Interests:Movies, movies, movies, books, books, books, repeating the same words thrice, PlayStation and being a verbose, boring, obnoxious prick with very badd speling Occupation:Student Industry:Entertainment
This is not a best-of list. This is shit I *liked*. And I liked Snakes on a Plane, so make of that what you will. This is part three. The part in which Sauron gets his ass handed to him and Frodo takes Gandalf to be his hetero life-partner as they sail away together. The one where, if you believe Wes Craven, all bets are off. With any luck though, this is better than Scream 3. This is Part One. This is Part Two.
Now. Down to business.
INGLORIOUS BASTERDS:
Is this Quentin Tarantino's best film? Come now, we could argue that point till the end of days as proclaimed by the man Jesus or Roland Emmerich. What I will accept no argument about is the fact that Inglorious Basterds is the year's funniest film. You laugh at the film's farce ("Bawnnn Journo!") and you laugh at its slapstick ("We just wanna say... we're a very big fan of your work."). And then you laugh in pure terror ("Monsieur LaPadite, may I smoke my pipe as well?"). Inglorious Basterds is about a lot of things, but what I love the most is how it's a movie about the power of the movies to rewrite history, remodel it in any image it sees fit. And so you get yourself an Aldo Raine, a play on B-movie star Aldo Ray. Your MacGuffin's a movie premiere, and vengeance, when it comes, looks like the revenge of a giant face on a film-screen. Tarantino's version of history may be as inaccurate as a saffron textbook, but the difference here is, you're in on the joke.
ANATHEM:
As the golfer once said, I'm cheating here, because this actually came out in 2008, but I only got around to it in early '09, and Holy Sizzling Neurons Batman did this book blow me halfway to the sun and back. Anathem is a book of ideas, ideas that live and die in the space where science and philosophy grab coffee together. And with this book, Stephenson comes out swinging. No question too heretic, no idea too bold here, and best of all, Stephenson packs em all into a furiously paced adventure that'd hold its own against the best of them, be it Lord of the Rings or Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. Sure Anathem is flawed. If manic digression was Tolkein's kryptonite, manic descriptiveness is Stephenson's. And yet, Anathem's frustrations are like those of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Grit your teeth, make it through the woefully over-descriptive opening 70 pages, and you will be rewarded. Of all the things I did, read, watched and heard in 2009, Anathem was the one thing I recommended to everybody I met, even if they didn't ask me to.
"Dude, what's the ManU - Arsenal Score?" You should read Anathem.
METAL GEAR SOLID 4: GUNS OF THE PATRIOTS
I'm not an MGS fanboy. I came in cold to part four of this sprawling franchise. And. Wow. The final chapter in the larger story of Solid Snake (SO tempted to tack the word "Plisken" onto that) is muddled as hell, plot-wise, and if any MGS fanboys would be kind enough to sit me down and tell me the whole tale, I'd be much obliged. But none of that matters when that controller springs to life and you guide Snake through a nightmarish future filled with privatized armies, grotesque half-machine half-animal attack units, nanotech-enhanced soldiers and biometrically locked weapons. It's Universal Soldier by way of Black Hawk Down, a third-person shooter where your best chance at staying alive is not shooting anyone at all. Epic.
LOST: SEASON 5
I know it's bad form to take cheap-shots at people on a list like this, but I have to ask. Remember when everyone went to town with their whole "Heroes is the NEW Lost" pap? And yet, many moons later, one of these shows has gone from creative nosedive to outright death-spiral, while the other's just gone from strength to strength. Lost is how you manage an ensemble that'd give Robert Altman the shivers. Lost is how you handle a plot that'd make Christopher Nolan weep in terror. Lost is how you spin a mystery, offering two new questions for every answer. Lost started out standing in some very long X-Files-shaped shadows, and ended up firing off the Files' shoulder instead, taking the sort of conspiracy-theory-mythos that Chris Carter's magnum opus popularized and marrying it to the sense of spooky frustration shows like The Prisoner first gave us. With just one season to go, can Lost tie all its threads together before they fray and snap? It seems almost impossible. Stephen King talks about the monster behind the door, where he says that whatever's hiding behind that final door, whatever your big reveal is, it will NEVER be as scary or awe-inspiring to you as the thing your imagination's cooked up. Truth is, it doesn't matter. Five seasons down, I'm just glad I got to go along for the ride. And to think, it started with one deceptively simple question. "Guys... where are we?"
TWITTER
Started the year hating it, ended the year addicted. This post is under 140 characters long. Whew.
SCI-FI AT THE MOVIES
This year, sci-fi ran the gamut. While Avatar was the narrative equivalent of being slapped in the face with a giant piece of ham, visually, it showed us the work of a man who has grown tired of the medium's inherent flatness, changing the definition of "depth of field". District 9 was the opposite, a message-minded narrative that dials the ham down just enough to seem prescient and shows you just how much you can achieve visually with a smaller chunk of change. And yet, I have a scrotum, so I've got to say, the tragic tale of Wickus Van DerMerwe was also a wickedly fun exercise in in showing off mech, weapons tech and the art of things going splat. What I love about both Avatar and D-9 is the fact that they go "Kids. Violence and xenophobia are bad. But LOOK how COOL this alien looks when it explodes!" Duncan Jones' Moon stood quietly at the other end of the spectrum, brooding over questions of identity and dispensibility with a stellar performance from Sam Rockwell and, well, Sam Rockwell. Between these three movies, sci-fi had a banner year, with something for everyone. And for 12-year-olds with important-sounding syndromes, we're glad you enjoyed the Decepticon testicles in Transformers 2, but I'd rather pretend it didn't happen, if that's okay with you.
STANDING UP
In August 2009, I tried my hand at stand-up comedy for the first time. Didn't do it because I thought I'd be good at it, still not sure if I'm any good at it. But I did it because I *wanted* to. It's the second most proactive thing I've ever done in my life (quitting engineering college is #1 forever), and for better or for worse, it is the most fun I've had with my clothes on, right up there with bungy jumping and skydiving. I don't know if I'll ever get to do it again, but I cannot, in retrospect, imagine not having tried it at all. A billion thanks to team Weirdass (Vir Das, Sorabh Pant, Kavi Shastri) for saying, go on up, have some fun, if you bomb, what's the worst that can happen, we'll just remind you of it for the rest of your sodden life. A gajillion thanks to all the friends that showed up and fake-laughed at me in the audience even though I didn't buy you that free beer I promised. And nine kajillion thanks to Raj Thackeray, Himesh Reshamiya, Tata Docomo and the entire city of Delhi for doing what you do best; being a bunch of giant punchlines.
Still I went to the stores and bought every one of them.
ME
She was all like "BOO BITCH! I'm awesome enough to orchestrate a plan to take over the world and yet retarded enough to totally miss the fact that the baddie is just my brother in a Mason Verger mask."
The bullet is subsequently blocked by his Nobel Peace medal...
ME
Marlon Wayans was like, "Hi. I'm black. I'm pretty sure I was white when we were inoffensive little plastic figures, but hi, I'm black now. Here, have a wisecrack."
Here then, is part two of my completely random year-end list. As explained in Part Uno, this is NOT a best of list, it is exactly what it says on the box. This is the stuff *I* enjoyed in 2009. Part One of this list is here in case you feel like having a gander.
Annnddd in no particular order, here's more shit I liked in 2009:
JOKER (Brian Azzarello): 2008 gave us not one but two excellent Joker stories. The Joker of Brian Azzarello's graphic novel isn't as iconic as the one we get to see in The Dark Knight, and Azzarello's tale doesn't quite plumb the depths of despair that the best Joker stories (The Killing Joke, Arkham Asylum) have, but Joker is all-systems-go when it comes to the Joker's favourite past-time; stirring shit up. Released from Arkham after serving his term, the Joker sets about taking Gotham back from the petty thugs who now rule its underworld. It's like he said in The Dark Knight, "This city deserves a better class of criminal." That puts the Joker on a collision course with everyone from Killer Croc to Two-Face, and of course the Batman, who, in the book's final showdown, destroys the Joker's spirit with just one sentence. (SPOILER ALERT). An infuriated Joker asks why the Batman doesn't just cover his entire face, why he feels the need to show-off to people the fact that there is in fact, a man under that mask. The Bat's reply is as devastating as the turn of a knife. "To mock you."
DEXTER: SEASON 4:
What I love about Dexter is just how it utterly rejects any sort of genrification. Is it a comedy? Yes, but then again it's all fun and games until someone gets hurt. Or ends up on a table in a finely-designed-to-leave-zero-evidence kill room. Is it a drama? Well, yes, except you have an unreliable, twisted narrator whose idea of a fun evening is killing other killers. It's also a fantastic police procedural, a gripping thriller, and, above all else, a fantastic horror show, with Michael C Hall playing one of TV's greatest monsters. In Season 4, the powers that be upped the ante by putting him up against an even bigger, more iconic monstrosity; John Lithgow's Trinity Killer. Trinity would be one of America's greatest, most brutal serial killers ever, except nobody's ever seen the pattern. Until Team Dexter Morgan stumbles upon it. But it's a little hard to follow Harry's code when you're staying up all night thanks to baby Harry's cold. The best part about Dexter Season 4 is that even though it could have, it doesn't just live and die on the strength of the Dexter-Trinity collision course. This season also saw Dexter at his most human, at a point where he realized that his humanity might be *more* than a convenient mask. The season also sees some of the show's strongest acting work. Hall, of course, has never skipped a beat, but this season it was Jennifer Carpenter who got put through the emotional wringer, and she's delivered the performance of a lifetime. But this season, it was all about Lithgow, at his repulsive, manic best. He's like a dog off a leash, and Trinity is by turns charming, reptilian, pathetic and dangerous. It is beyond a doubt the year's best television performance. Another thing I love about season 4? The fact that the season that saw Dexter's lowest-ever kill-count was easily the show's most graphic, brutal and bloody season yet.
UNCHARTED 2: AMONG THIEVES
The game that's everything I wanted Indiana Jones 4 to be. The game that's everything a game can be. A game that pushes the Playstation 3 to be all it can be. (Click on the picture for the trailer) Imagine the most thrilling action-adventure movie you've ever seen. Think National Treasure meets Indiana Jones meets Rambo meets Indiana Jones meets The DaVinci Code meets The Descent meets Indiana Jones. And then imagine being given control over the lead character of that movie in every single pulse-pounding action sequence and head-scratching, ancient-Macguffin-finding puzzle. So you're the one who has to scramble onto the train-car that's carrying the anti-tank gun. And use it to take down that annoying armoured helicopter that's firing missiles at you. As the train thunders down a terrifying, snow-bound Nepalese mountain-pass. You're the guy that has to solve the puzzle that unlocks the very road to Shangri-La in a monastery as outside the door, Yeti attack. From Turkey to Borneo to Nepal, Uncharted 2 is one of the most stunning looking games ever created, with jaw-dropping vistas that you could spend entire days just *looking* at. Except you won't, because you haven't got the time. You've got to find the mythical city. Before the power-mad Serbian warlord. And defeat him. And get the girl. While protecting the other girl. Doctor Jones would be proud.
KFC KRUSHERS:
Look, I told you this list was random. Truth is, I've been in love with the artificial sweet sugary crunchy cookie-laced chocolate filled joy of these things since the first time I tried one. I have one word for you. "Munchies".
STAR TREK:
I did *not* see this one coming. I love JJ Abrams, but working off an exhausted franchise with a bunch of unknowns who looked more like tweeny pretty-boys than anything else, at first I was afraid... I was petrified. I was worried we'd get Twilight-in-Space. I wondered how Harold would do as Sulu and how Eomer would do as Bones. I just didn't see it. But then Zachary Quinto came on board. And then there was Eric Bana. And then... the Nimoy. The end-result? A hyperkinetic, lens-flare filled romp through space with all your favourite characters prefectly recast for a new generation. After 10 movies and a billion TVspin-offs, each more portentious than the last, this is the closest Trek's gotten to recapturing that Original Series magic. It's goofy enough, even though there's always a ticking clock to race and it's more than just red-shirts who get iced. Avatar might be the year's biggest movie, but Star Trek was easily the year's funnest. Also, I'm calling it. Wynona Ryder's a MILF.
I'm a sucker for lists. They don't change anything, but they bring an order to the chaos that is pop-culture consumption, or even consumption in general. This is not a best-of list. This is a shit-I-liked list. It's the stuff that stayed with me, the stuff that made my day, week, month or year. This is beyond a doubt the most random list I've ever compiled since the first time my cousin took me to a Tescos in London so huge that I wanted to weep. It's a collection of completely random stuff that I just *liked* or loved this year. Books, movies, graphic novels, cars, games, even food.
Like all good lists, the methodology is scientific, meticulous and follows the two key tenets of all good research; I have made it up off the top of my head, and to quote Tiger Woods, I have cheated.
I've cheated because pop-culture consumption is, lets face it, a bitch. If you have six groups of friends, they're all watching six different TV shows, throwing their weight behind six different video games and reading six different things. And they're *all* the cool kids and you're just going mad trying to stay relevant to the conversation, inhaling everything you can, but there's only so many hours in a day, only so much of a beating my broadband can take, and only so much time left to watch and read stuff once porno time is done with. So, inevitably, you end up latching on to some stuff that came out in the second-half of 2008 only in 2009, stuff that flew under your radar, stuff you picked up on once other people buzzed it up. So, if I genuinely loved it and it came out in '08 but I only got to it in '09, it's on this list.
To be perfectly clear, this is PART ONE of a much longer list I hope to complete by the end of this week. If I put it all down now, I'm worried I'd break Xanga. And my fingers.
Now, enough chit-chat. In no particular order, here goes:
G.I. JOE: RESOLUTE
The year's BEST GI Joe film started its life as a series of webisodes in April before being released as a TV special. Written by Warren Ellis (yes, that Warren Ellis), Resolute did what Stephen Sommers' paint-by-numbers movie didn't. It reminded me why I parked my ass in front of the television every weekend as a kid to watch some Joe, and yet, it wasn't just an exercise in nostalgia either. It's a masterpiece in story-telling economy. Resolute hits the ground running, with the Joes fighting their way out of a Cobra-Commander-engineered corner, and their resultant fightback made for a genuinely gripping watch. Even so, it should have been just a cartoon. But then Ellis throws in the mythical beginning of the Snake-Eyes Stormshadow rivalry. And then carries it to its epic end. If you watched that other GI Joe movie this year, cleanse your palette. Watch Resolute.
THE JAGUAR XF:
This, ladies and gents, is the Jaguar XF. It has a 5 liter V8. It has more power than God. It sounds like the rage of angels. And it goes like the devil. And I will never forget the crisp monsoon morning that I gunned it around the road to Aamby Valley. With a sub-seven second 0-100 time and some fantastic-but-never-overprotective handling, I murdered the straights and clubbed the ever-loving shit out of the corners. But then again, on a job where getting the keys to a BMW 530i is an occupational hazard, why does the XF stand out? Because of the way everything came together that morning, because of the way that engine howled in my ear as we plunged into the fog, because of the way the gear selector *appears* from the flat center console when you turn the car on, because to turn the cabin lights on, you just sort of hover your hand around their general area like a fucking Jedi. Because while the Germans are perfect, the British are a bit barmy. Because when I was done tearing a hole through Lonavla, I had an entire Expressway to play with on the ride home. Because sometimes, the universe just. fucking. provides.
UNDER THE DOME (Stephen King):
From one of the greatest writers that ever lived comes an epic I didn't think he still had in him. After King's life-threatening accident, he's walked a fascinating career path. There's the burning drive that strikes a man when he's suddenly confronted with his own mortality, which resulted in his grand conclusion to his epic Dark Tower series. But a lot of his work since then has also been more philosophical, more introspective. While both Lisey's Story and Duma Key were crackerjack horror stories, they were also deeply personal and obviously cathartic tales about lonely individuals dealing with loss and frustration through art. Suddenly he was telling the sort of quiet stories about people with bruised souls that he hasn't really told since Dolores Clairborne. But with Under The Dome, King's come out swinging with a sprawling, cinematic epic about a town that gets cut off from the rest of the world by a giant, invisible dome. This is vintage King; an ambitious, almost foolish battle between flawed heroes and religious nut-job baddies. When my copy arrived, I grinned when I noticed that it specifically mentions "From the writer of The Stand." That's not a blurb, it's a mission-statement.
At 9 a.m on the 4th of July 1999, I walked into a screening of a film I'd won advance tickets to. I knew next to nothing about it, the sum total of my information gleaned from nothing more than one trailer.
It was called The Matrix.
And it was a sensory suckerpunch unlike anything I'd ever seen before. And it will always and forever be the defining cinematic experience of my life. Which leads us to the problem. Drug addicts often say that every subsequent hit of your favourite drug is an exercise in trying to recapture that first high, that first time they shot up. Ever since the 4th of July, 1999, I've been chasing that very dragon, unfairly (almost cruelly) daring other movies to step up and give me that headrush. It's a daunting ask, and it defeats most.
Didn't defeat Peter Jackson (Lord of the Rings). Defeated Peter Jackson (King Kong). Didn't defeat Bryan Singer (X-Men 2). Defeated Bryan Singer (Superman Returns). Didn't defeat Michael Bay (Transformers). Defeated Michael Bay (everything else). The only cinematic drug-dealers batting clean are Christopher Nolan and Guillermo Del Toro.
And now, James Cameron.
Let's get one thing clear. Avatar is not a movie. It is a showreel, it's the demo DVD stores are going to use to sell home-theater systems, the model home the developer's going to use to sell you a house. It is the LSD-addicted bastard child the Eureka Forbes man and Avon lady made while waiting outside your door to sell you cinema's latest face.
But let's temper the hyperbole with a little game of tell it like it is though. As a narrative, Avatar is Cameron's worst yet. The plot, such as it is, is almost infantile. In the year 2154, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington, who needs to now not play a robot/someone slipped into someone else's body), a wheelchair-bound ex-Marine, ships out to the planet Pandora as part of the Avatar program.
Pandora is an ecological paradise, a lush rainforest of a world so alive that you can almost hear it breathe. Pandora's flora, fauna and big blue indigenous people, the Na'vi, have learned to co-exist in a life that is absent of any hostility and filled with ecological harmony. Think Skull Island by way of Princess Mononoke; Pandora is paradise, but it's paradise with fangs, fangs that it isn't afraid to bare at any who trespass.
And so of course, trespass we must, in the form of a giant corporation that wants to mine Pandora for a rare mineral known, subtly enough, as Unobtanium. And so in keeping with the laws of cinematic logic, we're informed that the single largest deposit of Unobtanium sits under a tree that is sacred to the Na'vi. Oh, for added fun, it's also their home.
Pandora's dangerous to humans for reasons more immediate than giant angry Pandoran tigers. The planet's very air is toxic for humans, and thus, the Avatar program, where human consciousness is linked to synthetcially grown Na'vi bodies. Once they inhabit these bodies, their job is to go out there, interact with the Na'vi, and try to arrive at a diplomatic solution to the Unobtanium problem i.e. politely tell the Na'vi to very kindly fuck off and find another pad so humans can mine the shit out of the area. It's like building Dolly the sheep, and then making her head of an outreach program.
And so Jake joins the Na'vi, meets and falls for Neytiri, resident Na'vi hottie. She falls for him too, a process helped by the fact that the planet pretty much points at him and says "You there, yeah, you, you're our saviour." So, Jake realizes there's more to life than mining for badly named minerals and refuses to aid The Petty, Selfish and Destructive Human Agenda (TM), a decision that puts him on a collision course with the corporation's war-mongering security chief Col. Quaritch (Stephen Lang, brilliantly chewing scenery like its going out of style). Quaritch is the sort of guy that rode that nuclear bomb all the way down waving his cowboy hat and somehow lived to tell the tale. His idea of a good day at the office involves bombing the everloving shit out of everything and being home in time for dinner. And so begins the war for Pandora's jolly green soul, pitting the Na'vi and Jake against the might of the steel and smoke human empire.
The problem with Avatar's narrative is that Cameron litters it with metaphors and allegories so generic that you could interpret them as pretty much every single major conflict in humanity's history, from the fall of the Native American, to the rise of the British empire, to 9/11. There's something ham-fisted and clumsy about the "Trees are friends, not food" message Cameron's trying to put out there.
God help us, the king of the world has discovered tree-hugging. And yet, in an act that pretty much sums Hollywood up for me, he can't quite hug that tree without blowing the bells out of everything around it.
So the question is, after spending fourteen years developing this film and the technology he needed to make it, is Cameron the Wizard of Oz or just the man behind the curtain?
Let there be no doubt, he is indeed the wonderful Wizard of Awes. Forget the 3D here for a minute. Even without it, the simple truth is, when James Cameron directs an action sequence, you suddenly remember what you didn't even know you'd forgotten. Fourteen years after he went away, Cameron's come back to remind us that we've been living in a world of false prophets. He is not a conjurer of cheap tricks, this man. He just knows how to shoot and cut action, he gets the rhythms and cadences of action sequences, he understands that battles ebb and flow, and most importantly, he understands the one thing Michael Bay never will. If you've spent 300 million dollars and change making shit look good, why cut away from it every 0.5 seconds when you can let people ogle at it?
And then there's the 3D, the big show. I don't know if this is the future of cinema or not, I don't know whether Hollywood is going to pick this tech up and run with it, but I do know that I want to see more worlds made in this image. The 3D here turns Pandora into a world, an experience so fully realized that you'll catch yourself craning over leaves to get a better look, annoyed that you can't just brush branches out of your way to get closer to what's happening. When gunships do battle with Pandora's winged beasts, you'll soar and dip with them. The term depth of field just got a whooolllleee new meaning.
I love the way Pandora's plants damn-near called out to me. I love the throb of the Scorpion gunships, I love the mech armour soldiers gad about in. I love the fact that Sigourney Weaver is still the baddest bitch in the business. I love that Cameron's even managed to get rid of the evil uncanny valley that plagues most humanoid special effects.
Is Avatar my favourite James Cameron movie? Blasphemy. That honour shall always go to True Lies ("You're fired."). But is Avatar one of my favourite cinematic experiences of the decade? Good god yes. Ten years from now, I know for a fact that I'm going to joke about how twee some of the Na'vi customs and rituals were. I know for a fact that I'm going to squirm at them in the way I do while watching Reloaded's Zion rave party. But I do also know that I'm always going to end that conversation with "But fucking hell that movie was just spectacle being all it could be". I'm always going to end that conversation with a sense of "I was there"
If ever the medium was the message, then boy, James Cameron sure does get the message.
