Here are reviews of films I’ve recently seen. They are in no order (it could be an old or a new film, and in any genre) and there are no huge/major spoilers, but if you don’t want to know anything at all about the film, obviously don’t read on…

Title: Happy Go Lucky

Released: 2008

Director: Mike Leigh

Starring: Sally Hawkins, Alexis Zegerman, Andrea Riseborough

Happy Go Lucky is yet another beautifully realised film from Academy-award nominated, BAFTA-winning OBE Mike Leigh. He is undoubtedly a thoughtful film-maker. His movies are imbued with a sense of reality. Yet through the grit, cigarettes and cursing there are always unmistakably soft and feminine tones and themes. Leigh is also is a true auteur, writing most of his own screenplays. His amazing 2004 portrait of a sympathetic illegal abortionist, Vera Drake, is incredibly touching and beautifully portrayed, while retaining a strong sense of social commentary. In 1996’s Secrets and Lies, Leigh explores the shame felt by a working-class woman who had to give her mixed-ethnicity daughter up for adoption, in a less socially just time gone by. And in his pinnacle 1993 film, Naked, he wades through the ultimate in urban grit and grime to tell us stories from the perspective of a paranoid intellectual rapist, a nasty yuppie, and a couple of women fighting the patriarchial system by which they are surrounded. Then we have Happy Go Lucky, where the main character, Polly, played brilliantly by Sally Hawkins, epitomises compassion and feminine strength thoroughly. She is strong, but gentle. She stands up for herself, but will listen with empathy for everyone. She is happy go lucky, yet smart and gutsy. And rather than a flippant look at the life of some annoyingly upbeat teacher, which it so easily could have been, Happy Go Lucky is the portrayal of truly zen characteristics through a personification that everyone can easily identify with. You may think I’m overestimating things here. But I really believe the Polly is almost the embodiment of an enlightened person. Someone who will feel true compassion for people who mistreat her, because she understands that it is really them that are suffering, not her. Someone who will be strong, who believes in herself, who adores her loved ones, and takes life as something beautiftul to be worshiped. Considering eastern philosophy is characterised by what is thought of as ‘feminine’ traits (intuition and compassion, as opposed to the ‘masculine’ reason of the west) Leigh is, for me, a truly feminist and gloriously philosophical film maker, in both writing and treatment. He makes gorgeous, though-provoking, entertaining, feminine and fabulous films.

The idea that a cultural movement begins or ends with the flip of a calendar is, of course, fallacious. ”60s Music” is an identifier of a specific strain of popular music that really refers to the time period, between 1965 (mid-career Beatles) and 1976 (The Sex Pistols). What we think of as the Golden Era of 70s movies began, arguably, with The Graduate in 1967 (or Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? the year before) and ended with Raging Bull in 1980.

For now anyway, the 2000s can be called The Netflix Decade, a time when, in theory, more movies were more accessible to more people than ever before. That doesn’t necessarily mean everyone took advantage of this opportunity. Still, the idea that a movie, even one from say, Romania about abortion, can have a second life on video is encouraging. If you’re a stickler for lists, consider this the 90 (or so) best movies of the last ten years. What this era in film will ultimately be called is anyone’s guess, but, many films in this list, particularly those made in the US, reflect life in the Age of Terror, where the country was led by a man whose ambition far exceeded his abilities.

4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days – Over the last ten years there has been a rush, in relative terms anyway, of films from countries that were formerly behind the Iron Curtain. The best of these was a heartbreakingly frank film about the moral and practical dilemmas of abortion while Eastern Europe crumbled in the late 1980s. A movie of unflinching honesty. (2007)

8 Mile – Don’t laugh. Yes, Eminem played himself, but great movies put the viewer in a time and place and Curtis Hanson’s impeccable direction gives life to the hopelessness of Eminem’s Detroit ring of despair. The performances of Kim Basinger and Mekhi Phifer are first-rate.  The movie looks even more authentic now that Eminem has faded from the limelight. (2002)

21 Grams – The title refers to the amount of weight we lose after we die. Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s follow-up to Amores Perros brought together a math professor (Sean Penn), a grieving housewife (Naomi Watts) and a re-born convict (Benicio Del Toro). The story isn’t arranged chronologically and the morality of what’s taking place is apparent before the full impact of the plot.

The 25^th Hour – Spike Lee’s least bombastic work. Three men (Edward Norton, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Barry Pepper) one of whom is preparing for a prison stint, re-assess their lives in New York City while terrorist occupied planes still echo in the background. The request made late in the film by Norton will make you gasp, but then nod in agreement with his logic. (2002)

About Schmidt – When Jack Nicholson’s wife dies he decides to rent an RV and drive around trying to avoid the realization that he’s a selfish creep. Alexander Payne’s portrait of aging shines even brighter when compared to the emptiness of another Nicholson film about old age released several years later—The Bucket List. Hope Davis is brilliant as Nicholson’s estranged daughter. (2002)

Almost Famous – The best fictional account of the rock and roll life this side of Spinal Tap. Billy Crudup hits every note as an ambivalent guitar hero. Philip Seymour Hoffman is hysterical as rock critic Lester Bangs. Cameron Crowe’s movie also launched the career of Kate Hudson, who plays a groupie. Don’t hold that against it. The “Tiny Dancer” sequence on the tour bus is sure to put a lump in your throat. (2000)

Amelie  – Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s fable starring Audrey Tautou is certain to become a beloved classic if it hasn’t achieved that status already. Jeunet and Tautou occupy a world that looks much like our own yet is eminently more just, hopeful and full of love. Engaging from any number of perspectives. (2001)

Amores Perros – The three-pronged story about how lives have been irreversibly altered by a car accident can only be described as awe-inspiring. It introduced the world to the massive talents of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Gael Garcia Bernal and the progenitors of Latin American Cinema. Much as Amores Perros is a child of Pulp Fiction, it is also the father to the acclaimed City of God. (2001)

Away From Her – This tiny movie about a woman (Julie Christie) coming to grips with Alzheimer’s raises challenging questions about the true nature of love, honesty and companionship. That Sarah Polley was only 27 when she directed this counts as a miracle. (2007)

Babel – Whereas Amores Perros’ and 21 Grams’ centerpiece were a singular event, Innaritu’s Babel centers on a singular feeling brought on by a digital, wireless age. It’s one of mutedness. We can speak to more people in more places than ever before, yet we still have no clue what to say. The characters’ eyes tell us everything we need to know about their hollowed-out existences. In Babel, continents are little more than land masses that separate people trying to cope with this new world. Brad Pitt has never been better. (2006)

The Beat That My Heart Skipped – Romain Duris dreams of becoming a concert pianist conflict with his father’s desire that he follow his footsteps into a life of low-level street thuggery. Director Jacques Audiard brings together the disparate physical and emotional universes that Duris occupies. Paris, probably the most-filmed movie locale in the world after New York, is presented in a new, fresh way. (2005)

Before Sunset – Nine years after Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy fell in love on a single night in Vienna they meet again. Except now they’re in Paris. But time has passed and things have changed. Or have they? A great idea executed to perfection by director Richard Linklater and the two leads. (2004)

Black Hawk Down – Mark Bowden’s searing chronicle of the US Army’s disaster in Somalia. Ridley Scott and a strong ensemble cast capture the frantic efforts of well-intentioned men in one impossible situation after another. (2001)

Bigger Faster Stronger* – A straightforward documentary about steroids and American culture by a first time director and former devotee of the weightlifting/bodybuilding scene. (2008)

Bloody Sunday – Made prior to United 93 and The Bourne movies, Paul Greengrass’ re-creation of the events of January 30, 1972 in Derry, Northern Ireland seethes with anger. (2002)

Borat – Far and away the best comedy in recent years. Although it dutifully serves its  function as a biting social satire, it’s the bar which other comedies strive for: “Yeah, (title) was pretty funny. But it’s no Borat.” (2006)

Bowling for Columbine – With the school shootings still fresh in the public mind Michael Moore’s film about America’s obsession with guns is a tour de force of filmmaking. It’s become the template for countless other issue-driven documentaries, but the original is still the best. Who could forget Moore emerging from a bank, gun in hand as gratitude for opening a new bank account? (2002)

Capote – I tend to resist portrayals of historical figures little more than overwrought imitations, but there are some performances that just throw you back in your seat. Philip Seymour Hoffman’s depiction of the caustic, gifted, tortured Truman Capote is such a performance. (2005)

The Dark Knight – One of the major secular features of Bush Era was rampant self-involvement. Facebook has turned the personal into the global scale. In a landscape where fame goes to those who are willing only to be more extreme than their predecessor, Heath Ledger, as the sadistic Joker tapped perfectly into this pathos while living up to unprecedented pre-release hype. Everything, onscreen and off, about The Dark Knight reflected the culture of entitlement. Mostly though, The Dark Knight delivered on all its promise.  The movie has flaws; Christian Bale’s smoky (or is it gravelly?) voice is an unneeded prop and the stunt make-up of Aaron Eckhart’s character is unnecessary. That said, it performs the near impossible—a summer blockbuster whose story and message stays with you for days, if not weeks. (2008)

Darwin’s Nightmare – A documentary about the perch in Lake Victoria that shows the social and political effects of an ecological nightmare. While An Inconvenient Truth was the environmental movie that bagged the awards and attention, Hubert Sauper’s movie chilled and moved. (2005)

Eastern Promises –  David Cronenberg re-emerged with A History of Violence, but its follow-up was far more entertaining. Naomi Watts’ London midwife stumbles across the Russian mob, as personified by Viggo Mortensen, cultures clash, mayhem ensues–including a grisly fight in a steam bath. (2007)

Edge of Heaven – The best movies of the decade made outside the US addressed the blurring of boundaries among class, race, ethnicity or sexuality. Fatih Akin’s film about a German Turk who moves to Istanbul in order to find his half-sister makes you wonder if maybe boundaries aren’t such a bad thing. (2008)

Elephant – Gus Van Sant’s take on school violence is haunting. The impending carnage looms over the characters to such a degree that, as an audience member, you want to shake them by the shoulders and tell them to run before the bullets start flying. (2003)

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room – The best of its type. A traditional talking-heads documentary that harnesses the national outrage of the Enron collapse and the subsequent dominoes that fell. Names are named and we’re given plenty of reason to hold those mentioned in absolute contempt. (2005)

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – I resisted this as too gimmicky at first and I don’t buy Jim Carrey doing anything serious, but on a second viewing it struck me as a thoughtful consideration of how memory relates to romantic longing, especially considering it’s a major studio release. The rare instance of  when a blend of a potentially toxic mix of artists–Carrey, Kate Winslet, Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman results in a coherent final product.  (2004)

The Fall – A suicidal stunt man, an eight year old Eastern European immigrant girl who speaks accented English, Charles Darwin, Alexander the Great and many, many others people populate Tarsem Singh’s follow up to The Cell. Reportedly made without CGI, it’s unlike any film ever made. (2008)

Finding Nemo – A father clown fish loses track of his son clown fish. In desperate need of help in finding him, he is assisted by a pang fish with short-term memory. That the movie somehow takes a parent’s worst nightmare and turns it into something cute is a testament to its many charms. Edged Ratatouille and Up for a spot behind WALL-E on this list. (2003)

Garden State – While it’s easy to dismiss the movie as a tool for Zach Braff’s navel-gazing, Garden State appealed to people of a certain age, pre mid-life, who wondered, “What’s it all for?” It owes massive debts to The Graduate and the work of Wes Anderson but it’s a movie of and about its time. (2004)

George Washington – David Gordon Green’s somber sketch on poor black children in North Carolina plays like a Miles Davis number. The movie is all mood, but by the end, you feel like you know the kids in this movie intimately. (2000)

Gone Baby Gone – This may be a blasphemy in some quarters, but Ben Affleck’s directorial debut does Clint Eastwood better than Eastwood himself. It confronts many of the same issues as Million Dollar Baby and Mystic River the difference is the performance of Amy Ryan, as the world’s worst mother. (2007)

Good Night and Good Luck – George Clooney’s paean to an era gone by was meant to be a body blow to the modern media, where rumor and innuendo flourish. More than David Straitharn’s uncanny impersonation of Edward R Murrow, most the high points are the elegant singing of Dianne Reeves that served as a bridge scenes of increasing tension. (2005)

Goodbye Solo – Souleymane Sy Savane is  Solo, a Senegalese cab-driver in Winston-Salem, North Carolina (the Tar Heel State is a new hot spot for American Indie Cinema). He picks up a weary, southern man who asks that a few days from now Solo take him to Blowing Rock National Park, no questions asked. Ramin Bahrani’s movie is so loaded with symbolism it’s easy to overlook what an assured, confident piece of filmmaking it is. If there’s any justice, Savane will pick up an Oscar nomination this year. (2009)

Happy-Go-Lucky – How far does attitude go in life? At first glance Sally Hawkins’ Poppy is gratingly optimistic, but as Mike Leigh’s small masterpiece unfolds we see that Poppy is far more sophisticated than we’ve given her credit for. Furthermore, I can think of no film of this or an era that so lovingly presents a friendship between two women—Hawkins and Alexis Zegerman. They’re co-workers and have each other’s backs in ways that the girls from Sex and the City would never understand. (2008)

The House of Flying Daggers  – Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon set a standard that Zhang Yimou’s exhilarating epic set in the Tang Dynasty surpassed. That’s Ninth Century kids. Two police officers, with differing motives, force a gorgeous dancer to go undercover and infiltrate The House of Flying Daggers, a group of militants who steal from the rich and give to the poor. There’s a sequence where…ok forget that, watch it and you’ll instantly recognize why this movie is on a “Best of” list. (2004)

In America – After WALL-E this was the movie that stole my heart. Jim Sheridan directed a script he wrote with his daughters about a family a lot like their own. It’s the magical story of a family overcoming the loss of the youngest child through great sacrifice and a move to Hell’s Kitchen. Sarah and Emma Bolger, who play the precocious daughters, will steal your heart too. (2003)

In the Bedroom  – Tom Wilkinson and Sissy Spacek have a son (Nick Stahl) who gets involved with an older woman (Marisa Tomei) estranged from her husband. When Stahl gets killed by the husband in a jealous fit Wilkinson must face his own thoughts of revenge in this wrenching drama directed by Todd Field. (2001)

In the Mood for Love – It’s 1962 Hong Kong and Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung are neighbors who suspect their spouses of infidelity. Wong Kar-Wai’s film is in the grand tradition of a love story set against a society in upheaval, but simmers with a lust and eroticism all its own. Runner-up to Y Tu Mama Tambien for sexiest film of the decade. (2001)

In the Valley of Elah  – When Tommy Lee Jones’ son goes missing shortly after returning from a tour in Iraq, he sets out to find him. In the course of his quest he’s aided by Charlize Theron and the movie becomes a layered treatise about the war in Iraq, the military and family. In his best roles, Jones face says far more than any word could and that’s certainly the case in this movie, which takes its title from the site of David’s biblical battle with Goliath. (2007)

Into the Wild  – After graduating from Emory University in Atlanta, Chris McCandless, the child of well-to-do parents, gave away all his possessions and hitchhiked across America en route To Alaska. A wonderful companion to Jon Krakauer’s elegiac account of McCandless, Sean Penn’s movie brings together sweeping natural panoramas, marvelous supporting characters (Hal Holbrook especially) and a pitch-perfect score from Eddie Vedder. (2007)

Junebug – So many films about the clash between urban and rural ways of life resort to easy stereotypes, but Phil Morrison’s movie strikes just the right tone. Now living in Chicago, a son brings his art gallery-owning wife (the stunning Embeth Davidtz) to meet his parents in rural North Carolina. He re-acquaints himself with his brother whose wife (played by Amy Adams in the breakthrough performance of the decade) is pregnant. New conflicts arise as old wounds are re-opened. Celia Weston is delightful as the family matriarch. (2005)

Katyn – The legendary director Andrzej Wajda may have made his best film in his 80’s. It’s the heretofore untold story of the slaughter of thousands of Polish soldiers at the beginning of World War II by the Russian Red Army. Wajda focusses on how the Russians lies about the massacre left a permanent stain on the Polish psyche. The final twenty minutes of Katyn put your heart in your throat. (2008)

Kontroll  – Nimrod Antal’s film about life in the Budapest subway system defies easy description. Every scene and piece of dialogue seems loaded with literal and metaphorical interpretations. And the metaphor can apply just as easily to the main characters as to life in Hungary after the fall of the Soviet Empire. (2005)

 Lilya 4-ever – Abandoned by her mother, 16 year-old Lilya must fend for herself in bleak, gray Estonia. She meets a young man different from the abusive thugs in her neighborhood. He is kind to her and promises to pull her out of her dire circumstances. Hopeful and desperate, she trusts him. Thinking they will run off to a slice of heaven, Lilya is instead lowered into a kind of Hell that can only be borne from the minds of the truly evil. Lukas Moodyson’s film muscles its way into the pit of your stomach and stays there for days.

Little Children  – The decade’s best movie about suburban dystopia and arguably Kate Winslet’s best performance. She plays an educated mother whose marriage is passionless. She begins an affair with Patrick Wilson –The Prom King, as he’s dubbed by the neighborhood mothers—whose marriage is  deteriorating while he attempts to pas the bar exam. Most memorable, however, is Jackie Earle Haley, a sex offender trying to start a new life while under the watchful eye of self-appointed moralist. (2006)

The Lives of Others – An engrossing film about the horrors of life on the front lines of the Cold War. Ulrich Muhe is a member of the Stasi in 1984 who listens in on the conversations of a playwright and his lover. His own life being one of boredom he becomes increasingly engrossed in those of his subject. Florian Heckel von Donnersmarck crafted a film of personal destruction while addressing contemporary issues of privacy in a time of unparalleled freedom. (2006)

The Lord of the Rings Trilogy – It will be hard to explain to future generations the impact that this series of films had on a populace put on perpetual edge in the age of terrorism. Thousands of people lined up to watch the entire trilogy, nine hours in total. It did not take much imagination to see the similarities between Peter Jackson’s sprawling epics and the state of world affairs. The stories of honor, mysticism, fellowship and duty in the face of an indefatigable enemy bent on an engineering an apocalypse resonated with millions of people who had never even heard of JRR Tolkien. (2001-2003)

Memento  – How Christopher Nolan began the decade. The taut Guy Pearce is covered from head to toe with tattoos. He’s also written himself hundreds of notes. The ink on both the paper and his skin is critical because he has no short term memory. In normal circumstances this would be quite the conundrum, but it’s worse because Pearce’s wife has been murdered and he’s trying to figure if he did it or if someone else did. Memento was that rare, visceral movie that left the audience in their seats after the house lights came up, catching their collective breaths. (2001)

Michael Clayton  – Where Good Night and Good Luck was a clarion call to a lazy media elite, George Clooney got back in front of the camera in this tightly written drama about corporate malfeasance. He’s a fixer who keeps small problems from becoming big ones. He must prevent an old friend gone crazy (a manic Tom Wilkinson) from jeopardizing a billion-dollar project while keeping the company lawyer (a scathing Tilda Swinton) at bay. Tony Gilroy’s movie recalls 70s classics like The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor. (2007)

Minority Report - The back end (after Artificial Intelligence: AI) of a Steven Spielberg double-dip on the dire possibilities of the near future, blisters with energy. Tom Cruise plays a pre-crime officer—criminals are arrested before they commit their crimes—who finds himself caught up in agency politics that have far-reaching implications. Watch it again just to see how prescient it is, based on a Philip K. Dick novel. (2002)

Monster’s Ball  – An extremely graphic sex scene featuring Halle Berry and Billy Bob Thornton (ick) generated buzz, but Marc Forster’s depiction of troubled lives in the south is harrowing. Heath Ledger, Sean Combs and Peter Boyle are excellent in support of Berry’s raw performance. (2001)

The Motorcycle Diaries – Before he became a face on a t-shirt, Ernesto Guevera was called “Fuser” by his friends. As a student, he and a buddy traveled through South America on a beat up Norton 500. Gael Garcia Bernal is Che in Walter Salles’ exquisite travelogue about idealism colliding with reality. The Machu Picchu sequence is breathtaking. (2004)

Moulin Rouge! – Unapologetically over the top, Baz Luhrman’s was the best musical of the past ten years. A courtesan (Nicole Kidman) falls in love with a would-be poet (Ewan McGregor) much to the chagrin of a duke. This triangle is resolved in a splash of song, color and double-entendres. Jim Broadbent won an Oscar the following year in Iris, but he deserved it for his role as the ringmaster here. (2001)

The New World – Terrence Malick’s lyrical, contemplative rendering of the affair between John Smith (Colin Farrell) and Pocahantas sweeps you up and carries you off to a place that only he seems to be able to construct. When the duties of colonization become too much, the stability of their relationship is threatened. (2005)

The Notebook – The moment you say, “Oh, come on! That would never happen!” you’ve missed the point. Every character in the movie is of a type and that very broadness is what makes the film such a timeless love story. (2004)

No Country for Old Men – Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh immediately joined the pantheon of cinematic psychos but Tommy Lee Jones is outstanding as sheriff trying to make sense of killer whose weapon of choice is a cattle prong. Josh Brolin is up to Jones’ lofty standards as Chigurh’s main target. Kelly MacDonald turns a potentially forgettable role as Brolin’s wife into the moral center of the film. While the movie may have caught fans of the Coen Brothers off-guard, it fits nicely in the canon of the makers of Miller’s Crossing, Fargo and Blood Simple. (2007)

Once  – Set in modern day Dublin, Glen Hansard is a Hoover repair man and Marketa Irglova is an immigrant caring for her mother and daughter. They are both amateur musicians and gradually they write songs together that reflect their growing feelings for each other. A small treasure. (2007)

Pan’s Labyrinth – In order to escape her sadistic stepfather in Franco’s Spain, a ten year-old girl imagines a secret world where she must perform three tasks to prove that she is, in fact, a princess. Fashioned by Guillermo Del Toro, who spent the decade creating worlds that exist just beyond the reach of our own. (2006)

Requiem for a Dream — Four disparate characters succumb to drug abuse. Most frightening in Darren Aronofsky’s film is the descent into madness of a woman collecting social security played by Ellen Burstyn. Far from a lecture, the movie shows in explicit detail how different people become addicted for different reasons.  (2000)

Sideways - In celebration of his philandering pal’s upcoming nuptials, Paul Giamatti takes him on a tour of California wine country. Like any good road movie, Alexander Payne’s film contrives one scenario after another in order to reveal something about the characters. What made Sideways different was the intensity of Giamatti’s portrayal of a man consumed by his own self-loathing. (2004)

The Station Agent – A thoughtful independent film from Thomas McCarthy about a dwarf (Peter Dinklage) who inherits an abandoned train station after his best friend dies. He’s subsequently harangued into friendship by a chatty hot dog vendor (Bobby Cannavale). The unlikely friends then encounter a woman (Patricia Clarkson) who is in mourning. Well-deserving of the many awards it picked up on the festival circuit. (2003)

Taxi to the Dark Side – Of the many righteously indignant documentaries criticizing the Bush Administration Alex Gibney’s was the best. It’s the story of an innocent Afghan cab driver who was tortured and killed while in US custody. He’s not a casualty of the madness of war, but rather, the victim of carefully vetted policy.  (2007)

There Will Be Blood  – P. T. Anderson’s sprawling epic of greed, oil and religion has a problematic ending but who could forget the opening scene, where Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview, without saying a word, grunts his way into our psyche. He plunges one hole after another into the ground through the force of his personality, creating to a fortune but and future that will, most certainly, be bloody. An instant American classic. (2007)

Traffic  – The War on Drugs from the peripatetic camera of Steven Soderbergh. In his most complete film, he inspects many, if not all, aspects of the struggle and concludes that the effort has been a colossal failure. Sturdy performances by Benicio Del Toro, Dennis Quaid, Don Cheadle and Michael Douglas anchor a somewhat chaotic enterprise. (2000)

Waking Life – Richard Linklater’s mind-massaging meditation on truth, reality, dreams and just about everything else washes over you like a hot shower. The fact that it merges animates live action characters pushes it to the stuff of legend. An exponentially better “alternative reality” film than Mulholland Drive. (2001)

WALL-E – The other major secular strain brought on by the reign of error that was the Bush presidency was conspicuous consumption. Remember that he suggested we go shopping in the weeks after planes were crashed into the financial and political capitols of the country. And we did. Boy did we spend. The magicians at Pixar presented the down side of this approach to calming our collective nerves, while telling a tender love story. If you didn’t go “awwwww” at least once while watching WALL-E may God have mercy on your soul. (2008)

Waltz With Bashir  – Perhaps the first and last of its kind. An animated documentary about an Israeli soldier’s memories of a battle that occurred some twenty years earlier. Ari Folman’s autobiographical story of The Lebanese War had the unique distinction of reminding you of several other films while still being thoroughly original. (2008)

Y Tu Mama Tambien – The sexiest movie of the decade. Maribel Verdu joins Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna on a road trip from Mexico City to a mysterious beach with no strings attached. Much steaminess follows. (2002)

You Can Count on Me  – Before starring in Kenneth Lonergan’s movie Laura Linney and Mark Ruffalo had minor roles in minor movies. They play a brother and sister who are connected by a tragic event from their past. Each day is a struggle as they to overcome their flaws and make something out of their shiftless lives. Linney was nominated for an Oscar as a single mother trying to build a life out of perpetual setbacks. The soundtrack features several songs from Steve Earle, who knows a thing or two about turmoil. (2000)

Zodiac  – David Fincher’s story of the serial killer that spooked the Bay Area in the 1970s. Jake Gyllenhaal is a newspaper cartoonist who starts out trying to decode the murderer’s cryptic messages and ends up more obsessed with finding the killer than the police officer (Mark Ruffalo) assigned to the case. Fincher gets the grisliness out of the way early and delivers an unsparing crime procedural; the inclusion of Donovan’s Hurdy Gurdy Man on the soundtrack is inspired. (2007)

They barely missed the cut: High Fidelity, Oldboy, Adaptation and Up

Best Releases Three or Four Decades Late

Army of Shadows – Jean-Pierre Melville’s classic of The French Resistance, released in Europe in the late 1960s made going underground heroic and cool. It ushered in a much-deserved reassessment of Melville’s place in The French New Wave. (2006)

Killer of Sheep – the life of a Los Angeles slaughterhouse worker in black and white with one of the best scores in film history. Charles Burnett’s film sat in a vault at UCLA for 30 years until it was released on video by Milestone/New Yorker Video. (2007)

Underrated, Forgotten or Worth a Second Look

24-Hour Party People – Steve Coogan nails it as the riotously self-possessed Tony Wilson, the television host who sired the Manchester music scene in the late 1970s. Michael Winterbottom adeptly recalls a flowering cultural moment that was both depressing and inspirational. (2002)

The Bridge – Eric Steel’s documentary about why the Golden Gate Bridge has become Ground Zero for suicides. More than that though, it’s about those left behind and trying to make sense of the profoundly tragic. (2006)

The Cell – The acting isn’t much (Jennifer Lopez playing a psychologist and Vince Vaughn playing it straight) and the plot machinations are absurd but Tarsem Singh’s movie about the subconscious of a serial killer is loaded with visual explosions from start to finish. (2000)

The Claim – When you sell off your wife and baby daughter for a gold mine it’s just a matter of time before it comes back to bite you, even in the pre-Information Age. There’s no escaping karma on that one. Michael Winterbottom’s version of Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge is unforgettable. The icy turn-of-the-century Canadian landscape is the ideal backdrop for this morality tale. (2000)

The Dish – What role did Australia play in the first moon landing? Well, the country put up a satellite interface in a remote desert. Sam Neill plays one of the technicians who helps the locals prepare for and cope with their day in the, uhh, sun. Patrick Warburton is winning as the American liaison. (2001)

Everything is Illuminated – The movie based on what might be the best novel of the decade barely registered at the box office. Eugene Hutz steals the movie as Elijah Wood’s linguistically-challenged guide and Liev Schreiber’s debut behind the camera is extremely faithful to Jonathan Safran Foer’s source material. (2005)

Heaven – It came and went in the blink of an eye, but Cate Blanchett is a bald vigilante aided and abetted by police-officer Giovanni Ribisi. Impossible to categorize as an action pic for the art house crowd (or is it vice versa?), Tom Tykwer’s movie merits another consideration. (2002)

Idiocracy – Mike Judge’s futuristic comedy about what happens to a society that spends decades rewarding impulse and hubris over intellect and honesty. Sound familiar? (2005)

The Illusionist – In pre-World War I Vienna Edward Norton plays a magician who astonishes and taunts royalty (Rufus Sewell) and law enforcement (Paul Giamatti). It was overshadowed by The Prestige which was released the same year, but it is better shot, better acted and without the cop-out ending of Christopher Nolan’s film. (2006)

Innocence – After his wife dies a man looks up his lost love from over forty years ago. She has married and is living a comfortable life. Now in their 70s, they try to pick up where they left off. Paul Cox’s film of hope, death, loss, regret and risk tugs at your heart and never lets go. (2001)

Last Orders – A London butcher (Michael Caine) instructed his best friends (Tom Courtenay, David Hemmings and Bob Hoskins) to throw his ashes into the water at Margate beach. His son (Ray Winstone) joins them as they make the journey, recollecting about what was and what might have been. The type of small, touching film that big stars don’t seem to make anymore. (2001)

LIE – Paul Dano, in a pre-There Will Be Blood role plays a teenager who sits on a bridge above the Long Island Expressway. He has nothing, so when a dubious character, the slimy Brian Cox, offers him some semblance of normalcy, he takes it. (2001)

Made – Jon Favreau’s comedy is a follow up to Swingers which again features him and Vince Vaughan. This time they’re playing wanna-be mafiosos hired by Peter Falk to cut a deal with Sean Combs. The repoire of the castcast is terrific and the movie is even funnier with the audio commentary on (by Favreau and Vaughn). (2001)

Our Daily Bread – A dialogue-free documentary about the mechanized, industrialized nature of food production. Make sure you eat before viewing. (2006)

The Proposition – Set in late 19^th century Australia, the underappreciated Ray Winstone is magnetic as a frontier lawman determined to bring peace to his town. A group of four brothers has terrorized the locals and Winstone urges two of them to turn in the oldest, who is the ringleader. This sounds like a traditional Western but Nick Cave’s bloody and depraved script is accompanied by a setting that invites comparisons to Antonioni. (2006)

Reign Over Me – Almost all of Adam Sandler’s comedic characters are emotionally-stunted man-boys. His character in Mike Binder’s film is also a shell of a man, mumbling his way around New York City on a scooter, donning headphones to keep the outside world away. Don Cheadle is his usual superb self playing a dentist, trying to find out what’s gone wrong with Sandler, his old college roommate. In the course of reaching out to Sandler, Cheadle must face problems in his own life. (2007)

Sweet Land – In 1920s Minnesota a beautiful German woman arrives to marry a Norwegian farmer. He speaks little English and she speaks none. This is the least of their troubles as her ethnicity, in light of World War I, gives the rest of the community pause. Ali Selim’s feature debut is quiet, elegant and assured. (2006)

The Widow of St. Pierre – Patrice Leconte’s tale of redemption set in the (then) French colony of Newfoundland in the 1850s. Emir Kusterica plays a drunk sentenced to death for a murder. But time passes before the guillotine can arrive from France. Slowly, the community, represented by Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil, comes to see the murderer in a different light. (2001)

The Yards – James Gray’s story of corruption in the Queens rail yards was unjustly ignored by audiences on its release. Perhaps it was because the star, Mark Wahlberg, was an unproven quantity as a dramatic actor (Ok, some might say he still is), but he more than holds his own among James Caan, Ellen Burstyn, Faye Dunaway, Charlize Theron and Joaquin Phoenix. (2000)

A Double Feature About Women Living on the Margins

Frozen River and Wendy and Lucy -  Melisso Leo and Michelle Williams try to save their son and dog, respectively, while staring some hard truths in the face. (Both released in 2008)

Actors of the Decade—Gael Garcia Bernal and Philip Seymour Hoffman

Actresses of the Decade – Cate Blanchett, Laura Linney and Kate Winslet

Directors of the Decade – Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and Christopher Nolan

Overrated

Brokeback Mountain – A movie more concerned with its message than advancing the story in a cinematic way. The script is clunky (saved by Heath Ledger’s performance) and for a movie intended to bust stereotypes, it’s comprised of supporting characters who are exactly that.

Knocked Up – Where The 40-Year-Old Virgin was a sweet, bromance about the complexities of dating, this was self-indulgent. A stoner who lives with other porn-living potheads hooks up with a successful television producer? That’s a shaky premise to begin with and impossible to ignore whenever the two leads start talking about child rearing. Why weren’t women insulted by this movie?

Lost in Translation – Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson are displaced Americans in Tokyo. It’s a Jim Jarmusch movie done by Sofia Coppola. One Jarmusch is plenty thank you very much.

Mulholland Drive – What’s this movie about? No, really somebody tell me.

Movie that’s aged the worst – Crash. Only five years old and the tale of race and circumstance in Los Angeles already feels quaint.

And what of Wes Anderson? – His four films (three live-action and one animated) are entertaining, but they’re all riffs on a similar theme—highly stylized portraits of fractured families done to great soundtracks. They all made my best of the year list when released, but Anderson, so far anyway, has been content to have his characters talk about their struggles rather than show them.

Television (Still a vast wasteland)

The conversation begins and ends with The Wire. If you haven’t seen it you have deprived yourself of storytelling on par with Charles Dickens, but more visual. There’s no point in spilling more cyber-ink on it as countless others have extolled its virtues. So watch it. Now. You’re welcome.

The two best documentaries of the past ten years originally aired on television. Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home revealed every available side of Bob Dylan including a few that Mr. Zimmerman would rather have kept under wraps. Scorsese seemed to talk to everyone who ever had anything to do with Dylan.

The other great doc was Spike Lee’s agonizing, thorough, poetic story of the debacle and failure of our government’s response to Hurricane Katrina. It’s not hyperbolic to call When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts an act of public service.

OK…if I must choose…a baker’s dozen…(I actually already tipped my hand above by adding a clip after the summary)

WALL-E, Amelie, The Dark Knight, Memento, Amores Perros, In America, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, Moulin Rouge! There Will Be Blood, The Lives of Others, Waking Life, You Can Count on Me and Lilya 4-ever.

He is a writer, director for film and theatre. He was born in 1943. He won the scholarship during his school time, which leads him into the TV business, then he, starts his first write, and direct plays. Leigh has won several prizes at major European film festivals. Most notably he won the Best Director award at Cannes with Naked in 1993 and the Palme d’Or (Best film) in 1996 for Secrets & Lies. He won the Leone d’Oro for the best film at the International Venice Film Festival in 2004 with Vera Drake. He has been nominated for the Academy Award six times.

Mike Leigh

He was born on 20 February 1943, Salford, Greater Manchester, England, UK.  He graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and at Camberwell and Central Art Schools and the London Film School. His first original play was Bleak Moments which had a lot of improvisation. His early career was as a playwright and theatre director. He directed many stage play including Smelling A Rat (1989), It’s A Great Big Shame, Greek Tragedy, Goose-Pimples (1982), Ecstasy (1989) and Abigail’s Party (1979). He was nominated for the 2002 Laurence Olivier Award for Best Revival.

He later interested in making film and television. He wrote and directed many television plays including Nuts in May, Home Sweet Home, and Vera Drake. He was famous for his improvisation technique which help the actor to create new character from improvisation. His winning award films are All or Nothing (2002), Life is Sweet , Secrets and Lies (1997) and Topsy Turvy (1999). Happy-Go-Lucky (2008)

Welcome to Speak, the Tim Bowness album notes blog.

These pages will contain Tim’s thoughts, memories and reflections on albums that he has recorded with no-man, his solo releases plus collaborations with Peter Chilvers, Samuel Smiles and others.

Which is which? It’s all so topsy-turvy!

One makes social realist films; the other was filmed living such an unreal, anti-social life that you couldn’t make it up. One wanted to show us how much more positive life could be if we only had better attitudes; One wants to show us how much more positive life could be if we only had better attitudes. One started growing his beard when he was twelve; the other started growing his beard when he was three. One had thousands of faithful followers who adored him; the other has thousands of faithful followers who adore him. One dressed his acolytes in the colors of the sunrise; the other  dressed his main character in a different colour of lacy tights in each scene.

One filmed Imelda Staunton crying in gratuitous close-up in a prison, even though everyone knows that blubbering is the last resort of drama; the other believed that, if you only did exactly as he said, you would be free, free, free! One believed in Dynamic Meditation; the other believes in dramatic mediation. One uses this philosophy to develop his scripts through improvisational workshops in which his actors use their feel for character and situation to arrive at an understanding of the mise en scène; the other encouraged his followers to arrive at their own understanding of his philosophy of eternal emptiness by saying, “If you really want to know who I am, you have to be as absolutely empty as I am. Then two mirrors will be facing each other, and only emptiness will be mirrored. Infinite emptiness will be mirrored: two mirrors facing each other. But if you have some idea, then you will see your own idea in me.”

One is living a peaceful life of awards and plaudits and beginning work on a new film; the other was done for immigration fraud, called his henchpeople fascists, accused them of bugging his phone, which indeed they were, got them locked up, and then died.

Mike Leigh and the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh: could they by any chance be related? I think we should be told.

With a very grateful tip of the Baroque bonnet to Mr Banquo Calhoun, Esq.

Mike Leigh was born on February of 1943 and is an English writer and director. He directed on both theater and cinema. During his early years, he grew up studying in arts and acting. He attended many school, including London Film School. He started of as an actor in minor role, but it wasn’t until 1965 that he started on his own theater production. during the 70’s, he made deveral television plays.  His plays deals with religion, in which he uses his experience growing up in a Jewish as an inspiration. He also did films and among his works are “Naked” in which he was awarded Best Director by Cannes. He went on to wins many more awards in other movies he made. His previous work in acting might have influence his styles of working with film casts. He uses a lot of improvisations that takes weeks in rehearsal. He has rough ideas of how he wants things to be yet he doessnt tell the casts. Some of these techniques results to great films such as “Secrets & Lies”, “Topsy Turvy”, and “Happy-Go-Lucky.” 

“The good thing from my perspective is that nobody puts any pressure on me to say what it’s going to be. The backers accept that they don’t know what they are going to get.” – Mike Leigh 

I hope to visit England sometime in the near future, and when I do there are a number of must-see places on my list. Highgate Cemetery is one of these, not least because of its use as a prominent location in Mike Leigh’s High Hopes (1988). This is one of my favourite scenes in the film (please excuse the subtitles – it’s the best video I could find on the web):

Apart from Karl Marx, other famous memorials at the cemetery include Sir Ralph Richardson, John and Elizabeth Dickens (parents of Charles and models for Micawber and Mrs Nickleby), Carl Mayer (Austrian-German screenwriter of The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari and Sunrise) and Douglas Adams. An expanded list of famous interments is available at the official website.

Tim Roth in 'Made in Britain' (Alan Clarke, 1982)

The name of my blog is taken from the raw and brilliant film Made in Britain, directed by Alan Clarke and starring a 21-year-old Tim Roth in his first major film role. Written by David Leland, the film indicts the social welfare system and the larger Thatcher regime in England, as well as exploring the young male psyche. As the skinhead Trevor, Roth assaults both his co-stars and the audience with his racism, apathy and excessive violence. Eric Richard, best known for his role as Bob Cryer on ‘The Bill’ and also his lead in Mike Leigh’s television film Home Sweet Home, provides strong support. Interestingly, this was the first time that Alan Clarke employed Steadicam to ’shoot the characters in long, continuous takes to give the impression of ceaseless motion and neurotic energy’, a technique he would use stylistically in his later work (Murphy, 2006).
Tim Roth gives an incredibly strong performance in a film that encapsulates so much of the rage and confusion of the time, AT the time of its production.

Filmography: Made in Britain dir. Alan Clarke (1982)

Bibliography: Murphy, Robert, Directors in British and Irish Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 2006)

Torino non sta mai ferma. Neppure la sala Massimo: ecco che arriva la X edizione del Sottodiciotto Film Festival. Dal 25 novembre al 5 dicembre, ospite principale Mike Leigh (ma anche Fernando “Pino” Solanas e molti altri), con una decina di anteprime nazionali e centinaia di lavori lunghi e corti, di animazione e non… 

Il programma sul sito del Festival: 

http://www.sottodiciottofilmfestival.it/index.php

LIFE IS SWEET av Mike Leigh (1991)
Med Jim Broadbent, Alison Steadman, Jane Horrocks, Claire Skinner, Timothy Spall, Stephen Rea, David Thewlis, Moya Brady

SPOILERVARNING

Det kanske delvis beror på musiken – som påminner om den lätt igenkännbara dragspelsmusik man så ofta hör i franska filmer – men det är inte primärt därför Life Is Sweet känns som en Jacques Tati-film men skruvad 90 grader åt ett annat håll eftersom den är gjord i England och skruvad ytterligare 90 grader åt ytterligare ett annat håll eftersom den är gjord av Mike Leigh. Det känns mycket sannolikt att Mike Leigh varit inspirerad av Jacques Tati, men till skillnad från Jacques Tati gör han inte en komedi som med förundrade ögon betraktar en värld som är fullkomligt absurd – vår – utan en dramakomedi som betraktar en väldigt engelsk och inte alldeles funktionell familj med en svårt dysfunktionell dotter, som lider av både bulimi och klinisk depression.

Life Is Sweet balanserar förbluffande väl på gränsen mellan drama och komedi, och är alltså båda delarna. Med lyckat resultat är det sällsyntare än man kan tro och de flesta filmer som försöker kantrar omgående. Men här utspelas komedin inte bara mot en klangbotten av tragedi, filmen övergår i och slutar som hoppfull tragedi. Det här är något som Mike Leigh kommit att göra även senare, men kanske inte så uttalat som här.

Man borde bli tokig på Alison Steadman, familjens mamma, som kulsprutesmattrande spottar ur sig som hon själv tycker väldigt skojiga kommentarer till hennes och familjens vardag i en engelsk förort och oavbrutet flamsskrattar åt sina egna skämt, men det blir man inte. Tvärtom blir man oemotståndligt charmad. För dels framstår hon med sitt goda humör som så rörande hjärtevarm i en tillvaro där skälen att vara rörande hjärtevarm är få, dels får man så småningom en känsla av att det här är hennes sätt att klara av tillvaron, att det ligger mer i flamsskrattet än man i förstone kan tro. Den misstanken bekräftas, för det här är inte den flamsigt ytliga människa man ser under nästan hela filmen, det är en empatisk och insiktsfull människa, med oväntat stor förståelse för inte minst den svårt problemfyllda av sina tvillingdöttrar – spelad med en säreget överdriven stil av Jane Horrocks, en stil som borde bli ett självparodiskt magplask men som tvärtom träffar mitt i prick. Jag är inte alldeles på det klara med hur Mike Leigh och Jane Horrocks lyckats så väl med att så skickligt balansera på rätt sida om även den gränsen, men det har de. Och därför känns det desto märkligare att Timothy Spalls insats som familjens vän Aubrey, uppenbart en människa med flera bokstavsdiagnoser, spelas så överdrivet att han framstår som en lyteskomisk pajas utan trovärdighet.

Mike Leigh har alltid befolkat sina filmer med vardagens människor, men inte så sällan med dem av vardagens människor som har problem som gör dem i någon mening dysfunktionella. Jag tror att han utforskar den sidan hos nutidens människa – och ur alla möjliga synvinklar, från oförmåga att skaffa barn och det livstrauma det innebär för ett par som verkligen vill ha barn (inte i den här filmen) till ovanstående nämnda bulimiska, kliniskt deprimerade unga kvinna till en änglamakerska (också en annan film), och så vidare – helt enkelt för att olika former av dysfunktionalitet är väldigt mycket mer utbredda än någon egentligen låtsas om eller för den delen ens tror. Mike Leigh söker sig in bakom väggarna hos utvalda invånare i den enorma, moderna, anonyma storstaden, där sådana väldiga sjok av befolkningen på ytan är så strömlinjeformat lika varandra, där individerna som väller fram i mångtusenhövdade folkmassor på väg till jobbet varje morgon vid en hastig anblick kan förefalla utbytbara mot varandra. Så är det förstås aldrig och när Mike Leigh väljer ut någon eller några av individerna – för det mesta en familj – ur den väldiga folkmassan och tränger innanför huden på dem, visar han oss drama efter drama, med komiska men oftare tragiska inslag, som ständigt pågår runt omkring oss i den verklighet där vi lever, men oftast innanför hemmets väggar.

Mitt i allt detta, mitt i en problemfylld tillvaro som ytligt sett skrattas bort av en flamsig Alison Steadman, vågar folk även drömma och därför mot bättre vetande, som man skulle kunna tycka, exempelvis som hennes man Jim Broadbent köpa sig en rostig gammal husvagn till överpris i avsikt att förvandla den till en ambulerande korvkiosk. Den drömmen ter sig säkert inte särskilt storslagen för nästan någon av oss, för även om den med hårt arbete går i uppfyllelse är den inte rimligen något som står särskilt högt upp på de flesta människors önskelista över livsmål – men är den verkligen så ynklig?! Är det inte det faktum att man fortfarande förmår drömma som är det väsentliga?! Spelar det någon större roll vari drömmen består?!

Det som kanske mer än något annat griper tittaren i Mike Leighs filmer är den respekt och förståelse han visar de på ytan anonyma men i själva verket mycket älsk- , ömkans- och beundrandsvärda människor i vars liv han tränger in, och den respekten och den förståelsen förmedlar han på ett sätt som gör hans filmer till betydande filmkonst.

Kör hårt,
Bellis

Lord Baker and me (Photo: David Hartley)

It was a superb evening as usual, with the added excitement this year of picking up an award!
The Saatchi Political Award for Political Cartoonist of the Year.
It’s a peculiar feeling to receive that kind of honour in front of so many terrific cartoonists, most of whom would have had every right to stand up and shout: “WHAT?! HIM?”
Fortunately they all waited until I was out of earshot, so it was all very civilized.

An essential part of the evening is the fundraising for the Cartoon Museum. When presenting the award for Joke Cartooning, director Mike Leigh heaped praise on the work the small team at the Museum does, and quite rightly so! It is a terrific place which deserves to be supported in any way possible. For most of us on the night it means happily paying ten quid to pop a balloon or to be photographed sticking our heads through a humongous Dave Brown paining of an executioner holding the head of Gordon Brown (See below). For those with rather more impressive bank balances, it means paying £3200 for a Matt cartoon.

Other memorable moments included a simply hilarious speech by the old gag master Barry Cryer. Madness singer Suggs throwing Ollie Preston’s rather too heavy looking pen into the crowd after a mock auction, and Martin Rowson’s annual rant about the need to find young new cartooning talent so that we can break their fingers.

Black tie events are a rarity for most cartoonists, and most would probably say mercifully so. However, this annual chance to dress up in ill-fitting hired fineries is terrific fun.

For more on the awards, read Christian Adam’s blog and PCO’s Bloghorn.

La felicità porta fortuna è un film del 2008, una commedia britannica scritta e diretta da Mike Leigh. La sceneggiatura si concentra su una insegnante allegra e ottimista e delle sue relazioni con le persone intorno a lei.

Leggi altre notizie su: | Mike Leigh | Sally Hawkins | Alexis Zegerman

Last Friday, while attempting to write yet another lengthy post about the London Film Festival, I was repeatedly distracted by Twitter. This is nothing new. However, one of the people I follow whose name escapes me now (sorry) linked to an article posted on the film discussion site The Auteurs. I’d heard of it before but stayed away as I thought it had something to do with the dreary Luke Haines band, but in fact it’s a nice way to completely waste hours of your time, rating and “favouriting” movies to create a Profile for yourself, complete with representative movie still selection so you can have an iconic image next to your name (I went with Gene Hackman in The Conversation). It was pleasantly pointless, though I did take enormous pleasure in giving Slumdog Millionaire and Happy-Go-Lucky one star each, and Kung Fu Panda the five stars it so richly deserves. Take that, Sight and Sound subscribers.

The article that directed me to this site via Twitter was this lovely little prose poem half-heartedly giving Michael Bay some credit while referring to “fascism” and suchlike. This is possibly the only even vaguely positive critique of Bay’s work I’ve seen on the Internet that hasn’t been written by a teenager with an apostrophe allergy, and as such deserves to be preserved in amber. It might never happen again. As I said earlier this year, my opinion of Bay is torn between fascination and revulsion, the latter becoming more pronounced after the casual (but no less odious) racial insensitivity of Transformers — with the breakdancing jive-talking African-American parody known as Jazz getting killed in the final act, as is sadly the norm in movies — “transformed” into the full-on indefensible racial stereotyping of Skids and Mudflap. Shades of Caruso reader and former Transformers fan Lindywasp (one of her noms de Net) once sent me a very passionate disavowal of the sequel after an upsetting experience at a screening where the audience went from excited to silence once the extent of the caricature settled in. I was concerned by Bay’s decision before, but after reading her heartfelt condemnation, I became furious.

Though I’ll not be able to think of Bay without thinking about that incredible cloth-eared arrogance, I have still long been fascinated — as Daisyhellcakes can attest, having listened to me go on about it at length — by his public persona as the Fratboy DeMille, a man who stomps around like an over-excited teenager while making canny backroom deals for profit points, keeping the cost of his (sill expensive) movies down with obnoxious product placement, and buying effects houses such as Digital Domain. This bravado is ripe for parody, most brilliantly by the faux-Twitterer Fake Michael Bay (sample tweet: “Dammit, if I had a dollar for every time I dropped my iphone out of a helicopter doing a barrel roll…”), though I suspect he’s in on the joke.

Even more fascinating to me than Bay the Man/Douchebag is that signature style of his. Like haphazardly edited two-hour-long trailers, his films are plot-light endurance tests; a relentless swarm of images that he hurls at the audience, seemingly not caring why image B must follow image A. As long as the barrage of glowing, flashing, swirling pictures and the cacophony of multi-tracked sound effects keeps audiences pinned to their seats, Bay seems to think “Job done!” and then returns to his swanky Bay-Cave to drink Crystal and watch Total Wipeout. Is this good filmmaking? Hell no, and as I’ve attempted to explain before, I would never be able to argue that it was (though Danny Boyle’s similar everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach wins critical approval and Oscars). However, he does create an experience that no one else has the studio backing, the technical know-how, and the obnoxious confidence to be able to pull off.

Examples: Transformers ends with a city being pulverised, complete with epic firefights on a main street that totals buildings and blows up cars. The destruction-gasm setpiece in Pearl Harbor — a wretched film of enormous ethical dubiousness — contains the single most expensive shot caught on film, which is ghoulish, wasteful, and logistically impressive all at the same time. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is capped off with a huge scene where an Egyptian village gets mashed into the ground, pretty much (I’m sure it was not a real village, but if it’s fake he still managed to get it built before blowing bits of it up). He shows aircraft carriers getting split in half as if it ain’t no thing. These are stereotypically big and dumb crowd-pleasing moments that I’m sure Eric Rohmer’s fanbase would consider utterly vulgar, but they look impressive in slices. It’s not in Bay’s interest to coral these images into a coherent narrative other than “Man go from point A to point B while the world explodes.” It’s enough for him to hint that there is a goal that his heroes are trying to achieve, and as long as it seems there is some kind of forward momentum while he stages bravura visual orgasms containing complicated visual and physical effects, that’s enough for him.

Again, I’m aware that this is not technically artistically valid on a large-scale level, but on a micro-level, I cannot look away. Every dumb populist miscalculation like his nasty treatment of women, or his blindness to the wrongness of using racial stereotypes for stupid lowest-common denominator jokes, or his infantile reliance on slapstick and screaming instead of nuance and character growth, or any number of other admittedly dreadful habits, run parallel to his facility with composition. There are so many shots he has created that make my eyes wobble with pleasure that I cannot forget them. His reliance on patriotic button-pushing aside, he can create stirring moments just through imagery in a way that would probably make propagandists salivate. That ability to capture an emotion through manipulative visuals, aided by the pounding music of Hans Zimmer or Steve Jablonsky, is unparalleled. He truly is Leni Riefenstahl with a baseball cap and a collection of sports-cars in his Beverly Hills mansion.

And yet, despite this facility with imagery — perhaps the one thing I think even his detractors should accept, even if really really really grudgingly — he is treated like the Boogeyman. Numerous people accuse Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen of being the worst film of the year. Granted, it’s not very good, but I’ve seen far far far worse movies released this year. Just a cursory flick through the Auteurs site sees a number of forum threads based around hating him, including Why is Michael Bay on Criterion?, Is Michael Bay the worst director of all time?, and Reasons to *HATE* Michael Bay. The thread NAME THE FILM MAKERS YOU THINK SHOULD RETIRED OR SHOULD NOT BELONG TO THIS INDUSTRY AT ALL is filled with calls for Bay’s immediate withdrawal from the film industry. I get the feeling that this is a running joke, though it is borne of genuine frustration at his movies and his success.

They’re not the only ones who dislike him, of course. Mainstream critics are revolted by his movies, and even on a site oft-visited by the people you would think comprise his most ardent fanbase (Ain’t It Cool News), Bay is treated like a pariah. “Damn You Michael Bay” is a long-running Internet joke that has become a mantra. Bay hatred appears to be reflexive, the last word in an argument. Why accuse any other filmmakers of crimes against decency? Isn’t it obvious that Bay is the worst of the worst, representing everything that is debased and evil about modern cinema? He’s an unpleasant man with poor taste who appeals to the slack-jawed yokels and the hoodies and the youths with their popcorn and their knives and their mobile phones and suchlike and so on and so on etc. ad infinitum.

He’s the Hitler of films. Mike Godwin postulated that the overuse of mentioning Hitler in online arguments was sadly inevitable (“As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.”) Well, I reckon that there is another law we can accept as fact by now. “As an online discussion about film or culture grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Michael Bay approaches 1.” I don’t think this law should be associated with my real life name, which doesn’t have the Ooomph that “Godwin” has (that’s the kind of name that belongs in front of the word “law”). Therefore I propose we refer to this as Burke’s Law, named after the TV series from the 60s that was revived in the 90s. Why Burke’s Law? Because I always hear that phrase said in the same way as in the 90s title sequence, i.e. with this voice…

…and there is nothing more awesome than that. Sex up that show title, Sexy-Voiced Lady. (Here’s the first part of a full episode, just to show it in amazing context.)

So yeah, whenever a discussion about sucky film directors inevitably begins to focus almost exclusively on the vapidity of Bay’s destructo-porn epics, feel free to mention Burke’s Law. If Bay is what people think represents the true nadir of modern filmmaking, that’s up to them, but if they’re not willing to expand their search to other far less talented individuals out there, then I just can’t take them seriously. I see Dr. Uwe Boll get mentioned a lot, and he’s certainly a candidate. He’s made a shit-ton of laughably awful movies in the past — many more than Bay — and he has now tried to make himself seem classier by making a film about Darfur. However, he’s filming real rape victims re-enacting their own rape for his camera. Making fun of his shitty output suddenly doesn’t seem so funny.

If we’re going to talk about directors who create deafening, poorly storyboarded and edited action scenes that substitute crashing, clashing cacophony for flow and plot momentum, how about Stephen Sommers? He combines Bay’s inability to understand the clear, unambiguous narrative progression of a movie or an action scene with a flat eye for visuals, as evidenced by the busy but tedious G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra? Or Rob Cohen, a man who has yet to make even a half-way decent action movie? Though I’ve not seen his most recent movie — Fast and Furious — I did endure Stealth (where some of the best visual effects ever committed to film were wasted on a farrago of galactic proportions) and The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, which actually managed to be the worst film in the Mummy franchise. It takes a special kind of witless hack to out-Stephen-Sommers Stephen Sommers. I’d rather watch a Bay action scene than something by either of these guys any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

I’d also like to make the case for Robert Luketic, who keeps pumping out the most artless dreck, seemingly with no understanding of what cinema can do. His last three films were lifeless committee-borne crowd-pleasers that couldn’t even be bothered to do anything pleasurable, rendered even more unbearable by being presented in a lifeless cavalcade of wretchedly awful compositions. As a bonus they also featured either reductive, retrograde gender-politics (Monster-In-Law and The Ugly Truth) or ethnic white-washing (the utterly worthless 21). Or what about Jon Avnet, aka the modern day Ed Wood? His last two movies — Righteous Kill and the incredible 88 Minutes — were among the most catastrophically misjudged movies I have ever seen, made by someone without a single artistic bone in his body. It’s so bad that I suspect he doesn’t even understand the scripts he adapts. No matter how hard he tries, he will never be able to come up with a single memorable or inspiring image in his entire career. Not counting this one with Leelee Sobieski taking aim, that is.

If you’ve thought long and hard about it and have come to the conclusion that Bay is less talented than these directors, or that he represents something far greater than just bad filmmaking (i.e. he’s a mascot for the debasement of the culture at large), or that his Platinum Dunes production company is committing a terrible crime by making bland remakes of great horror movies, or that the compositions I love are just ugly but shiny commercialised parodies of actual art, or that he’s the worst kind of patriotism-spouting pro-military arrested adolescent, or even that he’s just an obnoxious douchebag (James Cameron without the brains or the talent), that’s perfectly understandable. I’m cool with that, if you show me your calculations. But don’t just say, “Michael Bay is the worst director ever” because that’s the accepted wisdom. That’s not film criticism. That’s letting someone else do your thinking for you.

Lloyd and I have been down in the bowels of the BFI, watching many British Council films. When I sat down this morning, I was meaning to put up our videoblog of that; but I realised that, before talking about the films, a little more context might be valuable. So, once again drawing on my National Archives trip, here’s a brief history of the British council’s engagement with film.

As I’ve mentioned before, the British Council’s film making golden age was during and after the war, up until 1946. It had a substantial in-house production / commissioning staff, and a clearly defined sense of mission. Films were intended to communicate information about one of four key areas:

1. Arts (including architecture, drama, fine arts, music and town and country planning)
2. Education (including films dealing with schools, teacher training, aspects of Britain and the British, law and order, sport and youth activities)
3. Medicine (intended for medical and para-medical audiences only and not for the lay public)
4. Science (including all branches of science, science teaching and technology)

About 90 films were produced; they were regarded as being important pioneer work, but with the end of the war came re-organisation and rationalisation:

It was decided that the production of officially sponsored films was to be the concern of the Central Office of Information – in effect, the government’s in-house advertising and communications agency – and that if the Council wanted any films made they would have to be produced through the C.O.I..

Much bureaucracy ensued, as the British Council’s film department was moved over to the new organisation. Quite apart from the logistics of the move, both had different pension and employment regimes; understandably disgruntled film staff battled to retain the rather better conditions they’d enjoyed working for the British Council.

Discomfort was felt more officially, too. Almost as soon as the new organisation was up and running, in January 1947, BFI Director Oliver Bell was writing to General Sir Robert Adam at the British Council. He bemoaned handover of film making reponsibilities to the C.O.I., and suggested that a small Sub-Committee of the Council should be set up to develop a clearly defined film making policy for the British Council.

Bell’s motivation is rather interesting; he admired the Council’s general output, but was particularly impressed by the way that it had created a trend in medical films with Surgery in Chest Diseases. I’ve talked about the positive overseas impact of the Council’s medical films in previous posts; it’s fascinating to see that they were very influential at home, too.

However, a combination of factors meant that Bell’s rearguard action was doomed. The General responded positively, but cautiously, in particular citing deep budgetary issues as an impediment to action. There was nothing more to be done; film production was now definitively in the hands of the C.O.I..

The British Council / C.O.I. relationship didn’t seem to be particularly smooth. There’s a fair amount of general grumbling in the records. Much of it is about a perceived lack of efficiency. A 1950 Treasury report bemoans:

The lack of adequate funds in the last 2 or 3 years, and the injunction to get any special films through the C.O.I. involving higher cost and delays in production as compared with what the Council could obtain by direct trade contacts.

There were also more specific issues. In 1950 and 1951, for example, the Council battled the C.O.I. over who managed the distribution of British Council films. The C.O.I. wanted to make distribution deals, and take a percentage of the profits; the British Council felt that it could handle this more efficiently itself, and objected strenuously:

Would you please advise me on this. I cannot quite see why we should seek C.O.I. Finance Division’s views on whether we are to make a good deal as regards selling our wares.

On 25th May 1951, the Council was victorious:

subject to Treasury approval, the Central Office should cease to conduct the commercial distribution in the United Kingdom of the Council’s films

The battle may have been won; the war, alas, was lost. The two organisations were tussling over Cricket, an enjoyable but inconsequential piece about – somewhat unsurprisingly – the history of cricket. It’s a fun little film (and is available to view at the BFI Mediatheque) but it lacks the deep political and social engagement of much of the Council’s earlier output.

From now on, the British Council’s filmic focus would be mostly on either artistic or linguistic subjects. However, there were consolations; from being a producer of its own films, the Council would move to develop a strong role as a booster of the British film industry in general.

It would establish a substantial film library, with movies available for screening worldwide, and work directly with major film makers to bring them and their work to the attention of international audiences.

Major figures including Terence Davies, Mike Leigh, Terry Gilliam, Peter Greenaway and others would be closely associated with the Council’s activities; and there’ll be more on that in upcoming posts, once we’ve looked at the films the Council was commissioning and distributing in the 40s…

I had a teacher that once said that drama is for feelings and comedy is for thought. At first I dismissed this idea because how can a movie like Little Nicky or Dickie Roberts: Child Star be thoughtful. But if you think about it, although they are horrible movies, they are indeed thoughtful. The former deals with living up to your father’s expectations, while the latter is about the effects stardom have on a child.

For this reason comedy is my favorite genre. Can you make a drama about a girl trying infiltrate a clique of popular girls to bring them down, and eventually becoming one of them? Yes you can, but it does not have the same effect as a comedy. So, I was quite excited about compiling a list of my favorite comedies of the decade, but it turned out to be harder than I thought. I’m sure I left out a few good ones, but I feel happy with the way it turned out.

Here’s my list for the 10 best comedies of the decade:

10. Shrek

Andrew Adamson, Vicky Jenson | 2001

I saw this without having seen any sort of promotional material for it (how I managed to do that, I don’t know), so imagine my surprise when the movie started. Shrek is a clever take on fairy tales that has jokes coming in very often, and they never get old. Will the movie age well? Probably not because of all the pop culture references, but I will always have fond memories of it.

9. I Love You, Man

John Hamburg | 2009

A great story about friendship sewn together by great chemistry between Paul Rudd and Jason Segel. Together, they make some poorly written lines and situations work. The rest of the cast also does a pretty good job of making this work, among them the always reliable JK Simmons, Andy Samberg, and Rashinda Jones.

8. Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy

Adam McKay | 2004

This movie came out at the peak of Will Ferrell’s popularity, that is when he used to do the things he still does, but with good scripts. The story is inpired and a perfect fit for Ferrell’s comedic abilities. The sight gag are great and the dialogue (which is rather good) is delivered perfectly by the cast. And I believe that this is still Ferrell’s best performance.

7. Ratatouille

Brad Bird | 2007

This movie is full of sophisticated and innocent humor. Prior to this it had been a while that I had not seen a non-Pixar animated movie that was hilarious and had clean humor. Yes, there is a poop joke, but that fits the personality of the character that is involved in the joke. Ratatouille made once again made the messy kitchen, the food to the face, slapstick feel fresh once again.

6. School of Rock

Richard Linklater | 2003

Jack Black gives his best and funniest performance here. Yes, the plot has been done before, but the way the story is told, and the earnest performances from the young cast, makes this stand above the rest of other movies with the same plot. Plus, the ending is pure magic.

5. Mean Girls

Mark Waters | 2004

Before “30 Rock” and Sarah Palin made Tina Fey a house-hold name, and before Linday Lohan started doing drugs and ruined her career, they made this movie. Lohan, along with Rachel McAdams, Amanda Seyfriend, and Lacy Chabert, make Fey’s creations come to life in a great way. The movie is full of your typical Fey dialogue, and that alone makes it stand above other comedies.

4. Hot Fuzz

Edgar Wright | 2007

The love that Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg have for bad action movies shows here. And only them could they make an intentionally hilarious action movie like this. The biggest laugh, however, don’t come from the spoofing, but rather from the small moments, like the old man being stabbed in the foot, or the crossword puzzle dialogue exchange. Just great stuff all around.

3. Happy-Go-Lucky

Mike Leigh | 2008

Some do not think that this is a comedy, and I can see why they think that however, since this made me cry because of all the laughter, it definitely qualifies as a comedy. No other movie made me laugh this hard this decade. This is all thanks to Mike Leigh’s great writing and direction, which fleshed out every single character, even those who are on-screen for only a few minutes. The movie also works as a comedy thanks to Sally Hawkins’ amazing performance.

2. Knocked Up

Judd Appatow | 2007

One would think that it would be hard to find comedy in an uncomfortable situation such as an unwanted pregnancy. However, Judd Appatow did, not in the actual situation, but in the fall out from it. Seeing these two people and their families trying either help them or trying to tear them apart is funny as well as seeing them trying to make things work when they are clearly not meant for each other. While his direction may not be the best, Appatow’s script makes the movie work, and one of the best comedies of the decade.

1. In Bruges

Martin McDonagh | 2008

Like Knocked Up, In Bruges finds comedy in a situation that would not necessarily require it. This time it is two killers hiding out after a job goes wrong. The comedy here is mixed in with the anguish that the main characters are feeling, and it works. On one hand we have Ray (Collin Farrell) feeling bad about what he did, and on the other we have him, and his partner Ken (Brendan Gleeson), getting into all sorts of trouble with their boss, a local drug dealer, Canadians, Americans, thieves and a midget. Even when things get awfully dark, the movie keeps it’s sense of humor, and that’s why it is the best comedy of the decade.

Honorable mentions: The 40-year-old Virgin, Role Models, Superbad, WALL-E, Amelie, Cheaper by the Dozen, Shrek 2, Blades of Glory, Juno, Little Miss Sunshine, The Spongebob Squarepants Movie, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Shaun of the Dead, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Darjeeling Limited

Thanks for reading. Feel free to comment about this list.

An Interview with Ray Carney

by Diane Cherkerzian | Published May 31, 1995

A cinematic Ralph Nader, Noam Chomsky, and Marshall McLuhan rolled into one, Ray Carney is a combination consumer advocate, media scourge, and film visionary who pulls no punches in his attacks on the American filmmaking establishment and the critics and reviewers who support it. Over the past 10 years, in a series of wide-ranging lectures and interviews, he has tirelessly crusaded for off-Hollywood films and filmmakers.

When he is not stumping for independent film, Carney is a prolific writer. He is the editor of the multi-volume Cambridge Film Classics, and the author of more than a hundred essays and eight books of his own, including the recently published “The Films of John Cassavetes” (Cambridge University Press). He is currently completing a critical history Of American independent filmmaking from 1953 to the present.

I caught up with him in his office at Boston University, where he teaches courses on film and American studies. The text that follows was edited from more than eight hours of conversation on three successive afternoons.

Diane Cherkerzian (MM): Since the Academy Awards are in a couple of weeks, would you comment on the state of the art of contemporary film?

Ray Carney: Do you realize you just used the words Academy Awards and art in the same sentence? Doesn’t that feel weird? Besides being the world’s most boring TV show, the Academy Awards obviously have nothing to do with art. It’s a three hour commercial for bad movies. Actors who can’t act, writers who can’t write, and directors who can’t direct get together and give each other little trophies congratulating themselves on how wonderful they all are. Hollywood is not about art. Art isn’t made by committee or by testing different versions of something to see which one the audience responds to the best.

But that’s old news. Everybody knows the accent falls on the second word in show business. What’s inexplicable to me is that American film schools go along with the whole thing. They actually show schlock like Fatal Attraction, Alien,Thelma and Louise, and Silence of the Lambs in film courses and invite the directors to speak to their students! I may be out of touch, but I was under the impression that the university curriculum was one thing that was not supposed to be up for sale to the highest bidder.

John Cassavetes directed wife Gena Rowlands in Faces.

MM: Are you saying these films shouldn’t be screened in universities?

RC: No. Just take them out of the arts and humanities courses. Screen them in the Business School. Study how they were financed. Discuss how the casting, the writing, and the ad campaigns were coordinated. Analyze them as wildly successful marketing coups-since that’s what they are. Snake oil for the brain. And while we’re at it, let’s get the library to re-catalogue all those books about Steven Spielberg, Oliver Stone, and Ivan Reitman, so that they are shelved where they belong–next to the books on mass-marketing and public relations. I have no problem with that

MM: But you can’t deny that Hollywood has an uncanny ability to put its finger on America’s pulse and involve a viewer’s emotions. Movies like Forrest Gump, JFK, Fatal Attraction, andPhiladelphia obviously spoke deeply to millions of viewers. The proof is that they took in hundreds of millions at the box office.

RC: You’re just making my point-illustrating how Home Shopping Club values have replaced artistic ones. We don’t measure Picasso’s Guernica or Paul Taylor’s Esplanade by how much money they rake in their first weekend. So what if a movie is popular? The Big Mac is the most popular food in America. Norman Rockwell is the most popular painter. Does that mean the English Department should dump Shakespeare and replace him with Stephen King?

As far as emotions go, if art was just about getting our feelings worked up, an auto accident or the cry of a baby would be more important than Hamlet. It’s easy to get a viewer’s emotions involved. Make a movie about a victim-especially a fashionable one: someone dying of AIDS or rounded up by the Nazis. Only slightly subtler, make a movie about a victim of some obvious social injustice. Take an even easier route and rely on a suspense plot with constant threats of violence. Stir and serve. I’ve just described 90 percent of the movies made last year. That’s not art, it’s just playing games with our evolutionary past duping our reptilian brain-stems into pseudo fright/ flight or maternal/protective responses.

Look, I’ll admit that I have the same visceral responses everyone else does to Natural Born Killers, Reservoir Dogs, and Pulp Fiction. I squirm. I cringe. I could hardly watch the screen while the Bruce Willis character in Pulp Fiction went back to his apartment. Even a no-brainer like Speed can leave you breathless with its propulsiveness. But what does that prove? These films are the best roller-coaster rides (in the case of Tarantino, the best haunted houses) ever made. But if that’s what you want, you might as well go to an amusement park. I remember a conversation I had with a director over dinner a few years ago. He said his goal was to grab viewers by the guts with the first shot of his movie and not let them go for two hours. I asked him where he had developed such a bizarre desire. Why would he want to grab people by their guts? Why wouldn’t he prefer to touch their minds and hearts?

J. C. Wilbur in Blues for the Avatar.

MM: I take it you are not a Tarantino groupie.

RC: You’re talking to the one critic in America who isn’t ready to found a religion around him. I was willing to suspend judgment after Reservoir Dogs, but it’s perfectly obvious to me by now that he’s a lightweight. A flash-in-thepan. The Tarantino cult will disband in a few years and search for another Messiah, once he predictably fails to live up to his “early promise “—just like the David Lynch cult did

MM: Why do you feel so negatively about his work?

RC: It’s only that in three films running something like seven hours in all-he has managed not to express one interesting insight into human emotion or behavior. If it weren’t for daytime television, it might constitute some sort of record. All there is in his work is the Grand Guignol campiness, the chiller-diller suspensefulness, the kicky twists and turns of plot, and reversals of expectation. It’s not much to go on, if you are beyond the age of 18 (which, admittedly, most of his audience is not at least not emotionally).

What am I saying? Simply that his scenes are boring. All he has to keep them interesting is the pop-schlock tones and effects. There is not a single conversation in Pulp Fiction that is interesting enough to stand on its own without some comic-book effect to jazz it up. Without the harem-scarem jokiness and thriller plot, even his teenage admirers would be bored out of their minds.

MM: At least you concede that it isn’t just buckets of blood, as some mistakenly say. His work is funny.

RC: My problem with the humor is that it is too shallow. The great comic masters-Chaplin, Mike Leigh, Elaine May, Mark Rappaport know that comedy is a deadly serious form. In their works, we laugh from the shock of recognition. We see ourselves in extremely complex ways. The comedy is a way of suspending a viewer within the complexity. Tarantino never uses comedy that way. It’s always merely for a cheap laugh at some easy irony or obvious incongruity-usually a sudden change of mood. The comedy doesn’t reveal anything interesting. That’s why in Chaplin, May, Leigh, and Rappaport the comedy draws us into states of intricately multivalent sympathy with the characters, while in Tarantino, it just makes us feel superior to them. The one kind of comedy makes things more complex; the other kind, Tarantino’s, makes them simpler. Tarantino’s comedy is similar to Altman’s in this respect. It reduces and demeans, but above all it simplifies.

MM: How can you account for the critical praise that’s been heaped on him?

RC: Oh, the critics are easy to buffalo. I sometimes give my students a recipe for making a movie that New York critics will champion. First, be sure you work in a well – established genre and wedge in lots of references to other movies. Play games with narrative expectations and genre conventions at every opportunity. That always appeals to intellectual critics, who like nothing better than a movie about movies. It makes them feel important. Second, include a ton of pseudo-highbrow cultural allusions and unexplained in-jokes. Critics love it when they can feel in the know. Third, strive for the “smartest” possible tone and look: as ironic, cynical, wised-up, coy, dryly comic, and smart-alecky as you can make it. It’s important to avoid real seriousness at all costs, so that no one can accuse you of being sentimental, gushy, or caring about anything. That’s a mortal sin if you want to appeal to a highbrow critic. If it’s all a goof, like Pulp Fiction’s comic-book approach to life, no one can accuse you of being so uncool as to take yourself or your art seriously. If possible, make the story blatantly twisted, surreal, excessive, or demented in some way. Make it outrageous or kinky. If the average middlebrow viewer would be offended by it, that makes it all the more appealing to this sort of critic, since shocking the Philistine is what this conception of art is about. Finally, glaze it all with a virtuosio shooting and editing style and a certain degree of on-rush in the plot. Keep the nonsense moving right along, so no one will stop and ask embarrassing questions about what it all means. Every other interest is abandoned to keep the plot zigging and zagging-psychological consistency, narrative plausibility, emotional meaning.

M.J. Knecht in Rick Schmidt’s Blues.

It all seems pretty adolescent and Spy Magazine-ish to me, but when you’re done, you’ve got Pauline Kael’s all-time greatest hits, and the New York and Los Angeles Critics’ Circle Awards winners for the past 30 years: Bonnie and Clyde, Mickey One, Clockwork Orange, Dressed to Kill, Blow Out, The Fury, Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller’s Crossing, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, Blue Steel, Near Dark, Blue Velvet, Heathers, Reservoir Dogs,Red Rock West, Natural Born Killers, Bad Lieutenant, King of New York, The Last Seduction, Pulp Fiction. I probably left a few out.

MM: Tarantino aside, aren’t you being blatantly unfair to other serious movies? They aren’t merely roller-coaster rides. People think when they watch them. They make complex moral judgments. They learn things. With films likeJFK, Malcolm X, and Quiz Show, they are forced to reevaluate historical events.

RC: These movies are to thinking what sound bites are to political debate. How much real thinking do we do in the course of any of the ones you have named? Lee and Stone and Redford don’t change anyone’s mind about anything. They don’t twist our brains into knots. On the contrary, they make things easy to understand, easier than life–or real art ever does.

The lighting, the music, the acting, the narrative events keep a viewer in the clear about what he is supposed to know and feel in every shot. You are not actually allowed to think on your own, trusted to draw your own conclusions, for a minute. All there is button-pushing: idea number one, number two, number three. Of course, it goes without saying that if you are told what to think, you are not really thinking at all. Thinking is an active state, not a passive one.

Maybe I’m just slow or something, but in the presence of a real work of art-a poem, a painting, a ballet-I’m never able to understand things in the Stone or Lee way. I’m uncertain exactly how to feel. I have contradictory responses. The experiences a work of art offers are not simple or easy. They’re hard and challenging. You have to wrestle with something that won’t come clear for a long time-that won’t ever come as clear as these movies do. You have to do a lot of work.

MM: What about a really serious movie like Schindler’s List? Certainly it forces people to work through difficult material.

RC: I’m afraid I can’t see much difference between Spielberg’s serious movie and his boy’s book movies. Schindler’s List depends on Spielberg’s inflatable, one-size-fits-all myth about how a clever, resourceful character can outsmart a system. Is that what the meaning of the Holocaust boils down to-Indiana Schindler versus the Gestapo of Doom? That’s what Spielberg’s entire world-view amounts to, as far as I can tell.

Stylistically, it’s the same old comic-book sense of life: Schindler’s List depends on the same formulaic responses to formulaic characters and situations that Jaws did. We live in a culture of mass-production and one of the products we manufacture the best is synthetic emotions and experiences. The Hollywood studios are brilliant at massproducing stock feelings. They have perfected the art of canning them.

MM: I’m not sure I understand what you mean. How can you call an experience or a feeling synthetic?

RC: Velveeta-experiences are everywhere. It’s done all the time in the human-interest stories on the evening news or in the newspaper. Wall-to-wall fake feelings. Or look at what happened during the Gulf War. A whole nation was worked into a frenzy of pseudo-emotions. In fact, I sometimes think that Americans’ obsession with live television-the IranContra hearings or OJ’s Bronco going down the freeway – is a reflection of how starved we are for real experiences. At 0J’s trial, there is at least the possibility of some reality breaking through-of something unscripted and unplanned happening. The hope is that, if only for a second, something truly real will be visible.

MM: What does this have to do with film?

RC: Well, Oliver Stone, Spike Lee, Steven Spielberg, and most Hollywood directors are masters at plugging into the emotional fad of the moment. They whip up the same sort of instant, artificial emotions that the Super Bowl does.Schindler’s List, Malcolm X, and JFK cycle the viewer through a series of predictable, cliched, plastic feelings. But it’s all just a bad simulation of real experiences and emotions. Virtual unreality. The ideas are prefabricated, the experiences are formulaic, and the emotions are superficial. Which is why it’s all forgotten a few hours later.

The superficiality of the experience is in fact what many viewers love about Hollywood movies. They take you on a ride. You climb into them, turn on the Cruise Control, and sit back. Not only are events, characters, and conflicts entirely predictable (most movies are their trailers), but there is nothing really at stake for anyone-actor, director, or viewer-in any of it. It’s like a roller-coaster ride in this sense too-a few pre-programmed thrills and chills and then all is well. When it is over, you leave the theater and go home untouched by any of it. Anything that has happened has taken place entirely on the surface. That’s what Antonioni meant when he said Hollywood was being nowhere, talking to no one, about nothing. It all takes place on a fantasy island. It’s all “as if.” There’s no real danger or threat in any of it.

MM: What does that mean? How can a movie really be dangerous?

RC: John Cassavetes did it with every movie he made-which is why he got into trouble with critics. His movies get under your skin. They assault and batter you. His hell isn’t reserved for other people. Cassavetes puts us on screen and forces us to come to grips with what we are. It is too easy to put the blame on someone else. Husbands and A Woman Under the Influence won’t let us locate the stupidity or cruelty somewhere else. They have neither heroes nor villains, but only in-between characters, because that’s what we are.

Spielberg could have done it with Schindler’s List if he had dared to make a movie sympathetic to the SS. You may smile, but I’m not joking. How about a movie that deeply, compassionately entered into the German point of view in order to reveal how regular people with wives and children could be drawn into committing such horrors? How about a movie that showed that, at least potentially, we are them? A film that didn’t locate the bad guys in an emotional galaxy far away? Of course, Spielberg could never make that film even if he tried to, because it would require too much insight on his part. And if he did make it, it would certainly not get Academy Awards-because it would not merely cycle through Good Housekeeping approved responses. It would make viewers really have to think. And thinking, real thinking, is always dangerous. They might be forced to realize things about themselves that they would rather avoid. They just might be made to squirm a little.

MM: Why don’t viewers detect the falsittes you are describing?

RC: Sometimes they do. Maybe it’s a matter of knowledge. Even the most untutored viewers detect the phoniness, the formulaic packaging when a film is close enough to their lives that they can compare it with something they know’ That’s why Reality Bites bit the dust at the box office. The teens it was supposed to appeal to were precisely the group that most sniffed out its fraudulence. It’s also why most Hollywood directors have the good sense to make characters sufficiently different from their viewers’ ordinary experience that the viewer suspends disbelief. The Crying Game worked because most audiences had no experience of its gay milieu. Inform yourself by viewing Gregg Araki’s Three Lonely People in the Night or All Fucked Up, and The Crying Game becomes almost as cartoonish as Fatal Attraction.

MM: Do you think people would prefer the Araki movies if they saw them?

RC: Unfortunately, no. I have no illusions that Araki will ever be as well-known as Tarantino or Stone. People prefer artistic tricks to true discoveries. Truth is messier and more complex than a gimmick. Flash is preferred to real insight because flash gives the illusion of insight without requiring the actual effort of learning anything new. It’s a fact of psychic life that our ideas and emotions are organized to resist fundamental change. Real art is always going to be resisted, because its experiences will never neatly fit into pre-existing categories. It makes us work. We can’t just sit back and take it in. We have to wake up and scramble.

Art doesn’t give us pre-cooked, pre-digested experiences, but raw, rough, unclassifiable ones. In fact, if you can say what emotions you feel while you watch a film, you probably aren’t having an emotional experience in the way I mean. Real emotions defy verbal summaries. And they leave us more confused than analytic. Thinking in a new way is more likely to bewilder than to enlighten us, at least at first. If an experience is truly original, it puts us in places we’ve never been before and may not want to be. To paraphrase Mick Jagger: art gives us not what we want, but what we need.

MM: Is that your definition of art?

RC: Well, art does lots of things in lots of different ways, but one of the things it can do is to point a way out of some of the traps of received forms of thinking and feeling. Every artist makes a fresh effort of awareness. He offers new forms of caring. He can point out the processed emotions and canned understandings that deceive us. He can reveal the emotional lies that ensnare us. He can help us to new and potentially revolutionary understandings of our lives.

MM: Can you give a positive example of how a film can do that?

RC: Sure. It’s more fun to praise than to criticize, anyway. The only problem is that Hollywood has such a hammer-lock on our imaginations that the major works of film art are still largely unknown-even to most film professors.

John Cassavetes’s Faces is an example of a film that simply leaves behind most of the ways other movies organize and present experience, as if Hollywood had never existed. At a stylistic level, it literally shows us life in a new way – ignoring all of those old cliches about how scenes should be shot and edited: all that stuff about using intercut shot/ reverse-shot close-ups for conversations; star-system hierarchies of importance for actors; melodramatic conflicts and confrontations between the characters to generate drama; and the reliance on an action-centered plot to keep the whole thing zooming right along

At the level of experience, Cassavetes shreds most of the myths that American life and film are organized around: the worship of personal glamour and power; the myth that outward actions and the belief that we prove ourselves by competing with each other. That’s what it means for a film to reject old formulas, cliches, and myths and present new forms of understanding in their place.

MM: But Cassavetes is a depressing filmmaker. Many viewers walk out of his movies. Does something have to feel bad for it to be good?

RC: You know why people leave his movies? Because they won’t simplify the experiences they offer and tell viewers what they are supposed to know and feel every second. They force us to come to grips with experiences that we have to work to understand. In short, he’s not Altman. He doesn’t offer easy ironies or intellectual shortcuts to knowledge. He doesn’t flatter us and allow us to feel superior to his characters and events. His work is depressing only if you refuse to give up your old ways of understanding. It’s frustrating only if you refuse to learn from it. His truths seem fierce, only because we resist them so fiercely. Otherwise, his work is a joyous, spiritually exultant viewing experience-because it opens the door to the discovery of new truths about ourselves.

MM: How does the assaultiveness and intensity of Faces differ from the shock value of Tarantino’s work? Aren’t both filmmakers using what you called “tricks” or “gimmicks to hold our attention?

RC: It’s a trick if it is there simply to stoke up the drama, to chum our emotions, to grab and hold us. It’s not a trick if it’s in the service of a profound insight. It’s not a trick if it opens up new understandings. Cassavetes is not interested in shocking, but in enlightening us. We feel the shock because we register the insight. In Tarantino, there’s nothing but the shock itself.

If you want a crash course on the difference between gimmicks and revelations, watch Pulp Fiction and Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky on successive nights. May creates characters who have a superficial similarity to Tarantino’s in their guttersnipe jitteriness, and scenes that similarly defeat our expectations, but she does it not to astonish us, but in the service of showing us astonishing things about ourselves. She’s not playing with genre conventions. She doesn’t use narrative surprises or shifts of tone to hold our interest. She doesn’t use gore to scare us. She gives us a scary, wonderful, shifting conception of who we are. She imagines experience as having a mercuriality, onwardness, and open-endedness that is exhilarating and terrifying. Like Tarantino’s, May’s scenes can be both shocking and screamingly funny, but the difference is that in May these extremes of feeling are almost accidental side-effects of the insights her work provides. In Tarantino, the shocks and the jokes are ends in themselves. They reveal nothing. They are all there is.

Mikey and Nicky shows us what great art does. It gives us new ways of knowing. It gives us new emotions, new brains and hearts, new eyes and ears. It blows our old, tired selves away and makes us, at least for a while, newborn, in a new world. MM

Ray Carney is Professor of Film and American Studies at Boston University and the author of more than fifteen books on film and other art, including the critically acclaimed Cassavetes on Cassavetes and The Films of Mike Leigh. He runs a web site devoted to independent film and other art at http://www.Cassavetes.com

Abigail’s Party is finally over. I have enjoyed the process, although sometimes stressful, the learning process was great to witness. I worked with some amazing people, and I gave birth to a very enjoyable play (based on reviews).

I have posted some promo photos below for all to see.

Adam Ekberg, A balloon in a room, 2008

• The (as-of-now) story of Roman Polanski’s arrest in Zurich. [Yahoo, BBC]
• A new Buddha Machine is coming soon, created by Throbbing Gristle. [Pitchfork]
• Sasha Frere-Jones on the history of pop criticism in The New Yorker.
• What comics learned at Second City. [Chicago Sun-Times]
• The Observer talks to Mike Leigh and others about why, thirty-two years later, Abigail’s Party is still important.
• Philip K. Dick’s letter to producers after seeing his first glimpse of Blade Runner.
• Roberta Smith in the New York Times on artists modeling clothes in the new J. Crew catalog.
• Kerry William Purcell on the art of psychographics at Design Observer.
• Pop & Hiss interviews dubstep champion Mary Anne Hobbs.
• Ron Rosenbaum takes a look at Nabokov’s last unfinished work, The Origins of Laura.
• Everybody is talking about Wild Grass, the new film by Alain Resnais, which opened the NYFF. David Hudson at The Auteurs Daily has the most complete coverage, and Jonathan Rosenbaum just posted his thoughts as well.

This is the 6th Mike Leigh i’ve seen in the last 3 months (5 of them off of YouTube)

It’s got all the usual bittersweet Pathos. But it’s also got an edgy kind of street-corner “nous”.

Phil Daniels is what gives it edge; he’s the levva jacketted Cockney wide-boy older brother of dim younger bro Tim Roth (Colin) They live in a cramped flat in a grimy tenement block in Saff London with irritable Mavis (Ma) and useless Frank (Pa) All of them are on the dole. Can’t find work. Can’t be arsed.

“Wot you gonna do?” Nobody ain’t got nuffing to do. Except get on each others nerves, wind one another up, take the piss. Get bullied or be bullying. Gary Oldman comes in as Coxy, a bovver-booted off-the-wall skinhead punk to jab in his 10 pence of  sarky scorn and sour spit. The verbal sparring between Daniels and Oldman comes across as something they know about for real; practising being narsty bastards on one another – in lieu of getting a smack in the gob.

Wot you gonna do? Nuffin. It’s dahn the boozer to piss away your dole, dahn the laundrette to sit there bored stewpid, dahn the bingo desperate to win house. It’s workin clarss cultcha. It stinks of disaffected hopelessness (how many times have i used “hopeless” in reviewing a Mike Leigh film?!)

Nice Aunty Barbara gives Colin  a “little job” to do painting. She’s tried to “better” herself, lives in a nice semi-detached house in a nice middle-class area. Only she’s lonely, depressed, her marriage is sexless and loveless. She needs Colin around for some company. Mark puts the kibosh on that; sees her charity for what it is: pity.

As in most of these Mike Leigh films, the sad seam of pathos within his characters  becomes all too painfully real, painfully revealed; Aunty Barbara is slumped up the wall, pissed, lonely as fuck – not able to talk to her husband; he’s not listening to her, not understanding. They don’t love one another anymore. She’s on her own, alone, isolated. I looked into Marion Bradleys eyes and i could see my own separateness, aloneness, unlovedness. She’d connected to me. You always seem to get these deeply affecting “human” moments in Mike Leigh films – where you feel a deep hit in your heart where it hurts, and you start to well up with tears.

Phil Daniels got to me also. Yes, he’s cynical; yes, he goads “Kermit”, “Muppit”, “Dobbin” dimwit Colin; but he also feels brotherly protective towards him; yes, he thinks “Frank” and “Mavis” as so-called parents are a pair of saddo tossers. He can’t bear to be like them. And yet he is like them: another dosser on the dole, with no job, no purpose. As sad as they are.

Only he’s got his gob and his nous to keep him going, keep him moving anywhere as long as it ain’t nowhere. As long as it’s not slumped on that sofa like Frank.

He’s lost. But he hasn’t given up. Not yet anyway. Still gotta keep kicking against all those fucking pricks.

Dir: Mike Leigh, England

8/10

Så. Jag har ännu en gång sett Happy-Go-Lucky och njutit av engelsk, flummig diskbänksrealism igen. Mike Leigh vet verkligen hur man gestaltar ett talspråk på film. Det vet Ken Loach också. Helt fantastiskt i Looking for Eric. Nu ska jag nog kunna skriva en recension på den också, Happy-Go-Lucky alltså.

Jag har verkligen saknat Vapnet. Vapnet, höst och te. Inte riktigt fulländat, men ändock en bit på vägen.

The first thing my housemate said in response to my latest rental from Lovefilm was that it sounded just like the usual indy arty cinema crap that I am erroneously known to be fond of. I had some similar fears myself. ‘Naked’ as a title does conjure up ideas either of shock shlop or unsexy sex with too many blue filters and contortionist camera moves. However I knew that in the hands of director Mike Leigh this was sure to be more interesting than that.

I needn’t have worried; Naked is amongst the best, most surprising British films I’ve seen. David Thewlis puts in a mesmerising performance as Jonny, a quixotic tramp like Mancunian who, after a nasty sexual encounter with a woman in a subway, steels a car and goes to London to chase up his ex. In this first scene of the film it is unclear whether Jonny has committed rape or not, although his behaviour certainly seems aggressive. This initial ambiguous episode is reflected in each sexual encounter that follows. The film is preoccupied with the relationship between violence, masculinity and sex. Both Jonny and his vile yuppie counterpart,  Jeremy, seem to play with violence, never quite committing to it, never quite becoming evil. Similarly whilst accompanying Jonny on his journey my emotions towards him swung from repulsion to sympathy, and back again. Jonny is one of the most beguiling characters I have ever seen on screen. As the film progresses he becomes stranger and more remote rather than more familiar, and this happens naturally, not through sudden character change or surprise.

Whereas Jonny seems to resist cliche and pull away from the celluloid that attempts to capture him, Jeremy slips a little too easily into the role of violent, newly rich arsehole. Greg Cruttwell still gives a captivating performance, being especially good at exuding an air of not quite mature sexual menace, but his character’s relative simplicity strikes the only odd note in what is otherwise a film populated with multilayered and fascinatingly plausible characters.

There are great performances from Katrin Cartlidge as Sophie, a delicate but whiny goth and Ewen Bremner, a middle aged door man who is bored to death by his job but still holds onto his dream of buying a cottage in Ireland. However,  my favourite performance had to be from Lesley Sharp as Jonny’s ex girlfriend, Louise. Her character was wonderfully understated, the perfect foil to Thewlis’s manic Jonny; down to earth, a little world-weary, but tender and witty too. When watching Sharp you feel as if minute aspects of her charcter are slowly revealing themselves, but you can’t quite work out what or how. Louise was a character that percolated through the film, rather than stamping her presence and underlining it with red ink.

Its evocation of London in the early nineties is spot on. Dirty, a bit crap and a little depressing. It felt miserable but interesting. The film is brilliant and intricate in its observation of character and human relationships, but to me it had less to say about class and the political situation in the early nineties, the first years after Thatcher. Its device of downtrodden Manchester lad vs. newly rich Yuppie reveals little that is not already obvious. I think the film would perhaps be better if the stories of these two characters were given their own separate platforms and not made to say something they cannot in tandem.
However these are tiny niggles on my part. This film goes beyond what we usually expect from our characters and delivers an experience not too different from savouring brilliant poetry or prose – the joy that comes from realising that yes, they are being that clever, and yes, this is something that will deliver a different experience each time it is revisited.