Omit Needless Awards 2008: Festive Opinion Dump

The Harry Caul Awards for Excellence in Cinema

1. Slumdog Millionaire. All of it, every single one of Anthony Dod Mantle's beautifully shot frames (even the ones on annoying angles). Danny Boyle has been threatening a masterpiece now for several films and it seems that ditching Alex Garland for somebody who actually knows how to write a third act and end a story as well as it starts has finally allowed him to get there. Ridiculously joyous but never trite, Boyle takes the risk of making one of those wretched outsider films about Bombay in which we become obsessed with colour and sense and never feel humanity or reality. But he doesn't do that. He makes the greatest film he has ever made and he makes me love cinema again, even if just for a moment.
2. Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight. I've never been a fan of Heath's, though not for any reasons of hometown cultural cringe, and certainly not because his team beat mine in high school improv championships a decade ago and I hold a grudge, no sir. His performances -- outside of Ten Things I Hate About You -- have seemed leaden, burdened, at distance from their characters. His gay cowboy was one of the most overrated performances of the decade. His Joker, though? A force of nature. A perfect storm. It was not a great film but you did not notice and you will not remember. You will only remember that last shot, that smile swinging in the wind. You can read something into the seductive story of a role consuming its player, but let's not. Let's celebrate it for what it is, and what it would have been had he lived -- one of the great performances of cinema.
3. Werner Herzog's opening thesis statement for Encounters at the End of the World, his suitably wigged journey to meet the Herzogian scientists and forklift drivers who inhabit the research bases of Antarctica. He explains to his funders that the film will not be about pretty pictures of cute penguins, but rather he will be seeking answers to the questions that plague him:
   

   "Is there such a thing as insanity among penguins?  And why is it that human beings saddle a horse, and like the Lone Ranger, put on masks in order to disguise their identity and then feel the urge to chase the bad guy?  And why is it that certain species of ants keep flocks of wild lice in order to milk them like slaves for droplets of sugar?  And why is it that a chimp--clearly a superior creature--does not straddle a goat and ride into the sunset?"

   
   To further illustrate this final question, we are shown a marvellous painting of a chimp straddling a goat, riding into the sunset.
4. Frank Langella's Richard Nixon in Frost/Nixon. The film itself is as middlebrow as you'd expect of Ron Howard, and the Frost incompetence narrative is played up no end, but Langella builds his Nixon so perfectly, so meticulously, that those final rounds of the boxing match, the eventual near-confessions, admissions of betrayal and regret, carry just as much weight as they do when you watch them in the original interviews. He holds that famous close-up perfectly.
5. The twenty minute shot at the center of Steve McQueen's Hunger. McQueen pulls off a remarkable feat, making a film that is otherwise near-silent, drained of dialogue and driven along only by incessant physical pain; by indignity and grunts and moans (often too artily shot for their own good, it must be said, though I allow McQueen some first-time-director let off points for this). And then, just as we're gasping for air, he opens the tanks and floods us, letting it all pour out in a riveting single shot two-hander between a prisoner and his priest which journeys tenderly and unsparingly through the Troubles and all of their contradictions and pain, from tiny human betrayals and folly through to the broadest and purest of battles led astray through idealism. And then, just as suddenly, we're treated to a minutes-long shot of a prison floor being swept of urine, it being pushed back under the cell doors, and we hear barely a word again for the remainder of the film.

The Timothy Treadwell Award for Cinematic Folly

• Australia, for showing just how much of a clusterfuck the Australian film industry has become. Here's my review, I don't have the energy to repeat it. To cheer you up and reassure you that things could always be worse, Baz Luhrmann promises that his next film will be The Great Gatsby.

The Townes van Zandt award for delayed discoveries of tortured, tragic genius

• I came to the late "seminal avant-garde composer, singer-songwriter, cellist, and disco producer" Arthur Russell last year thanks to a strange little EP of covers of his songs by folks such as Jens Lekman and Taken By Trees. His story was entirely unfamiliar, and the allmusic bio seemed a little improbably hyperbolic. And yet, as it is told in Matt Wolf's great doco Wild Combination, and through a series of excellent reissues mostly on the Audika label, I've fallen rather hard for this strange man who died too young, whose story and musical evolution, from sparse country to the 70s New York avant-garde scene with Cage and Glass through the Modern Lovers to disco and the birth of house music, are saying something bigger that I'm yet to entirely comprehend. Plus, those Dinosaur L tracks? You can not argue with those.

The Colossal Squid Award for Most Terrifying Thing in the World

• It was a terrifying year in the world, possible apocalypse creeping in from many directions both man-made and not. I was going to go for a top five here, but Radiolab's year-end list brought with it one more than freakish enough to wipe out all of mine. So, for your terror, I give you zombie caterpillars controlled by parasitic wasps. Try to stop thinking about them. Go on, try. They're in your dreams now.

The Fuck You Tree of Smoke for Being So Excellent and Long Award for Books I've Actually Finished this Year

This can't really be a top list, because I haven't finished enough books to make it so. Instead, books I've finished (which implies I quite liked them) separated for your convenience into fiction and non:

• Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke
• Jesse Ball - Samedi the Deafness
• Ahmadou Kourouma - Allah is not Obliged
• Jonathan Lethem - Motherless Brooklyn
• Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

• Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh - Off the Books: the Underground Economy of the Urban Poor
• Edward Tufte - Beautiful Evidence
• Philip Gourevitch - A Cold Case
• William Langewiesche - The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime
• Charles Glass - The Northern Front: A Wartime Diary
• Henry Mayhew - London Labour and the London Poor

Books in progress that I'm going to list anyway:

• Alex Ross - The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
• Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris - Standard Operating Procedure

The Hiro Protagonist Award for Most Overrated Book of the Year

• Joseph O'Neill - Netherland. The Great Gatsby is reached for as fair comparison by the sleeve critics. Yeah, maybe the Baz Luhrmann version. Perhaps it was unfair to read the two Lethem books before it but this reads like New York as imagined by a leaden-prosed tourist who's been there for a week, two days of which were spent staring at the odd characters milling about in the lobby of the Chelsea, the rest spent attempting to shed excess similes from baggage. I can't understand why the American critics embraced it so -- perhaps the exotic allure of cricket?

The Patrick's Being Indulgent Now Award For Albums He Didn't Put In His Top Ten

These are albums I didn't list in my radio top ten because I didn't play them much, either because I missed them when they first came out (Grouper) or because the kids don't like driving around to 20 minutes of loops and drone (The Fun Years). Or because I forgot. Or because they came out after I made my list. Or because they didn't actually come out this year but I didn't hear them until this year. Or because I want to list them here. Okay?

1. Grouper - Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill
2. Matthew Herbert Big Band - There's Me and There's You
3. Kieren Hebden and Steve Reid - NYC
4. Hauschka - Ferndorf
5. Jacaszek - Treny
6. Fennesz - The Black Sea
7. The Fun Years - Baby It's Cold Inside
8. Deer Tick - War Elephant
9. Wildbirds & Peacedrums - Heartcore
10. School of Seven Bells - Alpinisms
11. Jeffrey Lewis - 12 Crass Songs
12. Billy Harper - Black Saint

So there you go. No more lists until next year, I promise. Well done to all of you, except for you Baz Luhrmann... we need to have a little talk.