The Decade in Review: Crime, Crimefighters, Crime, and More Crimefighters

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The Bourne Effect

The spy for the 21st century was not James Bond, but Jason Bourne. The grittiness, global perspective, and moral quandaries of the Bourne triology (The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy, and The Bourne Ultimatum) instantly rendered James Bond moot. In following with the general post-9/11 trends, the Bourne films did not present the now-outdated black and white world of evil master criminals with the unquestioning moral righteousness of the government agents, but rather a corruption-from-within trope that proved much more relevant. A refashioned reboot, starring new 007, Daniel Craig, went back to the beginning with Casino Royale, and was a direct response to the success of the Bourne films.

Post-Tarantino to the CSI Effect

Although the “Post-Tarantino” age definitely began in the late nineties, the first decade of the millennium saw the further proliferation of Quentin Tarantino’s hallmarks – multiple characters with intersecting storylines, the beauty of violence, the injection of irreverent pop-culture referencing humour – to the point where they are now a standard. Arguably Guy Ritchie’s most popular film this side of the Atlantic, Snatch, struck a particular chord, filtering a Tarantino flash through a British sensibility. The “Age of Jason Statham” left in the wake only further branched out from here: The Transporter (and its sequels), Crank, Death Race, and so on.

This decade also saw Martin Scorsese win his first Oscar for The Departed, a remake of the Japanese film Infernal Affairs, which only came out four years previous in 2002. With Scorsese a common benchmark for crime films in Hollywood, The Departed, with a few traditional trappings of a gangster film, namely in its character archetypes, remains Scorsese’s most untraditional gangster film, with its unpredictable plot and Boston setting.

In the last ten years, we saw differing approaches to the deconstruction of crime, from the study of the criminal, such as the true-story Monster, to the crime-as-satire, such as American Psycho. On television, crime was perhaps most literally deconstructed (albeit within the confines of the strict formula of the crime procedural) in the runaway success of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (following-up an acronym with the acronym spelled out has always seemed rather redundant) and its many copycats. The graphic nature of the show, its grittiness, and lack of many “private life” storylines helped set the dark, green-filtered tone of the 2000s. Although on the wane, the genre is becoming more self-reflexive, especially with shows like Dexter turning the tables on the police versus killer dynamic (as the killer is one of the cops, natch) – a further re-evaluation of the Us versus Them value judgments in the post-9/11 era.

The remakes of Ocean’s Eleven – with their fairly PG nostalgic appeal of a happy-go-lucky criminal is definitely antithetical to the otherwise gritty realism of the decade’s crime films. This anomalous feel-good heist comedy (not to mention its even more outlandish sequels) stands apart from the rest of the decade in the same way Star Trek does, implying that remakes and reboots should follow one of two approaches: a) darker, moodier and grittier, or b) fun and frolicking with a sense of irony – but way, way, way cooler than the original.

Re: The Franchise, Retread / Remake / Reboot

Where to start on franchises, retreads, remakes and reboots? Any attempt to fully exorcise the extent of recycled material that appeared this decade would be the metaphorical equivalent of summarizing Shakespeare’s entire canon in “the play’s the thing.” In a fit of futility, I’ll be brief. Superheroes movies existed before this decade, as did sequels and franchises – but their complete and utter cultural saturation has taken itself to the extreme, where sequels and franchise spin-offs are expected, rather than a treat for the lucky audience. Too many bad remakes or sequels, such as Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull or X-Men Origins: Wolverine, seem to have left a poor taste in many mouths, yet studios still think in terms of franchise opportunities before they even greenlight the first film, as is evident with the immediate announcement of an Iron Man 2, a second Star Trek, and the set-up for at least one more Sherlock Holmes.

In literary adaptations like Harry Potter to almost every superhero film, the pre- and post-9/11/Iraq War transition is most evident. Harry Potter started in 2001 as a fantasy family story of good versus evil, and quickly became a dark, seething exploration of morality and identity. It would be hard to imagine Chris Columbus turning the central theme of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone into Harry’s identification with his shadow self that we see in David Yates’s Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Likewise, we saw the decade’s new explosion of superhero movies go from the campy fun of Sam Raimi’s Spiderman to the dark psychosis of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight – a perfect microsm of the story arch of the Noughties as a whole.

The Decade in Review: True Stories and Those Based on Them

Previous: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

The Biopic as Classic Narrative

The biopic has always been a Hollywood staple, and has traditionally been treated as a sweeping epic: one whole life’s story. Over the years, what was once a glorification, or even blatant excuse for hero-worship, produced warts-and-all critiques. As the last decade began, we were still watching our most beloved icons struggles against the first act of adversity, followed by the second act of inevitable struggles, character faults, and brink of despair, followed by the third act of redemption. It always seemed amazing that every life’s true story – Johnny Cash in Walk the Line, Ray Charles in Ray, Beatrix Potter in Miss Potter, Muhammed Ali in Ali, Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose, to name a few – could be tailored to a cookie-cutter formula. Only a few managed to break the mould, but they had to be almost subversive to do so, from the “po-mo” brilliance of the Bob Dylan-inspired I’m Not There (you can’t really call it a biopic), to Julien Temple’s fantastic documentary, Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten.

As the decade progressed from the cradle to the grave narratives of films such as The Aviator (Howard Hughes), the term “biopic” no longer seems relevant. It’s now memoirs rather than biographies. Films from the last few years, like The Queen, W., Becoming Jane, and Milk, or even this year’s Invictus, Bright Star and Julie and Julia, have focused on specific points in the subject’s life rather than the subject’s themselves. The attention now is on the issues related to that person, rather than the portrayal. For instance, does Joaquin Phoenix’s amazing portrayal of Johnny Cash redeem an otherwise clichéd and contrived film? It seemed to earlier this decade, but something’s changed. The surprise success of The Blind Side and the untitled Susan Boyle biopic in the works have proved that over a thousand years after its first recorded appearance, the Cinderella story still turns a pretty penny.

The Documentary as Spectacle

Long gone are the days of the carefully measured balanced view; here are the days of “infotainment,” and the closest thing we have to an “authority” on anything is Wikipedia. The focus is not the facts but the feeling, not learning details but getting the big picture or getting a character study, from everything Michael Moore to Supersize Me to The Corporation to Man on Wire to The Fog of War to In Inconvenient Truth. The nature of documentary filmmaking runs parallel to ethnographies: an alien invader attempting to understand and present something concrete when there may not be an objective truth in the first place. The best attempt documentary filmmaking and television can do these days is simply try to make their point in as entertaining a fashion as possible. It’s whoever can scream the loudest wins.

In television, its merits questionable or not, the rise and persistence of reality TV has been a defining characteristic of the Noughties. A strange class of documentaries themselves (albeit engineered by the almighty hand of the producers), reality television shows like Survivor and The Amazing Race, not to mention the endless stream of programmes devoted to the domestic arts, cannot be called anything but a spectacle, whether it being the exciting ‘who will win’ tension of a game show, or the perverse desire to stare at a car wreck.

As the decade has evolved, we’ve stumbled upon a slightly different approach: showcasing the subject in all its beauty; let the images speak for themselves. The documentary Iraq in Fragments avoided an explicit filmmaker’s perspective of ‘this is wrong / this is right’ but rather let us sink into the visual and visceral reality of war-torn Iraq. While the television series Planet Earth presented its subjects in all its high-definition glory. It was qualitative over quantitative. Maybe we didn’t always learn a lot but it was a spectacle.

Next: Crime, Crimefights, Crime, and More Crimefighters

The Decade in Review: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

Previous: The Epic and Science Fiction

Art has always lit the way for the great march forward. Hollywood, purveyor of popular art and entertainment, has always had to tread a careful line between progressive art and conservative entertainment. You need to push enough boundaries to stay relevant but be familiar enough not to alienate your audience. It is not surprising then, that the last decade has seen the careful balance between liberal and conservative. While many traditional story tropes were told in brilliantly new postmodern ways, we saw other conservative (as in traditional) storytelling devices, like the sweeping epic of Brokeback Mountain or the biopic of Milk, being used to tell very forward-thinking stories.

The main area of “social progress” has traditionally been race relations, especially for the American audience. While race relations are no where near ideal, this decade has seen the continuation of a “colour blind” way of seeing race, rather than being respective and tolerant of diversity: progressive, but not too progressive. Is it any wonder that the subpar and clichéd Crash won the best picture, when the deserving Brokeback Mountain did not? Brokeback Mountain entered the Academy Awards race with more award wins for Best Picture and Best Director than both Schindler’s List (1993) and Titanic (1997) combined.

Many films are pushing a thin racial moralizing, like The Blind Side and Invictus, but the subject of same sex coupledom is still controversial. We are starting to see this change, but real-life contradictions like the designation of Harvey Milk Day and the passing of Proposition 8 show how far there is to come. Words and actions aren’t jiving. Same-sex marriage is the social controversy of this decade – the last institutionalized prejudice in the United States – where racial issues are not seen as controversial, even though they still exist. With that in mind, by the end of the decade, however, race issues were still a big part of films. We need to remember that before this decade, there was no black Best Actress, and Denzel Washington became the first black multiple Oscar winner. The complete and total lack of controversy that arose with Guess Who, the Ashton Kutcher and Bernie Mac remake of 1967’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, seems remarkably demonstrative of where we’ve landed. The barrier has been broken, but we’re still crossing the boundary.

The Gender Divide

For most of the decade, women in Hollywood have followed the usual story: in performance, relegated to the roles of the mother, the girlfriend, the femme fatale, the ditzy romcom protagonist, and a whole host of other tired archetypes; in creation, relegated to the roles of art direction and production. Within the last year or two, we seem to be entering a transition period. Some actresses (a small group of amazing standouts) have been garnering attention for their complex and multi-faceted characters. While there is surely a wide talent pool for actress across the globe, there still seems to be a select few – Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett, Kate Winslet – that are consistently given the chance to fully flesh out the slowly increasing number of good female roles appearing in Hollywood.

Only at the end of the decade were we really beginning to fully accept the female auteur director. While small-but-important films (such Jane Campion’s Bright Star, Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, Lone Scherfig’s An Education, Kimberly Peirce’s Stop Loss, and Gurinder Chadha’s Bend it Like Beckham and Bride and Prejudice) have championed the female auteur, 2008 and 2009 were unprecedented for female directors rising to the marketable forefront of filmmaking, from Karyn Kusama of Jennifer’s Body to Catherine Hardwicke of Twilight. Say what you will about Twilight, it was still a better film than its male-directed sequel (Chris Weitz’s New Moon). However, the fact that when a director is female or a film has a good female role is still remarked upon as significant and not taken for granted is symptomatic of the fact that a gender divide still exists.

Next: True Stories and Those Based on Them

The Decade in Review: The Epic and Science Fiction

Previous: The War Conflict Film

Death of the Epic

The arrival of The Lord of the Rings arguably killed the epic. Virtually every traditional fantasy film – pumped out at a consistent rate in an attempt to duplicate The Lord of the Rings success – since has flopped. Think merely of other (mostly children’s) book adaptations, such as Eragon, Beowulf and The Golden Compass. The Chronicles of Narnia are still being churned out, but they lack the pervasiveness into the mainstream subconscious that something like The Lord of the Rings has. The old, familiar worlds of dragons and elves and knights were instantly rendered moot after Middle Earth. The epic formula has seemingly ceased to grab audience’s imaginations, other such epic flops include The New World, Kingdom of Heaven, Troy, and HBO’s critically applauded but quickly cancelled Rome. As popular as The Passion of the Christ was at the time, it is largely forgotten and irrelevant now. The successes have been such films as Harry Potter and Twilight, which have taken us into a postmodern pastiche of fantasy elements – witches, wizards, vampires and werewolves repackaged for the 21st century.

The Last Arias of the Space Opera

This decade brought us Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith. Did the total suckitude of these films kill traditional science fiction, or had we already outgrown traditional science fiction by the time they rolled around? I believe that it was a combination of the two (not to mention the sour taste in our mouths left over from The Phantom Menace). The post-9/11 world was ready to deal in black and white; good vs evil, but by the time Revenge of the Sith came out, we were ambivalent and jaded.

Firefly, and its film follow-up, Serenity, followed a group of antiheroes against the Imperial-like Alliance was similar to this template, but showed the steps we started to take away from the space opera. The new Star Wars dealt in black and white when we needed shades of grey: it left a void that science fiction storytelling in the manner of Battlestar Galactica would fill. Stargate: SG-1 and its spinoff Stargate: Atlantis each had a good run (Atlantis not so much, depending on who you ask), but both have ended, leaving the new Stargate: Universe in their wake, the premise of which – a motley crew lost in space – seems to be a missing link in the paradigm shift from old to new school science fiction.

A Galaxy Close, Close By

Far from the space operas or making contact films, in the latter years of the decade science fiction explored the off-beat and quirky side of space, and the reality in the dystopian futures. Dystopian futures have gone from the distant future to the frighteningly recognisable future: from Children of Men, where Clive Owen wears a London 2012 t-shirt, to Idiocracy and Wall-E, where real issues we can identify with now are thrown out exponentially in a starkly real satire.

Films like Sunshine and Moon explored our immediate space – rather than a galaxy far, far away. And District 9 didn’t even go into space at all. Sci-fi (or SyFy, apparently) has always been a good barometer of social issues contemporaneous to the culture that created it, but with films like District 9 and shows like Battlestar Galactica, the allegory is all too clear – pointing a firm finger into the face of society.

Elements of science fiction and fantasy were seen in film and were especially pervasive in television, with the incorporation of magic realism, magic, mythology, and things like time travel into the everyday verisimilitude of shows and films like Lost, Flash Forward, Pirates of the Caribbean, Pan’s Labyrinth, and the infamous Twilight.

To Boldly Split Infinitives

But this trend was not all encompassing. The overwhelming success of the Star Trek reboot – even after a realization that the old methods of science fiction storytelling were no longer relevant – clearly argues that traditional science fiction is still alive and well. The result was a happy-go-lucky winner: something standing in stark contrast to the prevailing mood of the decade. While most franchises grew darker, and most reboots had an underlying grimy social core, Star Trek was all flash and panache: a one-off or a sign of things to come in the decade ahead?

Next: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

The Decade in Review: The War Conflict Film

Previous: Introduction

The War Conflict Film

The war film as a Romantic narrative is virtually over. While this slow decline began with Vietnam, it only really grew apparent with the Iraq war. The war that was always seen as most Romantic, the most justified in our self-righteousness, was World War II. The Nazis are still the go-to bad guys of the twentieth century, and while this still applies, we’re increasingly seeing them as fallible humans rather than evil autocrats.

In ten short years we have gone from the pre-9/11 Band of Brothers, which seems the last of its kind as it very much belongs to the endless stream of WWII films of the 1990s, to whole new takes on WWII, from Quentin Tarantino’s gloriously postmodern exploration of brutality, Inglourious Basterds, to the German film, Downfall, where we get a surprisingly human portrayal of Hitler. Holocaust films have grown in their portrayals as well, to the point where, in The Reader, we have a Nazi as a main character. The self-reflexive view of history that appeared after 9/11 has made films like Passchendaele seem outdated. We have moved towards a much-more critical view of war, with a multi-vocal perspective, which is perhaps most evident in the surprise success of Clint Eastwood’s Japanese-perspective in Letters to Iwo Jima, and the parallel surprise failure of his American-perspective in Flags of our Fathers.

The Cold War was also far more evenly handled, with the demonization of the Soviets largely a thing of the past. The Soviet villains of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull somehow no longer felt justified; we weren’t ready for out-and-out bad guys. In Goodbye Lenin!, where we saw varying opinions on the fall of the Berlin Wall, the story followed the lives of ordinary people adjusting to the change to capitalism. The Lives of Others (perhaps gaining my personal vote for top film of the decade) saw the manipulations of the socialist state condemned, but one of the coldest, most ruthless Stasi agents greatly humanized and actually becoming the protagonist.

Western audiences also embraced (to some degree, at least) other cinematic explorations of 21st century conflicts around the world, especially in Africa. Almost all were based on a true story. We got a few, such a Shake Hands With the Devil and The Last King of Scotland, that gave us the “white outsider” perspective on an Africa issue, while others, such as the superb Hotel Rwanda and the recent Invictus, gave us a wonderful insight to African issues from an African perspective.

Next: The Epic and Science Fiction