Tom Salinsky

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.

It’s Oscar time once more. Seth MacFarlane has revealed the shortlist and once again it is my mission to watch all the Best Picture nominees – which in a way is disappointing as there are quite a few films coming out in the next few weeks which I am keen to see and which the Academy has not so blessed.

One of these was The Master which I watched over the weekend, which certainly has not gone unnoticed by AMPAS but which failed to get a Best Picture nomination. It is up for three acting awards however, and that’s pretty fair as this is an actors’ movie in every sense.

The story, such as it is, concerns Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), an ex-Navy man finding it increasingly hard to adjust to civilian life and who falls under the influence of charismatic cult leader Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Both are nominated for acting awards and both fully deserve it – Phoenix seemingly in constant discomfort, his body bent and buckled under the weight of his frustration and confusion, dealing with his angst by imbibing paint-thinner or by finding things to hit. Hoffman is outstanding, grinning fatly behind a blond walrus moustache and genially attempting to crack open the psyches of his devout group of followers, through a technique which is part Freudian fantasising and part Meisner (the acting technique famed for its use of repetition).

Early on, the narrative is lean and sleek, cutting years at a time to propel Freddie into Dodd’s clutches, and throughout the camerawork is poised and careful, capturing the performances whole rather than creating them or amplifying them via cutting or framing. Amy Adams (also nominated) does well with very thin material and it’s nice to see Laura Dern, although she is criminally underused.

In the middle section, the details of Dodd’s environment and Freddie’s position within it are sufficient to sustain the interest, bar an ill-judged scene in which A Sceptical Onlooker confronts Dodd with The Voice Of Reason and gets a tomato thrown at him by Quell for his troubles. This scene didn’t work for me, not because it was didactic (although it was) but because it stopped me seeing Dodd through Quell’s eyes, and made his continuing support of Dodd more pitiable than relatable.

Like Dodd’s own bizarre crusade, the film itself fatally runs out of steam in the final third. The story design demands that Quell and Dodd continue to come into conflict, but Quell can’t be allowed to heal since that would imply that the cult healed him, which clearly would be unacceptable to writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson (and probably me too). But if Quell becomes his own man and abandons Dodd then that also seems to give the cult too much credit, and so the two men are shackled together – Dodd obsessing over Quell on the flimsiest of pretexts – until suddenly they aren’t any more because it’s time for the film to end.

A very negative reading of the film is possible. From what we see of Dodd’s techniques, it seems that by confronting the subject with endless pointless tasks, often the same task over and over again, eventually the subject, rather than the cult, is forced to provide an epiphany to fill the void – and the same could be said of this story: if we watch these two people locked together in enough demented activities, eventually we will be forced to imbue the proceedings with meaning. I’m not quite ready to level that charge, but Anderson asks a lot of his audience when his story has so little in the way of a climax.

Meanwhile back to the Oscars. Once again, we have nine nominees (between five and ten is now the rule) of which I have seen only one – Argo. Here’s a quick note of what to look out for.

• Amour – a film that definitely wasn’t on my list. Two old people clinging to their love for each other when one of them suffers a stroke. Clearly, the better-done this is, the less enjoyable it will be to watch. A total lose-lose situation.
• Argo – as noted elsewhere, an extremely able piece of true-life storytelling, which may now find itself outgunned.
• Beasts of the Southern Wild – very much the dark horse, although, as I understand it, one of two stuck-on-a-raft-with-wildlife movies out this year.
• Django Unchained – who could resist? Tarantino’s assault on the Academy continues, although no nod for him as best director.
• Les Miserables – I’m a sucker for a good musical, so of course this was on my list anyway, but Tom Hooper fails to capitalise on his success with The King’s Speech and like Tarantino is not nominated in the directing category.
• Life of Pi – one of a recent spate of “unfilmable” novels which have recently made it to the screen. If they make a movie of Finnegan’s Wake I’ll be impressed and if it’s nominated for Best Picture, I’ll eat my copy.
• Lincoln – this is it, the 800lb gorilla at this year’s awards. Expect it to carry off a fistful, including best picture.
• Silver Linings Playbook – I watched the trailer for this before I knew anything else about it and for the first two-thirds I thought “ho-hum, standard issue quirky rom-com”. Then they started dancing and I decided this was a movie which had no idea what it wanted to be. To see it nominated for eight Oscars, tying with Les Miserables and behind only Life of Pi and Lincoln is utterly confounding. Clearly I’ve missed something.
• Zero Dark Thirty – I’ve got a lot of time for The Hurt Locker. This movie could be half as good as that and still better than most of the films on this list (and all the films on last year’s list).

So, already a much more promising batch than 2012 offered, but I’ve got my work cut out to see them all, while hopefully also cramming in less-essential fare such as The Hobbit, Flight, Jack Reacher and Seven Psychopaths. If you’re the betting type, put your money on Lincoln to stroll off with Best Picture and probably win the night. Daniel Day Lewis, Steven Spielberg, Sally Field, Tony Kushner and John Williams all have excellent chances and it may very well pick up awards for things like cinematography, editing, costume and sound as well. Only Tommy Lee Jones, up for best supporting actor has got real worries, up against Alan Arkin, Robert de Niro, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Christoph Waltz. That’s a tough category to call this year.

Here’s quick run-down of some recent productions I’ve seen. Be warned, as these reviews are quite late in the day, I’ve been generous in my provision of spoilers…

Five Go To Rehab

To complete my reviews of Comic Strip films, I sat down to watch Five Go To Rehab with some trepidation. The first Comic Strip film, Five Go Mad In Dorset, is as good as anything the team is capable of but the sequel, Five Go Mad On Mescalin, produced just a year later, managed to tarnish the memory of the original, rather than add anything significant to the corpus. With the sole exception of Four Men In A Car, everything from Red Rose of Courage has ranged from disappointing (The Hunt for Tony Blair) to ghastly (Wild Turkey) but the idea of the Famous Five reunited in late-middle-age is a very good one, so I was prepared to enjoy this production for satellite station Gold.

Performances, in general, were great. All four leads look a little chunkier, a little puffier than before, but French and Saunders are as great as ever, Richardson essays a fine line in pop-eyed dementia and Edmondson, given the lion’s share of the plot to shoulder, does a truly excellent job (although his character has been subject to even further revisions since Mescalin when he already bore little resemblance to the person in Dorset).

The execution, as ever, was the problem. The script seems very uncertain about where the comedy lies, alternately presenting fake adventures with real ones, and lazily making not one but two of the main characters secret alcoholics, holed up at the same bizarre rest home. While it’s a pleasure to see Robbie Coltrane reprise his role, mere nostalgia isn’t enough to sustain the running time when the plot is as ropey as this. The appearance of Daniel Peacock at the end re-energises the story considerably and the betrayal of his own children is a great ending, but leaving the Rik Mayall / Felix Dexter storyline dangling is lazy and pointless. Another minor misfire, although not without its incidental pleasures.

Looper

One of the most eagerly-anticipated films of recent years, with a delicious high-concept premise fleshed out by two wonderful stars. Bruce Willis is Joseph Gordon-Levitt from the future and they’re trying to kill each other. Who wouldn’t want to watch that? Sadly, the end result is a somewhat of a mixed bag. I don’t object to Rian Johnson’s cheerfully inconsistent view of time-travel, especially when it produces scenes as heart-stoppingly gruesome and astonishing as Frank Brennan’s horrible demise. Time travel never makes sense anyway, so complaining that it doesn’t make sense in any specific way is slightly pointless, even if a movie is flagrantly breaking its own rules. What’s less forgiveable is the way the movie abandons its delicious premise about half-way through for another movie entirely, one which is rather less interesting and lumbers the plot with double mumbo-jumbo, albeit blessed with two lovely performances from Emily Blunt and six-year-old Pierce Gagnon, who is nothing short of miraculous.

What’s even harder to forgive is the gigantic plot-hole which sits at the heart of this film and which seems to have been rather unremarked upon. As Gordon-Levitt’s character explains via voice-over “Time travel has not yet been invented. But thirty years from now, it will have been. It will be instantly outlawed, used only in secret by the largest criminal organizations. It’s nearly impossible to dispose of a body in the future. I’m told. Tagging techniques, whatnot. So when these future criminal organizations in the future need someone gone, they use specialized assassins in our present, called loopers.” Okay fine, so characters like our hero Joe get instructions to lie in wait for a victim to be zapped back in time, bound and gagged with payment in silver strapped to them, and when they appear, blast them with a shotgun, take the body to a furnace and stash the silver for themselves.

When one of these assassins (“Loopers”) is retired, the future mob sends the old version of them back in time (“closing the loop”). They get extra payment in gold and can retire from this brutal life. That’s one niggle right there – why should not the killing of one’s future self be the first assassination? Why does it have to be the last? But anyway, in one of the film’s most elegant narrative sequences, we see Young Joe fail to execute Old Joe who appears unbound and so escapes. We then apparently flash back to the same scene again, this time watching Young Joe blast Old Joe away when he appears, correctly trussed-up. In a long montage sequence we watch Young Joe celebrate his retirement, get bored, grow old, fall in love, and become Old Joe who eventually has a run-in with the mob who come for him, guns blazing, slaying his wife who is caught in the crossfire. Joe is taken to the warehouse where the time-travel machine is housed, and it becomes his only means of escape and thus, when he arrives in front of Young Joe, he is untied and ready to outwit his younger self. The whole of Old Joe’s motivation from this point on is to prevent his future – the future in which his beloved wife is killed by the mob – from occurring.

But it seems almost inevitable that if you stick clever criminals in a time-machine and send them back twenty-five years that they will find a way of fucking-up whatever you have planned for them. If it is “impossible to dispose of a body” as we are told, then a far better plan would be to shoot unwanted persons through the head and then send the dead body back in time for disposal. Bursting in to Old Joe’s place, firing weapons with lethal force, demonstrates that actually the mob is perfectly happy to kill people in the future. They just prefer to send living bodies back in time, because – well because it makes for a better movie apparently.

Anyway, there’s a lot to enjoy here, but movies that want to play with science fiction concepts like this need to be a bit more careful to deal with these kinds of inconsistencies. I’m not saying it’s Prometheus bad – just a bit sloppy.

Argo

In the hope of getting a jump on my Best Picture Nominees programme for 2013, I went to see Argo, the third film directed by Ben Affleck. Having greatly admired Gone Baby Gone and thoroughly enjoyed The Town, it was with very high hopes that I went to see this, and despite paying a premium to sit virtually around the corner from the television-sized screen, in the very back row of the smallest auditorium at my local Odeon (ugh!), Argo made me smile a lot. Just like The King’s Speech, it’s perfect Oscar fodder. Not a great film, perhaps, but a very, very good one, expertly balancing humour, suspense and character notes; blending a real-life story with a bit of Hollywood sparkle; and tackling big themes without confronting any deeply-held beliefs.

To its credit, the screenplay fearlessly plays fast-and-loose with the truth when it makes for a better film. The two major scenes on which the structure of the movie rests – one of the hostages declaring that the plan will never work, and that same hostage playing his role to the hilt when they are detained at the airport – are complete fiction. So are the most exciting and suspenseful scenes – the “location scout” in the bazaar, the last-minute scramble for tickets and the final runway chase. And for that matter so is the most entertaining character – Alan Arkin’s hard-bitten Hollywood producer.

But none of this matters when the attention to detail is so great and the forward momentum of the plot is maintained so effortlessly. Chris Terrio’s screenplay is brilliantly written and Affleck’s evocation of the period is breathtaking. And Argo probably has the best supporting cast of the year, with John Goodman, Bryan Cranston, Richard Kind, Philip Baker Hall, Bob Gunton, Titus Welliver and any number of other familiar faces joining Affleck in his astonishingly accurate recreation of 1979-80. Marvellous entertainment and an amazing true (or at least true-ish) story of courage and ingenuity, it hardly puts a foot wrong, provided you aren’t expecting a super-accurate history lesson.

Skyfall

This week comes news that Skyfall is the most successful film ever at the UK box office, scooping up in ten weeks what it took second-place contender Avatar eleven months to haul in, and without Avatar’s stereoscopic tax (such movies are not 3D). And a well-deserved achievement it is too. Director Sam Mendes and screenwriters Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and John Logan have accomplished a minor miracle here. Unceremoniously junking Quantum of Solace’s tediously unresolved storyline, the new movie brazenly reinvents Bond, whom we last saw as a febrile and undisciplined rookie, now as weather-beaten and rueful veteran. I adore Kim Newman’s theory which is that between Quantum and this film, all the other 007 adventures have befallen the Daniel Craig Bond. So, having left Dominic Greene to die in the desert, this man has faced Dr No in Jamaica, battled Oddjob in Fort Knox, married and lost Tracey Vincenzo, blown up Hugo Drax’s secret space station, sledded on Kara Milovy’s cello case, been betrayed by Alec Trevelyan and been held prisoner by General Moon in North Korea (inter-alia).

In the amazing pre-credits sequence – just possibly the best-ever – Bond pursues his quarry on foot, by car, on a motorcycle, and eventually on a train, before a badly-aimed bullet from Naomi Harris’s younger agent’s gun sends him plummeting into one of the best title sequences the series has ever produced. From a twenty-first century perspective, many of Maurice Binder’s once-innovative sequences look repetitive and clumsy, with awkward post-production camera moves reducing the gyrating figures to cardboard cut-outs. Daniel Kleinman’s revolutionary GoldenEye titles added a third dimension thanks to modern CGI technology, and gave us a virtual camera able to slide smoothly past surreal vistas with genuine depth. The three subsequent sequences failed to live up to the splendour of his first, but the flat graphic style of the Casino Royale sequence was exactly what was required – utterly different from any previous incarnation, and yet recognisably a continuation of what had gone before. That’s what long-running series like the Bonds need to be, and that’s Skyfall all over – the titles included. Returning to the fold having missed Quantum, here Kleinman’s CGI camera pushes forward, forward, forward, through a landscape with more depth than ever before. It’s a remarkable piece of work.

Returning to the fold, Bond is tested and found wanting, but M nevertheless sends him out on the trail of Raoul Silva who has blown up MI6. Together with the immensely striking Bérénice Marlohe, he tracks Silva down with apparent ease, but must sacrifice his latest girlfriend to do so. The execution of the apparently leading Bond girl within about 20 minutes is another shocking development, another radical departure from established practice, although I have to criticise Sam Mendes or Barbara Broccoli or the BBFC or someone for squeamishness here. Forced into playing a murderous game of William Tell with a bound Sevrine and a shot-glass, Bond shoots and misses, following which Silva wins the game by simply shooting her through the head – but the photographing of this shocking development is so coy that it’s easy to mistake this kill-shot for another poor aim by the marksman and a flinch from the target. A shame, as this moment should have been heart-in-the-mouth stuff. It’s not unusual for James Bond films to begin with a “sacrificial lamb” Bond girl (Jill Masterson, Aki, Rosie Carver, Andrea Anders, Corinne Dufour, Paris Carver, Solange, Strawberry Fields, etc etc) but it’s unprecedented for the leading Bond girl to be executed half-way through the movie, never to be replaced.

No more so than in his interrogation scene, Javier Bardem has tremendous fun with this camply disturbing character, and the revolting jaw prosthesis which he wears. His Lawrence of Arabia style entrance, walking slowly towards camera in a single shot, is also worthy of note – possibly Mendes’ reposte to the frantic cutting of Quantum which helped make that film such an unsatisfactory experience. From here, Silva’s plan becomes increasingly unlikely, but criticising the movie for this I rather think this misses the point. The best Bond films, with the possible exception of From Russia With Love, aren’t spy thrillers at all, they are colossal absurd fantasy adventures. The trick is in balancing the insane on-screen action with enough ballast so it doesn’t just become laughable. Daniel Craig adjusting his cuffs as he lands on the back of that train is perfect. Blofeld evading capture by dragging up (Diamonds Are Forever) is harder to take seriously, and Bond pretending to be Tarzan (Octopussy) is so stupid as to be insulting. Silva trying to kill Bond by chucking an entire tube train at him is hard to take, sure, but the execution is so faultless and the idea so extraordinary, I’m perfectly happy to watch it in delighted slack-jawed amazement – it seems rather dull trying to wonder just what it would take to plan, time and pull-off such an outré method of execution. You might as well complain that the idea of a “licence to kill” isn’t entirely credible.

From here, the film boldly veers off into completely uncharted territory. There’s no particular reason why not, but Bond has never really presented a siege situation before. In film after film, Bond has stormed the villain’s lair at the end, whether solo (GoldenEye, Quantum of Solace) with modest back-up (For Your Eyes Only, Tomorrow Never Dies) or at the head of massive army (You Only Live Twice, The Spy Who Loved Me, Moonraker) but never before has he holed-up in a safe house, set traps and waited for the villain to come to him. This splendidly suspenseful sequence both delivers the necessary excitement and catharsis and exemplifies the film’s theme – sometimes the old ways are the best. But the cost is ghastly – Judi Dench’s redoubtable M has paid the ultimate price.

It’s not until the credits begin rolling that I really took on board what had been wrought in the closing moments of Skyfall. This most revisionist of Bonds, as much a reboot as Casino Royale in its own way, has been quietly rebuilding the old Bond before our very eyes. Not just the little nods to previous movies (Bond’s escape on the backs of some reptiles, Q’s caustic reference to exploding pens, Bond telling Eve to stop touching her ear, probably others), but the mythos of Connery, Moore and Dalton movies is being reassmbled. As the screen fades to black, we are back to a patrician and avuncular M with complete if sometimes testy faith in agent 007, whose office hides behind a leather-panelled door, guarded by a spunky Moneypenny and whose payroll includes an enthusiastic gadget man, designated Q – a line-up we haven’t seen since 1989. Welcome home 007. I can hardly wait for your next mission.

On to the final stretch now, with three movies none of which I would have chosen to see if it hadn’t been for this project. That’s part of the point of course. I doubt I would have gone to see Precious two years ago if I hadn’t attempted this experiment then, but I was very, very glad that I did – I thought it was quite magnificent.

I can’t be quite so positive about The Help but I can say that it was nowhere near as bad as I had feared. I am quick to criticise movies for being too long and/or too unfocused and The Help is both of these things, but they weirdly help it to overcome a much more profound and serious problem which is that its central storyline is appallingly trite, sententious, self-important and dated. I have no doubt that the indignities heaped upon black maids in the American South were ghastly, but this is old ground and this story – of a white girl (headstrong, doesn’t fit in, speaks her own mind – standard-issue in other words) who documents the stories of these maids for a book which becomes a best-seller – can’t add much to the corpus.

Not only does it have little to add, the whole approach brings a succession of problems, from the sometimes “Uncle Tom” portrayals of the black characters, to their need to be rescued by a white woman, to the fact that while I’m sure the details are well-researched, the story of the book and its publication is not true. This all means that one particularly outré choice is rendered rather hard to, um, swallow.

In the central role is Emma Stone, who is perfectly capable of playing this kind of part, for whom the word “spunky” could have been devised, but she never seems credibly of the era, in the writing or the playing. She never manages the artful trick pulled off by, say, Peggy in Mad Men – aware of the limitations that this society places upon her, and yet still credibly a part of that society and not an alien visitor or time-traveller. This is a shame, especially as the rest of the movie captures the period and place extremely well, and here is where the length and lack of focus helps. By giving the story breathing space and by creating an ensemble feel, writer-director Tate Taylor allows us to spend time away from the central and problematic central narrative and explore some smaller and more intimate stories, and hang out with a vibrant supporting cast.

These include a lovely turn from Allison Janney as Stone’s mother, hilariously useless white trash Jessica Chastain and some deliciously vile work from Bryce Dallas Howard as the apotheosis of casual racism. And this is without mentioning the excellent performances of Octavia Spencer and Viola Davis as the two maids who are the first to jump on board. Spencer is sometimes given some unfortunately stereotypical dialogue, but her manner is so engaging I couldn’t help but smile at everything she did. Viola Davis doesn’t get as much screentime as I might have liked, but towards the end she is given the task of landing the film’s message and grounding it in some kind of human emotion which she manages with real feeling and dignity.

So, not quite the horrendous movie-of-the-week I feared, but still a TV movie with aspirations rather than a real piece of modern cinema. The same cannot exactly be said of The Tree of Life, the fifth film (in over forty years) from famous recluse and madman Terrence Malick. This film provoked both boos and applause at Cannes where it eventually walked off with the Palm D’Or and initially, it did capture me in its spell. Opening with an American family (father Brad Pitt, mother Jessica Chastain again) receiving the news that one of their sons has been killed, we then flash forward to the present day, where the boy’s brother is now a grown up architect played by Sean Penn. From where we go back in time to the creation of the universe (yes, you read that correctly) and then track the family’s early life through the eyes of the Penn character.

Presumably, the need to attach the relatively trivial story to an event as big as the creation of life is an attempt to give it greater depth, profundity and impact, but actually it has the opposite effect. Just as we grieve more for Luke Skywalker’s severed hand than we care about or even notice the dozens of anonymous stormtroopers gunned down by the good guys, it’s by placing us right at the heart of deeply felt events that film-makers can engage our emotions – not by continually insisting on showing us the bigger picture.

Equally misjudged I felt was the camerawork. Malick shoots the entire movie in either extreme close-ups or long wide shots (fitting for a movie which can’t decide on an appropriate scale from suburban to universal) but always with a steadicam lurching drunkenly around the actors. During the opening parts of the movie, this felt appropriate as a visual dramatization of this disorienting effects of grief and loss, but as the movie settled down into its long middle sequence, and as the by and large perfectly ordinary episodes of childhood played out, the looming, reeling camera became distracting and the effectiveness was lost.

It’s easy to give a patina of profundity to a narrative that hasn’t earned it by shooting it elliptically, by chopping up the time-frame or by juxtaposing other material, but is that all that The Tree of Life is doing? I’m not entirely sure. There’s clearly something important going on here for Malick – something about a childhood struggle between rigidity and clarity on one side (represented by Pitt’s manly father) and grace and flexibility on the other (represented by Chastain) – but something has got lost in the translation. I don’t mind the visual poetry of the opening sequence, nor indeed the similarly abstract closing, but if you abandon any sense of narrative and just show an audience a montage of images then to me the appropriate comparison isn’t with written poetry, it’s with a pop music video.

For me, though, it’s the banality of the middle section which kills it. The events of Jack’s life are just not interesting or extraordinary enough to bear the weight of pomposity which get heaped upon them by the modern-day bookends. And while Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain are both fine, second-billed Sean Penn gets almost nothing to do (which may explain his negative attitude towards the film).

Overall though, in a year in which so many Best Picture nominees seem so entirely ordinary, I’m glad that the Academy recognised The Tree of Life. It has plenty of fans, even if I’m not one, and it’s certainly a bracingly original, strongly authored piece of work that deserves to have others decide for themselves whether there’s anything to it or not. That I found little may ultimately be my loss.

Finally then, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close which has got pretty rotten reviews for a Best Picture nominee. Based on the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer and directed by Stephen Daldry, this is the first movie I can remember which uses the events of 11 September 2001 not as the main focus of the narrative (United 93, World Trade Centre) but as a mere MacGuffin – a device to get the plot moving and nothing more. That plot is the story of a young boy played with suitable intensity by Thomas Horn – cast after his prize-winning performance on a TV quiz show! – who finds a key presumably belonging to his father who was killed in the attacks. With his probably-Asberger’s brain pulsating furiously, young Oskar Schell sets off in search of the key’s owner in a quest to reconnect with his father.

There is some good stuff here, but there are some lumpen choices which consistently drag the movie back down. One is the largely-redundant voice-over which continually points out what it might have been more satisfying for us to discover on our own. Then there’s the polished and syrupy direction which makes everything look like an advert, even (or especially) the recreated shots of the stricken towers. Overall, there’s a strong sense that the piece has been constructed, rather than evolved. Now, of course, all screenplays are constructed, but the best artfully conceal the nuts-and-bolts of their construction (just as the worst of those which don’t collapse entirely reveal all of the scaffolding). With Oskar’s father sending him off on treasure hunts, the selection of a key with no lock as the clue which Oskar must pursue, the juxtaposition of Oskar’s secret phone messages from his father with his friendship with Max von Sydow’s mute, the whole thing feels deliberately assembled and this makes it very easy to disengage.

It’s not even as if this makes a feature of its artful construction, like Amélie, say or Life is Beautiful. On the contrary, von Sydow’s character is dropped into the story very late in the day to prop up a narrative which is running out of steam, and then summarily removed having altered nothing. It’s a lovely performance, but a horribly clumsy bit of storytelling.

And then, suddenly, just when I was ready to give up on the whole thing, there’s a moment between Oskar and his mother, played with generous restraint by Sandra Bullock, which seems real and true and heartfelt. Some of the less credible details from earlier in the film are rendered much more believable, the script does manage to achieve a certain level of structural sureness and – yes! – that damned voice-over shuts up and for a whole ten minutes it’s a wonderful film.

Before the credits roll though, it’s slipped back into all its bad habits, with a closing sequence which is just as trite, unconvincing, mawkish and lumpen as before. Obviously designed as an Academy Award honey-pot (even down to the name of its central character subliminally suggesting gold statuettes), in the event, it won neither of the awards for which it was nominated.

Finally, let me assess my own performance. Out of eight predictions, I got six right which isn’t too bad for me. My out-there pick of Melissa McCarthy for Best Supporting Actress was proven wrong when the heavy favourite Octavia Spencer was named. And I was sure that The Artist would cement its success by winning Best Original Screenplay, but they actually gave it to Woody Allen. I was also pleased to see the excellent Rango scoop up the Best Animated Feature gong and delighted for Bret McKenzie who won Best Original Song.

Join me again next year – the standard surely can’t be any worse than it was this time!

My final reviews will be up shortly, but in the meantime, here are some quick predictions.

Overall, it will be The Artist‘s night. No picture will win more awards, it will probably bag around 5-6 of the ten it has been nominated for. Hugo will be largely overlooked, except maybe for some technical awards.

Best Picture will go to The Artist but should probably go to The Descendants (or RON)

Best Director will go to Michel Hazanavicius, probably deservedly.

Best Actor will go to Jean Dujardin, but I would love Gary Oldman to get it for his George Smiley instead.

Best Actress will go to Meryl Streep – no bet will be safer this year. There’s a reason why Bérénice Bejo was put up for Best Supporting Actress instead!

Best Original Screenplay will go to The Artist, but I have also heard good things about Margin Call.

Best Adapted Screenplay is a very tough category, but I think The Descendants must surely get it.

Best Supporting Actor will likely go to Christopher Plummer, in a lifetime achievement sort of a way.

Best Supporting Actress should go to Melissa McCarthy by rights, and with Jessica Chastain and Octavia Spencer splitting The Help‘s votes, it just might.

Check back here tomorrow to see if I’m right. I don’t have access to Sky currently so I can’t watch them live, but I’ll try and see some highlights early next week. As noted, my final reviews of The Help, The Tree of Life and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close will be up here very shortly.