If nothing else, they are inverting a notable (and much abused) tradition – the traffic in remakes usually flows from France to the US. This is a leaner, more realistic film than Toback’s, and its protagonist is a more conflicted figure than Keitel. On the surface Tom seems a regular urban desperado, greedily inhaling his smokes like Belmondo in A Bout de Souffle and drumming his hands on bar-tops and car dashboards in time to the electro soundtrack on his headphones. Tom is a lowlife, but he’s not without a soul: his late mother was a concert pianist, and it seems that she bequeathed some of her talent to him; though he has neglected the piano for years, he still feels magic in his hands.Audiard and his co-writer Tonino Benacquista have adapted from James Toback’s 1978 movie Fingers, in which Harvey Keitel played a Mafia enforcer with a passion for classical piano.
Jacques Audiard’s moral drama The Beat That My Heart Skipped puts centre-stage an intriguing but little-seen type: the artist who’s also a yob. Thomas Seyr (Romain Duris) works for his father, a Parisian real-estate swindler and racketeer, which, often as not, involves roughing up debtors and evicting slum-tenants. We first see Tom and his cronies on a midnight raid, letting loose rats to precipitate a building clearance, and it soon becomes apparent that the ones with the long tails aren’t the only rats. Orlando Bloom sleepwalks through the role of a footwear designer whose new sports shoe loses his company nearly a billion dollars. He gets fired, and considers suicide, but then his father suddenly dies and he has to return to Elizabethtown, Kentucky, for the funeral.. Elizabethtown (12A)
By the end of this prostratingly tedious movie you may find it difficult just to pick yourself up and leave the cinema.What, in short, is the point of this piffle? Some years ago I would also have wondered how Cameron Crowe (Singles, Almost Famous) could have been its director, but you only have to recall the insipid mush of his Tom Cruise vanity project Vanilla Sky to realise that the warning signs were there.
Perhaps HMV’s respondents also felt unthreatened by Val Lewton’s great films at RKO: The Cat People, The Body Snatcher, I Walked With A Zombie.
“Yes, there will be blood,” runs the tagline for Saw II, the horror movie currently scaring off all rivals at the US box-office This is a sentiment that HMV’s list heartily endorses The gore factor is all too high Forget about psychological horror. Movies that prey on audiences’ sensibilities by the art of suggestion don’t even get a look-in. The list doesn’t acknowledge that some spectators may be more disgusted than frightened by Leatherface wielding his meat hooks in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (No 6) but still shudder in genuine terror simply at the sight of a face in the window in Jack Clayton’s The Innocents (overlooked entirely, as were Alejandro Amenabar’s The Others and Robert Wise’s The Haunting). Horror, HMV’s chart suggests, remains largely boys’ only fare.
You have to scroll down to number 46, Pet Sematary, to find a film made by a woman, Mary Lambert. Still, many of the films (notably Alien with Sigourney Weaver) feature strong female leads. Inevitably, the poll is tilted in favour of recent films that still linger in audiences’ memories. The list contains more titles from the 2000s (13 in all) than from any other decade. They don’t just come from Hollywood; there has been a steady stream of often terrifying Asian fare in recent years ( The Grudge features, as does Dark Water) Horror is also the most accessible genre for film-makers. As The Blair Witch Project, at No 12, attested most famously, you don’t need a huge budget to fill spectators with dread.
The Exorcist and The Shining surely warrant their places at the top of the poll if only because they transcend genre. Both are superbly crafted pieces of film-making in which as much attention is paid to plot, character and pacing as to shock tactics. The images of Linda Blair doing her spider walk or of Jack Nicholson dementedly grinning (“Wendy, I’m home!”) as he brandishes his axe may be the ones that spring most immediately to mind, but neither film is simply a freak show William Friedkin’s background was in documentary He immersed himself in the worlds he portrayed. The grey, often wet night-time Georgetown of The Exorcist is shown with a forensic eye for detail. Take out the devil and the movie could still stand up as a family drama. There are immensely moving performances from Ellen Burstyn as the mother fretting over her adolescent daughter, Jason Miller as the young priest uncertain of his faith and Max von Sydow as the solemn, long-suffering Father Merrin, confronting the forces of evil with just a nip of brandy to help him Kubrick likewise was obsessed with minutiae. Nothing about that old hotel where the writer (Nicholson) takes his family for the winter was too small to escape his attention.
