10 – Prometheus
For months the hype was deafening, so perhaps Prometheus
was always destined to be a disappointing experience, but even if the film had
snuck in under the radar I'm sure plenty of viewers would have felt let down by
this shoddy and redundant Alien prequel. Ridley Scott's return to the series set out to explore the origins of the Space Jockey glimpsed in his 1979 film (a
sighting surely more effective because of the mystery surrounding it), but the
film's screenplay is a shocking mess that wastes a more than capable cast. From
an ambitious opening section that suggested an attempt to explore mankind's
genesis, Prometheus rapidly devolves into a series of grisly encounters and dull
chases through corridors, with the characters paying the price for stupid
decisions dictated by the screenwriters' half-considered whims. As I watched
the film's rickety foundations collapse in the tired, effects-driven climax, I
longed for a summer film with the intelligence, suspense and craft
of...well...Alien, but few people are capable of making films like that
anymore, least of all Ridley Scott.
9 – Albert Nobbs
Every actor has his or her passion project, the one story
they're desperate to tell, but what on earth motivated Glenn Close to spend
thirty years attempting to bring this tale to the screen? In Albert Nobbs she
plays the title character, a woman posing as a manservant in 19th
century Dublin. She dreams of owning a tobacco shop (we know this because she
starts muttering about it in every idle moment) and she also appears to have
vague dreams about marrying Mia Wasikowska. In truth, it's hard to know what exactly the perennially confused and tight-lipped Albert wants, and when a film has been
in development for three decades, one might expect the lead character to be a
little better defined. Ultimately, Close is overshadowed by Janet McTeer, who
gives a commendably barnstorming turn as a fellow woman-in-disguise who happens
to find work at the same establishment as Albert, while simultaneously making
us wonder if any men in Dublin at this time were really men. McTeer reveals her
secret to Albert and the audience by flashing her massive breasts in the film's
second funniest scene, pipped only by a later sequence in which the pair wander
clumsily out onto the streets wearing ludicrous dresses. I fear I may be making
this dreadfully misguided film sound a lot more entertaining than it is, but don't be
fooled. Aside from those brief comic highlights, it's a dreary and baffling picture.
8 – Seven Psychopaths
After making an impressive debut with the flawed but hugely
entertaining In Bruges, Martin McDonagh's Seven Psychopaths exposes all of his
weaknesses and few of his virtues. Like Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation, the film
is very much about its own construction, with Colin Farrell's boozy
screenwriter repeatedly getting sidetracked as he attempts to work on a script
called Seven Psychopaths, but it lacks Adaptation's organic or heartfelt qualities.
The film is built upon a series of cocky, rapid-fire gags but the impact of
McDonagh's often sharp dialogue is undermined by the nastiness of the film's
violence and a dismaying misogyny (poor Abbie Cornish, Olga Kurylenko and Gabourey Sidibe - all wasted) which is hardly excused by McDonagh spoofing his own inability to write
female characters. Seven Psychopaths continues to try and top itself scene on
scene with increasingly outlandish fantasy sequences and bloody confrontations,
but it never feels like more than a collection of underdeveloped ideas in a
self-consciously clever postmodern package; the kind of movie that belongs in
the late-1990s and feels very tired now. The smart and talented McDonagh is capable
of much better than this, and so is his cast, of whom only Christopher Walken
seems to know exactly what he's doing and why.
7 – Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
People asked if it was "too soon" for a film like
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which is built around the tragedy of 9/11,
but that wasn't the right question to ask. The question should have been
whether or not the film was good enough, smart enough, subtle enough to earn
the right to incorporate those real-life events into its narrative, and on
those terms it completely fails. The story involves a 9 year-old autistic boy
who attempts to make sense of his father's death in the World Trade Centre by
traversing New York on a quest to find the meaning behind the word
"Black", found in an envelope in his father's personal effects. All
of this is drawn from Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel, but to make sense of such a
ridiculous tale in a two-hour film would require a skill and sensitivity that appears to be far
beyond Stephen Daldry's capability. He milks every moment for mawkish effect,
as if determined to extract tears from the audience through sheer force, but because
every development feels so forced and phony, its emotional pull remains easily
resistible. Ultimately, however, it's the misuse of 9/11 that amplifies the
film's many flaws and turns a bad film into an offensive one. Extremely Loud
and Incredibly Close is the kind of film that needed to be handled with great tact – instead it's the kind of film that makes a
visual motif out of Tom Hanks falling from the burning towers in slow-motion.
6 – The Raven
The Raven begins with a potentially interesting idea: in the
last few days before his mysterious death, Edgar Allen Poe is forced to
investigate murders that have been inspired by his own writings. Unfortunately,
potentially interesting is as far as this idea goes, thanks to the lousy
execution by the consistently terrible James McTeague. Taking on a
role that really required a crazed Nicolas Cage-style energy to enliven the
whole production, John Cusack brings a dour seriousness to the film, which
makes the sight of him frantically running around and shouting
"EMILY!" at the top of his voice unintentionally amusing. Beneath the
Poe hook, The Raven is nothing more than a familiar serial killer tale, with
one nonsensical clue leading to another until the inevitable
"surprise" twist reveals the true villain of the piece as someone
both (a) entirely unsurprising and (b) entirely uninteresting. The Raven is a
cheap-looking production, from the bland sets and lighting to the poorly
conceived CGI blood that spurts unconvincingly across the screen throughout.
Given how fascinating Poe was in reality, there's something particularly
depressing about the appropriation of his image for such cack-handed,
straight-to-video fare as this.
5 – Rampart
A dirty LA Cop written by James Ellroy, a second
collaboration with the director who helped him win an Oscar nomination – it's
easy to see why Woody Harrelson jumped at the opportunity to play Dave "Date
Rape" Brown. He seems to be having a whale of a time at the centre of this
movie, but where's our reward for spending time in this loathsome character's
company? After his understated collaboration with Oren Moverman on The
Messenger, the first striking aspect of Rampart is how unrestrained everything
is. Both Harrelson's oversized performance and Moverman's unspeakably ugly
direction (canted angles, garish lighting, 360 pans, fish-eye lenses, the lot) are
constantly calling attention to themselves, but perhaps they're only attempting
to distract from the emptiness at the film's heart. Rampart fails as a
character study because its protagonist is an empty vessel and we gain no
insight into his behaviour for all of the shouting, womanising and vomiting we bear
witness to; and it fails as a drama because the murky plot grows less
interesting with every layer of corruption and every additional character.
Finally – mercifully – the film just ends in an abrupt manner that suggests
everyone involved realised they had wasted enough of our time already.
4 – Where Do We Go Now?
I suppose you have to give Nadine Labaki points for
ambition. After making a charming debut with the modestly scaled Caramel, the
Lebanese filmmaker's second feature is a lively musical comedy that
suggests sectarian conflict would become a thing of the past if women were in placed in charge. Sadly,
Labaki's reach has exceeded her grasp to an embarrassing degree, and Where do
We Go Now? is a excruciating failure. Set in a small, remote village, the film consists
of a series of wacky set-pieces through which the village's female inhabitants
hope to quell the religious tension driving its Christian and Muslim menfolk to
acts of tit-for-tat violence. The notions include, damaging the village's only
TV so they can't watch the news, drugging them into subservience with hash
cakes, creating fake miracles and even commandeering a troupe of travelling Ukrainian
strippers to keep them occupied. Labaki plays it all as broad as possible, but
every comic sequence hits the ground with a resounding thud and her treatment
of the thematically thorny subject matter is too glib
for the jarring segues into tragedy to work. This irksome film quickly becomes
almost intolerable, and even the appealing presence of Labaki on screen (the
one place she always seems comfortable) can't mitigate for such an accumulation
of disastrously misconceived ideas.
3 – 360
Positioned late in the year as a potential 2011 awards
contender, with a Toronto premiere and the London Film Festival's opening night
slot, 360 finally limped into UK cinemas this August having been quickly
forgotten by all the unfortunate souls who endured it. A preposterously tedious
and bloated update of Arthur Schnitzler's La Ronde (already immortalised
onscreen by Ophüls), Peter Morgan's screenplay traverses the globe to tell a
number of bland stories that occasionally cross paths with the kind of subtlety
that involves two characters actually driving around Vienna's Ringstraße to
reemphasise the circular nature of the narrative. The cast hardly seem engaged
by such mundane material and most of them sleepwalk their way through the
picture, with the exception being Ben Foster, who sweats up a
storm as a twitchy sex offender trying to resist temptation in the film's most
ludicrous segment. The filmmakers even seem to forget about Jude Law and Rachel
Weisz's unhappy marriage halfway through the picture, and who can blame them?
If you'd said ten years ago that City of God director Fernando Meirelles could
turn in a film as listless and hollow as this, few would have believed it, but
he is a man on a seemingly irrevocable downward slide. One can only hope that
360 is rock bottom.
2 – Ted
Seth McFarlane didn't tinker with a proven formula when he
made the transition from television to cinema this summer. Ted's blend of taboo
humour, pop culture references and non-sequiturs will be familiar to anyone who
has seen McFarlane's Family Guy, and the character of Ted himself (voiced by
McFarlane) even sounds like Peter Griffin. In fact, if often seems as if Ted
exists solely to house a number of gags that McFarlane couldn't get into his TV
shows, and so the film plays like a series of one-liners and references loosely
connected by a threadbare, unimaginative narrative. The fact that none of this is amusing (I
know humour is subjective, but the setup and delivery of many jokes here is
objectively bad) is one thing, but the most dispiriting aspect of Ted is how
cheap its humour is. The film trades in homophobia, misogyny and racism, and
while McFarlane may claim to be an equal opportunities offender, I think the
lack of satirical purpose or thoughtfulness behind his jokes (in comparison to that displayed by
Trey Parker and Matt Stone, for example) is extremely troubling. He attacks
gays, women and ethnic minorities for the same reason he randomly throws in
jokes about Brandon Routh or Taylor Lautner – not because he's
"brave" or "subversive" but because it's easy. Many
comedies are unfunny, but few are as mean-spirited and ugly as Ted.
1 – Project X
Party plans going awry are a staple of the teen comedy and
it seems Project X set out to be the last word on the matter. It begins with
three unpopular teens throwing a party intended to earn them the respect of
their peers, and it ends with widespread destruction, the event having quickly
spiralled out of control. That's about all there is to it, though, numerous
scenes of idiotic teenagers partying and getting drunk before they start to
destroy property; and if that doesn't sound unpleasant enough, consider the
fact that this is a "found footage" movie. Much of the footage is
shot by an offscreen character enlisted to record this momentous night, and the
rest is drawn from various mobile phones carried by the partygoers, but this unnecessary
and distracting contrivance is handled with astonishing incompetence. But the
most repellent aspect of Project X is its trio of leading characters, who are
astoundingly obnoxious and whose responsibility-free antics play out with
little or no consequences. The film has no wit, no charm, no humanity, no
narrative development, no point. Enduring 90 minutes at this party is a truly
hellish experience and one that makes me despair for America's youth if this is
the standard of entertainment being set for them. Project X opens with a fake apology aimed at
the residents of the neighbourhood we are about to see being ruined, but by the
end of the film I felt like the audience deserved a real apology.
Dishonourable mentions Coriolanus; The Dark Knight Rises; The
Descendants; Elles; Gambit; Grassroots; The Hunger Games; Love Crime; This Must
Be The Place; Trishna
