2010: The Year of the Geek! (uhh, in movies, anyway...)

Sheesh, so 2010 has finally finished. Fina-bloody-lly. Sorry for the relative silence on here for the last few weeks, but hey, I work in retail and it's been Christmas. When I haven't been stuffing books into the hands of a desperate, crazy-eyed horde, I've been conked out asleep. I'm sure you can understand.

On a side note, Jane Eyre was absolutely the wrong book to try and read over Christmas. It's nothing against the book itself, it's just that I really should have gone for something A) Dumb and B) Contemporary, that's all I've had the stamina for. Oh well. Somebody remind me of this when we hit next December, would you? I can read something with vampires in it. Or zombies. Or, I dunno, ponies. (Idea! 'Vampire Ponies' ... sexy, brooding, [possibly glittering] Vampire Ponies ... I'll be a millionaire in a matter of months!)

Being as I am a huuuuuge movie buff, but I haven't written too much on cinema on the blog yet, I thought I'd do a wee 'favourite films of the year' post. I'm not gonna make it an official 'Top 10' or anything, that'd be too much like hard work.

Clearly the Geeks have inherited the earth, or at least, have inherited the offices of power in Hollywood. The best (adult) American movies of the year where all either by, about, or for geeks of all shapes and sizes. Without a doubt the film of the year was Kick-Ass, a raucous, joyous ode to the comic-books of our youth that also managed to be the revisionist superhero movie that we've been crying out for. How many Iron Man sequels and X-Men prequels was it gonna take before somebody had the guts to ridicule the whole pumped-up, 'roid-raging genre?

Ordinary schmo Dave Lizewski wonders why nobody in real life has ever tried to emulate their comic-book heroes ('Everybody wants to be Paris Hilton, how come nobody ever wants to be Spiderman?' he moans). So he goes for it, with results that range from shudder-inducing (first time out fighting crime, he gets stabbed) to hilarious (spawning a copycat named Red Mist whose Flock-of-Seagulls hairdo is the best piece of design in any movie all year). But it's when he comes to the attention of a Dad-and-Daughter team of psychotic vigilantes that the shit really starts to hit the fan. From its witty deadpan humour to the violence that was so over-the-top that laughter was the only possible response, Kick-Ass was simply the most fun I've had in a cinema for years. It's not for the squeamish though: if hearing an eleven-year-old girl call a drug dealer a cunt and then kill him with an enormous sword doesn't sound awesome to you, then maybe you should steer clear.

The Social Network, on the other hand, proved that really great dialogue is as compelling as anything else you can put on screen. And significantly more compelling than, say, blue alien warriors, or enormous robots that can turn into gaudy cars.

Like any previous piece of design genius (think: steam engine, television, nuclear weapons, etc.) a great website can reflect who we are and where we're at as a species, and there's no better website than Facebook. Whatever your personal thoughts on Facebook, it clearly taps into something important in the present state of humanity: whether that's a desire for greater connection with each other, or a cheapening of all human connections through a process of simplification and reduction, or a curious combination of both. David Fincher's film, however, carefully avoids any editorial comment on the website itself, focussing instead on the personalities and private tribulations of its creators.

The storyline, in case you've been in a coma for the last seven or eight years, runs thus: Mark Zuckerberg, after one or two false starts, thinks up a cool idea for a website, and makes it. He gets help from some friends, screws over some of them pretty badly, gets sued, and his idea becomes the biggest website in the entire world. Pretty slender stuff to base a film around, ain't it? What is exceptional about the film is not the dialogue, or the performances, or the direction, or the music, though all of those things are absolutely top-drawer. It's the picture it gives us of the pure joy of creation, the uninhibited love that Zuckerberg has for typing out lines of code and twisting new programming languages into new things, things that couldn't be imagined, let alone created, less than his own lifetime ago. Computer programmers are todays explorers, or astronauts: they get to go places nobody's ever gone. In the film, Zuckerberg's key line is: 'We don't know what it is yet. We don't know what it is.' And it's that 'not knowing' that makes the film great. In my opinion.

I know some people who have bitched about The Social Network's playing fast and loose with the facts, particularly with regards to Zuckerberg's motivations. Frankly, I couldn't care less. Films are only ever 'based on a true story' anyway, and the only responsibility any movie has is to be the best movie it can be. And The Social Network is great, so what's the problem?

My other favourite films of the year all used the shiny new cinematic toys of CGI to push the boundaries of what is possible in the world of film, but all did it in very very different ways. Scott Pilgrim vs The World was like a densely jewelled box of wonders, but where every jewel was won at the end of a level in some 1980's videogame. The (ridiculous) plot in a nutshell: if Scott Pilgrim wants to date mysterious, beautiful indie girl Ramona Flowers, he must defeat her seven evil exes in battle. I don't know if there's ever been a film in which every frame was so frantically packed with useless, throwaway information.

Film audiences are becoming more and more sophisticated, are sharper, are able to take things in in an instant ... and director Edgar Wright takes a seemingly sadistic delight in putting them to the test. Constant visual and aural allusions pepper the entire film, to the point that I don't believe anybody could take everything in on first viewing. Like a good videogame, there's always more to be discovered, more laughs to be unlocked. Though the film is a textbook example of style over substance, it's the sheer pop-genius of the style (Jason Schwartzman has a sword of pixellated blue light! It rules!) that makes it a must-see in my book.

Christoper Nolan's Inception is, in a weird way, a similar experience to Scott Pilgrim. You don't really come out of it feeling anything other than 'Man, that was cool', it's essentially nothing more than a giant exercise in style ... but what style. Memento and The Prestige are probably superior films for that reason - they have more in the way of a beating heart underneath their glittering facades - but Inception ain't far behind. It's almost a shame that Nolan has to go away and make another Batman film now, because it's what he does after that that's gonna be fascinating. 

In a world where corporate espionage has invaded people's dreams and thieves can steal knowledge from a sleeper's subconscious, expert 'extractor' Cobb is charged with doing the opposite: implanting an idea into a sleeping man's mind. Borrowing heavily from action movie cliche, Cobb has to perform this one last job by recruiting a rag-tag team of experts (so far, so Stallone), which will only be possible by venturing deep into the mark's mind, constructing dreams within dreams like a Russian doll of memory and psyche (hmmm ... not so Stallone after all).

I think it'd be fair to say that there's never been a movie this expensive that has also been this intellectually challenging. Usually, the higher the pricetag, the more simplistic. Nolan's skill is in presenting a fractured, complicated scenario with such unerring precision that (though you might need a second viewing to pick up on every little thing) you're never lost for a moment. He also gives cinema one of its great 'ticking clock' images in the super-slow falling van. All the performances are exemplary, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Tom Hardy standing out as soon-to-be stars, it's beautiful to look at, and - best of all in a mainstream blockbuster - it insists that you use your brain.

Now, I wouldn't feel right if I didn't have something a bit obscure on here: at MIFF I saw a mad, brilliant, surreal, Japanese slapstick film called Symbol and, if it ever comes out on DVD, please track it down. It's a work of demented genius.

 A man with a terrible hair-do (which he might have borrowed from Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men) and bright polka-dot pyjamas wakes up in a featureless pale blue room. There are no doors or windows, and no indication of how he got in, or how he'll get out. Suddenly, thousands of cackling cherubs (fat naked male babies with wings) emerge out of the walls and surround him, laughing maniacally. When they sink back into the walls, however, they don't completely disappear: their little penises stay sticking out. When the man (after a few minutes thought) experimentally touches one of these multitude of penises, it becomes clear that they've transformed into buttons, and that each button performs a different bizarre function. One penis drops a deckchair from the ceiling, one makes a Masai tribesman run across the room, and so on. Finally our hapless hero discovers a penis that makes a door open on the other side of the room ... but as soon as he lets go of the penis, the door closes. He has to utilise all the stuff he's collected by pressing the other penises to figure out a way to escape. Oh, and I forgot to mention that there's another story intercut with this one, a story about a lowly Mexican wrestler taking to the ring for one last bout.

It's a really strange movie.

But it's great. Writer/Director/Star Hitoshi Matsumoto is a latter-day Chaplin, or Buster Keaton, or whatever, and his gift for physical comedy is a wonder to behold. And, weirdly for such a bonkers film, the way the two story strands eventually coincide, and the journey that the protagonist ultimately goes on, is actually quite moving in the end, a bizarre celebration of life and living and all that's wondrous in the world. It's well worth tracking down.

There you go, that can be my top 5. Put them in any order you like, just make sure you see them. Other highlights were The King's Speech which is such an old-fashioned, heart-tugging sort of a movie, but it's made so well (and so brilliantly acted) that you can't help but be swept up in it. There were a few really good kid's movies this year too. Toy Story 3 is probably the worst of the Toy Story movies, but that doesn't mean it wasn't great ... and it had me wiping tears from under my 3D glasses on more than one occasion. I'm a Wes Anderson fan and a Roald Dahl fan, so it's no surprise that I loved Fantastic Mr. Fox, but How To Train Your Dragon came out of nowhere a bit. Strip away all the fire-breathing 3D blah and it's basically a story about a kid and his (oversize) dog, but done with smarts and sensitivity.

If you look over to the right of your screen, I've added a new feature to the blog, which I'm calling itty-bitty film reviews. I see way too many movies to do full reviews of all of them, so I'll be doing pithy little one or two sentence summations. Once I've done a few I'll probably start an archive for them as well.

Cheers, JC

currently reading: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

books to go: 116