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Showing posts with label Boyhood. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Boyhood. Show all posts
Monday, December 29, 2014
Monday, December 29, 2014
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In 2014 I saw 128 films in the cinema (a new record. Let's say a film is on average two hours long. That means I've spent about more than 10 days of the year sat in darkness, staring blankly at a screen. I've then emerged into the blinking light of day, headed home and put my thoughts down into lengthy reviews. Even when I'm not at the cinema I'm gradually working my way through the 1001 Movies to Watch Before You Die list (nearly done too!). This leaves me very little time for other forms of media; so why do I devote so much headspace to cinema? These films are why:
HONOURABLE MENTIONS
'Pride' directed by Matthew Warchus
It's been a bonanza year for British cinema, with standouts like Electricity, Paddington, Mr Turner and Locke (among many others) making going to see homegrown cinema a true pleasure. There's an unfortunate tendency for some Brit-flicks to have both eyes firmly mixed on the US Anglophile market, descending into twee, castrated Richard-Curtisery. Pride stands in opposition to all that, a film that's both fiercely, sincerely political and goddamn hilarious.
There's a clear-minded underlining of the notion of collective struggle and class solidarity , the film working on the basis that an injury done to a distant comrade is an injury done to you. Even though the miners and the gay rights activists share nothing in common except for being victimised by Thatcher, they come to recognise that their battles are mere fronts in a wider class war. This could be heavy-handed, didactic stuff, yet Warchus teaches us in the midst of making us laugh. Even thinking about the closing scenes gets me a little wobbly a whole six months after seeing it.
'Noah' directed by Darren Aronofsky
It's funny how some films grow in your mind with time. I dug Noah at first watch, but I only recognised its true stature once it had a couple of months to percolate in the mind. Perhaps it was only in comparison to Ridley Scott's dull and disappointing Exodus that I realised just what Aronofsky's achievements were. It's a colossally weird bit of film-making, a big budget exploration of some bonkers theology told with an utterly straight face and an admirably ambitious set of visual imagery.
If you're on the fence about this (and let's face it, bizarro epic Old Testament flicks aren't everyone's cup of tea), watch this gobsmacking 'creation' sequence. Throughout this we see echoes of Aronofsky's grubbily staccato editing from Requiem for a Dream and imagery from The Fountain all knitted with an utterly unique, clear-minded logical spirituality that's like nothing else I saw in cinema this year. That scene's the high point, but the rest isn't far behind, ideas and moments sticking in my subconscious and popping up in daydreams months and months after seeing it. Noah is a brave movie, one that's going to rise in stature over time, and for me it's a virtuoso example of how to tackle mythology in cinema.
'The Grand Budapest Hotel' directed by Wes Anderson
I don't get people who criticise Wes Anderson for having a distinctive style. Sure, his films are a continual process of refining one particular aesthetic, but it's a beautiful, precise aesthetic and anyway, it's not like there's anyone else that's doing anything remotely similar. But The Grand Budapest Hotel feels like a breakthrough, the moment where narrative, performance, aesthetic, editing and sound all finally coalesce into one perfect whole.
The end result is a film that's pretty much distilled joy; every frame crammed with details that stack up like a house of cards, leaving you drunk on the clockwork, pop-up world that Anderson has poured his blood, sweat and tears into. Also encouraging is that this is the first outright hit of Anderson's career, the mainstream and the arthouse coming together in mutual appreciation of something that's all too obviously goddamn amazing.
'Nymph()maniac Parts I & II' directed by Lars von Trier
It used to be the case that everytime I'd see a Lars von Trier film I'd leave the cinema having enjoyed myself, but vowing not to put myself through something so miserable again.Dancer in the Dark left me a miserable, quivering mess, Breaking the Waves had me staring in shocked disbelief and Antichrist? Well let's just say that was a bad choice for a date movie. So when I sat down in the Brixton Ritzy to watch his two-part five hour fuckfest I had steeled myself for complete psychological warfare.
What I hadn't expected was that it'd be so damn funny. Seriously, Nymphomaniac is sticky, gooey and oozes fluids all over the place, but it's got a surprisingly finely tuned sense of farce bubbling underneath. Charlotte Gainsbourg latches on some screwed up sense of absurdity in the material and everyone else runs with it, making for a film that's genuinely fun to watch, even as it goes off on increasingly bizarre tangents. I have a huge amount of respect for von Trier, an artist who's not afraid to piss everyone off, stick a middle-finger in the face of respectability and chuck a battering ram at boundaries. Nymphomaniac is the work of a master provocateur, jabbing the audience right in their prim, repressed sensibilities.
WINNER
'Boyhood' directed by Richard Linklater
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"No film like Boyhood has ever come to cinemas before. No film like Boyhood will again."
I go to the cinema to experience new things. All too often films try for this; be it with colossal sets, warehouses of computers crunching polygons, 3D imagery or just plain intense maximalism. All usually fail, increasingly polished echoes of what I've already seen. Linklater's Boyhood beats them into submission, and it does it without oodles of cash or high technology. Linklater's raw material is time, patience and artistic confidence. Boyhood's central premise, that it's filmed over 12 years with the same cast, is arguably a gimmick, but boy howdy what a gimmick.
Under the simple domestic surface lies infinite depths; time capsules of politics, fashion and culture, musings on the nature of family and personal development and a precisely observed set of emotions. Godard famously said that cinema is truth 24-frames-per-second and this has rarely felt more accurate than here. Allow yourself to get sucked into Linklater's world and you feel all kinds of unique feelings bubbling inside you: parental worries about the lead's development, reflection on your own development, empathy with your own parents and the disturbing sense that time is slipping through your fingers.
It's a titanic piece of film-making, all the more notable for the fact that this technique can only really be done once and never again. But Linklater has given something to cinema history in Boyhood, something that can sent into the future to show future generations what life was really like for a brief, mixed-up couple of years in the early 21st Century. As soon as I walked out I knew could be no real competition for Boyhood to be my film of the year.
There's nothing else remotely like it.
23rd December: Gigs
24th December: Art
26th December: Theatre
27th December: Shittiest films.
Sunday, July 27, 2014
Sunday, July 27, 2014
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Summarising Boyhood is a fool's errand. How can you fit a film like this into a couple of paragraphs? Individual superlatives spring to mind; wonderful, touching, amazing, beautiful and so on, but even they fail to quite convey the gobsmacking majesty of the movie. No film quite like Boyhood has ever come to cinemas before. No film quite like Boyhood will again.
Boiled down, Boyhood is a gimmick movie, but goddamn what a gimmick. In 2002 Linklater began shooting a film starring six-year old Ellar Coltrane. Twelve years later he wrapped. The innocent six-year old has been replaced by an independent 18 year old man. This film is about what happens along the way to this journey. Perplexingly, there's not even much of a narrative; the film functioning as a window into a normal life free from dramatic pretense and 'big problems', confident that merely exploring geological shifts in relationships will keep us engaged.
Coltrane plays Mason Jr, living a humdrum life in suburban Texas with his mother (Patricia Arquette) and older sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater). His often-absent father (Ethan Hawke) rolls up in a cool-as-hell muscle car every couple of weekends on visitation rights. As the years swim by we're introduced to a cavalcade of friends, family, houses and haircuts, and just as we get used to them it's all change - onto the next phase.
Linklater's directorial ability to make the mundane so gripping is straight-up superhuman. He's working some crazy alchemy here; no flashy camera work, no supercool dialogue and no show-offy grandstanding performances. So what exactly keeps us interested? Linklater has excavated an aspect of humanity in cinema that we rarely to get to experience; kindling real love in us as we watch Mason grow.
As Linklater cuts between the years we feel mild disorientation; just as we've become accustomed to Mason at one age we have to deal with his changes. It's with surprise that we realise his voice has broken between scenes, he's experienced a sudden growth spurt, developed an interest in girls or grown a cool new haircut. This progression puts us in the same shoes as Mason's father, stopping off every so often and having to deal with what's taken place in our absence.
Very quickly we get attached to Mason. He's a likeable enough boy at every stage of his development whether he's disappointed to realise that there's no such things as elves in the world, going on a classically Linklaterian ramble about conspiracies or ingesting psychedelics with friends. I began to feel like a ghost or guardian angel, a disembodied presence in his life silently observing and wishing the best for him - I've rarely felt so protective towards a character in a movie before. This sensation is so strong because deep down in our bones we know that we're really watching this person grow up.
Importantly, we're not just watching Mason grow up, we're not just watching his family wrinkle up - we're silently watching ourselves grow up too. Boyhood is a record of what the early years of the 21st century; characters smoking indoors, fiddling around with iMacs and playing splitscreen Halo 2. Linklater has an uncanny knack for capturing precise elements of particular moments in time; the fact that the scenes are filmed in those years means, by definition, they're entirely free of anachronisms.
There's a marvellous scene where a young, excited Mason attends a midnight book shop opening for the release of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. Your first instinct is to marvel at how beautifully Linklater has recreated it - then you realise that he probably filmed it at a real midnight Harry Potter opening. You get similar feelings watching technology gradually developing around our character; the progression from dumbphones to the ubiquity of iPhones; the rise of social networking and pop progressing from the Britney to the Gaga era.
This steady march through time underlines how quickly the world changes and how invisible these changes seem while you're living them. Most of all it makes you feel old; a miasma of melancholy enveloping you as watch a 6 year Mason playing a GameBoy Advance SP and realising - holy shit - I was just starting university when that came out! Realisations like this reveal that it's time itself that's the real villain of Boyhood, a cruel master whipping us onwards - never allowing us to stand still, even for a moment.
Time chisels away at our characters like waves beating against a cliff. We watch Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette softly slide into middle-age; their features softening as they wrinkle and grey. We see people degenerate into alcoholism and bitterness. Divisions growing between couples like weeds through paving stones. Towards the end of the film there's a quiet, touching moment where its bemoaned that time passes too fast: the clichéd parental moan "they grow up so fast". By this point Linklater has more than earned a dab of cliché, and it's deeply, sincerely felt by both characters and audience.
This is an incredibly important, enormously ambitious film and it is obviously - obviously - going to go down in cinematic history as a stone cold classic. There's a thousand beautiful observations within it; ranging from that we use gifts to mould people into what we want them to be, to appreciating the love in your life while you have it and so on - a fractal, infinite glimpse into humanity: life itself, captured on film.
Boyhood has got to be Linklater's magnum opus and with it he's undeniably entered the highest panethon of directors. If you have the slightest interest in cinema as a medium you need to see it. If you have the slightest interest in people you need to see it.
★★★★★
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