[JerryvonKramer]

Over the past few days, I've watched a shed load of films, most for the first time. Before that, I went to the cinema an awful lot in December. So I thought it might make for a nice thread to share my thoughts on every single film I've watched in this period. I'll separate them between "home" and "cinema".

HOME

A Matter of Life and Death (Powell and Pressberger, 1946) - Masterpiece with some great lines and sequences. Possibly the most British thing ever made. I would like to have the moustace of David Niven. Roger Livesey also an instant hero of mine.

Alice in Wonderland (Jonathan Miller, 1966) - dour non-animal version with lots of big names, but Alice is a real bitch in it. Couldn't quite believe this was made for the BBC to be put out on TV. Something of the aesthetic reminded me of 90s music videos -- White Town, Prodigy, etc.

The Bed-Sitting Room (Richard Lester, 1969) - closest thing to a truly surrealist British film, and another all-star cast, swings between Beckett and Python while never being as dark as the former or as absurd or funny as the latter. Still worth a look.

Performance (Nicholas Roeg, 1970) - still not a Roeg fan; love the comically-East-End gangster boss, but this revels too much in Jagger and its own contemporary "cool" to stand-up as a serious statement of anything.

The Holy Mountain (Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1973) - at first thing seems completely bizarre but as it progresses it becomes less weird than it might think it is, and not all that profound. Famously this is a "rorschach test" of a film. My take is that's just a flat call to see through the futile twin promises of capitalism and religion to "reality" beyond that. If it is that (as I suspect), there are quicker ways of saying it.

Fantastic Planet (René Laloux, 1973) - weird sci-fi animation thing with some bizarre images and an oddly flat tone. At least better than Avatar.

O Lucky Man (Lindsay Anderson, 1973) - should probably be more famous than it is. Sprawling kaleidoscope of allegorical everyman tale, 70s Britain, social comment, weirdness for its own sake, exquisitely posh authority figures, and Alan Price auditioning for the part of lead singer in a Kinks tribute act. Not without its flaws, but I'd say essential viewing. This is one of the few genuine examples of "Brechtian filmmaking" to come from a British director.

Lunacy (Jan Švankmajer, 2005) - this ultimately boils down to a philosophical debate between the Marquis de Sade's version of extreme liberty and authoritarianism. Jan Triska is hypnotic at times as the Marquis, but despite a lot of strangeness -- and inexplicable sequences featuring animated meat (yes, meat!) -- this feels like quite a cold, intellectual exercise.

Noah (Darren Aronofsky, 2014) - after the terribleness of Exodus, I was interested to see this and it is a much better film. There are some real philosophical and moral questions posed here as Noah contemplates the nature of his mission and weight of his responsibility. For a mainstream film, I thought this was quite bold filmmaking and -- dare I say it -- genuinely profound and thought-provoking in places.

Do The Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989) - been meaning to watch this for a long time. This is really good, a community asking itself some hard and probing questions and I can't get enough of Danny Aiello as Sal, who is possibly the most New York Italian-American man ever.

The Black Cat (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1934) - something awesomely 30s about this: all cold, angular and futurist. Super-stylised acting too, and perhaps proof that Bela Lugosi was right to be typecast for his whole career. Boris Karloff is a chilly presence, and comes off as the better actor. This has some great editing for 1934, but I wouldn't put this up there with anything by the masters of this period (Lang, Whale, Browning).

Maniac (Dwain Esper, 1934) - this film is properly mental. It should be legendary among purveyors of bad movies, but doesn't seem to be mentioned in Harry and Michael Medved's Golden Turkey Awards (1980). It has at least three shocking moments that had my jaw dropping. The acting is completely ridiculous, as are the script, plot, visual style and mostly everything else. You're left feeling that the real maniac was the director.

Machiste in Hell (Guido Brignone, 1925) - Maniac used images of devils, hell and Satanic rituals from this Italian film, which looked intriguing enough to follow the source. Apparently Machiste was the hero in a long-running series that has a sub-B movies 60s incarnation. But this is apparently the only one worth watching. It's silent, obviously, but the main reason to watch is for the satanic imagery and depiction of hell. It is visually striking and would serve well being played on loop on screens in a trendy Hoxton bar -- assuming the owners of such establishments are as cool as they think they are. Less entertaining than Haxan (1922) though.

CINEMA

The Grandmaster (Wong-Kar Wai, 2014) - All style and all style. Awesomely Chinese. Lacking the climax you want. It is a tease of a film with no pay off. Lacks the emotional punch of some of Wong Kar-Wai’s best films.

St. Vincent (Theodore Melfi, 2014) - You’ve seen this film before at least three times but that doesn’t stop it being enjoyable, partly because you get to spend some time with Bill Murray, and partly because Melissa McCarthy’s character seems very “real” and the kid is good. Naomi Watts is absolutely atrocious in it though. A film with a harder underside than its director appears to realise.

Interstellar (Christopher Nolan, 2014) - Really good film. Emotional. Just don’t think about it too much. It probably takes too many pains to explain all the science because this is much more a domestic drama that happens to be set across space and time than it is true “sci-fi”. I think a lot of the science stuff is a metaphor for the father-daughter relationship.

Nightcrawler (Dan Gilgroy, 2014) - Pretty good. Jake Gyllenhaal plays one of the more amoral characters ever to be the protagonist of a movie, and I suspect an Oscar nomination. The shots it takes at society as a whole land harder than the shots at the news industry (which feel trite and obvious).

The Imitation Game (Morten Tyldum, 2014) - Very good film buried under layers of chick-flick sensibility and syrup. Very well cast. Cumberbatch is excellent. Will play well at 8pm on BBC 1 on a Sunday.

The Babadook (Jennifer Kent, 2014) - Great psychodrama perhaps slightly mis-sold as horror. More towards We Need to Talk About Kevin and Polanski’s Repulsion. Contender for film of the year. Essie Davis’s performance is mesmerising.

The Hobbit Trilogy (Peter Jackson, 2012-14) - yes 8 hours+ in the cinema and more pop corn than you can possibly imagine. I have to say, I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would and it went a lot quicker too — and no one left, which is probably an achievement in itself.

Part 1: This is by far the weakest film of the three in that it consists entirely of scene-setting. Shakespeare would have dealt with it in about 10 lines. Hitchcock maybe in 5 minutes. Artistically speaking, I can’t think of a film that has less of a reason to exist than this. This goes back to my old talking point that there is far too much “backstory” in films now, and partly it may well be the legacy of Tolkein to blame — even if in this case, that’s quite unfair to the source material.

Part 2: Much better. More action. More plot (as in stuff actually happens). More character — we actually start being able to care about individual dwarves now. And sets things up very well for the finale.

Part 3: Pay off. Pay off. Pay off. Definitely tighter than the bloated Return of the King in that it only ends once. Probably the best film of the three, although it requires Part 2 to make any sense.

Overall thoughts: Comparisons with LoTR seem to be unavoidable. Hobbit doesn’t necessarily come out second best in all areas. For example, I find Bilbo a much more likeable and warm protagonist than Frodo — I mean it’s essentially Tim from the Office put in the middle of a battlefield, and that works really well. But it does come out second best in most areas. I think where things struggle a bit more is that Thorin (for good reason, he is interesting but more like Theoden) is much more difficult to like or root for than Aragon — and this makes it difficult to really care about the dwarves and their fate. Jackson and co must have sensed this and so we get we get given a whole raft of different emotional anchors: the Kili / Tauriel relationship (with a bit of Legolas too), Balin, who seems to represent the good-true-nature of the dwarves, and then we get Bard and his family. For whatever reason, I had a hard time getting emotionally invested in any of these characters. And none of this is helped by the fact that Gandalf seems a bit less invested in what is going on and that it never quite seems like Bilbo’s fight — and these are the two characters we really care about.

Another thing is that the whole thing, despite being 8 hours long and featuring many huge and complex battle sequences, for some reason, fails to seem epic. I do think it is “right” that The Hobbit should feel smaller than LoTR, but I remember feeling awe-struck during LoTR, and feeling like I’d come out of an epic marathon after watching it. But that just isn’t the case here, for whatever reason.

But one can’t grumble too much. The Hobbit trilogy is miles better than, for example, the Star Wars prequel trilogy and crap like Avatar and probably about 90% of all the fantasy films ever made. It’s just not LoTR, but that was a “once in a lifetime” sort of deal.