The 2024 Oscar The Grouches

On the cusp of 2025 I couldn't think of much particular from my year to celebrate. When writing this post in my head however, I found more than I had first thought. I've perhaps grown up a bit, had to be the level-headed, strong adult of the family (not a good idea by a stretch), been to Japan twice, been hospitalised then sick for an extended period, been on a date for the first time in literal years (and been ghosted for not the first). I've been told that I'm important, I've been told that I'm a MILFfucker (one f or two? Hopefully two).

I watched an embarrassing number of Godzilla films, read more than I have in recent memory, enjoyed myself and went on self-planned (or more accurately poorly planned) adventures on holiday instead of just going to whatever wrestling was on and drinking an absurd amount of whisky. I saw Boris live. I despaired at the prospect (or lack of such) of my romantic and home life, at the increasing weight of my daily solitude and my inability to change either. I'm very lucky.

Sorry I'm so embarrassing it will happen at least 5 more times today.

In film terms I've watched 175, which is an acceptably healthy number, seen one (Elaine May's sublime A New Leaf, not from 2024) that I think might be one of the best comedies ever made. But my concentration levels are at, if not an all-time low then, something close. It bothers me greatly and I don't know how to get around it. The enthusiasm is still there in spades but the situation has to increasingly cinematic. My beloved Indian cinema is also entirely conspicuous by its absence, a few in particular having taken an increasingly nasty misogynistic bent. Pisspot.

2024

Eureka (Lisandro Alonso - Argentina/Portugal/France/Germany/Mexico)

The Holdovers (Alexander Payne - USA)

All of us Strangers (Andrew Haigh - UK)

Kinds of Kindness (Yorgos Lanthimos - Ireland/UK/USA)

Robot Dreams (Pablo Berger - Spain)

Perfect Days (Wim Wenders - Japan/Germany)

La Chimera (Alice Rohrwacher - Italy/France/Switzerland)

Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos - Ireland/UK/USA)

Rumours (Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson & Galen Johnson - Canada/Germany)

The Boy and The Heron (Hayao Miyazaki - Japan)

Anora (Sean Baker - USA)

Julie Keeps Quiet (Leonardo Van Dijl - Belgium/Sweden)

Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person (Ariane Louis-Seize - Canada)

All Your Faces (Jeanne Henry - France)

The Beast (Bertrand Bonello - France/Canada)

Cloud (Kiyoshi Kurosawa - Japan)

Not 2024

A New Leaf (Elaine May - USA)

Godzilla vs. Hedorah (Yoshimitsu Banno - Japan)

The Unknown Man of Shandigor (Jean-Louis Roy - Switzerland)

Joker (Todd Phillips - USA)

Wolf Guy aka Enraged Lycanthrope (Kazuhiko Yamaguchi - Japan)

Love Happy (David Miller - USA)
The Skeleton of Mrs Morales (Rogelio A. González - Mexico)

Gemini (Shinya Tsukamoto - Japan)

Eight Hours of Terror (Seijun Suzuki - Japan)

The 2023 Oscar The Grouches

If the end of 2022 marked new hope 2023 was a year of growth, or the least closure. I achieved four things that were major to me although at least one certainly wouldn't be to many others. I travelled back to and across Japan, something that up until last year seemed like it might not ever be possible again. I got a promotion, raise and made a vague success of myself after a previous job spent five and a half years (and my brain and body far longer) destroying me. I had a threesome. If this is a better version of myself I'm not sure. There's still much I'm unhappy about; there are two big things in my life that I desperately want to change but I don't see a sensible or likely way they can; I'm still perpetually and crushingly alone, both romantically and socially.

Cinematically I've watched fewer films than I'd like to have (and fewer than last year) but more new releases. To a point that's the job (and the effect of COVID halting production the past couple of years) but more seems to have changed in my tastes. I've got into opera. Two of my list were films I really liked despite glaring flaws (Carmen, a tactile, ghostly, genuinely strange adaptation of the opera from ballet dancer, choreographer and not a director Benjamin Millepied with a ferocious and not central performance from Almodovar muse Rossy de Palma, and Babylon which was mightily self-indulgent, far too long and featured a montage at the end which was utter bullshit). A third, Brandon Cronenberg's immature body horror which filmed sex and psychotropic drug use really quite poorly, Infinity Pool, I liked but not as much as the other two. Carmen was also one of two dance-based films on my list, the other being Asif Kapadia's Creature. It also, along with Tár and Wim Wenders' deeply individual documentary Anselm, was a true cinematic experience with remarkable sound design which may not hit quite as powerfully when streamed at home. In my work as a projectionist I sat in the back row of our first screening of Tár with a notepad and had a very nerdy 2h38mins working out which speakers Todd Field (a former projectionist himself) was using or muting to try and settle on the appropriate volume level and if I had to put in automation cues for particular scenes and moments.

Where all this navel-gazing leads I don't know. I have goals in mind but no solid path to achieve them. It's now less 'anything can happen' so much as 'whatever'.

2023

Tár (Todd Field - USA)

Jigarthanda Double X (Karthik Subbaraj - India/Tamil)

L'immensita (Emanuele Crialese - Italy/France)

Four Daughters (Kaouther Ben Hania - France/Tunisia/Saudi Arabia)

Fallen Leaves (Aki Kaurismäki - Finland/Germany)

Suzume no Tojimari (Makoto Shinkai - Japan)

Anatomy of a Fall (Justine Triet - France)

Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese - USA)

One Fine Morning (Mia Hansen-Løve - France)

My Imaginary Country (Patricio Guzmán - Chile)

Nanpakal Nerathu Mayakkam (Lijo Jose Pellissery - India/Malayalam/Tamil)

All The Beauty And The Bloodshed (Laura Poitras - USA)

Holy Spider (Ali Abbasi - Germany/Sweden/Denmark/France)

Creature (Asif Kapadia - UK)

Passages (Ira Sachs - France)

Babylon (Damien Chazelle - USA)

Carmen (Benjamin Millepied - Australia/France/USA)

Please Baby Please (Amanda Kramer - USA)

White Noise (Noah Baumbach - USA/UK)

The Annoyed (Mehdi Fard Ghaderi - Iran)

Not 2023

Lost Illusions (Xavier Giannoli - France)

Gabbeh (Mohsen Makhmalbaf - Iran)

An Actor's Revenge (Kon Ichikawa - Japan)

Bad Black (Isaac Godfrey Geoffrey Nabwana - Uganda)

Horrors of Malformed Men (Teruo Ishii - Japan)

The Lion Has Seven Heads (Glauber Rocha - France/Brazil/Italy)

Big Time Gambling Boss (Kosaku Yamashita - Japan)

The German Chainsaw Massacre aka Blackest Heart (Christoph Schlingensief - Germany)

The 2022 Oscar The Grouches

Last year I spoke of being down but not out, having hope and searching for a new beginning, and 2022 lived up to that. The first half I spent unemployed but happier than in the past and divided my time between watching films, falling back in love with reading, growing despondent, actually seeing friends (in some cases for the first time since the beforetimes). Then in the second the old adage about buses transferred to the employment of a odd man in the South of England and two positions came along at once. The first - an admittedly well-paid (at least to me) role in pensions and insurance - I still don't know how I got. Even the thought of the 90 minute interview seemed far-fetched, I don't know that I have that much material on a subject I like let alone something as dull as myself and customer service. But it happened. Then literally a day later a friend aware of my situation and who also runs my local independent cinema called to say his long-term projectionist had handed in his notice and he was looking at hiring someone who could work across several different departments, and my enthusiasm and foul-mouthed ramblings soon became a career. I'm not entirely sure how this happened either, or how I'm six months in in a field I'm passionate about that rarely feels like a job to me. I'm very lucky.

Everything is better now and that in itself feels entirely strange somehow but it has happened. I'm happier and have prospects, I'm living again, my mental health is better, in cinematic terms I've also watched more films this year than I have in several (182) and I've even written, including a review out of the blue on here. My list reflects this as does my list of the best films not from this year. On TV I've loved the twisty, talk-heavy meta-self analysis Irma Vep (despite not loving much else Olivier Assayas has ever done) and Lars Von Trier's absurd apocalyptic hospital horror The Kingdom: Exodus while online MUBI and the Arrow Video app have been providing the streams of my dreams (and a lot of Meiko Kaji).

I genuinely don't know what 2023 holds but the trite platitude 'anything can happen' seems more true and more plausible than I ever considered. Here's to it...

2022
Crimes of the Future (David Cronenberg - USA)
Memoria (Apichatpong Weerasethakul - Thailand/Colombia/UK)
Gangubai Kathiawadi (Sanjay Leela Bhansali - India/Hindi)
Vortex (Gaspar Noé - France/Belgium/Morocco)
Hold Me Tight (Mathieu Amalric - France)
Oye Makhna (Simerjit Singh - India/Punjabi)
Parallel Mothers (Pedro Almodóvar - Spain)
The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonagh - Ireland/UK/USA)
Decision to Leave (Park Chan-wook - South Korea)
Taste (Lê Bảo - Vietnam)
KGF: Chapter 2 (Prasanth Neel - India/Kannada)
En Corps [Rise] (Cédric Klapisch - France)
Earwig (Lucile Hadžihalilović - Belgium/France/UK)
One Second (Zhang Yimou - China)
Hit The Road (Panah Panahi - Iran)
Official Competition (Gastón Duprat/Mariano Cohn - Spain/Argentina)

Not 2022

Oedipus Rex (Pier Paolo Pasolini - Italy)

Out Of The Blue (Dennis Hopper - Canada)

Chess Of The Wind (Mohammad Reza Aslani - Iran)

The Blood of Hussain (Jamil Dehlavi - Pakistan)

Stray Cat Rock: Wild Jumbo (Toshiya Fujita - Japan)

Bride of Frankenstein (James Whale - USA)

Egomania: Island Without Hope (Christoph Schlingensief - West Germany)

Bérénice (Éric Rohmer - France)

You don't have to say you love me, just be close at hand

Vortex

Gaspar Noé 2021 France/Belgium/Monaco

Starring: Dario Argento, Françoise Lebrun, Alex Lutz, Kylian Dheret

Gaspar Noé is a hard man to pin down. Other than his penchant for not so much challenging his audience as plunging them into a theatre of harmonic, sensory and literal brutality his films don't keep to a definable style. They shove, attack, fuck. His camera flies rather than hovers, spins and twists like the moment when you realise you've had too much to drink, he confronts us with images that horrify, arouse, disgust us (sometimes all at the same time) then he prolongs the terror, demands to know if we give in or why we have such an appetite for these pains. His viewers are voyeurs. He has been referred to as an enfant terrible although compared to others afforded the same mantle he's practically a demon. His 2009 Enter The Void immersed the watcher in the grubby psychotropic neon underworld of Tokyo to the level of intoxication then murdered its leading man and continued the film through the eyes of his spirit as it floated above his corpse, taking in and invading the city and those he may have loved; 2015's Love could at times be considered cruel pornography if it was at all arousing; 2018's subtly titled Climax took real-life dancers and recreated their rehearsals, interactions, flirtations, movements under the influence and bewilderment of surreptitiously spiked sangria; 2002's Irreversible, told in reverse and savage as a means of testing all and any limits available, meanwhile stands as one of only two films which have made me think not that "I don't want to watch this" or even that "I can't bear to watch this" but that "I shouldn't be watching this", something that would undoubtedly delight the provocateur-in-chief himself. Vortex is entirely different again, played as a traditional domestic drama examining an elderly couple whose lives, already enclosed by the spiky walls of books, scribblings and a cinephilia which feels closer to the tastes of a gentler Noé than anything we experience from them, inside their small apartment labour under the woman's increasing descent into dementia. It's as harrowing as his other work but in different ways entirely, the extremity replaced by emotion, the fear ferocity fucking traded in for a frightening humanity. The only abstraction is a single black line that dissects the screen in two almost immediately, both an invitation into the continued fracturing of mind, experience and relationship of the central pair, the images being shown from different angles and views, as if through the opposing sides of a barred window. Sometimes the two seem to connect, as if the characters and happenings are taking place side by side only for it to become gently obvious that they aren't, a hand leaving one window but not transferring to its neighbour. Again Noé challenges perception but with a subtlety and even maturity one wouldn't have thought him capable of and only in perhaps two short scenes does he break his new resolve and become the Noé we think we know. Michael Haneke's Amour has to be seen as an influence if not a direct predecessor but there's something darker here - Françoise Lebrun often commands the left side in a captivating portrait of disorientated anxiety, doing small things, trying to regain control of memories, feelings, abilities long lost. The Amour is still there, not least in the couple's relationship with the son whose lifelong mental health and impulse control issues have left him unable to become the parent they (and his own faintly destructive, neglected son) now need. In a stunningly fragile scene the woman (the couple are only named in the press notes) is able to overcome just enough of her confusion to comfort her son like the child he still is and he curls up with his head in her lap and his legs on hospital seats as she isn't quite able to understand who he is, just that he needs her. But there are also less desirable traits and feelings and there's a fascinating duality in the discussion of the committal of their then-teenage son to a hospital (not an "asylum") the man won't allow to reoccur for himself and his wife. The man himself is pleasingly multifaceted. Even before her illness is revealed he appears selfish, domineering, more than a little pompous but as time goes on it becomes obvious that it's his only method of coping and he is desperately balancing the care of his wife, his own flailing health and the compulsion to write, walking the increasingly threadbare tightrope often without the benefit of a safety net. Perhaps the film's strangest choice is the casting of the 81 year old master director of giallo horror (and questionably monstrous user of his own family) Dario Argento in the role of the man. It's not a jump to see him as a clear forerunner to Noé in attitude if not command of genre but he also plays it entirely straight and does commendably well in an incredibly giving performance, conveying his own cracking alongside the desires and needs he just can't shake off and his perhaps-faulty awareness that even as his wife loses her self he must retain his. I can't imagine where either will go next but I can't wait to find out because even in these later days neither has ever done anything like Vortex before and perhaps they won't again

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)
    

Butchers don't smile.

Eyes Wide Open
Haim Tabakman 2009 Israel
Starring: Zohar Strauss, Ran Danker, Ravit Rozen, Tzahi Grad, Avi Grayinik, Eva Zrihen-Attali, Mati Atlas

A new year traditionally brings new resolutions, old hopes that one often so desperately wants to achieve and ritually attempts to force into practice. I'm no different but, after settling on what I consider the most important of my own aspirations, have struggled to shake off the lesser parts of my personality and have done very little of any note in the past 12 days. One positive thing that the dawn of 2016 did encourage me to do though was a bout of spring cleaning that, in true movie fashion, yielded the discovery of long-forgotten, ill-gotten gains - namely, a box of video tapes containing films recorded from the annals of TV history long before the days of Sky Plus and the comforts of a regular salary. Some are classics from a variety of genres, some most assuredly are not. Others, such as Mani Kaul's 1971 adaptation of Hindi pioneer playwright Mohan Rakesh's Ashad Ka Ek Din, I've since discovered are a real bugger to find even in the days of DVD, Blu-Ray, restoration and on-demand streaming services so I'm delighted to get the opportunity to experience them. Also among all these are a couple of films that even I in all my geekery don't remember much about. One of those films, Haim Tabakman's Eyes Wide Open, I could recall a mere visual of, that of two men (one apparently a Haredi or Hasidic Jew) chin deep in a pool of blue-as-a-road-sign water, the smiles on their faces belying the danger such a visual could conjure up. Watching the opening minutes the mystery only deepened with torrential rain beating down and, in a gorgeous moment, dripping from the wide brimmed hat of the main character as he attempts to break into a shuttered building, the raised hand and sickle on the sign matching his own as he uses a large rock to defeat the padlock and chain blocking his way. Is he a particularly ill-prepared burglar? Or perhaps the owner, either having locked himself out or suffered the pain of repossession? Behind him is a death notice and as he enters the sodden floor and upturned furniture seem to suggest that neither of the latter are likely. He soon sets to cleaning the mess revealing it as a butcher's shop but still doesn't look all that pleased with himself. An extended glance at a photo of an older man indicates that it may be a relative and that his efforts might come from a deep familial obligation although as he can't even raise the enthusiasm to greet his customers let alone engage them in conversation it's difficult to imagine who he could be obliging. He seems like he hasn't a loved one left...except he does. He has a pretty wife who stops singing when he returns home and four submissive children, a sudden cut (no pun intended) as he snaps a heavy book closed to his cleaver slicing through a side of meat hinting that coldness and even violence may not be a stranger to his household while the sight of so many children indicates that maybe he hasn't always been like this. The man's name is Aaron and he's devoutly religious and as strict with himself as he is with his family - despite his adopted profession he doesn't allow himself much meat or fish, rejects his wife's advances and his associates' modernist insight into religion and can't bring himself to trust a helpless stranger. So it's a shock when he shows a flicker of charity and even hope, stating that "there is no such thing as broken", and takes on (and takes in) homeless, young student Ezri, teaching him his trade despite the disapproval of the insular society he lives in. In just one of a series of nice moments of mirroring Aaron finally lets his guard down and the pair go swimming, Aaron immersing himself in the water he was earlier trying to avoid then taking his apprentice home and singing boisterously at the dinner table, the release liberating him at least temporarily. The film's pace, both patient and intense, allows their relationship to develop almost unnoticed until they kiss (although Aaron at first rebuffs Ezri's advances) hungrily. The sex  scenes that follow are skilfully shot, as if Tabakman and DOP Axel Schneppat were mindful of their bodies entwined coming off as controversy-seeking. Zohar Strauss (Aaron) is exceptional throughout, his opposite number (Ran Danker) lesser so, the former's masterful internal conflict far exceeding the latter's half-heartedness. Danker in fact risks portraying Ezri as little more than the doe-eyed, opportunistic charmer that many suspect him of being. A later storyline featuring a community campaign against Aaron feels tacked-on and features some amplified acting at odds with the intricate sensitivity of the rest of the film but if nothing else provides a fresh look at the disturbingly mafia-like structure inherent in some quarters of modern Orthodox Jerusalem, the homophobia inherent in many traditions, the threat of the "modesty police", the absolute power of the (understanding) rabbi. Nevertheless the film's sincerity and incisiveness covers its failings and the startling final scenes linger like the feelings and temptations Aaron's soul just can't veil.