Jasper Sharp : Best Of Lists

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16
Jan

Easing into 2012 (and looking back, although not in anger…)

Happy New Year!

Yes, I know we’re already some way into it by now, but as you can probably guess by the date of my last post, I’ve not been too quick on updating this website of late. I’ve been so busy with other things, and not just Zipangu Fest; I’ve barely even really had time to think about promoting my last book, The Historical Dictionary of Japanese Cinema, yet, it has been out, I’m told, since October. I’ll be of course blogging and tweeting about any reviews as they come in, but for now the best I can really do is point you towards the publisher’s website and the info on this very site here in the Books section. I also aim to post a summary of all the reviews of Zipangu Fest 2011, similar to what I did with 2010′s inaugural Zipangu Fest, but really beyond that, I can’t promise I’m going to have much time to keep up with regular posting over the coming months.

I've not really mentioned it yet, but my new book Historical Dictionary of Japanese Cinema has been out since last October.

I also feel a bit remiss that I’ve not had time to share my ‘Best of 2011’ lists with anyone yet. I’ve always been of the opinion that it’s worth holding back on such things till the year in question is actually over, rather than trying to get in there first, say at the beginning of December. Due to print publishing deadlines, I had to get my top 5 for Sight & Sound in the midst of an extremely busy November. Hopefully my Midnight Eye top 10 will be a little more meaningful when it goes up in the next week or so, because I’ve had a little more time to reflect on things. I should also take time to mention now, as it cannot have escaped the notice of Midnight Eye fans, that the site remained in a state of suspended animation for much of 2011, and some might even have suspected that we were thinking of pulling the plug. Well, you’ll be happy to hear that there’s some heavy technical tinkering going on behind the scenes and Midnight Eye should be back in action some time in 2012 in a new and improved version. In the meantime, Tom and my ‘Best ofs’ will be appearing on the Midnight Eye facebook page, which is here, if you haven’t discovered it yet.

What with my Sight and Sound Top 5 and my forthcoming list for the Midnight Eye facebook page, I don’t think there’s much point in going over the same ground here at the moment. I think anyway, that my favourites from Japan are already pretty obvious when you look at the programme for Zipangu Fest 2011, even though we haven’t got the kind of budget to pay the major studios for the bigger films (not that bigger equates to better, of course…), so there might be a few others in my final list. And I should add, that like the previous year, I simply didn’t see that many new films in the cinema. Anyway, you can get an idea of my general feelings about ‘Best of’ lists if you look at my posts from 2009 and 2010 .

My best screening of last year, that's for sure, even if the film is almost 30 years old.

I think the best use for my look back at 2011 here is to talk about the kind of events that really stood out, about the kind of films and viewing experiences that others might have missed, rather than try and cover everything of note. In this respect, the definite high point of last year was discovering Dance Craze at Bradford Film Festival’s Widescreen Weekend last April (see my original post), screened for the first time in decades in the format in which is was meant to be seen, in 70mm on a big, big, big screen. As well as celebrating one of the greatest forms of music that this country has ever produced, 2 Tone Ska, it also marks a historical landmark in which black and white Britons first started playing on stage together on an equal footing. Coupled with it’s technical virtues, this film should be celebrated as a landmark of British cultural history, not lying unwatched on a faded 70mm print, and I pray that one bloody day before too long, someone is going to take the plunge and get this film back in circulation to be appreciated by modern audiences, and not just leave solitary voices like my own to sing its praises.

Words such as ‘culture’, ‘heritage’ and ‘legacy’ are going to come up for considerable scrutiny in the year of the London 2012 Olympics. Given how good British films were last year, there’s a particularly bitter irony to the Tory Government’s decision to scrap the UK Film Council and slash funding for filmmakers without a proven track record of box-office smashes behind them and to only make commercial films. David Cameron’s comments last week are so misguided, naïve, and lets face it, just plain idiotic, that it hardly calls for me to add to the throng of voices from the more culturally aware who have already picked them apart – I can’t say it any better than Charlie Brooker has already done, in his Guardian article “How to save the British film industry, David Cameron style” published yesterday, Sunday 15 January.

Endless choices for the British cinema-goer over the coming years, as long as it's tomato soup. A scene from one of last year's finest, We Need to Talk About Kevin, from one of our best filmmakers, Lynne Ramsay, who in Cameron's Britain probably wouldn't have a job.

Lets remember 2011 instead as a final flourish for the British film industry in which a variety of filmmaking talent nurtured under the very environment that the Tories have vowed to discard gave the world a variety of works whose quality was just as notable as its diversity. There was the success of the middlebrow Oscar-baiting heritage piece The King’s Speech at both the awards ceremonies and the box office; the surprise Summer hit of the foul-mouthed, teen-oriented TV tie-in The Inbetweeners; more challenging, critically-acclaimed though less commercially-minded quality auteur work such as Steve McQueen’s Shame, Terence Davies’ The Deep Blue Sea, Paddy Considine’s Tyrannosaur and Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights; some very British international co-productions like Tomas Alfredson’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Cary Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre and Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin; Asif Kapadia’s mass-appeal documentary Senna; international crossover cult hits including Richard Ayoade’s Submarine, Ben Wheatley’s Kill List and Joe Cornish’s Attack the Block; and last but by no means least, Mark Cousins’ monumental The Story of Film: An Odyssey series, which, for all the quibbles one might raise about its content and Cousins’ delivery, was both hugely ambitious and boasts a cultural value that will be felt for years to come, if only because of its raising the game for future TV documentary serials and proving you don’t have to play to the lowest common denominator to be popular.

Is this the kind of film you want to watch, Daily Mail readers? Because that's what's going to happen! One of last year's most commercial films from the UK.

I list all these films and apologise for any I might have overlooked, because we’re probably not going to see the likes of such a vintage year for some time now. I can’t claim I’ve seen all (or even most) of these films, but that’s not the point – many of these titles have travelled across international borders and helped in their own way in boosting Britain’s cultural profile, and more than paid their way in the process, as have so many filmmakers and performers who have made their name in similar productions that have benefited from state funding in the preceding years. No, if there’s any problem with the British film industry, it is embodied by Andrew Haigh’s low-budget indie feature Weekend, which won critical plaudits among all who saw it as well as a number of prizes at foreign festivals – yet which could barely find a screen to play on among the swathes of ‘commercial’ crap such as Cowboys and Aliens that our dear leader would clearly rather we be watching in this country.

Who decides what we watch in this country? Critics, censors, politicans? No, foreign-owned distribution chains, meaning the odds are firmly stacked against well-regarded indie films such as the Nottingham-set Weekend.

I’ve still got a few more things to say about our last year in films, but I’ll leave it for another day. I’ll just end this post by stating the obvious. It takes years and years to build up cultural and educational organisations and institutions, be they libraries, university courses, film-financing bodies or filmmakers themselves. Pulling the plug to save what in proportional terms amounts to a tiny percentage of our national expenditure in comparison with the amount lost through unpaid taxes from multinationals or bailing out the banks is just so short-sighted, because it takes a lot more money to build up the levels of expertise back again to where they were. Let’s pray that this current government actually takes some time to think about these cultural acts of vandalism instead of just trying to come up with dramatic headlines to please Middle England, before the rot becomes irreversible.

Posted at 12:55 on 16 January 2012

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14
Dec

Best Of Lists, Step Up 3D and The Christmas Party

Another year grinds torpidly to its bathetic conclusion, and the internet is already bulging at the seams with the traditional seasonal self-indulgence as various critics and aficionados such as myself flag up their top film picks of 2010. Forgive me if you were expecting even more of the same here, but my selection for Sight and Sound’s annual canvas of its contributors, 2010: The year in review, can already be already found online, while the Midnight Eye round-ups should be up for your perusal, fashionably later than most of our fellow movie websites, sometime in January. Meanwhile I’m faced with my usual dilemma of whether to try and tailor my selections according to the specific readership of each, or just cut and paste directly. One thing is sure – there’s no real need to come up with another variation on my selections here.

Before I continue, I’d also like to point out that this is not intended as any sort of end-of-year post. Things have been relatively quiet on this site while I’ve waited for the dust to settle down after Zipangu Fest, but I haven’t forgotten that I’ve plenty more to say on Jake West’s wonderful Video Nasties documentary and the other DVDs of Japanese experimental animation released by CALF.

Step Up 3D - maybe not the "quality" pic of 2010, but hey, it was fun!

Anyway, the primary purpose of this piece was basically to point you towards the Sight and Sound list, but I’d also like to use this opportunity to explain one of the more seemingly eccentric among my own choices, Step Up 3D. I’ll happily concede that this was not a “good” film in the way that Citizen Kane or, to cite a more current example, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (so I’m told), are “good” films. My criteria for mentioning it were twofold. Firstly, while I think 2010 was generally a pretty unexciting year for cinema, the most significant aspect of it was the sheer volume of 3D releases and cumulative their box office share, a phenomenon that, prompted in no small measure by the enormous pop-cultural clout of Avatar, I attempted to track in some detail in a number of posts earlier this year. Look, for example, at the bewilderingly high returns of Resident Evil:Afterlife, or the budget-for-box-office profitability of StreetDance 3D and it is clear this is not something that’s going to go away in 2011. Of the numerous such titles I made it my business to go out and see, I deemed this title the most successful in its innovative use of the format.

I think the Chicago Tribune’s critic Michael Phillips best sums up my feelings when he describes it in his review as “a bit like watching a CinemaScope musical from the early 1950s but front to back rather than side to side, i.e., turned at a 90-degree angle.” Yes, the story had its loopholes, I won’t deny it, as did StreetDance 3D, Piranha 3D and lets face it, Avatar itself. And the characters were unbelievable and wafer thin. But putting all cynicism aside, for me the pure brio of scenes such as the impromptu Fred Astaire homage that came about midway through, whose rendering via a lengthy fluid one-take tracking shot provided a perfect showcase for this newly possible exploitation of screen depth, were as rousing and magical as, say, the opening reel of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Sadly, you’ll have to take my word for this if you want to catch up on the film “flat” at home, but for me it nevertheless provided a perfect antidote not only to the migraine-inducing edits of Cameron’s film, but also the soporific “contemplative” static long-shots so beloved of practitioners of a certain strain of international arthouse cinema that became referred to as “slow cinema” following Nick James’ provocative “Passive Aggressive” editorial in the April edition of Sight and Sound that appeared to call time on this tradition, some of which is excepted here. I don’t agree with everything James says, and it’s clear he doesn’t either, but at the same time, one has to admit he has a point…

The rekindled vogue for 3D has managed to avoid much in the way of serious analysis by magazines such as Sight and Sound, no doubt due to its exploitation primarily by certain forms of quite brazenly entertainment-oriented productions thus far, allowing the misapprehension to set in that it is only suitable for such films. Twaddle, I say! Imagine how a Mizoguchi film might look if he’d been able to go down this route. Lets see how our more inventive auteurs like Werner Herzog or Wim Wenders (Go! Go! Gaspar Noe!) make use of the added dimensions before we pronounce the technology’s latest incarnations dead in its infancy.

StreetDance 3D - a pretty good use of screen space.

My candid acknowledgement of the pleasures inherent in the cheesier end of the cinematic spectrum was at least shared by one other contributor to the S&S poll, Hannah Patterson, who cited “sloping off alone to watch StreetDance 3D in a morning screening (dance movies, a guilty pleasure) and finding three others in the audience – all teenage boys – who proceeded to dance in the aisle throughout” as one of the movie-going highlights of her year. This somewhat echoes my experiences too, watching both StreetDance 3D and Step Up 3D during afternoon screenings at the Peckham Multiplex, sitting among exactly the same type of teenage audiences the films were aimed at, all responded viscerally to the physicality expressed onscreen. For someone whose movie-watching is largely confined to sitting in austere press screening rooms among other jaded note-scribbling critics or wading through copious screeners hunting out increasingly more elusive gems for to show at festivals, it was a refreshing experience, and rekindled those sparks of adolescent passion that had led me down my particular route of cinephilia in the first place.

The fact is cinema may well be viewed as an art form, or it may equally be viewed in terms of escapist fantasy, but whichever way you look at it, it is first and foremost an industry. What has began to trouble me over the past few years is the relative dearth of a younger generation of viewers inhabiting the same venues or festivals as I do, ready to take up the pen or the camera and keep this whole thing going into the future. I remember the first thing I did when I moved to London in 1989 at the age of 18 was to make a beeline straight to the Scala in Kings Cross, where I began educating myself with double bills of directors as diverse as Pasolini and Russ Meyer, or heading out in big groups when I was a student to the local arthouse cinema in Brighton to watch films as impenetrably erudite as Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books. Without getting too nostalgic about this, I’m wondering if this kind of audience is still there. Many of the venues for this kind of cinema aren’t any more. There might not have been any younger versions of myself at the screening of Step Up 3D either, but there were still people there at least, all having fun to boot.

They don't make them like this anymore... Prospero's Books

I guess I’m somewhat hampered by my London-centric viewpoint in all this. Cinema tickets in our capital are prohibitively expensive, and prices are only going to get a lot worse in the coming year with the Tory VAT rises. I can’t afford to go to the West End cinemas myself, which is why you’re more likely to find me in the Peckham Multiplex, where normal people can afford to treat cinema as a more habitual form of entertainment rather than need to save up for weeks to turn a trip to the Odeon Leicester Square into some sort of big night out. The number of films mentioned in the Sight and Sound poll provide ample proof that there’s a huge amount of titles worthy of further investigation, and I’d love to go and see them all, on a big screen, with a full audience, but I don’t know if most of them will play anywhere near me at a price I can afford. So for now I’m happy enough that films such as Step Up 3D and StreetDance 3D are out there getting people into cinemas and putting smiles on faces, fighting their respective corners amongst the numerous other avenues of entertainment that have arisen during the first decade of the twenty-first century that conspire to make film appreciation an atomised solitary experience rather than a communal one.

Talking of which, my opinions have also been solicited for another poll by Sight and Sound that will be appearing in the New Year – the top online videos of 2010. It’s an interesting indication perhaps of the role critics and curators are likely to play in the future. Rather than direct people to go and watch films that probably won’t be playing anywhere near them by the time they’ve heard about them, it is more like being the online visual equivalent of a DJ, or like curating ones own personal mini-film programme for people to enjoy in the privacy of their own homes; films that take as much of their meaning from the context in which they’re presented, the other titles they play alongside and the explanatory text that accompanies them.

Thanks to Adam Curtis for inviting me to The Office Party via his brilliantly pithy blog

So on that note I’d like to sign off with a link to Adam Curtis: The Medium and the Message on the BBC website (apologies to those readers outside of the UK who can’t access the films here). Documentary-maker Curtis’ various postings provide a masterclass in the savvy disinterment and dissection of long-forgotten news and documentary footage from the dim-yet-not-so-distant past in order to contextualise the present. Here’s one that particularly tickled my fanc as our new government strive to make this Christmas a particularly miserable one for students, public servants and much of the population at large alike - The Office Party from 1969. Not only a wonderful piece of social history, but just a damn amusing way to pass 30 minutes. Ho ho ho!

Posted at 12:26 on 14 December 2010

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14
Dec

On Annual ‘Best of’ Lists….

Sacha Gervasi's Anvil! The Story of Anvil

It’s that time of year again – Not only a dwindling number of shopping days till Christmas, but floods of annual “Best of…” lists sprouting up all over Facebook, specialist film websites, and the rest of the print and broadcast media, as well as a couple of solicitations for my own favourites. Anyway, the appearance last week of my top five films of 2009, published alongside numerous other international critics in the January issue of Sight & Sound (which for some reason has me based simultaneously in France and Japan – the reality of my actual existence in Southeast London is rather less exotic!), got me thinking a bit.

Henry Selick's Coraline

One thing I want to say about 2009 is that I saw a hell of a lot more films than I have for quite some time. Another thing I would add is that in general, the quality and diversity of what I managed to see was far higher than 2008, not only Japanese films but also those from other parts of the world, including mainstream Hollywood. Trying to whittle down the best into a mere five titles was quite problematic. For example, the rennaissance of the 3D format can be considered one of the most significant developments of the year, but while I was blown away by Pixar’s Up, I was only marginally less impressed by Coraline, a darker, smaller film, but also one which made great use of the aesthetic possibilities of working with an extra dimension to the screen (and I haven’t even had the chance to see James Cameron’s Avatar yet!) So, do I put both films in my top 5, or should I also recognise that there were some great works of an entirely different nature – hard-hitting documentaries such as Afghan Star or The Cove; edgy offerings from the farther flung reaches of world cinema, like Chile’s quite unforgettable Tony Manero, Russia’s Morphia or Egypt’s Heliopolis; noble arthouse titles like Michael Winterbottom’s Genova or Jane Campion’s Bright Star; genre fair like Nacho Vigalondo’s Time Crimes, Ben Wheatley’s Down Terrace or Buddy Giovinazzo’s Life is Hot in Cracktown; my top Japanese tips like Hirokazu Kore’eda’s Air Doll or Hajime Kadoi’s Vacation; punch-the-air Hollywood rollercoasters like District 9 or Drag Me to Hell; and what about the strong tide of Oscar hopefuls from earlier in the year that included Gus Van Sant’s Milk or Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire? Yes, there certainly were a lot of films out there in 2009.

Havana Marking's Afghan Star

There’s a few points I want to make about this. Firstly, as I’ve said, five films isn’t really enough to cover all the corners I’d like to have, so in my final Sight and Sound list several worthy titles got nudged aside to make room for others of a similar genre or tone. Secondly, there were a couple of titles which impressed me on an initial viewing, but I had the chance to catch a second time and were less impressed by. Thirdly, the atmosphere one catches a film in is pretty critical – if you’re surrounded by all the hubbub of a film festival, you’ll probably have a different view of a film than if you’re sitting in a near deserted press screening or watching a DVD screener for review purposes or, heaven forbid, you’ve actually paid to see it. Fourthly, I haven’t had a chance to see a lot of the more critically-lauded titles myself yet, like Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet, Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman or Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker. Fifthly, do I recommend films that others might have seen or will at least get a chance to see, or do I try and point people to more obscure titles? Who’s reading the list anyway? If I checklist an obscure Chinese indie like Panda Candy, will there be a distributor out there who’ll prick up their ears and look to see if it’s worth acquiring? Probably not… Will the average reader be able to track it down? Hmmm…. And finally, related to this, is the question of release dates. To take but one example, I saw Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In last year and already included it in 2008’s list, but it was only released in the UK this Spring. It was the same story with Laurent Cantet’s The Class, though I didn’t see it at a festival, but on DVD after its UK release this year, so included it in 2009’s list. Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata I caught during a press screening at the end of last year, though it was released in January, so by the time it came to the end of this year, it was almost a dim and distant memory, while Hirokazu Kore’eda’s Still Walking was released in Japan last year, when it also played London Film Festival, but is only getting a release next year in the UK – ditto for Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo on the Cliff. If I saw them last year, should I include them this year, or make room for more recent films and wait until next? For other more obscure titles, do I wait on the off-chance they get a broader release in the UK, or just include them anyway?

Hirokazu Kore'eda's Still Walking

You’ll have to buy Sight & Sound to see what I finally did plump for, or wait a few months to see my round-up of the year along with the other contributors for Midnight Eye – for the reasons I’ve given above, the lists will probably be fairly different. I’ve seen a lot of good titles since I originally submitted my Sight & Sound list in mid-November, including a whole pile at Thessaloniki, and perhaps by the end of the year I’ll have a different perspective on what was hot and what was not. All I will say is that I’m not going to confuse matters by adding a third list here on this website.

Nacho Vigalondo's Time Crimes

But the final point I would make is the same one that was made in the article accompanying the Sight & Sound list – there’s a vast amount of really good stuff out there at the moment, and individual critics can only go by what they saw, as well as being influenced by their own tastes and areas of expertise. The whole film market has changed vastly over the past ten years. There’s a lot more choice out there, and many titles come and go so quickly that by the time you’ve made up your mind to see them in the cinema, you’ve probably missed them, while converselty, within 6 months of the hype of the Oscars or Cannes, the bigger titles of the year might already be available for a fiver at HMV. It’s almost tragic.

Pablo Larrain's Tony Manero

In such an environment, the role of the professional film critic looks increasingly precarious. What should a major newspaper’s film editor choose to focus on when there’s upwards of ten films released every week and only space to cover a handful? The latest Harry Potter or Twilight film or an obscure Eastern European, Asian or South American title that probably won’t play outside of a single-screen in London? I can think of three Japanese films that got great reviews this year in the UK popular press – Tokyo Sonata, Departures and Love Exposure – but each got a very small release window, rarely more than a week and usually on only a handful of screens.

So in this context, the whole concept of an annual Top Ten has changed. Rather than representing a canon of titles that might be seen as classics in the future, they merely give a glimpse of what’s out there, and leave it to viewers to follow the advice of the critics they tend to agree with. It’s all a matter of personal taste after all. And best thing now out there is that you do have the chance to see these on imported DVDs, film festivals, Video on Demand sites etc. Critics now must serve a different role of instead of telling you what’s the best from a given week’s selection, to point you in the direction of what’s of interest in the swirling sea of images being produced all over the world.

Hajime Kadoi's Vacation

On a related note, I’m sure no one has failed to notice that we’re approaching the end of the first decade of the 21^st century. Mark Schilling has already published his fascinating survey of the Japanese industry’s fortunes in the Japan Times , which demonstrate a number of trends equally applicable to the UK market. I’ll probably be posting my own highlights of the past decade, Japanese and non-Japanese, both here and elsewhere. But, I think I’ll wait till the year’s out first, and I’ve had time to gain a bit more perspective on what the really significant trends of the noughties really were.

Posted at 10:24 on 14 December 2009

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