TOP TEN OF 2011 - IMHO!
I don't usually rank films. People ask me my favourite film ever, it changes. Top five? Okay, but I can't tell you the order. Normally, I know which film I like most in a year ... But can rarely think of a top ten. Last year, for some reason, I could. So I did. Here they are: The Ten Best Films of 2011 ... Official!
10: RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES
It annoyed me when they changed the name a couple of months before release – from Rise of the Apes. The added ‘Planet of the’ just seemed to make it all so unsubtle for me. The film itself, thankfully, worked a treat. It begins as a modern-day reworking of the Frankenstein story then develops into something far more spectacular. The motion-capture work with the rightly-celebrated Andy Serkis is remarkable – especially facially – but you never forget you’re watching a CGI monkey. Some of those facial expressions are heart-breaking … But you never think of him as a real ape.
9: THE RUM DIARY
Can’t explain why I liked this so much, because it is a minor work for all concerned. People sing the praises of Thompson, yet all the great lines in this film (of which there are many) are Bruce Robinson’s, who Johnny Depp successfully dragged out of retirement to write and direct this. The end result works well as a companion piece to both his Withnail and I and Depp/Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I can think of no higher complement than that.
8: SOURCE CODE
This is a real Rubik’s Cube of a fillum. It’s a mystery you enjoy solving. It takes the relatively unpromising premise of ‘let’s run the same eight minutes over and over again’ and manages to turn it into a compelling character-driven action-piece, one part Groundhog Day to two-parts Twilight Zone. After (the superior) Moon, this will be Duncan Jones’ calling card for the States. Expect exceptional things from him in years to come! There's loads more info, plus an explanatory infographic for those who still don't get it, with my review here.
7: ATTACK THE BLOCK
This is a bravura opening volley from Joe Cornish’s feature-film career. The film is unfairly compared to Shaun of the Dead because of the horror/comedy mix and the presence of Nick Frost. The only similarity is that they both understand and have great fondness for their source material – in this case early John Carpenter movies – but have not allowed that to stand in the way of their own creativity. I doubt if this will go down as well in the US as Shaun did, because they won’t understand much of the dialogue (if I’m honest, I didn’t understand all of it) and therefore won’t be Cornish’s hot ticket. But he has already got a Tintin script for Spielberg under his belt, so he’ll do alright!
6: CAPTAIN AMERICA: The First Avenger
This film is a good-natured, beautifully-designed romp with an excellent central performance from Chris Evans, who impressed me for the first time in his career. Yes, it’s a piece of mental chewing-gum, but it’s done with such panache – and is so loyal to the spirit of the 1940s source material – that it wins over the most cynical viewer. Along with Hugo, it has the best special effects of the year! And the best review of it, of course, is here.
5: X-MEN : FIRST CLASS
This film has a real panache, and looks to be Matthew Vaughn’s second stab at grooming a future James Bond (he gave Daniel Craig his first leading role in Layer Cake) because Michael Fassbender is captivating as Erik Lensherr, the avenging angel. A magical way of re-inventing the X-Men universe. Now, if only they could make a Wolverine film this well! For more info, my definitive review is here.
4: WARRIOR
The trailer did not sell this to me, neither did this unimaginative poster. I just wasn't interested. Then a few friends started telling me this was their film of the year. Intrigued, I investigated further and discovered: It is so much better than last year’s much-feted multi-Oscar-winner The Fighter. This is the story of two estranged kick-boxing brothers who, independently (and rather improbably) entre the same competition with inevitable results. It shouldn’t work. The plot is ridiculous, but the performances are so committed and so involving, the writing, directing and editing so perfect that you can’t help being drawn in and mesmerised by it.
3: DRIVE
Some films are released. Some escape. I had to hunt this film down with bloodhounds. It didn’t play in any multiplex in a fifty mile radius of where I live. But it was worth the hunt. This is a minimalist, chilly film with an extraordinarily controlled central performance from Ryan Gosling (Whose always interesting but easy to miss career really stepped up a gear in 2011). Yes, the film is entirely spoiled by its contentious trailer, so don't watch that, watch the film instead. To be fair, compared to Valhalla Rising (director Nicolas Winding Refn’s last film), Drive is as action-packed as a Transformers movie.
2: SUBMARINE
Came as a complete surprise to me, this did. I rarely fall for the interesting, independent British films, I’m always seduced by the big, flashy Hollywood fare. But this year was full of surprises for me. Submarine is simply a delight! If you haven’t watched it yet, treat yourself, pausing only to read my review, here.
1: HUGO
My opinion of 3D is a matter of record, yet Hugo needs to be in 3D. This is the only film yet made that made me upset that I can’t see in 3D. It is an integral part of the fabric of the film – which is a delightful fantasy set in a magical, beautifully realised world. You can feel the joy of discovery as the long unused parts of Scorsese's mind that once made him a genius, were fired into renewed life by the possibilities of this new medium. This is almost perfect movie-making for me and is a film I suspect I will revisit often on disc!
BLACK MIRROR: The National Anthem
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| But what about the victim? Oh, sod her, she's not the point ... |
So, Charlie Brooker has returned, to slap us in our complacent faces once more.
Once was the time, we tell ourselves, that our television was the envy of the world. My university lecturers told me. The critics I used to rub shoulders with at press-showings and festivals told me. The text books I recommend to my students tell me. Look at "Prime Suspect", they all say, or "Cracker" and before that "Edge of Darkness". Look at Dennis Potter and Alan Bleasdale! No argument from me about any of that. But that's all very, very old!
When you try and find something comparable from the last ten years ... That's where opinions are less unanimous. There's no shortage of excellence these days, but I fear that the moulds have been broken and the writings of your Tony Jordans, Paul Abbotts, Russell T. Davieses and even the (in my opinion) vastly over-valued Stephen Poliakoffs, pale in comparison to the 'greats' of the 'golden age' of the eighties. We’ve been impressed by literate, impassioned, artistic telly … Now we need to be more impressed!
Of course, part of that will be the break-up of the traditional viewing habits. it's rare now for ten million people to be watching the same programme on the same day. But the programmes that do command a huge audience, a loyal audience that tune in week after interminable week, an audience which feels so invested in the show they will Twitter about it, Facebook about it and even pay cash money to be involved in its outcome ... Are the reality shows and the soaps.
These don’t ennoble us. They do not aspire to be literature.
These are the factories out of which churn the new breed of 'celebrities' ... The business of show needs a steady stream of affordable celebrities as commodities to sell at a profit. And we accommodatingly worship these celebrities in an empty, envious and ultimately short-lived way. Our relationships with them go through a few fairly familiar stages ... Indifference, which becomes Mild Interest, then Fascination ... but, the relationship becomes abusive when we turn on them and develop a taste for their Pain. Only when that Pain is not of their own devising (such as in the case of Jade Goody's Cervical Cancer) does our sense of Guilt disguise itself as Sympathy.
At the moment, we are watching the Leveson Inquiry into tabloid journalists' invasion of people's privacy in search of the mud their front pages sling. We tut and mutter about the failure of standards and shameful immorality and try to ignore the creeping knowledge that they would have stopped doing it if we had stopped buying the papers.
There are several reasons I don't buy (or read) tabloids. Personal ethics is one of them.
There are several reasons I generally try to avoid 'reality shows'. Their cruelty is one of them.
The audience has become cruel. Of course, there's nothing new in this ... At least we're not standing in town squares to watch poor people getting hung anymore. Not literally.
I suspect that this cruelty has to do with the marching infantalisation of society. Education no longer prepares people for adulthood, it insulates them against failure. The welfare and tax systems punish those who act like responsible adults and attempt to pay their way rather than scraping by on handouts, meanwhile the popular media is obsessed with undemanding, familiar spectacle at the cost of analysis, insight and originality. It is not unusual now to age without growing.
Children laugh at others' misfortune without the conscience of an adult; they don't pause to think "There but for the grace of God ... " Well, that's okay, they're children, they're allowed. It's when those children are fully grown, with children of their own, that this unformed, uncivilised, bullying mind-set becomes an issue.
Which is where Charlie Brooker comes in. He's had the better part of a decade of watching and writing about the appalling brain-softening bilge that swells and bubbles flatulently between the ad breaks on our nation's most-watched channels. His loathing is detailing in a characteristic mix of eloquent insight and scatological spite. And, yes, he’s cruel. He sometimes feigns shock at his own levels of cruelty, then continues to unrepentantly re-demonstrate them every time he or his words appear.
But, of course, he is merely reflecting, satirically, the cruelty of the medium on which he comments.
He is also a major adopter of and leading contributor to social media (well, Twitter) with which the traditional media are attempting to maintain a clumsy symbiotic relationship. Social media has proven itself, time and again, to be a viral breeding ground of childish knee-jerk reaction. With no pause for reflection, people react and share their displeasure, even if the thing to which they are reacting is actually nothing (such as the regular ‘scares’ over Facebook starting to charge).
I have no idea how tasteless jokes used to circulate like wild-fire in the days before text and Twitter, but there’s no doubting how it happens now!
It was, therefore, only a matter of time before someone wrote a satire about both the old and new media egging each other on; and it is no great shock that Brooker thought of it first.
So, finally, I get round to what I intended to be writing about 800-odd words ago … Black Mirror. This is a triptych (though I doubt the author would call them that) of thematically linked films (though I think British TV still likes to think of them as ‘plays’) and the first is called ‘The National Anthem’.
The name, ‘Black Mirror’ suggests that the reflection of ourselves we see in the TV screen is a darker, crueller version of our actual selves. Things of which we disapprove in reality, we willingly, enthusiastically watch on screen. Morally, we are darker there. The title alone, then, is a telling metaphor of our relationship with our screens.
And what do we watch, in this black mirror? Programmes about the worst aspects of ourselves. It was inevitable, then, that this programme would be cruel. Cruel in the way that South Park and Family Guy are cruel. Cruel in the way Frankie Boyle is cruel. Full of merciless, insightful, intelligent, judgemental cruelty. But, unlike all these other peddlers of illusory human suffering, Brooker implicates the audience.
We have an appetite for televised cruelty but - partly in-hand with that childish sense of humour we now have and partly nurtured by a decade of I’m A Celebrity – this appetite is sated as much by embarrassment as it is by pain.
And so Brooker posits a situation where a member of the Royal family is kidnapped and held to ransom. The price being that the Prime Minster must fuck a pig on live television. You know this already, because you’ve heard/read about the programme in the flurry of prurient coverage it has received.
That, right there, was Brooker’s brainstorm: Criticise our addiction to sensationalising others’ embarrassment and suffering by creating exactly the kind of sensation he is targeting.
In the show, the whole country revels in the anticipation of the misery to be inflicted on their Prime Minister, much as we waited in eager anticipation to see this, Brooker’s latest diatribe. Then the British people in the film actually watch ‘the event’ and their appetite withers. That’s the thing with appetites … They’re all about anticipation. But, however distasteful people find it, they keep watching. We are shown empty street after empty street. The entire country is indoors, watching the degradation of their leader.
I thought the idea was loathsome. I was genuinely frightened that they would actually show ‘the event’. But I kept watching.
Brooker’s targets are many: Politicians who will literally do anything to hang on to power, simply because an opinion poll tells them to (the saving of a life is only ever a secondary motivation here); Journalists who will use any manipulative technique to get a lead on a story (here, the ambitious journalist in question rather satisfyingly gets shot); but, mostly you and me for our unwillingness to turn away from the car-wreck. It is what Joseph Conrad called ‘the fascination of the abomination’.
If this programme is offending you, he challenges, then simply turn it off. Such are the depths that TV has plunged to that this scenario – something from a sick joke told by a drunkard – is where Brooker has to take us in order to make his point. This is how low you have to go to be shocking these days. Of course, in doing so, he has simply lowered the bar even further.
This isn’t the first TV programme to challenge the audience for its unwillingness to avert its gaze. I am put in mind of the excellent 1983 movie Special Bulletin which takes the form of a news broadcast beaming live from a boat anti-nuclear protestors are about to destroy with a nuclear weapon. In that, the protestors repeatedly challenge the networks carrying their feed to pull the plug if they disapprove of the ‘terrorism’. Of course, no one does.
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| Special Bulletin ... And this news just in ... You're all fucked. Now Tammy with the weather. |
All this grumbling about lowering standards probably makes me sound like someone who promotes censorship. Nah. Censorship never works and usually succeeds in creating the opposite response to the one desired (cf the ‘Video Nasties Banned List’ which immediately became a collectors’ wants list). No, what I would like is some self-restraint. We should have the freedom create and consume whatever (legal) images we please. But just because we can doesn’t mean we should. And, even if we must, surely it would be better if we did so as a statement of independence, of defiance, and not simply so some impossibly wealthy tycoon can increase their market share by pandering to our basest desires?
Brooker has realised that the only way to really throttle the life out of the spineless TV monster he loathes (whilst it is making him a wealthy man), is to get down there in the gutter with it.
The look on Rory Kinnear’s face as he is going through with his public humiliation will live me for a while … It's just as well he's got his Hamlet out of the way already, because I wonder if I will ever be able to look at his face in any role he plays from now on, without remembered the grimace, the sobbing, the drool … Because the idea at the heart of this pieces is so entirely loathsome. Far less loathsome – but far more troubling – is the Prime Minister’s willingness to go through with it.
Thing is, we know no one would in the real world … But it serves as a commentary on the ambitions of those in Power and how they will, in order to hang on to that power, abandon any ethical and moral stand they ever took. New Labour did it. The new Lib Dens did it. The Tories haven’t, but that’s only because they only ever pay lip-service to ethics and morals, they don’t actually believe in any of it.
Brooker’s final master-stroke is the revelation of who the kidnapper is and why they did it. If you haven’t seen it, I won’t spoil it. But it’s a whole new target for Brooker’s withering scorn!
So, will this show be held up a glowing example of the new golden age of TV writing? Will it enshrine Brooker’s name on the same monuments as Potter’s and Bleasdale’s? Well, only if its story ceases to feel so extreme and distasteful; only if our culture continues on its downward spiral to infantile, puerile, docile oblivion. So, yes, then; very probably.
ANONYMOUS
But, purely out of a sense of professional courtesy, I felt that I should go see it. So I did. I am forced to wonder if, out of the same sense of professional courtesy, either writer John Orloff or director Roland Emmerich have bothered to see any Shakespeare plays, or were they working from the Cliff Notes?
I am by no means a Shakespearean scholar. I have read no more than a handful of his plays and they have all been in a school or college environment. Never-the-less, I detected a fairly free-wheeling attitude towards his work and its historical context.
It's obviously set in some alternate version of history where Henry V was Shakespeare's first performed play, followed closely by Romeo and Juliet, then Hamlet, Richard III and, finally, King Lear. All in about a year. (It's possibly the same Emmerichian alternate universe where the pyramids were build by aliens riding woolly mammoths).
Okay, so this is a work of fiction and maybe these details aren't that important. After-all, one of the things the film is concerned with is the cloud of doubt that surrounds Shakespeare so, I don't know, maybe the documents that have always told us when the plays were first performed are fake.
Could happen. So, let's leave that and move on.
The mission here was to create an Elizabethan political thriller, concerning the machinations of court (inspired, possibly, by the similarly Machiavellian activities depicted in Elizabeth's dad's court in the hit TV show The Tudors). That, at least, seemed perfectly feasible to my historically-uncultured eye. Indeed, Edward Hogg has a considerable amount of fun playing the villain, Robert Cecil - who has a hump! I imagine some imaginative stage director will already be casting him in a revival of Richard III.
All of this courtly behaviour, however, is portrayed with a lack of conviction and subtlety, which results in it seeming nothing more than camp! Particularly in the case of Rafe Spall who plays the talentless actor called William Shakespeare who becomes the front, the patsy pretending to be the writer. As the film progresses he degenerates from an interesting possibility to a pantomime bad guy.
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| So, how do I do the Ifans eyebrow? Is this it? |
Unfortunately, as wafer-thin as his character's motivation is, I would have probably swallowed it, and Ben Jonson's inexplicable willingness to go along with all of the repercussions that arise from the deceit, if only I believed one word coming out of any of the actors' mouths.
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| "Dude, even his moustache is, like, as unconvincing as the dialogue." "Totally!" |
This is an unfortunate occurrence when an American script-writer and a German/American director clearly decided they knew more about the way English actors spoke four hundred years ago, than the English actors actually reading the lines. Consequently, there is a general air - and not just in Ifans' performance - where the actors simply don't believe what they're saying.
With one or two exceptions ... Joely Richardson and Vanessa Redgrave are astonishingly similar as young and old Elizabeth ... Leaving one to feel that a time machine had been employed to allow one person to play both ends of their own life.
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| Joely Richardson, just 74 years young! |
Apart from Richardson/Redgrave, no one looks like their younger selves (well, okay, David Thewlis is pretty good at playing his younger self) but this makes everything appallingly complicated and you just know that it isn't worth the brain-power of trying to figure out who is meant to be whom.
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| Sorry, who did you say you were, again? |
The film is, then, a mess on several levels. Not least because it is hilariously funny in places; a fact which, I imagine, will come as a depressing surprise to the writer and director but not to the cast.
It's just a shame Derek Jacobi decided to take the money (for what must have been just a day's work) because his presence at the beginning, serving the role of the Chorus introducing the drama, lends the film some credibility which it certainly doesn't deserve.
11/11/11
All we ever ask our political leaders to do is protect us. Waging war is the single most despicable way they can fail ... And there is, hopefully, a special place in Hell for Blair, Bush, Thatcher and every other leader who sacrifice young men and women for a vote or a profit point.
I gaze at the blank-eyed mouth-breathers I sometimes teach and think that our (great) grandparents went through unimaginable suffering, simply so our generation could become ignorant, apathetic and arrogant.
Then I think about the people who still get off their arses and march and protest and camp outside St. Paul's simply because they have the right to have their say ... I think about the people who train for months to run marathons for charity, year after year ... I think about the people who risk their lives every day in lifeboats or as volunteer firefighters or mountain rescue when it would be so much easier not to ... Or who go unarmed into warzones and disaster zones to help, not because anyone makes them, but simply because they couldn't live with themselves if they didn't.
THE CELLULORD ON STAGE - ACT THREE
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| Me, intelligently wearing black in a black-walled cinema, with the lights dimmed. |
And so it came to pass that I was asked to introduce 'Anonymous'. This film, written by John Orloff and directed by Roland Emmerich, tells the story of the political intrigue surrounding Queen Elizabeth's court in her dotage and how this impacts on one nobleman's secret desire to write plays, necessitating the use of a 'font', namely one William Shakespeare.
Now, whilst this is the first film to deal with the idea, it is very far from a new idea, so my introduction looked into the whole matter.
So, to begin, we all know what William Shakespeare looks like, yes?
He looks a bit like Voldemort’s younger brother …Or, if you’re a Doctor Who fan ...
... You probably think he looks like that bloke off Shameless who does the Homebase ads …
This is the most famous likeness of Shakespeare … It is an engraving by Martin Droeshout – This engraving was published in the so-called ‘folio’ – the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s works – published in 1623, seven years after he died.
The only other portrait that is considered ‘legitimate’ is that on his Funerary Monument which is inside Holy Trinity Church in Stratford.
As its name suggests – this was also created after his death – but before the folio was published – because the intro to the folio mentions the Funerary Monument, so we know that was there first!
But both of these portraits were created from memory AFTER Shakespeare died!
There are various paintings which claim to be of Shakespeare and to have been painted in his lifetime – but most are completely dismissed by academia – except:
The Chandos Portrait, painted in 1610 by John Taylor (not the Duran Duran bassist – but the Elizabethan painter … Of whose work no other examples exist) This is the one that The National Portrait Gallery has put its weight behind.
But then – in 2009 – another painting was discovered … Claiming to have been painted in 1610 also!
Called The Cobbe Portrait – It is further claimed that this painting was copied for the Droeshout Engraving.
The National Portrait Gallery thought, don’t like this idea … they maintain that this is ACTUALLY a bloke called Sir Thomas Overbury … Who was famous for a sex scandal that got him imprisoned in the Tower, where he died – but that’s another story.
Is it credible that a painting could have hung on a wall for 400 years without anyone clocking that it was Shakespeare? Well, The Cobbe collection includes works handed down from the family of the third Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare's only known patron.
So, how come there are no DEFINITIVE portraits of the country’s greatest playwright? And how come those portraits we do have … all look different? That kind of uncertainy is exactly where conspiracy theories spring from!
See, this is not a new idea …
At the time of his death, Shakespeare was considered a great writer – but not THE GREATEST … Indeed – his works were adapted and re-worked many times over the years … No one saw his texts as Holy Writ … Personally I’d LOVE to see 1681 version of King Lear … with the happy ending!
Indeed, Shakespeare had been dead and gone a century before his works reached the heights of their popularity. By the time of the Licensing Act of 1737 – one in four of the plays on in London was a Shakespeare. His plays began to be studied. His reputation spread across Europe.
In 1785 a scholar named James Wilmot could find no evidence that Shakespeare had ever written anything so decided the plays must have been written by the philosopher, lawyer and scientist Sir Francis Bacon.
Further fuel was added to this when it was realised that Bacon stopped writing under his own name in 1613 – when he became full-time Attorney General. This was two years after Shakespeare supposedly wrote his last play, and three years before he allegedly died!
By the mid 1800s, when science was suggesting that we were evolved from apes, not Adam and Eve … And historians were beginning to wonder if The Bible was really written by God … Or if Jesus ever actually existed … A fella called Samuel Schmucker (!) wrote a book called Historic Doubts Respecting Shakespeare - it was meant to be a satire of other historical studies … But he inadvertently started something.
The flood of Shakespearean Authorship Doubters … Began with a woman. An American.
But this unlikely idea didn’t go away … Books continued to be written, investigations undertook and, as late as the 1930s, bodies were being interred for ‘proof’ of Shakespeare’s identity. However – proof – whether for or against … Continues to elude historians!
This isn’t helped by the fact that Shakespeare himself didn’t seem to know who he was – since, in his signatures, there are 25 different spellings, such as ...
William Shakspere Wm Shaxpere
Wm Shaxberd William Shakspear
William Shakspēr Willm Shakp
Wm Shakspē William Shakespeare
Willm Shackspeare Willm Shakp
By me William Shakspeare
Wm Shakspē William Shakespeare
Willm Shackspeare Willm Shakp
By me William Shakspeare
Of course, there is a long-standing conspiracy that the serious search for alternative authors is being suppressed, as though by some pernicious orthodox organisation … A sort of Stratford Association of Shakespeareans … Or SAS!
Another conspiracy believes that Shakespeare was REALLY Christopher Marlowe …
You see … there is a problem which just won’t go away – How did a self-educated dealer in grain and wool from the Midlands, rise through the London ranks from actor to director to the greatest playwright and poet to ever walk the boards?
Some people simply can’t accept this … They feel that Shakespeare MUST have been from the educated nobility. And there have been A LOT of famous fans of this theory …
Looks like he’s reclining on his own couch here!
Charlie Chaplin wrote in his autobiography: “I am not concerned with who wrote the works of Shakespeare … but I can hardly think it was the Stratford boy. Whoever wrote them had an aristocratic attitude.”
There are A LOT of theories about who Shakespeare was … NONE of the ones I have mentioned appear in the film you are about to watch … They have gone for a very different explanation. They may be right. We have no way of knowing.
For what it’s worth … I think I know who wrote the greatest literary works ever in the English language … Isn't it obvious?
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