Before I begin, honourable mentions go to the following movies from 2011 that are worth seeing, but that there just wasn’t room for this year:
13 ASSASSINS (an epic martial arts actioner that’s two parts Seven Samurai and one part Home Alone)
BEAUTIFUL BOY (a drama that examines the effect a school shooting has on the blind-sided parents of the shooter)
THE INTERRUPTERS (a documentary about three “interrupters,” former gang members who now devote themselves to intervening and defusing shootings and gang retaliations)
As well, it should be mentioned that I have not been able yet to see Bill Cunningham New York, Certified Copy, Coriolanus, The Guard, La Havre, Like Crazy, Martha Marcy May Marlene, Meek's Cutoff, The Mill and the Cross, Project Nim, Rampart, Senna, We Need to Talk about Kevin, or Weekend. It is possible one or some of them would be on here if I had been able to see them.
On that topic, one final thing before I get to this year’s movies: there are few titles that were unjustly not included in my list last year, as I hadn’t been able to see them in time. They are: Barney’s Version, I Love You Philip Morris, Ip Man, The Switch, Tangled, and The Trotsky. I’d especially like to call out The Trotsky, as it ended up being one of the five best movies of 2010. Don’t let the weird title dissuade you; if you enjoy laugh-out-loud comedies, check it out.
But enough about 2010. Let’s get to 2011!
25. RANGO
One of the most individual and truly unique animated movies of the last decade, Rango doesn’t try to get you to like it. It has a very off-kilter sense of humour, it spins a complicated tale of dynastic corruption harking back to both ‘60s Westerns and Chinatown, and its characters are downright butt-ugly. But all those things, which at first seem like flaws, prove to be what elevates this into the realm of amazing animated films.
24. IP MAN 2: LEGEND OF THE GRANDMASTER
The first Ip Man came out of nowhere with a bold, refreshing style for a martial arts movie, while looking to the past in subject and tone. It also had some of the best martial arts fighting this side of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. While Ip Man 2: Legend of the Grandmaster is just a notch below the first film in overall quality, it's certainly the best martial arts movie of the year. Not only that, but its fight sequences are even more impressive than those in the original.
23. INSIDIOUS
There tends to only be one great horror movie a year. For 2011, it was Insidious. At its heart, it’s just another suburban haunted house movie. Originality isn’t necessarily vital in horror, though, as long as there is style and tension to make up for it, which is certainly the case here. The ending was a tad weaker than the rest of the movie, but at the end of the night, there are scares in this movie that are still haunting me a year later.
22. PARADISE LOST 3: PURGATORY
Not a sequel, really, despite the title. This is the third documentary Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky have made documenting the ongoing case of the West Memphis 3, three men who were sentenced to life in prison in the mid-‘90s for the deaths of three children despite there being no physical evidence. The first two movies showed without much shadow of a doubt that the men were wrongly convicted, but the judge continued to refuse to reopen the case. (The movie smartly covers the first two movies in the opening 20 minutes, so you need not have seen them to see this final one.) Over the last decade, their cause has gained supporters as varied as Johnny Depp and the Dixie Chicks, trying to get them freed. Due to this movie (and the first two), the West Memphis 3 were finally released last year, after 18 years in prison. This is a real-life Shawshank Redemption, made all the more powerful by the raw truth that the two filmmakers behind it freed three innocent men.
21. RUBBER
Rubber is about a car tire in the desert that suddenly comes to life and starts killing people psychokinetically (for reasons completely unexplained). And yet, despite there being no way to describe it sensibly or make it sound less-than-horrible, the fact is it’s one of the most genius movies you will ever watch. I fought my reservations and watched it because I kept hearing from others that is was inexplicably fantastic. I can’t stress how much better it is than it sounds. The trailer will give you a better idea, but still not completely. I won’t lie, if you need your movies to make complete sense, you’ll probably hate it. But if you’re able to admire meta/experimental/too-bizarre-to-appeal-to-the-masses films like Mulholland Drive, Gerry, or Primer, you’ll be blown away by how clever a movie Rubber is. Especially since it manages it with such a ridiculous premise.
20. THE TREE OF LIFE
Did I like The Tree of Life? No, I did not. As I often stress, though, a healthy movie-watcher should be able to distinguish between liking/disliking a film and judging a film to be good/bad. I didn’t care for The Tree of Life, but there’s no denying its sheer brilliance. I haven’t seen a movie with such a bold visual style and such a deliberate pace since the heyday of Stanley Kubrick. It starts at the beginning of time, and covers the entire history of the universe to present day, zooming as far back out in scope as is absolutely possible to give a mind-boggling perspective. This is the only movie that includes the Big Bang, dinosaurs, a ‘50s nuclear family, and Brad Pitt.
19. BRIDESMAIDS
Many called this “the female Hangover,” but that’s a huge disservice to it. Funny is funny, regardless of whether a movie stars men, women, or both – and Bridesmaids is funny as hell. It’s not often that I have to watch a comedy a second time, because I was laughing so often and so loudly that I missed many of the jokes the first time, but that’s what happened with this ensemble comedy. (Extra props go to the much-applauded Melissa McCarthy, who gave the arguably the funniest performance since Sasha Baron Cohen in Borat.) As a pure comedy, there was nothing last year that came close.
18. HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS, PART 2
The final film in the decade-long Harry Potter saga was everything it needed to be and everything audiences wanted it to be. Taken as one story told over 20 hours of film, the final Harry Potter movie is all climax. It hits the ground running from the very first scene and provides the most epic finale of a series since The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. After the first seven movies, the producers had earned everyone’s trust that they wouldn’t drop the ball with the last movie, but even so, it was a relief to see everything concluded practically perfectly. The final Harry Potter is a monumental achievement and ensures this series will go down as one of the greatest in the history of film.
17. CRAZY, STUPID, LOVE.
Intelligent romantic comedies are rare. Much like good horror movies, good romantic comedies only come around once a year or so. The dreck that gets spun out the rest of the year under the label “romantic comedy” only makes it all the more refreshing when a great one come along. Partially, it’s because it’s become hip for romantic comedies to have multiple and intersecting storylines and to have a huge cast of recognizable faces – but for every Love, Actually that works there’s a Valentine’s Day, a He’s Just Not That Into You, and a New Year’s Eve that doesn’t. What made Love, Actually succeed are the same things the make Crazy, Stupid, Love. click: palpable chemistry, believable plot developments, likeable characters, appealing actors, and a lack of post-modern cynicism. In short, the best romantic comedies rise above the trappings that have stigmatized the term “romantic comedies”; Crazy, Stupid, Love. is one of those.
16. A DANGEROUS METHOD
A movie about psychoanalysts a hundred years ago doesn’t sound like it would be very riveting, but A Dangerous Method is fuelled by such hypnotizing dialogue and powerful performances, I actually found myself wishing I was in the movie, just to be a part of the characters’ conversations. A Dangerous Method covers the initial acquaintance and mutual respect between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, as well as the devolution of their civil friendship into bitter rivalry. Michael Fassbender, Viggo Mortensen, and Keira Knightley all deserved Oscar nominations for this, as did the screenplay. While the movie does end too abruptly for its own good – no matter how I look at it, the film felt anticlimactic – the spell the actors and screenwriter cast held me the entire time.
15. MARGIN CALL
The most basic maxim of the stock market is “buy low, sell high.” For his debut, writer-director J.C. Chandor grabs lots of acting talent that hasn’t been very valued since the ‘90s (Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, Demi Moore) or that isn’t currently valued enough (Stanley Tucci, Zachary Quinto, Simon Baker, Paul Bettany) and fashions many of their best performances in a decade. The fact that the movie is itself about the stock market is deliciously appropriate icing on the cake. Margin Call sputtered out at the box office, as did Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps and The Company Men before it, because people today still don’t really want to watch a movie about the very thing that destroyed countless people’s livelihoods. In a few years, though, when audiences are ready to watch a movie about the people responsible for the Great Recession, Margin Call is the likeliest to be recognized as a neglected masterpiece.
14. WAR HORSE
Older Westerns and war movies require modern audiences to turn off their cynicism and sardonicism to appreciate them. They have a susceptibility because of the honesty and openness that the stories were often best told with. War Horse is the same. It feels of a different period, and not just because it takes place before and during WWI; it feels like it was made half a century ago, in the heyday of directors like John Ford and David Lean. Told from the wordless point-of-view of a horse sold into the Army, as the farm boy who raised him concurrently enlists in the military to track him down, War Horse allows Steven Spielberg to use his war-movie skills and his family-drama skills to craft a classic family film that is destined to be appreciated by future audiences better than current ones. I can also say with all honestly than despite the beauty of films like The Tree of Life and Melancholia, no movie I saw in 2011 was more cinematically and visually awe-inspiring than War Horse.
13. THE DESCENDANTS
Since leaving his sarcastic phase in the ‘90s, each Alexander Payne movie has gotten better. About Schmidt was good, but very flawed. Sideways was much better, although not quite superb as many claimed. The Descendants is Payne’s best movie yet. George Clooney gives the most layered performance of his career as a man who finds out his newly comatose wife had been having an affair. Despite the depressing premise, the movie is very light in tone and never misses an opportunity to mine laughs out of extreme situations, especially when it comes to how people “should” act. Filmed on the Hawaiian islands, the culture and temperament is almost a character itself, giving the movie a distinctive flavour. One character, a stoner/surfer caricature who serves no real purpose in the movie, holds The Descendants back from being perfect, but the movie’s strong enough that it doesn’t detract too much. If anything, it just leaves room for Payne’s next movie to be even better yet.
12. MONEYBALL
Aaron Sorkin’s delightfully-written sitcom Sports Night was a sports show than had nothing to do with sports. His fantastic The Social Network was a computer-programming movie that had nothing to do with programming. With Moneyball, Sorkin has now written a brilliant baseball movie that has nothing to do with baseball. As much as Facebook was really just a background theme to the personal drama of the main characters in The Social Network, baseball is just used as flavouring to this true story of a down-and-out baseball manager who shakes things up by hiring a stats-obsessed economics graduate with revolutionary ideas of how to run a baseball team. Together, the real guys created a mathematical formula that resulted in one of the greatest comebacks in sports history and broke records with a 20-game winning streak. The big game, though, isn’t even really shown in the movie. Pitt’s character doesn’t even watch the game. After all, the movie isn’t really about baseball.
11. SOURCE CODE
If you put 12 Monkeys and Groundhog Day in a blender, you’d get something close to Source Code. A man (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) awakens on an inbound Chicago train, eight minutes before the train explodes. After it does, he awakens again on that same train, another eight minutes before it explodes. The man is actually a soldier, being sent back in time (sort of – yet also not really) over and over, into someone else’s body, to try and prevent a terrorist attack. When he fails, he flashes briefly back to “the present,” then is re-inserted into the past – the mumbo-jumbo used to explain the technology used in this process provides the movie’s title – and ordered to try again. By tweaking Gyllenhaal’s actions and reactions each time, each eight-minute sequence plays differently and the movie rarely gets tiring. Director Duncan Jones also gave us 2009’s Moon, a brilliant head-trip that was criminally underseen. On the basis of Moon and now Source Code, Jones has already become the reigning king of confusing sci-fi thrillers.
10. DRIVE
Many films nowadays are polarizing to audiences. As more movies are made for specific audiences, there are more that cause some to adore them as much as others despise them. Drive is one of those movies, it would seem. There are some who say there is too little talking or too little action. My guess would be that these people went into the movie expecting a street-racing/nitrous-fuelled actioner and were so disappointed in not getting what they expected, they couldn’t appreciate it for what it was. Drive is a hypnotizing throwback to the “lone gunman” movies of Steve McQueen and Clint Eastwood, when strong men rode into town, didn’t say much, helped people in distress, and rode off into the sunset. (I did find that the violence, while usually sudden and brief, was unnecessarily graphic, but that’s just me.) In essence, this movie is a Western, set to ‘80s synch music. It shouldn’t work, but the movie just has so much damn style, it holds your attention to the very last frame.
9. HUGO
One of my favourite developments in cinema over the last few decades has been the growing number of family movies that, while successful when viewed by a child, truly bloom when watched as an adult. The trend was kick-started by E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial in the early ‘80s, but it’s become increasingly common just in the last few years, from WALL-E to The Fantastic Mr. Fox. Usually, such movies are animated. Hugo, instead, is a vivid, live-action love letter to silent cinema, told from the point of view of an orphan living in a giant train station clock. Cinephiles can play spot-the-movie-reference till the cows come home, but the film’s true power for most adults will involve the mystery and backstory behind Ben Kingsley’s character, a storeowner in the station with an astounding past. Children will enjoy the adventurous and puzzle-solving elements of the film, but adults will be able to appreciate fully this wondrously transporting tale about the universal magic of movies.
8. MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – GHOST PROTOCOL
I didn’t care for the first Mission: Impossible. I hated the second. When I reluctantly watched the third, however, I loved it. (It actually made my Best of the Year list in 2006.) Now comes the fourth in the franchise and a groove has been found. While I always thought the series was sequential, like most sequels are, I finally realized with M:I – Ghost Protocol that each is a stand-alone action film, like the Bond movies, that requires no real knowledge of earlier films or even of characters. If the Mission: Impossible movies continue on the path they’re now on, this series will soon rival 007 himself – it’s become that good. If you gave up after the first two in the series, or if you’ve just never bothered with them at all, I highly suggest giving Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol a whirl. This is the one of the best action movies of the year.
7. THE CONSPIRATOR
Usually, movies that have laundry lists of actors use them as selling points. (See: New Year’s Eve.) (That’s just an expression. Please, don’t see New Year’s Eve.) Often, a movie is stuffed with a giant cast just to attract large audiences. The few that utilize them properly, like Confidence or Contagion, tend to not boast about it. As such, they sometimes slip under my radar, like The Conspirator did during its theatrical release; had I known at the time that it stars James McAvoy, Robin Wright, Kevin Kline, Tom Wilkinson, Danny Huston, Evan Rachel Wood, Justin Long, Alexis Bledel, Stephen Root, Colm Meaney, and Jonathan Groff, I doubt it would have. The beauty of this movie is that while it’s all about the aftermath of Lincoln’s assassination, The Conspirator is, essentially, a legal thriller. All too often, legal thrillers are interchangeable and predictable, but by virtue of this one taking place a century before cell phones, computers, DNA testing, or even cars, the tension is able to reach near-palpable levels.
6. TAKE SHELTER
Michael Shannon plays Curtis, a man who begins having dreams – or nightmares, rather – about a horrible storm coming. Not just a heavy torrent or a tornado, but a truly devastating tempest of destruction. He becomes convinced they’re visions. He can’t tell anyone about them, though, because heredity has a strong alibi against him: his mother is a paranoid schizophrenic. Not only that, but Curtis’s mom was diagnosed with it when she was the very age Curtis is now. Is Curtis prophetic? Or is he just crazy? The beauty of this movie is that it works both ways. Not only does the entire movie support either theory, depending on which answer you’re looking for evidence supporting, but the ending is bound to be debated, deconstructed, and argued over for years to come.
5. SUPER 8
Few directors have such a specific style that their names have been commonly turned into adjectives; Spielberg is one such director. Often, though, movies that are described at Spielbergian only share basic traits in common, like backlighting or plots about fatherless boys. Super 8, however, is a marvel. It truly feels like someone unearthed a lost Spielberg movie from the ‘80s.
Super 8’s director, wunderkind J.J. Abrams (Lost, Mission: Impossible III, Star Trek), channels Spielberg in every way, while still adding his own inimitable spicing to the mix. Those who have called the ending saccharine and hokey are themselves just cynical and jaded. Let’s not forget, many classic Spielberg action movies (especially the model for this one, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial) had endings with emotion rather than explosion; Super 8 simply does the same.
It also is absolutely ingenious in its pacing and the way it introduces new information, only to distract you before you can process how that information will come into play later; you only recall it once Abrams wants you to recall it. When it comes to directing action movies, Abrams has conclusively shown himself to be second only to Spielberg himself. Speaking of whom...
4. THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN
Near the start of every decade, Spielberg makes an action masterpiece. In 1971, he made Duel. In 1981, he made Raiders of the Lost Ark. In 1993, he made Jurassic Park. In 2002, he made Minority Report. 2011’s The Adventures of Tintin keeps that tradition alive, and deserves being mentioned in the same company.
Much debate has gone on over whether it counts as an animated movie or not. Spielberg filmed it using motion-capture, just like James Cameron did for Avatar. While all the settings and background characters are rendered photorealistically – my friend and I left the theatre unsure whether some parts were even unanimated, the effects were so good – the main half-dozen or so characters are rendered with exaggerated, slightly larger-than-life features. (Think of the character design in The Incredibles for an idea of what I mean.)
So, some say it’s animated, like The Polar Express was, while others argue that it’s no more animated than the central two hours of Avatar. The bottom line either way, though, is that this is the best action movie of the year. It is a new masterpiece by the greatest living director, and everybody who enjoys movies should see it.
3. BEGINNERS
If there were justice in the world, Beginners would have been a runaway indie hit last summer, like (500) Days of Summer and Garden State before it. It cruelly was not. Even more cruelly, those who have heard of this movie but haven’t seen it know it only as “that one where Christopher Plummer plays an elderly, gay man.” While Plummer’s plot in the movie is beautiful and fantastic, it’s just one facet of this movie and to define it just by that is akin to referring to Pulp Fiction only as “that John Travolta comeback movie.”
Beginners is a story of learning to show people who you truly are and conquering the inner demons and insecurities that try and stop us. Ewan McGregor plays the lead character, a man in his 30s who has closed himself off from people after being hurt. He meets a woman at a costume party he is reluctantly dragged to, and she begins to get him to open himself up to the possibility of love. Meanwhile, McGregor’s 75-year-old father announces that he is gay and does not want to hide it anymore. It’s tough for an old dog to learn new tricks, but he wants to at least be free to try.
As well, speaking of dogs, due to plot circumstances, McGregor adopts his father’s dog and they share a fascinating bond. (In one of the movie’s most delightful quirks, McGregor talks to the dog a lot and the dog wordlessly responds in the subtitles of what McGregor imagines him saying.) All three relationships are examinations of new beginnings, each of the characters in this beautifully touching and honest look at love being the titular beginners.
2. THE ARTIST
Three things right off the bat. Yes, it is black-and-white. Yes, it is a silent movie. And yes, you will love it. The Artist is a movie that reminds us why we love movies in the first place. The biggest hurdle the average person will have with it is simply giving it a chance. There’s the prevalent notion in our post-post-modern society that we don’t have the attention span for silent movies, or that black-and-white movies are boring, or that a black-and-white silent movie just couldn’t be that entertaining. This is really a gigantic falsehood, on every count. Most of our present-day exposure to black-and-white or silent films these days is through parodies in films or TV shows, which inherently poke fun at the format. However, such parodies are ridiculing bad silent, black-and-white films.
It’s a collective idea we’ve adopted that we’re “beyond” movies like that, that they’re somehow inferior to our sensibilities just because they’re old and arguably antiquated formats. There are really no grounds to it, though. When you watch a truly great black-and-white movie, like It’s a Wonderful Life or Casablanca, does it matter that it’s not in colour? And as for the silent-comedy aspect of it, if your favourite parts of the Ice Age movies are with Scrat futilely trying to get the acorn or if you used to enjoy watching Mr. Bean in the ‘90s, then I hate to break it to you, but you like silent comedy.
In the end, The Artist is a fantastically easy movie to love. It combines elements of A Star is Born and Singin’ in the Rain; features recognizable faces like John Goodman, Malcolm McDowell, Missi Pyle, and James Cromwell; has one of the funniest performances by a dog in cinema; and delivers thrills, tears, mystery, tragedy, scares, joy, and most of all, comedy. I walked out of theatre feeling happier than I had after watching any movie last year.
(Note: If at all possible, see it in the theatre. The experience of watching an old-fashioned silent comedy in a theatre setting with an audience will make you feel magically transported to the 1920s, if just for 90 minutes.)
(Note: If at all possible, see it in the theatre. The experience of watching an old-fashioned silent comedy in a theatre setting with an audience will make you feel magically transported to the 1920s, if just for 90 minutes.)
1. A SEPARATION
A Separation is one of those movies where a small number of people are involved in a battle against each other, with the stakes no higher than their very livelihoods. The best movies like that make you empathize with each character. Changing Lanes is a great example of that kind of concept, where Ben Affleck’s and Samuel L. Jackson’s characters are decent men who end up are pitted against each other not due to fault or blame so much as simply accident. A Separation is the same kind of idea, except it involves six characters instead of two, all involved in a tapestry of misunderstandings, lies, pride, devotion, presumptions, coincidences, and kneejerk reactions.
The plot is brilliantly played out, with perfect pacing and a master’s feel for story. It’s cliché to compare a movie to an onion, but A Separation is wondrous at slowly revealing more information as it goes along, and always at deliberately timed moments. Ruining the experience of learning how the movie unfolds would be criminal, but I can tell you the early set-up. A husband and wife in Iran legally separate, because she wants to leave the country (for both her and their daughter’s safety) but he wants to stay and care for his Alzheimer’s-stricken father. They can’t reconcile, so they separate and she leaves. Without his wife around to take care of his father, the husband has to hire a woman to do so during the daytime. One day, the husband comes home to find his father’s caretaker absent and his father tied to the bed, inches from death. The caretaker has a good reason for both, but the husband doesn’t know that yet and neither do we. When the caretaker returns, the husband understandably is irate, fires her, and, when she refuses to leaves, forcibly shoves her out the front door. I’ve perhaps already spoiled too much of the wondrous intertwining storylines, so I’ll stop there, but suffice it to say that the husband and the caretaker end up in a legal battle that spirals faster and faster out of control, eventually involving one of the characters even fighting murder charges.
The ultimate power of the film is that every main character – the husband, the wife, the daughter, the caretaker, and the caretaker’s hot-headed husband – is portrayed not just realistically, but sympathetically. We can relate to each character and understand why they say and do each thing that digs them all even deeper into their situation, even if we feel we wouldn’t necessarily have done the same. As well, even though the whole picture is slowly revealed to the audience, you usually have one or two jigsaw pieces more than any of the characters, so you’re burdened with knowing information the characters need to make the right decision, and you’re forced to watch them make the wrong ones, unable to warn them. Truthfully, I could keep going on and on about this movie, but I’ll quit the hyperbole and let its final position speak for itself. A Separation is the best movie of 2011.
Shocked by your #1 pick and VERY shocked The Conspirator was on this list. Not many people loved it.
ReplyDelete