Review of 2023: Part 2 – Movies

Here's part two of my review of the year, focusing on FILMS. The format: 20 'discoveries', seven old favourites, six stinkers, six movies re-appraised, and five areas of obsession.

20 DISCOVERIES

or 'premieres', or 'first watches', or whatever you call films that you saw for the first time this year. Here are the 20 that had the biggest effect on me.

1. Geronimo: An American Legend (Walter Hill, 1993) – An astonishing Western that's at once poetic and authentic as it unspools the untold story of the Geronimo wars. It's full of extraordinary language (much of it in a richly rewarding Matt Damon voiceover, Stand by Me via the real West), sudden action sequences and quiet fury, augmented by perhaps Ry Cooder's greatest score. On any terms, a masterpiece – and utterly unique.

2. All of Us Strangers (Andrew Haigh, 2023) – If you lost a parent young, this is about as emotional an experience as film can give you. If you didn’t, I wonder how you even make sense of it. Regret and pain and absence and longing and Scott’s inky eyes endlessly shining with tears. It's exactly as brutal and as gentle as it needs to be, excavating how our relationships with those we've lost can be easier than with those still living, but what you’re forever missing in return. It's funny in places; profoundly gay; wryly modern; but principally it's a ghost story about grief. It's certainly the most overwhelmed and unanchored I've ever felt in a cinema. It didn't feel much like watching a film at all, really.

3. The Reckoning (Jack Gold, 1970) – Oof. A film that fastens your jaw to the floor, as Nicol Williamson's alpha businessman returns to his roots, and begins to question whether he's lost sight of himself. Not that the alternate version of him is much easier to take. Amid seductions, drunken ranting and bingo, he's pondering whether to beat a teddy boy to death with whatever tools he may have to hand. It's an immaculately-constructed, blackly comic film, with a dazzling performance at its centre, but it's also a howl of despair: unstintintingly fascinating – and provocative – on the subjects of class, immigrant experience, and masculine pain. It does ‘⬆️ The North for revenge’ better – and earlier – than Get Carter, and marries sad songs to Scouse visuals a half-decade prior to Terence Davies's Children, while satirising Thatcherism before that term had even been coined. Along with Mike Leigh's Naked, it's one of the few films that permits a northerner to be smarter (and not merely jollier) than his southern counterparts. A stunning experience, swerving cliché right up to its subversive and chilling and perfect ending.

4. Aftersun (Charlotte Wells, 2022) – Finding a shorthand for this film is difficult. Saying it’s “about a father-daughter relationship” offers no clue as to its poetic instincts; calling it “a film about memory, mental illness and loss” carries the latent (and erroneous) threat that it is wanky, or unstintingly hard work. Instead, it is an intensely moving movie that in its rawness, naturalism and emotional honesty – smuggled in via fond joshing and moments of musical and visual inspiration – hits every audience it finds, about as hard as possible. It has some of Morvern Callar’s strobing and sun-bleached stylistics, some of Half Nelson’s grinning sadness. But its greatness is all Wells’s own, the dialogue, performance and camera all doing different things that together form a perfect truth. She fixes our eyes on a Polaroid as it reveals itself, on a TV recycling the recent past, on a man’s back as he comes apart at the seams. She wields the song score like a weapon, distorting it to meet her demands, the familiarity disfigured like our memories after trauma. As Mescal and Corio love and joke and hurt. I can’t get over that single fleeting shot of young Sophie’s face before she starts to dance: the filmmaker’s innate and crucial understanding that joy doesn’t undermine tragedy, it augments it.

5. The Mark of Zorro (Rouben Mamoulian, 1940) – Fox crashes the swashbuckler craze with this exuberant, precision-tooled crowdpleaser. Ty Power is perfect as the dashing masked avenger posing as a cowardly fop (the sole drawback being that, unlike Doug, he wasn’t permitted to do all his own stunts). It’s curiously-paced here and there, but also impeccably cast and superbly conceived, with ingeniously-devised dramatic sequences and a scintillating climactic duel. Mamoulian’s style is, unless you’re looking for it, close to invisible: you only know you’re entirely enveloped in the film. In short: irresistible.

6. The Intern (Nancy Meyers, 2015) – While clad in the garb of Meyers’ unquestioning capitalist conformity: a humanist masterwork. De Niro’s modest, earnest performance is pitch-perfect.

7. Café Metropole (Edward H. Griffith, 1937) – An utterly charming confection, with Ty Power’s dissolute gambler blackmailed into romancing heiress Loretta Young by bankrupt hotel owner Adolphe Menjou. It’s a magical, very funny and consistently surprising rom-com, with a touch of The Thin Man’s airy irreverence: Young is remarkably modern as the knowing, offhand love interest who resolutely refuses to engage with each threat of melodrama. Her scene with Power’s head in her lap is just beautiful. And so is Helen Westley’s gangster-talk. The abrupt opening, which works brilliantly in itself, was shamefully the result of studio head Darryl F. Zanuck excising Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson's entire performance due to worries that southern audiences wouldn't stand for a black guy in tails. The complicated, enduringly contentious super-producer did go on to make several sincere if compromised pictures about racism, including Gentleman's Agreement, Pinky and No Way Out.

8. Black Sheep (Allan Dwan, 1935) – A wonderful B movie from Sol Wurtzel’s unit at Fox, which deals – as ever – with jewel thieves on an ocean liner. But what lifts it way out of the ordinary is the central relationship between embittered, alcoholic gambler Edmund Lowe, and the bored, failing actress who joins him in intrigue (Claire Trevor). Their characters are real, their badinage (except for one slightly weak recurring affectation) zingy, and their chemistry off the charts. There’s a small moment where Trevor stops just short of embracing Lowe (“… that’s all I wanted to know,” she says instead) that must be among the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen on screen. Around them, there’s Lowe’s father-son relationship with a wayward rich boy, some rather tiresome drunk comedy, and Eugene Pallette releasing a clockwork mouse onto a dance floor, but we’re here for the heart-mending central couple. Just lovely.

9. Fifty Roads to Town (Norman Taurog, 1937) – “I hope you’re not one of those whimsical gangsters.” What an absolute delight this is, containing an epic meet-cute (the longest set-up in an early Zanuck film!?), glorious William Conselman/George Marion dialogue, and the only Stepin Fetchit performance I’ve seen where he is being slyly (and hilariously) subversive rather than a racist fantasy. Don Ameche and Ann Sothern are each on the lam from the law, and wind up in a mountain cabin, off-season. He’s sort of holding her hostage, but he’s not what she thinks he is, and she’s not that fussed about leaving. This sleeper is smart, sexy and surprising: full of neat reversals and funny lines. The best old rom-com I’ve seen in quite a while.

10. Freeway (Matthew Bright, 1996) sets itself up as nihilistic and sneeringly classist but stick with it: that’s all part of the game. It’s an adolescent, smugly dark and secretly soft minor masterpiece: Little Red Riding Hood as exploitation flick, with Witherspoon’s incredible performance as a white-trash teenager trolling a serial killer (Kiefer Sutherland). Like DiCaprio, she was most interesting before she became acclaimed, and as the perma-swearing, borderline-illiterate, hotheaded anti-heroine, she’s this movie’s heart and soul. Sutherland, too, was never half as good as he is here, and now and then a riotous Danny Elfman score gets involved, as disorientating as the rest of it. Bright's aim is to shock and surprise and confound, with whiplash turns of both story and tone, and his aim is true.

11. Strange Days (Kathryn Bigelow, 1995) – A post-Rodney King nightmare (and box-office calamity) that’s like Blow Out for the ‘90s: a paranoid, sumptuously-shot state-of-the-nation thriller, only this time spiked with exhilarating action. Ralph Fiennes is the complete fucking loser who unwittingly uncovers police malfeasance while doing a roaring trade in the black market of illicit POV memories. The use of subjective camera here honestly feels as revolutionary as anything done by Hollywood since it brought in the talkies. Perhaps this was the Jim Cameron-adjacent innovation that cinema should have followed? Launching with an incredible botched-robbery sequence shot with that subjective camera, Bigelow and screenwriter Cameron deliver an intoxicating fusion of frenzied pursuit, pointed (if compromised) social comment and rulebook-shredding technical wizardry, aided by a couple of fine performances (Fiennes, Angela Bassett) and a memorable one of fragile or possibly malevolent horniness from Juliette Lewis. There is at least one passage here that is virtually unwatchable, and difficult to defend on moral grounds, alongside less complicated shortcomings: a crashingly obvious twist, and Cameron dialogue that, as usual, employs alliteration at the expense of specificity. But the film still feels like a complete one-off, and a triumphant one at that: heady, desperate and, yes, strange, while positing a technical direction that cinema might have engaged with more often, had the movie not lost 34 million dollars.

12. Reign of Terror (Anthony Mann, 1949) – My new favourite genre: French Revolution noir, a world of Wellesian angles and huge looming heads. The paranoiac plot, about Robespierre’s missing hitlist, can barely withstand a moment’s scrutiny, and I was having far too much fun to care. It’s riotous pulp mayhem, with incredible photography from the inimitable John Alton, a fabulously seedy performance from Arnold Moss as the duplicitous Fouché, and every noir trope vividly reimagined for the setting. A horse-and-cart chase? Why not indeed. The scene in which Moss and Robert Cummings claw disfiguringly at one another’s faces gives Cloak and Dagger a run for its money in the Genuinely Disquieting Fight Scene stakes. This 35mm screening was a real highlight of the BFI's fabulous 'Film on Film' festival.

13. The Contender (Rod Lurie, 2000) – An unbelievably entertaining political drama, with a strong script that mixes insider talk and Hollywood thrills, and an exemplary ensemble. Jeff Bridges is particularly good; along with Cutter’s Way, this is surely his best performance, embodying a president whose wiles are so well-honed and well-worn that they crouch effortlessly beneath that pomaded exterior. Allen too is memorable as the vice-presidential contender at the film’s centre, whose sexual past may be about to torpedo her nomination (though I have never seen anyone run or play basketball in such a physically comic way, she looks like a Muppet). The last reel is a bit too much like wish-fulfilment (though so was Mr. Smith, so was The American President), and occasionally you catch Gary Oldman doing his Acting, but it’s a great ride all the same.

14. Absolution (Anthony Page, 1978) – Richard Burton, Billy Connolly and the lad from Kes, together at last. Thanks to Indicator for excavating another sleeper from the bin of history, in this case a film that has been underrated, vilified, overlooked and then, worst of all, forgotten. Written by Anthony Shaffer, who subsequently disowned the movie after having his work rewritten, it’s essentially Sleuth filtered through Hitchcock’s I Confess, with an ageing Burton as a priest and schoolteacher who becomes engaged in a twisted battle with pretty protégé, Dominic Guard. It’s beautifully acted by the leads, atmospherically directed, and perpetually surprising. The only shortcomings are Connolly’s glib, surface-level performance as a drifter, and one twist too many.

15. Bartleby (Anthony Friedman, 1970) – An enjoyably weird film about one of society's dead letters, a possibly depressed, possibly autistic, definitely disconnected accountant who one day decides that he would simply "prefer not to". A little too repetitive, perhaps – Melville's premise stretched to breaking point before snapping into paternalistic sentiment – but superb on loneliness, non-conformity, and the assumptions of capitalism. It's very funny too. "I would not like to kill two birds with one stone" is my new motto. Bartleby's passion for walking and looking provides a feast for vintage-London-location pervs, many of its bleakly seductive monuments to modernism since demolished.

16. High Tension (Allan Dwan, 1936) – A fast-paced B movie, with Brian Donlevy as a wisecracking deep-sea diver continually letting down his short-tempered, hilarious, pulp-fiction-writer girlfriend, Glenda Farrell – and as much fun as that sounds. Former silent film pioneer Dwan is slumming here, making a movie for Sol Wurtzel’s B-unit at Fox, but his comic timing is spot on, and that one meticulously-plotted establishing shot in Honolulu is a beaut. This one’s just highly entertaining throughout, with spectacular leads and a good balance between comedy, story and off-kilter romance; as Farrell’s love rival, Helen Wood has almost as good chemistry with Donlevy as Glenda does. Only complaint: the wrap-up is too abrupt. Norman Foster, who plays the second lead, soon became a B-movie director at Fox, and later collaborated with Orson Welles on the ‘My Friend Bonito’ chapter of the unfinished It’s All True, Journey Into Fear and, as an actor, The Other Side of the Wind.

17. Thirteen Days (Roger Donaldson, 2000) – A vivid retelling of the Cuban Missile Crisis, though I’d have hated to be in that emergency control room, what with everyone smoking. Costner’s version of advisor Ken O’Donnell has been ridiculed in some quarters for being too good to be true (often a problem with works based on memoir), and I can see that – especially when he seems both omniscient yet intellectually inferior to the Kennedys who are flailing – but his emotional reticence is a moving counterpoint to his moral rectitude. As a piece of cinema, it’s first-rate in almost all quarters: well-cast (both Kennedys are superb), making inspired use of the real meeting transcripts, and somehow interposing neat action sequences into a film about the avoidance of war. Only the occasional bum note – courtesy of Costner's wandering accent, scene-chewing from supporting cast members like Len Cariou (as Dean Acheson), and a periodic pomposity – keeps it short of greatness. The Lyndon Johnson really looks like him. Christopher Lawford, playing Cmdr William B. Ecker, is JFK’s nephew.

18. The Gay Deception (William Wyler, 1935) – Frances Dee is a sweepstakes winner masquerading as an heiress in a New York hotel, where European prince (Francis Lederer) has gone incognito as a bellboy. It’s a charming romantic confection, stylishly handled by Wyler, and filled with familiar faces. Paul Hurst is particularly funny as Lederer’s irascible line manager, who introduces another patronising maxim every day. Lederer’s accent makes him unintelligible at times, but visually he’s just right as both intrusive admirer and dignified royal, and Dee’s eccentric performance refuses to make even a passing acquaintance of sentimentality. (Also: she's allowed to have big sticky-out ears, a novelty in this period.) The film isn’t consistently hilarious or unfalteringly affecting, but it's still a little gem.

19. Holy Matrimony (John M. Stahl, 1943) – A truly lovely rom-com with two unusually mature leads. Monty Woolley (55) is a legendary British painter who fakes his own death so he can live in peace, and falls hopelessly in love with plain-spoken Gracie Fields (45). But their Putney idyll is threatened by his secret, especially when his work becomes the subject of a court case. Nunnally Johnson’s script is warm and appealing rather than terribly funny (do you think a debate in court about two neck moles is instinctively hilarious? So does Nunnally), but Fields is appealing, Woolley can wring laughs out of anything, and there are nice bits for Laird Cregar and Eric Blore. A courtroom climax where the hero dislikes both sides is also a notable novelty, and there’s a neat ending in a very mid-‘40s style.

20. The Road to Glory (Howard Hawks, 1936) – “Anything to get out of this grave.” A near-classic Hawks picture, devised by Fox to recycle footage they owned from the French war movie, Wooden Crosses. Somehow that lead to something halfway extraordinary, written by Nunnally Johnson, Joel Sayre and William Faulkner (!), shot by Gregg Toland, and featuring one of the best performances you’ll ever see, Fredric March underplaying unforgettably as a womanising lieutenant with magic in his fingers. He joins a memorable love triangle, fighting battle-hardened captain Warner Baxter for the affections of nurse June Lang. The film is ironic, cynical and witty, with Lang the most surprisingly effective of Hawksian women – she soon became a bright, blonde second lead, before her reputation suffered from marrying a literal gangster – but is sadly somewhat derailed halfway through by a lousy subplot featuring Lionel Barrymore as Baxter’s father, a character supposedly torn from life, but not remotely believable.

***

SEVEN OLD FAVOURITES

1. Remember the Night (Mitchell Leisen, 1940) – The small details, the wild counter-intiition of its courtroom climax, and Stanwyck’s story playing out on her face. The way Sturges and Leisen use comedy to segue into, or offer relief from, deep emotion (the cross-eyed grandfather after the homecoming heartbreak; Sterling Holloway’s ballad after he’s been put in his place). The use of snatches of everyday language to represent epiphanies. Bondi as conscience and heavy. My favourite film. And at the Christmas screening I just went to, the programme notes were from my Blu-ray essay!

2. Ball of Fire (Howard Hawks, 1941) – One of Old Hollywood’s true miracles. So sweet and cynical and clever and true and modern and timeless and of-its-time. Andrews as a slick shitheel, Cooper at peak bashful, Stanwyck at peak everything. Then there's Wilder’s dialogue, Hawks peppering his background with old professors, and Toland, fresh from The Little Foxes, throwing in those two wild and moody deep-focus close-ups. The ‘Richard ill’ scene robs me of my breath.

3. Stage Door (Gregory La Cava, 1937) – A crackling feminist masterpiece that passes the Bechdel Test 90 times a minute, and hits me harder than any other film. Aside perhaps from Holiday, it has the Kate Hepburn performance.

4. Libeled Lady (Jack Conway, 1936) – The great unheralded screwball comedy, and the ultimate comfort movie, with scintillating dialogue, that incomparable Loy-Powell chemistry, and Jean Harlow showing that in just seven years she had transformed herself from a plank of wood with large breasts into the best comedian in Hollywood.

5. Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophüls, 1948) – A captivating, emotionally overwhelming Ophüls masterpiece, with director and star (Joan Fontaine) working perfectly in tandem. She’s simply astonishing, playing a waif/model/socialite in turn-of-the-century Vienna, who is slung around by her secret, lifelong love of older neighbour/musician/womanising wastrel Louis Jourdan. Based on a Stefan Zweig story, the film is ingeniously structured, perfectly played and sumptuously filmed (Ophüls rolling out his trademark tracking shots, within the confines of Hollywood convention), as every choice amps up its unique atmosphere: both richly romantic and utterly bereft. Fontaine says in her autobiography that she always knew what effect this director wanted, and it's the one truly transcendent performance of her career, animated by such extraordinary inner life, her character's thoughts dancing across her face, obvious to everyone but the dissolute fuckboy she adores.

6. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee, 2000) – The plan-view photography during the sword vs whatever's-on-the-wall fight. The way every character has untold and epic depths. Michelle Yeoh's cheekbones. CINEMA!

7. 17 Again (Burr Steers, 2009) – “I grew up, and I lost my way. And I blamed you for my failures.” A melancholic masterpiece. There’s some goofy second-lead comedy and fleeting noughties nastiness in there, sure, but the film’s treatment of lost love, lost dreams, lost men is profoundly affecting – and never more so than when Efron says his piece in the divorce court, improvising an honest, last-ditch letter to the woman he both saved and failed. His delivery; Mann’s expression; Steers’ use of subjective camera and a Cat Power needle-drop. It is a remarkable sequence. The film's circular structure works superbly too, launched by the perfect mini-film that is its bleached-out 1989 opening, aided by rapid-fire cuts in that inescapable climax. Efron is just sensationally good throughout, though a mention too for Sterling Knight’s impeccable comic smarts.

***

SIX STINKERS

1. The Holiday (Nancy Meyers, 2006) – The only film I started and didn’t finish (which tells its own story), since one day I will die, and I think at that point I would have regretted it. It's surely the worst Christmas movie ever made: a chance to spend the festive season with a bunch of charmless pricks, and just unremittingly awful, exhibiting none of Meyers’ virtues and all of her flaws in their purest and most alarming form. A movie that begins by misunderstanding newspapers and goes on to misunderstand such concepts as ‘England’, ‘sex’ and ‘people’.

2. No Orchids for Miss Blandish (St. John Legh Clowes, 1948) – A notoriously and mesmerisingly terrible New York-set noir, shot in England, and populated predominantly by homegrown actors doing dreadful American accents in front of woefully unconvincing backdrops. Sid James is the wise, archetypically American barman, which goes about as well as you’d expect. It is marginally more nasty, violent and sexually provocative than was generally permitted by the Hollywood censor (though the outcry in the UK was largely fuelled by latent fears of cultural colonisation), but such licence can only take you so far when the story is this tedious, the characters are so colourless and similar, and no-one can act. The source novel was a blatant rip off of William Faulkner's (dire) 'Sanctuary', and Jack La Rue effectively reprises his analogous role from the Pre-Code adaptation of that book, The Story of Temple Drake (1933). Times had changed, though, and the part here was transformed, with the sanction of the BBFC, from that of a sadistic sex criminal to a doomed romantic.

3. Paddy O’Day (Lewis Seiler, 1936) – When Rick's Deep-Dive Into the History of 20th Century-Fox (see above, and also below) Goes Bad. An eye-wateringly dreadful Jane Withers vehicle, with the lunatic’s Shirley Temple doing an Irish accent so bad that it technically counts as race hate. Rita Hayworth’s in this too, when she was still called Cansino, and was still half-Spanish, and still had her original hairline. After a terrible opening, the film briefly becomes bearable with the intrusion of three members of John Ford’s stock company, before promptly disappearing off a cliff. I must say that I preferred (real-life bandleader) Pinky Tomlin at the start of the film, when he was an absent-minded bookworm rather than an arrogant prick. I don’t understand what was ever supposed to be entertaining about this film. Its songs are quite remarkably bad, and the slapdash production extends to Tomlin’s character being billed as ‘Ray’; he’s called Roy.

4. Hot Pursuit (Anne Fletcher, 2015) – A pissweak action-comedy featuring perhaps the single most irritating performance in cinema history, as Sofia Vergara yells virtually every line with the exact same grating intonation. The film’s principal jokes are that (a) she is vain and (b) Reese Witherspoon is small, though there’s also much spirited punching down, none of it funny (the opening scene has two jokes, one about transvestites and the other taking the side of a controlling father). This is basically The Heat if it was no good – comedically or morally – with even Witherspoon unable to make it work, though it is marginally more watchable than, say, This Means War. The movie's brief diversion into romance is a bit less shit than the rest of it. I like it when Reese sings ‘(I Never Promised You) A Rose Garden’. It lasts about 15 seconds and is easily the best bit of the film.

5. My Lucky Star (Roy Del Ruth, 1938) – An absolutely wretched Fox film, in which studio head Zanuck splices together three of the studio's cash shows – the Sonja Henie ice-skating vehicle, the college musical, and the putting-on-a-show film – to create something unspeakable. Shagger Cesar Romero sends employee Henie to university on the proviso that she change her clothes every few hours to advertise his store's fashions. So she does, while braving the taunts of the campus mean girls, and falling in love with some charmless prick (Richard Greene). Terrible story, banal performances, cheap production and awful songs (as far as I can tell, Henie is briefly permitted to sing, dreadfully, before being dubbed by a professional for her second burst). Even the skating scenes are sub-par, though I'm giving the film a full star for some fleeting moments of ice-borne transcendence. The less said about the hysterically ill-conceived 'Alice Through the Looking Glass' finale, however, the better. Henie, often accused of being a Nazi, has one coat that appears to incorporate a Klan hood. Elisha Cook, Jr. appears in his nerdy student era. There’s this weird thing in Fox films of the '30s where the stars are forever being terrorised by cafe owners trying to foist the special on them. These allegedly comic sequences can last for up to three minutes. Just very odd. Crucially, Henie is the worst fucking actor of all time. Zanuck had told his writers to never give her speeches. Here she gets speeches.

6. Traveller’s Joy (Ralph Thomas, 1950) – An often painfully unfunny farce inspired by postwar currency restrictions (yes really), with Googie and McCallum as a divorced couple who get stranded, broke, in Stockholm, a city that’s vividly brought to life, if indeed Stockholm is a drab, poorly-filmed hotel room. The film was based on a hit West End play but the material was dated by the time the movie was released. That’s the problem with signing a deal to hold your film until the source play has folded; it tends to fold because no-one cares anymore. The movie proved an incongruous closing chapter to the story of the near-legendary, borderline-notorious studio, Gainsborough Pictures, best-known for its flushed, sadistic mid-‘40s melodramas. In 1949, it merged with Rank. The man behind the camera is Rank (in both senses of the word) director Ralph Thomas, exhibiting his usual absence of style... and subtlety... and timing… though he does, in one fascinating moment, wring a proto-Sid-James bit of leering from Maurice Denham, who in reference to a potential sexual encounter genuinely utters the phrase, “Oi oi”. Thomas later directed the vaguely underrated Doctor series, while his brother Gerald was responsible for the Carry On films. Responsible in the sense that he should have been tried in the Hague. The film’s most interesting elements are Yolande Donlan’s part as a deceptively smart blonde – she’s very appealing, but also entirely ripping off Judy Holliday’s Billie Dawn, a part she had played in the West End – and the ration-induced gluttony of the script, a charge that Evelyn Waugh later levelled at his own Brideshead. There are, at most, three jokes that halfway land. I only watched Traveller’s Joy because I like Googie Withers but she’s largely bland here, and so is the film. Dora Bryan plays a Swedish maid (?).

***

SIX RE-APPRAISALS

... being, naturally, movies I revisited, and changed my mind about.

THREE UP

I actually saw this first one on New Year's Eve 2022, but this is my blog and I can do what I want.

1. Spider-Man (Sam Raimi, 2002) – What’s the wrongest you’ve ever been about a film? I think for me it’s Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man. I saw it when it came out on DVD, and regarded it as a time-passing piece of nothing, a vapid cartoon that regurgitated an over-familiar origins story while periodically breaking out into CGI action that – as Mark Kermode kept saying on the radio, and I was only too happy to parrot – had no “weight”. Without bothering to rewatch it, in 2017 I described the film, on Letterboxd, as “rubbish”. The problem with this opinion is that the film is fucking amazing: a stunning, vibrant, deeply moving movie beautifully balanced between mythmaking, comedy, action and emotion. As for the lack of ‘weight’ – he’s not supposed to be weighty, he’s the fucking Spider-Man! It plays exactly as it is intended to: the springiness is the point. If I wanted to pretend I was right first time, I could point to the mediocrity of James Franco, the hideous product placement, the distracting immobility of the Goblin’s face (and Spidey’s for that matter; when you have two masks talking to one another, it’s particularly undramatic), and the occasional intrusion of what we will come to recognise as The Marvel Style (or lack thereof). But as Twitter's @mildperil has said, the film is just so much more distinctive and unusual and affecting and thrilling than anything the MCU has ever done. It’s the sensitivity of Maguire’s performance – a pair of sad red eyes with a superhero attached. It’s Raimi injecting horror stylistics into the mix as he tussles for supremacy with the studio – and usually wins. It’s his innate understanding of iconography (Maguire ripping open his shirt while on the run, as Danny Elfman triumphantly blares), and the space he affords Dafoe to give a huge – but narrow – performance mixing pathos, menace and horror-ish ham. It's the way that the script plays around with expectation through its jokey cuts and delicate subversion – but never too much. It’s the relatively intimate scale of the story, which keeps it personal and human and direct, aided by Dunst’s perfect love interest. And it’s the fact that the action climax is done in 10 minutes, without the need to open a wormhole to another galaxy or destroy two-thirds of New York City. What a movie. Like I said, it’s rubbish.

2. The Nice Guys (Shane Black, 2016), which I liked on release, but thought outstayed its welcome. Not this time. It's Shane Black’s phenomenally entertaining buddy movie, with hired thug Russell Crowe and PI Ryan Gosling teaming up to search for a missing porn star in smog-filled late-‘70s LA. Occasionally too meta, with an overlong action climax and a plot that I still don’t understand, but honestly, who gives a shit? About as much fun as the movies have given us in the past decade. Now please make The Nicer Guys (2025) and The Nicest Guys (2028).

3. The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984) seemed thin and dated when I saw it as a teenager, but it was on pan-and-scan ex-rental VHS, and perhaps I was in the wrong mood too. It is, of course, your lean-and-mean sci-fi actioner, with its perfect premise, inspired use of Arnie, and Biehn’s frenzied B-movie intensity: so integral to the film, and so often overlooked. Cameron, then a veteran of just one film – Piranha II: The Spawning, from which he was fired – knits together the action in his instinctive and inimitable style. The rough edges, like Arnie’s rubber head, only add to the fun, though once the star finally exits to be replaced by a relatively scrawny metal skeleton, the film is conspicuously less scary, despite the shimmering imagination of that climactic crawl: its relentless grasping and panting evasion. The panicked synths, ominous drums and atonal honks of Brad Fiedel’s score are the coup de grâce.

THREE DOWN

1. The Wild One (László Benedek, 1953) – I hadn't seen this since I was a teenager. It was one of my favourite films back then, which makes me both fond of and appalled by my 14-year-old self. It is an exceptionally silly bikesploitation film, with Brando playing an alarmingly overage young hellraiser who leads his gang of hoodlums on a theoretical path of destruction, though their activities are for the most part hilariously anodyne. Like the Dead End Kids, their terrifying debauchery extends largely to repeating everything that the townsfolk say, in high-pitched voices, or pretending that a mop is some hair. Surely the only real threat here is that the people of small-town America might be irritated to death. Brando (demurring to do his own fights or riding) is anticipating Elvis a little, and providing plenty for James Dean to steal, but his particular genius almost entirely deserts him. It’s only in the closing 15 minutes – and especially that deeply touching final scene – that his brooding Johnny is anything more than a tedious, preening twat. The problem, partly, is that the film around him ties itself in knots, trying to appease every conceivable audience. Producer Stanley Kramer’s stock-in-trade was a shallow liberalism, but here he flirts with fascism – contrasting it only with vigilantism – by suggesting in the opening sequences that the only way to truly deter cowards like Johnny from causing mayhem is through a show of unwavering force. If the film later embraces some small degree of understanding, it's essentially posited as a next-best option, and even then only really applicable to special cases touched by the redemptive power of love. In support, a loud Lee Marvin gives perhaps the worst performance of his career, during that period where his principal role was to engage in informal sporting contests against Method actors (boxing Brando here; sprinting against Clift in the appalling Raintree County). There are a handful of neat shots employing chiaroscuro, Brando does his “Whaddaya got?” line (immediately ruined by a pointless, on-screen recap of what’s just happened), and Timothy Carey turns up to pull faces. But it is rarely other than an inescapably daft movie, and about as dangerous as dinner with your nan.

2. Young Mr. Lincoln (John Ford, 1939) – A folksy Fordian fantasy, with the Master printing the legend about the Great Emancipator’s formative years. Ford, and writer Lamar Trotti, are essentially revisiting – and reworking – their 1934 film, Judge Priest: both are movies about a lawyer, haunted by grief, who masks his wisdom and skill with eccentricity and stand-up comedy. Priest even faced down a lynch mob, as Abe does here, though the scene was cut from the earlier film for being too contentious, before being reinstated in Ford’s 1953 remake, The Sun Shines Bright. If I’m honest, Young Mr Lincoln didn’t strike me the same way at 38 as it did when I last saw it aged 21. In the interim, I’ve always thought of it rosily as one of Ford’s unassailable classics, but it isn’t quite that. The soundtrack is too busy, too noisy and ultimately too much (while Ford usually used music brilliantly, his producer Darryl F. Zanuck tended to over-score, leading to a notable battle over My Darling Clementine) and Trotti simply isn’t as good a writer as Frank Nugent. If in doubt he tends to lean towards corn, and the climax to his courtroom drama here simply isn’t convincing – or even plausible. But the film is inferior to the following year’s Abe Lincoln in Illinois, based on Robert Sherwood’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, not because the latter is more faithful to the facts – thought it’s certainly that – but because Ford’s film is flawed in conception and construction, centring on one semi-interesting court case, and too often taking its focus off Abe. The times when it does work, in fact, are when it focuses tightly on its mythologised central figure, generally analogous in this director’s work to an American Jesus, and on the image and nascent iconography of this jacklegged, tufty-haired, big-hatted future president. Henry Fonda, wearing three hours’ worth of make-up including a false nose that makes him look like Gary Neville, hadn’t quite become Henry Fonda, but he makes a fair stab of inhabiting an Abe who was already in some integral way Lincoln. The film's three great moments all belong to him and Ford: a brilliant segue to winter (unfortunately accompanied by a cacophonous, doom-laden score) that finds Fonda, like so many of the director’s heroes, chatting quietly at a graveside; Abe’s silence as he stares at the river in the company of flutey socialite Mary Todd; and the final passage, in which he walks off alone, into a thunderstorm that represents the future.

3. Spider-Man 3 (Sam Raimi, 2007) – You win some, you lose some: just a couple of minutes ago, Raimi was buzzing; now he's crying. More's the point, I spent more than a decade claiming this was a better film than the original. I'm lucky someone didn't punch me in the face. The first thing to say is: "Three villains, Avi? Three? That’s insane." Fuck me, this is such a mess. A shallow, unnecessary, bloated, almost unremittingly sour sequel that trashes the first two films, systematically sullying their every perfect moment. If that makes it sound potentially intriguing – a darker, more mature work, perhaps: something akin to Return to Oz, which inverted the iconography of the beloved 1939 musical – then rest assured: it’s not. Because it’s also stupid. The film finds Peter ruined by fame: now an insufferably smug Spidey whose worst traits are about to be amplified by an alien symbiote. Meanwhile, an escaped murderer (Thomas Haden Church), a vengeful paparazzo ((chris)Topher Grace) and a resentful old friend (James Franco) brood and plot, encouraged by their new superpowers. Church’s Sandman is a handy example of exactly what has gone wrong here. While Dafoe and Molina’s villains could have been taken from old horror films – perhaps Karloff vehicles at Columbia – this storyline about a doting father trying to get the money for his daughter’s operation might have been lifted from a cloying Wallace Beery film made in the early days of the talkies. The Sandman is an impressive visual creation but we neither care about Church’s plight nor enjoy his villainy: his dialogue is the most functional and tedious imaginable, and there’s no fun in his malevolence. There’s the odd sequence in Spider-Man 3 that is really special: most notably a restaurant scene between a desperate Mary-Jane and an oblivious, supercilious Peter that plays like a Before Midnight outtake, if bafflingly spliced with 'Allo 'Allo-ish comedy from Bruce Campbell. And there are a few that are really fun: Raimi having a laugh as Peter struts down the street ogling appalled women; the JK Simmons bits; every action sequence until the final one. But they’re in the service of a film that is cloyingly sentimental, crashingly pointless and apparently endless, the action climax anticipating the MCU both in its self-satisfied, bromantic asides and the fact that it goes on for fucking ever. Directors are not necessarily the last word on their own work, but when Sam Raimi said in 2014 that this film was "awful", he was not wrong. Most damagingly, it threatens to cloud our memories of those earlier films. I’m going to just start pretending it doesn’t exist. “Spider-Man 3? Yeah, it was a shame that never got made.”

***

OBSESSIONS

1. 20th Century-Fox (1935-40) – Between its birth in May 1935 and the point in 1940 by which it had fully found its feet – with studio head Darryl F. Zanuck (pictured above) realising what Ty Power did best (buckling swashes in The Mark of Zorro), discovering Betty Grable (Down Argentine Way), and rediscovering his social conscience (The Grapes of Wrath) – Fox was a studio in a fascinating state of flux. This year, as research for a writing project, I've watched around 80 of these transitional films, and it has been such a rewarding, exciting, eye-opening, exhilarating, maddening, and occasionally slightly boring ride. What did we learn? That the mid-period Loretta Young could be superb on screen (and was ravishing in colour); that Zanuck's short rein on his writers produced a startling uniformity of worldview and story structure across Fox's films; and that the Ritz Brothers remain the single worst comic troupe ever inflicted on a barely-prepared populace. But those were only the first discoveries from this deepest of dives. Seeing the star-making machine in full effect; beginning to comprehend Hollywood as a factory town: these were privileges I didn't expect. People online refer to anything they are even mildly distracted by with the words, "i am obsessed!!", but in this instance I actually am obsessed.

2. Ty Power – As an offshoot from the above project, I have spent several pleasant evenings gazing at Tyrone Power's pretty face, sometimes in colour.

3. Kung fu films on the Eureka label – You keep releasing them, I'll keep buying them. Often this proves to be wise (Royal Warriors) and at other times I feel like I've been robbed (Burning Paradise). But on those evenings when the switch marked 'brain' needs to be flicked to 'off', they're frequently a godsend.

4. Noir – That world of shadows, shady dames, and wry PIs who are the wittiest guys in the room, but with no concept of the frame closing around them. Throw in bluff cops, returning soldiers, corporate slimeballs, drunken floozies and homoerotic heavies, and you have the makings of a good evening in. Criterion Channel's 'Holiday Noir' season has been a treat (including an offering from the cheapo Monogram studio in which a man ends up being sentenced to death after throwing his shoes at a cat), while Indicator are doing the Lord's work with their Columbia Noir and Universal Noir sets.

5. Movies about politics – Completing this year's genre triumvirate: give me a set-piece gently stylising the to-and-fro of a congressional hearing, or an ob-doc about political corruption in a senatorial race, and you can burn down my house in the next 100 minutes and I won't notice.

***

Thanks for reading.

Review of 2019: Part 2 – Live

Part 1 was about books. Part 2 is about events and tbh it never gets as many hits, as you can famously read a book that someone read last year, but you cannot attend a gig in the past.



Gigs of the year:

When I wasn't reading, writing, working or being stabbed in the kidney by that surgeon I mentioned, I've mostly been at gigs. I've seen Knopfler, Clapton, Mariah Carey, the Lake Poets, Sheku Kanneh-Mason, Michael Giacchino and three nights of film scores at the Royal Albert Hall, old favourites David Ford, June Tabor (with Oyster Band), Bjӧrk and Kate Rusby, thrilled to Topic Records' 80th Anniversary show – which introduced me to Emily Portman and Lisa Knapp – and celebrated the long-awaited return of folk hero Ruth Notman, who's been busy in the interim training to become a nurse. And then there was that weird event where I went to an 'immersive screening' of Ghost World, and found myself watching more than an hour of ragtime jazz performed by director Terry Zwigoff and mad sexist Robert Crumb, punctuated by rants about political correctness. Yay!

But here are the 10 gigs that meant the most to me in 2019:



10. The Milk Carton Kids (Barbican) – I’ve got a bit of a thing about Inside Llewyn Davis, the wintry film in which the Coens brothers shrug off their arch, aloof smugness, and burrow into the psyche of their sullen anti-hero, a titular traditional singer wandering freezing Greenwich Village as the folk revival approaches. I can only play four songs on the guitar and three of them are from this film. So when I heard there was a spin-off concert film, Another Day, Another Time, I thought I better see it. And that's how I discovered The Milk Carton Kids, and a lot more besides. The duo's deceptively complex songs at first seemed frozen in time and genre – almost a pastiche of early Simon and Garfunkel – but over time they've diversified and gone deeper, pain and fear bringing not weariness but grace. Their biggest show so far, at London's Barbican, was a fast-paced treat mixing frenetic flatpicking, heartbreaking close harmony and the best between-songs badinage since the Manics stopped saying awful things for attention.


Yes she was, and yes I did.

9. Ariana Grande (The O2) – I liked Ariana Grande, the gay-friendly feminist who became a hero to my home city of Manchester, but I can’t say I liked her music. Then a friend played me ‘Into You’, that intoxicating blast of dance-y horniness, followed by ‘thank u, next’, the sad, wise title-track of her fifth album, and I stopped being a stupid dick who doesn’t know anything. A lot of rubbish gets talked about middle-aged men who spend more than a hundred pounds to go and see Ariana Grande live by themselves, but to me I am a legend. While the O2 isn’t the best place to see any kind of show – it’s essentially a warehouse in which the atmosphere simply evaporates, and everything is just too far away – Grande is a great performer, and when she isn’t also dancing (which takes the edge off the majesty), she has an insane set of pipes. Some songs I loved already (‘Into You’ was spectacular, ‘Fake Smile’ exuberantly misanthropic), and others came to life in concert: the knockabout ‘Be Alright’, the desperate ‘Breathin’’, though the numbers utilising the walkway that looped towards our section of the arena both raised the spirits and underlined just how good it would be to see Grande in a smaller and less antiseptic space. As she ripped through ‘thank u, next’ for the climax, she and the dancers skipped around it, waving Pride flags.



Lily! Martha! Certainly-one-of-the-Thompsons,-not-sure-which-one!

8. Rufus and Martha Wainwright: A Not So Silent Night (Southbank Centre) – The siblings in London together at Christmas for the first time in a decade. The older generation may no longer want to travel, but their own was out in force, including half-sister Lucy Wainwright Roche and their cousin (and personal favourite), the marvellously-monikered Lily Lanken. This all used to be about roots music and family, but Rufus is now the artistic brains behind these jamborees, and he’s made the whole thing so incredibly gay. It’s delightful. Among the guests were Dan Gillespie Sells, Neil Tennant and Sophie Ellis-Bextor, alongside various members of the inter-connected Thompson clan, Guy Garvey and Jenni Muldaur. The show was intended to celebrate the festive season but also the work of Kate McGarrigle, the matriarch who made her last public appearance at the previous London show in 2009. Being in a packed house watching Ellis-Bextor act her way through Kate and Anna McGarrigle’s ‘First Born’, a deep cut from their second record and a song that’s very personal to me, was a surreal experience – as was hearing a second live version of ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes’ this year; that’s the signature song of my musical idol, Sandy Denny. Lucy Wainwright Roche’s vocal here was better than Olivia Chaney’s, but she didn’t have half of Fairport behind her. Chrissie Hynde’s contributions may have been tuneless, but the rest of the show was scintillating, especially Martha’s Janis Joplin-esque ‘Mary Had a Baby’, her duet with Lanken on Jackson Browne’s left-wing atheist carol, ‘Rebel Jesus’, and Rufus’s ‘O Holy Night’, sung a capella and in French. I went in as a Rufus agnostic, but left as a fan. My affection for Martha Wainwright, you can take as a given. This was just about the perfect Christmas evening.



7. Rhiannon Giddens (Southbank Centre) – An extravagantly gifted performer, whose vocal texture, range, expression and timing is of the sort that most people can only dream about. This show saw her collaborating with Sicilian multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi, his self-deprecating patter and exceptional tambourine solos providing the perfect counterpoint to her spiky lectures on African-American experience and full-lunged outpourings of empathy and collective grief. The shade is balanced by the light. When you know what it’s about, ‘At the Purchaser’s Option’ is as gruelling as beautiful music can ever get, but her uproarious cover of Ethel Waters’ ‘Underneath Our Harlem Moon’, which reinstates the author’s original, unsanitised lyrics, is an uproarious, swinging showstopper, and the Celtic folk of ‘Molly Brannigan’ showcases the facility with a quickening vocal line that made me fall in love with her in the first place.



6. Johnny Marr (Southbank Centre) – I grew up as a huge Smiths fan (thanks Dad), but it had never really occurred to me that I might go to see Johnny Marr live. Then I heard him on the Adam Buxton podcast, asked for his book for Christmas, and ended up buying a ticket to his Meltdown show on the night itself. An encore of ‘Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me’ and ‘There Is a Light That Never Goes Out’ will do me, though I was surprised how much I liked his solo stuff – especially the obscenely catchy ‘Easy Money’. I think this show gave me more simple pleasure than any other this year. And Marr himself is so easy to like, which isn’t something one can necessarily say about all the members of the Morrissey-Marr songwriting partnership.



5. 33 Revolutions Per Minute (JW3) – This was such a magical night: an event inspired by Dorian Lynskey’s history of protest songs (which I wrote about here), featuring a gallery of gargantuan contemporary talents. Ayanna Witter-Johnson got the biggest ovation of the evening for her captivating ‘Redemption Song’ – accompanying herself on stand-up cello – but it was one of a string of highlights, from Kathryn Williams’ clear-throated cover of ‘American Tune’, to David Ford’s explosive takes on ‘John Walker’s Blues’ and the ‘Fixin’-to-Die Rag’, and a climactic, unexpected and thoroughly incongruous ‘Up the Junction’ from a very late Chris Difford. It was that kind of night. A few months later, I saw Williams hosting a Daylight Music show at Union Chapel, she and Ford doing a few numbers of their own, and spotlighting various protégés, including Phil Langran, whose ‘Time’s Dark Wing’ is simply one of the finest songs I’ve ever heard.



4. Richard Thompson: 70th birthday party (Royal Albert Hall) – A once-in-a-lifetime show, for those who incline towards folk, with virtually every existing luminary of the British scene coming to pay homage. It’s an embarrassment of riches, and an eclectic one, with guests typically doing one song of theirs and then one song of his. Surprises include Bob Mould’s chugging, punkish ‘Turning of the Tide’ (above), Thompson, his son Teddy and Maddy Prior duetting on a heightened ‘Grey Funnel Line’, and Loudon Wainwright’s ebullient ‘Swimming Song’, alongside more expected treats, like the birthday boy’s own ‘Beeswing’, delivered with a delicacy befitting its title. There’s also Kate Rusby returning to ‘Withered and Died’, half of Fairport Convention’s classic Liege & Lief line-up backing Olivia Chaney on ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes’, and Harry Shearer alienating the half of the audience who clearly haven’t seen Spinal Tap with an in-character (and interminable), ‘She Puts the Bitch in Obituary’.



3. Bob Dylan; support: Neil Young, Laura Marling and Cat Power (Hyde Park) – At a time when seeing Bob had begun to feel more like a duty than a treat, he came roaring back. Full review here.



2. Big Thief (The Roundhouse) – In January, I saw Adrianne Lenker on-stage in a church (London’s Union Chapel), performing wistful acoustic folk ballads behind a thatch of fringe, murmuring awkwardly through the void in her teeth. Three months later, she’s had a buzzcut, got a replacement tooth and is just screaming, amid a maelstrom of noise in a beer-soaked Roundhouse. This has been a big year for Big Thief, the most exciting band on the planet, ending with two albums in most ‘best of’ lists, and this was their biggest show to date. They can do it all, and at the Roundhouse they did: the hush and whimsy of ‘Spud Infinity’, the apocalyptic squall of ‘Not’ (the year’s best song?), the pure release of ‘Masterpiece’. No-one is writing more interesting material than Lenker’s tortured, introspective, pastoral alt-folk, nor delivering it with such exquisite abandon. The band, though, are not merely a vehicle for one woman’s genius, there’s a chemistry there: the fleet-fingered flat-picking of crooked-grinned Buck Meek, James Krivchenia’s lolloping, long-armed beats, Max Oleartchik... playing the bass (look, I don’t know much about music). I saw them again at Bush Hall in October, premiering new record Two Hands, and it was another experience entirely: every bit as vital, the band still figuring out the songs, groping towards greatness and frequently finding it. Next year I’m going to follow them on tour.



1. Robyn (Alexandra Palace) – Total catharsis, Robyn-style: the sexiest, saddest songs in the pop canon, battered across with the ultimate in quicksilver charisma, clad in white knee-length boots. I’ve never seen a performer with greater stage presence, a firmer grasp of a show’s necessary theatricality, or better dance moves. During ‘Dancing on My Own’, a celebration of jealous, heartbroken melancholia that represents some kind of peak, 10,000 voices join hers, and Robyn bursts into tears. Then it’s a wall of noise – an outpouring of love, and gratitude, for the returning queen of chilly Swedish electro-pop, doing her first UK shows in nine years – that goes on and on and on.

***

Theatre of the year...

... is probably a stretch, as I only saw 10 plays, and there were definitely more than 10 plays out there. Because I'm extremely clever, I didn't end up seeing anything I didn't broadly enjoy, though my tolerance for the annoying affectations of musical theatre (as opposed to the most naturalistic and intimate musical film) seems to be shrinking. While Come From Away (Phoenix Theatre) built to a rather lovely climax, fashioning something largely feelgood out of 9/11, Dear Evan Hansen (Noel Coward Theatre) dealt with its own subject – teen suicide – in a less than humane, intelligent way, though it had some fine moments. Hansard (National Theatre) broke no new ground, and largely recycled its audience's own liberal prejudices, though it was highly entertaining and extremely well-acted by Alex Jennings and Lindsay Duncan. The Lehman Trilogy (Piccadilly Theatre) went the other way, struggling to get ahold of its themes across three theatrically inventive but rather exhausting hours.

These were my favourites:



6. Anna (National Theatre) – Ella Hickson, who wrote the best play of 2018, returned with this gimmicky thriller, which was about itself and not much else. The audience was complicit in the surveillance state of East Germany, strapping on headphones and hearing only what the heroine heard, as she tried to survive in an atmosphere of spiralling paranoia (and, if we're being very literal about it, in a soundproof box with the rest of the cast). After The Writer, it felt like a slight comedown, but it was neatly conceived and made the most of its quirk, with some neat twists and a couple of great jump scares.



5. Present Laughter (The Old Vic) – Simply Noel Coward done well, with Andrew Scott having the time of his life as a vain, selfish, philandering actor who's making his entourage's life hell in '30s London. It wasn't deep, but it was riotously funny.



4. All My Sons (The Old Vic) – Classy adaptation of the early Arthur Miller play, with – and please excuse the banality – one of the handsomest sets I've ever seen: a quietly idyllic back garden in a small American town. Jenna Coleman couldn't hold her own among a heavy-hitting cast, and Bill Pullman couldn't project to the cheap seats, but he, Sally Field and Colin Morgan captured Miller's anger and anguish – tragedy on an intimate but epic scale.



3. The Starry Messenger (Wyndham's Theatre) – Space, adultery and adult education: this was none-more-Lonergan, with an exceptional performance from Matthew Broderick as a frustrated science lecturer trapped by the quietly festering American Dream. How it can be that, and make me laugh as hard as it did, is some achievement. Elizabeth McGovern, also billed above the title, had little to do until the final act.



2. A Very Expensive Poison (The Old Vic) – Lucy Prebble returned with this freewheeling, meta-textual romp through the Litvinenko tragedy – where, as with Dylan's 'Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll', perhaps the greatest tragedy happened after the killing. The material positively swaggers, throwing everything into the mix, but the right everything, at the right time, and no-one I can think of, in any medium, writes better off-kilter one-liners. Reece Shearsmith is perfect as a supercilious, bombastic and seductive Putin, at one point hanging out of a box to tell everyone to go home, as the story is clearly over.



1. Rosmersholm (Duke of York's Theatre) – Ibsen at his bleakest and most pointed, as influential former cleric Rosmer (Tom Burke) strives to understand his relationship with free-spirited Rebecca (Hayley Atwell) – and reconcile his friendship with smooth-talking hatemonger Kroll (Giles Terera) – as an election approaches, and the vultures of the press circle. This electrifying, overpowering adaptation saw writer Duncan Macmillan tease out the parallels with our current national binfire, played out by a note-perfect cast amid the light shafts and dust motes of an ancestral home that boxes in its characters as vividly as their political and personal dilemmas.

***

Other live stuff/exhibitions:



My favourite comedy set of the year was Stewart Lee's new show: Snowflake/Tornado, a succession of inspired, airtight routines about liberalism, Alan Bennett, Netflix, Fleabag, anti-PC campaigners and 'saying the unsayable', the last of which consists of him gurning, spitting, sputtering and striving to make noises for literally ten minutes. This show might be the best thing he's ever done. It's certainly the hardest I've laughed this year. He is simply on a different level to almost any other political comic working today, and probably the second funniest person in his house.

James Acaster's Cold Lasagna Hate Myself 1999 was often brilliant, but genuinely required a better working knowledge of shit TV than I've got to hand. It was also great to see Bassem Youssef doing his first English-language show, and to watch Daniel Kitson confounding a good portion of his audience by pretending for quite some time that his set would consist of him reading out a cabinet's worth of index cards listing his possessions. It didn't. Discovery of the year was Sarah Keyworth, who somehow emerged triumphant from a showcase at Union Chapel also featuring Sara Pascoe, Rose Matafeo and Phil Wang (and Arthur Smith).



And at work I got to be involved with Letters Live, one of the best nights of the year (even when Rory Stewart resigned from the Tory Party on stage and I had to work until 1am). Louise Brealey, pictured, – who can pack so much emotion, so subtly, into any material – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and (much to my surprise) Alan Carr were the stand-out stars.

Across the road, Dr Matthew Sweet, Pamela Hutchinson and David Benedict probed the Warner Bros canon in a lovely Proms Plus talk, and at the BFI Malcolm McDowell provided some insights and lols that turned out to be rather well-rehearsed when I decided to venture onto YouTube in search of further #content.



My favourite exhibition of the year was also the smallest, and it was, of course, your penis, a tiny addendum to the Design Museum's gargantuan (and impressive) Stanley Kubrick: The Exhibition, which collected some of his stunning news photography for Look Magazine. Visual art-themed jaunts spotlighted work by Matisse, William Blake, Abram Games and Eva Hesse – while the IWM's oddly disjointed Making a New World delved into WWI from a few odd and interesting angles – but Olafur Eliasson: In real life at the Tate Modern (above) was so great because it was so unlike anything else I'd been to, with a rainbow in one room and a world of coloured fog in another.

***

Thanks for reading. I'll chat about films a bit in the next (and final) part.

Review of 2017: Part 2 – Live

I'm not blasé about how lucky I am to have the job I do, to live in London, and to have just enough money to go to some incredible events (provided I don't go on holiday, and shop at Aldi quite a bit). In 2017, I've strolled around the Royal Albert Hall auditorium laying out Santa hats as Chrissie Hynde sang '2,000 Miles', gone for an extended drink with the Pern team after a day of filming with Christopher Eccleston, Paul Whitehouse and Nigel Havers, met Billy Bragg (straight in at #1 on the Nicest Celebs spreadsheet) and been to a celebration of Joe Orton featuring his sister Leonie, Kenneth Cranham and John Lahr. I've seen Allison Anders talk about Gas, Food Lodging, Bruce Robinson and Richard E. Grant discuss Withnail & I, and Kazuo Ishiguro reveal a deep love of screwball comedy. And through jobligations and a fast finger on the F5 button, I've been fortunate enough to go to the BAFTAs, Oliviers, the London Film Festival and the athletics world championships, and to see John Grant interview Elizabeth Fraser. It's been a bit daft.

That's everything that doesn't fit into my rigorously regimented Part 2 of the Review of the Year, which is split into Gigs, Shows and Exhibitions:

Gigs



12. The Best of Elmer Bernstein (June, Royal Albert Hall) – A fantastic concert showcasing Bernstein's pioneering work in everything from epics to comedies, Westerns to romances, and nature documentaries to sweaty, cynical, claustrophobic fag-end noirs. It was cosy, conversational and emotionally overwhelming in turn. Bernstein’s rhapsodic homage to/pastiche of classic Hollywood music – evoking the very history of Hollywood and composed for a ‘60s TV show called Hollywood and the Stars – was a revelation, captivating me with its sweeping, Steiner-esque beauty. Full review.



11. Martha Wainwright and Ed Harcourt (February, The Roundhouse) – An often brilliant evening in the company of one of the 21st century’s most compelling performers. Her new record is patchy, but she is such a mesmerising performer that she can wring brilliance from almost anything, her hips rotating sensually, her foot coming off the floor and her knee up towards her chest again and again in a mannerism that seems both inexplicable and inevitable, as much a part of her act as her easy humour, constant between-songs swearing and that unapproachable voice, racing over the octaves, blasting the roof off the Roundhouse or staying husky, deep and disgruntled somewhere in her larynx. Leonard Cohen’s 'Chelsea Hotel #2' is the highlight: among the most remarkable things I’ve ever seen or heard, at a gig or anywhere else (even after a false start in which she leaps straight into the second verse). At one point she’s crouched on the floor, her voice somewhere in the rafters, her heart somewhere in Hell. There are versions of it on YouTube, one from 10 years ago, another when she started doing it again live in December – clutching a lyric sheet, skitting around the tune – but nothing will ever come close to the way she sang it that night in February. It was revelatory. Full review.



10. The National (September, Hammersmith Apollo) – The best band since Suede (it's true, check your paperwork), and one of the most viscerally exciting live acts around. After three solid years of touring Trouble Will Find Me, they seemed keen to get away from it, delving further back into their catalogue and playing nearly everything from their new record, Sleep Well Beast. Highlights were a blistering 'The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness', a hushed, harmonised 'Dark Side of the Gym' featuring support act This The Kit, and a brass-backed take on that stuttering, syncopated hymn to escapism in a hellhole, 'Fake Empire'. My only quibble is that Matt Berninger, one of the most gifted lyricists of his generation and a dynamic stage presence, can't sing in tune live. It's not that hard.



9. Jens Lekman (March, Oval Space) – Glorious. Imagine how good he is when he doesn't have the flu. Full review.



8. David Ford's Milk and Cookies (December, Bush Hall) – Every Christmas, the protest-singing multi-instrumentalist puts down the economics textbook and plays a covers show for charity. Milk and cookies are on sale from a table at the back. This was the first time I'd been (though I've seen Ford live twice before), and it was a total joy, Ford effortlessly judging the mood as kicked off with 'Free Fallin' ', put his heart into a Whitney cover ('Didn't We Almost Have It All'), and played a joshing bromantic duet with Tom McRae (John Waite's 'Missing You'), between self-penned classics and randomly generated 'requests'. At one point, he asked the audience to sing a succession of notes, then used them as the synths for an inspired take on 10cc's 'I'm Not in Love'. What a treat. See you next year. I've put up a setlist (from memory) here.



7. Mike Heron and Trembling Bells (August, Cafe Oto) – As I said in the books review, my summer was commandeered by a burgeoning infatuation with the Incredible String Band. Robin Williamson's show at a Putney pub was distinctive and enjoyable, but ISB-free and dragged down by his wife's tuneless vocals. That felt in keeping with his character, and so did Mike Heron's hits set, backed by Glasgow folk-rock outfit, Trembling Bells. After support by a bad poet and a good young folkie, they took the stage for eight Incredible String Band numbers, including mesmeric versions of 'Douglas Traherne Harding' and 'A Very Cellular Song', probably the best thing Heron ever wrote. Pushing 75, he couldn't take a lead on all the numbers, so a backing singer unconvincingly deputised on 'Maya', but his voice has held up pretty well, and there's no questioning the enduring, singular quality of the material, nor the talent of his polished but flexible ensemble. He ended the show by duetting on the ISB rarity, 'Bright Morning Stars', with his daughter. Immediate reaction.



6. Yasmine Hamdan (March, Scala) – Every time I see her live, Lebanese electro-grunge pioneer Yasmine Hamdan features in this list. She topped it in 2014. The crowd was full of people farting and petting, but the performance itself was packed full of Hamdan's easy sensuality, instinctive creativity and megawatt charisma. The aftermath was somewhat spoiled by Yasmine not remembering me (we once hung out for like three hours) and then proceeding to offer me a fist-bump, which I misjudged and shook hands with. I can hear you cringing from here. Full review.



5. Susanne Sundfør (October, Union Chapel) – For me, one of this year's happiest musical discoveries, along with my numbers 10, 7 and 1. I saw her at the Scott Walker Prom in July (more of which later), and quickly became besotted. Y'know, musically. This show at London's most tranquil, atmospheric and welcoming venue (though the pews aren't ideal if you're a handsome 33-year-old press executive with a bad back) leant heavily on her new record, Music for People in Trouble, and its stylistic siblings: songs like 'Walls' and 'The Brothel', introspective, teasingly extroverted synth-folk ballads a world away from the stomping electro-pop of 2015's irresistible Ten Love Songs. Occasionally the show dipped into plonky nothingness, but there were stand-out moments from 'Reincarnation' to Paul Simon's 'American Tune', and when Sundfor rips the lid off that extraordinary voice for 'Trust Me' (a heart-stopping version) and the year's best song, 'Undercover', there's simply no feeling comparable.



4. John Grant (May, Union Chapel) – My first ever visit to Union Chapel was to see Review-of-the-Year stalwart John Grant, staying true to his reputation as rock's nicest genius with a charity show (to fund a kidney transplant for his friend Oleg) full of rarely-aired fan favourites ('Global Warming', 'You Don't Have To') and definitive versions. His 'Glacier' was the greatest I've ever heard, and I've seen him duet on it with Kylie. Full review.



3. Seu Jorge (May, Royal Albert Hall) – I loved The Life Aquatic from first sight, and one of its great joys is the Seu Jorge soundtrack: Portuguese-language covers of Bowie songs that give it so much of its poignant, perfect atmosphere. This year he toured those songs for the first time, pitching up at My Office for an intimate, conversational show. It was uplifting, unique, but deeply moving too: speaking very personally to the sell-out crowd, many of them sporting those iconic red beanies. “I am glad to see so many members of Zissou Team here,” says Seu. (A Team Zissou member calling Team Zissou 'Zissou Team” is the most Team Zissou thing ever). When a hidden screen comes down and his backdrop is The Life Aquatic and you realise that though it’s only 13 years, it’s already 13 years, and that the passing of time set to music is a rhapsodically poignant thing. Full review.



2. Prom 15: The Songs of Scott Walker: 1967-70 (July, Royal Albert Hall) – Perhaps the best show I've ever seen at work, a stunning reinterpretation of Scott Walker's early solo work from four of the most distinctive musical voices of later generations. Backed by Jules Buckley's impeccable Heritage Orchestra, each brought something different to the show, representing a different facet of Walker's mercurial persona: John Grant power and eloquence, Richard Hawley an urgent, tuneful melancholy, Jarvis Cocker a stage presence in place of the voice required to do Walker's songs justice, and Susanne Sundfør the insolent sensuality and super soaraway top notes. I'd come for Walker and Grant, but left as a Sundfør superfan. I first saw her in the soundcheck, doing something strange to 'The Amorous Humphrey Plugg'. By the end of the song I couldn't wait to hear more, and when she stepped out to sing it in Bond-theme style that night, I was just a foot away. It damn near lifted me to the ceiling. You can watch it here.



1. Father John Misty (November, Hammersmith Apollo) – In which the psychically tortured confessional artist puts on the most joyous pop concert of the year. Full review.

Would you like some more? I've written about plenty of other shows, from Jackson Browne being pretty damn great to Angel Olsen being pretty damn poor, and Richard Thompson not really being arsed.

Extra bits: Here are the best three pieces I wrote for the Royal Albert Hall blog this year: - My best pun of the year headlines this piece about Elmer Bernstein's greatest hits - Go behind the scenes at the filming of Brian Pern: A Tribute - And, after the untimely passing of the great Tom Petty, I wrote about seeing him live in 2012

***

Theatre


Yes, I like this sort of thing, what exactly is your point.

7. The John Wilson Orchestra presents Oklahoma! (August, Royal Albert Hall) – This counts, right? A semi-staged performance of Rodgers and Hammerstein's morally incomprehensible 1943 musical, in which the hero decides that a mentally ill love rival who owns pornography doesn't deserve to exist, and tries to convince him to commit suicide. Helluva show, though, powered by John Wilson's tight, exuberant orchestra, as a first-rate ensemble conjured Oklahoma from thin air with the help of a washing line, a couple of chairs, and impeccable song-and-dance smarts. Robert Fairchild was unquestionably the stand-out, but a mention too for Marcus Brigstocke. When I heard he was in it, I thought that was funny. It wasn't, but he was. I'd forgotten too how much great music there is in Oklahoma! I'll always prefer Rodgers and Hart to Rodgers and Hammerstein, but I prefer Rodgers and Hart to most things.



6. An American in Paris (March, Dominion Theatre) – An explosive, intelligent stage version of MGM’s 1951 masterpiece, direct from Broadway, which sags now and then in its book, but offers unmissable entertainment of a type rarely seen in the West End. It was the first night too, so Leslie Caron turned up to take a bow. Full review.



5. Girl From the North Country (July, The Old Vic) – A jukebox musical of Bob Dylan album tracks, allied to a Depression-era melodrama, and nearly as good as that sounds. Its greatest virtue was Shirley Henderson's performance. I've never been that taken with her, seeing her in films, but she had such a presence and physicality, flitting between pitiful and sensual, rabid and comatose, that I was transfixed. Though I tend to have a problem with portraits of mental disintegration which are big and tic-laden (as the journalist Tim Lott once wrote, a realistic piece of fiction about mental illness would just be very boring), this one managed to be funny, intelligently allegorical, moving and somewhat unpleasant, without traversing into unbelievability or hysteria, while her moments of lucidity unveiled an unexpectedly beautiful voice, shot through a Scandi-Minnesotan lilt. It was her, the songs and the atmosphere of quiet desperation that stayed with me, but mostly her. Full review.


Pennycooke as the dandyish Francophile, Thomas Jefferson.

4. Hamilton (December, Victoria Palace Theatre) – The top four could be in any order, really: I've been incredibly lucky to see four shows so thrilling and affecting in a single year. Lin-Manuel Miranda's Broadway sensation makes it to the West End in considerable style, delivering for an audience so hyped that they were whooping with barely-contained delirium when the lights went down. The writing is magnificent – two small moments that just blow me away are Lafayette's appearance in 'Guns and Ships' and "... we dream in the dark for the most time", a wail of impotence in the stand-out number, 'The Room Where It Happens' – and the staging and playing aren't far off. Rachel John (as Angelica) and Giles Terera (as Aaron Burr) are both incredibly classy performers, and there's explosive, pint-sized support from Jason Pennycooke. The West End audience seemed to retain its comfortable fondness for warbly show tunes (the cheesy if unquestionably effective 'One Last Time') over lightning-paced wordplay, but the atmosphere was something special all the same.



3. Angels in America (July/Aug, National Theatre) – The first half, Millennium Approaches, was astonishing: a clear-headed, literate and ambitious piece of art, lit by the NT's masterly, expansive stagecraft and a stunning ensemble. Part two, Perestroika, wasn't quite in my sweet spot, its abstract and metaphysical elements sometimes more confusing than compelling, but taken as a whole it was a vivid presentation of an extraordinarily ambitious, eight-hour play, with a sprawling focus but an enduring, unblinkered humanity. The performances from Nathan Lane (as Trump's mentor, McCarthyite lawyer Roy Cohn), Denise Gough and the relatively unknown James McArdle were absolutely terrific.



2. The Ferryman (August, The Gielgud Theatre) – What I always imagined theatre might be, and yet rarely is: both political and personal, with a specificity that gives it its universality, and a crackling, super-charged atmosphere that here buzzes with desperation, danger and the particular energy of unspoken love. Written by Jez Butterworth and directed by Sam Mendes, it stars Paddy Considine as a former IRA heavy whose tranquil farm life remains in the shadow of his brother's unresolved disappearance, setting up your expectations only to subvert them or – in the case of a moment of lucidity amidst the fog of dementia – time and heighten cliche with such effortlessness that it works just the same, before a descent into inevitable, ironic violence. Everything about the play is first-rate, but especially Laura Donnelly as the missing brother's wife. The play was based on Donnelly's own experiences, and her knife-edge performance is warm, tortured and erotic – sometimes all three at once.



1. Hamlet (April, Almeida Theatre) – Andrew Scott's Hamlet is the best I've seen − probing, philosophical, introspective and bitterly witty − and this intimate, innovative, cleanly modern production rises to meet him, keeping your attention rapt and your emotions engaged. He's also the first to whom I've felt a natural and personal connection, and it runs deep. He's groping in the dark, beset with an impotence of action from which he's trying to rip himself free, questing for self-knowledge, while praying for a relief from it. He's an existential Hamlet: thoughtful, melancholy, feeling deeply, a decent, anguished, emotionally tender Prince with an adolescent's loathing of hypocrisy and duplicity, a child's guilelessness, and a self-loathing born of immobility in the face of dishonour. In pegged black trousers and a collarless shirt, barefoot or in shiny black shoes, stripped to a vest highlighting his voluminous biceps, or dressed in cream and white for the graveyard scene, the wiry, wild-eyed Scott commands the stage, and all of your attention. Full review.

***

Exhibitions



"The bees are getting suspicious." My favourite exhibition of the year is on until April: the V&A's wonderful Winnie the Pooh: Exploring a Classic, which approaches its topic from the angle of E. H. Shepard's perfect illustrations. That was presumably through necessity, as Shepard's drawings are part of the museum's collection whereas the smaller number of Milne items are borrowed, but it offers a fascinating new perspective on the works, examining Shepard's preparation (sketches from life in the rural locations), his subtle tricks (lengthening Piglet's snout to bury it in a balloon, showing his ears streaming back in the force of a gale) and his genius, while celebrating a creative marriage of two forceful, remarkable talents that extended to the artistic layout of the text, which echoed and so enhanced the stories they were telling. Don't miss the little side-room which takes that one step further! The rooms are full of life-size recreations of the drawings, including a Poohsticks bridge with an electronic river, and of remarkable insights and artefacts. The best are the alternate, unused Shepard sketches, among 270 drawings that he donated the museum in 1973. What I also found fascinating, looking at a gallery of later Pooh editions illustrated by Shepard, is that it was only in his dotage that his colour portraits began to work. His watercolour paintings, at least in these reproductions, seem blocky and charmless, but when he returned to the subject in his eighties, his eyesight failing, he opted instead for simple washes over his old ink drawings, and it's those indelible editions (making Pooh's jackets red, where sometimes they'd been blue) which have become definitive – and rightly so. There are a few references to the abhorrent D*sney bastardisation of the books in the opening room, but otherwise we're fine.



Grayson Perry's small-scale offering at the Serpentine Galleries, The Most Popular Art Exhibition Ever!, made me very happy: a sly, self-referential and extremely funny collection, from a vase decorated with delicately hideous cartoons of the Brexit mob to a tooled up motorbike for his teddy bear and (my favourite), a pastiche of miners' gala banners that contrasts the vilified 'archetypes' of the contemporary working class with the hazy image of their forefathers' macho monochrome nobility.



I saw two great exhibitions at the British Library, as well as their enjoyable Harry Potter one: a collection of Jane Austen's teenage writings in the Treasures gallery, and a fine study of the failed communist experiment – already in tatters by 1920 – in Russian Revolution: Hope, Tragedy, Myths. The Imperial War Museum's People Power exhibition was impressive, multi-faceted and a little unfortunate in having to follow the V&A's Disobedient Objects, which is one of the best exhibitions I've seen since moving to London, and dealt with a similar theme: public protest.

If you like the idea of going into a warm hut and trying not to stand on some butterflies, then I'd really recommend the Natural History Museum's ever-popular Sensational Butterflies (seriously, it's terrific).



My favourite of the art exhibitions was Tate Modern's Soul of A Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, which had its philosophically impenetrable collections of twigs, but also works like Benny Andrews' provocative, 'Did the Bear Sit Under a Tree' – with its challenging, tactile 3D created partially by using an everyday zip for a mouth – and Betye Saar's 'Sambo's Banjo', its gaudy exterior covered in the infantilising, dehumanising racism of a blackface caricature, while its inside contains a black figure strung up for a lynching. Saar said, though, that the plight of the black man in America was not hopeless, destiny was in his hands, and so a sniper rifle lies within reach, waiting for him to free himself. I was less enamoured of the Rauschenberg exhibition, though it contained the greatest factual description of an artwork ever written, though American Dream at the British Museum got me thinking about the ways we see America, and the ways it sees itself.

***

Thanks for reading.