Rampart - Oren Moverman (2012)

1. Rampart is an astonishingly good film starring Woody Harrelson, directed by Oren Moverman. The screenplay is by Moverman and James Ellroy, but much of the dialogue is ad-libbed and Harrelson is so totally on-point he should probably get a credit too.
2. Los Angeles, 1998. The city has recovered from the riots only to be gripped by a massive police corruption scandal involving the anti-gang CRASH unit (Community Resource Against Street Hoodlums. Yep, really) based on Rampart Boulevard. Some 70 members of the unit are implicated in crimes ranging from armed robbery to the theft of huge amounts of cocaine from police storage. Beating suspects is SOP. Basically the group has turned into the city’s baddest gang, eg: its officers wear tattoos of a skull in a cowboy hat surrounded by poker cards showing aces and eights, ‘the dead man’s hand.’ They award trophies to each other for shooting suspects, in a bar in Echo Park.
3. It’s all relevant because the story centres on Dave ‘Date Rape’ Brown, a deeply corrupt LAPD cop. Brown is a Vietnam vet who regards the police presence in LA as a military occupation. He’s also the most dangerous sort of psychopath, the kind that believes that he’s the last good guy standing. There’s a sense in which he is the rampart of the title, betrayed, attacked from all angles, using every ounce of his ingenuity to hang on.
4. And this is just one of the reasons that we sort of admire him. You probably noticed that one of the film's dedicatees is C. G. Jung, and perhaps the satisifaction we get from watching Brown taking care of business comes from mainlining some very shadowy archetype behaviour.
5. Harrelson is in every scene and he’s insanely good. Sinewy as hell, chain-smoking, charming and bent on survival. He even manages to show us Brown’s vanity – his consciousness, when he’s being likeable of his own likeability. Also his terrible loneliness, which is the loneliness of anyone who tries to live life their own way.
6. There are some dangerous ideas in this film. One of the hardest to swallow is that women love a murderer. Dave Brown earned his moniker for the killing of a serial date rapist, and of all the women who he sleeps with in this film there isn’t one that doesn’t know it.
7. There are so many great lines: ‘I’m not a racist, I hate all people equally’, ‘you are the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in this bar’ and not forgetting ‘I like to suck cock! So sue me!’
8. Brown has a polygamous relationship with two sisters and a daughter with each of them. It’s a testament to the strength of his will that he can hold a situation like this in place, and a bellwether sign that his will is giving out that he can’t keep it together. He is the creator of his own morality, a father figure. But the film's final scene offers us the hope (and by then it is a hope) that although he may be losing his grip, he won't let go.
9. Even Ice Cube turns in an excellent performance. There’s a rightness in his appearing here, for fans of his album, The Predator, he represents the spirit of that particular place and time.
10. It's hard to know how Time Out expect people to take their film reviews seriously when they reference Kill List, a great film, but one that resembles this film not at all, and not Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenant. Or Aguirre Wrath of God. Or really any Werner Herzog at all. Also has anyone noticed the way that Time Out's reviews so often contain a 'really too many to mention here'-type phrase? Why not sit there with your pencil and try a bit harder yeah?

The Artist - Michel Hazanavicius (2011)

1. The Artist is a curious film by Michel Hazanavicius about how awful it is being French.
2. Hazanavicius' other major films, OSS 117: Le Caire, Nid d'Espions (Cairo Nest of Spies) and OSS 117: Rio Ne Repond Plus (Lost In Rio) are slapstick comedies about a clueless Gallic secret service agent, also played by Dujardin. Given meticulous 70s art direction, and a technicolour wash, these, too, are period pieces that use style to generate substance, comedies of nationality where being French is funny, rather than tragic.
3. Critics like Peter Bradshaw keep writing about how it's a 'homage to the age of silent cinema'. This simply isn't so. Hazanavicius says that the majority of silent films are 'boring'. His influences are directors like John Ford, Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock and the film's references are all distinctly post-sound, like Vertigo. Hazanavicius was interested, first and foremost, in making a film without sound, rather than a silent film, setting it 1920s Hollywood merely provided him with a pretext for doing so.
4. A French person will tell you that the word for cool in French is 'cool'. And if you say, 'no, what is it in French' they will look at you and shrug like a Pierrot.
5. If you're a director who makes francophone cinema you will inevitably spend your career trapped in the ghetto. The Foreign Language category at the Oscars is just one example of the patronising apartheid that will be the closest you'll get to recognition in the US. By making a silent film Hazanavicius has entered through a side door. Most of the academy were probably delighted when they discovered they'd just watched a French film that didn't make them feel stupid. At the time of writing Labrokes are 1/6 on him to win Best Director.
6. Just imagine if your language had no word for fun, and that every time you wanted to say something was fun the word that came out was charming. Obviously, the French don't make things easier for themselves by taking mime seriously, or dressing their children up in creepy little sailor outfits, but perhaps they only do that kind of thing because, tragically, they don't understand the meaning of the word charming either.
7. As you no doubt noticed the film as shown at a 1:1.37 aspect ratio. And there is something genuinely transporting about the way it feels to be in a cinema, looking at this oddly square frame, listening to an audience laughing over the instrumental score, bathed in the flickering white light from the screen. 
8. It is not true that John Goodman has never been in a bad film, in 2009 he had a major role in Confessions of a Shopaholic.
9. You probably realised that there was a sense in which Valentin was the artist rather than just an artist that was about more than the scattergun deployment of the definite article in French. His story is an anatomy of talent. Because, nothing is more likely to make you averse to trying new things than being good at one thing in particular. Valentin is only prepared to change once the pain of not-changing begins to outweigh the pain of changing. That he does so without dignity, sustained only by the faith of the people who love him, is relatively unimportant. All an artist has to do is survive his own process, by whatever means necessary.
10. The beautiful Berenice Bejo is Hazanavicius's wife. If you're a romantic you'll probably imagine that her off-screen role mirrored that of her character's, and that she sustained Hazanavicius through the, undoubtedly traumatic, process of making this strange film.

Shame - Steve McQueen (2011)

1. Shame is a film about a man with an interesting and varied sex-life, starring Michael Fassbender, directed by Steve McQueen. 
2. Seriously though, what red-blooded man doesn't have this much sex with strangers and prostitutes and webcam girls and female colleagues and porn and men all the time? What?
3. If you're interested in Michael Fassbender's penis you'll love this. You don't even have to wait long, it's right there in your face in the first scene, waggling around a spare, soulless New York apartment. Apparently Steve McQueen insisted on Fassbender's being naked all the time on-set and, whenever he asked, 'what's my motivation here?' would simply point at the tip of his penis with a conductor's baton.
4. This is the worst porno ever right? But, of course, this is a film about sex in a world where sex isn't fun any more. Fassbender's character, Brandon, is an addict. As is made abundantly clear, he uses sex compulsively because of a terror of intimacy. This not-very-subtle idea is stated in about 10 different ways. A female caller leaving an answerphone message for him over and over (it's almost like she can't get through to him), his inability to get stiff in the presence of woman who wants to know him (but it's fine with a prostitute later) and the 7-inch record of Chic's I Want Your Love, that's playing in his apartment when comes home (ironic!) and the fact he keeps asking his sister 'what do you want from me?' (she wants love, did you get that? Love).
5. But there is a cruel irony at work here, where the addict's substance of choice ends up delivering the precise opposite of the thing it once promised. So the alcoholic who drank for conviviality ends up pissed and alone. And the sex addict who once fucked to feel loved finds himself unable to love. The look on Brandon's face during coitus is that of a mating dog, a creature compelled to do something, without having the first idea why it's doing it.
6. It's pretty heavy stuff, so you can divert yourself by considering that Willem De Foe's penis was actually so large that Lars Von Trier had to use a body double for all the weird sex in Antichrist. And, according to model Janice Dickinson, Liam Neeson's cock is the size of an Evian bottle. So, those are the guys to beat.
7. Brandon jogs listening to Bach's piano cantatas. Of course, these are variations on repeated theme, so, a clever touch in a film about repetitive compulsive behaviour, but who, really, listens to disco in their flat and classical music when they go jogging? If you had to think of a word for the film's symbolism it would probably be heavy-handed, which is two words.
8. There are at least two meanings of the word shame. One is 'a feeling of humiliation brought on by the consciousness of wrongdoing'. The feeling we feel when our actions run counter to societal norms, according to Freud, a manifestation of the internalised society we each carry within us. Brandon, however, is living in a post-shame world. His boss discovering his browsing history is the worst possible thing that could happen - and yet there are no consequences, and he feels nothing. After all, how can the condemnation of authority mean anything when even that authority is literally shameless, cheating on his wife with Brandon's sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan)?
9. Turns out the price of liberation from our own shame is the freedom to live out our desires, which are delusions of the kind that, ceaselessly pursued, will eat you alive. As Sissy says: 'We're not bad people, we just come from a bad place'. The other meaning of the word shame is 'a regrettable or unfortunate thing'.
10. Carey Mulligan just looks so English and she has neither the face nor the voice to pull of a pretentious scatted version of New York, New York. The 10-Point Review literally fell asleep, twice, during the song, but that could just be that terrible post-coital exhaustion that usually kicks in after lunch don't you just hate that etc.?

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - David Fincher (2011)

1. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a superior best-seller to blockbuster adaptation by David Fincher.
2. Like Fight Club, this is way better than the book it's based on. Fincher and screenwriter Steven Zaillian, have stripped out most of the dross about industrial espionage and the Venger family history. Lisbeth's backstory is reduced to one intense vignette plus a menacing hint about her Dad. And there's none of the stuff to do with Venger having employed Blonquist's father in the 60s. All this makes it a leaner and tighter thriller altogether.
3. Speaking of which, Fincher cast Rooney Mara from the Social Network, instead of Scarlett Johansson, whom he rejected for being too sexy (which you have to like him for doing on behalf of all men, just once). At first the camera approaches her with caution, giving us the hard angles of her jaw and hair. But as the film progresses Mara's body is photographed pornographically. Now, there is absolutely nothing wrong with her body, but it is an unconventional sight in a blockbuster. Small-breasted and lithe as an eel, she's boyish, and never more so than when she's being handcuffed and sodomised (yeah, spoiler, if that's the word).
4. Fincher seems to be intent on provoking several million hetero viewers to an experience of the 'queer' element of their own sexuality. For instance, during the rape did you walk out? Why not, were you enjoying it? And if that seems like an uncomfortable question, consider that this film is all about the terrible things that people won't admit to.
5. If Fincher made the call not to move the action to the US it's not because he likes Sweden. Blonquist asks Harald, who sits surrounded by photographs of Scandinavian supporters of the Third Reich, why he doesn't redecorate. The exchange goes something like this:
   
   H:I'm the most honest
   B:In your family?
   H:In Sweden. My relatives want everything to have a shiny surface, like an Ikea table.
   
   Needless to say, this isn't in the book. Nor is this the first of Fincher's films to feature Ikea. As in Fight Club, the veneer hides something something far more savage.
6. Martin Wenger's chamber of horrors is an upgrade from the cellar in the book, which is merely a basement, rather than a centre spread from Lairs Magazine. What else would be hidden beneath his sterile Scandi-house? Like interior design, like mind. It isn't quite fair, since Fritzl was Austrian, but the precedent does prevent you wondering too much about how he got the sofas down there without anyone noticing.
7. Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor have put together a really intelligent score. You probably noticed the white noise as Lisbeth enters (she's a hacker, one who interferes), and the use of disjointed rhythms while they piece together disparate clues. Also that their cover of Led Zeppelin's Immigrant features a scream very like the one that Lisbeth lets out in the lift after her first meeting with Bjurman.
8. Lisbeth's primal scream is important, it tells us that, fucked up as she may be, she offers the dark currents of her personality a clear channel into the world outside. The really evil people in this film are the hypocrites, the kind that live in a world of wheat-toned scatter cushions with a soundtrack by Enya. By breaking Martin Wenger's jaw she reveals his true face, as it would be if evil could be seen, and when she rides out into the forest after him they do so as the purest versions of themselves: a demon chasing a monster.
9. The intro sequence is by Tim Miller at Blur Studio - not Kyle Cooper who did Se7en. As everyone keeps saying, it is like a James Bond intro, but there's a larger repertoire of fetish objects: guns, women, men, USB cables, rubber ball-gags and carnivorous plants, can you spot them all? And did it give you an erection? Just asking.
10. You can buy Lisbeth's 'FUCK YOU YOU FUCKING FUCK' nightshirt here. But to distress it properly you'll need to really put the hours in spooning heavily-pierced bisexuals.

Moneyball - Bennett Miller (2011)

1.  Moneyball is a surprisingly engaging film about using statistical analysis, or sabermetrics, to assemble a successful baseball team.
2. But it’s ok, it was written by Aaron Sorkin who also did The Social Network, the best film about a court case about a website that you are ever likely to see, and it was directed by Bennett Miller, whose last film was Capote.
3. You have to wonder whether Miller even likes baseball. His depiction of it is bleak – the players are exploited, the scouts are liver-spotted charlatans, the owners are shark-eyed capitalists. Pitt’s character, Billy Beane, is unable to even watch his team play, because he’s terrified he’ll jinx their game, so the game itself features hardly at all. Ok, there are a few graphs and some montages, but that’s more or less it. In fact, Miller seems to have ended up making a sort of anti-sports movie, which is probably good thing, given that the baseball is up there with cricket and kabbadi in the wilful tedium stakes.
4. Miller took over from Steven Soderberg, who wanted to turn it into one his of his multiple storyline films, following the car journeys of 20,000 individual Oakland As fans on their way to the stadium.
5. You suspect Brad Pitt is the man who made this film happen, since he’s been allowed to play his favourite version of Brad Pitt. In this sense the film is of a piece with The Ides of March, and The Rum Diary. A major star shooting an eccentric, otherwise virtually un-financeable script. You might see this as A-list males bankrolling their own B-movies. But even if these films aren’t as good as they’re making out, at least they’re way more interesting than studio pictures cobbled together from green paper, CGI and market research.
6. Aaron Sorkin is a huge Freudian. His stories are all about characters processing trauma. So Zuckerberg becomes the geek who can't relate who creates the ultimate system for mapping social relationships. Lt. Kaffee (Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men, which, yes Sorkin also wrote when he was about 15) is the lawyer who can't stand up in court because he’s so intimidated by his memory of his father, the star court lawyer, and ends up having to face down the ultimate father figure: a bristling Jack Nicholson. And here Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), the baseball player who was overrated by scouts as a young man, brings down the temple of subjective baseball analysis with sabermetrics.
7. It's a great way of writing satisfying films, but it’s sort of misleading, because it makes it look like a situation has arisen in order that the character can process their stuff. This is an illusion, brought about by the fact that Sorkin has worked backward from the event to the trauma, when in real life the trauma happens first, and there probably isn't any kind of causal relationship anyway. 
8. Sorkin used to like to freebase cocaine. He said ‘I had found a drug I absolutely love and that gave me a real break from a certain nervous tension that I kind of carry with me moment to moment.’ In a Sorkin film Sorkin would be a writer who learns to process his dissatisfaction with real life by writing screenplays where the dialogue is always perfectly polished and everyone has a sharp comeback ready. Miller allows his actors to hesitate, talk over one another and repeat lines which gives all the smart stuff the patina of realism. It works surprisingly well, even if you can't quite believe that people who work in baseball are anything like this entertaining.
9. You’ll notice that Beane has a load of pictures of The Clash on the wall in his office. These are from the single date the Clash played at the Oakland  in 1982, supporting the Who - you can tell because Strummer has his 80s wide Mohican going – like in the Rock the Casbah video.
10. Aaron Sorkin could probably write a script about eastern mysticism, field theory and kabbadi and it might even be interesting, so long as they didn't let Steven Soderberg direct it.

Margaret - Kenneth Lonergan (2011)

1. Margaret is a flawed, overloaded, but moving film by Kenneth Lonergan.
2. Who's Kenneth Lonergan? Well, he wrote Analyze This and, yeah, ok, The Gangs of New York. But wait, Margaret is really good, and at no point do gangs of men march on set, armed with a range of cutlery, and introduce themselves. If you're wondering what Lonergan looks like, he plays Anna Paquin's screenwriter dad here.
3. Don’t Matt Damon and Anna Paquin look terrific? It’s not CGI, it’s just that this movie has been trapped in post-production since 2006. Lonergan shot hundreds of hours of footage but couldn’t arrive at a cut he could live with. Fox Searchlight, to their credit, wouldn’t release the film without his approval – but they did sue him, hard, for not getting his shit together. This explains why, despite having some major stars in it, there was zero publicity, and you can only see it in about two London cinemas.
4. What you’re watching is a cut by Martin Scorsese, signed off by Lonergan. Things have to get pretty bad before people start saying ‘let’s get Scorsese to do this, at least he’s not such a perfectionist.’
5. It’s a film about sympathy, and how much we can really be expected to feel for other people.
6. All modern life depends on apathy. For instance, it’s only possible to inhabit a city like New York or London because, beyond your family and closest acquaintance, you don’t really care what happens to the human beings around you. Imagine the emotional ‘load’ of a single London tube carriage: all the hopes, dreams and fears of all those people sitting in close proximity to you. Compare that with your own deafening sense of isolation when sitting on the tube. The city has turned you into a psychopath. Why, you could probably watch someone being horribly maimed in a traffic accident and have forgotten about it by lunchtime.
7. Or could you? Are there certain kinds of tragedy that would force you into deep sympathetic contact with the strangers around you. And how would that be? Isn't there something greedy-seeming and, ironically, unsympathetic, about trying to participate in someone else’s emotional life without their permission? And how do we choose who we feel for and who we don’t? These are just a few of the pleasantly un-worked-out questions that the film raises.
8. There is no one in this film called Margaret – the title comes from a poem, Spring and Fall, by Gerard Manley Hopkins. It’s about a little girl crying for the dead leaves in Autumn. Hopkins basically explains to her that she’s crying for her future self who’s bound to end up so weighed down with human misery that things like dead leaves just won’t even touch the sides. Just one good reason for never leaving your child alone with a Jesuit.
9. You probably noticed that, in the scene in which Joan and Lisa sit down in the New York Opera House, the shot is an extension of your own view of the cinema’s seating. It’s a paradox that if you want to care about people you have to go to the opera. Or the cinema. Another paradox is that the people invested with responsibility for the public expression of emotion are actors, the most narcissistic, emotionally self-involved people there are.
10. The experience which Lisa is having at the end of the film is catharsis, as described by Aristotle. The drawing out of emotion elicited by drama. The spooky thing is that what she’s watching is Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann, which has nothing to do with her situation whatever. Which is, realistically speaking, true of any work of art you've ever loved.

The Rum Diary - Bruce Robinson (2011)

1. The Rum Diary is a confused film about boozing in Puerto Rico, based on a novel by Hunter S. Thomson with a screenplay and direction from Bruce Robinson.
2. Robinson is famous for Withnail and I, but he also made How to Get Ahead in Advertising, a poorly researched but entertaining morality tale about an ad executive (Do you mean executive or do you mean copywriter? Well how about you make up your fucking mind?) who grows a talking boil. He also wrote an autobiographical novel The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman, which the 10-Point Review can't really recommend.
3. About half-way through this film Johnny Depp's character, Kemp, visits a ghetto where he takes a picturesque photo of a young black girl through the window of an abandoned car. This scene is meant to demonstrate that Kemp is more than a tourist, he's a serious reporter with an axe to grind. Yes, fine, but the majority of the film is about getting drunk and chasing girls on a tropical island, which is more or less the modern definition of tourism. And all the other black people in it are hostile, frightening or sexually threatening. You cannot both have your cake, and also eat your cake.
4. In fact, if you're scared of gays and black people you'll love this. As in Withnail and I male homosexuals are menacing, but in Puerto Rico it's not just Uncle Monty who wants to bugger you, there are a load of sailors who are just dying to get right into your ass. There's also the scene in which a sweating Chenault (Amber Heard) dances with a young black man whose abs look like they've been carved from an illegally logged Amazonian hardwood while her husband (Aaron Ekchart) is forcibly restrained, powerless to intervene. You probably recognised these scenes as the expressions of sexual neurosis they patently are. If you're this worried about being forced to suck cock, no wonder you have to drink so much.
5. Speaking of which, there's a lot of cock fighting in this film, a blood sport that's illegal on the US mainland, but not in Puerto Rico. Its inclusion, in unflinching slow-motion, along with the racism and homophobia mentioned above, as well as the boozing, drug-taking, fast cars and the edible female lead, demonstrates the film's unrepentantly retro aesthetic. This is subtly different from the reconstructed retro of, say, Mad Men, which encourages the viewer to see the 60s in a slightly patronising light ('Nice suits, but if only they'd had therapy'). It's a sort of paean to a time when life was less complicated and/because these things were allowed to pass unexamined.
6. Bruce Robinson is a recovering alcoholic who relapsed to write this screenplay. Maybe that's what gives the movie its holiday feel: an escape from reality and its concomitant moral responsibilities. (Is it ok to have sex with prostitutes if you only do it in Puerto Rico? Just asking.)
7. You might consider this film as a sort of prequel to Terry Gilliam's, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Depp who at 35, played the 34-year-old Thompson in Fear and Loathing, now at 48 plays the 22-year-old Thompson in The Rum Diary. Basically he's twelve years older where he should be twelve years younger. It's confusing, and all you can take from it is that Jonny Depp looks fantastic for his age.
8. Aaron Eckhart is forging a career as what William Burroughs called 'The Ugly American'. Which is not to say that he's ugly, but that's there's something about his too-good-to-be-true jawline that means he's inevitably cast as a representative of everything that's cruel in the American dream. A few decades ago he would just have been a leading man, a la Donald Sutherland, but now he appears in order to demonstrate the vulnerability of old America, brought about by its lack sensitivity. His girlfriend is bound to cheat on him.
9. Hopeless sentimentality is as much a feature of alcoholism as drinking alcohol. And this film has a sentimental streak about a mile wide.
10. 'Empower the fowl', 'Your tongue is an accusatory giblet! Keep it out!', 'Can you smell that? That's the smell of bastards' - these phrases are characteristic of Hunter S. Thomson's idiosyncratic voice. Yes, well, none of them are in the book - they come from Robinson, who, let us not forget, could write a line for Uncle Monty like ' Come on lads, let's get home, the sky's beginning to bruise, night must fall and we shall be forced to camp.'