2001 a screen odyssey

Over-blown, over-rated and over here

The hype promises an unforgettable, intense, enchanting, spectacular, virtuoso, charming, bravura rollercoaster thrillfuckride of a movie. The film sucks. Here are the year’s worst offenders in terms of shameless over-reaching hyperbole:-

1 It’s never an auspicious sign when a film has to resort to letting its characters walk into walls in aid of a cheap laugh. ALMOST FAMOUS is that film. Cameron Crowe’s stupendously sanitised and twee account of touring with a rock band at the age of fifteen is notable for a demonically irritating ‘comic’ turn from Frances McDormand, an absolute void of a lead in Patrick Fugit, and rampant sexism paradoxically accompanied by puritanical coyness. As for the rock band on tour, their escapades of ‘excess’ remind you of an average bunch of first-years on a school trip.

2 PLANET OF THE APES – Many were dismayed, nay disturbed by the prospect of a remake of the accidental ’60s sci-fi classic, only to be heartened by the news that director Tim Burton was aboard the project. Surely his mischievous wit and visual craft could get it right? Unfortunately, his directorial stamp is barely visible in this travesty.

3 Passed to Spielberg after Stanley Kubrick popped his esteemed clogs, AI is by no means awful, but the headlong collision of directorial styles (Spielbergian super-sentiment versus the cold, analytical genius of Kubrick) is unsettling, making for a disappointing experience, not helped either by an excessive running time and a bullshit ending.

4 AMÉLIE, a froggy fable about a self-styled Diana Spencer ‘Queen of Hearts’ figure, was conceived by director Jean-Pierre Jeunet and co-writer Gullerme Laurent back in 1997. Then they sat down to write the thing on – wait for it – the day the 1998 World Cup started. Not just started, but started in their very own country, mere weeks before their fellow nationals became one of only seven elite nations ever to lift the beautiful golden trophy. We believe this says more about the film and the people who created it than any amount of abuse could ever convey.

5 MOULIN ROUGE, Baz Luhrmann’s exercise in style over substance, had its moments – most notably Jim Broadbent’s rendition of ‘Like a Virgin’ – but seemed suspiciously short on heart due to the relentless theatricality of it all. And as for Nicole Kidman’s watery, reedy singing voice – yuk.

Five you may have missed

As so often happens, smaller but thoroughly worthwhile films tend to receive blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cinema releases. Here are five you probably never caught up with this year, but should snap up on video wherever possible.

1 A widowed Japanese television producer uses an AUDITION to find a potential new wife. Unfortunately, she’s not all that she seems - in fact, she may even be a murderous psycho-bitch from hell. Miike Takashi’s unforgettable horror film is cinema at its most devastating and nightmarish.

2 GIRLFIGHT: a mixed-up teenage girl fights back against her father and lack of self-esteem to become an amateur boxer. While in many ways this is a very straightforward boxing movie in the Rocky tradition, Michelle Rodriguez’ brooding, volcanic central performance is easily the most memorable of the year.

3 DARK DAYS, Marc Singer’s documentary about a group of homeless people living in the subways under Manhattan, is full of compassion and respect, and while never losing sight of homelessness’s attendant horrors – showers in freezing water, endless rattling trains and omnipresent rats - neither is it mawkish or voyeuristic.

4 GINGER SNAPS: though it seemed an unlikely prospect, this resurrection of the werewolf movie is easily the best disaffected-teen flick of the year. A tale of menstruation and murderous rage, in which the dialogue crackles and the performances are terrific.

5 Predominantly a character-driven affair, Kenneth Lonergan’s directorial debut YOU CAN COUNT ON ME has Laura Linney as a neurotically sensible woman clinging to small-town certainties and her young son with considerable ferocity, and Mark Ruffalo as her aimless brother. Flawlessly acted: even the turn by Rory Culkin, Macaulay’s brother, is convincing.

Best Films

1 Darren Aranofsky’s REQUIEM FOR A DREAM, though it carries a grave mental-health warning and must be approached with extreme caution, stands alone as the most overpowering, hypnotic and affecting cinematic creation in living memory. Ten months down the line, neither of us has summoned up the strength of stomach required to sit through it a second time. A cautionary anti-heroin tale of Old Testament savagery, it accompanies two young lovers (Jared Leto and Jennifer Connolly) on a descent into the inferno of spiralling ‘utopiate’ dependency, while the former’s lonely widowed mother (Sara Goldfarb) succumbs to an equally horrific regime of valium and diet-pills in her isolated apartment. The result, euphemistically described by the director as ‘a trip to some sub-sub-basement of Hell’, is enough to put you off so much as going near a cup of coffee for months. Unnerving, to say the least, and utterly magnificent.

2 CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON – Ang Lee’s sublime marriage of doomed romance and martial artistry features inimitable Hong Kong stars Chow Yun Fat and Michelle Yeoh as martial masters in feudal China who become embroiled in the arranged marriage of a noble’s wayward daughter (Zhang Ziyi). Achingly beautiful, genuinely heartbreaking and visually wondrous, this is pure cinematic poetry throughout.

3 A new wave of extremely hardcore not-for-the-squeamish Japanese cinema could be seen as confirming every paranoid WW2-derived suspicion of inherent Japanese depravity ever harboured. Audition was a fine example, but BATTLE ROYALE virtually defied belief. Set in a futuristic Orwellian/fascist Japan, Takeshi ‘Beat’ Kitano stars as a psychopathic schoolteacher who consigns his forty-two schoolkids to a remote island, armed with weaponry according to his whims, and instructed to kill one another off until only one survives. Phenomenally enjoyable as twisted sport – if far too brutal for most tastes – this is truly unforgettable and perversely moving (!)

4 The spirit of JD Salinger’s Holden Caulfield lives and breathes through Terry Zwigoff’s GHOST WORLD, an adaptation of Daniel Clowes’ cult graphic novel of the same name. American Beauty starlet Thora Birch again shows massive potential as Enid, a cheerfully anti-everything teenage cynic who develops a deep friendship with a nerdy fortysomething obsessive blues collector, played by Steve Buscemi. As a life-affirming illustration of the extremely thin line that divides a cynic from a devout romantic, it takes some beating.

5 Taking a car-crash in Mexico city as its central point, director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s genre-defying AMORES PERROS is stunningly shot and edited, with each of its three narrative strands working wonderfully. As the dog-fighting scenes may hint, this is occasionally uncomfortable viewing, but infinitely more heartfelt and genuine than you could dare to hope.

Worst Films

1 BRIDGET JONES’ DIARY is now the fourth highest-grossing movie in Irish box-office history, to the eternal disgrace of Mna na hEireann (we can presume the majority of them were mna). An insufferably vile slice of self-absorption, it stars transplanted Texan Renee Zellweger as the eponymous heroine, who spends her time glugging chardonnay and fretting about her weight and surreptitiously enjoying chocolates and listening to shit music and wondering why all men are such bastards. As such, the immensity of the Jones’ phenomenon’s popularity is deeply, deeply disturbing. Did you know that it’s shifting more copies on video than Requiem For A Dream?

2 As patronising a chick-flick as the above, WHAT WOMEN WANT regurgitates every ‘men are from Mars, women are from Venus’ pop-pap-psychology cliche ever spouted. It stars Mel Gibson as the living, breathing definition of a sexist pig, given to arse-patting in the workplace, spouting smutty jokes and the like, until a bizarre electrical shock leaves him with the ability to ‘hear’ women’s thoughts. The latter, it transpires, rarely stray outside the realm of shopping and similar vacuous materialistic shite.

3 CHOCOLAT – best watched as part of a masochistic treble-header with the other two – inexplicably got nominated for an Oscar for Best Film. As the title hints, it’s about fucking chocolate, with Juliette Binoche putting in a grating central performance as a choc-manufacturer who distributes chocolates to the locals. It’s as thrilling as it sounds.

4 GLITTER ensures Mariah Carey’s place among the all-time greats and immortals of silver-screen history. Well, maybe not, but in true Showgirls tradition, it becomes an instant camp classic by virtue of its very awfulness. Mariah stars as a wannabe singer who encounters manipulative record company minions and music-vid directors yelling ‘I want to see more of her breasts!’ The film mightn’t have provoked her psychiatric breakdown, but it’s unlikely to have helped. Oh, and she sings.

5 While Bill and Ted had a goofy sort of stupid-dog charm, and Cheech and Chong could elicit the odd laugh if you were stoned enough, no substance on earth could be mind-altering enough to raise even a grim smile in the face of DUDE, WHERE’S MY CAR, a merry and comical tale about two ‘party-hearty dude’ who leer at women and their massive ‘hoo-hoos’. Makes you want to drive a fork through your feet.