Another Year at the Pictures

Film 2011

The end of the calendar year has always been a time of reflection, looking back at faults of the year past and formulating resolutions to improve the year to come or gathering low-rent celebs to provide sound bites covering any topic that can have a top 100 and involve TV clips. Anal types prefer to catalogue the experiences of the year, and being a shut-in fond of lists I'm providing my very own top films of 2011 to add to the millions of screen inches clogging the Internet.

This year I have seen 49 films at the cinema. This sounds a lot but based on previous years it's a bit low, less than one a week after all. Despite having a Cineworld pass my cinema visiting is in the decline - these days most cinema tickets in London are £10+ so if you want to see films at least once a week and not spend over £500 a year then Cineworld is your only option at just over £215 a year for a West End pass.
Even taking into account the Trocadero and Haymarket cinemas with about 10 screens between them, there are often a number of decent releases that aren't on in the chain, but that's not the reason I finally cancelled the subscription. In one recent screening a mouse or rat was fighting it's way into and/or out of a plastic bag, and then two films later they forgot to turn the lights down for the first five minutes of the film. Not something mentioned when they wheeled out Ray Winstone to growl on about how he loves going to the cinema for the experience. Still, shoddy cinema going experiences can't stop good films being good. Let's celebrate!

Cedar Rapids

Director Miguel Arteta had somewhat of a cult hit with 2000's Chuck and Buck, Jennifer Aniston vehicle The Good Girl is reportedly decent but his last, Youth in Revolt, wasn't an out and out success. Cedar Rapids however is an excellent entry into the comedy ranks, managing to be a warm and funny high school comedy that happens to be about middle aged insurance salesman at a hotel conference. The action is fairly predictable in a good way, recognised character types and situations are turned on their heads in this setting and renewed with the help of a snappy script and some great turns by the extended cast, John C. Reilly unsurprisingly brilliant as an obnoxious lout on the insurance scene, and Anne Heche shining with a great nose for comedy. Cedar Rapids, like Mamet's State and Main, brings about the feeling of a middle America that isn't all small town hicks suspiciously threatening rich yuppie kids but still has bite behind its warmth.

The Fighter

I've liked David O. Russell since his debut Spanking the Monkey, and Three Kings and I Heart Huckabees showed that he had a wider range than skewed family indie dramas, but I didn't expect something as fully formed as the Fighter to emerge.
Whilst a large part of it's success is down to Whalberg and Bale fully inhabiting their characters in this true-life tale of a boxer held back by his junky brother, Russell vividly recreates the world of Lowell, Massachusetts in the 1980s as Dicky Ecklund is followed around by an HBO TV crew while he trains his brother Micky Ward and flakes out on crack.
Boxing films are generally hard to ruin, naturally focusing tightly on a few characters with close knit ties and incorporating cinematic action sequences. The Fighter is no different, instead managing to spend more time on the familial problems of its leads without getting that movie of the week feeling. The whole cast, from Bale and Whalberg in their physically demanding roles, through Amy Adams and the cast playing Micky and Dicky's extended family, feel like real people and make this film more like the documentary within it rather than a dramatisation of the events years later. A career high for all involved.

Black Swan

Aranofsky has always been great, whether financially successful or not, and Black Swan continues an unbroken run of hits that make self destruction compelling viewing.
Natalie Portman plays Nina Sayers in a role that reminded me of Haneke's Piano Teacher - a professional artist still living with and stifled by her mother in adulthood. Nina (ballerina) is terrified at her abilities potentially lacking and her chance at the starring role in Swan Lake being ruined. Star director Thomas (Vincent Cassel) thinks her perfect as the swan princess but not passionate enough to play the Black Swan, and trains her hard to break through.
New York in winter is a large part of the film in much the same way as it was in Pi, the bleak hues in the urban settings emphasising the claustrophobia felt by Nina in a city bursting with so many millions as she starts to lose her grip on reality.
Aranofksy seems to be the master of psychological breakdown and at times Black Swan strays into the body horror of early Cronenberg. Urban alienation at its best.

13 Assassins

I've often written of Takashi Miike as one of my favourite directors, but he's rarely been what you could call mainstream. Miike's (latest) addition to latter day Japanese period action/drama films is still very much a niche but a much wider niche than some of his well over 70 films fall into.
A dodgy lord threatens the future of 1840s Japan itself with his psychotic, dishonourable behaviour, and his subjects conspire against him, building a squad of 13 samurai to work together and assassinate the insane warlord. There are a number of scenes of skewed Miike humour involving death and disfigurement, and po-faced discussions between the stoic samurai, but his assassins are purely heroic, cutting swathes through the sadist's henchmen.
The ending sequence is a massive set-piece involving a booby trapped village that impresses due to its scale, and despite the actors struggling to stand out in such a large primary cast Yusuke Iseya manages to impress as the hunter Kiga who professes immense strength and endurance despite a childish, monkey-ish demeanour, smashing the bad guys with blunt instruments.

The Guard

John Michael McDonagh's (brother of In Bruge's Martin McDonagh) debut is a big surprise, hugely enjoyable and darkly comic with a brilliant script brought to life by Brendan Gleeson.
The plot: A dodgy Irish Garda in the West of Ireland gets involved in an FBI investigation into drug smuggling.
Whilst this setting has endless potential to get bogged down in the swamp of stereotype, the sensibility of biting wit and cheeky knowingness keeps the film fresh at every turn.
The supporting cast is excellent, with Liam Cunningham and Mark Strong providing some memorable scenes, along with Don Cheadle as Gleeson's unlikely buddy in a loose buddy cop scenario. Oh, and there are beautiful, bleak landscapes for the breaks in between actors firing off witticisms at each other.

The Tree Of Life

I often find myself thinking that Terrence Malick is an overly ponderous director, feted by those who are afraid of not 'getting' something that's supposedly great and heaping unwarranted praise on overblown fluff. Then I remember watching Badlands for the first time, and being slowly and quietly blown away.
Tree of Life is almost purposely obtuse, a non-linear narrative mainly featuring segments of a 1950s American family's life, including Jessica Chastain and Brad Pitt as mother and father of two young boys. There is heavy use of voice-over and numerous shots of the boys in nature, playing in the yard or in woods and streams. There is also a sequence which sees the creation of he universe, of the earth and of dinosaurs on our young planet.
I can't pretend to have fully understood the whole film, its meditations on existence as a choice between grace and nature embodied in the parents, but as dense as it is Tree of Life will reward repeat viewing.

Kill List

This film was another of 2011's crop that seemingly came out of nowhere. In part a study of a family strained by the livelihoods of the parents - father Jay (Nail Maskell) is an ex-soldier turned hitman and still haunted by a previous job gone wrong, mother Shel (MyAnna Buring) is also ex-forces and the pair now try and live a normal family life with their son in the suburbs. To make some more cash Jay's partner Gal (Michael Smiley) comes calling with a job offer. The film then turns into a dark thriller as Jay finds himself losing control when taking out the men on their list, Gal trying in vain to keep their jobs clean as Jay takes it personally with some sickening violence.
For the third act the film goes haywire, descending into pagan horror and madness.
It's unlikely you'll have seen anything quite like it.

Animal Kingdom

Writer-director Ben Michod's directorial debut is startling in its power and authenticity.
The story of a 17 year old boy having to deal with his criminal family after his mum dies of an overdose and he moves in with his gran and uncles, Animal Kingdom manages to be quiet and poetic in its slow build of tension as the return of one particular sociopathic uncle starts to unravel the family.
James Frecheville impresses as 17 year old J, presenting a tall, non-communicative teen, blank faced and further introverted when faced with his family troubles, but it's Ben Mendelsohn who stands out as eldest uncle Pope, quietly scary despite his age and size compared to the other men.
One of the things that stays with me is the lighting, cinematographer Adam Arkapaw doing for Melbourne what Brick did for Los Angeles and providing an underlying mood for the film as J's life crumbles. Guy Pearce and his moustache show up in a key role as the policeman trying to take down the family using J, but the film doesn't need star cameos to shine.
In a word: sublime.

Insidious

Director James Wan kicked off the Saw quagmire, admittedly with a fairly decent serial killer B movie which probably wasn't aiming to churn out the first production line of gorenography.
Insidious happily takes a different tack, concentrating on fear and chills rather than violence and blood as well as a fair bit of gonzo oddness.
It's a classic haunted house tale with possession, astral projection, ghost hunters and classic empty corners and open doors to heighten tension and is one of the scariest films I've seen in a long time, benefiting from a certain unpredictability aided by one of the children put into a coma early on.
Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne also help to elevate the film from its roots, playing completely straight, distraught at the bumping in the night that follows them from house to house, even the veteran Lin Shaye dials down the gurning that she usually reels out for her many comedy parts.
In terms of recent horror Insidious is up there with Drag Me To Hell, not the classic of the Orphanage but a firm second tier.

Tyrannosaur

Paddy Considine's directorial debut is a blistering examination of anger and pain.
Peter Mullan manages to top an already brilliant career with a performance of honed frustration and rage aimed at himself but directed at anyone in the vicinity, often with tragic results.
An unwanted chance at redemption comes when Peter's Joseph meets Olivia Colman's Hannah, a Christian charity shop worker with serious problems of her own. If Eddie Marsan turns up you've got a high chance of bad times.
Joseph's Midlands council estate setting is pretty bleak, but his character isn't as one note as kitchen-sink drama wannabes might portray, aware of his problems and failings and simply accepting that he's not a nice person, a stark way of dealing with issues that few stories tell without using simplistic binary morals.


Special mentions

Films that didn't quite make my top ten but nevertheless stood out include Melancholia, Don't Be Afraid Of The Dark, Take Shelter, Blue Valentine, Submarine, State Of Emergency and Drive.


Worst film of 2011

David Gordon Green made a startling debut with George Washington in 2000, a visually poetic coming of age tale in run down North Carolina. Whilst his subsequent output hasn't matched that film's grace, his second-to-last, Pineapple Express, was a brilliant homage to 70s stoner comedies and 80s buddy action movies, filtering the present day through the feel of those decades to create something familiar and yet fresh, despite borrowing heavily from the Apatow mould.

My first impressions of his latest film, Your Highness, were good, the trailer making the film seem like an irreverent take on sword and sorcery fables with a bit of modern swearing and stoner and dick jokes thrown in, reuniting James Franco and Danny McBride along with other Apatow regulars in order to swash buckles with knowing winks and foul mouths.
And yet after sitting down to the film proper, I find myself wondering when the comedy would begin. Joke after joke was rolled out to no effect, I could see the workings and what they were trying to do, but it just wasn't funny, not once. I waited in vain for things to pick up, hoping maybe it was just a false start, but it just carried on in the same vein. Maybe halfway through, up to the point when Natalie Portman's character appears, I couldn't take it any more and had to walk, the first and only time I have left a cinema before the film has ended.
Maybe it did turn a corner once Portman appeared, but I can't see it happening. A shame.

Revolver

Revolver

Now that the dust has settled, as it were, it’s strange to see that Revolver is worlds away from the epic disaster that the media world labelled it as on its release back in 2005. With the hit Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels launching not only Guy Ritchie’s career but also a swathe of Brit gangster flicks and dovetailing with the rise of lad’s mag subculture, Ritchie was prime for a backlash.

The first glimpse of Statham has me thinking that his wig is impressive, it’s odd seeing him with hair and it looks relatively natural. A closer look shortly afterward reveals that his moustache doesn’t give off the same vibe.

There are strange little moments, Statham asking “can I go?” like a child sitting in a hospital gown talking to a nurse; shouting his friend’s name after he’s been shot, more like a mantra than in grief or surprise; “smart as a pair of little boy’s shoes”; a nice little moment where three groups have their tensions rising, intercutting between each despite different time frames; a lovely little animated sequence of the film as a heist plays out; Statham hit by a car in slo-mo straight through the windshield, only for the sequence to reverse all while he delivers a voice over about fate and motive; the final talking head segments of psychologists explaining how the only real enemy we have is our own ego.
Sometimes in criticism ‘interesting’ is a dirty word, but that is what Revolver is, and while it might not quite work it is worlds away from the glossy, empty, cockney gangster bollocks that people evidently prefer. The question is, did Guy Ritchie’s ego instigate Revolver or not?

Raindance Festival 2011

Thoughts on the fest:

Whilst the Apollo is plush and it's nice to be able to see things there without selling a kidney, the festival seems a lot more heavily centered on the industry than the London film fest a couple of weeks later, and when I say industry I mean an ocean of droning, braying media types studded with the odd actor, director and producer. It's unusual in a film festival that I feel an urge to flee the screen as soon as the films is over, after all, I've heard my fair share of odd Q&A sessions at the LFF; it's pretty much just an objection to the people in general.

But to the films themselves:

A Thousand Kisses Deep:

Starts slowly and seems to stumble, looking like an ill thought-through indie that should have died in a twilight spot of a TV schedule, it quickly picks up as it centres around the unquiet life of Mia played by Venus and Attack the Block's Jodie Whittaker, dealing with the impact of a man on her life and thanks to a time-travelling lift, trying to fix the problem's of the past.
Skirting past the risk of mawkish whimsy, the film ably lays out the idea that the root of problems aren't always what they first seem and it could be a lot harder to change the outcome of things than you think. Her mistakes are embodied in the slack-eyed, reptilian menace of jazz loser Ludwig played well by Dougray Scott who succeeds in conjuring a man simultaneously charming and vile.
The denouement is satisfyingly unexpected without being an overtly twisty/turny thriller, indeed the whole film is largely confined to the one apartment building and jazz bar and a small set of characters.
The film has secured distribution and it would be worth checking out once its released

An Act of Godfrey

To script a whole film in rhyming couplets is certainly ambitious, and while there's an inevitably twee, 'luvvie' aspect to the proceedings it’s given a little more weight with the backdrop of a range of characters staying at a hotel while a conference on selling strategies goes ahead. A varied and decent cast evidently enjoy mugging along, there’s a convoluted back story which comes together quite well and lots of neat, clever little touches to the script (though maybe not as clever as it thinks it is).

Skinning

It might be a tad unfair, but after This Is England it's hard to watch a film about a boy getting in too deep with some unsavoury nationalist types with any large degree of optimism of it being as good. In this case our protagonist is a quiet maths genius who has made an unwise friend in a stereotypical bomber jacket and bovver boots skinhead, also seemingly something of a maths whizz. As they spend more time together he gets more and more deeply involved, until things turn violent and he ends up leading the neo nazi gang. Meanwhile we also see things from the police perspective, chiefly involving the corruption and bribery involved in the dealings with skinheads, rival gangsters and gypsy Roma.
Apart from references to the 90s Balkan conflict and the ongoing racial tensions, there's little to set this apart from any other tale set in Europe, until the ending sequence which basically suggests that some people are always going to be evil, there's not much we can do about it and they need to be managed. It's a weird conclusion seeing as there's little that's gone before to distinguish this story from so many others (involvement with the far right stems from an estrangement from family, peer pressure from friends, wanting to impress a girl etc.), but despite this point of difference there's nothing new to add here.

Monk3ys

Alarm bells rang at the start when it purported to be a film delivered to the Metropolitan police and various media outlets, such claims to reality fall apart quite quickly when your actors act like actors.
The opening sequence is of people viewed from POV cameras entering a derelict building and finding people in a grim and bloody mess in a dark sealed room, and in retrospect this glimpse into the future is necessary as starting the film chronologically would see a large proportion of the audience walking out early on.
So a trio of film makers set about filming three people locked in a room for 48 hours, each of whom represent a manifestation of the Id, Ego or Superego. The majority of the film follows the three subjects in the room - an introvert, extrovert and a drunk, via wall mounted and hand-held cameras in chronological order, interspersed with sequences filmed from their interviews and the film makers discussing them/the set-up, running through intros etc.
In the room, things go bad as they realise they're not getting out after 48 hours, and the three descend into violence, rape and murder, as you would fully expect would happen, apart from the fact you wouldn’t.
The problem is not the weak idea, but that this is all done in such a cack-handed way that it struggles to hold the attention.

State of Emergency

This is a lot more like a 'regular' film. Mostly linear, with the well worn story of some sort of man made accident resulting in people becoming infected/undead, getting red eyes and rushing about dispensing violence on the unaffected. A small country town, an every man, a small group of survivors holed up in a defensible building, trying radios and TVs for information, being forced to venture out into danger for supplies - there are a lot of elements that have become genre staples over the years, and yet State of Emergency has a quiet confidence to it that places it apart from dozens of also-ran indie zombie efforts.
Concerning itself more with the relationships and thoughts of the survivors, State of Emergency has numerous moments of quiet and calm as they wait out the crisis, and even the infected are calmer here then elsewhere in the genre, mainly seen quietly standing about or slowly wandering in fields, only succumbing to the usual running and snarling once unaffected humans are spotted.
Beautifully shot, there are a number of moments that make use of the mostly rural setting with vivid colouring even at night, though locations are few the film makes the most of what it does have. My pick of the festival.

A hospital gown, open up the back

There are many studies of ex-cinemas, the grand old picture houses of the 30s and 40s of cinema’s heyday, the time of talkies and newsreels before TV came along. While some were converted into more conventional theatres or bingo halls, many of these buildings were lost and the legacy of local cinema with them.

But I don’t intend to talk so broadly about cinemas, rather I’m focusing on the changes that are happening to this very day.

I first started going to see films regularly when I was around 16 or so. It coincided with a newfound independence and the ability to legally back up my desire to see ‘15’s.
I had taken a year out of school after a bad start at my sixth form, and in the interim before I started my A-levels at a college, I took the opportunity to drink in as much cinema as terrestrial TV could offer.
All day long I would watch films on TV or from videos recorded when I couldn’t catch them, and I took in everything from 40s screwball classics and 50s B pictures to 70s thrillers and 80s blockbusters.

When I started college, I found myself with quite a bit of free time as we only needed to be in college for our lessons, so I made many trips to the Harrow Warner plex to see the latest Hollywood jobs and got the tube central for anything more unusual.
I carried on in this way at University, except unlike college, which I enjoyed, I grew to hate Uni and so would spend an increasing amount of time going to the pictures or collecting videos with my new part-time job’s discount.

Rather than just the films, visiting the cinema itself was part of the experience, and I came to know the differences between cinemas and between screens within the cinemas themselves, making a little mission to visit as many different cinemas as possible, at least in central London.
This aim was a lot more interesting back then, as there were simply more cinemas around. Since the early 90’s I have seen the demise of many a cinema in the West End, some of which I never got the chance to visit.

At some point early in the millennium, Odeon gained ownership of the ABC cinema chain, and began a process of assimilation or destruction.
A number of cinemas, such as Panton Street and Covent Garden survive those times as new Odeon cinemas, but many fell by the wayside.
One most recent loss is the Odeon Wardour Street and ex-ABC Swiss Centre, cunningly located in the building with the tourist-trap clock on the Piccadilly corner of Leicester Square.
Whilst many wouldn’t feel such emotion at the loss of this cinema, owing to the Mezzanine-rivalling ‘front room’ screens, it provided the opportunity to see world cinema and arthouse fare that sometimes weren’t covered elsewhere in London, even with the likes of the ICA, Panton Street and Curzon Soho catering for such tastes.
Despite the relatively small sizes, the screens were still larger than the current monster HD sets and so did at least provide something you couldn’t get at home.
I had managed to see something in each of its four screens before it went, and I have to say I had an affection for the smallest, with the bizarre metal rail between the front row and the screen.

An earlier ABC loss that never made it to Odeon status was the ABC Piccadilly.
Situated on Piccadilly itself, it was opposite the Tower Records/Virgin store and was basically just a small box office at ground level before the descent into the depths were the screens lurked.
The ABC Piccadilly was once a venue for adult movies and in spirit can be seen in the film “An American Werewolf in London”, though that scene was actually based on the Eros cinema that used to be at the site where you’ll now find the Gap shop. It never seemed to lose that seediness, which not only grew from the two screens being literally bisected into four (making for a less than immersive experience) but mainly from the flea bitten state of the place. It has been the only screening that I’ve had to walk out from before the film began because of an unidentifiable but nevertheless rancid odour.
Last time I checked it was still boarded up with the obligatory tourist tat stalls parked outside its doors, long may it rest.

Just down the road from there was the Plaza cinema, a wonderful building with a large lobby and a high ceiling leading to each of the four screens. The Plaza specialised in showing Blockbusters that hadn’t quite completed their run, but had been on release for some weeks, and offered them at budget prices. A sort of grand scale and more expensive Prince Charles cinema, the Plaza provided the opportunity to catch things you may otherwise may have missed, but without the unforgiving scheduling of the PC. Whilst most of the screens were of an average to good quality, the main screen upstairs was beautifully tiered and huge, well worth the asking price.
One day there were flooding problems in the basement and the cinema was closed for refurbishment. It never re-opened, part opening years later as a Tesco Metro and the rest opening later still as the Apollo cinema, a decent cinema itself but amusingly almost the opposite of the Plaza, a luxury cinema for top-dollar prices.

Another recent loss to arthouse venues wasn’t that far from Odeon Wardour Street. The Metro Cinema, which changed names to the Other Cinema a couple of years before its demise, was a lovely little two screen venue which specialised in foreign and indie releases.
Found down the side of the Trocadero on Rupert Street, it had an old-time ‘Ed’s Diner’ feeling to it and it seemed like the only reason it hadn’t been multiplexed to death is due to it being hidden out of sight.
Today it has become a front for yet another theatre ticket box office catering to our theatre-greedy tourist community.

Still more losses are even more obscure – the Odeon Haymarket was a few minutes from the now Cineworld Haymarket but closed not long after I was regularly cinemagoing so I never visited it; likewise an indie cinema of which I have forgotten the name on St. Martin’s Lane, toward Trafalgar Square and opposite from the Duke of York’s Theatre.
I could swear that there used to be a cinema called “The Phoenix” down the side of the Phoenix theatre, off Charing Cross Road, and my memory of a picture house that once stood on Oxford St. at the Tottenham Court Road end is hazier still.

Despite the increasing success of box offices in recent years, I can’t help fear for my cinemas, and I’ve never taken for granted that I have so much choice – I can’t comprehend of what it would be like to live somewhere where you maybe have a choice of a two-screen indie and a multiplex at most, three screens of which are taken up showing the latest blockbuster on rotation.
Whilst I do appreciate some of the positives of the multiplex chains – the usually large screens and generously terraced seating - it has to be said that sometimes the audience just doesn’t actually give as much of a fuck about seeing a film as they do in the West End. Even as you venture out of the centre, to the Odeon Tottenham Court Road or Marble Arch cinemas, the audience become that bit more irritating that much more frequently, where the act of film-going is seen as a social event instead of what it is – sitting in a dark room with strangers and watching a fucking film.

I would go on to discuss the cinemas that remain today, but that is for another time.

Here’s a picture found at this link Golders Green cinema. It closed after screening Eyes Wide Shut, the only cinema within walking distance. Bastards.


Follow these links to find information on London’s lost cinemas, and some pictures here

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