Disappointing... yet brilliant

Duel In The Sun

Director King Vidor (officially – unofficially, half a dozen others had a go, including Josef von Sternberg) Stars Jennifer Jones, Gregory Peck, Joseph Cotten, Lillian Gish, Lionel Barrymore USA 1946 Language English 2hrs 24mins Colour

Quite delirious attempt at star-making

Don’t be fooled: Duel In The Sun may look like a Western – it has lots of cowboys, the coming of the railroad, a gunfight in a saloon, a big ranch and some very charismatic cattle – but it isn’t one. It’s a melodrama, the great big unhinged tale of a girl whose terrible upbringing means that she ends up loving a man she also hates. It’s in a film in which our heroine screams ‘I’m trash, I tell ya, trash!’ and a preacher sums her up thus: ‘Call her a child? Under that heathen blanket there’s full-blossomed woman built by the devil to drive men crazy.’ It’s a film with what look to modern eyes like serious problems with race. It’s nonsense – but by god it’s beautiful (there’s one scene with lighting nicked straight from Caravaggio) and weirdly fascinating at times.

It goes like this: after her long-suffering father has gunned down her slutty mother and faces the hangman, wild-eyed Pearl Chavez (Jennifer Jones in terrible brown-skin make-up) is packed off to the care of Laura Belle McCanles (Lillian Gish), who lives on a huge Texas ranch with her bitter, wheelchair-bound husband, the Senator, and their two adult sons. Jesse (Joseph Cotton) is college-educated, kind, forward-thinking; he falls in love with Pearl instantly. Lewton (Gregory Peck) is useful for breaking wild horses, but otherwise he’s a gambling, guitar-playing wastrel; he quickly lures Pearl down to the local swimming hole…

The man responsible for the on and off-screen madness of Duel In The Sun was legendary producer David O. Selznick. It was Selznick who let the film spiral wildly over-budget, drove the original director (King Vidor) past the point of tolerance, hired and fired a series of replacements – and reportedly personally added extra fake blood to the climatic scene that gives the film its title. Two things spurred him on: the first was that he had behaved in exactly the same way during the making of Gone With The Wind, and that had become the biggest hit Hollywood had ever known. The second has that he was hopelessly in love with Jones (who was 17 years younger than him, which isn’t extreme by movie-world standards) and would do anything to make her a star.

She was miscast – her accent is all over the place, and she couldn’t nail the part of the elemental but contradictory Pearl. Of course, it didn’t help that she was buried in make-up that might just have worked in a black-and-white movie, but has a strange greenish tinge in super-vibrant Technicolor. Cotten is faultless as the worthy but dull Jesse. I’m not sure about Peck – it might just be that roles he took later on make him seem an improbable rogue. Gregory Peck was an excellent Gregory Peck, but he was no Clark Gable.

Pearl is at the centre of the story, but she doesn’t drive it on – until towards the end, things happen to her. The clash between the brothers, too, is often indirect. The result is that the film doesn’t really have enough energy to compensate for how daft it often is. Still, if you like drawn-out death scenes and out-of-control dancing girls and families at war and the movies at their vastest, it’s all here. 

Lore

Director Cate Shortland Stars Saskia Rosendahl, Kai Malina, Nele Trebs, André Frid Germany/Australia 2011 Language German (with English subtitles) 1hr 48 mins Colour

Growing up is tough when the Thousand Year Reich turns out to have been a big con

What kind of kind of film is Lore? It’s a teenage girl-struggles-to-come-to-grips-with-her-world indie movie, told in saturated colours, lots of close-ups, bursts of sound, taking time to follow sparks leaping from a fire or a snail crawling along a branch, all reflecting the intensity of the lead character’s feelings and largely set in deeply lush forests in spring and early summer whose burgeoning life echoes (but not in a clanging way) the girl’s budding sexuality. Roughly speaking, that puts it in a genre that takes in Sofia Coppola’s films, the terrific Swedish film Fucking Amal (aka Show Me Love), My Summer Of Love and director Cate Shortland’s excellent debut, Somersault.

It also belongs to the overlapping collection of films about young women who find themselves in extremely difficult circumstances, which includes Wendy And Lucy, festival circuit fave Martha Marcy May Marlene, Lilya-4-Ever and the brilliant Winter’s Bone, which Lore resembles at some of its best points.

Lastly, it’s a survivors’ road movie, one of those films about a group of people heading through a wrecked landscape looking for safety and civilization. Many of those are post-apocalyptic, and that’s how this film often feels, although it’s set in May 1945, and the disaster that befalls Lore (Saskia Rosendahl) and her family is the defeat of Hitler’s Germany. Because these aren’t victims of the Nazis, they are Nazis (granted, we can probably let the baby off the hook) – blonde, blue-eyed true believers. With their parents swept up by the Americans, teenage Lore is left in charge of her younger sister, twin brothers and the baby, trying to guide them across a country not only devastated by war but arbitrarily divided into four zones by the occupying powers, making the most straightforward routes from one place to another impossible. Along the way, they keep bumping into concentration camp survivor Thomas, and eventually have to accept this resourceful young man’s help.

Their journey (along with a lot of other things) is a metaphor for German’s eventual de-Nazification process, but far from a crude, unnuanced one. It’s probably best embodied in the younger sister, Liesel (Nele Trebs), who at the start seems a more perfect product of the system than Lore  but turns out to be repeatedly adaptable. Saski Rosendahl is good, too, as Lore, not especially likable, nor that heroic, just dealing as best she can (and sometimes failing) with the difficult circumstances thrown at her.

There are moments that can seem fairly familiar – the begging, bargaining, stealing; the first encounter with a dead body – and it isn’t entirely free of clichés. But it is a film that gives us characters with vile worldviews that aren’t their faults, and doesn’t crudely manipulate our attitude towards them. Nor for a minute does it feel worthy or like it is try to teach us a lesson. It’s a film that is often uncomfortable to watch but never feels like it is revelling in the grimness. But again, the setting, the history, is only ever part of what makes a film, and whatever this movie is trying to say is mostly conveyed by colour, by noise, by where the camera lingers, and it does all of that extremely well.

So far in the awards season there has been a clear winner in the battle the two based-on-real events movies involving the CIA versus Islamic extremism. It’s Argo all the way.
 Now, that neither proves that Argo is a better film than Zero Dark Thirty nor guarantees it a win at the Oscars. Its edge over Kathryn Bigelow’s hunt for Bin Laden movie is almost certainly due in part to factors unrelated to the quality of the work.

ZDT may have been hampered by Bigelow’s comparatively recent Oscars triumph with The Hurt Locker, while Argo seems to have benefitted from the Ben Affleck Redemption Narrative, something he hasn’t shied away from. Argo also has a splendid double act from old troupers Alan Arkin and John Goodman, which will probably go down well with the large senior contingent of the Academy (and it’s a partially a Hollywood on Hollywood movie, which always goes down well in the industry). ZDT, on the other hand, has an attention-grabbing star in Jessica Chastain, a little bit of Tony Soprano in a wig and the now obligatory rag-bag of Aussies and Brits.


ZDT has definitely been hurt, to some degree unfairly, by the torture controversy.It’s also been damaged by the film-makers’ early claims of accuracy and authenticity. As the awards season has gone on, the ZDT team have talked more about the small number of characters standing for the many CIA agents, informants, prisoners and so on that involved in the real messy nine-year quest. But that all came too late, and clashes with the texture of the film, designed to give you the sense that you are really there in Pakistan or Afghanistan. It’s not aiming for Lawrence Of Arabia mythic or Three Kings satirical, more ripped from the headlines, and that makes you vulnerable when you stray (as the film often does) from the established facts*.

Then there is the Barack Obama dimension. The release of Zero Dark Thirty was reportedly delayed until after the election in case this account of the president’s highest-profile foreign affairs achievement gave him an unfair advantage. Ironically, when the film actually did emerge, it turned out that Obama’s by almost-all-accounts very hands-on involvement in the final stages of the search for Bin Laden is nowhere in sight. While you can see why Bigelow and writer Mark Boal may have wanted to avoid accusations of being party political, by choosing to deal with such recent events they put themselves in a difficult position. In the end, they have dodged bias only by leaving a massive hole in the climax of the story.

Argo has been attacked for its inaccuracies as well. The film libels the foreign services of New Zealand and the United Kingdom, although it does so in one line that I would be surprised if one in a hundred audience actually noticed. But although they are both stem broadly from things that really occurred, Argo and Zero Dark Thirty invite different standards by which they will be judged. Argo’s story seems so delightfully improbable that even if only a quarter of it happened that way, that would be insanely great. ZDT demands to be taken seriously, so that those scenes that jar (and there are a number), really jar and undermine the whole exercise.

The final one of the external factors is that Argo takes what was the lowest point in America’s self-esteem - the Tehran embassy hostage crisis - and finds something positive that happened during it. ZDT gives you the pay-off of having UBL dispatched by the US special forces, but only after reminding you that the search for him was a seemingly never-ending shambles. Indeed, like a lot of recent films, Zero Dark Thirty is long and feels longer. The charitable explanation is this is deliberate, that Bigelow wants you to identify with the characters’ frustrations, that this maybe is the trace of the potentially more interesting film that Zero Dark Thirty was meant to have been, before the CIA unexpectedly stumbled across their long-lost target in Pakistan.

But none of that matters as much as the fact that Argo is a much better film, or if that sounds too subjective, at the very least one that completely succeeds on its own terms. It manages to be both efficient and charming, a masterful piece of economical storytelling and very funny. It’s not a short movie, clocking it at two hours flat, but it has a good use for almost every one of those minutes (the Affleck-kid scenes excepted), and that’s a horribly rare thing in mainstream American movies these days. As many critics have pointed out, Ben Affleck pulls off something technically impressive here, getting the balance right between the Hollywood satire and the hostage drama, the laughs and the tension. So many films try it, so many get it horribly, horribly wrong.

Part of my problem with Zero Dark Thirty is that ultimately I’m not convinced that in the end Bigelow and Boal were that interested in the search for Osama Bin Laden. As the poster above suggests, what they, and producer Megan Ellison, have done is to make a major historical event matter less than a bratty young woman getting her way. Bigelow and her collaborators seem transfixed by their own creation, allowing her to repeatedly pop at the centre of the story in ways that veer from the improbable to the impossible, not to mention committing at least five sackable offences. Rather than the 17,000-staffed CIA versus one man, this is the story of one tiny woman taking on her employers** and only as an afterthought Al-Qaeda. Sometimes it reminded me of Buffy The Vampire Slayer drained of humour, crossed with Zelig. Is she worth it, Jessica Chastain’s Maya? Is she a character needing over two and a half hours of your time, one of cinema’s greats? She is not. She is a solipsistic crashing bore. That’s probably true to life of course, truer than Claire Danes’ equally obsessive but fascinating CIA analyst in Homeland. But if you’re going to have the joyless truth, then you need the full joyless truth. You have to show the dozens, if not hundreds, of equally obsessed male and female Mayas there were, the Tora Bora clique and the ‘he’s dead already’ brigade just as driven and bright and full of theories as the ones finally proved right, all with coffee-stained teeth and terrible personal hygiene.

But Bigelow lacked the inclination, the chops or, most likely, the resources to tell a big story on the scale it deserved. The better option might have been to bite off a smaller chunk of it - for instance, there is surely a whole movie to be had in the raid (and it’s build-up) alone. Which brings us back to Argo, which focuses in on a tiny sub plot of a larger story (the main hostage crisis) that itself is brief moment in the history of the US and Iran… Affleck is aware the bigger picture, and the prologue montage even mentions that the CIA organised coup in 1953 that robbed Iran of any chance of secular democracy, but sticks to telling its characters’ story. The result is a rare thing, a totally satisfying modern movie. I am sure it cheats all over the place, but nothing about it made me want or need to turn fact-checker. It’s simply too entertaining.

*For instance, the film clashes with every account I have read by suggesting that rushed by Pakistan jets (which didn’t actually get airborne till later), the Navy SEALS were forced to leave potential evidence behind. In fact the took their time collecting everything they could see - the results provided a pragmatic as well as revenge-driven rationale for the operation, apparently showing that Bin Laden still had an active role in terrorism. Of course, the film has no need of documentary proof, because Maya knows it in her gut.

**The way things are going, I think what we need urgently in 2013 are pro-bureaucracy movies. But if you do want a bureaucrat-versus-their-own organisation film, go for the great Ikiru, which made me weep buckets.

Did we get it right? Neon magazine’s films of 1998 (Part 1)

Reading (and writing) end-of-year lists has got me thinking once again about the creation of these top 10s, 20s, 50s… It’s such an arbitrary, often panicky process, full of instant regret and shaded (when you taking part in a collective vote) with lots of calculation. Did you get it right at the time, and more contentiously, from the perspective of years later?

The test of time is a slippery notion, one beloved of batshit politicians like Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair in their final terms as they determinedly ignore those who disagree with them. But at least until we reach the Day of Judgement, history doesn’t have one point of view, it has multiple, ever-changing perceptions. For instance, the crucial question of how to react to the economic crisis since 2007 tends to be have been answered by experts according to their differing opinions on the causes and resolution of the Great Depression of the 1930s, a question very much unresolved 80 years on. And just because something was well thought of 100 years and is well thought of now tells you little about how it was thought 50 years ago and how it will be regarded in 50 years time.

With that somewhat pompous reservation noted, we come to the list. Neon was an excellent/crisis-ridden/very funny/short-lived monthly movie magazine published by EMAP from late 1996 to early 1999. I contributed to all but two issues and for final nine months was the reviews editor. The electorate for the 1998 poll was the magazine’s small staff - a few regular freelancers may also have got a say. To be eligible for selection, the films had to have been released for the first time in UK cinemas in 1998.

Here are the movies [click on titles to get the IMDB]:

20. Jackie Brown

19. Out Of Sight

18. U-Turn

17. The Castle

16. In The Company Of Men

15. Carne Trémula (Live Flesh)

14. The Last Days Of Disco

13. The Big Lebowski

12. The Daytrippers

11. The Truman Show

10. Hana-bi (Fireworks)

9. The Wedding Singer

8. Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas

7. Saving Private Ryan

6. Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels

5. Velvet Goldmine

4. There’s Something About Mary

3. Starship Troopers

2. Buffalo 66

1. Boogie Nights

First impressions from a 2013 perspective:

a) 1998 was a terrific year for films. But also, as an electorate, we may have voted for films that (mostly) big news within the confines of of our office, but were far from consensus choices from a lot of other critics (Fear And Loathing, Velvet Goldmine, even, absurdly, Starship Troopers).

b) Perhaps surprisingly, there are no films on the list about which my opinion has changed completely in the 14 years that followed, none that I loved then and now hate, hated then and now love. At 28 I was probably more excited by Fear And Loathing that I would have been at much older – my interest in Hunter Thompson has dimmed considerably since then, so that’s not really a judgement on the movie itself. And I don’t think we foresaw how tiresome (and unappealingly skinny) Christina Ricci would grow up to be.

c) Two of these films star Jennifer Lopez, then a neo-noir fave after her attention-grabbing turn in Bob Rafelson’s Blood And Wine. I think she could have had a very different movie career if she had wanted to (and funnily enough, she’s returned to roughly that kind of territory in her next film).

d) Maybe some evidence of the test of time is that I feel a few of these films may need an introduction (then again, some of them probably needed one then). U-Turn is small-town crime thriller that, rather surprisingly, was directed by Oliver Stone and starred Sean Penn and Ms Lopez. The Castle is an Australian comedy. The Daytrippers is an almost archetypal US indie of the era, a talky comedy about a woman convinced her husband is cheating on her who goes from Long island to Manhattan to find out - accompanied in a crammed car by her squabbling family. Stars Hope Davis, Stanley Tucci and - yes! - Parker Posey. Hana-bi (Fireworks) is a rather moving Japanese crime drama from director-star Takeshi Kitano. Buffalo 66 is somewhat uncategorisable film written/directed by and starring Vincent Gallo as a bloke who gets out of jail and, on his way to a meal with his hated parents, kidnaps a young woman (Christina Ricci) to pose as his wife. Gallo had been a Neon obsession from the start and was by a distance the least famous person we ever had on the cover. It must have taken a hell of a sales job to convince the people upstairs he was going to be the new Tarantino and Pacino all rolled into one. He wasn’t.

e) The most surprising placings, it seems to me now, are the subsequently much-loved Out Of Sight, down at 19, and Lebowski at 13. We had had Out Of Sight on the cover, so it wasn’t like it wasn’t a big deal, It may have split votes with the other Elmore Leonard adaptation, Jackie Brown, also lower than you might expect. Lebowski was a classic slow-burner.

f). The Castle? I’ve never seen it and have only the faintest notion of what it was about. Every time I think I remember, I realise I am thinking of The Dish. Then again, with such a small staff two people amounted to a powerful block vote.

g) I loathed The Truman Show then, and still do. It has an entirely unjustified reputation for being prophetic. In fact, the mass projection of love and hope on an unknowing Truman couldn’t be further from our collective relationship with Kim Kardashian. In any case, it’s actually about the death of God. And excessively tedious.

h) Lock Stock provoked some heated discussion. Associate editor Damon Wise argued (correctly) that the film was a huge deal with the punters and the sneery British film magazines had all missed the boat on it. He was right. I still think Guy Ritchie’s public persona is risible and his early films unwatchable, but he’s clearly done OK for himself, as have some of the cast.

i) Velvet Goldmine, American director Todd Haynes’ film about the very British glam rock phenomenon, got a tough ride from critics and public, stumped by characters who were sort of Bowie and Iggy but also not. Damon (again) prepped us by playing the soundtrack endlessly in the office and insisting we had to see the film twice (He was right: it was better the second time).

j) There are three films on this list I will always watch (and always enjoy) at least a few scenes of every time they are on TV: The Big Lebowski, Out Of The Sight and Starship Troopers.

k) So, my instinctive feeling is this: time (so far) has been actively kind to Out Of Sight, which in many ways created George Clooney the movie star, The Big Lebowksi and Starship Troopers, which after the George W Bush years looked every bit as prophetic as The Truman Show isn’t. Pedro Almodovar’s Live Flesh and Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown are probably the lowest-key films made by famously unrestrained, high-profile directors. Hana-bi? Takeshi was considered ridiculously cool at the time, maybe less so now? It’s a terrific film. U-Turn (despite all the big names involved), The Daytrippers and The Last Days Of Disco (Kate Beckinsale’s only decent American film?) have all been somewhat forgotten, unfairly in the latter two cases. In The Company Of Men is an odd one – it still gets shown on TV, but I think writer-director Neil LaBute’s very random film career matters a lot less than his status as an important playwright. My family, at least, still loves The Wedding Singer. Fear And Loathing is an interesting, watchable mess that will never escape the shadow of the book. Velvet Goldmine got at least discussed again when Haynes’ even more unconventional Bob Dylan film, I’m Not There, came out. There’s Something About Mary never needed critics’ lists anyway. Saving Private Ryan was hailed as an instant classic, but as time went on the reputation of the beach scene (high) and the rest of it (not so) have separated out. Purely anecdotally, people seem to talk a lot more about Band Of Brothers. We put a lot of effort into making Buffalo ‘66 at least a cult movie (I was allowed to place it as The Observer film & TV supplement’s sixth best film of the 1990s) – but has it made it?

In Part 2: What else was out in 1998? And we look at some crude statistics…

Punch-Drunk Love 

Director Paul Thomas Anderson Stars Adam Sandler, Emily Watson USA 2002 Language English 1 hr 35 mins Colour

Eccentric love story with astonishing sound design

Maybe I’m wrong, but I suspect that most people who have an opinion on the matter consider Punch-Drunk Love to be the runt in Paul Thomas Anderson’s litter. Unlike The Master or Magnolia, it’s not obviously about big themes. Unlike Boogie Nights, it didn’t have a cast packed with once and future stars. Unlike There Will Be Blood, it easn’t a showcase for the work of the endlessly admired Daniel Day-Lewis. Instead, it’s a romance starring Adam Sandler. And therein may lie the problem.

Sandler is enormously popular, and for a long time was the best-value-for-money leading man in Hollywood, but respected (other than by studio accountants)? Not so much. Unlike, say, Daniel Day-Lewis, at whom awards are freely flung.

But I’ve never really got the Day-Lewis thing – his total immersion business creating (in the relatively few films I have seen of his, which doesn’t admittedly include My Left Foot) mannered performances that make me think of a joyless version of Johnny Depp. Adam Sandler, on the other hand, made a string of films I enjoyed: The Waterboy, Happy Gilmore and, most of all The Wedding Singer. I remember seeing it with my whole family in the much-missed Riviera Cinema in Teignmouth and we all loved it. He has, admittedly, made a considerable number of truly terrible films since.

There’s a subtle difference between the way Anderson uses Sandler Punch Drunk Love and what he did with Tom Cruise in Magnolia. In both cases, the director knows he has hired a film star rather than a character actor. But with Cruise he pushes further – it’s a brilliant, revelatory performance in which the star seems to finally acknowledge the  creepiness inherent in his normal screen persona, but which is usually ignored because he is a mainstream leading man. What if we agree that his character in Top Gun manages to be both a narcissist and a stalker, that there is always something wholly unnerving about that grin and that strange stare, that inability ever to look relaxed?*

Sandler’s Barry Egan in Punch Drunk Love, immature, socially inept and given to moments of explosive violent rage, is in many ways close to the characters he plays in the (unapologetically crude) comedies that made his name. What’s different is the context. It’s very simple story, in a way: lovely Lena Leonard (Emily Watson), grown-up, smart, but apparently lonely, sees a picture of Barry and decides he’s for her. This is more good luck that Barry deserves, but he proceeds to do his best to sabotage things. 

But none of that explains the texture of this film. First and foremost is the extraordinary sound design. Some noises have been heightened, sometimes it goes silent, but there is always something happening. It’s something you might expect from a short, or a film shown in a art gallery, but not a whole feature. You could regard it as a gimmick, but it works, and reminds you that it’s normally only horror movies (and David Lynch, if you choose to regard him as outside the horror genre) that seem interested in the considerable possibilities of non-musical noise. And of course, standard ‘realistic’ film noise, like camera focus, is unnaturally flat: our perception of sound volumes in our surroundings is subjective and ever-changing – just think of what happens when you’ve been reading something in the office and are interrupted, or the shock silence of power cut when you realise how fucking loud the fridge is the rest of the time.

In the best possible way, Punch-Drunk Love feels like an experiment: it’s Anderson saying, what if I shoot it this way? What if there is a lense flare** everywhere? What if you make an odd little indie love story and have Adam Sandler in the middle of it? What if the lead character spends a lot of time try to explain a great air miles offer on packs of pudding and no one listens to him? What if Philip Seymour Hoffman gives one of the less satisfying performances of his character because actor and director have agreed to try something, just to see whether it works? What if you stick a harmonium in the middle of an office and let the audience search for the meaning in that?

In  terms of Paul Thomas Anderson’s career, it’s an interesting moment. It seemed like something of a sidestep, away from the huge ensemble casts of Boogie Nights and Magnolia, away from the shadows of Scorsese and Altman (although there is something Altmanesque about the one scene with Barry’s seven sisters). It’s uncharacteristically short, and uncharacteristically sweet.  

But if The Master is a synthesis of everything that Anderson has done so far, and I very much think it is, then Punch-Drunk Love is surprisingly high in the mix. The sound design is one obvious legacy, but Barry’s destructiveness, loneliness, violence, improvisational skills, sense of being at odds with the world, he shares with The Master’s Freddie Quell as played by Joaquin Phoenix.

Beyond that, though, Punch-Drunk Love is a film I’m very fond of in its own right. The sensory overload of the visuals and sound (do see it in a cinema, if you ever get the chance), Emily Watson’s eyes, the way that it draws us into this improbable romance… It’s a film a lot of people struggled with at the time, and for many Sandler is an impossible barrier to enjoyment, but I think it deserves a chance.

*Maybe the best use of that Cruiseness in a mainstream film is A Few Good Men, where is his character’s pure will-to-win, rather than any sense of compassion or sense of right, that leads to justice in the end.

**Before it became JJ Abrams’ annoying trademark

My favourite films of 2012

Simple rules: these are the movies I enjoyed most (or otherwise got something out of) out of those that had a British cinema release for the first time in 2012 – so no re-releases, no festival films, no award-season bait that won’t be in our cinemas until some time in 2013. I make no claims that this list is any way comprehensive. There were a lot of films I didn’t make it to by choice or by circumstance - for instance, I made a number of ill-fated attempts to see Berberian Sound Studio. Incidentally, the worst film I saw, by some considerable distance, was the Colin Farrell/Kate Beckinsale remake of Total Recall…

1. 2 Days in New York

Mildly smug couple get invaded by relentlessly crass in-laws from out-of-town (in this case, France). That’s often been the stuff of sitcoms and bad farces, but this is touching and funny and has lots of good jokes at the expense of both the French and the Americans. Julie Delpy (still hated by many for playing the singularly most irritating character in the 15-year run of ER) directed and stars with Chris Rock, as her long-suffering partner, Mingus. This is by a long chalk his best film outing (admittedly, no great claim) – his beard alone is a thing of joy. Daft and a bit self-indulgent but ultimately properly endearing.

2. Damsels in Distress

The best surprise of the year – Last Days Of Disco director Whit Stillman returned with his first movie since 1998, an unlikely campus comedy starring the brilliant Greta Gerwig. It’s infused with the spirit of Fred Astaire yet laced with sneakily filthy jokes. A lot more about it here…

3. Shame

On all the serious critics’ lists for 2011, but director Steve McQueen’s unblinking portrait of sex addiction wasn’t unleashed on the paying punters until January. You’ve got to respect at film that can literally silence a bunch of kids in south London. They should show it on the No3 bus. No one’s idea of fun, exactly, but contains some astonishing moments of cinema.

4. Moonrise Kingdom

I have little truck with the notion that something that is highly stylised can’t also be moving, which seems to the main charge laid against director Wes Anderson. On the surface, Moonrise Kingdom is a (clever, amusing, derivative, unabashedly twee) film about a couple of precocious kids running away on a quaint New England island. But it seemed to me much more about the adults caught up in it all. The sadness lingered with me for days – Bruce Willis is heart-breaking. I kid you not.

5. Avengers Assemble (aka The Avengers aka Marvel Avengers Assemble)

It could have been a horrible mess – a film cramming together a sackful of superheroes. But in the hands of Buffy creator Joss Whedon, Avengers Assemble was the perfect balance – fan-friendly but uncluttered by backstory, funny and with the right amount of people/ancient deities getting clobbered. Top marks for the casting of Mark Ruffalo as The Hulk.

6. The Master

There is no film this year I am looking forward to seeing again as much as The Master, Paul Thomas Anderson’s account of the strange pupil-guru relationship between a damaged WWII veteran (Joaquin Phoenix) and a charismatic cult leader (Philip Seymour Hoffman). It’s a movie full of incredible stuff – not just the two-handers with Phoenix and Hoffman, but also the department store scenes early on, and every second Amy Adams has on screen. And yet, it can also feel like a big beautiful film with not a lot in it. There is an argument that Anderson covered much of the same ground more economically and with more heart in his debut film Hard Eight (aka Sydney), and I have some sympathy with that* Consider this a provisional judgement.

*The counter-argument to that is that The Master takes the best bits from all of Anderson’s previous movies and creates something even better.

7. Argo

Ben Affleck’s retelling of a little-known incident during the 1980 Iran US hostage crisis is just a really satisfying film, managing a difficult balance between comedy and a sombre thriller about a group of trapped, terrified people. Credit to the costume and make-up department – a couple of high-profile critics assumed total unknowns had been used to play the hostages.

8. The Muppets

There are basically two halves of the plot – the first concerns Jason Segel and his muppet brother(?!?), who gets all jealous when Jason hooks up with Amy Adams, and I wasn’t too fussed about that. The second bit, your basic let’s-get-the-gang-back-together to put on a show to save the theatre, was terrific. But then, I love the Muppets.

9/10: Tiny Furniture/Blank City

Post-college meltdown and the lives of second-generation Manhattan loft-dwellers are lovingly depicted in Lena Dunham’s autobiographical comedy, a calling card that led to her HBO series, Girls. An earlier bunch of no-budget filmmakers living in the smack-ridden, rat-infested, crime-plagued downtown of old are celebrated in the entertaining, if outrageously lax with the facts, documentary Blank City.

11. End Of Watch

It has its limitations as a cop movie, but as a portrait of male friendship, this is tough to beat. More here…

12. Sightseers

A caravan holiday around Northern tourist attractions (a tram museum, a pencil museum) turns into a killing spree in this Mike Leigh-ish comedy by Ben Wheatley, who a lot of sensible people reckon is the most interesting young director in Britain. I’m not 100 per cent sold on that notion, but this turned out to be the perfect thing to watch after a day’s Christmas shopping.

13. Skyfall

What has been underdiscussed is how dim Daniel Craig’s Bond is. I can only assume this is deliberate and possibly intended as slightly subversive. Craig is a clever bloke who normally plays fairly clever blokes, but his Bond is far thicker than any previous incarnation, and hopeless at his job when you think about it.

14. Le Havre

Aki Kaurismaki decamped from Helsinki to the tough French port to make this sweet, sad film, an improbable mixture of 1950s melodrama, 1970s French crime flick and social realist examination of the refugee crisis. I’m not sure it added up but it was touching and surprising.

15/16. Bombay Beach/Beasts Of The Southern Wild

Two films digging around America’s rusty margins, looking for unlikely beauty. Bombay Beach, filmed on the shores of the Salton Sea in California, is a documentary of sorts, but contains sequences of dancing interrupting ordinary life choreographed by the director. Beasts… explores a similarly resourceful community on Louisiana’s easily flooded edge, and can seem like a bit of factual film, at least when rampaging prehistoric creatures aren’t around. Both movies have mesmerising moments - both also have times that could be accused of fetishising poverty. Bombay Beach is the more easily defensible - with Beasts I felt I completely understood both what its supporters and critics felt about the film.

Plus…

My favourite films from the past that I saw the big screen and for the first time

Quai Des Brumes (1938)

The BFI is always great, but there is usually one season there a year that in particularly excited about. This it was there retrospective of films starring Jean Gabin, the broken-nosed anti-hero of French cinema. Quai Des Brumes is one of the early ones, just pre-World War II, when he was rough-edged romantic lead. It’s on Le Havre’s seafront, among the desperate, would-be dangerous and on the run. It’s all atmosphere and moodiness, and stays just on the right side of cliché. There’s a terrific dog in it, too.

Maigret Tend Un Piege (1958)

I love George Simenon’s Maigret novels, and Jean Gabin (older now) is in his element as the unruffled inspector slowly nailing a serial killer who’s been terrorising young women in the centre of Paris.

Melodie En Sous Sol (1962)

This Riviera heist movie is a sort of passing-of-the-baton moment in terms of classic French crime cinema, with veteran mastermind Jean Gabin teaching pretty-boy newcomer Alain Delon the tricks of the trade (in some ways, in fact, it’s reminiscent of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Hard Eight).

Something Wild (1962)

This year’s big bit of London Film Festival vault-digging, a restored version of Jack Garfein and Carroll Baker’s bold film about a rape survivor. More on it here…

Submarine

Director Richard Ayoade  Stars Craig Roberts, Yasmin Paige, Sally Hawkins, Noah Taylor    UK 2010 Language English 1hr 37mins Colour

A coming of age in South Wales through a nouvelle vague filter

 

Youth In Revolt

Director Miguel Arteta Stars Michael Cera, Portia Doubleday, Jean Smart, Ray Liotta    USA 2009 Language English/French 1hr 30mins Colour

A would-be adolescent cult falls someway short

 

When I was 15 years old, Paris topped one of the many lists I kept in my mind. It shared with Houston and Cambridge the No1 spot of places I never wanted to visit again. To me, it was cold, wind-swept and rain-drenched, unfriendly, snobbish, deluded, food mostly terrible. The pavements were strewn with dogshit, the shop windows packed with bloody carcasses. To make it worse, after years of unhappy study, I could barely speak of a word of the language. Paris was a hell whose cinemas, I was sure, showed terrible films in which people wouldn’t shut up, pictures I had no intention of ever seeing.

This was a little inconvenient, because my parents had lived there in the 1960s and loved the place. We even had French relatives. So, on our way between great cities – London and Rome, London and Barcelona, we would stop off in the French capital, and I would manage to be even more titanically grumpy than I normally was in those days.

But my parents weren’t the only people who loved France. On the contrary, many, if not most, bookish middle and upper-middle class kids in Britain seemed to look across the Channel with envy. Camus! Gauloises! Runny cheese, which everyone knows is just so much more sophisticated than solid cheese! The dream of a tiny, endearingly squalid flat on the Left Bank, and endless erudite chat in cafés! Underlying all this was a conviction that over there lay an unashamed love of thinking and books and films and musicians unappreciated in the lands of their birth, not to mention both a greater instinct for the romantic and a refreshingly pragmatic approach to sex. Over here, so the claim went, the native population is clumsy and dull and uptight, while there they are chic and suave and have élan.

There were a few things from France I liked a lot – the books of Alexandre Dumas. And Asterix (of course).  A little later on, Françoise Hardy. And I liked Paris in American books and movies. But that wasn’t enough to moderate my fear of a country that apparently believed philosophy is fun, and yet whose kids – as encountered during holidays – seemed as ignorant and gawky and clueless as any other countries.

[Early 1990s, a road on the outskirts of Leeds. The car owned by my flatmate Jon has been stopped by the police. The officer wanted to know where we were coming from. The multiplex cinema, we explained. What had we been to see? With reckless honesty, somebody announced, ‘Cyrano de Bergerac.’ The policeman, who may or may not have had a deadpan sense of irony, said, ‘Cyrano de Bergerac? Was he some kind of poof?’]

Later on, when I was doing my MA, I hated the cultural cringe exhibited by British film critics of the 1960s, who sneered at films like A Taste Of Honey  as inferior copies of the nouvelle vague, while their academic counterparts were adopting a cravenly unquestioning approach to the deluge of theory that poured out of France from 1960s onwards, swathes of which seemed to me utter toss. By that time, I had seen some films that confirmed my worst suspicions about Gallic film-making. Eric Rohmer’s The Green Ray and André Techiné’s J’embrasse Pas, for instance, are not only terrible, but terrible in a way only the French can manage.

On the other hand, by then I had also discovered there are also endless terrific French movies*, just as there was a lot of other great 1960s and ’70s music beyond Hardy. Some of which is on the soundtrack to the American teen movie Youth In Revolt, including Jacques Dutronc’s awesome stomper Les Cactus. The hero of Youth In Revolt, Nick Twisp (Michael Cera) isn’t that keen on French things either until he meets Sheeni Saunders (Portia Doubleday), who has pictures of Jean-Paul Belmondo all over her room. In his attempt to find a way to be in the same zipcode as Sheeni, Nick surrenders his decision-making to his alter ego François Dillinger, who has a pencil moustache, a white belt that is barely wider and the recklessness of Belmondo in A Bout De Souffle and Pierrot Le Fou. Playing both Twisp and Dillinger is a chance for Michael Cera to show off his comedy skills, but like a much of this film, it never quite hits the target. Certainly Cera never gets near the greatness of his George-Michael Bluth in Arrested Development, and while the film has occasional smart moments, it’s nowhere near smart enough.

In Submarine, set in (unexpectedly cinematic) Swansea, it is Belmondo’s great rival and sometime co-star Alain Delon who stares down from the walls in a poster for his finest hour, Le Samourai. The film borrows the trademark typography and urgent blues, reds and yellows of Jean-Luc Godard’s early colour films, with a generous helping of both the mood and certain shots from François Truffaut’s first flicks, although those retro leanings also bring to mind the movies of Wes Anderson.

Once again, a precocious boy is stirred into action by a girl with trouble-making instincts. Yasmin Paige, who plays the pyromanical Jordana, is one of the two terrific things about this film, along with the cinematography, which makes South Wales look beautiful and mysterious.

The adults are well-cast, too, with Sally Hawkins and Noah Taylor as Oliver’s unhappy parents and Paddy Considine as the new age charlatan threatening to pull the family apart (not exactly his finest hour, for reasons I can’t quite pin down).

But, although it is an admirable and technically impressive debut from Richard Ayoade**, it never really got under my skin. I didn’t care at all about the central character, Oliver. Maybe the problem is that Ayoade has learned too well from his heroes – Submarine has a little too much of the sullenness that lurks in Truffaut’s films. For teen Francophilia in the movies, I think you’re better off with Carey Mulligan in An Education or Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom. Better yet, for once skip the movies entirely and read Julian Barnes’ excellent Metroland. 

These days, I’ve mostly made my peace with the French. I even have fond memories of my last couple of visits to Paris, even though it’s still not really my kind of town, and I’m pretty sure the food*** and the language will always be beyond me. I don’t think that worries the Parisians greatly, somehow.

*Written about extensively elsewhere in this blog.

**Aka, ‘You know, the bloke from The IT Crowd, big hair, not the Irish one.’

***Although I assume you can get decent falafel there these days.

[NB: this is a rewritten and much-expanded version of a review that appeared during the London Film Festival]

End Of Watch

Director David Ayer

Stars Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Peña, Anna Kendrick, Natalie Martinez

USA 2012

1hr 49 mins

Language English

Colour

Perceptive study of male friendship hidden inside a cop-movie wrapper

Of all the genres of film, it’s hard to think of one that has been eclipsed by the current golden age of television as much as the cop movie. There’s something about police work, its procedures, its different-but-similar incidents, the chat between two people stuck together in a car when nothing is happening, that seems to fit 13 or 24 hours better than two. That’s true whether you are following one big case or many smaller ones, going for downbeat realism or high gothic, and the setting is Malmo, the Paris suburbs or Baltimore.

End Of Watch goes chasing down the same kind of low-rent LA streets and alleys between one-story clapboard houses and chain-link yards* as (the impossibly great) The Shield** and, more recently, (the excellent) Southland, which is currently showing on More 4. It’s close in feel to the latter, especially to those bits involving the bloke from The OC. We’re riding with uniforms rather than detectives, and so meant to be dealing with the daily grind, not extended cases. Until…

But that TV comparison is not meant to belittle End Of Watch, just to say that bar has been set extremely high. This is a terrific buddy movie about two good, if slightly cocky, cops making a sincere attempt to do a tough job well. What Jake Gyllenhaal (unexpectedly big and bald) and Michael Peña manage here ranks up there with the finest attempts to capture the essence of male friendship on film, from the steady barrage of (quality, perfectly timed) taking the piss to the brief moments of total honesty. These are characters who, to paraphrase Vincent Gallo, have spanned some time together. 

This is a very funny movie, with a bunch of good jokes at the expense of white people. There’s a great soundtrack. It’s also somewhat anxiety-inducing, and occasionally horrifying. Some of the plot developments are a bit obvious, the bad guys absurdly over the top and too clichéd and the device of having the characters filming themselves a bit tired. But I liked it a lot, and loved the ending.

*LA’s refusal to build large-scale public housing projects has been an inadvertent gift to directors.

**Chris Petit on why The Shield is better than The Wire – it’s a tough call: season four of The Wire is an astonishing exposé of how big cities and schools in low income areas really work that will also make you weep buckets, but Vendrell’s storyline in the closing weeks of The Shield could be the best argument for long-running TV, seven seasons to get you to a point where behaviour that most of us regard as sickening and incomprehensible suddenly seems logical…

Watching reasonably disturbing movies in the South London suburbs

 1. Early in the year, I wrote about seeing Shame in an ordinary suburban cinema. It turned out to be a much stranger, more interesting experience than if we had watched the same film in central London, in a room full of people who knew exactly what they were getting and had already discounted some of the shock in their mind.

It might seem kind of unusual catching a film that is yes, critically acclaimed but potentially upsetting in both its subject matter and its approach, out in a chain cinema in a dozy, distant South London suburb that clings stubbornly to the belief it is in Kent, despite being administratively swallowed up by the capital almost half a century ago (and in practical terms long before than). It’s a correspondingly odd place, equal parts tea-in-a-china cup gentility and ‘are you looking at my pint?’ hostility. Going to the cinema in Beckenham requires a degree of tolerance for chat during the film, both between people in the cinema and on their phones, extravagant food munching, hair-pulling, the occasional scuffle – not to mention being impervious to extreme heat and cold, an unfortunate by-product of the building’s Grade II listing. Yet for all that, it’s a cinema where I’ve enjoyed seeing films from The Incredibles to Mean Girl to The Aviator.

And watching Shame in Beckenham had me flashing back to 25 years earlier, when – even younger than the kids so disturbed by that film – I saw Blue Velvet several miles to the south-west, in Purley. Purley is arguably a suburb squared, being a satellite of legendary 1960s town-planning catastrophe Croydon, which – depending on how you see it – is either part of the endless London sprawl or a thrusting neighbouring metropolis in its own right, Jersey City to London’s NYC*. Purley was then and is now a place of well-tended lawns and garages housing sizeable motors. Its main claim to fame in those days was that it was the home of the key members of Status Quo. Anyway, it was in Purley that I first watched David Lynch’s head-screwing masterpiece with its severed ears, queasy voyeurism, ghostly Roy Orbison songs and all the rest of it lurking just beyond the white picket fence. I wanted very much to believe in those days that similarly noirish possibilities lurked in Purley, but I couldn’t. I think now that more a failure of my imagination than any true comment on the place.

2. Film-going in London happens in three broad and slightly ill-defined zones. The first is the centre of town. Despite the continuing disappearance of cinemas**, central London retains a great number and wide variety. They range from in quality from the Cineworld in the Trocadero, a many-floored hellhole that has lingering traces of most unpleasant odours ever encountered, to the friendly elegance of the Curzon Mayfair, where it is possible to imagine it is 1939 and you’ve popped in to see Le Regle De Jeu. There are monster screens for blockbusters like The Empire, and official dispensers of cinematic nutrition in the British Film Institute at the Southbank*** and the Institute Of Contemporary Arts.

The ICA: Conveniently sited so the Queen can pop along to see the latest Bela Tarr

Forming a ring beyond the centre are the art houses, most of which have moved away from the homemade carrot cake of the old days to Konditor & Cook-level high-end snacks. To the west, you have the Riverside in Hammersmith and the Electric (at least before its accident), the Coronet and the Gate in Notting Hill; to the north, the Tricycle in Kilburn, the Everyman in Hampstead and the Screen on the Green in Islington; to the East, Richmix in Shoreditch and the Rio in Dalston; to the south, the Ritzy in Britxon and the Clapham Picture House.

And beyond them, the chain multiplexes of the suburbs. Not that boundaries are clear – heading west, you reach the Odeon Whiteleys, resolutely suburban (despite its recently acquired and slightly bizarre aspirations to be a place of fine dining), before you get to the Gate, and a rather more depressing mall multiplex, the Vue Islington, lies a few hundred yards to the south of the rightly much-loved The Screen on the Green.

3. There’s no doubt that, say, the Ritzy and Streatham Odeon offer manifestly different experiences, something than only increases with the passing of time. Although it would be excitingly contrary to claim otherwise, the food is better at the art houses. And at the Ritzy, for instance, you might expect a staff of more than two people on duty at any one time. You would also expect them to be able to give a pretty fair assessment about the movies showing – they actively want to work in a cinema (OK, they would prefer to making the films, but you’ve got start somewhere…) The running times are scrawled on a blackboard, which is meant to feel friendly and homemade and make you forget that the Ritzy is owned by what’s now a chain of 20 sites. 

But when it comes to what’s on screen, the gulf isn’t always as wide as you might expect. I’m not sure the Ritzy would show many of the flicks starring local action hero Jason Statham, but next week it will be showing Skyfall and Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted as well as Palestinian documentary 5 Broken Cameras and bleak European thriller Barbara.

Meanwhile, there are surprises lurking in sleepy Vues and Cineworlds. And this has been the case as long as I can remember. As well as Blue Velvet in Purley, I am pretty sure I saw the hilarious, anarchic, brain-scrambling Repo Man at what is now the Beckenham Odeon (either a Cannon or an ABC at that stage). I definitely saw Spike Lee’s debut She’s Got To Have It at the dusty old cinema on Queensway, in the building that later became a T.G.I. Friday’s and was empty last time I checked.

In recent times, I saw bonkers but engaging faux-exploitation movie Black Snake Moan (the one in which Samuel L Jackson chains Christina Ricci to a radiator in attempt to induce cold turkey for her nymphomania) late night at the Streatham Odeon, a big old place on what some reckon is London’s grottiest shopping street^‡.

And I watched the sly, appealingly daft Norwegian horror satire Troll Hunter at the Cineworld in Wandsworth’s Southside (né Arndale) shopping centre, an unlovely place that has layers accruing the worst in architecture and consumerism of the 1970s, ’80s, ’90s, ’00s… While I saw No Country For Old Men at the Ritzy, I caught the Coens’ True Grit in Streatham.

And fittingly, we saw Drive on the Purley Way, a stab at American-style edge city that is home to not just the usual range of major out-of-town outlets, but also Europe’s largest pan-Asian restaurant. Sharing its car park is a multiplex with a post-apocalyptic atmosphere. The ticket booths once filled with living beings are long empty – the few survivors of the disaster have been left incapable of responding to simple requests. My friend Steve and I saw Zombieland here late one night (having seen Up earlier in the evening), and would have been unsurprised if we had been savaged by the undead on the way out. And rolling out of the car park and accelerating onto wide, ghostly streets was much more appropriate way to keep the mood of Drive in your minds than it would have been catching a tube. For a couple of hundred yards, at least, you can squint and believe you’re in the Valley…

The Vue Purley Way: Useful if you want to pick up a bed to take home

*This is actually the comparison Croydon’s elected politicians promote.

**The Lumiere in St Martins Lane and the Metro/Other Cinema in Rupert Street were particular favourites of mine. On the other hand, at least I’ll never have to go the cinema in the Swiss Centre again.

***Still the NFT as far as I’m concerned.

^‡Homeland’s David Harewood makes the case for Streatham.

LFF#9: The Dead Man And Being Happy

Most years at the LFF I end up seeing something that is broadly like the work of Jim Jarmusch and Aki Kaurismaki, including some of favourite festival entries like Lake Tahoe and J’ai Toujours Rêvé d’Etre Un Gangster*. This, I think, fits squarely in that tradition. Every scene of the film is narrated by a measured female voice, sometimes describing exactly what we are seeing, sometimes providing a bit of background information or an ironic spin. At the end of some sections, she is joined by a male voice. It’s a conceit that I think only hardened viewers of art house films would tolerate.

 Anyway, the person whose actions she is filling us in on is Santos, an ageing Spaniard living, or rather dying, in Buenos Aires. He’s a hitman who has lost his taste for the job. Taking a small icebox of morphine with him, he hits the road* in his beloved ’70s station wagon. Heading deep into the country, he comes across strange places and lost people. The most significant of these is Erika, his travelling companion for the final days of his life. 

It’s a short but sedately paced film of small incidents. There are good moments - the faux-Alpine spa town for the last geriatric Nazis left in Argentina, the bribing of a traffic cop with a figurine of the Virgin Mary and a comedy tape. But we also see Santos struggling to find a part of his body to inject himself, which is (rightly) tough going.

It’s not a film I would recommend freely, but if meandering and curious are good things as far as you are concerned, there is something here.

*A lovely film that I don’t think ever got a UK release