THE ARTIST (2011)

In the last few years, we have had to bid goodbye to many familiar things, as technology marches on inexorably. The baby boomers are discovering rheumatism and we are writing bedtime stories about paper books, DVDs and a truly free internet for our grandchildren. So it is no wonder that 2011 was heavily nostalgic on the movie front: Midnight in Paris with its cotton-gathering hero, The Descendents with its protagonist who labours under the weight of his ancestors' deeds and the expectations of his descendents, The Tree of Life with its narrator who remembers the horror and innocence of childhood and Hugo with its touching tribute to Georges Méliès.  The Artist went one step further with its wonderfully satirical throwback to the silent film era.

How many film aficionados have you met, who don't list at least five silent films among their favourite films? And how many times have you told them that the only reason silent movies existed was because they hadn't found a way to stick sound to the picture, not because it was a superior story-telling device. The moment they found the technology to do so, they abandoned silent films and ushered in one of the most glorious and exuberant eras in film: musicals.  Why would you want to watch people mugging at the camera when you can watch Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers fire up the screen instead? Well, Michel Hazanavicius presents a strong case for the former, having had over a century's worth of cinematic cautionary tales warn and inspire him.  Is it not said that hindsight is 20/20? So too was The Artist with its beautifully arranged scenes and simple plot that always threatens but never actually falls into the trap of rose-tinting the past.  Perhaps the original silent films were constrained in their imagination and plot due to lack of technology and because the art was very new, but after watching this film, my interest in silent films has been piqued.  A well-executed and well-intentioned film, Hazanavicius reminds us that sound often obscures our ability to see.

Jean Dujardin plays a famous silent film star at his peak. He is entranced by a spunky, ambitious woman, Bérénice Bejo who manages to worm her way into Hollywood and hitches her wagon to the rising star of the talkies. Dujardin on the other hand, becomes a has-been and doesn't even realize it.

Simplicity has been called the crowning reward of art; the ultimate sophistication. If you take away dialogue and noise which tend to dissemble and even take away the over-the-top gesticulations associated with silent films, what you are left with are little gestures, longing glances and lip quivers which tell you the whole story.  After so many bloated films with enormous budgets, lavish sets and costumes and self-indulgent dialogue, The Artist with its spartan aesthetic was satiating.  There is a scene when Dujardin, the famous star of a film and Bejo, a set extra are filming a scene in a room full of dancers.  We giggle when Dujardin, is so captivated by Bejo's beauty, that he absent-mindedly forgets his role and then we sigh when they forget that the camera is rolling and dance together unmindful of the rest of the world. Or a scene when Bejo, sitting in her plush luxury car secretly purchases everything put up for auction by a tired, angry and destitute Dujardin and manages to convey love, concern and guilt without having to say word.

There were a number of hat-tips to Singin' in the Rain, a film about the introduction of talking films and one of the cheekiest and most enjoyable digs at studio bosses, starlets and Hollywood in general. But I was also reminded of another film about silent films: the darker and tragic Sunset Boulevard, a critique of Hollywood's flagrant use-and-throw attitude with its people.  Dujardin's fading celebrity more closely mimicked Norma Desmond's dangerous self-obsession and inability to flow with the current than Gene Kelly's Don Lockwood who, despite being uncomfortable with the new technology, admits defeat when he sees the overwhelming response to talkies. Singin' in the Rain is a happy story because Don swallows his pride and takes diction lessons. He accepts criticism of his silent film style of acting and instead concentrates on his strengths: song and dance. Norma Desmond failed, not because she was old but because she thought she was more important than the art itself.  While this film could have captured Dujardin's catharsis better, Dujardin does a fantastic job with his character.

Truth be told, I was not swept away by the film when I watched it. It was good, it did everything right but was it enough, I wondered. But weeks after watching it, I find myself dwelling on scenes, some of which were composed like paintings or I find myself thinking of Dujardin's range as an actor or even some particularly clever title cards.  Some would say that my growing regard for the film may be related to the growing number of awards it has been racking up and because it is a very likely winner in the Best Director, Actor and Picture categories this Oscar season, but that's nonsense. This year, my heart and inconsequential vote are with Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris. But then, simplicity really ought to be a more popular virtue in Hollywood and I hope that it is encouraged by suitably rewarding The Artist with golden naked men.

RWB'S TOP 10 FILMS OF 2011

Well, what do you know. Danish and I actually managed to enjoy some of the same films this year. Perhaps the world IS going to end next year after all! We may have bitterly disagreed on the merits of Contagion, The Tree of Life, The Ides of March and so many others but where's the fun if everybody in the world got along?  


Happy New Year, folks!






Danish's Top Ten 

10. The Source Code was a cerebral piece of science fiction with heart and a devilishly intriguing plot.  


9. Fright Night surprised me by how scary - and simultaneously hilarious - it managed to be. At a time when vampires are growing increasingly bloodless, this was a thrilling resurrection of the genre of yore.


8. In a year of shrill dramas and thudding blockbusters, Dhobi Ghat gave us a muted vision of the maximum city. Drenched in rain and coated in mellow guitar riffs, it was as unlikely (and perfect) an ode to Mumbai as Allen's reimagining of the Parisian nightlife.


7. 50/50 gave us the unlikeliest of genre mash ups - cancer comedy! - and made it work with charm to spare.


6.  Charm was also a prominent adjective for Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, which took a wondrous fantasy  conceit and combined it with a lyrical ode to a magical city.


5. and 4.  The Tree of Life gave us a vision of the creation of life, and Melancholia showed its destruction: both were transcendental pieces of filmmaking, by master film-makers working at the height of their powers. 


3.  A Separation was the best foreign language film I saw this year - the Iranian drama is remarkably complex and manages to dig deep into the well of its layered cast. 


2.  Beginners was suffused with wistfulness and hope, a hilarious and moving portrait of a gay man who comes out at the age of 70, and his straight son who struggles with commitment. Quirky and melancholic, this was Ewan McGregor at his sympathetic best. 

So that's the rest of the best - but what was the most purely enoyable cinematic experience I had at the movies this year? 

With the boy who lived, of course.  There were many, many ways for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 to end up disappointing me. The preceding movies have had their fare share of disappointing moments. And yet, when it came to it, when it really really mattered, when we wanted, nay, needed a rip-roaring cinematic conclusion - well, they delivered. 

The Battle of Hogwarts was a slam-bang spectacle, but here more than ever, we got to see the giant beating heart of the franchise. When the Order of the Phoenix comes together to cast protective enchantments around Hogwarts  or when Lupin and Tonks stretch out their quivering hands towards each other or even when Harry walks up to Voldemort facing certain death .... oh  we knew what was coming, but it didn't matter; every Potter fan worth his/her salt got the cathartic emotional payoff they deserved. A roll call of goodbyes was weaved into the 2 odd-hour running time, but it never cut the momentum. Instead, we got one last glorious hurrah for everyone – Slughorn, McGonagall, Trelawney, Flitwick, Sirius, the Potters, the Weasleys, the Malfoys, Ollivander, Fleur, Neville, Luna and the rest of Dumbledore’s Army …  and everything – the Chamber of Secrets, the Room of Requirement, those pixies from Gilderoy Lockhart’s reign, even some final broomstick flight – every little detail that made up the wizarding world for us popped into the busy frames at some point.

“Words are our most inexhaustible source of magic” says Dumbledore to Harry. For years, Joanne Kathleen Rowling gave us a constant supply of that magic – and the movies carried it on for a while longer. It’s over now, this  magnificent journey, and those of us who were middle school kids when the Philosopher’s Stone entered our lives are now caught in the vagaries of adult life.  There’s something heartbreaking about this, but I’m mostly thankful that we got to see this cultural phenomenon through.

And again, if it had to end - what a way to go.

Mischief Managed, Mr. Potter.




Honourable Mentions: 


Friends with Benefits was one of the best romantic comedies I've seen in a while; Wim Wenders' dance documentary Pina was a sight to behold; and Delhi Belly is probably the film that made me laugh the hardest this year. Also, Tintin for giving us that sustained string of animated thrills, and MI4, for managing the rare feat of being the best movie in a franchise at such a late stage. 

Lekha's Top Ten

10.  Contagion:  This is not a film likely to end up on many top ten lists because of what many have criticized as an overly realistic and almost documentary-like attention to detail. Despite all the characters behaving exactly like how non-movie people do and a perfectly reasonable approach towards apocalyptic scenarios, this film never lost that sense of drama and humanness.  Be it Matt Damon trying to give his daughter a childhood while trying to keep her alive or Marion Cotillard's pathos towards her kidnappers.

9. The Guard:  The best black comedy of the year, this film stars a foul-mouthed, racist but surprisingly smart Irish cop (Brendan Gleeson) and a preppy, straitlaced FBI agent (Don Cheadle) who have revived the buddy-cop genre (like it could ever die!).  I also loved how this film so rightly points out how the proliferation of American pop culture has affected our perceptions of crime and investigation.  Whenever Don Cheadle introduced himself as a Special Agent with the FBI, people knowingly say, "ah, Behavioral Science Unit".  

I'd have done the same.

8.  X-Men: First Class: The Wolverine is going to have some serious competition for Hottest Mutant of the Year Award. Michael Fassbender's animal MAGNETISM (sorry, I had to)  with James McAvoy's charm have revived a series that everybody had pronounced dead.  While it may not be the best X-Men film we've seen, I'm very much looking forward to the next installment.

7.  Bridesmaids: One of the dark horses of the year,  Bridesmaids was a smart, funny film that despite targeting the female demographic, did not reinforce stereotypes. Is it the best ever film ever made? Probably not, but it's a good start.  If nothing else, it might make Hollywood desist from making pandering films like The Help.

6.  Source Code:  You'd think that watching the same 8-minute clip 20 times is going to get boring.  You'd think that a sci-fi film with time travel and alternate time lines is bound to be full of plot holes. But surprisingly, this film worked.  It was gripping, and will have you thinking about it even days later. If that isn't the mark of a good sci-fi film, then I don't know what is.

5.  Attack the Block:  It hasn't been called the District 9 of 2011 for nothing.  As much of a social and political commentary as it is an action film about alien invasion,  Attack the Block managed to be funny, scary and touching.  After monumental flops like Cowboys & Aliens and World Invasion: Los Angeles, it is heartening that a plucky little film showed the big studios how the alien invasion genre is done.  And with so much attitude.

4.  Moneyball:  I've watched a dozen movies about baseball, but that game is freakin confounding. That said, Moneyball was a surprisingly non-melodramatic but brilliant sports film.  This is one of the few movies where the focus was not on the players or even the coaches.  The general manager, who treats players like they're cattle; the scouts and analysts who build the team and see each player as merely a bundle of strengths and weaknesses-- they're the focus. What this film lacks in terms of training montages, it more than makes up for in gripping sequences where players are bought and sold in the matter of minutes. And Brad Pitt? Also (surprisingly) brilliant.  

3.  Rango:  Right from the start, Rango immerses you in this surreal, almost dream-like landscape.  It tells the story of a small village of animals in the Mojave desert, struggling to make ends meet with their dwindling water source and an administration that callously controls this water source for personal gain.  This hilarious and fairy-tale like animated film seamlessly brings together diverse elements like spaghetti westerns, cowboy motifs, mythology, mariachi owls and the economic recession. And Johnny Depp's Jack Sparrowesque character was not annoying for the first time in years.

2.  Paul:  Nobody makes fun of the nerds anymore except in an affectionate way.  Keeping with that trend, comic duo Simon Pegg and Nick Frost return as two English sci-fi nerds with a deep interest in UFO-logy. Like any decent film by nerds for nerds, it begins at the San Diego Comic Con and takes us on a proper road trip across America. Also on the journey are a young earth creationist (it IS America, after all) and a foul-mouthed, Reese's Pieces loving alien trying to phone home ("Why does everybody assume that I want to probe their anus? Am I harvesting farts? How much can I learn from an ass?"). 

1.  Midnight in Paris:  It isn't often that a top ten of the year list also has a movie that made it to one's all-time favourite list, but Woody Allen did it again. With his wonderfully nostalgic portrayal of '20s Paris, he confronts and comforts the Walter Mitty in all of us.  You say is it merely a confection?  Well, all I can say is, the wisest thoughts I've ever had have been over a particularly good macaron or cheesecake. 

BONUS

Ryan Gosling in Drive/ The Ides of March:  Enough time and space has been dedicated to Ryan Gosling's photoshopped looking abs. Most cant believe that this suave hottie was the awkward man in love with a doll in Lars and the Real Girl.  While Crazy Stupid Love shamelessly exploited his sheer yumminess, Gosling managed to stand himself apart from mere eye candy with his intense performances in Drive and The Ides of March. 

MIDNIGHT IN PARIS (2011)

Who hasn’t dreamed of walking along the Canal Saint-Martin with a charming companion, sometime during the 40s? Obviously, it will be raining and a lone busker will be playing an appropriate tune on his accordion. The charming companion (who is a secret agent working to bring down the Vichy Regime) will then take off his smart jacket and drape it on my shoulders and then whisp… er, ahem… what was I talking about? Ah yes, nostalgia.

We are all guilty of wishing we lived in a different era, often because they are imagined to be a simpler or better time (for me, it’s a toss-up between candy-stripers and flappers). But it is only because we are fairly confident that we cannot actually be transported back to that time. Deep down, all of us escapists and romantics know that our nostalgia is nothing but a fear of the vague uncertainty of the future. Let’s face it: reality can be awfully depressing and the present is always the worst time to be born, but indoor plumbing, antibiotics, equal rights and the internet make life sweet.

However, it takes a special kind of artist and fellow romantic like Woody Allen to desist from being cynical about such nostalgia-seekers. Only he would think to remind us that even the greatest minds of history were dissatisfied with their times and that it is okay to dream of a better yesterday.

Owen Wilson plays a self-avowed Hollywood hack trying his hand at writing a real piece of literature: a novel about a man who works in a nostalgia shop. He visits Paris with his fiancee, Rachel McAdams and her staunchly Republican family and he is swept away by the small cafes where, presumably, intellectuals hold forth over bottles of cheap wine, romantic garrets where tormented artists ought to live and gramophone records with a story. His fiancee on the other hand, is all set to settle down in a swanky Malibu condo and thinks that rain is something that gets you wet and miserable and destroys those gorgeous pumps. After a small disagreement with her, he ends up walking along a cobbled street, when the clock strikes twelve and a 1920s era Rolls Royce pulls up and the passengers invite him to a party. It isn’t any old party: it’s a party for Jean Cocteau and the guests are Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.

Audacious? Absolutely. Silly? Not even for a second.

At some point in the movie, Gertrude Stein says that writers cannot be defeatist. It is their job to lift the reader from the crushing depression of reality and Woody does this marvellously: this film encapsulates all the virtues from his greatest works. The whimsy of The Purple Rose of Cairo, the wit of Manhattan, the cheekiness of Mighty Aphrodite and the overwhelming joy of Everyone Says I Love You (which, coincidentally(?), happen to be all my favourite works of his).

If Woody Allen stopped making movies tomorrow, this film would be a fitting epilogue to his oeuvre. Owen Wilson is just a young, less neurotic Woody circa Manhattan, with a soupcon of the wistfulness of Mia Farrow circa The Purple Rose of Cairo.

There is a joy and a passion in devotional works that are beyond compare. “Love” seems like such a shallow emotion in comparison. And what can one revere more than a city? Books and works of art simply cannot hope to compete with a city; even a mere street or alleyway is bursting with so much life, Woody says. And right there is the mantra to every Woody Allen movie ever made: he never has the arrogance to compete with or even simplify a city to a formula. He just makes devotional works to sing a city’s praise and meld with its cultural ethos. That’s what any artist worth his or her salt did: be it Vermeer’s view of Delft, Edith Piaf singing about the skies of Paris or Billy Joel’s state of mind. Cities are more than just a personality; they are deities. Which is why we worship them, curse them when it rains, curse them when it doesn’t rain, defend them strenuously when foreigners dare to curse them and we are haplessly bound to them.

Thanks to Woody, I know I’m going to be terribly disappointed when I visit New York and hear no jazz background number to accompany my stroll down a street in Manhattan.

Bottom line? You wont be able to hate this movie. I encourage you to try, but you will fail. You may not love it as much as I did, but that’s only because I suspect Woody peeked into my secret journal (which totally does not exist) where I’ve specifically stated that the world needs more movies like The Purple Rose of Cairo and that if I had a time machine, I’d head straight to the 20s. You may dismiss this film as a confection: delightful, but not satiating. I disagree. The sparkling wit and humour that one has come to expect from a Woody Allen film never took away from the depth of the dialogue. It gave every single cameo relevance, rather than rendering them into mere crowd-pleasers. Despite having a rather bold story that takes suspension of disbelief to a completely different level, he masterfully weaved the many themes together to create a very realistic fantasy. Add to that the fact that the cast was perfectly chosen and that even the most dislikable characters brought substance to the film (as opposed to existing solely as foils to the protagonist), that what you have here is a film that is wise and will remain ever-watchable.

After a long line of forgettable films, the inimitable Woody Allen is back.