Fish Tank

Last night Drew and I watched Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank from last year's movie season. It's been released on DVD by the Criterion Collection, which is why I first took notice of the film. (It ought simply to be a fact in all of our lives that any movie released by the Criterion Collection automatically deserves our notice; I treat a Criterion release as though a person whose opinion I deeply respect has given a film a stamp of approval.)

But I have to be honest: the real reason I rented this movie was that it contains a performance by Michael Fassbender, who in the last couple of years has become one of my favorite actors to watch. He gave one of my favorite performances of 2009; he is flat-out brilliant in Steve McQueen's Hunger, and I recently enjoyed his work in Jane Eyre and (though I thought the film was fairly asinine) in X-men: First Class, as well.

But never mind Michael Fassbender, because Fish Tank is not about him.

Fish Tank is about poverty and living in a world where there simply aren't a lot of choices. And Fish Tank is about bad – bad, bad, bad – decisions, and how sometimes we can't stop ourselves from making them because we feel powerless and don't know what to do.

My roommate and I watched this film and talked back to it almost throughout its entirety, frustrated with the choices the characters made and wishing we could talk sense into them and knowing that was impossible. Fish Tank is troubling in many ways, and often extremely uncomfortable to sit through. We changed our loyalties to the characters many times throughout the film, and fought among ourselves about responsibility and proper behavior, as well as horror and taste (this girl thinks she is a dancer, but Drew and I agreed she is most definitely not).

Part of the pleasure of the film, it seems to me, is its ability to make its audience squirm in its seats. If this doesn't sound interesting, Fish Tank is definitely not for you. It won't be fun for most people, I'd wager.

But wow. This film is excellent. I absolutely loved it, I enjoyed it entirely, and I've moved it into my top fifteen for last year.

Stardust

I am officially a Stardust fan. I really liked it last night when I saw it and the more I think about it, the more I like it.

It's not what you think, either, that's what's so cool about it. I thought it was going to be the standard mythical-creature fantasy-land fairy-tale movie with which we've been inundated since The Fellowship of the Ring and The Sorcerer's Stone in 2001. The most recent incarnation of these films was the terribly-made and boring Eragon.

But Stardust is more like The Princess Bride than Willow. It's filled with tongue-in-cheek humor, like Shrek without jokes about flatulence. These jokes are smart and clever, like the seven sons of the dying king all being named after the order of their birth (Septimus, Tertius, Primus). And what's wonderful, is that the movie doesn't point up its jokes. The filmmaker doesn't need to wink at the audience. Jokes like these are passed over as though they are just a part of this movie-universe.

It also helps that the male lead is the adorable Charlie Cox (you should remember him from Casanova). He's irrepressibly cute and he has a charming facility with making himself look like an ass and still allowing it to be funny (Orlando Bloom could take lessons). Claire Danes is her usual gorgeous self, and Michelle Pfeiffer is fierce and brilliant as the beautiful villainess. The movie also has tons of cool people in tiny roles: Peter O'Toole makes a random appearance as do Rupert Everett (!), Ricky Gervais (hilarious) and Nathaniel Parker.

I don't want to oversell the movie. It's not The Hours. But what it is is a fairy tale with a universe that doesn't play by the same old boring rules for fantasy movies that we're used to. It's inventive and clever and it doesn't take itself seriously. Definitely worth seeing.