Well, it's that time when all film reviewers of mixed ability offer up a list of Films of the Year. And what a year it was. JOHN CARTER broke the bank of Disney - not so much a PIXAR movie as a PIX- AHHHH! flick. THE ARTIST cleaned up at the Oscars. No foul language there - it was silent, well as near as darn it. Three box office hits featured a man in a black cape, a green man and a famished young woman respectively. (There's a joke there somewhere.) THE RAID encouraged exercise in its opening shots, but there is no running from Iko Uwais. Then there was the sort of film I like, with subtlety or subtitles - sometimes both.
I had a jolly nice chat with an orphan in Berlin who found the powerful THE KID WITH A BIKE relatable. I was knocked out by YOUR SISTER'S SISTER, flummoxed by the mid-movie revelation (now old news) in SEARCHING FOR SUGARMAN. I laughed at Emily Blunt's cookie monster impression in THE FIVE YEAR ENGAGEMENT. I enjoyed Roman Polanski's four-hander CARNAGE. And what about HAYWIRE, with action and tension in equal measure, well for three quarters of its length.
Then there was Sean Penn in a wig in THIS MUST BE THE PLACE: 'irony is an essential component to catch a Nazi', he remarks - or something like that. As a kid at heart (though I'm very old) I could not choose between MARVEL'S AVENGERS ASSEMBLE (not to be confused with that gosh awful Ralph Fiennes movie) and THE DARK KNIGHT RISES. After seeing the latter, I was putting my hand over my mouth for weeks afterwards - well Lady Oliver told me to do so whilst eating. But how I could forget AMOUR? Well I almost did, but for Kumar tapping me on the elbow.
That's ten movies. I must confess that I should like to add an eleventh, Alexsei Fedorchenko's SILENT SOULS. A tale of two men who go on a road trip to bury the woman who stood between them, this featured such memorable scenes as the decoration of a woman's child-bearing point of entry, ecstatic faces to depict a scene of lovemaking, and two birds purchased in Act One causing a fatality in Act Three. What did it all mean? That two men could transport a dead body to a remote location to be burnt without being stopped by the police. Apparently all the folksy rituals were made up.
Of films to be released in 2013, I heartily recommend Cate Shortland's LORE, which focuses on the middle section of a book by Rachel Seiffert's novel THE DARK ROOM, about a Nazi's teenage daughter struggling to survive with her siblings at the immediate end of World War Two. The film invites you to contemplate the legacy of being associated with a hateful ideology. Who will help you? How to do you relate to your family, supposedly your elders and betters? How do you stop yourself being corrupted? The film asks difficult questions; you expect nothing else from challenging cinema. Kumar should like me to mention CLOUD ATLAS, the ever-so-slightly bonkers adaptation of David Mitchell's acclaimed novel. Tom Hanks, Hugh Grant, Halle Berry and Hugo Weaving all play multiple parts, none of them particularly convincingly. Yet some of the episodes are fun, notably Jim Broadbent's escape from an old folks' home. Altogether now: 'I know, I know!'
