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Do you ever find yourself with a backlog of worthy, critically lauded films you’re almost certain you’d like but almost certain not to watch? Yes, I do, and I even worm my way out of the guilt for neglecting them. Because in my mental filing cabinet, they’re all under “Will watch”. It’s just that the films I’m actually going to watch aren’t in that file, they’re in the “Ooh, lasers!” one. Even before it won the best documentary Oscar, this apparently brilliant film about the slaughter of dolphins was in the “Will watch” file. But actually, it should have been in the “Ooh, lasers!” file. Or at least the “Ooh, midnight stealth missions with an international team of specialists using thermal optics to dodge guard patrols and infiltrate an enemy compound with geographical fortification to plant hydrophones and cameras disguised as rocks” file. Because there’s honestly not much in that one yet.
You’ve probably already heard that it’s brilliant, and it is, but don’t assume as I did that means ‘brilliantly important’ or ‘brilliantly depressing’. It’s actually a hugely exciting piece of film from the opening credits to the end, revolving around the bizarre story of the man who captured and trained Flipper. That show sparked a global fascination with Bottlenose dolphins that led to the macabre events in a well-hidden cove in Japan, and the climax of the film is his own mission to infiltrate that cove and record what happens there.
It’s simultaneously an amazing biopic, a tense espionage thriller and a fascinating expose of the Japanese government’s cover-up. And giving a shit about dolphins is optional – the story’s compelling enough without empathy to drive it.
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Intricate corporate espionage con romance. This might not even be the eleventh best film of the year, but it’s fresh in my mind so it’s going here. It’s a denser, more convincing version of the Mr And Mrs Smith premise: spies in love, associated trust issues. The corporate espionage theme somehow makes it cooler than the usual CIA/NSA/MEH, and the intentionally confusing time structure is fun to unravel. It also marks itself out as a superior con flick with its ending, avoiding both the ‘smug’ and ‘makes no fucking sense’ traps most of the rest of the genre falls into. Having said that, for those who’ve seen it, once The Thing is acquired, why does The Person put suspicion on The Other Person, and how does the latter get out of it? Supporting Role goes to Giamatti for a spectacularly frothing take on a very Ballmer-like CEO.
Violent, surreal kid’s fantasy. I had kind of hoped that one of my favourite writers adapting one of my favourite children’s books might mean some kind of story or content would be added to it, but it still works for the same reason the book does. It knows exactly what a weird young boy wants to do, and supposes a place where it can happen for a while. The arbitrary nature of the conflict and turmoil feels a bit pointless in the new book, Egger’s novelisation of his own script, but on-screen it doesn’t especially need a point: it’s wonderful madness to watch, and the emotions are impactful even if their causes are randomised.
Animated Wes Anderson movie. Every review I’ve read of this is entirely about whether it works as a kid’s movie, which misses the more important question: is it a good Wes Anderson movie? Yes! One of the best! The characteristic awkward pauses, wonky comic timing, lame heroics and quiet psychosis all work marvellously with the inherent creakiness of hand-made models, the shitty dancing and scary eating. Supporting Role goes either to rat, for being amazing, or Michael Gambon for: “You wrote a bad song, Petey!”
Less idealised superhero movie. Blessed with the advantage of never having read the comic, I was able to wholeheartedly enjoy this. It’s fun to see superheroes in a vaguely real world, where people are assholes and politics matter. The mask-off moment is tough to handle well with any vigilante, tougher still when he’s as vicious, gravelly-voiced and enigmatic as Rorschach. But here it’s done with a disarming lack of ceremony, and the casting of an awkward, freckly weirdo is perfect (says an awkward, freckly weirdo). More generally, that awkward freckly weirdo is perfect: when he finally gets his ‘face’ back, it’s almost a relief – he’s more terrifying without it. His quivering facial expression in the final scenes defies adequate description.
Dark, surreal fairytale. It was a traumatic year to be a kid. Four of my ten favourite films were kid’s movies with disturbing, disgusting, upsetting or inappropriate content. Coraline is about a girl seeking comfort in another dimension where she can have everything she wants if she lets them REMOVE HER EYES and REPLACE THEM WITH BUTTONS. Jesus fucking Christ. Happily, it’s disturbing in even more inspired and wonderful ways, and it’s one of the most deliciously weird films outside of the cult.
British political satire. “In Britain we have a saying… It’s difficult, difficult… lemon… difficult.”
Grim sci-fi action. Just around the time District 9 is getting a little too dark, a little too painful and unpleasant to watch, someone flicks a switch and it transforms into a spectacular and fun action film. Some say that lets it down, for me it saves it. I have no interest in the allegory and I was about to genuinely not like this film for taking itself too seriously, and as if by magic it stopped.
Sci-fi mystery. I’ll just say what I said earlier in the year: I thought it was going to be primarily about madness, and I’m glad it wasn’t. I thought it wouldn’t make sense, and I’m glad it did. I thought nothing would happen, and I was glad I was wrong. It’s not a twist film; the quirk occurs early and almost casually. But it keeps dodging expectations by straying close to clichés is has no intention of treading in. That makes it feel natural rather than contrived.
Comedy horror. A film made specifically for people who, like me, get irritated with the protagonists of zombie films for not having seen any zombie films. The protagonist of Zombieland – a World of Warcraft player – has seen some zombie films. He knows how they get you, and has geekily sensible rules for how to avoid it. There’s that, and there’s a general sense of fun: the reason zombies are such a mainstay is they combine an empty-world fantasy with an acceptable-violence one, which are two cheap and exploitative ways to have irresponsible fun without becoming morally compromised. Zombieland actually gets it, and gears its whole mood around the guilty positives.
Adventure. You know when people say “I’m not ashamed to say I cried”? I’m ashamed! Of course I’m ashamed! It’s pathetic! My only excuse is that Pixar have some witchy way to key into my emotions in a matter of seconds. That didn’t trigger the waterworks, despite an early death: sad things never do. It was when, towards the very end, a private discovery puts the old guy’s whole quest in a new, happier light. They cynically stashed all that sadness in my headspace all the way back in the intro, just so they could pull the plug and immasculate me at the last minute. Twats.
Pyow! I don’t actually like Star Trek very much, the original series. And this is the same characters even earlier, so not much positive bias going in. But I love this, partly for making retro sci-fi feel impactful, fantastic and exciting, but mostly because of Kirk and Spock. I never cared for the insufferably unstoppable alpha-male Kirk and the nothingy Spock. But by pitting the two as fierce rivals, they’ve revitalised both characters: Kirk’s still cocky, but he’s not always right and he doesn’t always get his way. Spock’s still dry, but there’s real steel beneath it now, and you feel like he gives a damn. [Spoiler warning] Ultimately in their struggle Kirk gets the command, and Spock gets – or rather always had – the girl. It’s a surprising twist, which is exactly why it makes the characters work: there’s no longer that dull inevitability. Also I really like the way the phasers have a disc that swivels when switching between stun and kill. Anyone see anything good I missed?
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Pentadact: Interesting stuff! I remain interested, but not quite interested enough to pay. I like spectacle, but 3D always looks very slightly flickery to me, which annoys me after a while.
Fixed the images. Dunno what broke, but I fixed it anyway. | ||||
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Is a sci-fi multiplayer shooter out this week, extremely like Battlefield 2142. Battlefield 2142 was awesome, and so is this. You literally dive into the battlefield from orbit, with no parachute, then pound each other with raucous guns and squabble over objectives. I like it because you can design your own class in a powerful and elegant way, choose where to drop down and angle your descent, and the dynamic missions that pop up are clear, fun and varied. Enemies get dynamic missions too, and in one round they were coming very close to capturing our intelligence. I’d died, so chose my custom Assault Sniper class, and picked their intel capture point to drop in on. I smacked into the ground just as the intel carrier reached the walkway leading to the capture point, and knelt there nailing him with sniper shots as he ran toward me until he buckled. It occured to me afterwards that I was the final boss in some AI dude’s epic quest to take our intelligence across this huge warzone. Sorry AI dude! Boss fights suck!
Aside: I got to see this game at an event in Texas once, and ran into the developers in the hotel the next morning, on my way out from breakfast. I asked them how they felt the presentation went, which is a stupid thing to ask developers because that’s exactly what they want to know from you. So they invited me to sit down and tell them. Previously I knew them only as the guys responsible for a FEAR expansion so drab I openly mocked it on this site (sorry!). But after my oat bran French toast stuffed with maple banana cream-cheese with them, I was left with the impression that they were smart, fun guys who play all the games I play and have most of the same loves and gripes about them. I’m really pleased to see that actually comes out in their game.
Is a film released in the UK this week about aliens living alongside humans in Johannesburg. It’s unusual in that the aliens are powerless: only the workers survived their accidental arrival, and they don’t have the wit to stand up for themselves. It’s also unusual in that the protagonist is both dorky and unsympathetic. He’s a smiling bureaucrat who goes about his unpleasant task with equal parts relish, cruelty and incompetence. The horrors that befall him, initially satisfying, soon become hard to watch, and the whole film threatens to become darker than its slightly flimsy premise warrants. Mercifully it stops short of that, and instead explodes in a giddy celebration of slapstick ultraguns and splattery comeuppance. The gritty unease of the first half sets off the geeky indulgence of the second satisfyingly, mixing moods and genres and smart and dumb in ways we rarely see, but should more often.
Aside: Mark Kermode said this week that all good sci-fi has to be a metaphor for something, make a point about reality. He’s an idiot. District 9 wilfully draws parallels to social rifts in Johannesburg, but like much good sci-fi, does it to add potency to its alien imagery, rather than say something about the source. You don’t need to replace black people with aliens for us to recognise cruelty and oppression. Is Bletchley Park, which became known in wartime as Station X partly because it was the tenth wireless communications station established, and partly because if they went around calling it Bletchley Park people might realise it was in Bletchley. It’s where the first programmable electronic computer was invented, not to crack the Enigma code but the Lorenz cipher, a much harder encryption that no-one seems to have heard of. It’s also where the war was won, a good two years earlier than it otherwise might have been, thanks essentially to mathematicians there being better at maths than the Germans thought anyone possibly could be. The ability to read communications they assumed were undecipherable was such an enormous advantage that the Allies had to pretend they didn’t have it. They’d send scout planes to locations they already knew contained German fleets, just to give the Germans a feasible explanation for why they were about to be destroyed.
Kim and I went there last weekend. It’s falling apart. They can’t afford to maintain it, and no-one’s willing to help. Some thieves stole a German Enigma machine from there a while back, wrongly assuming that the site of one of Britain’s greatest contributions to humanity would have government money to pay the ransom. They couldn’t. The thieves gave up and posted the machine to Jeremy Paxman, who returned it with what we must assume was an expression of some bemusement. Aside: This week the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown capitulated to an online petition by coder John Graham-Cumming for the government to apologise for sentencing the man primarily responsible for breaking the Enigma code to chemical castration for being homosexual. I don’t follow my own country’s politics closely enough to be conversant in the many reasons I should hate Gordon Brown, but the slimy, repulsive way he or his writers attempted to turn that apology into an excuse to boast, bafflingly claiming that he’s ‘pleased and proud’ to have to apologise for our country’s mutilation of its hero, is officially one.
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Inferno: I just watched district 9 and wow, the CG in that film is simply incredible. I thoroughly enjoyed the film too. Though, as you say, the stuff that befalls him and the populace of the alien district becomes harder and harder to watch. I was glad it changed into an overdramatic actiony silm with awesome special effects and alien technology. The best part was it didn't play out in the way I'd expected. It's also a LOT gorier than I expected it to be, just as a warning to anyone intending to see it.
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Best not to know much about this film going in, so I’ll be vague.
It’s not a twist film; the quirk occurs early and almost casually. But it keeps dodging expectations by straying close to clichés is has no intention of treading in. That makes events feel natural rather than contrived, which is disarming. Also on the positive side, it’s awesome.
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Cpt.Average: Just finished watching it at 1.30am. This is an example of why I favour sci-fi as a genre (despite the 80% or so thats worthless) - good sci-fi is REALLY good and extremely unpredictable. It has a pedigree that allows for not always letting the good guys win, which raises the suspense potential immeasurably.
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Despite being an English word in front of a Belgian placename, the title manages to make this sound like ponderous French arthouse cinema. Really, they should have called it: In Fockin Bruges? Wit You? Because it’s very much not ponderous. It’s a comedy thriller about two hitmen forced to bide their time in a quaint European city while awaiting further instructions. It’s fantastic. The funniest film I’ve seen in ages, including Wall-E and the last Futurama one. Situational comedy apparently means unfunny, often grave situations with gags inserted forcibly into them, but In Bruges exmplifies what the term ought to mean: comedy that derives almost solely from the volatile absurdity of the situation. There’s one scene in particular where you have no idea if you’re about to witness a murder, a suicide or a manly heart-to-heart. And later, one of my favourite mid gunfight conversations between antagonists, taking the crown from the bit in Grosse Pointe Blank where Dan Aykroyd offers to sell John Cusack an ammo clip. I think the film’s a little mean towards its short guy, and the ending felt just a tiny bit too inevitable before it happened, but the latter is more than made up for by the last line. Colin Farrell’s an unexpectedly adept comic actor, but Ralph Fiennes steals it utterly as the frothing London crimelord. 
Wall-E I didn’t believe the people telling me this was incredible, was wrong yet again. It is. Not so much for Wall-E himself, as the bizarrely affecting romance between him and Eve (or Eva, as Wall-E seems to say it). I don’t find robots cute and I almost never like romance, so the story had some serious work to do to win me over, but it accomplished it within about thirty seconds of the pair first appearing on screen together. Eve blows things up! That’s all I need to see to get invested in this love story. Some scenes just made me beam. It’s my favourite Pixar film, beating the Incredibles partly by being about robots, and partly because I’ve always resented the message of the Incredibles. You know that central line, where the kid complains that at school they’re always being told that everyone’s special, “But that’s the same as no-one being special at all.” Oh yeah, you’re right. People who aren’t genetically superior aren’t special. And it’s about time normal people were seen for the interchangable, expendable drones they are compared to you mighty ubermen. 
The Dark Knight I enjoyed this a lot, but I did find myself sitting there thinking “Why aren’t I more invested in this? Why don’t I care?” I cared throughout Batman Begins, and that had a lot more flaws and downtime than this. I think it’s because, while they’re both ideas movies, the first film just had one idea: fear. Batman’s origin is all about fear, the plot was all about fear, and the villain was the embodiment of fear. Dark Knight is about whether people need a white knight more than a dark one, but its main feature, the Joker, doesn’t have much to do with that, so it doesn’t feel as focused. I’ve heard a few people have mention that it feels stretched to include the two villians, usually with the caveat that they do realise it was necessary. I don’t think it strictly was: I think there could have been a movie entirely about Batman and Two Face, with the Joker just an unseen spectre in the background, teasing for a film of his own to crown the trilogy. Of course, this is the worst suggestion ever, given the circumstances regarding one of the cast necessary to enact it. The other thing I liked about Begins was that it explained Batman to me, because I honestly didn’t know what he was about. And I thought the Dark Knight was explaining the Joker to me – because again, I’ve never felt I got him – with the line “Do I look like a man with a plan?” But then every caper he pulls is a masterpiece of proposterously convoluted planning. The bit that did paint an evocative picture of him was the best scene of the film, with the line: “I enjoy dynamite, gunpowder, gasoline. You know what they all have in common? They’re cheap.” I give your film the worst grade imaginable: an A minus minus! Futurama will probably never be bad, but this lacked spark in exactly the way Bender’s Big Score didn’t. There’s a difference between fan service and what plays more like fan fic. The plot is entirely about a single, weak conceit that doesn’t really work as a joke, and makes no sense as a serious plot element. The drama is lazy, mean-spirited stuff that falls back on the character’s clichés, then takes them to out-of-character extremes for the sake of laughs that never come. A highly spoilerific example will appear if you hover over this image: 
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Jason L: I'm the best part of a year behind on this, apparently, but... More Futurama this summer! Without bizarre pastiche film/episode writing restrictions! Oplease oplease opleasebegood...
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I’ve already seen more great films this year than in the entirety of last year, but 2008 can’t really take the credit – pretty much all of them came out in 2007 in the US. The films I expected to love turned out to be merely good, and the films I had little hope of enjoying, I loved. I’m at the stage now where I don’t think anyone can agree with me even on just these seven films, let alone my increasingly bizarre viewing history.  There Will Be Blood: I’m not sure I could say I enjoyed this. People who haven’t seen it keep asking me what it’s like. What’s it like? It’s a masterpiece. It’s an extraordinary piece of cinema, a phenomenal performance, a work of art. Did I like it? No, not really. I’m just not that interested in cinema, or performances, or art. I was gripped all the way through, and as critics have said, what’s exciting about it is that you have no idea where it’s going. But by the end – which is macabre, surreal, comic, and utterly sick – I just thought “Oh. Nowhere, then.”  No Country For Old Men: This I did enjoy, a lot, but I still choke on my popcorn whenever someone calls it the Coens’ best. Are we talking about the same Coens? The Fargo, Lebowski, Fink, O Brother, Hudsucker Coens? Maybe there are other Coens. Again, it’s extraordinarily cinematic and artistically beautiful in a whole set of ways I don’t care about. What I did love about its direction was the fetishistic attention to detail: the sweeping black scuff-marks on the police station floor from the cop thrashing as he choked, the burn-splatters around close-range gunshot-wounds when they’re stripped bare for treatment, the way one character’s fate is only communicated to us by whether or not another checks the soles of his shoes. It’s also probably the most excruciatingly tense thriller I’ve ever seen – there are long scenes where you know precisely what will happen, but not precisely when, and I felt like I lost years of my heart-healthy life to each. What I liked most about it was that it felt like how a thriller premise would play out in the real world: the major plot events are determined by brutal, random chance that doesn’t bias the hero or villain, and when a character dies, it’s not always a poetic defeat at the hands of his nemesis. But unlike most of its fans, I didn’t think the ending was profound or interesting. I get it. I got it a while back. I got it from the title of the movie. I didn’t need the credits to roll on some absurd symbolic chin-stroking introspection to tell me what the point of the film was.  Gone Baby Gone: This absolutely deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as the above two, but rarely is. It’s a noir private-detective thriller starring Casey Affleck, who is a dramatically better actor than Ben in both sense of the word; and directed by Ben, who is a dramatically better director than actor, again in both senses. It revolves around a missing child, and the length and breadth of dilemma they mine from that scenario is alarming. It culminates in a decision so tough that you’re left with no idea who you’re rooting for, even as it tears all the good guys apart. That’s the hardest part of noir to achieve: true moral ambiguity, a situation so sticky it’s no longer clear who’s doing the right thing. Gone has a resolution of sorts, but it’s so hard won that it feels sobering rather than victorious.  Charlie Wilson’s War: Very much liked this, but given that it was written by Aaron Sorkin and prominently featured Seymour Hoffman, I’d expected to love it. Hoffman is superb – a whole film about his character rather than Hanks’ would have been magnificent. I just didn’t care all that much about Wilson’s private life, or Roberts’ character’s subplot, and those took up a lot of the running time.  Knocked Up: This is the only one I did see last year, twice in fact. It’s the funniest I’ve seen in ages, and emotionally honest with it. The premise is cheap – “Ha ha what if an ugly guy got you pregnant? Lol.” – but then the film never flinches from the awkward, unhappy consequences of that. It pays for that poster by having to tackle a really hard question: what do you do if it’s not working out but there’s a kid? And it doesn’t dodge it by having them magically turn out to be soulmates or by killing off the baby (you laugh, but it’s been done). It actually gives an answer, comes out and says “This unhappy compromise is slightly less unhappy than the other unhappy compromises.” Also, lol. Jack and Jill – the network executives who alternately congratulate and neurotically demean Katherine Heigl’s character – are worth the ticket price alone. And the weird, slight-too-friendly relationship between Seth Rogen’s character and Paul Rudd’s – the only real soul-mates of the film – just gets funnier and funnier. There’s also a lot of good relationship philosophy, meditations on chairs, a fantastic performance from a kid, and the seriousness of Steve Martin vehicles. In fact, quotes: “Marriage is like a tense, unfunny version of Everybody Loves Raymond, only it doesn’t last 22 minutes. It lasts forever.” “Oh, Matthew Fox? The Lost guy? You know what’s interesting about him?” “Where do babies come from?”  Dan In Real Life: I don’t even know why I saw this, the best I’d heard was that it wasn’t as bad as it might seem. That’s true; it’s wonderful. It’s so damn hard to make me care about a character, let alone root for them, but Dan (Steve Carrell) treads a tightrope between pathetic victim and jerk that just about keeps him clear of either – a rare feat. Each time it builds excruciating emotional tension, it doesn’t so much diffuse it with humour as release it in a controlled explosion. I’m sure most of the things I laughed weren’t funny at all, the script just has an uncanny knack for poking me in the ribs when I’m most vulnerable. Like Knocked Up, it takes a really tricky mess of plot points and doesn’t shy away from picking a line of best-fit through them, but its unflinching acceptance of the consequences of that doesn’t hold up all the way to the end. There’s just one, brief, tired old trope for resolving a love triangle that they roll out towards the end to keep everyone happy, and it does marr the otherwise impressive awkwardness of the whole ordeal.  Bee Movie: What the hell? Why did everyone tell me this sucked? I caught this on a plane, because one person of five had told me it was ‘okay’. It was great! I laughed ten times more than I did during Ratatouille, none of the characters were anything like as annoying, and it was actually rather original. There’s a bit where Jerry Seinfeld bee flies repeatedly into the same pane of glass about ten times before stopping, looking at it for the first time and muttering, “Oh that is just diabolical.”  Enchanted: I really thought I would loathe this, and I didn’t. It’s about a Disney princess who comes to life, so you can imagine what else was on the plane that I ended up watching it. But it’s sort of almost halfway charming. All I’d seen before was a clip of that awful “That’s How You Know” song on the Oscars, which Once rightly pounded into the dust and snatched the award from. But when that number actually came around in the film, with the slightly absurd way it starts, and the reggae buskers – I tried not to smile and was unsuccessful.
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Half Loaf 2: I disagree with your Opinion on 'There Will Be Blood'. It has a Beautiful score by Johnny Greenwood and like Mark Kermode Said 'It redefines the language of modern cinema'. However for the rest I agree apart from 'A Bee Movie'. It sells itself as movie for children and it just makes adult jokes. For Instance, How many 5 year olds Know What Sue Means. In the mean time It's Oscar season so a whole flock of film are out that you should go see. EG; Slumdog Millionaire, Changeling and The Wrestler. Enjoy 2009!
PS: I am going to see Architecture in Helsinki on the sixth of February | ||||
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Murder Inc.
Masq
Open World Games: The Good Stuff
A Stab At Meet The Spy
Invincibles
GalCiv 2 War Diary
SWAT 4: The Movie
Impression Of A Buddy
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I could do without the arbitrary stock footage of dolphins which seemed to just want to show off how beautiful the creatures are, but in general it was very, very good.