Hello, Science!:
2010

The opening minutes of Anton Corbijn’s The American provide a near perfect taste as to the style and sensibilities of the movie that will follow. Against a backdrop of gorgeous scenery in an isolated European locale, a man commits an act of violence so sudden and detached that it seems as though it did not happen at all. The man (played by George Clooney) is a weary hit-man on the run from unknown pursuers who are hunting him for down for some previously committed deed. Fleeing to a small Italian village, our protagonist, now going by the name of Edward, befriends a local priest and beds a local prostitute, and is soon convinced by his shady employer to take one final job building a custom-designed rifle for another assassin. Despite doing almost nothing to escape the narrative pitfalls of the hit-man genre, The American is a film that still manages to stands out because of its refusal to descend into either cheap thrills or overstated melodrama, resulting in a quiet and restrained thriller with a deep undercurrent of yearning eroticism and unmistakable regret.

While it was his frenetic visual style that made Fight Club one of the definitive pictures of the nineteen-nineties, recent years have seen David Fincher take on an increasingly controlled and reflective approach to movie-making. His latest undertaking – a follow-up to the Academy Award nominated The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – is The Social Network, an enthralling tale of betrayal and intellectual property theft based loosely on the real life founding of the massively popular internet website, Facebook. Adapted from perhaps one of the best scripts in living memory by West Wing scribe Aaron Sorkin, the movie is a stunningly absorbing and superbly acted drama with a flawless pace and mesmerizing aesthetic. It is a film that offers a brutal critique of one of its most influential figures of the internet age, and one that sees Fincher’s evolution as both a storyteller and an artist come magnificently to a head.

Fresh off the heels of the wildly successful and critically beloved superhero film The Dark Knight, British-American filmmaker Christopher Nolan crafts a complicated, exciting, original and at times genuinely awe-inspiring science fiction thriller called Inception. Centred around a group of thieves who enter a man’s subconscious in order to plant an idea deep within the recesses of his mind, the movie deals with notions of reality and perception with an intelligence rarely seen in big budget action pictures, while at the same time more than delivering on all the thrills that mainstream audiences demand. Given that Nolan directed not one but two of my all times favourite films, it is fair to say that my expectations for Inception were fairly high; the fact that he was able to once again surpass everything I could have hoped for cements him as one of the most talented and ambitious minds working in the entertainment industry today.

When is a piece of art not a piece of art? Does an image have to be committed to canvas before it is beautiful or meaningful? Need an artist be professionally trained, or can a hoodlum with a stocking on his head create something worthwhile? For years, the world of street-art has existed all around us; disenfranchised individuals taking to the cities, using spray cans, stencils, stickers – whatever they could – as a means to express themselves wherever they could. But the question still exists: are they creating art? Exit Through The Gift Shop is the documentary with the opportunity to answer that question, as well as to showcase some of the most talented individuals in an industry flourishing just outside the law. Like the very best pieces of street-art, the film is spectacularly original, ironically funny, defiantly independent and effortlessly cool, and the fact that the whole thing might be nothing more than an elaborate prank by the world’s most renowned street-art not only makes the movie that much more interesting, but also reflects better than anything the elusive and rebellious art form that it supposedly documents.