The Films I Watched in 2014.

Film For the past couple of years at around this time I've looked back at what happened in this blog's annual review a decade ago. A decade ago I kept a record of everything I watched that year (films, television and theatre) as well as listened to (mostly Doctor Who) for the entire year, and posted the results in the final week of December. That's all still here and perhaps most interesting in capturing the moment when I first watched a lot of television, notably Alias, the last series of Buffy and Friends and my first run through of Firefly. It's also the first year I signed up to Lovefilm and really began to widen the scope of the kinds of films I was attracted to, working through most of the primary French New Wave as well as the rest of the filmic canon in preparation for the applying to do film studies at university. If you can be bothered going and having a look you'll also see I hyperlinked all the titles. Most of them don't work, especially at the BBC, though it's worth noting how most of the Channel 4 shows I watched then are now available to stream over the internet from the same page I linked to back then.

Knowing that in the end I'd probably only end up writing something along the lines of the contents of this first paragraph, I decided to pay homage to that year and keep a record of the films I watched this year but posting them on the blog as and when on a generally weekly basis. Remembering the nightmares of 2004 when trying to remember on which days I'd watched which episodes of Murder One, I disregarded television and everything else.  Find below, now, a big long list of all the films I watched in 2014.  Here are some statistics.  I watched 331 films last year.  I watched only one film twice, Gravity, and another in a shorter and longer version, The Desolation of Smaug.  The only films I saw at the cinema were Boyhood, Guardians of the Galaxy, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Chinese Puzzle and The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, which is a lot more than usual.  144 films came from Lovefilm-by-post.  The rest were a mix of iPlayer, Netflix, Amazon Prime Instant stream and things I already owned.  No I'm not going to go through and work out which.  Nobody cares, least of all you.  Anyway, here they all are.  Join me at the other end for the analysis and "best of..."

The Films I've Watched This Year #49

Film Here are then and here we go with the final, the last of these sometimes weekly what turned into film review posts. Back at the beginning of the year when I said, "I'm going to try and keep a running record of the films I've watched in 2014" I didn't realise, as I so often don't when beginning these projects how elaborate a process it would become with hours spent trying to find something useful or interesting to say about films which probably don't deserve either. In that original post the comments are pretty brief and it's not until mid-March that the format settled down into something resembling a more formal film review post each weekend.  There probably isn't much of a coincidence that this was also the time when Doctor Who would previously have begun and I'd be writing Saturday night anyway.  Then later in the year, of course, Doctor Who actually began and I'd have to find some other time to knock these out too.

Writing these posts has given me a new appreciation for the work of professional film reviewers, especially those who work for the nationals who have to comment on all the films released in a given week.  We all have tastes and interests and yet a Kermode or Bradshaw has to have an opinion about everything and knowledgeable.  That explains why in some cases one of their reviews is little more than an elaborate synopsis and a star rating; there's no much that can be said about pretty generic *** or ** film that does its job but is nothing remarkable other than to say that it does its job and is nothing remarkable especially in a week then some oscar contender or big summer blockbuster is released.  No wonder they enjoy carving up the turkeys.  They're doing all the work of the team of reviewers on one of the monthly magazines themselves so it must be fun to let loose once in a while at the new The Hangover sequel.

The final post will analyse the results and suggest a potential list of the best and worst films I've seen this year.  How useful or interesting has this been for you?  At a certain point I did forget that I was only ever supposed to be doing this for a year in homage to Review 2004 until a few weeks ago when it dawned on me that I wouldn't be completing #disneywatch in the public gaze.  Glancing through the stats, the readership for the posts has averaged at about a hundred and fifty which seems large enough to me, though the most visited with 556 page views was episode #38 where I didn't list or review any films and posted a Norah Jones video instead.  No idea why.  Either way I'm heading into next year with only vague notions of what to write about other than the usual but I'm genuinely interested - have you used any of this as any kind of a recommendation?

Snowglobe
Hemingway and Gellhorn
The Lone Ranger
It's a Wonderful Life
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
The Croods
Atlantis: The Lost Empire
Lilo & Stitch
Superman: The Movie
Hysteria
Superman and the Mole Men
Strange Days

Let's begin with Christmas.  Happy Christmas.  Snowglobe is amongst the ABC Family movies which litter Netflix and and about the only one whose poster doesn't feature a smiling blonde woman or a puppy.  Christina Milian is the daughter of a family of Cuban bakers whose desperate for some independence and finds it extra-dimensionally within the world of titular magic snowglobe which is delivered to her by persons unknown.  A surprisingly effective mash-up of Pleasantville and The Purple Rose of Cairo (yes really) it benefits from a funny script which understands its debt to and comments on Capra-corn and committed performance from Milian and notably from Matt Keeslar as Douglas the snow shoveller she meets in the other reality who has the Jeff Daniels role in seeing his globe view shatter.  By a wide, wide margin I enjoyed this more than Elf and the Doctor Who Christmas special too if I'm being honest.

Having bought Dad the dvd for Christmas, we sat and watched Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy that evening.  He's one of life's film talk-throughers, but I noticed after the initial scenes with Mark Strong and the wig he was quite most of the time which I think means he enjoyed it.  Which he should because it's a modern classic.  It's not until watching this third time, in this setting that I realised that it's actually a pretty Christmassy film with all the important flashbacks to the storm before the calm when all of the spies were still a team, at an office party complete with a Santa Stalin.  Victorian vibrator, Dickensian dildo comedy Hysteria also ends on Christmas Eve just as it should with its overall theme about the spirit of giving.  Having decided before the festive season not to watch too many Christmas films this year, a couple turned up anyway and surprised me.  Hysteria's great by the way.  It's The Road to Wellville with sex toys.

The season's other rewatches: It's a Wonderful Life is a horribly depressing film if watched at the wrong moment and Christmas Eve was dicey.  The BD includes a trivia track which only pops up about every ten minutes mostly to tell us which awards it's won or lists its appeared and contains the horrific colourisation with its pastel skin tones.  Having been given the boxed set for Christmas I've begun working through the Superman films again beginning with The Movie which just as I remember has a magical, epic first hour, a nonsensical time travel ending and a depressingly generic middle though its interesting to note how few superhero films do stop in the middle just to show magical having powers can be.  My New Year's Eve film choice this year is Strange Days which looks all the more prescient and whose squid technology can't be too far away from happening in some form now.

Hemingway and Gellhorn, the HBO mini-series-movie with Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman as Ernest and Martha has numerous problems.  In seeking to tell us about the whole of their life together we're left watching a bitty, episodic, narrative mush especially once they've left the Spanish Civil War which would have had more than enough material and feels like it could have a clearer shape on its own.  In order to justify hiring Owen and Kidman for the roles its desperate to give them both some agency which means that although its Gellhorn's story, sequences which should be about her are regularly given to him for no good reason.  Plus there's the astonishingly weird decision to Forrest Gump them into contemporary footage for long stretches which never quite looks right in the way Eric Rohmer achieved on purpose with paintings in The Lady and the Duke.  Oh and it has one of the worst Orson Welles impressions I've ever seen.

The Lone Ranger on the other hand was a pleasant surprise, given its reputation.  Johnny Depp as Tonto is problematic in a way that not even the presence of so many real native americans can quite excuse as is the odd flashback structure.  But director Gore Verbinksi's embrace of the source material is admirable and what many critics don't seem to have noticed is the extent to which filmmakers have consciously referenced the vast history of the Western genre from its roots in silent film when it wasn't even a genre yet as such right through the Philadelphia western to whatever it is that we do now.  The final half hour, which has one of the best choreographed action sequences I've seen this decade is a loving homage to Buster Keaton, notably The General but also some other shorts and one shot in particular had me cheering.  Arguably the film's main problem is its length.  With some judicious cutting there's a magic two hours in here.

#disneywatch continues onward.  For some reason the original dvd release of Atlantis: The Lost Empire is "full screen" panned and scanned and it's not until returning Amazon afterwards that I realised I could have bought the special edition widescreen version for the same price.  Apparently there's not a shred of Joss Whedon left in the screenplay which is surprising - the sense of the team dynamic feels very much like something he'd do and it does retain the sense of what Disney originally asked him for which is "Journey to the Centre of the Earth" meets "The Man Who Would Be King".  Finally seen Lilo and Stitch which is as brilliant as everyone says it is though it shows just how far Disney's identity crisis had gone at the turn of the century that this re-imagining of ET was sandwiched between Atlantis and Treasure Planet.  You might well also ask how they went from releasing something as smart as this to Home on the Range within two years.

The Films I've Watched This Year #48

Film What already? Well, yes, with the #garaiwatch run on, here I am again just five days later.  Feels a bit strange still posting these during the other project which is going on, not least because whatever everyone else is writing is consistently more interesting, literate and well, alive, than whatever's in these containers.  I'm still debating whether I should produce one myself, though there's an inevitability to not just the fact that I probably should but also the topic which in and of itself feels like a cop-out.  Also watched this week so far: the final episode of The Newsroom in which Sorkin very much realised that no ending would be entirely satisfactory so fell back on a tried and tested formula, three episodes of The Box of Delights which for all its magic still leads me to say "Please ... thank you" at the screen ever five minutes due to the lack of manners on display and SHIELD which meanders onward revealing odd moments of brilliance intermixed with horrifyingly prosaic exposition which clearly exists because it's on US network television and assumes a vast proportion of its audience is stupid, even though its the same theoretical audience which watched House in their droves.  Still no announcement from Channel 4 on whether they have the rights to Agent Carter.  Marvel UK's twitter people don't know either.

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
Edge of Tomorrow
Elf

Liverpool Echo and Mirror columnist Gary Bainbridge is about where I am with Love Actually when it comes to Elf and his blog based evisceration led to his first television appearance.  Having finally seen the thing, for all its reputation, it's impossible not to agree with him.  It's not horrible, not in the same way as most of Will Ferrell's films are, a talent with whom I have a serious sense of humour bypass at the best of times (his best film is still Melinda and Melinda) (yes, it is) but most of the jokes were done better and more logically earlier in The Jerk in relation to his adoption and later by Enchanted when considering his naivety of spirit within the city (with a touch of Big and so 13 Going on 30 for good measure).  As with many of Farrell's films, few of the gags are unexpected, most of them go on far too long as do the scenes and although it's easy to dismiss the thing as probably being best viewed at eight years old, as Gary notices there's plenty of content which is age inappropriate.  On the upside, James Caan is clearly having a ball playing a version of his Mickey Blue Eyes character and an amazingly blonde Zooey's a pleasure as ever, even if there's barely anything for her to do and her character makes very little sense.  Sigh.

None of which was really helped by having watched The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies with its rather more majestic revisionist take on elves.  On one of the earlier blu-rays there's a documentary about how Tolkien and now Jackson have redefined what an elf is.  Not at Christmas in department stores, which is odd when you consider when all of these Lord of the Rings related films have been released.  Having had a glance back through this blog's archives, there's a lack of consistency to reviewing the films.  Fellowship of the Ring has no commentary.  The Two Towers has a weird rebuttle to critics and a prescient paragraph about ensemble films which prefigures my dissertation, Return of the King has a giddy paragraph, An Unexpected Journey is mentioned in my 2012 film choice, Smaug's first appearance is in issue 29 of this series and I covered the extended versions of both films a few weeks ago.  I saw The Two Towers at the Filmworks in Manchester when it was still owned by UCI, Return of the King at FACT Screen One, An Unexpected Journey in FACT Screen Two, Smaug on Netflix in my bedroom and Battle back at FACT Screen One in pretty much the same seat.  For the life of me I can't remember where I saw Fellowship.  Perhaps The Filmworks?  An Odeon?  Nope, no idea.

Either way, here we are almost at the other end of the franchise and if you're asking for a short answer on the third film in the series of six, it's a disappointment.  But, and it's important to say this, I was disappointed with both of the earlier films in their theatrical versions but then found the extended versions far superior.  In each case, and I appreciate some of you will find this statement ludicrous, the problem with the theatrical versions of these films is that they're too short.  Without the credits, Battle is only about two hours and ten minutes which makes it the leanest of the films and in places this leaness is at the expense of coherence.  There are moments when it's possible to lose track of exactly where characters are in relation to one another within the landscape.  At one point I had assumed Thranduil to be somewhere other than where he cropped up and there are other characters, built up heavily in the earlier films who just drop out and it's easy to assume that they're in the extended version waiting to shine.  Perhaps that's part of the problem - there are story elements which only properly exist in the extended versions and having recently watched those my brain was waiting for their resolution in a version of the story in which they were never included.

In other words the theatrical version of Battle feels like an advert for the extended version and we won't properly get to see the film until next November when its released more fully for the home.  Which isn't to say this version doesn't have its high points.  Not wanting to even attempt to improve on the battles of the previous films, Jackson instead profitably embraces the aesthetic of table top war games and so the digital equivalents with massive blocks of identical elves and dwarves and orcs doing battle with aerial shots which also resemble the historical simulations from some Dan Snow documentaries.  Thorin descent into madness is also well achieved, shooting him with the chambers of gold using many of the same shot choices of Smaug.  Evangeline Lilly's Tauriel is again one of the highlights, and the resolution of that storyline is perfectly judged if considered within the context of the whole series.  There are few moments which have the jaw dropping, gut wrenching, tear inducing majesty of the Olifants in Return of the King and such, but with ten years of other filmmaking between and Game of Thrones our expectations have increased somewhat in relation to what we expect to be possible using modern special effects techniques.

In the duff column there's Ryan Gage's Alfrid who Jackson is clearly very enamoured with and thinks is hilarious and so has given plenty more to do despite him being a sigh inducing one-note pantomime antagonist of the kind that used to weigh down Disney films in their fallow years.  This is doubly annoying because the moments when this made up character is doing rubbish things are at the expense of more action between the dwarfs many of whom are reduced to standing around and reacting in a way which would surely have been their position throughout the story if Jackson had just made one film from the book as some people who know nothing about how films are made have suggested.  Again it's entirely possible this will be resolved in the extended version.  My other gripe is just how horrible the film looks on the big screen.  Whether due to me watching it in a 2D version, or as a byproduct of having to convert the material from 48fps to 24fps effectively replacing every other frame with a copy of the one before it, large sections look not unlike an upscaled dvd on a massive flatscreen, or the equivalent.  I'm sure I saw anti-aliasing and edge enhancement in the places.  During a close-up in one key scene an actor's skin has all the detail of an impressionist painting.

Well, so, yes, it's fine.  Brilliant in places, but it'll probably only really make sense when watched as episode three in a six part series which as Jackson himself notes in the BD commentaries was his aim.  Even after the extended version of this release next year, I still don't think it'll be the last we see of the series and don't mean that we'll see The Silmarillion some time soon.  While I don't think he's a tinkerer on the Lucas scale of doing things, I'll be very surprised if we don't see another version of all six films at some point in the future with even more material filmed and previously discarded edited back in or even pick-ups created secretly during The Hobbit shoot to be added into the later films.  He says he won't, but given how much work has gone into dovetailing The Hobbit into Lord of the Rings, there must be part of him that wants to replace Ian Holm with Martin Freeman in the key Bilbo flashback.  It's for these reasons I still haven't upgraded my original dvds.  Having already bought about nine different versions of Star Wars across the years I've well learnt my lesson.

The Films I've Watched This Year #47

Film Attachments isn't available other than through about ten episodes released on VHS over a decade ago. I never did track down Midsummer Dream or the short film Running for River. But apart from that #garaiwatch is done, completed, finish and until Suffragette is released, as I sit down to watch a film or some television it will be with the disappointment of knowing that Romola does not feature somewhere.  I'm hoping to go and see The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies tomorrow.  I'm almost expecting her wander through playing an Elf.  Was it worth it?  It's fair to say that without her participation I may not have made time for Words of the Blitz in which she quotes, like the other participants directly to camera, from the diaries of a survivor Joan Wyndham, whose vivid descriptions of trying to maintain some semblance of a normal existence amid the bombs, really underscored for me just how important life is and why you should make the most of it.  Or the fascinating Russia's Lost Princesses (a rare voice over).  So yes, if only for those, yes it has been worth it.

Blitz was broadcast in 2010, right between Emma, which was covered last time and The Crimson Petal and the White, the 2011 BBC adaptation of Michael Faber's 2002 which isn't easy to love.  Garai is a Victorian prostitute who takes advantage of the attentions of an industrialist, a gloriously serpentine Chris O'Dowd, in order to shift herself from the squalor of the Dickensian undercity.  However extraordinary the performances, and Romola's pretty much a cameleon here in a role entirely unlike anything she'd done until that point, and how, I felt a tension in the adaptor not quite being sure whose story is being told or how to structure it.  Glancing at a synopsis of the book just now, I can see that it's more about the parallel stories of the two women in O'Dowd's character's life, the other being his frail wife.  Perhaps it might have benefited from giving just one of them the majority of the agency.  On the upside, it means Romola can add to theoretically non-canonical Doctors, Mark Gatiss (Doctor Who night sketch) and REG (Shalka) to her tally.

Of course, The Hour adds a whole bonafide, unarguable Doctor in her soon to be predecessor in the role Peter Capaldi.  One of the great tragedies of The Hour, other than the BBC's unwillingness to have everyone back for a couple more so they could resolve some of the storylines, is that it didn't manage to properly find an audience.  Like Party Animals and the like before it, this was British television attempting to offer something other than the same old tired genres, succeeding brilliantly but not finding enough viewers interested in watching this kind of drama to justify its existence.  At which point the very viewers who failed to watch it then complain about seeing the same old tired genres.  The second series isn't quite as good as the first to be fair, not managing to deal with shifting from what's a perfectly structured personal storyline in the first series to a moral crusade in the second.  None of which stops me from hoping Abi Morgan takes over as Doctor Who show runner in the future, not that she'd probably want to bother with it.

Garai's final, up to date credit on the imdb is for last year's drama contribution to the BBC's Cold War season Legacy in which she's  a spy who ultimately has little to do with the main plot other than provide the protagonist with some unrequited romantic interest and drive him around for a bit.  As I said last year, it's "like an episode of Spooks in which Harry's entered a coma and woken up in 1974 ala Life on Mars", not entirely unwatchable but mostly a reminder of when television used to broadcast this sort of play every week before deciding that if they were going to build all the sets they might as well get six episodes out of them, that working until the viewers lost interest anyway (see above).  On reflection, there's nothing about this which couldn't interestingly be turned into a series as well if the BBC had a mind to.  Which they don't lately (again see above).  Beyond this, Suffragette is in post-production as is Dominion, a $5m b/w, shot in Canada and Garai's been in New York on stage in Tom Stoppard's Indian Ink.

Which isn't where I stopped.  For the last couple of nights I went right back to the beginning of her screen career.  In the 2001 ITV drama, Perfect, Romola's adopted daughter goes in search of her mother only to find that she's Michelle Collins, a serial bigamist (yes, indeed).  Adapted from her own novel by Susan Oudot, it's about as early 00s as an ITV drama can be with contemporary musical cues borrowed from Cold Feet, Cathy Tyson as Collins's best friend and Barbara Flynn as Romola's adoptive mother.  It's quite a shock to see Romola wearing what would have been contemporary clothes for the time, black faux-goth t-shirts and denim skirts.  With the exception of Inside I'm Dancing, she wouldn't be seen in contemporary clothing on screen for most of the rest of her career.  Perhaps of most interest is how the tabloid journalists are portrayed in the scenes after the secret is out, prying and prowling, the drama suggesting this to be the norm, even though in reality they're simply turning ordinary people's lives into entertainment to fill the gaps between adverts.

Then I ended this escapade where she began in The Last of the Blonde Bombshells as the young Dame Judi Dench in flashbacks which reflect on her time in a jazz band during World War II, performing in just the sort of clubs Joan Wyndham refers to in the extracts Romola reads in Words of the Blitz.  Written by Alan Plater, directed by Gilles MacKinnon, the production design is from Michael Pickwoad, who currently fills that role on Doctor Who including the current TARDIS set.  It's a really charming old fashioned story about getting the band back together, with Ian Holm as the love interest and Leslie Caron, Olympia Dukakis, Cleo Laine, Billie Whitelaw, Joan Sims and June Whitfield as the "girls".  In other words if Romola was going to have an eye catching start to her screen career it would be this and although there's no sign that she even met any of the older cast members, she does at least get to keep her own voice.  Grant Ibbs who plays Ian Holm's younger self is ADRed over by the older actor.

Junkhearts
Having You
Babysitting (short)
Whitelands (short)

Garai's current penultimate screen credit, Having You sees her in the familiar spot of the fiance of the protagonist in this case Andrew Buchanan's Jack, who discovers after eight years that his drunken one night stand with Anna Friel begat a son, which is complicated because it was a year after he'd begun his current relationship.  Directed by otherwise actor Sam Hoare (who played Douglas Camfield in An Adventure in Space and Time) (pretty much everything Romola's been in it seems has some Who connection it seems) (I'm going to be checking this now aren't I?) who also lensed the Garai starring short Babysitting (poor dog) its the sort of thing which would probably have been an itv drama in the early 00s with its tonally awkward lurches between middle class lounge comedy and harsh mellodrama, notably in the form of Phil Davis as the disappointed father who feels like he's wandered in from a 90s Mike Leigh film.  Not unenjoyable but feels dated, especially its gender politics for reasons too spoilery to explain and in a way Whitelands manages to avoid.

The Films I've Watched This Year #46

Film And so life in the #garaiwatch goes on, very much as it has this past age. Full of its own comings and goings with change coming slowly, if it comes at all. For things are made to endure in the #garaiwatch, passing from one generation to the next. When I began this a whole month ago it hadn't been with the intention of watching all of Romola's screen output with quite this intensity, but here I am going into week five with at least four films, The Crimson Petal and the White and both series of The Hour still to do.  She'd probably think it was mad and a bit obsessive, presumably because it is a bit mad and obsessive, but if nothing else it has been just the thing as I otherwise wade through the treacle of the Doctor Who series 8 boxed set, each episode as uninviting as the last.  At least with Torchwood's Miracle Day, it's so rubbish and creatively bankrupt it's possible to watch it with a certain detached irony.  The problem with s8 is that it's so close to being good but destroyed by inconsistent and poorly considered creative decisions. a different kind of disappointment.  But I digress.

As I think I may have mentioned, once or twice, notably here, I've never been a fan of King Lear, which tends to lose me after the generally quite strange first act and although I've seen some very good productions and the Trevor Nunn version for the RSC starring Sir Ian, Sylv and Romola comes pretty close to at least making me understand why some people think it's Shakespeare's best.    Last time I saw this was as part of the plough through the whole canon in 2012 and as then found the studio production understandable but distracting.  Garai is Cordelia so is absent for much of the show which must have been an interesting challenge when the show was on tour and as with her appearance in As You Like It, it's just a shame that Shakespeare doesn't give the character more to do.  Her absence is structurally important, she's out of Lear's sphere so she's out of ours, but Garai's performance is so much richer than is often the case with this character in production that it's as frustrating as when a really good Ophelia turns up on a Hamlet.

Angel
Atonement
Glorious 39
One Day

Before all of that was Angel, Ozon's take on the heritage film, which is, well it's ...

Watching Ozon's Angel. Unremittingly horrible. Romola's giving a very good impression of a bad actress. I think that's what she's doing.
— Stuart Ian Burns (@feelinglistless) November 30, 2014

This is my evening. How's yours? #garaiwatch pic.twitter.com/zoCCDWpBiw
— Stuart Ian Burns (@feelinglistless) November 30, 2014

Not you too Fassbender. #garaiwatch pic.twitter.com/uF4jiC5ptl
— Stuart Ian Burns (@feelinglistless) November 30, 2014

Fassbender gives an excellent impression of what it was like to watch the last series of Doctor Who. #garaiwatch pic.twitter.com/Lvph4JoVKS
— Stuart Ian Burns (@feelinglistless) November 30, 2014

Oh up, war just broke out. #angel #garaiwatch
— Stuart Ian Burns (@feelinglistless) November 30, 2014

This bloody thing is still on. Romola is channeling the actress Elizabeth Taylor in a film based on the author Elizabeth Taylor. #garaiwatch
— Stuart Ian Burns (@feelinglistless) November 30, 2014

Well, either that or both of Shakespeare Sister. #garaiwatch pic.twitter.com/ckMfLUYsR8
— Stuart Ian Burns (@feelinglistless) November 30, 2014

Noel Fielding cameo. #garaiwatch #angel pic.twitter.com/kvVKfaJr42
— Stuart Ian Burns (@feelinglistless) November 30, 2014

Oh it's finished. Atonement tomorrow then. #garaiwatch
— Stuart Ian Burns (@feelinglistless) November 30, 2014

Atonement is fascinating though to properly discuss why, I'll need to spoil it, so I'd skip to the next paragraph.  I'd also skip the One Day paragraph too if you've not read that book or novel.  Glancing about the general impression with Atonement seems to be that people feel cheated by the ending, that it doesn't provide the expected catharsis, and it's true on first viewing it is possible to feel aggrieved that having been shown the central couple piecing their life back together to have that blown away does leave a nasty taste, especially since the "reality" is shown in montage.  But on second viewing, I see it as a very daring approach to the material and one which shifts Joe Wright's film squarely out of the mainstream period picture into art house.  Audiences do tend to react badly to this kind of tonal shift, especially if, unlike Inception or Gravity, it's not part of the DNA of the piece to seemingly try and service the opposite sides of the venn diagram at the same time.

When the film was tackled on Newsnight Review back in the day, one of the criticisms was the decision to cast three different actresses as Briony, the sister's whose sexual misconduct allegation leads to the central couple being kept apart.  And it's true, especially now, to see Saoirse Ronan growing up into Romola Garai and thence Vanessa Redgrave, three actresses who couldn't look less like each other despite Garai's obvious attempts to recreate some of Ronan's physical performance.  Plus Juno Temple remains the same in both ages.  But I think what Joe Wright is doing here is extemporising the fact that Briony is a different person in each of these ages with a different understanding of what she did.  It's like the Doctor says when his writer had surety of purpose, "We all change. When you think about it, we are all different people, all through our lives and that's okay, that's good! You've gotta keep moving, so long as you remember all the people that you used to be."

But the ending also makes apparent that in fact most of what we see in the film, especially that central relationship is a fiction.  When we're shown what happened at the fountain, what we're really seeing is how Briony imagines in the scene played out and every moment, which is why we cut back and forth to her looking out of the window.  We're effectively watching a film adaptation within a film adaptation, the version of events as she imagines them as they appear in her final novel.  In that way it's more akin to The Usual Suspects or Fight Club, in that the events we witness are a reimagining and it's not until the television interview that we're seeing the truth or something close to it.  Having not read the book (obviously), I'm not sure how much of this is from the book, but on screen it puts a lot of demands on the viewer who might not realise that Briony is the protagonist and that everything else that surrounds her is happening inside her imagination and expectation, a heightened reality.

After The Other Man and King Lear, Romola's next release was Glorious 39 which oddly enough has a similar flashback structure to Atonement but is clearer about it.  A modern undervalued classic, it's Steven Polikoff once again showing a piece of history from an unusual and original position, in this case the pre-WWII appeasement.  There's a weird old piece in The Guardian about how the film's scorn of appeasers is wrongheaded as though we're somehow not allowed to look down upon the ignorance of the past.  Essentially Poliakoff's film finds its edginess in its images, of the burning domestic animals, the mansion within existing ruins reminding us that the characters are all part of history which tumbles ever onward, the juxtaposition of steady-cam and honeyed photography with despicable acts.  Plus it's something of a reunion, Garai having played opposite a lot of the cast on previous project.  Oh and there's David Tennant bringing her Doctor tally up to two, not that there isn't one of her projects that doesn't feature another Who actors of some description.

The charming Emma was next (see trailer above) then into One Day in which she plays what she hoped would be a change, the "comedy bitch" but as she describes in the 2011 Guardian interview, "I thought there'd be a lot of fun in making her a total bitch, but [director] Lone Scherfig doesn't work in those sorts of stereotypes. The character was quite a departure for me and it was great to do comedy, I've never done anything like it before. If the filming experience is anything to go by, that film will have a lovely warmth."  She's right.  Because the film can't quite decide what it wants to be in general anyway, she's clearly wanting to do one thing but the film pulls her in other directions to the point that she's really quite loveable and given the behaviour of Jim Sturgess's main character Dexter probably understandable.  Indeed there's an action towards the end which leads you to actually wonder if her character doesn't have the more interesting story, which might have been a better film, of having to deal with falling in love with a man who already has a lifelong female friendship.

But the film is an adaptation and original writer David Nichols had a different idea which is essentially When Harry Met Sally as romantic tragedy. Which is fine, there's nothing wrong with that, except it's also exceptionally rote in places and the gender politics are up the wall. As friend of the blog Allyn Gibson said to me on Facebook earlier (comments reproduced with permission) (see also), "I have such mixed feelings about that film. It managed to film a book that I'd have thought was unfilmable, and in so doing it brought some of the book's problems to the fore. I didn't realize it when reading the book, but Em isn't much more than an manic pixie dream girl.  She gets a little more development than the typical MPDG (we see some of her life beyond Dex, though we never meet her family or friends), but her plot function is essentially the same -- be supportive to the male lead, be unattainable until the male is ready like a motivational tool, and then be available when the male has figured it out. And in case we missed it, Ian underlines all of that for us at the end."

Rereading that, Em's actually an MPDG squared, not just for Dex but also Ian and although she's gifted some agency, the whole Paris trip is from Dex's point of view, we discover with him her new found publishing breakthrough, her move to the continent her finding of a new boyfriend.  Then when the unfortunate incident occurs it's a good old fashioned fridging.  As I only vaguely noted in my old blog post about the genre, many, many of these films follow this structure of having a male protagonist and a female co-star with marginal agency whose own scenes are almost always in service of the main character's story (see also About Time).  That's why something like Celeste and Jesse Forever are such a revelation.  They subvert the genre by giving the agency to the female character in a way that they really shouldn't have to.  All of which is a terrible shame because Ken Stott as Dex's father is like weaponised Cribbins, especially in the final tv dinners scene. a single line from which and his delivery of will stay with me forever.

The Films I've Watched This Year #45

Film Oh Romola, Romola, Romola, where for art thou, Romola? From here on in Garai has a bit of a career schism in which, with the exception of Glorious 39, she enjoys the lead role on television but ends up playing secondary roles of daughters, wives or BFFs in films were quite often, and Vanity Fair's a clear example of this, she could play the lead just as well if not better.  Perhaps it's a choice; carrying television series with long schedules then dipping into shorter roles in films.  That seems to be the impression might draw from this 2011 interview.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.  The point is she's still in that interstitial point of being thought of enough to be able to make television but entirely capable of playing character roles in films which is the very definition of the kind of actor who ends up playing Time Ladys.

As I mentioned the other day, Australian mini-series The Incredible Journey of Mary Bryant is a fascinating shop window for the kinds of powers she'd bring to the Doctor, not least the necessary authority.  The piece itself is a bit halfy.  The first episode which sets up her character Mary Bryant's predicament, as a convict on the first ship to settle in Australia who breaks free of the authorities is amazingly pants in places with Jack Davenport playing an even more feckless version of his Pirates character in what's essentially the Torchwood equivalent of the old education series, How We Used To Live.  Endless exposition about the horrors of utilising convicts to build a colony punctuated by graphic scenes of sexual assault and torture.

But then in the second half, for an hour or so, everything clicks into place as a more intriguing chapter begins in which Bryant, her husband, children and various hangers on end up in an Italian colony where they attempt to build false identities.  Clearly the more intriguing story, you could imagine a film version told from the pov of the colonists attempting to decide if this group of apparent aristocrats are everything they say they are.  As intrigue gives way to tragedy, Garai's acting ability is on full display and she's heartbreaking, her Cornish accent cracks (forget what I said last week about accents).  Well worth three hours of your time so long as you're of a patient disposition.

Hugo 3D
Renaissance
Scoop
As You Like It
Amazing Grace
Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope

Garai's next film according to the IMDb was voice work as Helena on the English dub of the Spanish animation El sueño de una noche de San Juan or Midsummer Dream, which isn't available anywhere but tantalisingly has some box art on Amazon.  Garai's next film after that according to the IMDb was voice work as Ilona Tasuiev on the English version of the French animation Renaissance which is available everywhere and is sadly practically unwatchable.  A sub-2000AD story about the super rich attempting to find immortality, the animation utilises a graphic novel aesthetic to evoke film noir with the result that some scene are simply loads of black with various points of light which makes the action difficult to follow.

Romola is fine as are her co-stars especially Daniel Craig, but the enterprise falls into an animation uncanny valley because the characters they're playing look nothing like the actors which is less of a problem in other animation styles but a bit distracting here, especially when the character they're voicing looks like a famous French actor.  Who interest comes in the form of Sean Pertwee and Nina Sosanya who was about the only actor to come out of the Fear Her debacle with her reputation intact.  But on the whole you can imagine director Christian Volckman  and his crew slaving away on this for ages then watching as Sin City steals their thunder.

The rest of the week was spent rewatching films from a slightly different perspective.  This is my third time through Scoop which I've already reviewed twice on the blog, on first viewing and then in 2010 as part of the Woody Allen watch which is ongoing.  That's when I first noticed Garai and said:

"The big surprise this time was to notice Romola Garai as Scarlett’s best friend. Since 2006, she’s taken a few high profile roles, most recently as Emma in a BBC tv adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma and in Stephen Poliakoff’s underrated Glorious 39 and I think has the potential to be the next Kate Winslet or at least the British Johansson. She doesn’t have much to do here other than be Scarlett’s facilitator and sounding board (“I can get you into a club to meet Peter” / “Are you sure that’s what you want to do?”) but even then she’s luminous."

Which pretty much sums things up even if my predictions have gone a bit south since she's purposefully become neither of those things.  Like all the other British actors in this very rich cast, she's clearly agreed to do it so  she has a Woody Allen film on her CV and she's at least better served than Richard Briers and Toby Jones who seem to have found themselves in the waste bin on the computerised editing system for all but 0ne shot of them looking sullen on a barge.

Romola's role essentially that of Tony Roberts in Annie Hall, of walking in lateral tracking shots so that Scarlett as Woody's younger female avatar can fire jokes at her.  She does have one moment of agency while lying on a bed being told off by her mother but on the whole its all saucer eyes and teasing and not really having much in the way of a story for herself though it's not really that kind of film to be fair.  Despite being a BBC Film, Scoop still hasn't hasn't had a UK release but there are plenty of region 2 versions available on Amazon, including an Italian Blu-Ray.

For reasons I can't fathom, I really took against Branagh's HBO version of As You Like It first time around.  Not having bothered to write anything about that on the blog, my memory's a bit dim as to why, but I suspect it's because of the liberties played with the text to the point that some major characters are left with just a few lines and the Orientalism and it not being as epic as his theatrical releases notably Hamlet, not that anything could be as good as Hamlet.  But on a television budget what was I expecting?

This time around I found the whole thing a deeply emotional transcendent experience, from Patrick Doyle's ravishing soundtrack, to the golden photography to the touching performances especially from Brian Blessed in the dual roles of Duke's Senior and Frederick.  Plus having read much more theatrical history since then, I can appreciate the implications of Adrian Lester being here albeit not in his signature role as Rosalind, filled on this occasion by Bryce Dallas Howard.  who in her own way, for all the family connect is sort of the US Garai.  Perhaps Jurassic World will give her some traction.

Essentially two things pushed me over.  Garai of course as Celia, notably in the scene where staging requirements leave her sitting on the edge of a bridge, alone, contemplating nature while Rosalind sets out her test to Orlando, in the background throughout patiently waiting for Ken to say cut.  But also Kevin Kline's Jacques, a figure I sometimes fear I may have become especially in the closing moments when he's walking off just as the party's starting.  To break character for a second, that's just the sort of thing I need to do less of.

After two BBFs, Amazing Grace has Garai playing William Wilberforce's wife Barbara in what turns out to be the crucial role of persuading him to carry on with the necessary work of ending slavery.  But the real surprise in that lovely, oh you're really quite famous now but you weren't when I first saw this so I didn't notice you, is Benedict Cumberatch as William Pitt and clearly loving it.  Much of his IMDb is like that, loads of "I didn't realise he was in that..."  Creation?  Starter for Ten?  Four Lions!?!  Heartbeat!?!?!??!?

Ended the week on Star Wars for reasons you can imagine.  The BD on my 50 inch LED looked amazing, almost too detailed, with scuffs in paintwork, matting errors in space and prop shadows aplenty (across Sir Alec's body in the lightsaber scene).  Noticed this time?  The lack of women.  Apart from Aunt Beru and Leia and some background artists there are no women in the thing,  None of the Rebels are women.  None of the Imperials.  Where are they all?  Stuck in the 70s presumably.  Still, can't fault it otherwise ...

The Films I've Watched This Year #44

Film Now that Peter Capaldi's been confirmed for the ninth series of Doctor Who, I decided I couldn't wait another year or so to see his replacement Romola Garai in action so I'm now in full "career watch" mode and although I've already had a few glimpses of her future with The Last Days on Mars and The Other Man, I've rewound right back near the start (timey-wimey) and begun working my way through her works in order where possible, Lovefilm permitting.  They have The Last of the Blonde Bombshells in which she plays the young version of one of the characters, but Attachments isn't available on anything other than overpriced second-hand VHS (probably for the best) and neither is the next thing, an ITV drama called Perfect starring Michelle Collins.

Andrew Davies's adaptation of George Eliot's Daniel Deronda is arguably her first big television moment, in which she gives us a very coquettish Gwendolen Harleth and luminously memorable introduction as she throws a fortune away on the turn of a roulette wheel under the enchanted eye of Hugh Dancy's Deronda.  From then on she pretty much commands the screen with all the confidence of an actor with years more experience entirely aware of how the camera regards her especially in the archery scene where she simply glows.  The BBC Genome tells me I originally saw this on BBC Four at roughly this time of year in 2003 and although it wasn't until 2009 and the double whammy of Glorious 39 and Emma that I really decided she'd have the perfect future as a Time Lord, her screen presence is almost fully formed here.

If you do have Netflix or the dvds and three and half hours this is well worth the effort.  Some of the writing and performances is in broad strokes.  Hugh Bonneville's Grandcourt is a bit of a two-dimensional panto villain but in some respects needs to be to underscore the misdirection of Gwendolen's choices.  But balancing that is Edward Fox's multilayered turn as Deronda's father, whose aristocratic surface has as many cracks as his face.  Other than Bonneville the main Doctor Who connection here is its producer Louis Marks who wrote four classic stories, Planet of Giants, Day of the Daleks, Planet of Evil and The Masque of Mandragora.  It's also directed by Tom Hooper who after a bunch more television ended up on The King's Speech and Les Mis.

The Emperor's New Groove
Nicholas Nickleby
I Capture The Castle
Dirty Dancing 2
Vanity Fair
Inside I'm Dancing


The IMDb has Nicholas Nickleby as Garai's first film role which I originally saw in a free preview before Deronda back in 2003 and reviewed over a couple of paragraphs here then again in 2012 (#hathawaywatch).  Here she's Nickleby's sister Kate who is treated badly by Edward Fox's Sir Mulberry Hawk who seems to be channelling Bonneville's performance from Deronda.  It's a film which has improved with age, not least because of the now unaffordable and eclectic cast which I notice includes Daisy Haggard as "Juliet in play".  It's all the more surprising because two years before the director Douglas McGrath, a big friend of Woody Allen, directed the utterly unwatchable Company Men which I wrote about here after having watched it, and later I Don't Know How She Does It.  But also Emma and Infamous.  Creativity's an inconsistent and strange business.

I Capture The Castle, the Dodie Smith adaptation. was Romola's first starring role and demonstrates she can carry a film.  She's playing younger here, the seventeen turning eighteen daughter of Bill Nighy's washed up novelist and is delightful as this naive but intelligent ingenue.  It's about the fear, I especially experience, that once we have some great achievement (which in my case would be my MA), we essentially then spend the rest of our lives in a futile process of trying to replicate as we await the inevitable.  The script is by Heidi Thomas, who after a slight blip on Lilies, bounced onwards through Ballet Shoes (with which this feels stylistically connected), Cranford, the Upstairs Downstairs sequel and now currently Call The Midwife.  Tim Fywell's next directing job was Ice Princess of all things.

At which point she runs, or rather latin ballrooms, into the notorious Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights (to give it the US title) or at least notorious to those of us who've heard the This American Life interview with its screenwriter whose original script was a relatively serious biopic about a young girl growing up in Cuba during the revolution.  They suggest its "one of the worst movie sequels ever made" and although it might be with my Garai goggles watching, it's really not that bad.  The dance sequences are spectacular, the Cuban music soundtrack which has the original Shakira-less version of Wyclef's Dance Like This is stonking (Spotify playlist) and there's an unexpected ending given what the film's about (unless you've heard the TAL piece).  Swayze himself turns up for a cameo in one of the obligatory dance montages.  The additional content on dvd shows Garai and her partner Diego Luna really learned the routines.

I wish I knew the actual order in which these were filmed.  Seeing I Capture The Castle which is a highly literate script right next to Havana Nights which really isn't, is a startling experience.  Garai treats both jobs with the same professionalism, just as she would, but in the latter she's not best served by a directing and editing style in which the shot length is  fast even when there isn't the dancing.  Plus she's hampered by an American accent which is fine but sometimes the cliches she asked to voice simply sound wrong out of that mouth.  Glancing forward, it's interesting to note that she only plays one or more accented parts and no more Americans.  Director Guy Ferland would later lense three episodes of Torchwood's Miracle Day, though we won't hold that against him.  Much.

On Thursday I triple billed those two and Vanity Fair, Mira Nair's free version of Thackeray's novel and after seeing Garai in those starring roles, it was entirely curious to see her back in the supporting position as Amelia Sedley, friend to Reese Witherspoon's robotic turn as Becky Sharp.  Actually that's not fair, she's fine, but there's not a lot going on beyond her accent and although the editing favours her, she's acted right off screen by Garai whose own story, at the centre of a love triangle, comes across as far more compelling but undernourished because Julian Fellowes's screenplay can't quite decide just how to turn the original doorstop into a two and a quarter hour film.  The structure is all over the place and it's clear that as a piece of art it would have benefited from having Garai's part excised altogether.

Or having Garai play Becky Sharp which the other films show she'd be quite capable of but from here on in, right through to 2009, she's in supporting daughters and girlfriend roles.  Inside I'm Dancing makes her the object of affection for the two wheelchair bound protagonists,  played by James McAvoy and Steven Robertson who hire her to be their inexperienced home help as they fight for independence.  Adding mouthy Irishwoman to her repertory, she manages, with the aid of the script to retain the audience's sympathy despite reflecting our uneasiness with disability.  The film is problematic.  In purposefully foregrounding that disability it does fall into the trap of presenting pity/heroism attitudes but that always sadly tends to be the case with groups who are underrepresented by mainstream cinema.  Still cried though.

The Films I've Watched This Year #43

Film It's Saturday night, it's after nine o'clock and I'm tapping away at a keyboard.  As I think you may have detected, this particular stretch of Doctor Who's been particularly difficult to parse, certainly as difficult for a range of complex reasons as Torchwood's Miracle Day.  Perhaps I've been out of practice, the recent shorter series and odd episodes not quite preparing me for knocking that out every week for twelve of them.  By the final episode, as I think you might have detected, I was pretty exhausted but there's no doubt that if the episodes had been up to snuff I might have been inspired to do something useful.  But I am genuinely looking forward to revisiting series eight when it's finally released for the home so I can reappraise.  At this point, my favourite episode is still Robots of Sherwood with Listen, Flatline and probably Deep Breath close behind.  Even taking the horrors of The Caretaker and Kill The Moon into account, the low point will always be In The Forest of the Night, potentially the worst episode since the show came back, beating even Fear Her because at least that's unintentionally funny in places (Bob).  Anyway, mainstream, symposium and ...

Restless
Riddick
The Hobbit: The Unexpected Journey: Extended Version 3D
Only Lovers Left Alive
Dan In Real Life
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug: Extended Version 3D
Ernest & Celestine
Fantasia 2000
Dinosaur
The Last Days on Mars
The Other Man

Now that this series has finished, I've decided to catch up on what I've missed from the career of future Doctor (Who), Romola Garai, starting with The Last Days on Mars, which is essentially The Waters of Mars if the Tenth Doctor hadn't turned up for his moral implosion.  The story is in the title, a group of astronauts fighting off a zombifying alien infection hours before they're due to leave the planet.  Garai is one of the astronauts, the Veronica Cartwright role, and although essentially a bystander, has one very good speech in which she's trying to talk Liev Schreiber into doing a brave thing.  Mainly funded with UK and Irish money.  Well done us for the ambition and that includes for the special effects which offers some of the best man against Martian vista in film history.  It has an eclectic cast.  Olivia Williams is in the more challenging Doctorish role of the science officer who says whatever everyone's thinking but don't want to look like assholes and Elias Koteas is the mission captain.  But it is better than the RT score of 20% but for once I agree with Peter Bradshaw's sympathetic review, especially that it's far more interesting before the viruses and mayhem.

Back in 2008, Garai was playing daughters, touring in Trevor Nunn's King Lear and in Richard Eyre's The Other Man as the offspring of Liam Neeson and Laura Linney.  Utterly ludicrous in pretty much every way, after some initial moments when it looks like it might be a proto-Taken, for much of its duration Eyre's pretending to be Hitchcock via Adrian Lyne before a jaw-dropping twist sends it off into other generic territories.  There are about four things to say about it.  (1)  Romola's character's random film job is as an assistant in Ely Cathedral's gift shop (set report) and her boyfriend seems to be some kind of restoration engineer.  (2)  Antonio Banderas plays the man Neeson suspects of having an affair and at one point having heard the voice of Puss in Boots on a voice message blames the not at all alike sounding Patterson Joseph instead (3)  The twist is so, well, ludicrous that I thought it was something we were supposed to have learned early on anyway and I'd missed and skipped back to the beginning at that moment to check and (4) the ever accurate IMDB says Laura Linney apparently replaced Juliette Binoche though I haven't found the necessary evidence.

Binoche turns up in the pleasantest surprise of the week, Dan In Real Life, which is essentially to Hallmark tv movies what Independence Day is to grindhouse.  She's the object of Steve Carrell's widower's affection having met her at a bookshop while visiting his families vacation house (with the rest of his extended family) (I'd be rubbish writing the Sight and Sound plot synopsis) and then something happens which clearly works best if you haven't seen the trailer.  Hilarity ensues, and oddly, considering my usual aversion of Steve Carrell films, it really does.  Bits of it are maudlin, and like I said, the scripting in places is at about the level of a Hallmark movie, but I happen to like those, especially when the children are cleverer than the adults.  As Carrell's daughter, Alison Pill who gets to make that face a lot.  You know the one.  The director's previous film was Pieces of April, in which goth Katie Holmes attempted to cook thanksgiving whilst being filmed on a consumer camcorder and Patricia Clarkson was nominated for the Oscar.  The even younger Alison Pill got to make the face in that a lot too.  You know the one.  With the eyes.

With my 3D television, I've now also caught up with The Hobbit films.  In 3D.  I still remain unconvinced.  By the 3D.  Apart from odd moments like wildlife flying out of the screen and pointy swords and spears, much of the action takes place on a relatively flat but textured plane, the landscapes rendered miscellaneously murky due to the glasses with large sections lost to hazing.  As with The Hobbit: The Unexpected Journey: Extended Version 3D, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug: Extended Version 3D is much improved by the tampering, a whole new layer of back story added for Dwarf King in waiting Thorin (which I won't spoil because it's delicious) and better pacing overall correcting many of the problems I identified back in The Films I've Watched This Year #29 which now looks unbelievably harsh especially in how it ignores some of the brilliant fight gags during the barrell sequence and Smaug himself.  Having dodged it at the cinema, I won't be making that mistake again and will be there when The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies turns up in cinemas wondering what's been left out.

The Oscar nominated Ernest & Celestine is a charming French-Belgian animation based on the storybooks of Gabrielle Vincent in which a bear and a mouse inadvertently become partners in crime and which rather makes me wish Disney had retained E H Shephard's original drawings for Pooh (though I know when those films were originally made animation technology wasn't quite up to the task).  #disneywatch continues with the fun if empty Fantasia 2000 which has Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance paying host to a version of Noah's Ark starring Donald Duck but also an utterly glorious interpretation of Rhapsody in Blue set in the melting pot of the Jazz age which really cleverly Mickey Mouses the twists and turns of Gershwin's score.  Dinosaur was Disney's first grand experiment in character digimation, presenting big lizards and monkies against photographic background.  The slightly rudimentary facial animation in places might explain its relative obscurity, but like the best of the studio Dinosaur tumbles along amusingly despite its especially nihilistic premise in which extinction itself is the antagonist.

Finally, I've seen Restless now too.  As suspected, it's rubbish, entirely wasting the talents of Mia Wasikowska in the same year (2011) as Jane Eyre didn't.  The worst film Gus Van Sant's directed, it's a romantic tragedy in which she's romanced by a loner played by Henry Hooper, a screen presence so exciting he makes Peeta from The Hunger Games seem like Oliver Reed.  Stuff happens which is attractively filmed, but none of the characters have anything witty or interesting to say, apart from in this case Ryô Kase's character due to the virtue of him being an actual ghost, of a Japanese WW2 pilot not that the screenwriter really do anything useful with this other than offer history lessons.  Glancing at Wasikowska's career since Restless, it's almost as though she's said to her agent that she's not doing one of these again and it's telling that Stoker and the peerless Only Lovers Left Alive (which is pretty much unreviewable so I won't) both gothic character roles came very close on.  Every young actress at a certain point has to decide what kind of career they want and Mia's clearly looking enviously towards Cate Blanchett or Tilda Swinton.  Good on her.

The Films I've Watched This Year #42

Film  The new Star Wars has a title, The Force Awakens, which has led to the usual idiocy about it being awful (which it isn't) and inferring there'll be "more of that Jedi shit" (as though the original three weren't about a teenager learning to be a man through the medium of the force and becoming a Jedi).  Despite getting the band back together, despite the brilliant new casting, despite the set photos, despite everything feeling right about the way JJ (Babylon 5'll be next) Abrams is going about things, the stench of the prequels still lingers for them sadly.  My hope is the first shot of the very first scene will have an elderly Jar Jar's face grinning broadly saying something "Meeza welcoming you back..." whilst holding out his hand to the audience through the medium of 3D just for this reason, but perhaps that's just me.  But yes, The Force Awakens is ambiguous enough to not reveal much of anything we don't already expect but also feels like it might suggest a narrative journey for someone in the film and more so than The Phantom Menace which is still inherently meaningless.

Hercules
Mulan
Tarzan
Suburban Mayhem
Celeste and Jesse Forever
Cave of Forgotten Dreams 3D
The Pretty One
Tracks

If there's a running theme to this week's films it is female protagonists with only Hercules and Tarzan fulfilling the usual masculine story arc which, now that I'm come to think about it is pretty similar in that it's also essentially Superman.  All three are about young men fostered by parents from a different species becoming heroes, not actualising until they've successfully defended the realm from some dastardly villain.  What's interesting about Mulan, of course, is that apart from the fostering, it has a very similar story but her heroic fight for acceptance also includes having to convince a male dominated society that she too can become a warrior.  I love all three.  Hercules is funny, funny, funny, especially James Woods as Hades.  Tarzan always makes me cry and is at the spectacular apogee of the integration between cell animation and cgi backgrounds.  But Mulan, which I haven't seen since release is the biggest surprise simply because it's a template of how female orientated action films can be done and now I wish there were more of them.

This week Vulture published Jesse David Fox's 27 Great Indie Romantic-Comedies From the Last 10 Years and having seen and enjoyed many of the items on the list already it prodded me to see a few more.  As Fox identifies, Zoe Kazan's appeared in a quadrilogy of brill alt.romcoms and The Pretty One has all the hallmarks, notably a high concept which you can see being done horribly in a mainstream film but presented with great emotional depth in this idiom, in this case a "dowdy" identical twin not correcting anyone when she's mistaken for her more successful and confident sister.  Unlike the other three films, even though there are male co-stars, in this case Jake Johnson and Ron Livingston, the focus remains on her throughout and we see through the world through the prism of her personality.  Even when she's supposed to be the object of desire, the male gaze is nowhere to be seen, which is really refreshing and create an unpredictability in what could be an inherently predictable premise.

Similarly, despite the title, Celeste and Jesse Forever favours the latter, with the mighty Rashida Jones in what's effectively the Bill Murray role of not being able to deal falling in love with a best friend and just the wrong moment.  Co-written by Jones herself (with Will McCormack who c0-stars and she's now writing Toy Story 4 with), like The Pretty One it has the not quite mainstream atmosphere of going with the emotional rather than comic beat whilst still being completely hilarious.  In places the screenplay even seems to be commenting on mainstream romcom cliche.  Elijah Wood plays a gay friend and Ari Graynor is the foul mouthed mate but neither of them fulfills the cliche, for reasons which border too closely to being a spoiler.  If nothing else, it's made me want to revisit NY-LON which is still on 4od bless it, in which Jones plays a character not too dissimilar to this and indeed everything else she's ever made.  Or at least the good things.  A few pointers would be helpful.  I can't imagine I Love You Man is any good.  Or The Big Year.

My film of the week is Tracks.  Having watched most of Mia Wasikowska's back catalogue in the past few weeks, including the utterly rubbish Suburban Mayhem in which she plays a beautician, I think Tracks is her defining moment.  The real life story of Robyn Davidson, who decided to walk the Australian outback in the 70s in order to get away from people, Wasikowska convincingly portrays someone who simply wants to be left alone and has to leave those people behind in order to understand why she really needs them.  Which sounds like a snatch of the voiceover script but is the best description I can come up with.  Adam Driver plays the National Geographic photographer tasked with photographing her and pretty much confirms his position as his generation's Jeff Goldblum.  No desert film trope is ignored, but it's mostly because they're part of the experience she's searching for.  It's a confirmation for people like me that there's nothing pointless in challenging yourself and experiences what, from the outside, look like entirely pointless exercises.

The Films I've Watched This Year #41

Film Evening. There's nothing much else to report here other than that on the basis of its first two episodes Agents of SHIELD's continuing its upward trajectory towards being half competent continues with characters you genuinely care about who aren't complete morons and a proper sense of purpose, even if that's essentially Torchwood in Children of Earth.  Dodging the government and fighting Hydra creates an extra level of tension which didn't exist when they were some all powerful organisation and multiple Ward replacements are far more interesting figures than Ward ever was, even taking into consideration Ward himself is more interesting than he ever was too.  Since The Winter Soldier too, we now in the business of wondering how each new other thing in the MCU will impact on these characters, not least the upcoming Civil War storyline and Avengers before that.  Excellent stuff.

Aladdin
All That Matters Is Past
Rogue
Avatar 3D
The Lion King
Pocahontas
Sinister
The Hunchback of Notre Dame

For all my stressing about the unconscionable Pocahontas being the last film I watched of my thirties, the first film of my forties was Sinister and thanks to me posting the information here, now, I'm going to have a reminder of the fact forever (or until Google closes Blogger).  It's rubbish and the special kind of rubbish in which the story falls apart within about ten minutes of the film starting due to a single point, in this case that Ethan Hawke's true crime author has moved into the house which was the scene of the murder he's investigating and somehow his wife doesn't know.  No, and indeed, no, now look I'm sorry but no.  Hawke just about keeps it watchable, not least because you know its appearing in rubbish like this which is keeping his Linklater work viable, though as the typically brilliant Sins video notes, there's not one moment when you don't wish Julie Delpy would wander in for a conversation.

All That Matters Is Past is a Norwegian whydunnit with a similar structure to a Columbo episode but from the point of view of the murders.  We witness their work at the opening of the film and through an intricate flashback structure which shifts between various time periods we slowly learn the truth of what occurred.  Great performances from the central cast and lustrous photography from John Andreas Andersen (who previously shot Headhunters) which oscillates between something akin to the apocalyptic natural collapse of Beasts of the Southern Wild and the blander end of Norwegian Noir keep our attention as does the technique with which writer/director Sara Johnsen parcels out the mystery, wrong footing us throughout.  There's also a slightly odd interest in human anatomy, with various physical conditions shown from angles rarely seen on screen (he says desperately trying not spoil a crucial, if eye popping moment).

#disneywatch continues in earnest.  Now that Robin's not with us, Aladdin's an intensely difficult viewing especially in the moments when the title character suggests he might not give the genie his freedom, so filled now with metaphoric resonance.  The Lion King remains my favourite of all the Disneys; every song is a winner, the anthropomorphism's perfectly judged and the Hamlet connection of course.   Plus it's witty.  Wittiness goes a long way as is also demonstrated in The Hunchback of Notre Dame in which the jokes pretty much make up for some of Disney's very worse songs, especially the amazingly pias God Help the Outcasts.  Ugh.  The animation is gorgeous, especially of the human characters, but the general sense of trying to create a preparatory drawing for an ensuing stage musical in the Lloyd-Webber mode is impossible to ignore.  Ugh again.

Finally, welcome to Rogue and welcome to 2007 when Sam Worthington and Radha Mitchell were bit players and Michael Vartan, just coming off five years of Alias is the leading man.  Directed by Wolf Creek's Greg McLean, this b-movie exploitation flick about a river boat cruise which falls foul of a massive crocodile and at no point veers from any of the expected genre beats or tropes but is still pretty thrilling.  Raising it way above expectations is DP Will Gibson's photography, which like All That Matters Is Past is intensely interested in nature, with dozens of cutaways to the species of the outback and the rocky wilderness of such high quality in places it feels like a Bristol wildlife documentary.  Often we simply sit in the boat with the doomed tourists watching the scenery and it's almost a disappointment when the tranquility is destroyed.  Which, I know, is sort of the point...

The Films I've Watched This Year #40

Film  You'll notice from the list I finally saw Gravity in 3D this week, albeit on a fifty inch television domestically and once again my heart was in my stomach for much the duration.  Unlike Hugo, which is the only other film I've seen in the format and which suffered from the old Viewmaster problem of flat figures in a three dimensional space, or at least it did on the big screen, this is totally immersive and despite this being my third viewing felt like a completely different film.  Finally I understood the awe of the moment when the tear floats away, or how it feels to be with Sandra Bullock inside the space suit as she spins out of control and the sheer ingenuity of only having filmed their faces and recreating the rest in the computer and souring over the uncanny valley.  Like the very best films, even having seen all of the special features, had the magic explained to me, my suspension of disbelief was entirely intact.

Liberal Arts
Maleficent
Bachelorette
Divergent
Gravity 3D
Beauty and the Beast
Lawless

Two of the films don't deserve longer than half a paragraph each.  Divergent is disappointing, derivative, dull, dumb, diarrhoea.  Cresting on the YA wave, as every review has noted it has not a single original idea to its credit and fails at the first hurdle by offering an apocalyptic world which doesn't make a seed of sense.  Having Kate Winslet play the antagonist is an interesting idea.  Shame they couldn't have given her a more interesting character to play.  Based on a true story, Lawless is nevertheless a tired, generic gangster film with two-dimensional hats which if produced at the time its set, the 1930s, would have easily covered the same material in three-quarters of the duration.  Instead this stretches on for two hours which seriously meander because it can't decide on a protagonist in the way which often happens when there's at least two or three potential leads.

Liberal Arts is wonderful, but also an incredibly difficult for someone who has a liberal arts degree and finds himself mired in the same out in the world difficulties as the protagonist or would do if he'd had inclination for teaching or the ability and so instead is even worse off.  A post-mumblecore romantic drama about a college professor returning to his old alma mater and suddenly having to deal the fact he isn't as young as he feels, it's written and directed by and stars Josh Radnor from How I Met Your Mother (which I haven't seen), Elizabeth Olsen, Richard Jenkins in yet another of his sad man roles (I notice they're making a musical version of The Visitor which should be hilarious) and Allison Janney giving fair treatment to one of those inspiring lecturers you have good memories of crushing on even though you secretly suspected they were a total bore.

Thematically it's somewhat High Fidelity at a safe distance in relation to letting people like what they like and also Wonder Boys and its ilk, not to mention most of Woody Allen's career in terms of embarrassing the viewer for not being as literate as its characters.  Is it possible for people read this much?  One of the reasons I haven't read worked through my inferiority complex about the bigger books, genius authors is reading seems to take so damn long for me whereas in these films its almost as though they're knocking off an Austen in a week.  Which isn't to say there isn't one particularly good sequence about the longevity of reading to create some balance.  The film also features one of the best sequences I've seen about what it's like to discover classical music.  Not since Guardians of the Galaxy have I'm been quite so obsessed with a Spotify playlist.  All hundred hours of it are available here.

As you know I'm a bit obsessed with watching the Toronto Film Festival industry videos in which the heads or at least marketiers from Vod companies of various stripes wrestle with what the future will be.  Always but always two films are cited as the canaries, Margin Call and Bachelorette which has sat in my Netflix queue for months.  Released primarily as a video on demand product, it's become the by-word for how the kinds of mid-range commercial films which have been squeezed out of cinema other than for short runs to get them noticed by the press to help promote the Vod release can still attract relatively big stars and generally break out of the kind of stigma which made direct to vhs or dvd difficult to sell.  For more on this, see the discussion about day-and-date release models and sigh with pride as it becomes apparent that the UK is best at this (thanks to Curzon and the like) and France lags behind due it actually being illegal there.

Is Bachelorette any good?  It's fine.  Written and directed by Leslye Headland based on her play, it is a straight down the line commercial comedy, which would be easily dismissed as the Asylum equivalent of Bridesmaids, where it not for the main cast of Dunst, Fisher, Caplan and Wilson and that it's an old school stoner odyssey which just happens to be primarily be about women.  Bits of it are horrible and it's never entirely clear the extent to which we're supposed to be laughing at or with the protagonists or just plain hate them, which on reflection is pretty realistic.  It's also surprisingly problematic gender wise when the best man and his friends enter the narrative and whip the agency right from under the bridesmades to some extent shaming their behaviour in the process, teaching them lessons like a team of Petruccios (not that they're entirely successful).  Luckily, the My So-Called Life conversation in the middle saves everything.

Apologies if this is you, but there's an entirely incorrect review of Maleficent in SFX Magazine this month which gives it three stars, hates the fact she doesn't turn into a dragon and that she's the only fleshed out character while all the others gain nothing on the original cartoon.  Each in turn.  It's a five star film if ever there was one on the strength of Anglina's cheekbones alone.  Given that they monocapped and realistically recreated the faces of Lesley Manville, Imelda Staunton and Juno Temple such that I thought they'd Hobbited them and dangled them from wires against a green screen, I think they would have transformed Angelina into a dragon if they'd wanted to but since the point of the piece was to underscore how fairy tales are at their core folk tales and so will be told in different ways they decided to not.  I didn't miss it.  Plus why simply recreate the cartoon in live action?  The films at its least interesting when it's doing exactly that.

But the third charge is just bizarre.  The point of the film is to flesh out Maleficent as a character, to make her three dimensional, flipping the usual structure of a fairy tale film on its head where its the heroes who fight against two dimensional villains whose motives are simply that they're bad.  Whilst its also true that it means we're watching Darth Vader's six film story arc compressed into 90 mins, it's a solid attempt to give this fairy tale depth and nuance.  I really do miss Angelina as a screen presence.  Apart from the Panda films, this is her first screen role since Salt and The Tourist in 2010 which is too long.  I notice her directing debut, In the Land of Blood and Honey still hasn't had a UK release.  There's a Netherlands R2 release available on Amazon but it's strange that no one has picked it up.  Anyone have a clue as to why?

The Films I've Watched This Year #39

Film This week I watched some films, which I'll talk about in a moment. On other nights, as well as Doctor Who (which you hear enough about already), Freaks and Geeks (which I'll talk about when I've completed its eighteen episodes) and Australia's The Code, BBC Four's latest transcontinental import this time from Australia which began last Saturday and most people don't seem to have watched due to the scheduling carnage on the other side and not just in Mummy on the Orient Express.  Nothing about it is original.  Some of it's a bit Homeland.  Some of it's a bit State of Play.  Some of it's a bit The Thick of It.  Some of it's Broadchurch in the outback.  There's also lashings of Attachments of all things (or the blogging scenes in Netflix's House of Cards if you want to be kinder).  But it's also entirely gripping, has some fabulous performances and has a bonus of being over in six episodes so you know it's not going to meander on like some US and UK shows with their multiple episodes of filler and red herrings.  There's one scene in the second episode in which what seem like they're going to be huge mysteries that will sustain the thing are explained in about two sentences indicating immediately that there's more exciting enigmas ahead.

Transcendence
The Zero Theorum
The Double

A week's worth of films about lonely men which is just the sort of thing you don't need when you're unmarried and pushing forty (two weeks to go) (yes, Halloween) (I've heard that one) (and that one too).  Transcendence wasn't well received on release (19% RT) which as ever seems to have been born from high expectation, a marketing campaign which suggested it was something it isn't and the kind of pack mentality which also killed the likes of John Carter which was also equally fine if not quite spectacular.  Inception this isn't.  What Wally Pfister's produced instead is a homage to the genre films of the late-70s/early-eighties, The China Syndrome, Electric Dreams, War Games, and um, Capricorn One, but focusing on contemporary concerns about the potential sentience of the web and were it might logically lead.  Coma especially is suggested in the large white rooms that the entity ultimately inhabits.  If there are problems, it's a lack of focus in relation to the protagonist, which should be Rebecca Hall's character, but because there are so many other great actors and Pfister feels the need to service them, her agency is depleted at just the wrong moments.  Except those other actor's characters feel underutilized too only really turning up for expository purposes.  Odd.

The Zero Theorum is a pretty good argument against home working and is just how I imagine it must be for people who work on the Amazon Mechanical Turk.  A bit of a greatest hits package from Terry Gilliam, an 80s retro Brazil with Parnassus's fantasy sequences.  It's obtuse rather than entertaining and it's dispiriting to see him falling back on some of his old tropes when he is given creative freedom for a change (albeit on a modest budget).  For all that, it's good to Christoph Waltz in a complex, sympathetic lead role and the production design is as atmospheric and remarkable as any Gilliam film.  I was also reminded how few of Gilliam's films have strong female characters that aren't objects of desire.  Only two female characters have speaking parts here and only one, Mélanie Thierry's MPDG any great stretch of screen time.  I've never really considered him a blokey director, but apart from The Fisher King and Twelve Monkeys, in the both of which he was "for hire" rather than working on personal projects as such, females above the age of tween tend to be damsels.  On the upside, the QR Codes on the street advertising actually work if you pause the blu-ray and scan them, offering extra textual messages and jokes.  If only all films had that attention to detail.

The Films I've Watched This Year #38

Film I didn't watch any films this week.

The Films I've Watched This Year #37

Film As I said last night, I've been ill this week and binged on television. Completed the horrendous third season of Veronica Mars which like Doctor Who now, Buffy in its sixth season, the even numbered seasons of Friends and season five of The West Wing demonstrates that even the best series can go off the rails through a number of unforeseeable creative problems.  Thank god for the second season of The Newsroom which is as peerless as the first, even if it also Sorkin working through the same creative demons that dogged Studio 60 that spring from him not complete The West Wing himself.  Time and again I  applauded the screen in my lonely room, especially deep into the season when these acting giants, Fonda, Waterson and Gay Harden are supping away at this screwball dialogue, the direction buzzing, just buzzing.  If Hollywood was worth a damn any more, another rom com with Fonda and Redford would be greenlit, these two old pros bringing it once again.  Though not a sequel to Barefoot in the Park.  Well, ok, maybe.

Crime d'amour
The Amazing Spider-Man 2
Veronica Mars

The essential problem with The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is that the Raimi films exist, which was also the problem with the first film of course, but here the effects are much more severe.  The really iconic moments having been snaffood for those earlier works, Marc Webb and his screenwriters are stuck trying to do something else knowing full well their target audience still has that imagery knocking around in their brains which is a shame because by some measure these feel more like the comics than Raimi's films ever did.  Garfield's a superior Peter.  Stone's playing the perfect Gren.  Paul Giamatti's a fabulous Rhino.  Spidey's connection to the city is enunciated much more clearly and the pacing of the narrative, rushed through in the opening installment there is played out at a much more leisurely pace.  I can take or leave some of the mythology manipulation, but it's within the DNA of the comics title for all kinds of narrative ookiness to occur, for such discoveries to be made.

The gravitational pull of Oscorp is problematic, especially as its related later in the film and how it suggests its connection to a range of other characters.  There's narrative short hand at play here in setting up the moribund Sinister Six film.  If only Sony and Disney could have come to some arrangement about the cinematic universe.  If only.  Without that backdrop, this iteration feels the need to justify why all of these superpowered beings exist in such close proximity, whereas the MCU offers the justification of just because.  It's a similar issue which seems to be brewing at WB/DC were Snyder's even apparently making Wonder Woman a result of Krypton exploding for some reason, as though having her moulded from clay by a God is somehow less problematic.  Either way, despite the Transformers moment, it's still a lot more watchable than Spider-Man 3 even though that at least had the unabashed lack of embarrassment about introducing the world to alien life for, you know, reasons.

The essential problem with Veronica Mars is that it ends.  Having endured s3, even though this isn't a monumental return to form, probably for reasons of budget and scheduling Piz, Wallace, Mac and Weevil are short changed and the mystery isn't that surprising, but Kristen Bell is extraordinary at this, and as soon as the voiceover kicks in, there's a sense of "and we're back".  All of the strengths of the series in its earlier years are here, the chemistry between Bell and Enrico Colantoni as her father, the class struggle, the corrupt police department and the sense of her investigations as a calling and addiction, not something she simply does as a lark but because she can and so therefore she has to.  There are a few stunt cameos but not so many that it gets in the way of the story too.  It's affectionate without being cloying.  If they ever do get around to making the My So-Called Life reunion it should be just like this, though you sort of expect by now it'll be more akin to The Big Chill.  Who would they bump off?

Like I said, the essential problem with Veronica Mars is that it ends.  For all the way its shot, this is still television and if nothing else this feels like a pilot episode for a new series, especially at the end when Veronica marks out her territory.  Don't read further if you haven't seen this yet.  Still here?  Gone yet?  Good.  Everything about it breathes set-up.  Wallace is back at Neptune High.  Mac's as Kane Software.  Weevil's back with the gangs.  The old information network's being put back in place.  That doesn't feel like an ending but a beginning and there's a desperate moment right as the screen turns black when you realise that the next episode isn't on the disc.  Plus it's more clearly what the show was leading up to than the silly FBI reboot which made the mistake of trying keep the spirit of Veronica Mars while removing everything which made it different to other shows.  You can take the Mars out of Neptune but you can't take the Neptune out of Mars.  Which probably works just as well as the moon being a giant space egg.