3:10 to Yuma

My aspirations of reviewing every film i've seen this year are starting to crumble. Before the pressure takes its toll, this is a catch up of the month of January. 


First up is 3:10 to Yuma, the perfect antidote to the excesses of giggly girliness seen in Sex and the City. The Western genre can be split into two types of films. There is the Western: a psychological drama where the desolate landscape reveals character as much as the characters do, and the Cowboy: which is entertaining and relentlessly violent. James Mangold divides his film between the two, and to great effect. The beginning is definitely of the former, and the last half is firmly rooted in the latter. Its very much a buddy movie, a mix of Pat Garret and Billy the Kid and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Before the modern trend of Bromance, there was the buddy movie.


Before I go on, I read a review by Nick Hornby of Blockbuster, written by Tom Shone, which has the thesis that Spielberg, Lucas et al elevated cinema with their invention of the cinematic 'blockbuster'. He's not thinking of Transformers though, and believes that the likes of Jaws combined art house character studies with the mainstream. 3:10 to Yuma is in this mould. It may become slightly silly towards the end, but it still maintains a huge level of characterisation that makes this acceptable. (Worth noting, however, that my sister watched this film and just did not get the change in dynamic between Crowe and Bale. Maybe its just cause she's a girl.) 


I firmly believe that these are the types of films that audiences want to be engaged with, and while they may not take the medium forward, they are undeniably well crafted, intelligent, pictures that i'd like to make. 

Sex and the City

I've been skipping a lot of reviews for the last month or so. Sherlock Holmes has been missed. So has Good Night and Good Luck, Zack and Miri Make a Porno and a few others. I'm stopping the slide with Sex and the City, the first film I’ve seen in 2010. 

I got to thinking... That for all the television series feminist pretences, the film is comfortable highlighting -but not in any way critical of- socially acceptable sexism. Carrie is about to get married at 40, so Vogue runs an article about how profound it is that a woman of that age actually can marry. Any older is instantly dismissed by the Vogue editor. When Samantha gains a barely detectable bit of weight, (I thought all the gasping was over a boob job), she is derided over it by all her friends. 

In many ways it’s a strange film. Amongst Carrie's break - up angst, Charlotte shits herself. A 'token' black woman materialises as if out of an 80's movie (Ghostbusters sprang to mind); her dialogue seems like a middle aged white man's impression of how young black women in New York speak. This is all mixed in with the bouts of soft porn that made it essential viewing for teenage boys. 

Not all women subscribe to the stereotypes on offer, women who are slaves to materialism, designer labels and trendy restaurants. I find it mildly insulting to women, but then again most male orientated cinema treats men as idiots, and I like a lot of those films. It is meant to be fun: a fantasy for women in a male dominated market. We should see more of these - just to an improved standard. Sex and the City 2 is coming soon.

New Year's Day Special - Films of the Decade

This top 5 is based as much on the cinematic experience of watching the film as it is on its filmmaking merits. I know if i've seen an excellent film when I leave the cinema. I walk out and I feel different than when I came in. I feel that my worldview has been altered in an intangible way, and I resist leaving the universe the film created. 


Cinema has the ability to immerse the audience into an intense, revelatory experience of someone's worldview. For a couple of hours the viewer surrenders to an other's way of looking at the world. Having the ability to craft that kind of experience is my ultimate aim in filmmaking. It can happen with the most mainstream of films, with people returning to the cinema just to be in the atmosphere created by the film. Titanic was a huge success partly because of teenage girls going 4 or 5 times. 


When I was researching my top 5 I realised how many films I haven't seen, and not only that, how many films I have on DVD that I still haven't watched. Some notable potential list breakers: The Hurt Locker, Oldboy, Lives of Others and the Assasination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford which should be on the list purely on the merits of its title. 


See and Write Films top 5 films of the decade.


1 - Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008)
2 - Happy - Go - Lucky (Mike Leigh, 2008)
3 - The Departed (Martin Scorcese, 2006)
4 - Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly, 2001)
5 - Batman Begins / The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2006, 2008)


Here are some I desperately wanted to be on the list: Team America: World Police (Trey Parker, Matt Stone 2004), Elephant (Gus Van Sant, 2003) American Splendor (Shari Springer Berman, Robert Pulcini, 2003) City of God (Fernando Meirelles, Katia Lund, 2002)  History of Violence (David Cronenberg, 2005). 


And the best scene of the decade has to be the silent film in Talk to Her ( Pedro Almodovar, 2002), in which a shrunken man declares his love for a woman by climbing into her vagina, never to return.