So 2015 kind of flew by and while it was a rich and full year of films, many scoring highly, I still struggled to fill out a top ten. Make no mistake I saw my fair share of films, possibly more than any other year, but there was a distinct lack of films that specifically tweaked even my broad range of turn-ons. With much of the good stuff falling just short and even the two Marvel movies turning out fairly vanilla it's been a frustrating thing to watch. But thanks to playing catch up on DVD and courtesy of Bristol's Cube Microplex I have managed to film ten films releases in 2015 that made the grade.
Now bear in mind I didn't manage to see everything so if you're surprised that Sicario, Inside Out, Brooklyn or Bridge of Spies are absent just assume I would have otherwise added them. This also applies to films already out in the US but which won't reach my eyes until early 2016. Hence The Revenant and The Hateful Eight being omitted. They may appear in my Top 10 for the following year though. So without further ado:
10) Steve Jobs
I'll be the first to admit that Aaron Sorkin is a hit and miss scriptwriter (an opinion that may change when I finally mainline The West Wing) but Steve Jobs is a solid hit. A duel acting masterclass from Fassbender and Winslet with supporting turns from Jeff Daniels, Seth Rogan and Michael Stuhlberg. Thanks to Danny Boyle's direction the two hours of solid tech talk flows seamlessly and opens a window into the mind of a deeply...well deeply obnoxious human being. That said, Sorkin's version of the Apple CEO is an endlessly watchable creature. Determined, calculating, ruthless Fassbender's Jobs is always in deep thought but every once in a while he seems to be thinking about something other than himself.
9) Trumbo
Granted this is in part cheating since the film won't be released until later in the coming year. Still it's interesting to pick Trumbo since it's ultimately a film that doesn't work. It's the story of the Hollywood 10, ten writers blacklisted during the witch-hunts of the McCarthy era 'Red Scare'. It's something that should be profoundly tragic, ten talented people who were denied a livelihood and many never regained it. Yet Trumbo is one of the most cartoonishly comical films of the year burying Bryan Cranston under a Salvador Dali 'tache and high-pitched squawk. Similarly ostentatious turns come from the likes of Helen Mirren, John Goodman and Christian Berkel as very real figures from Hollywood's past. And somehow it carried itself thanks to a consistently amusing script and a sympathetic performance from Cranston.
8) The Martian
The Martian has appeared on numerous top ten lists already, even at the top of some and well-deservedly. It's definitely one of the most well-crafted films of the year, a smart hard science rescue film that's also incredibly fun and compelling to watch. The quality of which is vastly inflated by the best Matt Damon performance in years, playing the ultimate 'science bro' with a jokey demeanor that never ignores that weight or desperation of his situation. My only regret is that, with it being neither as gripping as Gravity or as emotionally powerful as Moon it just couldn't make it into the top five.
7) The Clouds of Sils Maria
This was a small but endearing look into the representation of women in the arts. Starring Juliette Binoche as an aging actress preparing for an upcoming role as the older counterpart to the ingenue role that once made her famous. Playing off her is an on-form Kristen Stewart as her co-dependent personal assistant who tries to help her come to terms with the role. The interplay between the two is organic and telling as the many layers to both their relationship and the film begin to surface. It's an endlessly watchable curiosity that leaves you pondering days after.
6) Star Wars: The Force Awakens
The Force Awakens logically shouldn't work. It's a brazen rehash of the original Star Wars film coloured with a diverse cast and countless nostalgia nods to the franchise, and yet work it does. Sure once iconic moments like the destruction of a planet or an assault on a certain enemy superweapon lose their emotional impact but everything with a new twist feels new and fresh and fun in a way I can't remember Star Wars feeling like. Abrams' cinematography makes you constantly feel in the moment of a swiftly-moving story, the characters and suitably new spins on established archetypes, the old guard cast-members are as smooth as they've ever been and I was genuinely curious to see where things go.
5) Dear White People
This didn't get a wide distribution in....anywhere but in terms of this years comedy offerings it has to be the best. Ostensibly a film about race and racial identity centered on four black students at a predominantly white Ivy league college. Each one is trying discover or establish their own personal identity while dealing with their white peers constantly misappropriating black identity. It's a smart look at race, white privilege, student radicalism and the relationships between different cultures that manages to be brilliantly funny throughout if a little soapboxy at times.
4) Carol
At the time of writing Carol is the big awards-baiting 'issue' movie still being talked about and while it checks all the boxes of such a film it still deserves the recognition. Carol is a sweet, endearing love story between two women completely sold by the performances from Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara. Refreshingly the struggles of such a relationship in a less enlightened period setting are secondary to the much more personal conflicts between two very different people overcome by a strong attraction. Powerful, emotive and endlessly captivating thanks to a swift and elegant direction by Todd Haynes.
3) Crimson Peak
I know, I know. It isn't scary. It's too melodramatic. It's predictable. Mia Wasikowska is magically able to walk off a broken leg (OK that one's kinda valid). Thing is while Crimson Peak has all of these problems it still contains everything I love about Guillermo Del Toro while still being a very compelling Gothic Romance. Big, bombastic, entertaining characters, elaborately grim sets and a central love story that is at once a complete pastiche yet still wholly believable. This was a film that I loved from start to finish.
2) Ex Machina
This was a film that came out at the start of the year and stayed in my consciousness throughout. A smartly written film that encompasses a range of topics from trans-humanism to gender dynamics. It pitches itself as a hard science fiction film until the very last moments when it turns into a grim horror and yet never loses its aesthetic identity. Driven by smart, well-characterised performances from Dominhal Gleeson, Oscar Isaac and a deceptive turn from rising star Alicia Vikander.
1) Mad Max: Fury Road
Well What else could it be? Fury Road is hands down some of the most fun I've had in the cinema this year. Easily the best action film since The Raid 2, proof that you can make an old-school, eighties bone-cruncher that fits in a modern world that reflects modern issues. Imperator Furiosa is one of the most badass action women since Ellen Ripley, Tom Hardy makes an iconic role his own and George Miller builds a fully realised post-apocalyptic wasteland with its own culture and nuances. There's no film in 2015 that has provoked as much feeling or thought as Mad Max and that's why it's my film of the year.
Showing posts with label Crimson Peak. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Crimson Peak. Show all posts
Monday, 11 January 2016
Saturday, 5 December 2015
The Crimson Peak of the Winter's Offerings
This is one I came to rather late which believe me I regret now. October was a rather crowded month for releases, money needed to be prioritised and honestly at the time I thought that the English-Language debut of Yorgos Lanthimos needed far more support than a heavily marketed new film from a (relatively) more established director. Well shows what I know as Crimson Peak has long-since be labelled as another of Del Toro's under-performers, even as its gross reached $72 million worldwide. A great shame because it really does stand alongside Hellboy 2 and Pan's Labyrinth as one of his best films to date.
The reason for Crimson Peak's success as a film is the same reason behind every successful genre film these days which is a knowing sense of self. Despite all the ghosts and strange apparitions this is old school, Gothic melodrama that wears its skin transparently yet 100% embraces what it it. A lavish, elaborately staged, camping-performed romance starring a host of characters that are, bizzarely, both archetypal and colourfully realised.
The films stars Mia Wasikowska, and really is there any better actor to cast as an ethereal symbol of innocence?, as Edith Cushing. Edith is the daughter of a self-made businessman from Buffalo NY and an aspiring author of Gothic melodrama. So it makes perfect sense when she falls for the ultimate Byronic heroin Tom Hiddleston's Sir Thomas Sharpe. Sharpe is Baronet with his fortune exhausted and his estate literally crumbling around him and Hiddleston's performance sells the hell out of this. He exudes both villainy and weakness, constantly being outclassed by those around him. The fact that you never really notice how much the film rushed the courtship of Edith and Thomas is a testament to the chaste chemistry the two actors possess. Their love is one of gentle companionship in contrast to what comes later.
When Edith, who is already haunted by the ghosts of family tragedy, loses her father to murder she runs away with Thomas to Allerdale Hall, his estate where the house is falling both in disrepair and being swallowed by the disused clay mines beneath it. Del Toro's set design is always a thing of art and Allerdale Hall is his masterpiece, a traditional English manor that manages to be both vast and claustrophobic. A creature alive, but visibly dying, with constantly-moving parts seen only at the fringes of it's broken husk. Each room and level is so distinct in its design that they feel like characters unto themselves. From the dank, industrial clay vats in the basement to the narrow, spiked hallways and the rotten, winding stairwell.
Allerdale is also residence to Thomas's sister Lucille, a detached creature fixated only on her brother and the grim realities of her life. Jessica Chastain has had a great run this year playing the down-to-earth rationalist among larger, more colourful characters. In Lucille though she gets to really let loose as a creature holding all her madness deep inside her. Like Annie Wilkes she is an unstable character made all the more chilling by how composed and calm she seems on the outside. When she finally does let loose it is to glorious effect, a sharp, terrifying performance that proves her more monstrous than any ghost or ghoul.
That's another thing about the film which has recurred throughout Del Toro's work and not always to positive effect. Del Toro has always been enamored of the supernatural and his films always find the true horror in everyday humans. The unfortunate result is that the more ghostly sequences, heavily featured in Crimson Peak's marketing, never really achieve the tense level of horror associated with films like The Haunting or Psycho. There are jump scares aplenty but they feel cheap and lacking in a more lingering impact. It's not so much the design of the ghosts, which admittedly are shown so explicitly that the horror soon wears thin. It's more to do with the build up of their arrival and how quickly they tranform, in true Del Toro style, from a spectre of torment to a benevolent ally.
There are other problems to be sure. It may be baggage from his Sons of Anarchy days but Charlie Hunnam really doesn't convince as a man of the 19th Century. Too much time is spent teasing him as Edith's rightful companion in what is supposed to be a feminist revision of that kind of trope. The violence is elaborate and cartoonish, which suits the film right up until the end when Edith herself is gravely injured. It may seem like a nitpick but to be able to slam her ribs into a balcony and walk away with only a sprain feels like a stretch.
Perhaps it's part of Peak's charm that it seems so vastly divorced from reality, like Del Toro's previous work Pacific Rim, it feels like a cartoon made with real actors. To the great directors credit this never lessens the experience, the sincerity one feels in the courtship of Edith and Thomas, her terror at the ghosts of Allerdale and the shock at discovering the dark secrets of Allerdale Hall resonate powerfully. The film draws from the conventions of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights but unlike it's predecessors has no time for happy resolutions. Edith won't leave Allerdale with the true man of her dreams and certainly not without the scars to prove she was there. If anything Crimson Peak is the Gothic romance you'll wish you read in school.
The reason for Crimson Peak's success as a film is the same reason behind every successful genre film these days which is a knowing sense of self. Despite all the ghosts and strange apparitions this is old school, Gothic melodrama that wears its skin transparently yet 100% embraces what it it. A lavish, elaborately staged, camping-performed romance starring a host of characters that are, bizzarely, both archetypal and colourfully realised.
The films stars Mia Wasikowska, and really is there any better actor to cast as an ethereal symbol of innocence?, as Edith Cushing. Edith is the daughter of a self-made businessman from Buffalo NY and an aspiring author of Gothic melodrama. So it makes perfect sense when she falls for the ultimate Byronic heroin Tom Hiddleston's Sir Thomas Sharpe. Sharpe is Baronet with his fortune exhausted and his estate literally crumbling around him and Hiddleston's performance sells the hell out of this. He exudes both villainy and weakness, constantly being outclassed by those around him. The fact that you never really notice how much the film rushed the courtship of Edith and Thomas is a testament to the chaste chemistry the two actors possess. Their love is one of gentle companionship in contrast to what comes later.
When Edith, who is already haunted by the ghosts of family tragedy, loses her father to murder she runs away with Thomas to Allerdale Hall, his estate where the house is falling both in disrepair and being swallowed by the disused clay mines beneath it. Del Toro's set design is always a thing of art and Allerdale Hall is his masterpiece, a traditional English manor that manages to be both vast and claustrophobic. A creature alive, but visibly dying, with constantly-moving parts seen only at the fringes of it's broken husk. Each room and level is so distinct in its design that they feel like characters unto themselves. From the dank, industrial clay vats in the basement to the narrow, spiked hallways and the rotten, winding stairwell.
Allerdale is also residence to Thomas's sister Lucille, a detached creature fixated only on her brother and the grim realities of her life. Jessica Chastain has had a great run this year playing the down-to-earth rationalist among larger, more colourful characters. In Lucille though she gets to really let loose as a creature holding all her madness deep inside her. Like Annie Wilkes she is an unstable character made all the more chilling by how composed and calm she seems on the outside. When she finally does let loose it is to glorious effect, a sharp, terrifying performance that proves her more monstrous than any ghost or ghoul.
That's another thing about the film which has recurred throughout Del Toro's work and not always to positive effect. Del Toro has always been enamored of the supernatural and his films always find the true horror in everyday humans. The unfortunate result is that the more ghostly sequences, heavily featured in Crimson Peak's marketing, never really achieve the tense level of horror associated with films like The Haunting or Psycho. There are jump scares aplenty but they feel cheap and lacking in a more lingering impact. It's not so much the design of the ghosts, which admittedly are shown so explicitly that the horror soon wears thin. It's more to do with the build up of their arrival and how quickly they tranform, in true Del Toro style, from a spectre of torment to a benevolent ally.
There are other problems to be sure. It may be baggage from his Sons of Anarchy days but Charlie Hunnam really doesn't convince as a man of the 19th Century. Too much time is spent teasing him as Edith's rightful companion in what is supposed to be a feminist revision of that kind of trope. The violence is elaborate and cartoonish, which suits the film right up until the end when Edith herself is gravely injured. It may seem like a nitpick but to be able to slam her ribs into a balcony and walk away with only a sprain feels like a stretch.
Perhaps it's part of Peak's charm that it seems so vastly divorced from reality, like Del Toro's previous work Pacific Rim, it feels like a cartoon made with real actors. To the great directors credit this never lessens the experience, the sincerity one feels in the courtship of Edith and Thomas, her terror at the ghosts of Allerdale and the shock at discovering the dark secrets of Allerdale Hall resonate powerfully. The film draws from the conventions of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights but unlike it's predecessors has no time for happy resolutions. Edith won't leave Allerdale with the true man of her dreams and certainly not without the scars to prove she was there. If anything Crimson Peak is the Gothic romance you'll wish you read in school.
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