Late-ish 2013 Retrospective: Top 10 Directors

Again, I don't have a huge disclaimer to put here. I know it's May, I know it's late, but hey, it is never too late to honour some pretty awesome directors, is it?

Honourable Mentions: Steven Soderbergh - Side Effects, The Coen Brothers - Inside Llewyn Davis, David Lowery - Ain't Them Bodies Saints, Abdellatif Kechiche - Blue is the Warmest Colour, Ron Howard - Rush, Lake Bell - In a World..., Joseph Gordon-Levitt - Don Jon, Ryan Coogler - Fruitvale Station, Asghar Farhadi - The Past, Richard Linklater - Before Midnight, Harmony Korine - Spring Breakers.

10. Spike Jonze - Her
Her is an incredibly brave film. Take it from one of the film's pivotal lines about love: "it's like a socially acceptable form of insanity." The way that the film ruminates on love is so beautiful, as opposed to sugar coating everything and having couples running of into sunsets and that kind of gooey stuff. Perhaps that's all because this is a film about a man having a relationship with his computer. Which is quite strange (it's quite hard to sell this movie to my friends), but Jonze does it in such a way that it feels completely natural. Not to mention, the futuristic world he creates is definitely a world that I could see actually happening, thanks to Jonze not over-saturating the film with ludicrous visions of the future. Even though the movie left me feeling extremely empty for a little while, this is a unique kind of beauty that I wish we could see more of.

9. Denis Villeneuve - Prisoners
Fun fact: throughout many lines of ancestry, it's possible that in some way I'm related to this guy (I would have even had his last name once upon a time, which would have been nice). If that somehow means that I have an ounce of his talent, that would be fantastic. Even though I haven't seen Incendies since it first came out about two and a half years ago, it is still engrained in my brain - it's so hard to shake the deliberately cold, striking way the film was made. It's the same with Prisoners, which Villeneuve could make with a bigger budget, bigger names, and the magic touch of Roger Deakins behind the camera. Prisoners is a masterful, slow burning thriller that mixes the suspense of detective work with the emotional trauma created within the families. It's a puzzle that doesn't seem willing to be solved, but it is made in such a way that I wasn't sure if I ever did want it to be solved. Villeneuve is always in control of his material. I haven't seen Enemy yet (because who knows if it will even get a release here), but how crazy is it that he managed to make those two films in the same year? And here comes my trademark saying: I want to be him.

DVD--Splice

or: The most stuffed up movie I have ever seen.

One word to sum it up: Weird.

Even though we were somewhat promised a cinema release on Splice, this sci-fi horror somehow wound up in our preview drawer ahead of it's DVD release next month. Now I see why the movie Gods didn't quite trust this film to get on our big screens. No, it's not bad...I kinda liked it. But it's just so strange and stuffed up that our audiences would probably get a little freaked by it. I saw this about five days ago, and I'm still not happy with the rating I have given it. In some ways, it's a load of garbage, but in other ways, it's a great piece of modern cinema at it's best.

Two young rebellious scientists, Clive (Adrien Brody) and Elsa (Sarah Polley), are told by their employers to halt groundbreaking work that has seen them produce new creatures with medical benefits by splicing together multiple organisms' DNA. They decide to secretly continue their work, but this time splicing in human DNA. Their work results in a new creature, Dren (Delphine Chaneac), who appears to be just like a human (with some differences) at first. As she grows, she starts becoming trouble, and Clive and Elsa discover that Dren is the harmless creature they thought she would be.

As I said, I'm torn between good and bad when it comes to Splice. Let's start with the good things this movie has to offer. Splice is a fantastic sci-fi, but also a great horror, which provides more thrills then we have been seeing in the latest 'B-grade horror trend'. The premise is not only intriguing, but particularly relevant these days due to scientists trying to do this kind of thing. Fortunately, Splice doesn't suffer from the Hollywood syndrome, where they take a perfectly possible storyline, dumb it down to the lowest common denominator, and make it totally unbelivable. Splice, instead, takes a very realistic look at genetic engineering, which is quite believable and isn't bogged down by silly special effects. Another thing that Splice has over similar sci-fi's is the impeccable performances from Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley as the 'rock star' scientists.

The flaws that this movie carries also have something to do with one of it's best assets. Blended into the storyline is a theme of growing up and teen angst, which comes in the form of Dren. As she grows up, we start witnessing her confusion over certain things, which contributes to the strangeness of this film. While that theme is so cleverly great, the way it is executed just led me to think 'WTF?!'...several times. In it's final act, Splice loses itself because I couldn't tell whether I should take the movie seriously or not. Either way you look at it, it's hard to take something out of what it is trying to say, and ends up becoming laughable for all the wrong reasons. I have come to the conclusion that Splice was a very good film, up until it became confused with what it wanted to be: a clever sci-fi horror or just another generic horror.


THE VERDICT: Could have been better, and could have taken itself a bit more seriously. However, the premise behind Splice is great, which makes up for most of the film's flaws.

7/10