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Best Films Of 2012

24 Thursday Jan 2013

Posted by Jemima Bucknell in 2012, 2013, David Cronenberg, Film, Paul Thomas Anderson, top 10, Woody Allen

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2011, Alps, Amiel Courtin-Wilson, award winning, Best Film oF 2012, best movies of 2012, British, capitalism, class, Cosmopolis, Dark Horse, David Cronenberg, DVD release, Elena, Film Blerg, Film Fervour, france, French, Hail, Holy Motors, honorable mentions, honourable mentions, James Bond, Leos Carax, Les Miserables, Like Someone In Love, Magic Mike, Margaret, Margin Call, mental illness, movies, Paul Thomas Anderson, Russia, Russian, Sam Mendes, Shame, Skyfall, Stephen Soderbergh, Steve mcQueen, Stripper, Ted, The Deep Blue Sea, The Master, To Rome With Love, Todd Solondz, top 10 films of 2012, war veteran, Woody Allen

burns heir

Here is Film Fervour’s top 10 films of 2012 released theatrically or to DVD in Australia. I’d like to honourably mention Woody Allen’s To Rome With Love, Whit Stillman’s Damsels In Distress, Sam Mendes’ Skyfall, Steve McQueen’s Shame and David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method as they could all be moved into and off this list at a whim.

Look forward to the 2013 theatrical releases (hopefully) of many festival films I had the pleasure of previewing: Like Someone In Love, Modest Reception, A Simple Life and Alps, to name a few.

The year’s worst film was a tie between Ted and Les Misérables. 

1. COSMOPOLIScosmopolis

Cosmopolis, which I write about here, is a culmination of a life of work examining human desire and its destructive/reproductive relationship with technology. This sterile, bleak and darkly funny film odyssey is like a sequel to Crash, showing us that we are so bonded to this greater, unseen machine, that all stimulation is mechanism, all feeling is programmed, all experience fabricated. From Stereo to Cosmopolis, Cronenberg has succeeded in paving an existential passage through cinema that can be mapped like no other auteur’s.

2. HAIL hail2

Hail, which I review here, revisits a class of Australian citizen with whom we have sympathised through legend, comic archetype and sorrowful moral tale. With a collage narrative, Courtin-Wilson delivers a radical portrait of human struggle with non-actors, and an artful rendering of sadness, love and rage, paying homage to some of film’s great humanist artists and experimental pioneers. There is nothing like it.

3. THE MASTERthe-master01

The Master, which I have written about here, is a film that explores several dualities of human conflict through a character that lives all and none of it simultaneously. It considers the confines of a class-conscious society and uses class as a means by which we attribute self-worth. Dodd and his team going down in an elevator, all heads inclined toward the upmarket New York apartment from which they were excused is an excellent metaphor of prescribed understanding and social confinement. Where Clarice Starling – who shared a similar frame in an elevator with recruits that towered over her in The Silence Of The Lambs – wishes to ascend the ranks as a woman in a man’s vocation, Dodd (Hoffman) wishes to set the social agenda by reworking history. Freddie Quell (Phoenix), on the other hand, aspires to nothing, and is free to do anything. The possibilities for viewers are endless.

4. HOLY MOTORSholy motors

Monsieur Oscar, a performer, laments the dwindling appreciation for the individual artist in a digital age. Through a series of startling vignettes, director Leos Carax and long-time collaborator Denis Lavant have unlocked a new dimension in cinematic art that shows us precisely what magic can be still be woven in a medium largely stuck in a kind of creative drought. This is a film lover’s golden ticket.

5. THE DEEP BLUE SEAdeep blue sea

With what is possibly the great female performance of the 21st century, The Deep Blue Sea captures a sorely romantic and sensuous love affair between the wife of a Royal court judge and a dashing Royal Air Force pilot. Centred on just one day and night, Hester (Rachel Weisz) and Freddie (Tom Hiddleston), bearing unspeakable symptoms of post-war depression, are caught between their own destructive natures and carrying on their immoral situation. With a stirring wartime soundtrack provided by drunks in pubs and passengers in train stations, the film is a beautiful portrait of British disillusionment, female desire, and the heart’s betrayal in its reworking of memory and how it shapes our experience of love. The best final scene of any film in 2012, and the best love scene.

6. MARGARETmargaret

Delayed in Australian cinemas for a number of years, we finally received the magnificent Margaret in 2012. When Lisa (Anna Paquin), is involved in a fatal bus accident, her own guilt leads her to alienate all those around her in a knee-jerk effort to correct the damage she feels responsible for. Highly intelligent and self-aware, Lisa finds little solace human exchange as she makes efforts to experience adolescence while suppressing/rebelling against her own maturity. Though her suffering is contending the greater sorrows of New York City, she and her mother are ultimately delivered by the redemptive influence of art. It is larger than life.

7. MARGIN CALLmargin call

Set largely over one night in an investment bank in the early stages of the GFC, Margin Call‘s drama is written on its characters’ faces, and lies between their discourse like a gaping, incalculable void. When two young employees learn that a miscalculation could destroy their firm, the board is summoned together to discuss a strategy that will keep them afloat, no matter what the cost to its investors or the public.  J.C. Chandor’s understated bureaucratic process, carried out by a group of despicably wealthy men, never plays up its sense of urgency, or emergency. It is as still as the warm New York night, completely removed from the bustle and noise of the city and yet tempered with an overwhelming sense of impending doom. Paul Bettany and Simon Baker are excellent.

8. ELENAElena2

Elena is a dutiful wife to a wealthy, ageing Vladimir. She prepares his meals, cleans for him, and is a warm and abiding companion. Both she and Vladimir have children from previous marriages. Elena’s son, Sergei, has a family of his own that Elena supports with her pension payments. Vladimir has a daughter with a history of sex and drug addiction who wants nothing to do with him. As a film with little more than a single tremor in the plot, this superbly Russian moral drama opens up to unknown dangers, treating them with refreshing frankness and some inexpressible cosmic influence. In what is the best written scene of 2012, Vladimir’s daughter visits him in hospital and a casual, and tremendously abundant exchange occurs between them.

9. MAGIC MIKEmagic-mike-pic04

Magic Mike suffers nothing but a sketchy/conservative understanding of it being a film about male strippers. Which it is. Soderbergh’s metallic-gold Floridian-American dream follows Mike, a stripper, who aspires to start his own custom-design furniture business. He takes the young Adam (Alex Pettyfer) under his wing, getting him work as part of Dallas’ (Matthew McConaughey) stage ensemble, while working hard at several jobs to get the deposit ready for his business loan. Adam takes to stripping, and the party life, like a fish to water and despite the apprehensions of his protective, hard-working sister (Cody Horn), the boys party very hard. Soderbergh has made a new instrument of Tatum, while capturing a very natural, fumbling romance in a beautifully false paradise. The hottest film of the year.

10. DARK HORSEdark horse

This film is Todd Solondz’ most satirical, cartoonish assault on Western civilisation since he began his career in 1984.       Abe (Jordan Gelber) and Miranda (Selma Blair) meet at a wedding and start dating. Miranda is severely depressed and concedes to the over-eager Abe, the “dark horse” of his family and also the most despicable bi-product of the capitalist experiment that could be conjured on-screen. Abe is incapable of anything, and desires everything. His deluded self-image manifests in a splendid cinematic cyclone as the cold facts of his pointless existence slowly start to dawn on him. It is Solondz’ most anxious and hilariously unsympathetic film and hits like a brick to the face.

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The Rum Diary

24 Saturday Nov 2012

Posted by Jemima Bucknell in 2011, Film

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2011, Giovanni Ribisi, Hunter S. Thompson, Johnny Depp, Puerto Rico, Raol Duke, Rum Diary

A seaplane glides leisurely through the clouds and over the sparkling waters of San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Dean Martin’s “Volare” carries us gently into the dank, chaos of Paul Kemp’s (Johnny Depp) hotel room after a massive bender.

Depp, at first glance, sadly closer resembles Edward Scissorhands and not Raoul Duke – after all, are we not viewing this for another cinematic incarnation of Thompson? His drunken stumbling is not a bow-legged gait, his teeth are not balancing a cigarette holder – oh, this won’t be like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas? This is the first of many misdirections in Bruce Robinson’s The Rum Diary.

Kemp arrives in Puerto Rico at a newspaper on its last legs. The high-strung editor in chief, Lotterman (Richard Jenkins), is hopelessly dependent on several deadbeat journalists to keep the press running and foolishly sees promise in the newest drunkard on his staff.

Puerto Rico in the 1950s is a growing tourist destination and its un-touched islands are being bought up to build resorts, casinos, and “so many bowling alleys, it is horrible to ponder the meaning of it”. Kemp is happily along for ride, paid well for minimal work, until floating with the tide one night (nice metaphor) he meets Chenault (Amber Heard), the only white woman in Puerto Rico.

Aaron Eckhart plays a composite of two of the novel’s characters. Though called Sanderson, the slick PR suit eager to capitalise on paradise, he has also absorbed Yeamon, a heavy drinking, short-tempered writer with an irresistible thrill-seeking squeeze. Perhaps to give the film and its characters a little more purpose, Robinson favoured Sanderson as a kind of corporate villain, but Kemp’s relative political conscience (barely existent in the novel) is so weakly adapted to the screen that the conflict between the two, even with their mutual interest in Chenault, is dull and vacuous.

An excellent performance by Giovanni Ribisi as Moberg, a man so affected by substance abuse that he is sub-human and Michael Rispoli is a good sidekick to Depp, and perhaps their slapstick scenes together are the most memorable.

Puerto Rico’s history of U.S. repression was never grasped fully by Thompson, and how could it be? They were both victims of capitalism’s machinations; he, through a lifetime of drug addiction and alcoholism, and Puerto Rico through Operation Bootstrap. The film fails as a legacy to Hunter S. Thompson because the novel wasn’t one of his best, and the script is polluted with bizarre trivial pursuits for its characters in order to shape some kind of plot or get a few laughs. Wouldn’t be surprised if Robinson directed it drunk as well.

* a version of this post originally appeared at filmblerg.com

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Tyrannosaur

24 Saturday Nov 2012

Posted by Jemima Bucknell in 2011, Film

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2011, dogs, kitchen sink, Leeds, Olivia Coleman, Paddy Considine, Peter Mullan, Tyrannosaur

Actor Paddy Considine’s debut feature Tyrannosaur is an extension of his short film Dog Altogether (2007) with Peter Mullan and Olivia Colman reprising their roles in this extended version.

Joseph (Mullan) is a man possessed of inexorable rage.  Staggering between violent intimidations, child-like antagonism, and drunken despair he is terrifying. When he meets Hannah (Colman) – an op-shop assistant with an abusive husband (Eddie Marsan), he is brought under her consoling influence.  As the bond strengthens, both Colman and Mullan’s accomplished tragic dimensions move you, uninterrupted, through Hannah and Joseph’s transforming circumstances.

The camera is rarely permitted to defer from Hannah and Joseph. It is their presence, their fears and pleasures that dynamically inform the narrative. It is more like a stage production but only a camera can properly capture the sensational tremors of Mullen’s brow or Colman’s brave and devastating smiles.

Considine seems apprehensive of the Christian significance of redemption. Hannah’s prayers are naive and her faith in Jesus is obviously her way of reckoning her devotion to a monstrous husband. Faith in God is essentially a faith in humanity, and the role of saviour is frequently substituted between she and Joseph as aspects of her home-life are revealed. In Hannah, Considine has succeeded with an equal female counterpart to Joseph, and not simply some reactionary love interest for a leading man – this is very refreshing but delivers some unsettling surprises.

 

Ned Dennehy is an excellent support as Tommy, Joseph’s drunkard crony. Filled with a similarly racist and infantile nature to his friend, he orchestrates a hate crime and muses dreams of opening a zoo within the same breath. Tommy’s crude charm belongs to a similar class of Brits portrayed in such films these days, and Considine rightfully keeps Tommy at a distance. This is not just another kitchen-sink drama from the bowels of England’s working-class. This film, like its characters, attempts to move out of its archetypal rut.

Shot in a very dreary Leeds, Tyrannosaur is an intimate look at the conflict of animalistic and moralistic reactions to the grievous circumstances that befall men and women – and very unfortunately, dogs. Handkerchiefs encouraged.

* a version of this post originally appeared at filmblerg.com

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