Film

2015 – The Year in Films – August & September

50: The Prestige – In which Christopher Nolan makes his best film ever. Christian Bale is, as per usual, fantastic and Hugh Jackman is cast to perfection as the showman who hasn’t got as much show as he’d like. The Prestige feels like a wonderful cinematic treat and on what is perhaps the fourth viewing, the magic is still very much there.

51: The Squid and the Whale – As films about dysfunctional family break-ups go, The Squid and the Whale is among the more toxic. Jeff Daniels is suitably vile as a husband who finds his fame in and out of the household is fading, while his wife, played by Laura Linney, is finding her feet as a writer. Jesse Eisenberg plays a son without any ideas of his own, parroting whatever his dad says. It renders him a detestable soul but perhaps the most interesting person in the film as you can so clearly see how the negative family life is ruining his own chances of ever growing up to be a good person. The script is at times vicious and a reminder that break ups are hard, and everyone’s best intention to be the bigger person in a break up is veneer-thin. If you watch this and think there are similarities with your own life, run.

52: Myth of the American Sleepover – Clearly, It Follows is one of the gems of 2015, and in the debut film by David Robert Mitchell, you see his style developing. The plotlines that don’t really go anywhere, because they don’t have to, they’re here. Young people that may be on multiple medications that make them bleary, yup. The film revolves around a bunch of parties – some wild, some not – and a cast of teens that sorta, wanna, y’know, make out and stuff. It is in these moments, these parties, where we grow up and find out who we are. There are fallings out, unrequited loves and it’s all more important than anything else, for a moment. And then the moment is gone. This film captures some of those moments and does so beautifully. It is wonderful to see a director come along who seems to have such a pronounced style that he could immediately be described as an auteur. A marvellous thing indeed.

53: Volver – I’m drawn back to the films of Almodovar often, for the style, the stories and that chance to slip into his world that is as full of madness as it is heart. If All About My Mother, Talk to Her and Bad Education could be seen as one distinct trilogy, then Volver, Broken Embraces and The Skin I live in is the next cycle. From Volver onwards the same themes are in play – women, betrayals, visitors from the past – but there is a renewed sense of purpose here that really appeals to me and the central characters are all compelling. It helps that Penelope Cruz’s performance here is a perfect blend of woman on the verge and strong mum who will do anything for her daughter. Volver is among my favourite films for the use of colour. Here, Red is used repeatedly and the whole film is steeped in glorious technicolour. The story twists and turns, leaving a dead body a mere side note in a film that is really about the interaction between women and it’s all the better for it.

2015 – The Year in Films – July

39: Masterminds – Masterminds has a stellar cast in Kristen Wiig, Zak Galifianakis and Owen Wilson and is directed by Jared Hess of Napoleon Dynamite and Gentlemen Broncos fame so was always going to be quirky and fun. The premise of the film is your standard heist gone wrong with many silly mishaps along the way. However, the film has had its release pushed back until October 2015 so there’s not much point in writing about it!

40: The Lavender Hill Mob – A classic British crime caper from Ealing Studios. Worth a watch for the scenes of a bombed out London alone, but better still is the tight plotting, great acting and sense of humour. Here’s the trailer:

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41: The Purge – The scene is easily imagined;” I wrote a screenplay” “we’ve all written a screenplay” “no this one is different!” and so the explanation is made of how all crime is legal for one night. Grab yourself a heavyweight actor in the shape of Ethan Hawke and screen magic begins. Only, no. The film has a premise that far exceeds the films charms. There’s a weird looking kid, a horny teenager and bland parents all living in a house where nobody ever turns lights out when they leave rooms. The Purge begins and blah blah, then obviously someone from outside comes in and some nasty people are cross. Group insanity. “it’s so Psychological, guys!” and you wish the house would blow up to get some energy into the leaden film. Haha, it’s all so wooden surely all the nasty people need to get in is some woodpeckers or termites?

Eventually, inevitably, the nasty men get in the house to cause some carnage. For the first time, we see some flair. The look between the parents as they realise their impending deaths is considerably more nuanced than anything else had been. Similarly, seeing the intruders smash the house up to a loud soundtrack and almost no sound effects creates an otherworldly vibe. Then it’s all ratatat boom, people dying and being killed and there’s a twist, there’s always a twist. Then the bland mum does something totally awesome. And there we have it. There are three moments, fleeting, where we see an idea or a quality that suggest this needn’t have been so the paint-by-numbers, bland fest it is. It’s not enough to make me not want to purge this from my memory as fast as possible.

42: Departures – This year has been about seeing new films from around the world. Iran has been a specific focus but this year I’ve seen films from a far wider selection of countries than I imagined. Japan is not a country I’ve seen much cinema from but Departures could easily change that. It’s a superb film that delves into the life of a man, Daigo, who goes back to his home town and stumbles upon the job of a traditional mortician, full of ritual and meaning. In Japan this is a job without status and Daigo finds himself hiding his new role from his wife.

Throughout the film, there’s a sharp sense of humour on display but the film also balances on a tightrope between tragedy and drama. It won the Oscar for Best foreign language film in 2009, which is completely deserved.

43: The Duke of Burgundy –

44: Mission Impossible Rogue Nation – There are few things we can be certain of in life, such as dark times lying ahead for Harry Potter and something tragic happening on Albert Square come Christmas. To this list we can also add that the IMF will always be disavowing Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt and co in the Mission Impossible series. Indeed, this time Alec Baldwin gets it closed down by speaking in a louder voice than Jeremy Renner, who mostly cannot confirm or deny anything. The old wizards of the American secret services look glum and the knives are out for Hunt. Again.

But against this business as usual backdrop comes a mission that is even more impossible than before, featuring a creepy-looking bad guy that is always a step ahead, a femme fatale with ninja-like skills and stunts that will leave you breathless.

To start us off gently, the team need to ensure a deadly package doesn’t make it on board a plane full of baddies. Inevitably, the package ends up on board and Hunt hurls himself onto the wing of the plane, before clinging on to the side of the fuselage as the plane takes off waiting for Benji (Simon Pegg) to sort his tech out. I’d be tempted to get some new colleagues but these chaps are loyal to the core.

The plot revolves around the group known as the Syndicate, who perform terrorist attacks to destabilise nations and businesses. The only problem for Hunt is that the Syndicate is highly secretive, slipping in and out of sight with ease until they make a very visible appearance after trapping Hunt in a London record store with its enticing poster for “Rock Festival” which suggests the set designers could be more imaginative. Hunt finds himself at the hands of a psychopath known as the bone cruncher, but also the mysterious Ilsa (Rebecca Ferguson) who is friend, foe, love interest and more all wrapped into one superb performance that doesn’t revolve around her needing to be rescued by a man at every turn.

Much like James Bond, the M:I films love an opera so it’s with some dread to see Benji escape the clutches of office boredom to catch a show in Vienna. Naturally, it’s packed with the Syndicate, out on the town to cause some carnage. This action sequence is refreshing in its use of movement and pacing; there is much chasing of baddies across lighting gantries, moving sets and opera house backstage areas, intercutting between guns aimed at the Syndicate’s victims, Benji trying to log on to Windows 8 in a cupboard and Hunt fighting a giant. An actor able to poke gentle fun at his height, Cruise looks startled as he finds himself unable to land a blow. Vulnerability in an action hero is always a treat, and Rogue Nation offers it up plenty of times, reinforcing the socialist message of the film that we achieve more as a team than we ever do alone.

Other set pieces are designed to thrill as much as show off Cruise’s endless appetite for danger. The team need to break into an impenetrable underwater vault which requires Hunt to hold his breath for 3 minutes while carrying out a series of complicated tasks, like if the Crystal Maze wanted to kill the contestants. What’s more remarkable is the weeks of training Cruise underwent so he could hold his breath for 6 minutes to do the scene in one shot, even though the film somewhat detracts from the tension by cutting back to Benji and Ilsa regularly.

After a brief pause once Cruise has penetrated the impenetrable vault, we’re back to the biggest set piece of the film, a car and motorbike chase in Morocco that pushes the boundaries of an action sequence. As Hunt pursues the Syndicate, the camera becomes increasingly close to the action, darting between cars and motorbikes with inches to spare and soaring around the vehicles and winding roads to create a spectacular ten minutes worthy of closing a section of the Morocco Highway for two weeks.

As the team inch closer to the mysterious Syndicate, double crossing and trickery become the common theme and the team are forced into a final stand-off in London that manages to be funny, thrilling and smart all at once, offering us this line from Alec Baldwin about Ethan Hunt:

“Hunt is the manifestation of destiny”

Quite. Rogue Nation never becomes so confusing as to render it senseless, and director Christopher McQuarrie is masterful at keeping the tension ratcheted up while allowing the script a dose of humour that keeps things from becoming too po-faced. Cruise is, as ever, fizzing with energy and able to play around with his persona, at one point leaping over a car bonnet and falling to the ground.

Rogue Nation is self-aware enough to distinguish itself from James Bond, but confident enough to know with every instalment it edges closes to action film perfection. With McQuarrie on board, the film manages to be a massive production possessing a human touch that focuses on the characters more than the locations or things going boom. It’s a triumph.

45: Happy Go Lucky

46: Khruschev does America

47: Two Days, One Night – It is in the small things that we see the big things happen. Two Days, One Night illustrates this through Sandra’s plight to keep her job, where her return from sickness is threatened by a simple vote for the workers; keep your bonus or keep Sandra (Marion Cotillard). Over a weekend, Sandra must convince her colleagues that she should be spared the blow of losing her job just as she’s ready to work again and win the vote on Monday.

As plots go, this is so simple and so raw because it requires so much of the core character and so little of the business that is so blatant in its disregard towards employee dignity. Sandra is played with stunning fragility by Marion Cotillard and what sets this performance apart is how her simple outfit of pink vest-top with white bra straps visible, slim jeans and short ponytail speaks so much. The frailty of her body endears her to us, putting us on her side and elevating the viewing experience from one where we might feel sorry for her to one where we cannot believe such a demeaning vote could ever be allowed.

As Sandra visits a colleague, she is offered a phone number and her hands nervously fidget in her bag to find paper and a pen, showing how unprepared she is for her quest and how emotionally exhausting this ordeal is. Again and again, she has to ask colleagues to forego their bonus to save her livelihood and the screws are turned against her as they say they didn’t vote against her, they just voted for their bonus. Props are used sparingly but to great effect; one colleague flip flops about giving up his bonus and resorts to squeezing his gardening gloves in discomfort as his wife refuses to give up the bonus. Another colleague, Timur, bursts into tears when confronted by Sandra as he comes face to face with her again and it becomes apparent how the cold actions of a distant company are pulling people apart.

In one remarkable scene, Sandra climbs flights of stairs to find another colleague who isn’t at home. Sandra convinces his wife to call him and in a dark hallway, she explains yet again her plight and yet again finds people need their bonus more than they want to keep her. There is a tragic pattern in Two Days, One Night where Sandra finds herself standing in the dark, on the porch or in the shadows asking for a reprieve and salvation. It is a world sicker than Sandra which the Dardenne brothers have tapped into, where the viciousness of European austerity is given a face and Sandra is forced to embark on a David and Goliath-style battle of empathy versus self-interest to stand a chance of working. Crueller still is that the bonus is just €1000.

This may not be a big or loud film, but what it says about worker’s rights and basic human dignity is important and is put together in a beautiful way.

48: Mistress America

49: The Spy who Loved me

Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation

There are few things we can be certain of in life, such as dark times lying ahead for Harry Potter and something tragic happening on Albert Square come Christmas. To this list we can also add that the IMF will always be disavowing Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt and co in the Mission Impossible series. Indeed, this time Alec Baldwin gets it closed down by speaking in a louder voice than Jeremy Renner, who mostly cannot confirm or deny anything. The old wizards of the American secret services look glum and the knives are out for Hunt. Again.

“Hunt is the manifestation of destiny”

2015 – The Year in Films – June

35: Lilting – Ben Whishaw first came to my attention in The Hour, playing loudmouth Freddie, a BBC journalist who takes his investigative work too far. He was brash, sensitive, frustrating and brilliant, often all at once. He made every word count and sparked with a self-belief that is rare to see; since then he’s continued in this vein with the outstanding Criminal Justice and in Lilting, his gentle yet intense performance gives depth to the film, which portrays love, guilt and families through the brilliant technique of language barriers between mother, son and boyfriend. Whishaw plays Richard, dealing with the loss of his boyfriend Kai (Andrew Lueng) yet finding himself unable to share his loss and memories with Kai’s mother, Junn, seemingly ignorant of her son’s real life and who never integrated into British life. Now, she finds herself in a nursing home, her loneliness intensified.

The film’s emotional core is magnified through Junn’s isolation; Kai was able to communicate with her, but the English man she is somewhat improbably dating has no idea what she’s saying. When Richard finds out about this burgeoning romance, he sets up for an interpreter to help them out. His determination to know Junn and for her to know that he existed in her son’s life is beautiful to see and the film’s storytelling through flashbacks and misleading memories – one minute Kai is dancing with his mother, and then it’s Junn dancing with Richard – creates an atmosphere that keeps us on our toes.

In the end, we are gently reminded that love isn’t a quiet thing and no language barrier is enough to stop a mother realising the truth. That the film portrays this so elegantly is testment to the skill of the actors and the care and attention gone into this film. Funded through the Film London Microwave scheme for just £120,000, Lilting shows that impressive things can be done on a tiny budget.

36: Law Of Desire – Pedro Almodovar is my favourite living director, so there’s bound to be some bias here but with an opening so strong, I can live with that. Swelling orchestral music starts the film, only for it to cut to a crummy bedroom where a man simulates an intense sex scene. The man carries out acts being directed from across the room. This sets up the theme of unrequited love that is always present in the film and as usual with Almodovar, there’s a whole host of characters you’d hope to never become acquainted with.

As the film progresses, we learn more about film director Pablo and his inabilities to find true love and his incredible ability to find men who are utterly obsessed with him. Alongside the fueding men is a transexual sister having her own tightly wound story told. Law of Desire is an excellent vehicle for Almodovar to explore sex, sexuality and love. In some ways, it’s one of his colder films, where sympathy for the characters is in short supply yet it’s a film that achieves more storytelling in 2 hours than most films could do in four.

As a matter of intrigue, I never did work out why a typewriter flung out of a building and into a skip would burst into flames. Perhaps it’s just one of those Spanish typewriters, full of desire and fire in the belly.

37: The Babadook – Easily one of the most magnificently scary and original films I’ve seen in years. All the love and adulation I piled on It Follows earlier in the year means the brilliance of The Babadook was slightly muffled and as usual has an ending that struggles to wrap up everything that has gone before. Pushing the film above its peers is an awe-inspiring, Jack Nicholson style explosion of rage and terror and love from Essie Davis. As Amelia, a mum still in mourning for her husband and tired from her son’s boundless energy, she portrays a frustrating existence to perfection. Instead of falling into a trap of becoming hysterical, she goes further and finds bellowing to be a useful tool. But there’s so much subtlety here as well. There is no recent performance in a horror I can praise as loudly as this because everything she does comes from a place that is dark and scary; you fall under her spell when she is caring for her son and you recoil in horror when her exhaustion overwhelms her.

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Her son Sam, played with immense skill and dexterity by Noah Wiseman, is in need of a father figure and The Babadook plays with this to spectacular effect by setting mother and son against each other in a more and more claustrophobic home. Watching this in the dark with headphones on supplied the most sinister environment imaginable – but the film works on every level from the gloomy interiors totally at odds with our idea of Australian weather, the canny use of sound and two central performances that snap Hollywood horrors into tiny little pieces. The Babadook is a future classic of the horror canon.

38: London Road – A contender for the best British film of the year is not what you might expect – London Road is unexpected in most ways. It is based on the musical about the murder of five prostitutes in Ipswich. It was originally a piece of verbatim theatre meaning all the words spoken came directly from interviews taken after the spate of killings.

Olivia Colman delivers a sensational performance as usual, playing a mum who lacks sympathy for the murdered girls and appears to be trapped inside her small world of Ipswich. Her character’s journey is one of the central ones in the film and her cold approach to make the community heal after the trauma they’ve been through is suitably distant and British for us all to identify that sort of person. The remarkable West End cast join her, a creepy Tom Hardy and a delightfully comedic Anita Dobson in painting a grim depiction of modern Britain where net curtains exist for two reasons; to be twitched so we can spy on those outside but also to hide everyone away.

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Rarely has the British psyche been displayed on a canvas so raw – the real words of real people condemn them all from the girls that nervously sing and laugh that “you automatically thing it could be him” and “it’s quite exciting cos nothing happens in Ipswich and it’s the first like bit of scandal we’ve ever had” showing that peculiar trait of gallows humour coupled with a fear of outsiders and change. The choreography is fantastic throughout, the camera gracefully moving about a shopping arcade, introducing us to tired people with eye twitches looking to find a murderer in their midst.

Colman’s character helps set up a campaign to beautify London Road with flowers, somehow believing splashes of colour will cover over the cracks in the neighbourhood and this is the most difficult aspect of the film, knowing that a theoretically harmless idea of bringing neighbours back together is on the one hand a coping mechanism yet is so cold an idea. Nobody seems to want to reach out to the prostitutes and when we hear the story from their viewpoint, their loneliness and struggles come through strongly.

London Road is one part film, one part musical to one part social document of how people talk and live. Every um and ah is a reminder of the conversations we have – how most of what we say is cut off, curtailed, spoken over or without point. The idea that it’s not what we say but how we say it is so true; in one memorable moment Colman gets up to speak to the community about the London Road in bloom contest, ends her piece and then quickly goes “Oh, fish and chip supper on Thursday” and all gravitas disappears in these familiar sentences. Acting a part seems much easier than acting a real person saying real things and the skill shown by all the actors is nothing short of spell-binding.

The film is stronger for staying true to the verbatim theatre approach and is full of moments of genuine brilliance and this is a British film at its very best and a reminder in these times that the BBC and publicly funded bodies are capable of producing art of the highest quality on minuscule budgets. Would I change anything about London Road? No, not a single thing.

2015 – The Year in Films – May

32: Wild Tales – I hate flying. I hate flying because I can’t lift my feet off the floor as that somehow triggers in my brain a flood of panic, screaming “you’re not attached to the ground at all!” which isn’t logical when there’s 37,000 feet of not-ground beneath you. Similarly, I hate flying because when I go to the toilet, I always expect a horrendous turbulence attack t0 then release my own bout of horrendous intestinal turbulence. So, you can imagine my horror when earlier this year the Germanwings flight ploughed into the Alps at over 400 miles an hour, killing everyone on board pretty much instantly.

Wild Tales manages to make the opening tale about a pilot gone wrong not only funny, but one of the most audacious opening sequences in cinema. The film doesn’t manage to keep the quality up throughout, but as a collection of short films, there’s a lot to love here even if sometimes it feels like ideas are being discarded before they’ve had their fair share of time.

“The Rats”, the second story, is about a girl working in a diner who comes across a gangster who ruined her life, and it’s immediately apparent he’s a baddy drawn out in the crudest crayon, and she’s lovely. The diner’s cook, however, is a bit more complex and is keen on exacting revenge on the gangster, through a healthy dose of rat poison. Morally, we’re always going to be on the side of revenge, no matter now bloody, and the story plays it safe with occasional flourishes of very poor service and glimpses of rat posion to spice things up. When the gangster’s son turns up, things get really interesting. As this is a film about death, you can draw your own conclusions about what happens. Just kidding, they all have a boozy night! Just kidding, there are definitely corpses.

Perhaps the most complete of the films is the third one, about two men, their cars and endlessly fun ways to kill one another. Featuring a strikingly solid poo, a wimp who doesn’t know how to change a flat and an angry country man, this segment is funny and scary in equal measure. The final fight scene, where one man is being strangled after a drawn out bitch off featuring a fire extinguisher and lots of slapping hands seems a little too close for comfort.

The other stories, one including a demolitions expert sent mad by bureaucracy, and one about a spoilt teen involved in a hit and run are good in their own ways, yet lack a truly gripping storyline, though they do tackle society and how the state can crush you or you can find a way to cheat it. It’s the final, and longest, story that really hits the spot. “Until Death Do Us Part” is wonderful for many reasons, but Erica Rivas as bride on the verge of a nervous breakdown is intensely watchable. On her wedding night, all sorts of secrets spew out, leading to her apocalyptic reaction. Perhaps all these stories somehow relate to Argentina’s trials of recent years; the defaults, the economic collapses and the inevitable social unrest that comes with it. Or perhaps the writers of Wild Tales are just wonderfully sick. Either way, these six stories of death and despair only make me want to go to Argentina even more – worrying, huh?

33: The Great Beauty – Alongside Dogtooth, it is The Great Beauty that has had me glued to the screen this year. Perhaps it’s the heart-breakingly gorgeous camerawork as the film opens on a Rome that looks beyond perfection, perhaps the colours of the film that have me logging on to check flights and the possibility of being part of this city that charms these beautiful people. So much is appealing here, not least the character Jep (Tony Servillo) who embraces his own brilliance as the king of the social scene whilst lamenting his descent into irrelevance at the same time. A party is thrown for Jep and everyone is there, all dancing to the most soulless of dance music you’ve ever heard and these people are in a vaccuum of their own creation; but it looks amazing. There’s a dancer, ignored by most and in a box sound-proofed to the point of silence. She dances to no music and to no witnesses. But it looks amazing.

When there’s a death, and reality threatens to creep into the funeral, Jep regales people with stories of how the ‘A’ list act at these engagements. With precisely calibrated moves, Jeps steals the funeral, the actual death of someone not particularly affecting him. You’d think this would make his character seem vapid and hateful, but somehow it adds to his sheen. Moments later, his cool collapses like a house of cards and he cries for real. All his advice is useless in the face of Jep hitting a wall of emotion he wasn’t expecting. He’s lonely, 65 and facing a cliff. Retirement beckons, the social scene will move on and he won’t be at the top.

Jep and love don’t seem to work together but maybe there is more to him than the superficial gloss of a man who hangs about in rooms filled with the world’s most beautiful treasures and is friends with people who get botox in an art gallery. For me, the line that shatters his world is: “This is my life and it’s nothing.”

But still, the film is utterly absorbing and impossibly beautiful.

33: The Smallest Show on Earth – A drunken night involving Sootie and Sweep on YouTube and some reminiscing of olden days led to my friend Lee buying The Smallest Show on Earth on DVD, with a promise that we’d watch it in the future. Why? Because the facade of a set was built into a railway tunnel at Kilburn, which is where we happened to be at the time.

It’s a total charmer from 1957, starring Bill Travers as Matt and Virginia McKenna as Jean, who believe they’ve inherited a giant cinema in some far-off town. They soon show ugly signs of greed as they think about how well off they’ll be, only to find that they’ve actually inherited a decaying heap known as “the flea pit” or the Bijou. They’ve also inherited three bickering staff members who seem unable to be together or apart. The baddie of the piece, Mr Hardcastle, wants to make his competing cinema the only one in town and turn the flea pit into a car park. Matt and Jean have other plans as their lawyer suggests they make the effort to re-launch the Bijou to spook Hardcastle into hurling cash at them so they can have their dream of money.

The staff members are delighted to see some care being given to the cinema, not realising they too are being played, but eventually and inevitably, everything goes pear-shaped. The cinema has its charms though; when a film is set in the desert, it’s time to turn up the heating and when a train is thundering through the station, it’s timed for the overhead trains to turn the cinema into a 4D experience. In many ways, the cinema is more modern than the IMAX, just with more rats.

Surprisingly, the film is edgier than you might expect from the late 50’s, dealing with themes like alcoholism, greed and even criminal behaviour as a means to an end but rather than jarring, it adds some weight to what could easily have been a light-weight romp. You want the cinema to succeed, perhaps because in 2015, everything is so slick. Flea pits are few and far between now, and this film is a little time capsule of a different age.

34: Spooks: The Greater Good – My love of Spooks is well documented, with characters as kick-ass as Harry Pearce and Ros Myers, not to mention Tom, Danny, Zoe, Adam, blah blah blah, any film version was bound to be all exciting noises and moving images. The Greater Good doesn’t deny the edge of seat, cheap thrills I’d come to expect. I suppose that Kit Harrington is for many a big draw – apparently he’s in some thing about Thrones which is bigger than the Sun – he’s no better an actor than any of the TV actors but seeing that they all got horribly murdered through the 10 series, they had to find someone for Harry to act against. The plot is the usual terrorist escaping, Americans getting pissy runaround, with Harry doing some stuff about his secret past. At this point he’s up to 98 years worth of secrets and for budgetary reasons, this secret was in Berlin and London.

The thing is, nobody in the world can deny that when Spooks does tension and excitement, there’s almost nothing that can better it. One fight scene sees Harrington crashing about a flat in a way that, thanks to some excellent sound design and smart camerawork, convinces in the best hiding-behind-hands tradition. This carries on throughout the film with set piece after set piece that builds ever upwards and then…it stops. Everything is solved and the world is safe! And then, it’s back with a final ending that is impossibly tense and exciting. Harry even gets to kill someone in a really fierce way; a Harry Pearce murder is a fine one indeed.

Spooks, please come back for one more!

34: Serial Mum – What a little Netflix treat this is! Kathleen Turner going crazy and killing everyone in sight – it’s a great way to spend a few hours. All that needs to be shown is the following clip, and it’ll let you make your mind up about watching it…

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2015 – The Year in Films – April

28: The Headless Woman – In Argentina’s so-called Dirty War of 1974 to 1983, up to 13,000 supporters of socialism were ‘disappeared’ by the Argentine Military Government. The war was chillingly described as a process of “National Reorganisation” and presumably these 13,000 individuals were not part of the reorganisation. Some were heavily drugged, bundled onto aircraft and thrown into the sea while still alive. The worst redundancy pay-off ever.

Argentina wasn’t alone in making the decision that some people in society are worth less than others, or finding that dispensing of swathes of the populace could be rather simple. Stalin was very keen on using his prison camps as a conveyor belt of death, Hitler we know about and the relentless march of ISIS reminds us that our comfortable lives cannot be taken for granted. Lucrecia Martel’s take on the disappearences is a sinister and dreamy tale told through the most untrustworthy of lenses. We are introduced the main character, Vero, as she prepares to leave a social engagement – we enter mid-flow in a conversation, never quite hearing the full conversation but I gather the new simming pool might have turtles in it, and chlorine is a disaster for dyed hair. Kids clamber over Vero’s car, covering the driver’s side window with hand prints and Vero heads off. Interspersed with this scene, we see some local kids and their dog running about near a dried-up canal. As Vero approaches the kids, her phone goes off and she takes her eye off the road to find it. Moments later, she hits something – all to the cheery tune Soley Soley by Middle of the Road. What did Vero hit? Has a hand print on the car appeared, or was that a continuity error? Why isn’t she stopping to find out what happened?

Vero smacked her head hard against the steering wheel in the accident, clouding her recollection. From this moment on her life is a series of encounters that veer into the abstract. She visits a hospital to get her x-ray done – the hospital seems dilapidated whereas it is clear she is financially well off – and wanders off before finishing the paperwork. When she checks into some hotel for what could be a day or just hours, she has a confusing sexual encounter and seems to exist only on tea. With brilliant comic timing she arrives at a dental surgery, takes a seat in the waiting area and then finds out that she is the one people have come to see. Oh Vero, what a mystery you are. Played with a deep sense of comfortable confused by Maria Onetto, Vero always has a half-smile on her face, a smile that never tells what is really happening.

What The Headless Woman purposefully never tells us is whether or not Vero did kill a person. When the rains arrive and fill the canal, something is found blocked in it. As Vero and family drive past the canal when the blockage is being investigated, our view of the scene is always obsured. We’re never given a straight answer to anything but by the end, we can appreciate with some certainty that Vero’s friends and family are influential and if somebody was killed, it was ok. They weren’t white, or powerful. They were the invisible people of the film – the nurses at the hospital, the silent maids in Vero’s gloomy home, and just like the old days, dispensing of somebody is possible if you have the know-how.

The closest we come to truly knowing if Vero’s movements after the accident are being deleted occurs towards the end; she heads to a family gathering in the hotel she checked in after her accident. In a flash, Vero moves from a bustling entrance to a silent reception. To make us feel more ill at ease, the scene is slightly slowed down, making every move seem tentative. Vero enquires about her stay at the hotel, but that stay never happened, says the system.

Her confusion, and the way her family seem to accept her altered state, is a great way for Martel to demonstrate how easy it is for us to forget things we have done, or to turn a blind eye to the horrors of a military government. I wonder how many supporters of socialism flipped their behaviour in Argentina to save their lives when it mattered? Our principles are only as strong as our will to survive; The Headless Woman demonstrates this with a cinematic flair that is hard to forget.

29&30 – The forgotten duo. Interstellar and Dogtooth.

So, I watched Interstellar because a friend told me how astonishing it was. I was astonished at how utterly bored I was by it. The Doctor Who meets Sunshine meets The Waltons with Asthma storyline was tedious to the extreme, the sound was audible only to Bane off of Batman, the effects were impressive but I had no idea what the hell was going on. So these are some comments I made about this travesty on a Facebook post that ended up with about 75 comments from various lovers and haters:

I was bored shitless. No idea what they were saying in the “script” and I’m not sure I got why they were stressed out, aside from all the asthma.

Oh yes, of course. It was the end of the world and all the corn had gone, but I don’t think I got the whole end of days vibe. It was just dusty.

What about blowing Anna Hathaway out of the film entirely.

Ugh, apparently science can’t save us, but saying “love”, “cosmos”, “dimension” enough times can save us. Awful, Anne. She was much better lip-synching to Miley Cyrus.

I turned it off when suddenly he turned up in a hospital or whatever. After he played space guitar with the twangy strings for half an hour shouting “noooooo” at his past.

Seriously dreadful – he realises he was the ghost in his bookcase, which was a lovely bookcase. He’s all like “noooo” but what’s he going to do? Something about a watch, then that woman off Zero Dark Thirty chucks paper at some scientists while screaming about the discovery.

Here’s an annoying thing. At one point Jessica Fletcher was chatting to Batman’s butler. The world had ended but she had a McDonald’s style soft drink cup. Wtf? Don’t you think she’d be reusing all the old mugs in an end of world scenario?

Honestly. Why did she have a McDonald’s style cup to drink from? Where is this fast food place? I mean, it’s all so dusty and people are DYING.

I recall a twenty minute sequence where a Dr is trying to get the kids to leave the dusty house and I swear it was all because the kid had a hacking cough. I wasn’t feeling particularly stressed. Also. Matthew Mccononahayyy seemingly just found the magical spaceship and they were all like “oh, we were gonna go but you’re here and also you’re the best so you may as well come”. I mean…coincidence!

They go for a drive, somehow find Professor Yana from Dr Who, who turns out to have decided he needs him for his experiment. What? How? I can’t even… Why is Matthew McConnaoaohey the best at everything? Why didn’t they Skype him before to offer him a place on the magical spaceship? Where did she get that cup from?

I liked the bookcases.

I really did.

I really did not like this. I couldn’t care any less about the characters. I thought the daughter, Smurf, was just so moany. Everything was just so earnest.

Dogtooth on the other hand, well, that was just fantastic. A mother and father leave their kids trapped in a strange interior world of their own making, where they can’t leave their family compound. Words have their meanings changed, the most dangerous creature in the world is the house cat, stepping outside the home is life-threatening and aeroplanes can actually be plucked from the sky – but only if you deserve it. Sex proves to be a complicated subject for the kids and an outsider is brought in to satisfy the eldest son. When he doesn’t come up to her standards, the outsider moves on to the daughter.

As we find out more about their impossibly strange lives, the kids become braver in the way they entertain each other. Violence becomes a way of life, new rules are made by the kids and the father’s journey goes from a very peculiar old man changes into that of a fully-blown psychopath. Dogtooth may well be one of the strangest films you’re likely to see, but it’s devillishly entertaining at the same time. It’s also remarkably accessible for a film that dabbles in incest. The cinematography brings a clear warmth to proceedings; the bright sun, green garden and neutral tones in the house brighten up a film that could have so easily have been filmed in grime and dirt. Instead, the house is spotlessly clean. The beauty of the film’s look amplifies the strangeness within.

My reading of the film was one of control; the more you accept the control someone has over you, the more tolerable your life becomes. But you lose yourself in the process. Others have said Dogtooth draws inspiration from Plato’s The Allegory of the Cave where people spend their live chained in a cave, staring at a blank wall. Objects as shadows are shown to them and noises are attributed to the shadows. To the prisoners, this is reality because they have never seen the real world. In Dogtooth, the kids have been fed a deeply strange story that has shaped their own reality, and it is fascinating to see it play out. Dogtooth pushes at boundaries while always remaining compelling viewing. Who needs Anne Hathaway crying in space when you can have this?

31: Play – Sweden, and Scandinavia in general, is a wonderfully confused notion. It is the country that is able to claim of being the most successful society the world has known – not for the boring stuff of getting rich – but of being able to close the inequality gap and move close to full equality for everyone. This is the country that gives you a free month of travel in the summer months on your 3-month pass. If everyone is off on holiday, you may as well get free travel if you’re still about town. The childcare, paternity and maternity leave, attitude towards women, sexuality and immigration has made it seem so very perfect.

And Play is the film that smashes this all into the dirt and, like so much Scandinavian cinema, loves to highlight that this place isn’t heaven after all. Play is directed by Ruben Östlund of the recently released Force Majeure. Much like that film, this is a film that asks questions of the audience and sends us on a psychological trip where five black teenagers set out to rob two white kids and their Asian friend. But the way they orchestrate this robbery is the central core of the film; the black kids, well, they’re looking out for their brother. You see, his brother had that phone – your phone – yeah, see that scratch there? His brother just wants his phone back. We need to go to him. You won’t get hurt! We’re not going to mug you! It’s because we’re black, you just assume…

Racism turned on its head is weirdly horrible yet compelling to watch. As a middle-class white man, I’m looking for Östlund to give me the get out card of seeing how dreadful their lives are. I want to see them get beaten up by violent fathers. I want poverty. Then, I can start to say how I understand why they’d want to set up these insane robberies, which take up whole days. They need to be part of a society that will allow them to flourish! But of course, Sweden is supposed to be that society. Instead, well, the black kids are little shits. I want to hurl them in a river. They show typical bully-boy behaviour. They mock those they don’t understand, are as sharp as knives when it comes to finding a weakness in their prey and they never give up. It’s like Jurassic Park with kids playing the raptors – I was expecting one of the white kids to mutter “clever girl” at some point as the deception became apparent.

In the end, the victims, who themselves are presented as being well off and well loved but totally lacking in street smarts, aren’t so much robbed as played out. Of course, I feel sad for them, but without any blood being shed, Östlund messes around with our perceptions about race, gangs and urban life and needles us into feeling emotions, one way or the other. Perhaps this is the key weakness of the film. A more subtle film-maker wouldn’t need to control the flow of the narrative quite so much. That said, another film-maker wouldn’t film the proceedings in such a clever way. The victims are always a bit far away, so we can’t help them. The victors are also beyond our reach, so we can’t berate them. As viewers, we are being physically and emotionally distant from all of the children and if the tales are true, all Östlund is doing is showing us a society where discipline for kids has all but vanished and where feral packs roam the streets of Stockholm and Skellefteå unhindered. Yep, this is the most successful society the world has ever seen, and it’s so much easier to be distant from wrongdoings in society than getting involved.

2015 – The Year in Films – March

21: Offside – Way back when, at the conception of this film diary, I wrote about wanting to see more Iranian cinema as well as world cinema. In a fit of pique about what to watch, I gathered together all the films on my to-do list (and made sure they were under two hours long) and decided to finally watch Offside by Jafar Panahi.

Decisions, decisions…

We open with father searching for his daughter, who he fears will go to the big football match that will decide whether Iran is going to qualify for the World Cup 2006 or not. The father stops a bus full of men, seeking her out in vain. He, alongside most of the men on board, fail to spot another woman stowaway, known in cast lists as first girl. She keeps herself to herself, with her baseball cap pulled low and the Iranian flag daubed in paint on her delicate skin. As one youth spots her, he reminds her “you totally look like a girl” and she does.

The moral compass starts spinning as soon as the film starts. Women banned from watching live football? The men of the movie portray themselves as moral arbiters, thinking of the devastation that will occur if a woman dared to enter this vipers nest of football fans. In a way, you can see the reasoning for this – 100,000 shouting men, a stadium flooding with testosterone – and you can sense the worry that the women would be in danger here. That makes sense. But what about the very simple, basic freedom of just going to something you want to do. That doesn’t seem to come up on the male radar.

The first girl isn’t the only deviant trying to get inside and alongside a bunch of other girls, she is swiftly detained for trying to get into the stadium. Despite endless questions about why the girls can’t go in, the male guards never consider they could. Bureaucracy is never far away in Iranian films and one can only imagine how restrictive life must be when these simple pleasures are denied. As Richard Littlejohn would have it (though I seriously doubt he’d be able to cope with Iranian cinema)… it’s health and safety gone mad.

Offisde isn’t about football so much as it’s about passion and excitement. The detained girls, kept in a pen a few metres away from a vantage point of the match, are delightful in their disdain of authority. They cajole the guards into narrating the match for them and when one girl needs a toilet, inevitable chaos ensues. Yeah, there’s no female toilet, which is a sobering fact. We meet a defiant girl who likes to smoke and another who came to the big match in a soldier’s uniform. As we get to the end of the match, all the girls are marched into a bus to be deposited to the Vice Squad. On the way, we pass through a city alive with excitement and chaos and the girls’ excitement reaches fever pitch at one point, with a guard dutifully getting the radio aerial to work so they can hear the result.

As the driver pulls the van over to get water, the film takes on an edge of anarchy. Amidst the melee, Pahani sees the passions of people as something stronger than the petty rules of the religious police and the government. People can’t be crushed so easily, and Offside reminds of this beautifully.

22: It Follows – While both Birdman and Whiplash scaled the heights of cinematic brilliance, It Follows has achieved something altogether more impressive; it’s carved its way into my dreams more than once and occupied my thoughts since I was lucky enough to see it at the London Film Festival. A second viewing opens up the films charms and remains every bit as tense, exciting and aesthetically glorious as it was first time round. The conceit of the film, a curse is passed on through sex, plays with conventions of teen horror in a novel way. There’s no virgin to be kept safe for the end and despite being in Detroit where over 80% of the population is black, the only faces you’l see are white. But then, this film doesn’t exist in the real world. David Robert Mitchell has created a fantasy world of the teenage years where summer is never-ending, parents are somewhere else, illicit booze is supped on porches, streets are quiet and the buzzing and clicking of the modern world is abandoned for the closeness of friends.

This teenage world allows us to escape the tedious concerns of reality and lets us drift into this slightly hazy world, before pitching us sharply back into the terrifying nightmate that Jay’s world has become. Jay, played by Maika monroe, finds out that she’s been given the curse after a date night ends in an abandoned car park, which looks achingly beautiful thanks to the work of cinematographer Mike Gioulakis. It’s rather simple really – there will be something coming after her, at a canter, but forever and always until she passes the curse on by sleeping with someone else. It’s the worst game of tig ever. Jay can only see her eternal follower and naturally her friends wonder if she’s lost the plot.

Mitchell opts not to confine Jay in inescapable rooms, choosing instead to frame her in open spaces that compel your eyes to always be looking for the slow-moving killer. A particularly memorable scene is held in her high school where the camera performs two circular pans, letting us see everything yet Mitchell is always holding the power to scare us when he decides to. Slow-motion is also used regularly to push home the languorous mood of the film, again changing the boundaries and rules of what a teen horror can be as a steady and calm style is preferred over hyperactive running and screaming. As we head to the end of the film, questions are left unanswered and the endless summer carries on like nothing’s happened.

It Follows is thoughtful, smart, scary, measured and a success on its own terms. There’s something of the auteur in Mitchell’s style and his is a world I want to see more of.

23: Do I sound gay? – For a film that is concerned with voices, its main flaw is that it lacks a voice of its own.

David Thorpe’s film about the gay voice and his efforts to alter the way he sounds is a strange compromise of a film. A chance to explore a tricksy area of sexuality, social conformity, homophobia and belonging is often pushed aside to relate back to a film-maker who might start to explore why he wants to change a fundamental part of himself in the first place. In his 40’s and newly single, there’s more than a whiff of crisis surrounding Thorpe’s sudden desire to sound less gay; near the start of the film he asks people on the street if he does sound gay, to which people come up with interesting responses. Most don’t care, some clearly identify a manly voice as something that is desirable and useful to have.

And when this film succeeds, it’s when Thorpe’s attention it turned towards how we are shaped by societies fixed image of success – whether that be the way we look, walk, talk or who we sleep with. Videos of young students being beaten senseless in American classrooms because they are gay reminds us that we maintain stifling social rules and some people are bound to become victims. That the onlookers choose the film the beatings rather than stand up to the bullies just pounds the message home that deviation from the norm can be damaging to your health. We all project many insecurities to the world and it is fascinating to learn that Thorpe designed his gay persona and voice at the time he started university and left his quiet upbringing behind, only for this persona to become a problem later in life. There’s a cycle of repression/freedom/repression going on here.

Sounding gay is something that Thorpe brings up in society as a negative indicator and the scenes where he works with speech therapists are often enlightening and entertaining but as we delve deeper into how the voice works and how it is possible to sound less gay, the film loses its thread. If Thorpe succeeded in changing who he is, what is there to be gained? Is it positive that a man in 2015 wants to indulge in heteronormative behaviour? Ultimately, we don’t find the answer to many of the questions raised as the film haphazardly rushes to a conclusion, telling us that the entire experiement is a little bit futile.

24: Force Majeure – Force Majeure blurs the lines between film-making and social experimentation. Why? Because the film will polarise men and women, mothers and fathers with a few simple questions. “What would you do?” and “Are you man enough?” are scattered throughout this film as a family ski trip turns into a devastating re-assessment of how a family works. Frazzled businessman Tomas is taking some time out with his family when during lunch an avalanche threatens to wipe them out. The decision Tomas makes is to run away with his iPhone, leaving his wife Ebba and their two kids to face the consequences. As the snow clears and we realise the avalanche missed the family, Tomas comes back, joking about the event. Ebba has just had a life-changing moment of seeing her husband flee at the time she needed him most – setting up the rest of the film.

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Tomas continues to deny running away from the family, acting as if Ebba has gone mad. Tomas can only deny flatly running away, but his affectations ring hollow and as Ebba increases her attacks on Tomas. At dinner parties and with friends, his lies become ever less effective until he eventually breaks down into a hot teary mess, at which point Ebba accuses him of not crying for real; Tomas coldly replies “No, maybe I’m not”. In our lives, we are trapped into gender roles whether we like it or not and Force Majeure exploits this for all its worth. The expectation of a man is to save his family above all else, but as the film tells us, even the old phrase women and children first held no power onboard the sinking Titanic as men scurried into the life boats.

So, Tomas is weak. And director Ruben Ostlund films this with great style by changing the positioning of light, children and reflections in mirrors to suit his needs. One minute Tomas is on top of the world and looks disarmingly handsome, sleeping with his beautiful family. Later on, his children smother him as he sobs, with his wife looking callous in the shadows. At one point, he forgoes reality and places Tomas, fully dressed up to ski, in a club full of topless men shouting their hearts out. In this macho environment, he looks ludicrously out of place. As the head of a family, he is outclassed by his wife. Force Majeure strips back the veneer of a good relationship, exposing the poison lurking underneath, offering all of us a chance to consider what way we’d go if we were on the verge of oblivion.

25: Women on the verge of a nervous breakdown – Clearly whatever I have to say about this will have been said a million times. This is a film that has embedded itself not into the little box called world cinema where people either freak out because they have to read while watching or think it’s all pretentious, but into the big box of classic cinema.

Watching it again, at the delightfully snug screening room at 20th Century Flicks in Bristol, I was struck by how gorgeous the whole thing looks. Almodovar does colours like no-one else – fyi, my favourite film for Almodvar’s use of colour is Volver, itself due a re-watch – and colours boldly pop through in Women on the verge… There are the gaudy colours of the Mambo taxi with a Pedro lookalike driving, there are the fabulous dresses of insane Lucia, a woman scorned and trapped in the outfits of her past, there is the bright red of the gazpacho; a prop which seems to hold endless possibilities in this film. The level of detail is sensational, from the way the camera tracks the movement of love-lorn Pepa as she paces left and right in her apartment, the focus on the click of her heels to the stunning sunset on a rubbish tip.

Phones are hurled across the apartment, beds are set alight and the characters of Pepa and Iván make a living from dubbing loving words into Spanish. No wonder nothing feels real when everything is built on artifice, confusion and the madness of a hot summer.

If you haven’t seen this, all I can say is vamos, see this now!

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26: The New Girlfriend – Francois Ozon is back, not that he’s ever away for a long time, and this time he stands up, locks glances with the film critics of the world and says “don’t you dare ruin the surprises” to which Justin Chang at Variety replied “oops, my bad”. I made a blood bond not to let anyone reading this (hi, all two of you!) go to see the film knowing its secrets because sometimes life is much more rewarding that way. The New Girlfriend starts off in audacious style with us watching a woman have make-up applied to her face. The shots are slow and elegant, there’s not a movement here that hasn’t been thoroughly planned. Lipstick has never seemed so austere. We track through the lives of Claire and Laura as they grow up, with Claire marrying Gilles and Laura Marrying David. They both have babies but it always seems that Claire is one step behind Laura and therein lies the truth of many friendships – aren’t we often trying to outdo our peers just a little, even while congratulating them on their success?

Life doesn’t always work out as planned and grief permeates the film’s opening, represented throughout by the beautiful autumnal colours like the mustard jumper of David, played with relish by Roman Dupris and the freckled face of Claire, played with grace by Anais Demoustier. Taking autumn further, it’s the season of decline but there’s still hope and beauty and as Ozon takes David and Claire on a journey of discovery and re-discovery, they open up to the audience and what we see isn’t always very nice. Claire harbours a selfish side, Gilles is something of an enigma dressed in a dashing suit and David struggles to find his true self, as changeable as the seasons. There is a bejewelled elephant in the room, alright, but human emotions and our ability to tolerate change and what society deems as autre are the things Ozon is exploring here.

Based on a short story by Ruth Rendell, there’s more than a hint of mystery in The New Girlfriend. Indeed, the film trades in light and dark, sometimes as light as an Almodovar romp before turning a Hitchcockian hue. The score, by Philippe Rombi, resembles the work of Alberto Iglesias, who often collaborates with Almodovar. Sexuality, friendship, loss and re-birth make this one of the more intriguing films of the year and certainly one of the most wonderful to look at, with every shot is pared down for maximum effect. Ozon again shows his skill at mixing comedy with drama, joy and despair and a flair for delving into our often unspoken of desires.

27: High Heels – I wouldn’t mock you if you said that you thought 1991’s High Heels by Pedro Almodovar came before Women on the verge of a nervous breakdown because Women… is so obviously the stronger film in every way, with all the hallmarks of an auteur. I felt the same, but I was wrong. Women… was released in 1988 and High Heels marks a stark decline in quality. It’s down to the film’s plot being convoluted without being ever being fun or dramatic enough to justify the twists and turns. Though much of the film works, it almost feels like he’s on autopilot – a barb that many would also aim at his last film, I’m so Excited! As usual with Almodovar, High Heels is often a feast for the eyes and many of the characters are sublimely ridiculous. The mother/daughter dynamic between Rebecca the younger and Becky the elder is great. Becky is horribly self-obsessed and has been absent for much of Rebecca’s life. No wonder Rebecca makes friends with Letal, a drag act based on Becky’s phase as a pop singer. I won’t even venture into the complicated love lives of the women.

Some of the best moments are based in an approximation of a women’s prison – my friend described it as a street closed down by the production crew with some guards wondering about every so often – and when the female prisoners decide to have a dance-off wearing the brightest assortment of clothes since colour was invented, well, it’s novel.

Ultimately, my eyes grew heavy and my interest waned. By the end, I didn’t much care for the characters and their crazy lives. But this is Almodovar, who at his best becomes a genre in his own right and eight years after this had a spectacularly successful run from All about my Mother to Volver.

2015 – The year in films – February

FEBRUARY

17: 12.08 East of Bucharest – Part of the Romanian New Wave, home to super-bleak ‘4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days’ and 2013’s ‘Child’s Pose’ comes this bittersweet comedy focusing on the moment that Nicolae Ceauşescu fled Bucharest and the simple question “did our town have a revolution?” The results of that revolution don’t seem to matter as the the film maintains a bleak realism from the start. Grimy streetlights meekly flicker to life across the city, apartment blocks looks like prison blocks, colour is barely perceptible. Children on the street constantly set off firecrackers, annoying everyone and bearing some similarity to Asghar Farhadi’s ‘Fireworks Wednesday’ with the constant crackle of fireworks warranting the question “where is the authority?” while the kids run riot. The atmosphere is never sinister in 12.08 East of Bucharest, but there’s little levity.

About 20 minutes in is when we first start to see close-ups as we get to know the main characters better and we see how they struggle in a life of little rewards, but a life where people help each out where they can. Romanian society comes across well, much less isolated as British society appears. Think about it, do you know your neighbours well? Society is also drunk to soak up the despair, as demonstrated by struggling teacher Manescu who along with old man Piscoci and TV show host Jderescu aim to explore how revolution affected their town.

The TV show descends into farce, as Manescu becomes more embattled as his web of lies spins out of control as callers attack his every utteracne. Jderescu tries in vain to keep his show running calmly but in the end, none of it matters. The young people and students in this film have no interest and even less knowledge of the revolution that changed their lives and a TV show with no conclusive answers won’t change their minds. It’s as if the revolution never happened. When life is tough, what matters history?

18: On Her Majesty’s Secret Service – I was never sure about how OHMSS slotted into the Bond canon – some have been snify about Lazenby’s abilities as Bond and others have seemed to dismiss it as minor Bond because it is Lazenby’s only outing. On viewing again, at a packed Prince Charles Cinema, it seems that the only opinion that matters is my own and this is it: OHMSS is completely bonkers and at points, a Bond film that took real risks to change the formula of the films. Let’s take the opening beach scene – it’s shot beautifully, but it’s also very dark. As in, you can barely see the people on the screen at times. Highly stylised and certainly more exciting for it, the opening sets the tone for a film that often makes little sense but is always entertaining.

After 45 minutes, I wasn’t entirely sure what was going on and why Bond was so cross with everyone. Slowly but surely, it turns out that a bunch of mad women in a clinic up a mountain are being hypnotized into becoming – literally – seeds of destruction. At one point we hear the soothing voice of villain Blofeld tell a terrified woman that “you used to be scared of chickens, but not any more” which is nothing if not peculiar.

Bond is called upon to save the world in circuitous ways to find out why Blofeld is so hell-bent on destruction. Bond has to play Sir Hilary Bray, a genealogist in a kilt, which of course leads the women in the clinic into quite a tizz. He flirts in a haphazard way, when the brusque Irma Bunt isn’t watching. Much chasing, shouting, skiing, drinking, funny quips and so on follow. At one point, a man is killed by the most bizarre wall ornament of all time – a foot-long decorative bunch of metal spikes that serve no purpose until Bond suddenly needs something spiky and attached to a wall, to kill a man.

There are moments of real brilliance in the film, especially in the last act where Bond and friends lay seige to the mountaintop clinic. The whole sequence excites and thrills. But it’s the ending which really sticks in the mind. We see a completely defenceless Bond stripped of all his gusto as he suffers a rare personal loss. A bit of an all-round gem.

19: Boogie Nights – The world and their Dog knows Boogie Nights is amazing. I found this out way late to my shame. But to my joy it was playing to a full house at the ICA. And it was very long, epic, marvellous, mad, insane, wow soundtrack. Any film that has ELO in is good in my book. Just…watch this.

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20: The Maid – I somehow keep seeing films where nothing yet everything happens and The Maid is stuck uncomfortably inbetween that particular rock and hard place. Raquel is a maid in a Chilean household – apparently adored by the children but harbouring vast reserves of bile for eldest daughter Camila while giving lashings of attention to the eldest son. As the family’s maid for 20 years, the opening birthday party scene is an uncomfortable introduction to how brittle Raquel is. She shows a hint of happiness that the family have given her gifts, only to disregard the gifts later on.

Throughout, you keep wanting Raquel to show a nice side, but she prevents that through the sheer displeasure on her face and by dispatching every maid bought in to help her as she falls apart, health-wise. The first maid she locks out of the house, the maid equivalent of spraying her territory. The second maid, a harsh, embittered woman who calls the family ingrates, has nastier punishments to come. It’s only on the third maid, Lucy, that we see Raquel almost bloom. It’s telling that when Raquel locks this maid out, she resorts to bathing topless, which delights Raquel.

As Raquel’s behaviour alternates between merely frosty and psychotic, Lucy questions what is wrong with her and why she’s such a broken individual. At one point, Raquel intensely disinfects the bathroom after Lucy showers, washing every bottle individually. Raquel is so committed to the family it almost feels like she’s suffering from Stockholm syndrome. This becomes more obvious when you think that no maid but Raquel is able to get in from outside and all the windows are barred over. Is Raquel free and if she was, could she cope with it?

At the end, we’re given the chance to work out if Lucy has changed Raquel for the better – or if her clear obsession with Lucy has just manifested itself in new, sinister ways.

2015 – The year in films – January

Every single film I’m going to watch in 2015 is going to noted on this page. I’m aiming for a totally random figure of 207 films this year. I’m even going to include the trashy ones because I don’t fear you!

JANUARY

1: Goodfellas – The first time I’ve ever seen it. I know, I’m a schmuck on wheels, but what you gonna do? A complete tour de force from Scorsese; Goodfellas makes the rocket-fuelled energy of films like The Wolf of Wall Street make complete sense. All of his directorial tics are here, from moments of humour that precede intense violence, to brilliantly thought-through characters, long takes, freeze frames and sublime music taste. I’d like to particularly mention how excellent Lorraine Bracco was . Her character was more than a match for the men in the film and I felt so sad as her character fell into the pits of despair whilst seemingly pretending she wasn’t in cahoots with the carnage unfolding around her. Incredible!

2: Tulpan – lent to me by my boss as part of our film war. It started out nicely enough with the superb Iranian film The Apple but the progression of this film war will end up with one of us palming off a 4-hour film set in deepest Nowherestan where nothing happens apart from when a woman swats a fly from her bread. Tulpan is a perfect slice of Sunday film-viewing; the pace is slow, the photography glorious, the dialogue hardly taxing. A man seeks a wife and wishes to live simply in the Kazkh steppe. We follow his attempts at obtaining a wife and maybe even start to think living on the Steppe might not be too bad. Prince Charles makes a surprising “cameo”.

3: NO – In which Gael Garcia Bernal seeks to lead a peaceful revolution in a referendum campaign and get rid of General Pinochet in 1980s Chile. What appealed to me was that he wanted to make an advertisement campaign based around happiness. In an election year when Britain faces another 5 years of the Conservatives, all they can advertise is that Labour will ruin everything, and they will make us prosperous. The Conservatives are still blaming Labour for everything that is wrong, nearly 5 years on. There are parallels between NO and this election; the people can choose between Tory fear and the hope that things can be better. I just hope the Labour party can run a campaign of positivity and hope over endless mud-slinging. But back to the film – it was filmed in U-matic 3:4 which is a format used back in the 80s and it works a dream. It’s a fascinating insight into how Pinochet was jettisoned for hope and as a piece of storytelling goes, it’s excellent viewing. Now I must get hold of director Pablo Larraín’s Tony Manero as my next Chilean film.

4: The Interview – Obviously I flew to America to watch this. It was pretty funny and Rogen and Franco are both absolute delights to watch. Sharply written, well performed but lacking in laugh-out-loud moments. The reality of North Korea is so much worse than this film would really hope to portray.

5: Life of Pi – I was suffering a strange sort of insta-flu when I saw Life of Pi at the cinema. Illness always renders me hopelessly emotional and by the time the film was over, my love of 3D cinema was assured; the effects were breathtaking and the glasses covered my teary eyes. At home on a 32″ screen, the difference is obvious but the film still looks utterly captvating. Pondicherry is photographed like a dream holiday and the sequence where the boat Pi and family are on sinks is full of wonder. This is a seriously well made film, with visual effects so good we could believe Pi was stuck on a boat with a tiger. Thanks to some inventive camerawork, the film works as a 2D piece and there are endlessly interesting ways of shooting life on a boat. But let’s not forget the brilliant performance from Suraj Sharma, who made his debut with this film. How incredible is that? He gives a full-blooded turn that is packed with humanity and passion. In short, this film is full of the magic of cinema where the audience can see dazzling visuals, be drawn into a story that is fantastical and allows us to ponder the question “how would I cope in this situtation” to which my answer is “badly”.

6: eXistenZ – At this point, on the 7th January, I feel exhausted by films but compelled to keep watching. eXistenZ gives a reason to keep watching films relentlessly. David Cronenberg manages to keep wrong-footing the audience with this film about gaming. As ever, the gamers are hyper-geeky and the inventor of the game says it is powered by the energy from gamers. Well, please enlighten me to a gamer that eats well and gets exercise and is in any way…energized. So, in that respect, eXistenZ would feature a load of pale-faced and exhausted gamers refusing to go outdoors.

Regardless, it’s a cracker with a subtle performance from a startlingly young Jude Law. Gosh. It all wraps up, like a fantastic tortilla, in the later stages of the film. A totally excellent film.

7: Birdman

Sometimes films come out that don’t fit into an easily marketable box. Birdman may be hard or easy to comprehend and to explain, depending on your viewpoint. Obviously, it’s certifiably insane, but it’s also such a daring and original piece of cinema that it doesn’t so much stand out from the crowd as fly all over it and do what birds like to do most. The story is about a washed up actor putting on a broadway play and the film almost all takes place in the theatre, allowing for sublime long takes that are stylistically similar to the tricks Gravity used so well. Long takes they may be, but you won’t see the edits join up and you will find yourself blindsided by the tricks on show here that make the film feel natural even when everything is so completely unnatural. However, there’s a vastly deeper and more involving story here than Gravity and it’s a film that is blessed with a cast from heaven. Michael Keaton as Riggan Thomson is sensational as a broken man trying to make the most of a play that he’s traded in everything for and yet still can’t seem to find joy. The sublety and nuance in Keaton’s performance of a man in the midst of a breakdown is that of an actor in absolute control, but then Edward Norton comes in and acts the roof of the theatre, too. Is Birdman a sanctuary for beloved yet overlooked actors? Norton is filled with electricity as Mike Shiner, a ghastly actor bought in as a last minute replacement for an actor who stinks. His unnerving eye contact with everyone else in the film offers some genuinely exciting moments of tension. He plays well off a bratty Emma Stone, who is playing a role that lacks any hint of vanity; she may be beautiful but she can play ugly. Zach Galifianakis plays it restrained as Thomson’s lawyer but does so brilliantly. Birdman is probably going to be the best film coming out this year, and it is competing with Whiplash, which in a normal year would probably be the best film of the year. Here we have a Hollywood film that is taking risks, using technology in a way that seems almost human – the special effects don’t look special because you don’t see the joins, it just feels real, just like the characters. Birdman flies, it soars, and like a bird is free from the restrictions of everyday life on the ground. It’s its own creation and every moment is magical.

8: *********

I signed an embargo form for this film, so all I’ll say is this: ****** ***

It was Kingsman. It delved into subterranean shite after Colin Firth exits. It seems to hate women. It’s overtly violent. It’s merely ok.

9: Election – Reese Witherspoon is up for election at high school and her inner bitch goes on the rampage. Her need to win overrides everything else in her life and initially she is unopposed. Her teacher, in trying to damage her chances of being elected, sets up a sports jock to compete. Adding to the mix, a girl with the rallying cry of “if I get elected, I’ll get rid of the student elections” joins the candidates. Hilarity ensues. Pretty much, yes. This is a superior teen comedy with a wonderful performance by Witherspoon and a great turn from Matthew Broderick, who succeeds in acting like the biggest dork in town.

10: Salt – After a never-ending search in CEX for something to watch that was not in any way taxing meant that Salt seemed to be ideal friday night fare. How wrong I was. Because it doesn’t hold up well, really. Angeline Jolie is perfectly good as Salt, who is supposedly a Russian spy in the process of being activated. The set-pieces are good, if not a tad leaden and in terms of cinematography, the film looks drab even when the choice of shots shows a keen mind at work. Ultimately, the film doesn’t hold together and that’s because the key characters aren’t memorable enough. We all know salt’s bad for you, so let’s not add to our daily dose with this film.*

*apologies.

11: The Long Goodbye – It is a precious thing to see a film in 35mm and an even more precious thing when the cinema showing this print of The Long Goodbye has not shown anything on 35mm for a whole year. To really make this an occasion, the Curzon Richmond had a brief introduction with manager Mick McAloon and a film buff. They talked in detail about this film and the connection to Inherent Vice, setting us up nicely for the film. Opening up with a sequence featuring a hungry cat, this is a film with a great sense of humour that is helped by Elliott Gould, smoking his way through the film, noting that everything is ok by him. The look of the film was great and Altman (this was my first film of his!) always seemed to go for the interesting choices and it’s always a pleasure to really be submerged into a director’s vision.

To my shame, I found some of the plot hard to follow, perhaps due to my sleepy state. It was certainly not a reflection of the film, which I will be watching again soon when less hungover and stuffed full of food. But hey, it was dark, cosy and I do love a nap.

12: Jack Reacher – We know that Tom Cruise enjoys running, because he’s always running. Even though he is incapable of being late, he likes to pretend he’s running late and he loves running for buses that left the bus stop fifteen seconds ago.

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In Jack Reacher, Cruise runs about, has the best ever ending to a car chase, sends up the whole genre of the action hero and continues to prove that when it comes to reliable, hyper-energetic stars, he is still the best. In fact, when I tried to think of someone who can deliver at the same level as Cruise and I came up with that Rock fella, Liam Neeson and his yearly jaunt into finding someone/something, Jason Statham and his defibrilator and Will Smith when he can be bothered. Daniel Craig as James Bond is probably this predator’s only other enemy in the wild. Look, I’m fond of the guy. And Jack Reacher is pretty good action fare. Christopher McQuarrie needs to be given a heap of praise for writing an action movie with balls and personality. I guess Lee Childs’ books have to be thanked as well. In fact, the script of Jack Reacher is good enough to make you realise how insipid most action films are. Here, Reacher makes sarky comments about prosecutors succeeding in court because of “impeccable tailoring” and narrates the outcome of fights before they even kick off. It’s confident and fun and I want more!

13: Still Alice – Julianne Moore has long been one of my actresses of choice, for many reasons. Let me count the ways! She can do crazy, she can attempt dowdy, beaten down, she can be elated and in Still Alice she can throw a little of everything into the pot and nail a person losing their essence.

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Still Alice, as good as it is, was hard to watch. Memories of both my Nans losing their life to alzheimer’s are never welcome and my natural state of paranoia meant by the end of the film I was questioning the health of my own brain and fighting the tears. It doesn’t do to sob in front of one’s housemate before then getting into a discussion about how much you can forget before you realise you’re forgetting.

Moore shines throughout, with her immense capacity for emotional work coming through to the fore. There are moments in the film which ring tragically true and this could be the year that Moore is recognised by the Academy folk for her sterling work. Perhaps the problem here is that the lead actor is better than the film itself, which can sometimes resemble a brilliantly produced TV drama rather than a fully-fledged film. Performance-wise, it can’t really be faulted, even if Moore’s on-screen kids are fairly bland. Only Kristen Stewart breaks free, with a particularly excellent turn as an actress coming to terms with her life and the changes to her family. An ace away from excellence, Still Alice is an emotional piece that will resonate deeply with anyone who has had to cope with alzheimer’s, and for everyone else might resemble something akin to a slow-motion horror film.

14: Selma – When did British actors go to Hollywood and claim it as their own? In Selma, David Oyelowo, Tom Wilkinson, Tim Roth and Carmen Ejogo all do the acting thing brilliantly, with all American voices and everything. Mostly everything in Selma is brilliant and by this stage you’ll have read how Oyelowo ought to be in the running for the Oscars and should soon be changing his name to Oyelowow! for his sublime performance as Martin Luther King. But it’s not to be. It doesn’t detract for one second that this film is solidly excellent, and manages to tease out the humanity and inhumanity in America’s tussle with civil rights. We see President Lyndon Johnson haughtily tell Luther King that while he has just one domestic issue, Johnson has many and cannot afford the time to ensure all black people can vote. By the film’s end, Johnson is desperately pleading with hideous local officials to change their tactics – the power of a president has never seemed so small. In comparison, Luther King comes across as a magnificent man who will never stoop to his adversaries levels to achieve his aims. Simply put, you won’t need to see a superhero movie this year because nobody is going to impress you more than MLK.

15: Cous Cous – On the 15th film of the year, I am somewhat impressed by the variety of films i’ve seen so far. American films prevail but there’s a Kazakh film, a Chilean film, an American-Taiwanese special offence bonanza and a bunch of classics. This time, it’s a France-Tunisia film with family at the very heart of the story. Main character Slimane finds his hours cut at the shipyard at work and needs to find a way to keep afloat. It is a pleasant aspect of the film to see Slimane going to his ex-wife to deliver her fish (she complains it’s excessive) and then to his daughter who hen-pecks him as well. Somehow through all of the hen-pecking he keeps his dignity and calm and plans for his future, showing up French bureaucracy as the beast it is as he attempts to open a Cous-Cous restaurant on a wrecked-up boat. Oh yeah, the Cous Cous would be cooked by his ex-wife, to complicate matters. One of the key scenes of the film is a Sunday feast, shot with an intensity that lets you see the grains in their mouths as they jostle, argue and have fun.

The fact that very little happens over 151 minutes doesn’t really matter; this is a mood-driven piece about human dreams and hopes, and the relationships are intricate in a way British cinema can’t seem to compete with. It’s like the fiery heat of the Meditteranean makes people warmer, more prone to explosions.

As Slimane progresses with his dream, encountering many setbacks on the way, he finally launches for a preview night and the film continues to charm with the generosity of everybody around Slimane, even as everything slowly but surely starts to unravel. The last twenty minutes is in some ways as bleak as cinema gets, but until the bitter end, there’s hope. We could learn a lot from these people and for two and a half hours, their company is a feast in itself.

16: Whiplash -An astonishing piece of cinema, Whiplash tears up the jokebook about drummers and instead shows us the insanity of attempting to be first in class. With a performance that is more fear-inducing than a chainsaw-wielding psychopath, J K Simmons’ Terence Fletcher arrives on the screen with the force of a hurricane tearing down everything in its wake. Fletcher has a bedside manner of a Wolf and is so laser-focused on perfection, he will stop at nothing to achieve his aims. During rehearsals for his band, he finds out just enough about Neiman (Miles Teller) to turn it on him in a torrent of abuse later later on. When Neiman doesn’t manage to be the greatest drummer within seconds, Fletcher’s fist clench accompanied by the phrase “that’s not my tempo” is chilling. Fletcher will never clarify what his tempo is, just what it isn’t.

In his aim of perfection, he’ll make automatons of his students and destroy not just their self esteem but their ability to do anything spontaneous. He snuffs out their candle before it’s fully aflame. Whiplash is a fascinating study of how teachers who weren’t able to achieve their dreams will pass their insecurities onto others, as well as showing the lengths students will go to impress a role model.

While Simmons is the one that everyone is talking about, Miles Teller puts in an awful lot of good work on Whiplash, only to be playing second fiddle, or alternate drum, to his master. Alongside Birdman, we’ve got the second masterpiece of the year.

2015 – the year of the film

I’m not one for making New Year’s resolutions. If I do, it’s usually something like calling an end to the vandalism of old phone boxes that I’ve never indulged in. Which does mean I finish every year pleastantly surprised that I succeeded in my aims but also disappointed that I’ve never gone off the rails and kicked a red phone box. If I could do that, I’d truly be edgy.

This year I have decided I want to expand my film knowledge. After watching a spate of Iranian films from The Apple through to The Secret Ballot, I feel this is a national cinema I want to explore even morea and 2015 is the year for it!

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But where to go next? I’ve seen a few Asghar Farhadi films like A Separation and Fireworks Wednesday – both superior dramas – but with him being the more accessible side of Iranian cinema, I know there’s deeper to venture so I’ll be checking out some of the films of Abbas Kiarostami without trying to worry about the sheer volume of his work. Then there’s Jafar Panahi. I already have Offside lined up, where a bunch of girls want to see a World Cup qualifying match but can’t because of gender rules. In fact, Panahi has had a number of his films banned in Iran and has been officially banned on making movies for 20 years. Not that that stopped him, as he smuggled a film in a cake in 2011.

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I’m fascinated by world cinema and as well as Iranian cinema, I also want to branch out in more European cinema. I’m already a fan of Lukas Moodysson but was recently introduced to Aki Kaurismaki who seems to trade in a darker tone. The Man Without a Past was a strange sort of film – light on dialogue but brilliantly put together.

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That said, I think the scariest film of 2015 is going to be It Follows. I was lucky enough to see it at the London Film Festival a few months back and it still gets to me now. Brutally efficient and made in such a way that it feels timeless, it discards the need to stab and pulverise everything in sight and goes for psychological fear. To say it succeeds in that undersells it greatly.

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wobblelikejelly

wobblelikejelly

Film

2015 – The Year in Films – August & September

2015 – The Year in Films – July

Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation

2015 – The Year in Films – June

2015 – The Year in Films – May

2015 – The Year in Films – April

2015 – The Year in Films – March

2015 – The year in films – February

2015 – The year in films – January

2015 – the year of the film