Dec 10, 2010

PERFORMANCE OF THE YEAR: Jeremy Renner

1. Jeremy Renner — The Town
2. Christian Bale — The Fighter
3. Michelle Williams — Blue Valentine
4. Colin Firth — The King's Speech
5. Rachel McAdams — Morning Glory
6. Julianne Moore — The Kids Are Alright
7. Sam Rockwell — Iron Man 2
8. Kirsten Dunst — All Good Things
9. Amy Adams — The Fighter
10. Mark Ruffalo — Shutter Island*
This blog does not believe in Great Acting, or at least the kind of sweaty over-exertion that gets celebrated as Great Acting elsewhere. We like performers who hide their work, pull their weight, and steal the show without taking a thing from their fellows — showboats who play well with others. We do not observe any distinctions of gender, class or nationality, although we admit to a slight prejudice towards the kind of performance that gets called 'supporting'. We are not gaga for Brits or their kings. We are not hot for a funny accent or prodigious feats of girth expansion/deflation. Disabilities leave us cold. Likewise famous beauties playing 'ugly'. We like comics when they are funny. We like entertainers when they entertain. We do not ask that they recant or apologise. We are not interested in 'transformations,' 'chameleons', and have no truck with 'disappearing into a role'. The performances listed above all conform, however, to the definition of art once given us, over a bottle of Italian red, by the art critic David Sylvester: a leopard too busy running to notice how beautiful it is in motion. We naturally trust no definition of art, but like this one because we like running leopards. Also, leopards in repose. Pretty much anything to do with leopards, in fact. They are cool creatures. So. We greatly enjoyed John Hawkes in Winter's Bone, Greta Gerwig in Greenberg, Blake Lively in The Town and Katie Jarvis in Fish Tank — leopards all. We liked Mark Ruffalo in The Kids Are Alright but preferred his cop in Shutter Island. His performance was an uncanny period piece: he could have slipped into any Bogart picture, third hoodlum from the left, no questions asked. We loved Amy Adams' combination of lily-white limbs and right hook in The Fighter, and felt Kirsten Dunst's dawning horror in All Good Things like a rip in our lower left ventricle. Sam Rockwell was svelte and self-absorbed in Iron Man 2, as if the entire movie was about him; he even got a laugh from a joke about Joyce'sUlysses, the first time I have come across one in a summer blockbuster about robots (all credit to writer Justin Theroux). For us, the real revelation in The Kids Are Alright was not Annette Bening, who's performance felt like an expensive engine just ticking over, but Julianne Moore: skittish, daffy, as loose as Keaton in her prime, her body acting about two seconds ahead of her mind, or morals, or any other bit of her. Rachel McAdams brought Doris-Day-like levels of perkiness to Morning Glory, establishing her as the de Niro of sugarplum moxie, with the best bum in showbusiness. We liked Colin Firth's anger in The King's Speech and the way the stammer seemed to originate in his throat not his mouth: a spiritual, not a mechanical matter. Michelle Williams gets a truly thrilling scene of inchoate rage at the end of Blue Valentine: a black declaration of anti-love that would do the Liz Taylor of Virginia Woolf proud. Somebody put Williams in a Mike Nichols picture. Second place goes to Christian Bale for his an antic, emaciated jack-o-lantern in The Fighter, his metabolism like a candle gutttering in its own wax; that he overwhelmed his own movie is the only thing in his disfavor. Bale could do with taking notes from Jeremy Renner, who powered up The Town without overpowering it, delivering the most infectious bit of daredevilry we have since Steve McQueen passed away. Almost any other actor would have rooted Jem's violence in his fear of going back to jail; Renner tacks in the other direction, tipping fear into glee. The result was both the most purely pleasurable performance of the year, pound for pound, and also the most precisely callibrated to the task in hand — an unbeatable blend of show-stopper and team-player.

* I haven't yet seen True Grit or Another Year
57 comments:

MOVIE STAR of the YEAR: James Franco

I don't mind admitting to a certain bashfulness whenever James Franco comes on the TV. My wife will tell you this is a vast improvement on last year when I succumbed to a series of doe-like flutters whenever Carey Mulligan made an appearance on our television. She described my face as rather like that of Eliott's whenever E.T is in trouble, happy or sad. The fact that this year's trance-like state is induced by Mr Franco is not without good reason. Whether indulging in feverish make-out sessions with the actresses on General Hospital, or popping up in the 'trailer' for Gary Shteyngart's Super, Sad, True Love Story, Franco has conducted himself with a wit that was entirely missing, say, Johnny Depp's attempts to self-subvert back in the nineties. When Depp moved to Paris in order to make himself over in the likeness of Hunter S Thompson, or dragged film projects down into Chaplinesque sight gags and puerile self-mockery, he came off as a self-delluding berk: a teen idol in flight from the his own meal ticket. Franco's adventures in Wonderland have an altogether airier, less self-sabotaging feel. His turn as Harvey Milk's lover in Milk and as the beatific stoner in Pineappple Express revealed an altogether lighter talent, as relaxed as a cat soaking up sunlight. Like Travolta, he is one of the truly natural attention hogs, so much so that his turn seducing himself for the NYT's excellent series of shorts seems born less of narcissism, and its attendant attempt to repair an irreperably shattered self-image, than on a simple desire to keep company with the rest of the civilised world, all of whom are already grooving on his Royal Franconess. Maybe this sounds I'm drawing hearts on my desk. Could be. This blog is not immune to the odd man-crush. I met Franco recently, for a profile I was writing for the Telegraph, and was completely baffled by the guy. His enrollment in not one but four graduate school programmes, his book of short stories, his TV appearances, cameos, art installations and assorted extra-mural celebrity 'happenings' all testify to the all-consuming rapacity of one of the world's largest egos, and yet he was strangely free of vanity, with one of thickest skin I've yet found on a celebrity, still less an actor. I don't think I've met one who seemed to need praise less. Quite how seriously he wants to be taken — or whether his career is in danger of turning into one giant wink — remains to be seen. I didn't like 127 Hours but think he has a genuine talent for the giving and receiving of delight. Movie careers have been built on far less. He seems to actually enjoy being a movie star, which is a rarity in and of itself these days, when most celebrities are taught to hate the blandishments of fame on sight. Franco gobbles them up like a child scarfing coco-pops.
22 comments:

Dec 9, 2010

BEST FILM of 2010: Inception


1. Inception A
2. The Social Network A
3.Toy Story 3 A-
4. The Kids Are Alright B+
5. The Town B+
6. The King's Speech B
7. Tiny Furniture B
8. The Fighter B
9. True Grit B
10. Another Year B-
It’s been a great year for movies that bulge the forehead and tickle the cranium, crossword puzzles like Inception or Shutter Island in which Leonardo di Caprio tries to work out if life is but a passing dream. That mood of solipsism is the prevailing one in American movies right now, what with the release, last week, of Darren Aronofsky’s latest head trip, Black Swan, in which Natalie Portman’s ballerina does battle with a possibly imaginary rival who may or may not turn out to be a projection of her deepest, darkest fears. Hollywood has not forgotten how to shred our nerves, boggle our eyes and fuck with our heads. But as we approach the end of this first year of the new decade, American movies would appear to have forgotten how to move us. What does it say that the most touching film out of Hollywood this year was Toy Story 3, whose release in July was the occasion for numerous press reports puzzling over the sight of fully-grown audiences weeping over a bunch of brightly-colored animated toys? Were they mourning their own lost childhoods? A Proustian rush brought on by the smell of Barbie-Doll plastic? Most of the films aimed at the heartlights of adults, on the other hand, have fizzled at the box office. Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter, a somnolent drama about the afterlife featuring Matt Damon in an array of muesli-colored knitwear, seemed to have already passed over to the other side, where it presumably met up with Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones to commiserate over the fate of the supernatural tearjerker. That is how we take our weepies, these days, cross-bred with other genres, or heavily disguised, as if embarrassed by more direct appeals to an audience's emotion. In almost any other era Love and Other Drugs, a love story about a slick pharmaceutical salesmen who falls for a young woman with stage one Parkinson’s, would have played a four-ply weepie. Instead it came on like a rom com on steroids, super-sexed, erection gags protruding — James L Brooks in the Age of Apatow. Even so, it struggled to make much of a dent against the Harry Potter juggernaut.

“We’ve suspended the willing suspension of disbelief,” Zwick told me when I interviewed him for the New York Times. “We seem to have given up that relationship, that almost hypnotic engagement, with the characters up there on the screen. It’s hard to point to those movies and single out a performance. ‘That was really exciting the cg was wonderful, okay so the script wasn’t very good and the performances were not good but I really had a good time’. It’s a new phenomenon. At the end of the day what is being served?”


There's a touch of fogeyishness to this complaint — a


younger audience is what is being served, of course, in much same way that the lragely female audience of the 1930s and 40s sharpened the instincts of Hollywood producers to fashion such classics as Jezebel, Casablanca, A Star is Born, Now Voyager, so the majority of the studio’s manpower, ingenuity, talent and technology is being laid at the feet of the under-8s. Whether knowingly or not, Pixar have tapped into the exact same vein of silent stoicism that powered along the great weepies, from Brief Encounter to An Affair to Remember. For the toys, remember, can never tell Andy of their secret love. Theirs is a life of Jeevesian devotion, unable to ask for the one thing they desire above all else, which is for him to play with them; when he does their eyes loll lifelessly while we imagine the fireworks within. Instead of Trevor Howard’s stiff upper lip, try Mattel-moulded plastic™.





Zwick's suggestion that


new technologies — cgi, 3-D, digital projection — have changed the way we watch movies feels more accurate to me. The medium is changing from a third-person medium to a first person medium, dependent not on empathy between the audience and characters they see on the screen, but the more upfront thrill of vicariousness. As David Edelstein wrote at the beginning of the year in New York magazine:—

“Subjectivity is everywhere in movies now, from the limited vantage points of Cloverfield and Paranormal Activity to the narration-heavy Up in the Air. Only a decade ago, first-person voice-overs were rare, a stern taboo in the lectures of venerated motivational screenwriting guru Robert McKee. Then Charlie Kaufman mocked McKee (played by Brian Cox) in the self-deconstructing Adaptation, and all at once, it seemed, you couldn’t get away from garrulous narration — I went, I thought, I felt, I saw, I blah-blahed. Films became like memoirs. Like blogs."
This is having, I believe, a profound effect on the psychological make-up of the industry’s storytellers — what Martin Amis would call the “feeling tone” of Hollywood. Old school empaths like James L Brooks and Steven Spielberg are an endangered species. The only two A–list American directors who seem able, or even interested, in unzipping the emotions of an audience these days are Clint Eastwood and Ang Lee, their skill at so doing deriving from their own innate emotional reserve, in Lee’s case because the Taiwanese are an emotionally reserved people, and in Eastwood’s case because he is, well, Clint Eastwood. I can remember staggering from the final scene of Million Dollar Baby barely able to see the traffic through my mask of tears, my only comfort the thought that when Dirty Harry cracks, the world’s male population can reach for the hankies without shame or censure. I have hopes that Scorsese might yet pull something off with Hugo Cabret, but if early reviews of James L Brooks's new movie are to be believed, this once-great master is now permanently stuck the marshlands of the rom com. Hollywood auteurs these days come in two flavours; wan ironists like Anderson and Coppola or beetle-browed brainiacs like David Fincher and Darren Aronofsky, who relaxed his gaurd long enough to deliver one knockout punch, with The Wrestler, but is now back to detailing the exact length, depth and breadth of his dark side. The same goes for Fincher whose Social Network, thanks to Aaron Sorkin, gives us the most vivid picture of human beings in a Fincher picture to date, but still packs all the warmth of a block of dry ice. "You have a responsibility for the way you make the audience feel, and I want them to feel uncomfortable,” Fincher has said. "Some people go to the movies to be reminded that everything's okay. I don't make those kinds of movies. That, to me, is a lie. Everything's not okay." The wonder is that he still thinks there’s a battle to be won. The mainstream he grew up hating has all but disappeared. I don't know when he last went to the cinema, but it’s not exactly raining On Golden Ponds out there. Look at the winners of the Best Film Oscar in recent years — The Hurt Locker, Scorsese’s Departed, the Coens’ No Country for Old Men — and you will see plenty of hard, flinty, rigorously unsentimental choices, and only two, Slumdog Millionaire and Brokeback Mountain, that made any kind of emotional claim on their audiences at all (Correction: and of course, Brokeback lost, an event so traumatic I appear to have repressed all knowledge of it). Is it any wonder that audiences sneak off to get their emotional fix with movies like The Blind Side or Crazy Heart? It’s rather like what happened to the sale of alcohol under prohibition. If Hollywood’s A-listers neglect the emotional demands of the audience, the audience will go to the B-list, or if that fails then the c-list. Movies like The Blind Side are not happen when you give into the cheap allure of Hollywood schmalz. It’s what happens when you don’t.




25 comments:

BEST FILM SCORE of 2010: Inception

1. Inception — Hans Zimmer
2. The Social Network — Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross
3. I Am Love — John Adams
4. True Grit — Carter Burwell
5. Black Swan — Clint Mansell
6. The King's Speech — Alexandre Desplat
7. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps — Byrne & Brian Eno
8. The Town — Harry Gregson-Williams & David Buckley
9. 127 Hours — A. R. Rahman
10. Alice in Wonderland — Danny Elfmann

* An asterisk to denote the fact that I haven't yet seen Another Year.
17 comments:

BEST SONG of 2010: U Smile by Justin Bieber

1. U Smile — Justin Bieber
The only evidence I can find that Michael is not dead, merely in hiding behind a haircut closely resembling that of a lightly tousled tulip.
One day I may feel about this song the way I feel about the Pogues Fairytale of New York. I'll report back. Makes me miss scotch.

Steady, wistful, fond, like toys breaking up with one another, or airport music by Harry Nilsson.
4. Get Outta My Way — Kylie Minogue
There's a series of stepped, consecutive fifths in the chorus that feels like a staircase rising up to meet your feet as you duck and jive your way up towards the mirrorball that awaits you, always.
A little slice of heaven: Wilson does Gershwin. Like finding a brand new Beach Boys single you've never heard of.

Peter Gabriel does Vampire Weekend does Peter Gabriel. Yet the self-reference, instead of being smarmy, comes off as sweet, bashful even.

Peter Gabriel does Vampire Weekend does Peter Gabriel. Yet the self-reference, instead of being smarmy, comes off as sweet, bashful even.

From the Bird and The Bee's album of Hall and Oates covers: a song that sounds like an old number one but turns out, upon closer inspection, to be an original.

As close as an indie band comes to sounding like Bill Withers without being frog-marhed to the door and ejected on the grounds of tunefulness.

The London jazz crooner channels Neil Diamond and Billy Joel among others. The way to Sophie Dahl's heart, we now find out.
9 comments:

Dec 7, 2010

BEST ALBUM of 2010: The Wild Hunt

1. The Wild Hunt — The Tallest Man on Earth
2. Go — Jonsi
3. Plastic Beach — Gorillaz
4. Interpreting the Masters — The Bird and the Bee
5. July Flame — Laura Veirs
6. Heartland — Owen Pallett
7. The Winter of Mixed Drinks — Frightened Rabbit
8. Subiza — Delorean
9. Contra — Vampire Weekend
10. Gorilla Manor — Local Natives
5 comments:

Dec 6, 2010

Quote of the day: Christian Bale

“Nuclear apocalypse — who do you need?” he asked, launching into a half-joking rant. “Actors are probably not top of the list. What can I do for you? I can pretend to be somebody who can grow you some nice crops.” — Christian Bale, The New York Times
I would have thought that in the event of nuclear apocalypse, entertainers would be in even greater demand. You think we'd want to sit around the campfire dwelling on nuclear winter talking about how much we'd kill for a can of split-pea soup? I tell you who wouldn't be much in demand: screamers.
6 comments:

We are all Lord Voldemorts now

"Dark means serious. Dark means shadows. Dark means not evading the sad and inexplicable complexities of life—or even worse. Dark is grownup. I was mulling this when I read a short piece in the November 25 New York Review of Booksabout a previously unpublished confessional poem that Ted Hughes wrote but never finished before his death in 1998. It dwells on whom he was sleeping with, and where, on the weekend when his estranged wife Sylvia Plath committed suicide. Don’t count me among those fascinated by either Plath’s death or Hughes’s infidelities, any more than among those obsessed with whether the Rosenbergs were guilty. Those are special tastes. But Carol Ann Duffy, Britain’s current poet laureate, did get my attention by praising the poem as “the darkest poem that he wrote about the death of Sylvia Plath,” one that “seems to touch a deeper, darker place than poem he’s ever written.” Actually the NYRB article, by Mark Ford, leaves a rather different impression, of a man’s desperate effort to exorcise the memory of squalid, shameful behavior." — Peter Steinfels
Or, as the Pet Shop Boys sang on Miserablism, "Just for the sake of it, make sure you're always frowning / It shows the world that you've got substance and depth." It will also get you work. When screenwriter Alan Ball was called in for a meeting with Dreamworks executives to talk about his script for American Beauty he was told “’Could you just make it just a little more fucked up,’ which is not a note that you get in Hollywood very often. And I though, ‘Wow!’ And that gave me free range to go a little deeper, go a little darker, go a little more complicated.” It's the modern catechism: Deeper = Darker = = fucked up = good. It may have been the first time in the history of Western civilization that a creative artist was asked by his creative overlords to make his work more fucked up, but it was certainly not the last. At the cinema you cannot move for actors exploring their dark sides these days, in small, gritty dramas designed to puncture the upbeat pabulum we are spoonfed by the studios. Turn to the upbeat pabulum spoonfed us by the studios, however, and the picture is the same. “There’s no denying it, these are dark times,” begins the new Harry Potter, which spends most of its time with out teenage heroes in a tent, arguing about the hopelessness of their situation while the forces of darkness amass. Amongst current blockbusters, only Star Trek dares to abjure skies the colors of rust and plots the size of vengeance. On TV, it is the same story: writers pursuing that holiest of modern virtues, “edginess”, by cross-wiring our sympathies with undertakers (Six Feet Under), serial killers (Dexter) and drug dealers (Breaking Bad). When Battlestar Galactica dared to end on a rare hopeful note the fans were outraged. Meanwhile, Kanye West blanket-coverages the airwaves with his latest album, My Beautiful, Dark Twisted Fantasy. “It’s a strange critical phenomenon that only works of art that are ‘edgy’ or ‘scary’ or ‘dangerous’ are regarded as in anyway noteworthy," Nick Hornby recently complained. "Can’t we let them console, uplift, inspire, move, cheer? Please?." What happened? Wasn’t pop culture supposed to be about fake uplift? The ambrosial optimism of Disney and Spielberg? The false consciousness of the Hollywood happy ending? Such is the view of pop culture that has reigned since its inception, when F R Leavis first lambasted “the cheapest emotional responses” of newspapers, Auden declared “I don’t see how any civilized individual can watch TV far less own a TV set” and Virginia Woolf waltzed by the queues at her local cinema ( “These lowbrows are waiting, after the day’s work, in the rain, sometimes for hours, to get into the cheap seats and sit in hot theatres”). The result was Modernism, the world's first anti-mass aesthetic, designed to be as difficult, dark and mass-audience-alienating — a “virtuouso art of nerves” (Ortega y Gasset). By a process of assimilation that someone, some day, should write a book about, these attitudes have now been wholly subsumed within the pop culture they once sought to oppose. These days it is mass culture that harbors the anti-mass aesthetic. Avante-garde values have become the buzz-words of advertisers, corporate management gurus and high tech entrepreneurs. As Jim Jarmusch has recently said, “I reach for my revolver when I hear the word quirky. Or edgy. These words are now becoming labels that are slapped on products to sell them.” Superheroes boast dark sides that would put a Conrad antihero to shame. A trip to the latest David Fincher film involves more radical alienation than a season of Brecht. Darren Aronofsky has more contempt for the minnows of the mainstream (“to find Paris Hilton's partying interesting, is beyond nauseating”) than Pound's Cantos. Nor are they marginalised in any way for their radical stances: between the two of them, you're looking at two of this years' biggest Oscar winners! We queue up to applaud darkness. We toast the misanthrope. We ask for morbidity's autograph. Whether it be the fleshy self-flagellations of Black Swan or the rusty apocalypse of the latest Terminator, I am reminded of P G Wodehouse's rewriting of The Wasteland:—
“Desolation,
Doom,
Dyspepsia
And Despair.
I am a bat that wheels through the Air of Fate
I am a worm that wriggles in a Swamp of Disillusionment
I am a despairing Toad
I have got dyspepsia”.
Lighten up, toads!
7 comments:

Dec 5, 2010

BEST PERFORMANCES of the 1980s

1. Debra Winger, An Officer And A Gentleman (1982)
2. Tom Hanks, Big (1988)
3. Gerard Depardieu, Camille Claudel (1988)
4. Gary Oldman, Sid And Nancy (1986)
5. Michelle Pfeiffer, Dangerous Liaisons (1988)
6. Joe Pesci, Raging Bull (1980)
7. Holly Hunter, Broadcast News (1987)
8. Dennis Hopper, Blue Velvet (1986)
9. Melanie Griffith, Something Wild (1986)
10. Anthony Hopkins, Elephant Man (1980)
4 comments:

New York City, just like I pictured it

'“The only city on earth that glitters from afar when you are in it,” said Updike, or something like that, and its true: stand on any street corner and gaze down the avenues, each block milkier than the last, and you will find yourself looking at more places you are not, or could be, or should be, than any other city in the world. Want — or aspiration, or ambition — is built into the very architecture of the place. The absent cradle of the welfare state may be what lends the city it’s vertiginous late-capitalist thrill, but it’s like driving without shock absorbers: you feel every bump in the road. Even the car horns sound a note of muscular self-furtherance. In London a parp on the horn registers the inquiry “Are you mad?” In Paris, together with a shrug heavenward, it sounds a more philosophical note “The whole world is mad.” In New York, it is more primal, self-expressive. “I’m mad! Get out of my way!”'
— from my article about living in New York for Intelligent Life

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