Hit Me With Your Best Shot: Cinematic Creatures

This post is a contribution to the Hit Me With Your Best Shot series at The Film Experience.

"I don't care what you do. Paul and I are going to Hollywood. They're desperately keen to sign us up. We're going to be film stars."

The girls of Heavenly Creatures lose themselves in fantasies of murder, of emigration, and of magical castles, but, particularly because this series focuses on cinematography, it's the cinematic inflection to it all that really sparked my interest.

"Absolutely not! Ugh, Orson Welles! The most hideous man alive!"

Juliet (Kate Winslet) and Pauline's (Melanie Lynskey) deification of various male filmstars is fascinating on various levels, not least in how it plays with the film's navigation of the girls' sexual desires and fantasies. What particularly struck me about this moment, though, was the position of power within their friendship - Pauline is constantly looking with worshipping eyes at Juliet, evidently deifying her friend more than any of the stars in the photos. When Pauline finally suggests her own heterosexual desire, Juliet - seemingly unaware, and certainly uninterested, in Pauline's feelings towards her at this point - isn't just disapproving, she's horrified.

Orson is easily thrown away and quickly consumed by the waterfall. Crucially, the ease and cruelty of this action by Juliet suggests to Pauline that people who are not approved of, or who disrupt their lives, can be simply, cleanly disposed of.

Naturally, it turns out Orson isn't that easy to get rid of.

"I never have never in my life seen anything in the same category of hideousness... 
but I adore him!"

Actor Jean Guérin, as Orson Welles, is inserted into scenes from The Third Man, alongside Joseph Cotten and Trevor Howard, so that when he haunts the girls on their trip home from the theatre, the connection is easy to make. In a perverse way, folding into the domination of the girls' fantasy worlds, Welles acts as a foreshadowing of Pauline's mother - showing the girls how killing someone does not mean you can so easily escape them.

Picking up where he fell off the waterfall, Orson continues interjecting into the power Juliet holds over Pauline. Pauline's voiceover, taken directly from her real diaries, demonstrates her heterosexual desire peeking through the repression she has undertaken at Juliet's distaste, and further, assuming the cinematic realisation of fantasies are attributed to Pauline, this subordination to Juliet bleeds over here. Exhausted, delirious from the fright and thrill that Orson's chase gave them, Pauline kisses Juliet - but then she changes into Orson, and creates my favourite image of the film.

So many of the film's themes seem to come together in this one peculiar image. Juliet's immersion in worlds of imagination. The increasingly present blue chill of the image, making Juliet seem the more unreal of the pair. Sexuality as distorted by cinema's presentation of movie stars. The erotic element of death. The scene, like the film, treads a careful line between hilarity and morbidity, encapsulating both the pleasures and dangers of losing yourself inside invented worlds.

Two runner-up shots, presented without comment:

Behold, Your New King

Alright, so not really. And although I may have predicted The Reader in both Picture and Director, where it scored (not so) surprise nods, I'm certainly not happy about it. The Dark Knight may have been ridiculously overhyped and it's not as good as a lot of people would have you believe, but it's still far superior to 'that Holocaust movie' (you know that's how it's going to be described). I would pass judgment on the other nominees there- I get the impression it's hardly a stellar line-up- but in fact The Reader is the only one of the Best Pictures nominees I have so far seen. (Slumdog is tomorrow.)

I am obviously also extremely irritated by the Sally Hawkins snub. It's not as though they didn't respond to the film- Mike Leigh got a nod in Original Screenplay. Which, when you think about Mike Leigh films, is a bit silly, because they're largely improvised and surely more down to his direction and the acting. But oh well. It's just one thing we'll have to live with. Again, my viewing in this category is limited- only Jolie, who shouldn't be there, and Winslet, who I'd swap for Sally in a heartbeat. Sorry, Kate, but you've done so much better. (At least they put her in the right category, though. Fight the category fraud, AMPAS!)

In other news, pleased Dev Patel was passed over (he was always my least favourite on Skins); I totally ballsed up the Original Screenplay category but the results are certainly interesting; pleased for Melissa Leo (I'm taking in Frozen River tonight), if just because it's nice that an early-release and non-famous actress got in; taken off-guard by the double-appearance of Wanted, but not in a bad way; and totally befuddled by Original Song, both because there were only three and because the Boss was conspicuously absent.

Oh, and my percentage was 68% (69 out of 99). That's up from last year but still worse than the year before.

Der Goldene Mann

There's been a tendency in recent German cinema- or, at least, the recent German cinema that is deigned good enough to be internationally distributed- to look back and reexamine the country's troubled past century. Obviously this primarily focuses on the Second World War- it sticks out like a sore thumb, dontchaknow?- and I can't help wondering if this is because the filmmakers are now, probably, at least two generations removed from those who were directly affected by the war. We're surely getting to the stage now where direct connections to the war in families are lost before this new generation of filmmakers was born- the war is, slowly, becoming consigned to history. And, if there's one thing we know the Academy loves, it's history.

The Reader- which, I hasten to add, is not a German film but an American-British co-production, although it heavily features many German actors- is indeed all about a generation that were not directly involved in the war. Central character Michael Berg (David Kross/Ralph Fiennes) is part of the first post-war generation- born, it would seem, during the war, but living in a time where the loss smarts so keenly on the older generation that he himself remains freewheeling and content. It's only as he grows up, having had an affair with a reticent but enigmatic older woman (Kate Winslet), that he becomes engrossed in the politics and morals of his country's past. Particularly when his former lover appears as a defendant in a War Crimes trial.

Stephen Daldry's third film- following British ballet fairy-tale Billy Elliot and the elaborate, confounding The Hours- clearly wants to dig deep into the moral maze that is the war and the spectral shadows it cast, but, to twist a phrase, it's all talk and the wrong kind of action. For a film that is fraught early-on with nudity and intimate sexual happenings, The Reader is remarkably cold- even these scenes are presented with almost clinical precision, not the nervous anticipation that should surely be accompanying young Michael's first sexual encounters (for the film is undeniably aligned with him- Winslet's Hanna remains a distant mystery). Expecting these films to solve the moral dilemmas is surely ridiculous- if we could, then such crimes would become thinkable, the one thing they are surely not- but The Reader offers up stultifying classroom discussions and expects them to be readily applied to its simplistic offerings up in the courtroom. I've heard it said, predictably enough, that The Reader isn't about the Holocaust, and while it is obviously a personal story of being forever haunted by a lost love and a betrayal, to negate the aspects that refracting that story through such a damaging period such as the war is basically insulting. Any deftness the film manages vanishes completely towards the end, as Hanna is miraculously excused from her wrongdoing with an ill-concieved (or at least ill-portrayed) plot point, and Fiennes' older Michael connects past and future in a painfully rendered moment with his daughter (Hannah Herzsprung). The Reader feels distant and cool about something that surely deserves so much more life and passionate inspection. C

Likely bound for a Best Foreign Language Film nomination in just under a week is The Baader Meinhof Complex, which, despite no explicit statements to highlight this, is the story of a group of people whose paths in life are born from the collective guilt The Reader so bluntly explores. Mostly students- with the glaring exception of the Meinhof of the title, Ulrike (The Lives of Others' Martina Gedeck)- the Red Army Faction protest and bomb against the political forces they see as fascism, particularly the support of the American war in Vietnam. Parents are, with the exception on an early scene that mirrors the moment Michael has with his family in The Reader, neither mentioned or seen, but their spectre is hanging over the new generation: these are people who either feel guilty for what their parents did, or else still harbour anger against those who did things to their parents.

The film, though, has within itself various generations- as the founders flounder in prison, a second generation rises. By the time we get deep into this second lot's activities, it feels like an entire film has passed just with our following the now-enprisoned originals. While the obvious effect of our emphasized unfamiliarity with this new generation of militants is to telegraph the idea that this is a neverending, spiralling circle that will spin further and further away from the very point of the faction's point, it is inescapability deadly for a film to spend at least an hour (time lost all meaning, I'm afraid to say) with a bunch of people we don't know and therefore can't care about. Of course, we never cared all that much about the founding members themselves, and when they prove themselves to be even more distancing and fragmented as they crumble within prison walls, the problem doubles, because the film decides to abandon the philosophizing and politics (excepting occasional check-ins with Bruno Ganz, saddled, as in The Reader, with telling us Everything We Need To Know) and hang its forward thrust on the tragic unwinding of their lives. This split is, again, between words and actions: too consumed with explosions and naughty sexual inserts and flashes of documentary footage in its first half, the film then expects us to care when it switches to talk about the increasingly muddled political angle of the group, and worse, their personal struggles. At the point of one tragic event, I suddenly got the feeling that the film was only progressing in this manner because history told it to: it had lost any interest in itself. And an audience can hardly expect to care about a film that's given up on itself halfway through. C

The Baader Meinhof Complex isn't likely to win the Oscar, even if it is nominated- Waltz with Bashir is, you feel, too strong for that- but another film mining Germany history proved to be last year's victor (albeit in the conspicuous absence of both Persepolis and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days). The Counterfeiters is actually an Austrian production, and that factoid certainly helps account for the strangely nostalgic attitude the film holds towards what it's depicting. That isn't as bad it might be- although set in a concentration camp towards the end of WWII, this is a camp, as the prisoners note, with soft beds and blankets, a light and polished canteen, and a row of shining ceramic sinks. Why would prisoners get such cushy treatment, you ask? Well, these are prisoners with skills- skills, that is, of counterfeiting. Money, passports- it's what Himmler wants and it's what Himmler will get.

You can kind of see why The Counterfeiters attracted Oscar attention- it's professionally, slightly too slickly done, deals with a dark historical time without really dealing with it and it balances the drama with a touch of humour and that rather odd dash of nostalgic I mentioned (note the bluesy harmonica music. A weirdly incongruous decision.). Thing is, it's a perfectly pleasant film, but despite finishing as a bizarre cross between Schindler's List and Ocean's Eleven, it doesn't leave you with much to say about it. Like The Reader, you feel as though it should treat such a delicate subject with a bit more... well, delicacy. Moral debates exist through the central character (Karl Markovics) and his clash with Burger (August Diehl), the latter of whom continually sabotages the countfeiting line's efforts to succeed, but they feel gratuitous and ring hollow. Sure, it's an extraordinary story, but overload something with cliches and it'll quickly become rote. C

These films- not, as noted, all German productions- all display a strange, and dispiriting tendency- they have the impetus to delve head on into Germany's complex, difficult past, but peter out remarkably quickly, either because they are unsure about what they want to be saying, or simply because they have nothing left to say. Here's hoping that future films mining Germany's past century have the courage to tackle them with the passion and sustaining introspection that it necessitates.

The Fox and the Child (Jacquet, 2008)

Before The Fox and the Child began, me and the five other people in the theatre were forced to watch several trailers for what looked like more of those crass, celebrity-populated animated movies. Through this, it’s clear at what market they’re trying (and evidently failing, says the size of the audience) to catch with this movie. But while it is indeed true that The Fox and the Child is, at least in its British incarnation, a movie for children, there’s little of the grossness or hollowness of the flagging trend of the aforementioned animations. By no means perfect, The Fox and the Child is a type of kid’s entertainment that doesn‘t seem to exist anymore- it’s gentle without being too naïve, slow without being sluggish, and moral without being patronising. Technically, there are problems to pick out- but for children, this seems almost a necessary entertainment, a fairytale that ends with an important life lesson, and an uncommon connection to the reality of the natural world of today.

The film is self-evidently not British, although with the gentle (and, dare I admit it, occasionally irritatingly precious) narration of Kate Winslet as the grown version of the girl (Bertille Noel-Bruneau) who is the only human on-screen for the entirety of the film, you could be forgiven for thinking so. But I don’t believe we have many bears in this country; and there’s also the rather terrible dubbing of the girl herself, who clearly isn’t saying what we’re being told she is. These are minor nitpicks, though, as are the occasional editing missteps (the most prominent being the sudden growth of a ladder, and then the difference between the night and morning the girl spends in the forest), and to dwell on them would be churlish. What is perhaps more problematic is the question of how the filmmakers achieved some of the footage we’re shown. One particular scene of the fox being chased by what I think was a bobcat is shown in such close, intimate detail that you have to assume it was constructed, and I suppose, if we don’t doubt any ethics here (which would surely be unfair), that the fact that I’m questioning it at all is testament to the superb assembly of such a moment. Undoubtedly the camerawork, at least when dealing with the animals, is outstanding- we get not only beautiful, varied shots of the fox(es), but of all sorts of animals from badgers to wolves to hedgehogs. Maybe preaching that wild animals cannot, and should not, be tamed, while using tamed animals to portray this is hypocritical, but I’m not an ethics committee and I can only assume that some of the French words that rose before me at the end told me that no animals had been harmed in the making.

Luc Jacquet, the director of 2005’s favourite documentary March of the Penguins, reportedly took the inspiration from a real-life story, and sometimes the story structure does feel appropriately rugged in its construction. That said, Jacquet seems to be doing everything he can do set it all up as a fairytale, since the girl seems, for most of the film, to be the only one in existence, and even though there are occasional flirtations with the grim reality of the wild world (poachers), for the most part it’s a bizarre love story between the girl and the fox- apt enough, given the title. And as such, it works. As I said, it’s not naïve about what happens to the girl who unwisely becomes obsessed with a wild animal, but nor is it entirely unromantic. Wildlife is beautiful, Jacquet is saying, but to be approached with caution. B-

Victim's Gold Stars: The Worsts

Yes, 2007 is over. Technically, if you're going by the Gregorian calendar (and who reading this isn't? Put your hands up...), it ended three months ago, but everyone knows that the movie year, especially when combined with British release dates and my bizarre need to go by American release dates, that 2007 doesn't end until, at the earliest, mid-March. But now it's April 2nd, I saw The Orphanage and No End in Sight yesterday (oh, More4, I bow to your US-documentary acquisition skills), and I have decided that, with We Own the Night not appearing on DVD until April 28th, that it's time to stop this madness. Yes, in short, my awards begin now.

Now, last year, I begun with an Over- and Under-Appreciated post, but I'm leaving that this year- the most under-appreciated movie of the year will get coverage enough, believe me- and instead starting with a modicum of fun: the Worsts. All in fun, and remember- I really had to stretch to fill out the Worst Actress category. Mirroring how painful it was to pare down the Best Actress category to a paltry five. But we'll get to that later.

WORST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Orlando Bloom, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End
I think Orlando is really a poet. And this is his ode to a wet-blanket.

Robert De Niro, Stardust
Alright, so the script hardly invites a good performance, but god, it's horrible watching someone who used to be so good be so consistently terrible nowadays. I had to watch his scenes through my fingers.

Clive Owen, Elizabeth: The Golden Age
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...

Randy Quaid, Goya's Ghosts
Are you done being verbose and over-ripe yet?

Jon Turturro, Transformers
Any movie where Jon Turturro turns up is immediately 50% worse.

WORST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Saffrow Burrows, Reign Over Me
I doubt anyone could make wanting to fellatio Adam Sandler believable, but she's bug-eyed and skittishly irritating at the same time, so she never had a chance.

Mamie Gummer, Evening
She's no Meryl Streep, that's for sure.

Natasha Richardson, Evening
The most vacant, useless, listless and irritating performance in a cast chock-full of them.

Julia Roberts, Charlie Wilson's War
All I could think while she stood there delivering those idiotic lines in the weirdest Texan accent was that she didn't fit into her dress properly. Seriously. Her bust had major overhang.

Susan Sarandon, Enchanted
I love Susan. I do. But hammy is too weak a word to describe this.

As last year, here's a little break: five diamonds in the rough.

BEST PERFORMANCE IN A BAD MOVIE

Gillian Anderson, Straightheads
Empathic, rich, delicate characterization in a movie that only wants her to shove a rifle up someone's arse.

Steve Buscemi & Sienna Miller, Interview
These two virtuosic explorations of unpredictable characters provide interest for most of this movie, forming a fascinating duet (someone's literally) and navigating wild mood swings with pinpoint precision.

Tracie Thoms, Death Proof
God knows, I could've watched her spit out that Tarantino dialogue all day; she does it with such relish and vehement enunciation.

Kate Winslet, Romance & Cigarettes
Another vibrant characterization in a movie that was pale and listless; Winslet puts on a fierce Northern accent and stomps through this movie like the fruitful tart she's playing.

WORST ACTOR

Javier Bardem, Goya's Ghosts
I've already explained this: "it's like he's trying to do a Spanish accent, even though he's already got one".

Johnny Depp, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End
Unfortunately multiplication of an actor does not improve the quality of said actor's performance. In fact, it seems to be a reverse equation.

Danny Dyer, Straightheads
Look, just stop talking, okay? Please. Just stop.

Tom Hanks, Charlie Wilson's War
Oh, Tom. You're just not good enough any more.

Anthony Hopkins, Fracture
I'll always hate you, Anthony. But this just took it to an unknowable level of contempt. You're not called Hannibal Lecter in this movie, okay? And if you say you killed your wife, who are we to argue? In a sane world, this movie would've lasted five minutes. Or, rather, never existed at all, because Embeth Davidtz would never marry you, Anthony.

WORST ACTRESS

Emmanuelle Beart, The Witnesses
Remember: stretching. But there was something incredibly unsettling about her performance in this film, all 'kooky' and faux-hip.

Cate Blanchett, Elizabeth: The Golden Age
Alright, so the way she chews on her dialogue before yelling it passionately kinda gets me ("I too can command the wind sir!"), but that's also the reason why this film fails so miserably, so you're not going to get away with it, Cate. (Plus, I have to have one Oscar nominee on these lists somewhere, and Jennifer Hudson wasn't in a film last year. Kidding. I'm kidding!)

Claire Danes, Evening
Wake me up when she can act again.

Megan Fox, Transformers
Alright, so she's only meant to be hot, and I'm okay with that. But there are other hot young actresses who can act, so why not hire one of them? Shia deserves better than this.

Evan Rachel Wood, Across the Universe
This is basically the polar opposite of her performance in thirteen: never have I seen a less enthusiatic protestor. And she delivers her lines like some malfunctioning kind of robot. And she can't sing.

WORST PICTURE

5. The Brave One
Unbelievably stupid, reductive and ridiculous, and that's before you get to the ending.

4. The Kite Runner
I've said it before: "the more I reflect on it, the more I detest it's backward simplicity, its cliched arcs, its flat visual sense, and the fact that it treats such a hot-button subject with such blunt tactlessness that it is, actually, quite offensive."

3. Evening
How you manage to make so boring, listless and contrived a film with this many talents on board (and make most of them seem so terrible, too) is beyond my comprehension.

2. Straightheads
Horrible, horrible revenge fantasy where the man is an impotent coward and the woman a hero for shoving a rifle up someone's arse.

1. Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait
I know no one saw this but me, but my god, this is what gives art cinema a bad name. Watching someone sweat, spit and occasionally kick a ball (usually off camera) is not interesting. No, not even when you input a montage of things that we happening around the world at the same time.

Coming next: I kick off the Gold Stars proper with the first in my top ten countdown, followed by awards for best visual effects, and best make-up.

Scene Sunday: Sense & Sensibility

It's the start of a new, and hopefully longlasting, series here at Victim of the Time. This time, in keeping with my newly analytical mindset for this blog (I've never been too great at the celebrity news or the humour stuff, as you may have noticed), I'll be taking a look at a single scene from a movie each Sunday- a newly released movie (on DVD, natch), one I've just discovered from the archives or just a favourite that's been on my mind. Let me know whether the post is interesting or if you think the whole idea is total tosh- I just want to know if people are reading!

It's of that last variety that today's introductory scene comes from. The BBC recently screened a new, Andrew Davies-penned version of Jane Austen's Sense & Sensibility, but, good as it was, I couldn't help remembering Ang Lee and Emma Thompson's 1995 feature film version of the same story. So I dug it out.

Now, you all know- or you should- how big a fan of Kate Winslet I am. While watching the new version of Sense and Sensibility, it came to the scene where Marianne's illusions concerning Willoughby are shattered- and immediately the same scene from the '95 version shot into my head. I may be alone here, but there is one line from the '95 version of the scene that sticks in my head. I know not whether it comes from the book or not, not having read it, but Davies wisely omits it from the new version. It is Winslet's delivery of the line- which I'll reveal as we go through the scene- that made it stick in my head, repeating itself like a broken record until I actually sat down to watch it. But enough chatter. Let's take a closer look.

Marianne Dashwood (Kate Winslet) has just recieved a letter from the object of her wilful heart, John Willoughby (Greg Wise). Excited, she exits the dinner-table to read it in her room. But her sister Elinor (Emma Thompson) knows something is wrong, and, after a rather cutting aside to her own love rival, Lucy Steele (Imogen Stubbs), goes after her sister.

Cut to Marianne's white, frozen face staring blankly at the letter, clasped loosely in her hand. On Elinor's arrival in the room, she begins to read.

Winslet has Marianne read Willoughby's cold, dismissive words in an empty, hollow voice, never letting it break as if in heartbreak- Marianne does not even seem to be in shock, more a detached emotionless state, her blood not having reached her heart yet, instead in some kind of empty, listless chamber. Behind her, Thompson's Elinor looks, listens and her breath catches, tensing then shoulder slumping in realization.

Finished, Marianne smoothly stands and walks to her bed, and Elinor follows, along with cinematographer Michael Coulter in a short, fluid tracking shot. The scene, for all its focus on Marianne, clearly makes it stand with the more pragmatic Elinor.

The movement seems to have jolted Marianne's heart, for Winslet's face moves from cool passivitity to a slow, heaving glumness, eyes staring downwards in some kind of mixture of shock and shame. Even now, before her brain seems to know, her body realizes her own mistake, her head bowed. Elinor, scrambling for the silver lining, stands behind her sister and grasps the bed-post, closing in on her sister as best she can.
"Oh, Marianne. Dearest... it is best to know what his intentions are at once. Think of what you would have felt if your engagement had carried on for months and months before he chose to put an end to it."

Quick as a flash, Marianne replies with an almost scornful,
"We are not engaged."

"But you... you wrote to him, I thought then he must have left you with some kind of understanding..."

"No. He is not so unworthy as you think him."
Marianne may have been swept coldly aside by Willoughby but Winslet makes it clear with the low-key anger she uses to undercut Marianne's reply: she loves him, and he did no wrong.

"'Not so unworthy...'", Elinor echoes in disbelief... the camera once again moves with her as she swiftly skirts the corner of the bed and sits across from her sister, forcefully grabbing her arms.

"Did he tell you that he loved you?"
Thompson's eyes go wide, forcing Marianne to look at Elinor and tell her the truth.

"Yes..." Marianne replys quickly... then Winslet looks down, and there follows a quivering, shamed, "No. Never absolutely."

The realization shows on Thompson's face; and here comes the line, delivered by Winslet with such quavering shock and resigned realization that has made it stick in my head all these years:

"It was everyday implied but never declared."

"Sometimes I thought it had been, but it never was. He has broken no vow."

But Elinor will not let her sister take all the shame. Clutching ferociously at Willoughby's letter, Thompson waves it desperately, insisting that "He has! He has broken faith with all of us, he made us all believe he loved you."

And Marianne has had enough of defending Willoughby, and even trying to cope. "He did... he did!" she cries, her voice cracking open like a muscle shell, her reddening face unable to hold itself up any more... and Winslet has her face crumple, screwing it up with fierce tears, and her hand moving up in a vain attempt to hold herself together. "He loved me as I loved him!" Marianne wails as her final words, body falling onto the bed in a wrack of sobs.

Winslet spends the remainder of the scene lying on the bed, cries quiet but continually broken, as Mrs Jennings (Elizabeth Spriggs) enters and offers her kind but gossiping words to Elinor. Winslet, indeed, spends her time flat against the bed, her lips formed into some kind of perverse clownish smile, though of course it is no smile at all.

Mrs Jennings leaves the scene with a final note of humour, perhaps telegraphing further how that this, finally, is Marianne's 'punishment' for being so wilful, open and impulsive. "Does she care for olives?" Mrs Jennings asks caringly, prompting an amusingly comic reaction of bemused bewilderment from Thompson; eventually Elinor replies "I cannot tell you", and we leave Marianne to her tears as the new scene has her problems airily criticized by her acidic sister-in-law and her brother.

Looking Ahead: My Ten Most Anticipated of 2008

My most anticipated from last year didn't exactly turn out so well, but that's the fascinating thing about anticipation: things you have little interest in can turn out to be superb, and things you just can't wait for more often than not let you down. And then of course there's all the things that just aren't on the radar yet. Here's to looking back at the beginning of 2009 (oh, my) and seeing just how odd my anticipations were.

This list does not contain 2007 US releases that UK is still to get; for reasons I now don't understand but am bidden by anal-retentive personality to abide by, my movie year is governed by America and not Britain, which means you can look forward to this year's Gold Stars from mid-March (my month away from uni). So, while I may be whizzing round the room in excitement over Juno and There Will Be Blood, they will not be found within.

Runner-ups: The Changeling, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Dark Knight,Genova, How to Lose Friends & Alienate People, Stop Loss, Sunshine Clearing, The Young Victoria

10. The Brothers Bloom
dir. Rian Johnson
cast: Rachel Weisz, Adrien Brody, Mark Ruffalo, Rinko Kikuchi, Robbie Coltrane, Nora Zehetner
I was the rare non-fan of Johnson's debut Brick, but this con movie just looks cool- and the cast (barring Brody, my nemesis) looks fantastic. I get a sort of screwball vibe from it, and there just isn't enough screwball these days. Johnson's done noir- can he tackle another classic Hollywood genre?

9. Australia
dir. Baz Luhrmann
cast: Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, David Wenham, Essie Davis, Bryan Brown, David Gulpilil
Baz Luhrmann's long-awaited Australian epic (I'm assuming) sounds, looks and feels like a potential masterpiece, some kind of defining movie for both it's country and it's time... if it's done right. It seems to be an epic, a war movie and a western all rolled into one. And how interesting is it to cast Nicole Kidman in an Australian movie called Australia and have her play an Englishwoman?

8. The International
dir. Tom Tykwer
cast: Clive Owen, Naomi Watts, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Ulrich Thomsen
A simple equation: Tom Tykwer + Brothers' Ulrich Thomsen x Naomi Watts = me interested in movie.

7. The Reader
dir. Stephen Daldry
cast: Kate Winslet, Ralph Fiennes, Bruno Ganz, Karoline Herfurth, Linda Bassett
The switcheroo of Nicole Kidman for Kate Winslet made this jump up onto the top ten, and if that doesn't tell you how frequently I kneel at the altar of the Winslet nothing will. I still have reservations about the story and the accent, but I watched A Christmas Carol for Kate so I'm bloody well going to watch this. (Plus, Perfume's silent nose-filler Herfurth is in it!)

6. Blindness
dir. Fernando Meirelles
cast: Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Gael Garcia Bernal, Danny Glover, Sandra Oh
A fascinating plot based on a novel by a Nobel Prize winner, three superb leads and a director who's already proved he knows his way around a camera. This is already being touted as an Oscar contender, and, though it sounds a little off their track, hopefully it will be good enough to break down barriers and become a real hit.

5. The Box
dir. Richard Kelly
cast: James Marsden, Cameron Diaz, Frank Langella
Unusually for Kelly, the basic plot sounds alarmingly simple, but the imdb's idea of "true humanity" may hint at a much more complex and difficult film to deal with. This has the potential to be a complete disaster, both artistically and commercially, or some kind of minor masterpiece (I can't see it going mainstream, somehow). Plus, James Marsden!

4. Body of Lies
dir. Ridley Scott
cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Russell Crowe, Carice Van Houten, Michael Gaston
Reasons why I want to see this movie: Carice Van Houten. Carice Van Houten. Carice Van Houten. Carice Van Houten. Carice Van Houten. William Monahan. Carice Van Houten. Carice Van Houten. Leonardo DiCaprio. Carice Van Houten. Carice Van Houten.

Does anyone have a problem with that?

3. Synecdoche, New York
dir. Charlie Kaufman
cast: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Michelle Williams, Catherine Keener, Emily Watson, Samantha Morton, Dianne Wiest, Hope Davis
The name Charlie Kaufman should really be enough by itself. But my god, look at all those ladies. I'd see a film by Paul W.S. Anderson if it starred all of them. Delayed from last year, this will assuredly be as original and unpredictable as Kaufman's previous work, and with him behind the camera as well, it should all add up to a truly unique- and hopefully marvellous- experience.

2. WALL-E
dir. Andrew Stanton
cast: WALL-E, a robot
Pixar may have disappointed me with their last couple of movies, but this looks truly wonderful. Still filming, reports seem to suggest that there's going to be very little dialogue- risky, surely, for what is essentially, at least in the marketer's eyes, a kid's movie? Now that Disney have seen sense and are (apparently) letting Pixar alone to do their own thing, this will hopefully be a return to the studio's glory days of Toy Story. It's certainly the big event of the summer as far as I'm concerned.

1. Revolutionary Road
dir. Sam Mendes
cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Kathy Bates, Michael Shannon
Not only are Jack and Rose reunited, but they brought Molly Brown with them! There are so many questions. Will the chemistry still be there? How will the ten years + have changed the way Kate and Leo interact? How will Kate work with her husband as director? Is the book actually any good? Can this possibly live up to the hype? I have to wait exactly a year from today to find out.

Everyone Wins!

So, it's ten to two in the morning and I've just come through a problematic viewing (DVD + laptop = disaster) of Fatal Attraction (um... oh, my) and I come online to this rather wonderful news:

Winslet expected to replace Kidman in "The Reader"

Now, I know that's Yahoo! but they did cite her publicist so I'm trusting it. And this makes me very excited. For, much as I love Nicole, seeing my dearest Kate in a film I'm really looking forward to (it's in my still-drafting Most Anticipated list) just makes me alight with happiness. Last year was Winslet-free after her rather awful glut of films at the end of 2006 (when the best of your films is The Holiday, you know you're in trouble), so I'm really ready to see her back on-form with both The Reader and the highly anticipated Revolutionary Road. I almost feel like popping in Sense and Sensibility in joyous celebration. But I won't.

They're zombies! Oh, and those others like to take a bite out of your necks...

Dawn of the Dead is, like, terrifying. Seriously. I don't think I've been this scared by a film since I saw Blue Velvet years ago and was constantly shivering from utter terror. There's one particular bit in Dawn of the Dead to do with a pregnancy that was so obviously going to be horrifying but it made me so uncomfortable that I almost fainted. And this was from watching on DVD! The film itself- which is, as I'm sure you're aware, a remake of George A. Romero 1978 sequel (which I haven't seen- I tried once, when it was on tv, but I just wasn't in the mood for gore then) to the terrific Night of the Living Dead- isn't overloaded with gore (though it's still pretty violent), but is more concerned with sustaining an atmosphere, as a group of survivors of the sudden zombie epidemic hide out in a well-protected shopping mall and try to plot a way to escape. The film is remarkably well-cast when you consider what it is- no big names so to speak, but indie-regular Sarah Polley (who directs the soon-to-be-released Away From Her with Julie Christie) headlines, with solid background names including Ving Rhames and Mekhi Phifer astutely playing their purposely surface roles- these aren't people we ever have time or need to get to know, as they don't with each other for the most part. To its credit, Dawn of the Dead never divides itself into set-pieces, never repeats itself, and feels remarkably fresh and modern. Grade: B+

The Holiday, meanwhile, clearly wants to be fresh and modern, what with all its gleaming, expensive and expansive L.A. mod-cons and its cosy, extraordinarily remote English cottages, but all in all it feels rather backward, not just because of its squishy romantic sensibility but because of its antiquated ideas of what British life is like (Cameron Diaz is disturbed by how small Kate Winslet's lovely cottage is- bitch should try living in my house) and how freakin' manipulative it is. Also there's an enormous subplot- I say subplot, but the supposed romance between Kate and Jack Black is hijacked by her friendship with Diaz's elderly screenwriter neighbour Eli Wallach, while Diaz spends all her time snogging the face off Jude Law, because, eww, if the girl isn't a stick and the guy is a tiny bit portly no-one wants to see more than a peck! Anyway, said subplot is all about how Wallach (and thus Winslet) bemoan the kind of movies we have today (the kind Diaz, as a maker of movie trailers, is all about making "look like a hit"), yet all the while director/writer Nancy Meyers is indulging in exactly that! I don't think The Holiday is totally bad, because there are some nice touches in there (Diaz can't stop that familiar trailer voice from overlaying her own predicaments) and the cast are a capable bunch who do their best to paper over the creaky, sentimental gaps, but The Holiday is never truly heart-warming, even in the corny sense, and even though its all so bloody long (2 hours and ten minutes!) I doubt it'll leave much of an impression on anyone at all. Oh, and it hasn't snowed like that in England at Christmas for ages. Grade: C

Oscars 2006: Best Actress

Here it is, the last of my posts on the Oscars' acting categories, and it's my favourite... Best Actress. After this, I'll be returning to my usual eclectic array of posts, which I'm sure you'll all enjoy.

Oscars 2006: Best Actress

5. Kate Winslet as 'Sarah Pierce', Little Children
I've yet to see The Holiday, but, after my frenzy of excitement at having four Kate Winslet movies in the space of three months, I was incredibly disappointed to see that all of them are distressingly worthless. Believe me, I'm just as distressed to see my favourite modern actress all the way at the bottom here. Her turn as alienated housewife Sarah Pierce is far better than her choppy role in All the King's Men, and there's not much wrong with it at all to be honest- it's merely proficient work, demonstrating Winslet's professional and committed work ethic, but the role itself is what's limiting here- like the others, Sarah is essentially destroyed in the awful climax, and there is literally nothing Winslet could have done to prevent it. Only a scene in a book group meeting gives Winslet the chance to shine as bright as she has done before.
Likelihood of win: 2%

4. Meryl Streep as 'Miranda Priestly', The Devil Wears Prada
Streep is on glacial form here, as cold as an Antarctic night, yet bitterly funny too, yet it's hardly one of her best performances. Of course, with Streep there's always an extremely tough curve to grade on, given her multitudinous superb performances, and Miranda Priestly just isn't one of her best roles. I'd happily sit through this film again, and again, if just for superb Emily Blunt, but many of Streep's caustic readings are hilarious too- and it is nice to see a bit of true comedy amongst this otherwise rather serious line-up (Cruz excepted).
Likelihood of win: 2%

3. Helen Mirren as 'Queen Elizabeth II', The Queen
I think, being a Brit, the experience of watching The Queen was rather different for me than the rest of the world, given that this is my monarch in my country presiding over me. The day- or rather, the morning after Diana died is one of my most distinct memories from an otherwise hazy time- I remember waking early on that August morning, turning on the tv and seeing my morning programmes interrupted by the news. Even at the age of nine, I was shocked and saddened. So The Queen, for me, was a fascinating look behind the scenes of a landmark memory, the political scene behind my childhood. And Mirren is, indeed, superb, and I have no qualms with her inevitable Oscar win- I just wasn't blown away by this work, as I was by numbers 1 and 2.
Likelihood of win: 90%

2. Judi Dench as 'Barbara Covett', Notes on a Scandal
I only saw Notes last week, and I think a performance as complex as Dench's needs some time to settle into my head, and so take this placement with a pinch of salt. Dench applies so much to what could have easily been a slim, villainized role- Patrick Marber's script paints with an exceedingly thin brush, and Dench, unlike co-star Cate Blanchett, totally eschews what Marber has given her to create a full, multi-layered character. Barbara does misguided, even cruel things, yet Dench recognises the deep loneliness and pain behind these actions, and every moment is driven by this. She realizes that Barbara is not really attracted to Sheba, but is so lonely she convinces herself of it. Every moment of this performance is filled with rich detail- the judgmental looks at her co-workers, the fiddling with her handbag strap, the movement of her pen. This is the best Dench has been in years.
Likelihood of win: 5%

1. Penelope Cruz as 'Raimunda', Volver
Penelope Cruz has reigned supreme at the top of this list for several months, until of course I finally saw Dench and started to err. But Cruz's performance is superb- her movie-star wattage finally mixed with her native language, allowing her to shine in both senses of the word. Assisted by push-up bras and posterior-padding, Raimunda is a sexpot, sure, but she's also a mother, and she's not really after men, at least consciously. Of course, the moment in Volver that sticks in most people's minds is the scene where Penelope lipsynchs to the title song, and, indeed, that is the moment of this performance that has haunted me the most- I love that, even though it's evident that she is mouthing, Cruz is utterly devoted to the moment, her mouth moving passionately and tears flooding from her eyes. It's a beautiful, perhaps transcendent moment, and the one that epitomizes this superb, unexpected performance.
Likelihood of win: 1%

Maybe their horses would have helped them?

I seem to remember hearing somewhere that All the King's Men was re-edited at the behest of studio heads- that might just be my imagination, but if it's true it would explain a hell of a lot. All the King's Men doesn't make sense, on any level. I mean, for one thing, I don't understand why all these talented actors- Sean Penn, Jude Law, Kate Winslet, Mark Ruffalo, Patricia Clarkson, et al.- signed up after seeing such a verbose and unsubtle script, but on a simpler level I could barely understand what was happening in the film. For one thing, every character excepting Penn and Law is so marginalized and choppy that their storylines never make sense, and the actors just come out looking like amateurs, although I get the feeling that there was perhaps a coherent performance in them all, but it just got cut up by furious studio editors. I assume that the original novel, by Robert Penn Warren, made some kind of linear sense, that it explored its various themes with gravitas and depth, and that it didn't seem to run all its threads into some kind of enormous entangled web. (I also take it that the first film made of the novel, in 1949, did the same, since it's so well regarded.) But this film doesn't make sense at all. I kept drifting off into reveries, remembering all the other films that these actors had been so good in, before realizing that, hey, I wasn't concentrating on the film- but then it just happened again. It doesn't help that Stephen Zallian's writing is so languid, so simultaneously grand and dull, and that is direction is so horrifically unsubtle- yes, Stephen, we heard the chandelier tinkle, we don't need to see it too- that you'd be surprised if the spider under your seat wasn't rolling his eyes. All the King's Men, thanks to some solid period recreation work, isn't really any worse than a film like Final Destination 3, yet, with a cast this good and a story this respected, it comes out looking a lot worse, because you weren't expecting that schlocky horror to be any good, but this... oh, dear. Grade: D+

Little Children, Scenes of a Sexual Nature and Slither

[Little Children (Todd Field, 2006): The initially middling grade I gave Little Children probably sprung for my intense desire to want to like it, to admire it, to say that the acting here covers up the horrendous mess of the script and direction. Kate Winslet is undoubtably my favourite modern actress, and maybe it just wounds me too much to say that even she can't make up for the deficencies here. There's nothing particularly wrong with her performance here; indeed, it's probably as good as it could have been, save perhaps for the scene where, ironically, she shows the most emotion. (The moment feels so odd, fitting in I suppose with the histrionics the script constantly visits; but in the context of repressed surburban housewife, it's jarring.) There's little, indeed, wrong with most of the performances here: Patrick Wilson, Jackie Earle Haley, Phyllis Somerville, Jane Adams, and particularly Jennifer Connelly (able, as always, to mine so much out of an underwritten and marginalized role) are all fine, often excellent- only Noah Emmerich is bad, a garish performance which suits the film around him better than do the other actors- but they're all slaving away in service of a confused, puzzling mess of a film which thinks it knows so much when it knows so little. It throws you off right from the beginning, the stale, sage narration of some always-unknown quantity striking up at irregular intervals and never, really, serving a purpose apart from highlighting things the audience should be left to understand on their own. But what's worst about Little Children is it's smugness- Todd Field and Tom Perrotta's script (adapted from Perrotta's well-recieved novel) sits there, laden with a strange bitterness and pessimism that is never explained, winding it's way through a serious of rather unexciting events concerning- and how ironic this is- adults acting like "little children", selfish and irresponsible, all wanting to feel needed and loved, trying to make their lives worthwhile. Even before it reaches it's bizarre and conflicted climax, Little Children navigates various levels of over-egged histrionics and self-involved events, abandoning all sense of balance to the talented cast to try and sort out- it's not their fault, I cry, vainly trying to convince myself that it deserves attention; but really, there are better performances out there that warrant attention, and Kate the Great will have to wait a few more years for that thin golden statuette. Grade: D+]

[Scenes of a Sexual Nature (Ed Blum, 2006/7): Even worse than the smugness of Little Children is the smugness of Scenes of a Sexual Nature, which has even less claim to the idea of knowledge than Todd Field's unweilding mess. No, here is a film which, like Little Children, has employed a talented cast- Ewan McGregor, Polly Walker, Sophie Okonedo, Andrew Lincoln, Eileen Atkins, et al- to act out its complacent "ideas" about sexuality, this time in the form of seven criss-crossing vignettes between various couplings. The first false note is struck by the sickeningly twinkly and whimsical score, which, as one review I read commenting, "will make you want to kill yourself". The script is hollow and empty, full of cliched lines and situations- most of the vignettes seem like the more boring scenes from a common romantic comedy, the bits you'd sit sighing through waiting for the amusing comedic side-kick to re-appear, because they're the real reason you paid the ticket price. The talent of the cast, and the reasonable performances they give, somehow makes the whole thing even worse- how, I ask loudly, could all these actors be conned into starring in this horrific mess? Oh, and I never, ever want to go to Hampstead Heath, thanks. Grade: F]

[Slither (James Gunn, 2006): The delirious joys of Slither take a while to kick in, but when they do, oh-ho-ho, they don't let go. In the spirit of '80's alien horrors, but without their laughable effects (Slither looks, at times, frighteningly realistic), James Gunn's debut is a witty, exciting ride, expertly balancing comedy and horror and never over-dosing on either. The cast is game, with Serenity's Nathan Fillion playing the hero with a reluctant gusto, and Elizabeth Banks is both a funny and sympathetic straight-face as the wife of the man-turned-monster (and, naturally, the object of Fillion's affections). Overall, Slither's narrative goes in a predictable direction, but Gunn has a lot of fun in the intermediate scenes, constantly springing gory surprises that provide for some hilarious lines. To use a familiar expression: no, it's not Citizen Kane, but there's a lot of fun to be had by all. Grade: B]