Top 10 of 2011

I didn’t see nearly as many movies as I would have liked, but that’s always the case. There were plenty of movies that I probably should have seen but never got around to it. The Skin I Live In. Take Shelter. Tree of Life. The Artist. A bunch of others. I’m sure I’ll see at least a few of those eventually. I seem to be on about a three year lag. I’m watching a lot of movies from 2008-2009 lately. Oh well, what can ya do? A big part of it is my lack of access to a decent theater that actually plays some of the more off beat movies. At the moment I’m stuck with mostly multiplexes that play only the most mainstream of movies. That’s reflected in my list, but I’m okay with that.

Of the movies that I did see and enjoyed.

Drive
Along with Blue Valentine and The Ides of March, Ryan Gosling has very quickly become an incredibly awesome actor. Like, with those three movies (and I didn’t even like Ides of March, but he was amazing in it) he jumped up into probably my top five actors. When I walked out of Drive, I thought to myself “Man, I wish Spielberg would start making new Indiana Jones movies with THAT guy as Indy.” I mean, when a movie has a performance that gets me recasting Indiana fucking Jones, then I know we’re dealing with something special.

I thought the movie itself was decent. Nice and moody. Violent when it needed to be. Sweet when it needed to be. Dirty and uncomfortable most of the time. With a hauntingly stellar performance from Albert Brooks, Drive was just a whole lot of cool.

Plus, I’m always pro-Christina Hendricks. She’s just wonderful.

Moneyball

I heard a comedian (I believe it was Doug Benson) joke about Moneyball. He said (paraphrasing) that people were constantly telling him “Don’t worry, it’s not really about baseball.” and then he went to see it and “THAT MOVIE IS ONLY BASEBALL!”

He’s right too. It is most definitely a movie about baseball. The difference is that the vast majority of movies about baseball are about the players and the big game and having heart and being the underdog. This a business movie. It’s the business of baseball, but it’s definitely a business movie.

It happens to also be a very interesting business movie. It’s also very much about America and American business. The contrasting ideas of tradition and innovation and the conflict between forward thinkers and experienced elders. It’s about shaking up the system and rethinking your approach to life and to people from the ground up.

It’s a fascinating movie with solid performances from Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill. It’s perhaps not for everyone, but I really liked it.

Source Code

I completely and totally loved Source Code. I don’t really know why I seem to be the only one, but I thought it was fantastic. I’m a huge fan of Duncan Jones’ previous film Moon, and I felt like this was a natural progression up from that. Perhaps not a better movie than Moon, but it certainly felt like a bigger budget movie from the same director.

The best part about it was that, to me, it was an unofficial movie version of the show Quantum Leap. It was basically the same premise, with a very similar set up. It was like Quantum Leap with Vera Farmiga (who I am pretty much in love with) instead of Dean Stockwell (who, don’t get me wrong, isn’t a bad looking guy for his age… but he’s no Vera Farmiga) and Jake Gyllenhaal instead of Scott Backula. I can’t complain about that.

The ending was a little wonky but I didn’t mind. I thoroughly enjoyed Souce Code.

Super 8

JJ Abrams’ tribute to early Spielberg movies accomplished exactly what it meant to accomplish, which was capturing the feeling of adventure and fun in those early Spielberg movies and recreating it with today’s technology. It was a charming movie with stellar performances from the kids, a solid story and an over all warm feeling of nostalgia for this Spielberg nut.

X-Men: First Class

I was skeptical about this movie (even unfairly critical) before I saw it. What they managed to put together was a damned fine comic book movie. I think that X-Men First Class is a pretty good representation of the difference between Marvel movies and DC movies. While The Dark Knight (probably the best example of a superhero movie to date) had to elevate its material and shake off some of the sillier aspects of the comic book in favor of a nearly R rated level of violence and misery, X-Men: First Class is a perfect balance of comic book campiness and solid storytelling and character development. While certainly not as good as The Dark Knight (the movie by which all comic book movies will be judged from now on) it’s perhaps a better representation of its source material. Not because it’s faitful to the minute details, but because it perfectly captured the spirit of both The X-Men comic books, and comics in general during the 1960s. That meant a lot to me.

Plus, the performances by the two leads (Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy are completely earnest and without irony. They respected their roles enough to not become caricatures. Jennifer Lawrence was, again, amazing as the young, conflicted Mystique. Kevin Bacon was fun as the bad guy, and played his role like a Bond villain, which was appropriate for the setting and tone of the movie. There were a few (one) weak links in the chain (I feel like I shouldn’t say specifically who. Don’t get mad, man) and I feel like they’ve run out of interesting X-Men mutants to put in movies so they’re just kind of making up generic ones. But otherwise it’s a decent, fun movie.

It also left me wanting an entire movie of Magneto chasing after Nazi war criminals. (original review here)

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Okay, when I saw the remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street, I thought to myself “This chick is way too intense and weird to be Nancy.” I mean, I enjoyed her performance, but I was aware that she was somehow acting in a different (probably better) movie than the rest of the cast.

So when I heard that she had virtually stalked David Fincher for the role of Lisbeth Salander I was instantly curious. Partially because I suspected that she could be a very interesting actress, and because I knew it was going to be a intense role in what was surely going to be an intense and dark movie.

Full disclosure, I haven’t seen the Swedish films and I haven’t read the books. I started the first book and got about fifty pages in and ended up distracted and ultimately abandoned it. I meant to watch the movies but I simply never got around to it. I knew it was going to be a huge investment of time and energy and when I miss movies at the theater and there’s no longer a time frame on when I can see them, they tend to slip by me.

But I was fairly aware of the story and this character of Lisbeth Salander through osmosis. I worked in a video store when those movies came out and people talked about them. A lot.

So when the David Fincher telling of this particular story came out, I was sure to get to the theater and watch it, just so I didn’t repeat the same mistake I’d made with the first one.

I’m glad I did because I absolutely loved it. Specifically I loved Rooney Mara in it. She was amazing. She was subtle but at the same time like a powder keg about to explode. She was smart and calculated and tough. I loved the role reversal of her being ultimately being the one rescuing Daniel Craig (James fucking Bond for crying out loud) and it totally works. It wasn’t awkward or forced. It just worked.

A lot has been made of the big rape scene, and I’ve heard people criticize the movie because it’s so incredibly disturbing and brutal. I’m not sure I understand the criticism though. Should it have been less disturbing? I mean, a rape scene SHOULD be uncomfortable to watch. It should make you cringe in your seat and feel horrible watching it. If a rape scene does anything other than that, then I think there’s something wrong. People might argue that it didn’t need to be in the movie at all. But again, it’s the story. Should they have glossed over it because it’s not nice? Fuck that.

I really hope they decide to go through with the other two movies, and I hope that Fincher stays on board to direct them. My understanding is that she’s not quite as prominent of a character in the other two movies. I hope they beef up her role a bit if that’s the case, because she’s great. (original review here)

Rise of the Planet of the Apes
The original Planet of the Apes is one of my favorite movies. I love that shit. When I saw Rise of the Planet of the Apes I was pretty impressed. While it didn’t exactly reflect the racial undercurrents that played so heavily in the first film, it did still manage to deal with the way people treat each other in general. As a straight action/sci-fi movie it delivered for me. It set up the original story quite well and it was respectful of the spirit of the first movie.

I don’t have a whole lot to say about this movie other than that it’s a fun movie. They recently announced that they’re developing a sequel. I hope it works out.

The Innkeepers

I totally just reviewed Innkeepers a few weeks ago, so I’ll make this brief. It’s a simple story built around fantastic, interesting characters and classic haunted hotel scares. A wonderful follow up to House of the Devil from Ti West.

Young Adult
I’ve been really back and forth on Charlize Theron over the years. After Monster and Aeon Flux (a flawed movie, certainly, but I liked her commitment to it) I was fully on board with her, but then over the years she’s had a lot of misses and I think her personality makes her come across as kind of cold in interviews. So when Young Adult came out, I was pretty luke warm toward it. I liked Jason Ritter’s previous movie (Up in the Air) quite a lot. I never really fell in with the blowback against Diablo Cody that so many people experienced, so I had no problem there. And I really like Paton Oswalt (check out the movie Big Fan if you haven’t yet) so really my only hang up was her.

What turned me around was, silly enough, her appearance on Top Chef. She came on promoting that Snow White thing she’s doing with the Twilight chick. What I realized watching her on that is that I don’t believe that she’s actually cold and hard, but that she’s just very unusual and very committed to whatever it is she’s doing. It made me go see Young Adult and THAT got me fully on board with Charlize again. She was wonderful in the movie. Perfectly willing to be just as ugly as she needed to be (and that was pretty ugly at times).

The movie is a very sad, very intense examination of a pretty horrible person. It’s funny and it’s endearing, but it’s also quite moving as well. You really get a good sense of why she’s as broken and vile as she is. It’s sympathetic in so far as you understand how she got to that point, but it also never really justifies anything either. It just is what it is, and when the movie’s over, things are pretty much the same as when it started. People like to cite a character’s journey as an important function of a movie. That the “hero” of the story needs to learn something about life and themselves. Young Adult proves that that isn’t always the case. The hero of Young Adult is who she is, and it’s our job to not only figure out why she is that way. Not just look for excuses, but see things from her perspective.

It’s quite a remarkable movie and it features a fantastic performance from both Charlize and Patton.

Hanna

Hanna is a nightmare fairytale masquerading as a teenage action movie. Similar to the movie Running Scared, Hanna takes what should be a fairly routine action set up and transposes it into this surreal, dream like world full of creepy, cartoony villains and helpful, clown like weirdos that guide our hero (the wonderful young actress Saoirse Ronan) through this violent and threatening landscape. Cate Blanchett plays a psychotic, murderous CIA agent hunting Hanna down and is truly terrifying.

Director Joe Wright seems to have mostly done dramas in the past, but I hope that he returns to this genre in the future, because Hanna was bad ass.

honorable mentions

Sucker Punch, Captain America: The First Avenger, The Muppets, Contagion