Too Young: An Education and Fish Tank

The autumn of 2009 was a very troubling time.  If you can’t summon up the memories from so long ago, fear not, for I will helpfully recap.  As the world geared up for yet another Oscar season, a small film by Lone Scherfig was garnering the kind of awards hype you couldn’t ignore if you tried.  Touting an original screenplay by Nick Hornby, An Education was meant to be a smart, sensitive coming-of-age story featuring a breakout performance by a relative unknown and would, at the very least, herald the beginning of an exciting few months for smart, worthy filmgoers.  Of course, anyone who knows just how awful these ‘award seasons’ are will greet the hype with a sense of knowing, slightly smug dread.  Still, this was hardly a Ron Howard movie, and its smallish, festival roots gave some small amount of hope.  On top of that, any Doctor Who fan worth their salt would never turn down the chance to watch that breakout star, Carey Mulligan, for a few hours.  As it turned out, it was one of the worst seasons for award-bait in a while, and An Education was predictably over praised and now, aside from Mulligan, doesn’t have a chance in hell of winning anything of much significance (offense intended, BAFTA).

Sherlock Holmes

The miserable career of Guy Ritchie since his two early successes (though it was really just the one repeated, albeit well) in shallow, gangland-pop entertainments is well documented.  Flop after flop of misguided, kaballah-drenched soggy retreads had given the once British wonder boy the air of a has-been one-trick pony, like a novelty pop star desperate to follow up the original success by aping it.  One imagines Warner Brothers decided to resurrect one of the most famous literary characters in the world with the directorial equivalent of the Crazy Frog for at least two reasons:  1.) Recent career woes meant he was cheap and malleable and 2.) Holmes is apparently based in London, and Ritchie did those films that were set in London but were flashy and cool and maybe he could do that here, yeah?

What Price Spectacle? – Avatar 3-D

As the year draws to a close, the last great blockbuster of a particularly good decade of them is unleashed upon us all.  It’s a convenient, albeit entirely constructed, narrative that the greatest single advance in cinematic technology heralds the end of one digit and welcomes the change to another.  Like The Matrix back in 1999, there is little doubt that James Cameron’s Avatar heralds the future of overblown, over budgeted, and overwrought spectacles of the 2010s.

Where the Wild Things Are

If you see enough and read enough about films, there’s a tendency to pigeonhole everything into a genre, be it as broad as ‘drama’ or as specific as ‘neo-noir’ or ‘mumblecore’.  This practice is fine as far as it goes, as knowing the history of a particular type of film and understanding its basic conceits helps with expectations and, to some extent, enjoyment level.  Take westerns, for instance.  You can watch any Leone film, or maybe Eastwood’s Unforgiven, and knowing the tropes, you can recognize what is there, what is subverted, and what is being done to comment on what has come before.  The downside of this whole approach to cinema is that every so often a film comes along that explodes its genre that you really don’t know where it’s coming from or how to take it.  I don’t mean this in the sense of American Dreamz, which is both audaciously ridiculous and so wildly miscalculated that it turns into an interesting misfire.  I mean this in the sense that the aim of the filmmakers to work in an area is obvious, and they succeed at getting across what they want to get across, and yet you’re still not sure how you’re meant to take it.

The Twilight Saga: New Moon

Oh boy. I really don’t know where to begin.  The Twilight series of books and now accompanying films are a genuine global phenomenon, and it is almost enough to make me give up on the world altogether.  Okay, that’s unfair, as there are plenty of cultural touch points that are just as bad and befuddling in their popularity (Dan Brown, Transformers, and The Hills come to mind).  Still, there’s something insidious about the enterprise that just feels worse in some way.  The writing in the books (of what little I have read, anyway) is appalling, and I can’t help but feel that an entire generation is getting dumber for reading them.  At least with Dan Brown and Nicholas Sparks it’s a more adult demographic, meaning that an awful lot of people are already lost.  As Stephanie Meyer’s series is directed at tweens and teens,  I worry that it might stunt their growth.  Only time will tell, and that’s literature anyway, which isn’t my area in the first place.  Based on the two films so far, however, I wonder if they’re not just feeding a generation of emotional idiots, but actually creating them.

2012

Poor Roland Emmerich.  The man is in a war of escalation with himself, and I think he might just have ended it, destroying himself in the process.  He, along with his ex-partner Dean Devlin, revitalized the disaster picture with Independence Day, a film that in some ways gave birth to the mega-blockbuster summer period we’re still in today.  After some moderate successes and downright failures, he split with Devlin and came out with his best movie to date, The Day After Tomorrow, one of my favourite boneheaded blockbusters of the decade.  As Mr. Emmerich has tapped into that natural desire to see everything you know completely destroyed in a 9/11-would-have-been-so-awesome-if-it-wasn’t-real way, the next logical step after destroying major cities, and then a healthy chunk of every continent, was the entire world itself.  He must be preparing to follow it up with a CERN-made black hole that is eating up the entire solar system as a scrappy band of survivors make their way to Alpha Centauri and deal with their family issues along the way.

Fantastic Mr. Fox

By this point, you’re either with Wes Anderson or you’re against him.  Some will say he peaked with Rushmore, and everything after has been a succession of diminishing returns.  Others, myself included, whilst recognizing that Rushmore just might be his masterpiece, have found a lot to love in his recent work.  Royal Tenenbaums is pretty wonderful, and I can’t really understand whatever criticisms people might throw at it.  Life Aquatic is deeply unfocused, and yet it’s entertaining and interesting and the finale never fails to bring a tear to my eye.  I even admire Darjeeling Limited, which benefited a great deal from a second and third viewing.  If you can handle his somewhat precious aesthetic, and accept that this is his style and he probably won’t change it, there’s a lot of good to be found in his work.  On the other hand, if you find yourself unable to take his style, Anderson has absolutely no interest in helping you out.  With that understanding, let us press on with his newest feature, the stop-motion animated Roald Dahl adaptation of Fantastic Mr. Fox.

The 25 Best Television Shows of the Decade – Part 4

A message board I frequent is running a poll on the top 25 television shows of the decade.  There were threads for nominations (which I missed), and the votes had to be chosen from the resulting list of a couple of hundred programmes.  The qualifying rules meant that any show had to air episodes in this decade, but could started in the fall ’99 season.  If shows started before then, only the seasons aired from fall ’99 onwards were to be considered.  This is Part 4, which features numbers 5-1.  Part 1 can be found here.   Part 2 can be found here.  Part 3 can be found here.

The 25 Best Television Shows of the Decade – Part 3

A message board I frequent is running a poll on the top 25 television shows of the decade.  There were threads for nominations (which I missed), and the votes had to be chosen from the resulting list of a couple of hundred programmes.  The qualifying rules meant that any show had to air episodes in this decade, but could started in the fall ’99 season.  If shows started before then, only the seasons aired from fall ’99 onwards were to be considered.  This is Part 3, which features numbers 10-6.  Part 1 can be found here.   Part 2 can be found here.  Part 4 can be found here.

The 25 Best Television Shows of the Decade – Part 2

A message board I frequent is running a poll on the top 25 television shows of the decade.  There were threads for nominations (which I missed), and the votes had to be chosen from the resulting list of a couple of hundred programmes.  The qualifying rules meant that any show had to air episodes in this decade, but could started in the fall ’99 season.  If shows started before then, only the seasons aired from fall ’99 onwards were to be considered.  This is Part 2, which features numbers 20-11.  Part 1 can be found here.  Part 3 can be found here.  Part 4 can be found here.