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dir: Michael Haneke
Maybe if I loved you a little bit more, then everything would be okay
That guy, what do they call him? Oh yeah, the Grim Reaper.

As if life itself isn’t enough of a reminder of it, this movie reminds us why the Reaper is always preceded by the adjective ‘Grim’.

We live our lives knowing that they will end, but, to function every day, to find meaning in the little things, we have to push that thought and its attendant fear out of our minds. I’m not pretending I came up with the Denial of Death concept, or that I’m Ernest Becker. I wish. Things I’d do with all those royalties.

But we know, we know. Everyone one of us, everyone we know, who we love or hate, all of us go into that great oblivion, and thinking about it too much crushes us.

So we watch a film about two seniors, Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) and Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant), people who’ve lived fulfilling and meaningful lives together, who’ve aged the way we all do, who still, somehow, thought the ‘end’, whatever form that would take, would somehow skip over them, at least for a while longer.

But ‘this’ is ‘it’. To be betrayed by one’s body despite not having done anything ‘wrong’. It is to be helpless in the face of mortality, like we all are, but still feel the inherent unfairness of it, because it’s always going to feel unfair.

Death is not unknown to me. People have died around me, through illness, through suicide, through old age. My parents, though, still live, thankfully, blessedly. They are the age of the two main characters here, and it was impossible to see the flick without thinking of them, and without thinking about their inevitable decline into helplessness and death, and how much I dread that for them.

Anne and Georges are upper-middle-class Parisians, both lovers of and experts in the field of music, both of an age that implies they’ve been together 50 or 60 years. They attend concerts and live their fussy lives in the way we’d all aspire to at their age. When they come back from the piano concerto of one of Anne’s protégés, the door to their apartment has been crudely jimmied open with a screwdriver. Their world has been rudely invaded, even though nothing’s been taken (yet).

But the ‘invader’ is already inside. Next morning, during breakfast, Anne has a strange moment of unresponsiveness, scaring Georges. He’s not sure what’s happened, or what to do, but we know, for a number of reasons, that it’s not going to be good.

Turns out it was a stroke. A mild stroke, but it reveals a more potentially serious problem, which gets operated on, with disastrous results.

What else can we do in the face of the person we share our life with becoming helpless? We look after them as best we can. But what do you do when you yourself are fairly aged and can barely look after yourself? You do the best you can to look after both of you. After all, why else would this film be called Amour?

This is a film which contains a specific circumstance, but it’s lived by millions of people, has been and will be ever more. The details and the ‘intruder’, the aspect of mortality that invades our lives and takes us down, but not before reducing us in every way possible, differ from what’s experienced by Anne and Georges, but all the same, we all know this story.

It’s the depiction of it that is most confronting, even though it’s not gilded in any way or minimised, downplayed. This film isn’t a story about a couple to whom ‘stuff’ or a plot happens and someone dies at the end: it’s about the journey towards that death, and the impact on the people who are experiencing it, being, in this case, a loving old couple.

It’s called Love, it’s called Amour, but it’s even, for much of it, about how little that love compensates or alleviates what they go through. Sure, love all you want, love as much as you can, but the horror of what Anne endures isn’t made that much easier even with the tender ministrations of Georges, or his loving ways.

dir: Steven Chbosky
Just for one day
I’m a romantic, but I’m also fairly cynical. I watch a lot of movies, a hell of a lot, as you can probably see from just scrolling down a bit. Most movies don’t move me. Most movies provoke little more than mild interest while their playing, and I sometimes get that curious sensation of walking out of a cinema or pressing stop on the Blu-Ray player or switching cable channels, and being unable to remember, for the life of me, what I just watched.

Few movies move me. The Perks of Being a Wallflower moved me, a lot.

Why do they keep making films and television shows about high school, about coming of age? Because those of us who survive it remember it our whole lives, and we’re always hoping for some way to go back and get it right.

My heart was breaking for Charlie (Logan Lerman) within minutes of the film starting, and then, for the rest of its duration, it kept rebuilding that heart meticulously before smashing it again and again. I felt so much for this character that I started finding it absurd that I was so moved by it.

I’m not so easily moved to tears, but some elements of the human condition appeal to me endlessly, and always will, I hope. Charlie is about to start high school in Pittsburgh, I think, in the early 90s, and he’s dreading it. He has a number of reasons, the main one being that he’s a wallflower, someone who feels they are perpetually on the outside, looking in.

He is terrified of spending school, the rest of his schooling, alone, and calculates the days remaining. As in, the days left until he can go to college.

To him, it looks like everyone else makes friendships effortlessly. They’re always laughing (other people are always happy when you’re stuck in this amber of social anxiety), and the majority of his interactions are with bullies, who don’t even have the decency to put any effort into their bored cruelties. They act as they act because school is an ecology and a hierarchy, and teenagers, after all, are the most conformist creatures of all, rarely rejecting the pushes and pulls they feel.

That’s not a fair thing to say, they’re all different, most of them are decent people already, but for many they have a long way to go before getting there, if at all. Charlie is a sweet kid, which makes his disaffection and his isolation all the more painful. There are people who should be outsiders, and isolated, because they’re horrible shitty people who bring misery to everyone near them, whereas Charlie is alone because he’s shy, sensitive, desperate, and all the other kids can smell it on him, and mock him for it.

He just longs, longs for friendship, for connection with the kids around him. Something like this has to be delicately done to avoid being mawkish or making the protagonist seem like a self-centred jerk, and the film manages that throughout. I would expect that the director ‘gets’ how important it is to tell Charlie’s story properly, since the same chap who wrote the novel directed the flick, and did a tremendous job sensitively bringing it to life.

The Tree of Death
dir: Nuri Bilge Ceylan

This is a remarkable film, a very long film, in which very little happens. It's about something fairly important, in that three car loads of gentlemen for most of the film's length are driving around the bleak landscape of Central Anatolia for an important reason, but that reason seems to be out of proportion with the journey they endure.

In essence it becomes less about a murder investigation and more about the men involved, even though we get the barest amount of information about them. And then they drive on and on.

As the film opens, there are three men we observe behind a window, chatting about stuff and laughing, and then one of them gets up and looks out the window. This takes a fair amount of time.

The next we see, after the titles, is a barren landscape in fading light, as a bunch of cars drive across, looking for something. It will be a long time for us and them before they find anything. More so for us.

What follows is a very naturalistic, very mundane police procedural, but don't for a second confuse it with a CSI: Turkey. It's not a forensic investigation or even an investigation. These chaps know who committed the crime, and the guilty are there with them as they drive around in their cars. In fact, there's not a scintilla of mystery to the proceedings. There's just cold hard reality.

Can there be beauty in the mundane? We regard 'beauty' as being something almost rare, or extraordinary, and it truly can be. But we make the distinction between something of surface glossiness and something possessing depth, at least I hope we do. It would seem inelegant or even inappropriate to describe this flick as a beautiful film, because there's nothing obviously beautiful about the set up or the realisation. It's also a very painstakingly slow film. When people in the flick do anything, they do all of it. There aren't a bunch of establishing shots or montage-like edits getting us anywhere, ever. When they need to drive somewhere, they drive the whole time there, and we're with them the whole time. As the sun sets on this fairly grim part of the world, it takes a long time setting. Much is made of the natural light used for much of the flick, and it really does help in making you feel not as an omniscient observer, but as someone who's actually there, having to endure the passage of time, and the petty disagreements and obstacles along with the other characters.

As for those characters, well, they're a strange bunch of people. They're not David Lynch strange, or riddled with quirks and tics as in a Wes Anderson movie; it's just that they seem like they're fully realised but banal characters who live this life and endure all its mundanity for reasons we're never going to find out and that we don't need to know. And we should already know this stuff, since we've been working with them for ages already.

dir: Asghar Farhadi
You've got to keep them separated
Simin (Leila Hatami) and Nader (Peyman Moaadi) are seeking a separation, a divorce, in other words. They plead their respective cases to the judge. The judge, in this case, is the camera. For five minutes they argue at each other through the ‘judge’, who keeps admonishing them for whatever they are trying or not trying to do.

They make their plaintive statements, in Nader’s case fairly passive-aggressive statements, to us, pleading for us to understand which one is in the right. The thing is, though, they are trying to use the law to get what they want: Simin doesn’t really want a divorce, she wants the whole family to leave Iran, so she wants custody of their daughter Termeh (Sarina Farhadi), to make Nader come with them to places unknown, but far away from here.

The judge’s voice says, with hidden menace, “What’s wrong with living here?” The question is left unanswered, because this is the place where answering honestly can fuck up far more than just your day. Especially for Iranian women.

This is Iran, and I can’t imagine the scenario in which a court grants a woman anything there, including an uncontested divorce. Nader won’t let go of Termeh, because he knows his wife will never leave Iran as long as Termeh stays with him. And Simin might as well be talking to statues, regardless of her determination, regardless of how right or wrong she may be.

This all sounds like too much drama, but it’s pitched at just the right human level. It’s not melodramatic or over the top, it’s not Kramer Vs Kramer Persian style mixed with Nineteen-Eighty-Four: it’s people with real emotions dealing with the bizarre Iranian legal system to get what they think they deserve.

But that’s the problem: to hope for satisfaction from such a legal system, any legal system, but especially this one, is to hope in vain. It’s not just the vicissitudes of the legal system at fault, but the aspects of people’s personalities and their actions that render people both right and wrong at the best and worst of times.

It’s impossible for those of us not living in Iran, and not that conversant with all the various complexities therein, to watch a flick like this without seeing it as an indictment of the oppressive regime they live under. Every Iranian flick, every flick that mentions Iran is unavoidably seen through that lens. It’s also the kind of place that jails and beats its directors and their families, as director Jafar Panahi found out several months ago, the poor bastard.

I try to sarcastically derive all my knowledge of people, political systems and places from movies, so all I know of Iran comes from films like the ones made by Jafar Panahi, Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and the graphic novels (and movie Persepolis) of Marjane Satrapi. It’s a limited perspective in some ways, because it means the sum and total of my impressions are derived from the views of upper-middle-class creative types with the skills and the contacts to dance the razor’s edge between creating art and pissing off the mullahs that would see them jailed and unemployed for the next twenty years.

In other words, if you don’t know from some source just how rich Iranian history is, and how fucked up Iranian society has been since the Revolution, you’re not listening hard enough, and elements of a film like A Separation will look like life on some alternate reality Earth.

dir: Martin Scorsese
Here's Time, making fools of us all
With delight, I watched this, with great delight in my heart.

If you’re reading this review, you know that I watch a lot of films, and a lot of them I even review. Those reviews, you would know, are to my benefit and to your detriment as a reader. I’m sorry about that. Really, I am. I wish I were a better reviewer; someone who could encapsulate succinctly and with wit what is great and what is less great about certain movies in this artistic medium I prize the most, after literature, puppetry and the accordion, of course. And I wish I could say it all without having to resort to the boring bullshit a billion other (paid) bunglers routinely trot out to justify their verbosity.

No, honestly, I wish I were a better reviewer, so that I could credibly explain why I loved Hugo so much, so that you, too, could feel the joy that I felt, and get a glimpse of how it felt to watch it. Yes, even cynical old me feels joy whilst watching a film, very rarely, but it happens. Aiming that high dooms any enterprise to failure, no doubt, but it should be perfectly obvious that failing at something doesn’t stop me from doing it. Au contraire, to get into the vernacular of it, au contraire, mes amis.

Hugo is based on The Invention of Hugo Cabret, by Brian Selznick, and it should come as no surprise that this film is about a boy called Hugo who lives in the Gare Montparnasse train station, in the 1930s. He doesn’t just hang out there, dodging the dogged and limping local constable (Sacha Baron Cohen), and trying to eke out a meagre existence by stealing: he literally lives within the walls and towers of the train station, keeping the clocks running on time.

dir: Lee Unkrich
He's an Intensive Care Bear
Yeah, I know, it’s hardly brand new fodder worthy of reflection and critique. But Pixar flicks are the pinnacle of the animated heap: every release is an event, they make more money than Jesus, and nobody does it better.

And I love their flicks with a passion, the kind of passion most other people reserve for quaint garden gnome collections or pointless sports results. Thus, reviewing their latest gift to us, the luddite, barely computer-literate, unwashed masses, is less of a necessity than an obligation.

Toy Story 3 is as great as any of the other flicks in the series. Ranking them is pointless. You could point out that yet again the technical expertise envelope has been pushed even further out, with computer-generated animation second to none, but that misses the point. These movies are beloved not because of the quality of the graphics, but because of the quality of the story-telling, and the deep nostalgia they inspire in adults.

Oh, yeah, and kids probably love them too. My three-year-old thought it was wonderful, but she’s just three, with a limited appreciation of the long history of cinematic animation and she barely knows anything of the seminal work of obscure Belgian animators from the 1930s who put together their cartoons with parchment, tallow candles and shadow puppets constructed from sheep stomachs and bandaged scabs.

My daughter just knows what she likes, and she likes these Toy Story movies. And she loved this third one possibly a bit more than the others, but to me they’re all part of a joyous continuum.

dir: Pou Soi Cheang
Look both ways when crossing the street, and then kiss your ass goodbye
There’s this thing about Hong Kong films: most of them aren’t good, and most of them are the same. The rare good ones, to people who don’t watch a lot of Hong Kong flicks, could be indistinguishable from the bad ones.

Actually, that’s probably not entirely true. The really bad ones usually have lots of annoying screaming, people eating snot and Stephen Chow pretending to laugh until food falls out of his mouth.

But good goddamn do they get it right when they get it right. The last of the contemporary HK directors that I considered worthy of following each and every project that came down the chute was Johnnie To, with his atmospheric and contemplative crime dramas. Now I have to look out for this chap, Soi Cheang, as well, because I haven’t seen something this good in a while.

The problem is that it won’t be easy to translate the ineffable ways in which this very slight, very moody, and virtually silent flick gets everything so right into a worthwhile film review. Of course, it’s never stopped me before, so it’s not going to stop me now, is it?

There’s this crew of people, four of them, and their job is to carry out contracts on selected targets. Yes, they’re assassins, but their job is not only to kill people, but to make it all look entirely like an accident, happenstance, a random and unfortunate occurrence.

Everyone knows their job, and more so they know how to look at a particular environment meticulously in order to figure out a sometimes incredibly complicated way to take someone out with what’s available to them, or the innocuous stuff they can inject into the environment to have the cumulative affect of snuffing out some poor triad boss’s lights.

They are led by Kwok-Fai, or Brain, as his team call him (Louis Koo), who is a very uptight but effective leader. He clinically observes every location until he can feel comfortable that he’s taken every variable into account. And then, after exhaustive reconnaissance and theorising, and only then, do they put their complicated plan into action.

Being meticulous, and with their objective being not only the ending of the target’s life, but the overarching requirement to make the deaths look like accidents, it’s not anywhere near as easy as just finding the right place to pull a trigger. These deaths are intricate works of art.

dir: Duncan Jones
Watch out for the giant circle, Sam
Moon is an absolute throwback, to a kinder, gentler, colder era of cinematic science fiction, and it wasn’t until this flick came along that we knew we needed it so much. I won’t go so far as to say this is an utterly brilliant flick, because there aren’t really any elements of tremendous originality or mind-blowing complexity at play. But it is, all the same, a tremendously good flick. Really, really good flick.

Of course, it will bore the hell out of you if you’re expecting explosions, gunfights or aliens bursting out of people’s chests.

Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is the sole occupant and operator of a mining facility some time in the future. This facility, surprisingly enough, happens to be on the moon. Earth’s moon. The world’s energy needs are being taken care of by this facility, which uses harvesters to extract helium-3 from the surface of the moon, which Sam sends them back at regular intervals. He does general maintenance, fix-it jobs the robots and automated parts of the facility can’t take care of, and drives out with a buggy to the harvesters to fix things that have gone wrong.