How to Be Single
The post-Sex and the City surge in films and TV shows based around the dating habits of singletons was largely a conveyor belt of deceptively packaged romantic comedies still based around the idea that marriage should remain a woman’s ultimate ambition. Attempting to cover up a repetitive conservative agenda with cocktails and frank sex chat was a temporary solution to actual progress. But even, as noted in How to Be Single, the independence of Carrie Bradshaw and her pals was something of a fallacy as they spent the majority of their time talking about men.
That casual aside hints at a refreshing agenda for a film that, yes, still falls into formula mode at times (prime real estate for characters on average salaries – tick!), but makes a somewhat groundbreaking statement for a film of its ilk: it’s OK, and often preferable, to be single. Dakota Johnson’s incredibly nuanced performance anchors an often rambling ensemble piece that offers up a glossy yet surprisingly sharp view of relationships. Like a more multiplex-friendly take on 2014’s underrated drama Wild, we have a film that praises the importance of being alone and not falling into a vortex of co-dependency. It’s also a warm and funny comedy with a pitched-just-right comic performance from Rebel Wilson and a damn fine genre-defying ending that comes as a breath of fresh air after years of stuffy rom-coms. BL
Kubo and the Two Strings
For sheer movie theater spectacle you just can’t beat Kubo and the Two Strings, an unspeakably beautiful stop-motion animated yarn about a one-eyed boy named Kubo (Art Parkinson) who must find his father’s armor with the help of a silent knight made out of origami paper, a samurai-beetle with amnesia (Matthew McConaughey), and an irascible monkey (Charlize Theron).
The movie vanished without a trace after its opening but it is well worth remembering. Its various set pieces stand alongside the most inventive in contemporary filmmaking: There’s a battle with a huge red skeleton monster – the skeleton itself being the largest stop-motion puppet ever assembled – and there’s the duel with Kubo’s evil aunts on a ship made out of leaves, as well as a stunning climactic sequence in which the evil Moon King is destroyed in the most unexpected, touching way.
Kubo and the Two Strings stuffs its 102 minutes with action and humor, but the film’s deep well of sadness makes it memorable beyond the sheer adrenaline of its flamboyant visuals. As Kubo wanders through the movie’s notionally medieval-Japanese setting, director Travis Knight and the Laika staff offer up image upon image of ruin, the little boy stark against empty buildings and abandoned temples.
The screenplay’s beats stay refreshingly unpredictable all the way to the movie’s end, and its open-hearted hero has more to offer the children of the film’s intended audience than the unbearable “believe in yourself” or “growing up is hard” of its kid-movie competitors. The film-makers carefully build a desolated world with the care of the best stop-motion craftspeople, and within it, they still make hope plausible.
Swiss Army Man
Seeing a film that most people referred to as the “farting corpse film” on the final day of a festival after watching more than 30 films at altitude wasn’t ever that appealing of a prospect. Ten minutes into Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s “gay necrophilia movie”, there was an almost irresistible urge to walk out – just after the scene where Daniel Radcliffe’s corpse had ridden over the waves, propelled by that most eco-friendly of fuels: flatulence.
You can’t really get around the fact that this is a feature about a farting corpse, but the directors know that and reveled in it: “What if we took that really stupid idea and poured our hearts into it?” was the question they asked themselves when making it. Swiss Army Man is the result of that questionable approach. After the initial 10 minutes of head shaking, eye rolling and prudish giggles – the plot begins to emerge and what Kwan and Scheinert manage, incredibly, is to create a film that is strangely uplifting as it is ridiculous.
Paul Dano’s hopeless, deluded loner is brilliantly wrought and perhaps a comment on the kind of characters he usually gets cast as. While Radcliffe does as well as anyone could expect of an actor whose main motivation is post-death bowel movement. It might have been the altitude, it might have been the farts, but by the end the film had gone from perhaps the worst thing I’d ever experienced to something that I couldn’t stop telling people about.
Hunt for the Wilderpeople
Taika Waititi isn’t exactly the film world’s biggest secret: he was tapped up by Marvel to direct Thor: Ragnarok some time ago, having impressed everyone with the vampire comedy What We Do in the Shadows (which itself was an extension of his work on Flight of the Conchords).
However, before embarking on Thor, Waititi managed to get this long-nurtured film off the ground, an adaptation of Wild Pork and Watercress by Barry Crump, long a legend in Waititi’s native New Zealand. And what he produced is a terrifically charming film, a fish-out-of-water comedy that manages to be both a family-type tale about a miserable teenager and a sly tribute to New Zealand’s rugged outdoors.
Julian Dennison plays said miserable teenager Ricky who worships Tupac, but is a blight on the local family services department: he is eventually fostered on a rough-hewn middle-aged couple called Bella and Hec (played by Rima Te Wiata and Sam Neill). For a variety of reasons too complicated to go into here, Ricky and Hec end up stranded out in the bush, with the cops convinced the oldster has kidnapped the kid with dark intentions. But actually the two are developing a father and son bond, a novel experience for both of them.
What marks Hunt for the Wilderpeople out is primarily its dry-as-dust sense of humour; tonally very closely related, not surprisingly, to Conchords and Shadows. Waititi also seems to have learned a thing or two from Tim Burton as to how to set up a nicely framed and calibrated sequence – or perhaps that comes naturally after making a vampire movie. Whatever’s behind it, he gets a great performance, both funny and natural, out of Dennison; and basically doesn’t get in the way of Neill, who has been one cinema’s most reliably likable performers for almost three decades. It’s a little baffling why this didn’t do better at the US box office: it’s just so easy to like. But it’s ideal if you want something to watch over the holidays, so look it up. AP
The Valley of Love
There is one true queen of cinema this year. One woman whose poise and froideur have all bowing before her. The whole of Elle – Paul Verhoeven’s brilliant rape revenge comedy – is basically a homage to Isabelle Huppert. Every moment ripe for a gif; the whole construction reliant on its leading lady’s epic, aspirational oddness.
It’s easy to love Elle; likewise it’s easy to admire Huppert’s other hit this year: Things to Come, by Mia Hansen-Løve, in which she stars as a philosophy professor abruptly left by her husband. Here we saw cracks in Huppert’s composure; the scene in which she weeps on the bus is extraordinary, ditto the one in which she begs a cat to return. What a year, crow her fans. What range! What exquisite agonies!
But they have forgotten something. For the goddess Huppert has in fact delivered us a holy trinity of hits; it’s just that one got oddly ignored. The Valley of Love, which premiered at Cannes in 2015 and which enjoyed a muted release this summer, ought not, even on paper, to be a movie that met with shrugs. It reunites Huppert with Gerard Depardieu, 26 years on from making their only other film together, Loulou. Here, they go by their own names; they are both film stars – the movie imagines they were once married and had a son together, who has recently killed himself. In a letter written before his death, he instructs them to reunite in Death Valley, on the promise they will see him again.
There is complete joy to be had in simply watching these two back at work together. She so tiny; otherworldly beneath goggle sunglasses and unlikely sunhats. He so vulnerable and enormous; for much of the run time stumbling about in his underwear, disbelieving the heat. Their relationship is funny and compassionate and complicated in a way alien to anyone who isn’t French. The film itself is half social-realist divorcee-romance, half supernatural sci-fi, set against this strange bleached landscape, beautiful and remorseless.
There is a twist, late on, for which the audience must patiently wait. Yet ultimately it remains as unresolved as life itself: a film full of truth and strangeness and uncertainty. Not perhaps what everyone wants from the movies, but well worth seeking out. CS
Green Room
Jeremy Saulnier’s horror film came and went in the space of a few weeks in May, taking just £160,000 in the UK and $3.2m in the US. A month after its release, it became a footnote to a sad story when its star, Anton Yelchin, was killed in a bizarre car accident. Yelchin, best known for his role as Pavel Chekov in the rebooted Star Trek films, plays Pat, the bassist of DC-area punk band the Ain’t Rights. When the final show of their tour falls through, the promoter sets them up with a show in backwoods Oregon at what turns out to be a neo-Nazi skinhead bar.
The Ain’t Rights need the money and take the gig, where they antagonise the crowd by playing a cover of the Dead Kennedys’ Nazi Punks Fuck Off. Later, Pat accidentally witnesses the aftermath of a murder. As the killers try to cover up their crime, the band members become trapped in the green room of the venue.
Saulnier showed his mastery of suspense in his previous film, Blue Ruin, and the tension in Green Room reaches new heights. In his hands, the siege story is inventive and fresh and the exposition is never didactic – never has a shot of a pair of red shoelaces been so terrifying. It’s unremittingly gory, but the violence is never sadistic or gratuitous; it’s necessary – the inevitable, inescapable result of the two sides’ conflicting goals. I realized at the end of the film that I’d been gripping the seatrests for an hour. It’s the scariest film I’ve seen this year, but it also manages to be tremendous fun. If one tiny positive comes out of the untimely death of a talented young actor, it might be that this thriller ends up being seen by a wider audience. AE
Gods of Egypt
More than forgotten foreign imports (like Romania’s Aferim!) or minuscule arthouse documentaries (like A Space Program) the most unfairly dismissed movie of 2016 was Alex Proyas’ Gods of Egypt. A box-office stinker in the US (it did better overseas, but not good enough) Proyas, an Australian with Egyptiotic roots, rightly caught hell for this picture’s whitewashed casting. It is hard to argue against that, but if you take the movie for what it is – a modernized version of mid-century musclemen silliness – the exercise makes a little more sense.
Gods of Egypt’s storyline is impossible to predict, zooming from ancient times to outer space to the afterlife and back again. Our immortal heroes bleed gold, transform into enormous winged beasts and have regular-sized humans massage their enormous aching ligaments in gigantic indoor swimming pools. Plus two scrappy twentysomethings (Brenton Thwaites and Courtney Eaton) prance around in very little clothing. (What? It’s hot in Egypt!)
So many of our big-budget fantasy and sci-fi projects feel a little safe. Even Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is more about snapping like a jigsaw piece into a preexisting mythos than being its own thing. Gods of Egypt and its whacked-out (OK, borderline-incoherent) storyline is bursting with creativity and risk. If you can watch a bald Geoffrey Rush shoot fireballs from a sword on his crystal spaceship at a giant worm of chaos and not be moved, you may as well stop going to movies. JH
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The best films of 2016 ... that you probably didn't seehttps://goo.gl/6N6PJT
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