2006 has proved, with the exception of a very few good films, a moribund year for cinema. Nonetheless, the ‘best of’ list has been difficult to compile. MovieBuff usually goes about it on the basis of how much he enjoyed the films in question. This time, however, the most important and starkly powerful film of the year has to be Paul Greengrass’s United 93. Not a film you enjoy. Not a film you even watch. A film you live – claustrophobically, tensely, urgently.
So I’m introducing a new category this year, one that slots in before the Top Ten:
The Most Important Film of the Year: United 93. For the reasons cited above.
And now to the Top Ten:
1. The Prestige. The smartest, cleverest film I’ve seen in ages. Christopher Nolan returns to the tessellating structuralism of his earlier Memento and produces a masterpiece.
2. Pan’s Labyrinth. Wonderment and terror, poetry and brutality, fantasy and grim reality swirl in and around each other in the shifting canvas of Guillermo del Toro’s greatest film yet.
3. Good Night, and Good Luck / Syriana. Okay, I’m cheating here by giving two films the same placement, but both see George Clooney get political and emerge on top form, confirming his talents as actor and (in GN&GL) director.4. Little Miss Sunshine. A film about failure and familial dysfunctionality. Quite how it manages to be so charming, funny and ultimately life-affirming is still something I’m trying to figure out.
5. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. Tommy Lee Jones delivers a directorial debut of outstanding promise in this literate and intelligent contemporary western. Worthy of Peckinpah.6. Children of Men. The future is dark; the future is Cuaron’s. The Mexican director takes on quintessentially British writer P.D. James’s most thorny novel and creates a compelling and gritty vision of a broken-down society.
7. Walk the Line. Joaquin Phoenix gives the performance of a lifetime in this definitely-not-rose-tinted biopic of controversial C&W icon Johnny Cash. Wuz robbed at the Oscars.
8. Breakfast on Pluto. Neil Jordan’s best since The Crying Game: witty, poignant, political, satirical, inventive. Cillian Murphy gives a bravura performance.
9. Lady in the Water. M Night Shyamalan atones for the self-importance of The Village with this plaintive, poignant and cleverly worked-out fairy-tale.
10. An Inconvenient Truth / Grizzly Man. MovieBuff’s two favourite documentaries of the year: respectively, an appeal to global moral conscientiousness, and a mouth-dropping study in obsession.
A mention in dispatches to: TransAmerica, Brick, 36, Thank You For Smoking, Cars, Inside Man, Pretty Persuasion, Severance, Right at Your Door, The Host, Casino Royale and Flags of Our Fathers*.And now to the disappointments. It’d be too easy to take potshots at the likes of Ultraviolet, or the remakes of The Wicker Man or The Omen – films that were always going to be crap and we knew it from the outset – so, in time-honoured tradition, I present you with the ten films of 2006 that should have been something special. And weren’t.
1. The Departed. Scorsese, Nicholson, di Caprio, Damon, Winstone, Sheen (snr); cops, gangsters, sudden violence and compromised morality. And yet it was so dull! This exercise in self-plagiarism should have been sent back to the editing room at gunpoint and trimmed by at least an hour.2. Brokeback Mountain. Ang Lee directing a script co-written by Larry McMurtry from a story by E Annie Proulx. Two of these people have won Pulitzers. Result: overlong, pondersome, indifferently acted and directed, and sunk from the outset by the absolute absence of any chemistry between the leads.
3. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. None of the charm and personality of the original. Not much hope for Part III.
4. Miami Vice. The fall of Michael Mann, signalled by the amateur-hour stylisations and bad acting of Collateral, continues unchecked. Turgid script, confused narrative, and – as with Brokeback – indifferent acting and no chemistry between the leads.5. Nacho Libre. School of Rock proved Jack Black’s comedic brilliance. Napoleon Dynamite established Jared Hess as an offbeat satirical talent. What happens when they team up? Ninety minutes of forced, trite and painfully unfunny celluloid.
6. The Black Dahlia. James Ellroy’s breakthrough novel is pounded into over-stylised melodrama by Brian de Palma.
7. Superman Returns. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s a pretty good first hour which degenerates into anti-climactic drudgery to the point of absolutely nothing happening for the last quarter of an hour. The Man of Steel is definitely suffering from metal fatigue.
8. Capote. Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s much-lauded performance (inexplicably granted an Oscar) errs too much on the side of parody. The script is verbose and the direction pedestrian. File under worthy but dull.Here’s to 2007 raising the standards …
*Review shortly.
I’ve been lax in my cinema-going of late. This past month, the Christmas shopping crowds have led me to absent myself from the city centre and my local multiplex. I’m hoping to take in a screening of Flags of Our Fathers tomorrow; my last cinema visit of 2006. So, to clear the decks before my best and worst of the year round-up on New Year’s Eve, here’s the last few stragglers. Two of these should have had stand-alone reviews. What can I say? With work on the novel progressing apace, plus entertaining friends over Christmas and a little soiree planned at MovieBuff Towers for New Year, time has not been on my side …
Crank. Jason Statham gives his usual monosyllabic hard-nut turn in a hyper-kinetic crime caper that is, at best, subversively satirical and surreal (a standout set-piece has Statham in an operating theatre gown – you know, the kind that leave your arse exposed – high as a kite and stunt-riding a stolen police motorcycle while ‘Windmills of Your Mind’ tootles on the soundtrack); and, at worst, a parade of guns ‘n’ girls (all nubile and semi-clothed and not required to do or say much), fights ‘n’ f-words – the kind of production line, video-game aesthetics manufactured to a checklist provided by a sub-literate Loaded or FHM reader. Shame, really – had the smarter elements of the script been developed and the bullshit edited out, this could have had potential.
Children of Men. Alfonso Cuaron’s filmography is proving eclectic to say the least – who else could go from rites-of-passage sex comedy (Y Tu Mama Tambien) to Harry Potter franchise (H.P. and the Something of Whatever). The one constant in all this is a sense of darkness trying to subsume a fragile patina of hope. Children of Men, from the novel by P.D. James, is his darkest work to date, a mordant fantasia on a totalitarian society – but the small core of hope which glimmers dimly at the end is all the more poignant for the darkness that has gone before. Cuaron depicts Britain a few decades hence: there have been no pregnancies, no children born, for eighteen years. The youngest person on earth has just died in a nightclub brawl. Terrorist bombs explode. The government indulges free rein in persecuting ethnic minorities and free-thinkers. Former activist turned desk-jockey Theodore (Clive Owen) finds himself draw back to the cause by his erstwhile lover Julian (Julianne Moore) who is sworn to protect a young woman who has found herself miraculously with child. Now the government and any number of underground factions battle for ownership of the child – not for the fact of its life, but for its importance as a political symbol. Owen turns in the performance of his career, Moore is compelling, and Michael Caine is lively and sympathetic as an ageing hippie. The mise-en-scenes are gritty, in-your-face and urgent, the film-makers’ vision uncompromising, their morality and intelligence evident in every frame.
Pan’s Labyrinth. Guillermo del Toro returns to his homeland after two Hollywood outings (Blade 2 and Hellboy) for this Mexican/Spanish co-production. Set in Franco’s Spain, the story centres around a young girl, Ofelia (an astonishing performance from 12-year-old Ivana Baquero), who is sent with her heavily pregnant and recently widowed mother to live with the sadistic Captain Vidal (Sergei Lopez). While Vidal ruthlessly hunts down a network of freedom fighters who have decamped to the hills, Ofelia retreats into a world of fairytales – or rather, the world of fairytales comes creeping into her world. In del Toro’s hands, the brutal realism of the war scenes doesn’t just sit side by side with the fantasy sequences – the two meld into each other, the world of Ofelia’s imagination (or is it?) twisting and turning and reshaping almost in response to the world of Lopez’s tyranny. The imagery is poetical, startling, creepy and challenging by turns. A sense of ambiguity snakes like tendrils through the very fabric of the film. Pan’s Labyrinth is dark, strange, poignant and beautiful. As just about every other reviewer on the face of the planet has pointed out, it’s del Toro’s masterpiece.
How do you revitalise a movie franchise? Appoint a director who’s going to give the proceedings a bit of energy. After a number of increasingly stodgy Bond films helmed by John Glen, Martin Campbell called the shots on Goldeneye and the result was a bloody good action thriller. Sadly, the Brosnan Bonds alternated between slick excitement (Goldeneye, The World is Not Enough) and self-indulgent tedium (Tomorrow Never Dies, Die Another Day – which started well enough but lost the plot in the spectacular fashion).
Now Campbell is back in the director’s chair for Daniel Craig’s first outing as 007: Casino Royale. And how does he revitalise the franchise this time round? Well, the answer’s in Neal Purvis and Robert Wade’s script (with contributions from Million Dollar Baby scribe Paul Haggis) and it’s a stroke of genius.
Casino Royale simply disregards the twenty Bond films that came before it and sets itself up as the first instalment. It also goes back to an original Ian Fleming novel, for the first time in a couple of decades. Obviously, it throws in a few big crowd-pleasing set pieces but on the whole it’s a pretty faithful adaptation, right down to a cringe-inducing torture scene where Bond gets it (to be blunt) in the balls. His antagonist, Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen), opines that he doesn’t see the point of contrived torture scenes – a bit of basic brutality is so much more effective.
It’s a neat moment, meant to strip away the clichés of previous outings. Other elements of the film echo the sentiment. Q is absent; there are no ludicrous gadgets. Cheesy one-liners are also off the menu, replace by genuinely snappy dialogue. “Shaken or stirred?” a bartender asks an ashen Bond, his cover blown, the operation seemingly in tatters. “Does it look like I give a damn?” 007 snaps.
Craig’s portrayal of Bond gets right back to the character of the novels: he’s rash, he makes mistakes. He’s a more human incarnation than the unkillable smart arse of the later films. Craig makes the best Bond since Connery. In fact, MovieBuff is putting all his chips on the table: Craig is as good as Connery.
A couple of minor quibbles: at two and a half hours, it’s overlong. The poker scenes could have been trimmed. At times, the midsection feels like half an hour’s worth of Channel 4’s Later Night Poker found its way into the editing room and got spliced in.
Still, Casino Royale gets the series right back on track, the editing pointing towards the next film. Here’s hoping the producers keep it gritty. In the meantime, a vodka martini is being raised to Daniel Craig here at MovieBuff Towers.
The Host opens with a US military type browbeating a Korean serviceman into illegally dumping some chemicals into the Han River in Seoul. Cut to: two fisherman noticing a mutated aquatic life form. Cut to: someone committing suicide off a bridge over the Han, a hulking shape awaiting him under the churning surface of the dark water.
That’s all there is by way of prologue or provenance. Five minutes later, the beastie is on the rampage. Wonderfully-named director Joon-ho Bong pitches his first big set-piece in a fractured filmic middle ground between comedy and terror. The monster is part laughable, part grotesque. But it moves. Thundering out of the water, it charges along the riverbank; chaos ensues. When it dives back in, it takes with it a young girl. Her divided, dysfunctional family spend the rest of the film trying to get her back.
Sounds formulaic enough, but Bong takes the material, by degrees, into less expected territory. Farcical family squabbles are played out against a backdrop of military intervention, the monster’s “infected” victims herded brutally into quarantine. The government – its strings pulled by the US military – turn out to be as monstrous, and as threatening to the protagonists’ survival, as the beast itself. Perhaps more so.
The final stand-off against the monster comes after two hours of governmental deception, media hysteria and social betrayals on every level. The beast has become a metaphor for la bete humaine – the beast in man. The creature feature has become political.
Small quibbles: the film is a tad overlong; the effects in the explosive finale could have benefited from better CGI. But these are minor matters. Ultimately, The Host is a damn good movie, playing fast and loose with genre conventions, pulling the rug gleefully out from under the audience as the broad humour of the first half morphs into political satire of the sharpest and darkest hue.
On the surface, this should have been an easy review to write. Break out the superlatives, praise Christopher Nolan’s faultless direction to the heavens, rave about how clever and intricately structured the film is, and applaud a cluster of great performances – Christian Bale, Hugh Jackman, Michael Caine and David Bowie (a revelation!), take a bow.
Then there’s the period recreation, the hugely atmospheric cinematography, the attention to detail that coheres what could have been a sprawling epic – timelines and interrelationships overlap – into intimate drama. There’s a bravura twist in the tail. Well, not so much a twist as a whole switchback of twists. The last half hour will leave you reeling. MovieBuff’s advice: go straight for a drink afterwards, you’ll be debating the movie over several pints.
On the surface, I should be able to continue in like fashion for a few more paragraphs, repeatedly exhorting everyone who reads this review to down tools – immediately – and go see The Prestige. The difficulty comes in offering a synopsis, or talking about the film’s construction and its themes of duality … I owe it to everyone who decides to see The Prestige – and I urge you again: go; it may well prove to be the film of the year – not to say too much.
The main characters are illusionists. The central theme is what it costs to achieve success, how much you have to sacrifice … And now I have to stop. The very fabric of the film is an exercise in illusionism itself, a clever, crafty, mind-boggling cinematic sleight of hand. Having said that, it’s not just a visual parlour trick, the way Shyamalan’s The Village was, only good for one viewing. The Prestige will reward multiple viewings, for its visual poetry as well as its intellectual conceits. And if the suspension of disbelief that the big revelation calls for leaves you feeling Nolan has gone a twist too far, that’s because it’s meant to work on a metaphorical level, not necessarily a literal one. It’s about dualism … about sacrifice …
It’s an absolute bloody masterpiece.
Thanks to my friend Viv for the following review:
I had expected The Devil Wears Prada to be light and frothy (had chosen it on purpose to bring me back from the brink after seeing Children of Men* two weeks ago) - and it certainly fulfilled its promise. Although an enjoyable fairy tale, I felt that it stretched the bounds of credibility a little too far, so that at times it was in danger of pinging into women’s magazine territory.
*Review shortly.
Two strong central female roles are at the heart of Little Children, Todd Field's follow-up to the acclaimed In the Bedroom. Kate Winslet plays Sarah, a graduate stuck in an airless marriage to a never-home businessman with an addiction to internet porn. Jennifer Connelly, as Kathy, is Sarah's opposite: a successful documentarist trying to persuade her layabout husband, Brad (Patrick Wilson), to sit the bar exam and become a lawyer.
Sarah meets Brad at the local playground, their days spent caring for their offspring and growing further apart from their partners. Before the eyes of a clique of neighbour mothers - who occupy their time with reading groups and gossip - they begin a tentative friendship. Then, secretly, a passionate affair.
Meanwhile, Brad's friend Larry (Noah Emmerich) stirs up vigilante action against Ronnie (Jackie Earle Haley), newly returned to the neighbourhood after serving time for exposing himself to a minor. The sultry summer days blister into a heatwave; feelings run high; jealousies, violence and recriminations bubble under the surface.
Despite its subject matter, Little Children begins in an almost humorous vein. A laconic voiceover emphasises the ironies and idiosyncrasies of humour nature. Fields populates his film with stock characters, but seems to do so deliberately. He has fun shuffling the clichés.
Gradually, the tone becomes darker. As the locals demonise Ronnie, their own flaws and failings are thrown into sharper relief. Sure, Ronnie is an unpleasant individual, but is the threat he poses as great as Larry paints it? After all, everyone's guilty of something: Sarah and Brad are adulterers; Sarah's husband is as sexually dysfunctional as Ronnie; Kathy sidelines family for career; Larry is a hypocrite and a bully. And yet all of them - even Ronnie - are capable of humanity. People are complex and complicated, Little Children seems to say; there's good and bad in all of us.
Fair enough. But this doesn't disguise the film's faults. Fields relies too heavily on cyphers. Sarah's husband is one-dimensional. The members of the reading group are straight out of central casting. The voiceover feels increasingly forced. The denouement is clumsy, character motivations going off the rails for the sake of lumbering melodrama.
So, to recommend or not to recommend? Little Children boasts some terrific performances, moments of genuine erotic frisson, and, for the most part, a refreshing lack of judgementalism and as such is worth seeing. It's just a shame, in its closing stretches, that it falls so flat.