Category: Film

Kick-Ass is going to cause a lot of controversy. It's about vigilante justice. It's about revenge. It's about a twelve-year-old girl swearing and stabbing people and shooting them in the head and cutting off their limbs.

The strangest thing is that people are shocked most of all by the girl saying "the c word”, rather than the brutal murders she commits. The unstrange thing is that a lot of people … chiefly the denizens of this faceless morass we call the internet … are going to love it.

I didn't quite love Kick-Ass, and part of that was the audience, and part of that was a not very subtle undertone of homophobia, but it's a worthy enough movie that I hope achieves enough success for Matthew Vaughn to keep making movies.

When the Oscars are over for another year, it's legitimately difficult to care about them, isn't it?

Here's my post mortem, though, for those playing at home.

The Oscars, once again trying to do something to mix it up, have further diluted their already severely degraded brand. Much as Chris Rock said that the Oscars are about movies only white people watch (being as the world is divided into two distinct groups: white people and black people; white people talk like this and black people like this), this year they're trying to make the whole thing that much more populist … and therefore meaningless.
Ten Best Picture nominees, but only five Best Director nominees. This is the same thing as there being only five Best Picture nominees. The Best picture and Best Director don't always line up; one need only look at 2005, when Ang Lee rightly won Best Director for Brokeback Mountain, and Paul Haggis' execrable Crash took Best Picture.

You may have noticed that Brokeback Mountain still gets mentioned for many reasons, not least of which being the still somewhat raw tragedy of Heath Ledger (a bizarrely opposite parallel to the movie itself), while Crash is mentioned largely for the fact that it undeservedly won Best Picture and the various shallow implications it had for race relations.

Ten Best Pictures! What a spread! They run from the criminally overrated (An Education, Up in the Air), the way out there (District 9), the sadly without a chance (Up), the extremely popular (Avatar), to the totally mystifying (The Blind Side).

In the perfect world, Alice in Wonderland could be released without having to be considered by people above a certain age as "Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland”. If the exact same movie had been made by someone with no name to speak of, the viewers would be more free to loudly proclaim that the movie kind of sucks.

I'm free to do that now, of course: this movie kind of sucks.

There's a stigma to having done so, though. Had I loved it, I would have been a Tim Burton sympathiser in a dense jungle of haters. Had I hated it, which is almost my position, I would have been a petty fool who can't understand true greatness.

So ignore Tim Burton, and take Alice in Wonderland on its own merits: fact is, it doesn't have many. It's simply not a good or interesting movie, and no name can mask that fact.

The trajectory of Avatar for me was an initial reaction of “what?” then “oh, okay,” then “yes, that looks quite good”, then “I must see this, right now”, then “I have my tickets. I must not think of this film until such time as I see it, lest I overhype myself and die.”

Then Avatar came out today and … yes. This is what movie making is about. I could point to an entirely different film, different genre, different crafting, different styling, and say “this is what movie making is about” – and that is what movie making is about.

Avatar is a specific brand of amazing and perfect movie making. All of the cliches apply here: a labour of love, a man at the peak of his performance, best movie Cameron has made since Titanic … but they’re all true. Especially that last one.

ABSOLUTELY NO SPOILERS INSIDE!

Miyazaki Hayao is one of the stalwarts of Japanese animation, and possibly the only director known by filmic people in the Western world. After a thirty year career of increasingly telling humanity how terrible and polluting they are, Miyazaki finally returns to the spirit of wonder evident in the heroines of My Neighbour Totoro. In Ponyo he has made a movie about the relationship between a five year old boy and a magical fish girl. In his old age, the man has truly become the freewheeling Miyazaki.

Pixar is one of the greatest film studios presently in operation. They are a studio with a consistent vision and a strong distaste for making the same film twice. Above all, they don't just make great animation, they almost always make great films. Pixar is a studio captained by people with a deep respect for every aspect of their craft, and they have impressed once again with Up, which finally sees release in Australia this month.