Top Ten of 2012

It’s always interesting when doing a top ten list to look back over the year and revisit films from the very start that might have been forgotten as the months passed. Although I’ve only got three from the pre-blockbuster season, they’ve pushed out films including The Avengers Assemble, Skyfall, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Skyfall, Silver Linings Playbook, Ted, Prometheus (the year’s number-one disappointment), Chronicle, 21 Jump Street, The Descendants, Looper and the hugely overrated Life of Pi when it came to comprising 2012’s Top 10. Notably, Moonrise Kingdom is worth mentioning for being the first Wes Anderson effort I’ve actually enjoyed rather than endured (The Royal Tenenbaums, I’m looking at you), but it still didn’t get into the list

10. Killer Joe. William Friedkin, the director of 1970s classics The Exorcist and The French Connection, has been given something of a new lease of life in recent years thanks to his collaborations with playwright Tracey Letts, two of whose plays he has adapted for the screen in recent years. This adaptation stars Matthew McConaughey (also undergoing a resurgence in fortunes) as a contract killer employed by Emile Hirsch to kill his mother so he can collect her life insurance. Although Hirsch can’t afford his services, McConaughey agrees to accept Hirsch’s fifteen-year-old sister, Dottie, as payment. A violent black comedy, this will be hard going for some, who may not be able to sit through it, but rewarding for those who do.

9. The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Emma Watson and Ezra Miller play school-age characters again, but very different ones than those who made them famous, Hermione and Kevin. In Stephen Chbosky’s adaptation of his own novel (which, unsurprisingly, more than does justice to it), they populate an alternative crowd which invites the wallflower Charlie into its group and sets him off on a journey of self-development punctuated by the usual coming-of-age film moments. A brilliant soundtrack as well as humour, pathos and a swift turn into darkness elevate this story above the usual teen-aimed fare.

8. Argo. The fact that this film is massive Oscar bait in terms of cast and subject matter (CIA rescues Americans from anti-American Middle Eastern country by employing the help of – who else? – Hollywood) shouldn’t detract from the skill with which director and star Ben Affleck builds and releases tension and suspense in a film in which there is no violence or even a chase scene. He nails this film in every way, punctuating it with humour but never letting us relax or feel like everything will turn out fine, even though we assume it must do. Sometimes patchy in front of the camera throughout his career, a long and glittering one surely awaits Affleck behind it.

7. Young Adult. Jason Reitman continued his impressive run of cinematic successes by reteaming with Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody and directing Charlize Theron in arguably her best screen performance to date as former high school queen bitch Mavis Gary, who returns to her hometown with the intention of getting her claws into her old boyfriend, now happily married and a new father to boot. Sour and cynical but still recognisably human, Theron has the perfect foil in Patton Oswalt as the stereotyped high school loser who now becomes a drinking partner and confidante.

6. Rust and Bone. It’s difficult to say exactly why Jacques Audiard’s forceful, almost melodramatic French romance works so well, especially with a plot catalyst that seems as contrived as Marion Cotillard having both her legs amputated after an accident involving a killer whale. Her relationship with feckless, irresponsible kickboxer Matthias Schoenaerts (channelling Marlon Brando), which begins after her accident, comprises the film’s second and third acts, and shouldn’t work – he’s too matter-of-fact, she’s overly proud – but they seem to fit together, and the evolution of his relationship with his young son serves as a counterpoint to his burgeoning relationship with her.

5. Martha Marcy May Marlene. Although Jennifer Lawrence has been taking (admittedly deserved) plaudits for her performances in two of the year’s biggest films, Silver Linings Playbook and The Hunger Games, another actress who has made an equally impressive breakout, albeit taking a more indie route, is Elizabeth Olsen, who gives a phenomenal performance as damaged cult escapee Martha in this unsettling psychological drama which does an impressive job of crawling under your skin without you ever realising it. With his debut feature, writer/director Sean Durkin has established himself as one to watch.

4. Seven Psychopaths. Writer and director Martin McDonagh’s follow-up to In Bruges sees Colin Farrell lumped in with his slightly unhinged friend Sam Rockwell and his business partner Christopher Walken when they accidentally-on-purpose steal psychotic gangster boss Woody Harrelson’s dog. That’s the one sentence description of this film, but it packs so much more into the narrative in every sense that it doesn’t do it justice. Matching In Bruges for violence, entertainment and quotability while simultaneously deconstructing the conventions of the films it was clearly based on, this was another undeniable McDonagh triumph.

3. Amour. Cannes 2012 saw the return of one of the masters of European cinema, Michael Haneke, with the Palme D’Or-winning Amour, his examination of love, death and the inevitable onset of aging. Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant play Anne and Georges, a couple in their eighties whose lives are torn apart when Anne suffers a stroke, losing her independence and forcing Georges into the role of nurse. Had this been a Hollywood film, the most emotional parts would have been saturated by a sweeping soundtrack, but here it is resisted and Haneke films mostly in long takes, savouring the intimacy and emotion prevalent throughout the film.

2. Shame. The second collaboration between Michael Fassbender and Steve McQueen produced a riveting, intense examination of sexual addiction and put paid once and for all to the idea that it’s the best kind of addiction to have. As Brandon, Fassbender is a timebomb desperate for sexual release so that he can get on with his life, and incapable of relating to women (apart from sister Carey Mulligan) in anything other than a sexual sense. An uncompromising film in every way, and a major reason why Fassbender and McQueen’s third film, 2013’s Twelve Years a Slave, is so hotly anticipated.

1. The Dark Knight Rises. Some of the lauding of Christopher Nolan’s final part of his Batman trilogy must have come from the relief that it wasn’t a complete stinker, but we can go further and say that it’s a terrific film in its own right, more than capable of standing tall alongside Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. Spectacular, complex and demanding of audience’s attentions in the way that Nolan has always demanded it, TDKR boasts strong performances from Christian Bale and Michael Caine, with fresh energy introduced in the forms of Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Anne Hathaway’s revelatory Catwoman. Given what it had to live up to and the success in which it did so, taking in spectacle, acting, visuals, scripting and direction, it’s my film of the year

Life of Pi Review

Novels are often said to be unfilmable – Wuthering Heights, for example, constantly falls at the cinematic hurdle – and Life of Pi, the 2002 Man Booker Prize winner by Yann Martel, was also said to be one of those books. It has now been brought to the screen by Academy Award-winner Ang Lee, who has proven that, although the novel was very much a filmable one, perhaps he shouldn’t have wasted his time.

The film concerns the coming-of-age of Pi (Suraj Sharma), an Indian believer in all things religious – simultaneously a Hindu, Christian and Muslim, he is derided by his zoo-owner father and encouraged by his mother – who, following a shipwreck on his way from India to Canada, finds himself stranded on a lifeboat with only the tiger from his father’s zoo, Richard Parker, for company.

The film's faults are many and far outweigh its virtues - most obviously, when two thirds of a film involve only one actor and a CGI tiger interacting with each other, and when most of the dialogue in that section comes by way of voiceover narration, you need to have employed an exceptional actor and, although Sharma aesthetically fits the role of Pi, this is far too demanding a role for him in his first film, and he is consistently guilty of misjudging the tone of scenes, lurching from soap-opera melodrama to deer-caught-in-the-headlights woodenness and back again throughout. When you’re being out-acted by the tiger, you’re in the wrong business.

Looking at the film from a purely narrative-driven point-of-view, the film is utterly devoid of any sense of tension because of the framing device Lee employs showing a grown-up Pi telling his fantastical story to a writer (Rafe Spall) who is completely taken in and more than happy to bring the tale to a mass-market audience – if we know that Pi survives, what’s the point in the story? The only purpose it can have, in that case, is to make us ask serious questions about our own beliefs and the role of religion in general, but unfortunately the film isn’t nearly as spiritually inspiring and insightful as it thinks it is – an exchange between Pi and the writer towards the end acts as a ham-fisted attempt to justify what we’ve just seen and make it seem as though it all had a point, and then casts doubt on the authenticity of the entire film as it’s just been presented to us. How can we be “convinced of the existence of God”, as Pi claims the writer will be upon hearing his story, when the ideas coming out of Life of Pi are so muddled? Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life was far more convincing in this respect, though that was an original screenplay, and it’s possible that Lee and screenwriter David Magee were hampered by the source material.

What cannot be faulted, however, are the visual effects employed throughout the film, which wonderfully complement the cinematography of Claudio Miranda. The tiger is predominantly computer-generated and for the vast majority of the lifeboat sequence it’s utterly convincing, as are the ways in which other oceanic animals are brought to life in dazzling colour, and Rhythm & Hues Studios, which has already won two Academy Awards for its previous work, must surely be on for another come the Oscars in February. From start to finish, it’s a beautiful, dazzling film, and that’s the best thing that can be said about it.

Life of Pi is a film that you’ll discuss after seeing it, but only to try and work out what the hell its point was, wonder why so much time and effort was put into adapting it and question why you spent more than necessary to see it in 3D when that seemingly-indestructible cinematic fad managed to render the stunning shipwreck sequence (undoubtedly the film’s highlight) as dark as the inside of Richard Parker’s stomach.

2/5

Seven Psychopaths Review

Like his previous film, In Bruges, for pure entertainment and endless quotability, Martin McDonagh’s Seven Psychopaths is one of the films of the year. Blending the stylistic violence of Tarantino, the genre deconstruction tropes of the likes of Scream and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang as well as the crackling, hilarious dialogue that has become his trademark, McDonagh has returned after four years with a gangster dramedy that skewers the films upon which it was based even as it leaves most of them (let’s not carried away, this is no Pulp Fiction) trailing in its wake.

Colin Farrell arguably hasn’t given a memorable screen performance since starring in In Bruges, and in his reunion with McDonagh here he plays things relatively low-key, allowing showier performances from the likes of Christopher Walken, Sam Rockwell and Woody Harrelson take the limelight. Farrell plays Marty, a struggling, alcoholic screenwriter who wants to write a screenplay called “Seven Psychopaths” but hasn’t got any further than the title. His best friend, Billy (Rockwell), in a bid to help him out, places an ad in the newspaper asking for psychopaths to contact him for research purposes, while Billy’s dognapping business partner Hans (Walken) misguidedly steals Bonnie, a Shih Tzu belonging to unhinged gangster Charlie Costello (Harrelson). Walken, playing that soft, calm intensity he’s been doing his whole career, gives his best performance in years, and is the perfect foil for Rockwell, who has the manic energy and haywire unpredictability to convince the audience that his character might turn out to be the biggest psychopath of them all. Harrelson, too, while often playing for laughs via his baby-voice relationship with Bonnie, delivers chills during an exchange with Han’s wife, Myra, in her hospital room.

The film winds its way back and forth between the Bonnie Situation and Marty’s screenplay and writer’s block problems, taking detours by way of (among other scenes) Tom Waits’s psychopath Zachariah, who answers Billy’s advert to relate a tale of travelling the country killing serial killers and an extended imaginary sequence where Billy lays out his ultra-violent conclusion for Marty’s screenplay, noting that audiences will accept you killing anyone you want in a film, but woe betide you if a cute rabbit happens to catch a bullet. In this way, elements of meta also find their way into the narrative – it is surely no coincidence, for example, that the main character is an Irish writer called Martin working in Hollywood – but for all its attempts to pull you out of the film and examine it critically, it’s far too enjoyable for you to do anything but sit back and wonder how McDonagh has managed to weave so much into such a seamless screenplay, which should be a shoe-in for a Best Original Screenplay Oscar nomination.

Violent, often side-splittingly funny, thought-provoking and even emotional at certain points, Seven Psychopaths is more than a worthy follow-up to In Bruges, confirming McDonagh as one of the most original writers and directors working in Hollywood today. One can only hope that we don’t have to wait four years for his next film to make an appearance.

4.5/5

The Perks Of Being A Wallflower Review

Every generation needs a coming-of-age movie. From Rebel Without A Cause through American Graffiti and Fast Times At Ridgemont High to The Breakfast Club and Dazed And Confused, high school years are so intensely formative and life-changing that they have made for richly fertile cinematic ground for decades. Directing the adaptation of his own novel, for which he also wrote the screenplay, Stephen Chbosky has crafted a film in The Perks Of Being A Wallflower that will stand up to the very best of the genre for legions of young people to find meaning in.

Although it’s hard to imagine the three leads, attractive as they are, ever being considered to be wallflowers at any high school across the US, they successfully convince the audience that they belong to “the island of misfit toys” – Logan Lerman plays the lead character Charlie, an introverted freshman who begins the film with no friends and hints at a traumatic period which he has only just begun to get over, with Ezra Miller and Emma Watson playing Patrick and Sam, extroverted step-siblings who don’t fit into any of the standardised cliques and so rule over their own group. Patrick is gay and has been hooking up with a jock football player who doesn’t want anyone to know that he likes men, while Sam seems sweet but, in her own way, is just as damaged as Charlie. They take him under their wing during their senior year, introducing him to the common experiences that most high-schoolers go through around the same age – first kisses, first drug usage, first dances and so on. They help him learn those important and valuable lessons about himself that every coming-of-age film likes to focus on, while becoming a key source of support for them as well.

It’s true that the film borders on kitsch at times, but it doesn’t matter – have any high-school age kids ever expressed themselves meaningfully in the way that they always seem to be able to manage in films? Even though phrases like “I feel infinite” jar when you hear them, the actors and characters are strong enough and the film moves swiftly along enough to ensure that these small missteps don’t linger in the memory. This is more of a character study, although tantalising flashbacks that show a younger Charlie and his interactions with his aunt promise and eventually much more, lending the film a much darker tone that might have been perceived from its promotion.

Miller and Watson, coming off the back of playing the psychopathic title character in We Need To Talk About Kevin and the straight-laced Hermione in the Harry Potter series respectively, are still playing school-age characters but dig into their parts with relish and skill. The flamboyant gay friend is often a thankless role but in Miller’s hands it becomes nuanced and touching and, while Watson may never escape Hermione (and especially if she doesn’t start taking on roles that can’t be compared to the character), her haltingly emotional scenes alone with Lerman demonstrate that she has already begun to grow as an actress. With the main three supported notably by Paul Rudd playing it straight as Charlie’s insightful and encouraging English teacher, the cast as a whole more than does justice to Chbosky’s story – while they may never entirely convince as wallflowers, they show that there are undeniably perks to being one.

4/5