Tom Salinsky

At the time of writing, I’ve seen four out of nine of the nominees. Here’s a quick assessment of the runners and the riders, and then I’ll post some more reviews.

Arrival: Cerebral science fiction with a cracking central performance from Amy Adams but zero chance of winning the main prize. Longer review here.

Fences: Denzel Washington directs and stars in this family drama which also explores social and racial issues in 1950s Pittsburgh. Viola Davis is also up for Best Supporting Actress. Well-reviewed but not getting the kind of buzz it needs to win.

Hacksaw Ridge: Mel Gibson directs a number of other Aussies in a World War II movie based on a true story. Again, well reviewed but not really a contender.

Hell or High Water: Clint Eastwood directs and Jeff Bridges and Chris Pine star in the Western crime thriller which completely passed me by on its initial release, but which I’m hoping to find at an art cinema somewhere before resorting to iTunes.

Hidden Figures: Second true story on the list, this time that of the social and racial issues surrounding the largely unsung women of colour working on the maths behind the moon landing. Not a front-runner but I wouldn’t right it off completely, especially after its cast won the Screen Actors Guild Award.

La La Land: Festooned with awards, this is Damien Chazelle’s bubblegum follow-up to his brilliant debut Whiplash. By any measure, the one to beat.

Lion: Third true story, this time a family drama focusing on adoptive Australian Dev Patel’s quest to rediscover his Indian heritage with attendant social and racial issues.

Manchester by the Sea: Casey Affleck leads a very strong cast in this family drama which also explores social issues in contemporary Boston. Kenneth Lonergan’s film represents the best that the La La Land haters can hope for.

Moonlight: But don’t write-off Moonlight either. Mahershali Ali is the most recognisable face in this unstarry cast assembled to essay this family drama which also explores social and racial issues in contemporary Miama.

So, this is very much a list of two halves. Four films which represent adventure and derring-do of one sort or another. Four films which represent smaller more personal stories, including as noted, explorations of social and racial issues.

And then there’s La La Land.

Okay, let’s start with Damien Chazelle’s film taken purely on its own merits. I’m a sucker for Hollywood musicals and I regard the current TV trend towards musical numbers as a very positive and happy thing. I thought Whiplash was a fascinating and largely excellent piece of work, and I was absolutely ready to be charmed by the follow-up – and by-and-large I was.

The opening number is delightful and the leads are sketched in efficiently and playfully, with just enough time-jumping shenanigans to keep me on my toes, but not so much that it becomes distracting and show-offy. I don’t find Seb’s passion for jazz or his need to explain it to others offensive or insufferable, and I can forgive the occasionally iffy singing, especially when the dancing is largely very successful. And I defy anyone to not leave the movie humming Justin Hurwitz’s music.

For the most part, the tone is very carefully balanced – just enough sweetness and naiveté to sustain the confection of the musical genre; just enough real-life cynicism and acid to make it play in 2017. And the two leads do tremendous work. Chazelle repeatedly frames Emma Stone’s preternaturally expressive face very close-to and just lets his camera absorb the play of emotions across her features. And if Ryan Gosling isn’t exactly giving Winona Ryder a run for his money, then when the camera rests on his far more stoic physiognomy, there’s always something going on behind the eyes.

There are quibbles. When both parties get everything they dreamed-of, the details don’t entirely hang together, nor does the cost (they have to give up on each other) quite counter-balance the sugariness of Cinderella twist. And their parting is a little too comfortable and mature for their not-quite-reunion to have the kind of bittersweet tang that it really needed. But overall this is a perfectly inoffensive and rather winning piece of film-making, which shows that Whiplash was no fluke and that Chazelle is a singular artist whose career will be well worth watching.

But is it one of the top ten best films of the year? Well, that seems a bit of a stretch, even given that the Best Picture nominees frequently contain works of hugely varying quality. For it to have received more Oscar nominations than any other film this year seems very surprising. And for it to have equalled the record for the most nominations of any film ever is nothing short of ludicrous. With so many true life stories, so many intimate family dramas and so many explorations of social issues to choose from, faced with a world which seems to be rapidly heading towards a Twitter-fuelled Armageddon, the Academy appears to have voted for pure, flimsy, gossamer escapism.

Frankly, who can blame them?

Well, for some time now, my new role as podcast producer has made updating this blog very difficult, and in the light of the ghastly developments in UK and world politics, my half-assed views on TV shows and movie seem hardly relevant. But the world keeps turning and since I’ve been to see a few movies and things, I may as well try and keep up my record.

So, let’s start with the Doctor Who Christmas Special. One reason for my not reviewing this at the time is that it was basically fine. Nothing terribly wrong, but nothing terribly exciting either. As writer, Steven Moffat reigned in most of his worst excesses, Ed Bazalgette frames it all with professionalism and style, real (north) American Justin Chatwin and faux American Charity Wakefield are both convincing and Matt Lucas was far less irritating than we might have feared.

Even the one big error simply duplicates a mistake made in pretty much every superhero movie ever shot, which is the physics-defying fantasy of magic catching hands. A person falling off a building will hit the floor and be made to stop very suddenly, and the impact will cause them severe damage. The kinetic energy they give up when their acceleration towards the ground suddenly ceases has to go somewhere. However, in superhero movies and in The Return of Doctor Mysterio, no such problem exists if the thing which the falling person (or object) collides with is a person’s hands. When Grant catches the ship, it stops just as suddenly as if it had hit the ground, but mysteriously with no damage to Grant, the ship or any of its occupants. Other than that, absolutely fine. Four stars.

Next let’s turn to Arrival, the cerebral science-fiction slow-burn movie starring Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner and directed by Dennis Villeneuve which depicts the international response to a number of alien obelisks which descend without warning on planet Earth. Putting so much emphasis on Adams’ painstaking attempts to decipher the alien language is undoubtedly gutsy and for me in pays off handsomely, drawing me in to the puzzle as the various military powers across the globe get increasingly twitchy.

The central twist is a little over-familiar for those of us who have seen more than half-a-dozen science fiction films, but it’s artfully concealed and bolstered by excellent performances, from a luminous Adams on down. It was nominated for eight Academy Awards, of which more later.

And finally, let’s tick off Rogue One. I’m not really a devoted Star Wars nerd, which meant that the number of “Easter Eggs” I noticed was not excessive, although I gather that they come at the rate of about two a minute if you really know your Force from your elbow. The tactic of alternating “saga” movies (like The Force Awakens) with “anthology” movies seems like a smart one and by inserting a narrative into the gap between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope seems like an excellent way to start things off.

And so, this is not quite the Star Wars we’re familiar with. No opening crawl! No John Williams! No wipes! On-screen captions to identify the planets we’re visiting. And early on, it’s all a bit clunky, as we whip from planet-to-planet in search of the film’s plot. As the characters start to establish themselves, and the humour and adventure comes to the fore, things begin to improve, and the team assembled around Felicity Jones’s Jyn Erso all get some great moments, especially Alan Tudyk as reprogrammed droid K-2SO, even if Jones herself can’t quite match up to the astonishing Daisy Ridley.

But the narrative momentum isn’t sustained, as the plot ties itself in knots to prevent us from getting to the last act too soon. I swear when they meet up with Jyn’s father, I can actually hear two different drafts of the film fighting each other, as the person Jyn trusted to deliver her to her father, whose message the rest of the film depends on her hearing, has a crisis of confidence and decides not to betray her by killing him anyway. Badguy Krennic then kills all of his men but not him and then rebel bombers blow him up anyway! Not exactly a clean narrative line!

In the final mission to get the plans out of the Imperial base, however, things improve enormously as director Gareth Edwards manages not just to summon up the spirit of the original trilogy, but to finally give his movie the singularity of purpose it seemed to struggle for earlier. And I have to admire both the commitment to the reality of the suicide mission and the neat plugging of the original film’s most glaring plot hole.

Everyone seems to have their own opinion about the digital Cushing and Fisher avatars which appear throughout the movie. For me, the brief glimpse of digital Leia worked fine. But the continual featuring of the CGI Tarkin stretched the envelope well-past breaking point. The dead eyes and weird mouth and imperfect vocal impression were a constant distraction and I was left with an appreciation of just how wide and featureless the uncanny valley truly is.

A full round-up of the 2017 Oscars will be here soon.

I was surprised that this didn’t sneak into the Best Picture nominees. Ever since 1996’s Fargo, the Academy has tended to appreciate the Coen Brothers’ efforts, nominating True Grit in 2010, A Serious Man in 2009 and No Country for Old Men which won in 2007. I was even more surprised given the near-universal critical acclaim it received, and since I’ve enjoyed almost everything the Coens have produced, I fully expected to love this one. Having seen it, I’m no longer surprised that it wasn’t nominated and even more startled at the unstinting praise it seems to have garnered.

It starts promisingly, with Oscar Isaac brilliantly portraying Llewyn Davis as a bitter, misanthropic, parasitical, drifter, permanently couch-surfing as he struggles to scratch together a few hundred bucks here and there playing folk music. On leaving the apartment of his bewilderingly benevolent uptown friends the Gorfeins, he mistakenly lets their cat out and ends up almost adopting the poor thing. From here, he ends up at Carey Mulligan’s Greenwich Village apartment and manages to make a little bit of cash playing guitar on a novelty song written by her boyfriend played by Justin Timberlake.

So far, so good. We are offered a bracingly unlikeable hero, struggling for meaning and identity in a heartless universe – see also Barton Fink, Larry Gopnik and to some extent, even Fargo’s Jerry  Lundegaard. But this is a movie trying to find a centre, a narrative thread that will pull us through. We have various plots set in motion – Llewyn’s opportunity to return to the navy, the Gorfein’s cat, his ex-girlfriend who may have secretly raised his child in Akron, the abortion which he has to procur for Mulligan, the song he has recorded with Timberlake, but they have not yet begun to satisfyingly mesh.

And suddenly, they are all, repeat all, underline all, abandoned for an entirely self-contained thirty minute stretch in the middle of the movie, wherein Llewyn shares a car with an absurdly over-the-top John Goodman, laboriously makes his way to Chicago, gets an amazing offer from record magnate F Murray Abraham, turns it down and equally laboriously makes his way back to Chicago to rejoin the movie I thought I was watching. By now, even if the Coens had been interested in joining up the plot-threads, there isn’t time, so it’s left to a clumsy revisiting of an earlier flash-forward to try and give this narrative porridge some sense of structure. It’s worth noticing that this is the third rather episodic film I’ve seen in a row to use this device and here it’s done particularly pointlessly. The sequence we have to watch twice is hardly any more interesting or significant than those around it, and it’s far from clear when we first see it that it is a flash-forward which briefly threatens to turn the whole film into Groundhog Day when suddenly it starts happening again.

I can certainly see what other critics liked about this – Llewyn is a fascinating character, brilliantly realised by Oscar Isaac and by music supervisors T-Bone Burnett and Marcus Mumford. The supporting cast are all fine, and some (Abraham, Mulligan) are exceptional. Some of the episodes are diverting in themselves, others are just a bit “so-what”, but the whole is so wilfully disorganised and uninterested in cause-and-effect that it just starts to become tedious. If you can’t be bothered to arrange the episodes in your story to create some semblance of relevance, I’m not sure I can be bothered to watch.

We get to see Llewyn at his most vulnerable when his doctor friend reveals that he might have a child in Akron. It’s possibly the most powerful scene in the film. Later as he is driving back from Chicago, he passes the turning for Akron – but declines to take it. In a movie which generally has been well-structured and where the plot is strong, this would be a fascinating character beat. In a movie which is characterised by hopeful juxtaposition of unrelated cameos, it’s the last straw.

I return briefly to some points I made about 12 Years a Slave, while noting that Llewyn Davis is by far the lesser film. It is certainly arguable that the events depicting in the Coens’ film are much more like real-life. But it’s also worth pointing out that real life is frequently very boring. The job of an entertainer in a narrative medium is to cut out the dull bits and give the rest relevance and power by properly constructing the architecture of the story. It is also no doubt true that the point of the film is largely that Llewyn is fundamentally incapable of change, growth or development, but it nevertheless seems to me that the story of a character who cannot change can be much more powerfully told if placed in a context where familiar screen archetypes would change. Instead, Llewyn’s “fuck this” attitude seems to have infected the entire screenplay, resulting in a series of unrelated events which wouldn’t really have the power to change anybody.

I don’t know if this kind of what-the-hell plotting is intended to give the movie greater poignancy, significance, insight or profundity. I do know that simply typing up a handful of unrelated incidents and stopping on page 120 is a hell of lot easier than constructing a satisfying narrative, with set-ups and payoffs and cause-and-effect throughout. A major disappointment from one of my favourite movie-makers and I can’t for the life of me understand why everyone else seems to love it so much.

It occurs to me that I am pretty much a Coen completest, so for context, here’s a quick rundown of my take on their other movies.

Blood Simple
Powerful, brooding, brilliantly plotted and properly nasty. The low budget shows from time to time, but with a script and performances this good, who cares?

Raising Arizona
Their breakthrough, a sort of live-action cartoon, radically different from their debut, with brilliantly demented lead performances from Nicolas Cage and Holly Hunter. I don’t love it the way some people do, but I like it a lot.

Miller’s Crossing
Amazingly complicated film noir with classic scene after classic scene. Just great.

Barton Fink
Just possibly my favourite – a film only the Coens could make. A satire on Hollywood capitalism and East Coast narcissism equally which suddenly turns into a ferocious grand-guinol nightmare in the final reel.

The Hudsucker Proxy
Maybe their most charming film, although a big flop at the box office, especially compared to its more than usually lavish budget. I like it a great deal, possibly because of how unpopular it is amongst Coen fans.

Fargo
A masterpiece of atmosphere, characterisation, plotting and cinematography. Earns all the praise the gets lavished upon it.

The Big Lebowski
Sprawls where Fargo marches relentlessly, bloated where Fink is lean and focused, but by combining the life-and-death stakes of Fargo’s kidnapping plot, with Hudsucker’s charmingly naive characters, the Coens fashioned another classic which won them armies of new fans.

O Brother Where Art Thou?
A disappointment after the brilliant run of form they experienced up till now. The cheerful stupidity of the characters pulls in the opposite direction from the Homeric template they’ve given themselves and so the film lurches about a bit and goes past several possible endings. The lead performances however are great and the film contains many stand-out sequences.

The Man Who Wasn’t There
Powerful stuff to begin with, but the plot runs out of steam and eventually turns into the same pointless slurry as Llewyn Davis only without the songs. My least favourite of their films by quite a distance.

Intolerable Cruelty
The reviews of this were so bad, I had to stay away. It’s not a true Coen Brothers movie in any case, as Joel and Ethan were drafted in to doctor an ailing script and somehow ended up directing it.

The Ladykillers
Just horrible. If you have the urge to watch this film, just put on the 1955 Alexander Mackendrick version instead. Watch it all the way to the end. Then watch it again. Then destroy any copy of the Coens film in your possession. The only reason I like this more than The Man Who Wasn’t There is Tom Hanks as The Professor. He is electrifying throughout.

No Country for Old Men
Frustrating, because again any semblance of plotting is abandoned in the final third, but the shift in emphasis seems somewhat more purposeful here, and all the sequences are excellent, even if it feels a little bit like reels from two different, but related, movies have been accidentally spliced together.

Burn After Reading
Somewhat trivial, but bouncy and fun. Very happily passes the time.

A Serious Man
A very similar theme to Llewyn Davis but Larry Gopnik is basically a decent guy who makes good decisions, which makes the tiny calamities which unravel his life so much more meaningful. Larry Gopnik’s life doesn’t make much sense to him, but he notices this and complains about it, and seems to live in a narrative world where choices matter. Llewyn Davis lives in a narrative world where it doesn’t much matter what he or anybody else does, because no idea carries over from one scene to the next.

True Grit
A far more faithful version of the novel than the earlier version starring John Wayne, with better supporting performances and with better-staged action. After the intensely personal A Serious Man though, this felt a bit workmanlike.

Next up, Spike Jonze’s Her…

This is a quick spoiler-free review of Gravity which I saw yesterday at the IMAX. A more thorough review, full of spoiler-y goodness may follow later. Or not.

So, firstly – believe the hype. Everything you’ve heard about these being the best space sequences, and especially the best weightless sequences ever shot – that’s all true. Almost every frame is stupefyingly convincing. IMAX 3D makes all the difference, I imagine this would lose a lot on Blu-Ray, or heaven forbid DVD.

And I’ve been pretty down on 3D in the past but here it’s used with remarkable taste and restraint. We got a trailer for The Hobbit before the movie and it had that awful cardboard cut-out look that so many stereoscopic movies have these days. In Gravity, apart from some flying debris, what you mainly get is depth – horrifying, unimaginable, inky, depth.

The storyline is lean to the point of austere. After a dizzying 12 minute sequence with no apparent cuts, all hell breaks lose when a cloud of debris ploughs in to astronauts repairing the Hubble Space Telescope. Minutes later George Clooney’s grizzled and loquacious old space-salt and Sandra Bullock’s wet-behind-the-ears scientist are the only survivors with no working shuttle to get them back to Earth. What follows is an amazingly contained and sustained ordeal as they struggle to make it back to Earth safely.

Director Alfonso Cuarón (who wrote the screenplay with his son Jonas) is extraordinarily rigorous about point-of-view, almost never showing us material which would not be visible to the protagonists, and only allowing such sounds as would be likely to transmit through spacesuits to be heard. In one groundbreaking shot, the camera drifts, almost lazily, inside Sandra Bullock’s helmet and back out again. What’s impressive is that this doesn’t seem like showboating, it’s a natural part of the visual grammar of the movie.

It isn’t perfect. Most of the technical quibbles are irrelevant to me, when they got so much else right. I don’t really care that the shuttle has been decommissioned, or that orbital mechanics make journeys from one craft to another much more complex than is depicted here. I’m sure the law and medicine I see practiced in movies isn’t accurate either. So what? But I do have some issues of pure audience credibility in the last few minutes.

And the tone wobbles a little in the middle. By making the bold, and probably correct, decision to avoid clumsy flashbacks to her life back on Earth, Cuarón as writer and director requires that Sandra Bullock’s back-story is delivered almost entirely in two brief dialogue scenes, at least one of which felt just a little forced. But Bullock and Clooney both do excellent work here – theirs are basically the only faces we see – aided by (of course) Ed Harris as mission control, voice only and precious little of that.

Gravity is an extraordinary achievement, a fine adventure story in a breathtaking environment, helmed with precision and rigour. I don’t know how much of it will live with me, but I’ve very, very pleased to have seen it, and delighted to see it get made. Such a strongly authored piece, with no franchise to back it (and it’s essentially immune to sequels) deserves to do well and it’s been killing it at the box office.

There is even talk of Oscar nominations – about which, more very shortly…

On Sunday afternoon, I popped in my Blu-ray copy of Beasts of the Southern Wild which would complete my ennealogy of Best Picture nominees. I’m afraid to say it’s probably the one I liked least. Partly this is due to the fact that movies short on plot but long on squalor just don’t tend to engage me, and partly it’s due to the fact that the one element which is potentially the most interesting is poorly integrated into the main narrative. However, that’s not to say it isn’t a fine piece of filmmaking. In what’s been a generally quite strong year, Beasts simply isn’t to my taste, rather than genuinely bad like, say, War Horse, Extremely Long and Incredibly Shit or Midnight in Paris.

So while its disjointed and slender narrative, eccentric use of fantasy and limited supporting cast might not have entirely worked for me, I did enjoy some of the individual set-pieces and – like everyone – was completely captivated by both Dwight Henry and especially tiny, extraordinary Quvenzhané Wallis as Hushpuppy. She makes the entire movie worth watching with her pint sized charisma and astonishing lung-power.

On to the main event. Seth MacFarlane’s hosting faced the usual horrible cleft stick. Does the host adopt the irreverent tone for which they are known and risk a backlash from the self-important Hollywood elite? Or should they play it safe and leave fans wondering who on earth is this ghostly photocopy of their idol? MacFarlane managed with unerring accuracy to dive straight between these two stools. Whereas Tina Fey and Amy Poehler pulled off the trick of appealing both to their smug hosts and their own fans, MacFarlane was just crass enough to piss off those to whom the Academy Awards are everything, but far from extreme enough to be a genuinely bracing breath of fresh air. William Shatner’s wheezing cameo was clunky in conception and execution and “We Saw Your Boobs” was just embarrassing.

On to the awards themselves. Regular readers will know that I told them there was no point betting on Spielberg for Best Director and Lincoln for Best Picture and this certainly proved to be sage advice, although for all the wrong reasons. Almost as soon as I made my prediction, Lincoln’s lead began to evaporate and Argo which many considered a spent force, released far too early to clean up at the Oscars, experienced a huge resurgence. So while I’m smarting at my error, I’m delighted that Argo, my favourite film of the year, took the main prize. With Affleck not nominated as director, despite his beautifully precise handling of Argo’s mise-en-scene, the field was wide open and I suppose a win for Ang Lee is justified. I was less impressed with the Academy’s decision to give Christoph Waltz a second gong for essentially the same performance a second time around, but very happy indeed for Jennifer Lawrence. I might have to go and watch The Hunger Games now…

This is the 800lb stovepipe-hatted gorilla at this year’s Oscars. I’d tell you to go and put your money on Lincoln winning Best Picture, Spielberg winning Best Director and Daniel Day-Lewis winning Best Actor now – if it weren’t for the fact that the odds are so poor it would hardly be worth your while collecting your winnings. Is it actually any good?

Having apparently learned the tedious lesson of Chaplin among other lumbering biopics, most recent Great Figure Of History movies have done the sensible thing and opted to dramatise a manageably short but pivotal chunk of a distinguished life and career, the sort of thing that can be panel-beaten into a recognisable story shape, rather than depicting an endless series of disconnected episodes in a joyless plod from cradle to grave. See also Hitchcock, My Week with Marilyn, The King’s Speech and many more. Lincoln is no exception, beginning shortly after his re-election but crucially before his inauguration and focusing almost exclusively on his quest to pass the Thirteenth Amendment which would end slavery in the United States.

From the first few shots, it’s clear that this is an Important film, a Serious film and a Quality film, but it isn’t without its flashes of sly humour. Opening with a neat handling of the Gettysburg Address (including Lincoln’s own reciting of it would have just been too Bill and Ted), we slowly understand Lincoln’s feverish desire to pass this legislation rapidly, even at the cost of potentially prolonging the Civil War, such is his moral imperative to have the outlawing of this barbaric practice enshrined in the most respected of all American legal documents, and such is the uniqueness of the opportunity presented to him.

He is aided and opposed by a simply stunning rogues gallery of American character actors, putting to shame even the impressive rosters of Argo and Zero Dark Thirty. Sweating under wigs, beards, hats and sideburns, it’s just possible to discern David Strathairn, Bruce McGill, David Costabile, Michael Stuhlbarg, Walton Goggins, Jackie Earle Haley and Gregory Itzin – to say nothing of the delightful trifecta of John Hawkes, Tim Blake Nelson and blessed, glorious James Spader, having an absolute whale of a time as one of Lincoln’s unofficial vote-fixers.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt is perfectly fine as Lincoln’s eldest son, but isn’t really given much to do. More interesting and impressive is Sally Field as the sometimes hysterical Mary Todd Lincoln. If it weren’t for Anne Hathaway towering over the award like Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman, Field might be walking away with Best Supporting Actress.

But ultimately, the film belongs to Daniel Day-Lewis. This is simply an epic performance. His Lincoln is stooped, grave, benevolent, picaresque, tenacious. Spielberg’s atypically restrained camera work gently dollies and arcs past his leading man’s hunched shoulders and quiet smile, again and again contriving to turn Day-Lewis granite features into a monument – appropriately enough! The story is largely one of politicking, deal-making, legislating and debating. Tony Kushner’s script includes enough human interest to prevent the film from desiccating  as you watch, but knows when to take its time and simply allow Lincoln to set out his legal reasons for pushing ahead with the amendment when the Emancipation Proclamation is already law.

The only performance which can even attempt to eclipse Day-Lewis is Tommy Lee Jones – never better than here as Thaddeus Stevens, Lincoln’s ferocious antislavery bulldog whose ranting zeal may be more hindrance than help. It’s in what possibly should have been the film’s final shot of Stevens and his housekeeper (in fact it comes about ten minutes before the end) that the epic human reason for having all these bearded men shouting at each other is made heartbreakingly clear.

This, then, is proper grown-up filmmaking, handled by a director who made his name with hugely energetic and skilful popcorn nonsense. It’s particularly gratifying to see him tackling such a weighty story with such delicacy after the ghastly Warhorse last year. It’s almost as if the director recognised that that script was so slight that the only chance it would possibly have would be for him to Spielberg all over it, but here he trusts the clarity of the text and the precision of his actors to do much of the work for him, which is greatly to his credit.

There is a tremendous amount to admire here, but ultimately I feel that this is a hard film to love. Dense, complicated, internecine and talky, it doesn’t have enough of an emotional pay-off – or enough good jokes (although there are some) – to be a truly engaging cinema experience. But it targets the Academy’s proclivities with prodigious accuracy. If Argo was ultimately too loose, too funny, too boys-own – too much fun – to win Best Picture, but Zero Dark Thirty was too bare, too sombre – not enough fun – to win Best Picture, then Lincoln hits the bullseye.

My other film of the week was David O Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook. Russell is the writer-director of one of my favourite unsung gems, the delightfully funny Flirting With Disaster, an early success for Ben Stiller as neurotic Mel Coplin, unable to name his child until he has tracked down his own biological parents. On first seeing the trailer, I didn’t clock Russell’s name. It looked for the first two-thirds like standard-issue kooky indie rom-com fare, then they started dancing and I just checked-out. When it later started to get Oscar buzz I was somewhat confused to say the least.

Now I’ve seen it, I’m still somewhat confused. Much of it is very good indeed. Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence’s pair of star-crossed crazies are not, as I had assumed, run-of-the-mill Hollywood nutjobs with endearing eccentricities. On the contrary, they are deeply damaged people, seriously, unpleasantly and dangerously ill, both struggling to understand the faulty wiring in their head, but having to use that same faulty wiring to do it. Brilliantly, Cooper’s father has his own history of mental illness, is a bundle of superstitions and OCD and, even more brilliantly, is played by Robert de Niro.

Cooper and Lawrence ignite the screen whenever they appear – their superstar charisma (and pretty nifty dancing skills) instantly elevates the story and they each manage to create genuinely affecting characters for the great majority of the movie. The scene in which Lawrence uses her own statistical research to clamber inside the de Niro character’s delusions and rewire his perception of the world is absolutely extraordinary, delightfully funny and quite unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.

Unfortunately, it’s also around here, in the final act, that the wheels start to come off. Firstly, the plot is juggling quite a lot of different elements at this point – the central love affair between Cooper and Lawrence, Cooper’s attempts to reintegrate himself with his family and friends, Cooper’s unresolved feelings for his wife, the letters which Lawrence is ferrying between them, the dance contest which Cooper and Lawrence have entered, the epic sports bet which de Niro has made – it’s a lot. And the demands of the genre begin making themselves felt, so this quite unconventional story suddenly starts ending in a very conventional way indeed.

But although all the basic plot demands of a wacky rom-com are met, Russell the scriptwriter has been sloppy with the details. The first three quarters of the film are littered with set-ups which are never paid-off. Whole characters turn out not to influence the plot one bit (say hello, Chris Tucker) and what look like hugely important plot contrivances are just forgotten about or brushed aside. But at the same time as the structure is becoming unsatisfyingly frayed at the edges, the spiky, unpredictable, unconventional characters are becoming unsatisfyingly airbrushed into conformity, with all of the rough edges sanded off and all of their dangerous quirks blanded away by the soothing power of dance.

I doubt it was Russell’s intention but the very clear message of the end of the film is – you have to be normal to be happy. For such an original, nonconformist piece, this is a hugely disappointing way to wrap things up.

No-one else seems to have noticed, or to care though, especially not at the Academy where it has been nominated for an astonishing  eight awards, all of them big hitters, including the “Big Five” plus supporting actor and actress nominations for de Niro and Australian Jacki Weaver as Cooper’s mother.

I only have Beasts of the Southern Wild to go now, which is on its way to me on DVD. For now, here are a few quick predictions about the Oscars ceremony on 24 February. As noted, Lincoln will scoop Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor and probably Best Adapted Screenplay as well – although Silver Linings Playbook and Argo probably have a shot here too. Best Actress is a toughie, but  I reckon Jessica Chastain will probably take it, although I would love to see Emmanelle Riva triumph. De Niro has a good chance with Best Supporting Actor, and Best Supporting Actress will go to Anne Hathaway, absolutely beyond a doubt. Best Original Screenplay is also wide open. I wonder if Mark Boal will be recognised for Zero Dark Thirty.

Every list of Oscar nominations brings its own themes. In 2013, the Academy seems to be favouring history (not for the first time), politics – (a little less typical), children adrift on a raft (wtf?) and tragic death (natch).

Zero Dark Thirty, like Amour, can hardly be called entertainment. Kathryn Bigelow follows up her astoundingly good The Hurt Locker (probably my favourite Best Picture winner of the last ten years) with this reconstruction of the tracking, finding and executing in Pakistan of Osama bin Laden.

Obviously, telling this story is fraught with political pitfalls, most of which Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal nimbly avoid. It’s telling that the film has been both criticised for validating torture since it shows that the “detainee program” under George W Bush’s presidency provided vital leads which led eventually to bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound; and praised for demonstrating that after suspects at Guantanamo had been subjected to “enhanced interrogation” for years, real progress in tracking the al-Quaeda leader was only made when torture was abandoned in favour of more traditional “tradecraft”.

In fact, the movie studiously avoids any such comment, it simply portrays the events which undoubtedly took place. Suspects were waterboarded by Americans, the programme was shut down and other methods were later substituted, following both of which bin Laden was located and eliminated. It’s impossible to say, based on the evidence presented here what might have happened if there had been more torture or less.

In fact the whole approach of the movie is simple, factual, procedural. There are moments of excitement – various life-and-death moments during the course of the investigation, not to mention the final approach and assault on the compound, presented in all its chaotic brutality – but the main meat of the film is simply observing how this kind of international police work is done.

Bigelow and Boal’s task is to take this history lesson and turn it into a movie, without it becoming a melodrama, and by and large they succeed admirably. By taking a single character (whose real-life counterpart has not been publicly identified) in the luminous persona of Jessica Chastain and threading her like a needle through every aspect of the story, they manufacture both a complete through-line and just enough human interest to keep the story watchable. As the baton is passed from Chastain to DC bureaucrats and finally to the officers of SEAL Team Six, the screenplay does an excellent job of keeping her an active part of the narrative without compromising credibility too much. The movie is also neatly divided into titled chapters, a technique I’ve always enjoyed (see also The Fortune Cookie and Pulp Fiction to name two favourite but utterly dissimilar pictures).

If anything, as with The Hurt Locker, Bigelow occasionally lets the demands of traditional movie storytelling get in the way. A couple of times, what should be a shocking surprise is telegraphed too much by the need to show the calm-before-the-storm. But film grammar tells a savvy audience that if we just see calm for too long, with no other obvious purpose, then it can only mean that a storm is coming. By and large though, this is clean, simple, urgent and distinctive filmmaking, with a forensically clear gaze, but enough taste not to dwell on the viscera and brutality of its subject matter. Although I did note that the actual events of 9-11 are deemed too shocking to reproduce through visual effects – instead we are just given an audio montage at the beginning of the film – whereas the 7/7 bombings in London are happily recreated with lots of black powder and gasoline.

William Goldman has observed that “audiences love ‘how’” and this film does test that to the limit. If your tolerance for patient detective work is limited and your appetite for political manoeuvring small then you might find the middle third of the film slow or even boring, but I was very happy to sit and watch events unfold. With a large cast, many of whom contribute only a few lines here-and-there, Bigelow is smart to cast familiar faces to help us keep track. Mark Strong shows up, in full-on Alec Baldwin Glengarry Glen Ross rant mode, not to mention fleeting appearances by James Gandolfini , Stephen Dillane, Harold Perrineau, Kyle Chandler and even Chris Pratt from Parks and Recreation, surprisingly effective as one of the Navy SEALs. More jarring is the handsomely incongruous presence of John Barrowman for two lines, not to mention my friend Jeff Mash. Hi Jeff!

Many have compared this to Lincoln, which apparently is much the same only with more beards and fewer suicide bombers, but – not having seen Spielberg’s no-doubt Oscar champ – my main point of comparison is with Argo, that other tale of do-gooding CIA heroes abroad. It’s a fascinating counterpoint. On the one hand, Argo is a far simpler tale, in which the good-guys are engaged in a purely humanitarian mission. And Argo makes it easy to streamline the narrative, since it gives itself far more licence with the facts. Zero Dark Thirty on the other hand, wades through much murkier ethical waters – the good guys here are on a revenge execution mission and are, at least initially, unafraid to torture their way to their goal. But, even though it’s a simpler story, Argo is actually more ambitious – delicately balancing the demands of being a political thriller, historical account, Hollywood satire and boys-own adventure. By giving themselves permission to bend the truth, and invent characters and situations, director Ben Affleck and screenwriter Chris Terrio have created a piece of cinema which possibly feels less important, but which is more entertaining, more satisfying and – yes – actually has more to say.

Zero Dark Thirty is thoroughly deserving of its place in the Academy’s top nine of 2012, but it’s not the best film on the list, and it won’t win the main prize. Even if Lincoln were suddenly disqualified, it would still be too divisive, too political and just not fun enough. Jessica Chastain has a shot, but she’s got stiff competition from all four other nominees, as does Mark Boal, up for Best Original Screenplay. Awards success aside, if you want to know what counter-terrorism is actually like, then this is definitely worth seeing, if only as a corrective to the demented antics of TV’s 24.

My other movie of the week – not nominated for best picture – also reminded me of the adventures of Jack Bauer. It’s the Tom Cruise vehicle Jack Reacher, based on the lengthy series of novels by Lee Child.

It’s somewhat of a mystery to me why this film exists, and an even deeper mystery why Tom Cruise is in it. No doubt scores of relatively unheralded sequences of thrillers exist in airport bookshops across the world. Any one of them might be purchased by a film studio hoping to mint a new franchise at any time. Make no mistake, the Ian Fleming books were popular and sold briskly (especially after JFK bizarrely nominated From Russia With Love as one of his favourite novels) but the James Bond phenomenon started with Sean Connery in Dr No and it’s the Eon-produced films which ensure that the character is still current sixty years after the first book was published.

Especially in the context of other movie heroes, the Jack Reacher of the books isn’t especially striking. And here, with some of the rough edges sanded away and in the compact form of Tom Cruise, he seems even less remarkable. Since Dr No in 1962, the standard action adventure hero has been composed of the same basic ingredients – only the proportions vary. From Die Hard to Batman, to Raiders of the Lost Ark to Lethal Weapon, you can see the same approach. Your hero needs to be a kick-ass, a smart-ass, be possessed of preternatural gifts of perception, deduction and luck, and to be just tortured enough to provide the illusion of depth. Not only does Jack Reacher add nothing new to the pantheon of cinema action heroes, it adds nothing new to the pantheon of cinema action heroes played by Tom Cruise, who already has a perfectly serviceable tortured smart-mouthed magic kick-ass to build a franchise around in the shape of Ethan Hunt.

But Jack Reacher would have been an oddity even without Cruise. Writer/director Christopher McQuarrie’s laudable goal was to create a more intelligent kind of action-thriller, but it’s easy to see why it hasn’t set the box office alight (so far $180m worldwide – in 1996 the first Mission Impossible film did $450m). Far too slow and talky for the Transformers crowd, it’s also far too dumb for those who would seek out Argo or Lincoln. The plot, involving a sniper who picks off five random strangers and is then beaten into a coma but not before scrawling “get Jack Reacher”, is effective enough (although the real reason for the quintuple murder was obvious to me almost immediately) but there isn’t enough of it to justify the running time. And while Werner Herzog has a ball as the panto villain known as “The Zec” who chewed off his own fingers to avoid gangrene, Rosamund Pike has a fatal lack of chemistry with Cruise, indeed she can’t seem to summon up any spark at all.

This is well-mounted, with exciting car chases and gun battles and some suitably pithy one-liners, and perfectly serviceable bank holiday weekend TV watching stuff, but it’s amazing to me that this utterly ordinary piece of movie-making was either Cruise or McQuarrie’s dream project.

Of all the films on this year’s Best Picture list, the one I could have most happily have done without is clearly Michael Haneke’s Amour. I’ve not seen much of Haneke’s output, but what I have seen I have admired rather than enjoyed. Funny Games is ferociously original and extraordinarily confrontational, but it’s hard to believe that it could be anyone’s favourite as it’s such disturbing viewing. Caché seems designed to be deliberately frustrating. It contains some truly amazing moments, but by initially presenting a traditional mystery-plot and then providing very few coherent answers, it doesn’t play fair and it’s hard for me to know if it’s really about anything or not. I haven’t seen The Piano Teacher or The White Ribbon but after Amour, maybe I will.

The story is very simple and straightforward. Georges and Anne (apparently very many of Haneke’s protagonists share these names) are a dignified septuagenarian Parisian couple, living out their days in their spacious apartment and going to recitals given by their erstwhile pupils. Over the course of the film, Anne suffers a series of strokes which leave her progressively less able to look after herself, or to communicate clearly. Jean-Louis Trintignant plays Georges and Emmanuelle Riva plays Anne.

That’s about it. Two people who love each other, who have loved each other for five decades, perhaps longer, who are losing each other, because – well, because that’s what happens. At first glance, Haneke’s chilly, detached style seems an odd match for such emotionally draining material, but actually his clear-eyed objectivity is exactly what is required to prevent this simple story from slipping into melodrama or mawkish sentimentality. When Georges snaps at his daughter (Isabelle Huppert) who tries to tell him how concerned she is about her mother “What good is your concern to me?” I suspect that’s the director’s voice in the narrative.

Time and again, Haneke simply places the camera and mercilessly observes as something awful, or simple, or banal, or appalling unfolds. Actors enter or leave the frame, are shot from behind, or wander away from the camera. Take after take is simply allowed to happen – at a rough guess there are maybe 50 cuts in the two-hour running time. There’s no room to hide, nowhere to go to evade the truth of what is happening. When Haneke does cut to a close-up, it seems shockingly intimate.

Trintignant is wonderful as the stoically dignified Georges but Riva is astonishing in her depiction of Anne’s pathetic decline. Partly because of the restrained shooting style, but also because of Riva’s skill and dedication, it’s almost impossible to believe that this is a relatively fit and able-bodied performer and not documentary footage of a real stroke victim.

The final scenes offer something a little more figurative, something a little less literal, without unduly sacrificing coherence, which provides a welcome additional note – ironically for a story about music teachers there’s almost no music and none of it is non-diagetic, not even over the credits. A key visual theme is that of intrusion or invasion. The first shot is of a door being broken down. The state of various doors and windows in the apartment – open or shut, locked or unlocked – is of perpetual interest. A pigeon twice flies in through the window and proves difficult to evict. A neighbour trying to be helpful lingers on the threshold a little too long. Huppert’s English husband is unwelcome company. Even the business-as-usual breakfast scene which precedes Anne’s first attack shows Georges cracking open an egg. This debilitation invades their loves, tries to destroy their love for each other and nothing they do can possibly get rid of it.

Far more complete, for me, than Caché, this is still an awfully hard film to love. I’m very glad I saw it, but there’s zero chance of me buying it on DVD and no time I can think of when I’d ever see it again. Since it is also nominated for Best Foreign Language Film, I assume it is a shoo-in for that and has no chance at the main prize. Emmanuelle Riva is up for Best Actress though and that would be well-deserved, although she is up against stiff competition.

Seeking some respite in the world of fantasy, I also took in Life of Pi. The latest in a series of “unfilmable” novels which have somehow nevertheless found their way into cinemas recently (see also Cloud Atlas, Tristram Shandy, The Naked Lunch and so on). The problems with filming Yann Martel’s novel (which I haven’t alas read) are twofold. Firstly, much of the action takes place with a single human character adrift at sea in a small life boat. Secondly, the other major character is an adult Bengal tiger. So even if you solve the problem of a single-person narrative, you are left with the technical challenge of realising the actions of a large carnivorous mammal in close proximity with your leading actor, and in a watery environment. Even a handful of years ago, this would been utterly impossible to render convincingly. Spare us from the Jim Henson version of Life or Pi let alone the Ray Harryhausen incarnation.

What we get is so blindingly and stupefyingly convincing that I can’t even begin to speculate about how it was achieved. I’m sure a tremendous  amount of CGI has been deployed, as well as presumably at least some footage of a genuine animal, but the digital rendering of muscle and bone and whisker and fur is now so perfect that the join, if it even exists at all, is completely invisible. The version I saw was also in so-called 3D which added very little, if anything at all.

As far as I can tell, the storytelling is very faithful to the book. The adult Pi tells a visiting author his story, beginning in childhood with how he acquired his name, filling in details of his young life and the fateful decision by his father to move the whole family and their menagerie of animals from India to Canada. During a storm, all on board are killed, and only Pi escapes together with a zebra, and orang-utan, a hyena and the afore-mentioned tiger. When the tiger has consumed the others, Pi has to catch fish for it and train it to allow it to share the lifeboat with him.

Whereas Michael Haneke simply places the camera and lets the actors talk or make breakfast, director Ang Lee can’t even cut from one time period to another without some kind of visual flourish, but this richer cinematic language helps ground the fantastic imagery in a coherent artistic framework. He’s helped too by lovely performances, especially Suraj Sharma as the 16 year old Pi who carries almost the entire middle of the movie solo, and Irrfan Khan (familiar from Slumdog Millionaire) as the adult Pi, telling blocked novelist Rafe Spall his amazing story, with a genial twinkle.

If there’s an issue I have with the adaptation, it’s the use of this author character. He’s essential to assist in the delivery of the punchline, which provides both a welcome shot of vinegar in a world which threatens at times to become too sickly, too cloyingly fantastic, and which broadens the scope of the narrative to become a story about stories, rather than just a fairy tale. Just as the young Pi refuses to pick just one religion, just one way of interpreting the world, so the adult Pi won’t provide just one way of understanding what happened to him out on that lifeboat. But it’s clumsy that once the shipwreck occurs, Spall drops out of the movie almost entirely, only to pop up again at the end when we’d all but forgotten about him.

The penultimate sequence on the island is also a little hard to swallow. To be sure, much of what happens on the boat is unlikely, but none of it is actually impossible. What happens on the island seems much more like fantasy – maybe the shift is less noticeable in print, but in pictures it jarred for me.

Life of Pi is very, very charming and an amazing technical achievement. It’s an apparently simple story with something interesting to say about how we look at the world, but the two parts of the narrative are never truly braided together which makes the pseudo-reveal at the end feel almost like a footnote, or a scholarly commentary, rather than an intrinsic part of the narrative. It’s a fine piece of cinema, but it wouldn’t be my pick of film of the year. So far, that honour still goes to Argo, but I have Zero Dark Thirty, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Silver Linings Playbook and of course Lincoln still to go.

What is the point of Quentin Tarantino?

What is the point of a Quentin Tarantino film?

As a filmmaker he is in a truly enviable position. Able to write and direct more-or-less any movie he wishes, with scores of big-name actors of prodigious talent practically begging to be allowed to speak his dialogue, his films are relatively inexpensive to produce, virtually guaranteed to be profitable and he regularly wins awards for his cinematic creations. What is he doing with this power?

Much as I enjoyed the experience of sitting in the cinema watching Inglourious Basterds, it seemed to me to be a little hollow. It’s all tinsel and no substance. The void inside is filled partly by the raw power of some of the individual set-pieces, notably the agonising opening scene with Hans Landa and the farmer. It’s also filled partly by the elegant structure which avoids the frequent Tarantino trope of telling the story out of order, and replaces it instead with an approach which at first feels very disconnected, but gradually braids together its diverse strands. And the sheer demented chutzpah of the ending goes a long way as well. No other mainstream filmmaker would conceivably have adopted such an irreverent stance to such a dark period of human history.

His latest effort, Django Unchained continues this recent trend of revisionist historical revenge fantasies – probably too niche to be a true sub-genre. It also continues a longer trend of recycling material from earlier movies, but where Reservoir Dogs recycles elements of Hong Kong mafia and American seventies heist movies, or Kill Bill reproduces tropes from Shaw Brothers chopsocky films, Django Unchained is composed less of bits-and-pieces from spaghetti westerns (although it definitely does contain those elements) but, more troublingly, devices from Tarantino’s own previous movies.

So, here’s the historical revenge fantasy from Basterds, as noted. Here’s the singular character bent on revenge from Kill Bill from which is also derived the blood soaked finale where that revenge is first enacted on dozens of minor or non-speaking characters. Here’s the torture scene from Reservoir Dogs, only about a tenth as effective. From Pulp Fiction, here’s the pair of hired guns – one black and one white – who find time to discuss other less vital matters before executing their victims. And here’s Christoph Waltz, essentially playing an 1850s Hans Landa with a faceful of beard.

I also was constantly reminded of two other instances of prior art – neither of which I suspect were genuinely influences. One was the excellent FX tv show Justified which also recently featured an elegantly-dressed character with a Taxi Driver-style sleeve gun, and has two cast members in common with Django in the forms of Walton Goggins and MC Gainey. The other, less helpfully was Blazing Saddles, especially when Django rides in to town next to Schultz for the first time.

When not being distracted by these issues, there is plenty to enjoy here. If Waltz hasn’t many new acting tricks to show us, he certainly gets some choice lines to speak, and Django’s slow growth under his patient tutelage is accurately portrayed by a carefully restrained Jamie Foxx. There are laugh-out-loud funny moments, such as the exchange between Schultz and Django as they debate whether or not to shoot the last remaining Brittle Brother or the incompetent redneck hood-wearers who try and exact revenge on them for the same murder.

Following this fairly lengthy set-up, we arrive at last at Calvin Candie – possibly a career-best performance from DiCaprio who has enormous fun as this preposterous caricature of southern venality. But I dearly wish his plantation had not been called Candie Land which smacks to me of bad British sit-coms of the 1970s in which people called Teacup ran a café – that kind of thing.

Warning – here be spoilers. Watch the film before reading on.

When we arrive at Candie Land (ugh) we finally get the dose of Samuel L Jackson that the film has been missing. On first impressions, Stephen is a truly remarkable character, impressively bald, walking with a cane, laughing hugely at the master’s jokes and given enormous licence to joke himself, but mistreating the other black slaves with a confounding enthusiasm. This characterisation brilliantly turns out to be a Keyser Soze style front, behind which is a perfectly fit and shrewd man, Candie’s trusted confidante and advisor, who rapidly sees through Django and Schultz’s deception.

But after negotiations between Schultz and Candie fall apart, so does the movie. After an orgiastically blood soaked shoot-out (with a number of human shields in various states of health), Stephen produces Kerry Washington (wasted as Django’s wife in need of rescue) with a gun to her head, and forces Django to give himself up. It’s pretty hard to believe that these vile individuals who hold black life so meaningless don’t just gun him down for fun. It’s almost impossible to believe that, having taken him captive, they don’t just put a bullet through his wife’s head out of sheer spite. Keeping her alive has no purpose at all, except to ensure that if Django does evade their clutches, he will definitely have a reason to come back for them all.

Stephen’s character just collapses at this point too. Of the many things that made his earlier appearances so fascinating, the most interesting was his devotion to his master. Calvin Candie owns Stephen, and regularly has people like Stephen torn apart by wild dogs or made to gouge out each other’s eyes or beat out their brains with a hammer. And yet Stephen appears to love him – the animal howl which he lets out when Schultz puts a bullet through him is terribly affecting.

And yet, in subsequent scenes there is no grief, no sense of loss, no mourning. There is a certain amount of irritation, but in his scene with the captured Django, he seems more like a headmaster pondering how to reform an unruly child.

Anyone who has seen even a couple of his earlier films knows what Tarantino is capable of when bad men have sympathetic characters at their mercy. Officer Nash loses an ear before being casually blasted away by Nice Guy Eddie. Mr White cannot forgive Mr Orange his treachery and puts a bullet in his brain even though it means suicide-by-cop for him too. Maynard and Zed anally rape Marsellus Wallace and are promised torture by blow-torch for their efforts. On learning of her part in the plan to blow up the cinema, Hans Landa strangles Bridget von Hammersmark with his bare hands. Even Beatrix Kiddo removes Sofie’s limbs before sending her back to Bill.

Billy Crash certainly has Django at his mercy – trussed up and gagged, naked except for a Hannibal Lector style muzzle. He talks earnestly of his plan to castrate Django and approaches his scrotum with a blade when – in a particularly dreary movie cliché, Stephen interrupts at the crucial moment to announce that the white folks have a much better plan, which is essentially to let him escape, come back and kill them all. So Django gets to keep his balls, but I can’t help feeling Tarantino has lost his.

Drawing a veil over the director’s ill-judged cameo, everything that follow is by-the-numbers, almost perfunctory. Django returns, kills all the white people, kneecaps Stephen who continues to say and do absolutely nothing of interest, and then blows up the plantation before riding off into the sunset, with his bafflingly-preserved wife.

To be clear, I don’t harbour a deep and sadistic desire to see Jamie Foxx graphically parted from his testicles. It’s just that the writer has painted himself into a narrative corner and rather than stay true to the characters he has created, even if that means we don’t get the ending we want, he just abandons the rules of the world and has Django (as Jamie Foxx put it on Saturday Night Live) kill all the white people in the movie. I parted company from the story when Kerry Washington’s life was spared and didn’t believe a single thing that happened after Stephen sold Django to the mining company. It might even have been better if everything after that point had been a near-death fantasy as in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. A sudden cut back to Django bleeding out like a stuck pig would have been genuinely shocking.

And that’s another point. This is arguably the least complex narrative of any of Tarantino’s films, but it’s also presented in the most straight-forward way. There’s no cutting around in time, there are no multiple viewpoints, it’s entirely linear. It’s certainly possible to flatter a flimsy narrative by presenting it in an interesting way. With so much else recycled from earlier movies, it’s baffling to me why he didn’t also borrow the non-linear narrative. And it doesn’t even have Basterds hubristic irreverence to keep it afloat – this is much more respectful. Tarantino’s depiction of slavery is largely accurate and Foxx never becomes a one man Emancipation Proclamation backed up by dynamite and six-shooters.

This is a pretty harsh critique of a film which never bored me and which contains at least four outstanding performances, maybe more. But eight films in to the Tarantino canon (depending on how you count) it’s possible to view this prodigious talent as engaged in a fairly determined flight away from meaning, truth, insight or realism and into fantasy, fakery and trivia. Given how concerned with his own legacy Tarantino seems to be, I hope he notices this trend in time to arrest it.

My Oscar quest begins in earnest with a trip to see Les Miserables.

Director Tom Hooper has come in for some stick in some quarters, with some grumps regarding The King’s Speech as too safe, too stagey and too limited in its scope to be a reasonable Best Picture nominee. But compared for example to the horribly TV-like An Education (also nominated, remarkably), Tom Hooper’s direction does I think elevate the material. A tyro in the Fincher, or Boyle or Tarantino mode he may not be, nor a true original like the Coens, David Lynch or Soderbergh, but he’s rather more than a plodding journeyman.

And he certainly made life difficult for himself here, taking on a beloved stage property – a musical no less – and then getting his cast to sing the whole thing live instead of miming to a pre-recorded track. (Not the very first time this has been done – among other obscurities, I believe this technique was used on Billy The Kid And The Green Baize Vampire which is worth putting on if you can bear to see yet another musical-snooker-horror-western.)

So let’s have a little chat about musicals. Once de rigeur, the form has fallen into disuse, if not total disrepair roughly since Hello Dolly and many contemporary directors are concerned that modern audiences won’t accept the conceit of characters suddenly bursting into non-diegetic song – possibly correctly. Various techniques are available to help sugar the pill. You can shoot the whole piece in a very stylised way, so that the scenario never seems to be taking place in the real world (Sweeney Todd, Moulin Rouge). You can relegate the song-and-dance numbers to a fantasy world and shoot the rest normally (Chicago). Or you can just shoot the movie like any other and hope no-one notices that people keep singing their thoughts (Mama Mia).

None of these options is really open to Hooper, shooting a story on film which is told almost entirely in song. There are a few snatches of recitative but no real dialogue to speak of. He should be thankful there’s (almost) no dancing. So, having got through the production company logos in tasteful silence, we are confronted with the absurdity of dramatic singing right from the outset.

It helps that the opening shots are absolutely spectacular, entirely cinematic and matching the energy and drive of the music perfectly. It also helps that the first person to do any real singing is Hugh Jackman, whose Jean Valjean is at first weakened and feral, slathered in grime, then genial and sleek in fine clothes, later pinched and haunted and finally emptied out by everything he has endured. It’s a masterful performance and Hooper’s approach is not simply to capture it but to let it pour out of the screen at us. The first big number, Valjean’s Soliloquy, is played out almost entirely in a moving close-up shot as Jackman flings himself in and around the bishop’s house. The live singing technique is incredibly valuable here, allowing Jackman to act with his face, body, voice and soul. Hooper hasn’t entirely rid himself of the visual tic of framing people in the lower left or right corner of the screen, but it’s less pronounced here than in The King’s Speech I’m pleased to report. He’s determined to have the actors sing to us, the cinema audience, and the huge close-ups in which so many of the big numbers are photographed mean that many performance subtleties are possible which would simply be invisible in a large theatre.

But this approach also leaves nowhere to hide, which is great if you are as accomplished as Jackman – or for that matter Samantha Barks as Eponine or lustrous Anne Hathaway who seizes this opportunity and in about 15 minutes of screen time creates an absolutely indelible version of Fantine, motivating everything Valjean does from that point on.

With Russell Crowe, it’s another matter. True, his singing can’t match those I’ve just mentioned, but to be fair to him, he never goes full Pierce Brosnan either. But although on paper Crowe is excellent casting as the relentless Javert, the liveliness of the score leaves him looking stiff and stolid. He somehow never manages to mate his own brand of driven intensity to the kinetic power of the music and his rendering of the part is amazingly limited for such a well-regarded actor. There’s so little depth here that when he eventually commits suicide by plunging himself into a weir (spoiler, but to be fair it’s a 25 year old musical of a 150 year old book) it looks less like the psychic collapse of a man whose moral framework has been shaken to its foundations and more like one of those robots in bad sixties sci-fi films who get confused to death when somebody gives them an insoluble riddle.

There are other problems too. I’m apparently in a very small minority when it comes to the performances of Borat and Mrs Tim Burton. Mrs Tim Burton, I suppose is bearable, but Borat has been allowed to indulge himself to a baffling degree, with constant face-pulling, demented gesticulations and a wandering accent which virtually makes him into a one man production of ’Allo ’Allo. I never found him funny and his mere presence undermined the drama of several key scenes.

But it’s in the barricade sequences that the wheels really come off. On stage, this is often when the production becomes most epic, but in the movie version, the art director seems to have gone off for an early lunch, leaving the second unit to shoot most of the footage in somebody’s back bedroom. It really does look cheap and poky and artificial, clearly a set, erected on a modest sound-stage and worlds away from the epic scope of the opening shots and the earlier location work.

By the end, of course, as Hugh Jackman’s life finally ebbs away, and Amanda Seyfried (fine) and Eddie Redmayne (fine) try and comfort him, I start to get a lump in my throat. The power of the story and the impact of the music are undeniable – save the new song “Suddenly” which is entirely inessential.

And that’s really the achievement here. This was never a project for a firebrand director to put his or her personal stamp on. Tom Hooper has been lucky enough to be given a beloved property which after 25 years of careful development is pretty much flawless. His challenge was to demonstrate that he had the skill, the care – above all the taste – not to fuck it up. By and large he succeeded. Crowe is limited, but no doubt his involvement helped get the film made. The revolutionaries look like escapees from a minor British public school, but making them a bit wet and spindly also makes their merciless execution in a hail of musket-fire all the more affecting. Borat and Mrs Tim Burton are apparently amusing to some. But Anne Hathaway’s rendition of I Dreamed A Dream, Hugh Jackman’s version of Who Am I and Samantha Barks singing On My Own are reason enough to make this film and reason enough to see it.

If you like that sort of thing.