SOME GOOD FILMS FROM 2005, Part I;

Ideally, I’d like to write about films on this weblog a lot more often than I do, but I still find film comparatively difficult to write about in comparison to music – for one thing, a good feature film is an involved and complex beast which I feel needs a pretty lengthy exploration to really do it justice, and for another thing, ‘film writing’ doesn’t really allow too well for the various shortcuts of comparisons, wise-ass remarks, raw enthusiasm etc. that decades of popular music writing convention has helped us to develop / get away with.

But anyway, enough excuses. I’ve spent this year living within walking distance of an extremely good cinema, and as such have seen tons of films both new and old that are worth mentioning, so I’ll take you through a round-up of some of them that you might have missed;

Surprisingly, one of my favourites was probably Jean-Luc Godard’s new film Notre Musique. I’ve been bringing myself up to speed with the genius of Godard’s ‘60s films recently, but I’m still entirely unfamiliar with what he’s been up to for the past 30 years, so I can’t really say whether this was a return to form or just another addition to an excellent body of work, but either way it struck me as one of the best films of the year. As ever with Godard, it’s so loaded with intellectual reference-points and obtuse cinematic tricks that it makes me feel stupid, but that’s a feeling I’ve grown to quite enjoy from his films, and there are still few other filmmakers around with the guts to really hit the audience with such direct questions and challenges. Notre Musique is as powerful an exploration of the grim realities of the world as it stands in 2005 as ‘Weekend’ was back in 1969 – less epic and confrontational maybe, but don’t write this old dog off yet, he’s still smarter, angrier and more on point than subsequent generations of lazy film school graduates will ever be.

Speaking of which , we come to another one of my favourites from an archetypal lazy film school graduate, Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Skin. I’ve long been a fan of Araki’s much maligned ‘teenage apocalypse’ films (‘Totally Fucked Up’, ‘The Doomed Generation’, ‘Nowhere’), and have been disappointed whenever critics and audiences have missed the point and written them off as puerile slacker trash. Thus it’s a fantastic feeling to see Araki returning with a film that’s ‘developed’ and ‘mature’ enough to gain widespread recognition without compromising either the lost-souls-in-a-plastic-hell beauty of his film-making or his central themes and obsessions (in brief: garish pop-art dystopia; teenage confusion; weird sex; aliens). It’s a real masterpiece of a film that manages to explore the uncomfortable realm of child abuse and resulting trauma without being cringeworthy or difficult to sit through, but whilst remaining fluid, artfully assembled, emotionally honest, reassuringly weird and ethereal, quietly subversive in its approach to sex and many more good things besides. Probably features the best soundtrack of the year too, with Harold Budd and Robin Guthrie reappropriating some classic shoegazy haze.

I also seriously dug Gus Van Sant’s Last Days – yeah, y’know, that Kurt Cobain movie. It sees Van Sant ably following through on the comeback curve he started with Elephant, and to my mind this film is even better. Somehow it manages to combine a lot of the elements that usually piss me off in current indie cinema (endless long shots, gratuitous mumbling, a vague and half-hearted narrative, narcissistic and self-conscious examinations of ‘alienation’) and emerges with a film which kept me utterly transfixed throughout. I wouldn’t blame anyone for thinking otherwise and dismissing it as tedious crap, but something about it struck me as truly original – it’s almost like ambient cinema, drawing you gradually into a headspace where every new crumb of visual information can be slowly contemplated and added to an overall abstract whole of weird beauty and slow-burning emotional engagement. Maybe you see it, maybe you don’t, but whatever – I think it’s a very impressive film.

The Edukators (directed by Hans Weingartner) was a good one too – a German film basically about the troubled relationship between contemporary political radicalism and it’s more idealistic ‘60s/’70s predecessor. Boy, I bet that description really sold it to you! But, no, really, don’t stop reading – it’s an excellently acted and directed and genuinely involving character drama that would be quality stuff even without all the social/political ruminations it also brings to mind. it’s a smart film, it understands human dignity, makes a great, big point on the whole “the personal is political” score and when was the last time in our troubled world you saw ANYTHING this overtly political that managed to end on such an overwhelmingly positive note? The note in question being the opening chord of Leonard Cohen’s terminally over-used “Hallelujah”, here given its best cinematic outing is ages. I can’t really encapsulate this film very well, but go see it – you’ll thank me. Unless you’re some kind of misanthropic right wing weirdo, in which case you’d probably quite enjoy...

Downfall (directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel). Yeah, y’know – that Hitler movie. As well as being startlingly refreshing after 60 odd years of largely quite rubbish, one-sided WWII movies, and the most illustrative cinematic example of the grotesque insanity of the Third Reich I can think of, I also found it was an interestingly constructed film in that it’s basically one long ending. We all learned the beginning and the middle in history class. So within the first few minutes, everybody realises “right, we’re fucked”, and from there on in it’s just a matter of taking bets on when different characters are going to blow their brains out. In places it has an almost abstract apocalyptic vibe going on that was really quite powerful. Sadly it does tend to lapse into historical-TV-drama type cliché at various points, but beyond that you’ve got a uniquely positioned, not to mention catastrophically morbid, motion picture to enjoy.

More on the way later.