A top 10 of the film year

Not being much of one for award ceremonies, I don't tend to pay too much attention to the Oscars, beyond casting an eye over the nominees and winners when I'm looking for something that I might want to watch. I do enjoy making a good list, though, and putting it in order of my personal preference. There are nine films up for Best Picture, so I wanted to make a list of nine films that came out this year that I would have nominated, but I didn't want to leave anything out, so a top ten it will have to be.

Some caveats: There are some films that I've not seen yet (e.g. A Separation) that I imagine could well alter the order of this list. I've not seen all of the actual nominations for Best Picture, either. I really want to see Hugo (although only at the cinema, and only in 3D if I can), but I have no interest in The Help or War Horse, for example.

Anyway, my list:

1. The Artist: An absolute joy. Not a terribly out-there choice, I know, but so what?

2. Senna: It's a crime that this hasn't been nominated for anything at all. Really good film, and I say that as someone who, try as I might, cannot get excited about Formula 1.

3. The Skin I Live In: I actually only saw this a couple of days ago, but I loved it, as enjoyable as any other Almodovar film I've seen.

4. Martha Marcy May Marlene: Where have they been hiding Elizabeth Olsen? She was great in this, as was John Hawkes who I'd seen the previous year in Winter's Bone, and I love the denouement.

5. Cave Of Forgotten Dreams: More top stuff from Herzog, who never disappoints. The only 3D film I've seen (so far) where it actually seemed as though it was 3D for good reason.

6. Midnight In Paris: Not vintage Allen by any means, but perhaps those days are over now. Enjoyable nevertheless, and Owen Wilson is good in the Woody role.

7. Shame: A difficult watch to say the least, but an affecting film that stays with you long past seeing it, somehow.

8. The Tree Of Life: Perhaps a little over-long, and I had some problems with it at the time, none of which I can really recall now. But in terms of its visuals alone I thought it was stunning. Best watched on the big screen, really.

9. We Need To Talk About Kevin: A rather troubling but well-made film. I've not read the book, but the praise for it makes me wonder whether I would've rated this as highly had I read it beforehand. A very good psychological thriller, anyway.

10. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: I've since seen a couple of episodes of the old television series of this, and intend to finish it at some point and re-watch this film when I have, though I watched this first and really enjoyed this for what it was.

Pingu does John Carpenter's THE THING.

Those of you reading this may already seen this, but here is a rather disquieting video that I saw the other week, from a gentleman called Lee Hardcastle, who makes claymations that are not particularly suitable for children. Here, he has put together the Pingu (a children's television show, for the uninitiated) version of John Carpenter's The Thing. Not for the faint of heart.

Woody Allen season at the BFI

The BFI are this month running Wise Cracks: The Comedies of Woody Allen, to which you must try to get along if you possibly can. I'm pleased to see that Hannah and Her Sisters, one of my favourites of his, is getting an extended run, as is Zelig, and his latest film Midnight in Paris. The others are getting a few screenings each, and I have listed the films being shown below with their times. I have starred the films I would particularly recommend going to see, but there is more information available on the BFI website.


Annie Hall*

6 Jan 18:30
13 Jan 20:45
14 Jan 18:30


Bananas

8 Jan 20:40


Broadway Danny Rose

7 Jan 18:40
9 Jan 18:20


Bullets Over Broadway

14 Jan 16:15
18 Jan 20:45
21 Jan 20:40


Celebrity

25 Jan 20:30
29 Jan 18:20


Crimes and Misdemeanors*

13 Jan 18:30
15 Jan 20:45
22 Jan 15:50


Deconstructing Harry

11 Jan 18:15
28 Jan 18:10


Everyone Says I Love You

15 Jan 18:30
20 Jan 18:20


Hannah and Her Sisters*

4 - 19 January


Husbands and Wives*

10 Jan 18:30
14 Jan 20:45
22 Jan 18:10


Love and Death*

7 Jan 16:00
12 Jan 18:30


Manhattan*

6 Jan 20:45
10 Jan 20:45
22 Jan 20:45


Manhattan Murder Mystery

12 Jan 20:40
16 Jan 18:20
17 Jan 20:30


Match Point

26 Jan 20:30
30 Jan 18:20


Melinda and Melinda

26 Jan 18:10
30 Jan 20:45


Midnight in Paris

27 January - 8 February


A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy

8 Jan 18:20


The Purple Rose of Cairo*

9 Jan 20:45
21 Jan 18:40


Sleeper

7 Jan 20:50
18 Jan 18:30


Sweet and Lowdown*

25 Jan 18:20
29 Jan 20:40


Vicky Cristina Barcelona

27 Jan 18:10
31 Jan 20:40


Zelig

4 - 19 January

Distant Voices, Still Lives / Taxi Driver / Manhattan / The Magnificent Ambersons

It is a bit of a new years' resolution of mine to get back on the horse vis-a-vis watching more films, so to that end I thought I would put up a quick post about films I have watched, or re-watched, recently. Firstly, Distant Voices, Still Lives, which is part of an autobiographical trilogy of films directed by Terence Davies and set in his native Liverpool mid-way through the last century. It's regarded as something of a hidden gem of British cinema, and I liked it, overall: it was quite effectively bleak, and the late Pete Postlethwaite was good as the rather threatening patriarch, though the many scenes with characters breaking into impromptu song got on my nerves a little after a while, to the extent that I thought it got in the way of progressing the story a little.



I saw Taxi Driver, shown again by the Cornerhouse in Manchester as part of Play It Again. I had not watched it on some years, so to see it on the big screen was something of a treat, even though it hasn't been given a new print. It is surely a prime candidate to be given one, though there is something about the murkiness of the film stock, along with the masterful score of Bernard Herrmann, that compliments the mood of Martin Scorsese's malevolent masterpiece. I had also forgotten the ending, which I obviously won't give away here in case anyone reading this hasn't seen it, but it is about Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), an honourably discharged ex-marine who takes a job as a taxi driver in New York, purposely working long hours to combat his insomnia. Over the months during which the film is set, we see his mental health deteriorate as he becomes increasingly disenfranchised and alienated from the city around him, his increasingly violent urges propelling him to 'wash away the garbage and trash off the sidewalks'. I have a few more things to say about this film so I will perhaps explore them more fully in a future post.



Having recently seen Another Woman and Sleeper on DVD for the first time, over new year I re-watched what I personally consider to be Woody Allen's masterpiece, Manhattan. It is, as the opening narration suggests, a love letter to the city he loves, and made me wish that Woody would start setting his films there again. The BFI has just started showing a season of his comedies which will run to the end of this month, and they will be showing Manhattan in particular three times during January. If you live in London, or can get there, I can heartily recommend that you go and see it.



Finally, last night, I watched The Magnificent Ambersons, Orson Welles' adaptation of the 1918 novel of the same name by Booth Tarkington, which is about the fall from grace of the Ambersons, an Indianapolis family who, at the beginning of the story, are in the upper echelons of society but over the course of the film George, the heir apparent of the Ambersons, finds himself on an inexorable downward spiral. On balance, I probably preferred Citizen Kane, which Welles had made the previous year, but still enjoyed it. For what is described as an epic, it isn't the longest of films (its duration is less than ninety minutes), and on reading about it this morning, I see that the finished film is much different to how Welles had originally intended. He lost control of the film to the stupid, RKO, and in between its initial preview and full release in 1942, a full hour of footage was removed in exchange for what I must admit at the time seemed like something of a tacked-on happy ending. Unfortunately, the scenes that were expunged from the film are now no longer in existence, so there is no hope of even a speculative directors' cut.

Video essay on chaos cinema

via IndieWire, a very good video essay on 'chaos cinema' by Matthias Stork, which I recommend you watch.


Most chaos cinema is indeed lazy, inexact and largely devoid of beauty or judgment. It’s an aesthetic configuration that refuses to engage viewers mentally and emotionally, instead aspiring to overwhelm, to overpower, to hypnotize viewers and plunge them into a passive state. The film does not seduce you into suspending disbelief. It bludgeons you until you give up.

Chaos Cinema Part 1 from Matthias Stork on Vimeo.

Chaos Cinema Part 2 from Matthias Stork on Vimeo.

The Tree Of Life (2010)

I took in The Tree Of Life on holiday recently, having been wanting to see it ever since someone sent me the head-turning official trailer earlier in the year. I've long wanted to see some of Terrence Malick's earlier films, particularly Badlands and Days Of Heaven, and since he doesn't release things on a very regular basis I had been quite keen to catch this before it disappeared from the big screens in time for its release on DVD (in the United Kingdom, at least) at the end of October this year.

It is about a 1950s middle-American family, the O'Briens, and the loss of innocence of its oldest son Jack, played as a child by Hunter McCracken, and, somewhat superfluously in my opinion, as an adult by Sean Penn. We see the film primarily through Jack's memories, and as a result the narrative skips around a little bit between different points in his childhood, veering off track altogether at various points into the recesses of his subconscious.

The first thing to say is that I am glad I saw it in the cinema, because The Tree Of Life looks stunning. The previously-mentioned trailer is a good pointer to the visual style of the entire picture, and I suspect that even if you don't find the film itself to your taste, there is an awful lot to be said for its cinematography; to say that it is a feast for the eyes is an understatement in the extreme.

Unfortunately, the other reason that I was glad I saw it in the cinema was that otherwise I might have been tempted not to pay it my full attention, owing to the fact that it was probably about thirty or forty minutes longer than I felt it needed to be. An awful lot about it feels as though it is extraneous: the fantastical sequences of dinosaurs and the solar system, the whispering of characters between scenes about nature and grace, and almost all of the entire end sequence of the film featuring Sean Penn wandering around the desert, didn't particularly need to be there in my opinion. It is not that I particularly had any problem with Penn being in the film, just that it seemed pointless him being there if all we were going to see him do was wander around looking slightly ponderous.

Given this prevarication on things that didn't seem to serve the story much purpose at all, I found it strange that there was such little reference to anything that happened between Jack's childhood and his present situation of middle aged disenfranchisement. I suppose, though, that since it was obviously a deliberately made choice on Malick's part to use memory as a storytelling device in order to distort and obscure things from the audience, this is clearly something that we are expected to make up their own minds about.

There is, having said that, an awful lot to like about The Tree Of Life once you set all that fluff to one side. Particularly striking is Brad Pitt, who plays Jack's father, who until the credits roll is unnamed in the film as far as I can tell - as a few of its characters seemed to be - but whose performance dominates and intrigues. His mother (Jessica Chastain) is good, too, but the best thing about the film is story that is at its heart, which is that of Jack beginning to embark upon the very beginnings of adulthood.

Through various seemingly unconnected experiences we see the innocence of his childhood starting to become overwhelmed by the realities of life and the inherent danger, but also freedom, that this is starting to present to him. The Tree Of Life isn't a film I would recommend you see unreservedly, because I do think there are things that are wrong with it, but it is at least ambitious, and though it perhaps doesn't quite manage to achieve what it sets out to, this rites of passage story ultimately saves it from being little more than just a visual treat.

Rare Alfred Hitchcock film footage uncovered - BBC

The first three reels of footage from the only known print of Alfred Hitchcock's first film, The White Shadow, has been found within the New Zealand film archive, according to the BBC:

David Sterritt, chairman of the National Society of Film Critics, called the find "one of the most significant developments in memory. These first three reels offer a priceless opportunity to study his visual and narrative ideas when they were first taking shape," he added. The film archive described the movie as "a wild, atmospheric melodrama". The family of New Zealand projectionist and film collector Jack Murtagh sent the highly flammable prints to the organisation for safe keeping after his death in 1989. It is not known where the remaining three reels are and no other copy is thought to exist. The footage will be preserved at Park Road Post Production in Wellington.

Little is known about The White Shadow, but it was a silent film made in 1923 and starred Betty Compson as two sisters, one of which was good, the other evil. It was based on a novel by Michael Moreton called Children Of Chance.