Movie round-up 2010

One thing that’s really hit home this year is that expectations can be a real killer for movies. Take The Social Network  I adore The West Wing and most of Aaron Sorkin’s other work (stepping gingerly around Studio 60), and therefore I was almost indecently excited when I heard he’d written a tale about the creation of Facebook and even more so when I heard early reviews. It’s a highly accomplished film for sure, but I found myself constantly thinking “this isn't quite as good as the West Wing”, or “not sure about that sequence”, or “this cinematography is too darn dark!”, thereby ensuring that my colossal expectations were never likely to be met.

Conversely, I went to see Toy Story 3 in Durban after a month in South Africa during which I’d been largely cut off from movie hype. Even though I expected it to be good, there was always a feeling that surely Pixar were milking the franchise slightly, as the third film of any series is wont to do (assuming a trilogy wasn’t the original plan, natch). That it was nearly as good as, if not equal, to the second one was amazing. Although nothing, Pixar or otherwise, can hope to top the “No Buzz - I am your father!” line, which produced what is still the greatest reaction to anything in a cinema I've ever seen.

The gap between mainstream and arthouse movies grows ever more distinct. Again, expectation-wise I tend to enjoy the spectacle of a big-budget US movie that entertains without patronising me more than an equivalently good indie flick, purely because it’s quite rare. I think this is why so many people loved Inception so much, despite its many flaws.

Sometimes though, the studios just make a flat out brilliant movie such as Easy A, which might even be my favourite of 2010. It didn’t do half as well as it should have, perhaps due to being caught between two teen flick/grown-up film marketing stools, but the script is wonderfully sassy and Emma Stone displays impeccable comic timing in what deserves to be a star-making performance.

Both Kick-Ass and Scott Pilgrim were enjoyable to a point but ended up disappointing me with their excessive violence/language and unfocused self-indulgence respectively. (See earlier posts for more moaning about these.) Were I ten years younger and squarely in the target market for such stuff, and with the different expectations that entailed, I would probably have found them far more fun.

In indie terms, Un Prophete has to be up there with the year's best too. An ultra-gritty prison drama which largely avoided cliche, and one which Ray Winstone will be begging them to remake, for if ever there was a role he was born to play then this film’s wily old King of the Slammer lag is surely it. Having said that, with a length of 155 minutes it did drag on a bit.

Four Lions is one film that fully lived up to expectations. Chris Morris had clearly invested a lot of time into this, turning ingredients which in lesser hands could have ended up as crass nonsense into a funny, thought-provoking and at times extremely poignant piece. Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain’s script was unmistakably from the same writers who brought us Peep Show, and there were clear echoes of The Thick of It (on which Armstrong also works) in some of the more Tucker-esque rants. I enjoy all of the above and so don’t have a problem with this distinctive writing style exactly, but despite this I’m a bit worried that the knowing postmodernism and creative swearing might outstay their welcome eventually.

Also deserving of a mention are The Kids Are All Right (Julianne Moore in particular), The Ghost (dodgy ending notwithstanding), Tamara Drewe (fun if somewhat all over the place) and Cemetery Junction (Gervais and Merchant perhaps trying a little too hard, but with hearts in the right place).

This week I saw the much-praised Of Gods and Men. Director Xavier Beauvois does a nice job of painting a world in which a group of French monks coexist peacefully with their Algerian neighbours, which makes the scenes of violence particularly shocking when the two are juxtaposed. The critical adoration in this case is well deserved, and without it I would have certainly avoided what on paper sounds like a worthy slog. However, this once again created expectations which were not quite met – the best example being a key scene near the end when the monks share a last supper, which would have been far more captivating had it not been flagged up in advance in all the reviews.

By the way, there’s been a lot of talk about Codes of Conduct in cinemas lately, most of which centres around the misbehaviour of younger folk - kids of today, hell in a handcart, etc etc. Having seen the above and the NT Live broadcast of Hamlet at the revamped Phoenix cinema in East Finchley recently, for both of which I was comfortably the youngest person in the audience, I can safely say that our senior citizens (very middle-class ones at that) are just as bad at nattering, rustling, loud coughing and taking pee breaks as kids are - if not in fact worse, because they should know better. Expectations again, see.

Finally, an early contender for film of 2011: The King’s Speech, previewed this month, is an all-round quality production. The acting is superb from everyone - Geoffrey Rush is always great, Helena Bonham Cater reminds you what an accomplished actress she is when she’s not pissing about in Tim Burton films, and Colin Firth really has joined the top table of reliable heavyweight performers. It’s been a slow ascent - for a while he seemed destined to be remembered purely as Mr Darcy, but years of patient character roles are finally yielding their rewards. Give these guys a script this sharp and witty which tells an interesting yet relatively little-known real-life story and you shouldn’t really fail to win bucketloads of awards. We shall see.