Film Review: Saturday Night (2010)

One of the reasons why behind the scenes documentaries tend to be a bit bland is that they so often focus on works that take a long time to produce. If people are working on a movie or a TV show or an album that is going to take months to complete, then their answers about it will probably be a lot more controlled, deliberate and PR friendly. There are exceptions, such as Lost in La Mancha or I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, where the documentary makers happen to be in the right place to capture a moment of artistic implosion, but, generally speaking, the longer it takes to make something, the less likely it is that a documentary about it will be particularly candid.

Film Review: And Everything Is Going Fine (2010)

About two-thirds of the way through And Everything Is Going Fine, Steven Soderbergh's documentary about the life and career of writer/actor/raconteur Spalding Gray, Gray relates the story of how Soderbergh approached him to play the character of Mr. Mungo in King of the Hill, the director's 1993 film about a young boy surviving on his own during the Depression. Soderbergh had read Gray's semi-autobriographical novel, "Impossible Vacation", and felt that the regret of the central character fit that of Mr. Mungo, a lonely man living with nearly boundless sadness. When Gray asked what happened to the character in the film, Soderbergh told him that he committed suicide, and this appealed to Gray, who said that at the time Soderbergh approached him, he was contending with thoughts of suicide, and felt that the role would allow him to work out his fantasies of killing himself through a creative medium.

Film Review: Carancho (2010)

Pablo Trapero's Carancho (The Vulture) opens with statistics about the numbers of people who are involved in fatal or near-fatal traffic accidents in Argentina. After delineating the daily, weekly and yearly figures, it ends with the wry statement that "the compensation business is booming," before introducing us to Sosa (Ricardo Darin), an ambulance-chasing lawyer who is being beaten up at the funeral of a man who has been killed in an accident, and whose family don't take kindly to Sosa showing up trying to convince them to start legal proceedings before the body is even in the ground.

Film Review: John Carpenter's The Ward (2010)

Considering that John Carpenter had not made a film in nine years when he made The Ward, it doesn't really feel like he went away, primarily because his back catalogue has been so efficiently strip-mined in the intervening years. Starting with Assault on Precinct 13 in 2005, there has been a steady stream of remakes of Carpenter's seminal work from the '70s and '80s that has simultaneously burnished and cheapened his legacy as one of the great genre film-makers. Whilst some of those remakes turned out to be entertaining and functional (Assault on Precinct 13) and others wound up being dreadful, witless retreads (The Fog), none of them displayed the same sense of a personal vision that Carpenter's best work did, and his return to film-making following the utterly awful Ghosts of Mars should be cause for celebration.

Film Review: Arrietty (2010)

Note: This review is based on a screening of the English dub of Arrietty, hence the use of the English voice actors. Who are all excellent, incidentally.

Arrietty (Saoirse Ronan) is a member of a race of thumb-sized people called Borrowers, so named because they sneak out of the nooks and crannies of human houses in order to 'borrow' whatever they need to survive. It's a perilous existence, since the smallest, most benign object to humans can be a life-threatening hazard to a Borrower, but it's also one filled with a sense of wonder and adventure, one which Arrietty is eager to join once she comes of age. On her first 'Borrow' with her father (Mark Strong), Arrietty is inadvertently spotted by Sho (Tom Holland), a sickly young boy who is staying in the house, which is owned by his aunt and secretly the home of Arrietty and her family. Initially ashamed and afraid, since being seen by humans is considered the greatest threat to the Borrowers, a tentative friendship develops between Arrietty and Sho, one that could save her family from the nefarious attentions of the housekeeper (Geraldine McEwan) who has become obsessed with finding them.

Film Review: Senna (2010)

I'm going to be up-front here, and admit that I have little to no interest in Formula One. I know a few things about it. I know who Michael Schumacher is; I know that Bernie Ecclestone is involved somewhere; I know that there are sporadic uproars in the press over who can advertise what on the cars. That's about as far as my knowledge extends. So, when I say that the documentary Senna, about the life and career of three-time World Formula One Champion Ayrton Senna, is probably the best film I have seen this year, don't think that my judgement has been clouded by a love of the sport. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Film Review: Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010)

In 1994, a team of scientists led by Jean-Marie Chauvet discovered a cave in the South of France. Contained within the cave, which now bares Chauvet's name, were hundreds of cave paintings dating from 30,000-40,000 years ago, almost twice as old as any previously known drawings. Since the cave had been sealed off for millennia by a rock slide, the paintings were perfectly preserved, and entry to the cave was restricted to ensure that they stayed that way. Legendary film-maker Werner Herzog was granted a special dispensation to spend time in the cave, both with the scientists who have spend years mapping and cataloguing it, and alone with his crew in order to create a film documenting the interior of the cave.

Film Review: Benda Bilili! (2010)

The phrase "truth is stranger than fiction" is one of those curious aphorisms that most of the time seems quaint, even trite and banal, until a story comes along that proves just how apt it actually is. The story of Staff Benda Bilili, a band of street musicians from the Democratic Republic of Congo is one such example. Seriously, you could not come up with their story is you tried.

Film Review: You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010)

Let history show that this was officially the point at which Woody Allen just stopped trying.

Woody Allen has directed at least one film a year since 1982, and his decision to keep up that work rate well into his 70s is, on one level, incredibly admirable. However, whenever he produces a film as lazy, ill-conceived and tired as You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, it's hard not to think that, much like Alfie Shebritch (Anthony Hopkins), he might be better off accepting that he isn't as young as he used to be and that adopting a more sedate pace, or at least taking an extra few months to come up with an ending to his script, might be a better idea.

Film Review: Buried (2010)

Alfred Hitchcock always relished the challenge posed by making a film where the situation and location restricted the movement of the camera. He most famously explored this in Lifeboat (1944) in which almost the entire film takes place in one boat, as well as Rope (1948) and Rear Window (1954) in which both stories unfold in one apartment, even if in the case of latter film the action takes place outside of the apartment and is observed from that one location. I'm not saying that Rodrigo Cortes' Buried is in the same league as those previously mentioned, but I couldn't help but imagine that Hitchcock would have gotten a kick out of seeing how Cortes tackled the challenge of making a film that not only takes place in a single location, but one that features one actor on-screen for its entire duration and never leaves the confines of the coffin within which that actor is interred.

Film Review: Piranha (2010)

It's Spring Break, and for one town in Arizona that means one thing; thousands of horny, drunk college students descending on the town for a week of sex, wet T-shirt contests and gallons of Tequila. Jake (Steven R. McQueen) hopes that it will finally give him the chance to win over his longtime crush, Kelly (Jessica Szohr) with the help of an eccentric adult film maker (Jerry O'Connell). Also, schools of prehistoric flesh-eating fish are intent on tearing all the young, nubile bodies into thousands of young, nubile pieces.

Ed's Top 10 (and a bit) Films of 2010

Every year, critics, pundits and bloggers try to boil down a varied and amorphous year into far too rigid ranking systems that, through a similarly restrictive consensus, tell us what the best films of the year were. And who am I to go against the tide? To (ever, ever so slightly) fight the system, I've done a sort of Top 20. This first ten have been ranked, whilst the second ten have been listed alphabetically. This year was such a strong one for film in general that I wanted to show my love for the ones that just missed out.

Note: Where possible, I've included links to my reviews of the films in question. Some I haven't had time to review fully, but they are well good.

Film Review: A Prophet (2009)

Malik (Tahar Rahim) is a young Muslim man who finds himself facing a six year prison sentence for attacking policemen. Once inside, he comes to the attention of a group of Corsicans who, under the leadership of Cesar Luciani (Niels Arestrup), essentially run the prison. The Corsicans have learned that Reyab (Hichem Yacoubi) a witness against them is being held in another cell block. They can't get to him because the cell block he is in is predominantly Muslim, and a Corsican could never hope to get in there. But Malik? Well, he could get close enough to kill the witness, and if he doesn't they'll kill him.

Film Review: Of Gods and Men (2010)

Belief is one of the most important components of human life. Whether you believe in the teachings of the Bible, the Torah, the Qu'ran, or nothing at all; whether your beliefs are on strictly religious or political lines (or, more often, a mixture of the two), what you believe in is crucial in defining who you are as a person. For most people, it isn't necessarily the single thing that you allow to define you, but is certainly something that colours your decisions, the way you act and the way that you interact with the world around you. Xavier Beauvois' film, Of Gods and Men, is about men who have dedicated their lives to their beliefs, and the ways in which that dedication manifests itself in their actions.

Film Review: Sex and the City 2 (2010)

The one positive thing that can be said of Sex and the City 2 is that it is only two and a half hours long. Considering how punishingly dull, painfully unfunny and perversely shallow and inane the film is at its current length, it should be considered nothing short of a minor miracle that it isn't a single second longer. It tries to cram a season's worth of boring sub-plots, sub-standard sitcom banter and laboured puns into two dull, soulless hours, creating a film which is overly busy but in which astonishingly little seems to happen.

Film Review: Exit Through The Gift Shop (2010)

Considering the meteoric rise of street artist Banksy, going from just one of many similar artists to someone whose work routinely sells for thousands of pounds and who can be called upon to design a typically bleak and hilarious opening sequence for The Simpsons, his first foray into film seems both inevitable yet unexpected. There is a limit to what his satirical pieces can do, so a move into a more populist medium makes sense, but that just raises the question of whether or not his impish satire would work on film. Exit Through The Gift Shop, whilst not as dark as Banksy's other work, definitely maintains the healthy irreverence which has gained him such notoriety.

Film Review: How To Train Your Dragon (2010)

The over-riding narrative of DreamWorks Animation over the last decade has seen them cast as an infinite number of monkeys banging away at an infinite number of typewriters to Pixar's Shakespeare. Whilst DreamWorks has delivered a great deal more product than Pixar in the same amount of time - often releasing between two and three films a year to Pixar's one - and has ensured that they have maintained their position amongst the upper echelons of modern animation, they have rarely if ever released films that have met with the sort of deafening acclaim that Pixar's films have (rightfully) received. They seemed to turn a corner with the fun and inventive Kung Fu Panda in 2008, but if we are to return to the analogy of monkeys and typewriters, How To Train Your Dragon may very well be their Hamlet.

Catfish

Yaniv "Nev" Schulman is a professional photographer who lives and works in New York. After a picture he took of two people dancing on top of a roof is featured in a magazine, he receives an e-mail from an 8-year old girl named Abby. Abby lives in rural Michigan, but was so taken with Nev's photo that she paints her own version, which she then sends to Nev. This initiates a correspondence which gradually leads Nev to come to know the members of Abby's family, specifically her 19-year old sister Megan.

Ed's Top Ten albums of 2010

Let me just preface this list by pointing out that, whilst I am much more of a film person than a music person, I know what I love and I can only list the albums that meant the most to me over the last year. I'm sure people will disagree with some of my choices, even I might in a few years, but as a purely subjective list (aren't they all?), these are the ten albums I enjoyed the most this year.

1. Kanye West - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

With his debut album, 2004's The College Dropout, Kanye West was able to set himself apart from pretty much everyone else in hip-hop. In a genre which is overwhelmingly dominated by gangster posturing and braggadocio, he delivered an album that was defined by his insecurities, inadequacies and stories of his faith and family. Most importantly, he turned these subjects into fantastic songs. Each subsequent album found him delving deeper and deeper into his own ego for the sake of pop music, culminating in 2008's 808s & Heartbreak, an experiment in Auto-tuning and grief-counselling that he recorded in the wake of his mother Donda's death.

Having apparently come to terms with at least some of his demons, West returned with an album every bit as ambitious and brash as he himself. Taking listeners through a veritable bacchanalia of sex, drugs and self-love/self-loathing, West offers the clearest view of himself yet; someone still trying to get to grips with his fame and loving it, despite the pitfalls attached. What makes the album so great, especially in comparison to 808s, is that it feels so fantastically alive. Every track overflows with invention, and it finds West at the height of his powers as both producer and performer, throwing absolutely every idea he has at every track to see what works.

As with everything West does, the album is not perfect. Some of his rhymes are unintentionally hilarious and clumsy (though I personally have always found the juxtaposition of his unpolished rapping with his slick production to be a major component of his charm) and, whilst the excessive nature of the album is what makes it so fun and fascinating, some of his detours wind up in cul-de-sacs. The worst offender of this is the song, "Blame Game." For the first five minutes it's a brutally beautiful ballad in which West and John Legend describe the ins and outs of a turbulent relationship, but then the last two and a half minutes are taken up by an extended skit in which a man talks about how his girlfriend learned how to fuck better, which is meant to be funny but is just weird and distasteful.

The joy of West's work has always been seeing how close he gets to realising his fantastic visions, even if he sometimes lacks the tools that would let him realise them. The mere fact that he envisions them at all is why he's as successful as he is, and why everything he does is so interesting even when it doesn't work. Thankfully, this one mostly works.


2. Laura Marling - I Speak Because I Can

British folk singer Laura Marling followed up her great debut Alas I Cannot Swim with an album that saw her finding her voice in more ways than one. Her vocals seemed to have a richer, more mature quality, no doubt the result of touring the first album, and whilst the songs retained the sweet, sad quality of her earlier recordings, there was a wiser, more worldly feeling behind them that suggests that she's grown and learned a lot in a short space of time. If only all lessons were this good.


3. The National - High Violet

I fell for The National this year, and I fell hard. They've always been a band that I've known about and who have been on the edge of my consciousness, but it was only with their fifth album that I really sat up and took notice. Their mix of woozy, echo-laced guitars, soulful vocals and ability to build momentum and magic from nothing made for an album of often heartbreaking beauty. I fell for The National this year, and I fell hard.


4. M.I.A. - Maya

Dark will be the day when I don't enjoy an M.I.A. record, and whilst Maya Arulpragasam seemed to be doing her damnedest to make me dislike her by acting like a shallow, pretentious dick in interviews, the strength of the music speaks for itself. Whilst there was no "Paper Planes" or "Jimmy" that stood out from the pack, the songs as a whole were so strong that Maya ended up being a far more cohesive work than either of her first two records. She continues to make music that blurs the line between beauty and ugly, throwing together genres and sounds that shouldn't work, and which can often be abrasive and uncomfortable, but which somehow coalesce into intensely catchy and clever pop songs.


5. Arcade Fire - The Suburbs

Whilst they have yet to regain the heights of their debut, Funeral, (my favourite album of the last decade) Arcade Fire have continued to refine and experiment with their sound, choosing a fairly uncluttered and pared down style for album number three. This made for their warmest, most inviting record, despite lyrics which dealt with the sense of isolation, alienation and desire for escape that comes with suburban living. At sixteen tracks, it's overlong and cutting four or five would probably have made it a better experience, but you can make allowances for self-indulgence when the panoramic grandeur of "Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)" is the result.


6. Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse - Dark Night of the Soul

Originally slated to be released in 2009, and in fact leaked online in early 2009 allegedly as a protest at E.M.I.'s refusal to release it, Dark Night of the Soul finally surface in a legal, physical way in the summer of 2010. But the release, not to mention the title, were given a new, bittersweet meaning by the death of Mark Linkous, the creative force behind Sparklehorse, who committed suicide on March 6, 2010. This unfairly casts a shadow over the album, but even listened to before his death it was impossible to miss Linkous' brittle and beautiful melancholy as it coursed through an album of inspired collaborations with the likes of David Lynch, Iggy Pop, Frank Black and Julian Casablancas. It is all too often the case that those capable of creating such beauty are unable to see it in themselves, and Linkous left behind a fitting epitaph to an all too small body of work.


7. Big Boi - Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty

That ridiculous title alone almost earns it a place on my list, and the fact that it's more or less the first peep we've heard from either member of OutKast since 2006's misbegotten Depression-era musical film/album project Idlewild all but demands that it be considered, but what really matters is that it's a really fun record full of songs designed to get a party going. Of the members of OutKast, Big Boi has always been the more confident and talented rapper, and he doesn't lose any of his vitality or energy by working without Andre 3000, yet the album lacks some of the spark, wit and inventiveness of their work together. That doesn't make it bad album by any means, but since it only really gets crazy on "You Ain't No DJ" (the sole track produced by Andre 3000, unsurprisingly) it does make me yearn for them to do a new, real OutKast album together.


8. MGMT - Congratulations

I was not impressed by MGMT's first album, Oracular Spectacular. Obviously, I liked the technicolour clamour of "Kids," because who could possibly resist that melody? But the album as a whole didn't contain that much to interest me, and seemed to reflect their colourful, verging on garish, stage shows; empty spectacle masking a lack of substance. Congratulations didn't completely dissuade me of that opinion, but it did convince me that their eccentricities are not mere affectations. Largely eschewing anything even remotely resembling a catchy hook, they instead made a modern psychedelia record that is initial frustrating, but gradually reveals itself to be a surprisingly warm and strange diversion. If they can combine that desire to experiment with their knack for creating gigantic choruses, I might just be converted.


9. Sleigh Bells - Treats

The difference between Treats and most similar indie-dance music is that it is loud. VERY FUCKING LOUD. Sleigh Bells turn everything up to 11 and, whilst that can make their music somewhat punishing on first listen, they don't quite obliterate the really solid songwriting that lies at the heart of songs like "Tell 'Em," "Infinity Guitars" and "Run The Heart," the closest the album gets to a slow jam. They're too rock-y for dance-town, too dance-y for rock town, but if you fall within the Venn Diagram of those two genres then there's an awful lot to enjoy on Treats. Assuming that you don't deafen yourself.


10. Midlake - The Courage of Others

Continuing in the vein of 2006's The Trials of Van Occupanther, Midlake's third album remained as haunting and melancholy as what had gone before, but moved away from the more processed sound of their earlier recordings for one that feels more organic, conjuring images of rural living and a time long since past. For me, a much more lush and exciting prospect than Van Occupanther, which I've always found a bit chilly in places, and a clear sign that they are growing into their role as one of the best country-folk bands out there.

Film Review: We Are What We Are (2010)

In Mexico, an old man falls down in the street, black liquid spewing from his mouth, and dies. His family are understandably devastated by the news, not because he was their father, but because he was the key to their monthly ritual; he was the one who went out and kidnapped people so that his family could kill them and eat their flesh. Life's tough when you're a cannibal. His children set about trying to replace him, heading out into the night to find new victims, whilst a couple of cops begrudgingly try to figure out just why the old man died with a partially digested finger in his stomach. As the time for the ritual edges closer, the two groups are bound to collide, and it won't be pretty.