Easy

If Jane Weinstock’s 2003 romantic comedy Easy had been made for a Hollywood studio, with attendant bigger budget and presumably bigger stars, I probably would have praised it as a noble failure.  Sure, it is not a good film, but in those circumstances, it would certainly be trying to do something interesting in that blandest and most uninspired of genres.  Unfortunately, Easy is a low-budget indie that should understand the trade-off between having no budget is having no market expectations, freeing the filmmaker to break the mold of the everyday genre fare and explore the possibilities it offers in elucidating the travails of romance in modern society.  The fact that it was written and directed by a woman, something that still happens all-to-rarely, only makes it worse. 

Sunday Morning Movies – Conan the Barbarian

I really can’t figure out who likes Conan the Barbarian.  Not just the latest reboot/reimagining/remake, but also the character in general.  What is the appeal? Fantasy fiction, whether it’s Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones, takes us into new worlds that are somewhat recognizable and also completely alien.  The baseline interest in the genre is, really, world building (and a certain fetishization of medieval garb, I suppose).  Set up a fantastical, intriguing place and then create characters to play around in it.  I’ll bet this is a reason for the success of World of Warcraft or the Elder Scrolls series of games.  Still, there are characters in the fiction in which to invest, and a whole set of rules that are ever changing to inhibit their desires.  Conan the Barbarian’s sole source of interest is his muscular physique and the way in which that allows him to swing a sword quite well.  There are notions of heroics and honor, but this isn’t a well-established universe – at least as far as the film adaptations are concerned – and there doesn’t seem to be a central struggle.  In the new film, he wants revenge on a guy who also happens to want to take over the world.  Conan, then, must be devoid of personality or conflict or even flaws.  He is a Hero in the most banal sense – the always-good guy who can’t be beat.  Why is this interesting for anyone?

Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol

For what could have been a Tom Cruise vanity project, the Mission: Impossible series has been remarkably solid.  The idea to have a different director for each entry has been reasonably fruitful, though the extremely distinct styles of its first two entries – reflecting the status of their directors, perhaps – has given way to a less conspicuous visual mode.  Brian DePalma’s first entry was kind of brilliant in its use of wide angles and clear lines, playing up the director’s fascination with paranoia and subterfuge.  John Woo’s insipid M:I-2 was about as horrendous a film as I can remember, but it wasn’t lacking in those trademark slow-motion gun balletics or, indeed, doves.  The third in the series, directed by then-first-timer J.J. Abrams, came some years after the previous and in a way was a rejuvenation in terms of style, even as it reigned in the auteurist flourishes.  It was slick, to be sure, but it’s fun came from the zippy writing and plot movement instead of any sort of extravagant visual distinctness.  Now we have Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, which sees Abrams return as a producer and Brad Bird, of The Incredibles and The Iron Giant fame, make his live-action directorial debut.

The Best Films of 2011 Part 3: 10-1

10.  Poetry

Mija is an elderly woman looking after her grandson.  She’s a part-time in-home caretaker to make ends meet.  She goes to the doctor to see about a pain in her arm and learns that she’s in the early stages of Alzheimer’s.  Soon after, a local girl’s suicide is tied to her selfish, carless teenage grandson and everything begins to fall apart.  In the midst of all this, she decides to take a poetry class at a local college.  Jeong-hie Yun plays Mija with thoughtfulness, confusion, and a reservoir of able understanding.  It’s one of the best performances of the year, and it’s the centre of Chang-dong Lee’s extraordinary character study Poetry.  As she comes to grips with the fact that her normal life is all but ending, she attempts to come to terms and fix the predicaments she finds herself in while also awakening to the possibilities of her creative self.  Her struggle to understand poetry and what it takes to write a poem gives her an aura of wonderment that those she comes in contact with assume is a goofy thoughtlessness.  Her slow understanding of the transcendent power of creativity and art, and her final attempts to truly know herself, make for a stunning, thoughtful film.

The Best Films of 2011 Part 2: 20-11

 

20.  Rise of the Planet of the Apes

As July turned to August it felt like the summer movie season was going to be the worst in recent memory, with Super 8 standing as the lone bright spot amongst the sea of pitiful sequels and sub-par superhero fare.  Shockingly, in the Hollywood Dump Zone that is August, a surprise hit rose out of the mist (yep).  It shouldn’t have happened, of course.  When the early teasers came out proudly exclaiming “from the visual effects studio that brought you Avatar”, you could feel the desperation as the marketing department scrambled.  In the end there is no substitute for having a good, quality product that people like, and they liked Rise of the Planet of the Apes in droves.  A huge box office success – a rare occurrence in a year that saw consistent under-performing from tentpoles – and well liked critically to boot, Rise seemed to have tapped a nerve with audiences.  Personally, I think that was down to the simple reason that it is a good story well told.  Its simple three-act structure is executed almost perfectly and with a minimum of fuss.  A good deal of the credit must go to British director Rupert Wyatt (unknown to me, and my original cry of “studio hack!” saw me eating crow after the screening), who understands the basics of storytelling in an age where visual excess is the raison d’être of so many filmmakers working in The Industry today.  The humans hardly matter, but the focal point of the story was always going to be Caesar, brought to vivid life by the visual effects team and the performance-capture heroics of Andy Serkis.  There were subtleties in his performance and the effects of the completely CGI Caesar that telegraphed a world of meaning and understanding.  Wyatt also understood the value of pacing one’s self.  It moves along at a brisk pace – it is a lean 100 minutes after all – but there’s no rush to throw out huge set-piece spectaculars every twenty minutes lest the audience get bored.  It’s a proper build consisting of establishing the hero and his life, throwing him into a situation where he finds his consciousness raised, and then evolving into a leader.  The inevitable ‘rising’ has all the build-up it deserves, allowing for a cathartic sequence of apes run amok, while still maintaining through almost purely visual terms their location, their goals, where they have to go reach them and what they have to do to achieve them.  Throw in a brilliant ending credits sequence – complete with a pounding John Powell score – and you have the best summer movie of the year.  I wonder as well if part of the reason for its success is the way it seemed to capture the zeitgeist of grassroots civil unrest.  Critics complained about the lack of allegorical substance in the film as compared to the original series, but in the year of the Arab Spring and, eventually, the Occupy Wall Street movement, it feels like too much of a coincidence that one of the biggest films of the year would be about the rebellion of beings abused and mistreated at the hands of sadistic, power-hungry jailers and uncaring corporations.  Caesar’s rebellion against the forces holding him back gave a sense of catharsis to those who feel impotent to act in these troubling times.  Serkis’ performance humanized the downtrodden.  It just so happened to be an ape.

The Best Films of 2011 Part 1: 30 – 21

There was an exceptional episode of South Park this year where Stan turned ten years old and suddenly everything he loved previously started to literally look and sound like shit.  He had suddenly hit an age where cynicism had kicked in, and things that formerly looked awesome to him no longer looked appealing in the slightest.  There is a fantastic scene when he attends a film, and in the various trailers he sees, including one for Jack and Jill, every character turns into fecal matter and the narrator sporadically tells the audience, “fuck you!”  I felt that way for a while this year, as the summer movie event season was particularly poor in that it produced only 3 or 4 films I even partially enjoyed.  I always prided myself on seeing the joys of mainstream Hollywood, even when it was mostly producing rubbish, but this year I felt like I had cracked.  As the end of the year approached, however, I realized that actually it had been pretty brilliant for film.  This list started as a more traditional “top 20”, but it soon ballooned into 25 before finally hitting the incredibly self-indulgent Top 30 you see before you.

If you want to read the general rules of this list, please refer to the introduction to last year’s.  The differences this year is that I’ve made a conscious decision to cut myself off on December 31^st, so every film considered was seen by me for the first time in 2011.  I’ve still retained the rule that it had to be theatrically released (festivals do not count) during the calendar year.  As I don’t live in Los Angeles or New York, nor am I rich beyond my wildest dreams and can afford to see everything, this leaves me with a number of notable omissions due to not having seen them.  The heavy hitters include Mysteries of Lisbon, We Need to Talk about Kevin, Le Havre, and Shame.  I was also ill for quite a bit of the year, and though I’ve tried my hardest to see as much as I can, there was always going to be a limit.  Anyways, here they are, my top 30 films of 2011.

The Eleven Best Television Shows of 2011

The nature of the medium of television breeds a certain amount of critical consensus every year.  There just aren’t that many shows out there, and while there are enough that this list could be entirely different from someone else’s, it isn’t likely.  So what’s the point of making this list?  Basically, it’s just a bit of fun really.  I’d also like to talk briefly about something that I devote far too much of my time so it feels at least somewhat worthwhile beyond sheer entertainment.  The rules are simply whatever aired in 2011, so the final results shouldn’t include the first half of a broadcast network season (even though I admit that they probably play a role in some cases).  There’s an intriguing discussion to be had somewhere about how a year-end list favours cable dramas because of this, but we’re not going to have it here.  Just a note that Friday Night Lights could technically be on this list, but as it only aired 3 or so episodes – as I saw them – this year it didn’t seem fair.  Suffice it to say that it’s a great show and if you haven’t seen it you should seek it out. Spoilers for two shows have been noted in the headings.

 

Celestial Metaphors: Melancholia and Another Earth

Lars von Trier’s Melancholia begins with a series of tableaux that, like the opening of his previous film Antichrist, could be a demented perfume ad.  This time around, however, he’s putting his cards on the table at the very start.  The images reflect both the mental state of its two main characters and a portent for things to come. A bride is being ensnared by limbs and roots, a woman runs frantically across the 19^th green of a golf course clutching a child, the bride is peacefully sinking into water like Millais’ Ophelia, and so on and so on.  Never one to hold back theatrical bombast, this is all set to a piece from Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde.  It ends with nothing less than the destruction of earth as a significantly larger heavenly sphere smashes through it.  This prologue is both beautiful and almost laughably overblown, but it is also turns out to be an incredibly useful mood-setter for events to come. 

The Princess of Montpensier

Bertrand Tavernier’s The Princess of Montpensier is as impressive for the things it doesn’t do as it is for things it does.  A high medieval romance set against the backdrop of the French Wars of Religion, the desire to heighten the drama with bodice-ripping passion or play up the epic scope with huge battles is wisely suppressed for something more intimate in scope.  On the other hand, the painterly, unsentimental distance of Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon or the sparse, directorial opinions of Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac are also missing – though the latter feels evoked from time to time in its matter-of-fact approach.

Terri

Azazel Jacobs’ Terri has all of the elements you’d expect from a reasonably low-budget American high school outsider indie.  Many of these films are content to trade out the mainstream tropes for slightly more alternative ones, using non-commercial elements and treating them with an honest sensitivity to give us a slightly more “realistic”, but hopeful, ending.  In fact, recounting the basic elements of Terri, one can have a pretty good sense of where it’s going to go.  The main character is an overweight high school student that lives with his clueless and goofy uncle.  There’s an awkward but well-meaning assistant principal, a strange and annoying skinny friend, and a pretty blonde with problems.  Even incident wise, there’s nothing particularly radical about it.  Difficulties with bullies, an unexpected connection with a crush, and a night of alcohol and drug induced self-discovery are all present.  As ever, it’s in the execution that this type of film will succeed or fail, and Terri succeeds to such a surprising degree that it might just be one of the best films of the year.