Screen Machine

Vaughn demonstrates an innate understanding of the primal dynamics of action cinema, aided by a crack conductor’s sense of tempo and pacing.

If nothing else, this year’s list confirms that we at Screen Machine are big Jesse Eisenberg fans (but then who isn’t?). It perhaps shows other continuities from our 2009 list, indicating some of the approaches and prejudices we have as film critics and spectators. We hope that the pieces we’ve written on each of the twenty films that appear here are of greater use and interest to readers than the mock-suspense of learning what finishes in which position. Returning to these films now allows us to say things about them that we couldn’t when they first appeared, and we think that these reflective pieces on the films of 2010 will offer plenty to discuss as we begin the new year.

Bong Joon-ho’s Mother, the story of the frenetic attempts of a woman to exonerate her simple, sweet son of the brutal murder of a teenage girl, may present less immediately engaging or obvious thematic subtext than the law and order and institutional indictments of The Host and Memories of Murder, but it also proves Bong to be an effortless manipulator of his audience.

Andrew Kidman and Aaron Curnow’s Last Hope is a feature length collection of short subjects inspired by the ocean, showing exclusively at the new venue Speakeasy Cinema. Kidman, a noted Australian surfing filmmaker and musician-photographer-writer-hyphenate, collected a posse of directors to make one or two short films each, all set to music from Curnow’s label Spunk – including tracks by such excellent artists as Sufjan Stevens, Dirty Three, and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy.

The end result is something like a Fantasia for surfing, with each film providing a seductive, and occasionally surprising, accompaniment to its chosen song – although the film itself is less like a concert-hall program than a really well structured mix-tape. I spoke with Andrew Kidman about the creation of the project, its distribution, and the life of an independent artist.

I write on Martin Scorsese’s new film Shutter Island mostly as an excuse to cross reference it to one of my favourite quotes I’ve encountered in my time spent reading film criticism. The author in question is NY Press’s noted contrarian Armond White, who wrote of Brian DePalma’s maligned 2000 sci-fi flop Mission to Mars that “It can be said with certainty that any reviewer who pans it does not understand movies, let alone like them”.  As declarations go it’s…

With Thirst, Park Chan-wook, best known for the excellent Vengeance Trilogy of the past few years (Sympathy for Mr Vengeance, Oldboy, and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance) takes a welcome step into full on Grand Guignol horror melodrama; only it takes him a bit too long to get there. Park’s best films, particularly Mr Vengeance and Oldboy, are models of dramatic construction; beginning with a simple set-up that slowly, inexorably, spirals down into violence. You come out feeling like you’ve been…

I think with Mother, his fourth feature length work, Bong Joon-ho cements his place as my favourite working director of any nationality. I’ve seen him compared (on the basis of his two previous works; The Host, and Memories of Murder) with Spielberg and Hitchcock, and unlike most such analogies this description manages to be both utterly foolish and somewhat apt. It’s easy to scramble for such names when discussing Bong’s work for two reasons. First, because despite defying most generic…

[Observe and Report trailer here.]
Review by James Douglas
With Observe and Report, director Jody Hill cements his place as my new favorite American satirist. Previously known for micro-budgeted indie The Foot Fist Way, and HBO comedy series Eastbound and Down, Observe finds Hill with an increasingly sure grasp of the complex tonalities that marked his previous work, and a high budget, studio-sanctioned playground in which he can let them loose. There’s something excitingly transgressive about watching such subversive, disturbing material delivered…