Was 2011 the year 'movies' broke... in half? And hydra-like those halves doubled back to wormy life? More and more media downloading and portable small screens means more variety and reasons to 'wait for the video' and--with their bedbugs, twelve dollar ticket prices, contagion-level coughing, popcorn that leaves you nauseous for days, uneven heating and cooling systems, out-of-focus projection, flashing peripheral blue texting lights, and uncouth nostril breathing--theater experiences are no longer as peerless as far as 'the best way' to see a film, especially with anamorphic blu-ray and giant TVs so beautiful and rich with deep blacks you can't even see where the screen begins in the 3-D clarity . American Horror Story is the best thing out there but does it really count on a movie blog? I've been covering the show the last few weeks because, simply put, it makes me tremble with excitement the way few other movies did this year. Where was the 2011 BLACK SWAN, ENTER THE VOID or THERE WILL BE BLOOD?
I am nonplussed by the sight of bourgeois darlings like THE ARTIST and HUGO which might be well made and 'adorable' but are so enraptured by the magic of the movies they're like narcissists staring at their celluloid profile in the mirror for anywhere between ninety minutes to three hours. Personally when I see an image of some kid in a theater, the light from the projector reflecting on his or her rapt face, I wince. Of course we believe the filmmaker is in love with the movies, we don't need to see him depict himself seeing through the eyes of a child. It's the most unironic of self-congratulating self-reflexivity to see 'us' through a filmmaker's eyes (unless we're crying like Anna Karina in MY LIFE TO LIVE or about to be killed like that cute chick in MESSIAH OF EVIL). A true movie fan doesn't even like to exist at the movies, we go to escape the mundane image of ourselves. We want to just vanish into the screen, leaving only a popcorn bag and a scarf behind.
Now that 2012 is on us, and the cinema is attended only by people hoping to encourage us to keep going back by their example, our cinema's great depressives turn to issues of endurance and deliverance, the approach of Planet X and alien invasions, and/or presenting clear examples of why humanity deserves what's coming, with not one but four films dealing with the apocalypse of human memory - CONTAGION, ANOTHER EARTH, MELANCHOLIA, TREE OF LIFE, and five cathartic uprisings or eve-of-destruction skaters: SUPER 8, X-MEN FIRST CLASS, BATTLE: LOS ANGELES, and RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES. In the latter, my #1 favorite of the year, Andy Serkis establishes himself as our generation's official Lon Chaney Sr., the thousand-faced CGI Spartacus of our rat-in-a-cage era. Meanwhile footage of the great Angela Davis rises from the basements of Swedish TV studio's to show how no amount of brutal miscarriage of justice and imprisonment can keep a noble spirit down, while MELANCHOLIA's Justine (Kirsten Dunst) shows how even a beyond-expensive wedding can be the most brutalizing of incarcerations.
Many films I've written about or seen in 2011 deal with a new idea of the father, replacing the mom as the go-to single parent: the sheriff single dads in TWILIGHT and SUPER 8, the scientist single dads in RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES and X-MEN FIRST CLASS, and don't forget Odin, Nick Fury, Nick Ray, the fathers of modern psychology Jung and Freud, 2011 was the year we said goodbye to all of them, and I said good-bye to mine as well. RIP, James Kuersten --you were some kind of a man, and a great 70s dad...
BEST
1. RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES
dir. Rupert Wyatt
Also, from a fringe science standpoint, this movie explains human evolution and its little alien-enhanced 'spark' of language/intellect better than any bible or textbook. It's no accident 2011 was the year ISLAND OF LOST SOULS finally came out on DVD. We're meant to cheer our own demise in RISE, the way we cheered the demise of Moreau is SOULS, and I say that's fine. Let it go, man, let it go like Justine lets it go in MELANCHOLIA. The apes know what their doin'. We'll get it right next time! Some day, yeah, when the world is much solar flare brighter.
2. MELANCHOLIA
dir. Lars Von Trier
"Von Trier dives into the abyss that Terence Malick only wades in to his knees in, drops a dress and calls it art in the other 'big' film of 2011, TREE OF LIFE. Both link 2001-style classical music-scored space visions with inter-personal relationships and the forthcoming apocalypse but MELANCHOLIA's tale of a woman's depression coming to life in the form of first a wedding and then a world-destroying planet is the suicide note to TREE OF LIFE's faded funeral notice. TREE mourns my dead father but MELANCHOLIA comes for me, and the son of my unborn son, and the ground beneath our unborn feet..." (more)
3. TREE OF LIFE
dir. Terence Malick
My friend Max tried watching this and turned it off after 45 minutes, "life's too short," he said. And that kind of sums up the film's message, appeal and problems. How you react will depend a lot on your mindset and maybe the size of your TV. I saw it in the theater having just heard about my father, and so I cried a lot throughout and took comfort in its sense of eternity and fleeting memories and great 50s dad style patchwork stream of consciousness (my childhood occurred in the 70s, but close enough). But when I wasn't crying, I was also smirking at the epiphany-ridden classical music score and the typically Malick use of poetic, whispered inner voiceovers that read like a mash-up of your grandma's poetry collection... (more)
4. THE BLACK POWER MIX-TAPE (1967-1975)
Music by Questlove
In the basement of a Swedish TV station it waited, until now... when America has enough distance to perhaps confront it all as objectively as the Swedes could. The black leaders interviewed tell a rational, sane story and it's all scored by Questlove of the Roots, effortlessly evoking the soul and funk of the era and moving slowly into the alienation of crack and the urban drum and bass of the 90s. There's a lot of time spent with titans like Angela Davis whose towering intellect and 'fro beg the question - when? When will they do an Angela Davis biopic? (And if they do it better star Angela Bassett or Pam Grier and not frickin' Halle Berry). More than anything, MIX-TAPE makes a fine addition to many of the other films on this list in exposing America's tendency to boast of its freedom even as it orders six new cages off Amazon. America, conscious of its freedome but unconsciously a callous self-righteous oppressor of African Americans, women animals, trees, drugs, sex, smokers, dancing, oceans, drug users, women, scientific facts, and the romantic yearnings of their own children.
5. SUPER 8
dir. J.J. Abrams
I was expecting a STAND BY ME meets IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE style swamp of triteness and overbearing John Williams strings but the Spielberg-produced/JJ Abrams-directed SUPER 8 turns out to be a surprisingly effective, especially if you were a kid making Aurora monster models, HO scale B-17s, and super 8mm science fiction films in the 70s-early 80s. Abrams keeps Spielberg edgy and Spielberg keeps Abrams human and all the cliches are gone: the fat kid (Riley Griffiths) doesn't have chocolate all over his mouth and is actually smart, ambitious, even Carl Denham enough to incorporate all the disasters going on into his film's mise en scene; the lead (an impressive youngster named Joel Lamb) doesn't stutter around the hot girl or let his dad bully him and he makes having lost his mom believable instead of convenient.
The alien is a pleasing if unoriginal composite of all the aliens ever created by either director but it's the first love' story aspect that sends SUPER 8 over the top into greatness: Dakota Fanning's sister Elle, with her ironed flat long blonde hair and too much make-up, has the sad thousand yard stare vibe of Veronica Lake in THIS GUN FOR HIRE. Dragged semi-unwillingly into the super 8 production as the hero's concerned bride, her rehearsal of a tearful farewell at the train station is so moving and strange it marks her as a star like the audition scene in MULHOLLAND DR. marked Naomi Watts or THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN marked Meryl Streep. With her Trans-Am driving, possibly abusive shithead father guarding her like a certain kind of a hawk, Elle reminds me of a doomed poetic girl I loved when I was her age, but she slept with my portly super 8 filmmaking partner instead. Elle brought back those memories to the point I began to feel quite haunted (see: a Girl Must Have her Ghost). The score gets a little too John Williams-ish at the big climax, all but doing your agape jaw wonderment for you, but it's by Michael Giacchino, not Williams and is thus not near as overbearing and helicopter parenting your every emotion for you and that in itself is some kind of trans-dimensional miracle.
6. THOR
dir. Kenneth Branagh
7. SUBMARINE
dir. Richard Ayoade
On one hand it's a little too self-aware and beholden to the 60s new wave as evinced in endless 'quote' shots referencing everything from Bergman's PERSONA to Truffaut, Rohmer, Godard, Mike Nichols, and modern classics like RUSHMORE --so much so that if you start checking off the references you quickly begin to wonder if any moment in the film is it's own. On the other hand, that's kind of what the film is about, being the age where we try on personae one after the other, feeling our way into our adult via looting through the hand-me down shots and textures of older brother films, taking a smirk and a reaction shot here and a soundtrack cue there. It's like Warhol or SUPER 8 in that it becomes original through it's sheer unoriginality. And if the stuff being looted is your stuff, like spending the first half of your life trying to disappear in plain sight within layers of science fiction and cinema and longing for a girlfriend and the second half enduring the skeevy terror of actually getting a girlfriend, and watching her let her guard down and turn weak and emotional, which in turn becomes more terrifying than a dozen consecutive prison sentences, so the only thing to do is leave her... and then pine for her... like a dumbass.
8. IN THE CAVES OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS
dir. Werner Herzog
Mixing fourth wall breaking documentary analyses with his usual tired monologues about dreams, Herzog may be in danger of becoming his own cliche, but the key word is 'own.' If you didn't catch this in 3-D you can get the picture from the wide angle lenses that comb through the surrounding French countryside like it's the opening sequence of THE SHINING. The 30,000 year old cave art itself is mind-blowing: the animals are drawn so that they overlap and merge perfectly with the fissures and cracks of the cave walls and Herzog brings home the idea they were drawn to seem like the first movies, limbs and horns waving in the flickering shadows of primitive man's fires --and the result is a spookily contemporary --the first 3-D movies now recaptured in 3-D after a 30,000 year hiatus, this be the serious HUGO.
9. BRIDESMAIDS
dir. Paul Feig
"This earns huge props in its skewering of the rampant materialism and bourgeois oppression that's encouraged and indulged in the name of a 'magical wedding.' Props also come via the peerless improv naturalistic dialogue especially between SNL goddesses Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudolph. It would make a great double bill with MELANCHOLIA! Even if her motives are self-centered and/or lifted from MY BEST FRIEND'S WEDDING, it's damn heroic to see Wiig trash the bridal shower the way Anne Hathaway never could in RACHEL GETTING MARRIED. "(more here)
10. RANGO
dir. Gore Verbinksi
WORST:
1. Worst example of doing too much with too little and simultaneously vice versa:
SUCKER PUNCH - the only redeeming feature of this film is that it makes the equally underfed 'hottie abuse victim stranded at understaffed mental hospital' John Carpenter film of the same themes, THE WARD, look awesome by comparison.
CONTAGION - As pleased as the film is with its all-star casualty list and clever 'the virus is the star' framing, it's still much ado about nothing - never bothering to answer the big question - is it really such a loss to lose 90 million people? Shouldn't our reckless population growth be allowed its own herd thinning almost as a built-in protector for humanity's ultimate survival on this over-crowded planet? Since the disease is the star, we really don't 'feel' these deaths, so there's a strange moral neutrality at work here; all Soderbergh is doing here besides showing off how clever he frames disparate threads is making you never want to spend two hours breathing the same air of a sniffling multiplex audience ever again. (more)
TREE OF LIFE - Sure, it's also one of the best films of the year, but on a basic level it's still self-important pseudo-religious wankery and Terence Malick is still just a great cinematographer desperate to convince us that's enough to justify his godlike reputation but just can't stop with those damned shots of hands waving over rippling fields of wheat.
RED STATE.
After SALT and all the other poptop Bournes of late, one would expect the fairy tale symbol-drenched HANNAH to bring something new to the table, anything to warrant its existence, and aside from some odd casting choices--Cate Blanchett with an unconvincing southern twang, Erik Bana channeling Jason Patric, some good wintry atmosphere and a winning performance by Soairse Ronan--there's nothing but ultra cliche'd chases and battles, cross-Europe flight or fight to keep your 'riveted.' Some really lame plotting and strange rationale makes the whole film seem to evaporate only a few paces behind itself, so by the time you reach the end, there's nothing but the white snow of the opening credits to remember, and the distinct feeling someone just sold you an empty box.
That's it, and I'm out. Long live the Kings of Catchphrase! Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeef Jelly.
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