I’ll be honest – I had such high expectations for this movie I kind of had to be numb to them. Baz Luhrmann has been one of my favourite directors for a long time now and I didn’t even want the fear of a letdown. Though none of them struck me as anything special the first time round (some of them, actually, irritated the heck out of me), I’ve come to view every one of his 4 previous features as a pretty unbroken chain of perfection.

Some people found the idea of him doing The Great Gatsby – in 3D, no less – was a bizarre move. I immediately thought it sounded perfect. Luhrmann has always – even when working in a low budget with his first, Strictly Ballroom – revelled in excess. “But Gatsby isn’t about excess! It’s about the folly of excess!” I’ve heard some cry. Yes. But you have to show the excess in order to criticise it, and Luhrmann does just that, as only Luhrmann can – did anyone think the garish design in Strictly made that world look desirable? If the image of Gatsby alone in his coffin with none of his party “friends” around at the bitter end doesn’t do it for you, I don’t know what to think.

At first I feared perhaps the whole thing was too Luhrmann, with particular reference to Moulin Rouge. Nick is a single writer who stumbles into this world of opulence, our representative, just like Christian in Moulin Rouge, the camera swooping through “oldefied” New York streets, and into Gatsby’s party mansion, extraordinarily similar to our introduction to the famed Paris club in 2001.

But as the movie settled into its own thing, I thought maybe this familiar entry point was sort of deliberate. I read “The Great Gatsby” as a teenager at school and its been sort of tainted for me ever since. At the time I struggled to understand it at all – I’m sure less to do with the book’s quality (it’s quite beloved, don’t you know…) than a teaching method that gave me no way in to the material. I passed whatever exams that quizzed me on it, I guess, but I was only ever regurgitating what I’d been told. I can honestly say that till I saw the last moments of this movie, though I could’ve told you what that last sentence of Fitzgerald’s novel meant, I honestly didn’t understand it in my own way. It could even be an age/experience thing – maybe at 33 I could read the book and get so much more out of it now than I did then. But I’m 33, slightly lazy in such things, and probably wouldn’t have even considered reading Gatsby again if not for Luhrmann’s movie.

I was surprised in the run up to the film’s release that most of the buzz pertained to the Jay-Z soundtrack and I’m even more surprised having seen the movie. The whole hip-hop idea doesn’t seem nearly as well developed and integrated as Luhrmann’s musical ideas, in particular, for Moulin Rouge and Romeo+Juliet. Most of the music in fact seemed to me to be Craig Armstrong’s characteristically lush and emotional piano and strings (I don’t like being hit over the head emotionally by many people but Armstrong, like Luhrmann, is one of the few.)

I try to avoid mentioning the 3D when I see these movies because I don’t believe it should matter and be more of a kind of garnish – the movie should still work (and I’m sure it does) without it, but it’s just a nice little extra. From first shot and title sequence to last, honestly the 3D here puts all others I’ve seen (and I’ve seen most of the big ones) to shame. I’d entirely forgotten about the whole “green light” thing in the book but the first shot of it here knocked the breath out of me… just the most perfect use of depth I have ever seen. Of course there’s the sheets, shirts, sparkly things, gimmicky 3D stuff as you’ve seen in the trailer, but there’s plenty of beautifully subtle stuff too.

I saw some criticism of Carey Mulligan’s portrayal of Daisy who (at least in the opinion of whoever wrote it) was (apparently, I can’t remember) much colder in the novel. As with much of the comments (many before actually seeing the movie) about the use of 3D, I feel this misses Luhrmann’s intent. She’s clearly still cold in her actions at the end of the movie – what we’re seeing in Mulligan is perhaps what Gatsby sees in Daisy, and what Nick sees in Gatsby… what does drive a person so lost to hold such hope?

As I said, I’ve never warmed fully to Luhrmann’s movies on a first viewing. But clearly this one (perhaps because it’s the first I’ve watched on the big screen?) is an exception, so I look forward to seeing how it holds up to further viewings (probably without the 3D – though the upcoming 3D Doctor Who special certainly has me tempted to save up for a 3D set). Clearly I’m not coming to it as a great worshipper of the novel (I certainly intend to give it another go after this though) – but what I loved most about it is that, however he went about it, Luhrmann gave me a way in to understanding Fitzgerald’s work on my own terms – I either never was told about the “extraordinary gift for hope” in Gatsby when I was at school or I had just not suffered enough disappointment at the time to see it for myself – or maybe Luhrmann was the only person who could show me. I know some people don’t need that kind of accessibility, but a lot of people do – and what he’s done with Fitzgerald for me here is as miraculous as how modern he made Shakespeare’s words sound back in 1996.

I guess it was either in my reviews of Casino Royale or The Muppets that I never got round to posting that I referred back to the first of JJ Abrams’ Star Trek movies (since I didn’t write it in that review) saying something about the current trend of remakes/sequels/reboots/requels? i.e. the way that it’s all been kind of mashed up to a point where a lot of these movies are none of the above – the first Abrams Star Trek is both remake, sequel, and reboot, e.g. A lot of the Marvel movies leading up to The Avengers had a similar feeling – all set-up. Tony Stark is Iron Man at the end of Iron Man and I was like, okay, now can we go on an adventure please? etc. Ditto Batman Begins, The Thing, any number of recent re-dos.

When Chris Pine took to the captain’s chair at the end of that first movie, I felt the same same way – and I kind of expected the second movie to deliver on that. But within minutes of the title credit of Into Darkness, Kirk has been once again unseated as Captain due to characteristic disobedience pre-credits. It’s the first of many moments that make this movie even more (it has to be said) pleasantly surprising than the last of this year’s big movies, Iron Man 3, and I hope at least that part is a trend that continues.

I’m writing this from a bunch of notes about a week after seeing it because I didn’t really know what to think after I saw it and I wanted to hear a few other people’s opinions to see if anyone felt whatever I was feeling. I think this tweet pretty much captured it for me

Iron Man 3 & Star Trek #IntoDarkness both tell stories rather different from what their trailers suggest. In Iron Man this is a good thing.

— Alex Gabriel (@AlexGabriel) May 9, 2013

How about some of the good… As in the first of Abrams movies, there’s much made of the logic/emotion collision between Spock and Kirk. Though I’m sure this has always been a part of the whole Spock/Kirk set-up, I have to admit that despite enjoying the movies and struggling through at least one season of the original series (I still say only the extended first episode “The Menagerie” really did anything for me), I never really got this as much as I have in Abrams and co’s more refined, delineated take on them. The pre-credits sequence leads to Spock saying the famous line, “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few,” in reference for being prepared to lay down his life before disobeying a Starfleet directive – leading to a coldness between him and Uhura for much of the movie as, to her, it appeared like he didn’t think about her. There’s later a wonderful scene between him and Uhura where he explains to her (paraphrasing, I don’t remember the exact line), “You mistake my decision not to feel as an unwillingness to live, when in fact it is the complete opposite,” – something that resonates with me deeply. I love what they’re doing with Spock in this series.

So, in case it isn’t clear, I was sort of disappointed with this movie – moreso in the days after the final credits rolled than while watching it. I love that big movies like this are now subverting both our expectations (even despite the level of promotion these days – there’s far more space in this movie than I’d been led to believe, for one thing) and “original” events in the old timeline – whether it’s done well as in Iron Man 3 or just a little disappointingly as here. Avoiding spoilers about the true nature of Benedict Cumberbatch’s part here (but you probably have your correct suspicions, as I did), when someone screams that name here, it’s a direct inversion of what we’ve seen before. I kind of love that the way they set up this “parallel” Star Trek franchise in the first Abrams movie looks to be something they’re going to keep drawing upon (I didn’t quite see the point of the repeat Nimoy cameo here, though – Shatner or nothing next time, okay?) But I really hope that the next one really takes us somewhere new.

Of course I came to this movie well prepared in terms of the Avengers franchise – this week in anticipation I watched both of the first Iron Man movies and last year’s team effort again; but in terms of the tone Shane Black brings to the table, perhaps I would’ve been less surprised if I’d also seen his debut feature Kiss Kiss Bang Bang first. I finally watched it the minute I got home from Iron Man 3 and the “fast and loose” made a lot more sense – Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is just as much of a delirious overturning of genre – but it’s still a pretty big shock that Black was allowed to play so much with such a huge property here.

“When are we gonna talk about New York?”
“Maybe never?”

The movie is so much fun in the end that it’s easy to forget how brutal it is initially in setting up the stakes. There’s some real nastiness here from Ben Kingsley’s Mandarin and all he represents that is every bit as bold from a mainstream American blockbuster as all its ultimate slapdashery. Given Kingsley’s very bearded similarity to one of America’s most recent enemies and images of Tony Stark having fever dreams and anxiety attacks over his recent encounter with unprecedented attacks in New York, it’s hard not to see the clear parallel being made here. We’ve seen a lot of depictions of terrorism in movies since 9/11 but perhaps none quite so close to the bone as this. The anti-American diatribes uttered by the Mandarin are the kind that almost have you convinced he might have a point. A musing on the phoniness of the fortune cookie – an invention not Chinese but American, and therefore “hollow and full of lies” – leads into a larger more tangible statement, the bombing of something equally artificial, Grauman’s Chinese Theatre… a moment that strikes one as being as much anti-Hollywood as it is anti-American (not to mention being a particularly unsettling watch in light of even more recent events…). There are early references to America’s genocide of the Native Americans, and even a callback in the middle section of the movie where Stark, lost and suit-less in the middle of snowy Tennessee, calls home and tells Pepper Potts, “I just stole a poncho from a wooden Indian,” having done just that outside a gas station.

“The second you give evil a face, you give the people a target.”

It’s hard to talk more about Ben Kingsley’s performance other than to say it is at turns chilling and completely in keeping with the more riotous tone of the movie – to say more than that would be to ruin one of the movie’s biggest surprises. I’ve probably already said too much – but I honestly lost count of how many times I couldn’t believe what I was seeing during this movie, so it’s pretty hard to spoil completely. I expressed astonishment that a movie like The Hunger Games got made by Hollywood last year. Let’s just say, what that movie had to say about the duplicity of power was nothing compared to the even harsher indictments of the modern Western world up the Mandarin’s sleeves…

The Mandarin’s minions are pretty scary individuals too – bio-engineered into either weapons or bombs (it depends how the treatment “takes”) – the “burning embers” flesh effect here is perhaps the most disturbing thing I’ve seen in a comic book movie since Robot Vera in Superman 3. The visual effects of the various havoc they wreak are quite something to behold, and particularly visceral when contrasted with the snowy setting of the middle section of the movie.

Then there’s the “barrel of monkeys” scene. I probably would’ve seen the movie in 3D even if I didn’t want to since that was all that was on offer in the way of a midnight screening and usually I’d say I can take or leave 3D (especially when it’s post-converted as here, something I only learned shortly before seeing it), but this free-fall sequence isn’t just one of the best uses of 3D I’ve seen but also one of the most basically uplifting action scenes too.

The movie isn’t without its little wobbles. In the Tennessee midsection it strays dangerously close to MacGyver territory as Stark resorts to building an arsenal of weapons out of bits and pieces purchased at a hardware store, and the young boy who becomes a kind of sidekick is something of a worry when he first appears, but what can I say? Like everything else, Black pulls it off – some of the funniest and most cheeky lines come between Stark and the little boy, in fact.

Likewise there are more than a couple of “deaths which turn out not to be deaths” that would normally annoy the hell out of me but for some reason – perhaps because this movie just isn’t like other movies – they didn’t. Perhaps it’s that the first of those “deaths” is oddly the more moving of the two (I don’t want to spoil, but hopefully this will make sense when you see it). Incidentally this is another thing I might not have found so strange had I seen Kiss Kiss Bang Bang first – in which Black actually brings all his dead characters, plus Elvis and Lincoln (and why not?), into a final scene to make a funny point about one character surviving and happy movie endings in general.

Which brings me to Christmas. Of all the surprises Iron Man 3 has to offer, this was the one which makes it likely to be the Avengers movie I will wind up watching the most in years to come. Because Iron Man 3, it turns out, among other things, is an instant Christmas classic. An early scene has two kids approach Stark in a restaurant and ask for his autograph – one is a little blonde-haired boy in glasses to whom Stark quips, “I loved you in A Christmas Story by the way…” The movie begins with Stark buying Pepper, much to her consternation, a ridiculous oversized bunny for Christmas but ends with him offering her a much larger (literally and emotionally) gesture. There’s Christmas songs on the soundtrack. There’s snow. There’s redemption. It’s not just a movie that happens to be set at Christmas – it’s an honest to god Christmas movie. It’s bizarre they didn’t schedule it for a November/December release (though I’d neither want an unfinished movie nor to have had to wait 8 more months…) – but that’s when I’ll be watching it in the future.

Iron Man 3 winds down very much as if it means to be the closing out of a trilogy that has done as much for the comic book movie (remember just 5 years ago when an Avengers movie was like a distant dream? I was barely even interested!) as it seems to have done for its star. When Downey Jr.’s narration speaks of the Iron Man suit like a cocoon it’s hard not to feel like he’s talking about himself and his much storied past problems. Like Stark, he immersed himself in this role that seemed at first so at odds with his image, and he seems to have emerged a far better man. I was reminded of the even more troubled Mel Gibson’s narration at the end of The Beaver – “This is a picture of Walter Black, a once hopelessly depressed individual, who had to become a beaver, who had to become a phenomenon, so that ultimately this could just be a picture of Walter Black…” For all its eye candy this is a franchise that has real characters with demons working through real recognisable issues at its core, and it’d be a jaded soul indeed that didn’t recognise how wonderful this is to find in what will certainly be one of the biggest movies of the year.

* (I’m usually as picky as the BBFC at typing film titles exactly as they appear in the opening credit but “Iron Man Three” just looks strange so I’m sticking with the 3)

Posting this review I feel a little like I’m finally catching up with myself. When I first saw Chronicle last year it was the Kick-Ass of that year, the movie where I just thought, “well that’s it, nothing’s gonna beat that…” but of course it was early days and there was so much more to see and I was in a place where I just wasn’t writing as much as I’d like to, so I told myself I’d have to watch it again “sometime” in order to really write about it. Before I watched it today again it’d slipped all the way down out of my top ten of 2012. Just wrongness all over and further reason I’m glad I didn’t even post that list yet even if it is April (it’s coming, I promise…)

If Batman Begins was the superhero movie stripped back to its core, I don’t know what Chronicle is… it strips it back so far that it melds with other genres and makes it more pertinent than even the best of other recent efforts could hope to touch. A young man who has as hard a time at home from his father as he does from fellow students at school decides to start filming everything – as evidence, as a journal, just because, who knows? His cousin in an effort to bring him into the world takes him to a party – he meets a couple of people more on his level at the party who show him a weird hole in the ground – the next thing we know, they’re all starting to develop strange powers…

The most incredible thing about Chronicle – even more incredible than its budget – is its under 90 minute running time. I’m always impressed by a 90 minute running time, but the scope of the story here is something else. The way things build from cheap home videos to Jackass style pranking to full on airborne effects extravaganza overwhelms me. The Jackass phase of the movie rings particularly true, the pranking in the supermarket made me laugh as much a second time as I did the first even when it gets a little too mean. Of course eventually one of the boys (Andrew, the one with the troubled homelife) goes too far and ends up causing a car crash – perhaps meaning to just give the vehicle beeping at them on a harsh turn a scare, perhaps not.

It’s an early indicator of the inevitable end those who know these stories might see from the start. As I’ve said many times, I think there’s a difference between predictability and inevitability in movies, especially where tragedy is concerned. Tragedy is all the more tragic if you know what’s going to happen but you can’t do anything to stop it. There’s much in Chronicle that owes a debt not to comic book superheroes but psychological horror – in my limited knowledge on that (I’m sure there’s a much earlier common source because there are so many common details) I’m talking about Stephen King and David Cronenberg in particular. John Farris/Brian De Palma’s The Fury comes to mind too. In the troubled young Andrew there are powerful echoes of Carrie or Firestarter‘s Charlene – a body gifted with an ability completely beyond their mind’s comprehension and led astray by the only ideas at hand of how best to use it. It touches on that basic Twilight Zone-y type fear, like what if a toddler had their finger on the big red button? When Andrew talks about the “apex predator” theory, including the line I opened the review with, that’s when this movie really gets scary and beautiful for me.

The powers of the boys are conveyed with startlingly simple but effective visual effects. Even when occasionally they fall outside the realm of believability the images are so grounded in ideas that they still completely capture the imagination. People bundle this movie into the “found footage” genre because of the way it all happens to be filmed by the characters’ own various cameras (going so far as CCTV footage in the final sequence) – I really think this misses one of the movie’s greatest inventions. As the movie progresses Andrew – who has a surprising knack for the more delicate aspects of his power, a fact that makes some of his friends green and jars wonderfully with his wicked leanings – learns how to hold the camera in midair at a distance. This results in the camerawork becoming more cinematic as the movie progresses, as his power grows. We end up watching from what we would usually term a “crane” angle in scenes ending with Andrew flying up towards the camera and grabbing it to take with him as he passes. We associate the camera with Andrew so completely that in the end (without spoiling things), Andrew becomes the camera. Despite how cutting edge this movie is, I find something about this to be completely, almost profoundly, cinematic.

There are astonishing images in this movie – Andrew blowing apart a spider into its component parts with the muffled sound of his dying mother coughing in pain in another room; or the Space Needle in Seattle, its lights going out, the glass shattering into a mist from which Andrew emerges. What really makes it one of the best movies of 2012 for me, though, is the strength of character that makes this so much more a tragedy than a spectacle. There are no good or bad people here – just victims of circumstance, opportunity and instinct. It’s incredible to me how anyone squeezed so much joy, sadness, scale, and minutia into just 80 minutes.

For a movie that’s been hyped as the “most terrifying film you will ever experience”, Evil Dead starts boldly slow. After a kind of unnecessary flashback (which sort of reminded me of the opening scene of Exorcist II now I think about it) establishing the “history” of the book that will cause all the trouble (surely just the sight of the flesh-bound tome is enough to tell you all you need to know?), there’s even more kind of unnecessary contrivance to get to the meat we’re all here for. Though a girl going cold turkey is a pretty good excuse for her and a bunch of her friends to hole up in an old cabin in the woods for a while – no matter what condition it’s in upon arrival – it’s evident from the start here how thin the characters are. The brains (brainy enough to have a good stab at interpreting the contents of the evil book, but not strong enough to resist the many warnings scrawled within its pages), the brawn, the blond, etc – I actually found myself wondering how many, shall we say, less informed viewers will see this and think it’s maybe somehow ripped off or at least related to last year’s Cabin in the Woods.

Much has been said of this movie’s more “serious” approach compared to the original which people remember as being as funny as it was scary and I’ve found myself agreeing with the bemused likes of Robert Florence on Twitter who wrote, “I don’t get these reviews that criticise the new Evil Dead for not being as ‘fun’ or ‘funny’ as the original. They’re thinking of ED2 right?” In an interview on Mark Kermode’s Radio 5 film show, the film’s director Fede Alvarez claimed that Sam Raimi had said he always intended for the original to be plain scary while Kermode countered quoting Raimi from an earlier interview of his where Raimi said he always intended for it to be “the three stooges with blood and guts for custard pies”. I think what we need to do is wonder why Raimi made the much more genuinely funny Evil Dead 2 more of a remake itself than a sequel and I believe it’s likely, like any artist, Raimi was striving for a very particular tone that was an exact degree to one side of the line between comedy and horror – two genres that have always been intertwined (another horror legend Wes Craven has often stated he directs “scares” with much the same attention to timing as the greatest comedy minds) – and he felt after the first movie and given more resources that it was worth another shot.

None of this changes the fact that the first movie, on its surface, is more scary and nasty than it is funny. The laughs come (for me, at least – and I’ve watched it twice in the past couple of years – and again, tonight, just to check – with no diminishment of its impact) because its pace, the sheer barrage of horror, is just so relentless, particularly in the last half hour, and that’s the one thing that this new rendition is frequently lacking. There are so many places where the action slows or stops completely for more discussion and explanation of what’s going on – enough, at least, that my mind wandered, and I began mentally composing this review. Which is great because I didn’t want this to be another movie I fail to write about, but of course doesn’t speak well for the movie.

But I’ll be honest, what I really wanted from this movie was what I’d heard about in recent weeks – a number of horror directors/fans on Twitter have raved about how gory the movie is, and when those people are raving about such things, it’s hard not to get one’s hopes up. On this count, at least, and it’s really the only count that matters, Evil Dead does not disappoint. Almost all varieties of squeamishness are catered for, including my own which is pretty niche in the genre. My personal squirm inducer? Needles, craft knives, small, seemingly innocuous things. One of the horror films that always gets to me is the original 1981 Halloween II – in that movie, set in a hospital, people are variously killed by syringes, scalpels, one person simply slips in blood on the floor and bangs his head badly on the floor (oddly the worst one for me, completely non-violent, just awfully unfortunate and sad). Here, you get almost all those things (the scalpel replaced with the aforementioned craft knife) in just one scene – with a girl cutting her own face off as an aperitif. All of this, as has been mentioned often in promotional interviews, is done with practical effects, not computer effects, and this is probably this movie’s killer move. To make one of my wild comparisons, the practical gore here works in a similar way as the live singing did in Les Misérables (whatever my personal feelings about that movie are). Though live singing – especially as thorough as they did on Les Mis – had rarely been done before, practical effects are almost as rare these days so they come as just as pleasant a surprise. Couple this with some fantastically claustrophobic set and sound design and it’s really hard not to recommend this one despite its relative emptiness, and it’s one I’ll probably watch again more often than needed. There’s plenty of homage to the original to keep the fans happy (and stick around till after the credits to be real happy) and it bodes well for the future of mainstream horror.

(I just found this whole review in my drafts, I think I wrote it some time between Halloween and New Year – I think there’s a lot to be written about this movie regarding the plot, as messed up as it might be… I think the movie really has a lot to say based around that line above, it just majestically fails to say it… it won’t be the last time I watch it though…)

I’m sort of surprised I haven’t written about this one before, then again, slightly not. It’s a tough one. For while I agree that compared to the original this is barely worth the celluloid it’s printed on, I think taken on its own merits it’s nowhere near as bad as its reputation either. Director John Boorman has spoken of the fact he deliberately made a movie that was practically the anti-thesis to what audiences at large mistakenly perceived (and continue to perceive, alas) as the original movie’s raison d‘être – to shock and be nasty. It’s not worth really talking about how wrong this starting block was except to mention it – if you don’t see the great good in The Exorcist, I feel sorry for you…

So this doesn’t fit into what I would consider as the real Exorcist series – which would be the original, William Peter Blatty’s mostly unrelated follow-up The Ninth Configuration, and Exorcist III which re-united us with Damien Karras and Detective Kinderman – so what? What it does offer is the return of Linda Blair as Regan MacNeil, now troubled by her vague memories of what happened in the original movie; also the return of Kitty Winn as her mother’s assistant Sharon; a brief glimpse of Max Von Sydow out of old age make-up doing the “first exorcism” that is spoken of in the original (and would feature in the prequel “The Beginning” / “Dominion”); a haunting return to the house in Washington, standing just as we left it (for a time, at least…); some stunning photography by William A. Fraker; frankly incredible visual effects in the final reel (notwithstanding the awful recreation of Regan’s possession make-up/voice…); and a simply awesome score by Ennio Morricone.

If a lot of this sounds like mere aesthetic pleasure, I’ll be honest, it mostly is. Plotwise the movie frequently falls down. I’ve seen both versions and they both feel like they’ve been tampered with in a desperate attempt to make it all cohere (the short version only available on VHS is far worse in this regard, I seem to remember, though), and yes there are parts that are downright laughable. But if you don’t get just a little unsettled by the opening scene, or that strange first appearance of “possessed Regan” grappling with the doctor’s heart; or moved by Morricone’s “Regan’s Theme” over the autistic girl, Regan on the rooftop, or the closing moments; or just drop dead at how gorgeous Blair is here (okay, maybe just me, but I had to mention it: she’s never looked more beautiful), I really think you’re missing something slightly wonderful, albeit disastrously fleeting.

(I’m afraid this might read like an unstructured babble that almost makes watching the movie unnecessary, so… spoilers? I was just desperate to post something here as it’s been nearly a month since I did lol and this one really gave me a lot to think about…)

If I never said so before – though I’m sure I have in one form or another – one thing I always want from a movie is for it to be more than what it seems on the surface… if I have expectations, for it to exceed them. I knew I’d find this documentary marginally interesting based on its subject and interviewees (not just the big names on the poster) – even though I don’t have a strong opinion (though I didn’t know why that was until this documentary – which I’ll explain at the end), the whole film/digital debate has of course been something I’ve followed as a cinema lover.

So while on its surface this is a documentary about the digital revolution, particularly as it pertains to film – a lot has been said in the past year or so about “the end of film” with film labs and camera makers actually shutting down and most recently with half of the Oscar nominated films being shot digitally – Side by Side goes far, far deeper, eventually becoming more about all our potential fears of the digital nature of our lives. Anybody could’ve found talking heads to talk about why they favour the old or new mediums, and there’s certainly plenty of that here – but this film looks beyond the actual celluloid and/or pixels at other ways technology affects expression.

There’s discussion with actors and directors about how the ability to shoot nonstop with digital affects performance – while John Malkovich talks about how stifling it was to have to wait when shooting on film when the performance was ready “now”, there’s talk of another actor who left bottles of urine around a set in protest at being constantly on record. The whole subject of dailies is covered, with one contributor saying, with digital, they’re “no longer dailies… now immediatelies…” and how that instant access to playback can also affect both performance and technical things like lighting, for better or worse. Robert Rodriguez makes a beautiful comparison about the delay between shooting and developing film as being like “painting with the lights off”.

Crucial analogies are made here – the film retraces points in film history covered plenty in other documentaries where technology advanced cinema and we either embraced it or didn’t notice – the boom in digital effects around Jurassic Park, digital colour correction coming from music videos, and way before that, digital editing systems and audio. One of the big questions asked is, we didn’t care when everything else went digital, why are we so hung up on the image?

The big plus touted in film’s corner is its archival value. As digital stands there are just too many risks and continuing format changes alone make it difficult to keep a backup for more than 10 years even if the file survives, while film always works as long as you have a light to shine through it – I think it’s David Fincher talks about having to put an actual reader in with any digital archive to be sure of being able to decode the format in the future. But one person rightly, again, looks beyond cinema and, while acknowledging the problem, states, “there’s too much digital information out there not to figure out a way to store it forever.” I’d like to believe this is so. It seems ridiculous if not, right?

The other quite amusing issue addressed in all this is the new abundance of content that digital brings. Everyone has a camera and access to YouTube now – yes, the democratisation of the art form is wonderful, “Everyone’s interpreting reality – or what they think is reality – through a lens,” Martin Scorsese says, but some of the more stuffy contributors fear that this will just result in noise. A telling moment makes clear where this film stands on this, when one of these anti-digital folks moans, “There isn’t a tastemaker involved!” and a voice from behind the camera simply says, “Wow.”

My big takeaway from this movie was that it’s really all the same. The abundance of content we face now? It brings to mind that commonly stated factoid that 90% of films made before 1929 have been lost. There’s always been a lot of stuff to watch. Maybe loss is a fact we have to face in art as much in digital as ever. Film may have the edge on digital as far as archival storage goes, but it’s still only got 100 years on it, it’s as young as anything. Any global event large enough to have a devastating impact on our digital storage would likely affect our film storage systems too.

More than this? I found myself thinking, what if it all did disappear? Would that be so bad? We didn’t have sound recording technology when Mozart and Beethoven were around. We don’t even have photographs of the first performances of Shakespeare. But it all survives. Even if all the great films of our time were somehow snuffed out one day, as long as there were people, they’d survive because we talk about them with passion constantly. Something will always remain of art or ideas that change the world – even if it’s just a memory handed down and bent out of all recognition. One of the greatest benefits of digital is immediecy, and perhaps the fact that its ubiquity makes it so fleeting is what finally makes the moving image as an art form complete.

Best Picture Beasts of the Southern Wild
Best Director Benh Zeitlin (Beasts of the Southern Wild) (these are the trickiest categories and I have no strong feeling… I’m going with my heart – everytime I see clips of this and hear the music it lifts me to the exact same place it did the first time…)
Best Actor Daniel Day-Lewis (just duh, and I thought it was great too)
Best Supporting Actor Robert De Niro (Silver Linings Playbook – I keep flipping around on this category, but I’m going with De Niro for now… the movie certainly deserves something… I didn’t review it yet because I haven’t stopped thinking about it – it grew on me a heck of a lot on the second viewing and I think it could end up being my favourite of the whole bunch… just not yet…)
Best Actress Emmanuelle Riva (Amour – I’m dead set on this one… it’s the most extraordinary, unique performance of the year. Quvenzhané Wallis is just as exciting and I’d be overjoyed for her… but we’re just not gonna ever get Riva’s performance again…)
Best Supporting Actress Helen Hunt (The Sessions – another movie I haven’t yet reviewed because it got to me so much… I’ve written something, though, and might bash it into shape in the next few days… this is a long shot, but it’s a hell of a category, and I don’t like to go for the obvious)
Best Screenplay Wes Anderson, Moonrise Kingdom – because, for god’s sake, it deserves _something_…
Best Adapted Screenplay Lincoln (another that I haven’t reviewed – I thought the talkiness of this was it’s best feature)
Best Editing Silver Linings Playbook (from what I hear they reshot everything with a different tones and then figured out what worked best in the editing room – on the second viewing this really showed…)
Best Cinematography Roger Deakins, Skyfall (I’ve not seen Anna Karenina in this category yet but this is the most prestigious award Skyfall stands to win, and I hope it gets it… Roger Deakins is always overdue – again, this is one I haven’t reviewed yet, but I do have a ton of notes ready to be moulded into something)
Best Score Life of Pi (I don’t have very strong feelings in this category but I love Mychael Danna – again, I haven’t yet seen Anna Karenina in this category)
Best Song Ted (another review waiting to be posted – I can’t wait to see this one performed on the night – this is the category I’ll be most upset if Les Miserables wins – I haven’t seen Chasing Ice yet)
Best Production Design Lincoln (again, no real strong feelings – except how the heck Moonrise Kingdom wasn’t nominated – and I haven’t seen Anna Karenina)
Best Makeup/Hair Hitchcock (perhaps obvious, but honestly less for the prosthetic than the overall recreation of 60s etc…)
Best Costume Lincoln (I haven’t seen three in this category – Anna Karenina, Mirror Mirror and *Snow White and the Huntsman*… so no clue…)
Best Sound Mixing Les Misérables (the only one this movie deserves – and to be honest, I’m not even sure about that anymore…)
Best Sound Editing Skyfall
Best Visual Effects Life of Pi (another duh, really… come on Richard Parker… haven’t seen Snow White and the Huntsman)
Best Animated Film ParaNorman (really rooting for this one, I thought it was the most lively and original of the bunch)
Best Foreign Language Film Amour (sadly haven’t seen any of the other nominees, though I might squeeze a few in before Sunday – but I doubt any could match Amour)
Best Documentary Searching for Sugar Man (the only one I’ve seen but it kinda blew my mind – next up is How to Survive a Plague if I can squeeze it in before Sunday)

…leaving the documentary features and shorts off as usual for now, though the plan was to watch most of them and it still might happen… this whole post might change in the next few days depending what I watch/rewatch but this is where I am for now

A “bargain basement Stephen King” writer (played by Val Kilmer, looking even more like he could play Jim Morrison at death’s door, especially as he swigs liquor) enters a small town to sell his book (the town is so small that there is no bookstore: he sets up in the hardware store). The tone is strange, tongue-in-cheek-ish, thanks to a Twilight Zone-like narration by none other than Tom Waits. Kilmer meets Elle Fanning, seemingly his only fan in town, but for some reason she won’t (or can’t) come back with him to the place he’s staying at to get a book signed. By the way Fanning is shot (hauntingly but beautifully) it’s pretty clear what’s going on. Then he runs into Edgar Allan Poe…

Twixt is full of beautifully shot images (and one extraordinary moment I’ve never seen before – fangs pushing braces off a person’s teeth as they grow) but the remix concept shows. Perhaps, as I wrote of the similarly conceived Tracey Fragments (Tracey: Refragmented), if there’s so much other footage maybe one day a more coherent movie will emerge of it. I watched it in a double bill with Hick and it falls into the same category for me – forgettable movies lifted higher than they deserve by a couple of my favourite young actresses.

The Shining poster doesn’t appear in Eyes Wide Shut but this moment does come back into one’s mind later when some of the more visual theories about The Shining (the one that really knocked me back was the pattern of the carpet reversing from shot to shot) are discussed and footage is shown as “evidence”. I don’t doubt for a second that the other footage presented here is untampered-with, but I guess what I’m saying is, boy does this documentary make you want to go back and watch the movie again (and I’ve watched it a lot recently, working through Taschen’s Kubrick Archives book and the recent Movie Geeks United Kubrick series).

Speaking of those other extraordinary Kubrick works (the Taschen and Movie Geeks United podcast series – particularly the latter’s episode on The Shining – both musts for any Kubrick fan), what most impressed me here was that Room 237 never felt redundant. Even when discussing theories I’d heard before, the use of Kubrick’s own footage only hammered it home all the more. There’s an enormous disclaimer right at the start of the movie and I’m assuming it’s the only way they could get away with using so much of the man’s own imagery in conjunction with often controversial ideas of what he meant by it. It’s one of those documentaries that benefits hugely from this somewhat official blessing – like the use of the Sherman Brothers music in a documentary I recently watched, The Boys, or the slick old horror documentary Terror in the Aisles hosted by Donald Pleasence, it makes it so much more than if it were just a series of talking heads (which is essentially what the soundtrack consists of). It’s more a jumping off point for infinite further discussion than a definitive collection of theories and interpretations, but the fact that it managed to thrill me so much by the end after having heard so many of the stories before is the highest recommendation I can give.

I can’t exactly say this wasn’t what I expected because from first shot to last, Excision is as blood-drenched as any horror movie I’ve seen, and that’s all I really wanted or expected from it. Shortly before this, I saw American Mary (which I’ll review soon – I intend to watch it again first) and from the first scene there I really expected this decade’s May, but in the end wasn’t exactly satisfied. It was a thrill then, with every passing minute of Excision, to realise that the weirdness I craved was right here. Having watched it twice now, and with few notable titles yet to see from last year, I’m fairly sure this was my favourite movie of 2012 by a long way.

To explain the story without spoiling anything, it actually resembles American Mary in a lot of ways. A young woman with aspirations to be a surgeon finds the more standard route to that profession, shall we say, blocked to her (in American Mary it’s more of a money/misogyny thing; here, the young woman is the high school weirdo). Where the Mary of American Mary is (initially, at least – but compared to Pauline here, totally) balanced even in her alternate pursuits, however, Pauline here is clearly troubled inside. The first shot of the movie is one of many insights into her mind that punctuate the film, and where most of the gore is seen – two Paulines face each other in a clinical blue room. One of them seems to be in horrific pain, blood pouring from her mouth – the other is quite the opposite, seemingly more orgasmic with every drop of blood she sees come out of the other. Pauline often comes out of these grotesque visions visibly aroused – there’s no question she’s not “normal”. Whether you take this movie to heart as much as I did I guess will depend on where you draw the line between fantasies and reality.

AnnaLynne McCord’s Pauline here is played to lip-curling precision, if anything in fact out-weirding Angela Bettis’s May, but the focus isn’t just on the oddball teen. The surprise here is the equal attention given to the parents (Traci Lords – I thought she was Hope Davis till I saw the credits! amazing performance – and Roger Bart). Their own struggle in dealing with one daughter who’s a misfit and another with cystic fibrosis is given so much weight I imagine my sympathies will shift each time I watch this movie in future in the same way as when I watch The Bad Seed depending on my mood. The mother is a horrible character, spouting unbelievably narrow views at each dinner scene (where the movie most clearly pays homage to American Beauty), and in a flashback to Pauline’s near-drowning telling her father (after he gives her a last minute kiss of life), “You have a cold sore on your lips, you should’ve waited for the lifeguard!” But there is something there that tells you she can’t help it any more than Pauline can, that she’s doing her best with everything she’s been directly or indirectly, for better or worse, taught is right.

I’ve seen a lot of comments on the movie saying the ending was predictable but I think that’s kind of the point – the inevitability of the final unbearable scene underlines even the funniest moments leading up to it. Myself, I had an inkling of where it was going, but not of who the real victim would wind up being, and that reveal broke my heart profoundly. The writer/director Richard Bates, Jr joked on Twitter recently, “Some people say Excision’s a horror film. Others say it’s a comedy. I call it a period piece.” You’ll get it when you see it, but I can honestly take it as a serious statement too – with its precise tonal balance of extreme gore, the darkest comedy, and final tragic pain, it speaks volumes about how unbalanced people end up actually acting out the horrific things in their head at this precise moment in time. It’s the American Beauty of horror movies.

From all the talk around the movie (mostly about its possible Scientology/L. Ron Hubbard angle) even before its release I imagined Hoffman’s character would be much more clearly painted as the “bad guy”, but this is one of those “bad guys” who is all too seductive – who, when presented alongside the all too headstrong arrogance of Phoenix, seems like a much more appealing bedfellow. But he isn’t necessarily shown to be always in control either – he snaps multiple times when rationally questioned by others, and a key scene has his wife, played by Amy Adams, masturbate him into a sink in a way that resembles his own controlling process on others, as she warns him off his attempts to tame Phoenix. She does a similar thing with Phoenix, too – without the hand job – catching him in-between sleeping and waking, trying to get him to stop drinking. In a way Adams kind of dominates the movie, arguably giving it a slight feminist bent similar to Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. In this sense the movie is less about good/bad/right/wrong and more about cycles of control – we all wish to control, manipulate or direct the universe around us in our own way and reality is just the balance.

I find criticisms of The Master‘s lack of plot if anything more bewildering than the ones I saw of Magic Mike – there’s a very clear narrative here, at its simplest a Pygmalion story. I think people’s responses to this movie are really split into two – those who need to make a snap judgment the moment the credits roll and move on, and those who know that some things need to be left to stew a while, possibly years. It’s the reason I don’t find the movie’s seemingly low score on the IMDb as I post this worrisome – why I don’t feel odd giving the movie only 4 hearts right now even as I want to call it a masterpiece. It took me nearly 15 years to see Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut for the perfect summing up of what he was always trying not to say… I’m willing to give The Master even more than that. I think Paul Thomas Anderson himself knows it too, as an exchange between Hoffman and Phoenix goes at one point:

“It’s a hard, slow process.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I don’t either. That’s why we’re here.”

[SPOILERS]

For a good chunk of Wreck-It Ralph I really wondered and worried exactly what it was trying to say. The Toy Story like story (“in a world where games come to life when the arcade is closed…”) has Ralph, the bad guy in an old 8-bit game, decide he doesn’t want to be the bad guy anymore and set out into the wider world of gaming (from 8-bit all the way to modern) to find a gold medal. The trouble is that without a bad guy, Ralph’s game (“Fix-It Felix”) will be reported as broken and be put out of service; and his forays into other games threaten to cause similar problems to those games too. In one game, “Sugar Rush”, he meets Vanellope, a “glitch” with a similar desire – she wants to be a part of her game. But if she becomes a part of the game (she is told) her glitch will be seen, be reported, and the game will be over. It’s a hell of a dilemma, and it’s presented in a way at times that truly suggests that the moral might be to “know your place”. Thankfully, as always, Disney know better.

Somewhere towards the beginning, an animated sign in “Game Central Station” (there’s a lot of these puns – Nesquik-sand, “I’m not a glitch, I’m just pixlexic!”, “Are you hurt, sire?” “No he just glazed me!” and for me they did get slightly irritating and Aardman-ish – there’s an hilarious Wizard of Oz reference involving Oreo cookies, however) has Sonic the Hedgehog for some reason informing passers-by, “If you die outside your game you don’t regenerate, ever.” The intention may have been for this to merely add a note of peril to the seemingly harmless environment but my problem, which might make sense if you read my Frankenweenie and ParaNorman reviews, is I took it a little further. When a big sacrificial moment is suggested towards the end, I really braced myself for something profoundly emotional – even more than a heartbreaking moment earlier when Ralph “wrecks” something very precious to Vanellope – and it never came.

This moment is followed by something that threatened to make me give up on Disney entirely as I almost did after Enchanted. I’ve never liked movies where a hero or heroine (usually heroine) has to essentially integrate into society to be accepted by it – it’s the reason I will take any opportunity to tell people Grease 2 is better than Grease, and, closer to Disney, why my heart always sinks a little when Violet seems relatively “normal” at the end of The Incredibles. The way Vanellope the glitch’s story plays out here, then, is kind of wonderful. What actually happens when she becomes part of her game is, the game “resets” and her glitch disappears. She literally becomes a princess, complete with puffy pink dress – at which point my face must have been a picture – which (yay!) she promptly glitches out of, because that’s who she is.

I guess what I’m saying is, I really didn’t know what Wreck-It Ralph was doing half the time, which is probably a good thing. For now I really don’t know where it sits for me as far as Disney are concerned. It’s almost simultaneously a step forwards, backwards, and sideways for them, feeling more at times like a (albeit good) Dreamworks animation – perhaps because of the more recognisable voices of John C. Reilly, Sarah Silverman and Jane Lynch – and with a much more complex message than even their most recent work. It’s certainly one I’ll revisit – it’s possible my experience a second time could be wildly different if I know what’s coming.

You’d think I would’ve had enough of Nightmare on Elm Street extras after the 8 hours of Never Sleep Again and all the other Elm Street stuff I spent weeks watching a couple of years ago but I’ve actually been looking forward to seeing this, which has now seemingly been rebranded as “Never Sleep Again 2”, for over a year now. I don’t really know which is the higher praise – that it more than deserves to sit beside the vast array of material in Never Sleep Again, or that it made me appreciate again the original movie – which I’ve said before is one of those movies that have kind of grown a little stale to me over time through over-watching – more than any other horror documentary I’ve ever seen.

As the title suggests, this is billed as Heather Langenkamp’s story but in all honesty her contribution is not as total as I expected. The documentary is split into two major parts: footage of a horror convention celebrating the original Nightmare’s 25th anniversary where Heather spends most of her time asking people “what about Nancy?” and looking for an action figure of herself (one that doesn’t suck – she finds a “freezing cheerleader” in one Nightmare board game but no Nancy), and a great extended interview with the creator of Freddy and Nancy, Wes Craven. This interview is intercut with another interview with his daughter Jessica, holding a baby daughter of her own – Jessica explains that she may have “inspired” Nancy by saying of Craven’s Swamp Thing 2 years before Nightmare, why are the girls always falling down in your movies?

The documentary reaches some real moments of honesty towards the end – I’m incredibly cynical about emotional moments in these things since the whole reality TV boom but (though not quite as tragicomic as Best Worst Movie) there’s an awkwardness to the human interactions here that I believe can’t be faked. The parade of fans lining up to get her autograph in the convention segment is really something to behold – a worrying moment has one fan pull out a machete to be signed, then there’s a deaf girl with her father, a lot of young children, a guy who wants to tell Heather all about his recent break-up, and most notably a British girl in a wheelchair who moves Heather to tears telling her what Nancy and the Elm Street movies meant for her. Langenkamp’s mission is to get all these people, and us, to “be Nancy!” through the dark times – it sounds corny, but I couldn’t believe how good this movie made me feel.

The story is essentially Poison Ivy (which I realise came later but for me is pretty hard to beat for what it is) with a little witchcraft thrown in, which ironically kind of makes it less scary. The use of Blair so soon after The Exorcist isn’t wasted – one scene actually has her in bed screaming “Motherrrrr!” as her skin erupts in boils. I love Linda Blair but she’s not too good here excepting one scene featuring the death of an animal – unsurprising given her commitment to animal rights, PETA, etc in later life (producer Max Keller says in the commentary she brought “45 dogs” to the set even then). Aesthetically she’s as nice to watch as ever, if not as adorable in the horse scenes as in Wild Horse Hank (was that really made a year after this?) or as shameless in the trashier scenes as her later more exploitative work like Savage Streets.

Particularly in the effects laden (and you can imagine how hilarious that is on a 70s TV budget is) finale it’s odd Wes Craven followed his hyper-real debut Last house on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes with this, but it clearly served its purpose for him and it’s not a complete waste of time if you have an interest in any of the participants.