"Everyone knows amnesia is bollocks": Danny Boyle's Trance

With echoes of Inception, Memento and Vanilla Sky, Danny Boyle's Trance is the latest in a line of what I've decided to call the "What the hell is going on here?" genre of films. Much like Inception, it shows the dangers of mind control and the unforeseeable outcomes of planting ideas in people's heads. Like Vanilla Sky, it features a protagonist with an altered memory, trying to rediscover what he has lost.

One area in which the film clearly differs from other thrillers of its ilk is its interest in genre film. On some level, Trance is a sort of film noir, with its gangster mob and its mysterious femme fatale. Rather than following the genre formula through, however, Boyle manipulates conventions to confound our expectations. Elizabeth is much more than just her sex appeal: in an underworld of gambling, drugs, theft, coercion, manipulation, torture and murder, she's turns out to be the best and the worst of all of them, repeatedly refusing to be victimised.

Not one character comes out of this film well, and their shallowness can at times make it difficult for us to care much about them. Yet each is still a more interesting personality than any of those in, for example, Inception, where ideas take precedence over people. Unfortunately, the characters behaved just a little too inconsistently to be completely compelling. This is particularly true of hypnotherapist and love interest Elizabeth: I frequently found myself wondering why on earth someone like this, who has worked so hard to achieve her ends, would decide to risk everything for the sake of a silly fling with a criminal. Still more frustrating is that her real aims and motives remain unclear even at the end of the film.

It's unfortunate that, despite Elizabeth being the film's most interesting character, I suspect that it's her full frontal nudity scene which will be many people's main reason for watching and remembering the film. The sexual politics here are murky. On the one hand, we're presented with a deliberately objectified and self-objectifying woman, remaking herself to satisfy a man's fetish. It's not quite as straightforward as just being pornography, however: the film makes it clear that Elizabeth's objectification is intellectual and artistic as much, if not more, than it is sexual, through Simon's obsession with the hairless nudes of Classical art. And of course, it's possible to argue that, because of Simon's obsessive, possessive and abusive nature, we may be being asked to condemn or at least to question this objectifying element. Unfortunately, assuming this to be the case, it feels rather too much like Danny Boyle has tried to have his cake and eat it: the same point could have been made much more subtly without the complete nudity or lingering close-ups, which in the end were gratuitous and far from essential to the plot. Furthermore, what the film attempts to present as an unusual fetish, specific to someone with Simon's interests, is actually so mainstream now as a result of a pornography industry which has ballooned to monstrous proportions, that his amazement that she "knew what he liked" ultimately rang false.

Trance is undoubtedly more problematic than any of the other films mentioned here. There were a fair few plot holes, and many things which just didn't seem to make sense. This may be partly because there's just too much going on - too many twists and turns to keep track of. It's ultimately neither as tight as Vanilla Sky nor as clever as Inception or Memento. Nevertheless, taken on its own terms, it's an enjoyable film, tense, fast-paced, slick and nicely straddling the middle ground between popular and intellectual.

I'm a Royalist.

Well, no. But I did quite enjoy The King's Speech, actually. There were a lot of good films that year, and I don't think it deserved as many Oscars as it got, but Colin Firth's was probably the best performance in any of them, and there's no way anyone could begrudge him the award. Geoffrey Rush, too, was brilliant as ever. Funnily, they'd gone to the trouble of employing an excellent (and presumably expensive - I suppose that's why it needed the hype) supporting cast, to do - well, very little, actually. Comparable to the equally Oscar-sweeping Amadeus, The King's Speech is very much a two-man show - and one just as claustrophobically compelling.

I've always been a bit of a sucker for a period drama generally, but the quality of this one was particularly impressive. Visually, it was convincing and beautiful. Aesthetics is, I think, one very important area of film where we can fail to give credit when it's due, except of course when there's something weird and wacky going on with it, or when it becomes a deliberate statement (which is easily tiresome and pretentious - I'm thinking of some of the sort of artsy stuff I had to sit through when I did Film Studies). The designers of The King's Speech deserve some recognition for this.

The script and direction too were spot on, and did what they needed to. It maintained a sense of humour and a lightness of tone, despite its closeness and the sadness it dealt with. Perhaps most impressively, it wasn't really royalist at all. It made me pity a King, a sensation I'm far from used to outside of Shakespeare (incidentally, fitting references to Richard III, Othello, The Tempest and Macbeth cropped up). George didn't want to be a king, and should never have been one. Neither should his brother. Rather than blaming individuals, however, we saw the faults of the system that forces people in positions they can't cope with or simply don't want to be in.

Above all though, it was the acting that made this film. On all other counts, I think the mania about The King's Speech kept a lot of other fantastic films from achieving much-deserved recognition (for example, Christopher Nolan scandalously was not so much as nominated for Best Director with Inception), and it was partly my indignance on their account that prevented me from seeing this film earlier. Toy Story 3, True Grit, Inception, Alice in Wonderland, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, Burke and Hare, Four Lions, Tangled - all of these I loved. If I had decided the winners on my own, the Oscars 2010 would have looked something like this:

Best Director: Christopher Nolan - Inception

Best Actor: Colin Firth - The King's Speech

Best Actress: Hailee Steinfeld - True Grit

Best Supporting Actor: Geoffrey Rush - The King's Speech

Best Supporting Actress: Helena Bonham Carter - Alice in Wonderland (not for The King's Speech, which didn't make enough demands of her to merit an award)

Best Animated Film: Toy Story 3

Best Original Screenplay: Chris Morris - Four Lions

Best Adapted Screenplay: Coen Brothers - True Grit

Best Music: Randy Newman - Toy Story 3

Best Cinematography: Inception

Best Costume Design: Alice in Wonderland

Best Make-Up: The Black Swan

Best Visual Effects: Inception

As for the other categories, I don't feel as qualified to comment on documentaries and short films which I didn't really see, and "Best Film" is just such a stupid category that it's not worth bothering to try answering.