By Preston Wilder
A recent online article by Daniel Carlson (http://moviemezzanine.com/film-criticism-essay/) reckons that the film review as we know it – the “conventional” film review – is an endangered species, and will soon be replaced by long-form, discursive essays of the kind now being written about TV shows. Leaving aside the paradox that the internet – the medium that gave us the dismissive meme “tl;dr” (‘too long; didn’t read’) – is now encouraging verbiage and rambling, there’s nothing especially new about Carlson’s piece. Yet it seems a good place to start, typifying the two main tenets in today’s film culture: that the world as we knew it may be ending, and that the answer lies in looking to television.
More and more, this annual recollection of the best films screened in Cyprus over the past 12 months is starting to resemble a wake, or at least an existential crisis. Even the piece itself no longer makes sense – because the concept dates from a time when August was a cinematic wasteland (when theatres essentially closed down for a month), so the last week of July was a logical end of the season. Nowadays, however, though the exodus of vacationing families has a slight impact on family films (Inside Out isn’t being released till the schools re-open), teen-friendly ‘summer movies’ never stop coming: the new Mission: Impossible is due next week, closely followed by Fantastic Four. There’s no special reason to look back in late July, as opposed to any other time.
As our article has lost its raison d’être, so have movies in general. No-one seems to talk about them anymore – or maybe it just seems that way, because the volume of talk about films is so often dwarfed by the din of talk about TV shows. It makes sense, of course: TV has serialised plots that keep people guessing (and talking) about what comes next – not to mention that viewers get into shows more obsessively, because they spend so much time watching them. Add the fact that TV series now contain more explicit sex and violence than most Hollywood movies (and more radical scripting, like the unabashed gay content in the Wachowskis’ Sense8), and the seismic shift is almost complete – a shift from public to private, from the theatre to your living room (or smartphone), and a shift from poetry to prose, from the terse shorthand of film to the plot-heavy storytelling of TV.
What can you say? The public gets what the public wants. (Personally I prefer the rhythm of movies; I find it more elegant.) The real news is how the shift has affected what we see at the cinema: most blockbusters are now franchises, i.e. glorified TV shows with an over-arching back story and a new ‘season’ every couple of years. And there’s also another, subtler change, especially in American films: a certain self-indulgence, as befits a culture where people spend entire weekends binge-watching House of Cards or Game of Thrones. When you watch a Hollywood comedy like Spy it’s hard not to notice how lackadaisical it is, compared to the snappy style of old Hollywood comedies from the Marx Brothers to the ZAZ boys. There are tangents, obvious dead spots, gags in search of a punchline, a blatantly excessive two-hour running time. Nor is the trend limited to comedy: the recent Magic Mike XXL spent its entire second hour preening happily, momentum forgotten, as if it (and we) had all the time in the world.
We don’t, of course. Time is precious, and there’s so much to see – yet this is where the wake needs to double as a celebration and acknowledge that it’s possible to keep panning for gold and finding nuggets, even in the foolish detritus of a medium that may (or may not) be mutating, or becoming extinct or whatever. Magic Mike XXL wasn’t as good as the original – yet it also contained some of Andie MacDowell’s finest moments, and it also contained that scene (you know the one) where Channing Tatum dances to ‘Pony’ while welding in his workshop, and welds in time to the music. That’s something we’ll remember, ditto that astonishing stunt in Furious 7 where a car smashes its way out of a skyscraper and into the next skyscraper (then the one after that), ditto that ridiculous joke in Taken 3 about how to attract lots of rabbits using only a box of matches. What, you don’t remember? It’s simple enough, you just open the box slightly, extract a single match so it looks like the antenna on a walkie-talkie, then you say: “Calling all rabbits. Come in, rabbits!”. You’re welcome, readers.
Not that Taken 3 is worth watching – but that’s my point, everything is (kind of) worth watching. It’s easy to complain about self-indulgence, and indeed Hollywood films badly need to become sharper, less waffly, less complacent – but it’s also true that random, irrelevant moments often bring the most joy, and it’s also true that the universe unfolded in any given movie is so rich and detailed it’d take umpteen viewings to absorb fully. I don’t agree with Daniel Carlson (there’s a lot to be said for concise, “conventional” film reviews), but it’s tempting to assume that the fathomless worlds of Cinema must be met with an equally grand response. Films contain multitudes, even the bad ones.
And of course you also have the good ones. The spaceship swooping down to snap up the grieving boy at the beginning of Guardians of the Galaxy. The frame physically changing – pulled apart by our teenage hero – to suggest escape and euphoria in Mommy, shown at the invaluable Cyprus Film Days. Bradley Cooper on a rooftop in Iraq, having to decide whether to gun down a mother and child in the first few minutes of American Sniper – and the film simply leaving him there, coming back to the rooftop half an hour later when audience perceptions have been altered. Superwoman Lucy meeting primitive woman Lucy through the magic of Time-travel in Lucy. Bitzer the dog waiting patiently for the lights to change – even though he’s chasing a runaway caravan at the time – in Shaun the Sheep Movie.
I could go on. Passengers on a doomed plane slowly realising the connection between them in the opening ‘tale’ in Wild Tales, shown at the invaluable Friends of the Cinema Society. The climax of the moody, languid Blackhat, a foot-chase played out against a crowd going in the opposite direction. 14-year-old Amy Winehouse singing ‘Happy birthday’ and trilling like an old jazz diva in Amy (gone too soon, like its subject). Lloyd’s long-lost daughter musing that she’d like to go to India and volunteer at one of those leprechaun colonies in Dumb and Dumber To (“I think you mean Ireland,” corrects Lloyd gently). Liam Neeson vs. Ed Harris in Run All Night – but also Liam Neeson showing he can apply his trademark intensity to literally any situation in Ted 2. Reese Witherspoon bristling in Hot Pursuit. Pablo Escobar (Benicio del Toro) in a swimming pool with kids clambering over him in Escobar: Paradise Lost. Winsome boy Kostas Nikouli asking his brother if the Acropolis is indeed the Acropolis in Xenia, also shown at Cyprus Film Days.
That mid-April festival (our only world-class festival), which even showed a smattering of Cypriot films this year, also accounts for the top two positions on the following list. Thanks to the Ministry of Culture for continuing to sponsor CFD – and thanks to the Friends of the Cinema for continuing to spread the gospel of films beyond the multiplex, with special mention to the nascent (or resurgent) Larnaca Film Society which has been making valiant efforts to bring movies to that small market in the past few months (see our listings for details). Without even further ado, here’s a Top 10 of sorts, with Honourable Mention going to Gone Girl, Guardians of the Galaxy, Blackhat, and Bill Murray in St. Vincent – just for being Bill Murray.
10. Do the Oscars mean much anymore? Probably not – but I still got a thrill when they voted for Birdman, a high-energy, entertainingly neurotic semi-comedy about actors and theatre, living on its nerves and in the moment. Technical dazzle, magical realism and ferocious performances; Michael Keaton losing to the Stephen Hawking impersonator was an obvious travesty.
9. The year’s most pleasant surprise at the multiplex was The Boy With the Cuckoo-Clock Heart, a dark-but-cute Franco-Belgian cartoon that was often erratic, slightly mad and altogether charming. The titular boy pursues his beloved, Miss Acacia, across 19th-century Europe, with featured roles for Georges Méliès and Jack the Ripper. A fairy comes out of an egg, and explores the cogs inside his heart. A full moon swallows a flying train while our heroes yell “Andalusia!”. Cuckoo, indeed.
8. I’m torn between finding Interstellar rather pompous – it certainly takes itself seriously – and admitting that this three-hour chunk of science fiction is surprisingly touching. A dying world, a father and daughter, people who lie and deceive (as people do). There are astronauts, Time dilation and singularities – but it’s not really about quantum physics, it’s about human frailty. A small, painful film inside a grandly epic one.
7. What’s left to say about Boyhood? The greatest cinematic experiment of 2014, following a boy’s maturation from 6 to 18 across the actual 12 years that it took to make the movie. Clearly unique, albeit not without flaws; the niceness palls, and the characters sometimes grate – little kids are cute, teenagers languid to the point of self-parody – but it’s still a kind of masterpiece.
6. Liam Neeson seems to be everywhere, and that’s fine with me – but A Walk Among the Tombstones is something more, a knowingly retro private-eye thriller that’s compellingly hard-boiled from beginning to end. Also notable for Dan Stevens, breaking out of the Downton Abbey ghetto (see also The Guest) as the haggard rich dude seeking revenge for his murdered wife.
5. Scarlett Johansson is Lucy, an ordinary girl who gets plied with a literally mind-expanding drug and finds herself “colonising” her own brain. Luc Besson’s magnificent mess – a superhero(ine) movie with a difference – features shoot-outs and car chases then becomes increasingly philosophical, culminating in a straight-faced head-trip through the fourth dimension. Cool.
4. Opening this week is Southpaw, a fair boxing drama with a muscle-bound Jake Gyllenhaal – but Gyllenhaal will never top his gaunt, creepy turn in Nightcrawler, as a tabloid-TV newshound with junkie eyes and the vocabulary of a corporate training manual. Spiky dialogue, eye-popping colours and a constant thrum of violence that explodes – predictably but shockingly – in the final act.
3. Evil midgets, albino children, flame-throwing guitars, man-birds on stilts; all these appear in Mad Max: Fury Road – and of course there’s Max (Tom Hardy), who’s mad, accompanying Furiosa and a passel of runaway damsels to a dream of “the Green Place”. A lurid, violent fantasy? Maybe so – but also a vivid, symphonic tale of a world in tatters that seems re-imagined from scratch. Any number of action films will appear at the multiplex this year; none will approach the impact of this one.
2. Thank you Cyprus Film Days, for the riches that you bring – and Whiplash won the Audience Award (as well as three Oscars), which is no surprise at all because it’s riveting to watch, a battle of wills between youthful drummer Miles Teller and tyrannical teacher J.K. Simmons. Rushing? Dragging? “Not quite my tempo…”
1. Thank you Cyprus Film Days, for the riches that you bring – and Putin-haters tend to love Leviathan reflexively, for political reasons, but this strange, desolate Russian drama goes so much further. Plays like a cynical political drama for about an hour – then the structure unexpectedly collapses, leaving only chaos, a wasteland, modern Russia as a mad Leviathan which no-one can possibly hope to reel in with a fish-hook. A perverse, immensely sad film to cherish – and a film to think about as the world of films changes beyond recognition. Happy 2015-16…
