Tom Salinsky

Steven Spielberg’s War Horse continues the 2012 Oscars trend of handsomely made and utterly unthreatening movies. Adapted from, let us not forget, a children’s book and also owing a huge (and credited) debt to the National Theatre’s stage version, this is bracing, stirring, wryly funny with a great feeling for time and place and character. It’s also an almost suffocatingly cosy chocolate box of a movie which never even begins to transcend its kid-friendly origins.

Lack of time and planning this year means I haven’t done my homework as well as I could have. I haven’t read Michael Morpurgo’s novel in which the story is told from the horse’s point of view. Nor have I seen the acclaimed theatre production. So I am forced to judge Spielberg’s movie on its own terms, but I can’t help feeling that an extra element, such as a first-horse perspective or an astonishing feat of puppetry would be required to makes this naïve fable into something richer and more arresting.

Given that the narrative is going to be rendered in such a straightforward way, Spielberg is an ideal match for the material. His camera swoops and darts, virtually canters, around the environments and with no need for funny glasses he creates tremendous depth and energy in every frame. Possibly no director working today understands light, space and movement better than he does and together with production design Rick Carter and director of photography Janusz Kaminski render the rolling hills of Devon, the French woodlands and the grime of the trenches with an incredible lush richness. Parts of it look like they were shot in 1940s Technicolor, but unfortunately this same simplistic approach carries through to the rest of the movie.

It’s not just that the characters are so broadly drawn, or that in deference to his young audience, Spielberg tastefully cuts away from or otherwise elides the deaths of speaking characters. Bluntly, in story terms, any adult watching this movie is required to accept that Joey – the central equine character – is a horse who is so unimaginably appealing that adults and teenagers from almost any background fall in love with him as soon as they see him, and in the grip of this romantic delusion, they are then compelled to spend vast sums upon him, adopt him, even risk their own lives to protect him, and finally to put themselves in the line of fire to be reunited with him. The fragile spell which this movie casts could be shattered at any moment if anyone were just to say “I’m terribly sorry, this is just a horse like any other, isn’t it? I do beg your pardon, I must have lost my mind for a moment.”

This danger is most apparent during the incredible scene where Joey is rescued from No Man’s Land. Here Lee Hall and Richard Curtis’s script, as well as some nicely underplayed performances, just about prevent the on-screen action from tipping into total absurdity. As it is, credibility is merely strained and not completely shattered.

By the time Joey rides joyfully home, silhouetted like Lassie against a painterly sunset, I assume the idea is that there isn’t a dry eye in the house, and if I was a horse-obsessed eleven year old girl then I might have succumbed. But even John Williams’ swooping strings couldn’t wring a single tear from my stubborn eyes.

This I followed with Moneyball, the true story of how a baseball team struggling for cash harnessed the power of statistics to identify overlooked and undervalued players and change the nature of the game. This is a fascinating story, with a sharp script from old hand Steven Zaillian, burnished up by Aaron Sorkin – who fits this material like a catchers’ mitt – and it’s certainly a film for grown-ups as opposed to War Horse.

Watching the story unfold, I was never bored, but I was struck by the fact that it’s very much a process story – a sports procedural if such a thing were to exist. I’m inclined to give the larger share of the credit to Sorkin for making the early scenes between Brad Pitt’s Billy Beane and his army of advisors, and then with Jonah Hill’s pudgy economics whizzkid so engaging. The dialogue crackles without ever seeming overly smart. But there’s a remote, chilly feel which the brief divergences to Billy’s family life and history in the game of baseball does little to dispel. In fact, at times, these glimpses of the human life behind the quasi-political struggle feel like distractions.

What’s curious is that there’s no attempt to bring the emotional story and the procedural aspects together in any meaningful way, beyond a few fist-pumps and exhortations. When Billy’s carefully constructed team on a shoe-string budget is not deployed on the field the way he intended, he has to outmanoeuvre the team manager Art Howe, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman. But although we understand how Billy forced Art’s hand, there’s never any emotional pay-off – not even when Art starts getting the credit for Billy’s savvy hiring. The character just fades away as unceremoniously as he appeared. Nor does Jonah Hill’s character seem to grow or respond to his new success in any way. And it’s part of Billy’s story that he remains resolutely fixed on his goal even as the movie closes – in fact, the moment which moved me the most is a caption which appears at the end of the film, just before the credits roll, which says a lot about the approach taken.

But, before I’m tempted to say outright, that this would have been better as a talking-heads documentary, which would have allowed even more analysis of the statistical methods used (“woo!”) I must pause and acknowledge the contribution that Brad Pitt makes. No longer just a pretty boy actor, Pitt is now a genuine movie star in every sense of the word, and he illuminates the whole of Moneyball, making the whole thing seem worthwhile.

So, that’s six down and three to go, and at the moment I feel like I would happily rewatch The King’s Speech before I saw any of them again and that The Hurt Locker absolutely pisses on all six of them. But my movie week wasn’t entirely disappointing. I won’t say too much about The Muppets except that it is wonderful. Knowing enough for the adults, sweet enough for the kids, funny enough for the teens, and if Fozzie Bear sometimes doesn’t sound quite right, then that’s a small price to pay for having Kermit and Co back. Commission the sequel right now!

Hugo is not exactly a typical Scorsese movie, but then it’s hardly a typical anything. At first glance it appears to be a Jean-Pierre Jeunet movie by way of Pixar featuring a cast of mo-cap characters in the Tintin mode. Why is Hit Girl from Kick Ass talking like a character from E Nesbitt? What’s Borat doing there? Is that Dracula? What the hell is going on?

What’s going on is that Scorsese is making a movie which kids could watch without being scarred for life. It’s his first stereoscopic movie (it isn’t 3D), and although as usual with this technique, objects don’t appear to have any real roundness and form, appearing more often as flat cut-outs which move away and toward the viewer, the illusion of depth is often very well used.

It’s easy to right-off movies which are visually dazzling as all style and no substance, but that’s not an entirely fair criticism here. First of all, it really does dazzle. The production design by Dante Ferretti is absolutely eye-popping throughout and Scorsese’s camera swoops and glides through it, and seamless CGI augmentations of it, as if the director is channelling David Fincher. The story is admittedly slender, but it doesn’t grind to a halt so we can admire the execution. The spectacle of it all is part of the point.

Because this is the story of the rediscovery of the works of Georges Méliès, by way of a clockwork robot which recreates one of his designs, when Hugo finally completes the restoration job. Méliès was a pioneer of cinema in an age when spectacle was the principal attraction of the medium. While on the one hand this legitimises Scorsese’s sudden indulgence in every pixel-pumping trick in his new digital handbook, it also creates a narrative distance. The ostensible hero is Asa Butterfield as the titular Hugo Cabret – all saucer-eyed stoicism and fierce introversion. But his function in the plot is to reveal and elevate Ben Kingsley, restrained and dignified as Méliès. As uninterested as Scorsese is Hugo, he isn’t that interested in Méliès either – this is really a love letter from a filmmaker to the medium as a whole.

Still, as gossamer-thin as this is, it is still a lot of fun, populated largely by cartoon characters, to be sure, but handsomely drawn ones, with any number of top British actors given ninety seconds each to make an impact. Richard Griffiths, looking rather like Billy Bunter in his 70s, and Frances de la Tour, who put me in mind of the drawings of James Thurber, briefly flirt through the medium of pets. Emily Mortimer looks doe-eyed at evil Borat, who in his impossibly bright blue uniform and with his gammy leg and black-gloved hand, comes off like a demented blend of Doctor Strangelove, the Child Catcher and the Conductor in the Polar Express. I’m still not entirely sure that was Sascha Baron Cohen and not Andy Serkis in a body stocking. Jude Law and Ray Winstone get one fairly brief scene each. Ray Winstone!!

Standing out are Michael Stuhlbarg (A Serious Man) who doles out great lumps of exposition with a twinkly stillness which is totally arresting, and luminous Chloë Grace Moretz, who handles the cut-glass English accent with aplomb. (Why is it that Scorsese requires English accents from every cast member – does that say “Paris” to the inhabitants of Boise Idaho?)

What’s frustrating is how sanitised this all is – not just that it’s kid-friendly – but how limited in scope and ambition this is. There’s no real pain, no cost to anything, preciously little jeopardy – even the runaway train looks too pretty to carry any actual threat. Disney killed Bambi’s mother but the man who brought us Goodfellas and Taxi Driver can’t summon up any grit at all, any lemon juice to add a bit of sharpness to this sometimes cloying chocolate box of a movie.

All of which would be fine – I don’t think Scorsese has failed in his intentions, I think he’s made precisely the movie he wanted to – if it weren’t for the fact that this is the most nominated film at this year’s Academy Awards. Has Hollywood forgotten how to make truly epic films about emotions and relationships, or has the Academy just stop noticing them?

As I feared, it’s looking like a thin year. So far we’ve had one self-regarding doodle, one joyful bit of fluff, a piece of confectionary in movie form and a slice of superior soap opera which is currently the best of the bunch. The King’s Speech might have been a bit cosy, but at least it was about something.

Four down, five to go.

It’s Oscar time again – the nominations were announced on 24 January and I must say the list of Best Picture Nominees was a bit surprising. No longer locked-in to ten movies, the Academy has found only nine to nominate this year. As regular readers will know, in the past by this stage I’d already seen about half of the nominees, but this year I’ve only seen one (Midnight in Paris – not good except by the standards of other recent Woody Allen offerings). I’d like to think that this is because it’s such a thin year and not because my cinema-going has been more than usually philistine.

Here are my preconceptions of the remaining eight…

• The Artist – black-and-white, silent, French and many critics’ film of the year. Also featuring tap-dancing (yay!).
• The Descendants – from the director of Sideways, starring George Clooney in a tee-shirt.
• Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close ­– from the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, about a boy who on 9/11 loses his father but finds a key.
• The Help – being a black maid in the American South in the 1960s wasn’t entirely awesome, apparently.
• Hugo – Martin Scorsese in 3D
• Moneyball ­– don’t worry, it’s not all baseball. It’s also maths.
• The Tree of Life – Sean Penn ponders his life. In other news, the universe is created.
• War Horse – this time with real horses. Probably not an improvement.

Now, since the Oscars ceremony will be on 26 February, I’ve not got long if I want to see all nine, and so I’ve got cracking straight away with a double-bill this weekend. First, here are a few more quick thoughts about Midnight in Paris which I saw on a plane.

What the hell ever happened to Woody Allen? The hilarious clown prince of angst who segued beautifully from broad scattergun gagfests like Sleeper and Love and Death to the delightful but richer Annie Hall and then a wide array of splendid movies in a variety of genres (my personal favourites being The Purple Rose of Cairo, Crimes and Misdemeanours and Bullets Over Broadway) seemed to fatally lose his way from about 1995 onward. The 17 films which he’s made since then (and that’s more than many directors make in their entire career) have varied from the inessential (Small Time Crooks) to the tedious (Vicky Cristina Barcelona) to the insultingly incompetent (Match Point – of which my beloved Deborah so memorably said “I don’t think I would have been interested if that had been my life”).

And yet he still grinds out a movie a year – whether he has a good idea or not. The best that can be said of Midnight in Paris is that it isn’t as bad as Match Point, or actually as bad as Vicky Cristina Barcelona or Whatever Works (“why can’t everyone be a New York intellectual – it’s so much more fulfilling that anything you might think is making you happy right now”). That should be enough for at least one critic to trumpet it as a “return to form” – a line which it seems at least one critic is mandated to trot out as each new Allen movie makes its debut.

But is it good, as in Oscar-worthy? As in from the director of Annie Hall? No, let’s get real. It’s incredibly slender, a doodle in the margins of a life in which a man who has pretty much everything he could possibly want, is granted a no-strings vacation into the past to have his ego stroked by the great and the good of the 1920s. Owen Wilson is charming enough, and the various celebrity impersonations are all decent, and there’s one (count it, one) stand-out gag involving a private detective very near the end, but the rest of it is predictable, pointless and clunky with various characters endlessly stating and restating the conclusions which we cannot be trusted to find ourselves.

And there’s the issue of the relative fame of various of these characters. It’s treacherous for a person who has simply failed to connect with a piece of work to denounce it as “pretentious”. Just because my cultural intake so far hasn’t overlapped with the assumptions made by the artist does not mean that the art is worthless, and as delightful as crowing “the emperor has no clothes” can be, it’s actually a fairly feeble criticism. But it’s dramatically weak to have our novelist hero transplanted back to the very period he reveres in the first place, and I can’t help but feel alienated when he instantly recognises not just superstars like Picasso and Hemmingway, but the comparatively obscure Man Ray and Luis Bunuel instead. Wilson is Allen’s surrogate so it is impossible for him to ever be made vulnerable by not recognising someone he should – and all this despite the presence of the (typically amusing) Michael Sheen as the pseudo-intellectual poseur in the modern sections.

For Midnight in Paris to be nominated for Best Picture is certainly surprising. For it to get four nominations is unlikely and for it to be Allen’s most commercially successful movie in the USA ever is just wrong. For completists only, who will hate themselves afterwards.

Now – on with some better news. We took in The Artist and The Descendants as a rather eccentric double-bill this afternoon. Both movies look far more at home on the list of Best Picture nominees, and The Artist is the clear favourite to win with ten nominations (beaten only by Hugo with 11). The Artist is a nostalgic hymn to a Hollywood past. Set between 1927 and 1932, it charts the rise of young star Peppy Miller as the talkies sweep through movieland, and the simultaneous decline in fortune of silent movie megastar George Valentin. It is (almost) entirely silent, shot in black-and-white in the 4:3 Academy ratio and contains much to admire.

Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo, who star as Valentin and Miller (and who both seem equipped with a preposterous quantity of teeth) are both irrepressibly charming and are given handy support by a splendid John Goodman, who can express more with one twitch of his jowls than many actors can in five paragraphs of dialogue. James Cromwell is stiffly subservient as Valentin’s manservant but Penelope Ann Miller and especially Missi Pyle are criminally underused as his wife and co-star respectively. Malcolm McDowell also has a bizarrely irrelevant one-shot cameo but this is Dujardin and Bejo’s show, ably assisted by Uggie the dog.

Any film which depicts a silent movie superstar at the coming of the talkies is bound to evoke comparisons with Singin’ in the Rain, and The Artist just goes ahead and essentially recreates much of that film’s first act during its opening scenes – the quarrelling stars meeting their public at the first preview, the ingénue meeting the star without quite knowing who he is and not to mention the tap-dancing! And yet, despite the nostalgia which leaks out of every frame, this movie does managed to feel fresh and original for the most part.

Only daring occasionally to push the limits of the silent movie form (rather as Spielberg allowed himself one red coat in Schindler’s List), director Michel Hazanavicius seems to know what he is doing, plunging us into  despair before finally allowing the star pair to express their joyous contentment. You have to admire the cheek of a movie which depicts a silent movie star witnessing an early test of talking pictures, without even giving us a sound effect to represent the recorded speech which is about to end his career. But the overall effect is muted rather than captivating, and it never really seems to be about anything – it’s all effect and no guts.

The Artist is fun while it’s on, albeit entirely unthreatening, and will almost certainly take the Best Picture Oscar this year.

Alexander Payne’s The Descendants really couldn’t be more different. George Clooney stars as Matt King, a wealthy lawyer in Hawaii whose wife is comatose in a local hospital following a boating accident, while he tries to reconnect with his two young daughters. As he attempts to deal with this horrible situation, Payne and his fellow screenwriters Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, working from the novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings, consistently make his life credibly but dramatically more conflicted, complicated and confusing.

Entirely Clooney’s movie (we only get to see his wife’s father at her bedside because King peeks around the hospital door), he is magnificent, fighting to keep a public image in place as a ghastly set of circumstances is ranged against him. Again and again, Payne pitiless camera trains its implacable gaze on Clooney’s face as a fascinating web of emotions flickers across it.

A beautifully on-theme sub-plot is not overplayed and there is strong support from Shailene Woodley and Amara Miller as his two children. For me, the only bum note was the elder daughter’s slacker boyfriend, played by Nick Krause. Both in the writing and the playing, this was a little too broad, in a screenplay which manages tone so expertly everywhere else. Consistently mining little nuggets of ironic humour which prevent the film as a whole from becoming unremittingly bleak, this is a clever, brutal, complex, grown-up story which is sentimental in all the best ways.

The Artist, for all its sparkle and dash, essentially tells us that no problem is so difficult that it can’t be solved by a really good tap-dance (or even a merely adequate one). The Descendants tells us that life provides plenty of problems that just never go away, and that sometimes you just get punished more for doing the right thing. Which is both why it should win and why it won’t!

A few movies I caught up with recently.

THE TIME TRAVELLER’S WIFE
w. Jeremy Leven, Bruce Joel Rubin, Audrey Niffenegger (novel); d. Robert Schwentke
Eric Bana, Rachel McAdams, Ron Livingston

This soapy romantic drama I understand renders the novel fairly faithfully (I haven’t read it) but without any dash or sparkle. It’s certainly a problem determining the best order of events in which to tell your story when your two main characters experience events in totally different orders, but this movie never finds a solid mode to work in. The science-fiction details of the hero’s slipping through time never feels credible and fatally neither does the romance, with Bana and McAdams blandly competent rather than fizzing with chemistry. In the one serious deviation from the novel, the ending is muted for obvious reasons (what’s disquieting in print would be horrifying in technicolour) but at the same time it’s fuzzed and lacks clarity and punch. With no loyalty to the novel, I didn’t hate it or feel betrayed by it, but if I could go back in time two hours, I’d pick another movie to watch instead.

BRIDESMAIDS
w. Annie Mumulo, Kirsten Wiig; d. Paul Feig
Kristen Wiig, Maya Rudolph, Rose Byrne, Wendi McLendon-Covey, Ellie Kemper, Melissa McCarthy, Chris O’Dowd

First of all, it’s absurd that a comedy with three female lead characters should be so remarkable for that fact alone. There is no reason at all why there should not be a glut of such movies. There’s no shortage of female talent, and there’s certainly an audience for movies built around this kind of cast. That said, despite many pleasures, Bridesmaids is not an unqualified success. Co-writer Kristen Wiig is fine, and Rose Byrne is very good – miles away from her dour, but equally successfully, turn as luckless attorney Ellen Parsons in the TV series Damages. Chris O’Dowd is hilariously mis-cast but charming and winning as the for-no-good-reason-Irish traffic cop and Melissa McCarthy is a real find as a sort of Zach Galafianakis with breasts. With Jon Hamm, Matt Lucas and Ellie Kemper off of The Office rounding out the supporting cast – what’s not to like?

Well, there are two problems. One is that several of the comedy set pieces seem to have been stuck in at random. One of the funniest and most sustained sequences comes bizarrely at a moment where the plot is demanding that the stakes are at their highest, yet as the sequence develops, it increasingly looks as if the protagonists are concerned only with amusing each other. Another problem is that while it has the smarts to reject many of the standard-issue tropes of the Romantic Comedy Genre (Wiig archly tells O’Dowd not to try and “fix” her, which recalls screenwriting guru Blake Snyder’s device The Six Things That Need Fixing) but has nothing with any emotional power to put in their place. Possibly connected with this is that several characters, notably Kemper’s, seem to be setups for payoffs which never arrive. Finally, and almost fatally, the central character’s actions are seemingly designed to create the greatest possible suffering and inconvenience for herself and her so-called friends. She’s a horrible friend and a demented individual with whom I found it almost to empathise.

I was never bored and I was frequently amused, but for me it was a missed opportunity.

HORRIBLE BOSSES
w. Michael Markowitz, John Francis Daley, Jonathan Goldstein; d. Seth Gordon
Jason Bateman, Charlie Day, Jason Sudeikis, Kevin Spacey, Jennifer Aniston, Colin Farrell, Jamie Foxx

The most completely successful of these three movies, Horrible Bosses is blessed with a brilliant central idea which allows it to coast when its comic invention runs dry, which it does from time-to-time. Among the trio of caricature employers, Kevin Spacey is given most of the screentime and most of the best lines. Farrell in particular is rather unfairly sidelined and upstaged by the set dressing in his own character’s house. Sudekis and Bateman amble along good-naturedly, allowing the relatively unknown Charlie Day many of the film’s showiest moments, and when the script isn’t quite sure where the laughs should be coming from, the director just has all three of the leads talk simultaneously, upping the chances that one of them will be saying something funny.

But the plot is properly, if perfunctorily, put together and every so often there’s something a bit special – a wonderful cameo from Ioan Gruffudd, Jamie Foxx in a very funny performance, and Bunk from off of The Wire.

LIMITLESS
w. Leslie Dixon (novel The Dark Fields by Alan Glynn) d. Neil Burger
Bradley Cooper, Abbie Cornish, Robert de Niro, Anna Friel

Limitless is a sprawling pharmaceutical fantasy that works handsomely for as long as it can coast on its star’s winning charm, inventive direction and the giddy excitement of its premise, but is slightly let down by a clumsy ending and some lapses in logic.

Struggling writer Eddie Mora (Cooper) is offered a little clear pill known as NZT which, his sleazy ex-brother-in-law claims, will allow him to access 100% of his brain, instead of the mythical mere 20%. Not scenting urban legend bullshit, Mora takes the pill, pulls his landlord’s wife, spruces up his apartment and rattles off ninety brilliant pages of novel in a frenzy of organised creativity until the magic medicine wears off. Now hooked, he goes in search of a further – ideally limitless – supply, and that’s where his troubles really start.

This is all sketched in with admirable economy, and director Burger uses every trick in what must be a fairly hefty book to bring these changes of mental state to life. Sudden close-ups of Cooper’s impossibly blue irises, infinite zoom-ins, shifts in digital grading, animated letters falling from the sky, simultaneous Bradley Coopers multi-tasking, all work well to make cinematic and visceral what might otherwise have been merely conceptual. I found the x-ray movie of him swallowing the pill a little hard-to-take and it’s true that these kind of directorial flourishes can becoming irritating and tic-y if overused, but Burger seems in control of the material – almost to the end.

Before then, Abbie Cornish is winsome but underused. De Niro seems cast largely because his reputation as an actor saves three script pages to build up the character, but he shows up and glowers suitably. A variety of largely unfamiliar faces fill out the remaining roles of sleazy gangsters, smooth executives and bangable babes.

For much of its length, the movie is high on its own giddy concept – there’s nothing Eddie can’t do when pumped up on NZT and the film loves to see his superbrain tackle tough spot after tough spot. Of course, he’s done nothing to earn this, which is why having such a likeable star is so important. And then comes the inevitable crash, but – hopefully without giving too much away (stop reading now if you’re genuinely spoilerphobic) – the movie’s too much in love with its delightful central character and can’t bring itself to punish him in the way we’ve clearly been promised. The filmmakers even wheel in a tastefully uglified Anna Friel to point out just why this can’t last – and then ignore it. It turns out that NZT’s use is rather more widespread, which starts to raise other little awkward questions about who is manufacturing it and why.

Unable to decide whether his hero should pay the price for his hubris or be rewarded for his cunning, director Burger and screenwriter Leslie Dixon just go ahead and give us a jarringly brutal fight scene to resolve most of the dangling plot strands and then an ambiguous but basically “junkily-ever-after” coda designed to ensure that Eddie won’t have a sudden come-down and so neither will we.

Thoroughly enjoyable, full of charm, wit and invention, but ultimately empty inside the glittery shell and not really sure what it was trying to say. Not every movie has to have a strong moral message (use Western Union) but is it asking too much of a piece of popcorn entertainment to pick a point-of-view and stick to it?

This blog having been sadly neglected, I’m going to put up a few quick posts tying up loose ends. First is the Oscars. My quest to see all ten Best Picture nominees having met with success, all that was left was to watch the ceremony and test the quality of my powers of prognostication.

The ceremony itself was certainly marred by the choice of host. Anne Hathaway is a perfectly charming presence, but was rarely given anything funny to say. James Franco, such a charismatic and fearless actor seemed to be playing the part of stiff and gauche neophyte out-of-his-depth and made me feel rather uneasy watching him moreorless throughout.

On the upside, some of the dopier decisions of ceremonies past had been quietly reversed. Gone was the shepherding of multiple technical award winners on to the stage simultaneously. Gone were the ponderous personal valedictions from five presenters to five acting nominees. Back were the individual musical numbers for Best Song (sort-of).

The awards themselves were fairly predictable. In the technical categories, both Inception and The Social Network did slightly better than some had predicted, raising a question mark over The King’s Speech‘s chances at the top prizes. But stuttering Bertie eventually scooped up Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay as it was always bound to. Apparently, my choice of Tom Hooper was anti-consensus, but honestly I only picked him because of the momentum of the movie itself.

Truth be told, it almost certainly wasn’t the best-directed movie of the year – certainly 127 Hours and The Social Network both have stronger claims. Yet, I don’t think it’s fair to right off Tom Hooper’s contribution entirely. Hooper does use the camera and the sound design in interesting and compelling ways. The movie neither looks nor sounds like a TV movie (as An Education did last year, for example) and if, as is generally agreed, Colin Firth pulled off the performance of his career, then surely some of the credit for that can be given to the director?

My only other anti-consensus call was picking Hailee Steinfeld for best supporting actor, which I had serious cause to doubt after watching Melissa Leo in The Fighter but if you make an out-there prediction, and you stick to it, and you’re right – then you’re a genius. Whereas if you dither about and pile up caveats and codicils, then who cares? Of course, Steinfeld did not prevail and Melissa Leo fucking did, not undeservedly.

That’s it till next year. If this blog is still here, we’ll do it all again then.

Four more Best Picture nominees under my belt since I last posted. Here are my capsule reviews in the order of my viewing…

Winter’s Bone
A film which entirely passed me by until it suddenly started showing up at the top of critics’ top ten lists at the end of 2010, this is based on a novel which I was equally unfamiliar with. It’s the simple story, almost thin, of a young woman in the Ozark Mountains, living in fairly desperate poverty and struggling to raise her younger brother and sister. As the movie opens, her meth-cooking father has skipped bail and if she cannot present him at the courthouse (alive or dead) she will forfeit the shack which is the only home she has. The rest of the movie is her struggle to find him, while most in the community would rather she left well enough alone. Cold, spare and featuring strong performances from Jennifer Lawrence and John Hawkes (both nominated), this benefits hugely from the novelty of the environment and for telling its potentially melodramatic story in an admirably simple way. But just as this approach avoids undue hysteria, it also means that the film as a whole feels like it never quite gets cooking. Add a couple of (presumably deliberate) loose ends, and the impression I get is of a slight lack of conviction, although I was entirely gripped while it was on.

The Kids Are All Right
When this was over, my first thought was “was that really one of the ten best films of 2010?”. And I guess the answer is it probably was one of the best soapy family melodramas of 2010, but I think a movie of that type probably has to do a little more to earn a Best Picture Nomination – such is the “inflation” caused by nominating ten films instead of five; this film would never have got a nomination two years ago. Not that there’s much wrong with. The “two moms” scenario is treated in a suitably matter-of-fact fashion, Julianne Moore is very good (as usual), Annette Bening is not quite as good (as usual), the kids are neither too wooden nor too winsome, Mark Ruffalo is on good form, and the story is well put-together. But once it gets going, its entirely unsurprising, with the plot unfolding in the most straightforward and obvious way possible. But where Winter’s Bone has the novelty of its setting and the urgency of its situation to elevate it, the slender storyline is a much bigger problem in this generally rather cosy, familiar setting. While the sober treatment of its lesbian lead characters is admirable, I can’t help thinking that their presence has earned this movie brownie points which it doesn’t really deserve.

127 Hours
In  his very entertaining book, Which Lie Did I Tell, William Goldman recounts one of the (many) reasons why the movie he wrote about killer lions, The Ghost and the Darkness is fatally compromised. In the true story, the white hunter waits up a tree for days, gun in hand, for the moment that his prey finally presents himself. Goldman is simultaneously in awe at this man’s courage and fortitude, but despairs that this waiting game is entirely uncinematic. But Goldman is a talented hack and Danny Boyle is a genuis, for Boyle has made that film and it’s a triumph. Anyone else would have delayed the moment when Ralston is trapped in the canyon or included frequent cut-aways and flashbacks (as Ralston himself did in the book he wrote about his ordeal) in order to have something to shoot and some structure for the narrative. Boyle and co-writer Simon Beaufoy, spend less than 15 minutes with Ralston unencumbered before the terrible accident occurs which leaves him a prisoner for five days. For most of its running time, therefore, this is Boyle’s camera and James Franco’s face and very little else, but the ordeal is brilliantly realised. As Ralston goes through disbelief, resignation, fear, determination, self-mockery, hallucination and finally auto-amputation to free himself, Boyle and Franco bring it all vividly to life. Just as a “heavy” director like David Fincher was the right choice to add power and weight to the otherwise trivial Mark Zuckerburg story, so it needed a “light” director like Boyle to nimbly add zip and fizz and kinetic drive to this entirely static storyline. Little moments of irony are handled with grace and aplomb – Ralston leaving behind his Swiss Army Knife, Boyle’s camera favouring Franco’s right arm as he shakes hands with two cute hikers before his accident, the battery on his camcorder slowly draining away – and the final redemptive scenes are meaningful without being corny or melodramatic. Ralston isn’t a different person after his ordeal, he’s just come to see a bit more clearly who he is and what living a life means. Yes, the amputation is hard to watch (and listen to – the sound effects are the worst part) but looking away would hardly be the point. This is a masterclass in movie-making and probably my favourite film of the year. It’s a crime Danny Boyle isn’t nominated for Best Director, but having won two years ago for Slumdog I imagine he’s not too bothered.

True Grit
Another inhospitable environment film, this one set in the old west. I’m a big Coen Brothers fan, but not a big western fan, so I read the Charles Portis novel and watched the John Wayne film in preparation for this one. Comparing the two earlier works, it’s very easy to see that the novel is about Mattie Ross, the young girl who hires a US Marshal to bring her father’s killer to justice. The Henry Hathaway movie is about the legend that his John Wayne, however, and so dispenses with the narration from the older Mattie as well as providing a suitably valedictory ending which also left the door open for a sequel. The Coens restore Mattie’s narration and the book’s more downbeat ending, but in many other ways this is a less faithful version of the novel, restructuring Mattie’s business deals both with the man who sold her father his horses and with Marshal Rooster Cogburn himself, and removing Texas Ranger La Boeuf (Matt Damon) from much of the action, where both book and Wayne movie have the three protagonists as a team for most of the middle of the movie. However, in its staging and performances, the new movie generally improves on the old – better paced, more textured, free of the Coen’s excesses, but full of their care and attention to detail, it’s a very, very solid piece of work. Hailee Steinfeld improves in almost every way on Kim Darby’s version of Mattie Ross, as does Matt Damon on singer Glen Campbell’s version of La Boeuf even though the character is somewhat sidelined. And if Jeff Bridges isn’t quite the legend that Duke Wayne was, he certainly brings his character acting chops with him – somehow managing to look even older and fatter that Wayne, despite being two years younger (he was 60 when he shot it, but the novel describes a 40 year old man, not in good shape, admittedly). A very, very good movie, then rather than an extraordinary one, and if not quite up there with Fargo or Lebowski, certainly in the top half of the Coen canon.

d. Darren Aronofsky; w. Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz, John McLaughlin (story Heinz)
Natalie Portman, Natalie Portman, Vincent Cassel, Mila Kunis

NB: This review contains spoilers. If you don’t want to know, don’t read.

This is the first Darren Aronofsky film I’ve seen, but I’m aware of his reputation as an uncompromising director of sometimes-baffling dramas and this movie, very well received by British and American critics, certainly lives up to that reputation. Natalie Portman stars – by which I mean that she’s hardly ever off the screen – as Nina, a dedicated ballerina given the chance to dance the lead in Swan Lake. She has the technique and the grace to play the vulnerable white swan, but her director (Vincent Cassel) doubts that she has the dark power required for the duel-role of the black swan.

Both in casting and on the page, it’s Vincent Cassel’s Thomas Leroy who is the weak link here. His part of the story is overfamiliar – the prickish cocksman of a director who dominates a vulnerable young would-be star, alternately encouraging her and confounding her until she either cracks or delivers the performance of a lifetime. Cassell makes little headway with this limited part, which also requires him to dole out thudding exposition, but just when one might expect his villainy to ramp up, he withdraws and other candidates come to the fore as potential antagonists.

One is Mila Kunis, in a lively turn as a looser, less dedicated but funkier rival who ends up being cast as Portman’s understudy. The other is a Barbara Hershey, channelling Bette Davis as Portman’s mother, whose own ballet career failed to live up to expectations and who alternates pride, concern and envy in a very well-observed fashion. And let’s also raise a glass to Winona Ryder as the retiring ballet star, pleasingly bitter and lush in what is essentially a cameo role.

However, the real antagonist here is none of the above. Instead the role is fulfilled by Portman’s own fragile psyche, brought vividly to life by a hugely energised combination of jump-cutting, fractured soundscape and brilliantly-realised CGI. It’s this playing with reality which elevates the movie above its over-familiar backstage status-battle storyline. Although there are some quirky hints early on, from the middle of the movie, neither the viewer nor the protagonist can trust the reality of anything they see, and Aronofsky expertly builds the tension and confusion, almost to the end. From an objective standpoint, the stakes here are relatively low (will some girl dance quite well or very well?), but the entire film is designed so that we only never get that objectivity and see the world from Portman’s own increasingly-unreliable point-of-view.

At the centre of this increasingly demented maelstrom, then, is Portman herself. Aronofsky’s camera rarely leaves her – when it isn’t fetishizing her feet and her shoe-preparation routine, it’s crawling over her skin as she wounds herself, or as feathers apparently sprout from her flesh. When it isn’t hovering in front of her, it’s creeping behind her, or watching her reflection in one of the countless mirrors or other reflective surfaces which litter the film, and which make for some of its creepiest effects sequences. On the rare occasions when she isn’t filling the frame, we are generally looking out through her eyes – and sometimes both at the same time. Portman’s gaunt yet luminous beauty shines through the grainy photography, and her slightly Spock-like eyebrows mean she can transform effortlessly into Satanic counterpart without the viewer being entirely aware of what has changed.

In its bravura penultimate sequence, reminiscent of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, the constant rug-pulling and demented energy becomes a little offputting and the whole thing threatens to tip into absurdity. And the final supposed revelation that to give such a “perfect” performance, Portman’s character has had to re-enact the plot of Swan Lake, right down to that self-destructive ending, is a little too pat, for what is otherwise such a breezily off-kilter fillm. But almost all of what goes before is fresh, disturbing, engaging and surprising.

Far too offputting for the Academy to do much more than nominate it, Aronofsky’s film is a complex mix of pulp melodrama, high art and character study. If you’ve been waiting all year for a nightmare psycho-horror fantasy film en pointe, then your wait is over, but this effort is very good rather than perfection.

It’s Oscar time again, which means that I’ve been moreorless keeping up this blog for a whole year. Well done to me.

It also means that I intend to duplicate my 2010 efforts and see all ten (why ten!?) Best Picture nominees before the ceremony on 27 February (and I’m away next week). In fact, I never did get around to seeing the very dreary-looking Sandra Bullock, Friday Night Lights-inspired The Blind Side (it’s still on my hard drive, courtesy of iTunes). However, it’s not so bad. I’ve already seen four out of ten in the ordinary course of things, so I’ll put my capsule reviews of those four up here, and a quick rundown of what I consider to be the favourites in the various categories.

First of all, here are the Best Picture nominees I’ve seen.

The King’s Speech
Big favourite this year, not just for Best Picture, but Best Actor and Best Director too. The King’s Speech is the most-nominated film this year, which generally bodes well and it’s easy to see why – it has Oscar glory stamped all over it. Apart possibly from Toy Story 3, it’s the most purely entertaining film on the list, has done well at the box office (although all the naughty swearing means an R rating which has hurt it a little in the States) and manages the ideal Oscar trick of being genuinely about something (duty, family, friendship, articulacy, communication, status) whilst at the same time, absolutely not daring to challenge its audience’s preconceptions in any way. Cosy enough to turn nobody away, yet meaty enough not to feel insubstantial, and blessed with two exceptional performances from Firth and Rush, this may not go down in history as a cast-iron classic, but it’s certainly in the right place at the right time (stealing momentum away from The Social Network).

Inception
Another film which tries to have its cake and eat it too, Inception, is a remarkable achievement from a remarkable director, and was a hugely fun night out when I went to see it on a nice big screen, but it doesn’t have a prayer in the Best Picture stakes. Whereas The King’s Speech is an entertaining drama which asks its audience to ponder weighty themes without asking any really awkward questions, Inception is a cerebral thriller, playing with levels of reality with huge daring and imagination, but with a popcorn heart. This is Nolan’s achievement – designing an intellectual framework within which he can pull off heart-stopping action sequences and eye-bending images, and then creating an emotional McGuffin to tie it all together. I loved it, despite Leonardo di Caprio’s characteristically bland central performance, despite Ellen Page’s dual role as naïf and sage, and despite the occasional plot hole. But its dry intellectual heft is no match for The King’s Speech double-whammy of historical weight and emotional drama. Worthy beats fun every time for Oscar, and so Chris Nolan will go home empty-handed, apart possibly from some technical awards.

The Social Network
Another film I thoroughly enjoyed, right up until the last ten minutes which attempted to tie a too-neat bow around what had been a compelling narrative thus far. Aaron Sorkin’s masterful and archly witty screenplay gracefully solves the problem of why we should care about what the geeks who invented Facebook ate for lunch between coding by the elegant device of the double-litigation flashback structure. As well as the wholly-unrealistic (but hugely satisfying)– whipcrack dialogue, the film showcases a pair of outstanding performances from Jesse Eisenberg and Spiderman-to-be Andrew Garfield and an invisible special effect – as they generally should be – to turn one actor into a pair of identical twins. What will hurt its chances at the Oscars are that it peaked too late, that David Fincher’s chilly direction will have put some people off what’s potentially a dry-seeming screenplay in the first place – and that Fincher himself was extravagantly praised for the lumpen Benjamin Button at the 2009 Oscars.

Toy Story 3
Will clearly win the Best Animated Feature award, but hasn’t a chance in hell of winning Best Picture, despite the fact that it apparently has a lot of the same things going for it as The King’s Speech – excellent box office, high quality entertainment, important themes which give it weight without dragging it down, technical standards dazzlingly high – but let’s be clear, no animated sequel ever has or ever will win Best Picture. Which is a shame, as it’s an exceptional piece of work even by Pixar’s high standards. Up was lovely, but the structure was a little clunky (and it was criticised in some quarters for double mumbo-jumbo), WALL-E was magnificent until they got on board the ship, after which I found the satire a little heavy-handed, Ratatouille had marvellous moments but lost energy in the middle third. Toy Story 3 reminds us where it all started for Pixar and also how far we’ve come. Resisting the urge to snazz-up Woody and Buzz, they’re just the same simple, yet appealing figures they were in 1995, the filmmakers flex their muscles with much more convincing humans and stunning simulation work of various kinds. The supporting cast is trimmed down where necessary (no Bo Peep, RC, Wheezy, Etch for example) and expanded on brilliantly (Michael Keaton as Ken, Timothy Dalton as Mr Pricklepants and Ned Beatty as Lots-O’-Huggin’ Bear are wonderful additions). The tension is almost unbearable during the incinerator scene, which is brilliantly resolved, and when Andy – still voiced by John Morris – plays with Woody and Buzz one last time, there isn’t a dry eye in the house.

So four down, six to go. And they are Black Swan (The Red Shoes meets Shutter Island), The Fighter (Rocky with Mark Wahlberg), The Kids are All Right (lesbians are mainstream now, cool), 127 Hours (I have to watch while you do what!?), True Grit (we’re not remaking the John Wayne film, we’re just adapting the same novel) and Winter’s Bone (which completely passed me by until it suddenly started popping up on American critics best of 2010 lists).

I’ll put reviews up here as I see the films, and I’ll attempt a little bit of crowd-sourcing to predict the results in the major categories. In the meantime, here are some gut reactions to the high profile nominations.

Best Picture – The King’s Speech pretty much has this sewn up I think, which means good news for Tom Hooper, since it’s rare for the director of the Best Picture to be overlooked.

Best Actor – will likely go to Colin Firth, who following his nomination last year for A Single Man, has demonstrated his Oscar-friendliness. But this is a strong category and it’s hard to right-off Javier Bardem, or – Oscar host! – James Franco.

Best Actress – is even harder to call, with all five women having a reasonable claim. My guess is that Natalie Portman has been made to suffer enough and hasn’t been smiled on yet by the Academy. The others are either too indie-obscure or too familiar with Oscar already, but any of them could do it, really.

Best Supporting Actor – is probably between Christian Bale, overlooked for The Dark Knight last year, and Geoffrey Rush, who may be swept along with The King’s Speech’s overall good fortune.

Best Supporting Actress – I have a strong hunch will go to Hailee Steinfeld who played the 14-year-old Mattie Ross in True Grit, at the remarkable age of, wow, 14. Best Supporting slots are good ways to reward newcomers, and otherwise overlooked films. Since I don’t believe True Grit will do well (a violent remake, which outweighs any nostalgia for westerns), this will be a place to recognise it. Steinfled could well follow in the footsteps of ten-year-old Tatum O’Neil and 11-year-old Anna Paquin.

The writing categories throw up a couple of oddities. The script for Toy Story 3, in which every twist and turn of the story is an original invention, is nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay, since some of the characters were created for a prior movie. On the other hand, the script for The King’s Speech, which documents actual historical events, is nominated for Best Original Screenplay, since it does not acknowledge any particular prior work. This aside, The King’s Speech will probably take this category too, while in the Adapted camp, it’s a straight fight between 127 Hours and The Social Network, both of which turned uncinematic true events into gripping narrative. Winter’s Bone is probably in with a slim chance too.

That will do for now. In short, The King’s Speech will do well, True Grit won’t do as well as its ten nominations suggest. The Social Network, Black Swan and Winter’s Bone all have possibilities. Inception will be almost entirely overlooked.

Given my track-record with this kind of prediction, that should be enough for you to put an enormous bet down on Inception right now, but we’ll see in a few weeks’ time.

Part three is here

GoldenEye (1995)

w. Jeffrey Caine, Bruce Fierstein; d. Martin Campbell
The one with: him out of Remmington Steele, him out of Sharpe, him out of The Comic Strip Presents, the wonky music, the tank chase
Overview: the radical reinvention which we were promised in 1987 finally materialises. A new Bond, a new M, a new Moneypenny, gorgeous CGI titles, a crackerjack theme song – things are off to a good start. The contrast between this and Licence to Kill couldn’t be greater. The glamour, the fun, the charm are all back in full force, but this film knows how to ring the changes too. Whereas Licence attempted to give us Bond as a rogue agent and fudged it, this film gives us a real turncoat in the form of 006 turned meglomaniacal villain. I still can’t believe that in all the prelease press and TV coverage I saw, in all the interviews and previews, I entirely failed to notice that we hadn’t had the villain introduced to us! The excellent tank chase also kicks off what will prove to be a quite rewarding trend, as for the next half-a-dozen movies, the stunt team attempts to find more and different vehicles in which to stage chases. With a magnificent debut from Judi Dench as M, top-drawer stunts and effects work, an astonishingly assured debut from Irishman Brosnan, and a clutch of bright supporting cast members including Robbie Coltrane, Joe Don Baker, Alan Cumming, Samantha Bond’s spunky take on Miss Moneypenny and Famke Janssen quite beguiling as thigh-crushing Xenia Onatopp, this teeters on the brink of parody more than once, but never quite stumbles over it. Niggles? Brosnan’s hair is too long, and the five o’clock shadow isn’t a good look for him – it was abandoned after this film; Trevelyan’s evil plan makes no sense whatsoever; and the music is horrible, except for the already-mentioned theme song and the tank chase sequence. In general though, this is very assured and entertaining stuff, with a swagger and style which completely eluded the previous movie. As with Living Daylights, a few scenes provide a veneer of emotion which hints at just a little more depth to the character – and that’s all I really need. Takes its title from Ian Fleming’s house in Jamaica (really!).
Best for: pre-titles sequence – and that’s really saying something. Despite very stiff competition, this really is the last word in these sequences. The bungee jump off the dam is amazing; the gun battle in the weapons facility is brilliantly shot and combines action, humour and suspense with total control; the final stunt – freefalling after the crashing plane – is totally ludicrous, yet completely convincing; and the sequence sets up the big reveal which, when it comes, re-energises the middle of the film but which here manages not to be too clearly signposted. What a return to form! Hurrah!

Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)

w. Bruce Fierstein; d. Roger Spottiswode
The one with: all the Asian chopsocky (no, the other one), the climax on the enormous tanker (no, the other one), the remote control car, her out of Desperate Housewives
Overview: By now, the action movie had become a genre and it was films like Lethal Weapon, Robocop, Die Hard, Raiders and their various sequels that the Bond films were being compared to. The problem is that Bond really comes from a different tradition, in theory appealing to a much wider audience, but the crossover with action movies is clear to see. Where the best Bond films differ is that they have a little more plot, a bit more style, a bit more class than the average action movie. In his second outing, Brosnan is even more self-assured and makes the most of his brief appearances in the pretitles sequence (Brosnan himself never visited the location) and manages to carve out a recognisable figure amongst the mayhem, but Spottiswode is determined never to let the pace up for a second – even the briefing from M is delivered in the back of car, screeching through London. The one pause for breath is probably the highlight of the film – Bond, knocking back vodka, waiting for Paris Carver. This is followed by the excellent showdown with Vincent Schiavelli’s eerie Dr Kaufman and the preposterous, but fun remote control car chase. In Saigon, things take a turn for the noisier, and the wall-to-wall gunfire makes it hard to pick out the moments of sly humour, character beats and grace notes, which may or may not be there. What ultimately sinks the film is the terribly shaky performance by Jonathan Pryce, hopelessly miscast as Elliot Carver and with no clue how to combine comic book villainy with any hint of gravitas at all. For sheer excitement and adrenalin, it does pretty much work while it’s on, but as soon as it’s over, there’s nothing left. What is welcome is the arrival of David Arnold, who from now on becomes the Bond composer-in-residence, continuing John Barry’s legacy and unafraid of a drum machine if it’ll help. If only they’d used k d lang’s superb “Surrender” as the theme song instead of Sheryl Crow’s rather anonymous effort. Its title has nothing to do with Fleming or anything else.
Best for: pace. It will likely leave you out of breath, but if you’re in the mood you’ll probably enjoy the ride.

The World is Not Enough (1999)

w. Neil Purvis, Robert Wade, Bruce Fierstein; d. Michael Apted
The one with: the world’s least convincing nuclear physicist, yet more skiing, the boat chase down the Thames, Basil Fawlty
Overview: A polar opposite of its predecessor, strong where Tomorrow Never Dies was weak, yet it lacks the coherence, urgency and drive of that particularly kinetic entry. Handing the megaphone to a “proper” director in the shape of Michael Apted, means in turn that he lets the excellent second unit, commanded by Vic Armstrong, take care of the action. More than usual, then, this feels like a faintly uninteresting family/spy drama intercut with an unrelated but highly competent action movie. Another crackerjack pretitles sequence – the boat chase from MI6 to the under-construction Millennium Dome – gets the film off to a good start and Bond’s busted shoulder is an interesting wrinkle, but try as I might I can’t bring myself to really care about Elektra King, Renard and whatever it is they’re trying to do. Even the kidnapping of M seems low-key, perfunctory and without any real resonance or impact. I admire the way The World Is Not Enough tries to take the espionage storylines of From Russia With Love or On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and bring them up to date; I think it’s a good idea to try and create a Bond girl with more depth who can actually hurt our hero emotionally (Elektra, of course, not Christmas Jones); I think Bond is at home in these exotic European locations – I just remember how underwhelmed I was by it when I first saw it. Even Robbie Coltrane’s Zukovsky is markedly less fun second time around. Its title is Bond’s family motto, according to On Her Maj.
Best for: goodbyes. Q’s farewell is genuinely touching. Who could have known that Desmond Llewellyn would be killed in a car crash months later?

Die Another Day (2002)

w. Neil Purvis and Robert Wade; d. Lee Tamahori
The one with: the hovercraft, Bond goes rogue (no, the other one), Halle Berry, invisible car
Overview: Oh god, where to start? This was the twentieth “official” Bond movie, released in the fortieth anniversary year of the first movie and the fiftieth anniversary year of the first book, and was intended to be a celebration of the entire franchise, with nods and winks to most if not all of the preceding movies. But whereas the previous three films, for better or worse, each had a strong sense of identity, a clear mission statement (make Bond fun, make Bond energetic, make Bond work as drama) this one fires off wildly in every direction it can find. Like Octopussy, it never finds a coherent style or tone, and like Octopussy, some very good sequences don’t make up for some truly appalling ones. Unlike Octopussy, though, which shuffles up its various styles and plots, Die Another Day splits neatly down the middle. The hovercraft chase in the pretitles, while not in the same league as the TWINE boat chase or GoldenEye’s attack on the weapons complex, is fun, novel and shot with Vic Armstrong’s customary wit and verve. Bond’s capture, torture and escape is genuinely shocking and demonstrates both our hero’s vulnerability and his prowess far more effectively and cinematically than that dodgy shoulder in TWINE. Most of what happens in Cuba is fine and the partnership with Jinx is fun. The MI6 scenes are brilliantly nostalgic and effective and John Cleese makes the Quartermaster’s role his own – such a shame he didn’t return. And then Bond leaves for Iceland and the whole film falls to bits in spectacular style. Graves’ dual identity is stupid, the battle of computerised cars is boring and stupid, the CGI ice-surfing scene is unconvincing and stupid, the fight on the plane is confusing and stupid and the invisible car is the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen. Toby Stephens, if anything, is more ill-at-ease than even Jonathan Pryce, Rosamund Pike is a total blank and Madonna’s presence only serves to irritate. Michael Madsen is clearly being set-up as a new returning character, but it was not to be. Once again, time for a rethink.
Best for: fight (found weapons). That fencing scene might be the best fight since the elevator in Diamonds.

Casino Royale (2006)

w. Neil Purvis, Robert Wade, Paul Haggis; d. Martin Campbell
The one with: the black-and-white opening, the poker game, black Felix Leiter (no, the other one), Bond’s balls, the unresolved storyline
Overview: As with Timothy Dalton taking over from Roger Moore, most of the creative team remains in place, but the presence of a new leading man reinvigorates everyone. Artfully expanding Fleming’s slender 1952 novel with a new opening sequence setting up the conflict and a new coda which adds additional layers of complexity and emotion, Purvis and Wade create a magnificent debut for this “reimagined” James Bond, with a little bit of a dialogue polish from “proper” screenwriter Haggis, and with the blessed Sir Martin Campbell calling all the shots, not just shooting the dialogue scenes and then going home for an early night while the second unit films the fights and explosions, this is the most complete and coherent Bond film since – well, GoldenEye actually. Michael G Wilson had pitched “young Bond” to stepdad Broccoli many times in the past, but the older producer had always vetoed this on the basis that audiences wanted to see an experienced and capable Bond. But, by joining Bond’s story at precisely the point where he is transitioning from rookie to veteran, Casino Royale manages to have its beefcake and eat it too, with a simply stunning performance from Englishman Craig anchoring the whole thing. On first (and indeed subsequent) viewings Craig make me believe totally that this guy could seriously fuck people up, while actually making me care about his emotional problems. It’s a remarkable accomplishment. The monochrome opening, bereft of over-the-top stunts, is an apparently low-key way to begin, but as a statement of intent it’s compellingly clear. And when the film does explode into action, standards are as high as ever, but tellingly, it’s some of the non-whizz-bang-crash scenes which linger longest in the mind – Bond and Vesper on the train, Le Chiffre “scratching Bond’s balls”, the meeting with Mathis. If I have a quibble, it’s that the constant double-crossing and rug-pulling in the final third pulls me away from the emotional story, which does get a little soapy at times. But really, it’s only in Venice that the three demands of action, plot and emotion get in each other’s way. The rest of the time, it’s to its enduring credit that all three mesh perfectly.
Best for: chase (on foot). The parkour chase is not only hugely exciting, it’s not only fresh and new, it simultaneously defines Daniel Craig as the Bond we know and love and also very much as a new and individual take on the character. Again and again Sébastien Foucan leaps nimbly over some wall or other obstacle, which Bond simply barrels straight through. Rarely before has the character been given such singularity of purpose. At once, instantly Bondian, yet you can’t imagine any of his predecessors doing it in quite the same way.

Quantum of Solace (2008)

w. Neil Purvis, Robert Wade, Paul Haggis; d. Marc Forster
The one with: all that oil (no, the other one), Bond goes rogue (yet again), fights in the new Jason Bourne confus-o-cam style, the unresolved storyline (again)
Overview: For the third time running, a new Bond’s stunning debut has been almost completely ruined by trying to turn the second film into an amped-up, all-action sequel in a different genre entirely. This time, not only are we propelled from demented action sequence to demented action sequence as quickly as plot demands allow, but the action sequences themselves are shot so wildly and cut so quickly that it’s rarely possible to decipher what is actually going on. I suspect that some splendid stunts are being performed in the opening car chase and in the scaffolding gun-fight which follows, but it’s hard to say for certain. When it does quieten down, during the opera for example, it’s still more confusing than compelling. Apparently functioning as the middle of a trilogy, this retrofits much of the actions of Casino Royale’s villains as the work of a larger and more sinister organisation, but by the end of the film these plot strands remain unresolved, and with the Bond rights once again in limbo at the time of writing, it seems they will stay unresolved for a while longer. Also of note is the rather distasteful repeated motif of Bond executing people whom M wished to question, consistently written and played almost as if Bond is a character in a fifties sit-com who has eaten his boss’s sandwich. I half-expect Judi Dench to start saying “Why I oughta…” Is it too much to hope for the taking of human life to be given a little more significance? Are we supposed to know who “Yusef” is from Casino Royale and be impressed when Bond doesn’t kill him at the end? I couldn’t care less. It is at least short – at 106 minutes it’s the shortest ever, curiously immediately following the longest ever. The title comes from one of the short stories in For Your Eyes Only.
Best for: sacrificial lambs. The death of Mathis is genuinely affecting, especially when recalling his conflicted loyalties from the previous movie (and I do remember that).