The perfect career. The unachievable dream; the sirens calling from the rocky shoreline. The law of averages seems to suggest a 100 per cent hit-rate can’t be done. Even cinema’s mecha-titans have movies that weigh heavy on their conscience – Spielberg has that Crystal Skull nonsense; Raimi probably still wakes up at night weeping over turning Spiderman 3 into a musical comedy, and studio bullying meant that David Fincher’s Alien³ left us wondering what might have been, and why they had to put the 3 all the way up there.
Of course it can’t be done. But it’s a quixotic exercise in futility that is inherently noble. So here’s a list of some of the very select group who have made a great start or gotten pretty damn close, which usually means they’re too early in their career to have been tempted into shovelling crap for the Hollywood dollar or they’re too young to have died inside and stopped caring. In any case, a clean(ish) score card is a rare and impressive feat; long may their winning streaks continue.
PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON
When a director is five features into their career, they’ve usually produced enough material to have revealed the strengths and weaknesses that they’ll be trying to harness or minimise throughout their career. Well, after writing and directing five uniformly excellent films, Paul Thomas Anderson’s weaknesses are nowhere to be found. His unflinching style is distinctive but is always restrained enough to serve the narrative. He shares Todd Solondz’s fascination with the inner workings of desperate characters but with less of the soul-destroying pessimism. He’s a prodigious talent when it comes to both marshalling huge ensembles (Magnolia) and directing towering central performances (There Will Be Blood). With each consecutive film, Anderson has grown from an indie upstart to a bold, fully-formed auteur. It’s clear that the man always had vision, but he’s also got the craft to back up his art. Of the American indie outsiders who came to dominate the American arthouse scene in the 90s (Tarantino, David O Russell, Bryan Singer etc), Paul Thomas Anderson is at the front of the pack, a spot he shares with very few.
Impeccable-est moment: The dry heat and simmering misanthropy of There Will Be Blood marks the culmination of PTA’s advancing skill. Running a close second is the homage to a real TV ad fail that he made with Philip Seymour Hoffman for Punch-Drunk Love – here’s the original and here’s PTA’s version.
SOFIA COPPOLA
Sure, no one likes to admit that daddy’s little dynastic princess is any good, and yes, she kind of ruined The Godfather Part III (with a lot of help from dad). But when it comes to writing and directing her own features, Coppola is beyond reproach. The Virgin Suicides is one of the most startlingly assured debuts of the last twenty years, smothered in mystery, tragedy, and half-recalled adolescent memories. From there, Coppola has marked herself as an unparalleled aesthete, moving effortlessly from the Lost In Translation’s Tokyo nightscape to the gilded splendour of Versailles as seen in the much-misunderestimated Marie Antoinette. But that’s not to say she’s an empty painter of pretty pictures – far from it. She’s an absolutely masterful writer and director of women, allowing, as so few Hollywood films do, female characters to be alluring yet damaged; confused and alone; brave but soulless. In short, she writes women as they should be written, but so rarely are. 2010 will see Coppola return with Somewhere, in which we’ll see if her intuition for female leads also applies to men, as Stephen Dorff plays an excessive Hollywood waster holed up at the Chateau Marmont hotel who is forced to make adjustments after the arrival of his 11 year-old daughter. Apparently, Jackass’ Chris Pontius will co-star, which makes me excited and terrified at the same time.
Impeccable-est moment: Lost In Translation is seductive from peachy prologue to enigmatic end. Never has a film about emptiness and nothing been so consistently engaging.
JUDD APATOW
Judd Apatow is a pie-fingerer. No doubt about it; you heard it here first. After the breakout success of his debut feature The 40 Year-Old Virgin, the writer/director/producer has spread himself thinner than a lonely guff wafting around the Grand Canyon. The result? While he’s produced some excellent comedies in the last few years (Superbad, Pineapple Express), he’s also lent his name to some unbelievable cinematic excretions (Fun with Dick and Jane, Walk Hard). So why’s he on this impeccable careers list? Well, because when he gets fully involved in a project as writer and director, that’s about as solid a stamp of quality as you can get. The 40 Year-Old Virgin is arguably the very best in the zany improvised high concept comedy subgenre (yes, even better than Anchorman); Knocked Up kept the funnies coming but with an added injection of emotional subtext and grounding in reality. Funny People marks a real step forward for Apatow, pushing the drama component to his dramedy cocktail even further and eschewing the nigh-inevitable neat happy ending in favour of a genuinely insightful look at the desperation and emotional neediness that swirls around the stand-up comedy circuit. Just as Sofia Coppola is an expert writer of women, Apatow’s strength lies in depicting various shades of boys, men and man-boys struggling to interact with the world in a meaningful way. It’ll be interesting to see what direction he takes for his first movie of the next decade, but one thing’s for sure – if he puts his heart into it, I’ll watch it.
Impeccable-est moment: If I don’t mention Undeclared and Freaks & Geeks I’ll lose all credibility as a card-carrying internet opinionista, but truthfully, Apatow’s finest moment came when harnessing collective comedy experiences and in-depth knowledge of fame and its effects to help craft Adam Sandler’s self-referential, career-defying turn as sad, aging funnyman George Simmons in Funny People.
WES ANDERSON
When two films as good as The Life Aquatic and The Darjeeling Limited are described as your period of creative malaise, you know you’re in a good place. You’re in a good place because the products of your “creative malaise” are better than 99 per cent of other movies, and all your critics are just jealous of your stupendous talent. Seriously though, Wes Anderson movies leave themselves open to cynicism because they are defined by the stately visual style and dialogue affectations that have always been hallmarks of his work. But Anderson’s movies are such a rarity in an industry that has always preferred to overstatement over subtext that each feature, even those that might be remembered as minor additions to his body of work, feels refreshing and unusual. And while his style might seem to take precedent over traditional narrative, Anderson’s characters are always complex, sympathetic and engaging. Especially when they have daddy issues, which 84 per cent of them do.
Impeccable-est moment: Fantastic Mr. Fox was so charming it almost burst my ventricles, but I’m going to be predictable and pick The Royal Tenenbaums as the most elegant implementation of everything that makes Anderson great: music, casting, dialogue and camera dynamism all combine to create one big swirling vortex of daddy issues. Who raised this guy, the devil?
TERENCE MALICK
You’re probably going to read a lot of gushing superlatives concerning Terence Malick on this blog, so I’ll try to keep it short. With four films in nearly as many decades, Malick takes his time. It shows. He was a Harvard and Oxford-educated philosophy professor before moving into film, and his movies toss away traditional narrative and focus on delivering mood and unspoken thought through staggeringly beautiful images and painstakingly considered performance. His films are the perfect example of what movies can accomplish that no other medium can. His next film, The Tree Of Life, may well see release this year, which would mean two Malick films in the space of five years. Truly, we live in an age of wonders.
Impeccable-est moment: It’s too soul-destroying to pick between his four features (Badlands, Days Of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, The New World), so let’s zoom in. Never has the horror and unnatural violation of industrialised warfare been better dramatised than in The Thin Red Line’s haunting cutaways – a dead Japanese soldier’s staring face, half buried in mud; an injured bird writhing in the oily sand. Compare the war scenes with the movie’s unforgettable opening montage of a Melanesian tribe’s idyllic existence and you get a pretty clear picture of Malick’s opinion on mankind and its natural place in the world.
HONOURABLE MENTIONS: Shane Meadows, Andrea Arnold, Mel Gibson, Nick Broomfield, David Simon, Paul Greengrass, Edgar Wright, Spike Jonze, Park Chan-wook, Stanley Kubrick, Hayao Miyazaki, Pedro Almodovar, Brad Bird, John Hughes, Akira Kurosawa, Rian Johnson
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