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Original title: Leningrad
Russia/UK: Aleksandr Buravsky, 2009; IMDB

USA: Drew Barrymore, 2009; IMDB

Despite its unashamedly derivative nature and a largely pointless romantic subplot, I really enjoyed WHIP IT, Drew Barrymore's directorial debut. With Ellen Page in the lead role and Fox Searchlight as the studio behind it, it's tempting to compare it against JUNO, which is not entirely unreasonable: it has a similar (albeit less abrasive) tone and is essentially yet another "coming of age" tale of teenage angst, albeit with pregnancy replaced by roller derby.

Now, I don't know the first thing about the rules of roller derby and the film doesn't exactly go to great lengths to explain them, but in the end it doesn't really matter and I suspect that's because, as much as the derby scenes take up a major portion of the film's running time, both the humour and the pathos are situated at a far more personal level. I must admit I'm not entirely sold on Ellen Page - not to say she isn't a talented actress, just that she has certain quirks in every performance of hers that I've seen which for some reason grate with me - but she's a lot more likeable here than when playing Juno MacGuff, simply because the character, Bliss, is far less deliberately obnoxious. Great performances by Daniel Stern (whom I actually hadn't seen in anything since the HOME ALONE movies - man, he's aged) and Marcia Gay Harden as Bliss' parents, not to mention Kristen Wiig, Juliette Lewis, Zoë Bell et al as the skaters, and some really nice photography courtesy of Robert Yeoman, one of those "workman" cinematographers whose name shows up in the credits for everything from crummy Jim Carrey comedies to Wes Anderson's films. I'd be surprised if WHIP IT sets anyone's world on fire, but I really enjoyed it and would certainly recommend giving it a look. (I actually thought it was slightly better than JUNO, but don't tell anyone.) 8/10

France: Pierre Morel, 2010; IMDB

USA: Martin Scorsese, 2010; IMDB

USA: Chris Columbus, 1990; IMDB

Original title: Micmacs à tire-larigot
France: Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2009; IMDB

USA: Frank Darabont, 2007; IMDB

Canada: David Cronenberg, 1983; IMDB

David Cronenberg is a director whose work I have to be in the right frame of mind to enjoy. I find his films to be very cold and misanthropic, and while I sometimes suspect that Sturgeon's Law applies as much to human beings as to anything else, I suspect my outlook on life is generally more optimistic than that of old Croney.

I liked VIDEODROME a great deal the first time I saw it, several years ago, and rewatching it the other night I found myself still admiring its obvious strengths, despite being a little less taken by it as a whole than I previously was. It's typical of early-to-mid-period Cronenberg, turning on a dime between gross-out horror and biting social commentary. (Although I've described the evolution of Cronenberg's style in recent years as "mainstreamification", it's fair to say that his old body horror obsessions haven't left him - they've simply been submerged beneath a more "accessible" surface.) The world he depicts is as grim, cold and unfeeling as anything else in his filmography, and the protagonist, Max Renn, is a character for whom it's difficult to like, dislike or feel any real sympathy for. I often feel that the characters in Cronenberg's films are not really intended to be seen as people at all but rather collections of flesh and bone destined to be graphically disembowelled or transformed. In a sense, they feel like films told from the point of view of a dispassionate observer - a scientist, which of course is precisely what Cronenberg started out as.

I remember reading somewhere that Cronenberg was still writing the script while the film was shot, and I suspect that may have something to do with the film's somewhat disjointed feel and uneven pace. At times I feel it lacks cohesion, even when taking into account the fact that its protagonist spends a great deal of time hallucinating. I'm not convinced it really conveys the feeling of being in a waking nightmare (at least not in the way that films such as MULHOLLAND DRIVE and INFERNO do), and I have a feeling that this is at least partly due to Cronenberg's cold, detached approach conflicting with a desire to convey an experience as deeply personal as hallucination.

Still, although it probably sounds like I'm coming down pretty heavily on it, I like VIDEODROME. It's a style of filmmaking (more overt body horror) that I'd love to see Cronenberg get back to one day. I really liked the unusually humanist (for Cronenberg) EASTERN PROMISES (I was less taken by A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE and my reaction to SPIDER was downright lukewarm), but I think there's something to be found in films like VIDEODROME, THE FLY and DEAD RINGERS that Cronenberg does better than anyone else, and the horror genre is a poorer place without his input. Love live the new flesh!

USA: Chris Sanders, Dean DeBlois, 2010; IMDB

HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON is the best DreamWorks animated feature I've seen to date... which would put it a notch or two below the worst of Pixar's output. In my opinion, whereas even Pixar's lesser movies have something reasonably substantial going on beneath the surface, most of DreamWorks' films feel like they started life as one-note jokes... for example BEE MOVIE, for which I'm still convinced a bunch of balding executives dreamt up the title at a board meeting, feel about slapping their thighs and laughing themselves silly, and then passed it off to their underlings to cobble together a film. I've made no secret of my disdain for most of the studio's output, but a couple of years back I was pleasantly surprised by KUNG FU PANDA, which was a pleasant enough way to pass an hour and a half, and this year, DRAGON has upped the stakes again with what is by far DreamWorks' most substantial animated effort to date.

A lot of the credit for this, I suspect, goes to Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois, writers and directors of LILO AND STITCH (by far the best Disney film in the last fifteen years), who were brought on to the project fairly late in production, replacing the original writers and directors. A lot of the problems I tend to associate with DreamWorks are still present: the human character designs are ugly, the attempts at being "edgy" (a Katzenbergian mainstay) tend to fall flat, the voices are completely forgettable, and at its heart the story conforms to generic "boy wants to please father" animated feature template with all the expected clichés. So it's clearly no LILO AND STITCH. It's fun, though, moving along at a brisk clip and not getting bogged down in the nudge-nudge wink-wink pop culture references that so often mar CG animated features. The dragon toothless, the most obviously Sanders-like element of the film, is a decent Stitch stand-in, and the growing bond between him and Generic Teenage Boy Protagonist #34 is nicely realised.

This year, when compared against TOY STORY 3, HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON has no chance. In the UK the stakes are particularly high as DRAGON finds itself competing not just against Pixar's juggernaut for the crown of best animated feature of 2010, but also PONYO, THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG, THE ILLUSIONIST and THE SECRET OF KELLS. I've yet to see THE ILLUSIONIST so I can't comment on it, but I'd rank DRAGON a little above KELLS and below PONYO and FROG. Still, I do get the impression that DreamWorks' output has been steadily improving in recent years, so who knows where whatever they release next year will end up on my "top films of 2010" list?

USA/France: Paul Verhoeven, 1995; IMDB

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