That was the year that was: Cinema

Sadly, due to increased committments in other fields, I saw far less cinema in 2007 than was the case in previous years. My intake of films peaked a couple of years ago, when I was presenting a fortnightly review segment on a friend's RRR program; since then a combination of work (which prohibits me attending most media screenings, which are usually held on mid-week mornings) and the wish to see more performances, has impacted on the number of films I saw in 2007, as the following figures will show you:

2002: 68 films
2003: 103 films
2004: 100 films
2005: 58 films
2006: 69 films
2007: 49 films

2003-2004 was when my film watching peaked, as you can see; and was also the worst possible year to ask me to help chose a DVD to watch: "Seen it, seen it, seen it, heard it was terrible,seen it..."

But enough about numbers; let's talk details...


The first cab of the rank is Au-delà de la haine, or Beyond Hatred, by director Oliver Mayreu, which screened in the 2007 Melbourne Queer Film Festival. In 2002, a young gay man, Francois Chenua, was brutally murdered by neo-Nazi skinheads in a regional French city. Rather than dwell upon the crime, Mayreu's film focused on the victim's family; and followed their attempts to understand and forgive the deprivations which warped the lives and souls of their son's killers. An austere, remarkable and deeply moving exploration of the traits that make us human. My favourite doco of 2007.



Another remarkable festival experience was the total brain-fuck of Ex-Drummer, by director Koen Mortier. A co-production between Belgium/The Netherlands/Italy/France, this was a brilliant yet bleak, confronting, beautiful and deeply disturbing film about class and contemporary culture set to a driving punk rock soundtrack, and boasting some truly exquisite cinematography. Some six months after catching it at the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) in August, I'm still not sure what to make of it, save that it was the single-most memorable film I saw in 2007.


Also seen at MIFF was the deranged and inventive Teeth, from US director Mitchell Lichtenstein. A cleverly observed horror-comedy that never settled for cliche or the easy way out; a refreshingly unique take on the classic male castration complex; a startling story of female empowerment via the myth of vagina dentata; and a wild ride that still doesn't have an Australian distributor yet, as far as I'm aware. Definitely one to track down if you get the chance.


Among the films I caught in general release, one of the real standouts was UK director Shane Meadows' superb This Is England, ostensibly about a skinhead gang being infiltrated by the National Front and the calamity this causes. This Is England was a remarkably delicate drama considering its robust characters; wonderfully acted and deftly told; and a film which never descended to sentimentality or cliche to get its point across. A work of rare truth; a subtle indictment of Thatcherism; and a chilling yet moving exploration of prejudice and despair.


Equally as affecting, yet worlds removed from This Is England, was John Carney's Once. It's rare to see a film which so perfectly captures the joy of creativity; the fraught, awkward, painful pleasure of bringing a new work of art into the world. It's equally rare to see a film about love with is so refreshingly free of mawkish cliche and sentinmentality. Told with paucity and restraint; and focussing on emotional honesty and truth instead of flashy cinematography or incidental detail, Once was without doubt my feel-good film of the year.


Finally, and most recently, I saw Atonement, only the second feature from talented British director Joe Wright, and a triumph. A period piece, a love story and a meditation upon the nature of fiction itself, it features spectacular cinematography, great acting, a concise script, and best of all, shows consideration of its audience's intelligence. As I wrote in an earlier post about the film, Wright handles the emotionally-fraught narrative with restraint and subtle flair; resulting in an accomplished work which I'm pleased to say is my number one film of the year.


There were, sadly, plenty of films I missed this year, most notably Dee McLachlan's acclaimed story of human trafficking, The Jammed; and many other films that were good, but not great (the Ian Curtis bio-pic Control, for instance; and the Australian period piece, Romulus, My Father) but of the 49 features I saw in 2007, it's the six films listed above that stayed with me the most, long after the house lights had come up and I'd left the cinema.


Then, of course, there were the films I wish I'd never seen in the first place...


Steven Soderburgh's The Good German was deeply disappointing; featuring miscast leads (Tobey McGuire seemed to be acting in a completely different film to everyone else); a hybrid style that aimed for film noir homage merged with contemporary sensibility, but which failed to gel; and a laboured plot that strove for convoluted but which failed to spark interest in its audience. Essentially, a giant exercise in self-indulgence that worked as an experiment, but nothing more.

Then there was the animated excess of 300. Zack Snider's ambitious epic about the Battle of Thermopylae in 480BC, when 300 Spartan soldiers mounted a suicide mission, guarding a narrow mountain pass against a million-strong army of invading Persians, was based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller. Apart from being simultaneously homoerotic and homophobic (see, straight boys? It's ok to ogle the flesh of muscular almost-naked Spartan warriors, because we've given you an offensively stereotyped, evil gay villain in the Persian king, Xerxes, on which to project all your discomfort and fear!) it was also tedious, lacking in dramatic tension, 3-dimensional characters and anything resembling a narrative arc.

And speaking of blockbuster crap, if nothing else,2007 was memorable as the year of the dreadful sequels. Spider-Man III suffered from too many villains, including the alien spider-suit that manifested Peter Parker/Spidey's darker traits in a ludicrous emo dance routine; and a frankly tired, two-dimensional plot. Pirates of the Carribean: At World's End jettisoned anything that was fun or exciting in the first film in its franchise in favour of bombast and hollow spectacle; and of The Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, the less said the better.

But have I learned my lesson, to avoid big-budget Hollywood excess in favour of arthouse, independent and foreign language screen experiences? Yes and no: I'm already looking forward to the new Batman movie later this year, as regular readers would know, as well as the screen adaptation of Sweeney Todd...

To conclude this post (which has taken way longer to write than intended; dammit, Ihave real work to do this afternoon) my cinematic diet was dominated by mainstream releases this year; perhaps a side effect of taking in so much theatre and visual art in other aspects of my life - more of which in the next post!