And my favourite film of 2012 is...

2012 began with a great film and ended with a great film.

In January, Steve McQueen's Shame was released in the UK. I can't begin to describe the impact this film has had on me, months later and it still haunts my imagination. The story of a sex addicted drone (Michael Fassbender) and his mentally unstable sister (Carey Mulligan) was treated with such sensitivity and compassion that it became almost unbearable to watch. For me, one of the greatest pieces of pure cinema occurs in this film: an extended tracking shot of Fassbender jogging through a nocturnal city, desperately trying to sweat out of his system his distorted, contradictory passions. Technically, the most amazing tracking shot since Touch of Evil and Raging Bull. Existentially, the most poetic summary of the contemporary predicament.

In December, I saw Amour - Michael Haneke's penetrating examination of old age, sickness and death. There's not an ounce of sentimental fat on this film. The story of an elderly husband who cares for his wife is told with a fierce tenderness and humanity. Every frame of this film has a painterly quality. Every emotion on the screen is delivered with gamma knife precision. Cinema for adults only.

And so, there is no favourite film this year. For me, Shame and Amour both take the top spot. They share the laurel crown.

And my other favourites:

Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master - Anderson is the new Kubrick. Joaquin Pheonix gave a performace of such feral rawness and strangeness that it tore up the screen.

Leos Carax's Holy Motors - it is demented, punk, exotic and completely mesmerising. People use the word "surreal" about things that are merely strange. But this film is surreal. Holy Motors takes its place alongside Dali and Bunuel as a surrealist work of art.

Sam Mendes' Skyfall - this Bond movie looked a million dollars and that was thanks to the remarkable cinematographer, Roger Deakins. It was tense and exciting, until the anti-climactic final scenes (big Scottish pile in the Highlands blows up...yawn). It also had the campest villain in any multiplex film I can recall. Javier Bardem channelling Kenneth Williams and Augusto Pinochet.

Gareth Evans' The Raid - kickass entertaiment.

Dexter Fletcher's Wild Bill - the gangsta movie reinvented.

So what were your top five films of 2012?

Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master

It feels as if the film ends mid sentence. The words The Master appear as they did at the beginning of the film. The credits roll. It’s an ending but not as an audience normally experiences it. In a packed Leicester Square cinema, the audience sat momentarily frozen, unsure how to respond. There was a communal sense of bewilderment at the beauty and strangeness of what we had just seen.



The friend I went with admitted to getting bored three quarters of the way through and wanted there to be more “ordinary” characters. He described it as “a mood piece...think, late Kandinsky.” I don’t disagree with his reflex review (and the need to find analogies with other artists and artistic forms) but, twenty four hours later and having allowed my initial responses to settle, I think there might be more to say:

1. You are not going to see a better performance on screen this year than Joaquin Pheonix’s war-damaged ex-sailor, Freddie Quell. This is acting of such feral ferocity and rawness that it shreds the “method acting” handbook and takes film performance into another territory. This is not acting, this is possession. In his portrayal of Quell, Pheonix exposes the terrible damage to the soul caused by the lacerating shrapnel of life – a failed romance, the horrors of war, existential rootlessness, Godlessness. Quell is a man in spiritual and psychological tatters.

Pheonix's Quell is a portrait of an outsider – a man to whom life has become something alien and he an alien to it – but without any existential romanticism. Though terribly damaged, Quell clings to a scintilla of hope: that he is loveable, that someone might love him. Your cinema ticket is worth every penny just to see how Pheonix conveys longing and hurt in his wounded-animal eyes.

2. There is not a frame in Paul Thomas Anderson’s film that is not beautiful. It has a numinous quality. Shot in 70mm format and designed with meticulous attention to period detail, The Master definitively answers the question of whether a film can be a work of art with a resolute, “Yes, of course, it can and this is such a work of art.” The Master is an aesthetic treasure that will be looked at, studied and commented on in decades to come.

3. Contrary to internet reports The Master has very little to say about Scientology or the dubious motives of those who found religious movements. The Master is a bromance but not of the comforting sort we have become accustomed to. This is a bromance with barbs and thorns that cut and nick. Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Lancaster Dodd, the founder of a religious movement called The Cause, uses Quell as a guinea pig for his experiments in spiritual “processing.” He claims to be able to heal Quell. For the damaged Quell, this promise is attractive. He sees Lancaster Dodd’s new religion as the way to restore some sort of psychic stability in his life. This is not a friendship based on affection but one based on the different needs of the two men. The need of the charlatan to believe his own lies and to have his lies believed. The need of the outsider to find a way inside the city walls. The Master is an oblique study in neediness.

4. There are no simple narrative arcs or easily comprehensible character motivations. The film is a frustrating watch and for this reason comes close to reality as we experience it, where so much is hidden from our immediate understanding and slips our conceptual grasp. So much of who we are remains a mystery, at once, fascinating and terrifying. If people find The Master boring and frustrating, it is because, in one sense, it is exactly that. Anderson refuses to pander to the audience’s need for the security of conventional story-telling. Instead, he delivers something that is closer to a parable or tone poem where depths of meaning are released with every viewing.

5. Why should you go and see The Master? Joaquin Pheonix, Philip Seymour Hoffman and the uncompromising originality of the writer-director, Paul Thomas Anderson.

What films will The Invisible Province be watching in 2012

It looks like 2012 could be a good year for film. Some serious directors (Guillermo del Toro, Terence Malick, Ridley Scott, Baz Luhrman, etc) are releasing films in the coming twelve months. So, here are some of the cinematic treats that The Invisible Province is looking forward to in the coming year:

1. Prometheus
Director: Ridley Scott, ETA: June 1 2012



There is a lot of speculation on the internet ether about what this film is about. One theory is that Prometheus is a prequel to the Alien series(Ridley Scott directed the classic Alien film that spawned the franchise). Another blog theory, is that it is an autonomous Sci-fi adventure in which the aliens may or may not make an appearance. All we know is that (according to the actor, Michael Fassbender) it is "a journey to the darkest corners of the universe". Westfield, Stratford, then? In Westfield no one can hear you scream. Thirty years after Blade-Runner, the prospect of Ridley Scott returning to the sci-fi genre is reason to be intrigued and just a little bit over-excited.

2.The Dark Knight Rises
Director: Christopher Nolan, ETA: July 20 2012



Only the recent Batman films have come close to translating the action of the comic strip into something that feels like true cinema. Under Nolan's direction this has been achieved by emphasising the heart of darkness of his Gotham City superhero. This is the comic strip re-written by Albert Camus (actually it's his brother, Jonathan Nolan). What do we know about the latest movie? Anne Hathaway is Catwoman (which is a worry but it could have been worse, it could have been Halle Berry), Marion Cotillard is the new love interest and Tom Hardy has been down the gym again and plays a musclebound psychopath called Bane. Nolan has declared that this is the last Batman film he will be involved with which suggests that it could also be the grimmest and most explosive yet.

3. The Great Gatsby
ETA: autumn 2012, Director: Baz Luhrmann



Australia was a turkey, so it will be interesting to see if Baz Luhrmann gets back into the groove with his $125 million version of F Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel, The Great Gatsby. The worry is that it will become another camp meringue, albeit where characters wear white suits and flapper dresses. Can Luhrmann tame his flamboyant directorial style or will the soul of the novel be lost in Luhrmann's jazz age kinetic editing? We wait and see. I suspect this will be a film that will divide critics and audiences. Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan star and...did I mention, it's shot in 3D! I want this film to succeed (and if it does it might be brilliant) but there is a little sick feeling forming in the pit of my stomach.

4.Love
Director: Michael Haneke, ETA: autumn 2012


A new film by Michael Haneke is always an event. Plot details are sketchy but Love seems to be about an elderly French couple, played by Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva (both of them in their eighties), whose relationship is severely strained when one of them suffers a stroke. Haneke has said that he is interested in exploring the process of ageing and the indignities of old age. Where Abercrombie youth is exalted, Haneke (ever the subversive) swims against the cinematic tide.

5. The Master
Director: PT Anderson, ETA: early 2013

Paul Thomas Anderson's films(There will be Blood, Magnolia, Boogie Nights) have always referenced religious fervour in an oblique manner, but The Master appears to be an explicit investigation of the varieties of religious experience. From what I can tell, the film centres around a
World War II veteran in the 1950s who decides to invent his own religion. The film has had terrible trouble finding financial backing which suggests that it is serious film making and not multiplex pulp. Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, Joaquin Phoenix and Laura Dern are in the cast. I can't wait. Can't find any trailers or leaked clips so here is a reminder of PT Anderson's greatness:



And the best of the rest....

The Hobbit, directed by Peter Jackson...it's about small guys with hairy feet, you know.
Cosmopolis, directed by David Cronenberg...it will be interesting to see if a great director can bring the literary giant, Don deLillo, to the screen.
Seven Days, directed by Michael Winterbottom...the greatest living British auteur?
The Burial, directed by Terence Malick ...because even when he's bad (The Tree of Life), he is good and when he is good, he is mind blowing.
Django Unchained, directed by Quentin Tarantino...because we all want to say "that was as great as Pulp Fiction"...we know he's got it in him.