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.

HRAFF Review: PLANET OF SNAIL

Young-Chan spends a lot of his spare time thinking about the universe. He imagines distant suns and remote lightless voids as well as glittering star fields. He often refers to himself as an astronaut. He talks of his life on another planet and that he is still learning to live on this one. This is understandable as, being completely blind and almost totally deaf, he probably should feel like a stranger in a strange land.

Young-Chan is tall and slender with delicate features and precise movements. Walking outside with his wife is like a picture imagined by Allejandro Jodorowsky. Soon-Ho is not much taller than a metre. She has to stand on a stool to do the dishes. When Young-Chan stands beside her at the sink he still towers over her. But when they walk outside together, guiding each other through air that glitters with snowflakes,  it's neither funny nor confronting: you're just too busy being fascinated.

On the surface of it this is a film about coping with disability. A little, and only a little, deeper into it reveals an absorbing exploration of the human mind and its hunger for discovery. Young-Chin is a patient thinker and forms his thoughts with the care of a calligrapher, letter by letter, word by word, as he builds his description of the planet where he has landed.

Planet of Snail invites us into Young-Chan's investigations and allows us a pretty workable idea of what it's like to be him. Because of her height, Soon-Ho can't replace the failed circular fluro light in the bedroom. She has to guide Young-Chan through each movement, desrcibing what he must do next to install and secure the bulb, communicating through tactile signing where she seems to play his fingers like typewriter keys. Between the two of them the job is done and the light which means nothing to him is restored. The sequence is extraordinary not because it's a gruelling step by step climb through failure but because its purpose is to show the harmony struck between this pair of people who had considered themselves irredeemably lonely before meeting each other.

Keeping the focus on both Young-Chan's constant discovery and the essential weave of experience he and Soon-Ho must maintain results in a constantly rewarding film that, though it includes it, never becomes a plea to its audience's sympathy. Young-Chan surprises us early on with his voice. He was neither blind nor deaf from birth and has developed an eloquence equal to his physical elegance. The narration he shares with Soon-Ho swings between an authentic poetry and hard pragmatism that act as effective counterweights and prevent a progress-murdering slump either way.

On that last point, if you want disabled people on screen to be seen for themselves rather than through counterproductive pity, show them arguing. A social visit includes an amiable spat between Young-Chan and his similarly deaf-blind childhood friend. This is waged in spoken taunts and rejoinders which neither can hear but everybody else can. There is a necessary pause each time between the message and its delivery, each one knowing that the point scored has met with applause, just not how much.

Touch is the more powerful of Young-Chan's two languages as it is the one that he has mastered more than anyone hearing and sighted ever does. When reaching into the rain through the window of his flat he even closes his eyes, perhaps in memory of what that once meant to him. Same when he literally hugs a knotty old tree. It's almost worship. When Soon-Ho wants to join in he jokes that it would be like a threesome. He's smiling but it's clear what he means. And then, finally, he floats in the sea, loosely tethered to safety by a rope to shore we understand why we have been listening to the dull rush of underwater sounds throughout the film and also that here, more than in any other moment, he resumes the role of astronaut.