Review of 2011's Films

So, with the end of 2011 more or less upon us, I thought I’d try my hand at a Best Films Of The Year article. It’s been an odd, but compelling year in cinema, with films coming out of nowhere to knock our socks off while highly-anticipated efforts have failed to capture audiences’ imaginations. We’ve had new efforts from Terrence Malick, the Coens, Martin Scorsese and Danny Boyle, while European directors such as Nicolas Winding Refn and Tomas Alfredson have broken into the mainstream. There have also been career-best performances from such acting luminaries as Gary Oldman, Ryan Gosling, Kirsten Dunst and Natalie Portman.

Television has also raised its game, and is worth mentioning because of it. Favourite imports from America like Boardwalk Empire and The Walking Dead have been supplemented by one-offs like the Kate Winslet/Guy Pearce-starring HBO mini-series Mildred Pierce. Stung by their success, British programming attempted to respond with BBC2's The Hour (the new Mad Men it was not, but it was a decent effort) and The Shadow Line, which gave us one of the year’s most compelling characters of any medium in the sinister Gatehouse, played by Antony Sher, whose work was only matched by Dominic West as serial killer Fred West in ITV's Appropriate Adult. There was also continued acclaim on Channel 4 for Shane Meadows and his three-part continuation of the This Is England series, as well as Charlie Brooker for Black Mirror.

So, to the list. I allowed myself to pick any films I had seen that had been released in the UK in the 2011 calendar year. Unfortunately, there are a lot of films I suspect may have made the list had I got a chance to see them. With apologies, there is therefore no place for Senna, Bridesmaids, The Guard, Beginners, The Skin I Live In, Melancholia, Tyrannosaur, The Adventures Of Tintin, Contagion, The Ides Of March, The Help, The Deep Blue Sea, Moneyball, My Week With Marilyn, Take Shelter, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and The Artist. There are also films that have come out in the USA but not the UK, so I couldn't include Shame, The Descendants, War Horse, A Dangerous Method, J. Edgar or Young Adult.

With honourable mentions for 127 Hours, True Grit, Submarine, Tracker, Route Irish, Super 8, We Need To Talk About Kevin and (shock horror that it’s been omitted) The King’s Speech, this is my list of 2011’s top 10 films:

10. The Tree Of Life. The film that divided critics and audiences alike. Is Terrence Malick’s meditation on family, love and nature deep and profound or pompous rubbish? The fact that the film appears to be at least partly autobiographic is to its credit, as is the way it has been developed and filmed in defiance of the demands and constraints of Hollywood. Whichever way you look at it, it’s a hell of a discussion topic. 

9. Wuthering Heights. There have been so many adaptations of Emily Bronte’s epic novel that radical changes had to be made for this new version. Fortunately, Andrea Arnold had the balls to do so, and while her handheld camera style and sparse dialogue may not be to the tastes of the period drama purists, she certainly gives future projects another take to consider. Fresh and raw, her Wuthering Heights is not for the faint-hearted, but is rewarding for those prepared to give it a chance.

  

8. Barney’s Version. In the same way that 2011 might be called the Year Of The Gosling, this particular type of film might come to be labelled as the Paul Giamatti Genre. Arty, smart, witty, gritty, literate and touching, this is Giamatti’s finest performance. Barney Ponofsky is a television producer whose life and loves are spanned over forty or so years – while the plot and time-frame is large and rambling, it just about hangs together to produce another hell of a sleeper hit. Dustin Hoffman is a particular delight as Barney’s father.  

7. The Fighter. Possibly the best sports film since Raging Bull? Certainly the best boxing film since Raging Bull. What is about boxing that makes it such a compelling cinematic topic? Maybe the fact that most boxers appear to be massive pricks – certainly the character of Dicky Eklund helps to bear that theory out. Christian Bale is electric in that role, while Mark Wahlberg must be gutted that everyone except him won awards for the film that was his passion.

 

6. Never Let Me Go. This devastating film was largely overlooked by more or less everyone, which it didn’t deserve. Based on Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel set in an alternative England, Never Let Me Go elicits the best work to date from Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield, ably supported by Keira Knightley. Heartbreakingly elegiac from the beginning, this is a very...English film.

 

5. Black Swan. If you’re in the mood for a massive head-fuck, this is the film for you. While playing the title roles in Swan Lake, ballerina Nina (Natalie Portman in a deservedly Oscar-winning performance) experiences something of an identity crisis which is exacerbated by the influence of fellow dancer Lily. With so many clues to discover and things to notice, this is a film that only gets better with every viewing. 

 

4. Drive. It’s probably fair to say that this was cinema’s biggest unexpected surprise, and is the main reason why 2011 may in future be known as the Year Of The Gosling. The pulsing electro soundtrack sounds like it should be at odds with the driving sequences, but instead it helps to perfectly illustrate the isolation of the Driver, while the sequences of extraordinarily bloody violence punctuate the film like lightning. 

 

3. Hugo. The first ever Martin Scorsese film for kids and the first ever Martin Scorsese film to be shot in 3D. While the merits of 3D remain unconvincing even in his talented hands, this story of a boy who winds the clocks in a Parisian train station and is thrown into the world of early film provides a shot of charm and magic to warm even the most cynical and jaded filmgoer.

 

2. 50/50. The surprise of the year. A bromance about comedy could have been a cliché-ridden embarrassment, but Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Seth Rogen’s natural chemistry made this tale of two friends trying to deal with one’s sudden cancer diagnosis both hysterically funny and desperately sad in equal measure.

 

1. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. One of the most anticipated films of the year, and it didn’t disappoint. Supposedly our American cousins didn’t “get” it, which will hurt it during awards season, but a Swedish director making his first English-language film had no such problems. Led by Gary Oldman as George Smiley, the superb cast helped to ensure that this stylish, claustrophobic, stiff-upper-lip take on John le Carre’s masterpiece was the best film of the year.

50/50 Review

I think it’s fair to say that 50/50 is far, far better than a lot of people expected it to be. While the cast looked promising, there seemed to be a definite tendency to write this kind of film off as a bromance with cheap depth and little heart, which would have surely incurred the wrath of cancer support groups attacking it for trivialising terminal illness. I was one of the people fearing the worst. I was wrong. 50/50 is a ballsy, one-of-a-kind film filled to the brim with heart, soul, laughter and tears.

Adam (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a young, fit, healthy man, with a hot girlfriend and a cool job at a radio station, but when he goes to the doctor for treatment on a painful back, he is shocked to find out that he has a rare type of spine cancer. As he puts it, ‘I don’t smoke...I don’t drink...I recycle.’ With his chances of survival only 50%, he embarks upon a well-trodden cinematic journey of anger, depression and chemotherapy with his foul-mouthed best friend, Kyle (Seth Rogen), his flaky girlfriend, Rachael (Bryce Dallas Howard), his overbearing mother, Diane (Anjelica Huston) and his hospital-appointed but vastly inexperienced therapist Katherine (Anna Kendrick).

Another screenwriter, given the concept, characters and plot fully fleshed out for him to work dialogue in for, could not have crafted a film half as good as this. Only someone who has lived through this could possibly understand the mental, physical and emotional trauma that Adam goes through during the film, and screenwriter Will Reiser has. The film is based on his own struggle with cancer and, though it follows a fairly standard three act structure, perfectly balances male comedy on the juvenile side with shattering emotion of the sort more often reserved for ‘real’ films with ‘real’ actors without ever straying into hysteria or melodrama, with credit also going to director Jonathan Levine for his sensitive direction. It pulls back at the right moments to preserve its credibility and power.

Seth Rogen, who as Reiser’s best friend played this role for real, appears to be playing the role of crude buffoon he’s so often displayed in the past, but displays touches of genuinely heartfelt acting in the emotional final third. Kendrick gives another solid performance, reminding us why she was nominated for an Oscar last year, while Huston’s scenes with Adam are the most emotionally devastating of the film. 50/50 as a whole, though, belongs to Gordon-Levitt, who brings such humour and pathos to the Adam’s journey that it would not be surprising, despite the Academy’s comedy snobbery, to see him on the Best Actor shortlist next year. 

In the kind of film normally reserved for audiences of women to bawl their eyes out with their friends, this astounding film is the surprise of the year, and you’d be hard-pushed to find a showing that doesn’t have at least one man asking his girlfriend for a tissue. 50/50 is beautifully acted, wonderfully written and sure to be completely underrated by everybody until they actually sit down and watch it.

5/5

Wuthering Heights Review

For a time, it looked as though this new version of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights would not be made. The project bounced from director to director with actors and actresses as varied as Natalie Portman (wrong nationality), Michael Fassbender (interesting), Gemma Arterton and (shudder) Gossip Girl’s Ed Westwick attached at different points to play Cathy and Heathcliff. Eventually the film found its way into the hands of Andrea Arnold, and received the most radical stripping-down a period film has ever received, which is impressive given the amount of corsets that have collectively been ripped off throughout the genre’s history. This is a hard, visceral world with all romance or pretence of it buried beneath an obscene volley of “niggers”, “fucks and “cunts”.

The structure of the novel has always presented problems for screenwriters, with framing devices, minor characters and the small matter of the maturing of two generations condensed into a single book. Arnold’s version cuts the character of Lockwood and begins with Mr. Earnshaw leading the foundling Heathcliff (Solomon Glave in adolescence and James Howson as an adult) across the moors in the dead of night towards Wuthering Heights. Physically and verbally abused by his skin-headed adoptive brother Hindley (Lee Shaw) because of his race, he finds solace in his friendship with Hindley’s sister Cathy (Shannon Beer and Kaya Scodelario). The two grow up roaming the moors together, but when Cathy opts to marry wealthy neighbour Edgar Linton, Heathcliff leaves, only to return years later, mysteriously rich and craving revenge against Hindley along with Cathy’s love.

With so many unremarkable costume adaptations of the novel in existence, a change of direction and style was clearly needed. Arnold has merged the grit and handheld camera approach of her first two films, Red Road and Fish Tank, with the sense of wonder at the natural world always so prevalent in the films of Terrence Malick. The shaky framing as we follow the two tearaways fleeing Heathcliff’s baptism leaves us as breathless as if we had run with them, and generates a shockingly intimate atmosphere as we watch their relationship build. However, while the focus on the moors and its assorted wildlife provides a relatively peaceful counterpoint to the human drama engulfing the two families, it was overused – no film with such rich dialogue in the source material needs six establishing shots of diving falcons and waving grass before every scene.

Arnold’s casting of an unknown, untrained and inexperienced actor in James Howson as the adult Heathcliff was a gamble that has worked well for her in the past, with previously unknown Katie Jarvis giving a breathtaking performance as the lead in Fish Tank, but falters slightly here. The complexity of Heathcliff’s character is one of the novel’s most enduring aspects, and Arnold might have been better off searching casting agencies instead of job centres for her leading man. That said, Howson makes a good stab at the role, at the very least equalling Tom Hardy’s performance in the 2009 ITV version. Scodelario captures the adult Cathy’s manipulative, childish essence well considering that she had not read the book, but the film is stolen by Glave and Beer as the younger versions of the characters. I was enthralled watching the children in Super 8 during the summer, and felt the same here. As soon as Glave storms off into the windswept, stormy night at the end of the first half, I almost wanted the film to end until he and Beer had grown up enough to portray the adults, such was the power of their onscreen chemistry.

Although this adaptation is by no means perfect (especially the ending, which leaves the characters of Heathcliff, Hindley and Isabella unresolved), there is ultimately enough new perspective here for any subsequent director to try and perfect this unfilmable, tempestuous novel once and for all. 

3.5/5

How To Film Wuthering Heights

NOTE: This was an article I wrote for Don't Panic when Wuthering Heights premiered at Venice, but for some reason I missed putting it up on here when I was putting up the other Don't Panic articles. I'm putting it up now because I'm seeing the film tonight and I'm going to review it at some point in the near future.

Andrea Arnold’s take on Wuthering Heights premiered this week at the Venice Film Festival, but it appears to be yet another adaptation of Emily Bronte’s classic novel which has fallen short. Just why is it so difficult to film?

For fans of the book, there has never been a satisfactory film or TV adaptation of Wuthering Heights. There have been more adaptations than you can shake a stick at following the Laurence Olivier/Merle Oberon 1939 version, all of which have had varying degrees of success but never quite managed to capture the book’s spirit. The early reviews coming out of Venice this week suggest that Andrea Arnold’s adaptation will be consigned to the same scrap-heap as all of the others – despite a bold style reminiscent more of Terrence Malick than Merchant-Ivory, a ‘crucial lack of chemistry’ between the two leads has been cited as the film’s main problem.

The main problem is that Wuthering Heights is really two novels in one, the first featuring Heathcliff, Catherine, Hindley and the Lintons; the second featuring Heathcliff, Cathy, Edgar and Hareton. The first part is undoubtedly more dramatic than the second, but the second completes the saga and offers closure and hope to the story – those adaptations that discard the children always feel unfinished. Arnold has cut the story of the children, though she still follows Heathcliff until his death. Surely a straight adaptation of the book minus the character of Lockwood could be done in 150-odd minutes? Failing that, just go the whole hog and do a three-hour-long film – it might become The Godfather of period adaptations.

Then you’ve got to get the casting right. Olivier’s Heathcliff was too tidy and cultured and Juliette Binoche, who played both Catherine and Cathy in the 1992 version, was FRENCH for God’s sake. There have also been issues with the ages of the actors as opposed to the characters they are portraying. For the majority of the novel Heathcliff and Catherine are around 20, but they consistently been played by actors 10 or 15 years older (Tom Hardy in ITV’s 2009 version was 32), with Heathcliff, described as a dark-skinned gypsy, always played by white actors. Arnold has rectified this in her version, casting unknown Leeds actor James Howson as the first black actor to play the role, with Skins’ Kaya Scodelario as Catherine. Howson is 25, Scodelario is 19.

Finally, it is crucial for the director to get the tone and feel of the book right. Arnold, who won acclaim for her films Red Road and Fish Tank, has by all accounts gone for the same gritty approach that made her name, albeit on 1800s moors rather than modern-day council estates, and seems to have got this right in terms of presenting the desolation and wildness of the moors, but I have yet to see a Heathcliff and Catherine display any of the passion Bronte describes. This is also a casting issue, but a director’s job is to guide an actor towards the performance they want in order to best represent the story. None have succeeded so far, and it is this, more than anything else, that determines whether a Wuthering Heights adaptation lives or dies.

Those not lucky enough to be in Venice this week will have to reserve judgement on Wuthering Heights until it is released in the UK on November 11.

We Need To Talk About Kevin Review

We Need To Talk About Kevin, Lynne Ramsay’s adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s novel, was released last week. I wasn’t expecting to be reviewing it, but somehow the plan changed from seeing The Adventures of Tintin to seeing this.

I hadn’t read the book before seeing the film, but given that pretty much everyone else has, I’m not going to worry about giving away spoilers. Eva Khatchadourian (Tilda Swinton) and her husband Franklin (John C. Reilly) have two children. One, Celia, is a sweet, perfect little girl who wouldn’t hurt a fly. She idolises her older brother, Kevin (Ezra Miller), who, unfortunately, is a raving sociopath. The trouble is, only Eva can see it, and it is she who has to deal with the consequences when Kevin commits a high school massacre. The film follows their relationship from his birth to her visits to him in prison.

The title is an odd one. Eva and Franklin certainly did need to talk about Kevin, but they never broach the subject. The onus is on Eva to tell Franklin about what a monster he is, but she doesn’t do it forcefully enough – he brushes away her concerns and she gives up. Is she ashamed of her perceived failings as a mother? Does she tell herself she is over-reacting? Or does she simply lack the courage to bring up the possibility that her son has somehow become a lunatic? Even after it is implied that Kevin and a bottle of bleach are responsible for the loss of one of Celia’s eyes, which Eva suspects, she does nothing. Is she the real monster here? This might explain the way she stays in town after the massacre when she could have moved away, as a kind of penance for her inaction. Tilda Swinton will almost certainly get an Oscar nomination for her finely-balanced performance as a mother struggling to connect with her son and carry on after he has made her life almost unliveable.

Ramsay provides no motivation for Kevin’s actions, seeming to suggest that he was evil from birth. Often, as with the Columbine massacre, the perpetrators are ostracised from their peers, but we never see Kevin at school or interacting with anyone other than his family. We see him throughout his life: only stopping his crying when held by Franklin rather than Eva as a baby and spraying paint all over the walls of Eva’s map room as a toddler. However, Eva can be seen as a classic unreliable narrator. Looking back over Kevin’s life, she may be twisting events to show that he was evil from birth, when really her lack of empathy towards him as a woman who never wanted to have children pushed him towards his unenviable place in history. Ramsay leaves this up to the viewer, but her direction throughout is largely cliché-ridden and ponderous. She obviously doubts her audience’s intelligence, pointlessly featuring the colour red in almost every scene, from jam sandwiches to cans of tomato soup, as a signpost to the horror yet to come, when I’m sure most people would have understood her intention in the first five minutes of the film. In addition, the flashbacks and flashforwards are initially confusing – until Kevin is born, it is difficult to tell exactly where you are in the narrative.

The film’s greatest achievement is the way it portrays the ambiguity of the relationship between Kevin and Eva, as well as the reasons behind Kevin’s massacre of his classmates. Fittingly in the run-up to Halloween, it comes across as a very modern horror film, let down only by its clogged direction.

3.5/5

My Favourite 10 Opening Scenes

This is fairly self-explanatory - my favourite opening scenes, not necessarily "the best" in terms of filming or dialogue or anything like that.

10. Narc

This criminally underrated cop thriller begins with the bluest, fastest, most intense foot chase scene you’ll ever see, made incredibly visceral by a shaky hand-held camera and a lack of distracting soundtrack. Having picked this up for 50p from a going-out-of-business DVD rental shop and not really expecting anything groundbreaking from it, this scene absolutely floored me. And it’s not even the best part of the film.

9. Inglourious Basterds

I could equally have gone for the openings of Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill Vol. 1 as my Tarantino choice but the introduction to SS Colonel Hans Landa is so beautifully paced, shot and acted that it pretty much chose itself. A more compelling scene based on social niceties and milk quality you’ll never see.

8. The Breakfast Club

We hear “Don’t You Forget About Me”, which always compels me to air-drum. We hear the letter they write at the end. We get introduced to all of the kids as they turn up for detention, which establishes their characters – the brain, the athlete, the princess, the basket-case and the criminal. It’s an economical beginning, but a memorable, completely John Hughesian one. 

7. Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels

A very cool opening to a very cool film. From Jason Statham’s market patter to Ocean Colour Scene’s “Hundred Mile High City” soundtracking, there’s practically nothing to dislike about it. Apart from Statham throwing the open suitcase down the stairs in slo-mo – I still don’t know why he does that, and it pisses me off every time I see it.

6. Once Upon A Time In The West

I can’t think of an opening sequence that takes so long to get to such a quick payoff. We watch the three hired goons (originally intended to be Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef and Eli Wallach, apparently) wait for Harmonica for about 10 minutes during the credits – he turns up, makes a crack about the number of horses they brought and kills them. It’s incredible how hooked you can get on so little action.

5. Goodfellas

I couldn’t not have a Scorsese one in here somewhere. Pitching us in at the middle of the story, we get gratuitous violence immediately juxtaposed with a jazzy, upbeat Tony Bennett song symbolising the glamour of the gangster life, along with Henry Hill’s immortal line: “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.” Iconic isn’t even the word.

4. Mission:Impossible III

Considering M:I-2 was ultimately quite a fun, harmless film, the opening of its sequel is pretty harrowing. Like Goodfellas, we’re thrown into the middle of the film with Ethan Hunt trying to convince Philip Seymour Hoffman not to shoot his wife. Very tense, very dark. Tom Cruise actually doing some good acting.  

3. The Godfather

“I believe in America.” The camera starting close-up on Bonasera’s face and zooming out slowly over Corleone’s shoulder. The stray cat that had been wandering around the set and was dropped into Brando’s lap just before the scene started. The tux. Duvall and Caan. “Someday, and that day may never come, I’ll call upon you to do a service for me.” Genius.

2. Raiders Of The Lost Ark

I once ripped this off for a story I wrote at school when I was about 10 – for some reason I assumed that the teacher hadn’t seen Raiders but obviously he had. Anyway, the opening introduces you to all the key element of the Indy series – the whip, the archaeology (grave-robbing), the fear of snakes, the triumphing against adversity, etc. And the theme tune. Love the theme tune. 

1. Saving Private Ryan

Now I know that the opening scene is technically the one with old James Ryan in the French war cemetery, but whenever I consider my favourite opening scene, I always come back to this one. Shot in desaturated colours by Janusz Kaminski, it’s the leading up to storming the beach that always gets me rather than when they actually get onto it. Has to be the best battle sequence ever filmed, if only because of how realistic it seems.

Killer Elite Review

Jason Statham’s latest guns-and-muscles film, Killer Elite, based on a book by Ranulph Fiennes and directed by Gary McKendry, was released last week. Is it standard popcorn fodder or is there more going on than in the average action flick?

After killing a father in front of his child on an operation, Danny (Statham) decides that he doesn’t want to be a mercenary anymore and retires to Australia to build a house. A year later, however, he is pulled back in by a sheikh who wants revenge on three SAS operatives who killed his sons. As an incentive, he’s holding Danny’s mentor, Hunter (Robert De Niro), hostage. Not only does he want the deaths to look like accidents, he also wants taped confessions. Former SAS man Spike (Clive Owen) is tasked with stopping Danny.

I cannot in good conscience review this film without first commenting on its obsession with male hirsuteness. This film should have been called Men With Ridiculous Facial Hair. Its actual title is hugely misleading seeing as more or less everyone bar Robert De Niro manages to cock up killing someone at some point during the film’s 116 minutes’ running time. What is in evidence, however, are what must be a record-breaking number of preposterous moustaches and beards for one film. Clive Owen’s moustache looks half-hearted and De Niro’s beard looks scruffy and uncared-for, but credit to Dominic Purcell as Danny’s mate, whom I decided to label “Lemmy’s Brother”, for his incredible mutton chops.

As an action film, Killer Elite ticks all the boxes – there’s guns, explosions, car chases, rooftop chases, fistfights and swearing galore. It’s when it tries to go all political that cracks appear which, with a more experienced writer and director, might have been papered over. Spike’s superiors are an organisation called the Feather Men. We don’t really know who they are or why they’re there – they’re pulling all the strings but we forget about them later on, so they can’t have been that important. They may have had something to do with a war in Oman. Or not. God knows. In addition, one guy, apparently from somewhere unconnected to either Danny or Spike (possibly the Feather Men), turns up during their interrogation scene, talks for a bit and then gets killed almost straightaway. I have no idea who he was or why he was there. I think he may have been knocking around before, but the multitude of Men With Ridiculous Facial Hair and wishy-washy direction means it’s difficult to tell. And did we really need a love interest who adds nothing to the plot apart from complication and pointlessness?

In fact, the script as a whole is pretty atrocious. Matt Sherring, take this as a subtle hint. NEVER write another screenplay. Could you not have come up with an alternative line to “Killing’s easy...the hard part’s living with it”? It’s far too long, with several unnecessary twists. When Statham, tied to a chair, flips over in midair to land on the back of a prostrate Owen with crushing force, it could have ended for me. I was entirely satisfied. But it didn’t. At least Aden Young (playing another of Danny’s mates, Meier), who couldn’t decide if his character was German, American, Dutch or Australian, got killed off relatively early.

Its deep political aspirations are admirable, but I shouldn’t be getting confused during a Jason Statham film. It could have been done better. 

2.5/5