As ever, expect 2013 entries that I didn't get to see in 2013 because of reasons.
10. Blue is the Warmest Colour (dir. Abdellatif Kechiche)
As my dad aptly put it, this is the Frenchest film ever,
being concerned with just three things: sex, food and philosophy. The three-hour running time is a bit
excessive, but only a bit – given that it stretches over several years, it needs
to be long to work properly. A trim of
fifteen minutes or so would’ve done it. Kechiche's thorough shooting method (I seem to recall reading he ended
up with something like 800 hours of
footage) means that it can be a bit vague at times – there’s no real way of
working out exactly how many years it spans – but it results in a sort of
emotional scrapbook of a person’s life that works very well (cue Richard
Linklater laughing a laugh of one-upmanship as he unveils Boyhood later in the year).
Stunning performances from Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux,
obviously.
9. The Wolf of Wall Street (dir. Martin Scorsese)
Another three-hour epic, but this one earns every minute of
its time. That’s why Scorsese is so much
the daddy that my laptop has his name in its spellcheck dictionary. Its staggering pace and energy (seriously,
this was directed by a seventy-something man?), as well as the sheer amount of
plot to get through, means it doesn’t have time to bore you or overrun. Key to its success is that it’s incredibly funny,
with Jonah Hill waltzing off with the top moments (a toss-up between his trying
to justify being married to his cousin or masturbating in the middle of a party
while off his face on expired pills).
(“Toss-up” pun accidental but very pleasing.)
8. The Raid 2
(dir. Gareth Huw Evans)
A mere stripling at two-and-a-half hours, The Raid 2 is ridiculous. The first Raid could be subtitled Iko Uwais Beats Up Indonesia, and this
sequel could be subtitled Iko Uwais Runs
Out Of Indonesians To Beat Up So Tries It On With Half Of Japan Too And I Think
There Were Some Chinese Guys In There As Well, Right?. A twisting criminal epic delivered through
the medium of fist/face interaction, the major failing is that it is
occasionally obvious that the script started life as a separate project before
writer/director Evans retooled it as a sequel to his surprise hit, and it lacks
a little of the sheer verve of its predecessor.
But then something completely jaw-dropping (or, indeed, jaw-demolishing)
happens and you forgive it. One example
will do for all: there’s an action sequence with Uwais scrapping in the back of
a car driving down a motorway where the camera, which is obviously attached to
the outside of the car, suddenly makes an impossible move and passes through the
car and out the other side. I couldn’t
for the life of me work out how they did it (it clearly wasn’t CGI) so
consulted the internet when I got home.
Turns out, they dressed a cameraman as a car seat and passed the camera
to him, then he passed the camera to someone driving alongside the car. Yup.
7. Frozen (dir.
Chris Buck & Jennifer Lee)
You might have heard of this one. In some ways it’s kind of odd that Frozen has become Disney’s all-time
success story – it’s certainly not one of the studio’s best, and indeed its
obvious spiritual forbear, Tangled,
was a better movie overall. But in other
ways it’s not that odd, because when Frozen’s
good it’s very good indeed. The
downsides – mostly to do with the trolls, who dispense clunky exposition at the
beginning, completely derail the film’s momentum with a misplaced comic song
two-thirds through and that’s it –
are more forgivable when you learn that the final script only came together
twelve months before release (a preposterously small amount of time to do a
big-budget CGI cartoon). And the good
bits – the excellent characterisation, clever deconstructionist script,
jaw-dropping costumes (seriously, watch it on Blu-ray and marvel at individual
stitches) and strong musical numbers – are the bits that stick in the
mind. I’ve already mentioned that thisfilm has my single favourite sequence of the year, a marvel of songbook, voice
acting and animation.
6. A Most Wanted Man
(dir. Anton Corbijn)
A proper, meaty, grown-up movie of the sort that were apparently
all that was made in the early- to mid-‘70s, if you listen to nostalgic
cineastes. (I was not existent enough to comment then,
but I suspect all the good movies were remembered and all the crap ones
forgotten, rather than some sort of golden period. It’s usually the way.) The tale of an illegal immigrant looking to
claim his war criminal father’s inheritance hiding out in Hamburg, being fought
over by two different sets of authorities – one just wanting to secure the
cash, the other hoping to use him in a progressive, humanitarian-ish trap to
catch a suspected terrorist bankroller – it maintains just enough bruised
optimism to avoid a bleakly cynical view without becoming idealised. Atmospheric and twisting, it’s a tense,
intelligent, thought-provoking watch.
5. Gone Girl (dir.
David Fincher)
If A Most Wanted Man
avoids bleak cynicism, Gone Girl
dives in headfirst but maintains your interest by finding the utter bastardry
of humanity completely hilarious. The cheerfully ludicrous plotting – which
starts off as unnervingly plausible before gradually shedding its skin to
reveal an unashamed eye-popping melodrama is seized on by the whole cast with
relish, while Fincher plugs back into his Fight
Club-era, blackly-witty-misanthropy persona. At the beginning I was tense, halfway through
I was laughing, at the end I was back to tense again. It’s the movie to watch if you want to break
up with someone!
4. The Hunger Games:Mockingjay – Part 1 (dir. Francis Lawrence)
I wasn’t expecting great things of this one. I love, love, love Suzanne Collins’ Hunger
Games trilogy, and was concerned about the films because they’re the sort
of thing that could easily be messed up on the trip to the screen. The first film, happily, proved an exemplary
adaptation. Then I got worried again
when original director/co-screenwriter Gary Ross bowed out due to concerns
about the time demands the studio had for the turnaround for the sequel and
handed the reins to Lawrence, a man known for solid, exec-pleasing efficiency
rather than greatness. The second movie,
Catching Fire, appeared to play out
my concerns, being decent but unremarkable.
Then came the news that the final book, Mockingjay, would be split in two – something completely
unnecessary, as the book could be comfortably fit into one film. It seemed The
Hunger Games had fallen into the tiresome formula of all the other
young-adult adaptations clogging up cinema in the wake of Harry Potter (a series that actually justified its trendsetting
concept of dividing the last book). Just
look at that awkward full film title, for heaven’s sake. But!
Happily, and unexpectedly, and delightfully, Mockingjay 1 proves to be a great movie, close in quality to the
first instalment. The book’s main
emotional beats are transplanted seamlessly, new ideas (dragging vapid Effie
into the grey communist state of District 13, giving President Coin more of a
rounded personality since the film lacks the first-person perspective of a
character who doesn’t like her, scenes of the Capitol’s reactions to the
growing revolution) fit in well and the film even finds time to satirise
itself. The Blu-ray of the first film
included a documentary with scenes of fans going crazy for the initial trailer,
and the propaganda films made by District 13 have the same feeling as the
film’s own advertising, finishing with 13ers going crazy in much the same
way. I was half-expecting a hashtag.
3. Belle (dir.
Amma Asante)
Proving that Hollywood hasn’t cornered the market on
inaccurate historical depictions, this biopic of the UK’s first mixed-race
aristocrat is apparently (my dad researched it) about as factually accurate as Mockingjay. And it doesn’t matter, because the film’s
brilliant. It’s the sort of narrative
you can half-envisage just from being told the basic scenario, and it doesn’t
really surprise at all, but it’s made with such conviction and love that you
end up getting swept along anyway. The
cast is universally excellent, but when you have the likes of Tom Wilkinson,
Penelope Wilton and Miranda Richardson in there universal excellence is pretty
much prerequisite. The undoubted star is
relative newcomer Gugu Mbatha-Raw in the title role, giving a performance
that demands awards to be fired at her from a high-powered Gong Cannon. (Side note: nice to see that Tom Felton,
a.k.a. Draco Malfoy, can expect a long, comfortable career of playing
aristocratic dickbags. He’s very good at
it.)
2. The Wind Rises
(dir. Hayao Miyazaki)
Accompanying Belle
in the Biopic That Says Bollocks To Actual History corner, here we have the story
of Jiro Horikoshi, an aeroplane designer best known for the Mitsubishi Zero,
wherein pretty much everything is made up for the sake of the film. However, not only is this a Studio Ghibli
film, it’s Hayao Miyazaki’s final film, so we’ll let it off. It helps that it’s really good. Miyazaki’s first attempt at a “realistic”
film (unless you count The Castle of
Cagliostro, which I don’t), it’s a quietly absorbing drama that takes on an
extra dimension when you consider Jiro some more. A quiet, skinny, polite man with huge
coke-bottle glasses, rarely far from a cigarette and completely obsessed with
flight, it’s a thinly-veiled autobiographical portrait of the writer-director. The film he inhabits presents a fascinating
portrait of a Japan attempting to run so hard and so fast into the 20th
century (one memorable moment shows the latest plane prototype being towed onto
the runway by oxen, much to Jiro’s colleague’s despair) that it ends up on the
wrong side of history, as Jiro goes on a business trip to a shadowy,
fear-filled Germany and muses on how his “beautiful dreams” of flying machines
are being corrupted by war. (It’s
interesting to note that Japanese audiences considered the movie too
anti-Japan, while Americans thought it too pro-Japan, essentially letting off a
war criminal.) On a more artistic note,
it’s nice to see that even for his final film, Miyazaki experiments with new
ideas, most notably using human voices in place of sound effects for certain
scenes, which adds an unreal, nightmarish quality to the film’s finest moment,
a vivid recreation of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923.
Possibly the most Gilliamesque film ever made, the most
obvious thing to say about The Zero
Theorem is that it’s a sort of flip-side to Brazil (indeed, writer Pat Rushin apparently checked out the Brazil screenplay among others for
inspiration when writing it). Where Brazil’s Sam Lowry tries to escape from
a world of boring, grey bureaucracy via flights of fancy, Zero Theorem’s Qohen Leth
is a man who prefers quiet boringness but is stuck in a hyper-connected,
hyper-colourful, hyper-hyper world that could easily be us in fifty years or
so. It’s an excellent performance from Christoph Waltz, a man better known for
playing charismatic men – his Qohen, bald, shy, awkward and head-to-toe in
black, couldn’t be more out of place and constantly uncomfortable if he
tried. His new work assignment – to try
and crack the titular theorem, which may or may not solve the meaning of
existence itself, worked on via a virtual reality machine that looks like Mirror’s Edge meets Portal meets some really hard algebra and so impossible that
everyone who’s tried it before has ended up dead – seems initially a nice
excuse to not have to leave his house.
Unfortunately, people keep disturbing his peace and as he gets closer to
cracking the theorem the film gets closer to cracking in general. Gilliam’s usual themes of a man up against an
increasingly strange panoply of adversaries in a world with certain norms
exaggerated to grotesques – here it’s information overload, how social networks
can both increase and decrease social connections and a general infantilisation
of culture (a neat visual gag near the beginning concerns the Church of Batman
the Redeemer) – have rarely worked so well.
The film’s one major failing is that the female lead, Mélanie Thierry,
has a rather basic, oversexualised role – but then that proves to be kind of
the point near the end, so there you go.
SPECIAL BONUS ROUND! POINTLESS AWARDS TIMES!
Best Cameo
Billy Connolly as Dain in The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies. A dwarf chief so belligerently Glaswegian he knocks orcs out by headbutting them despite the fact he's not wearing a helmet and they are. Also he rides a pig into battle and has a hammer pretty much the size of himself.
Best Facial Hair
Connolly again. He has a beard shaped to resemble boar's tusks.
Best Tree
Groot, obviously.
Best Batman
Lego Batman, also obviously.
Sweatiest Sweat
I saw Alien and Aliens as a double bill for Hallowe'en (first time I've ever been to a double bill, in fact). Having seen them on the big screen for the first time, I can confirm the actors get ridiculously sweaty.
Most Envy-Inducing Superpower
Blink's ability to make portals. Love the bit where she provides a way for Colossus to build his momentum up. Someone's being playing Portal!
Most Inexplicable Lack of Blood
Two improbably giant dragons have a fight in How to Train Your Dragon 2. One stabs the other with its building-sized tusk. Drops of blood spilled? None.
Most Touching Scene Where One of the Characters is Additionally Shitting Himself
Robert Downey Jr. cleaning up his Robert Duvall-shaped, cancer-riddled dad in The Judge.
Funniest Pronunciation of a Single Syllable
The Hobbit wins again, with Martin Freeman's "...Yiss." when asked by the elf King Thranduil if he was the one who organised a prison break from under the nose of the elf King Thranduil.
Luckiest Human
Aaron Taylor-Johnson's Ford Brody goes through so many near-death scrapes in Godzilla that it got quite funny by the end of the film.
Silliest Name
Seriously, "Ford Brody"? And this is a year that gave us Guardians of the Galaxy and a Middle-earth movie.
Biggest Slight Disappointment
Jenny Agutter starts beating people up in Captain America: The Winter Soldier! Then it turns out she's actually Scarlett Johansson disguised as Jenny Agutter. Oh.
No comments:
Post a Comment