The best and worst of 2009

As the annual commercial hoop-la of award-season hoves into view, I thought I'd add my tuppence-worth with the conventional and more unconventional annual Bina007 Best of and Worst of list. And, given that award-givers typically reward melodrama rather than comedy, with start with the laughs. After all, as Sullivan found in that Preston Sturges masterpiece, there's nothing wrong with just trying to make people laugh, especially in a year as ball-shrinkingly grim as 2009........

Funniest movies of the year: by far the funniest was Armando Ianucci's scabrous political satire IN THE LOOP. We already knew that Peter Capaldi's Malcolm Tucker was the filthiest, most evil of spin doctors, but Tom Hollander was a delight as the incompetent junior minister who indirectly led Britain to war. I was crying with laughter for pretty much the entire first twenty minutes of this film.

The second funniest film of the year was the Paul Rudd vehicle ROLE MODELS. The genius was in the casting: Ken Jeong as the narcisstic little bitch warrior king; Bobb'E J Thompson as the foul-mouthed little kid; and Jane Lynch as the former crack-addict turned mentor. Pure Comedy Gold. Funnier than PINEAPPLE EXPRESS and I LOVE that film.

And continuing the warm-hearted tone, here's some praise for films that I didn't really expect too much from. It's moments like these that I live for: the reason why I watch so many movies: the capacity to be genuinely entertained and surprised. First up, its Bryan Singer's hammy Hitler-assassination thriller, VALKYRIE, was better than it should've been, and such was Tom Cruise's fervour, I almost believed he was going to take Germany! Second is Alex Proyas' Nic Cage sci-fi flick KNOWING. It had all the hallmarks of Nic Cage schlock but somehow won me over with the sheers balls-out bravery of taking the movie to its logical conclusion.

The movie that made me cry the most, but in a good way, was MILK. Sean Penn's Harvey MILK was simply inspiring, and the love affair with James Franco's Scott so convincing and beautiful. But most of all, I felt so very deeply for Josh Brolin's repressed, twisted, vulnerable Dan White. The real scenes of the candle-lit march had be blubbing like a little girl.

The most beautifully imagined movie I saw, and the movie that most perfectly encapsulated the wonderful mystery of cinema - why show and tell is so powerful - was THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS.

The most believable lovers were Meryl Streep as Julia David and Stanley Tucci as her supportive husband in Nora Ephron's semi-biopic JULIA & JULIA. There perfectly matching eccentricity left me wanting more Parisian craziness and less contemporary whining.

Of course, not all movies can be unique, beautiful, brave and intelligent. But it's all the more disappointing when good directors do bad things, movies that were less than they should have been:

David Fincher takes an elegant little F Scott Fitzgerald and turns it into a pretentious bloated movie that wants to be profound but ends up being just one damn thing after another. The only good thing about THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON was that Tilda Swinton cameo.

John Patrick Shanley's award winning play turned movie, DOUBT, starring premium-cut actors and featuring the photography of Roger Deakins turned out to be over-acted, over-written and over-directed hammy pretentious nonsense with not one elegant or original thing to say.

Zack Snyder's heartfelt but ultimately flawed adaptation of Alan Moore's genius graphic novel WATCHMEN featured both the most astounding opening titles of any film of the year but also the most excruciating sex scene and the worst wig. Ultimately, Snyder's shooting style also mitigated against the point of the film - the superheroes do not actually have superpowers (Doc M excepted) and so shouldn't be shot as though they do.

Michael Mann's turgid John Dilligener biopic PUBLIC ENEMIES failed to catch-a-fire, despite a sterling cast, and beautiful production design. Washed out DV visuals didn't help either.

Finally, and most heart-breakingly, Pedro Almodovar's latest, BROKEN EMBRACES just didn't match up to the recent brilliance of VOLVER or BAD EDUCATION. And yet, and yet, isn't a re-examination of early Almodovar better than 99% of what plays the cineplex?

The movie I'm ashamed to admit I was happy was a failure: THE SOLOIST: over-hyped British director Joe Wright finally made a movie so irredeemably bad that even his typically fawning press couldn't ignore it.

Most balls-out insane: Werner Herzog's simply inexplicable, high-camp, purely insane, iguana-obsessed BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL: NEW ORLEANS. A movie so large, so insane, that even Nic Cage is left laughing at the camera wondering what the fuck is going on. A noble winner in the face of strong competition from Park Chan Wook's insane priest-turns-vampire love story, THIRST and Lars von Trier's leg-crossingly excruciating ANTICHRIST.

The Francis Ford Coppola Memorial Award for Alpha-Gamma Film-Making: Nicholas Windig Refn, director of the unique, brutal, beautiful biopic BRONSON featuring a mesmerising performance from Tom Hardy, as well as the bizarre, momentum-less elongated howl, VALHALLA RISING.

And now to the conventional awards:

Best Film: Nicholas Windig Refn's visually stunning, brutal biopic, BRONSON

Best Animated Feature: Henry Selick's wonderfully dark children's horror, CORALINE

Best Foreign Language Feature: Michael Haneke's strange, enigmatic, disturbing drama, DAS WEISSE BAND

Best Documentary: Serge Bromberg's loving restoration of the the movie that almost killed Clouzot: HENRI-GEORGES CLOUZOT'S INFERNO

Best Director: Tomas Alfredson for his hauntingly beautiful LET THE RIGHT ONE IN.

Best Actor: Sam Rockwell as Sam in Duncan Jones' astonishingly assured, provocative and moving debut feature, MOON

Best Supporting Actor: Josh Brolin terrifying vulnerability as Dan White in MILK

Best Actress: Carla Gugino's complex relationship to her own past as The Silk Spectre I in WATCHMEN

Best Supporting Actress: Both Mo'nique and Mariah Carey as tyrant-mother and patient social worker respectively in the moving drama PRECIOUS: BASED ON THE NOVEL PUSH BY SAPPHIRE.

Best Adapted Screenplay: Tom Ford's delicate, elegant, compelling adaptation of Christopher Isherwood's romantic tragedy A SINGLE MAN.

Best Original Screenplay: Armando Ianucci for IN THE LOOP - a movie that made me laugh more than all the others combined.

Best Production Design and Art Direction: The wonderfully cluttered, antiquated and tactile world of the THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS

Best Cinematography: Eduard Grau's honey-toned California sunshine in Tom Ford's impeccably put-together A SINGLE MAN.

RED RIDING - 1974 - Less slippery and subversive than the novel but well put together nonetheless

1974 is the first of three films produced for television by Britain's Channel 4, based on the "Yorkshire noir" novels of David Peace. Each of his four books, 1974, 1977, 1980 and 1983, is about the corruption of policeman, priests, politicians and businessmen who murder and extort for no reason other than that they can. There never seems to be much money or success to be had from it, other than protecting the status quo. These crimes are posited as endemic in a region crippled with obsolete heavy industry and chippy toward outsiders. The greatest tragedy is to think you can remain an outsider - a cool observer - and that you can affect change. West Yorkshire is a law unto itself, and that law is policed by West Yorkshire's Finest, and spun by the compliant journalists of the Yorkshire Post. David Peace's world is one of almost complete corruption and casual evil. There are no heroes, but there are characters through whom we investigate the world and with whom we come to empathise.

In 1974, that character is a cocky young journalist called Eddie Dunford, newly back from a failed stint as a journo in Fleet Street, and desperate to make a name for himself by proving that someone is serially killing little girls despite the obfuscation of the rozzers; competition from senior crime reporter Jack Whitehead; and the powerful forces protecting a successful local property developer, John Dawson.

The movie is directed by Julian Jarrold, whose previous directorial efforts included the painfully superficial and hi-gloss remake of BRIDESHEAD REVISITED. 1974 is a far more successful film. Shot in sepia tones through the perpetual haze of cigarette smoke, the movie feels claustrophobic and sinister - just as it should. There's a superb scene where the camera looks over Dunford's shoulder through the patterned glass to a distorted image of Paula Garland - mother to a murdered girl - and soon to be Dunford's lover. That sums up Dunford: he sees through a glass darkly. And the tragedy of the film is that his eventual knowledge brings no relief. In a pivotal scene, he hands over a bag of documents - the research of his dead colleague Barry Gannon - to the one policeman he thinks is honest. Dunford is relieved - elated - as he drives toward his lover for an escape to the South. What a fool, the film-makers say, to think that he could actually escape the clutches of Yorkshire corruption. What a selfish, naive fool to think he could dump the files and fuck of to the South, where the sun shines.

Andrew Garfield is superb as Dunford - with his performance in THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS - he has become an actor I will go out of my way to watch. Rebecca Hall is moving as his lover, Paula Garland. In John Dawson, Sean Bean finds yet another role that capitalises on his slightly sleazy charisma. But the real strength is the depth and quality of British character actors filling the cast, from John Henshaw as the harsh-but-fair Editor, to Peter Mullan's Reverend Laws.

The resulting film is atmospheric, sometimes like a bad dream, hard to hold on to, unnverving, and very hard to let go of. Tony Grisoni has done a good job in adapting a ferociously complicated novel for a hundred minute runtime, and cleverly compresses characters. What the film looses, however, is the sheer force of its brutality. The novel is hard work, both in terms of language and descriptions of violence and sex. Every time Julian Jarrold cuts away from a blackmail photo or pans away from a scene of torture, David Peace takes you into the mind of the aggressor. And where the worst crime Grisoni's Dunford can be accused of is naivety, and a final loss of temper, Peace's Dunford is a far more ambivalent character. If policemen casually rape whores, then in the novel Dunford treats women as casually and cruelly, though playing, as it were, in the minor leagues.

And, without ruining either, I found the "solution" of 1974 and the closing scenes too neat and twee, where they should've been more slippery and open-ended. Presumably this was the result of the compression of a large conspiracy into a single culprit but the result was that the ending felt rushed and just plain bizarre - the logic behind the killing was almost given as a throw-away line, and significantly undermines the slow build-up.

RED RIDING was shown on UK TV in 2009 and is available on DVD and on the Channel 4 4oD video on demand service.

Douglas Sirk Retrospective 1 - HAS ANYBODY SEEN MY GAL (1952)

Douglas Sirk was a Danish boy raised in Germany, who was forced to leave his successful career in European cinema in 1937, eventual finding fame as the director of melodramas for Universal in the 1950s. His films raked in the phat cash - women loved the soupy romances with strong women triumphing over parochial social mores to find love and sometimes wealth. But, in contrast to fellow emmigres, Otto Preminger and Billy Wilder, Sirk's films were critically panned. After all, the 1950s was a decade in which European directors were stripping back cinema to deal with supposedly more authentic real people in real situations. Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer and Rivette were the heirs of Italian neo-realism. There movies featured improvised dialogue, jump cuts and existential angst. The characters in the Nouvelle Vague films were the kids of the bourgeois middle-aged women featured in Sirk.

But history sometimes redresses past slights, and Sirk is now as beloved of the self-appointed guardians of taste as the French auteurs. Directors from Fassbinder to Tarantino cite him as a key influence. The references are subtle (in PULP FICTION, Mia Wallace orders her "Douglas Sirk steak, bloody") or complete, as in Todd Haynes' homage, FAR FROM HEAVEN. Contemporary critics thought Sirk's lavish use of colour, sets and costumes was superficial and pandering to the baroque tastes of his audience. They failed to see that Sirk was using lavish interiors and costumes to show the oppression of his characters by their surroundings. The suburban house, filled with life's accumulated wealth, comes to symbolise the staid restrictions of country club society. Characters are frequently shown imprisoned by window panes and reflected in mirrors. Sirk may have given Lana Turner the most expensive costumes in cinema history for IMITATION OF LIFE, but that was for a greater reason than to dazzle his audience. It was to show quite literally the price she had paid for happiness.

I must confess that before this retrospective, I'd never seen a single Sirkian movie, and I was shocked at how explicit they were in tackling social issues such as race and sexual conventions, but also how fresh they seemed in tackling still relevant issues about a working woman's ability to successfully raise a family. On one level, Sirk's movies are absurd to modern eyes - can you really imagine a whispering campaign against a middle-aged widow because she wants to remarry a younger, poorer man? No. But one can certainly see how selfish children can stifle a mother's happiness in any age. And so, on to the marathon!

The first film is HAS ANYBODY SEEN MY GAL? Unusually for Sirk, this is a costume drama, set in the 1920s, with a very light tone. Our heroine, Milly (a shockingly young Piper Laurie) is happily courting Dan (Rock Hudson) until eccentric and wealthy Sam Fulton leaves her family $100,000. Newly rich mother Harriet now wants Milly to marry a socialite, fit to match their new mansion and new friends. It plays almost like a musical without songs - or rather with only one song - the opening number. There's plenty of screwball comedy and tongue-in-cheek aw-shucks feel to it. But even here, the familiar Sirkian style and themes are familiar. Style-wise, the colours are bright and brash and the sets are lavish and cluttered. Characters are defined by their environments - the pharmacy with the soda-stream is beautifully recreated, and the movie is essentially the story of a family who move to a nicer house. It is, then, the familiar Sirkian battle between true love and bourgeois convention. And most importantly, the movie features strong woman - first Harriet, who is wrong-headed but a matriarch, and then Milly, who is equally strong-headed. The husband and beaux are merely victims of their caprices. Even Milly's little sister bosses around the rich Sam Fulton, dragging him round like a puppy! No wonder women loved this film!

HAS ANYBODY SEEN MY GAL? was released in 1952.

NOWHERE BOY - suprisingly conventional Lennon biopic

NOWHERE BOY is a beautifully written, beautifully acted, sensitively directed biopic of the young John Lennon, directed by the reknowned British artist, Sam Taylor-Wood. Set in a perfectly rendered 1950s Liverpool, the film shows a 17 year old Lennon groping toward the truth of why he lives with his Aunt Mimi rather than with his mum and dad, not to mention taking his first steps toward becoming a Beatle.

Aaron Johnson (THE THIEF LORD; ANGUS, THONGS AND PERFECT SNOGGING) is assured as the young Lennon, complete with rock-n-roll quiff and iconic Scouse accent. He pulls off both the cockey laddishness and the vulnerability. His John is witty and playful; promiscuous and arrogant; occasionally violently angry; but also desperately adrift. Kristin Scott-Thomas also gives a nuanced performance as John's Aunt Mimi - both stiff and severe in her middle-class home, but also undoubtedly very loving toward John and possessing a wicked sense of humour. (And to those reviewers criticising Scott Thomas for being too posh, Mimi really didn't have a broad Scouse accent. Indeed, Lennon later commented that he had to broaden his Scouse accent for PR purposes.)

The character that jumps off the screen is John's mum, and Mimi's younger sister, Julia. Anne-Marie Duff's Julia is so full of energy and fun that she simply sweeps you up in her love of life and rock'n'roll music. But like John you can't help but feel something is forced in such buoyancy and we're right to distrust it. Despite being remarried with two small children, Julia obviously suffers from depression and can only truly relate to men through flirtation. This extends to John and his band members, and the delicate way in which Sam Taylor-Wood and her script-writer deal with this is both honest and elegant.

The resulting film is a moving emotional drama that is interesting on its own terms, let alone because it formed an iconic musician.

NOWHERE BOY is a very good film. It reminded me a lot of Tom Ford's feature debut A SINGLE MAN, in that it was both apparently conventional in its structure and visual style but also wonderfully brave in tackling uncomfortable subjects head on, without judgement and without cliché. The conventional style is even more surprising from Taylor-Wood given the nature of her graphic art, and her bizarre short film.

NOWHERE BOY closed London 2009 and is currently on release in the UK and Australia. It will play Sundance 2010. It opens in New Zealand on March 4th; in the Netherlands on April 1st; in Russia on April 15th and in Norway on September 10th.

DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE MORGANS? is okay shock

Maybe I'm just in an unreasonably happy holiday mood, or maybe my expectations had been lowered by the generally pisspoor reviews, but I rather enjoyed DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE MORGANS? It's the latest romantic comedy from writer-director Marc Lawrence, the man behind the phenomenally successful MISS CONGENIALITY and 2007's rather charming MUSIC AND LYRICS, also starring Hugh Grant. In DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE MORGANS? Hugh Grant and Sarah Jessica Parker play two successful New Yorkers on the verge of divorce but forced into the witness protection programme together.

This is a rather ludicrous premise on which to hang a relationship drama, but perfectly in step with typically farcial rom-com set-ups (see THE PROPOSAL or FAILURE TO LAUNCH). And, as you can imagine, there are plenty of set pieces where the effete liberal New Yorkers come up against the cruder delights of country living. Naturally, there is a third act crisis which prompts a happy ending. There's plenty to object to here. The laziness of the derivative plot, for one. The reductive politics in which city dwellers are cynical ne'er-do-wells and country dwellers are the keepers of Real American Values, is another.

But hidden underneath all these lazy genre tropes is a rather engaging romantic drama in which two mature people talk through issues from real life - the way in which difficulty conceiving can put a relationship under pressure. I found myself actually routing for Sarah Jessica Parker and Hugh Grant. Moreover, many of Hugh Grant's lines are genuinely witty.

So, whatever the rest of the reviewers say, I had a good time with this film. Underneath all that predictable attempted screw-ball slapstick lies a rather sweet relationship drama.

DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE MORGANS? is on release in the US, UK, Australia, France and Thailand. It opens next weekend in Argentina, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Portugal, Singapore, Switzerland, Austria, Spain and Sweden. It opens on January 20th in Egypt; on January 27th in Belgium, South Korea and Norway. It opens on February 5th in Brazil, Estonia and Finland; on February 11th in the Netherlands, Slovenia and Venezuela; on February 18th in Russia; on February 26th in Italy and Romania. It opens on March 5th in Poland and on March 12th in Japan.

SHERLOCK HOLMES - solid blockbuster fun, but what's with Adler?

I have read much of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes canon, but was never as taken with it, qua detective fiction, as I was with Agatha Christie. The reason being that Conan Doyle did not play fair. His Victorian detective always solved crimes by means of arcane knowledge that only he could possess - the taste of a particular type of wax used by just one candle-manufacturer in Brittany. As a consequence, the clever reader cannot solve a Conan Doyle mystery in the same way that he can use pure logic and close observation to solve an Agatha Christie novel. So, I read Conan Doyle, as most schoolchildren do, for that sense of Britain at the height of imperial glory but also at the depths of urban degradation - and for that wonderfully subversive idea that Holmes was a bit of a bastard, possibly homo-erotically attached to his sidekick Dr Watson, and addicted to cocaine.

I would suggest that Guy Ritchie's new adaptation of Sherlock Holmes also works best as a mood piece, interspersed by some rather spectacular stunts. His London is out of Tim Burton's SWEENEY TODD - all smoke-filled narrow streets and filthy docks contrasted with the opulent luxury of parliament, Mayfair hotels, and quasi-Masonic lodges. The production design is simply marvellous and makes good use of what is left of Victorian Britain in Manchester and London (from what I could tell). Ritchie also finally finds a suitable object for his obsession with posh chaps bruising with the chavs. He amps up Holmes' boxing, drug-taking and general down-and-dirtiness. Holmes is happy chatting with the local bobby, Clarkie, or with a grimy looking trawlerman. He is altogether more uncomfortable dining in a genteel restaurant.

As an action film, SHERLOCK HOLMES works well too. Ritchie gives us some marvellous stunts that truly make use of the Thames. There are three action set-pieces: one sees a ship slipped off its moorings during a fight between Holmes and a French giant; the second sees Watson set off a string of explosions at a riverside factory; and the final act confrontation between Holmes and his adversary, Lord Blackwood, takes places atop an as-yet-unfinished Tower Bridge. I would have happily paid the price of admission just to see the imagined Victorian vista from the top of that bridge.

Even better than as a mood piece and as an action film, SHERLOCK HOLMES works best as a "bromance" in the manner of all the best action/detective flicks. Robert Downey Junior and Jude Law, as Holmes and Watson respectively, utterly convinced me of their fondness for each other. With such a high-stakes and frankly ludicrous plot swirling about them, it was the credibility of their relationship that anchored the film. I loved their bickering; Holmes' resentment of Watson's new fiancée; and their genuine affection. We truly believe that, as in the books, Watson has brought Holmes back to the edges of respectable society. We also believe, in the first of a few annoying retcons, that Holmes keeps Watson's addiction to gambling in check. When all the explosions were over, I loved the scenes between these two, and I'll be watching the next film for those.

So all in all, I had a rather good time with SHERLOCK HOLMES as a beautifully rendered, action blockbuster, centred around a charismatic relationship between Holmes and Watson. Sure the plot was insane - Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong) wants to use black magic to rule the world! But it does at least do that typical Holmes thing where something that seems supernatural can be explained with good old fashioned science. I know that Ritchie has exaggerated Holmes' bruiser antics in the manner of his Mockney flicks, but hey, what's life without a little indulgence? And, it finally looks like Ritchie has found a good excuse to use his slo-mo fight scene style!

That is not to say that there isn't a problem with this film. And that problem is the retconned introduction of Irene Adler - a love interest for Holmes. Anyone with any knowledge of the books will know that this is just plain wrong. But, producers aiming for a target demographic of horny teenage boys will have their way so it looks like we're saddled with her. Ritchie just doesn't do female characters. He doesn't know how to create a well-rounded, interesting woman on screen. And Rachel McAdams' Irene Adler is a victim of this. The concept of the character, nowhere in the books, is a good one - to have a criminal mastermind who has gotten under Holmes' skin. But for a woman to have married as many times as Adler and to have been up to as much crime, she would need to be older - nearer to Holmes' age. I would have loved to see Helen McCrory in this role. But more to the point, Adler was utterly redundant in this flick, except as a nod to the teenage male audience, and in helping to set up the second film. I mean, seriously, imagine a film without Adler. It would've been twenty minutes shorter and the better for it. So for the sequel, I'm hoping that McAdams will be booted, just like that awful Katie Holmes from BATMAN BEGINS, and replaced by someone older and frankly, better at acting. I'm also hoping the scriptwriters give her more to do.

SHERLOCK HOLMES is on release in the USA, UK, Bahrain, Croatia, Hong Kong, Kuwait, Malaysia, Portugal, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, Canada, Denmark, Italy, Latvia, Switzerland, Australia, Iceland, New Zealand, Norway, Indonesia, Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Mexico, Romania and Sweden. It opens next weekend in Belgium, the Czech Republic, Hungary, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Brazil and Estonia. It opens on January 14th in Argentina, Greece, Spain, and Turkey. It opens on January 22nd in Finland; on January 28th in Germany and Switzerland; on February 3rd in France and on March 12th in Japan.