Category Archives: Films

The Bens 2010

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I freely admit to nicking this idea from my friend Bob, who has to have regular dialysis and so gets through a lot of films and awards his own annual Bobs to them. So, here are the 2010 Ben Awards, for movies seen during 2009.

The guiding criterion of the Bens is the principle oft-stated by Roger Ebert and repeated by me so often that Bonusbarn now likes to get in there first: it’s not what it’s about, it’s how it’s about it. Also (like the Bobs), as any movie seen is eligible the winner in any category doesn’t have to be new.

Best movie shortlist

Bubbling under: Layer Cake, Valkyrie

The winner: Inglourious Basterds

The judges note: for its sheer panache, exuberance, total in-your-face disregard of history and recycling of Ennio Morricone, it can only be this one.

Best performance shortlist

Bubbling under: Sacha Baron Cohen (Brüno, Brüno), John Malkovitch (Buck Howard, The Great Buck Howard); Meryl Streep (Miranda Priestly, The Devil Wears Prada). All very good, all cursed by the fact that they are in fact so good they could do it in their sleep.

The winner: Christoph Waltz

The judges note: rare as it is for Tom Cruise to get any kind of acting award, he is certainly worthy of consideration for so completely burying his film star persona in his portrayal of the noble but ultimately doomed von Stauffenberg. Quentin Tarantino is good at getting actors you wouldn’t normally associate with the part to turn in a master performance (cf. Daryl Hannah in Kill Bill pt 2) and in 2009 he triumphed with Christoph Waltz, whose name may be on everyone’s lips in his native Germany but is barely heard of outside it; the creator of the charming, slimy, ruthless, highly intelligent, mesmerising Col. Hans Landa – one of the few baddies you actually want to win and then kick yourself for realising that he’s sucked you in too.

Best SF or Fantasy shortlist

The winner: Let the Right One In

The judges note: the only vampire movie it has been worth watching the past decade.

Best animated movie shortlist

The winner: WALL·E.

The judges note: while the other movies on this list successfully used animation to portray real people, WALL·E used animation to ascribe emotions and feelings to a mechanical device that are more realistic than many actors can manage.

Best comedy shortlist

The winner: Brüno

The judges note: awarded even though, or perhaps because, the judges spent half the movie with their eyes shut; and even though he’s done it all before.

Best quirky / indy movie shortlist

The winner: Telstar

The judges note: comedy, tragedy, good acting, excellent music and a faithful recreation of period. The same could almost be said of The Boat that Rocked andStone of Destiny but in the former (fictitious recreation of the Radio Caroline heyday) the tragedy is just a bit too fluffy and nice and in the latter (slightly fictioned-up account of how some genuine Scottish students stole the Stone of Destiny from Westminster Abbey and brought it back to Scotland) you only really care about the outcome if you’re Scottish.

Best crime movie shortlist

The winner: Layer Cake

The judges note: this is probably the role that got Daniel Craig the Bond gig, but here he shows he is so much better than that. This is the movie Guy Ritchie would make if Guy Ritchie could actually make movies.

Best movie featuring Bill Nighy shortlist

The winner: Valkyrie

The judges note: not only does Nighy actually resemble the historical character he plays, but apart from the only occasional trademark Nighy grimace he actually acts the part.

Best previously seen and worth rewatching shortlist

Bubbling under: The Whole Nine Yards

The winner: Master & Commander: The Far Side of the World.

The judges note: one of the very few cases where Hollywood takes rights to a book and improves on the original. They also note that while Paul Bettany is far too young to be Dr Stephen Maturin, this is made up for by the flawless casting of Jack Aubrey, Killick, HMS Surprise and other roles.

Best overcoming of the plot’s sheer predictability shortlist

The winner: The Commitments

The judges note: you have to be brain dead and/or historically illiterate not to work out how any of these are going to pan out, but The Commitments does it with Irish humour and great music.

Best phoned-in performance shortlist

The winner: Clint Eastwood

The judges note: for most of the movie he is, while still very good, undeniably Clint Eastwood doing a post-retirement pensionable Dirty Harry. Then suddenly we get taken by surprise.

Finally, for the record, here is the full list of all contenders for 2009.

Avatar

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Very little of what follows is a spoiler because you’ll work most of it out for yourself in the first five minutes, leaving you with 2h35m of brain candy to absorb.

Avatar doesn’t have a fresh idea in its pretty little head but its head is very pretty. If you’ve seen Tarzan (fantastic tree-hugging jungle escapades), Dances With Wolves(out-of-town boy goes native), Aliens (bone-headed military with technofetish hardware) and the work of Roger Dean then you’ve pretty well got it – but it joins these well-established dots very nicely, with not a single bad performance and nary an unconvincing special effect. Sigourney Weaver – well, naturally, excellent. The aforesaid hardware will appeal to anyone who grew up on Gerry Anderson. Even the bad guys are a little better rounded than in Aliens – the chief civilian would really rather not massacre innocents if he can possibly help it, and the chief jarhead has a job to do which, okay, he relishes a little too much.

The story really is engagingly naive and would have us forget every example from history of what happens when more and less technologically advanced peoples collide. Even in Dances with Wolves, Dunbar knows he’s only checked the advance temporarily: he and his friends must head west. Anyone who thinks, at the end of this one, that the humans won’t be back in far greater force is a fool. “Nuke the entire site from orbit; it’s the only way to be sure,” Sigourney once sagely uttered in an earlier Cameron movie. Nukes wouldn’t be needed in this case, just masses and masses of weed killer.

Then there’s the whole questionable morality of turning so totally upon your own people. I can understand disagreeing with them to the extent that you go and live somewhere else but a massacre of these proportions just isn’t on. We’ve been told that one check on the power of the colonists is public opinion back home, but when word of this gets back to Earth, surely politicians will be elected on the sole mandate of shipping the weed killer to Pandora. And, fatally, it actually gives a bit of sympathy to the chief jarhead. “How does it feel to betray your own people?” are his not unreasonable dying words.

So, zero advance in science fictional story telling but astonishing advances in the visual medium of telling stories. Even without the 3D, the alien world would inspire awe and the 3D itself isn’t intrusive. I could comfortably wear the 3D specs over my own glasses and everything on screen looks completely natural. There is no gratuitous waving-things-at-camera to remind the audience they’re watching in 3D and you half – but only half – forget it’s there.

Whether a story needs that kind of visual telling is another matter. This one doesn’t. I would love to see Cameron’s Ghosts of the Abyss, which is a factual 3D documentary filmed around the wreck of the Titanic. That would be worth the extra effort. As it is, the 3D is a tool but that’s all. Technologically, anything that makes the user jump through one more hoop to achieve an effect is doomed to failure, even if that hoop is as simple as putting on a pair of special glasses. (The behind-the-scenes people may of course be jumping through no end of hoops – that doesn’t matter.) 3D will have arrived when viewers can comfortably snuggle down in front of the TV equivalent and watch it with exactly as little effort as they can switch the TV on now.

The CGI effects blend seamlessly with the real actors, so you can see 12-foot blue skinned humanoids and human beings travelling in a futuristic helicopter without once spotting the joins. And yet, when I think back on it everything including the humans appears in my mind’s eye as a Playstation-quality generated image. Strange.

And finally, a prayer. The marines are so obviously of the same ilk as the ones in Aliens that I could well believe this to be the same universe … and therefore, please God let no idiot studio exec decide that what the world really wants is Aliens and/or/versus Predator and/or/versus Avatars.

C’est Inglourious mais ce n’est pas la guerre

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I like to think I’m the kind of person who would Get Inglourious Basterds. I can see what Quentin Tarantino was doing and so I’m not going to make myself look silly by protesting “but World War 2 wasn’t like that.” No. It’s a Spaghetti Western revenge-drama told in the framework of a WW2 movie. I get that. And it’s great fun, beautifully made, perfectly acted, impeccably dialogued. The bad guy in particular deserves an Oscar, if not for Best Supporting then for Best Nazi in a Serious Screenplay (Ever). In fact – another Spaghetti Western touch – he reminded me of Henry Fonda in Once Upon A Time in the West, even with a touch of facial similarity, and I wondered if it was deliberate.

But.

There are two ways revenge dramas should go. One is all-out tragedy – everyone dies horribly. The other is a happy ending, with the revenger triumphant and the revengee nicely dead, but always the revenger remains on the moral high ground. Even if we’re talking a difference of a matter of inches, he’s better than those around him.

In IB it’s an uncomfortable truth that the good guys are slightly worse than many of the bad guys. I can say this because it’s a driving point of the movie, so (unlike saying “World War 2 wasn’t like that”) it’s meaningful within the film’s own frame of reference. It may be that no fate is too bad for some Nazis, but then we get the perfectly decent Wehrmacht soldier wearing his Iron Cross – “for bravery,” he says, with quiet dignity – bludgeoned horribly to death by the Basterds for not giving away the position of his lines. Hmm.

And then there’s the ending … Right, we’re truly into fantasy territory here and it’s here that the film just rollercoasters along. But. Without giving anything away, let’s just say it’s a given within the movie that it would be better for Hitler, Goering, Goebbels and Bormann to have met their ends earlier and in a different way than they actually did. True, the cast don’t know they are characters within a movie: they have no idea that it was the total, humiliating Gotterdammerung of 1945 that smashed Nazism so decisively. To a group of US soldiers behind enemy lines in 1944 it might have seemed a perfectly reasonable proposition and so they act upon it. But I wasn’t convinced. That, plus the non-tragedy of the brutal revengers, means that for the first time I come away from a Tarantino movie thinking, “hmm, could have ended better.”