palpable or otherwise effective wintry atmosphere or ambience. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. You can get frostbitten just watching it.
30) Gerrit Graham or Jeffrey Jones?
Definitely Jeffrey Jones. He’s great in my favorite Halloween movie, Sleepy Hollow. He’s just got an amazing face.
31) The best cinematic antidote to a cultural stereotype (sexual, political, regional, whatever).
I don’t know if it’s the best, but I really get a kick out of how Amy Madigan plays McCoy in Streets of Fire. She miraculously doesn’t come off as a total dyke; she’s a genuine partner to Michael Paré.
32) Second favorite John Wayne movie. Stagecoach. The Quiet Man comes in first.
33) Favorite movie car chase.
The original The Italian Job. The cars are so cute.
34) In the spirit of His Girl Friday, propose a gender-switched remake of a classic or not-so-classic film. (Submitted by Patrick Robbins)
I’d love to see a faithful, word-for-word adaptation of The Women, using only men playing it straight.
35) Barbara Rhoades or Barbara Feldon?
Oh Max!
36) Favorite Andre De Toth movie.
I’ve only seen Slattery’s Hurricane, and I didn’t much like it.
37) If you could take one filmmaker’s entire body of work and erase it from all time and memory, as if it had never happened, whose oeuvre would it be? (Submitted by Tom Sutpen)
Otto Preminger because he’s a complete shit.
38) Name a film you actively hated when you first encountered it, only to see it again later in life and fall in love with it. Love Story. Click through to find out why.
39) Max Ophuls or Marcel Ophuls? (Submitted by Tom Sutpen)
Max. It’s really apples and hand grenades, isn’t it?
40) In which club would you most want an active membership, the Delta Tau Chi fraternity, the Cutters or the Warriors? And which member would you most resemble, either physically or in personality?
None of them. They exclude women.
41) Your favorite movie cliché.
The ingénue who goes out in place of the injured/angry/detained headliner and comes back a star.
42) Vincente Minnelli or Stanley Donen? (Submitted by Bob Westal)
Minnelli. His golden age musicals are like priceless jewels, especially Meet Me in St. Louis.
43) Favorite Christmas-themed horror movie or sequence.
It has to be when Ralphie’s dad unpacks his major award. I was overcome with horror thinking about that going into MY living room, let alone Ralphie’s.
44) Favorite moment of self- or selfless sacrifice in a movie.
When Sister Marie Bernard shows the enormous tumor on her leg to Sister Marie Therese in The Song of Bernadette and says she has never suffered. The horror on Gladys Cooper’s face when confronted with real selfless suffering and her own jealousy is gut-wrenching.
45) If you were the cinematic Spanish Inquisition, which movie cult (or cult movie) would you decimate? (Submitted by Bob Westal) The Dark Knight fanboy cult. I have visions of them all becoming ruthless corporate raiders if they are allowed to grow to maturity.
46) Caroline Munro or Veronica Carlson?
I’m not very well versed in Hammer horror. I’ll call it a tie since I’m sure they’re both wonderful.
47) Favorite eye-patch wearing director. (Submitted by Patty Cozzalio)
Definitely Raoul Walsh. He’s responsible for so many great films from the silents through the golden age.
48) Favorite ambiguous movie ending. (Original somewhat ambiguous submission—“Something about ambiguous movie endings!”– by Jim Emerson, who may have some inspiration of his own to offer you.) Madeleine. Ann Todd’s entire performance is an exercise in ambiguity, but that Mona Lisa smile at the end slam-dunks it.
49) In giving thanks for the movies this year, what are you most thankful for?
Roger Ebert. He continues to be supportive of my work and an inspiration to me. I hope he lives a long and happy life.
50) George Kennedy or Alan North? (Submitted by Peet Gelderblom)
George Kennedy. He’s funny and very cool. He kind of reminds me of James Coburn.
You are about to read the 500th post on Ferdy on Films, etc. When this all started back in December 2005, I had no idea how long it would last or what directions it would take. I knew that I enjoyed writing film reviews: indeed, the first reviews on this blog were copied and pasted from a film discussion board I frequented, a place film congregants who bolted from the New York Times Film Forum in protest—including Rod and the hubby—met to discuss films, fight like a dysfunctional family, and express outlooks that became as doddering as the participants who voiced them forgetfully for the 15th time. I was no longer the film neophyte who came to them looking for information and guidance several years before. I had the moxie to think that I knew enough about movies to tell other people what I thought about them without fear of becoming a laughingstock. Looking back over the 500 mainly substantive posts that comprise Ferdy on Films, I can honestly say that there is little that seems hastily digested, little I would take back, and actually a few moments of grace—my review of The Quiet Man is my own personal favorite—that any writer or commentator is lucky to achieve.
If I had been the sole critic on this blog, my “offroad” approach to film reviewing (or as Rod calls it below, the “Oxfam approach to world cinema”) might have doomed the blog to the backwaters where I hunt for new kinds of films to view. It has been my great good fortune not only to have such a brilliant writer and analytical mind in Rod to bring some real scholarly heft to Ferdy, but also his enthusiasm for mainstream movies. Thanks, Rod, for going where no 50ish woman should ever have to and bringing back such enlightening tales from the front as The Dark Knight and a double-feature of Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer/Transformers. Rod’s double-features are always well-considered, from his comparison of the original King Kong with Peter Jackson’s imperfect, but ambitious remake to a pairing of two Gus Van Sant films, Paranoid Park and Milk, giving me an appreciation for changes in style over time as well as a more well-rounded look at directors who have and are continuing to make a mark on the cinematic landscape.
Rod’s ability to be comprehensive while still relatively compact astonishes me. His “Look Back: Influences and Major Figures of the British Free Cinema” is an article I still reference and recall when choosing British films from this period to watch. I also believe his tribute pieces are without peer. Was there a better overview of Roy Scheider’s career at his death than Rod’s? I’m convinced not. Rod’s lengthy series on the films of Martin Scorsese gave our current reigning king of American cinema an in-depth, career-long retrospective in a succinct, accessible way, though Rod’s refusal to gaze again on After Hours, Scorsese’s ’80s affectation, still has me chuckling.
Rod’s great enthusiasm is in horror. I don’t think there’s a style of horror out there, from the eerie classics like Val Lewton’s Isle of the Dead to the made-for-television cheese of Salem’s Lot and great European classics, such as Dario Argento’s Suspiria and Jesús Franco’s Vampyros Lesbos, that Rod hasn’t covered. There are a lot of film blogs devoted to horror; there are few film critics who can burrow into such an irrational passion with such clear-eyed focus. Rod is never blinded by the light.
I don’t have a particular favorite among Rod’s works, but there are two reviews that have lingered in my mind. His appreciation of Olivier Assayas’ Boarding Gate really opened my eyes to the potential in this rising French director and the full-to-bursting creativity of its star, Asia Argento. The other, Happy Feet, was a rare personal review from Rod that is as close to a self-portrait as he’s ever likely to do here. Thanks, Rod, for all you’ve done for the blog, its readers, and for me personally. A better partnership I could never ask for.
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A quick check proves that my first piece for Ferdy on Films was posted in January 2006, barely a month after Marilyn started her blog. My, how time flies. My first post is still one of my favourites, being as it is about one of my favourite films, Ridley Scott’s The Duellists. Being a film commentator, or anything, really, on the internet, has its challenges and traps. It is, in essence, the freedom to mouth off in any fashion you want, and it offers everyone else the same opportunity. Everything on the internet is both instantaneously old and yet can live on and on.
It’s perhaps a minor miracle that two people as opinionated, and of often such differing opinions, as Marilyn and I have managed to maintain a working partnership for so long, relatively free of blow-outs and blow-ups. Perhaps it’s the fact that we share a strong level of both enthusiasm and cynicism, distinctly catholic tastes (in the original sense of the word), and don’t mind a fight when it comes around. Gladly or not, we’ve both suffered a lot of fools over the years, but Marilyn’s industriousness gets things done, man! And, oh yeah, I really like reading Marilyn’s writing, when I agree with every word, and even when I disagree with her to the point when the vein on my forehead threatens to burst and my hyperactive salivary glands spew out white foam.
Marilyn has expressed amazement at my own desire to understand pop culture, where Marilyn’s fondness for little-known and diverse foreign films, which, in some of my grouchier moments I mumblingly refer to as her Oxfam approach to world cinema, is that of someone who likes to look beyond the ever-limiting prescriptions of distributors (I won’t use that now so vague and tired whipping post called “Hollywood”), studios, theaters, and mainstream critics, and look for the undiscovered and the little-appreciated, or the stuff worthy of reappreciation. The great boom in independent and international filmmaking, the huge resources of modern communication, a theoretical freedom of choice such as has never existed before, have ironically enabled the continual narrowing of alternatives by the utter cynicism of modern news and entertainment media, mercenary prerogative of corporatised culture, and a general cultural zeitgeist that’s often just fucking lazy. Such phenomena have both compressed and atomised opportunities for getting the news out on the original, the vigorous, and the interesting, not necessarily as opposed to, but surely in addition to, the colossal one-weekend monstrosities and the favoured few darlings of the fanboys.
Plus we just like yapping about movies, dammit!
One irony of this is that I often find myself having to avert my gaze from Marilyn’s commentaries on films that look interesting and will probably never turn up anywhere. I’d be lucky if I’ve seen half of the movies Marilyn has commented upon.
Still, I love that she turned me on to Jiri Menzel’s I Served the King of England, recognised the disguised Bette Davis movie that is Park Chen-wook’s Lady Vengeance, and so vigorously defends Paul Verhoeven’s Black Book. I’ve been much amused by the difference of her opinion of Tom Collins’ Kings with my father’s—it’s a Celtic thing, he insists. I loved that she gave John Hillcoat’s The Proposition the trashing it so richly deserved, approached Ken Russell’s The Devils with such passion, and that she spares some time for some now-underrated oldies like The Nun’s Story and The Life of Emile Zola. Marilyn’s political and feminist button-pushing is always entertaining, and it hits the mark effectively, judging by some of her comments. I meditated for days on her commentary of A Question of Silence and I Spit on Your Grave, worth a dozen whining posts about mixed messages in Katherine Heigl films that passes for a lot of cultural commentary on the internet. And of course, her frontline posts from the film festivals she attends are a cornucopia of interest. I don’t go to film festivals. I can’t afford to.
If Marilyn’s a little bit more the activist, and myself more the self-styled philosopher of our blogship enterprise, well, at the very least Ferdy on Films is, I hope, a site that exhibits strong principles and considered opinion, and fulfils our mutual desire to exist on a mean between accessibility and erudition. With the 500th post on Ferdy on Films, I can’t help but see us at something of a crossroads. Perhaps that’s because we are, indeed, at a crossroads. Real life makes us acknowledge it even in the most pristinely remote corners of cyberspace. Both spirit and flesh can get a bit weak. But there’ll always be more movies to write about. l
Since the occurrence of vomiting as a response to motion is both widespread and apparently disadvantageous, it presents a problem for evolutionary theory. An hypothesis is proposed suggesting that motion sickness is triggered by difficulties which arise in the programming of movements of the eyes or head when the relations between the spatial frameworks defined by the visual, vestibular, or proprioceptive inputs are repeatedly and unpredictably perturbed. Such perturbations may be produced by certain types of motion, or by disturbances in sensory input or motor control produced by ingested toxins. The last would be the important cause in nature, the main function of the emesis being to rid the individual of ingested neurotoxins. Its occurrence in response to motion would be an accidental by product of this system.
In other words, movement that does not compute with the way we normally see, hear, or experience sensation will cause us to puke. If we’ve swallowed poison, its effects on these functions may help us to expel the poison, perhaps saving our life.
There are other theories of motion sickness, such as one postulated by University of Minnesota kinesiologist Tom Stoffregen. Stoffregen is investigating whether “weird” movements in his volunteer subjects—mostly young and vigorous students—make them get sicker than subjects who remain perfectly still when subjected to sickness-inducing motion. He is physically strapping people into chairs to help test this hypothesis. “We’re interested in how [motion sickness] begins, not how it ends,” Stoffregen says. “No one has ever thrown up in my lab. And that’s a record I’m proud to keep.”
I like to encourage new thinking about this eons-old problem of the human race, but I think Dr. Stoffregen is barfing up the wrong tree. People move when confronted with disorienting motion because we want to get away from it. How many times have I turned, put my head down, and tried to refocus my eyes in the so-called “queasicam” productions that are increasingly filling our larger-than-life movie screens? Doctor, you’re putting the cart before the horse. It’s like a ski-training method my ex-husband read about that has you close your eyes and stand on one leg to increase your sense of balance. Why do you think being able to balance with your balance centers closed will make your balance better overall? Do you ski with a blindfold? None of this particular reverse engineering makes sense to me.
I remember when Martin Scorsese clucked in wonder at the perfection of the steadicam that made his tracking shot of Henry Hill’s backdoor entrance into a nightclub in Goodfellas so smooth; AMPAS even awarded a technical Oscar to its inventor, Garrett Brown. But as happens all the time, there was the inevitable backlash against the slick Hollywood movie, and with handheld DV technology, Filmmakers R Us has been fully launched.
What has puzzled me lately is how some directors are employing handheld cameras. Although The Blair Witch Project is the only film so far that actually made me throw up, I can at least understand the motivation behind its use of a handheld—the camera was the POV of a character in the film. Same with Cloverfield, such a good movie that I found a way to endure the nausea and headache it caused so I could watch it beyond my usual 40-minute limit. But what was Jonathan Demme’s rationale for using a handheld in Rachel Getting Married or Michael Mann’s in Public Enemies?
In both cases, it seems as though these directors were attempting to give audiences “you are there” moments. For Rachel, I presume it was for a sense of intimacy, of being one of the guests at this personal occasion in the life of a family, though truthfully, it didn’t make a bit of sense to me; the camera seemed more like someone stalking Anne Hathaway, a guard from her rehab clinic or somesuch. Mann might have been trying for audience identification with John Dillinger’s in-the-moment approach to living, or maybe just for the adrenaline rush that comes from pretending we’re a bad guy whose life hangs in the balance. Whatever the motivation, the self-consciousness of the camera—a truly living machine when it moves—turns the movie-going experience into a virtual-reality carnival ride. And I can no longer go on carnival rides without physical distress.
I don’t expect directors or DPs to sacrifice their vision for the sake of people like me who can’t physically stand to watch their films. The regret must be mine that a film I really wanted to see, Public Enemies, will forever be unavailable to me, not because the master and very last print of the film have disintegrated the way so many of our early films have, but because a shooting technique that has come into vogue is bad for my health. Who’d ever have thunk that movies could be hazardous to anything but the status quo? l
No freak show speculations or gawking at the face that changed strangely through the years. Only admiration for the wonderful music, my music, the music of my adolescence and young adulthood. The Jackson 5 were all over the airwaves when I was growing up. My dance studio played the first copy of “Thriller” I ever heard, and I was one of the “early adopters” of that album. I outgrew his music, even as he never grew up. But I’ll never stop loving it. Here’s a ubiquitous song from 1972 that was the first one I thought of when I heard the news. Only Michael Jackson could have made such a corny song this vital:
"You put a lot of love into your blog." – Roger Ebert, Roger Ebert's Journal
"Marilyn and Roderick … always raising the tone." – Farran Smith Nehme, The Self-Styled Siren
"Marilyn and Rod aren't merely engaging writers, they're engaging debaters, willing to argue (civilly) a point or discuss a post with even the most ardent dissenters." – Greg Ferrara, Cinema Styles
"Honestly, you both have made me aware of films I've never seen, from every era. Mega enriching." – Donna Hill, Strictly Vintage Hollywood
"You have my highest praise!" – Andreas, Pussy Goes Grrr
