The 2021 Oscar The Grouches

Last year I started off using the cliche 'this year has been unlike any other' except it was actually true, COVID having transformed the everyday, travel, cinema, the world at large and literally everything in between. In 2021 a few things have changed, got better, got worse, repeated, cancelled but we're still under the pandemic's thumb, subject to its movements, its variants. Life has been unpredictable, frightening yet oddly mundane in many ways, utterly depressing in others. In my personal life it has been a year of two halves or more accurately several sections. In a couple I broke down, was signed off work for a total of six weeks, my mental state reaching a point where I couldn't continue. Circumstances changed more than once and the goalposts moved (the only fucking sports reference I'll ever make) but at the end of October I reached both my limit and a ladder out of the rut I had been in for longer than I care to remember. Financially I was ok, COVID having also decimated what small social life or spending patterns I had, and an acquaintance and Twitter poet gave me the phrase "why keep wounding yourself". It made sense. So I made the huge change, leaving my job with nowhere particular to go, no substantial plans in place, just convinced that there must be something better out there, that there had to be. And before I'd worked my notice I found another position, something I'd struggled to imagine as likely and a revelation in so many ways. To be treated more than well, to work sociable (and sensible) hours, to feel a lot less like my brain had too many tabs open was a day of rest and sunshine during monsoon season. It sounds achingly trite but removing one (great) source of stress took me out of the multi-year burnout and has made me feel more capable of dealing with other issues within my life. It hasn't cured it - to again use a banal platitude that doesn't happen overnight - but it's given me hope and made me hopeful. I'm growing and that feels like an achievement, a voice to hold in the dark and I don't think that can be overstated within the present. Due again to the pandemic and cautious upper management that new job has ended and I find myself unsure of what lays ahead, what the path for 2022 is but I'm optimistic. I now know I can make changes and they aren't so insurmountable and that's something to celebrate. In the film world (for that's mostly why I'm speaking and presumably why you're reading) cinemas have closed, reopened with restrictions, stuck to safe sellers, brought back 'anniversary' editions of crowd-pleasers and finally in the third quarter of the year returned to some sense of (ab)normality in showing arthouse and world and my list reflects that. The 100-ish trips of previous years have barely reached double figures and streaming services have saved and frustrated, TV has become more important (and in some cases more profitable, both financially and creatively) so once again I'm accompanying my somewhat compact 2021 list with another for standouts from the beforetimes and also feel obligated to mention Hagai Levi's excoriating Bergman-re-imagining, the mini series Scenes From A Marriage and its captivating, uncomfortable, untamed yet forensically controlled portrait of crisis. What a way to reach January. Cheers

2021
Annette (Leos Carax - France/USA)
This Must Be Heaven (Elia Suleiman - Palestine/France/Canada/Turkey)
Sound Of Metal (Darius Marder - USA)
Shiva Baby (Emma Seligman - USA/Canada)
All The Dead Ones (Caetano Gotardo/Marco Dutra - Brazil)
Nizhal (Appu N Bhattathiri - India/Malayalam)

Not 2021
The 120 Days Of Bottrop (Christoph Schlingensief - Germany - 1997)
Parting Glances (Bill Sherwood - USA - 1986)
Johnny Got His Gun (Dalton Trumbo - USA - 1971)
The Congress (Ari Folman - Israel/France/Belgium/Luxembourg - 2013)

The 2020 Oscar The Grouches

I hardly know where to start. 2020 may be the first time the phrase "this year has been unlike any other" is anything more than a trite cliché. COVID has devastated the world, changed lives, health, businesses and almost unnoticed daily routines in ways no-one could have predicted. Days have become months and in the UK we're currently on our third national lockdown (degree of restriction yet to be fully announced) following a Tier system that will continue potentially for long enough to become a mundane normality, all with the spectre of Brexit looming and mishandled by an increasingly right-wing government in the background. Bars and restaurants have closed, borders have closed, many workplaces have liquidated, film sets and cinemas alike have closed, opened, closed again, repeated. The repercussions on people's relationships and mental health have also been massively destructive - the story of 42 Chinese couples coming out of quarantine and immediately filing for divorce was hard to miss. At the other end of the scale when I commented that a regular customer at work seemed to be losing her voice she sheepishly admitted that, being elderly, judged at risk and without any close family, she hadn't spoken to anyone in 3 weeks or so. As many could have probably predicted I haven't been impervious to these repercussions either. I've struggled dealing with the small things, let alone the endless bigger ones; in September I had a major depressive episode, and this year (or last year as it now is) has marked the worst sustained period of mental ill-health I've suffered in some years. As 2020 closes just about all I can say is that I'm a year older, still (and perpetually) single, I haven't seen my closest friends for a few weeks shy of a full year (with a couple having reached that point in November) and I'm desperately unhappy. In many ways I'm very lucky and this year has shown me that more than others but there are so many things I want to change. Churlish as it is to complain in many ways, everything feels more insurmountable than ever when you can't go further than the cornershop, or in my case to work, for months on end, can't be within a 2 foot distance of people or are attempting conversation through two layers of masks and a pane of perspex. There doesn't seem to be an end in sight, a time where any of us can do what we once did or what we dream about doing. The counter to all this is that film and TV have become more important than ever in isolation and I too have found my viewing becoming freer and less restrictive. I finally watched films I obsessively recorded on VHS then left on a shelf for 11 years, binge-watched TV shows I first saw in my insufferable teenage years that I wasn't mature enough to understand or appreciate then, cast my net wider. As a result I'm accompanying my (admittedly small) 2020 list with another made up of the best films I've seen in the last 12 months that aren't from 2020. Also of note in that vein is that, while I've often told practically anyone who will listen that I think the Tamil film scene is one of the best in the world (often to the point of tedium), in 2020 the Malayalam industry has blown all other contenders out of the water in terms of creativity, writing or just plain delirium. From the clever, understated medical procedural Anveshanam, the ferociously bombastic Mammootty-vehicle Shylock, the inventive comic misfire Halal Love Story, the ethereal, mysterious Sufiyum Sujatayum or my film of the year, the swaggering fever dream Trance. I don't know what's in store for 2021, personally, cinematically or for life as we no longer know it, and making predictions seems if not senseless then unwise. Really all I can think of is to quote a friend "find strength in your passions, sometimes that's all we have"

2020

1. Trance (Anwar Rasheed - India/Malayalam)

2. Oh My Kadavule (Ashwath Marimuthu - India/Tamil)

3. What Did Jack Do? (David Lynch - USA)

4. Shylock (Ajai Vasudev - India/Malayalam)

5. Sufiyum Sujatayum (Naranipuzha Shanavas - India/Malayalam)

Not 2020

Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders - USA - 1984)

The Silence (Mohsen Makhmalbaf - Iran/Tajikistan - 1998)

Nagina (Harmesh Malhotra - India/Hindi - 1986)

Oliver! (Carol Reed - UK - 1968)

Akira (Katsuhiro Otomo - Japan - 1988)

O Lucky Man (Lindsay Anderson - UK - 1973)

Dr M (Claude Chabrol - West Germany - 1990)

The Strange Love Of Martha Ivers (Lewis Milestone/Byron Haskin/Hal B Wallis - USA - 1946)

The 2019 Oscar The Grouches

Straight off I have to say that I know I'm late with this. Posts in previous times have been around new year but just short of midnight on January 16th is the first chance I've had. I can't say I've been doing anything of massive importance, reflecting on the decade at its end or the like. I've been making coffee, sleeping, getting lost in Tokyo and trying to find the time for so many things. When last we spoke I wrote that the thing I wanted most was to better. I don't know that I necessarily am but I do know that at the start of 2010 I was a misanthropic, incapable, hollowed-out crisp packet with a brain that spent the majority of its time beating the shit out of itself and I was resigned to the idea that I'd never see 25. Now a fortnight and change into 2020 I'm certainly happier, more able and I've done things I couldn't have done then, live less vicariously through others who may not even exist in the first place, have made some of my dreams come true. I'm here and I'm improving and another change is that the itchy pinball inside my head has once again started spitting out phrases, single words, desires and a feverish longing to start writing again, be it on here, manifesting itself in increasingly bad poetry, in finishing the half dozen cathartic short stories I scribbled when I still had hair and have been adding to somewhat futilely when I should be drowsy every wet Wednesday since. Perhaps elsewhere. I don't know but if you've any idea answers on a postcard so to speak. Cheers

1. The Souvenir (Joanna Hogg - UK)
2. Gurkha (Sam Anton - India/Tamil)
3. Everybody Knows (Asghar Farhadi - Spain/France)
4. Capharnaüm (Nadine Labaki - Lebanon)
5. Loro (Paolo Sorrentino - Italy
6. Do Dooni Panj (Harry Bhatti - India/Punjabi)
7. Sorry To Bother You (Boots Riley - USA)
8. Parasite (Bong Joon-ho - South Korea)
9. KGF: Chapter 1 (Prashanth Neel - India/Kannada)
10. The Favourite (Yorgos Lanthimos - UK)
11. Super Deluxe (Thiagarajan Kumararaja - India/Tamil)
12. Kalank (Abhishek Varman - India/Hindi)

The 2018 Oscar The Grouches

Every year I post on here and hope someone reads it. Usually they do, not many but some do and it makes me smile. This year hasn't been a big one for smiling. In the past I've lamented how time constraints and changing life situations have affected my cinematic input and output, how I've watched far less and written about fuck all and sadly the trend has continued. In August 2017 I went to Japan, the realisation of a long-held, unbelievable dream, and had the added test of sharing 2 weeks of my socially awkward, self-reliant life with a group of people, most of whom I'd never met or even spoken too. This is a dreadfully trite phrase that I abhor using but it was truly the most joyous time of my life. This past June I tried another test, travelling to Japan alone, not speaking the language, not really knowing how I was going to cope and it was wonderful and I did cope and flourished. Other times of the year I didn't. I had the worst period of mental ill health that I've had in a long while, I came close to losing my job and I feel reduced, a redundant format of myself from when things were bad. But I'm trying. In films watched I beat last year, barely but I did and that's something. Last year I joked about promises for the new year, about how I was going to be better. In 2019 all I can say is that I'm trying. Here's my list


1. Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson - USA)
2. Moon Maids (Tchidi Chikere - Nigeria)
3. Mulk (Anubhav Sinha - India/Hindi)
4. The Third Murder (Hirokazu Kore-eda - Japan)
5. Imaikkaa Nodigal (R. Jay Gnanamuthu - India/Tamil)
6. Bitch (Marianna Palka - USA)
7. Badhaai Ho (Amit Ravindernat - India/Hindi)
8. 2.0 (S. Shankar - India/Tamil)
9. Slava (Kristina Grozeva/Petar Valchanov - Bulgaria)
10. Happy End (Michael Haneke - France/Austria)
11. Kolamavu Kokila (Nelson Dilipkumar - India/Tamil)
12. 6.9 pe scara Richter Scale (Nae Caranfil - Romania)

I want you to piss in pain so I can console you

Happy End
Michael Haneke 2017 France/Austria
Starring: Fantine Harduin, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Isabelle Huppert, Mathieu Kassovitz, Franz Rogowski, Laura Verlinden, Toby Jones


That Michael Haneke's latest film is forensic and wildly pessimistic may not be a surprise. That said film is also a shockingly modernist comedy with the frankly optimistic title of Happy End and opens with the eyes of the main character replaced by the proxy of a camera phone spying on a woman going through her nightly routine of ablutions, the accompanying dialogue appearing on screen in the form of a series of texts, will almost certainly be unexpected. Likewise that the 12 year old behind the camera, Fantine Harduin's Eve, then films her hamster eating feed laced with her mother's antidepressants "to see what happens" sounds like it could have come straight from Benny's Video. The commentary, again by text to a never revealed recipient (perhaps live updates on a blog or YouTube channel of some sort), talks about how unhappy "she" is and for a moment it's unclear if "she" is the hamster out of its mind on Sertraline or Eve's mother, only shown through an emoji spattered screen. The hint that the former may have been a dry-run for the incident that launches the film's story frankly feels further towards gallows humour than Haneke or many directors would be comfortable with. Also despite the genuinely legendary cast Haneke has assembled for what is defiantly an actor's drama regardless of its lack of chat, it's far less even-handed than his past work. Here Eve is the main character, somewhere between too smart for her own good and genuinely psychopathic, and Harduin gives the towering central performance with the established superstars Huppert and Trintignant as admittedly brilliant support fleshing out the story as Eve is removed from her normal life and transplanted into the middle-class household of her parently baffled father Thomas (Kassovitz), a philandering doctor somehow successful in every walk of life despite being about as smooth as Swarfega; her cold, organized aunt Anne (Huppert), head of the family company and dealing with a workplace accident that has caused the death of a working-class employee with steely style; her volatile, desolate, rapidly destructing adult cousin Pierre (Rogowski); and her suicidal grandfather Georges (Trintignant in his 87th year and coming out of retirement for Haneke again), a dyed in the wool patriarch suffering the early stages of dementia and apparently declared too healthy for Zurich. Also on board is an underused Toby Jones as Lawrence, Anne's English lawyer and sometime boyfriend. They all communicate for the most part electronically; Eve with her unidentified, perhaps wished for online friends; Thomas exchanging sexual depravities with his mistress; Anne and Lawrence linked only by cross-Europe phone calls. The only pair who really talk are Eve and Georges, at first with him inquiring how old she is - an indicator of the fact that he hasn't seen her since she was 3 as much as his depleting faculties - then welcoming her to "the club" before moving into late, brutally stark conversations about death and their past misdeeds (although no judgments are offered so misdeeds may be the wrong word). They seem to have an understanding as Georges tells her how seeing a bird torn apart by a predator in the garden, its feathers flying like it was snowing, caused his hands to shake while he found a similar scene poetic on a TV documentary. A skewering of the modern world isn't difficult to read although when, mid-film, the family have a day at the beach, the lingering gazes on gorgeous bodies and fleeting glimpses of Calippos bring to mind the Greek New Wave's lust and lack of understand more than the normally muted shades of grey synonymous with Haneke's theatre of cruelty. Harduin is utterly believable and worryingly intense throughout, particularly in the scene where she suddenly, momentarily breaks down in front of her father but remains more in control of the situation than him, another where faced with her ailing mother she can only glance back bored by it all and the best moments of the film late on with Trintignant. She found early fame with a mentalism act on Belgium's Got Talent and she often appears almost hypnotised, emotion gradually pushing its way out of her frame through single tears and harsh words cracking her resolve. Everyone is excellent but the only scene that truly matches her is Rogowski, drunk out of his mind and in the midst of a simultaneously ferocious and crumpled karaoke session. A nice counterpoint is provided when a violinist performs at a family party, violently gesticulating as she goes, her movements far less frightful and hideous because they're socially acceptable (at least in the world of the characters). Another typical nuance occurs in the traces of racism when Trintignant attempts escape for the umpteenth time, wheeling himself down the pavement and flagging down a group of young black men to ask directions only for a middle-aged white man to cautiously intervene because he has misread the situation spectacularly and can't imagine it can be happening any other way. A reference to a dead sibling being floated as the start of Eve's disconnection however feels tacked on, melodramatic and in the end never important enough to be elaborated on. The silent passing of time is treated more delicately, portrayed as ultimately unimportant as everything else in perhaps the most despondent film Haneke has made since his debut.

The 2017 Oscar The Grouches

This year has been stranger than the last. In many ways it's been the best I've perhaps ever had and I've done things I never would have thought possible, I went to Japan which has been a dream since I was a pre-teen who couldn't connect with people, made so many friends around the world, removed some poisonous people from my life. I have a job where I actually have to deal with people head-on the whole time rather than simply working behind the scenes to a soundtrack wider than my head and not interacting with anyone for hours at a time. Unfortunately said job is also the source of a few bad things, it saps my energy, takes up a lot of my time, it can be very stressful and in September I had my first major depressive episode in about 5 years. I'm not watching anything like the number of films I used to. A few years back I did the 365 challenge, namely to try and watch one film for every day of the year and I managed it without much problem. This year I watched 89, very possibly the most paltry number since I was a teenager, and missed so many I was excited about, my multiple-times-a-week cinema visits going down to a couple a month if I'm lucky. Regardless, here are my favourite films of this year, the list may not be as far-reaching or full as it has been or as I'd like but here goes. I hope I'll improve in 2018, but for now I deserve all of Shahib Hosseini's stern looks.

1. The Salesman (Asghar Farhadi - Iran)
2. Cemetery of Splendour (Apichatpong Weerasethakul - Thailand)
3. Through The Wall (Rama Burshtein - Israel)
4. Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade - Germany/Austria)
5. Dear Zindagi (Gauri Shinde - India/Hindi)
6. Get Out (Jordan Peele - USA)
7. Chi-Raq (Spike Lee - USA)
8. The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers (UK/Morocco - Ben Rivers)
9. Arunoday (Partho Sen-Gupta - India/Marathi)
10. Raees (Rahul Dholakia - India/Hindi)
11. Old Stone (Johnny Ma - China/Canada)

The 2016 Oscar The Grouches

This year has been a strange one in so many ways. At the end of 2015 I felt disenchanted and fairly disappointed in myself in a number of ways and did something I never have before, namely making three loose aims to reach for in 2016. In a surprise to everyone (especially me) two of the three have actually happened. I've made them happen. Unfortunately as good as things have been in those respects my spare time and energy has taken a big hit and as a result so has the number of films I've seen and written about. There are so many I've wanted to see and not gotten around to and a few more that have simply fallen by the wayside. 250 has become 126, 100 odd has become 1 and the top 20's of past years have become a top 11. Last year I said that I wanted to be better and I humbly think I am but in 2017 I still want to improve, to be far better than I am now, more able, more capable, more efficient in dividing my time and handling my load (no sniggers please). I want to watch more, write more and enjoy both but I don't know if I will. I don't know that I'll get the chance. Regardless these are my favourite films of the year, give them a shot, enjoy them, make of them what you will. Until we meet again.

1. The Wait (Piero Messina - Italy/France)
2. Ae Dil Hai Mushkil (Karan Johar - India)
3. Yakuza Apocalypse (Takashi Miike - Japan)
4. A Girl At My Door (July Jung - South Korea)
5. The Forbidden Room (Guy Maddin & Evan Johnson - Canada)
6. Thou Wast Mild And Lovely (Josephine Decker - USA)
7. Room (Lenny Abrahamson - Canada/Ireland)
8. Anomalisa (Charlie Kaufman & Duke Johnson - USA)
9. Horse Money (Pedro Costa - Portugal)
10. Sarbjit (Omung Kumar - India)
11. Bridge (Amit Ranjan Biswas - India/Bengal)