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Showing posts with label The Grand Budapest Hotel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Grand Budapest Hotel. 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.
Saturday, March 8, 2014
Saturday, March 8, 2014
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If Wes Anderson was God the world would be a much nicer place. Over the course of his cinematic career he's woven unique cinematic style; creating a fractally detailed, synchronised universe. This is a world where every tiny thing on screen is a jigsaw piece in a bigger picture; the fabrics used in the productions, the style of beards; the fonts on the cover of books; the dents on cars and tiny sound effects and a thousand other minute, carefully considered elements adding up to a sumptuous feast - a beautiful world, an aesthetic world - a better world.
The Grand Budapest Hotel is pinnacle of Wes Anderson's style; a geometric, symmetric and rectilinear caper through beautiful spaces populated with the cream of modern acting talent. After watching this it's difficult to imagine how a film could be any more Wes Anderson than this; every frame packed to the rafters with his idiosyncratic style.
At it's core, the film is the story of a hotel. Set in the cartoonish fake Eastern European country of Zubrowka, the film quickly reveals a pleasingly onion-like structure. We open with a modern woman visiting a monument to a famous Zubrowkian writer known only as "The Author". As she opens a book we flash-back to 1985 where the middle-aged author is explains his methods and how he gets his ideas. From here we flash-back once more to the mid 1960s, where the author (now played by Jude Law) stays at the hotel; now bedraggled, largely unoccupied and suffering under a shabby Kubrickean refit. Here he meets the unassuming owner of the hotel. The two men have dinner and the elderly owner recounts the tale of how he came to run this building.
Now we're in the meat of the story: it's 1932 and Zubrowka is on the verge of war. The hotel is its prime, every aspect overseen by the exacting eye of concierge M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes) with the assistance of his lobby boy protégé Zero (Tony Revolori). With the death of elderly patron Madame D (Tilda Swinton) and her subsequent bequeathment of a painting to the concierge, the stage is set for adventure. For the rest of the film we plunge into an energetic, fast-paced farce as Gustave and Zero battle assassins, the military police, prison guards and sinister in-laws of Madame D. The plot twists and turns across Zubrowka, taking in cities, countryside and mountain-tops, showing us every inch of a country which usually only exists on the front of a chocolate box.
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| It's always nice to see Jeff Goldblum in a film. |
As with most Wes Anderson films, you'd be hard pressed to put together a better cast he can. Every few minutes a hugely talented actor pops up, does themselves proud then vanishes back into the crowd. But though we see some memorable turns from luminaries like Jeff Goldblum, Bill Murray, Harvey Keitel, Edward Norton and Adrien Brody, none of these can really touch Ralph Fiennes. Quite simply he's marvellous, combining a brittle pansexual grace with a military man's attention to detail. Often, (sometimes within the space of a single line of dialogue!), he's paternal, horny, cruel and touching. It's a masterclass of a performance; turning what could have been a prissy Basil Fawlty type into a weirdly noble action hero.
One aspect of Wes Anderson's writing I deeply appreciate is the sincerity of his characters. They wear their passions on their sleeve, announcing their loves and fears at the drop of a hat. There's no ironic winking in a Wes Anderson film, when someone declares their love - whether it be for a hotel, an elderly lady or a resourceful baker, the film takes them at their word. It's important not to take this transparency as shallowness; just because these characters don't have secrets doesn't make them any less dramatically fascinating. My own theory as to why Anderson's characters behave so oddly is that they're children's ideas of what adult behaviour is like.
This is at the forefront of most of his films; the childish revenge of Herman Blume in Rushmore, the arrested development of the children in The Royal Tenenbaums; the swashbuckling (apparently) 'ideal' Dad Steve Zissou of The Life Aquatic. Most of all it's at the forefront of his last film, the excellent Moonrise Kingdom, with two young runaways besotted with each other to the confusion of the neurotic adults. In Grand Budapest we see Anderson's child-like world butting up against realpolitik, from the opening sequence we realise that this idealised 1930s world will be crushed under the boot of concrete realism - innocent childhood gradually and acceptingly replaced by the cool utilitarianism of adulthood.
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| This is a very pretty film. |
This is furthered in the visual style of the film, the watercoloured matte-paintings and landscape wide-shots of Grand Budapest recalling children's pop-up books, the objects whizzing and wobbling through the scenery in a pleasingly analogue manner - looking like hand-made papercraft. In fact, of all Wes Anderson's films, the closest aesthetic relation is the stop-motion Fantastic Mr. Fox - a film that's literally children's literature in motion.
With the clear divisions between goodies and baddies and fast-paced rhythmic action The Grand Budapest Hotel succeeds largely because it follows this basic template of children's adventure story, with laser-perfect moments of swearing and the odd bit of gruesome violence. This is pure escapism - a retreat into a reassuring world of order and beauty. The camera movements, locked into horizontal or vertical geometric motions underline this vision of an ordered universe, which ultimately becomes represented by the clockwork running of the titular hotel.
This is an absolute pleasure to watch from start to finish, tapping into the same base level of wonderment as you get when you peer into a miniature village, or pull open the doors of an extravagantly detailed doll's house and marvel at the detailing on every tiny piece of furniture. Under Anderson's steady hand everything in the film pulls in the same direction, the best moment being a pursuit up a mountain where every single sound effect squeaks and beats in time to Alexandre DeSplat's masterful score.
The Grand Budapest Hotel makes no grand claims to sociological importance. It has no pretensions to tell us anything about the modern world. The message, such as it is, is essentially about the importance of good people sticking together - hardly news to a seasoned audience. Yet there's something to be said for simple beauty, humour and craftsmanship in cinema. For a film to quite simply make you happy is reason enough for it to exist: with The Grand Budapest Hotel now out there in the world, things are minutely happier.
★★★★★
The Grand Budapest Hotel is out now.
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