Round-Up of 2008

Two lists: 1)the best, and 2) those of which much more was expected, and so are more deserving of listing than “the worst” (the prize of which goes to Redacted); neither list is in any particular order.

The conclusion of this year of cinema-going? I need to be more adventurous. Only one foreign-language film, no documentaries, not even a plucky ham radio trying to make out with an iPod. Despite temptations to rename the list (“Large-Scale Hollywood Establishment Products Round-Up of 2008”) I chose to stick to my guns, and take the flak.

No honourable mentions here, but it should be said that Tropic Thunder nearly made both lists, and so got caught in an un-listed purgatory: the blame, for both, belongs to Ben Stiller. Also hovering between the brilliant and the banal was Quantum of Solace, in which director Marc Foster seemed to make up for the wholesale surrendering to Bournestyle by filling the margins of the film with unexpected delights: the regional fonts, the pill-peddling of Giancarlo Giannini, the sleekly swampy sound design and the J.G. Ballard-bothering desert finale to name just a few. (Please note that while Gone Baby Gone was only released in the UK mid-’08, it is a true 2007 film, and so is not included here as one the very very best).

The Best:

The Dark Knight
What can one say about this film that hasn’t been said a dozen times by reviews, articles, and conversations in coffee shops? A superb jumble of ideas and philosophy which somehow struck a chord with the entire country, being openly adored by people for whom the superhero genre is normally a punchline.

Appaloosa
Not only a showcase for some of the most majestic performances of the year, but also a literate and unusual film about semantics and specificity. A warmly affectionate piece of work which addresses Western mythos with an understated charm.

Franklyn
Due for a release in the UK soon (late February), Gerald McMorrow’s debut feature is at times stilted, but manages to create some rich and sombre alternative realities, and then just about keeps all the plates spinning as these begin to crash into on another in the final act.

Shine a Light
For the collection of incredible cinematographers working at their peak. For the unexpected explosion into full-screen twenty minutes into the IMAX version. For the witty, if stage-managed, prologue. Most of all, though, for the sheer elevating joy of the thing.

No Country For Old Men
For some a 2007 film. Also, for some, an excruciating exercise in cool detachment. To its fans, however, it’s an excruciating exercise in cool detachment. Simultaneously too faithful to Cormac McCarthy’s novel and not faithful enough, this is a brave, swiss-watch-accurate piece of film-making, only falling down in the more metaphysical tenets of the story.

In Bruges
Martin McDonagh’s debut as a film director was one of the unexpected gems of the year. Balancing darkly abrasive humour with metaphysical guilt and outright surrealism, In Bruges also boasts fine location shooting and three fantastic central performances.

The Chaser
This strange, hypnotic Korean film about an ex-cop turned pimp frustratedly trying to find the third of his girls to go missing is well worth seeking out both for the atmospheric visuals, and a script which is rich in subtle ironies, if not psychological depth.

The Missed Opportunities:

Taken
Liam Neeson playing Jason Bourne – what could go wrong? Plenty, it appears. Choppy film-making, a strong Europhobic streak, and some of the most unfittingly bizarre narrative choices of the year make Taken a frustrating and insulting watch when it could have been a first-class guilty pleasure.

Hellboy II
Included here only to mark the nailing of the coffin into my enjoyment of Guillermo del Toro’s cinema. Every time I get excited, and every time I get the same melancholic doomed love, extended central sequence of astonishing banality, clock-and-cog aesthetics, and irrational characters. Enough, I say. But that’s just me.

Max Payne
How do you screw up a heady brew of noir plotlines and apocalyptic aesthetics? Here’s how. That the unremarkable Constantine did it better tells you all you need to know, really.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
A film which, the more I think of it, the less I think of it. In telling the story of a man’s unusual life it succeeds finely, but in saying something more, something fresh, something sweeping, it fails. Perhaps this was intended, but for a Fincher film to evoke Robert Zemeckis seems like, well, a missed opportunity.

Body of Lies
William Monaghan, shame on you. We’ve come to expect poorly conceived but richly executed films from Ridley Scott, but your writing for him here is like an after-school exercise in Middle East suspicion.

Pride and Glory
Firmly in the tradition of other (both lesser and greater) corrupt cop thrillers, the crime of Pride and Glory is to offer so much and then deliver so little. Barring a completely unnecessary expository scene the first hour is bracingly shot entertainment, culminating in a fiercely believable confrontation between a seething Colin Farrell and a polite drug dealer in a frostbitten backyard. Then it all goes pear-shaped, and not even the brilliant closing shot can save it from ignominy.

Nobody Politic: A Review of ‘Body of Lies’

Like the son I never really had an opinion one way or the other about: the script by William Monahan for Body of Lies depicts yet another post-Oedipal, woman-free zone of masculine friendships and apathy.

Shortly before departing the house for what turned out to be a private viewing of Body of Lies (evidently even Peckhamplex’s “bargain Tuesdays” have failed to beat the credit crunch, or indeed the lacklustre reviews), I saw the opening segment of the December 1st Daily Show: in it, Jon Stewart and John Oliver discussed the recent terrorist attacks in India, and concluded that the perpetrators were “motherfucking motherfuckers”. This alternative news show, normally quite willing to dig deeper and more acutely than major US news networks, responded emotionally and crudely to the tragedy. Ridley Scott, director of this new but by no means fresh geopolitical thriller, fails to engage either emotionally or intellectually with the subject, and concludes much the same as these pseudo-journalists, only without the slight hint of grace required to illicit laughs in light of a massacre.

It is difficult to in the film down, it spins away in so many lacklustre directions. Leonardo DiCaprio plays a CIA operative in Iraq who is frequently mis-handled by Russell Crowe’s overweight strategist back in Langley. Between them they manage to balls up seemingly every operation they come into contact with, preferably utilising missile-laden helicopters. It turns out that, while this sort of thing is permissible in the war zone around Baghdad, it doesn’t fly so well in Amman, where DiCaprio’s Ferris initiates a hesitant yet doomed friendship with the self styled king of Jordanian intel. As the script later spells out, trust is the overriding factor in cross-cultural co-operation involving Arab nations and organisations, and Uncle Sam seems inherently unable to show all his cards.

With the casual detail and atmospherics that come as standard with a Scott production (from either brother, for that matter), it is at first a pleasure to watch an Iraq depicted as a real place, rather than the dramatic borderland of DePalma’s Redacted, or the bomb-stricken dysfunctional state viewed nightly on BBC news. However, the more destinations the film visits, the more they each feel the same, as though every Middle Eastern country had the same roads, architecture, bakeries, and slums. For all the absurdity of James Bond’s latest sojourn around the globe, at least every place he visited felt alive with its own customs, weather, people, and even introductory font. The people moving in front of this background don’t liven it up much either: protagonist Ferris orchestrates his existence as if he is writing the screenplay of the film himself, while Crowe’s Analyst Ed Hoffman serves little purpose than to provide a counter-image of America: the packaged sushi-eating bad father to DiCaprio’s do-gooding cultural nomad (although, if he loves the Middle East so much and has worked there so long, why does he make such rookie mistakes as offering a new inamoratas his hand to shake while being watched by so many purist locals?).

Amongst the anonymous score by Marc Streitenfeld and unremarkable Pietro Scalia editing, one of the few pleasures to be had is Mark Strong’s performance as Jordanian intelligence chief Hani. Walking a fine line between several cliché characterisations, all of them a million miles away from each other, he lends dramatic weight and intellectual curiosity (if not believability) to all scenes in which the character features. William Monahan’s script fails to provide the same taste and refinement for the other characters, while the narrative he crafts follows a similar sons-impressing-their-father’s trajectory as his work on Kingdom of Heaven and The Departed, but is tellingly free from the bracingly unique statements of personality and individual identity that made those so sly and rewarding.

The film is watchable enough, and were it a movie of the week imported to this country from HBO, it would be little more than an uninteresting diversion. However, with the calibre of much of the talent, and the indication from many of those involved from previous projects that they have an interest and sensitivity towards a more compelling and progressive depiction of geopolitics than one finds in the latest Bruckheimer production, Body of Lies is a sore and unwarranted disappointment.