Hugh Thomson's Blog, page 4

The 21 Best Films of the 21st Century

 

The BAFTA season is about to begin, and as I have done for some twenty years, I will be sitting down to watch the best films of the year before voting.

Before I do, this is a personal response to a recent list where worldwide critics did their poll of polls for the best 100 films of the millennium for the BBC.

These professional film critics have in the usual way opted for obscurity over clarity – quite ridiculous for Mulholland Drive, The Tree of Life and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to be in the top 10 when a straw poll of regular punters would show no one had a clue what any of them were on about. Or cared.

My own Top 21 favours innovation and pure cinema over cult credibility and if that means some blockbusters and animated films, so much the better. And I think I’m right in saying that only a very few of them won the Oscar or BAFTA for Best Film (answers on a postcard).  The majority don’t even make the 100 chosen by worldwide critics.  But they are the films of the century so far that I still think about and return to in my mind – that still live with me.

 

1          Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010)    [BBC top 100 list #50]

The film I have watched most often in the last few years, and the one that in every sense has the most layers, with a powerful emotional undercurrent.  Pure cinema.

 

2          Ida (Paweł Pawlikowski, 2013) [BBC #55]

Luminous, rigorous, beautiful, the sort of film Bresson would have made if he was still alive.

 

3          The Life Aquatic (Wes Anderson, 2004) [BBC not included]

Of all Anderson’s films, this is the one I am most fond of.  Yes I know it’s about an explorer… Quirky and wonderful and deeply eccentric.

 

4          Boyhood (Richard Linklater, 2014) [BBC #5]

Not just conceptually perfect, but open-ended in the way life is.

 

5          The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006) [BBC #32]

Never lets up, but also defies expectations.

 

6          The Incredibles (Brad Bird, 2004) [BBC not included]

For its innovation and wit and sparkling script.

 

7          El Secreto de sus Ojos [The Secret in Their Eyes] (Juan José Campanella, 2009) [BBC #91]

I’ve always been haunted by the story of the disappeared during the Argentine dictatorship and made my own film about it, so drawn to this incredible Hitchcockian dark tale of obsession.

 

8          Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000) [BBC #25]

An audacious idea, well executed.  Christopher Nolan is along with Wes Anderson the only director to get two richly deserved mentions.

 

9          Little Miss Sunshine ( Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, 2006) [BBC not included]

American black comedy road film.  Family dysfunction at its best.

 

10        Prometheus (Ridley Scott 2012)  [BBC not included]

Completely misunderstood, best seen as sharing ‘the Alien universe’, not as a prequel, and Ridley Scott’s finest of the new millennium.

 

11        Lust, Caution (Ang Lee, 2007) [BBC not included]

A mesmeric film of sexual obsession, hinging on one moment of abandonment in wartorn Shanghai.

 

12        Apocalypto (Mel Gibson, 2006) [BBC not included]

From the most vilified director in Hollywood (apart from Woody Allen) came this brilliant imagining of the brutalities of the Maya world.

 

13        The Revenant (Alejandro González Iñárritu  2015) [BBC not included]

A film about wilderness in the truest sense.

 

14        Rust and Bone (French: De rouille et d’os) Jacques Audiard 2012 [BBC not included]

Another fabulous performance from Marion Cotillard and an unflinchingly tough view of life at the lower end of the French street.

 

15        Embrace of the Serpent (Ciro Guerra 2015) [BBC not included]

The Amazon in black and white: perhaps the way it always should have been portrayed

 

16        Fantastic Mr Fox (Wes Anderson, 2012) [BBC not included]

Takes Aardman-style animation to new heights.

 

17        Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008) [BBC not included]

Hallucinatory and dreamlike account of the invasion of Lebanon, but with the real voices of the Israeli soldiers to pin it to reality.

 

18         Amélie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001) [BBC #87]

Life-affirming in the way the best comedy should be.

 

19        Ex Machina (Alex Garland, 2015) [BBC not included]

Kubrickian and contained.  Most self-assured directorial debut of century so far.

 

20        American Hustle (David O. Russell, 2013) [BBC not included]

Sheer pleasure to watch. Which counts for a lot. And will annoy Barry Isaacson if I include it.

 

21        Into the Wild (Sean Penn 2007) [BBC not included]

I am always attracted to films about getting lost.

 

 

11 Runners-up and highly commended:

 

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Peter Jackson, 2001) [BBC not included]

For getting it right.

 

The Watchmen (Zack Snyder 2009) [BBC not included]

Best of the ubiquitous comic book movies by a country mile, particularly the longer Director’s Cut.

 

The Pianist (Roman Polanski, 2002 [BBC #90]

In some ways, the film that Polanski always had to make – about his childhood in the Warsaw ghetto.  And not an ounce of sentimentality.

 

The Great Gatsby (Baz Luhrmann, 2013) [BBC not included]

Another under-rated film.  Pitch perfect.  And fine Leonardo DiCaprio performance.

 

Adaptation (Spike Jonze, 2002) [BBC not included]

Thinking way out of the box.  Meryl Streep great.

 

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (David Fincher, 2008) [BBC not included]

Audacious narrative curve.  Or rather bounce-back.

 

Atonement (Joe Wright 2007) [BBC not included]

One of the very few British films on the list – which may say something about our limited cinematic ambitions and fondness for theatrical bio-pics.

 

The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke, 2009) [BBC #19]

A black-and-white exploration of the origins of evil.

 

Labyrinth  (Guillermo Del Toro, 2006) [BBC #17]

Imagination of the highest order.

 

Avatar (James Cameron 2009) [BBC not included]

For being a blockbuster with heart and probably doing more for worldwide ecology than all the Rio conferences put together.

 

Almost Famous (Cameron Crowe, 2000) [BBC #79]

The best rock n roll film of the bunch.  ‘How will I know he’s taken the drugs?’

   

Notes:

I have not included documentaries in the above as they deserve their own list.

For the original poll, 177 critics were asked (55 women and 122 men). Like them I have taken 2000 as my Year Zero.

 

Surfing in Peru

Peter Mel rides Pico Alto, which can reach up to 40 feet in height

‘Here’s the thing,’ the surfer tells me as he changes into his wetsuit. We look offshore at the monstrous wave of Pico Alto as it comes charging towards us. ‘That wave gets to 40ft high. But it’s not just the height. It’s the depth of water behind it. It’s triangular. So if that thing comes down on you, it feels like a brick house coming down – with you underneath it.’ He runs towards the water before I learn his name.

I have been coming to Peru for 35 years and it still excites – perhaps because of its endless capacity to surprise. Although I know the Inca heartland around Machu Picchu best, I have come to love the long Pacific coastline, with its pyramids and fabulous beaches.

Today I am 25 miles south of Lima in the town of Punta Hermosa, where the new mania for surfing in Peru has precipitated a building boom. Rows of brand-new white apartment blocks gleam in the sun on the cliffs above a whole series of incredible waves: Caballeros (Gentlemen), a right-hander, is matched chivalrously by Señoritas (Ladies), an equally impressive left-hander. Further out is the daunting sight of Pico Alto – meaning high summit.

read the rest of my article in British Airways High Life magazine

Embrace of the Serpent

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Nominated for an Oscar and already much feted, Embrace of the Serpent can now be seen in British cinemas and is a revelation.

The masterstroke is filming the Amazon in black and white – counterintuitive but brilliant – like Salgado and letting the strange dreamlike journey play out along the river.

I am less certain that the dual narrative – many decades separate the two different storylines – works quite so well, and at times the anthropology can creak at the seams, but at its best, this is an odyssey along the most serpentine of all rivers, with many way-stations and dangers for the travellers in their canoes.

The Colombian director, Ciro Guerra, is not afraid to allow strange epiphanies to creep in:  a comet passes overhead at one point, lighting up the dark faces of those below; the torches of mission children are like fireflies in the night. The photography throughout is both numinous and luminous, shot on Super 35.

There’s been some discussion about the historical background to the film.  The producers say that ‘ the film was inspired by the real-life journals of two explorers (Theodor Koch-Grünberg and Richard Evans Schultes)’, but anthropologist have already been quick to point out the discrepancies:  Koch-Grünberg, for instance, had no interest in hallucinogenics.  The historian John Hemming has pointed out to me that the brilliant and disturbing depiction of the messianic shaman with his own cult is based on Venancio Christo, active in that region from the late 1850s to early 1860s – half a century before Koch-Grünberg and a century before Schultes.

But as an imaginative interpretation of the spirit of the Amazon, this film must surely be hard to beat. And while Fitzcarraldo had previously set the benchmark, that was a film about the European psyche; this tries to be one about the mindset of the South American Indian.

Jim Curran – A Tribute

I was very sorry to hear that Jim Curran had died.  He was an ebullient and kind figure who was generous with his help – and whisky – to writers like me who were less familiar with the mountaineering world.  When I wrote my book about Nanda Devi, he gave invaluable advice.

I was also drawn to him because he was a talented filmmaker as well as writer. The underappreciated late film he made with Chris Bonington when they attempted a remote peak in Tibet – and Bonington has to face up to the ageing process – is a classic and I shared Jim’s frustration that it was screened so badly by television that few ever saw it.  Overall he shot some 15 documentaries featuring alpine giants like Joe Tasker, Peter Boardman and Alan Rouse. 

He championed the cause of mountaineering films with his stewardship of the annual Kendal Mountain Film Festival and one of my proudest memories is being awarded one of their bronze statuettes of prayer flags.

Both Bonington and K2 have been lucky to have such an accomplished and sympathetic biographer.  In the summer of 1986, 13 climbers died on K2, climbing tragedies that aggressively carved the epithet the “savage mountain” into the public consciousness. Jim Curran was at the mountain all summer. The following year, Curran’s scrawled notes became K2 – Triumph and Tragedy. He went on to write his most famous book, K2 – The Story of The Savage Mountain, which won him the 1996 award for best non-fiction at the Banff Mountain Book Festival: ‘a tribute to all those who have set foot on K2, both living and dead.’  He was a five-time nominee for the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature.

But aside from his multiple creative achievements, one quality will always stand out for me about Jim – a quality that is not always a given in the focused, over-achieving world of mountaineering: he was extraordinarily generous and terrific company.

the ‘lost’ Swedish artist Hilma af Klint

Regular readers know that this blog occasionally touches on great art exhibitions I chance across, but rarely, as frankly there aren’t that many of them about.

But the new exhibition at the Serpentine of the ‘lost’ Swedish artist Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) is definitely worth celebrating.

Although a pioneer of early abstract art – predating Klee, Kandinsky and many others – she was only rediscovered in the 1980s, as she worked well out of the mainstream. Fearing that she would not be understood, she stipulated that her abstract work should be kept hidden for 20 years after her death. After a few exhibitions around the world, she is now being hailed – rightly – as a maverick and visionary.  Both qualities I value.

Not unlike Yeats and some of the Surrealists, she wove together spiritualist sources that we might now find dubious, from Mme Blavatsky to her mentor, anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner, to create art of luminous integrity.

Her abstract paintings, perhaps because she was making up the rules as she went – and she was not part of the 20th century mainstream – feel very different; perhaps her nearest equivalent would be, much later, Sonia Delaunay.

The Paintings for the Temple sequence – which af Klint thought she had been ‘commissioned’ to paint by a celestial entity named Amaliel – are at their most magnificent in the eight large paintings celebrating the passage of life which fill the central gallery at the Serpentine.

The looping circles of colour are matched by her similarly looping handwriting, as if giant pages from a molecular notebook on life – and she worked for a while as a draughtswoman at the veterinary institute in Stockholm in 1900.

To stand in this gallery was one of the most intense artistic experiences I’ve had for some time.

María Rostworowski obituary

.With her absorbing yet accessible accounts of the Peruvian world before the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors, María Rostworowski, who has died aged 100, brought the Incas to life for countless readers. Perhaps more than any intellectual in Peru, she reconfigured our understanding of the ancient Andean mind.

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Her 1953 biography of the Inca emperor Pachacútec paved the way for the more extensive and groundbreaking Historia del Tahuantinsuyu (1988, translated in 1999 as History of the Inca Realm), which deconstructed the suppositions made by some Spanish colonial historians – including the very European idea that the Incas had an empire at all in the Roman, imperial sense. She argued it should be seen more as a trade confederation.

She also showed how Andean principles of kinship wove a complicated thread through Inca politics, which did not observe European principles of primogeniture but instead depended more on a matrilineal line of influence; nobody had written much previously about the mothers of Inca emperors.

María looked for documents that had never been studied before: the bureaucratic records of the courts, censuses and tax registers. Some of the most interesting material she found was in lawsuits brought by claimants just after the conquest. She uncovered a wealth of material, and about a dozen books and countless articles built up a picture of the pre-Columbian world in which the central element of reciprocity was stressed.

see my full obituary in The Guardian

A Walk In The Woods

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A Walk In The Woods is a curious film and proposition.

Bill Bryson wrote his book in the 1990s, when he himself was in his 40s like his friend Katz, with whom he makes this journey along the Appalachian Way.

Robert Redford wanted to turn this into a movie – but with himself playing Bryson, despite the fact that Redford is in his late 70s and looks absolutely nothing like the bearded writer.

Despite the incongruity, critics have been a little unkind to it, as it’s worth watching for the gentle humour with which things unfold – and gentle humour is a rare commodity in movies these days.  Also, the film – and the Bill Bryson character – are lucky enough to have Emma Thompson as a (much younger) wife, who always brings some welcome asperity and wit to proceedings.

Nothing is less filmic than a man walking or hiking slowly across landscape – which is why movie-makers since the time of John Ford always try to get them on a horse, wagon or fast moving car.  When I was making travel documentaries myself, I always used to dread the bits when my presenter would ponderously stumble along with a backpack.

But the filmmakers make a decent fist of it here and if it is all a tad inconsequential – particularly the jeopardy moment when they fall off a very small ‘cliff’ and think themselves stranded – there’s a slow, loping charm which is very much like the act of walking across such a landscape.

Sound and Light at the Peabody where East meets West

Excited to be in Salem for a remarkably innovative weekend put together by Sona Datta and her colleagues at the Peabody Essex Museum.

As some readers may remember, I made a series for the BBC with Sona last year – Treasures Of The Indus – for which we travelled to Pakistan and India.

Now Sona is not only having a screening of the films for an American audience, but has tied it into a new exhibition by the talented Anila Quayyum Agha, who has created an installation that conjures up the spirit of Spain’s Alhambra Palace, where a thousand years ago Islamic and Christian traditions thrived in coexistence.

A square black cube of steel weighing some 600 lbs has been laser cut by Anila into filigree work like that of a jali screen, so that the light from a single bulb inside creates a shimmering effect around the yellow room.  (I did ask her how she was ever going to change the bulb…)

And Sona is also putting on a Night at the Museum party, hosted by my old friend Bee Taylor and his House Of Honey collective, when more light projections will be played around the atrium of the building itself.

The fact that outside it’s blowing a Boston snowstorm won’t stop some determined partying.

Unravelling the quipu

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Of all the ancient civilisations, we know least about Peru because, as an illiterate society, they had no writing. They did, however, leave quipus, elaborate knotted cords mentioned by the Spanish chroniclers, which have still not been fully deciphered.  These remain one of the most tantalising challenges in archaeology.

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There are around 600 known quipus around the world, either in museums or private collections.  Some of these quipus follow a straightforward numerical pattern, as if itemising goods.  Others are more random and difficult to interpret.  And even with the numerical quipu, we have no way of knowing what the numbers refer to, as for the vast majority there is no provenance – the quipus have arrived in collections from dealers, from the booty of conquistadors, from looted tombs, or by accident.

Until now.  The team led by Harvard’s Gary Urton has been looking at some quipu discovered recently near the goods they may have itemised – a potential breakthrough, if not, as he is careful to say, a Rosetta Stone.  The quipus – or khipus  – were buried under the remnants of centuries-old produce, which was preserved thanks to the extremely dry desert conditions.

We long for the pre-Columbian civilisations to be able to speak to us direct from beyond the grave:  is there some Homeric tale, some Peruvian Gilgamesh, of which we know nothing? Yet there is a danger that our overwhelming desire for the quipu to be proved a form of language could force us into unnatural contortions to prove that what may still just be an accounting device is actually much more.

see Cochineal Red for a more detailed discussion of quipus and other aspects of pre-Columbian civilisation (published as A Sacred Landscape in USA)

The Revenant – a film about wilderness

Long-standing readers of this blog will know that I rarely touch on films – despite being, among other things, a filmmaker.

But then The Revenant is a rare film and moreover, a film about wilderness, the exploration of which is very much the theme of this blog.

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It is also a reminder of how films need not be formulaic; how a bold director can rework and reimagine a mythic landscape – in this case, a wild west, or perhaps more accurately a wild north as we are in American fur trapping country of a brutal cold.

Alejandro G. Iñárritu finds the lyrical interstices of landscape. The moment you look up into the trees or the mountains.  Most directors use a landscape shot to frame a sequence, usually at the start and end – as Quentin Tarantino does in his new Western, The Hateful Eight. Iñárritu edits his landscape shots to disconcert the viewer during the scene – to give the suggestion that the story is much bigger than the human one.

In some ways, his rule-breaking reminds me of what Terrence Malick did in Days Of Heaven – and like that film, a different way of working prompted mutiny from some of his crew. Film-making is so often done by default – there’s an elegant shorthand that has been involved for every type of sequence or narrative –  that if anyone tries to escape that, they are rolling a rock uphill or, like Herzog in another movie that broke the mould, trying to take a ship over the mountain.

Iñárritu already showed in Birdman that he has a virtuoso mastery of camera and narrative rhythm (and ability to win prizes, which he certainly should for this); but whereas that was a lighter, theatrical piece, here he applies his talents to an elemental story of survival and revenge.  DiCaprio holds it together well and Tom Hardy is a magnificently gnarly Texan;  Domhnall Gleason’s captain has a documentary plainness to him that is as good as anything in Barry Lyndon, a film with similar lacunae of still moments.

This is a film about what it’s really like to engage with wilderness – the bloodiness of it and the bloody mindedness needed to survive.  And of the beauty of elemental moments. It’s not a film for the fainthearted – but then they never did get out and about much anyway.

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The Revenant is released tomorrow on Xmas Day in the States, about the least appropriate festive film of all time (though The Hateful Eight is released the same day);  and in the UK in the New Year.  see trailer