Anne Billson on Film 2010

By Anne Billson

For three years, Anne Billson wrote a film column for the Guardian newspaper which became obligatory reading for anyone interested in the world of cinema. She combines in-depth knowledge of her field with an eminently readable and unpretentious style and makes sometimes surprising and controversial observations with wit and elegance. Quite simply, she's a must-read for anyone who likes movies.

Billson, born in the UK, is a well-known film writer with thirty years experience (including eight years as film critic for the Sunday Telegraph) and half a dozen books about film and three horror novels to her name. After reading her vampire novel Suckers, Salman Rushdie called her, "a superb satirist"; Jonathan Carroll described it as, "a rare and impressive piece of literary juggling" while Christopher Fowler called it, "dark, sharp, chic and very funny." Nicholas Lezard of the Guardian wrote of Spoilers, another collection of Billson's film writing, "she's on the ball, and funny with it." Ian Freer in Empire magazine called her monograph on the Swedish vampire movie Let the Right One In, "a fun, stimulating exploration of a modern masterpiece."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anne Billson
• Release date: Jan 28, 2012
• ISBN: 9781465993953

Anne Billson

Anne Billson is a film critic, novelist, photographer, screenwriter, film festival programmer, style icon, wicked spinster, evil feminist, and international cat-sitter. She has lived in London, Cambridge, Tokyo, Paris and Croydon, and now lives in Antwerp. She likes frites, beer and chocolate.Her books include horror novels Suckers, Stiff Lips, The Ex, The Coming Thing and The Half Man; Blood Pearl, Volume 1 of The Camillography; monographs on the films The Thing and Let the Right One In; Breast Man: A Conversation with Russ Meyer; Billson Film Database, a collection of more than 4000 film reviews; and Cats on Film, the definitive work of feline film scholarship.In 1993 she was named by Granta as one of their Best Young British Novelists. In 2012 she wrote a segment for the portmanteau play The Halloween Sessions, performed in London's West End. In 2015 she was named by the British Film Institute as one of 25 Female Film Critics Worth Celebrating.

Book preview

Anne Billson on Film 2010

collected columns from the Guardian, 2010

Copyright 2012 Anne Billson

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Foreword

This is my second collection of film columns written for the Guardian's Film & Music section. The first collection was of columns first published in 2009; all the columns in the following selection were originally published in 2010. I am hoping it won't occur to you that, instead of coughing up $0.99, you could have gone straight to the Guardian's website to read them all there, but just in case it does, I've been trying to think of all the reasons why you shouldn't mind paying those 99 cents.

Firstly, by buying this ebook it means I have already done all the hunting and gathering for you, and am presenting the raw, bloodied pelts to you here without the distraction of adverts, creative subediting or cuts made necessary by increased advertising or reduced space.

But as a sweetener, I have added to the end of this collection an article about the Alien films, published in British GQ to tie in with the release of Alien 3 in 1992 and not, as far as I know, available anywhere online (unless, of course, somebody has pirated it without my knowledge). It's an overview of the franchise up to that point, rather than a critique, but it does contain a couple of original comments by Sigourney Weaver, to whom I talked on the telephone.

I'm afraid I've had to remove all the accents from the following texts, as I'm told unusual key combinations can play havoc with e-publishing. So apologies to Alejandro, Erzsebert and the Paris Peripherique.

In any case, whatever you think of the finished results, I'd like to thank you for buying and reading. Please feel free to tell me what you think (preferably in a civilised manner) via Twitter or on one of my blogs, links to which you can find at the end of this collection.

Anne Billson, 2012

Chapter 1: Nerdy Girls

Sandra Bullock has starred in some turkeys in her time, but lately she has been getting some of the worst reviews of her career for All About Steve, in which she plays a dysfunctional cruciverbalist who becomes obsessed with a TV news cameraman. Seriously annoying, wrote Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. Unwatchable, unbearably unfunny, said Peter Travers in Rolling Stone. Grimly unfunny, was Manohla Dargis' verdict in the New York Times. All the reviewers like Bullock; you know they do, because they're always saying so. But they hate All About Steve.

I have yet to read a review which acknowledges that the film, for all its faults, is unique among mainstream rom-coms in concluding that geeky girls don't need boyfriends. This, for me, is a radical proposition and one that merits attention. So what if Bullock's character is annoying, with stalkerish tendencies and a sort of social Asperger's which makes her babble and wear inappropriate clothing? In the movies, it seems, women can be geeky only if they're also adorable, perhaps with mildly eccentric fashion sense, nothing that can't be corrected with make-up, a personal shopper and the solid affection of a studly male. They're not supposed to lurch around in shiny red boots, being loud and embarrassing.

Bullock has played geeks before, though in While You Were Sleeping she was self-effacing and sweet. In The Net she was a computer nerd. Miss Conviviality and its sequel were dismissed as fluff, yet they peddled the message, still pretty unusual for Hollywood, that a) women don't necessarily need men to rescue them and b) they usually look better before rather than after their Barbie Doll makeovers. So, in her own way, she's been doing her bit for the sisterhood for years now, even if the films weren't slapped with a feminist label. If she's prepared to push her geekiness to uncomfortable extremes, as she does in All About Steve, I think she deserves a pat on the back instead of all this grumbling that she's not playing her usual charming self.

Because while nerdy guys like Seth Rogen and Shia LaBeouf are all over the place these days, their female counterparts are still barely to be glimpsed. In every genre other than the shopping-and-weddings rom-com, women are little more than decoration, trophies or spoilsports whose function is to remind the guys it's time they faced up to adult responsibility instead of smoking pot/watching Star Wars/putting their albums into alphabetical order. So shouldn't we be treasuring those rare female characters who don't conform to these stereotypes? Even the annoying ones?

Bullock recently became the first female star to single-handedly power a film past the $200 million mark at the US box-office - not All About Steve, alas, but the dismal inspirational true-life sporting yarn The Blind Side. She and a handful of other actresses, such as Drew Barrymore (who recently made her directing debut with the adorable roller-derby girl-fest Whip It!) wield a certain amount of clout through their own production companies, and are constantly being exhorted to make not so much movies as some sort of Enriching Female Experience, that sliver of legendary cinematic gold which will somehow bridge the gap between the populist Mamma Mia! and artier, more rarified fare such as Frozen River or Bright Star - a miraculous all-purpose artefact which women can enjoy but which will also provide nourishment for their souls.

Well, bollocks to that. Male directors don't come under this kind of pressure - they make the sort of films they want to make, or that the studios want them to make, and they don't get berated for letting their entire gender down if they make mistakes. They're not being urged to make Enriching Male Cinematic Experiences all the time. Occasionally they do, more often they don't, but the films that enrich your soul are not necessarily the ones that deliberately set out to do so.

Nor am I looking forward to this mythical Enriching Female Cinematic Experience, which looms dreadfully in my consciousness like a sort of Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants as reimagined by Sally Potter. I'm all for more leading roles for women, but the only thing we should exhort female film-makers to do is make more films.

Chapter 2: Verse Case Scenario

Invictus, Clint Eastwood's new film, is named after a poem by William Ernest Henley, who wrote it in 1875 to jiff up his spirits after his leg was amputated. Nelson Mandela (played by Morgan Freeman) quotes the lines, I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul as a source of uplift and inspiration, and it's just a shame for everyone concerned that the very same poem was chosen as a pre-execution statement by Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber.

Henley's not the only Victorian poet whose work has provided memorable but, to the uninitiated, slightly baffling titles. Even if you've never heard of Ernest Dowson, you'll be familiar with at least two of the phrases from his work: Gone with the Wind and Days of Wine and Roses. Dipping even further back into literary history, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is borrowed from Alexander Pope's poem about Eloise wishing she could forget Abelard. The enduring popularity of Rudyard Kipling's If-, voted Britain's Favourite Poem in a 1995 BBC opinion poll, must be at least partly due to its having been adopted, with the dash replaced by an ellipsis, as a title for Lindsay Anderson's subversive school fantasy, though one imagines Anderson was being ironic; he reportedly loathed the poem and all it stood for.

I'm wary of poetry in the cinema, the