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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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Paris Manhattan

16 Sunday Dec 2012

Posted by Jemima Bucknell in 2012, Film

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Alice Taglioni, Amelie, modern French cinema, Paris Manhattan, Patrick Bruel, Sophie Lellouche, Woody Allen

paris manhattan

It is rare that a fan-film makes its way to population through legitimate channels. Its channel is usually YouTube and its love and knowledge of its subject is often profoundly nerdy. If not pornographic, it will ascribe itself to the comic genre, and jokes with which other fans can relate and interact, will have it shared, talked about, viral. Sophie Lellouche’s Paris Manhattan must be commended for its sheer existence because it’s an impossible film.

Anna Taglioni is Alice, a pharmacist working in her father’s business who prescribes Woody Allen films to depressed women, and armed robbers, instead of medicine. She’s a knockout blonde who plods around like a wooden puppet, and can’t find a husband because she’s too tied up in her misuse of her favourite director’s body of work. Since adolescence, Alice has spoken to an Allen poster that looms large from a wall in her bedroom. The poster speaks back with smatterings of Woody’s own dialogue which would work if the film was a parody like Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid.

When Alice meets security system designer, Victor (Patrick Bruel), who has never seen a Woody Allen film, a friendship is formed and built on some strange investigations into Alice’s family life. His work and Alice’s, which occupy much screen-time do not carry any symbolic significance and are mere echoes of boutique queerness in the modern French post-Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain purview.

Lellouche’s Allen-sphere is incoherent and idiotic. When asked why she likes his films, Alice’s answers are flimsy, or she dismisses the question altogether. Manhattan shares the film’s title with Paris, but Manhattan and Manhattan are so remote to Alice that it completely alienates her from viewers; rather than charmingly unconventional, she is pathologically trite.

The film is a collage of misappropriated Allen ideations. His vanity, self-obsession, death anxiety and neuroticism, the precarious nuggets of Woody lovers, are not attended – which would be refreshing, of course, if only Lellouche had succeeded them with anything insightful or interesting. Rhythmically anarchic, Paris Manhattan is a bizarre narrative compression, centred on a character whose existential puzzle revolves around her prioritising her career over marriage – another system of gender confinement disguised as radical thinking – something that Allen, inclusive of all his prostitute and actress characters, never stoops to. Any woman claiming to adore Woody Allen – and it is him that she appears to favour over his film legacy – must do so with reservations. This strange pandering to the director’s ego, which is the most documented ego in cinema, delivers some disheartening/disappointing twists.

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Hannah And Her Sisters

26 Monday Nov 2012

Posted by Jemima Bucknell in 1986, Film, Woody Allen

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actress, artist, barbara hershey, cancer, carey fisher, dianne wiest, duck soup, Hannah and her sisters, max von sydow, mia farrow, michael cain, music, oscars, punk show, sam waterson, thanks giving, Woody Allen, writer

Hannah (Mia Farrow) is a retired actress with a dysfunctional family. Her mother is an alcoholic. Her husband, Elliot (Michael Caine), is obsessed with another woman. Her ex-husband Mickey (Allen) is a hypochondriac. Then there are her sisters, Holly (Dianne Wiest) – a struggling actress/writer/recovering addict, and Lee (Barbara Hershey) living unhappily with a tortured artist Frederick (Max Von Sydow) and the object of Elliot’s affection.

The film boasts the richest assembly of talent on screen in any of Allen’s 46 film career and, perhaps, in film history. Aside from the exemplary Allen regulars, (incl.  Sam Waterson, Julie Kavner, Daniel Stern) small parts are lived through iconic and treasured performers with Carrie Fisher as April, Maureen O’Sullivan as Hannah’s mother (Farrow’s mother in real life), Lloyd Nolan as Hannah’s father, and of course, Bergman muse Max Von Sydow as Frederick. The film gained both Dianne Wiest and Michael Caine Academy Awards Best Supporting Actor. Wiest deserved hers.

A tenor that is equally funny and moving, the film is a pitch-perfect balance of comedy and tragedy. This is shown in the unforgettable sequence that has Mickey’s tormenting cancer scare turn out to be nothing. Elated, he runs out of the doctor’s office and leaps joyously down the street until stopping suddenly, realising that his life will someday end, and resuming hypochondria within seconds.

With Hannah, Allen explores the many incarnations of art as philology, like a second language by which people can love. It is expressed in structure (architecture), in performance, as a movement (the delightful scene where Holly takes Mickey to a punk show – attributing his hearing loss), as a commodity (Dusty seeking work of Frederick’s to go with his furniture), as love-making – the sensual passages that Elliot gives Lee, and as a redemptive moderator between strong personalities, as in the lovely scene when Hannah’s parents, after a fight, settle at the piano and make music together.

The film readdresses the delivering experience of going to the movies. As Cecilia sought to escape from a depressed reality in Purple Rose, Mickey finds a reason to live when he watches Duck Soup. For Allen, art, more than anything, harmonises us, and makes life worth living. Hannah And Her Sisters is a celebration of art in all its forms, and is itself probably Woody Allen’s finest creation (the script alone is a work of art independent of the film), and should be his most enduring cinematic legacy, perhaps a leg above Annie Hall.

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

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Small Time Crooks

24 Saturday Nov 2012

Posted by Jemima Bucknell in 2000, Film, Woody Allen

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2000, cookies, heist, Jon Lovitz, Small Time Crooks, Sunset, Tracey Ullman, Winkler, Woody Allen

Ex-con Ray Winkler (Woody Allen) convinces his wife, Frenchie (Tracy Ullman), to front a cookie store so that he and his friends can tunnel into and rob an adjacent bank. The store becomes a wildly successful business, and while the robbery attempt fails, the cookie empire – to their surprise – makes them millionaires.

The film’s cast is excellent, each performer bringing their own quirky incarnations of idiocy, however, the prizes go to the women. Tracey Ullman’s delivery is right on the mark, resting somewhere between Fran Fine and Carmela Soprano. Screenwriter Elaine May is superb as May Sloane, whose naïve honesty and daft delivery of exceptional dialogue seems to shame the ensemble of professional comedians. Allen discards his obsessive, neurotic New York intellectual, for a man of proudly flippant taste (though still obsessive and neurotic) interested exclusively in eating fast food and watching television.

The second act begins with a delightful documentary interview, in which we are re-introduced to the characters in their new roles within the Sunset Farm Corporation. Ray and Frenchie undergo lessons in life, taught by Hugh Grant (put to much better use than in Mickey Blue Eyes) as David, a young and debonair art-dealer for whom Frenchie develops a crush. As she begins to “outgrow” him, Ray forms a new bond with May and Allen showcases his beloved Manhattan through their budding friendship.

The final act sees Frenchie’s cookie crumbling, while Ray returns to crime, planning to replace a priceless emerald necklace with a fake. Ray and May make an hilarious crime duo, and their chemistry is somewhat better than his with Ullman.

The film largely addresses the different guises and fronts that people adopt and how the genuine article can become obscured and unattainable by farce. Ray failed as a stick-up man because his whole crew wore Ronal Reagan masks. The cookie store was a sham that became a legitimate success. David jokes that there is a portrait of him ageing in a closet somewhere. Ray spends half the heist reading his own map upside down. When given the opportunity to arrest them, a policeman decides to go into business with them instead.

Crooks operate within all circles of society. Being a successful crook, in itself, presents a moral contradiction, and as all criminality requires an element of fakery or disguise, it is easy to confuse your true self with that which you aspire to. Small Time Crooks is another hollowed-out American dream, redeemed by love, and its one of Allen’s funniest films.

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

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Cassandra’s Dream

24 Saturday Nov 2012

Posted by Jemima Bucknell in 2007, Film, Woody Allen

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2007, Cassandra's Dream, Colin Farrell, Ewan McGregor, London, Match Point, Tom Wilkinson, Tragedy, Woody Allen

The third of Allen’s London films, Cassandra’s Dream, much like Match Point is a film within which what we know as “Woody Allen” is completely absent. It is the third London film, and the third consecutive film that deals with a murder plot. This calls into question Allen’s interest in the city as a character, and while Match Point and Scoopmade an exhibition of London’s bourgeois beauty, in this film London’s grey banality is something that the characters seek to escape from.

The film opens with the eager purchase of a sailboat by two brothers Terry (Colin Farrell) and Ian (Ewan McGregor) but before this scene, Philip Glass’ score plunges us into a grand, dark spiral over the affectionate Allen font credits. The music is a palpable, sinister presence throughout and it takes sometime for the plot to match this, and then, somewhat suddenly become absorbed by the tragedy which it relentlessly suggests.

Terry and Ian are bound by a familial estrangement to the previous generation, and their differing dependence on money. Terry works for a mechanic and has a gambling problem. Ian works for their father’s restaurant and needs a loan to pursue his own enterprises. When Terry’s losses get him in trouble with loan sharks, the brothers turn to their Uncle Howard (Tom Wilkinson), a self-made millionaire who, in exchange for his financial support, asks his nephews to commit murder in order to protect him from an unknown, but significant, financial crime.

The film sees family as a great moral complication to its characters. Their mother constantly reiterates blood loyalty; her regard for her wealthy brother is something to which she expects her sons to aspire to – money, like family, demands a certain kind of respect. The pursuit of wealth is also in the interests of building families. Terry wishes to buy a house with his long-time girlfriend, and Ian’s new love for an actress, and his business venture in Los Angeles becomes a dream for both their futures.

In its tragedy, it is much like a play, and Allen reflects this by drawing curtains with the camera several times throughout, and in particular, concealing its most violent scene: we retreat behind a hedged fence, reminding us that we are not a party to this crime, our own moral questions are not invited – this crime is strictly between two brother’s and we may only observe its dire effect.

It is a great forgotten Allen film, with two exceptional performances from Farrell and McGregor. It was surprisingly not as successful as Match Point, but perhaps its unyielding tragedy, and disillusioning end is not as tidy as its older brother’s.

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

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