Hindsight: A 2014 Cinematic Retrospective

So I saw even fewer films in 2014 than I did in 2013. Yeah, take that, Hollywood! You're not getting my small contribution! Anyway, let's consider what I didn't watch.

9 Films You Might Have Expected Me to See but I Didn't

X-Men: Days of Future Past

The trailer for this did not inspire me. As much as I enjoyed "X-Men: First Class" and was intrigued by the idea of the new, younger actors being contrasted to the traditional cast of Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen and the like, the trailer made it look like way too much of a monotonous CGI assault on the senses, with loads of CGI Sentinels flying around a CGI wasteland and shit. I'll pass for the time being, but I may watch this eventually.

Update in 2017: I've seen this now and I actually quite liked it.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2

The first one was balls, no way I was watching this one. It's amusing that this attempt by Sony to reboot the franchise is now already dead because Disney has renegotiated to bring Spidey into the Marvel Cinematic Universe franchise. Hopefully they'll make a new version of the character who, for the first time ever in cinema, is actually like the character in the comics.

Guardians of the Galaxy

I was unsure about this because generally I've watched the Marvel Cinematic Universe films but the trailer really put me off: loads of corny jokes seemed to be incoming, and I didn't think I could hack it. Once it was out people were acting like it was the greatest film they'd ever seen. Seriously? A Hollywood action movie is the greatest film you've ever seen? I think you may need to watch more films.

Update in 2017: I've seen this now and I actually thought it was pretty decent. The final battle was a bit unoriginal before the dance-off but everything else was fine.

Interstellar

I am actually curious to see this because as a general rule I like Christopher Nolan's stuff but it didn't interest me sufficiently to cause me to go out of my way to see it. Kinda looks awfully similar to 2001: A Space Odyssey I must say.

Transformers 4

Piss off.

Ninja Turtles

Piss off again.

To go into slightly more detail, a new Ninja Turtles film should eschew the cheesy franchise baggage the concept has accumulated since the 80s cartoon and deliberately set about satirising modern comic-book films. Set it in the 80s and use it to contrast modern superhero cinema's pretense at realism with how absurd it really is. This film did not look like it was going to achieve anything so intelligent. And before you argue, TMNT was originally a satirical concept with a bit of thought behind it, not just a dumb franchise about goofy turtle characters eating pizza and fighting a guy with steak knives strapped to his wrists.

The LEGO Movie

Supposedly this is good. I just haven't seen it.

Update in 2018: I've seen this now. It was a lot funnier and more charming than I expected. Chris Pratt is spot on as the voice of Emmett, the tributes to Lego eras old and new is pleasing, and Mark Mothersbaugh's music fits right in. A pleasant surprise, to be honest.

Robocop

No way in hell was I gonna see this: not because I'm some mortally offended hardcore Robocop fan but because I found the idea phenomenally crass. The original Robocop (the only one I've seen) is probably one of the best action films of the eighties: an extremely violent science-fiction-crime-dystopian mash-up satire which ruthlessly attacked the worst excesses of 80s culture. Not only is Robocop therefore totally irrelevant outside of that context, the only way to reshape that would be for a new film to do the same thing to 2010s culture, ripping the shit out of its plutocratic-authoritarian political structure, monstrous consumerism and cultural deadness. When it turned out this was just going to be sanitised PG-13 bullshit I completely lost interest.

Birdman

I want to see it but I haven't yet. Give me time.

Update: I've seen this now. As everyone else at the time said, it's very good. By a weird coincidence I ended up reading Raymond Carver's "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" short story collection before seeing this, which was convenient.

5 Films I Actually Saw in 2014

The Inbetweeners 2

I really like the tv show this is based on, but this film went further than the first in losing sight of its main comedic purpose, I think. I would argue that a large part of the point of the TV show is to specifically highlight the sense of horrendous alienation many people feel as adolescents. Thus they're 'inbetweeners': they simply don't fit in with anyone in their community. This film seemed to just rely on cheap gross-out humour mostly: Will getting shit on his face and spewing everywhere, or Neil pissing on Simon. In the TV series, comedy of this sort derived not from the grossness of, say, Simon spewing on Carli's little brother or Neil pissing the bed at Tara's sister's house, but because of how utterly untenable the situations are socially: it's impossible to fathom how those situations could be resolved. The film also basically rehashes Simon's plot from the first film in bits with Jay and Will. Like the first film, this one also featured far less comic dialogue than the TV series. I was a bit disappointed with this.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier

I have rewatched this film and I'm afraid to say that I just don't think it's that good. My opinion hasn't really changed since my review. The film's plot tries to do too much - it really undersells the idea of Steve discovering that his best friend is still alive, but brainwashed - the action scenes are repetitious and there are way too many main characters, as if they didn't feel that Chris Evans could carry the film on his own (even though he'd to a significant extent managed as a main protagonist in the first one). They needed to focus on SHIELD and the other Marvel characters like Nick Fury a lot less, drop HYDRA completely and focus on the personal story of Cap in my opinion. I would have even probably shunted Bucky into a later film, because his resurrection so soon lacks impact. The satirical content of this film is also rather thin, in my opinion: yes, surveillance is bad, but it's much more confronting to be spied upon by your own government than by a conspiracy of evil people who've infiltrated your government, because it reduces the complexity of the issue. Even if we argue that our politics have been infiltrated by authoritarian nut-jobs, we need to understand why, not just characterise it as an "evil conspiracy." This film could have been much better in my opinion.

Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones

More like "Paranormal Activity: The Farked Ones" amirite? Let's just say I... uh... didn't see this one at the cinema. As a general rule it was pretty crap, but the twist ending where they go back in time to the first film was actually quite cool. Not much to say about this one: very far from being essential viewing unless you're a fan of the series.

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

You can read my review of this here. It's probably in some respects the best of the three films in my opinion, at least for its first half. The second half is crap. I'm glad it's all over. It'd be nice if they'd stop dicking around with Tolkien's work now. Y'know, I occasionally read defensive film fanboys going "Tolkien would have liked them." Sorry, but regardless of quality, he would have bloody hated them. I don't think he liked cinema in general, and if you read his letters you can see how strenuously he tended to object to even fairly minor deviations from his source material. One thing I'd argue he probably did want was for his work to be taken somewhat seriously as literature, and I don't think the Hollywood adaptation treatment achieves that by a long chalk. Now I'd appreciate if shallow corporate interests would leave his writing alone.

Foxcatcher

Although I didn't see this in 2014, it's a 2014 film. Read my comments on it here. It was a pretty dark and confronting film, taking an extremely bleak view of the America equivalent of the "idle rich" and those who fall through the cracks in American society. Observed curiously through the lens of Olympic wrestling, the film represents a fundamental awkwardness and sense of discomfort in the American dream and ideal and how badly that dream can fail or disguise far deeper problems. It's not a film I'll be rushing to see again, but at least it had something to say, unlike most of this trash.

Thus, my top film of 2014 must be:
The Grand Budapest Hotel
Another 2014 film I didn't see in 2014. It's good. Read my thoughts here. It's an amusing and well-performed film which questions our romanticised perceptions of Interbellum culture and different decades and time periods in general. I'd heartily recommend it. It makes most of this other stuff (apart from Foxcatcher really) look like the brainless nonsense it is. I still haven't quite escaped Hollywood, but I've at least well and truly escaped bad action films as being the extent of what I see. If you're going to watch any one of the films I've mentioned here, watch this one.

"The Grand Budapest Hotel" by Wes Anderson

I just checked, and I've confirmed that I've never seen a Wes Anderson film before this one, so you'll excuse me if I don't recognise any of his usual schtick. I've been a bit desperate for something interesting to talk about on here for a while; the usual subjects of "New Who isn't much good" and "people on the internet are stupid" haven't seemed worth writing about lately, so I was glad to strike upon a film which captured my interest. I don't intend for this to be a review, per se - more of a reading, but I'll at least say that I enjoyed The Grand Budapest Hotel, although I wasn't completely amazed by it. Nonetheless it's a recent film which I'd actually recommend, and they seem to be few and hard to come by lately. The reason The Grand Budapest Hotel fired my imagination in particular was because I've been reasonably interested in Late Modern European history recently, a topic with which I feel the film rather substantially engages. I've particularly been interested in the bits that don't make it into one's school education; I regrettably lacked the space on my university timetable to read History, and in any event was foolishly uninterested in it as an undergraduate to my possible loss. Nonetheless a recent revival of interest on my part has allowed me to pursue subjects of personal curiosity at my own leisure, and particularly the goings-on of Central Europe over the last two hundred years or so. Thus my reading of the film is as follows: that it questions the particular concept and representation of interbellum Europe and the concept of Europe in the first half of the Twentieth Century, interrogating how reliable and authentic modern culture's image of that place and period in history is. I'm sure this is a subject which other writers have discussed, but I wanted to express my thoughts on my own. For what it's worth, The Grand Budapest Hotel reminded me of two texts in particular: the Tintin comics by Hergé, and particularly the instalment "King Ottokar's Sceptre," in regards to the cultural-historical representation of the film, and The Turn of the Screw by Henry James in regards to the manner of the narrative.

The narrative itself is one which presents multiple layers of narration: the story is the recollection of youthful experiences by an old man, relayed to a young author, who himself recorded this information as an older man in a piece of writing being read by a young woman in the present day. Thus there are, to my reckoning, four levels of narration: the book being read by the young woman, the older author's recollection of the story, the narrator's recollection of the story to the author as a young man, and the narrator's actual experience of events as a youth. This obviously affects how the story is presented; for instance, the protagonist, one of two, named Zero Moustafa, actively delays discussing his long-dead wife Agatha, and introduces her abruptly. There is a question of reliability. This is just one part of how Anderson, to my mind, evokes the notion that the modern, arguably nostalgic, vision of Europe in the first half of the Twentieth Century is fundamentally an unreliable one.

Further evidence accumulates in terms of the film's presentation. The heavy use of modelwork on, for instance, mountain cable cars, the hotel's lifts and indeed the hotel itself all convey a sense of artificiality. This is further accentuated by the quasi-historical nature of the setting. It is primarily set in a fictional Central European nation, "Zubrowka," during a Fascist uprising in 1932, one year off from the Nazi's seizure of power in Germany. The Fascists themselves border upon reality without fully duplicating it, evoking the awkward status of German-aligned Nazi imitators in Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania and the like during the Second World War. The names are a complete mish-mash of Germanic, Slavic and Francophone referents, and similarly the characters' accents simply retain those of their actors, combining English, Irish, American and French accents and more besides without any particular consistency. This is particularly embodied in the character of the other protagonist, Zero Moustafa's employer Monseiur Gustave, an English-sounding man with a French name who runs a Central European hotel. Combined with the bright purple hoteliers' uniforms, the Fascist military garb, the really quite Alcatraz-like prison inmates and the mountainous, snowy geography an image emerges of this period as a hazy and chaotic hybridisation of innumerable cultural and historical signifiers which serve to highlight the artificiality of the stereotypical image of this era in Europe. It is of course further emphasised by the state of the hotel in the "1968" era, in which Zubrowka has clearly been subsumed into the Eastern Bloc, and its Soviet-brutalist external architecture is matched by the tacky orange plastic-and-vinyl interior as a contrasting and reflecting historical stereotype. The effect is to throw this cultural picture of "chocolate-box Europe" into stark relief by exploring the idea that completely fictional historical and geographical images are just as capable of signifying a particular time period in the cultural consciousness as real places and events.

Thus the film considers this imaginary construct of a real time and space. It is further referenced in the screenplay by the juxtaposition of the notional setting to the frequent use of modern idiom and colloquialism in the screenplay. The language of several characters in the "1932" era is even more modern than most of the language in the framing "1968" setting. As such the film serves to propose how utterly disconnected from reality artistic representations of the past generally are, such that a moustachioed Ralph Fiennes in a "1932" prison can earnestly inform his visiting partner in crime Zero of his familiarity with the necessity of avoiding being a "candy ass" while claiming that he derived such knowledge from reading Penny Dreadfuls. Thus is established a juxtaposition of the cultural perception of this time in Europe, as a sadly-lost period of fine living crushed by Fascism and Modernity, with the more accurate historical argument of its status as part of the extremely drawn-out death rattle of the Nineteenth Century and the Victorian Era. This is put forward by the older Zero, who claims that Fiennes' Monsieur Gustave "sustained the illusion" of a world which truly perished before Gustave's own time. Gustave's character, whose swearing and seduction of aged noblewomen is juxtaposed to his graciousness, friendliness and public propriety, underscores the notion of the interbellum's supposed glamour and decorum as a facade, albeit not one without its own virtues. This is also on another textual level underscored by Gustave's love of Romantic poetry, which in real literary history had completely fallen from grace by this time in favour of Modernism. Romanticism was in fact viewed as a badly ageing movement before the end of the Nineteenth Century and even blamed in certain quarters for promoting and enabling the kind of careless attitudes which were held responsible for the unprecedented wastefulness and destructiveness of the First World War. Gustave's failure to ever completely recite any of his poems, and the fact that many of them aren't very good, symbolise the concept that Romantic Europe was already dead, but that society had not entirely come to terms with it by that point, and perhaps still hasn't. Dmitri's desperate desire to recover the "Boy with Apple" painting similarly represents a vain wish to cling to the Romantic past: in Dmitri's case the painting symbolises the immense wealth, status and dignity of a bygone age. The fact that it later hangs forgotten behind the counter in the hotel attests to the ultimate futility of this desire to keep that period alive for whatever reason, and Zero's replacement of it in Dmitri's house with a piece of confronting erotica further reinforces the notion that the Romantic age was just as "improper" as any other time and simply pretended that it wasn't. Thus the film also draws attention to this regretful dream that Romantic Europe was killed by Fascism: it wasn't - it had died a decade and a half earlier in the trenches.

In this way The Grand Budapest Hotel also engages with the modern cultural image of the 1930s adventure narrative. It thus evokes not only Tintin, which is actually from the period, but also later representations of cultural significance like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. It particularly draws attention to the idea of interbellum Europe as a place of adventure and derring-do, represented by, for instance, Gustave's ridiculous escape from prison and Zero and Gustave's sled-chase of Willem Dafoe's skiing SS-style enforcer Jopling, after which they, as such adventure characters so often do, stand around lightly clothed in the snow unaffected by the freezing conditions. The ultimate encapsulation of this is when Adrien Brody's Dmitri and a crowd of alarmed Fascist soldiers shoot up a hotel balcony in confusion while hitting no one whatsoever, such that Zero is capable of running through the fusillade to attempt to rescue Agatha. This serves to emphasise how unrealistic this perception of the period is, while simultaneously reminding of those virtues and values which can and will survive in the face of mindless violence and persecution. The success of Zero and Gustave's absurd adventure serves to mock Fascism while reminding that it was the ugly truth of the era. The Fascists' intrusions, above all other unwholesome elements presented as lurking beneath the surface of European society at that time, function as a reminder of the ultimate tragedy of the period and its doomed nature, represented by the abrupt, off-screen execution of Gustave, the surly but comical Fascist thugs of the first train confrontation being replaced by a filthy, humourless "death squad" with no interest in discussion or investigation, the fundamental empty ugliness of Fascism emerging through its thin veneer of outward respectability. Yet respectable it nearly is in the early parts of the film. The original uniforms, which partially evoke the more decorative Imperialist garb of the First World War, and the reasonable nature of Inspector Henckels, remind modern culture that the Interbellum and Fascism are one and the same. They are products of the same historical motion which occupy the same historical space, both arguably, and in part, the corrupted vestiges of the mouldering remains of long-dead Romantic Europe. The execution of Gustave as such strikingly declares that Europe at that time was not, really, a nice place to be in many respects. The description of the event is abrupt and darkly comical, however, consoling us with the knowledge that it was brutal but that it is also over.

The final component I wanted to mention is one of equivalent interest to me but one which I hadn't myself previously fully connected with the film's other ideas. That is the concept of what I might describe as, for want of a better phrase, "islands of time." What I mean by this entirely inadequate phrase is the idea of specific, especially short, historical periods which nonetheless genuinely were, or are inaccurately perceived to have been, distinct historical entities with their own peculiarities. The interbellum period is obviously a prime example of this: twenty short years which are nonetheless perceived as sort of "sticking out" rather sharply from the history around them, almost this notion that because of the First and Second World Wars the 1910s didn't really flow organically into the 1920s and 30s, which themselves "jolted" into the late 40s and then the 50s. I think the film manages to somewhat draw attention to this notion as well, without necessarily criticising it. This is particularly represented by the idea of historical inertia in the face of the sudden and unexpected. It is shown, for instance, in the hotel maintaining in a sense its normal operation despite being overrun with Fascist officers who have essentially turned it into a headquarters, or the white-garbed monks in the mountains carrying on their monastic life despite the country being completely revolutionised. Of course the most substantial image of this is the fact that Zero, thirty-six years on, has essentially bribed the local Soviet government to keep the hotel operational as a tribute to his long-lost wife and child: "We were happy here, for a little while." Thus the film conceptualises the innate contradiction of periods of history and periods of life which are structured, routine and substantial, but which are only ever temporary, and sometimes are very brief. Thus Anderson rounds out his exploration of the cultural image of the period, explaining why it is so enduring: because of this personal human tendency to perceive these "islands of time."

To conclude I ought to explain the textual comparisons I made at the beginning. The Grand Budapest Hotel of course evokes "King Ottokar's Sceptre" because both feature intrigue centred around a historical or culturally significant artefact in a fictional Central European nation under threat from fictional Fascists. Hergé's comic is period satire, of course, reflecting the political situation of the time, using fictionalised regions to enable the point he is making. Anderson's presentation of the inaccurate and nebulous modern conception of 30s Europe may therefore be compared to how such representations once had enormous relevance and purpose, but that modern culture has more or less lifted away the surface of the time period and left most of the reality behind. The Grand Budapest Hotel draws attention to this insubstantiality in modern representations and adaptations. An awareness of this very insubstantiality explains  how, for example, Steven Spielberg's 2011 "The Adventures of Tintin" spectacularly misses the point of its source material. To turn to Henry James, the film evokes The Turn of the Screw in two ways: firstly with the use of multiple layers of narration, which also involve the recollection of experiences long past, and secondly in the theme of the tension between Romantic notions and reality. What Anderson achieves in The Grand Budapest Hotel is to question the intersection of layers of history, memory and culture, and speculate upon where reality lies, and where reality intersects with beauty and fairness and happiness. Perhaps all these things are to be found mingled amongst each other, and many worse and better things beside.