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We Need to Talk About Kevin

dir: Lynne Ramsay
I really wish we didn't need to talk about Kevins, but we do, we really doI really wish we didn't need to talk about Kevins, but we do, we really do
Goddamn. God. Damn.

We Need to Talk About Kevin is pretty brutal. Actually, it’s beyond brutal. It’s one of the most brutal depictions of the terror involved in becoming a parent that I’ve ever seen.

It’s terrifying enough becoming a parent, bringing a new person into the world, trying to shepherd them towards becoming a decent person (if you have the capability or inclination, that is, because I’m sure there’s plenty of terrible parents who don’t give a damn). Mix in with that those feelings of ambivalence, of momentary regret a parent might have, lamenting the loss of their freedom, of their self-determination sacrificed on the altar of being a ‘good’ parent, which can manifest in anger towards that child, and consider the range of emotions that conjures up.

And then wonder whether monsters are born or made, and whether that monster, which is your own, became so because of everything you did, some of the things you did, or nothing you did, and know that there can never be a definitive answer, and there you have the crux of this whole, harrowing story.

Such a complicated premise isn’t going to be told in a straight-forward fashion, so the story jumps around in time, creating parallels and juxtapositions through the different timelines that otherwise wouldn’t exist. Throughout all looms that titan of cinema known as Tilda.

To this day, I still find how great she is as an actress to be staggering. It staggers the mind. This could be one of the most difficult roles of her career, a career abundant with difficult roles, but there’s no doubt that there’s no one else on the planet that could have played it as brilliantly as she does. Meryl Streep couldn’t have touched this with a ten-foot pole constructed entirely of Oscars on her best day. Of course Tilda deserves Oscars and such, but she’s not going to get them for this role. It’s way too much, and way too dark.

Her performance is too great, and the flick is too harrowing. She’s in almost every scene, and her acting has as much if not more to do with her physical performance, her body language, her grimaces of feigned levity, the pain and grief she carries in her eyes. This woman, when we first see her, is as happy as she’s ever going to be in these opening moments. Everything else, from then on, will be agony leavened only momentarily with brief moments where she forgets everything that’s happened. Only for the briefest of moments does she get slivers of grace.

It’s a lot to forget. Those opening moments try to encapsulate the freedom and joy Eva (Tilda Swinton) used to experience as part of her life. She’s at one of those festivals, Spanish, I think, where they celebrate harvest time, or the expulsion of the Jews in 1492, perhaps, by throwing tonnes and tonnes of tomatoes at each other. She’s covered in red, and ecstatic about it.

We see her in red quite often later on; red paint, red light, but for very different reasons. The intercutting of the two timelines shows us an Eva before she became a parent, and the Eva who she becomes long after Kevin has come along. Something terrible has happened, we slowly learn, and feel with increasing dread, that has rendered Eva something of the walking dead, but we’re not going to understand entirely until long after.

We Bought a Zoo

And you smell like one tooAnd you smell like one toodir: Cameron Crowe

There’s this feeling that certain films and certain directors provoke that’s akin to having been in an embarrassing relationship with someone completely unsuitable in some dark alleyway of your past. Sure, at the time you thought they were wonderful and fun, but then you look back with the benefit of maturity and hindsight and think “what the fuck was I on?”

And it happens, mostly, when you see them in their current state, giving the world new examples of why they were always embarrassing, and why you should have known they were a disaster way back when. Sure, I really enjoyed Almost Famous, and sit through it whenever it pops up on one of the cable movie channels, but, really, I can’t believe I ever liked this man’s movies.

We Bought a Zoo actually has a story that I found interesting. A grieving widower called Benjamin (Matt Damon) decides to buy a zoo, to take his two kids out of the city and all that reminds him of his departed wife, to start afresh. Along the way he has to say a lot of things that would embarrass even those kinds of people you know who biologically seem not to have any capacity for shame. You know, politicians, pornstars, footballers: even they would be blushing with some of these execrable words given to them. Instead, you have Matt Damon and Scarlett Johansson uttering this dolorous, dunderheaded dribble, which demeans us all individually and as a species.

This, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, interesting-sounding premise is then fed through a sequence of formula and cliché machines so mechanical and calculated in their efficiency that every moment that rolls along is broadcast well in advance and amped up in such a way that you start to hate the people you’re watching, and wish that bad things would happen to them both on and off screen.

The Descendants

dir: Alexander Payne
I wonder how high up on People magazine's Hottest 100 Bachelors list I am this year...I wonder how high up on People magazine's Hottest 100 Bachelors list I am this year...
I was so surprised when this didn’t turn out to be a biopic-documentary about the great punk band The Descendents, from whose ashes rose other punk superstars Black Flag and All, blessing the world with their fast, brutal pop-punk noise, inspiring a legion of teenage boys in Akron, Ohio and Ringwood, Melbourne, to pick up guitars in their bedrooms and then put them down again once they finished their chemistry and engineering degrees.

No. That would have been too real, too awesome. Instead, here’s George Clooney Clooning things up for the rest of us, based on the novel of the same name by Kaui Hart Cummings.

We see, for the briefest instant, a woman riding on a jet ski, who seems very happy. That’s the happiest we’re going to see her, because Clooney’s sonorous voiceover ensures that we will know quick smart that these people aren’t or can’t be happy for very long.

It turns out that the woman we beheld in all her glory is now in a coma, and her husband, Matt King (Cloons) is looking after her, and dealing more so with the fact that he now has to reengage with his family, being two daughters, which he thinks he’s not ready to do. The youngest, Scottie (Amara Miller) is getting in trouble for acting out (by saying ever so rude and hurtful things to other girls), and his elder daughter Alex (Shailene Woodley) has her own problems unsuccessfully hidden away at her elite boarding school.

Though he uses and abuses voiceover throughout the flick, Matt’s main problem, and Payne’s intention, as it often is the case with his films, is to point out that even with people living in paradise, which is what a lot of people would consider Hawaii to be, their lives can still suck a bit, and they can do shitty things to each other.

I’m not sure that’s going to come as a surprise to anyone, but maybe it needed to be said. I never really thought life was easier for emotionally distanced people living in a hot, tropical place, because I always assumed the humidity and heat would drive residents into semi-regular alcoholic rages.

Moneyball

dir: Bennett Miller
Brad Pitt IS A Ball of MoneyBrad Pitt IS A Ball of Money
Why would I watch a flick about baseball? Why would anyone? That is, why would anyone watch a flick about a sport they know nothing about apart from its existence, and couldn’t care less about?

Well, there have been some decent baseball flicks, for which it doesn’t matter a tinker’s dam whether you’re a fan of the sport or not. Eight Man Out, Cobb, The Babe, The Natural, Bull Durham, Field of Dreams: they're all the ones I can think of right now. You can argue that it’s not even the sport itself which is relevant in terms of whether they’re good films or not: it’s the story that goes along with it, eliciting as it does awe, hope, joy, boredom, strange sexual feelings and probably other darker emotions that I'm not privy to.

Well, truth be told the only reason I saw Moneyball is because I’d seen a lot of good reviews, a lot of praise for it, and many if not all of those reviews said stuff like “you don’t have to be a fan of baseball to enjoy the flick”. And so I watched it.

The reality is, though, if you don’t know or care about baseball, or sport in general, this film could bore you so much that you eventually hate any mention of it, or have all affection eroded you may have had for the athletic arts.

It doesn’t really give us a lot of reasons to care. Moneyball, I would argue, is the exact opposite of those flicks that you can think of, or any sport flick which has this basic premise: team of underachieving misfits band together to beat the odds and take on the snootier, nastier team in the final to just barely scrape through in the end, usually because of one really inspirational speech a captain or coach or sick child gives the team.

That’s not a bad thing, per se, but if you don’t enjoy scene after scene of Brad Pitt mugging the screen, and you don’t give a fat rat’s fuckhole about baseball, there’s practically nothing for you here.

It’s going to make me seem limited and unimaginative, but I’m going to say it anyway: I found the whole thing pretty goddamn boring, though not without some elements of mild interest. Even with its cynicism towards the sport, and the whole passionate tribalism aspect reduced to nothing before our eyes, there isn’t really enough to justify my time. And it’s over two goshdarned hours as well. And my time is ever so valuable.

Some time in the 1990s, the general manager of the Oakland As, called Billy Beane (Pitt) embarks on a controversial path after the team loses some of its best players to other richer teams, including the hated New York Yankees. Steinbrenner, one of the most hated names in baseball except for Pete Rose, gets mentioned several times (see, I do know something about the sport).

50/50

dir: Jonathan Levine
Now boys, getting cancer is no reason to become neo-nazi skinheads, okay?Now boys, getting cancer is no reason to become neo-nazi skinheads, okay?
Cancer is a hard sell. It’s okay for those four-hanky weepies they make for the abundance of chick channels on cable, but for a comedy drama with nice, liked actors in it, you have to think a lot of people apart from the creative ones involved would have been a bit leery or at least anxious.

“Who’s going to see this?” muttered one studio executive, tugging on his soul patch and massaging his shoulder where Consuela, his usual deep-tissue masseuse had failed to work out the knot that had been bugging him all week.

“I mean, it’s a bit of a bring-down, isn’t it? Can’t he have, like, a cold or something less depressing?”

“What about lupus?” said his female counterpart, fighting the urge to think about food denied to herself at least until daylight hours were over. “Lupus would play well to 27 to 39-year-old one legged lesbians who like blue blankets, at least that’s what our data shows. What about an earache? No, we don’t want to alienate the people with sore eyelids. How about AIDS? Everyone loves AIDS. That’ll get the, you knows, into the theatres.”

“They have so much disposable income, they’ll buy a hundred tickets each! And we’ll make it in 3D! Perfect! Francine?”, he bellows into the adjoining office at his assistant, “get these Seth Rogen and Will Reiser shmucks on the line, and tell ‘em to change the screenplay to say the main character’s got AIDS. Whaddya mean the person it’s about, Will Reiser, had cancer? If I tell him it’s AIDS he had, then it’s AIDS, or I’ll run his weedy ass outta town on a fuckin’ rail. And Seth Rogen doesn’t get to tell me what to do just because he lost some weight and went all Hollywood. Fuck that Canadian wheatgrass drinking derelict. I’ll send him back to Saskatoon if he doesn’t change the goddamn script…”

And so on, and so on. That’s my pained and convoluted way of saying that while studios put out a fair number of flicks dealing with illness and cancer, they generally err on the side of weepy or stupid, or often two for the price of one. Even the true stories get so mangled that they’re less a life-affirming example we can all relate to, and more an exercise in torment. Apropos of nothing I’m just going to scream really loudly that The Bucket List was a fucking terrible film about two guys with cancer.

Just so you know, that’s how I feel. And a lot of reviewing is about feelings. It’s not about mise en scene and diagetic sound, or thematic complexity and Tarkovskian scene composition. It’s just saying “this film worked for me, because it felt like they got it right.” And I really liked this film. It was touching and sweet, and affecting without being manipulative or treacly.

Bellflower

dir: Evan Glodell
I can't imagine it gets decent fuel mileageI can't imagine it gets decent fuel mileage
I couldn’t tell you what it’s about. I’ve watched it twice, and I still don’t know.

But I can tell you that it connected with me, for reasons I cannot fathom as yet.

Let’s fathom those reasons out together, dear reader. Maybe over the course of the review, I’ll be able to figure it out for myself.

This could be a flick about two youngish alcoholics, Woodrow (Evan Glodell) and Aiden (Tyler Dawson), who really wish they were living in post-apocalyptic times. They don’t seem to have jobs or money, but they have a close friendship, I guess defined by the frequency with which they bellow ‘dude’ and ‘so awesome’ to and at each other. They’re really close, even just for best friends.

I’m not implying anything, I’m just saying. They spend their days talking about some fairly strange stuff, and they do it in a fairly casual way. Mad Max – The Road Warrior seems to have had a fairly profound impact upon them. They don’t just dream of modified beasts of cars, or flamethrowers; they build flamethrowers and modify cars in practical but cumbersome ways.

And, for fun, they chain up a propane tank and shoot it with a shotgun, just to watch it burn under escaping explosive pressure. They are, or at least think they are, preparing for something that the rest of us would desperately hope would never come to pass.

On the other hand, they’re never really talking about this post-apocalyptic stuff in any deep way, or from the perspective of survivalism. It’s mostly about looking cool and being awesome. They’re not even talking about it ironically. They’re not even taking the piss out of themselves, or their motivations, or their actions.

Their spiritual mentor, their Dalai Lama, if you will, is Lord Humongous. To those of you not familiar with the second Mad Max movie, Lord Humongous is what they call the monstrous chap who leads a band of marauders gently killing and raping their way across the Australian wasteland outback.

Margin Call

dir: J.C. Chandor
Why so serious, gentle fellows?Why so serious, gentle fellows?
This is a non-stop rollercoaster ride of Armageddon-like thrills and fucking spills. If you’ve seen Children of Men, the incredible action / dystopian sci fi flick about a planet where no children are being born, then imagine that level of cinematic amazement, only set in an office populated entirely by shmucks working in the finance industry.

Yes, the finance industry, or the financial sector, if you want to be pedantic, and who, splayed seductively across the tubes of the internets, doesn’t? It’s the place where the best, brightest and most amazing people in society work with the largest sums of money that anyone outside of the accountant for an oil-rich country’s brutal dictator gets to play with.

Margin Call is not about a specific firm (cough Lehman Brothers cough) or a specific time (hello Global Financial Crisis circa 2008), but it does seem to be trying to represent a certain kind of muted catastrophe that some of us might remember, seeing as its effects are still reverberating, and, if you believe certain doomsayers, hasn’t even peaked yet.

It follows a day in the lives of a bunch of traders, analysts and executives at The Firm, which, from the view from the building’s top floors, is the crème de la crème of Wall Street. Though we’re meant to assume that they are a money factory, they’re still shedding workers at film’s beginning, either because they’re not dead inside yet, or because they’re not unethical enough.

The Help

dir: Tate Taylor
Well, kiss my gritsWell, kiss my grits
Yeah, yeah. I know. It can’t be good, can it?

It’s so obvious in its pandering for Oscars. It’s so worthy. It reeks of Oprah, and it’s all so, so goddamn earnest.

What if I told you that it’s actually not that a bad film? I think you’d be unpleasantly surprised. And even if the spirit of Hattie McDaniel hovers over the movie, cursing and moaning in contempt, it’s not entirely without merit.

Naturally, I’m not the intended audience, though I’m the right ‘colour’. White, American middle-aged, middle-class women are clearly the key demographic that made this flick such a success. It has dominated the US box office for the last few weeks like it’s one of the Transformers movies. Of course, some of the characters are less animated than the robots, but other than that there is little they share in common.

Apart from being big, stonking successes, that is. Of course, one is slightly less annoying and self-righteous than the other. And the other doesn’t have robots.

It’s set in the early 60s, in Mississippi. Guess what and who it’s about. Go on, I dare you, I double dare you, I triple dare you.

Win Win

dir: Thomas McCarthy
Oh, Giamatti, you handsome devil, when will your day come?Oh, Giamatti, you handsome devil, when will your day come?
When you watch a lot of movies, you get so used to the hysterical, overbearing, oversaturated general default setting of cinema, that when a relatively quiet flick comes out that treats (mostly) dramas between people in a sane manner, it seems strange.

Not bad strange, just not at the fever pitch of melodrama that people expect from their media, or I guess have expected for decades.

Thomas McCarthy specialises in films seemingly devoted to fairly ordinary people living lives of quiet desperation, alleviated only by their interactions with other more interesting people. The films meander along, some conflict seems to arise organically, forcing some kind of crescendo, and then people’s lives continue, hopefully in a slightly better way. Maybe it sounds like I’m being derisive, but it’s not intended.

Though the protagonists of his previous flicks and the settings are all different (The Station Agent, The Visitor and this one), that approach seems to hold as a constant. You know, in case I haven’t made it clear enough, it’s a gentle, meandering, believable, human way to get a film and a premise across.

Perhaps you can guess what the laziest and most obvious criticism of these flicks could be. Something that mimics ‘real’ life in too realistic a manner runs the risk of being like actual life, in other words, tedious and painful. It can sap the will to live.

But that’s not my take on these films, or on this film. I enjoyed it, as much as a flick like this can be enjoyed. The performances are strong and mostly not showy, and it’s always a delight to see Paul Giamatti play another in a long line of shmucks.

The Tree of Life

dir: Terrence Malick
Everything... everythingEverything... everything
It’s a beautiful film, trying to encompass in its scope, the entire world, the entire human experience, the entire universe. With such mighty ambitions, how can Malick not fall short? How could any of us not fall short?

The fact that the scope of his reach and the magnitude of his grasp are so close to each other means that when one exceeds the other, it doesn’t represent the failure that it would for other filmmakers. There are very few filmmakers (with money) like Malick, and his films are their own genre. As such they’re only really comparable to each other, not as much with other films.

You can only really know if you can enjoy a Malick film by having watched a few, and having immersed yourself in them, know what to expect. They are not conventional, they don’t follow a pattern, they don’t unfold in a conventional manner, and, mostly, they’re overflowing with beautiful cinematography, and the vast majority of the thoughts and intentions of the characters are delivered through internal monologues (voiceover).

So the following, endemic to his films, might not be for you: hours and hours of sporadically edited nature footage, interspersed with people walking around in a daze, with people whispering drippy philosophical bullshit like ‘where do you end, and I begin? How can a just god keep us apart, here, so distant from the apex of humanity’s innocence? I saw you today in the outstretched hand of a beggar, and I cried. And where’s that ham sandwich I ordered half an hour ago? Surely it can’t take them that long to heat up a fucking ham sandwich and make a goddamn coffee, can it?”

Small Town Murder Songs

dir: Ed Gass-Donnelly
That's some serious policeman's mo you've got there, StormareThat's some serious policeman's mo you've got there, Stormare
No, it’s got nothing to do with Nick Cave, and it’s not an album. But it is a Canadian film, about a murder, in a small town, and there are some songs.

The songs are great. They’re Great. Genuinely bracing songs, mixing elements of church spirituals, violent percussion, very dark bluegrass (I guess?), and probably a bunch of other influences as well. Imagine the bastard love child of Steve Earle and Nick Cave, sitting in some muddy weeds, crying while toking on a meth pipe.

So the soundtrack, I think we’ve painfully established, is pretty amazing. The Canadian film itself? Perhaps not so much.

The setting is rural Ontario, and the small town is so very, very small. They never mention the population specifically, but it’s probably in the hundreds. It’s such a small town that the last murder was before the time of the current town police chief, being Walter (Peter Stormare).

It sounds, from my description, and that pesky title, that this is a crime movie, a police procedural about a murder, that someone has to solve. It would be a mistake to believe that. It’s a mistake I made. Sure, there are elements of that, but the flick is aiming for something very different.

The town is a strange one, in that it has an old population of Mennonites, who often speak in a German dialect. The film opens with a scene where a car drives past a horse and buggy. So, yeah, it’s kind of like the Amish, except they don’t do barn raising, don’t wear those cool clothes, and they use electricity.

We don’t get much of an insight into the Mennonites at all. For all that it matters to the film, the townsfolk could have been Hindus, Rosicrucians or Scientologists. It does matter in the sense that these are people completely unsuited to the modern kill-crazy world the rest of us live in, and they’re very much opposed to violence, goddamn them.

Love and Other Drugs

dir: Edward Zwick
Yes, we should keep our mouths shutYes, we should keep our mouths shut
It tries, oh it tries. Yes, I know it’s an old flick. I feel the obligation to review it all the same.

Why? Well, it’s not very clear to me either, but maybe I’ll stumble over a few reasons as we go along.

Love and Other Drugs sets itself firmly in the 1990s by opening to a montage set to the rocking tones of Two Princes, that fucking wretched song by no-hit-wonders The Spin Doctors. That song alone already put me in a bad mood as the flick began.

This is, somewhat perversely, based on someone’s actual life and experiences. Jaime Reidy, an actual human, apparently, worked in the pharmaceutical industry and experienced many of the experiences such an individual has to have in order to need a yuppie redemption story to be made about them.

Human history, for those either working in the drug industry, who suffer from erectile dysfunction or who are trying to have sex with someone with erectile dysfunction, is divided sharply into BV and AV: Before Viagra and After Viagra. This flick follows suit, because clearly nothing in human history has ever been as important as that single invention.

Yeah, Fuck You, Galileo, Edison, Einstein, Tesla, Newton, Curie, Franklin, Wilkins, Watson, Crick and Hawking! What have any of you achieved compared to the magnificence of a four-hour erection? Your collective discoveries amount to Nothing. Less than Nothing!

You’d think a flick focussed on the somewhat unethical practice of trying to bribe doctors into prescribing your company’s drugs even if their patients don’t really need them or want them, would be scathing in its ripping the shit out of them for doing so. But this flick isn’t trying to piss off drug giants like Pfizer or GlaxoSmithKline or any of the other billion-dollar behemoths. It’s just, like, bringing it up, for, like, shits and giggles.

Confessions (Kokuhaku)

dir: Tetsuya Nakashima
Remember the days of the old school yard? We used to bleed a lotRemember the days of the old school yard? We used to bleed a lot
From revenge… to more revenge. This time, we’re doing it Japanese style.

Now, just to get all simplistic, reductive and borderline racist, if the old saying regarding revenge goes that it is a dish best served cold, like sushi, then what this particular director and cast do is take that revenge, like a platter full of sushi, dip it into a tank of liquid nitrogen, and shatter the freeze-burned remains with a HIV-covered sledgehammer.

Man, do they serve this revenge up cold. And, man, do the Japanese hate school kids.

Confessions is a flick where a whole bunch of people confess to each other or to us in the audience in order to tell the story. There are bits where people talk to each other, but mostly people are talking in monologues.

Our first speaker is a junior high school teacher who explains to her class that she’s quitting her job, and why. For the next half hour, mostly she stands in front of the class and talks earnestly but quietly to a bunch of savages who are barely in their teens. They carry on like they’re on the island from either Lord of the Flies or Battle Royale, just with lots of texting involved, but they listen and react whenever she says any crucial element of her story.

For what is mostly a monologue, the editing carries on in a determined but spastic manner, with hundreds of postcard shots, shots of kid’s mobiles as they comment on what they’re hearing, with a constantly moving camera that doesn’t want to allow for the possibility that maybe what’s being told to us is mostly boring.

It’s not, I guess, because what the teacher, Yuko Moriguchi (Takako Matsu) is telling them, and us, is the story of why she’s just infected two of the kids in the class with HIV.

The Kids Are All Right

dir: Lisa Cholodenko
Insufferable. Utterly insufferable.Insufferable. Utterly insufferable.
And here is the last of my reviews of the ten flicks of 2010, nine destined to lose the award for Best Picture, and the one that will doubtless win at the upcoming Academy Awards. I've seen and reviewed all the rest (Toy Story 3, True Grit, Social Network, King’s Speech, Winter’s Bone, Inception, Black Swan, 127 Hours, The Fighter), and felt, for some inexplicable reason, that I had to review the one remaining flick if I was ever going to pretend to have an informed and important opinion about the annual filmic circle jerk scheduled to occur on Monday.

Whoopee for me.

So here’s my review of The Kids Are All Right. Enjoy.

If you permit me to enter the American Culture Wars for a moment, and if you’ll grant me the license to pontificate about the aforementioned despite the clear fact that I have absolutely no stake in that polarising political / ideological bullshit by dint of nationality or geographical location, please just let me say the following: This flick reminds me of how utterly insufferable we are.

Look, I say this as someone who either directly or passively accepts that on the Red State / Blue State, conservative / progressive, Monsanto is evil / McDonalds is Great divide, I completely associate and adhere with one side over the other. It’s just that the rudiments of it, the signifiers, the chai lattes, the smug self-righteousness, the precious preciousness of shopping at organic farmer’s markets, locavore, anti-sweatshop, sustainable / ethical clothing made of vintage hessian sacks stuff drives me up the fucking wall. I infinitely prefer it to the other side, which raises getting outraged, selfishness and a lack of giving a damn about the impact of one’s own actions and choices on other people to a high art form, but I still find us insufferable some times.

Thankfully, one of the characters here agrees with me, and goes on a drunken tirade yelling about how sick she is of composting and organic this and biodynamic that.

The only problem was, after that, I felt bad about having thought ‘my’ side insufferable in the first place, because the character going on about it is pretty obnoxious specifically at that moment, and in general, too.

The Fighter

dir: David O. Russell
Idiots on paradeIdiots on parade
David O. Russell is a director not known for sports flicks. He’s known, if he’s known at all, for three things: directing Three Kings, which remains one of the only decent flicks set during the first Iraqi adventure; making a thoroughly stupid flick called I Heart Huckabees; and for a screaming match that occurred and was recorded between himself and Lily Tomlin on the set of that flick.

Mark Wahlberg is best known for having a brother who was in New Kids on the Block, who had a short career as rapper-performer-Renaissance man Marky Mark, and playing John Holmes stand-in Dirk Diggler in Boogie Nights. He is not well known for his acting ability.

Christian Bale is best known for screaming abuse at people on the set of some films he’s been on. And a wicked eating disorder. He’s also an actor, or so I’ve been told.

The three of them, oh, and a bunch of other people as well, collaborate here in order to make a fairly amazingly good film, one which, noting the participants, the location, and what they’re famous for, I couldn’t really have predicted.

Based on the actual lives of actual people, The Fighter chronicles the rise, the fall, the stumbling, then the falling again, and eventual rise of a pair of brother boxers. Which one will triumph is not entirely clear until the end, unless you already know about the people involved and the golden era in which they fought.

The narrative device the flick uses, very successfully in my opinion, to tell the story initially is through a HBO documentary film crew following around someone who was initially a town hero, the Pride of Lowell, Massachusetts. Yes, unfortunately, it means we have to listen to those fucking accents for two hours, but you can’t have everything, after all. We don’t want our movies to be too perfect, do we? Otherwise we’d lose ourselves inside them permanently, never wanting to venture out of the cinema.

Black Swan

dir: Darren Aronofsky
I wonder if that crack represents her state of mind. Ya think?I wonder if that crack represents her state of mind. Ya think?
Hmmmm.

Darren Aronofsky returns to the well that prompted him to make Pi way back in the day, with a different gender in the lead but the same ultimate problem: madness brought on by sexual frustration. In Pi a maths genius can’t get any, and goes mad (or madder) listening to his hot Indian neighbour have sex. In Black Swan, a sexually- repressed prima ballerina called Nina (Natalie Portman) has to go mad in order to access her dark side to become the most perfect ballerina in the history of Swan Lake performances.

With mixed results. In a way, though she’s won’t and shouldn’t get credit for it, Portman did a Christian Bale and starved herself down in order to play this character. She’s already tiny, but here she’s depleted enough here to have that horrible strained look on her sternum where flesh is supposed to be, and now there’s only bone and tendon.

It’s not for me to judge what actors do in the pursuit of money, critical respect and the adulation of the masses. If it’s okay for Bale to do it in every second flick he does, then why not a chick that probably already weighs about 40 kilos anyway?

Yes, yes, women’s issues with body image, yes, yes, negative media images contributing to pressures on actresses specifically and women in general.

Whatever. It’s not that I don’t care, it’s just that it’s pointless to single that out when a) she’s playing a ballerina, a group of waifs who take body modification to an extreme as a rule, what with the footbinding and the vomiting and such, and b) it’s not like it’s represented as a positive career choice.

I mean, these ballerinas are bitches, aren’t they? Backbiting, backstabbing, vain and hysterical trollops; who would want to spend any time with them or near them? They live and die in hope of prancing about in front of a bunch of people so wealthy they can throw their money away to watch people mince and carry-on in the most enervating manner possible. It’s Death that comes a few steps closer to you whenever you watch this pretentious twaddle, tempting you ever closer with the promise of oblivion and the promise of never having to watch this foofy frippery ever again.

Greenberg

dir: Noah Baumbach
I could call this flick many things, but none of them would be 'extremely' or 'entertaining', or 'extremely entertaining'I could call this flick many things, but none of them would be 'extremely' or 'entertaining', or 'extremely entertaining'
Officially the most depressing flick of the year. Worse than a twenty-hour Holocaust documentary. Worse than a dramatic indie flick chronicling the breakdown of a marriage in excruciating detail. Worse than a live action film where the main character is a computer animated dog.

It always gets me when the people designing the posters for films do this, whereupon they put the name of the ‘star’ at the top linking it directly to the main character of the flick they’re obviously in. When they were making those Bourne Identity et al flicks, the posters, which featured a big muscly pic of Matt Damon, often came standard with the phrase “Matt Damon IS Jason Bourne!” as if there were any lingering doubts in the confused populace.

Of course the confusion arises because Matt Damon isn’t Jason Bourne, a fictional character, he’s the actor and soft drink salesman Matt Damon, surprisingly enough.

So when the posters for this dirge of a flick has the same type of phrase, as in “Ben Stiller IS Greenberg”, I don’t have the same pedantic reaction. What I actually think in this instance is that if Ben Stiller actually was this Greenberg person, someone should murder him in his sleep.

Greenberg, as in the sort-of main character in this flick, is like the worst person I’ve ever seen in a movie. Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lecter comes across as more pleasant and avuncular. The various versions of Hitler on film come across as less repellent and self-absorbed. Richard Milhous Nixon in the Oliver Stone flick screaming obscenities about Kennedy, blacks and Jews is nicer and cuddlier than this monster Greenberg.

Dogtooth (Kynodontas)

dir: Giorgos Lanthimos
The family that's depraved together stays together mostly because of the high wall around the propertyThe family that's depraved together stays together mostly because of the high wall around the property
Oh, what a fucked up family, and, oh, what a fucked up film.

I haven’t had much cause or recourse to review Greek films thus far, in fact it’s never come up. In a decade or so of reviewing (and twenty years of chin-stroking viewing), there’s never been an instance where I’ve watched a Greek flick in a local arthouse cinema, because I can’t recall the last time one got to play. Sure, you can occasionally watch flicks about Mongolian yak herders, or Massai tribesmen, or Inuit fishermen fishing for fish through tiny ice holes, and every single French flick no matter how vacuous or silly, gets arthouse play, but practically nothing from Greece.

I have no idea if the European Union’s poor orphan cousin has that much of a film industry, to be honest. Can’t imagine there’s that much spare cash lying around. Still, arguably the most famous (internationally) director from Greece, called Costa Gavras, who’s a pretentious pill but an accomplished director if I’ve heard or seen one, doesn’t even direct flicks in Greek, preferring the international language of arrogance, being French.

So it’s something of an occasion for a Greek flick to get arthouse play, and critical talk as well. I guess winning something at Cannes can do that for your flick’s promotional chances. This flick has made, inexplicably, a tonne of reviewers’ best of end of year lists, and I have no freaking idea why. That’s not to say it’s not an interesting film, if you’ll permit the double negative, which is the written grammatical equivalent of farting loudly during a funeral.

Crazy Heart

dir: Scott Cooper
Alcohol makes you more interesting, and smoking makes you coolAlcohol makes you more interesting, and smoking makes you cool
I didn’t like this film. I don’t like Green Eggs and Ham, either, but the fact still remains that I really didn’t think Crazy Heart was a good flick at all. At all.

Even as I acknowledge that Jeff Bridges is a wonderful, wonderful man, and I’m happy to see him get an Academy Award for his services to the acting profession, it’s painfully obvious to me that he got it not for this performance, but because of his body of work.

You know, star turns in stuff like Star Man, Blown Away and How to Lose Friends and Alienate people.

Yes, he’s done great stuff in the past, but it’s hard seeing the character he plays here as being the pinnacle of his performances.

Bad Blake (Bridges) is a country singer / songwriter, who’s never hit the big time. He ekes out an existence playing shitty venues (most ironically, at film’s beginning, a bowling alley, considering The Big Lebowski) for booze money. We are given to understand that Bad could have been somebody, a contender even, if his alcoholism, boozing, drinking and pride hadn’t gotten in the way.

Because his songs, you know, are just awesome!

His version of a hardcore, 56-year-old drunk is someone who gets wicked hangovers and who throws up occasionally. None of the grim actual reality of people losing fights with lampposts, shitting and pissing themselves or ruined bodies and faces for this Oscar winner.

No, this is the audience-friendly version. As such, it shames me to say this, considering how much I love the man, the performance is coasting of the highest order. Anyone, any man at least or sufficiently butch woman, could have played this clichéd role, in a film so cliché I could predict (much to my partner’s irritation) everything that was going to happen, how and when.

A Single Man

dir: Tom Ford
Uh, hey, it's the end of the financial year, and I need help with my tax return. You up for it, Poindexter?Uh, hey, it's the end of the financial year, and I need help with my tax return. You up for it, Poindexter?
You may not know who Christopher Isherwood was, or care, or know who Tom Ford is, or care. If you’re a woman, then odds are you know who Colin Firth is, and, depending on your age, you’ve thought he was dreamy ever since he played Darcy in thirteen or fourteen different variations on the role from Pride and Prejudice.

After watching this flick I’d wonder if you care any more about anything anywhere, since it plays out like the longest, tamest, gayest cologne commercial you’ve ever seen. Every scene is set designed and framed to within an inch of its life, and the performances, especially by Colin Firth, and Matthew Goode, as the central couple, are note-perfect.

But I’m sorry to say I walked away from this with barely anything having registered.

The love that dare not speak its name, but these days proclaims itself from the rooftops would seem to be the central premise, since the flick is set in 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but really, it’s just about love. It’s about loving someone, and losing them after 16 blissful years together, and not being sure how to or whether to carry on.

The love that not only heals and elevates us, but that also hollows us out with its loss.

George (Firth) is a meticulous, and incredibly fussy, college professor who lives in the fussiest goddamn house in California, in the early sixties. His life partner has recently died, and George no longer seems to be able to care enough about maintaining the façade that life is worth living. We watch as he fussily goes about preparing all the kinds of things overly considerate and compulsive obsessive individuals would (we presume) when they plan to end their own lives.

Suicide is a very horrifying and serious topic to me, having lost a few people to its siren call, so it’s something I take seriously even when watching films and such. There’s a wrenching quality to it for me, usually, but the way this film treats it is probably right, with a very light touch. It even goes so far as to try to extract laughs out of the premise, perhaps ill-advisedly.

Even though we spend the day with George as he takes care of his preparations, we get to see reasons why he feels he has to (the flashbacks to his domestic bliss), we see why he feels compelled to (much of the world as he sees it, or when we view him, is drained of its colour, as if his depression is bleeding his world of life), and why he shouldn’t (practically everyone he knows or meets adores him). And when he starts meeting particularly hot boys the world itself seems to bloom.

Whip It

dir: Drew Barrymore
You go, GrrlsYou go, Grrls
I never really thought I’d be writing a review of a film that has Drew Barrymore listed up top as the director. It’s not because she often acts, depending on the circumstance, so bubbly that you’d think she’d never be able to get it together long enough to call action, sitting not in a director’s chair, but in a bubble bath.

No, it’s because there’s a disconnect between her public persona (super girly and bubbly), her film personae (super girly and bubbly), and what she’s apparently like behind the scenes in the turbulent world of film production (a don’t-fuck-with-me-or-I’ll-destroy-you player).

More power to you, sister. She’s got money and sway, so surely nothing can stop Drew if that’s what she wants to do?

I guess making a flick about women’s roller derby manages to satisfy two of her main criteria for what she wants to project to the world about herself: being girly and tough at the same time. There’s nothing wrong with that, in fact I find it very endearing, the way people find virtually everything this woman does endearing, and have done so ever since she was an adorable little moppet who started abusing cocaine at age 12.

Whip It is a coming-of-age story, shoe-horned into the safe dimensions of the sports drama, complete with unsupportive parents whose approval has to be earned by the final reel, a vicious rival (Juliette Lewis, who looks like she’s been hanging out with Courtney Love a bit too much), and montage after montage of training. Even better, from the sports movie perspective, it features a sport virtually incomprehensible in its arcane, though probably basic, rules. I have less of an understanding, after having watched this flick, of how the sport works than I do about the rules of Quidditch, that curiously made up and nonsensical game from the Harry Potter world of junior wizards.

Unlike quidditch, however, this is about real girls skating hard and beating the crap out of each other. An average teenager called Bliss (Ellen Page) finds solace and meaning in the company of some very rough and very gorgeous roller girls competing in the most made up of made up sports. Despite being tiny, and looking like my three-year-old daughter could knock her over, Bliss feels an affinity for the sport, where her speed is apparently an advantage against women three times her weight and double her height and age.

Up In the Air

dir: Jason Reitman
Grow up, Clooney, and stop grade-grubbing for OscarsGrow up, Clooney, and stop grade-grubbing for Oscars
This flick has garnered an incredible amount of positive reviews, awards, nominations, probably women kissing posters of George Clooney in public, dreamily smearing their cheap lipstick all over the glass failing to protect his poster within.

And for what? A guy flies around the States firing people. The end.

That’s it? That’s everything wrapped up in a neat little fucking package?

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

Ryan Bingham (oh, you’re soooo dreamy, George Clooney) is a charming and empty man who spends almost all of his time in the air, flying from downsizing opportunity to downsizing opportunity, and he loves it that way. He hates having to go back to the company headquarters, because it means he’s not in perpetual motion. Like some form of even more soulless shark, he needs to keep moving or he gets frantic.

He has reduced the elements of travelling, like dealing with the customs people, the torments of rental car hire, hotel reservations and those little bottles of booze all to both a fine art and also the stuff of his own life.

Bingham even has the temerity to try to peddle his fancifully ‘happy’ life into the stuff of get-rich-quick / self-help seminars, asking prospective sheep “What’s In Your Backpack?” as if it’s a question of any worth. He starts off, in his presentations to ever-increasing groups of morons, representing to them how all the stuff they care about in their lives, including their families, are pretty much worthless.

I’m all for praising the individual, but honestly, that level of isolation is priceless.

An Education

dir: Lone Scherfig
Leave Audrey Hepburn alone in her grave, defilersLeave Audrey Hepburn alone in her grave, defilers
If I was to tell you that this flick is the coming-of-age tale of a private schoolgirl seduced by an older, sophisticated man, then you’d tell me that this is clearly a porno or at the very least a remake of Rochelle, Rochelle, an young girl’s erotic journey from Milan to Minsk.

If I was then to tell you that it is nothing of the sort, and if I apologised profusely for having made a Seinfeld reference in one of my reviews, then you’d probably still not be interested in what is otherwise quite a charming little flick set in the early part of the 1960s.

Based on the memoirs of journalist Lynn Barber, with a screenplay written by Nick Hornby (of High Fidelity and About a Boy fame), An Education is set in 1961, and looks at what goes on in the life of an intelligent but unworldly girl called Jenny (Carey Mulligan), who comes across the path of a charming and sophisticated (from her limited perspective) older man called David (Peter Sarsgaard).

See, you could only get away with setting a flick like this in the 60s. Back in those halcyon days, the creepy setup looks a little less creepy. Back then you are meant to see it a little bit more as people being a product of their times, and acting accordingly. It's still creepy, but, y'know...

It makes it sound like it’s all about one thing, and it’s not. Sure, a seduction lies at the heart of the tale of woe, but it is more the seduction of an otherwise sensible young girl by a lifestyle she could only ever imagine before, let alone approach.

Submarine

dir: Richard Ayoade
DoltDolt
Coming of age stories are a laugh, aren’t they? Whether it’s some spotty git fucking an apple pie, or four friends searching for a dead body, coming of age stories are almost always nostalgic and poignant, because they’re watched by people far removed from the actual age. Throw in some period detail, some tunes from an earlier, ‘better’ time, and it’s like crack to oldies of a certain oldness.

The problem or virtue of Submarine is that it’s set in the 80s, which no decent person should be nostalgic for, including and especially those of us who came of age in the 80s, and also it’s a flick in love with coming of age flicks. There’s plenty of references to other classic boyish coming-of-age flicks (400 Blows, Harold and Maude, The Graduate, bunches of others), but this has its own unique take on the Bildungsroman.

That doesn’t make it good, necessarily. The reason I went out of my way to see this flick is because of the almost surreally positive reviews it has garnered, even down to local Potato Head Pomeranz and Old Farmer Stratton giving it stratospheric approval. And it was lauded and praised to the heavens around the world long before it came to Australian shores to die a quiet death at the box office.

I don’t really see it. I’m sorry. Maybe I’m not as interested in coming of age stories any more. The appeal of Submarine pretty much escaped me.

On the Waterfront

dir: Elia Kazan
When you were a young godWhen you were a young god
1954

It’s a bloody shame that possessing too much knowledge makes it impossible to just talk about a great film and call it a great film. Either that, or you can put it down to arrogance, pretentiousness, or affected hipsterism. Whichever and whatever combination thereof that I’m afflicted with, I’m too aware of the history behind this picture to be able to blithely review it like it’s just any film.

Sure, it’s a film like any other. Although, it won a bunch of Academy awards, and it contains one of the greatest performances by Marlon Brando that you’ll ever see. And it casts a mournful eye over the waterfront upon which it is set, and the cowardice, greed and cruelty that conspires to render good men either dead or useless at the hands of a corrupt union.

And it’s directed by a man who made some great films, like this, Streetcar Named Desire, A Face in the Crowd, Splendor in the Grass, and Gentleman’s Agreement; films which I’m sure all the kids of today are big fans of and love to hear quoted in the latest emo and rap songs illegally downloaded onto their iPods.

But Elia Kazan also named names during the Communist witch hunt era, lending credibility and legitimacy to a process that should never have possessed a skerrick of either, and continued to work and live a happy, productive life after condemning others to blacklisting and misery.

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