Films of the year

Poster for Boyhood

At work just before Christmas, we were talking about our Christmas party.  As it was taking place on a Thursday, we joked that we should just stay out all night and come straight to work.  I said “I only want to stay out all night if it’s in Vienna and I’m with a French woman.”  Nobody got the reference. I know, I work with heathens.  (It’s a nod to Before Sunrise, if you’re reading this and are a heathen, too). The Before trilogy – Sunrise, Sunset and Midnight – are three of the best films you’ll see, charting a relationship over years.  Directed by Richard Linklater, he took the idea of films spanning years and put it into Boyhood, one film shot over 12 years, charting a boy’s life until he goes away to college.  It is, by some distance, the film of the year.  Nothing much happens; the boy moves with his mother and sister, his father is pretty much absent, his mother remarries, gets divorced, the father remarries.  There is a moment when you think something is going to happen, but it doesn’t.

Boyhood isn’t perfect, but there is so much interesting stuff in it.  The parental roles get reversed.  I bumped into someone from work when I saw it, and we talked about it for a long while.  Like the Before films, it stays with you. Watch it. It’s the best film of 2014.

Here are my other films of the year, in no particular order.

Afghanistan Forever? Taylor Kitsch in Lone Survivor. If you wouldn’t have sex with this man then you must be gay.

Lone Survivor. I haven’t seen Lone Survivor on any other films of the year list, but I thought it was superb.  Director Peter Berg specialises in stories about small groups of people up against it.  Here he told the true story of a US Special Forces mission that gets compromised by a goatherd, and as the title suggests, only one of them gets away.  Berg’s best work will always be the TV series Friday Night Lights, and here he mixes that with Bravo Two Zero in a way that could pretty much have been designed purely for me.  2013 was a shit year for me, and one of the few highlights was meeting Andy McNab, and another was watching Friday Night Lights. (McNab worked on Michael Mann’s Heat as a technical advisor, as well as Mann’s new film, and Mann worked as a producer on Berg’s The Kingdom – Mann’s daughter also directed an episode of Friday Night Lights).  A soundtrack by Explosions in the Sky, Taylor Kitsch sacrificing himself for the greater good, handheld shots of a strangely beautiful landscape, it shares many themes and motifs with FNL, and moved me in the same way that TV series did (I shall be writing more about FNL at some point).

Fruitvale Station.

Fruitvale Station.  Another true story, more FNL alumnus (Boyhood also features a couple of people from the series).  I fulfilled an ambition of about 20 years by going to the Sundance festival this year, albeit the one that the 02, not in Utah, and I watched the important, devastating Fruitvale Station.  Telling the story of the final 24 hours of a young man who is not exactly an angel but was trying to do the right thing.  Going out on New Year’s Eve, he gets into a fight on San Fransisco’s BART system, and gets shot by a policeman.  Michael B Jordan gives a great performance (as he did as Vince in FNL), and as the year went on, the film became more important.  It got its initial release in 2013, but you could not find a more 2014 film than the story of a young black man shot dead by the authorities than this.  Star Jordan and director Ryan Coogler will hopefully reunite on his Rocky spin-off, Creed.

Gone Girl I wrote about here. I liked it because it was a proper grown up film, aimed at adults.  Matt Saracen’s mom is the best thing in it, as I alluded to in my final paragraph.

The Wolf of Wall Street and Dallas Buyers Club both featured more people from FNL, and I would put them alongside American Hustle (nobody from FNL in that, as far as I can tell) as high quality, prestige Hollywood films that are, to use a football phrase, there or thereabouts.

After I saw it, I would have said The Imitation Game was the best British film of the year, but the further away I got from it, the less I’ve thought about it.  For me, the opposite is true of Locke, which is exactly the sort of film we should be making in this country; small, simple concept used to brilliant effect.  You only see one person – Tom Hardy – as he drives away from work one night and talks on his phone, his life, both professional and personal, falling apart.  Hardy is superb in the film, as is the writing, by Steven Knight, who also directed.  It is up there, for me, with Collateral and Drive as one of the three great digitally shot driving at night films.  ’71 is worth a mention, too.

Calvary is shocking, right from the opening line, especially if you are expecting something like The Guard.  The Edge of Tomorrow was a good, entertaining action film.  I’m sure there are others, but these are the films I enjoyed and appreciated and thought about most this year.

Edit: Completely forgot about Birdman.  Definitely up there. No FNL connection, though.

Kajaki

If we’ve learned anything since the beginning of the 21st Century, it’s that overthrowing an authoritarian regime is easy.  I mean piss easy. You send in some special forces to hook up with local rebels, call in some air strikes and the regime is gone in a matter of weeks.  In a bigger country like Iraq, you might need a few cruise missiles and some mechanised battalions, but you’ll still be in control of the country sooner rather than later.

The bit that comes after; turning a country that shouldn’t really exist, is just a mish mash of tribes who have been fighting each other for centuries, into Switzerland, is the hard part. I mean really fucking hard.

I’m as hawkish as anyone – more hawkish than most, I’d say – but every British military intervention of this century has failed.  At least the Americans stuck around in Iraq long enough to get some sort of withdrawal with honour.

Afghanistan was always seen as “the good war” (because removing a genocidal dictator in Iraq was “bad”), but the British deployment to Helmand, beginning in 2006, was a complete and utter failure.

Anyway, you’re not here for my political views, you’re here for a review of a film.

Kajaki has had an interesting production; it was crowdfunded, and then last week the producers got various male celebrities to tweet telling their followers to go and see it.  Oddly, one of the celebrities was Piers Morgan, a man who happened to buy shares in a company just before before the financial column in the newspaper he edited said they would do well, and who lost his job when he printed photos showing British soldiers torturing Iraqi detainees which turned out to be fake (he remains unrepentant about this).  A strange choice of person to promote a film about the British Army.  It’s only being shown at Vue cinemas, which I would think limits their audience somewhat, but it was nice to see staff in olive green when I turned up to watch the film.

I almost put some money into the crowdfunding campaign for Kajaki, but didn’t because at the time I had very little money, the rewards you got for giving money were a bit crap, and some of the money would go to charities like Help For Heroes.  I’m not as bad as one of my friends, who once told me he wanted to set up a rival charity to Help For Heroes called “Help For Cunts Who Couldn’t Get A Proper Job”, but this whole “support our troops” thing that seems to be an import from the US, and only happens when you’re fighting a shitty, unwinnable war (see: Vietnam), never sits well with me.  The armed forces are not automatically heroes. The civilian version of this is those who venerate nurses and teachers as saints, when the truth is that some are awful, some are great, and most are just doing their job the best they can, like the rest of us.

I said this was a film review, right?

Kajaki is a place in Helmand, the site of a reservoir and hydro electric dam.  The film is a the true story of a British patrol who get caught in a minefield, the hangover from the Russian invasion of the country.

There are things I liked about Kajaki, and things I didn’t like.  I’m not sure they needed to tell us, via an onscreen title, that Helmand Province is in Afghanistan.  Is anyone who watches the film not going to know that?  There is a bit of dodgy exposition at the start, and the dialogue as a whole is a bit ropey.  The CGI isn’t great, and it’s obvious a lot of dialogue was dubbed in post production.  Coupled with some sub par acting, this made me I fail to sympathise with the protagonists when it all kicked off.

Not that it does kick off, really.  The soldiers aren’t fighting an enemy; when they enter the minefield, and the inevitable happens (more than once) they aren’t taking out Taliban, they’re just unlucky to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.  With this, the film ducks the rights and wrongs of the deployment to Helmand.  It’s been described as “the British Hurt Locker”, but a closer comparison is Lone Survivor; a small band of soldiers is up against it in Afghanistan.  Lone Survivor is far, far superior, though.

There is some gallows humour, and some very British jokes (a guessing game they play means a character asks “Am I Fred West?”).  Whoever did the make up for the wounds deserves an award, but though the subtitle is “The True Story”, it doesn’t tell the truth.  You cannot have a film about Western intervention in Afghanistan where the Taliban only make an appearance at long range, at night.  The film doesn’t even tell the truth about Kajaki; two years after the events depicted in the film, an operation took place to install a new turbine in the hydro electric plant in the dam.  It would create jobs, and provide electricity.  The plan failed.

Like the British deployment to Helmand, Kajaki has high ambitions, but was done on the cheap, and is ultimately disappointing.