film

Interview | Ben Lewin, director of The Sessions

Focusing upon a brief period of sexual awakening in the life of real-life polio-afflicted Californian journalist and poet Mark O’Brien (John Hawkes), Ben Lewin’s The Sessions is an amiable and largely enjoyable comedy drama set in the 1980s. As a survivor of boyhood polio himself, the film’s subject is very close to Lewin’s heart. We sat down with the man recently to discuss his inspiration for the film, getting the right tone, and the experience of working with such a talented cast.

PPH (in bold): What in particular drew you to the story of Mark O’Brien?

Ben Lewin (in regular): To put it very simply, it was the emotional impact on me when I quite accidentally read his article on seeing a sex surrogate [played in the film by Helen Hunt]. I didn’t expect to be reading that, even less for it to reach me in the way that it did. A few minutes later, I took the article out to my wife and said to her, “I think this is our next movie.”

How did you approach adapting the work and what he had written?

I think I tried as much as possible to use his article as a blueprint for the whole thing. And I may have moved away from it at times; you know, I wrote various drafts, but always kept coming back to it to find what it was that had turned me on. When you write, you sometimes lose your way or meander off on a tangent. I think it was a combination of what he had written plus the insight I had got from his girlfriend, who was with him in the years before he died, Susan Fernbach. And the really rich account that I got from from Sheryl Cohen Greene [Hunt's character] of her side of the story .

How did you approach the tone of the film?

The process of writing goes everywhere for me, it goes dark and light and everything in between. Finding the tone is, in fact, the process. I simply reached a point where I thought that it represented Mark O’Brien’s really unusual view of life and the influence of his poetry on his way of thinking. And I think that I never worried too much about the tone, I never worried particularly about trying to be funny. Sometimes it’s quite a surprise to me, particularly when I heard an audience, and there’s a moment when he says [to Sheryl], “Your money is on the desk over there” and people laughed. And I never intended that to be a funny line, but I think people identified with his awkwardness. And that’s where the humour comes from, so I don’t think that it’s full of funny punchlines and so on. I think the situation itself is what generates the humour.

What are some of your cinematic influences?

I certainly never looked at other films about disabled people – they were not a guideline. In a way, one of the films I kept thinking about was Risky Business. I thought that also had a real verve to it, plus a touch of authenticity. Otherwise I’m not sure that I used any other film as a model. I guess my heroes are Bruno Weill and Billy Wilder and probably people that have been long forgotten by most others! But film is just another way of storytelling, and I would say that I’m as much influenced by storytelling in written literature as I am in film culture.

Helen Hunt and John Hawkes in The Sessions

Initially, the title was The Surrogate – what was the reason for the title change?

It wasn’t an exciting reason at all, it was the fact that there was a film out called Surrogates which Disney had made with Bruce Willis that was completely different. And both Fox and Disney, being members of the MPAA, they didn’t want to have any confusion between the two films. I was in the end, very happy with the choice of the title The Sessions.

Did you come across across any issues with the MPAA [Motion Picture Association of America]? The film’s surprisingly sexually explicit…

Well, we were concerned. I think that we never thought we would get a PG-13, even though Bill Macy is very vocal on this subject. He thinks that it’s a crime that films full of violence are given a PG-13 and films that touch on sexuality are immediately in the R rating. But we were gratified that the MPAA liked the film and didn’t ask us for any cuts.

That must have been a relief…

It was a relief, because there were a couple moments which are on the edge, and all of a sudden they want you to edit it and you’re in danger of getting an NC-17 [the rating that carries the stigma of box office death]. In the end we were happy with the attitude that they took and they saw the film the way it was intended.

What was it like to work with your two leads?

It was like sitting back and watching the best theatre in the world. I’d like to think that my particular gift is casting! [Laughs] I know that if you do that correctly, you never have to look over your shoulder. I really think they did all of the heavy lifting. We spent a lot of time together before the shoot talking through the script and particular scenes and when it came to the actual shooting, I really tried to let them use the spontaneity of the moment as much as possible, and as much as possible, stay out of the way.

Was William H. Macy your first choice [for the role of the Catholic priest?]

You know, he wasn’t my first choice, because I was actually thinking because this was Berkeley, California at a particular time, I wanted something completely different. I was thinking of a black or Latino priest. Then all of a sudden the suggestion of Bill Macy came up, and it took me all of a millisecond for me to agree to that! But often the best choices come out of left field and you don’t know they’re coming.

What’s next for you?

Well, I know that I’m going to buy new shoes for the children! [Laughs] I’m kicking the tyres of a bunch of projects and writing a couple, but I haven’t committed to one in particular just as yet.

The Sessions is out in cinemas from Friday, released by 20th Century Fox.

Draw Something Wild | Criterion creativity

This came to my attention the other day, so I thought I’d share it. Some wonderfully talented creative type (with an enviable amount of time on their hands) has painstakingly reproduced most (if not all) of the Criterion Collection covers using the Draw Something mobile app. Criterion, for the uninitiated, is a DVD and Blu-ray label dedicated to lavish, special feature-heavy issues of classic and contemporary films. Their output leaves the dreams of cinephiles as wet as their bank accounts invariably end up dry.

The madcap intensity of this project nicely reflects the level of dedication and detail which Criterion brings to their work. Here are a few of my favourites:

Visit Made-Up Stories for the rest

via @grady_hendrix on Twitter

PPH end of year round-up part 3 | Events, acknowledgements and hopes

It was a year of new departures for Permanent Plastic Helmet, as we got into the events game.

Our first of three events at London’s Clapham Picturehouse - a 35mm screening of Spike Lee’s classic Do The Right Thing on July 5 – drew a large crowd, who wolfed down the free pizza before falling under the spell of the New Yorker’s incendiary 1989 masterpiece. Incidentally, in case you didn’t know, the blog’s name comes from a line spoken by Samuel L. Jackson’s character Senor Love Daddy in this film.

Oh, and Spike Lee liked the poster so much that he asked for a bunch of copies to be sent to him:

@PPlasticHelmet The Poster Looks Great.Can You Please Send Me 5? My Addrees Is 75 South Elliott Place,Brooklyn,NY 11217 USA. Thanks,Spike

—
Spike Lee (@SpikeLee) June 14, 2012

Our second, a super-rare theatrical screening of Michael Rapaport’s documentary Beats Rhymes and Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest on September 27, was a complete sell-out. Before the film (and after the now customary pizza), a patient crowd politely waited for me to carry out one of the most protracted prize raffles in history.

In December, for our third and final screening of 2012, scores of people braved the cold (and presumably turned their backs on Christmas parties) for our 20th anniversary showing of Ron Shelton’s White Men Can’t Jump on December 6. Following an hour of classic 90s hip hop and R&B in the bar, I took a leaf out of Gloria (Rosie Perez)’ book, and ran a ‘things that begin with the letter ‘Q’ quiz. Here’s a nice shot of folks in the bar beforehand:

I’d like to thank the team at Clapham Picturehouse (in particular Clare Binns, Kate Coventry and Dan Hawkins) for being so supportive of the events and super helpful in running them. Thanks to Yves Salmon for photographing the second event. And a massive, massive thank-you also to the outrageously talented Piccia Neri, who was responsible for poster artwork for all the events.

We’re going to continue with our programme of events in 2013, so stay tuned for upcoming announcements. We’ve got some crackers lined up.

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It’s been an interesting year on the blog. I’m delighted that the readership has increased (incidentally, December 2012 has been the best ever month for hits on the blog), but I’ve found myself with less time to work on it, such has been my workload elsewhere this year. (I’ve started freelancing for Sight & Sound, Little White Lies and Grolsch Film Works, among others). I also got married!

Consequently, huge credit must go to the team of contributors, who have furnished the blog with some really intelligent, incisive work over the last twelve months.

These contributors are (each name is hyperlinked to their Twitter account, so you can follow them): Guillaume Gendron, Ed Wall, Cathy Landicho, Basia Lewandowska Cummings, Sophia Satchell-Baeza, Sophie Monks Kaufman, Fintan McDonagh, Dylan Cave, John McKnight, Michael Mand, Joseph Walsh and Tom Cottey.

I’d also like to thank each and each every person who read, recommended, RTd, or Facebook ‘liked’ PPH, or simply stumbled across the blog searching for actual plastic helmets (this happened more than I’d care to admit).

On that theme, I thought I’d share a few of my favourite “search terms” – essentially word combinations bashed into Google that somehow led to Permanent Plastic Helmet. (WARNING: EXPLICIT CONTENT):

pakistani multi smoker, naked joe pasquale, richard and judy naked pic, vanessa feltz ass, naked girls fucking naked boys, keith chegwin penis, permanent obsession limp dick captions, cool troll eating, confused animal face, iranian sex.com, hunk bull, rabbit in army helmet, porno del grupo musical tight fit, jungol nakeds, mike shinoda raping, on the bus i’m naked, we are most familiar with when it comes to rock stars: drug addictions “leave a reply”, and “chitty chitty gang bang” brigadier. And that’s probably enough of that.

Thanks also to all the distribution companies and PRs who have been kind enough to keep inviting us to screenings and sending us DVDs. Couldn’t do it without ya.

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Finally, here are some things from the blog this year that I’m particularly proud of/enjoyed:

My opinion of Prometheus as expressed through the facial expressions of Eddie Murphy - review

The Expendables 2 - review | Ed Wall

Shame and Gender  – feature | Cathy Landicho

Music Video Week – David Wilson - interview

Music Video Week – Sound and Vision: A Potted History of an Artform – feature

Moebius: Human After All - feature | Guillaume Gendron

Ira Sachs - interview

Killer Joe – review

Cyrobra or: The Three Ages of Tormented Man | Sophie Monks Kaufman

In the next year, I hope to streamline and simplify both content and design, and introduce a whole bunch of new contributors and regular features.

Watch this space in 2013

Thank you for reading.

A

PPH end of year round-up part 2 | Dogs, disappointments and discoveries

With my year-end Top 10 done and dusted, it’s time to engage in some good old-fashioned negativity, and reveal my least favourite films of the year. Before I continue, I should say that while there were probably plenty worse films out there (in terms of technical quality etc, not to mention all the stinkers I mercifully avoided) this is a completely personal take. What follows is an account of the films that particularly irritated, bored or offended me (or in some frightful cases, all three). Who let the dogs out?!

Cabin In The Woods (dir., Drew Goddard)

In stark contrast to screenwriter Whedon’s sprightly Avengers Assemble, this clever-clever novelty was slathered in a suffocating sheen of smugness; it was almost as though the film kept pausing itself to explain to us – the poor audience – how awesomely intelligent it was. But it fell at every hurdle: not scary enough to work as a horror, not funny enough to work as a comedy, and not smart enough to provoke thought. The film that fell between all these stools was, in its own repellent way, the real stool.

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Damsels in Distress (dir., Whit Stillman)

When critics wrote effusively of Whit Stillman’s “light, frothy” campus comedy, I wondered if they’d watched the same film as me. On the contrary, I saw an airless, smug, joke-free mess with precisely as much respect for its characters as its audience: zero. One of the most painful experiences I’ve ever had in a cinema – I couldn’t wait for it to end.

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The Darkest Hour (dir., Chris Gorak)

Had the filmmakers been honest, they’d have called it The Darkest 89 Minutes. This desultory sci-fi shambles about hungry electrical monsters (I know, I know) was a thrill-free ordeal.

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The Dictator (dir., Larry Charles)

Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest was an ugly, flat, mean-spirited shambles full of lame jokes, pathetic toilet humour and hapless, dated attempts at satire. Another bad sign was the reliance on the celebrity cameo for chuckles; a conceit which underlines the nagging feeling that Baron Cohen – now a major league Hollywood player – is part of the smug, self-congratulatory gang he purports to lambast.

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How I Spent My Summer Vacation (dir., Adrian Grunberg)

“Mad” Mel Gibson’s comeback as an action star was a noxious, derivative blast of casual racism (when will we live in a world where filmmakers will refrain from shooting Mexico through sulphurous filters?), gratuitous, nasty violence and beyond-retrograde sexual politics: ‘spicy’, brutalized Latina maidens were so 1985, guys.

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The Imposter (dir., Bart Layton)

Was there a more appropriately titled film released this year? Sure, Bart Layton’s film had a great story to work with (it’s explored brilliantly in this New Yorker article), but the director completely failed to trust said material, smothering it with pointlessly slick formal jiggerypokery. Worse still, I got the strong feeling that the filmmakers didn’t really give a toss about any of the characters they were dealing with. Contrast the humane way in which the New Yorker article treats the people involved with the cold calculation of the film. A real missed opportunity.

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Irvine Welsh’s Ecstasy (dir., Rob Heydon)

This ridiculous low-budget Canadian adaptation of an Irvine Welsh short story fused the production values of Hollyoaks with the clarity of insight and intellectual rigour of Hollyoaks. A spectacularly misconceived fiasco bereft of a single redeeming feature.

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A Man’s Story (dir., Varon Bonicos) | full review

Varon Bonicos’ deeply boring and hagiographic effort was less of a documentary than an extended electronic press kit. Its biggest crime was to make its fascinating subject (fashion designer Ozwald Boateng, who became the youngest, and first black man to open a shop on Savile Row) seem like a total dullard.

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Red Tails (dir., Anthony Hemingway)

When watching this cheese-sodden, horrendously inept would-be epic about the heroic Tuskegee Airmen, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. There’s a tough dilemma at the heart of the act of responding to the George Lucas-produced Red Tails: should we be simply happy that this important story is being highlighted for a mass audience, or dismayed that it’s been handled so badly? There’s room for both emotions, but it’s little short of a tragedy – and an indictment of Hollywood’s racial mores – that a film this poor had to fight so hard to get made.

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The Sweeney (dir., Nick Love)

I maintain that, despite the critical opprobrium he’s always received, there’s a decent filmmaker lurking somewhere within the bowels of Nick Love. His debut Goodbye Charlie Bright was a truly decent effort, and the first half of The Business showed a hitherto undiscovered lightness of touch. Sadly, his witless, crass, pointless remake of the 70’s TV cop standard reminded us of the reasons for his current standing. Further minus points for wasting some great London locations.

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Dishonourable mentions go to: Christopher Nolan’s bombastic, self-regarding and stupid The Dark Knight Rises - thank God that trilogy is over; Oliver Stone’s laughable Savages (only a man with the hubris of Stone would try and get away with one of those pretend endings in this day and age); Cameron Crowe’s nauseating We Bought a Zoo - the moment where the director’s giddy optimism crossed the divide from heartwarming into terrifying; rubbish Canadian comedy Starbuck, which wasted a great premise with slack, cartoonish execution; and Michael, a shallow and repugnant Austrian film which played like a bankrupt man’s Michael Haneke remaking Misery after reading about Josef Fritzl. I found its ending (I won’t spoil) particularly unpalatable.

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A quick round-up of disappointments

Perhaps 2012 found me in a particularly crotchety mood, but I was largely unimpressed with a vast swathe of the year’s biggest critical darlings. The two films I’d most been looking forward to – Jacques Audiard’s Rust and Bone and Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master (feature) – both ended up being my least favourite films to date from their respective directors. I found the former to be a disjointed (no pun intended, Marion) and manipulative – if well-acted and occasionally powerful – affair, replete with weirdly dated sexual politics and hilariously fetishized notions of masculinity.

Anderson’s film, meanwhile, looked and sounded great, but after a superb opening, simply disappeared in a feeble puff of ineffectuality. I was compelled enough to watch it twice (not least so I could further bask in Joaquin Phoenix’s unhinged performance), but was even more bored and confounded the second time round. I think Anderson is a visceral and propulsive filmmaker rather than a cerebral one, and The Master betrayed signs of its creator either lacking ideas or simply failing to communicate them adequately. However, it deserved serious credit for refusing to spoonfeed its audience, and for being such a genuine oddity in the oft-restrictive context of mainstream American cinema. It also inspired some truly outstanding writing, not to mention some lively pub discussion.

Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild was another critical favourite which, despite its undeniable energy and originality, left me cold. I found it hokey, shallow and not a little patronizing. Another film to depend heavily on young actors – Wes Anderson’s ever-so-precious Moonrise Kingdom (full review) - felt like a serious case of diminishing returns even though it looked gorgeous. Early stills and teasers of Andrew Dominik’s Killing Them Softly had me hot under the collar, but the end result – a hectoring, gratuitous and self-satisfied mess -  poured ice down my trousers.

There was plenty of praise for Miguel Gomes’ Tabu, but I found this broken-backed film hard work, and seemed to be alone in preferring the austere first half to the colonial-era second. However, in the interests of full disclosure, I watched it on a laptop on a timecode-inscribed DVD screener – hardly optimal conditions for a film which many described as one of the year’s most visually lush. If it’s playing on a big screen near me any time soon, I’ll make sure I give it another go.

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Discoveries

I managed to keep a complete record of everything I watched on every format this year, so I thought I’d whack together a couple of (alphabetical) Top 10s of some great stuff I saw for the first time:

Cinema

2001: A Space Odyssey | dir., Stanley Kubrick, 1968 | BFI Southbank

Faces | dir., John Cassavetes, 1968 | BFI Southbank

Hyenes | dir., Djibril Diop Mambéty, 1992 | IFI Dublin

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie | dir., John Cassavetes, 1976 | Prince Charles Cinema

Ordet | dir. Carl Theodore Dreyer, 1955 | BFI Southbank

Ornette Coleman: Made in America | dir., Shirley Clarke, 1985 | IFC Center, New York

The Passion of Anna | dir., Ingmar Bergman, 1969 | BFI Southbank

The Purple Rose of Cairo | dir., Woody Allen, 1985| Arsenal, Berlin

The Spook Who Sat By The Door | dir., Ivan Dixon, 1973 | BFI Southbank

Yeelen | dir., Souleymane Cissé, 1987 | IFI Dublin

 Home viewing

32 Short Films About Glenn Gould | dir., Francois Girard, 1993

All That Jazz | dir., Bob Fosse, 1979

The Bad and the Beautiful | dir., Vincente Minnelli, 1952

Blue Collar | dir., Paul Schrader, 1980

Chameleon Street | dir., Wendell B. Harris, Jr., 1989

The Hit | dir., Stephen Frears, 1984

Safe | dir., Todd Haynes, 1995

Sisters | dir., Brian de Palma, 1973

Spider | dir., David Cronenberg, 2002

Wonderland | dir., Michael Winterbottom, 1999

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Thanks for reading. Tune in tomorrow for the final part of PPH’s end-of-year round-up.

PPH end of year round-up part 1 | Editor’s top 10, the nearlies, and the never-weres

There seems to have been a developing trend in year-end film lists for the listmaker to casually drop a self-deprecating reference to the sheer arbitrariness of the task they’re engaging with. Well, I just enjoy making lists, and to paraphrase 90’s pop favourites The Cranberries, everybody else is doing it, so why can’t I? My ambitions for the list are fairly modest: that a) it might provoke a bit of discussion, and b) it might inspire people to go out and catch some good films they may have missed.

For consistency’s sake (and to couch the list in some kind of context), I’ve only selected films that were released in the UK in the calendar year 2012. This means there’s no place for some fare I greatly enjoyed at festivals, including Pablo Larraín’s astonishing docudrama No, Adam Leon’s sprightly New York fable Gimme The Loot, Ken Burns’ riveting documentary The Central Park Five, or Ashim Ahluwalia’s gloriously seedy Miss Lovely, all of which should (or definitely will, in No and Gimme The Loot’s cases) hit UK screens in 2013.

Here, then, is the Top 10, in alphabetical (not numerical: that taxonomic task was too tough) order.

Amour (dir. Michael Haneke)

Austrian director Haneke (who “took to Twitter” this year with hilarious results), produced two truly outstanding performances from Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant for this stately study of the devastating effects of dementia on an elderly, close-knit couple. It didn’t necessarily say anything overtly profound, but it was profoundly moving, not least because the two actors so fearlessly confronted issues that, owing to their advanced age, they would surely be dealing with when the cameras stopped rolling. Regardless of how Haneke’s exactitude made one feel on a moral level (Riva has a truly upsetting nude scene), it made for searing drama.

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Barbara (dir., Christian Petzold)

Petzold’s slow-burning drama about a nurse plotting her escape from banal early 80s East Germany was a fascinating, beautifully composed character study which had me hooked from minute one. In the title role, Nina Hoss was extraordinary. Her surface coldness was a vivid semi-subversion of the passion, fear and political courage that bubbled underneath. When her character eventually thawed, the monumental rush of relief and excitement I felt was testament to the poise and the sublime technical control of her performance. All that said, I also really enjoyed Andrew Tracy’s perceptive, skeptical review in the ever excellent Reverse Shot magazine.

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Bill Cunningham New York (dir., Richard Press) | full review

My favourite doc of the year profiled the octogenarian, workaholic New York Times photographer in breezy, joyous style. Likeable, eccentric, talented and ultimately unknowable, Cunningham was the perfect subject. As I gushed at the time, “[BCNY is] not just enjoyable; it transcends documentary filmmaking to become a hymn to passionate, singular creativity.” I also said, “It’s aptly titled; encapsulating his world, a breathless rush where subject and location are inseparable, indivisible. Punctuation would just get in the way. It’s Bill’s city.” So there we go.

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Breathing (dir., Karl Markovics) | full review

Like Barbara, Markovics’ initially austere (and very well-acted) directorial debut crept up on me, possessing an unexpected power. Focusing on the rehabilitation and subsequent growth into manhood of a 19-year-old offender, it was a real slow-burner about a tough subject that somehow managed to end up genuinely uplifting rather than depressing. Though such a comparison may seem a tad arbitrary, I much preferred it to the Dardennes’ The Kid With A Bike, which struck me as far more overdetermined, protracted and fantastical than many of its more effusive cheerleaders had suggested.

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Holy Motors (dir., Leos Carax) | full review

Moment for moment, Carax’s Holy Motors was the most fun I had in the cinema this year. Following a day in the life of mysterious everyman (and he really is every man) Mr. Oscar, played by chameleonic superstar Denis Lavant, it was an episodic, unpredictable and dazzling tragicomedy packed with bizarre jokes, berserk stylistic diversions, and myriad loving cinematic references. Above and beyond the craziness, the film hit me on a gut level. I saw a brave self-portrait of a filmmaker self-reflexively admitting the absolute folly of striving to present “reality” onscreen. And, most heartbreakingly of all, I saw, in Mr. Oscar, a deeply moving portrayal of the exhausting, crippling effect of the various roles which we (the human race – I’m aiming high here, folks) force ourselves to play, over and over again, on a daily basis. Oh man, and those chimps at the end: was there a more bittersweet moment at the movies this year?

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Keep The Lights On (dir., Ira Sachs)

No film swam around my head this year like Ira Sachs’ elliptical, New York-set drama. Focusing on a long, doomed relationship between a sensitive documentary filmmaker and a drug addicted lawyer, the semi-autobiographical KTLO was marked by fiercely unguarded performances, gorgeous cinematography by Thimios Bakatakis, and extensive use of the woozy music of late musician Arthur Russell. Not only that, with its plot thread about late queer artist Avery Willard (not to mention its championing of Russell), it actively looked to celebrate and excavate a particular section of American subcultural history. A deep, warm, discomfiting nightmare dream of a film.

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Killer Joe (dir., William Friedkin) | full review

Evil has a voice, and it sounds a lot like veteran director William Friedkin collaborating with playwright Tracy Letts for a second time. And guess what, evil’s a whole lot of fun too. This rollicking redneck neo-noir pushed the boundaries of taste (just ask Colonel Sanders), and provided Matthew McConaughey (an actor for whom I’ve never – Dazed and Confused aside – had much time for) with his greatest role to date. Rough, sexy and surprising, Killer Joe was the best thriller of the year. In the interests of full disclosure, I also got off on quite how much it seemed to piss people off, too.

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Magic Mike (dir., Steven Soderbergh)

Despite a marketing campaign which did its level best to make it as difficult as possible for the heterosexual male to walk up and buy a ticket, Magic Mike emerged as one of the most purely enjoyable films of the year. Expertly helmed by the redoubtable Steven Soderbergh, it was a hazily (and gloriously) shot Floridian tale which balanced a keen view of contemporary economics with a host of cutely quoted influences, from Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights to John Cassavetes’ fondly sleazy The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. Channing Tatum was great in the lead role, and McConaughey (again; who’d a thunk it?) shone in a flashy supporting role as Dallas, the oiled-up, stripping patriarch.

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Once Upon A Time In Anatolia (dir., Nuri Bilge Ceylan) | feature

Boringly thrilling? Or thrillingly boring? Either way, Ceylan delivered a cinematic oxymoron of rare depth and panache with this rich, long and deeply atmospheric procedural. When it finished, I genuinely felt like I’d been locked in the cinema all night with the film’s cast of exhausted, devastated characters. Existential malaise never tasted so good.

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Sightseers (dir., Ben Wheatley) | full review

The surprise of the year, for me. After the crushing disappointment of the second half of Wheatley’s sophomore feature Kill List, my expectations for this black comedy were low. But what began as a cute riff on Martin McDonagh’s play ‘The Beauty Queen of Leenane’ swiftly turned into something much richer and darker. Sightseers was a merciless excavation of the murkily unpalatable underbelly of the British national character, filtered through a host of key tropes from the history of classic passive-aggressive British TV comedy. What’s more, all of this venom was set against Laurie Rose’s exceptional cinematography, which highlighted England’s natural beauty like few films have deigned to do. It stayed in my head for days afterward.

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The nearlies

There were a few films painfully close to squeezing into my top 10. One was Ron Fricke and Mark Magidson’s “non-narrative, non-verbal 65mm journey” Samsara, which made me feel like I was flying at the time, but wore off fairly quickly afterward. Another film whose lasting effects didn’t quite match up to the visceral experience of watching it was Gareth Evans’ gripping (and absurdly violent) martial arts cracker The Raid (full review). The seediest film I saw this year was Beauty, Oliver Hermanus’ exquisitely composed and extremely disturbing tale of illicit obsession in contemporary South Africa.

I also really enjoyed a couple of big blockbusters (I’m only a preening arthouse dilettante for some of the time); Sam Mendes’ Skyfall had the lot: a good story, some great stunts, truly beautiful cinematography (kudos Roger Deakins) and, in Javier Bardem, a genuinely brilliant villain. Seeing it at a full-to-bursting public screening on its seventh (!) week of release underlined the extent to which this Bond bonanza was ‘event’ cinema at its best. I was also taken with Avengers Assemble; chaotic, overlong and in-jokey for sure, but also a hell of a lot of fun which possessed a keen sense of its own ridiculousness. It made me laugh like a drain on more than one occasion.

On the other side of the ‘fun spectrum’, Steve McQueen’s Shame, which sent me into paroxysms of praise at last year’s London Film Festival, cooled on me like few films in recent memory, not least in response to a discussion with my wife about the film’s questionable sexual politics. Her excellent piece on that theme, ‘Shame and Gender’, can be read here. Oh, and despite Mark Cousins’ pretty bizarre rant (I like him normally), I enjoyed Argo lots too.

2012 was also an excellent year for documentaries; I greatly enjoyed Malik Bendjelloul’s revelatory musical excavation piece Searching for Sugarman, and was very moved by Call Me Kuchu, a sensitive and shocking study of the day-to-day lives of brave LGBT campaigners in Uganda. Amy Berg’s West of Memphis was a powerfully made and propulsive dissection of a grim failure of US justice, but let itself down by indulging in some of the formal shock tactics it decried its villains (the West Memphis Three prosecutors) for using. Finally, though it was no doubt an acquired taste (you had to buy into the myth of LCD Soundsystem as one of the modern titans of popular music to swallow its precious combination of hushed reverence and relentless solipsism), I was ultimately seduced by Shut Up And Play The Hits.

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The never-weres

There were a handful of films – very highly rated by people whose opinions I generally trust – that I never got round to seeing. These included: Bela Tarr’s final film The Turin Horse, James Marsh’s Troubles-based thriller Shadow Dancer, Jafar Panahi’s “not a film” This Is Not A Film, performance art doc Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present, David Cronenberg’s limo-fest Cosmopolis, and child soldier drama War Witch (which I’m not sure ever actually got/will get a proper theatrical release). I hope to get around to all of these sooner rather than later.

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Thank you for reading. Do pop your head around the door for the second part of our end-of-year round-up, which will be with you shortly.

Intel Four Stories campaign | The Mirror Between Us

The other day I came across the online-hosted screening event, The Four Stories, which is the culmination of a campaign launched by Intel® in partnership with W Hotels to find some of the world’s most promising aspiring film-makers. Entrants were challenged to upload their original screenplays to intel.com/fourstories for their chance to see their idea brought to life on the big screen. The competition was curated by Roman Coppola and his production company, The Directors’ Bureau, with the winning scripts turned into individual ten-minute shorts, and a final film being created by Coppola himself. The winning screenplays were selected from global entries by a panel of judges including Coppola, Michael Pitt (once of Dawson’s Creek, if you remember!), and the perma-trendy Chloe Sevigny (who I think I saw last year hanging about on Cambridge Heath Road, but I could be wrong…)

I had a butcher’s at the winner, and my favourite was The Mirror Between Us, directed by music video helmer Khalil Joseph (Flying Lotus, Seu Jorge) and starring the excellent Nicole Beharie (last seen – by me, anyway) in Steve McQueen’s top shagger comedy searing sex addiction drama Shame. It’s a beautifully shot short about two young who women embark on a dream-like adventure through the Maldives islands after an event turns both their worlds upside down. Here it is, check it out:

PPH presents White Men Can’t Jump | TONIGHT!

“You can put a cat in the oven, but that don’t make it a biscuit” - Sidney Deane (Wesley Snipes)

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I’ve never really understood what that means, but tonight, at the Clapham Picturehouse, I’m going to get another chance to find out. And you’re invited too.

In the third edition of Permanent Plastic Helmet presents (following Do The Right Thing and Beats Rhymes and Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest), we’re delighted to be putting on a 20th anniversary screening of Ron Shelton’s classic comedy White Men Can’t Jump.

To get you in the mood, you can remind yourself of how amazing the film is by watching the trailer, or (and I highly recommend this) by reading this fascinating oral history of the film’s making over at the top sports & culture website Grantland.

We’re kicking off in the bar at 7.30, with drinks, music, pizza and snacks, then the film (preceded by a brief intro from yours truly, and a raffle draw) at 8.30.

You can buy tickets here, or rock up on the door. Prices are £9, £8 members, £7 concessions. See you there!

The PPH Interview | Jesse Vile, director of Jason Becker: Not Dead Yet

In cinemas now, Jason Becker: Not Dead Yet is the moving story of the eponymous guitarist who refused to give up on his dream despite being diagnosed with a rare, incredibly serious wasting disease. PPH caught up with the film’s eminently likeable young director Jesse Vile to talk about his must-see film, the process of art, and cheese in cans.

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PPH (in bold): From watching the film it’s pretty obvious you have a great deal of genuine feeling for Jason and his family. Having read some of what you’ve written and said in previous interviews it seems this was an idea you had germinating for a while. Apart from knowing his work growing up what was it that drew you to his story?

Jesse Vile (in regular): The thing about Jason is he’s such a rare individual. Everything about him is rare. The fact that he was so talented at such a young age and the fact that he actually achieved the rock and roll American dream at 19 – that’s rare. Not many people get to do that. And for his talent and the amount of success that he was able to achieve he was still a super down-to-earth great guy who didn’t get into drugs and alcohol like most rock stars do – that’s rare. And then he gets a relatively rare disease at an extremely rare age, and then lives 23 years after diagnosis which is…only 5% of people with ALS ever do that so that’s extremely rare. So he’s just a rare person. I thought: what a fascinating guy, everything about this guy is just amazing and he just never stops amazing people and just being brilliant pretty much and that’s what drew me – he’s an amazing person.

So was it the idea of telling an incredible story, would you say, that you wanted to make something that was inspirational to other people in that sense? Or you just wanted his story to be known to a wider audience?

Yeah, well I definitely wanted that that for sure – for his story to be more widely known. But I didn’t want to make just a fan film – I didn’t want to make a film that only fan-boys of Jason and of the guitar would like – I think a lot of directors probably easily could have gone in that direction. I wanted to do something that was… that had more of a universal human story at its core – because it does. I mean – to spend all that time and resources to make a film about Jason which is purely just about his shred and having ALS and dealing with it would have been selling the story short – it was more about incorporating all of the main characters in his life and all the themes that come out in a film. So yeah, I guess I didn’t really set out to inspire people because Jason did that for me, I just pretty much kept myself out of it [laughs] as much as possible.

You can definitely see that in the film. And I would definitely say that it succeeds at being a universal message, one that I personally found really hopeful. As a film that’s aiming for a universal audience – because it is quite niche terms of subject matter – regardless of the way the film turned out some people are still going to perceive it as being mostly about a shredding guitarist. As the producer as well as the director how have you found the challenge of bringing it to that wider audience and how much pressure have you felt being so personally connected to Jason and the people who are close to him, in gaining that wider audience?

I feel very lucky and grateful that it’s been received so well on the festival circuit. I think that’s really helped bring it to a wider audience. It’s very, very, true people either look at my film and go “oh my god it’s about heavy metal and a guitar shredder” or “it’s about ALS and it’s sad and depressing” and they don’t go for either of those reasons. You know, people come up to you after Q&As and they say “great film” or, they don’t [laughs] – but the most satisfying ones are when people come up to me “I just stumbled in. The film I wanted to see was sold out so I came in here and I’m so glad that I saw yours. Has it been out long?” I mean that’s cool because that’s really who I made it for: people who would maybe just stumble in, had never heard of Jason, hated shred guitar and would walk out kind of glad that they saw the film.

I think it would be sad if people were put off by the fact that it involves shredding. In some senses it starts off as being about Jason’s career…but you don’t watch The Wire because you’re really into the idea of being a drug dealer…

Yeah, exactly, like “I’m a crack addict so I’m looking to start selling crack in the streets of Baltimore or whatever”. It’s difficult! Fortunately in the States, the UK and Canada it’s not my main job any more – my job is support and to help get the word out to Jason’s fan-base and things like that.

It was interesting: earlier you called Jason’s success ‘the American Rock and Roll dream’ – what did you mean by that?

Well, just to be a rock star. If you’re an American kid, most American kids want to either be a football player or an astronaut or…a rock star. Maybe some people want to be doctors and teachers and stuff, and those are brilliant obviously but I think kids grow up wanting to be rock stars. You’re in a rock band in middle school and high school because it’s worth aiming at.

It’s funny though because when you’re particularly a teenager the idea of rock and roll stardom appeals because of the lifestyle. But then with Jason it doesn’t seem he was really into all of that, so it’s interesting because he got into it purely because of the music – which I think is quite naturally a part of his success – that he really committed to it.

Yeah, Jason’s dream was never to just get chicks and do drugs and drink. His dream was to be a professional musician – but to be the best one. He wanted to be the best guitar player – and he was on his way to doing that. And that’s what those guys on that label – the label he was on, Shrapnel Records – that’s what that label was about. It was started for guys like that, that were focused on just being the best on the guitar. It was for guitar nerds and really technical guitar playing and – you know the guy in the film Richie Coxon? He’s in the film very briefly, he’s an old friend of Jason’s – he was in the band Poison in the 80s who are known for super glam excess and all that kind of stuff – and he basically said “we didn’t do that any of that stuff. That’s not what we were about on that label. We were all about guitar, being the best at the guitar.” And then what he said is kind of funny – it’s like “and then you know, once I figured out: ok I can play guitar. Now what?” That’s when he got into all the shit.

Jason Becker

There seems to be an obsessive impulse that runs through all these guys…

It’s competitive! And…it’s not just like Keith Richards – they’re not just writing great songs on the guitar that aren’t…well some of those songs are really difficult! But you could probably learn a Keith Richards song if you started playing guitar within a year, whereas one of Jason’s songs you’d spend ten years trying to learn it. It’s a completely different level of technical guitar playing. And so you can’t be all fucked up on drugs if you’re gonna play like that! We interviewed Steve Vai. He had a really interesting thing where he was like: “I was a bee on the edge of the honey pot. And I would just take a little taste every now and again. But I knew a lot of guys that would fall in and that was it.” And for him, again, for him the most exciting thing was getting an idea out of his head and onto tape. And some guys, they’re excited about just being fucked up, you know?

They’re virtuosos. The way those guys look it almost reminds you of the way musicians looked in the times of Beethoven and Mozart doesn’t it?

[Laughs] Jason never wore that stuff though. All that glam stuff you see him in – that was just someone dressing him up for photos. He was just into jeans and sneakers.

He strikes me as an incredibly unpretentious guy from an incredibly unpretentious family. His parents and his brother – all the people around him – are obviously crucial in his life before as well as after the illness. The influence of his parents shines through the film as a big part to his character…

I’m glad you saw that because that was definitely intended – they’re huge characters. They’ve done everything for Jason – they’ve given up their lives for him – not just to take care of him for the past twenty years, but for everything. At the very beginning they nurtured him. They saw that he was interested in the guitar and they nurtured that. They supported him and, yeah, they’re huge characters. Hid Dad invented how he speaks now for Chrissakes! You know what I mean? They’re not going to not have a huge part in the film. They just awesome people, and really interesting. Gary (Jason’s Dad) has the greatest voice. He’s so great on radio. Everything about them was brilliant so I just wanted to include them as much as possible.

I think there are certain moments of the film that really bring out an optimism in humanity. The fact that his parents devoted themselves so much to their children…you can infer that from the film – they seem extremely tight as a unit and it was almost like a blueprint of how to be a good family. The parents are artists, really creative people but not in the way that they’re trying to use that creativity as a leverage above other people. Where was it they live? 

Richmond, California. It’s quite near San Francisco.

It’s not an amazingly affluent area, it’s quite run down…

Dave Lopez says it’s pretty ghetto. And he’s right man. A couple of the guys from my crew went and picked up the Chinese food we ordered for lunch when we were shooting and they were scared to death! It’s rough man! Jason’s old high school has got barbed wire, a fence and metal detectors.

I love that though, I love that they’ve brought him up in a really… I guess it’s realistic urban environment. Some of his friends were interviewed in the film, and again, they just looked like an amazingly tight knit group – good people you know?

Yeah. I met some amazing people making this film. Everyone I met. Well, just about everyone (chuckles ironically) were just unbelievably amazing.

It’s just unbelievably selfless a lot of these people and what they give up for Jason. That was amazing. I never really saw a family that close before and people just give up their lives to help someone else before like that. It was really inspiring.

In the wrong hands this film could have been incredibly melodramatic. I could tell that wasn’t your intent…

I’m not a sentimental or melodramatic guy. Most Brits I think definitely aren’t and that’s why it was great working with a British film crew and a British editor because you want some drama but you don’t want it to be…[sighs] lame. I think it’s more of an American thing. Because we love our cheese.

Yeah. Why is that?

We just love cheese. We love it so much we put it in cans. And squeeze it out on ourselves.

Spray it all over each other.

Yeah! We love it! But you know, I think you’re just immediately aware when something’s just [grimaces] cheesy so it’s kinda…there are certain scenes in the film where I asked “dude was that cheesy” and they’d be like “no, that’s great” and I’d be like “OK, cool”, you know?

I think it struck a nice balance. To sentimentalise a situation like that is to patronise Jason quite a lot and you showed him the appropriate amount of respect – the tone of the film was spot on in that sense.

It could have been really easy to do that if you didn’t try and keep a close eye on it – not because he’s someone to be pitied but it’s not something you deal with every day is it?

Becker with director Jesse Vile

You’re in a situation where it’s really easy for someone from the outside to say “Oh, poor you”, though.

He gets that all the time. At the end of the film you see him go see his spiritual guru, Amma – and he gets people going up to him [speaking in a loud, slow voice] “hello – how… are… you… today?” And I saw that and I was like for fuck’s sake. And Sorana’s like “he’s not deaf you know”. Or they’ll go round and go, “you’re such an inspiration” and he’s just like “thanks, that’s really sweet but it’s a bit much!”

The thing with Jason is once you hang out with him you know he’s not like everyone – in many ways. And not just because he’s ill. Especially in emails because on email he can ramble on and crack jokes…

He comes across as having a sharp wit.

He does. And he’s really observant. For obvious reasons. He can’t just jump in and start chatting. And he was really getting the whole film thing. He was picking up a lot of stuff, with people in interviews. He’d say “no, you have to go back and do it like that” and it was like “oh yeah!” No, he’s really observant and he’s a smart dude. He’s not just great at guitar he’s a smart guy as well.

You talked once before, in another interview I saw, about waiting to make this film until you were ready – you had the idea in film school – what prepared you to finally take that step of saying “alright, I can do this now”?

It was a combination of regret and the challenge. I think I always regretted not following through with it. I’d always see his name in my ITunes and just go “oh!” – I couldn’t even listen to it – I was so like “damn, when am I gonna make this film?” and all the rest of it. So it was kind of that, thinking “I don’t want to feel that way any more. I want to make this film. Fuck that. Fuck regret.” And the other was just – I’m ready. I was 29 when I started and I was like “I want to make – or be making a film – before I’m thirty at least” and…I don’t know! I just felt I was ready. I’d experienced things in my life.

It must take an emotional maturity to deal with such a vast subject matter that, as you say, requires a lack of sentimentality in certain areas…

For sure. And I think I was just really creatively starved. I wasn’t doing anything too creatively fulfilling at the time.

Were you working a normal job at that point?

Yeah. I’ve always worked in the film industry – helping other film-makers have their work be shown and put out there and exhibited – but never my own. And it was always like: when am I going to get around to doing that? You know, you get stuck in your day job, paying the bills and going on holiday and all the bullshit and then you come home and you’re tired – you don’t want to write. You don’t want to put a project together and raise a hundred grand of funding. You don’t do that stuff so…really, it’s a big effort so it just takes something to push you over the edge to think “Fuck it. Just do it.”

And now that you’ve done it have you got other ideas germinating? New plans forming?

Yeah, I’ve been developing something for the past few months. It’s not concrete. I don’t really have the rights to do it yet. Unfortunately. I’d love to be able to talk about it because I’m quite excited but because it might not happen. But yeah, it’s going to be amazing! It’s got to be something you love to do because you’re going to be busting your ass doing it for two or three years – longer sometimes.

I remember I saw a Q&A with Shane Meadows and he said just don’t work on anything you’re not passionate about. He said he wasn’t that passionate about Once Upon A Time In The Midlands and that’s why he didn’t like it, or it didn’t turn out as well as it should have – because he didn’t love it. And I feel the same way. I can’t get involved in anything I’m not crazy passionate about. So anyone who wants to make a film just needs to love it and do nothing but think about it, and hopefully they stay that way for two or three years! Otherwise you’re like halfway through a project thinking “I hate this, I just want to get it over with.” You just find ways to get out of it like “ok, that’s fine, cut, next one.” And it just becomes, you know…shit!

I think the only inexcusable art is lazy art, ultimately.

Yeah, and I think a lot of artists are (lowers his voice conspiratorially) lazy [bursts into laughter].

Jason Becker: Not Dead Yet is in cinemas now, and released by Dogwoof. It’s available on DVD from December 3.

Jason Becker: Not Dead Yet | review

Cinema’s power often lies in a very direct form of emotiveness, with the immediacy of the image being the perfect foil for a good story. But the simplicity with which this directness operates requires a fine balance. It’s all too easy to mishandle the power at one’s disposal, to bludgeon an audience’s goodwill into pained submission under a hail of grandstanding sentiment. This is especially true in the ‘Life Story’ genre. Documentaries and acted biopics which bear this scary moniker often come generously ladled with words and phrases like ‘inspiring’ and ‘heart-warming’ as directors amp up every aspect of tragedy and triumph in human life, screaming ‘FEEL!’ at the audience as though we were already cold in our seats, vacant and resigned at this still-early stage in the emotional evolution of the human beast. In most cases, ‘vomit-inducing’ would be more of an accurate description of these films.

Great credit, then, to Jesse Vile, director of Jason Becker: Not Dead Yet who has made a film which impacts in a meaningful way whilst keeping any potential melodrama or sensationalism firmly outside of the frame. Jason Becker isn’t manipulative, it isn’t preachy, and most importantly it isn’t patronising. Jason Becker isn’t dead yet, and he doesn’t want your sympathy.

In 1989, small-town teenager Becker, a ridiculously talented guitarist, was about to make the step up from barely-known prodigy to big time player. David Lee Roth, whose band had launched the careers of first Eddie Van Halen and then Steve Vai – the established Best Guitarists in the World in the ‘shredder’ mould – had heard Becker playing and wanted him to feature on a new album and a tour. This was literally ‘it’ – and nothing more than a culmination of years of obsessive practice combined with a natural talent in a nurturing family environment, although these are the kind of dreams we hardly dare hope for even in our wildest moments. The album was recorded and the band were hitting the studio in preparation for the next stage. Around this time what had begun as a twinge in Jason’s leg was causing him serious discomfort. On the advice of his parents he went to the doctor, who diagnosed him with ALS – a wasting disease – an extremely rare condition for someone of his age, and totally incurable.

As a reviewer you try to be as neutral as possible during screenings, but sometimes you get caught up, and from there it’s almost impossible to imagine blankly critiquing things like form and narrative. In this sense the film must, therefore, be a success – removing this reviewer from the relative ease and safety of his objectiveness. So far as this is a piece of cinema, it has some cute directorial touches, but Vile is both wise and modest enough to keep his presence to a minimum. If there’s a message, it’s one that comes naturally from the material, not from some superficial slants, artificial crescendos of emotion or sensationalism. Becker’s story changed, it deviated from what might have been expected – and many times – but it’s clear from the film that all changes are navigable with good people behind you.

Having made a point of the film’s emotional neutrality, I haven’t tried so hard not to cry in a film since watching Bambi as a child, unsure as I was at the time whether it was allowed in the cinema or not. As with then, the effort gave me a massive headache. But it wasn’t that what I was watching made me sad. The film’s emotional impact sits in that quiet hinterland between sadness and joy – the one where you’re experiencing the sense of being. It’s neither a happy experience nor an unhappy one, but it’s more than both – an experience of fullness and potential. A man who created his opus while paralysed? A great achievement – but here’s the thing – it’s also not. It’s entirely normal when viewed in the context of Becker’s life. What this film highlights –the incredible thing – is that all of life is within anyone’s grasp if they just have the confidence to take it in hand – to commit to it. Life can’t be this simple, so we think. And truly, you don’t know what myriad complexities have been simplified, what disparate threads have been unified for the purposes of effective cinema. But what this film suggests is that there aren’t any, and if there are they’re unimportant. While it’s common practice now to view life ‘realistically’ as a series of inherently meaningless events swinging, by our selfish imposition of our worth upon them, between the twin states of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’, one can also approach it from a far simpler outlook: we’re alive right now, and that’s what really matters. Is there not incredible hope in that?

Please don’t be put off if you think this is just going to be a film about a metal guitarist. This is a universal film, an important film, meriting a wider audience than it will probably receive. In his steadfast refusal to patronise his subject, Vile has made the film his subject richly deserves.

Jason Becker: Not Dead Yet is in cinemas from Friday, and released by Dogwoof. It’s released on DVD on December 3.

Does The Master reveal Paul Thomas Anderson to be a cult leader?

Rather than review Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film The Master, I’m much more interested in taking a closer look at its critical reception; because I’m an English teacher and not a film critic, I find the discourse more fascinating than the film’s actual merits and flaws. The film has garnered lavish praise from an overwhelming consensus of film critics, and that could very well affect your reaction to (or even viewing of) the film.

At the time of writing (Fri 2 Nov), collative site Rotten Tomatoes says that The Master has an 85% approval rating from critics, but 60% from non-critics – that’s a 25% discrepancy. Metacritic, which exercises a bit more quality control, calculates an 86% critic approval contrasted with a dismal 43% approval rating among non-critics; that’s a 43% difference.

Are critics really so different from thoughtful movie-watchers who bother to actually sign up and contribute to Metacritic? You actually have to defend your rating on Metacritic; it’s not a matter of casually clicking on a number. And Metacritic users can obviously see what the critics have said. Granted, there are some films that are perfect for critics but not audiences, and I’d love to hear of some comparable examples in the comments. But even so, this is notable because it’s a massive discrepancy on a substantial scale. What on earth is going on? Let’s look at a cross-section of quotes and see if we can make sense of this.

Numerous critics from highly-esteemed publications stumble over each other to be the most ardent disciple of cinematic master PTA. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone stridently opens his review with: “I believe in the church of Paul Thomas Anderson… [he] refuses to do the thinking for you. His films mess with your head until you take them in and take them on. No wonder Anderson infuriates lazy audiences… Written, directed, acted, shot, edited and scored with a bracing vibrancy that restores your faith in film as an art form, The Master is nirvana for movie lovers.”

Is he seriously saying that if we don’t positively rate this film, then we’re lazy cinema-goers who don’t properly love movies? It’s telling that Travers proclaims that he is a follower of Paul Thomas Anderson’s cult while burying this admission with adulatory adjectives and bludgeoning us with his self-righteousness. A.O. Scott of The New York Times at least hints at the divisive nature of the film before professing his faith in PTA: “This is a movie that defies understanding even as it compels reverent, astonished belief… It is a movie about the lure and folly of greatness that comes as close as anything I’ve seen recently to being a great movie. There will be skeptics, but the cult is already forming. Count me in.”

The majority of positive critics’ reviews sound like some form of cult worship. And granted, Paul Thomas Anderson is a darling of film buffs, who understandably gravitate towards auteurs; think of how films by Quentin Tarantino or the Coen brothers garner support before the trailers are even cut. Perhaps film critics, whose occupational hazard is to take their opinions very seriously, are somehow compelled to continue praising the work of these auteurs, since they’ve written glowing reviews of their previous films. Oddly, Peter Bradshaw refutes this idea in the opening of his review in The Guardian: “Nothing makes critics more nervous than a director who makes two exceptional films in a row. Reviewers get a bit self-conscious about dishing out the top prize again, scared of looking like fanboys and pushovers. They feel the need to change the mood, to validate the uniqueness of their former praise.” To me, it sounds suspiciously like Bradshaw is trying to put some spin on the fact that he’s jumped on the bandwagon along with the other critics… like it’s so brave of him to be a film critic and a fan of Anderson’s work.

In the Metacritic tally, there are scant examples of critics who don’t prostrate themselves before The Master (though some more even-handed, non-listed responses have begun to emerge: check out Nick Pinkerton in Sight & Sound). One well-defended response comes from famed thumbs-user Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun Times, whose opening sentence is: “The Master is fabulously well-acted and crafted, but when I reach for it, my hand closes on air.” While this isn’t a review per se, I can’t pretend to be totally objective – I agree with Ebert. There are plenty of laudable aspects of the film: the extremely committed performances, its striking visuals, the resonance of the post-WWII time period with cult formation, Jonny Greenwood’s impressionistic score. But all to what end? For me, watching the film was challenging, but not in the intellectual sense; it challenged me in an existential sense. I wondered why I was sitting there, watching the film. Why it exists. What its purpose is. How it got there. The film, to me, is frustratingly far less than the sum of its parts.

Another independent review is from and Richard Corliss of Time Magazine, who engages with the contention of many critics that Anderson is a visionary ahead of the curve, mentioning that the filmmaker is “apparently determined to rewrite 2,500 years of dramatic literature.” I’m no traditionalist, but established principles of good storytelling just aren’t redefined by this purposefully oblique film. Anderson may be a model of devotion to film and The Master does reflect this – but is it a well-told story? Cinephiles who have decided that it is cannot avoid proselytizing this cinematic master they badly want to believe in – and that is so beautifully ironic.

Look, I am an unashamed fan of Boogie Nights and Magnolia, and I appreciated There Will Be Blood. Plus it’s an achievement in itself that The Master can provoke such powerful reactions from its audience. But this feels like that old fable about the Emperor and his new clothes. A purportedly masterful man creates what people choose to believe is fantastic yet invisible to nonbelievers, and in the end, a child has to point to the Emperor and yell, “but he’s not wearing any clothes!” So this is me being that child, trying to break the spell of groupthink. Though by all means, go and see The Master for yourself, and form your own opinions regardless of what everyone else says.