2009 in Review Pt. 5

The Cream of the Crop: The 20 best films of 2009 (Part 2)

We’re almost there. I know that you’ve read through a LOT of words on the films of 2009 to get here, but this is IT, the list of the 10 films that, if you saw nothing else from 2009, you should have made absolutely certain to catch. Once again, these picks are based on UK screening dates; these 10 films either received UK releases or were seen at a UK festival during 2009.

For my money this year’s Top 10 represents a great selection of cinema, it encompasses films from France, Japan, Greece, Germany and Denmark as well as the US and generically they vary from absurdist comedy to surreal drama to shocking horror. Something, then, for everyone, and a signal that, even in the age of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, cinema is in rude, even inspiring, health.

As with the Bottom 10, the quotes are drawn from my original review of each title

The Top 10

10: Le Premier Jour Du Reste De Ta Vie
[The First Day of the Rest of Your Life]
Dir: Rémi Bezançon

“this film feels like a peek into the lives of these vibrant and engaging people.”

Despite the fact that it ends up covering 15 years in the life of a family, taking in a lot of life’s major turning points (from the day a child moves away from home, to marriage, to death) along the way, The First Day of the Rest of Your Life could be accused of being a rather slight film. That’s largely thanks it’s surprising lightness. Director Rémi Bezançon could, with largely the same script, have made a much darker, more depressing film, but instead, even in the darkest of times he fills the film with humour. It’s this that really brought it to life and made it feel real for me because that, at least in my experience, is what family life tends to be; black comedy.

Rather than attempt to tell the whole story of 15 years the film zooms in on five key days (with a few contextualising flashbacks thrown in), each of which focus on a different member of the family. This is a nice idea, because it gives each of the excellent cast their own moment to shine. I laughed a lot, more than in most comedies I saw this year, during The First Day of the Rest of Your Life, but it also works as a drama, the acting (especially by Jacques Gamblin, Zabou Breitman and Deborah Francois) is terrific, and really allows you to connect with these five people. By the devastating last couple of scenes I was crying a little bit.


9: 空気人形
[Air Doll]
Dir: Hirokazu Koreeda

“if 45 minutes into Air Doll you aren’t head over heels in love with Bae-Doo-na then, honestly, you and I have nothing to say to one another.”

In recent years there have been a couple of films that have used the idea of a man obsessed with his ultra realistic sex doll. Lars and the Real Girl played it for pathos, Love Object for horror. Air Doll is a little different, because it’s first film to give the doll life. Bae Doo-na plays Nozomi, a sex doll who, as the film has it, ‘finds a soul’. When her owner leaves for the day she comes to life. She gets a job at a local video shop, where a young clerk falls for her, and who could blame him?

Excellent though the whole is, Bae Doo-na’s enchanting performance as Nozomi is pretty much the whole reason that Air Doll makes this list. Her wide-eyed innocence is totally convincing, she makes you believe the character in small ways; the slightly awkward movements, her mobility restricted both by her moulding and the fact that it’s all very new to her, her delivery is also excellent, as Nozomi haltingly learns to speak. More than ever, in both her look and her wonderful light comic touch, Bae channels the spirit of Audrey Hepburn.

Air Doll could quite easily have been little more than a confection but thanks to Koreeda’s intelligent screenplay and Bae’s performance it becomes a fascinating study of a character learning how to live. It’s often very funny (never more so than when Nozomi mistakes the seams in a woman’s tights for the seams in her own legs), sweet and romantic (the relationship between Nozomi and the store clerk is genuinely moving) and sometimes rather sad. It does, however, always remain the Bae Doo-na show.


8: Das Weiße Band
[The White Ribbon]
Dir: Michael Haneke

“an atmosphere of impending doom and of utter dread that begins as an almost imperceptible background note, but grows with every passing frame to a crescendo.”

Michael Haneke’s Palme D’Or winner is a barnstorming return to form from the utterly pointless excursion of Funny Games US. The White Ribbon struck me as a film of contradictions. It’s utterly about violence, but there is almost none on screen. It begins by saying that it is going to explain the events you are about to see, but not only does it not explain, it obfuscates. The setting; a rural village in Germany in 1913, is important, because the implication is that the people responsible for the violent incidents that begin to plague the village are its children, children who are the exact right age to be among the leaders when the Nazi’s come to prominence. In the absence of its depiction The White Ribbon becomes a film about the threat of violence, and in the casual cruelty meted out we can see the seeds of incipient fascism.

At a time when more and more films are going for a handheld, in the moment, style The White Ribbon is perhaps visually unfashionable, with its beautifully composed, somewhat artificial, framing. There is a formality to the whole film that feels a little bit old fashioned and gives it an air of the work of directors who have inspired Haneke; notably Dreyer and Bergman. The visuals, as well as being astonishingly beautiful, suck us into the period and the mindset of this village.

There are several startling scenes in The White Ribbon, but few more so than when the village doctor tells his lover (Haneke regular Susanne Lothar, excellent as always) in the plainest and cruellest terms possible, that he no longer wishes to see her. This is perhaps Haneke’s great triumph with this film, he keeps the physical violence off screen, giving both it and the perhaps more devastating psychic violence of the film stronger impact. Impact is the word, despite moving at a glacial pace, despite maintaining an austere distance from both the events of the story and us the audience and despite the fact that it never really does what it tells us it is going to do, The White Ribbon is a film that will live with you, a troubling, disturbing piece of work that you can’t just shrug off.


7: Das Herz ist ein Dunkler Wald
[The Heart is a Dark Forest]
Dir: Nicolette Krebitz

“incredibly brave, emotionally shattering and monumentally shocking.”

Nina Hoss is one of the best actresses I’ve seen in the last few years, sadly what I’d seen her in had largely been unworthy of her talents, until this. Written and directed by a former model (she’s on the cover of New Order’s Get Ready album) The Heart is a Dark Forest finally sees Hoss appearing in a film (at least in one that an English audience has a chance to see) that matches the depth and intelligence of her performance.

The film starts off as a slice of life drama, with Hoss discovering that her husband (Devid Streisow) has another family across town, but from there it becomes stranger with each passing scene, culminating in a third act set at a masked ball much like that in Eyes Wide Shut. Krebitz shows real strength of vision here; the film is beautifully, artfully, designed and quite beguilingly strange. Krebitz’ images, along with an excellent score by Fetisch and The Whitest Boy Alive, which combines classical instrumentation with dance beats create a strange, doom laden atmosphere in which you never quite know where the film is going.

However, the real gut punch is the ending. Krebitz sent her script out with a fake ending, because she feared that, while it’s not explicit, the film’s actual ending would be so shocking that she wouldn’t get financed if it were in the script. I can’t imagine what she wrote to send out to financiers, because no other ending would make sense for this film, and no other ending would have the shattering impact of the one we see, or rather don’t see. This is a film that announces a major new talent, a brave and interesting filmmaker with a real voice. Seek it out.


6: Dear Lemon Lima
Dir: Suzi Yoonessi

“a wonderful find, a sweet and very smart film that will make you laugh and very possibly cry.”

Dear Lemon Lima won’t win any prizes for originality, it’s easy to see echoes of films like Revenge of the Nerds, Napoleon Dynamite and Juno among others, it is, however more than just another in a long line of quirky high school movies.

That’s thanks in large part to debuting writer/director Suzi Yoonessi, who based the film on her own teenage years, and expanded this feature from a short film. The fact that this is clearly a personal project for Yoonessi really comes through in her screenplay, which is very smart and funny, but manages to be so in a way that sounds organic. While Juno featured teens who talked like adults, adults who talked like teens and, in essence, a cast that talked like Diablo Cody, Dear Lemon Lima’s teenagers sound like teenagers, and more than that they all have their own voices. This is never more true than when we hear Vanessa (the wonderful Savannah Wiltfong) narrating the story through her diary entries, which seem so credible that I could believe either that Wiltfong was asked to write them herself or that Yoonessi simply incorporated, unedited, her own diary entries. The look of the film isn’t its biggest draw, but Yoonessi draws a nice contrast between the pastel colours of Vanessa’s imagination and the rather drab reality of her life in Alaska.

While the fact that the screenplay is consistently true and funny is certainly a major boost to what is a rather formulaic story (Girl breaks up with her first love, is a bit of a misfit, but finds another group to belong to through her school’s Snowstorm Survivor competition) what really makes Dear Lemon Lima work is its talented young cast. Yoonessi has put together an excellent group here, led by smart performances by Wiltfong, who carries the film with an assured, funny and completely believable performance and Shayne Topp, who is hilariously slimy and egomaniacal as Philip.

This is an assured debut for Suzi Yoonessi, one that mixes comedy and drama beautifully and marks her out as both a fine writer and a strong actors director. I was utterly charmed by it, and I hope some distributor picks it up for UK release so that you can be too.


5: Antichrist
Dir: Lars Von Trier

“Antichrist is an extraordinary film; I have no idea if I liked it.”

The most controversial film of the year (largely because the mainstream media utterly failed to notice a film I’ll get to soon) was also one of its best, and certainly one of its most interesting. People denounced it without seeing it, people questioned whether its passing through the BBFC uncut rendered censorship pointless, the BBC even devoted their debate programme The Moral Maze to it, all, largely, because of one (admittedly wince inducing) shot. The thing is that Antichrist is so much more than that one shot.

The violence of Antichirst actually comes rather late in the day, after about eighty minutes of scenes showing us the absolute emotional devastation of a woman (Charlotte Gainsbourg, who won the Best Actress prize at Cannes) who has recently lost her child in a tragic accident. These scenes are perhaps more difficult than the violent ones, because Gainsbourg is so brilliant that you go with her to the depths of her despair. It’s the most vivid, most accurate and most disturbing depiction of depression that I’ve ever seen. Lars Von Trier has made a film that is literally painful to watch; a searing horror film that gets to levels of disturbance that few others approach.

To say that I liked Antichrist probably isn’t true, but I was incredibly impressed by it. It is, without question, the most visually ravishing film of the year, perhaps of the decade. Anthony Dod Mantle’s crisp, gorgeous, photography brings us right into the film, making its most hideous moments even more impactful (and even more disturbing, because even as you are repulsed by what’s happening you are awed by the beauty of the cinematography). The opening five minute sequence, shot entirely in slow motion, high contrast, black and white is so beautiful it could make a grown man weep (even though it does include a hardcore insert shot that makes me want to slap Lars Von Trier, and tell him to grow up).

Many of Antichrist’s detractors tried to dismiss it as mere torture porn. They were wrong, the film is thick with meaning, so dense and layered that many viewings and hours of debate can easily be devoted to figuring out what Von Trier is saying. This is provocative cinema at its best, as with IRREVERSIBLE, the extremes to which it goes make Antichrist hard to recommend, but equally they make it impossible to ignore.


4: Up
Dir: Pete Docter

“What I really want from a movie is to be affected, and in that respect Up delivers over and over.”

Up’s opening 15 or so minutes, the lead in to and then the montage showing us the fifty year marriage of Carl and Ellie Muntz is pure cinematic perfection. That entire montage, roughly ten minutes, is played without dialogue and yet through it we understand and share every bit of Carl and Ellie’s life together. It goes from being sweet and amusing to devastatingly sad with such assured brilliance, and is perhaps the single most moving sequence I’ve ever seen at a cinema.

The rest of Pixar’s latest doesn’t quite come up to that level of magnificence, but it is a rollickingly good entertainment nevertheless. The elderly Carl (Ed Asner) is a beautifully written character, his curmudgeonly façade being slowly and credibly peeled back in his quest to take his and Ellie’s house to Paradise Falls, where they had always meant to live and by his relationship with Wilderness Explorer Russell (a priceless performance from 9 year old Jordan Nagai). These unlikeliest of movie buddies make for a fantastic comic pairing, largely because Pete Docter and co-writer Bob Richardson never forget who their characters are, they don’t make Carl anything other than an old man, and Russell is always an excitable nine year old.

Up is filled with wonderful things from the characters, to the performances (Richardson’s hilarious turn as a talking dog named Dug is a highlight) to the breathtaking visuals (which will look even better in 2D, because then the colours will be as bright as they are supposed to be; the sky white rather than grey. However, it’s the emotion of the film that really makes it as powerful and as brilliant as it is.

That opening backstory lays so strong a foundation that it resonates throughout the film, Ellie, although she is dead, is in some ways the most important character. It is her spirit that makes the film’s emotion resonant, rather than cheap. I don’t often cry at movies (three times in the past decade), but I wept like a little girl during Up, I cried three times and still, having not seen it for months, I’m a little emotional as I write this. That’s a special movie.


3: Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs
Dir: Phil Lord / Chris Miller

“slightly twisted humour permeates every frame, with side jokes all over the place and a beautifully developed sense of the absurd.”

Titles matter. Last year I saw one of my top 10 films; Russian high school movie Everybody Dies But Me purely because of the brilliance of its title, and this year I very nearly missed Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs because it was called Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, however, on hearing Mark Kermode call it ‘David Lynch for kids’ I decided I should check it out. What I found was the funniest, most anarchic and most flat out enjoyable comedy I’ve seen in a long time.

I loved this movie ten seconds in, when the credit “A Film by A Lot of People” came up (my Brother tells me he loved it even before this, when a CG banana crushed the Columbia logo). I knew I was in the hands of people with both a love of movies and a proper sense of satire, and from that moment on until the credits rolled I don’t believe a minute went by without me laughing out loud. The influences are many, and easy to see, as well as Lynch and Terry Gilliam there are shades of both Looney Tunes and Monty Python here. The amazing thing is that Cloudy doesn’t disgrace any of these illustrious names.

The very silly story of Flint Lockwood (Bill Hader), who invents a machine that causes it to rain food on his tiny island town is already very pyhtonesque, but directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller simply pack the film with silliness, making it so gleefully packed to the gills with absurdity that you really will have to see the film twice to see all the jokes. Even the running gags just keep on scoring. Flint’s talking monkey Steve (voiced by Neil Patrick Harris), for example, is the comedy gift that just keeps on giving, despite his limited vocabulary. What’s great, though, is that the film doesn’t just lean on its wackiness. It knows when to pull back a little, and the story actually has some strong emotional content. The romance between Flint and weather girl Sam Sparks (a perfectly cast Anna Faris) is actually nicely developed, and played with some sensitivity, as is the fractious relationship between Flint and his father (James Caan).

The film looks great, with the closing set piece, in which Flint and Sam have to try and shut his machine down, being a particular highlight, not least for the wonderfully bonkers sequence in which they are attacked by anthropomorphic roasted chickens. Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs is an indulgent treat, and a film that signals that somewhere in Hollywood there are still original, crazy, talented people making films.


2: Kynodontas
[Dogtooth]
Dir: Yorgos Lanthimos

“a strange and haunting piece of work, one that you’ll be going over in your head long after its abrupt finish.”

I’ve seen about 7000 films. Think about that for a second, and then wonder how often I see something that strikes me as truly new and different. Dogtooth is one of that increasingly rare breed of films.

The story of a family of five, the parents (Chris Stergioglou and Michelle Valley) have raised their three children (Hristos Passalis, Aggeliki Papoulia and Mary Tsoni), all now in their late teens or twenties, in a completely insular world, they have never left the family garden. Only the Father goes out, to work. The only outsider is Christina (Anna Kalaitzidou), who the Father has hired to tech his son about sex, practically. There isn’t much of an overarching plot here, but the film is compelling in its utter strangeness, even more so because it never explains itself, it never tells us why the Father and Mother raise their children this way.

Dogtooth is a disturbing film, primarily in the way the children relate to one another. Their games are bizarre, and everything is a competition. The elder daughter (Papoulia) appears to be the family doctor, and at one point she and her sister (Tsoni, whose band Mary and the Boy provide some of the film’s music) huff an anaesthetic, saying that the first to wake up will be the winner. There’s a chilly distance to the whole film, placing you at one remove from the characters, thanks largely to the formality of Lanthimos’ compositions. Usualy this distance and artificiality would be frustrating, here it just adds to disturbing sense of being completely in the dark as to what is going on here, and what can possibly happen next.

Some people will hate this film. It is a bizarre, graphic, disturbing thing that refuses to explain anything and ends without any real resolution. I thought it was perfect in this regard, no explanation could possibly be enough and the fact that no effort is made to put a bow on the ending just means that the film continues to play, troublingly, on your mind. This is intense, intelligent cinema and well worth seeing when it opens in the UK this spring.


1: Martyrs
Dir: Pascal Laugier

“it’s out to disturb, to disquiet, and it achieves that aim from first frame to last.”

Here’s how Martyrs affected me. After I first saw the film there was a Q and A with director Pascal Laugier and leads Morjana Alaoui and Mylene Jampanoi, which lasted about half an hour. When I stood up after that session I was still weak at the knees. I told Mylene Jampanoi that I wasn’t sure I had exactly liked Martyrs, but that I had thought it was brilliant, and knew that I needed to see it again.

Martyrs is, by far, the best new film I saw in 2009. It leaves everything else in the dust. It may not be the best shot (that’s Antichrist), it may not have the best single sequence of the year (that’s at the start of Up) but its cumulative effect is staggering. This is a horror film of truly special intensity, and it amazes me that in the year the mainstream media went bonkers about Antichrist nobody noticed Pascal Laugier’s far more violent, far more punishing film. This is, at the end of the day, an assaultive film; it grabs you by the throat just minutes in and then shakes you, refusing to let go, for the next 90 minutes. Laugier says it is a film not about torture but about pain, and he’s absolutely right. Pain is the defining element of this film, it is about the psychic and physical pain of torture, it is about the pain of loss, it is about the pain inflicted in vengeance. It is, at times, also painful to watch, and that is exactly as it should be.

Taking us through the film are two searing, brilliant, performances from Alaoui and Jampanoi, whose utter conviction sells what could easily have been a risible story (especially in the film’s mind-blowingly brutal second half). Alaoui is perhaps especially good, making her relationship with Jampanoi’s character something that we can invest in in short order, and then using that investment to devastating effect in the last passage of the film.

Laugier stages the film’s extensive violence brilliantly, every moment feels completely, hideously, real and even when, at the end, things become a touch more outlandish, we are able to go along because of both the quality of the effects and the believability of the film’s violent content to that point. The effects, from the simple task of getting the blood to look real, to gunshots, to a smashed head to, well, an image you won’t soon forget, are exceptional.

What really makes Martyrs special though is that its impact isn’t gratuitous. There may be a 20 minute sequence in this film consisting largely of a series of beatings meted out to Morjana Alaoui’s character, but that sequence isn’t there for you to enjoy at any level (and if you do, seek help), it’s there to serve the story, to help make an actual point. It’s so rare to see an extreme horror film that is really about anything more than violence, and this one certainly is. Debate will rage after you see it about the nature of the film and especially the nature and meaning of its ending, but the sheer impact of Martyrs can’t be denied, whatever else you think of it. I've now seen it four times, and each time I come away more impressed. I believe it to be a masterpiece, and the greatest horror film of the last ten years.

Movie Resolutions 2010

Each year I set myself a few goals, a couple of movie based projects to keep ticking over throughout the year as a way to expand my experience and knowledge of cinema, here are my resolutions for 2010

1: I will write at least a mini-review for every film I see. I will also keep up with the special features for the blog.

2: I will expand my (rather meagre) knowledge and experience of films made before 1970, plugging some of the bigger gaps in my viewing of the 'classics'.

3: I will expand on my knowldge, experience and understanding of the horror genre in general.

4: I will attempt to see at least 200 2010 release films.

5: I will attempt to see at least 500 films I have never seen before.

2009 in Review Pt. 4

The Cream of the Crop: The 20 best films of 2009

Every year, at this time of year, I let out a big sigh, because there’s always some article or some comment asking ‘is this the worst year ever for movies?’ The answer is no. It’s no better or worse than any other year really. There’s a truckload of crap, which tends to be what Hollywood drives up to our multiplexes and disgorges into screens each week. There’s a ton of utterly average, underwhelming movies and, somewhere in amongst this mass, there are the gems. At times being an avid moviegoer is like panning for gold, you sort through pan after pan after pan of nothing, but still, when you find that small piece of gold your five hundredth piece is as exciting as your first.

I saw plenty of good films this year, but we’re not concerned with them just now. This is about the great films, and 2009 saw a good amount of those, if you don’t think that’s the case then, frankly, you are watching the wrong films.

Over the next two posts I’ll be unveiling my Top 20 films of 2009 (either released or festival screened in the UK during 2009), starting with 10 runners up.

Runners Up [In alphabetical order]

Anvil! The Story of Anvil

Apparently, This is Spinal Tap was true, albeit the band wasn’t Spinal Tap, it was Anvil. This film managed to be both sad and uplifting, both bitter and funny thanks to the engaging and personable Steve ‘Lips’ Kudlow and Robb Reiner, the guitarist/singer and drummer who founded Anvil when they were 14 years old and who we find, long after their brush with fame in the 80’s, still desperately trying to be rock stars as they enter their 50’s. Lips is a brilliant character, his musings on life endlessly quotable (on a terrible European tour he observes “At least there was a tour for things to go wrong on”) and you really root for him and for Robb (whose art has to be seen to be believed). It’s heartwarming and very funny and easily the best documentary I’ve seen this year.

An Education

Lone Scherfig’s comic drama seems sure to net an Oscar nomination for young British star Carey Mulligan, and rightly so, she’s outstanding as a fiercely intelligent young girl whose potentially glittering future is threatened when she falls in love with the much older Peter Sarsgaard. However, Mulligan is hardly the only great thing in An Education. The supporting cast is excellent (notably a wonderful comic performance by Rosamund Pike, and Alfred Molina’s turn as Mulligan’s perhaps over caring Dad). Nick Hornby’s screenplay sparkles with wit and Scherfig keeps a firm grip on look, performances and tone.

Fish Tank

Andrea Arnold is simply one of the most exciting filmmakers in the UK, and her second feature Fish Tank is another true, vital, utterly compelling piece of drama. Arnolds imagery is at once down to earth and beautifully designed, with evocative shot selection that manages to convey meaning without battering you over the head with a metaphor. Katie Jarvis’ remarkable debut was the big story of this film, but Michael Fassbender and Kierston Wareing also did brilliant naturalistic work in this riveting film.

(500) Days of Summer

As I said in my initial review of this film, the key to the success of (500) Days of Summer is that everyone has their Summer; that person we’ve loved who hasn’t loved us back in quite the same way. This is a film that captures with clarity all sides of a relationship; the elation and thrill of the new and the slow slide, the way that those things you previously found enchanting can begin to irritate you. The performances by Joseph Gordon Levitt (surely the finest American actor of his generation) and Zooey Deschanel are sympathetic, full of conviction and absolutely nail the bittersweet comic tone of the film.

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince

Far and away the best blockbuster of the year, and the only Harry Potter film since to get near the high watermark set by Prisoner of Azkhaban. Despite a two and a half hour running time David Yates’ second crack at the Potter whip is a pacy, entirely involving thing. The cast have really grown into their roles, with Daniel Radcliffe finally becoming a capable anchor, Bonnie Wright unexpectedly soulful as Ginny and Emma Watson finding real emotional depth in Hermione’s love for Ron. The film mixes the set pieces (notably an outstanding sequence in which Harry and Dumbledore set out to find a horcrux in a cave) with a genuinely amusing romantic subplot, giving each plenty of breathing room. A great film that provides strong setup for the two part closer.

Katalin Varga

Peter Strickland’s remarkable debut is an atypical, but riveting, revenge movie. It doesn’t deal in the visceral payoffs of films like I Spit On Your Grave or Oldboy, preferring an almost glacial pace and a constantly simmering tension that lurks behind almost every frame. Making her film debut Romanian actress Hilda Peter gives one of the best performances of the year, making Katalin a fascinating character in her ability to become almost a different person depending what the situation demands. And delivering a staggering monologue at the end of the film’s second act, which is one of the most mesmerising pieces of cinema in 2009. This is a slow burn of a movie, but it’s well worth your time.

Maria Larsson's Everlasting Moments

Everlasting Moments is a hymn to the power of film, in this case still photos. It follows a dutiful, mistreated wife (the luminous Maria Heiskanen) who escapes the harsh realities of her turn of the century life in Sweden through early photography, for which she discovers a natural talent. Jan Troell’s film is hugely engaging and moving throughout, but it is its perfect final shot, which had tears pricking at my eyes, that makes it truly remarkable.

Rachel Getting Married

I hated the way that Jonathan Demme’s latest was shot, its self conscious shaky-cam lensing annoying me rather than drawing me in, but the expert performances from the likes of Anne Hathaway (deservedly Oscar nominated) and Rosemarie DeWitt, whose soulful work was, unaccountably, overlooked come awards time and the hard hitting yet very real screenplay by Jenny Lumet sucked me irresistibly into this family and this big event in their lives. Like an Altman film Rachel Getting Married is often like spending time as a fly on the wall, watching events that are both extraordinary and everyday.

Revolutionary Road

Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio’s first teaming since Titanic is almost the antithesis of that film; small in scale and about not the foundation of a grand romance but the slow strangulation of a real relationship. The leads are both exceptional, both giving their career best performances (the fact that Winslet’s Oscar was for The Reader, the year this was eligible, is a decision I will NEVER understand) but it’s probably DiCaprio who is most astounding, giving notice that as he enters middle age he’s becoming a powerhouse actor. This is a dark, harsh, film, filled with cutting scenes of dialogue between the two stars, a superior drama and perhaps Sam Mendes’ best film (in the same year as his indisputable worst).

Rumba

This was one of those happy little surprises, a barely 80 minute slice of graceful physical comedy from writer / director / star team Fiona Gordon and Dominique Abel. As two amateur dancers who are injured in a car crash Abel and Gordon are charming and hilariously funny, but it is the visual invention of the dance and slapstick that makes Rumba such a joy. This is a truly universal film; near silent, utterly inoffensive and hugely funny.


The Top 10 ought to be up in a couple of days

Merry Christmas

Happy Christmas everyone. 24FPS will be taking a quick break over the holidays, but I ought to be back before the end of the year with more overlooked films from the 2000's, the rest of the review of 2009 and more reviews, as well as my movie resolutions for 2010.

As a little treat here's a vid from a couple of years ago with Mark Kermode running down the Top 10 Christmas movies on BBC Radio 5Live. Enjoy, and have a great day.

Xmas Eve Double

Neither of my choices for the third film in what was supposed to be a triple bill were available to watch online, so a double bill will have to do. Click the titles for the first part of each film.

Merry Christmas.


Elf

I'm not, generally speaking, a great Will Ferrell fan, but in this he's actually very funny and gives a real performance rather than just being Will Ferrell. He's a great deal fun as Buddy; a man raised by the elves at the north pole who comes to New York to find his father (James Caan, doing surprisingly well with the comic tone of the movie). As a bonus the movie also features two of the most boundlessly charming actresses around; Mary Steenburgen (as Caan's wife) and Zooey Deschanel (as Buddy's love interest). A modern Christmas classic.


The Shop Around the Corner
While the abysmal remake (You've Got Mail) has been out since the early days of the format, Ernst Lubitsch's sweet, romantic and very funny Christmas rom-com is, unaccountably, still unavailable on UK DVD. It's well worth seeking out though, whether through youtube, a rare TV showing or a seasonal turn at a rep cinema. James Stewart (and Christmas just isn't Christmas without Jimmy Stewart) and Margaret Sullavan are just brilliant as the unaware lovebirds who court one another through anonymous letters. It's a film that leaves you with a warm, Christmassy, glow.

2009 in Review Pt. 3

The 24 FPS Awards 2009

So far this year I have seen 173 titles I have counted as 2009 films (that is films that have received a regular theatrical release, a direct to either DVD or TV release or that have been viewed at a UK festival during 2009). The bulk have been seen at the cinema (with a few viewed on DVD or online).

Over the next few months, in the run up to the Oscars, Hollywood will indulge in an orgy of awards season backslapping as they ask themselves ‘what were the finest cinematic achievements of 2009’. Here are the correct answers.

BEST PICTURE
See Top 20 post [coming soon]

BEST DIRECTOR
Pete Docter: Up
Michael Haneke: The White Ribbon
Yorgos Lanthimos: Dogtooth
Pascal Laugier: Martyrs
Lars Von Trier: Antichrist

WINNER: Pascal Laugier

This was a two-way race, between Laugier and Lars Von Trier. Antichrist is clearly the best looking film of the year, but Laugier’s work is also visually astonishing, the two films are also well matched in terms of performances, each filmmaker drawing emotionally nuanced work from their two main cast members. Martyrs wins because it has stronger storytelling and because, while Antichrist’s impact is most deeply felt in its third act, Martyrs creates an atmosphere from the get go, and sustains it at fever pitch for it entire running time. It is a film that - literally - staggered me.


BEST ACTOR
Ed Asner: Up
Alfredo Castro: Tony Manero
Michael Fassbender: Fish Tank
Burghart Klaussner: The White Ribbon
Phillip Seymour Hoffman: Doubt

WINNER: Philip Seymour Hoffman

Phillip Seymour Hoffman is, without a doubt, the DeNiro of his generation (and by that I don’t mean the shambling husk now calling himself Robert DeNiro, I mean the vital actor of the 70’s and 80’s, who utterly transformed himself every time he made a film). Doubt was short on the titular ingredient, and what intrigue there is in the film comes almost entirely from Hoffman’s quietly brilliant performance. Unlike Meryl Streep’s gigantic turn; full of bombast and bluster with a large side order of ham, Hoffman largely dials back his performance, his most revealing moments being when he’s not speaking at all. He could easily be either a good, misunderstood, man or a monster, often in the same moment.


BEST ACTRESS
Morjana Alaoui: Martyrs
Sasha Grey: The Girlfriend Experience
Nina Hoss: The Heart is a Dark Forest
Katie Jarvis: Fish Tank
Hilda Peter: Katalin Varga

WINNER: [Tie] - Morjana Alaoui / Hilda Peter
This always seems to be the hardest category for me to choose a winner in and, true to form; it could easily have been a five-way tie this year (don’t think I wasn’t tempted). What’s remarkable about the category this year is that there are four newcomers in it, Nina Hoss the only nominee with an extensive (mainstream) filmography.


Morjana Alaoui had perhaps the single most difficult job in this category, she spent most of the shoot for Martyrs being brutalised, and the difficulty, the pain, often shows in her performance as Anna. What’s really impressive is that, even in the film’s most extreme passages, character comes through. As Anna is tortured repeatedly in an excruciating 20 minute sequence we can see in Alaoui’s performance Anna’s ever growing strength and resolve, a toughness that makes her a great final girl. But there’s also tenderness; a quickly but strongly forged romantic bond with Mylene Jampanoi’s Lucie, which ends up in a pretty heart rending place in the middle of the film. It’s amazingly nuanced work in an environment that doesn’t always encourage it.


Hilda Peter’s brilliant performance as the title character in Katalin Varga is largely about withholding, about a woman who has learnt to draw her emotions inside herself and keep them there. She does this brilliantly, while allowing us just enough access to recognise that this is how Katalin has learnt to cope. You also get a real sense of intelligence, of calculation, from Peter. However, it is one extraordinary scene which means she’s tied here. The five minute monologue in which Katalin finally reveals the story behind the crime she’s spent the whole film attempting to avenge is spine tingling stuff. Peter delivers it with a cold, harsh tone, which makes every word, every inflection, hit like a sledgehammer to the chest, even when she stops speaking for a few moments, she draws you right in, making you almost afraid to blink lest you miss something.


BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
James Franco: Milk
Bill Irwin: Rachel Getting Married
Glen Kenney: The Girlfriend Experience
Anthony Mackie: The Hurt Locker
Michael Shannon: Revolutionary Road

WINNER: Michael Shannon
Revolutionary Road is a film about repressed society and the seething underbelly of an outwardly idyllic marriage. Michael Shannon’s intermittent appearances are like an atom bomb going off in the cinema. It’s a big performance, but never an overplayed one and his cruel final line is one of the year’s most indelible cinematic moments.



BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Amy Adams: Doubt
Rosemarie DeWitt: Rachel Getting Married
Susanne Lothar: The White Ribbon
Amparo Noguera: Tony Manero
Rosamund Pike: An Education

WINNER: Rosemarie De Witt

The unsung star of Rachel Getting Married was Rachel herself. Rosemarie De Witt’s performance is extraordinarily sensitive, and rich in detail. Particularly notable is the dynamic with her screen husband Tunde Adebimpe, the tactile relationship between them always feeling utterly real and unforced, but the moment that puts her here is the heartfelt simplicity with which she delivers Rachel’s wedding vows, which she wrote herself, and that of her stunned silent reaction as Adebimpe delivers his.


BEST ENSEMBLE
An Education
Dear Lemon Lima
Dogtooth
Life During Wartime
Rachel Getting Married

WINNER: Dear Lemon Lima

In Dear Lemon Lima debuting director Suzi Yoonessi managed to marshal a large cast, composed mainly of children, and draw intelligent and affecting performances form every one of them. Among the adults a delightfully kooky Beth Grant stands out, while Savaannah Wiltfong delivers a star turn in her debut, but it is Yoonessi’s firm guiding hand that allows the whole ensemble to gel beautifully while being individually outstanding.


BEST SCREENPLAY
Andrea Arnold: Fish Tank
Nick Hornby: An Education
Jenny Lumet: Rachel Getting Married
Scott Neustadter / Michael H. Weber: (500) Days of Summer
Suzi Yoonessi: Dear Lemon Lima

WINNER: Jenny Lumet
There was much improvisation involved in the making of Rachel Getting Married, but that came largely in the manner in which it was shot. Most of the words, despite the naturalistic acting style that suggests improvisation, were in fact tightly scripted by Jenny Lumet. It’s a screenplay that pulses with emotion and with wit, that gives each of its characters a very individual voice, it’s beautifully structured, but most of all, it just feels true. That’s why it wins.


BREAKTHROUGH PERFORMANCE
Sasha Grey: The Girlfriend Experience
Tom Hardy: Bronson
Katie Jarvis: Fish Tank
Carey Mulligan: An Education
Michael Shannon: Revolutionary Road

WINNER: Katie Jarvis

It’s a hell of a story; Katie Jarvis was discovered, and asked to audition for the lead role in Fish Tank, when the film’s casting director spotted her at the station, having a blazing public row with her then boyfriend. How close Katie Jarvis is to her Fish Tank character Mia, I don’t know, but in the film it feels as though the two are indivisible. There is a fire to Jarvis’ performance that is rare, an utter conviction to every moment that speaks of an impressive, if very raw, talent. I am expecting big things of her in the next few years.


THE ONE TO WATCH AWARD
For the most promising first or second time director
Andrea Arnold: Fish Tank
J. Blakeson: The Disappearance of Alice Creed
Nicolette Krebitz: The Heart is a Dark Forest
Peter Strickland: Katalin Varga
Suzi Yoonessi: Dear Lemon Lima

WINNER: Peter Strickland
Note: Having won Best Director Pascal Laugier was not eligible for this category.
Peter Strickland spent his life savings; a very meagre in film terms £25,000, making Katalin Varga in the Romanian countryside. It could quite easily have ended up looking like it was shot by some bloke with a camcorder, but Strickland’s astonishingly beautiful shot choices, his clever use of natural lighting, his inventive use of both camera and editing, and his richly textured soundtrack make this film look like it was made for a hundred times its budget. He also drew exceptional performances from his Romanian cast and wrote one of the more thought provoking screenplays of the year. This is a deeply unusual debut, and one that marks Strickland as a talent to keep a very close eye on.


BEST MOVIE POSTER


American Teen
Antichrist
Dogtooth
The Hurt Locker
Martyrs

WNNER: Dogtooth
Some might find it off putting, because it’s so utterly unlike any other movie poster, but I love this simple, strange image (which is, actually, totally appropriate to the film). It’s so obscure that I found it, from the second I saw it, absolutely fascinating, and I still do.


BEST SCENE
The children’s performances: Dogtooth
Mia and Connor in the living room: Fish Tank
Katalin’s monologue: Katalin Varga
Wedding vows: Rachel Getting Married
Carl and Ellie montage: Up

WINNER: Up

The ten minute sequence at the beginning of Up which silently depicts Carl (Ed Asner) and Ellie’s fifty year plus marriage is perhaps the single most moving sequence I’ve seen in a cinema. Both times I saw Up I was in floods of tears during this sequence, and even writing about it now is a bit emotional. Pixar’s wonderful animation tells us in gesture everything we might ever need to know about these two people and how deeply in love they are. In ten minutes we share the joy and the pain of their life together. If you don’t love this sequence then, truly, you have no heart and no soul.



WORST PICTURE
See Bottom 10 post

WORST DIRECTOR
Antonio Campos: Afterschool
Michael Bay: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Maeve Murphy: Beyond the Fire
Neveldine / Taylor: Crank - High Voltage
Rob Zombie: Halloween II

‘WINNER’: Maeve Murphy
Beyond the Fire demonstrates that Maeve Murphy has the directorial skill of Ed Wood’s talentless cousin. It is perhaps the ugliest, most technically inept, film I’ve had the misfortune to see in a cinema and also happens to feature several performances that couldn’t have been worse had they been given by people pulled off the street at gunpoint. Embarrassing.



WORST ACTOR
Olly Alexander: Tormented / Enter the Void
James Corden / Mat Horne: Lesbian Vampire Killers
Robert Pattinson: New Moon
Hugh Sachs: Beyond the Fire
Jason Statham: Crank - High Voltage

‘WINNER’: Olly Alexander
Olly Alexander can’t say ‘hello’ convincingly on screen. That’s how bad he is at his job. The two films that he has appeared in this year are each titanic achievements in the field of shitty acting, and yet in each he places himself so far below even the abysmally low bar that I wonder if English is in fact his first language (it is, he’s English).


WORST ACTRESS
Megan Fox: Jennifer’s Body / Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Katherine Heigl: The Ugly Truth
Stana Katic: The Spirit
Bai Ling: Crank - High Voltage
Kristen Stewart: Adventureland / New Moon

‘WINNER’: Kristen Stewart
Here are a few of the things I’ve said, this year, about Kristen Stewart’s acting. I stand by all of them.
“The two expressions she does have (‘Huh?’ and ‘Can’t act, blinking’) tell us nothing, and the fact that she seems to be afraid of the camera is a real problem.”
“has there ever been a face on screen that seemed less encumbered by thought or emotion?”
“Stewart’s face and voice remain resolutely inexpressive, even when she should be projecting deep, raw, emotion.”
“Next time I see her in a film I’m going to try and count her facial expressions. I wasn’t keeping score this time, but I doubt I’ll run out of fingers when I do.”
“Her main facial expression is a quizzical confusion that caused me to constantly expect her just to shout ‘line’.”
So, yeah, not a fan.

24FPS in 2010

As 24FPS enters its second full year I've got plenty of plans to keep things entertaining and interesting around here. I'm already drafting plans for new Hall of Fame and Complete... articles.

The first of these will be a Complete Indiana Jones and a Hall of Fame on Dutch director Paul Verhoeven, in January and February respectively.

I've also got plans for a new feature (which doesn't have a name yet, so suggestions are welcome), but I need your help to make it work. The idea is simply this: send me a list of about 10 of your favourite films (a nice variety of genres would be useful) along with a few other details on your taste in movies and I will, within a week, have a list of five to ten recommendations for you, movies you may not have seen, but which I reckon you'll enjoy. Yep, personalised reommendations, it's all part of the service here at 24FPS (or, it will be, assuming any of you three reading this take me up on it).

Email your requests to: frames24@ymail.com

Essential Xmas Viewing

Christmas is upon us, by this time on Friday my kitchen will be filled with about eight very, very well fed people, who will probably be playing very, very silly games. But Christmas is also a time for movies, and so I thought I'd link you to a few personal seasonal favourites, three very different Christmas classics so that there's something for everyone.

I'll have three more for you on Chirtmas Eve.

Titles are clickable to either the first part or the full movie. Enjoy, and Happy Christmas.

Note: I did not upload, and am not hosting, any of these films myself.

It's A Wonderful Life


Frank Capra's classic was a flop when it first opened, but it has since been accepted as perhaps the ultimate Christmas movie, which is somewhat odd, because for as heartwarming and as funny as it is much of the film is about a man who wants to kill himself. However, George Bailey (the great everyman James Stewart, in one of his finest performances) is shown the error of his thinking when he gets a glimpse of a world where he never existed. It's a beautiful film, and never fails to make me cry.

The Muppet Christmas Carol

The first Muppet movie to be made after the untimely death of creator Jim Henson is also the best film ever to feature the characters. It hits all the familiar story beats from Dickens' classic story, but does so with a wonderfully anarchic and entertaining tone, while never losing sight of the emotion of the story. The Muppet cast are brilliantly performed, and fit beautifully into their roles, while Michael Caine, perfectly cast as Scrooge, finds the exact right tone at the head of the human cast. This is a perfect movie for chidren; bright, breezy and hilarious, but with a strong message and, while never excluding kids, it's also a riotous entertainment for those of us who grew up on these timeless characters.

Santa Claus Conquers the Martians


The lump of coal in your christmas stocking, courtesy of 24FPS. You're welcome. This hilariously terrible, stunningly cheap, B-Movie is an absolute treat for Christmas Eve. It's the perfect thing to sit around after pre-christmas drinks with friends and mercilessly mock every stupid line, every terrible performance, the abysmal opening song, the shonky sets and props and even the wierd character names (really, the best name you could come up with for the king of the martians was Kimar?) You won't care about the kidnapped Santa being returned to Earth, because he appears to be a talentless drunk picked up at a department store, but you'll have a lot of fun.
BONUS: Santa Claus Conquers the Martians [MST3K Version]

2009 in Review Pt. 2

Bottom 10: The Worst of the Worst

The quotes here are taken from my initial review of each film.

10: The Informers
Dir: Gregor Jordan

“quite spectacularly terrible, but there’s nothing really to say beyond that, because it’s not terrible in any interesting way”

Gregor Jordan’s film is based on a set of interlocking short stories written by American Psycho author Brett Easton Ellis when he was in his late teens. This teenage sensibility seem to carry over into the screenplay (by Ellis and Nicholas Jarecki), which is less concerned with coherence and character than with broad stereotypes and random scenes of nubile young things lying around wearing as few clothes as possible (Amber Heard’s credit really ought to be solely for her breasts).

It’s a real shame that The Informers is as crashingly boring as it is, because Jordan’s visuals aren’t terrible (there’s a nice clean 80’s sheen to them, set against the seedy events) and the cast is top notch ranging from fine character actors like Billy Bob Thornton, Mickey Rourke, Kim Basinger and Winona Ryder to talented up and comers like Lou Taylor Pucci and Amber Heard’s breasts. On a sad note the film also features a bloated Brad Renfro, a pale shadow of the intense and interesting talent he might have been, in his last role before his death of a drug overdose.

As you might expect from a film adapted from short stories The Informers is bitty, there are ties, but each story largely floats around, independent of the rest, and anyway, each of them is written with such a tin ear for dialogue, acted with such disregard for what real human behaviour is like and so mind bending in its tedium that even if the film were more coherent it would still be terrible.


9: Afterschool
Dir: Antonio Campos

“badly told from both a narrative and a technical standpoint”

The fact that Antonio Campos has managed to make and release a first film at just 26 is impressive, but unfortunately Campos’ first feature is a pretentious, masturbatory mess, so impressed with its own cleverness that it forgets little things like an interesting story, or characters we understand or enjoy spending time with.

Campos’ visual style is deliberately unpolished, the framing is almost always off, the focus always extremely shallow, characters are frequently only half on screen, even in their most important moments (Olivia Williams' teacher is represented solely as a disembodied voice and an out of focus pair of legs). The problem is that, though he clearly wants this to seem as though it is observed and almost improvised, every single shot feels absolutely designed, painstakingly chosen to convey an empty metaphor.

The story, which sees two popular students at an exclusive boarding school die of drug overdoses, and an awkward member of the video club assigned to make tribute video, rehashes themes from the likes of Elephant (as well as nicking its supremely irritating style) and Heathers, but there’s little shape to the story, and we never know enough about anyone involved to allow us to be engaged. The monotonous performances simply add to the somnambulant tone of the film, and though young Addison Timlin does manage to rise above the material, her contribution is far too little, far too late.


8: Bruno
Dir: Larry Charles

“pathetically retrograde, sniggering, haphazard, pointless and outright unfunny”

I noted in my review that there was one joke, involving Mel Gibson, that I laughed at during Bruno. I no longer remember that joke, what I do recall from the long and tedious experience of watching Bruno is that for 81 minutes and 59 seconds of this 82 minute film I was not just un-amused, I was usualy quite cross.

I was cross for the same reason that I was cross during Sacha Baron Cohen and Larry Charles earlier overrated opus Borat, and that’s because this brand of gotcha comedy strikes me as cruel and largely unfair. During Bruno, Baron Cohen tries as hard as he can to get people to reveal themselves as homophobic, making Bruno himself the most unappealing, in your face, flaaaaming stereotype possible. Over and over he confronts people with his upfront sexuality and, for the most part, he meets tolerant, polite people who indulge him. They may look shocked on occasion, but generally nobody cares that Bruno is gay.

When Bruno does get a rise out of people it’s because he’s pushed the boat out so far that almost any reasonable person would react that way (for example, what would any straight man do if, in the middle of the night, they were woken by a naked, condom carrying, gay man they barely know, who is asking to sleep next to them?)

Yes there are disturbing things in the film (the closing wrestling match for example) but those sequences are disturbing, not funny, and this is supposed to be a comedy. Sacha Baron Cohen is clearly a supremely talented actor, and it is a real shame to see him wasting his talents on such braindead, unfunny, borderline offnsive, idiocy as this.


7: New Moon
Dir: Chris Weitz

“I just object to anything so slapdash, so lackadaisical, so explicitly an exercise in commercial cynicism, being vomited into cinemas.”

I know these films aren’t for me, but oh for the love of god, why must they be quite so terrible? The thing that bothers me about this that the audience that these films are for deserves better. It is as if the producers of the Twilight series have assumed that Twilight fans have no critical faculties and will readily accept any old slapdash shit… OH! I get it now. Still, that’s no excuse.

I’m not sure which is the worst aspect of New Moon. It might be the script, which seems to take Stephenie Meyer’s semi-literate Anne Rice impression as if it were Shakespeare, treating it with absolute seriousness and as if her every word were some piece of sacrosanct poetic wonder, resulting in a film that runs an arse paralysing 130 minutes despite having a ‘story’ that would struggle to fill an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and, as a result, is boring beyond description.

Then again, it might be that Chris Weitz’ direction is the worst thing on display here. He shows no ability with the actors, and is unable to alter what seems to be the franchise style of shooting every possible frame of film in close up. He uses gimmicky frame rate effects during the (brief) action scenes, but to no real purpose other than that it might look cool (it doesn’t, Stevie Wonder could shoot a better action sequence).

I know what the worst thing is about New Moon. It’s the acting, or rather the ‘acting’. Kristen Stewart, has there ever been a face on screen that seemed less encumbered by thought or emotion? The two expressions she does have (‘Huh?’ and ‘Can’t act, blinking’) tell us nothing, and the fact that she seems to be afraid of the camera is a real problem. Robert ‘poor man’s Derek Zoolander’ Pattinson seems embarrassed to be in this movie, he’s so clearly collecting a paycheque that you almost want to send the poor guy a donation. It’s not an excuse for his utterly vacant performance, but it may be an explanation. As for Taylor Lautner, well, who needs that talent stuff when you’ve got abs?

Actually, now that I’ve given it some thought, the worst thing about New Moon is that it exists.


6: Observe and Report
Dir: Jody Hill

“a violent, mentally unbalanced racist who at one point date rapes the girl of his dreams. Ladies and gentlemen, our hero”

Director Jody Hill said of this film that it is the first comedy to be inspired by Taxi Driver. From this we can divine two things: 1: Jody Hill hasn’t seen, or didn’t understand, The King of Comedy. 2: Jody Hill REALLY didn’t understand Taxi Driver. Here’s the thing about Taxi Driver; Travis Bickle isn’t the hero, he’s a dangerous mentally unbalanced nutter with a gun and an obsession with Jodie Foster, the fact that the media makes him out as the hero at the end of the movie isn’t telling us what to think, it’s a comment on the media. Jody Hill clearly doesn’t understand this.

Hill’s Bickle analogue is Ronnie Barnhart (Seth Rogen) and the film holds him up as an unambiguous hero, despite the fact that he is a psychotic, violent, gun fetishising, racist who has gone off his medication and at one point in the film commits a date rape. It is one thing to take an immoral, or amoral, character and refuse to judge him, but to hold up someone as corrupt as Ronnie as a hero is both sickening and irresponsible.

The other problem, aside from the film’s offensiveness, is captured in a line about midway through the film, in which someone says “I thought this would be funny, but actually it’s just kinda sad”. This is one seriously depressing laugh desert of a comedy, hunting for a funny joke here is like trying to find a strand of hay in a huge stack of needles; as fruitless as it is painful. Hills gags are juvenilia that Benny Hill would have rejected as being a bit retrograde, they aren’t even jokes really, it’s more like ‘look, a penis, isn’t that funny?’ or ‘people swearing is funny’ or ‘twins, Chinese twins, isn’t that the funniest thing you’ve ever seen?’

Observe and Report is a stupid, offensive, unfunny, juvenile film made by people who think that what they are doing is edgy and clever. I can hardly explain how wrong they are.


5: Crank - High Voltage
Dir: Neveldine / Taylor

“a perfect storm of terrible cinema. It is ineptly shot, written, edited and acted. Those are the least of its problems.”

Ah, Neveldine / Taylor, the Friedberg and Seltzer of action cinema, a two headed, empty headed auteur with the attention span of a 13 year old crackhead, and between them about 5% of the talent that resides in the little toe of Martin Scorsese’s left foot. Yes, make no mistake, Crank - High Voltage is, at every possible technical level, a film so bad that Ed Wood and Uwe Boll would have disavowed it. It’s so poorly written that Stephenie Meyer would laugh at it, the acting is so numbingly terrible that had the cast actually been dead Neveldine / Taylor probably wouldn’t have noticed and would have got about the same performances out of them and the abomination that is the editing appears to have been achieved by giving a hyperactive chimp the dailies, a blender and some sellotape. But that’s not why it’s here.

Crank - High Voltage is here because it is the product of a diseased, disgusting mind. This vomitous, hateful little film seems to have no other purpose than to cram as much bile, as much depressing vileness, as is humanly possible into 90 minutes. It is unremittingly sexist, treating all women as no more than walking breasts and vaginas (one especially putrid moment, played - god help us - for comedy, sees a stripper shot in the breasts and the silicone leaking out of her implants). Not a single woman n the film has either a character or a brain; Amy Smart’s entire purpose here is to be fucked. It’s also racist; every villain in the film is a stereotypical ethnic minority (one played, in a performance redolent of Mickey Rooney in Breakfast At Tiffany’s in its stunning racism, by David Carradine) and every ethnic minority (and every homosexual) in the film is utterly morally corrupt.

Even if Crank - High Voltage were as perfectly crafted as No Country For Old Men its putrescent content would still have landed it on this list. It is a despicable, nasty, depressing film and Neveldine / Taylor should never be allowed to step behind a camera again.


4: Beyond the Fire
Dir: Maeve Murphy

“speaks to an almost Ed Wood-esque allergy to a second take”

This is, without question, the single worst made film I’ve ever seen at a cinema. The fact that something this inept managed to show at London’s ICA is, frankly, embarrassing. Every single technical aspect of the film is mortifyingly poor. The lighting is perhaps especially bad, with some scenes so poorly lit that you can hardly see the characters through the light bouncing off the lens, and others so murky that the picture (which already looks like bad, old Hi-8 video) degrades into a greyish brown murk.

It’s a real shame that Beyond the Fire is so poor, because it is about something that really is important; how people are treated after and cope with having been sexually abused, but the important subject is lost among the hideous look, the cack handed editing, and acting so bad that it wouldn’t seem out of place in “Manos” The Hands of Fate. Every single scene in the picture rings false, because the script never gives any of the characters anything that resembles normal, recognisable, human emotions or behaviour (or when it does the acting is so poor it still seems false). How about the way that rape victim Katie (Cara Seymour) takes ex-con Sheamy (Scot Williams) into her life without question? Or the jaw droppingly stupid scene in which, after Sheamy admits he’s a virgin, Katie makes explanatory sketches of the female anatomy for him.

There’s just such a lot of awful things to choose from: like Hugh Sachs’ quite astonishingly awful performance as the priest Sheamy goes to after his release, like the fact that Seymour and Williams romantic chemistry generates all the warmth of a freezer at the south pole, like the abysmal live music Katie and Sheamy listen to. You probably won’t get a chance to see this film, which is almost a shame because, perhaps uniquely among this list, it is genuine car crash cinema; so awful that you have to slow down and look.


3: Halloween II
Dir: Rob Zombie

“an inexcusably awful film, by a filmmaker who has said that this excremental production represents his vision. That being the case he should get his eyes tested and have his DGA card taken away”

Since his debut, House of 1000 Corpses, Rob Zombie has built a career, and something of a following ripping off the 70’s and 80’s horror films on which he grew up, so it perhaps wasn’t surprising when he remade John Carpenter’s peerless classic Halloween. It was also not much of a surprise that the remake was abysmal. Halloween II is worse, staggeringly worse, so much worse that it almost beggars belief.

Zombie’s big idea in Halloween was to explain Michael Myers; here he takes that idea further, plunging us into the psychology, the dreams, of the previously faceless killer. These are, despite attempts at intended comic relief, perhaps the funniest thing in the film. The dreams are so pretentious, and so pedestrian, that all around me at the screening people were sniggering. Really they are no more than Zombie’s excuse to put his (admittedly pretty) wife Sheri Moon-Zombie in the movie, despite her character; Michael’s mother, having died in the first film, he opens the film with a caption, explaining the symbolism of the white horse that appears in theses dreams. Despite this I have no fucking idea what the horse, or any other ingredient of these scenes, means.

The acting is abysmal, but it’s hard to blamee the cast once you hear what they have to say. First of all, about 75% of the dialogue appears to be the word “Fuck”, and it is used with exactly the same abandon by every single character in the movie, meaning that every single character in the movie sounds exactly the same, as though the script were chopped up and lines picked at random out of a hat. Zombie’s direction of his actors appears to extend only as far as ‘more redneck’ for the guys and ‘again, but could you try it sluttier?’ for the girls. Most of the cast appear not to be able to act in the first place (stand up Scout Taylor Compton), but when Brad Dourif and Malcolm McDowell are rubbish, that’s a directorial problem.

Oh, and by the way, Rob, If I EVER meet you I’m going to punch you in the face for lifting the last shot of Psycho and aping it in this shitpile of a movie.


2: The Ugly Truth
Dir: Robert Luketic

“[a] fundamentally broken and diseased idea”

I have been, basically, obsessed with movies for 20 years, and in that time I’ve come to understand a lot about Hollywood and how the industry works, but even after two decades and 7000 odd movies, sometimes I’m still just baffled. How, how in the name of all things holy, does a film like The Ugly Truth manage to worm its way into cinemas?

Honestly. How, in the first place did initial screenwriter Nicole Eastman come up with an idea so fundamentally awful as this? How did she write two characters (Katherine Heigl’s careerist, self-obsessed, anal retentive, borderline autistic harridan Abby and Gerard Butler’s rampagingly sexist ‘relationship guru’ Mike) so utterly unlikable? How did she manage to ensure that at no time would there be anything resembling a tender moment between the two characters who are supposed to fall in love? How did she manage not to get sued for ripping off Roxanne (albeit without the jokes)? How the holy hell did anyone see enough potential in this hideous, misshapen thing that they decided to have rentahacks Karen McCullah Lutz and Kristen Smith do a rewrite? How did they not manage to add a single joke during rewrites? How did they manage not to get sued for ripping off When Harry Met Sally?

How did anyone convince themselves that this script needed a budget of nearly $40million? How did anyone decide that spending that much on it in the first place was a good idea “Here’s a script that’s utterly unfunny, lacks any kind of credible romance and is sexist to its very core”. “Will $40millon be okay?” It’s a conversation I struggle to imagine.

How did they manage to cast anyone as these awful, awful people? How, especially, did Katherine Heigl, who had previously denounced her breakthrough film Knocked Up as sexist, get involved in one that could be accused of out and out misogyny, except that it actually hates everyone? How did they manage to allow someone’s six year old cousin to do the composting on the sole big effects shot?

How did anyone look at this and even manage to think ‘That’s releasable’, let alone put it in cinemas? Really, if someone can tell me the thought process I’d be fascinated.


1: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Dir: Michael Bay

“a collection of footage that someone threw at a screen, without caring what it ended up being”

Don’t get me wrong, I’d like to have surprised you. I’d like to have put this film a bit further down the list, and found some other colossal turd to sit atop this steaming pile of shitty movies. I really, really, hate to be predictable, it’s just that Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen really is that bad. And then some.

Revenge of the Fallen is the loudest film of the year, perhaps of any year. Stuff is always happening, and even when it’s just an astronomy class it’s happening LOUDLY with WHOOSING CAMERAS and BOMBASTIC MUSIC. Come the action scenes the noise becomes eardrum splitting in its pummelling intensity, but despite levels of noise that I’ve only previously experienced at gigs I had trouble staying awake in Revenge of the Fallen. That’s its biggest crime; it’s boring. It’s so boring that I began to think about trivia, rather than what we’ll charitably call ‘the plot’. When you are picking out grammatical errors in a film’s dialogue, that is when you know what boredom truly feels like. When, during a scene of two huge robots fighting, you are trying to work out the geographical logistics of the last five minutes; that is boredom.

There’s nothing wrong with making a big, loud, entertaining, film about robots punching each other, that’s what Transformers was, and while it was certainly not great art it did its job perfectly well. The problem is that Revenge of the Fallen isn’t, not for a second, entertaining, because even when it’s just robots hitting each other the effects are so busy, and the colours so dull (gun metal grey hitting gun metal grey, that you can’t see what is hitting what. You can’t get invested in the action, because it is ineptly shot and edited, with close ups far too prevalent and a cut every half second, just to make sure you are still awake (fair enough, you may well not be) but also because the ‘plot’ is so convoluted, so abysmally poorly told, that you will likely have no clue what’s going on.

As well as being stupid and badly made, Revenge of the Fallen is an objectionable film. First off it is jingoistic, warmongering flag waving at its most obnoxious. One hideous scene sees a government agent who thinks that negotiation might be a worthwhile tactic thrown out of a plane by a military commander (okay, he’s given a parachute, but it’s still played as something we’re supposed to cheer). More troublingly, the film is also racist. How the hell did a Transformers film manage to be racist? Why did anyone think that the two Sambobots were even remotely acceptable, either their designs or their voices, in this day and age?

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a $250million fuck you to a global audience. It’s a film that says ‘you are so fucking stupid that we can do THIS LITTLE, we can make a film this bad, and you’ll still come’. Well, fuck you too, Michael, cause I’m done with your movies.