Movies Of The Year

Thinking about this year at the movies, I’m struck by just how uninspiring it has been. There has been very little to actually coax me from the comfort of my sofa into the cinemas. Part of the problem is the prevalence of remakes and sequels – while I’m interested in such films as Iron Man 2 and Paranormal Activity 2, I’m not interested enough to schlep all the way to the cinema, queue for aeons and then pay cinema prices to see them when I could pay a fraction of that and watch them via LoveFilm in the comfort of my own home. The same goes for something like the movie version of The A-Team. There is also the ongoing problem of the length of modern movies – there seems to be a temptation (which I blame completely on the tedious Lord of the Rings franchise) to try to make a movie seem epic by giving it an epic run time. I mean, does anyone really believe that Shutter Island needed to be as long as it was?

Yet two films do stand out to me this year, and while they are very different in content, style, budget and profile, they have one thing in common – intelligence. The first is Christopher Nolan’s Inception - a movie that takes larking about in people’s dreams and makes it into compelling viewing. There are two main reasons why this movie works – firstly, it is visually stunning. As a director, Nolan shuns CGI as much as possible, and we can see in this movie that really paying off. Nolan messes with reality, but the effects he uses to achieve this are given a more tangible quality by not being simply done on a computer. Yet despite being an effects heavy fantasy movie, Inception deals with complicated themes in a subtle, yet clear, way. Freud is a clear spectre in the film, and it is as much about psychoanalysis and the burying of painful emotions as it is simply about dreams. Crucially, it makes you think about dreams and how we respond to them. And that’s no mean feat for a film designed to be a blockbuster.

The other film that really stands out to me this year was Precious. Unlike Inception, this picture is very much based in reality – and the grim reality of abject poverty in America. Crucially, the film doesn’t pull any punches – it shows abuse (including a terrible example involving a newborn baby), welfare dependency, incest and discrimination in such a way that demonstrates the drama without slipping into melodrama. Parts of the film are very difficult to watch – but, then again, they have to be. To fully demonstrate the reality of Precious’s world, there has to be a realistic depiction of her nightmarish parents, the general debilitating impact on people of abject poverty and the inability of those tasked to help people like Precious to do so effectively. There are no easy solutions offered here, and as a result the film is innately political in away that many overtly political films are not.

So the two films that really made an impression on me are very different, yet they engage with the viewer’s intellect, and as such are worth actually going to the cinema for. And this is something that, in the era of 3D and endless remakes, the best filmmakers should bear in mind – if you want to make a film that genuinely stands out from the crowd, then you should try to make it intelligent.