…then I’m a very manly muppet…

I end the year with a look back at the films I’ve watched in the last 12 months. I think this year I’ve reached over 70 ‘first-time’ viewings, plus at least another 5-10 repeats. More than in recent times I’ve seen probably 5-10 films on the big screen, not all of which were animated…

Anyway, in no specific order, my highlights…

Bronson: a tremendous tour-de-force of a performance from Tom Hardy as the eponymous career criminal, something between a sociopath and a circus ringmaster (mostly sociopath). Astonishing bravery in his acting and fearless direction from Nicolas Winding Refn. Not for the faint-hearted, but for anyone who likes either that actor or director, a must-see.

Super 8: a fine tribute to the heyday of Steven Spielberg, with lens flare and suburban streets, bike chases and kids hat home movies, this recreates a slice of 80s magic wonderfully. Much better than I had expected. Very entertaining.

The Muppets: a joy from start to finish, for both Rachel and I (who grew up with The Muppets TV show on Saturday evenings) and our daughters (who only know the Christmas Carol movie). Fabulous songs, brilliant fun performances from Jason Siegel and Amy Adams, with the best maniacal laugh of the year from Chris Cooper, showing Tom Cruise he’s not the only person to send himself up (but in a much less stagey, self-conscious way).

The Guard: how Brendan Gleeson was overlooked during Awards Season I’ll never know. He tremendously unsympathetic as the titular Guard in a small Irish backwater, and his chemistry with Don Cheadle is amazing. Just as funny as In Bruges with an even better ending.

The Raid: OUCH. When I left the cinema I genuinely felt like I’d been kicked in the ribs a dozen times and had the air sucked from my lungs. Breathtaking fight choreography and barely a moment’s respite in 90 bone-crunching minutes.

Confessions: a very strange Japanese film that starts with an astonishing 30-minute sequence where a teacher starts to confess something in front of her class. At first they’re paying no attention, she seems incapable of commanding their attention. But gradually, she does, and from there her confession leads to episodes from various pupils’ point of view, as they confess their own part in a terrible crime.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: a fantastic old-school thriller that’s as much about characters and human interaction as the fairly labyrinthine plot. The ensemble cast is uniformly fantastic, not least Gary Oldman, Toby Jones and Colin Firth. I saw this early on in the year, and can’t wait to see it again.

Benny’s Video: as a fan of Michael Haneke’s more recent work I sought out this earlier film, which (unsurprisingly) is as bleak as they come. On the one hand there’s Benny, alienated teenager who spends most of his time making or watching violent videos, with similarly violent images from news footage constantly in the background. And then, when Benny Does Something Very Bad, there are his parents.

Coraline: a wondrous stop-motion animation that seems like it’s in the tradition of Roald Dahl, as it goes to some pretty dark places and revels in the macabre. Again, I’m sure this would repay multiple viewings.

Tyrannosaur: a barnstorming directorial debut from actor Paddy Considine, with what is ostensibly a three-hander between Eddie Marsan, Peter Mullan and Olivia Colman. A truly brutal, bleak depiction of alcoholism, abuse and damaged souls. Colman is outstanding in a hugely complex and difficult role that’s light years away from her TV comedies; my performance of the year.

Badlands: a long-overdue viewing of Terence Malick’s first film, a truly beautiful depiction of disaffected youth in the heartland of middle America. Lyrical, sometimes infuriating, often breathtaking.

Drive: Nicolas Winding Refn’s second mention, featuring a brilliant turn by Ryan Gosling and even stronger support from Albert Brooks and Carey Mulligan in another 1980s throwback that oozes style and class in every frame.

Martha Marcy May Marlene: a really interesting, strong directorial debut from Sean Durkin, starring Elizabeth Olsen in an amazing role about identity and memory. Ostensibly telling the tale of a girl who somehow joins then escapes from a cult/commune lead by the very scary John Hawkes, it’s more fractured than that, with unexplained aspects throughout and a notoriously ambiguous ending. I loved it.

The Innocents: perhaps my discovery of the year, a 1961 horror classic. It opens to a pitch-black screen, and silence. Then a child’s voice starts singing; pure, angelic, and more than a bit creepy. Slowly, a pair of hands are revealed, dimly lit against the black, shaking. We can hear quiet sobbing. The child’s song ends with “then I die” repeated. With an image that surely influenced ‘that scene’ from The Blair Witch Project decades later, we close in on Deborah Kerr’s terrified, trembling face, babbling almost incoherently about ‘the children’, wanting to protect them, not destroy them…

It’s a stunning opening that utterly unsettles the viewer. What could possibly have caused all this? Immediately it cuts to Deborah Kerr as Miss Giddens, clearly a sane and proper young woman, meeting “The Uncle”, a wealthy bachelor who wants her to act as governess to his orphaned nephew and niece. He makes it clear that she is in sole charge as he doesn’t want anything to do with them. We hear phrases from that opening scene of terror in this conversation. It’s chilling. We know the set-up and we know that Something Very Bad happens. But what?

There are hints almost immediately… the house is a huge Gothic pile, inhabited by two children and the housekeeper, who is clearly unsettled already when Miss Giddens arrives. The previous governess died mysteriously. The girl Flora seems creepy in the extreme, and we learn that Miles (her brother) has been expelled from school, with words like “contaminates the others” involved.

Then they play Hide & Seek, and there’s a scene that reminded me of ‘the face in the boat’ moment from Jaws: truly scary and unsettling. The paranoia escalates, the sound design is fantastic in ramping up the tension (again, I feel Stanley Kubrick learned from this film for The Shining about creating tone and dread through sound and space).

While the climax felt a bit rushed, the way the film comes full circle back her trembling hands reveals the full horror of what has happened and is simply brilliant. The ending has almost no glimmer of hope for the innocent children of the title, nor indeed for their tragic governess.

This has influenced countless horror classics, if not the whole genre. It’s sense of paranoia and paedophobia must have been groundbreaking at the time. There’s almost no onscreen violence or blood. It works completely on the psychological level, with lingering images designed to unsettle, with sound that creates tension and dread, and with a tone that never lets up.

Thanks for reading my blog this year, I’ll try to be more regular in 2013! I thoroughly recommend all these films, and I hope from my descriptions you can gauge whether they’re your sort of thing (quite a few are definitely not easy viewing)…

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Born the King of An-gels…

You might have noticed an absence of new posts from me in the last few weeks, mostly due to an unrelenting workload of exciting new business pitches that just kept coming. Everyone in our office has been absolutely flat-out, and while it’s been both exhilarating and challenging (mostly in a good way), it has meant that this blog has been somewhat neglected…

…but finally, it feels like there is some respite (although I’m already nervous about January!). So indulge me while I reflect on how we’ve at least started to have a very merry Christmas…

Singing Carols

Ever since my schooldays in the annual carol service choir, I’ve loved the range of different carols sung in this country. I can still remember our music teacher taking us to task over breathing (some carols have v-e-r-y l-o-n-g lines), or that line in O Come, All Ye Faithful. It’s “born the king of an-gels”, not “born the king of ay-n-gels”. It just is. Take my word for it.

Anyway, as I’m finally writing this early on Christmas Eve yet, I’ve already been part of three fantastic carol-singing opportunities.

The first was at the usual “turning-on” of Tetbury town’s Christmas lights; except this year it wasn’t usual. HRH Prince Charles and his wife Camilla (the Duchess of Cornwall) are well-known locals, living only a couple of miles away, and this year they switched on the lights. And so, at the end of this very Royal year, Tetbury had made a big effort. Schoolchildren made lanterns and we all processed up the main street, and hundreds of us stood around the Market Hall singing carols until the Royal couple arrived. It was bitterly cold, but the atmosphere was terrific.

During all this, Rachel and I were lucky to be stood fairly near the front of the crowds. We were behind a guy sat in a motorised wheelchair, offering us a good view over his head, until he took a massive camera out of his bag, and stood up. It was so unexpected it filled us with unstoppable giggles. He was a big man.

So, not completely incapacitated then…

Just a couple of days later, we were very lucky to be in the audience for the City of London Choir’s performance in St John’s Smith Square in Central London. This was a high-class performance, but for all its professionalism the highlight was still when the children in the audience were invited up on stage to sing “Away in a Manger”…

Hannah just to the left of the conductor, Eleanor on the far right in the front row…

Lastly, we packed into the beautifully tiny Avening Church for a service of nine lessons and carols, this time attended by HRH Princess Anne (another local!). Rachel had been asked to accompany some of the choir’s carols on her oboe, and I’m not just being biased when I say she was fabulous.

This evening, we’ll be in Tetbury for the Christmas Eve Crib service, designed for children to participate and make Christmas about more than the wrapping paper and the presents, the chocolates and television.

The Parties

Our company parties have often been legendary affairs, often for  a combination of reasons, such as fantastic creativity, brilliant fancy dress, dance-floor or karaoke performances, or simply the fact that the alcohol consumed so addled everyone’s memory that the retelling of events might be patchy at best. This year we scrubbed up extremely well with a 1920s theme. I’ve never seen so many white braces and black shirts, feathery fascinators and strings of pearls in one place. And the cocktails… marvellous.

The invite suggested we dress in ‘silver screen glamour’, and so I went for a literal version of this, channeling Douglas Fairbanks, Jr as a classic cinema icon. I enjoyed walking through Bristol at rush hour in full costume to reach the party, and at seeing my silhouette beneath the street lights…

And then on Saturday, we gathered with friends in Tetbury’s Market Hall (the same one Prince Charles illuminated a couple of weeks ago), to drink and chat and watch our children dance to Gangnam Style and Lollipop. It was noisy, chaotic and brilliant, reminding how lucky I am to live here, in a lovely town with fantastic friends.

The School Nativity

In all honesty, these can be mixed affairs, for all their innocence. But this year the KS1 children at St Mary’s (and their teachers) outdid themselves. A Tale of Two Birthdays told the parallel stories of the traditional Nativity alongside that of King Caspar’s 40th birthday. His party came complete with circus performers and exotic dancers. The wives of the Caspar, Melchior and Balthazar were like something out of Sex & The City, coveting the new star in the sky like a glittering diamond, and commanding their hen-pecked husbands to retrieve it for them. The reason the Kings travelled from The East, was actually a last-minute shopping trip! I’m not saying they were typecast, but Sophie, Isobel and Amelia were perfect in their roles, at once a crystal-clear depiction and commentary on modern-day consumerism.

Fergus exuded astonishingly natural regal authority as Caspar, bossing his hapless companions around, feeding people their next line, and apparently improvising more than a couple of his own. He was amazing. There were also messages on friendship, militarism and teamwork alongside the traditional Christmas story, all in 30 minutes.

Eleanor was one of two narrators, following in the family tradition, and she was great. While I’d helped her practise her lines, noone had told me that she and Katie (the other narrator) had a song which involved them singing unaccompanied, with no microphones. The sound of two 7-year-old girls’ small voices in a large hall was one thing, but when one of them was my daughter… let’s just say it suddenly got very dusty in there.

It’s been a frantic couple of months, and even now the torrential rain is causing a change of plan for Christmas as my parents’ living room now has puddles in, so we’re relocating the festivities tomorrow to our house. But today I shall bake a ham and bake sourdough bread, go to the Crib Service, tidy the house up and watch A Muppet Christmas Carol, and It’s a Wonderful Life. It’s beginning to feel a lot like Christmas. Wishing you all the very best.

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