2012 top ten and more

The old curse of living in interesting times befell me this year with a leg injury making me miss out MIFF MUFF and a few other smaller scale festivals. I managed to catch up with most of my MIFF choices through subsequent cinema and blu-ray releases and really grimace at having to miss it at the time as it would have been outstanding. Otherwise it was the year of not cult cinema but the cinema of cults with no less than three movies focussing on the effect of cult membership. In the era of CGI-heavy action, constantly enhanced 3D screening and ever soaring budgets a black and white, mostly silent comedy in 4X3 won the Oscar and the best superhero film was a found footage piece. The auteur stakes were spare with Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master competing (from what I was able to see) only with Sion Sonno's Himizu. Left this late as I need to see a few late release titles before making this list.

My top cinematic moment of the year, though, included one of the worst projected images I've seen for many a year (and at ACMI!) but I was happy going along with it as it was Goblin playing their score to Suspiria live. Sublime! Now they need to come back and do the same for Deep Red. And John Carpenter needs to come and play to Halloween and Prince of Darkness (I know I'm meant to say The Thing but I don't like that music as much  as those two. Sorry, I know it's Morricone...)








My top ten for this year is, I think, stronger than it has been for a fair whack of years. Here it is:

The Artist: Because it's clever, knows it but also knows it's meant to be fun. Not a history of silent cinema as much as a reminder of why it worked. Best seen with a full cinema.

Martha Marcy May Marlene: For starting as a severe indy piece and developing into a new kind of horror film. Like a current Eurohorror without the extreme violence.

Safety Not Guaranteed: Because it mashed a quirky indy with a buddy and a sci-fi and made them all work together. More non-schtick Aubrey Plaza, please.

Planet of Snail: A love story, an against-odds epic, a poetic film that works as poetry and it's also a documentary. Brilliant work. Still haunts me.

Chronicle: I forgave the tired found footage approach because this is the best superhero film outside of the best that embrace the comic aesthetic. Well played and well told.

The Master: New P.T. Anderson almost guaranteed to make the cut but this one shows why he's still going and going against the grain. He's an original who doesn't mind showing where he's come from. I like this one the more I think about it.

The Hunger Games: Suprised me completely. Thought it would be a soft centred copy of Battle Royale but it transcended its derivations to claim itself. Very good work.

Sound of My Voice: A cold and creepy indie that looks a million bucks but plays down where Cronenberg started. As with Martha Marcy May Marlene, this is a team to watch. There are three movies about cults and dark charisma in this list. Strange year for that....

Sightseers: Delicate balance between funny and humourlessly bleak. The teetering is a plus. Almost thinking of this as a savage parody of the Mike Leighs of the world.








Beberian Sound Studio: For being original about the power of cinema, choosing a fascinating era of it to do so and having the courage to plummet into territory usually only walked by David Lynch without once giving in to obvious Lynchian influence. Haunting.





Honourable mentions:

Beasts of the Southern Wild, Robot and Frank, Himizu, Shadow Dancer, Shame, Cosmopolis, A Separation, The Island President, Beer is Cheaper than Therapy, No, Searching for Sugar Man.

Catchup review: Martha Marcy May Marlene

Marcy May flees the weird cultish commune where she's been living and the pursuit of her by the others ends with a brief ineffectual confrontation in a diner. Free, she's on the payphone outside reversing the charges to her sister who turns up and collects her, carrying her back to a splendid huge lakeside house in the country. Marcy May is really Martha. She's in good hands now.

Martha doesn't tell her sister Lucy anything of the cult she was in, being persistently vague about where she has spent the previous two years. But we see and as we do we quickly get a sense of the structure of this film as it phases between the present life in Lucy's house and the previous one at the cult's farmhouse.

Her life there included constant degradation as the women were subject to the leader Patrick's charismatic divide and rule policy, an initiation involving rape which the women facilitate, some cruel mind games and finally home invasions and worse. They refer to themselves as a family to which anyone with a passing knowledge of the 60s will mentally add the name Manson.

So, good thing she's out. Well, although she began well by appearing chatty and involved in the life of her sister's house and marriage. Soon enough it becomes clear that whatever social skills she had before the cult she now has nothing but a series of guesses and they are all wrong. Her damage is profound, beyond the scope of the care of her increasingly alienated sister. Through a moment of weakness Martha betrays her new position to the cult.

That's as far as I'll go with the plot as, even though it's a slow boiler, there are no go areas for a reviewer beyond this point. But as well drawn as the plot is the worth of this film lies more in the constant psychological commerce taking place between characters in the new life and the past. Martha was so soured by her life in the cult and events they have engineered that she must flee but the normal world beyond the woods has become alien to her, a world of threats and filled shadows.

This is the creepiest film I've seen since Last year's Kill List but without need of the genre jumping virtuosity. Martha... presents one thing only but with such cold deliberation and a surprising grip on the elements of cinema and how they will serve that deliberation that it is unthinkable that, once accepting the premise and its initial development the viewer will not be shaken by the closing moments. This is a horror film, an undeclared horror film as it looks like it's going to be another severe indy piece like Winter's Bone. It starts there but then turns to its own course, going somewhere old by a completely new route. I have seldom witnessed such a sustained exercise of sheer unease, such constant dread as here. The house invasion scene and Marcy May's preparation of the new girl are lighted like Rembrandt paintings but play like real nightmares.

Elizabeth Olsen shows in this piece the sheer power and control that would make her complex turn in Liberal Arts so compelling. Here, her gentle beauty is a curtain of hell. As such she will continue to bear close watching.


PS - I saw this on dvd even though I'd wanted to see it at the cinema on release earlier this year. It came out before my injury but I just didn't get there. Now I wish I had seen it with an audience. I'm definitely getting my own copy.