Films of 2010

(bearing in mind I haven't seen A Prophet or Toy Story 3)

Hello,

In case you might be interested (although I don't see why you would be), here are my top 10 films of 2010.

10. Catfish.
Entertaining and sad documentary about one man's journey into Facebook's heart of darkness. No less riveting for its dubious authenticity.

9. The Bad Lieutenant
Scorsese meets David Lynch: Nicolas Cage is let off the leash with great effect in Werner Herzog's drug-soaked drama about a desperate, hopelessly medicated cop.

8. Four Lions
Surprisingly lightweight but extremely funny Ealing-style comedy from Chris Morris about a gang of would-be suicide bombers.

7. The Other Guys
I loved this genre-destroying comedy starring Will Ferrell and Marky Mark Wahlberg as a pair of mismatched police detectives trying to make a name for themselves as heroic crimefighters. Very, very stupid but with an impressively high gag hit-rate.

6. Kick Ass
One of the few superhero movies I've enjoyed, and one that manages to be affectionately subvert its genre. Incredibly violent, totally childish and gleefully irresponsible, in a good way.

5. Up In The Air
The film that gave George Clooney a chance to toy with the dark side of his screen persona, playing essentially a lonely loser. A mostly heart-warming and slick comedy with a surprisingly sad conclusion.

4. Inception
A rare example of an intelligent, complex blockbuster, which also packs an emotional punch. In a tradition continued from The Matrix, the special effects are all the more impressive thanks to their being intrinsic to the film's slightly tortured logic.

3. Let Me In
Surprisingly good Hollywood remake of the Swedish vampire horror Let The Right One In. The superb performances by the two young leads make this a moving experience, allied to some truly scary sequences, including possibly the most terrifying car crash I've ever seen on screen. I actually preferred this to the austere original.

2. Greenberg
Ben Stiller gets to flex his acting muscles in this downbeat existential comedy about a New York musician house-sitting for his brother in LA as he recovers from a breakdown. An amazingly natural supporting performance from Greta Gerwig as the girl who attempts to pull him out of his shell made this a really special film, along with some hilariously awkward moments. And it also had the best abortion gag of the year.

*drumroll

1. The Social Network
A perfect marriage of writer and material: Aaron Sorkin produced the smartest script of the year, consisting largely of brilliantly funny sarcasm and pithy putdowns. Who'd have thought a story about bickering computer nerds could be so compelling and moving? The acting is faultless, particularly from Jesse Eisenberg, who looks like he's sucking a lemon throughout, and Andrew Garfield as his jilted business partner. Manages to tell a cracking story and say something profound about the nature of our relationship with social networking and the internet.

Stinker of the year: Cemetery Junction
Soppy and uninspired coming of age movie whose script seems to have been cut and pasted from a dozen better ones. Slight and almost entirely unfunny. It's hard to believe that this came from the same minds as The Office.

Honourable mention: Crazy Heart
Pretty much a country music version of The Wrestler, with a devastating central performance by Jeff Bridges that was about ten times better than the film itself.

That's it! Feel free to post your disagreements and general virtiol...

Stop

The following things must be stopped:

- Romantic comedies that end with a dash across a busy city to reach someone before they get on a plane.

- Those Halifax adverts where ‘employees’ are all ‘working’ in a ‘radio station’.

- Bawdy pelvic thrusting/using a bottle as a substitute penis in Shakespeare productions, just so we know they’re doing a rude pun.

- People using the word ‘besides’ in films and TV, e.g. ‘We’ll never make it to the airport in time. Besides, it’s rush hour.’ When did anyone ever say this in real life?

- Similarly, people in TV and films saying ‘Ah’ when someone enters an office, e.g. ‘Ah, Mr Barker, do take a seat.’

- Films that end with a crane shot moving up into the sky, usually away from a moving car.

- That weird, scary robot voice doing the announcements at Kings Cross underground station.

- Footballers (especially England players) using the phrase ‘we’ll be the first to hold our hands up’ when contemplating losing. As if there was someone else who should take the blame…

- People doing ironic heavy metal devil horns with their hands at gigs.

- People who say 'less' when they mean 'fewer'.

- People who say 'done' when they mean 'did', e.g. 'He done well'.

- People who say 'there's' when they mean 'there are', e.g. 'There's no more Kit Kats'.

- People who don't know how to use apostrophes. It's really not complicated.

- The following phrases in films: ‘I think you’d better come take a look at this…’; ‘We’ve got company’; ‘Lock and load’; ‘It’s payback time’.

- Comedy panel shows that can’t be bothered to find a proper host, so they use a different lame celebrity every week.

- The use of the Rudyard Kipling poem ‘If’ on TV, especially before a sporting event.

- Text on computers in films that always makes a bleepy sound as it appears across the screen. Again, when did this ever happen in real life?

- People calling me ‘buddy’, ‘fella’ or ‘babes’.

- Top Gear.

- Janet Street Porter.

That is all.

Music

Q: How many muso-hipsters does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: It’s a pretty obscure number, you probably haven’t heard of it.

Recently I’ve been suffering from pop-anxiety. I realised that the contents of my iPod, although indicating my excellent and eclectic musical taste, includes very little new music. How can I consider myself a well-rounded cultural consumer if I don’t listen to the latest bands? I’m old, but I’m not that old, and I’m not quite ready to settle into a diet of Abba, The Eagles, and music that might be used in an episode of Top Gear. Surely I’m a little bit cooler than that…

Pop music has long been an arbiter of cool, more than any other art-form. To varying degrees, it affects the way we dress, the things we say, the way we style our hair, our politics, and the general attitude with which we deal with the world. If you listen to James Blunt, you’re not cool. If you listen to the latest garage-punk-breakbeat-nufolk-metal band (a growing subgenre – there was an article in the Guardian Guide about it), you are.

Listening to music is a complex business these days. Because most modern pop music is a mish-mash of stuff that’s gone before, identifying trends has become nigh on impossible. Genres have multiplied, mutated, and melted into one another. And there’s a whole raft of new criteria to consider: Is it too derivative? If so, is it derivative in a good way? Is that 80s handclap effect used because they genuinely think it’s good, or are they being ironic? Are they trying to sound like Paul Simon circa Graceland, or have they just not heard the album? It’s clearly crap, but is it intentionally crap?

This last question is the one that troubles me the most. I often listen to BBC 6Music, which despite being easily the best radio station available, is to close next year so the BBC can make a few more episodes of Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps. 6Music is like a vast buffet table where you can sample not only the latest sounds, but pickings from the entire history of pop music. I like the fact that the playlist is so varied, so weird and so eclectic that for every piece of music I love, there is one that just leaves me baffled.

There’s a thin line between ridiculousness and genius (as any Dylan or Bowie fan will tell you), and it’s difficult to say whether the latest album of beeps and clicks by a pair of Scandinavian anorexics is selling because it’s actually good, or because they happened to have a particularly good publicist who is telling everyone that this is the next big thing. But it begs the question: do people listen to it because they like it, or because it’s cool? And how are we supposed to tell the difference?

People are possessive about music, and there is a large breed of music geek who only like music that nobody else likes – and as soon as it becomes popular it also becomes passé. True, there is a particular pleasure in discovering an artist and sharing it with your friends, but refusing to like something solely because it’s popular is the stuff of psychosis. That’s where genuine enthusiasm about music fades, and the desire to be cool takes over.

Anyway, for the record (pun emphatically intended), the new albums I bought on my new music splurge are Contra by Vampire Weekend (brills), Sigh No More by Mumford and Sons (also brills), The xx by The xx (jury’s out – beeps and clicks territory, although I think it might be a grower) and The Courage of Others by Midlake (slightly less good version of Fleet Foxes). I realise that some of these albums aren’t particularly new, but hey, I’m just not that cool.

Haircut

I’ve just had a haircut.

I once had an idea. I was going to open a silent hairdressers – just an ordinary, common or garden unisex barbershop with one difference. No talking allowed. No greeting, no chitchat, no explaining how you wanted your hair. Absolute silence.

You would enter the shop and be handed a large book with laminated pages showing models with every hairstyle imaginable, (starting with timeless classics like the short back and sides, moving on to whatever the current E4 presenters were sporting, followed by daring and vintage styles) and you simply point to whichever cut you’re after. The hairdresser nods, and indicates a chair that you sit in. He or she cuts your hair. In silence. You pay. You leave.

To me, this would make the whole experience of getting my hair cut infinitely more bearable. It’s not just that I don’t like small talk. In fact, I don’t mind small talk. I often enjoy a bit of banter with the nice man in the newsagents, or the person preparing my baked potato in the café. And in my current job in a theatre bar, it always makes things more interesting when the punters have a bit of a friendly chat. But in the barber’s you are literally trapped. It's like being in a benign hostage situation: you are totally at the mercy of the person cutting your hair. And the choice is simple (not that the choice is yours): awkward chitchat that will have to be extended way beyond its natural course, or an even more awkward silence where you begin to wonder why they’re not talking to you. Do I give off unfriendly vibes? Do I look uncool? Boring? Tory?

There’s also the mirror problem, which is two-fold. Firstly, call me old-fashioned, but if I’m looking at someone in a mirror, I don’t feel like I’m actually looking at them. I’m looking at their reflection, their double, their ghost. I have to resist the urge to turn round and look them properly and get a scissor-blade in the eye. It’s in the same way that I can’t have a conversation with a taxi driver’s eyes in a rear-view mirror – it just doesn’t feel right. You might as well have a conversation with someone's shadow.

The second facet of the mirror problem is that you have to spend an extended amount of time looking at your own reflection. I avoid this studiously in everyday life, because I’m invariably disappointed about how I look. That’s not self-deprecation; I think most people have a skewed self-image and are hyper-critical about their appearance. So watching my doughy face engage in entirely forced and laboured social interaction (the furrowed brow of feigned interest, the horrible fake laughter) is not my idea of a good time.

Next on my list of barber-related neurosis is that I just don’t speak the language. I often get asked if I want the back of my hair ‘tapered or natural’, and I still don’t know the difference between the two (I usually plump for natural, because it sounds less dramatic). I find it disquieting that the hair-attendants frequently ask if what they are doing with your barnet is to your liking. I really have no answer to that. And on the few occasions that I have raised objections, asking for a bit more off the top or a bit shorter at the back or sides, my request has been met with a confused expression, as if I’ve just asked them to shave a swastika into my pubic hair. Either they counter with a load of incomprehensible barber-jargon, to which I crumble and reply ‘Ah yes, I see what you mean, just carry on the way you’re doing it’, or they action my request with a look that says, ‘OK, if you want to walk round for the next six weeks looking like a total twatbag then it makes no odds to me’. 

And at least once during each haircut I have that moment of panic when I see the half-completed state of the haircut and become convinced I’m going to leave the shop looking like Forrest Gump’s less attractive brother.

So you begin to see why the prospect of a visit to the hairdresser doesn’t fill me with joy. In fact I dread it, and I will usually put it off until I’m mulletted beyond endurance.

Today it wasn't too bad. Topics of discussion: Liverpool, Liz Taylor, roadworks and Gok Wan. He was friendly, asked me no awkward hair questions, but best of all, he was very quick. I tipped generously.

Impotence

On Monday night, I was waiting for a Number 88 bus at Vauxhall station. I waited for half an hour. In the grand scheme of things, it’s not really a huge amount of much time. It’s about the amount of time it takes to listen to Never Mind The Bollocks by The Sex Pistols. It’s the amount of time it takes to watch an episode of Keeping Up Appearances. But to me, pacing and tutting and cursing in the South London night, it was an eternity. The Number 88 is supposed to come every 8-10 minutes, and I was growing more and more angry.

Maybe it was because it was late at night and I was a bit tired. But when the bus eventually rounded the corner and pulled up, I was incandescent with rage. I was a victim of the highest order. I was the most wronged person since Steve Biko. The doors opened with such an arrogant swish, as if everything was absolutely fine. I climbed aboard and before I bleeped my Oyster card (essential to do this before paying for ultimate effect) I addressed the driver through the little holes in the plexi-glass. ‘I’ve been waiting for half an hour,' I said.

My tone of voice was stern, but controlled. I was containing my rage in a flimsy bag of reasonableness, straining at the seams. I was communicating the fact that I’m certainly not the type of person who would normally complain, oh no, only when my patience is STRETCHED TO THE LIMIT.

The thing that happened next sent me to the next level of self-righteous rage. I thought my anger had already reached its peak, but no – like Spinal Tap’s amplifiers, it seems I go all the way to 11. The driver’s response was so incredible, so unexpected, so unjustified. This is what he did:

Nothing.

And when I say nothing, I mean nothing. He didn’t apologise, he didn’t argue, he didn’t glare, he didn’t sigh, he didn’t even look at me. He didn’t show any sign that he had registered the fact that someone was speaking to him. It wasn’t just that he couldn’t be bothered to deal with an awkward customer, or that he was anxious to get going in order to catch up to his timetable. There’s no way he didn’t hear me. Frankly, my dear, he just didn’t give a damn.

So when I stomped up to the top deck, sitting at the front (always), I was already mentally composing my complaint to Transport For London. Not only did I have to wait an INORDINATE amount of time for my bus (I would use these capitals in the letter), when I attempted to register a complaint with the driver, he didn’t even ACKNOWLEDGE MY EXISTENCE. Are your drivers ROBOTS? Have you begun employing ANDROIDS? Is it now a prerequisite that one is LOBOTOMISED before being allowed to sit behind the wheel of a London bus? For the love of Christ, please tell me, whatever happened to CUSTOMER SERVICE?

Good.

Then. 

I imagined my letter being opened in the TFL complaints department (for I would send a letter, not an email, just to show that I was serious enough to pay for postage). It would probably be opened and read by a work experience kid, or at best an intern. Someone who probably cares even less than that driver. I saw the work experience boy (in my imagination he was male, fifteen years old, pale and spotty) opening my letter, scanning for the gist, seeing the furious capitals, and only getting halfway down the page before consigning my letter to the tray marked ‘nutters’.

And he’d be right. And the driver was also right to pay me absolutely no heed. And of course, I realised all this within about two minutes of sitting on the top deck of the Number 88 bus.

Impotent rage is a curious thing – because there is no visible target, it feeds upon itself. The injustice grows and grows until it forms an amorphous, organic blob of fury that ferments and fills your head, until it is finally punctured by reason. The air escapes and you wonder what the hell you were so angry about.

Public transport seems to be a common cause of this kind of rage. Of course it can be unreliable and expensive, and it’s possible that it’s generally poorly run. But the amount of energy we expend in being angry about it must be checked, or that blob of fury inside your head could be a permanent fixture, and before you know it you’re Richard Littlejohn.

Needless to say, I didn’t write the letter of complaint on this occasion, and the fact that I had to wait half an hour in Vauxhall bus station late at night has had absolutely no impact on my life. Just like my complaint had absolutely no impact on that driver. Ah, the sweet sensation of perspective.

Weight

Like most people, I think I have a fairly normal and sane attitude to issues of body-size when it comes to other people – but a pretty horribly skewed one when it comes to myself.

I lost about two stone last year due to a bout of depression (I’m fine now by the way, thanks for asking), and the reaction from people who didn’t know about the illness and only saw the weight loss was mixed – some thought I looked good, others were concerned. But most who remarked upon it were neither positive nor negative. Recently, however, I’veinevitably started to put the weight back on, and I can’t help feeling rubbish about it. Why?

If I see an overweight person on the street, or if I see a friend after a while who happens to have put on a few pounds since I last saw them, my reaction is an astoundingly mundane ‘oh’. I make no judgement, and barely even notice. In short, it matters not a jot.

There are all sorts of physical variables from human to human, and all sorts of indicators of health and well-being. So why do I and many other perfectly sane people reach for the panic button when an excess of chip consumption in our lives has inevitably sent the dial on the scales in an upward trajectory? Is it simply nature’s way of getting us to care about our health? Or an attitude thrust upon us by an evil, manipulative media who wants us all to be on an unachievable quest to be thin, cool and good-looking?

I have a problem with this latter theory. True, we are constantly bombarded in magazines and on television with images of perfect looking people, airbrushed to within an inch of their lives, looking like they haven’t had a decent meal inside of them for months. Media aimed at women seems to be particularly, though not exclusively, guilty of this kind of image-projection.

But in these times of media-literacy in which much material is filtered through several layers of irony in order to appeal to a naturally sceptical consumer, can pictures of rich, successful, good-looking thin people really be blamed for our obsession with weight? In my experience, most people have a much more intelligent, less polarised view than thin = good, fat = bad. I don’t read Heat magazine (God forbid), but from glancing at its various horrible covers scrutinising the physical faults of celebrities, there seems to be as many gaudily coloured arrows pointing at overly-thin stars than those with an excess of body fat (Heat readers, please correct me if I’m wrong about this).

So why do most people want to be thin? Is it due to the potential behaviour of a few barely worth mentioning idiots who might shout at an obese person in the street? I dread to think what prejudice bigger people have to deal with, both implicit and explicit, on a daily basis. But I'm more referring to the tailspin of despair prompted by the putting on of a few pounds.

I think we're afraid of judgement. Which is ridiculous since, as I said above, people who are worth bothering about would never make a judgement about someone based on how many pies they've eaten recently.

I could also attribute it to the fact that I'm an actor and that I'm worried I won't get work if I'm not 'lithe' and 'toned' – oh yes, because only thin actors get work. Timothy Spall, James Corden, Philip Seymour Hoffman – haven't seen them down the job centre recently. Even Hollywood stars such as Leonardo DiCaprio and are carrying a few more pounds around these days, and nobody seems to care.

(By the way, I understand totally that the above paragraph probably rings entirely false for women in the entertainment business – but I won't presume to try and address that here.)

So in conclusion, I really don't know why this issue takes up such a massively disproportionate amount of our head space. In the words of Matthew Wright, I'd love to hear your thoughts...

(I don't have an attractive secretary trapped in a glass box though.)

Hello

I have thoughts. I'm sure you do too. Sometimes I think about stuff, other times I think about things.

Sometimes I think it would be nice to write down some of my thoughts for other people to read. Other times I think that's a ludicrous idea. In the spirit of the first sentence of this paragraph, I've decided to write a blog. I'm doing it now. I can tell because my fingers on the keyboard are making a tappy sound and words are appearing on the screen.

I thought about writing a blog on a specific subject, but I don't think I have any detailed knowledge about anything in particular. Except my life. And even that's a bit sketchy. If I went on Mastermind, and my life was my specialist subject, I'd probably get about nine or ten, tops. Probably not enough to set me up for a surge to victory in the general knowledge round. I can see John Humphrys' patronising little smile as he dismisses me from the big black chair, 'and in that round, Matthew Barker, on The Life and Times of Matthew Barker, you scored... six points.'

So that's it really. Thoughts to follow.