Amélie (2001)

A quick list of some things I like: critically acclaimed films, French women, quirky yet realistic characters.

A quick list of things I don't get: Amélie, the love for Amélie.

It should have been a perfect storm but I just didn't really enjoy Amélie at all. I finally got around to watching it after going through a "Movies like this" list for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which still sits on the throne of my favourite films, so I was expecting to fall in love.

Amélie just stinks to the high heavens of trying way too hard. It's charming, but it's too charming. It's quirky, but it's too quirky. It's whimsical, but it's too whimsical. The only grounding element in the film comes in the neuroses of Amélie herself: an introvert badly damaged by her incompetent parents who finds it hard to properly connect with others. But her broken social skillset is too little to stem the flow of tweeness flowing out of every other character and situation in the film. 

I'd be tempted to put it down to a simple difference of culture. Maybe it's just one of those French things that as an uncultured Englishman I'm never going to get? But I recently caught a few episodes of The Returned (a French mystery TV series) and that was beautifully bleak. As you might have already guessed from this review, I should have liked this. I tend to fall in love with the "manic pixie dream girl" characters despite how disgustingly unrealistic they are. Some of my favourite films are Garden State, Eternal Sunshine and Breakfast at Tiffany's (and that isn't easy for a straight, male twentysomething to admit) and was expecting Amélie to slot right in there in next to them but apparently I have a point where I draw the line and say "cut that quirky shit out, you're a grown woman for God's sake".

Let The Right One In / Låt den rätte komma in (2008)

 

A fantasy story with vampires that doesn't make you want to cut yourself.

This 2008 Swedish language film came as part of the little wave of Scandinavian culture that got hijacked by the Anglo-sphere in the last few years. This, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Wallander and The Killing are all things that we've nicked and made, sometimes better and sometimes worse, our own versions of.

Let The Right One In (remade recently as Let Me In) bucks the trend of recent fantasy love story (looking at you Twilight) and doesn't take a glamorous brush and paint the undead as cool, moody and mysterious romantic beings. LTROI is pretty old school in it's approach to vampires, despite the two main characters being 12 year olds.

Oskar is a lonely kid living in a Swedish council estate (although it could double for any eastern bloc hellhole) jumping between his divorced parents and being bullied at school, when a mysterious family moves in next door. He and Eli, the new neighbour's daughter become friends despite their common awkwardness and start themselves off on a quirky little pre-teen love story that seems like a really messed up version of Moonrise Kingdom. Obviously things get a little complicated when secrets start to come out and the blood starts flowing.

This is a great film that pulls no punches. The violence is visceral and gory. The vampires are cursed with horrific lives, not blessed with superpowers and sparkles. The kids are awkward, and not in that cutesy hipster fashion but like properly awkward kids. To put it in a way that sounds really stupid: it's a vampire love-story that feels very grounded in reality.

Only God Forgives (2013)

Nicolas Winding Refn set the critics and the internet alight in 2011 with the Ryan Gosling led Drive. His artsy take on a crime film stood out against the rest of that year's major releases with it's incredibly slow and deliberate pace. It also stood out somewhat as Refn's most "mainstream" production, if not by much. Drive was slick artistic and reasonably accessible while keeping a tight hold of that arthouse feel. A hell of a lot of people were expecting Drive 2.0. Only God Forgives is not that.

Only God Forgives goes a bit further from the beaten track and is full on arthouse with symbolism and slow-burn intensity coming out the back end. It created a mixed reaction with critics, to put it lightly. During its trip to the world famous Cannes Film Festival it was walked out on and booed in some screenings and came out of other with top critics awarding it perfect scores. The graphic violence and cryptic approach to storytelling understandably splits reactions pretty much down the middle.

From the get-go, OGF sets out its stall a creeping and eerie dynamic. No punches are pulled as we're introduced to Ryan Gosling's Julian and his brother Billy, who are American-born gangsters working the streets of Bangkok fronting as a Muay Thai boxing club. Billy manages to befall a deserving but gruesome fate which brings the brothers' mother as well as a vengeful police lieutenant out of the woodwork and sets them all on a journey of revenge and retribution exploring the nature of sin and forgiveness.

If you're big on hard hitting and compelling dialogue, this film is not the one for you. In a trademark style, Refn's main character here barely speaks (in his 2009 picture Valhalla Rising, the main character doesn't speak at all). Gosling apparently racks up a total of 17 lines in the entirety of OGF. Most of the feeling in the film comes from the physical acting and the beautiful, beautiful use of lighting and set dressing. Not everyone can agree on whether the rest of the film was impressive, but I'd challenge anyone to come up with a good argument for how this films doesn't look good. Deep blacks, broken by soft hues of gold and deep reds, are interspersed with expertly placed neons that lend the entire production the feel of a dreamy acid trip in the seedy backstreets of Thailand.

Major criticisms come in the form of the characters. Many have said they don't feel like people  and just seem to represent "ideas" instead. And that's kind of exactly what makes the film a great watch. The three main characters, Julian, his mother and the lieutenant, are all pretty inhuman monsters to varying degrees. The lieutenant is a sin eater: he carries out harsh and brutal punishments on those who deserve it. This allows him to also be the agent of forgiveness. It might just be because I've been watching a lot of Breaking Bad, but just because someone is the main character doesn't mean they're the good guy, and just because the lieutenant is working against Gosling doesn't mean he's the bad guy.

Then you have Gosling. Julian is just completely messed up. There is a very overt Oedipal relationship between him and his mother, and it's clear it's just left him confused and belittled his entire life. This confusion and and inability to see the world in the simple black-and-white of the rest of the cast is why he's our main character.

I came because it was a Gosling (and Refn) movie, but I stayed because of Kristin Scott Thomas' Crystal. I haven't seen her in anything before, and truth be told I only knew she existed because of Jeremy Clarkson's obsession with her on Top Gear, but god damn does she steal the show here. It's a departure from her usual high-class and refined roles. She's a mafia take on Lady Macbeth, and it's brilliant.

Crystal is scary. Not in that "She's clearly a crazy psychopath" kind of way either. There's no sense that's she's crazy or just missing the empathy part of her brain, she's just plain cold and ruthless. There's no veneer, only straight up contempt, disgust and hate and Scott Thomas does it perfectly.

Only God Forgives is not going to make it on many "Best Films" list, but where it does it'll be pretty high up. I'm a sucker for good looking films and this is one of the best visual stories I've seen in a while. It's not Drive 2 by a long shot. It's a trippy, violent and unsettling film. One that I'm very pleased with.

The Wire Season 1 (2002)

Quality TV in is fast becoming the most consumed and talked about artform of this decade. Game of Thrones is smashing records, both legal and nautical, every time it shows its face. Breaking Bad is ready to set the internet alight with its final eight episodes come the end of summer. Even the way TV is being made is changing, with Netflix getting in on the action with House of Cards and the latest season of Arrested Development. Both shows took the new approach of releasing all episodes at once for you to choose your own pace: watch one a week when you get time, one every night for a week or two, or do what I do and binge through them all in a weekend.

Even with the recent loss of the greatly talented James Gandolfini, you can see how quality programming has dug its feet in. This was a man who was in a film just last year that received five Oscar nominations (Zero Dark Thirty) among numerous massively successful films, but every single mention of him has forgone all them to describe him as "Sopranos star James Gandolfini".

It's, now "classic", shows like The Sopranos that today's TV owes its existence to. The early 2000s set the precedent, and 2002 gave us one of the most influential shows when HBO debuted The Wire.

The Wire, when boiled down to the bare minimum, is a cat-and-mouse drama set in the crime and drug riddled city of Baltimore. The extensive cast of characters come mostly from two sides: the cops and one of the city's many drug gangs. But to say it's a black and white, clear cut story of cops chasing robbers is a disservice to how grey The Wire gets. Nobody is a fully blown bad guy or good guy, but there are a few that are close to the extremes on both sides. Essentially, the people you end up rooting for aren't those on the right side of the law but the people who are trying to do the best for themselves and their friends given the restrictions of the world they inhabit.

Characterisation is where the show truly shines. It's a credit to the shows writers that the frankly huge cast (only a fraction of whom are in the artwork above) all seem to be developed at least to some degree of believability in just 13 episodes. So often in any medium, be it TV, film or books, you get characters who exist solely to perform one action that moves the plot forward. But here, even if that's the only reason a character exists, they're at least fleshed out to be interesting enough that you don't notice.

Apparently, my favourite from the roster is shared with President Obama himself in Omar Little. Imagine your typical gay, black drug dealer character  and Omar will subvert it. This is one scary motherfucker, and I don't mean that creepy type of scary that lazy writers will use to try and make a gay character scary. Omar literally gets people running from the streets  when he makes an appearance because they know that he, along with his trademark shotgun and whistled theme tune, has come to town to cause some bad shit for some unlucky people. Despite being an armed robber by trade he has a strict adherence to a code of honour and it's these sort of almost contradicting traits that make him one of the best characters to watch on screen.

Not only that, Omar has the best single line of the series, and Michael K Williams absolutely nails it.

The tradeoff of focussing so heavily on characters is pacing. You have to go all in with a show like The Wire because the payoff is great but you're going to be waiting a while to get there. This isn't Homeland where every episode has a 50% chance of having an "Oh holy shit!" moment; there's a handful in the season but they are so much more worth it. It's for this reason that I'd recommend the binge approach for this show. I watched all 13 episodes of the first series over the course of four nights (because I have no life) and even then I had to stop for a minute at least once per episode to remind myself who had done what and what had happened. Slow, steady pacing and a cast that'd fill a coach isn't a recipe that comes out best when cooked over 13 weeks.

If you haven't clicked on by this point: I really, really like The Wire and thank it for everything it's responsible for in the modern TV landscape. And if that's not enough for you the show even managed to get the famously sarcastic and pessimistic Charlie Brooker to just sit back and say "It is just fucking brilliant".

V/H/S/2 (2013)

When you've essentially got five teams working on five different short films, it's easy to get stuff done fast. Thanks to this V/H/S/2, the sequel to my favourite horror of the past few years (V/H/S), is here less than a year after the original and it hasn't suffered too abdly for it.

These films are taking us back to an old style you don't see too often any more: the horror anthology. V/H/S/2 follows pretty much exactly the same format as the first: there's a central story about some people being duped into going to a house and finding a bunch of random ass VHS tapes (despite being set right now). They pop the tapes in and we get a bunch of short films breaking up the central story.

Again, the framing story is the weakest of the lot. It doesn't really need to be strong at all though, seeing as it just functions as an excuse to play a bunch of short found-footage type films. I will say though, in the first we were given a reason to believe the guys in the central story deserved to be in this fucked up situation, but in this one they just seem to be good people getting fucked with for no real reason.

As for the feature shorts, there's a range of quality.

The first ("Phase I Clinical Trials") is pretty much your standard ghost story and easily the most disappointing of the bunch. It's pretty well made, and there's an interesting backstory that's alluded to but otherwise it's just pretty standard and has really predictable jumpscares. Not to mention the instance of completely out of the blue gratuitous nudity. I mean, I'm an insane Game of Thrones fan, so gratuitous nudity isn't a problem for me, but in this it's comes out of the blue and for no real reason other than tits.

With the start of the second film ("A Ride in the Park") my stomach sank and my eyes rolled. I won't spoil what it is, but it's a monster invasion that's been done to undeath so much these past few years. Luckily for me, it continues past the point where you'd expect the run-of-the-mill version to and actually becomes a fresh, fun take on something quite tired.

"Safe Haven" in slot three is the highlight of V/H/S/2. If the first film didn't have Amateur Night, Safe Haven would be the highlight of the series so far. Gareth Evans, director of the massively acclaimed action film The Raid: Redemption, throws a news crew into a commune of an apocalyptic death cult during the climax of their doomsday prophecy. Things get very crazy very, very quickly. It just keeps escalating and getting more and more intense until it gets so messed up even some of the victims can't help but just laugh at the sheer ridiculous brilliance.

Coming in last is the very efficiently titled "Slumber Party Alien Abduction". Yeah, it pretty much does exactly what it says on the tin. It's a very 90s styled throwback that knows what it is and just decides to have a bit of fun with it.

Overall,  the film feels a lot less coherent than its predecessor. The first film was incredibly tight and despite having a handful of directors had very clear themes running throughout but the sequel just feels like a bunch of, seemingly random, short horror films from all over the genre. It's still a very good example of found-footage done right, but if you're left only able to see one for some bizarre reason, go for the first.

Side Effects (2013)

 

With a cold open of an apartment floor spattered with blood and deep red footprints, Side Effects  starts with the air of mystery and intrigue it keeps throughout. 

Without giving away too much, Side Effects revolves around a group of people, both patients and doctors, in the psychiatric world and the dangerous possibilities that foreseen or unforeseen side effects can bring about. This is a psychological thriller that deals in money, sex, lies and (pharmaceutical) drugs. Much like many police procedurals with which it shares its style, Side Effects hinges on that oh so ambiguous thing: the truth. When a course of anti-depressants leads to horrific consequences for Emily (Rooney Mara), her doctor (Jude Law) sets on to unravel the mystery of just what happened on a fateful night between her and her husband. More importantly, with his reputation and sense of justice on the line, he pursues why it happened.

The two leads (Mara and Law) elevate what could potentially have descended into one of those convoluted daytime TV movies. Jude Law gives his Dr Banks a pure heart and develops a truly compelling sense of righteousness that would leave only the most cynical not on his side, which makes some later developments for him all the more a difficult pill to swallow. On the flip side, Mara shows off her true range here. We've seen her as an everyday sort of girl in her bit part in The Social Network and the volatilely broken Lisbeth in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. In Side Effects she shows off a number of sides. From her all too believable state through the depression as a timid and injured soul to scenes where she is anything but (to say any more would give away too much), Mara is enthralling throughout.

Side Effects is quite a wild ride with twists and turns... once it gets going. For the first forty-ish minutes you're kind of left wondering where everything is going and although there are one or two interesting characters, they're not doing much, rather that things are just happening. Getting past that first act, something happens that makes you retro-actively appreciate everything that happened. It's a bit of a mis-step in that I would really have preferred to enjoy it as it was happening but being able to look back and think "Damn that was clever". As it stands, the first act is a lot more like looking at a sad painting instead of watching a film, which is great if you're into character studies like me, but it's not why a lot of people watch films. That said, do stick with it. If you like complicated mysteries that flip and flop and have people playing off each other in a vortex of angles, you'll love the last two thirds of Side Effects.

Gotta say though (ending spoilers) the ending is very much bittersweet... Actually no, it's just bitter. This character you've been rooting for pretty much the whole time pulls a massive dick move. I'm not saying it's not justified, but considering their motivations all the way through, the exact type of resolution seems particularly cruel.

The Place Beyond the Pines (2013)

Derek Cianfrance pulled no punches in his début film Blue Valentine and he shows no signs of slowing down with The Place Beyond The Pines. But where Blue Valentine focussed tightly on the two central characters falling in and out of love, the sense of scale has been ramped up taking The Place Beyond The Pines into grander territory.

Focussing on the lives of two fathers, the central conflict comes from people who are neither wholly good or wholly bad but the beautifully murky grey area of just trying to do what's best for their families. In the first two acts, of this film which is very clearly divided into three parts, focus on the trials of Luke and Avery. Luke (Ryan Gosling) is a motorcycle stunt rider who, upon returning to a town with his annually touring show, finds he has a child that he fathered the previous year and sets out to provide for him in the only way he can. His less than lawful profession sets him on a collision course with the incorruptible cop in Avery (Bradley Cooper) and worlds collide as the two men and their families struggle to come to terms with the consequences over the next two decades.

TPBTP is a long film, and it feels long too, but if you can invest yourself in it it pays off in spades. There are no heroes here, only people ruled by their emotions and their efforts to do what is right. Mistakes, guilt and lies echo through generations as the sins of the father are imprinted on those who are doomed to also suffer for them. You may find yourself a little lost at the end of the first act and wondering why any of the progression we get of Avery in the second chunk matters, but it all comes to fruition in the understated and powerful final half hour.

It will be a film that polarises audiences. Many will criticise its awkward pacing and overly lengthy run time. But for those who love characters who are fundamentally broken, especially those who have major identity issues with their somewhat broken homes, this film will resonate to the core. Personally, I saw a lot of powerful emotions reflected back at me that I've dealt with myself. Never to the degree shown here, but I'd argue that anyone who has an issue with a parent would struggle to empathise here.