The Artist – a review

There may well be a more charming and entertaining film to start the new year with than Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist, but right now it’s difficult to think of one offhand. Since premièring at Cannes last year, a seemingly unstoppable head of critical and commercial steam has been building behind this effortlessly light and imaginative comedy, with many talking up its chances as a contender in February’s Oscars.

The Artist takes us back to the glory days of silent Hollywood, and into the life of George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), a handsome, moustachioed and ever-so-slightly ridiculous hero of big screen action and swashbuckling films, somewhat in the mould of Douglas Fairbanks.

We first encounter George at a screening of his latest film, as he, a starlet and his cigar-chomping producer, played by John Goodman (a man born to play a cigar-chomping producer), wait behind the screen to eavesdrop on the audience’s reaction.

Films of 2011

Now I’ll be the first to admit that my film ‘blogging has become a little bit… well, shall we say ‘sluggish’ this past year. Travelling, film-making and working in an office have all played their part in slowing the once Amazon-like flow of words from my keyboard to a trickle as has, it must be admitted, a streak of laziness running through my bones like words through a stick of rock.

On the other hand, my film-going habit has continued apace and at various points this year I’ve found myself spellbound, surprised, shocked and staggered in the cinema. Below then is my selection of the finest films released in the UK in 2011. 

As for 2012, well I can only promise to redouble (or perhaps even re-quadruple) my efforts in the new year, and to endeavour to share some thoughts on cinema with you much more often.

My Top Six

Le Quattro Volte / The Four Times (Michelangelo Frammartino)

A story of goats, goatherds, charcoal-makers and burly men who cut down trees. Set deep in the Calabrian countryside, Michelangelo Frammartino’s film straddles a fine line between fiction and documentary. Its four stories are based around observations of Italian peasant life and loosely correspond to Pythagoras’ ideas about the different states that the soul passes through during transmigration (or reincarnation): mineral, vegetable, animal, man.

There’s hardly any dialogue yet the film contains some of the most dramatic and involving scenes that I’ve witnessed in the cinema all year. A baby goat becomes lost from the flock and wanders bleating over the winter hillsides; a sick old man gathers dust swept up from a church floor and mixes it with water to drink as a medicine; a towering fir tree is chopped down in the forest, hauled into a medieval hilltop town and re-erected in the market square for a local festival.

Particularly staggering is a 10-minute scene featuring a Passion play, a sheepdog, a pick-up truck and some escapee goats, miraculously choreographed in one unbroken shot. An antidote to Terrence Malick’s overblown Tree of Life, this is a piece of work that should be sought out by film-makers, students of film and anyone else interested in the poetic power of cinema.

Meek’s Cutoff – A Review

 

The revisionist Western has been with us for so long now that it seems almost impossible to imagine any contemporary film-maker wanting to produce a piece of work on the old ‘good-guys-in-white-hats, bad-guys-in-black-hats’ template. From Clint Eastwood’s 1992 excoriation of his gun-toting past in Unforgiven to Jim Jarmusch’s brutal and chaotic Dead Man, from TV’s expletive-laden Deadwood to Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, the Western has become a much more critical, questioning genre than ever before, with the old heroic certainties of the West long dead and buried somewhere out on the prairie.

The latest addition to the genre is Meek’s Cutoff, directed by Kelly Reichardt, hitherto best known for her low-budget portrayals of contemporary American life (Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy). In it, the director tells the story of a group of pioneers on or, more to the point, off the Oregon Trail in 1845.

As the film opens, the pioneers – three married couples and a boy – are well and truly lost. Having broken away from the main trail to follow the ‘cutoff’ suggested to them by their charismatic guide Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood), they find themselves in an arid, almost featureless landscape of prairie grass and salt flats, with no obvious indication of which way to turn their wagons next.

Most popular posts of 2010

 

… And if you’re still game for pointless lists, here are the 5 posts that proved most popular on this ‘blog with you, the readers, in 2010:

'Paranormal Activity'

1

Location, Location, One Location December 2009
2 comments

Buñuel on set

2

The Luis Buñuel Film School February 2010
1 comment

Christoph Waltz in 'Inglourious Basterds'

3

Mind Your Language September 2009
2 comments

Draper thinks about smoking a fag

4

At The Movies with Don Draper March 2010
1 Like on WordPress.com,

Bad Santa? Michael Haneke

5

Happy Haneke November 2009
3 comments

Films of 2010

   

'Dogtooth'

And so, without further ado, here’s my pick of the best films released in the UK in 2010:

The American – A Review

George Clooney in 'The American'

Films about assassins can generally go in one of two directions. They can either play up the inherent air of stylishness, mystery and glamour that we seem to associate with hit-men, or they can try to play these associations down, and instead show us contract killers as they really are: flawed, desperate and, more often than not, a little incompetent.

Most directors seem to plump wholeheartedly for Option A (Le Samourai, Leon, No Country For Old Men), and even those who opt for Option B (Ghost Dog, Grosse Pointe Blank, In Bruges) seem to find it difficult to let go entirely of the studied, self-conscious ‘cool’ that we associate with the genre.

Anton Corbijn, whose 2006 debut Control told the story of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis, here finds himself with a foot in both camps too. On the one hand, George Clooney’s Jack is an archetypal cool-as-ice hit-man: methodical, isolated and ready to kill in cold blood at the drop of a hat. On the other, as he lies low in a small Italian town after a bloody opening shoot-out in Sweden, he is a man haunted by his past and by the realisation that, if he were to put his work to one side for just a moment, he would find a life with precious little else left in it to call his own.

We’re a long way from Phuket, Toto

'Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives'

If a passing stranger with too much time on his hands were to ask me to make a list of the ten most important film-makers at work in the world today, then the name of the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul would be somewhere near the top.

Unfortunately, as I’ve discovered from bitter experience, the opinions of a semi-employable film ‘blogger count for little in this cold, hard world of ours. So it’s gratifying to see that Apichatpong (or Joe to his friends) is finally starting to receive the international recognition that he deserves for his work, with a Palme d’Or win at this year’s Cannes Festival and his latest film set to represent Thailand at next year’s Oscars.

Another Year – A Review

I’ve always had mixed feelings about the films of Mike Leigh. On the one hand, the 67-year-old director’s work is unique, intelligent and ambitious in a way that other British films often struggle to be. On the other, in films like Happy-Go-Lucky (2008), High Hopes (1988) and Abigail’s Party (1977) there always seems to be an uncomfortably thin line between characterisation and caricature, a line which the director, with his famous, semi-improvised approach to performance, seems too often to stray across.

So it was with bated breath that I settled down to watch Another Year, Leigh’s latest film, and a contender for the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Another Year tells the story of a year in the life of Tom and Gerri (Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen), a happily-married, middle class couple drifting slowly and contentedly towards retirement. He works as a geologist, she as a counsellor; weekends are spent tending their allotment and cooking for friends and family.

Enter The Void – A Review

It's all gone a bit Pete Tong... 'Enter The Void'

What happens to us after we die?: perhaps the oldest and most troublesome question known to mankind. A question, nevertheless, which Argentinian-French director Gaspar Noé (Irréversible, Seul Contre Tous) sets out to tackle with characteristic gusto in his intense new film Enter The Void.

Never one to shy away either from controversy or from mind-bending visuals, Noé casts his film as an unapologetic ‘trip’ movie, a staggering, high-concept piece that takes its cue from The Tibetan Book of the Dead as it recounts the premature death and ghostly wanderings of a young American in Tokyo.

I’m Still Here – A Review

 

JP, yesterday

A huge number of column inches has already been devoted to the question of whether Casey Affleck’s new film about the physical and mental disintegration of his brother-in-law and friend Joachin Phoenix, is a straightfoward documentary (as it says on the tin) or something far more contrived and mischievous.

Well, let me say straight away that I’m Still Here is very obviously not an ‘honest’, fly-on-the-wall record of events. Certain key scenes have quite evidently been scripted in advance, and Phoenix’s shambling, paranoid performance is simply too funny to be completely unplanned. To call it a spoof or a mockumentary is perhaps going a little too far though. Rather, it’s a record of a year-long tragi-comic performance, a living piece of installation art almost, for which Phoenix grew a big bushy beard, smoked a lot of dope and appeared in various stages of coherence in the US media. How far this performance spilled over into his off-camera life is anyone’s guess, but for much of the film the actor certainly seems to be pretty immersed in deep character, living and breathing the Method like some latter-day, hoodie-wearing Brando.