When one’s, ahem, job requires the watching of many films, it often feels like being a vulture perched on a very unlovely skip. Except you have full blown De Clerambault’s Syndrome and the garbage belongs to the person you stalk and adore (for the moment, anyway). There’s always stuff of consequence. For all the wailing and gnashing of teeth from the Hollywood sector about box-office apocalypse – all those tedious tirades against equally tedious remakes and sequels and plain bad ideas (Dukes Of Hazard, Fantastic Four – take your pick) – there were reasons to be cheerful...
1. Tarnation
Simultaneously an autobiographical cine-scrapbook, a boy’s heartbreaking love-letter to his mother and a screaming-comes-across-the-screen instant post-modern classic, Tarnation was assembled from family home-movies, tape-recordings, video-diaries, stark inter-titles and pop-culture fragments to create a cubist portrait of director Jonathan Caouette as a young man, reflected primarily through his relationship with his mentally-traumatised mother, Renee. Brilliant and breathtaking.
2. 2046
Wong Kar Wai’s elegiac emotional mystery was so sensual it feel like wet, warm breath against your neck. Or perhaps that was just from all the panting over the film’s indecent contingent of good looking birds.
3. Serenity
Timing can be everything. When Joss Whedon first brought the immortal Buffy into being, the world was not yet ready for the slayer – at least not as essayed by fembot Kristy Swanson at any rate. Fast-forward a couple of years and the noble comedy-horror failure becomes an ass-kicking blockbuster TV show. Serenity, Mr. Whedon’s fabulous new film played out the same scenario in reverse – a failed TV venture (Firefly) made luminous by transference to the superior medium of the big screen. Buffy fans had much cause for cheer. There was a good deal of happy overlap here – mock heroic dialogue worthy of Alexander Pope with a snarky po-mo spin, the right on post-feminist ogling of empowering female biomechanics, hell, Serenity even has a Dawn and a Willow. It’s Buffy in space. I rest my case.
4. Team America; World Police
While I have on occasion stumbled across fem/slash fiction where Lady Penelope pours herself into pink PVC and does things with the Rolls Royce Eros statuette that have surely never been tested in the factory’s safety checks, Gerry Anderson’s Supermarionation has never been utilized for puppet porn. Until now.
5. Somersault
So raw it’s practically fucking dripping down your face, this remarkable Australian feature just simmered with angst, sexuality and melancholy. That’s all my boxes ticked. Cate Shortland’s boozy, fucked-up coming-of-age drama was further enlivened by newcomer Abbie Cornish playing cinema’s most compelling Little Lost Slapper since a young Sam Morton donned a fur-coat and no knickers for Under The Skin.
6. The Edukators
Earnestness may often represent stupidity gone to college, but heaven knows, it’s hard to be anything other than stern and rather dull when valiantly struggling against the monolithic might of the bourgeoisie. Situationists, however, are the pie-throwing loveable clowns of Revolutionary Marxism and in Hans Weingartner’s oddly enthralling entertainment, they made for endearingly passionate protagonists despite the dogma.
7. Sideways
Between the cunning classroom satire of Election, the inverted manifest destiny fable About Schmidt and the delightfully perverse Citizen Ruth, it’s been evident for quite some time now that Alexander Payne is one wickedly smart writer and director. It transpires he’s been holding out. Craftily low-key, tartly bittersweet and divinely arch, Sideways was always a lock for official Unlikely Hip Movie Of Zero Five, but unlikely is something of a speciality with this filmmaker. It seems incredibly unlikely, for example, that anyone would care less about Paul Giamatti’s anti-hero, a tosser of quite staggering proportions. Dissatisfied teacher, epic wine snob, failed novelist, failed husband, he’s an absolute car-crash with a predilection for (gulp) golf, Barely Legal and self-loathing Eeyore-isms. From a distance, his picturesque tour of Californian wine country with Thomas Hayden Church’s has-been actor ought to be a damning depiction of male menopausal meltdown. And that’s just why we like it.
8. Kung Fu Hustle
It rocks! It chops! It belly-flops! Stephen Chow’s thrilling kung-fu comedy – a fandango of top-hatted gangsters, cartoonish lunacy and pounding action – was a summer blockbuster like no other. Supremely entertaining, giddy, anarchic, set into a '40s Shanghai slum. What’s not to like?
9. Dear Wendy
Thomas Vinterberg (Festen) directed this splendid displaced western from a script by madcap fellow Dane Lars von Trier, and on paper at least, Dear Wendy sounded suspiciously like a hipper, teenage Dogville, pondering such American conundrums as gun ownership, racial tensions and teen disaffection before reaching some predictably grim conclusions in a blistering Bonnie And Clyde Go To Waco finale. Then again, on paper, one might easily mistake a dashed-off synopsis of Wild Strawberries for Are We There Yet?
10. History Of Violence
There was nothing conspicuously Cronenbergian about A History Of Violence and it was quite confusing when video equipment didn’t spill forth from the wounds during gun battles. But in Viggo Morgenstern’s Liberty Valance-like duality, the Canadian director plenty of disquietude to be getting on with. Even the hottest marital sex scenes since Don’t Look Now were put in service of a seductively sinister portrait of masculinity.