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Showing posts with label Noah. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Noah. 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.
Tuesday, April 1, 2014
Tuesday, April 1, 2014
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Noah is completely bonkers in the best possible way. The Biblical epic has fallen out of fashion in mainstream cinema and, buoyed by a love of The Ten Commandments and Ben Hur, Aronofsky is determined to bring it back with style. He does with an incredibly earnest, largely humourless, crazily imaginative and idiosyncratic ecological fable by way of some of the most symbolic and densely written portions of The Bible.
Everyone knows the basics of Noah. God, like someone wrestling with a malfunctioning iPhone, has thrown his hands up frustration at the immoral shit infesting his creation and decided to 'Reset to Factory Settings'. He's basically sticking a paperclip in the back of the Earth and trying a hard reset - starting again from scratch. Well nearly from scratch anyway. He instructs Noah to build a big boat and load up two of every animal on it, the idea being that they'll survive the flood while everyone else dies horribly and when the waters recede he can have another stab at creation. I guess everyone, even God, gets at least one do-over.
What you might not remember from Sunday School are the gigantic murderous rock monsters, the post-apocalyptic industrial civilisations, the guns, steel and welding masks, the generous lashings of incest and Noah going totally nutso and setting his murderous sights on newborn babies. But hey, The Bible is a crazy book full of chatty snakes, donkeys and bushes so the odd rock giant and baby-stabbing really shouldn't be so surprising. Aronofsky clearly finds a perverse freedom to make a crazy film by sticking as close to the text as possible - it's hard to think of a better defence than to refer directly to the text themselves when making a Bible film.
The end product is a defiantly individualistic film with few obvious antecedents. There's elements of Lord of the Rings in the grubbily plausible fantasy world, the wrecked industrial landscape recalls the Fallout series of games, the gangs of grubby raiders are lifted from Mad Max, and the way the giants move and fight are peculiarly reminiscent of Michael Bay's Transformers. Being tossed into this world is a dislocating experience that Aronofsky exploits to the fullest, placing himself in the position of introducing us to an exciting 'new' fictional landscape within one of the most familiar stories of our civilisation.
The weight of myth lies heavy in Noah, blanketing every single decision and action in the film with incredible significance. This intangible element is largely why the film works, arising from a combination of committed performances, excellent production design and weighty cinematography. To various degrees of success the cast throw themselves headlong into the material, and though the younger members of the cast like Emma Watson and Logan Lerman occasionally come a bit unstuck they at least put in the right amount of effort. But Noah is ultimately a film about grizzled old badasses, the performances from Ray Winstone, Anthony Hopkins and Russell Crowe redefining roaring, confident machismo.
Winstone, playing Tubal-Cain, King of men and direct descendant of Cain, hurls himself into the role with barnstorming gusto. Who wouldn't when you get to stand in front of an army and give a rousing speech vowing vengeance against God? Later on, when he's charging at fallen angels, spear in hand and roaring a throaty cry of rage it's difficult not to have a sneaking admiration for the guy, even though he's obviously the villain. Hopkins as the 969 year old Methuseleh is a little more restrained, interpreting the role as a playful Yoda type, shot through with the steel of countless past battles.
But it's Crowe that utterly dominates Noah. He's so burly, so bearded and so macho that him being able to build a boat to contain all the world's animals begins to seem oddly plausible. Impressively Crowe takes Noah from idealised, kindly all-father right through to homicidal maniac without ever losing the character's thread. He excels in subtly externalising the internal agony of the character, typified by a great shot of him sitting alone in his ark listening to the terrified screams of the hundreds outside being dashed to death on rocks by a vengeful God. Later, when he reaches the coldly logical decision that all humans must die, he portrays a man out to stab some babies to death and still basically keeps the audience's sympathy. There's not a huge amount of actors that can pull that off, even fewer with his astonishing level of physical commitment.
What does all this inspiration, artistry and effort add up to then? In Aronofsky's hands, Noah becomes an ecological parable: a debate between misanthropy and philanthropy. The Antediluvian industrial world of Noah is polluted and violent, threatened by rising sea levels that are the direct result of man's nature. Sound familiar? The meat of the movie is a battle between the idea that humanity is irrevocably destructive; even with the best intentions we destroy our environment and the world would be better off without us in it, and the opposing idea that humans are intrinsically worthwhile as a way for the universe to understand itself and add context to the chaos of nature.
At stake is the beauty of the natural world, the 'innocent' animals the true victims of our unquenchable hunger. Given the broad strokes of the fable it's not exactly surprising that Noah comes out in favour of animal rights, deliberating placing the worth of animals above even human life. Refreshingly it even comes right out and says that eating meat is morally wrong - a position that I happen to agree with - though one I've never ever seen a mainstream movie espouse so plainly.
The film shares this spiritual/humanist intelligence with Aronofsky's earlier The Fountain. I met Aronofsky after I saw Noah and asked him about this connection. He informed me that the two films comprise a loose duo - both dealing with the consequences of Eden - one with the Tree of Knowledge and one with the Tree of Life. In addition the seed pod that's so significant in The Fountain reappears in Noah as the trigger to begin construction of the Ark. After their respective apocalypses both films conclude with the seeds of a brighter future being sown in the soil. It'd be all too easy for both films to conclude that life is pointless and that humanity is a cancer on this planet, yet even after all the misery and pain Aronofsky proves an optimist, his films finding worth and purpose in the teeming, smelly, vicious mess of mankind.
Noah is far from perfect. Often it's frankly a bit of a mess, but a beautiful, intelligent mess packed with astounding visual imagery (that Creation sequence - woah!) and yet another awe-inspiring score by Clint Mansell and the Kronos Quartet. It's nice to know that there's people willing to splash out tens of millions of dollars to realise Aronofsky's idiosyncratic vision. The result is a fascinating piece of cinema that defiantly stands apart from the crowd and resists easy classification.
★★★★
Noah is on general release from April 4th
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