Yeah, yeah, the first one sucked. This one's going to be awesome anyway.

The Top 10 Films of 2011

Below are the 10 films that stood out as 100% the most unique, inspirational, passionately-crafted and altogether fascinating films released in the calendar year 2011.

They’re not all perfect, but I’ll take passion over perfection any day.  When making my list this year, I focused on the films that affected me the most on an emotional, gut level.  The films that felt like they had the highest level of investment in them from the filmmakers behind them, the films that reminded me how great the medium of film can truly be, and the films that in a handful of cases are honestly unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.

#10. Meek’s Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt)

I wasn’t a particular fan of her previous film, Wendy & Lucy, but there’s no denying that Reichardt’s latest work is a truly unique, haunting effort.  On one level, I enjoy this film as a parody of Hollywood’s penchant for optioning things like board games or toys and affixing narratives to them.  I like to imagine this film is the big-budget adaptation of the Oregon Trail PC game, as it at least shares a basic narrative construct with that thing.

Admittedly, that’s bullshit, but it’s a fun thought exercise.  For me.  Probably not for anyone else.

This film follows a group of settlers including, among others, Michelle Williams, Will Patton, and Paul Dano as they follow the enigmatic snake-oil salesman Stephen Meek, played by an unrecognizable and ruthlessly beardy Bruce Greenwood.

The film is told – as in shot, edited, and mixed to be viewed from the perspective of Michelle Williams’ character, which makes for an at-times frustrating experience, as occasionally you have to struggle to hear what some of the characters are saying when they’re not talking to her.  The film is also shot in a 1:33:1 aspect ratio (aka, Fullscreen), which renders the frequently gorgeous cinematography uncomfortably claustrophobic in a strange way.

We follow these characters through their day-to-day routine of traveling, setting up camp for the night and then moving on in the morning, and we’re right there with them as it slowly sets in that maybe this Stephen Meek character doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about.

As a peculiar kind of tedium sets in for these characters, we slowly start to realize – and I don’t think it’s really a spoiler to say this – but we start to realize they’re not going to make it anywhere, really.  As Meek himself says at the film’s elegiac, haunting finale, “We’re all just playin’ our parts now.  This was written long before we got here.”

Perhaps that’s why I’m having trouble writing about it.  It’s a good thing to run up against obstacles in writing about a film, it means there’s no comparisons to other films I can really make, and there are no outside elements like awards shows or anything to muddy the water.  It’s a film I suppose one could technically call a Western, but it’s also one not beholden to any particular genre.  It’s a unique effort, and one I find more puzzling and enigmatic with every viewing.

#9. Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (Brad Bird)

The most kinetic, inventive, and handsomely-crafted action film we’ve gotten since…honestly, I can’t even remember the last time we had an action film this great.  Perhaps not since producer JJ Abrams’ own Star Trek, honestly.  This film rockets from set-piece to set-piece, each one so well-executed by first-time-live-action-filmmaker Brad Bird it boggles the mind.  It’s not just that this film features great action sequences, well-staged, it’s that Brad Bird makes it look like it was so easy for him to figure out.  To transition from animation to live-action can be a daunting task, but Bird’s clearly having the time of his life here.

I suppose that’s one of the major lessons I learned from this film.  The whole ‘one-for-them, one-for-me’ career path that Hollywood seems to force filmmakers to take can sometimes result in some true wonders.  Bird’s choice for his live-action debut would have been the mega-budgeted, first-Pixar-live-action-film-ever, about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, called 1906.  Studios weren’t too keen to back a filmmaker with virtually no background in live-action narrative filmmaking – let alone to the tune of 150-200 million, so he backed off, and subsequently found himself in the running for this.

Abrams is clearly a fan of Bird (that alien in Super 8 is trying SO DAMN HARD to be the Iron Giant), and Bird is clearly a fan of well-crafted action blockbusters (see: The Incredibles), so everything worked out perfectly and we got one of the most fun, inventive, and clever action films since Bird’s own Incredibles.  We almost had a Joe Carnahan-helmed M:I-4 (which could have been interesting) or a David Fincher version at one point (which I would still love to see), but I can’t imagine anyone pulling this film off as well as Bird managed to.

The franchise had already seen an analytical, technically astonishing director’s approach to the material (Brian De Palma), a goofy, dovey-lovey action maestro’s take on the story (John Woo), and a TV wunderkind’s first stab at feature-film-directing which was weirdly the most appropriate fit for the series-to-date (JJ Abrams), but it took someone who’d spent his entire filmmaking career in the blissfully boundless world of animation to bring energy and vitality to a franchise that many had assumed had run its course by this point (including me).

And the good news, of course, is that 1906 appears to still be next-up for Bird.  I can only imagine what that’s going to be like.

#8. Midnight in Paris (Woody Allen)

The most compelling, whimsical, and utterly essential effort from a filmmaker frequently too prolific for his own good.  Let’s just take a moment to talk about Woody Allen, shall we?  The one-film-a-year thing may have tended in recent years towards diminishing returns more often than not, but it’s also something that I feel is essential for him to produce anything.  Like, he can’t judge his own ideas in terms of merit because he figures they all come from the same place, so they’re probably all bad, so why rule anything out?  At least, that’s how I read him, but I don’t think I’m being too presumptuous.

Now let’s talk about the movie – how did this film turn out so damn perfect?  Woody’s never been subtle about his influences, and I kept expecting this film – in which a Woody Allen-like character (Owen Wilson) travels back in time to Paris in the 1920s to visit his idols – to descend into wink-wink, nudge-nudge humor, and it never did.  In fact, it pretty handily condemns anyone who romanticizes the past in such a vague, broad way.  And, in a way, it evidences a thematic progression for Allen as a storyteller that I find fascinating.

Essentially, he’s playing in the same area thematically where 1985′s Purple Rose of Cairo came from.  Where that film illustrated the misguided nature of cinema-as-mere-escapism, this film questions the merits of blind nostalgia and hero-worship.  It feels like Woody’s most open, most personal, most relatable film since…probably since Husbands & Wives (1992), honestly.

It’s tempting to mistake this film for a mere entertaining trifle with a modicum of novelty value, but it’s so much more than that (and if that’s what you’re looking for, The Artist might be a good place to start).  This is the first film in a long time where Woody’s felt like he’s got something new to say, and for me that makes it pretty damn special.

#7. Super (James Gunn)

I’ve seen this movie at least 6 times the year.  It’s a film I didn’t expect to like – a film I was kind of bummed out to see James Gunn wasting his time with.  I thought, Kick Ass already happened, and it was pretty good – what else is there to really explore with this premise?  I’ve never been happier to be proven completely and utterly wrong.  This film is remarkable, featuring a pair of fantastic performances from Rainn Wilson and Ellen Page.  What makes it place so high on this list is the boldness with which the film shifts from a madcap dark comedy to its legitimately moving finale.  It’s such an earnest and unexpected coda on the heels of what’s come before that it almost seems like a joke at first.

The whole film you spend time with characters who constantly straddle the fine line between relatable human beings and outright cartoon characters, and at first the end felt like a bitterly ironic coda, a la Observe & Report or Taxi Driver, but then it takes a turn into this genuinely emotional, weirdly-appropriate place and that’s where this film leaves you.  It turns an otherwise misanthropic, caustically violent black comedy into a weirdly hopeful…caustically violent black comedy.

There was also no moment in a film this year funnier to me than when Rainn Wilson’s Crimson Bolt sets a villain on fire and then proceeds to stab him repeatedly anyway.  If that sounds hilarious to you, maybe you’ll like this film as well.  It’s certainly not a film for everyone, but I found it unexpectedly moving and hilarious in equal measure.

#6. The Tree of Life (Terence Malick)

A flawed but fascinating effort that ultimately could have benefited from being way shorter or way longer.  Regardless, it’s handily the most essential film of the year, featuring shots and sequences – including the 90-minute core of the film’s narrative – that are just, hands down, the best filmmaking of the year.

This isn’t a film that tells some great story, it tells a very simple story and brings it to life in a way only a great film truly can, but also in a way no film has every really done before.  This isn’t just a film that’s evocative of childhood or one that inspires blind nostalgia, it captures what it feels like to be a child.  To hit a baseball in the street, or catch a pop fly.  To wander through the neighborhood, to throw rocks through windows, to ride your bike into tall grass then hop off of it and keep going into the woods.  It’s the most beautiful, remarkable, intoxicating film of the year as far as I’m concerned, but its problematic finale – well, it’s problematic bookends, I suppose – make it difficult for me to put it any higher on this list.

Christopher Plummer recently mentioned during a roundtable interview that he’d never work with Malick again, and that he “desperately needed to hire a screenwriter” – or some words to that effect.  And although I completely agree with Plummer’s plight as an actor on the set of a Malick film, constantly in danger of having his role reduced a la Adrien Brody in The Thin Red Line, I don’t necessarily agree that Malick needs to incorporate more structure or form into his approach to filmmaking.

The improvisational nature of this film is what’s resulted in so many true moments of ethereal beauty sprinkled throughout.  And much of the heartbreakingly-rendered portrait of this middle-class Texas family feels as accurate and as bracingly personal as it does largely as a result of this.  This is an entire film that plays out at one pitch: pure, unfiltered, raw emotion – and that’s a truly astonishing and rare quality.

Do I wish the film had a tidier narrative?  Yes.  Do I want Malick to change the way he makes movies in order to accommodate my personal preferences?  Absolutely not.

#5. Martha Marcy May Marlene (Sean Durkin)

One of the most ridiculously impressive debut features I’ve ever seen.  Elizabeth Olsen gives the best female performance of the year, and John Hawkes turns in yet another terrifying performance as the truly menacing leader of the cult Olsen finds herself trapped in, even after she escapes.

I’m not too familiar personally with these guys, but Durkin and this film’s producer, Antonio Campos (Afterschool, the upcoming Simon Killer) take turns producing and directing, which I find fascinating.  Like, I’d be interested in following their careers out of sheer curiosity based on this information, but then they have to go and make great films on top of that.

And this is a great film – and one impeccably structured to, much like Meek’s Cutoff, really put us in the mindset of Elizabeth Olsen’s character.  I’d imagine the primary reason this film’s been overlooked this awards season and seemingly forgotten by all parties involved with Oscar voting is largely due to the film’s ominously anticlimactic final shot, which seems to have split people right down the middle.  Possibly this is due to a glut of indie films (again, such as Meek’s Cutoff, although there are probably 2-dozen more I could think of) that just…end, without anything.  Tree of Life does kind of the same thing.  The end credits start rolling after a shrug of a finale and you’re left puzzling over what you just watched.

It seems like many modern filmmakers have a difficult time ending their films in a satisfying way, so they settle for what they believe to be an enigmatic, open-ended finale which is really just laziness masquerading as pretentiousness masquerading as merit.

Honestly, though, I can’t think of any other way to end this film.  It’s a seamless progression of her mental breakdown that’s been slowly building over the course of the film.  The ending seems to indicate that, no matter how far away she gets from this cult, in her mind – she’ll always be running.  It’s the rare film that earns is anticlimax by using it to reinforce the themes it’s been establishing all along.

#4. Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn)

An art-house slasher film-esque 1980s noir throwback that features the best cast of any film this year (Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Albert Brooks, Bryan Cranston, Ron Perlman, Oscar Isaac, Christina Hendricks – yeah, there’s not even really any competition here), and turns a script that very nearly could have been a Neil Marshall/Hugh Jackman action-thriller into a unique exploration of the outrageous violence that lurks just beneath the surface of man.

Don’t get me wrong, a Neil Marshall/Hugh Jackman action-thriller sounds like it could have been awesome.  I’m a pretty big Neil Marshall fan (Doomsday, people.  Check it out), but what’s unique about Refn’s approach to this script is that – well – he basically re-wrote it.  He brought in the actors and said, hey, let’s take a look at these scenes – what would you like to change, what do you think your character would do here, what do you want your character to be?

From this collaboration comes a film that’s meticulously constructed, that features the finest score of the year (from Cliff Martinez and friends), and that has – naturally – been criminally overlooked during awards season.  It’s a strange film, for sure.  Gosling’s character begins the film as the strong, silent type we’ve seen in a million other films (Walter Hill’s The Driver, for example) and then gradually becomes more and more unhinged as the film progresses to the point where he literally dons a mask and begins stalking and killing people.

It’s a weird genre-blending story, with all the sheen and gloss of a film like Thief or To Live and Die in L.A. coupled with transgressive, shockingly violent sequences that wouldn’t be out of place in a Paul Verhoeven film.  It’s film noir-as-Tetris – the only mystery here being in what order the bodies stack up and whose they’ll be, and it all comes together in a final face-off between Gosling’s Driver and Albert Brooks’s Bernie Rose (seriously, where the hell do the Oscars get off?!) that’s evocatively filmed as two shadows grappling with each other, reflected on asphalt.

It features the best opening sequence of the year, the best head-smashing scene we’ve seen in a long time, and the most eerie, haunting slasher-mask since Michael Myers (not that I’m saying this is an outright slasher-film, it’s clearly not, I just enjoy the elements of slashers it incorporates).  And look, if nothing else – this film is special because how long has it been since Albert Brooks has been in a film?  Since what, 2006?  ’07 if you count the Simpsons Movie, I suppose.  The man’s always a sight for sore eyes – if he’s in a movie, it’s probably going to be great.  And even if it’s not great, he’s going to be great in it.

One final note – how does Quentin Tarantino not like this movie?  On his end of the year list, he listed it with several others under ‘Nice Try’ – a condescending, kind-of-a-dick-move of a category.  I mean, he’s Tarantino, he can get away with a lot – but going out of his way to shit-talk this movie just baffles me.  Unless I’m just reading the condescension into it and he literally just means ‘Nice Try’ – like, as ‘Honorable Mention’ or something.

In which case, now might be as good a time as any to mention that the script for Django Unchained is pretty awesome.

#3. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Tomas Alfredson)

Gary Oldman gives the finest performance of the year as George Smiley in this cold, fascinating and densely-layered adaptation of the John Le Carre novel. It doesn’t hurt, of course, that Alfredson surrounds him with one of the other best casts of the year – Benedict Fucking Cumberbatch, Tom Hardy, Colin Firth, Mark Strong, Toby Jones, Ciaran Hinds, John Hurt, etc. – but Oldman’s quiet, reserved performance throughout stands head and shoulders above the rest.

So it’s time to say something good about the Oscars: they got one thing right, nominating Oldman for Best Actor.  It seems like George Clooney and Jean Dujardin are frontrunners, but hopefully they split the opportunistic vote and Oldman gets the lion’s share of ballots from people who are actually concerned with the Oscars awarding not just great acting but the finest screen acting each year…

Let’s talk about the actual movie, though.  I haven’t read the book by John Le Carre.  I’ve heard of it, I’ve heard of the miniseries, but I’ve never seen that either.  So I went into this blind, knowing only that Oldman’s character was named George Smiley and that I could reasonably expect a dense, layered, complex narrative to unfold over the next two hours.

What happened next was something different – something so far afield not only of anything I expected but of anything I’d ever really seen before.  It’s a film that carries echoes of some of those great, paranoid 1970s spy thrillers like The Conformist and The Conversation, but with a lack of emphasis on narrative clarity in favor of mastering a very particular tone of paranoia, distrust, and anonymity over the course of its runtime.

It’s as much George Smiley’s story as anyone else’s, and the film’s told in a way that emphasizes the impersonal nature of spying, to the point that major issues – such as what is ostensibly the crux of the plot, that there is a mole in MI-6 – are given little narrative weight.  It’s a curious, problematic approach to telling this story, and one that consciously seems to keep the audience at arms’ length.  And, honestly, none of this would work without this cast.  Not just Oldman’s turn as Smiley, but Benedict Cumberbatch (as a civil servant that’s essentially an acolyte of Smiley’s) and in particular Tom Hardy (as Ricki Tarr, one of the few characters in the film who lets emotion get in the way of his work) both deliver remarkable performances as well.

This is another film that’s not for everyone.  It’s pretty bleak overall, and requires a major intellectual investment that nine times out of ten even I’m not interested in making for a film – but if you enjoy spy thrillers/like the book/appreciate great acting, then…well, then you’ve probably already seen this.

#2. Attack the Block (Joe Cornish)

The finest debut feature of the year and the film that personally inspired me more than any other.  Its airtight script and overall aesthetic are two key reasons why this film is so much more than just an entertaining little indie sci-fi/action/comedy.  This is a film with thematic weight to it, with political undertones that never overwhelm the narrative pace of the film, and with a cast of unknowns/virtual unknowns delivering remarkable performances all around.

Let’s start with why I find this film inspirational, shall we?  For starters, Joe Cornish is 40 years old and only now getting around to making his first feature film.  Not that I want to wait until I’m 40 (I don’t really want to wait until I’m 24 if I can help it), but still – the fact that the man toiled in relative obscurity for so long and then emerged with this is encouraging.  And, more importantly, he delivers great action with cool, unique-looking alien creatures on a budget through the simply ingenious method of putting Terry Nation in an all-black gorilla-looking suit and CGI’ing a glowing set of teeth onto the resulting beast.

Its ingenious alien design aside, this film’s also notable for being the most briskly-paced film I’ve seen in a long time.  This is something Executive Producer Edgar Wright frequently excels at (although Scott Pilgrim loses a little steam towards the end), so perhaps that should come as no surprise, but – again – for a first-time feature?  The editing here is fantastic.

And on top of all of that, you’ve got a film here that creates multiple compelling characters – most of them teenagers – that also has no qualms about killing some of them off.  It’s a film that has real stakes, and a film where every bit of dialogue either serves to further character development, drive the plot forward, or – more often than not – do both of these things at the same time.

More than anything, it’s just the most damn fun I’ve had with a movie this year.  There’s no way you can walk away from this without a smile on your face.  It’s just got this triumphant, crowd-chanting, Ghostbusters-esque finale that’s emotionally resonant and wholly earned over the course of this film.

So how could anything have been better this year than Attack the Block, you may wonder?

#1. Hugo (Martin Scorsese)

The best use of 3-D I’ve yet seen, and one of the best films Scorsese’s ever made.  And here I suppose is as good a time as any to further explain why The Artist failed to move me.

The Artist isn’t just a story we’ve seen before (Singin’ in the Rain), but it’s a film that relies on a gimmick for novelty value while never, in my opinion, fully committing to it and therefore never fully realizing the potential of it.  I would love to see a great, modern-day silent film – one that was visually striking throughout and took full advantage of the limitations of the form.  The Artist is not that film.

Additionally many people are mistaking The Artist for a film about movies.  It’s not that, it’s a film about Hollywood, about celebrity.  It has about as much narrative and thematic weight as The Muppets.  Both films are empty husks with some commendable moments sprinkled throughout.

On the other hand, we have Hugo.  It’s actually a movie about movies, I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that at this point.  It’s a film that carries a message that’s near and dear to my heart about the importance of film preservation, and one that also never lets its underlying agenda compromise the emotionally resonant story of a boy without a father trying to find his place in the world.

Knowing little about this story beforehand, other than that it was based on a kids’ book and would be shot in 3-D, I worried.  There may be no filmmaker out there whom I trust to deliver quality work every time out as much as Scorsese, but still – I had my doubts.  Maybe he just wants to take it easy after so many years of hard work in the service of great cinema?  That’s certainly his prerogative.  In any case, my doubts were handily assuaged over the course of the film.

It’s become clear to me that Scorsese cannot make a film without committing 100% of himself to making it as good as it can possibly be.  Last year’s Shutter Island was a prime example of this.  Scorsese took a script with a pretty lame twist and crafted a film around that lame twist that, for me, handily overcame its shortcomings through sheer force of filmmaking will.  This time out, Scorsese has the benefit of a great story and another excellent cast to help him pull it off.

Honestly, I mention The Artist and The Muppets above because they’re both also about artists/entertainers who have fallen on hard times and are coaxed back to the limelight by old friends/fans.  This film executes the same subject matter much more effectively by creating a character in Hugo who has his own reasons for returning George Melies to the public eye, and by creating a character in Melies who’s disconsolate over the notion that all of his work has been lost over the years and needs to be returned to the public eye in order to realize that people do care about him and his work.

The Muppets in The Muppets have fallen on hard times, and are faced with a public that they believe doesn’t care about them anymore.  They’re depressed, sure, but there’s nothing at stake other than a mansion they aren’t using.  Jean Dujardin in The Artist is a stubborn man who lets pride bring him low by refusing to star in talking pictures and literally takes himself to the brink of suicide as a result (which that beautiful, awesome dog just will not allow him to do).  Melies is a victim of circumstance.  Brought low by financial struggles and the first World War, he was forced to sell all of his work to shoe factories, where his films were melted down to make heels for womens’ shoes.  He’s a man who’s been living in a misery ever since that’s not at all of his own making.

Also, I’d like to point out that you could probably watch Hugo on mute – or just with Howard Shore’s remarkable score (which I hope we can do on the Blu-Ray one day) – and get a much better approximation of a great silent film than you get from The Artist.

This is a film that’s very personal to me.  In much the same way I’d imagine it’s personal to Scorsese as well.  And it’s been neck-and-neck with Attack the Block for the #1 spot on my list for some time now.  Ultimately, I had to go with my heart on this one.  It may seem predictable, but the guy who loves movies loves the movie that’s about movies more than any other movie this year.

The Best Films of 2011:

My list seems to be quite a bit stranger than most of the lists I’ve seen.  This isn’t just because I’m trying to draw attention to more obscure films (although that’s hopefully a happy by-product).

No, what I tried to do this year was simply relate the films that resonated with me on a primal, gut level.  The films that mean a lot to me, the films that made me cry or laugh uncontrollably (or both, ideally).  The films I saw this year that felt truly invested with an almost unbridled passion for the stories they were telling.

And so it goes…

#30. The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn (Steven Spielberg)

Wrote a bit about this HERE already, as this was part of a quadruple-pronged Christmas present to myself.  However, since watching this that first time I’ve returned for a second viewing and found new things to appreciate that I hadn’t expected.  A recent re-watch of Jurassic Park was similarly eye-opening, largely because I hadn’t seen it in a long time, but more importantly because I had never really watched it with an eye towards dissecting it from a technical/structural perspective.

There are techniques Spielberg utilizes in many of his films that are so simple and understated they’re easy to miss on cursory viewings.  The fact that he’s so great at drawing an audience into a narrative also tends to draw focus away from the technically astonishing craftsmanship on display.  Ultimately, Tintin is #30 on this list for a few reasons.  For starters, the actual character of Tintin isn’t really a dynamic or dramatically compelling creature.  I found it hard to get drawn into the story on both viewings as a result of this and as a result of the madcap insanity Spielberg surrounds everything with.

With that said, the madcap insanity I speak of is also one of the things I love most about the film – particularly in the ‘single-shot’ action sequence towards the end of the film that’s one of the most brilliant, purely pleasurable stretches of cinema of the year.  It feels like we’re finally getting a glimpse at the unbridled imagination of Steven Spielberg, which makes this film utterly essential viewing for anyone who’s a serious fan of cinema.

In closing, to return to the craftsmanship on display here – and the comparison to Jurassic Park – both films feature major action sequences that are symmetrical, for lack of a better word.  They’re eerily-similar, I suppose.  To go back to Jurassic Park, there are little touches throughout, but the major similarity is between the car falling out of the tree onto Tim and Alan after the T. Rex attack and the T. Rex skeleton falling on Tim during the climactic raptor attack.  In a way, it’s like he’s conducting a symphony of images with the film – the moment you recognize a similar visual element in the Rex rib cage falling on Tim, the T. Rex himself shows up to save the day.  It’s a powerful, unconscious emotional connection Spielberg establishes with the audience, and it’s as good an example as any of what’s made him so successful for so long.

The example in Tintin involves a mid-battle flashback in which two ships’ masts become entangled in the midst of a maelstrom – one of the most insane action sequences ever – which is then called back with Captain Haddock and Saccharine duelling with construction cranes on the docks.  The big difference between Tintin and Jurassic Park is that, ultimately, the story here is just an excuse for Spielberg to run wild and little more.  It’s an inconsequential, goofy adventure cartoon that falls just shy of being a true masterwork.

SIDEBAR: This whole visual-callback thing comes directly from a viewing of John Boorman’s unjustly-maligned Exorcist II: The Heretic, in which a film full of evocative, haunting imagery all comes together in a flurry of madness in its final sequence where every single sequence is recalled.  That film is fascinating.

#29. Hanna (Joe Wright)

This is not my genre.  Girl who’s a stone-cold assassin, trained by her father to be a spy and then set loose on the world, etcetera.  I don’t love it.  There are films that this film is reminiscent of, films like Leon: the Professional or something, that I’ve never gotten the praise for.

With that said, Joe Wright firmly establishes himself as a truly remarkable filmmaker by once again making a film from subject matter I could not care less about and making it amazing.  The basic script for this film isn’t much, honestly.  I don’t know how many of the fairy tale trimmings are on the page, but I’d imagine Wright brought a lot of that to the film himself, and the film honestly wouldn’t work without it.

I’ve only seen this film once, in theaters, but I look forward to returning to it in the near future.  It’s an invigorating action picture, yes, but more than that it’s a film that takes some time out to focus on quieter moments with its characters.  Wright and Saoirse Ronan create a truly complete and endearing character with a series of minimal touches throughout.  It’s a rare, understated wonder of an action film that coasts on a propulsive score from the Chemical Brothers and the sumptuous visual imagery Wright manages to conjure throughout, particularly during a climactic showdown in an almost-unimaginably macabre fairy-tale-themed amusement park.

And all due props to Tom Hollander, who gives a remarkable performance in this film as a blonde-haired sociopath, and whose character certainly deserves a better fate than he receives.

#28. Bridesmaids (Paul Feig)

I was honestly not expecting to like this movie anywhere near as much as I did.  A large reason for this, I’m sure, were the annoying press approaches to its mere existence, all “women can be funny too!” and “women can make dirty jokes and stuff just like men can!” – but I’m sensitive to any agenda trumpeted so loudly, and the only thing that matters at the end of the day is whether or not the film is any good.  The good news, of course, is that this film is great.

Other than the fact that it could definitely stand to be a good bit shorter, I can’t think of too many problems I had with this film.  For a long time now, I’ve thought Kristen Wiig was one of the funniest women on the planet – frequently in spite of her repetitive-to-the-point-of-annoyance characters on SNL – but now at least there’s definitive proof.  Melissa McCarthy also deserves a lot of recognition, and not just for playing a completely insane character, but for grounding that character in its own warped version of reality that makes the jokes ring much truer.

I don’t really have as much to say about this film.  This isn’t the kind of film I sit down and analyze, beat-for-beat, for shot-selection and structural technique or anything.  It’s just a fun, crowd-pleasing, heart-warming romantic comedy that also happens to be one of the best films of the year.

#27. X-Men: First Class (Matthew Vaughn)

I’m quite fond of the X-Men series.  I grew up on the cartoon, I love the films, I love what I’ve read of the comic (although Grant Morrison’s run kind of went off the rails towards the end, but I digress), and I love alternate history tales.  Usually, these tales just involve the Nazis winning WWII or something, but my favorite kind of alternate history story is the kind this film chooses to be.  A version of reality that’s just slightly-off, and maybe even a version that could have actually happened and been covered-up.

Fassbender’s Magneto describes himself early in the film as Frankenstein’s monster, and at that point the film could have taken me anywhere.  From its pitch-perfect casting of Kevin Bacon as villain Sebastian Shaw to its climactic scenes on the beach in Cuba, we’re treated to an inventive, inspired take on classic X-Men characters rendered engaging through the visual style Vaughn brings to the material.  That’s probably the thing I love most about this film – and the thing that’s made it stick with me as much as it has.  Simply the presence of a filmmaker behind the camera who’s truly invested in the story he’s telling – I mean, that’s all a film really needs.  Of course, it doesn’t hurt to have Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy in your two lead roles.

It’s far from a perfect film, however.  January Jones is pretty wooden for a woman ostensibly made of diamonds, and Jennifer Lawrence’s Mystique is…I don’t know that any of this is her fault, but that character is just awful and whiny pretty much throughout.  And, to top all of that off, this film gets an award for Worst Scene in a Great Film for the sequence in which all of the ‘First Class’ of X-Men give each other code names that just so happen to be the same as their code names in the comics.

The finale, however, makes up for a lot – with the showdown on the beach shifting on a dime from a battle between Eric and his former Nazi tormentor to a showdown between Eric and Charles – a showdown of two competing ideals that gives the film a weight its frequent campiness threatens to subsume.  For Matthew Vaughn, it’s a major step up from 2010′s Kick Ass, and I can’t wait to see what he does next.

#26. Young Adult (Jason Reitman)

A very good, deceptively slight film from Reitman with a fantastic and restrained script from Diablo Cody.  Featuring almost none of the ‘look-how-clever-I-am’ dialogue Cody’s become infamous for, this film is ultimately a genuine, heartbreaking depiction of a deeply-flawed, borderline-loathsome human being.

Charlize Theron continues to prove herself to be an actress of unimaginable depth and range, and Patton Oswalt manages to more than holds his own as a sad sack nerd-type character with irreparably-damaged genitalia who lives with his sister and brews his own liquor in the garage in his spare time.

I hope it doesn’t sound like I’m damning this film with faint praise to say that there’s really nothing else I can say about it.  It speaks for itself.  All I can do is whole-heartedly encourage everyone to check it out.  Charlize Theron is a MAJOR snub in the Best Actress category at this year’s Oscars, and it’s a shame this film won’t get the box office boost her richly-deserved nomination would have gotten it.

This is the kind of film that’s likely going to age very well, and I’m afraid I’m going to regret placing it so low.  It’s a film that grows richer in my mind the more I think about it, and one I can’t wait to return to whenever it comes out on Blu-Ray.

#25. Rango (Gore Verbinski)

Some goofy kid-humor aside, this film is fucking bizarre and all the more wonderful as a result.  A truly vital kids’ film that values surreal humor above all else, this was both one of the most pleasant surprises of the year and proof positive that Gore Verbinski is one of the most under-appreciated filmmakers out there right now.

The sheer amount of imagination on display in every frame of this film is staggering.  It’s the most carefully-crafted and labored-over animated film since Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox.  It’s a film that creates a complete world, with truly unique character designs and a strong sense of its Spaghetti Western influences in everything from said character designs to the downright Sergio Leone-esque framing.

Into a plot that’s basically a riff on Chinatown stumbles a character in search of his own story, and although the meta aspects of the film – such as a Greek chorus of owls – frequently threaten to teeter into annoyance, the film ultimately succeeds as an adventure film first and a meta-commentary on the Hero’s Journey a distant second.

Now that Tintin isn’t nominated for the Best Animated Feature Oscar, I would hope that gives Rango the undisputed advantage in the category, but who knows.  The fact that such a deeply strange film reached both the level of financial success and the level of critical acceptance it did is a truly remarkable thing.

#24. Rise of the Planet of the Apes (Rupert Wyatt)

So good I was really hoping this guy would land the Twilight Zone gig when it was up for grabs earlier this year.  Here, Rupert Wyatt does one of the finest, most fascinating franchises of all time proud.  Not that Matt Reeves is any slouch, but I digress.

This franchise is one near and dear to my heart – even, with a handful of qualifications, the 2001 Tim Burton remake.  The original series followed the most bizarre progression of events of any film series…or really any series of events linked in some sort of narrative progression, honestly.  From the first film with its now-forever-spoiled ending, to its sequel which has an ending that should, in theory, negate any further films, to the 3rd film which involves a pair of apes traveling back in time to the 1970s to partake in the Roe v. Wade debate and eventually bring about the end of humanity, to film #4, which this film is a quasi-remake of.

And, honestly, this film is a worthy successor to the underrated Escape from the Planet of the Apes in ways Conquest of the Planet of the Apes wasn’t quite.  A lot of this is due to the work Andy Serkis puts in as Caesar, but there’s just as much to be said about Rupert Wyatt’s exquisitely-staged action sequences, and the work all around by the fine folk as WETA as well as stunt coordinator/Why Cookie Rocket? orangutan Terry Nation (who will show up much later on this list as well).

This film came at the tail end of a rotten summer for blockbusters and people wondered why it did so well at the box office.  Because it was fucking awesome, that’s why.

#23. Paranormal Activity 3 (Henry Joost & Ariel Schulman)

The first two films of this series both resonated with me a great deal, but this is indisputably the finest effort of the bunch and one of the most unique and well-constructed found-footage movies I’ve ever seen.  It’s a film that isn’t as concerned with adhering to its gimmick as it is to telling a well-constructed narrative, and Joost & Schulman coax a pair of miraculous performances out of their two child leads that help sell the scares – which are aplenty, and still give me chills – all the better.

I haven’t seen their first film, Catfish (although I have had its ending spoiled for me), but if this film is any indication, these guys are going to be unstoppable.  Having well under a year in which to put this whole enterprise together and release it, these guys had to unravel the increasingly-complex riddle of this series’ narrative (which, admittedly, gives the Planet of the Apes series a run for its money) and figure out a way to somehow surpass the two preceding films in scares while adhering to the same rigid found-footage conceit.

In a way, the Paranormal Activity series is like a horror franchise version of The Five Obstructions.  Instead of making the same film over again with new restrictions, this series gives its filmmakers of choice the same set of restrictions while allowing them to come up with a new story each time out, so long as it furthers the narrative.

It’s the best film in one of my favorite horror franchises – and really the only horror franchise we have going right now, sadly – and it also happened to be one of the most fun theater-going experiences of the year for yours truly.

#22. War Horse (Steven Spielberg)

A very good film that falls just short of true greatness for me.  Has some sequences that I love unabashedly and that had me close to tears, but has others that feel like they just hit the wrong notes.  It feels like Spielberg’s outside of his comfort zone this time out, making a film more akin to an artistic exercise a la Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar or L’Argent than to a family-friendly melodramatic WWI film.

And, ultimately, I find value in the film for that.  It’s astonishing to see filmmakers like Spielberg and Scorsese trying their hand at new approaches to narrative and filmmaking so far into their careers.  These are filmmakers who gamble everything on their films, every time out, and risk falling flat on their face in the process.

In fact, many people have accused Spielberg of doing just that – of making a film that panders, making a film that’s needlessly melodramatic.  And ultimately, nothing I say is going to change anyone’s mind on this film.  It is what it is.  Yes, it’s definitely a throwback to an older style of filmmaking – a more grandiose, big-budget, Golden Age of Hollywood-style film, and I find value in that.

My minor quibbles with the film – such as the under-utilization of actors as talented as Tom Hiddleston and Benedict Fucking Cumberbatch – are just that, minor.  I love the story of the boy and his horse – I get it, and I had a beagle die this past year so I understand what a pet can mean to a kid growing up.  I get that.  And so maybe this film works more for me for that reason alone, I don’t know.

When this film clicks – I mean, just works – it’s the best film of the year.  Sequences like the one towards the end of the film that takes place in No Man’s Land, or the scene where the two brothers are caught after deserting their post and stood up before a firing squad – they’re blissfully cinematic in a truly timeless way.

Most importantly, Janusz Kaminski’s work here provides evidence that he knows some of his work in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull looked like shit.  Scenes in that film that were supposed to look like throw-back, studio-set-with-rear-projection scenes ended up just looking unnatural and hokey.  The scenes towards the end of this film, with the sky taking up so much of the frame that it almost seems as if it’s falling, are shots that feel like they’re going for that same effect and achieve it.  They look like grand, Technicolor, 70mm widescreen shots from some epic 1950s melodrama, which is ultimately the kind of film this is.

If you’re not getting emotional by the end of act 1, when Albert has to use Joey to plow a rocky field or his family will lose their farm, well – then it’s just not going to work for you.  For me, obviously, it worked.

#21. The Guard (John Michael McDonough)

A very small film that has a unique charm to it – not unlike director McDonough’s brother’s 2008 film In Bruges.  Not quite as good as that film through and through, but still a very fun and engaging little film that surprised me quite a bit.  I remember first hearing about this film playing some festival, maybe Toronto or Sundance last year or something, and then it just kind of…the word of mouth dissipated pretty fast.

I imagine a lot of people dismissed this film as a slight effort, which is tempting given the lightweight manner with which the characters in the film treat the situations they face.  If they’re making light of everything, is this all just a low-key farce?  Some weird, goofy, self-aware crime thriller?  It is a bit of that, sure, but it’s also a lot more.

Brendan Gleeson and Don Cheadle have an affable enough buddy-cop chemistry in this film, but Gleeson in particular elevates his character from a goofy, casually-racist simpleton to a legitimately compelling, fully-formed character.  Also turning in a strong performance is Mark Strong, playing a career criminal who’s sick of dealing with the kinds of people he has to do business with.

Occasionally the film threatens to become a touch too self-aware, very nearly breaking the fourth wall to speak directly to the audience in one instance, but it never quite crossed the line for me.  It’s a small little film that’s alternately hilarious and tragic in equal measure.  I don’t want to say too much about it because I’m pretty sure most people haven’t seen it yet.

Every character in this film feels fully-realized.  That seems like a simple thing, but it’s so rare that when it’s truly done well it’s quite remarkable.

#20. Moneyball (Bennett Miller)

I would still love to see Soderbergh’s take on my favorite sport, but this film is still a pretty damn solid work and one I’m sure I’ll be returning to plenty in lieu of any actual baseball going on at the moment.  Bennett Miller’s other film, Capote, featured some great performances but never really connected with me as a narrative.  It was very good, but it was also a prototypical prestige picture.  I’ve been meaning to return to it since seeing this film, however, because this film is, as you may have been able to guess, one I particularly enjoyed.

Brad Pitt gives his 2nd-best performance in a film this year as Billy Beane, and this is a story I’ve known for a while now.  I didn’t read the actual book, Moneyball, until late in 2010, but the story of how Billy Beane built the Oakland Athletics into a juggernaut of a team on a shoestring budget has quickly become a part of baseball lore.

There are a few elements here – like the bit with Billy Beane’s daughter being a songwriter – that reek of over-manipulation.  It’s evident there’s a simple, real story here and an element like that threatened to unravel my investment in the narrative almost single-handedly.  Annoying touches aside, the script by Sorkin and Zaillian largely eschews the wordplay Sorkin in particular is so fond of to focus on interactions between general managers of opposing teams, or between a general manager and his staff of scouts – where more is implied that outright stated.

Pitt does great work, sure, and – although I’m not sure he should have been nominated for an Oscar – Jonah Hill does a great job as well in the role of not-Paul DePodesta.  Not to mention the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo by Spike Jonze of all people.  But I digress, this is a very good film that, like I said, I’ll be spending a lot of time with in the lead-up to the 2012 baseball season.

Also worth nothing: 2011 had the most dramatic and incredible finale to a Major League Baseball regular season that I’ve ever seen, with multiple games going on across several different time zones seeing two teams be eliminated – including my Atlanta Braves – from the post-season by blowing massive wild card leads in the last month of the season.  So Moneyball can’t help but pale in comparison to the real thing.

#19. 50/50 (Jonathan Levine)

Leaps and bounds better than both All the Boys Love Mandy Lane and The Wackness, this film isn’t so much Levine’s accomplishment as it is screenwriter Will Reiser’s.  A keenly-observed film that could only have been conceived in such a genuine, heartfelt manner by someone who’s actually been through this experience.

I don’t think I cried more at a film this year than I did at this film (I take that back actually, we’ll talk about that other film much later on this list).  The interactions between Joseph Gordon Levitt’s character and his parents are heartbreaking, particularly towards the end of the film right before he goes in for surgery.  A lot of people felt the Bryce Dallas Howard girlfriend character was portrayed as kind of a bitch, but I honestly have to disagree.

She’s placed in an untenable position given where their relationship is – it’s not like they’re engaged or anything that serious.  She’s in an awful position and no, she doesn’t handle it very well but it made me imagine how I’d react in a similar scenario, or how I’d expect a girlfriend of mine to react.  It’s a lot to expect of someone, to stick by you.  It’s not something anyone should take for granted.

But I digress, this film should feel manipulative in every way, but Reiser and Levine are able to stay just on the right side of schmaltz throughout.  It’s a film I wish more people had seen, and one I suspect will become regarded as a modern classic before too long.

#18. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)

A film that feels like a living, breathing, organic thing.  A film that feels like dreaming, that’s impossible to fully comprehend as anything like a concrete narrative.

I don’t even – there’s nothing I can really say about this film.  It works on a primal level, with the sound design and visual imagery on display calibrated precisely to evoke the sensation that you’re watching something special, even if you – like me – have a hard time quite comprehending what exactly is going on.

Is that a woman making love to a catfish?  Sure.  Is that a wolf-boy?  Absolutely.  This is a film that aches with melancholy and is rendered unforgettable through Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s downright peerless grasp of the medium of film – AND at least one character in its ensemble is covered in hair and has a set of beady red eyes that glow like hellfire in the dark.

This is the only film of his I’ve ever seen, and I am just in complete awe of him, even if I don’t completely know what to make of the final product, it resonates with me on a gut level that’s impossible to shake.

Honestly, I’m a little surprised these entries seem to be getting shorter.  I suppose it’s because I don’t have as much to say about good ol’ Apichatpong or Jonathan Levine.  Most of what I wrote about Tintin was actually about Jurassic Park.  I could write some more about that.

#17. The Skin I Live In (Pedro Almodovar)

A psycho-sexual, Frankenstein Created Woman/Eyes Without A Face-indebted melange that’s handily Almodovar’s finest work since his 2002 masterpiece Talk To Her.  Honestly, this was not something I was expecting to even be interested in when I first heard about it.  When Almodovar’s at the height of his craft (Talk To Her, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, etc) – there’s no one better.  But lately, his films just seemed to…I don’t know, they just didn’t connect with me.

Largely this was due to the subject matter.  On paper, Talk To Her – for instance – does not look like a movie I’m going to fall head over heels in love with.  In execution, however, that’s a different story.  What seems to have happened between me and Almodovar has been a slow but steady decline in the rapturous critical reception of his work, which has discouraged me from seeking out some of his more recent films.  For example, the film A Separation.  NOT a film by Almodovar, but a film I wouldn’t give a shit about were it not getting the crazy, ‘instant classic’ reviews it’s been receiving.  But take a film like Volver – which I did see, but which I remember nothing about and feel no desire to return to.

Bad Education and Volver are both good movies, but there was nothing in them as bizarre and downright ballsy as that silent film sequence in Talk To Her, and as a result I’ve largely forgotten those films since viewing them upon their initial releases.  I didn’t even see Broken Embraces, and have no idea what it’s about.  But word on the street intimated that this film was a return to form of sorts.  Or, rather, a break from his recent works.

Outside of talking about as many of his other films as possible, I don’t want to say too much about this film.  If you know the films I compared it to in the first sentence, you’ll have an idea where this narrative is going.  But otherwise, I think the surprises this film has in store are too rich and rewarding to spoil in the middle of this 10,000-ish-word longread.

It’s a unique film, it’s a strangely romantic film, and it’s a fascinating work from one of our greatest living filmmakers.

#16. Contagion (Steven Soderbergh)

For a film accused by many of being cold and emotionless, the many narrative throughlines of this film added up to a cumulative emotional resonance that kind of knocked me out.  Soderbergh is one of our national treasures.  He’s a ridiculously talented filmmaker whose hands-on approach to filmmaking (he shoots and edits his own films for fuck’s sake) is somehow coupled with a staggering productivity.  I honestly don’t know how he does what he does.

And Contagion is a star-studded effort that marries the big-budget sheen of his Ocean’s films with the experimental approach to narrative he’s been exploring in virtually every other film he’s made.  This feels like a fascinating progression for Soderbergh, who seems to be approaching filmmaking as a riddle to be solved.  Constantly trying new things and delving into myriad genres – everything from this film’s big-budget disaster-movie trappings to the large-scale, two-part experimental biopic of Che Guevara to this January’s action-thriller Haywire – he’s constantly trying to push the medium of film forward in new and interesting ways.

This film is the product of a ridiculously rewarding ongoing collaboration between Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns (The Informant!, as well as the upcoming film Bitter Pill), and one can only hope Burns is able to talk Soderbergh into continuing to make movies in spite of his alleged ‘retirement’ at some point in the next two years or so.  We need more films like this.

#15. The Descendants (Alexander Payne)

A few minor missteps aside, this film feels like a great throwback to the American New Wave films of the 1970s, a sparse, Bob Rafelson-esque tale that I found completely engrossing.  It’s not Payne’s best film (I still maintain that’s Sideways, but to be honest it’s been a while since I’ve seen it), but it’s a sneaky little effort that surprised me.  Typically these big awards-season films are the kind of transparent Oscar fare I’m particularly fond of calling bullshit on, but not this time.  I actually really enjoy this film and honestly don’t understand the backlash.

I almost wish it wasn’t so heavily-favored to win Best Picture (unlike a…certain other film that may or may not be silent).  It seems like that’s what’s garnering a negative reaction.  I wish this was just a movie that somehow managed to find a distributor, that had no big names in it (although Clooney gives a phenomenal performance, don’t get me wrong), that was discovered at a festival by a small indie company like Magnet or IFC and subsequently released on their On-Demand platform and viewed in about half-a-dozen households before being relegated to Netflix Watch Instantly forever.

Because that’s the kind of film this is.  It’s the kind of great, American New Wave classic film Clooney tries to make every time out (and in the case of this year’s Ides of March, falls short of making).  That’s really my only quibble with this film, that I couldn’t discover it for myself.  I had to hear the months of hype leading up to its limited release, but don’t believe the hype.  This isn’t the type of film these awards shows normally champion.  It’s actually really, really good.

#14. Melancholia (Lars Von Trier)

The purest and most accurate portrait of what depression truly feels like that I’ve ever seen.  Its structure is something I initially found problematic, but subsequent viewings have only seen the film grow richer and more textured in my mind.  The first half remains the strongest portion of the film for me.  I love John Hurt’s ridiculous father character, I love Charlotte Rampling’s bitch of a mother and I love Udo Kier’s vindictive wedding planner.  But on top of all of that, Von Trier never loses sight of the troubled woman at the center of this film, played in what has to be the best performance she’s ever given by Kirsten Dunst.  Well, best since Jumanji, at least.

There are a handful of elements in this film that are a touch…problematic.  Oh, you’re going to name the planet that.  Okay, it’s a planet actually named Melancholia – you’re sure that’s not a bit…okay, whatever Lars, sure.  That’s cool, and oh, yeah, by the way Manuel – yes, Cinematographer Manuel Alberto Claro yes you, if you could just shake the shit out of that camera for me, that’d be great.  No, all the time, yeah.  Shake it…yeah, like a salt shaker, you’ve got it…

But in spite of these maddening flourishes – which, on the heels of Antichrist, I suppose I should just be glad no one’s [description of graphic genital mutilation redacted] this time out.

Ultimately, it’s a very good film with a lot of problems that I love mostly because I think Lars Von Trier is a fascinating individual.  I find his manner of dealing with depression (making a pair of almost unbearably-pretentious, frequently gorgeous films) far more constructive and interesting than what I’ve managed to come up with (watch any movies that are not Lars Von Trier movies), and I certainly don’t want to miss an opportunity to encourage him.

Like this, my end-of-the-year list.  Which he will definitely read.

#13. The Trip (Michael Winterbottom)

I initially feared this film would prove to be little more than a one-joke premise stretched too thin and padded to feature length.  I couldn’t have been more wrong.  Winterbottom takes the groundwork laid in 2006′s Tristram Shandy: A Cock & Bull Story and expands upon it in a way that feels genuine and relatable.

As a fan of Steve Coogan already, I don’t know why I was so wary of finally sitting down and watching the thing.  Ultimately, Netflix Watch Instantly and a handful of recommendations coming so closely on the heels of one another from such disparate sources as ‘my own family’ and ‘other people I know’ came together in a perfect storm of “maybe I should sit down and just watch this already.”

And so I did.  I watched it whilst on a trip of mine own, you might say.  I started it in Louisiana at home, watched about an hour, had lunch, rode to the airport in Jackson, MS with my brother, and finished watching it in the Jackson airport as my flight inexplicably stopping in Houston while on the way to Nashville continued to be delayed.

Coming when it did on the heels of 4 days spent at home with my family and away from my friends in Nashville (all 7 of you – and thanks for reading this so far, by the way, high five!), it was really just a case of the right film at the right time.  I saw this exactly when I needed to most and not a moment sooner.  And I suppose that’s really…I don’t know what that means.

“She was only fifteen years old…”

#12. Shame (Steve McQueen)

An exquisitely-acted, harrowing portrait of how the downward spiral of addiction only ever results in total isolation from the world around oneself and a crippling breakdown in communication with the ones you love.

The snubbing of Michael Fassbender would be likely to resonate through the ages as one of the great Oscar snubs in the history of the awards show…if anybody really remembered anything like that.  I mean, sure, I personally remember Paul Giamatti got snubbed of a Best Actor nomination way back in 2004 for Sideways, but really – who else remembers something like that?  Other than maybe Paul Giamatti himself and James Adomian’s impression of him.

But – and I’ve noticed I’ve been doing this a lot more the longer this piece gets – this is not about Paul Giamatti, this is about a movie called Shame which is fresh in my memory and which is an exquisitely-helmed piece of work from a filmmaker who only has one other film to his credit, Hunger, which is similarly well-crafted.

WHOA, SIDEBAR HAPPENING:

I saw this with some friends of mine and we stayed after to listen to a discussion about sex addiction with a couple of sex addiction experts/therapists (I can’t remember which one, probably both).  Anyway, the conversation was largely a constructive piece of work that didn’t really add anything to my enjoyment of the film or its themes but did provide some interesting insight into how everyone else in the theater that afternoon perceived it.

And I’m only going to talk about one person/group of people, and only because they’re not here to defend themselves and in spite of the fact that, if you’re reading this, you don’t deserve to be subjected to this rant.  Basically, what happened was, one man mentioned that he was bothered by what he perceived to be the film’s connotation of gay sex with hitting rock bottom.  He then mentioned that he was, admittedly, a little sensitive to the issue because he was himself a gay man.

I mention this because I hope people aren’t going to take that away from this film.  I find that to be a gross misrepresentation of what the film is about and I find it detracts from any discussion of the film as a piece of art.  Much like it did in the theater that afternoon.

This is not a film constructed to make some kind of political statement about gay culture, or being gay in America, or how America views gay culture, or what have you.  It’s the study of an individual grappling with a particular disorder.  In this film, the character is a straight man – so, naturally, as the addiction progresses he’s driven to do things further outside of his comfort zone to get that thrill he needs.  It’s like a drug, he needs more stimulation to get the same high each time out.

If the character had been a gay man, the finale of the film would have seen him fooling around with a woman for most likely the first time in the whole film – but then if the film had been about a gay man, the conversation would only be about whether the film was implying that all gay men are sex addicts or that only gay men are sex addicts, etcetera.

Point being twofold – 1) that in spite of one surely-bullshit statistic that roughly 50% of the world is homosexual or bisexual that one of these sex addiction therapists dropped during the Q & A, the bulk of the world actually is heterosexual, and Fassbender’s character in the film is as well possibly to reach the largest possible audience, or possibly just because the director of the film (who co-wrote the script with Iron Lady scribe Abi Morgan) thought it would be more interesting or maybe even because they flipped a fucking coin, and 2) that it demeans the art you’re critiquing to approach it as a perceived affront to your way of life above anything else.

And this goes double for all those ornithologists who can’t get over how they’re portrayed by Steve Martin, Owen Wilson and Jack Black in The Big Year as well.  It’s not a movie about people who watch birds, it’s a movie about people.

FIN SIDEBAR.

Shame is an amazing film, and I haven’t even mentioned how adept James Badge Dale (The Pacific, Rubicon) is as playing an absolute cad of a boss or how show-stopping Carey Mulligan’s performance of “New York, New York” is.

If my violent reaction to an innocent question posed by a man who in all likelihood enjoyed the movie is any indication, yeah, I love this film and think it’s incredible.

#11. Bellflower (Evan Glodell)

The most purely vital independent film of the year as far as I’m concerned.  It’s sloppy, overlong, and almost embarrassingly personal, but it’s also a pure distillation of a filmmaker’s vision so specific he even built his own cameras to shoot the damn thing and his own cars to…set fire to things with.

This is going to be a controversial pick or something, right?  I mean, I don’t blame anyone who sits down to watch this movie if they end up hating the shit out of it.  It’s a polarizing thing.  For me – and I’m not proud, I’m just too honest – I get the rage that’s put across in this film.  Not that it’s a pure, like, ode to rage or some grand emo statement of ‘girls are weird, I don’t understand them, I should kill them’ – although there’s certainly a bit of that here.  No, it’s a film that gets across with maddening focus how it feels to be frustrated with everything.  With the world, with culture, with your generation, with your life, with your friends, with everything – it’s about all of that.  It captures the unfocused rage of youth with a startling, unforgettable clarity that I find moving.

It’s also a film that beat Drive to throwing a Chromatics track into the mix (this one uses the exquisite Halloween-y track, “Killing Spree”).  And if only for that – for making me feel like I’m not crazy for having that Italians Do It Better After Dark compilation album permanently in rotation over the past 5 years – this would be a truly special film.  The fact that there’s so much more here to chew on is good, sure, but the reason this film is so high on my list is mostly because – at its heart – it’s just about guys who love to blow shit up.

_______________

Wow, I can exhale now.  Almost 6800 words later, here we are.  It’s almost 1 in the morning and I’m long overdue for some shut-eye.

The goal is to have my Top 10 list up before the weekend.  Perhaps the Oscar nominations inspired me to get this out there today (although I’ve had portions of these write-ups written for weeks now), but either way, we’re dangerously close to nobody caring about the best movies of last year anymore, so I figure better late than never.

Some movies I didn’t see for this list include: A Separation, We Need To Talk About Kevin, Project Nim, Rampart, Tyrannosaur, and probably a few others.  I will see the first…three of those in the next few months.  The latter two, I’m not so sure.  Rampart got a surprisingly tepid response for everything other than the Woody Harrelson performance, and Tyrannosaur – though I love me some Paddy Considine – is allegedly bleak as fuck-all.

So who knows.  I mention them because they’re not showing up in my Top 10.  So don’t get your hopes up, fans of those movies.  Because it’s not happening.  I put my foot down on January 23rd, and this was a completely arbitrary thing I did but I stand by it.  That’s my cut-off date.  Because why not.

2011 In Memoriam, Part I: The Lackluster Year?

Many of these ‘Best of 2011′ lists seem weirdly eager to paint the last 365-day chunk of our lives as one fraught with mediocrity.  Sites like the A.V. Club bemoaned the lack of one truly excellent, consensus-pick Album of the Year (perhaps this stems in part from the Kanye West list-domination at the end of 2010), where I spent the whole year enthralled with an embarrassment of musical riches, from artists as disparate as 2011 newcomers The Weeknd to my own personal AOTY by Real Estate, to that Caretaker album that’s provided some quality nightmare fuel over the past few months with its decaying old record aesthetic.

So really, it’s all about perspective here.  The sheer quantity of great music released this year continues to stagger me.

Meanwhile, films such as The Tree of Life and The Artist are topping the lion’s share of end-of-the-year critical plaudits, while smaller films (such as some of the ones on my list) are largely being overlooked.  Even some of the strongest films of the year have been deeply, deeply flawed efforts.

I ended up well into the triple-digits this year, seeing just a little over 100 films, and learned that if nothing else, the garbage this year was in rare form.

Also, I made a list a few weeks ago about films I wasn’t going to bother with.  The films whose existence I felt some obligation to comment on, but not enough to actually track them down to watch them.  I’m sure it’s as interesting to read as it has been to hear me describe it briefly here.

_____________________

So, without further ado, we’re back to the old Top 30 list.

Let’s begin with some honorable (hona-gah-bull) mentions – basically some titles culled from spots 31-50 on my list, more or less.

Number 31:  13 Assassins, the Takashi Miike film.  An excellently crafted action epic that ultimately was more impressive for the sheer amount of well-staged and shot action on display than it was for any kind of emotional investment in the characters or in their predicament.  Miike creates a truly loathsome villain, and – again – the action sequences in this film are UNREAL, but ultimately when it came time to choose between this film and the one that ended up being #30 on my list, I had to be honest with myself and think, ‘which one of these will I watch again.’  The answer was pretty simple, as I’ve already seen my #30 film twice in theaters.

Number 32: ALSO barely edged out for a spot in my top 30, Warrior was so, like, far-and-away better than I ever could have imagined.  Featuring great performances from Tom Hardy, Joel Edgerton, and especially Nick Nolte (neck-and-neck with Albert Brooks for Best Supporting Actor this year, easily) – this film comes highly recommended.

For a year claimed by many to have been a bad one for movies, I’ve got to say, any year that a pair of films this good don’t crack my top 30 of the year?  Seems pretty damn good to me.

It wasn’t the greatest year for documentaries, but Senna easily stood out from the pack.  I didn’t see The Interrupters – which seems to be one of the best-reviewed ones – but entries from Errol Morris (Tabloid), and Werner Herzog (Cave of Forgotten Dreams 3-D) were good enough without being truly great.  Mark Hartley cast an eye towards exploitation films shot in the Phillippines with Machete Maidens Unleashed – which, though a far cry from his excellent Not Quite Hollywood, is still worth a look-see.  I also haven’t seen Herzog’s Into the Abyss yet.

The one doc I could see possibly even cracking my top 10 based on subject matter alone is the Corman’s World documentary, but alas – I won’t get to see that until it hits home video in a couple of months or so.

The blockbusters:  Super 8, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, Fast Five, Real Steel, Captain America, and Thor all delivered to some degree.  They’re listed in descending order of goodness.  Super 8 would have been better if they’d cut out the alien entirely (although what we’re left with is a strange mash-up of go-for-broke almost Goonies-style excess and weirdly emotional E.T. the Extraterrestrial-level earnestness/whimsy, so, you know, that’s still pretty damn great), I’m glad there are no more Harry Potter movies to sit through but Deathly Hallows Part 2 was quite a fitting end to the series – epilogue and all, Fast Five could have lost half an hour without anyone noticing but is bookended by a pair of the best action sequences of the year, Real Steel was fun as hell while somehow retaining the core thematic elements of the Twilight Zone episode it was adapted from, Captain America had the unenviable task of rendering a static-by-definition character somewhat engaging that it…mostly succeeded at doing, and Thor took a character I had little-to-no interest in and made him one of the most interesting figures in this whole Marvel movie-verse simply by casting Chris Hemsworth.

Source Code was a solid enough little pulp thriller, although not quite what I’d hoped for from Duncan Jones’ follow-up to Moon.  Speaking of low-budget, star-driven, high-concept sci-fi thrillers: The Adjustment Bureau, though silly at times, came dangerously close to sneaking into my Top 30 for the year based largely on the chemistry between Matt Damon and Emily Blunt.

The Ides of March was a bit of a disappointment, but only in the face of my sky-high expectations for it.  It’s basically a modern-day remake of Michael Ritchie’s The Candidate, only nowhere near as good.

Same goes for The Green Hornet, although most people have probably forgotten about that film at this point.  It’s got a lot of problems, but it’s trying something unique enough that I think it should have gotten a little more love.

Crazy Stupid Love, Win Win, The Lincoln Lawyer, The Beaver and Limitless were all quality, well-crafted entries in their respective genres.  In particular, I think The Lincoln Lawyer was kind of fucking fantastic – if a touch formulaic.  The Beaver got a lot of undeserved flak in the wake of Mel Gibson leaving crazy voicemails and all that crap, but it actually turned out pretty great.  Jodie Foster was an inspired choice to direct, really.  This could have all-too-easily turned into a quirky indie comedy piece of garbage but Foster’s direction and Gibson’s performance (and real-life struggles as well) really make the film something that sticks with you.

SIDEBAR:  In fact, can we get a moratorium on all of the Mel Gibson stuff?  He’s made mistakes, but damnit he’s a great actor and a great director and we all make mistakes.  Like, it took how many years for people to get over all the Tom Cruise Scientology stuff?  And he didn’t even make racial slurs or threaten violence towards a loved one. 

My point is simply that, although I don’t agree with what Mel did or the things he said or the way he said them, I empathize with him.  I’m not just trying to focus on the things he did that I liked in the past (Lethal Weapon Road Warrior Maverick Braveheart Conspiracy Theory – yes, I said Conspiracy Theory – Lethal Weapon 2 Lethal Weapon 4 Apocalypto…), and I’m not trying to blindly ignore the downright terrifying amount of verbal abuse he subjected his (now ex-) wife to.  I’m just suggesting maybe we should all be more constructive about the situation and try empathy rather than blithely spouting off pithy one-liners or approaching a new film of his as a vehicle for sarcastic enjoyment and nothing else.

SIDEBAR END.

Take Shelter features one of the most raw, incredible performances of the year from Michael Shannon, but something about it just seemed a little…off to me.  The scenarios at play here felt a touch too contrived at times, in spite of Shannon and Jessica Chastain doing their damnedest to sell this material.  I imagine I’ll return to this film a fair amount in the future.  Terri is another quality indie film with some remarkable performances that’s a lot more problematic than Take Shelter.  Still, I thought lumping them together made a strange sort of poetry, so here that is.

The Artist – expect there to be a lot of talk about this when I get to my #1 movie of the year.  I wouldn’t say this was a disappointment as, outside of all the Awards recognition, it’s not like I was really expecting much from it.  Hazanavicius conjures some indelible imagery, such as Jean Dujardin’s aging silent film star glaring at his shadow cast on the silver screen by the glow of a projector until the shadow walks away from him, but then he has to underline everything with a title card of Dujardin asking the shadow where it thinks it’s going, and calling it a loser with exclamation points.

It’s a silent film executed with a modicum of visual wit and imagination.  I’ll have more to say about this film, and a lot of it will probably come off as overly-harsh, but I did ultimately enjoy the film for what it was – which is a featherweight melodrama I’ll probably never watch again.  As is his wont, I feel Devin Faraci pretty much nails it with his review HERE.

HORROR:  Insidious scared the shit out of me and kind of made me fall in love with Rose Byrne, Five-nal Destination may have been the strongest film of the series in spite of some overly-CGI’d death sequences, and Kill List is a SLOG of a film that makes up for a lot with one of the most warped endings I’ve ever seen.  In fact, I expect I’ll return to Kill List again in the near future to make sure I’m not missing something truly special.  Fact is, it never really got interesting for me until about halfway through, and even then its ending was the only thing that truly got my pulse racing.  A Horrible Way To Die came dangerously close to being one of the worst movies of the year, but somehow I ended up liking it a good bit.  Couldn’t tell you why.  Tucker and Dale vs. Evil was a whole hell of a lot of fun throughout, but kind of lost me by the end.  Still, well worth checking out.

Hobo With A Shotgun I re-watched again recently, and it’s awesome.  It’s a perfectly trashy and silly 1980s throwback that features a game-for-anything Rutger Hauer in the lead role and downright Troma-esque levels of gore.  Grindhouse really is the gift that just keeps on giving.  Closer to Planet Terror (which I seem to be in the minority on, but I think it’s kind of incredible) than Death Proof, I find even the notion that people are making throwback films of this ilk nothing short of invigorating.

Trespass featured the year’s best Nicolas Cage performance while almost being a parody of home invasion thrillers (which the script may actually have been, not sure Schumacher had any idea though).

And finally, Your Highness was probably the film I loved that got the most shit this year, like all year long.  It’s not one of the 30 best of the year, but it’s exactly the movie these guys were trying to make.  It’s a pitch-perfect 1980s fantasy film.  Sure, a lot of those were terrible, but this film replicates many of the moments of stoned genius those films at their best (KRULL, I’m looking at you) would occasionally stumble upon.

Disappointments, AKA: Cranky Old Man Time:

Listed in No Particular Order…

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – Fincher pulls out the whole toolbox to build a beautiful-looking house with rotten foundations.  The best-made film on this list of disappointments, but one that’s also torpedoed by its inane source material.  It’s not a total failure, and I’ve cooled on my dislike of it recently – it’s still not as bad as Panic Room – but the onus was on Fincher to take this material and mold it into something greater and he failed at that.

Cowboys & Aliens – although I like this more than most people seem to, there’s no denying it just doesn’t quite work.  And for some reason it made my parents hate Paul Dano.

Carnage – Somehow, even at 71 minutes this is a film that over-stays its welcome.

The Future – The best film I’m listing as a disappointment.  Occasional flashes of brilliance can’t quite overcome the frustrating quirkiness of its leads.  It has some great moments, some moments of odd beauty that crop up here and there, but I don’t find the whimsical wanderlust of these characters relatable at all.

In Time – Would love to see a sequel to this film that realizes the potential behind this core concept.  Or, more likely, a remake in about 15 years or something.

Paul – The sheer amount of talent involved with this thing…I still don’t understand how they managed to cobble together something this lazy.  Almost worth seeing for Jason Bateman’s performance, which I kind of loved.

The Muppets – because I watched The Muppet Movie immediately prior to seeing this, WHICH NO ONE SHOULD EVER DO EVER BECAUSE NO OTHER MUPPET MOVIE WILL EVER BE THAT GOOD.  More importantly, this thing was supposedly a comedy but I only laughed, like, maybe a couple of times towards the beginning?  Jokes aren’t well-executed all the time, but most of the time I felt like they weren’t even there.  Add in half-assed musical numbers like “Me Party” and Chris Cooper’s cringe-inducing rap number, and the whole thing just feels off.  It feels like it was compromised by studio tinkering or what-have-you, but there’s not enough here to make me think some unfettered adaptation of Stoller and Segel’s original draft would be much of an improvement.

Beginners – Much like The Future, contains flashes of brilliance and some incredible performances that ultimately prove to be in service of…yet another indie quirkfest only barely distinguishable from a million others.  Melanie Laurent, however, is the most beautiful woman on the face of the planet.

Sucker Punch – Yep.  I was looking forward to this.  I look forward to revisiting it someday, but I’m waiting for the price to drop on the Blu-Ray.  I’d imagine it’s going to take some time for this to happen, as Warner Bros. has some serious costs to recoup.

I Saw the Devil – I mentioned this last year, just wanted to mention it again because it’s been popping up on some Best of 2011 lists.  A terrible, amoral slog from a filmmaker far too talented for these monkeyshines.  AVOID.

Movies I Expected To Hate, Didn’t Quite:

Straw Dogs remake.  Still very bad, don’t get me wrong, but it has James Woods and some novelty value in relocating the original film to the American south.

Bucky Larson: Born to be a Star – yup.  I laughed a couple of times.  There’s very little that separates this film from a movie like Grandma’s Boy (which a whole hell of a lot of people seem to love and which I…like, it’s okay) or Joe Dirt (which is just awesome).  Admittedly, Swardson’s character is grating and awful, but Don Johnson, Stephen Dorff and Christina Ricci pick up a lot of the slack.  There are some legitimately funny and strange non sequitur gags like how Ricci practices to be a waitress (by stepping over things like taped-down pink footballs while carrying a tray of soup) or how Kevin Nealon (Bucky’s roommate in the film) sees Bucky crying and yells at him for eating his grapes while also assuming that’s why Bucky’s crying in the first place.  It’s not a great movie or even a good one, honestly, but there were films this year far more deserving of the critical outrage this film garnered.

Mars Needs Moms.  Although I’m not sure why I watched it in the first place, it entertained me.  I’m also not sure who thought this would be a good financial investment.

_________________

And with that, I will return soon with my Top 30 Films of 2011.

After that, I expect I’ll disappear for a while.

Black Mirror (2011)

Created by Charlie Brooker, Black Mirror is an anthology series that aired this past December on BBC 4.  Each episode deals with some technological aspect of our lives today taken to a borderline-absurd conclusion.  It’s a bleak, cynical look at how the world works that I also found weirdly optimistic.

I’ve viewed all three episodes now, and I’m really almost at a loss.  I’d stack any single one of these three episodes up against many of the best films of this year, let alone the best television.

Some of you may know Charlie Brooker from…well, if you live in Great Britain, that might help as he’s apparently a much larger personality over there.  All I’d known him from was 2008′s zombie miniseries Dead Set – a show I loved pretty unabashedly in spite of the zombie oversaturation that was beginning to take over the culture at the time.

Anyway, in the midst of all this end of the year list-making brouhaha and chicanery, I’ve been looking for something to at least distract me from things like, for instance, still working in a grocery store.  I’ve also been looking for something to inspire me, something to keep me motivated to create, and really something to convince me there’s still new things out there to explore.  New stories to tell and new ways to tell them.

So that’s where I’m coming from when I rave about this show like I have above and like I’m going to below.

The first episode, “The National Anthem,” conjures an eerily-plausible scenario in which the Princess of England is kidnapped by terrorists and the video with their ransom demands posted onto YouTube.  They only have one demand, and it’s very…specific.

What follows is a wryly comic and ultimately kind of emotionally wrenching exploration of just how easy it is to place a figure as public as the Prime Minister of Britain in a no-win situation.  What begins as an absurdly dark joke – even the prime minister thinks his aides are pulling one over on him at first – quickly becomes an all-too-real reality.  It’s the kind of dark comedy Chris Morris explored in his series, Jam, rendered in a much more palatable fashion that somehow makes it all the more effective.

“Fifteen Million Merits,” the second episode – in addition to featuring Rupert Everett as a Simon Cowell-esque judge on a wildly popular reality show – plays like a bleak version of Ernest Cline’s novel Ready Player One.  Set in a future where people largely live their lives within a simulation of reality, riding exercise bikes to provide their own power and using that power largely to play video games and watch mind-numbing reality TV programming, this segment is the longest of the three episodes.

It takes some time to set up this world and all its idiosyncrasies – but as the plot began to unfold, I could feel a wicked smile creeping across my face.

The plot really kicks in when a beautiful girl shows up and inspires our main character to buy her a ticket to audition for the American Idol-esque Hot Shot.  Of course, things don’t go as expected, and the events that follow build up to a truly stirring finale that resolves itself with a bittersweet punchline of an ending.

And finally, the “The Entire History of You” – which features Attack the Block‘s Jodie Whittaker alongside Jerry Bruckheimer-favorite Toby Kebbell – is just a gut-wrenching thing.  It takes place in a near future where all of our memories are recorded onto a tiny chip implanted just below a person’s ear called a ‘Grain.’  Using a tiny remote, one can rewind and replay ones’ own memories, and they can see other peoples’ memories through their Grains as well.

Kebbell’s character suspects his wife (Whittaker) of having an affair, and the fallibility of memory is just one of the many themes this episode explores in an unflinchingly accurate and altogether disconcerting manner.  It posits the existence of such a device as the ‘Grain’ – probably something we’ll be entirely possible of creating and mass producing before long – and explores the problems it could cause and how its existence could irrevocably warp our day-to-day life.

There’s a sequence in this episode that will probably haunt me forever.  At first we see Whittaker and Kebbell’s characters having sex from each others’ points of view.  It’s passionate, it’s intense, they’re both really into it and breathing heavy – and then we cut to a shot of the two of them lying side by side, eyes glazed with the images of the two of them having sex with each other years earlier, Kebbell absently thrusting until he’s done, neither of them engaged in the act, both simply going through the motions.

That sequence is essentially the series as a whole in microcosm.  It questions the full-speed-ahead progress of technology (a theme which makes it dovetail nicely with this week’s epic viewing of Jurassic Park on Blu Ray), while still illustrating in a not entirely cynical manner that people will always be the same flawed creatures dealing with the same problems in the same flawed manner.

It’s a sentiment I find strangely comforting.

A Book I Did Not Read

On My Consumption of Media

I take in a lot of…stuff in any given year.  Like, a whole lot.  I’ve seen 95 movies that were released this year, and I’ve written about probably twice that many from prior years just on this blog alone.

I tried to stick to my 100-books-a-year tack I started and through sheer stubbornness somehow accomplished in 2010.  But, alas, with only 2 short days left in the year (days on which I have plans), I’m tapping out in submission.  Coming up just short, after experiencing novels in pretty much every format imaginable (free iPhone Kindle app, audio-book, actual hard-bound physical copy, etc), I’m stuck at 94.

This is a respectable number.  It’s not my goal, but it’s ludicrous enough for my purposes.  If I made t-shirts that said, “I read 94 books this year,” people would ask, “did you really?”  And I would offer a smug, self-satisfied grin and answer their question in the affirmative, tacking on an obligatory “but it wasn’t easy” or something like “you betcha, and boy are my arms tired” – or what have you.

Books I started but didn’t finish (that I don’t know when I’ll get around to finishing): 

War & Peace (that is a lot of book), I got about 129 pages in, give or take.  Proposed the notion of a summer spent reading all 1400+ pages of this way back in June on this very blog.  Maybe one day.  Any book where drunk people fight bears at parties can’t be all bad.

Number9Dream by David Mitchell, I read Part One of this, “Panopticon,” way back in March or something, and just set it aside and forgot about it for a while.  I’ve noticed that I tend to finish books quicker when I’m using a cool bookmark, so I blame the Sport Clips Haircuts card I chose to bookmark this one with.  I’ll get around to it sometime next year I hope.  I read Cloud Atlas back in 2010 and subsequently snagged copies of some of the rest of his books – this one, Black Swan Green, and this year’s rapturously-received The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.  There’s a lesson here: bookmark selection is important.

There are, hang on – let me count these real quick…four books I’m 100+ pages into, each of them.  These are just going to kick off the list for next year, as I have, like, legitimate things to take care of today and over the next two days.

And I’m not going to go crazy and list all of the books I read – not because I’m cheating (if including screenplays is cheating, then including Richard Brautigan books is also cheating, plus I only read like 4 or 5 screenplays all year) – but because that would take a really long time to do and nobody wants to read all of that.

So, without further ado, I give you…

The Two Worst Novels I Read This Year:

1. Midnight Movie by Tobe Hooper & Alan Goldsher

2. My Dead Dad was in ZZ Top by Jon Glaser

Books are hard for me to hate, because by the time I’m done with them there’s a level of personal investment in play that I don’t put into movies or music anywhere near as much.  Both of these novels are works I found truly risible but somehow still finished anyway.

Glaser’s little jokebook was painfully unfunny.  I’m all for humor that straddles the line between fiction and non-fiction, or even humor that tries to sell its outrageousness as the truth with a straight-face (John Hodgman is very good at this), but this was just a smug and off-putting piece of work.  A quick read, but the man should probably stick to what he does best.  His show, Delocated, had a freaking hilarious first season, and I look forward to sitting down and checking out the second season at some point as well, but this book is garbage.

Tobe Hooper’s one of my favorite filmmakers, on the other hand, and in spite of really really wanting to love his novel, I ultimately found nothing of merit in the proceedings.  The entire premise (young filmmaker makes short film so good it turns everyone into zombies, has to somehow remake it when he’s older and washed-up in order to save the world) is self-serving and feels oddly like wish-fulfillment.  Hooper (and Goldsher) fashion their story as a would-be Stephen King-type-deal, but fail to present Hooper and the handful of other characters as anything other than caricatures.  It’s House of Leaves meets John Dies at the End, basically, only if both of those books were terrible.

And now it’s on to a much less smack-talk-y category:

The 10 Best Novels I Read This Year:

1. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick

This began as a read borne of something like obligation.  I’d read Man in the High Castle last year, and I liked it a lot actually but I wasn’t anywhere near as versed in the lore of Philip K. Dick as I became over the course of this year.  I had this book from the Library of America that collected 4 of his novels (Castle, Eldritch, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and the still-unread Ubik), and this one was next.

I figured I wanted to get to the Blade Runner one, and I didn’t want to just gloss over this one, placed smack in the middle of the two.  So basically, what began as mild disinterest turned into shock and amazement, then fascination with the author, then something approaching obsession.  I spent a lot of money at second-hand (and first-hand) booksellers this year, and every store I visited I went straight for the sci-fi section to see what novels of his they had for sale, and how many I could possibly purchase.  I’ve accumulated quite the collecion at this point – what, with each of the 5 volumes of short stories Citadel Press put out, plus the 3 Library of America collections along with a dozen more paperback copies and the just-released-this-year Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, edited by PKD megafan Jonathan Lethem. And I’d probably add either We Can Build You, Electric Sheep or The World Jones Made to this top 10 of the year were I to allow an author to appear on this list more than once, but I’d rather spread the wealth.

This novel has had an incalculable influence on science fiction over the years – much like the bulk of this man’s work.  Even when not directly adapted, the influence of a novel like Lies, Inc. (whose plot synopsis is all I’ve read) on a show like this year’s god-awful Terra Nova is so evident it approaches plagiarism.  This novel most calls to mind the labyrinthine, in-and-out-of-consciousness narrative of 2010′s Inception.

While I think this novel tells a much more haunting, beautiful story, it’s not the case where someone could simply adapt this into a film today as-is and it would be incredible.  Much of the novel is either dated or – and this is something Stephen King also specializes in – the kind of concept that works on paper but doesn’t translate well to a visual medium.  As a novel – like, as a journey from page 1 to page 195 (or page 235 to page 490, in the case of my copy) – it’s handily the best thing I read this year, and in the running with Blood Meridian and Kavalier & Clay for my favorite novel, like, ever.

2. Flats by Rudy Wurlitzer

Rudy Wurlitzer’s Flats is a masterpiece of some kind, and I’m not sure which kind.  Featuring a shape-shifting lead character who changes his name throughout from city to city* – the novel is dense, even at 115-some-odd pages.  A true, unfiltered vision, I’ve no idea what this thing is truly about but I’ll be damned if it isn’t one of the most singular achievements I’ve ever seen in any medium.  Having come to know Wurlitzer through his screenplay work on films like Two-Lane Blacktop, Walker, and Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, and even through other books of his such as the comparatively simple narratives of Nog and Slow Fade, this novel was a revelation.

*Not, like, as he travels from city to city.  Like, his name is one city, and then his name is another city.

3. Cannery Row by John Steinbeck

Steinbeck’s Cannery Row is a novel that crafts a cast of unique and fascinating characters and details how they interact with each other – most vividly how some of the homeless folks try to throw a surprise party for Doc.  They succeed, sort of.  It’s light-hearted at times, but sketches its characters well enough that in spite of how madcap things can get, they still feel genuine.  Did I mention it’s a quick read?  It’s like 120 pages or something but that’s more than enough space for Steinbeck to sketch a complete and believable world.

4. Norwood by Charles Portis

Portis’s first novel, Norwood, is a wry comic adventure that I may have breezed through a little too haphazardly upon first blush.  It’s a novel that paints its lead character as a bit of a dimwit but never demeans his integrity.  They apparently made a movie of this with Glen Campbell and Kim Darby (hot on the heels of their roles in an adaptation of Portis’s True Grit).  Go figure.  It’s a sweet little novel whose slightness is deceptive.

5. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Um, it’s The Great Gatsby.  I’d never read it before this year.  It’s really fucking good.  They teach it in schools, none of which I attended.

6. So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away by Richard C. Brautigan

Brautigan’s final work aches with melancholy.  It’s seemingly-light stuff, but having read many of his novels this year (In Watermelon Sugar and The Abortion are also well-worth checking out), this is the one I plan to return to the most.  This is the one that sticks with me – and not just because it’s the one I read most recently, but because it feels like a pure, no-frills effort on his part.  Where I sometimes find his cleverness distancing, here everything is dialed-back to tell a muted, simple story of a boy dealing with regret.  It’s heartbreaking stuff.

7. Robert Altman: An Oral History by Mitchel Zuckoff   (Audiobook)

Listening to the audiobook for the Oral History of Robert Altman was a truly unique, wonderful experience for me.  By hearing many of his friends and colleagues talk about the man in their own words – sometimes in their own voices – I really felt like I got to know the man.  And I learned a few things about his body of work that I didn’t know going in.  Sure, it’s about 20 hours in its unabridged form, but it’s a true celebration of an idiosyncratic individual and one that takes a warts-and-all approach to telling the story of his life that I found genuine and refreshing.

8. Elmer McCurdy: The Misadventures in Life and Afterlife of an American Outlaw by Mark Svenvold

Svenvold’s take on the incredible true story of Elmer McCurdy (mostly of his corpse) didn’t really gel with me at first.  Ultimately I just see the story in a different way, having been familiar with most of the details beforehand.  For now, this is the best, most cohesive way to really dig deep into the idiosyncrasies of this story – and it’s such a great story that, for me, it’s hard to screw it up.

9. Writing Movies for Fun and Profit by Thomas Lennon & Robert Ben Garant [TIE]

Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant’s how-to guide to getting a script produced/made in Hollywood is something I feel confident enough in my knowledge of the craft and the industry to label downright indispensible.  It’s kind of…yeah, it’s kind of incredible.

9. Making Movies by Sidney Lumet   [TIE]

Lumet’s Making Movies, although a bit dated in the technical aspects, is nonetheless a remarkable glimpse at both the working methods of Lumet in particular and at the filmmaking process boiled down to its bare essentials as well.  Even as he details movies like A Stranger Among Us or Daniel, which I don’t really care about, it’s never less than fascinating.

10. Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King

King’s short story collection is fascinating, and particularly in its strong first entry: 1922, which concerns the murder of a woman by her husband, and the subsequent attempts to cover it up made by father and son as the story takes turn after turn deeper into the macabre.  Big Driver is an almost unrelenting descent into grisly descriptions of events that leaves you even more unsettled in the wake of its ostensibly happy ending.  Fair Extension is the slightest of these stories, and plays almost like a segment of Night Gallery (and a particularly bleak one, at that).  A Good Marriage concludes the collection on a suitably bleak, bitter note.  All of these stories work the way King’s best works have over the years – they take relatable characters, place them in situations as believable as they are terrifying, and then resolve these situations in a manner that assures no one escapes unscathed.  A harrowing collection of tales that’s hard to put down and even harder to shake.

_______________

So let’s see, I limited it to one book per author, but only Dick (11 novels, 1 book of short stories) and Brautigan (6 novels, 1 book of short stories) were really in danger of making this list twice, largely due to the fact that I read so much of their stuff this year.

Other Great Reads/Listens:  John Hodgman’s That Is All, Charles Bukowski’s Hollywood, George Saunders’ Pastoralia, Alan Partridge’s audio book reading of his autobiography I, Partridge: We Need to Talk About Alan, the Andy Milligan biography The Ghastly One, David Grann’s collection of non-fiction essays The Devil & Sherlock Holmes, Wurlitzer’s Quake, J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories, and the most recent Thomas Pynchon novel, Inherent Vice.

2012 should prove to be an even more difficult year for me as far as reading my annual 100 books goes.  Not merely because I’ll be much busier than I typically am, what with hopefully landing a new job, breaking in a new car, and both writing and shooting many more shorts and hopefully putting together a feature – but most importantly, I’ve got to finish everything before December 21st, because that’s like when the world ends and stuff.

___________

One final note – I’m waiting on these films to finalize my top 30+ whatever list of the year:  A Separation, Shame, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and The Artist.  And I’m still catching up on a few, but yeah – just a reminder that this is still happening.

The Christmas Day Quadruple-Feature-Stravaganza 2011

Given that circumstance precluded me from going home for Christmas, I decided it might be high time to live out something of a lifelong dream of mine.  That would be, of course, the dream of actually living in a movie theater (ostensibly one that’s also always showing films I want to see). I would also like to live in a Major League Baseball stadium – these are the kind of dreams we have as children, most people forget them or grow out of them or grow bitter at their failure to achieve them.  I persevere, apparently.

Call it a Christmas present to myself, call it a great way to catch up on a lot of movies I need to see for my end-of-the-year list, call it whatever, I’m going to call it the Christmas Day Quadruple-Feature-Stravaganza and I guess you could stop me but why would you really want to?

12:35 PM.  Large tub of popcorn (free refills), medium drink (free refills), and 3-D glasses in hand, I sauntered down the escalator on my way to a little film called…

The Darkest Hour (Chris Gorak)

This was shot in 3-D, from what I can gather, and it looks good.  Produced by Timur Bekmambetov (aka the Mole People’s Hollywood emissary), this film takes a high-concept idea and executes it on what had to have been a limited budget with a weirdly-established cast and, unfortunately, a really lazy script.  I mean, like, first-draft lazy.

At 90 minutes (if that), this is a film that is at least aware of the kind of film it is.  It’s a silly, high-concept, B-movie that never tries to rise above that, outside of transparently attempting to set up a sequel.  The action sequences are occasionally inventive, and the aliens themselves are well-designed and even genuinely  menacing once you finally get to see them.  In fact, that’s probably one of the chief achievements this film deserves credit for – making CGI beasts-we-can’t-see into a genuinely threatening presence.  So much so, even, that when we do see what they look like – even though it’s a little cheesy – it’s not distracting.  It feels organic to what these creatures are and how they operate.  Also, the way they kill people – by turning them into ash?  Never gets old.

Make no mistake, though, this is not a particularly good movie.  It’s a novel concept executed through a series of moments repetitive of sundry other films, but I found it enjoyable enough.

As a first film in a four-film marathon, its effects on me would prove to be essential to making it through the next film in the queue.  This is a film that reminded me how much I love just about any movie.  I can rationalize a bad movie into being good in my head and maybe even in public sometimes (see: Southland Tales), and this film is also one that, in spite of being more than aware of its myriad failures, I’d choose to celebrate for its meager successes.

This is a film that brings a cool concept to the table, some nifty CGI effects to do it with in quality 3-D, and an endearing willingness to kill off just about any character whenever they so choose.  The acting isn’t great because I’d imagine there’s not much to these characters on the page, but it’s passable enough that you feel it when major characters get killed.

I don’t really recommend this film, but it’s a passable time-waster if it’s on HBO in the future.  The 3-D is pretty great, so a matinee might be worth your time, or maybe you live in a world where dollar-theaters have 3-D capabilities.  I enjoyed myself, but I can’t give this higher than a C+

Which brings me to 3:00 PM sharp, when I sat down to watch the new David Fincher joint:

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (David Fincher)

David Fincher has been on a bit of a roll since…well, since Zodiac in 2007, really.  The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was a film that – at the time – I thought was a missed opportunity and a bit of a snooze.  In hindsight, the film has aged well – its missteps minor in retrospect.

The Social Network was another great film – a fascinating story, well-told, where Fincher took a great script and brought it fully-realized to the screen.

This film, on the other hand, is the worst film Fincher has made to-date.  On par with the annoyingly-CGI-zoom-heavy Panic Room, and more than a cut below the wildly underrated Alien 3, Fincher has delivered a tepid, poorly-paced adaptation of the novel that comes alive occasionally only in spite of itself.

Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara and…well, pretty much all of the performances here are well-executed.  Mara especially is equal parts alluring and vicious, uncompromising and vulnerable throughout.  Her performance as Lisbeth Salander is one that will probably be recognized come awards season – and should.

The film around these actors is a confused, muddled mess.  Thematically incoherent and structurally incompetent, with a pair of obnoxiously-protracted bookends that do little to serve the story (and, if anything, short-change the characters), The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is a major disappointment.

Much of the first half of the film is split between Craig and Mara’s stories, intercut with little effect or purpose, and the denouement only serves to further story lines that aren’t just superfluous to the story, they actively lessen its impact.  Particularly the sub-plot/tangent regarding Daniel Craig’s character losing his job as a result of a libel suit brought against him by this Wennerstrom guy.  This is supposed to make Craig’s character sympathetic, when really he screwed himself over by not checking his sources, but whatever – we all make mistakes, I can relate to that.  He screwed up, I empathize with that because he seems to realize that’s what happened.

But then, in the protracted finale, Lisbeth Salander borrows about 50 grand from him, forges an identity, and essentially robs this Wennerstrom guy of all the money he’d been embezzling.  Again, embezzling’s bad, I’m not the biggest fan of this Wennerstrom guy but whatever.  I’m a little bothered that such a strong female protagonist is going out of her way to prove herself to Craig’s character by restoring his name so he can keep running his liberal magazine, but whatever.  They’re in love, she thinks, whatevs.

And then Wennerstrom gets shot.  Like, three times in the face, as a direct result of this.  So Salander gets this guy killed while trying to – what – get Craig to keep liking her?  Stick it to the men in power who abuse their authority?  Seems a lot closer to the former when she shows up at his place with a nice new jacket for him, only to see he’s back in the Robin Wright (Penn?) saddle again.  Basically, this entire denouement recasts everyone in the film as grossly unsympathetic, self-centered monsters heedless of the effects their actions have on others.

The meat of this film is in the middle, and it’s a compelling enough cold-case murder mystery but nothing spectacular.  Do I think The Lincoln Lawyer had a more engaging mystery element that was more integral to the plight of a more relatable and compelling protagonist?  Without hesitation, yes.

But I don’t want this to turn into a series of smack-downs in which I name films that are better than this one.  That would take a long time, and wouldn’t really get us anywhere.

The subject matter (rape-revenge/serial-killer plots) is pure pulp.  Like, disposable, provocative, trash more or less.  And that’s okay.  That’s a perfectly all right thing to be.  But Fincher and screenwriter Steven Zaillian seem to shy away from the inherent pulpiness of their material here.  They seem to be trying to turn it into a prestige picture or whatever, and that’s a shame.  The film has a lot of atmosphere, and at times verges on taking a turn straight into the horror genre, which would have been great if anyone involved had had the balls to take it there.  What we’re left with is a lot of style in service of precious little substance.

At 90, 95 minutes – maybe even 100?  With a focus on the mystery and a lot of the first half of the movie dispensed of in dialogue between Craig’s Blomkvist and Mara’s Salander characters, this could have been a much, much stronger movie.  So much here feels inessential, it’s maddening.

And what frustrates me most about this film is that it seems people are receiving this relatively well.  Like, people already like the book so it’s going to make money.  Critics seem to be giving it a pass as ‘minor Fincher, but still better than most.’  I do not understand this impulse.  Fincher has made a film devoid of personality, as bland as the poster above.   It seems a lot of people are mistaking a handsomely-mounted production for an actually good film.

I walked out of this film wondering why David Fincher would make it.  A film so lazy it’s hard to label it anything, but ‘misanthropic’ is close enough I guess.  In the wake of something as goofy and endearing as The Darkest Hour, this film did a real good job of sucking the wind out of my sails.  Hell, I almost feel like Fincher made this film just to make that trailer.  C

Speaking of trailers, the one for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy got my heart pounding, my brain all tingly and I think I may have grown a full bushy beard there for a moment.

After this, it was on to the real reason for the season.  The Steven Spielberg double-feature to end/salvage the day.  And at 7:15, I settled in for both the 3rd entirely-different set of previews (thank God), and a little film called:

War Horse (Steven Spielberg)

This film exists on the opposite side of the spectrum from Fincher’s film in literally every single aspect.  From the cinematography to the score to the story to the fully-realized vision of the filmmaker on display to even the method of shooting the damn thing (Fincher’s 4K Red Camera v. Spielberg’s 35 mm film), this film is a remarkable achievement.

Honestly?  I’m going to have this on my end of the year list, so I don’t want to go to-much in-depth here.  Just a few key things I want to go into – mostly, Janusz Kaminski’s work here.  Here’s a guy who made Crystal Skull look occasionally like a pile of dog-shit while trying to approximate that widescreen, Technicolor vibe Spielberg was going for.  This time out, he’s figured out how to lense such an approximation properly – rendering scenes like the grand homecoming finale as pitch-perfect renditions of these 1950s epics Spielberg grew up on.

The horse is never over-anthropomorphized, and Spielberg shoots WWI warfare in much the same way he shot WWII – that is to say, it is terrifying and crazy and claustrophobic and harrowing and masterfully done.

And…yeah, I’ll talk much more about this sometime in the middle of January, once I’m able to see a few more films (Shame, A Separation, The Artist, etc.) that stand a good chance of being awesome.

This was the best movie I saw on Christmas.  It made the entire four-movie, 12-hour ordeal worth it, and had me emotional more or less throughout (except when the asshole behind me was kicking my seat during the Benedict Cumberbatch charge).

I highly, highly recommend this film.  It worked for me without seeming too treacly, although as an earnest film, it’s certainly ripe for mockery.  That doesn’t make it any less of an achievement.  A-

And finally, at 10:10 PM, I sat down for a film starring the time’s namesake himself:

The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn (Steven Spielberg)

Fatigue was beginning to set in.

It’s one thing to see multiple films in one day.  I did it with Wanted and Wall E in 2008, I did it with Juno, Sweeney Todd, and Walk Hard in 2007, and I’m sure I’ve done it countless other times since (Contagion/Attack the Block earlier this year, actually).

But 4 films in the theater – which turns into a 12-hour ordeal – is borderline-insane.

So, here’s another Spielberg film (scripted by Steven Moffat!!, Edgar Wright!!, and Joe Cornish!!), and one that is kind of…insane.  He is clearly having the time of his life making this movie, and I found it kind of invigorating, even if my eyes were occasionally too drowsy to follow some of the action (particularly in the super-long-take chase scene through the town towards the end).

This film is a living, breathing, mad thing that succeeds largely on the strength of its setpieces more than anything else.  Whatever the writing team conjured up for a story has been hammered down into only the essentials, and the pace of the film benefits from this immeasurably.

Personally, and I could be crazy (I am crazy), but I kind of picked up on some of the individual strengths of the writers throughout.  You’ve got some of the slap-stick, quick-witted comedy of Edgar Wright – particularly in the interplay between Thompson and Thomson (Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, natch), you’ve got the story-spread-out-over-centuries-of-time narrative devisings of Steven Moffat, and you’ve got the air-tight plot construction Joe Cornish brought to Attack the Block earlier this year.

It all adds up to a really fun, silly cartoon of an action movie that’s a bit of fluff and occasionally indulges in puerile, childish gags throughout.  It’s the kind of movie I could see myself watching 800 times when I was little.  It’s a breathless adventure film that, honestly, reminds me more of 1941 than any other Spielberg film.  It retains a lot of the comic sensibility of that film (including a bit that spoofs Jaws), and I’m intending that as pretty high praise.  B+

__________________

The night before, I saw Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, but I’ll be writing a lot more about that on my end of the year list (I really, really, really liked it), and a 35 mm print of a little film called Gremlins at the Belcourt theater.

Which, as far as that goes, let me just say: there are Christmas movies, and then there is Gremlins.  Nothing gets me in the Christmas spirit like mega-downer Phoebe Cates in Gremlins.  Not to mention, Billy’s parents look just like my grandparents.  Also, this film’s structure – like, the setting, the characters, the situation, etcetera – is a staggeringly incalculable influence on everything I write and I honestly never made that connection.

Anyway, I hope everybody had a very Merry Christmas and maybe I’ll see some of you for New Year’s.

Pictured: A Film With Merit

The Year In Remakes:

We survived it.  We survived the worst Hollywood can dish out.

A pair of painfully inessential remakes (The Thing and Straw Dogs) were released this year, and quickly forgotten by just about everyone.  Both performed poorly at the box office in spite of the mildly interesting tweaks each brought to the table, and hopefully this article of mine is the last anyone speaks of either of them.

The Thing, for starters, presented itself as a prequel to the 1982 film (itself a remake).  Essentially about the Norwegian team that originally discovered the creature in the ice, the film is mildly entertaining in spite of itself.  The CGI creature effects occasionally give way to some interesting practical F/X work, and in spite of the film’s inane adherence to the formula of Carpenter’s film there are a few novel touches sprinkled throughout.

So it could have been a lot worse.  It doesn’t sully the memory of the original by lifelessly recreating scenes and sequences wholesale.  It’s just a dull monster movie, full of poorly-sketched characters and silly-looking effects. It’s harmless.

Straw Dogs is a bit more…hair-pully-outy.

Rod Lurie’s film transplants the story to the rural American South, and transforms the David Sumner character from Dustin Hoffman’s mathematician to James Marsden’s screenwriter.  This offers Lurie a chance to spell out all of the subtext of the original just in case anybody missed it, and it also grants him the opportunity to rid the film of any and all ambiguity.

This has the unfortunate, and completely, like, 100% unforseeable side effect of robbing the film of any emotional or psychological impact.  Rod Lurie didn’t like the original Straw Dogs.  He didn’t like it so much that he had to make another version of the story that made sense to him.  I’m not trying to make light of Rod Lurie’s intellect by saying this, but rather trying to highlight just how incredible the original Straw Dogs is.  This is just Lurie’s way of coping with what that film did to him.

So I can’t hate this film like I thought I would when it was first announced. The change in scenery and the presence of some actors I’m quite fond of (Walton Goggins, JAMES WOODS?!) renders the film at least palatable.

And, you know, it has CGI deer.  Think of what Peckinpah could have done with the technology we have today.

____________

The Five Worst Films of 2011

I did not see a handful of true, no-doubt-about-it stinkers this year.  Typically I go out of my way to subject myself to the latest Adam Sandler offerings, but even I couldn’t muster the courage to sit through Just Go With It or Jack and Jill. Not to mention the Sandler-produced Bucky Larson: Born To Be A Star.

My Bottom Four are truly horrendous.  Like, the worst of the worst.  It hurts my brain to know that there were probably many other films released this year that were actually worse than these.

My #5 is…well, let’s discuss it, shall we?

I remember...like, there was darkness...and...and maybe some vomit...like, cause the devil...

#5. The Rite (Mikael Hafstrom)

On the heels of the solid 1408 and the buried-for-a-reason? Shanghai, Hafstrom returned to theaters this year with a film about a Catholic priest and an exorcism, and based on a true story and, like, he gets possessed, and, like, there’s a young priest who, like, is losing his faith and Alice Braga?  And yeah.

Boring, forgettable, and far too languidly-paced at nearly 2 hours long, this is a film lacking visual invention or even narrative competence.  I remember a few things from this movie, here they are, in order of how I remember them.

1. Anthony Hopkins is in it.

2.

What was I doing in January?  Drinking?  Not enough, apparently.

From the Man Who Brought You Homeward Bound II: Lost in San Francisco

#4. Shark Night 3D (David R. Ellis)

A movie with this title that is rated PG-13 is a crime against the gods of cinema.

In fact, let me just get this out there.  David R. Ellis, I believed in you.  You directed Final Destination 2, which was an incredibly gory, silly, and just plain fun horror movie.  You staged inventive death sequences, you weren’t afraid to play up the gallows humor, and you utilized gore in an appropriately gruesome manner, while never going too far over the top with it.

And you’re great at titling films.  Snakes on a Plane?  This?

But it’s like, now you come up with the title and then you stop.  Snakes on a Plane was dull and lazy.  This time out, you chickened out and gave the studio the PG-13 3-D horror movie they wanted.  And, to the surprise of absolutely no one, nobody cared.

The script for this film is muddled and confused.  What starts as a typical “dead teenager movie” gives way to a weird torture-porn thing that’s so poorly thought out it conjures the notion of screenplay-as-Madlib.

You strand talented actors like Donal Logue and Sara Paxton (also in this year’s The Innkeepers which I sadly have not had a chance to see yet), and even at 79 minutes you make a film that just DRAGS interminably.

And, surprisingly, this wasn’t even the worst film opening the weekend it was released.  But I wouldn’t want to ruin the surprise.

The Only Film I Saw This Year That Was Not

#3. Creature (Fred M. Andrews)

I already wrote about this on here.

HERE.

And here’s a choice excerpt:

It’s a silly film given to copious amounts of nudity and haphazard, meat-pulled-from-a-grocery-store-dumpster gore effects, and it’s released by a company that calls itself The Bubble Factory.

And, here’s Fred M. Andrews’ impassioned defense of his film:

It’s not a film for critics; I mean, come on, it’s called CREATURE, for God’s sake! But on the other hand, I was happily surprised when the LA Times gave us a good, honest review; they got it. As have a number of other reputable critics and publications like FANGORIA, Nuke the Fridge, Killer Films and Unwinnable. Those lowbrow sites that have trashed it and bloggers who harshed on the film were no surprise to me, man. Come on, what kind of critic are you if you use the word “titties” in your review, or you’re still talking about my film when you’re reviewing another one. You can’t take those guys seriously, man; they’re bottom feeders.

I can say one positive thing about this film.  There were two feature films released this year that I honestly thought were worse.  One even cost over 100 million dollars!  And both were released by major studios!

I don’t even take his comments personally, because at most I reach, like, 25 people.  Which is about how many people saw this movie in theaters!  ZING!

Honestly, this and my #2 are almost-interchangeable, but I was looking forward to the other one more, hence…

Aaron Eckhart vs. the Gooey Things That Come Out of Those Metal Things and Shoot Those Explodey Things

#2. Battle: Los Angeles (Jonathan Liebesman)

It has been a bad year for bad movies, I’ll say that.  Like, they’re worse than usual.  Devoid of redeeming qualities, even.  I’ll usually find something to like in any movie, but this year saw a handful of films rise to the challenge of truly and utterly obliterating the part of my brain that hopes.

This film was a soul-crushing experience.  Not because it was, like, one of my most-anticipated films of the year or anything (I’ve seen Darkness Falls), or even because I’d heard a lot of great reviews of it (I had not).

No, this film is a numbing, shattering experience because it is a film utterly devoid of anything resembling narrative.  This film is a series of events bound together only by characters we do not know, whose fates are interchangeable and ultimately irrelevant, and whose predicament – trying to battle an invasion force from another planet using only their wits, gum, and some paperclips or something while behind enemy lines – is rendered eye-socket-rapingly-dull through inane repetition.

Liebesman is directing next year’s Wrath of the Titans – sequel to a mediocre remake of a mediocre original – and appears to be on the up-and-up in the studio system.  And honestly, judging from Darkness Falls, the guy at least knows what narrative is.  But holy Christ, if this guy can direct big-budget studio films I could probably do it in my sleep.

I also wrote about this HERE, if anyone wants to read a version of this that likely has a few more expletives sprinkled throughout.

Honestly?  I thought there was no way I’d see a worse film this year.  I thought this had to be the bottom of the barrel.  I didn’t watch as many films this year if I thought they’d be bad, because I knew I already had my number 1 worst film of the year on lock-down.

There were a lot of films this year that were ultimately forgettable, but only one film was so awful, so headache-inducing, so rage-engendering as my #1 movie.

There's Monsters in the Rocks. Why? Because Fuck You.

#1. Apollo 18 (Spanish Alan Smithee?)

You remember that story about that guy who got boned by that horse?  And the horse’s junk was so big it ripped the guy’s ass open so wide he bled to death?

Yeah.

I mean, really, I got nothing.  This movie’s like 71 minutes long or something ridiculous.  There’s these two guys who film everything.  And then, like, they find a dead Russian crew.  And moon-rock monsters infect one of them, and then people die and cameras fall down and we get a few titles cards before the end credits that detail a MUCH MORE INTERESTING STORY ABOUT MOON ROCKS ON EARTH BEING CONFISCATED AND HOW THAT IS A CONSPIRACY BECAUSE THEY HAVE MONSTERS IN THEM.  ADMITTEDLY THE MONSTERS INSIDE THE MOON ROCKS THING IS A SILLY CONCEPT BUT IN THAT CONTEXT I WOULD BE INTERESTED.  IN THE CONTEXT OF THIS FILM WITH ANNOYING CHARACTERS AND BAD ACTING AND TRYING TO MAKE THE FILM STOCK LOOK AUTHENTICALLY SHITTY WHICH IS AN AESTHETIC CHOICE THAT CAN GO FUCK ITSELF BY THE WAY?  I’D RATHER WATCH A GUY GET HIS ASSHOLE RIPPED OPEN BY A HORSE’S JUNK.

The end.

Dishonorable Mentions:

Burke & Hare – John Landis returns with a whimper, in spite of a great cast (Andy Serkis!) and an interesting premise.

The Mechanic – an entertaining but weirdly mean-spirited little film.

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides – A film unremembered.  Like, seriously, I feel like I only ever saw the trailer but there’s about 2 and a half hours from the middle of July I can’t seem to account for.

Green Lantern – The triumphant return of the clueless 1990s superhero movie!

Priest 3D – This year, in Cam Gigandet….

I Am Number Four – Your dog is cool.

The Hangover Part II – Apparently, the real reason they didn’t want Mel Gibson involved was because he wasn’t in the first film.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon 3D – Michael Bay has ruined Shia LaBeouf for all of us forever.  Also, robots.  Also, cars.

And that’s all from me.  I’m sure there are plenty of awful films I didn’t see this year, but I’m only a man!  I can only take so much!  The two worst films this year are two of the worst films I’ve ever seen.  They make me want to apologize to Alice in Wonderland for dragging it through the mud last year.  That’s crazy talk.

150 Albums, Famous Peoples’ Luggage, Lots of Shows, Car Troubles, Faith-Based Indie Films & An Expired Belcourt Membership…

I moved here in the middle of September, 2010, and I figured what better way to write about my favorite albums of the year than to couple it with a retrospective on my entire experience of living in Nashville (so far).

I always tell people that the movie Nashville (1975, Robert Altman) is, gun to my head, my absolute favorite movie.  And yet for some reason, I’ve also always downplayed the part it played in inspiring me to move here.

Sure, I also moved here to get out of my parents’ house and build a post-collegiate resume working on films and music videos, but I also moved here because the film Nashville is my favorite movie.  Because that’s how much movies mean to me, and because that’s how naive I am when it comes to making major life decisions like ‘where would be the best place to start my career as a filmmaker?’

The Shows

I saw pretty much every band that came through town that I wanted to see (with the notable exceptions of Wolf Parade, Bill Callahan, and Yo La Tengo), and – living in Nashville – that’s a long, long list of bands.

I felt uncomfortable asking Kurt Vile to sign my landlord’s red-vinyl copy of God Is Saying This To You…, I felt really uncomfortable telling Alex Bleeker (of Real Estate and Alex Bleeker and the Freaks) after his Grimey’s in-store that I was the guy who’s house he and the guys were supposed to be crashing at – only to be informed that I had been woefully misinformed on that front, and they were all staying in a hotel.  I don’t remember the name of the opening band, but a member of that band was the one who failed to properly relay this information to me and let’s just say there is a grudge harbored.

I saw Mount Eerie live, but the acoustics in the venue (The End) weren’t quite conducive to the intimate nature of the music, and what we got was a lot of BASS and KEYS over Phil Elvrum’s whispered mumblings and barely-audible acoustic guitar-picking.  Still, it was a pleasant surprise to discover they were touring in the first place, and they played all of my favorites from 2009′s Wind’s Poem.

I saw Stephen Malkmus live, and the show was good enough but it also was the final nail in the coffin as far as me going to shows alone.  Although I did find out that Malkmus (and the Jicks) and I saw Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion at the same theater, the Regal out on Thompson Lane – or, according to Malkmus – the one that looks like a casino.

Let’s see, I was an hour late for the Girls in-store and refused to watch the web-cast that Pitchfork posted out of stubbornness.  I kicked off the year with a back-to-back Guided By Voices four-hour marathon on Friday/The Walkmen at the Exit/In on Saturday, and both shows were absolutely remarkable.  In November, 2010, I remember seeing Blonde Redhead for some reason.  Also, that November, was the Grinderman concert which was handily the best one I saw that year.  Yes, better even than the Pavement reunion show.  Even better than the Deerhunter/Deakin-from-Animal Collective show that also happened that November.

There was Destroyer/The War on Drugs (Bejar mostly played Kaputt in its entirety, but this was not a bad thing at all), there was Fucked Up (and Jeff the Brotherhood) where Pink Eyes took the microphone everywhere in the Exit/In except for the bathroom (yes, even the balcony), there was a particularly awful outing to the Ryman (still my only one to date) to see Bright Eyes, of all people.  The show was fine enough, pretty much what I expected, and I had gotten the ticket pretty much for free so it wasn’t like I was out-of-pocket 30 or 40 bucks.  All the same, that night began with a basket of deep-fried pickles and ended in confusion and something like misery.  I also paid $15 for parking.  Outside of the media I’ve chosen to consume, this has been a bit of a down year for me.  This will be a running theme.

As far as local bands, I feel like I saw Tristen like four or five times, I saw Jeff the Brotherhood at least 3 times, and I saw my good friends The Gills about a half-dozen times as well.  One band that hasn’t recorded anything yet, which I can only assume is why they aren’t more talked-about around here, is a band called Little Bandit, and I may have seen every show they played this past year.  Might have missed a couple here and there.

Hands down, the best show I saw in Nashville was Ty Segall/Heavy Cream/Mikal Cream/D. Watusi at the Exit/In – where the venue shut off the mics due to an alarming amount of stage-diving, only to turn them back on and see Segall hand his guitar to a member of one of the opening bands and dive into the crowd HIMSELF.  The Nashville Scene that came out this week listed this in the category of ‘The Bad, The Ugly.’  I’m not sure what people are looking for from shows.  This is coming from someone who doesn’t stage dive and didn’t during the show.  I stand there and I watch what’s happening.  I’m there to be a part of something, and that’s what happened at the Exit/In that night.  That room was fucking electric.

And, although not in Nashville, there was My Morning Jacket/Neko Case and Phosphorescent show, where MMJ proved that they are hands-down the most incredible live band touring right now.  An absolutely unbelievable set, and worth the trip down to Tuscaloosa.

I saw 2 stand-up shows: Scott Thompson and Kevin McDonald from the Kids in the Hall and Marc Maron, both at Zanie’s.  The Kids in the Hall guys were fun and it was surreal to see them in-person.  Maron did a solid set, but the energy in the room wasn’t really up and a lot of his material was from his most recent album This Has To Be Funny or from his opening 15-minute segments on his WTF podcast.  I did get to shake his hand on the way out and grab a free sticker/buy a t-shirt though.

_________________

Famous Peoples’ Luggage

I worked at a swanky hotel.  I saw these famous people: Carrot Top, John Hawkes, Garrett Hedlund, Lil Wayne, Kristin Chenoweth, Kristin Chenoweth’s super-hot assistant, Gretchen Wilson (bitch), Big & Rich/Cowboy Troy, Martina McBride, Lionel Richie, Paul Simon, Art Garfunkel, The Strokes, Meat Loaf (Aday), Dee Snider, Nick Jonas, Roger Goodell, and countless other country music stars I just don’t recognize.  I’m a little ashamed I recognize the ones I do.  Also, probably a handful of Titans football players I don’t recognize either.

I talked to these famous people (very briefly):  Kevin Costner, Reese Witherspoon, Gary Busey, Donald Driver (AKA the NICEST person I have ever met, seriously), My Morning Jacket, Tom Jones, Incubus, Brendan O’Brien, Sheryl Crow, James Marsden, Kenny Chesney, Grace Potter and the Nocturnals, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.  In fact, I got to move a seat up in the cab for Kareem because he is a gigantic human being.  Oh, and Monte Hellman – whose hand I shook and who most likely thought I was a crazy person.

Celebrities who stayed there who I did not see:  Tobey Maguire, Sandra Bullock, Gwyneth Paltrow, Justin Bieber.

Famous car I got to drive: The American Pickers van.

Celebrity who never showed up:  Jake Gyllenhaal, Dave Coulier.

I had a conversation with Bret Saberhagen, who just stays at hotels like a normal person apparently and doesn’t roll with a posse like you’d think a two-time Cy Young Award winner would.  A very nice guy who was impressed I recognized him at all.  I also got to know most of the guys in Darius Rucker’s touring band/road crew pretty well.  Him not so much, but these guys practically lived at this hotel.

I’m forgetting some, I’m sure, and the ones I remember are kind of absurd.  And this list of people is ultimately meaningless, but the novelty value I derive from compiling it all is…tangible.

______________

Faith-Based Indie Films:

Firebird/Unconditional, directed by Brent McCorkle, starring Lynn Collins, Michael Ealy and Bruce McGill.

I had more fun working in the art department for this film than I’ve had working on any other movie.  With that said, I honestly don’t expect much from the final result.  The people I met on this set and the experiences I had (and the sleeping bag I accidentally stole) would have been worth it even if I hadn’t gotten paid, which was the case on this next project.

Deadline/Please Change This Title, directed by Curt Hahn, starring Steve Talley and Eric Roberts.

Oh, working for free.  Eric Roberts rode shotgun in my car at one point, which was surreal enough.  It wasn’t a long trip back to set, but I’m fairly certain it was long enough for me to make an ass out of myself.

Everybody was really awesome to work with really.  Production Assistant work was fine by me, I was okay with doing the grunt work and whatnot – but it was seeing the waste of resources on a project of such…dubious merit that was the real eye-opener this time out.  Yeah, Firebird/Unconditional wasn’t a great script either but there’s some marketability there.

I’ve seen a rough cut of this and rough is always going to be a word used in the description of this project.  It has some solid scenes, but the production is straight-to-DVD amateur hour, and I put a lot of hard work in on this thing for zero dollars.  Minor realization: Part of your job as a filmmaker is to make sure the final product reflects the hard work of your cast and crew.

I worked for HGTV a lot this year, for their show My First Place, and this remains the best job I’ve had.  A hefty paycheck to do very little actual work?  Sign me up.  I learned a lot from the camera guys, audio guys, producers, and occasional gaffer I worked with on this show.  I’d even get free groceries and gas money out of it (they pay out what seems an absurd amount in gas compensation, like, 50 cents on the mile, it’s insane).

I worked on a music video for Sarah Jarosz (if it’s out yet, it’s the one with the creek and the bridge and the foggy field at night and stuff), a music video for a band called Hotpipes, and was an extra in a Lady Antebellum music video way back in 2010.  Music videos are the worst.

I was an extra for one night on the pilot for Outlaw Country, starring John Hawkes.  FX isn’t picking up the show for a series.  Being an extra is the worst.

And, finally, Park Chan-Wook’s new film, Stoker.  A loose re-imagining of Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt starring Mia Wasikowska, Nicole Kidman, Matthew Goode, Dermot Mulroney, Jacki Weaver and Alden Ehrenreich.

The script for this is pretty solid, and I won’t spoil too much of anything about it.  Also I’m not sure I can really talk about anything that happened on set, but I was only there for two days and I think it’s okay to say that at one point I burned my hand on a hot tea bag in front of Dermot Mulroney.

Also, we shot at the University of the South in Sewanee.  It was a long, shitty day but that campus is gorgeous.  The trees, the buildings, the people, everything.  It was a hazy gray day in the middle of September.  It was beautiful.

In case you haven’t noticed, not a lot of reputable films shoot in Nashville.  Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln almost shot in Tennessee, actually (WHICH I WOULD HAVE DONE LATRINE DUTY ON FOR FREE), but ultimately went to Virginia because they have better tax incentives.

_____________

An Expired Belcourt Membership:

The Belcourt is an incredible oasis of a repertory theater that I supported for one year as a member, and will support again as soon as I get some cash saved up.  It is a wonderful place where miracles happen and dreams are realized and where I occasionally fall asleep at the midnight movies.

This year alone, I got to see film prints of the following films on the big screen:

The Phenix City Story, Wild River, Stars in My Crown (masterpiece), Steamboat Round the Bend, The Sun Shines Bright, Reflections in a Golden Eye, Lost Highway, Billy Madison, Wind Across the Everglades, Lady Terminator, Anguish, Night of the Creeps, Return of the Living Dead, Abby, Race with the Devil, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (!), Zombie, Cockfighter, Stay Hungry, Book of Numbers, 2,000 Maniacs, They Live, and too many more I’m forgetting at the moment I’m sure. 

And this was the theater in town that got Attack the Block, Bellflower, and Super (which was released unrated and therefore would never have been picked up by a major theater chain).

My membership expired in November, the day I went to see Martha Marcy May Marlene, but my membership will return!  In On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

Let’s see, I also went to a screening of the Halloween remake and got to shake hands with and tell Malcolm McDowell how much I love the film O Lucky Man!  I think he was genuinely surprised and grateful that I not only remembered him in that film but that it was also one of my favorites, given his affection for director Lindsay Anderson and whatnot.  Although it’s entirely possible he was just sick of talking about A Clockwork Orange.

One final note about the Belcourt:  Gremlins is showing on December 23rd AND on Christmas Eve at midnight.  I’m probably going on the 24th so I can come home and catch Santa.

____________

150+ Albums:

And, finally, my top however-many albums of the year:

1. Real Estate – Days - The album that comes closer to Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain than any other album I’ve ever heard.  An exquisitely-recorded guitar record that brings me peace.  An album that I can only listen to from top-to-bottom because every single track is essential.  As someone who wasn’t really a fan of their last album, this album came out of nowhere and, to this day, continues to boggle my mind.  “Green Aisles,” “Municipality,” “Three Blocks”

2. Destroyer – Kaputt – The finest album one of my favorite artists has ever released.  One of my favorite live shows of the year (Dan Bejar is really tall), and also a standout in a year full of albums prizing nonsensical lyrics over lyrics with thought behind them and merit to them.  The inclusion of Bejar’s exquisite “Bay of Pigs” on a proper LP exquisitely bridges the line between victory lap and icing on the cake.  “Chinatown,” “Savage Night at the Opera,” “Poor in Love,” “Kaputt,” “Bay of Pigs”

3. Drake – Take Care – Because it includes the line, “Bitch, I’m the man.”  And because I am a huge Drake fan, and could probably write a lot more about him but will refrain from doing so just now.  He’s not the most accomplished rapper on a technical level, and his subject matter is relatively…consistent, but his beat selection, production skills, and double-LP-sequencing are downright peerless.  Not to mention a run of tracks earlier in the year including the exquisite “Dreams Money Can Buy” that could have comprised an album of nearly equal merit on their own.  “Shot for Me,” “The Crew,” “Marvin’s Room,” “Lord Knows,” “Doing It Wrong,” “The Real Her,” “Look What You’ve Done,” “Practice”

4. Bon Iver – Bon Iver, Bon Iver – I listened to this for the first time on the plane, on my first visit out to Los Angeles in May.  My ears were popping and after “Perth” the album confused me.  “Perth” was monumental and wondrous, but the rest of the album seemed slight and the lyrics muddled and murkily-mixed.  On the flight home two days later, after discovering how ridiculously wonderful Los Angeles is, I listened to it again…and again, and again.  In fact, I’m listening to it right now.  In spite of my gut reaction to overwhelmingly positive critical reception, this album deserves the plaudits.  It really is that good. “Perth,” “Holocene,” “Wash.,” “Beth/Rest”

5. Bill Callahan – Apocalypse – An album that stuck with me all year long.  An album that, at 7 sparsely-furnished tracks, stands head and shoulders above most of the ‘Best New Music’ I was being prompted to check out on something like a bi-weekly basis.  An album that details how even the shitty aspects of this country are an inseparable part of what makes living here so strange and wonderful.  An album that I initially described to people as downright On the Beach-ian.  One of Callahan’s strongest, most vital works.  The entire album, start-to-finish, is pretty close to flawless.

6. The Weeknd – House of Balloons/Thursday - A pair of mixtapes that – one slightly more so than the other – helped me through a difficult summer by rendering in the most ridiculous 3-D IMAX widescreen comically out-sized versions of a lot of the emotional turmoil and intellectual distaste I began to fear were indeed inseparable from my psyche.  If that sounds crazy, it’s because I was probably something close to that at one point this year. “What You Need,” “House of Balloons,” “The Knowing,” “The Zone”

7. Oneohtrix Point Never – Replica – A haunting, peaceful ambient record with a killer album cover that succeeded even my own somewhat lofty expectations for this follow up to Returnal.  An album so immaculately-constructed, you reach the end feeling as if you’ve bent time somehow and no time has passed at all.  An atmospheric ambient record with personality, I could see this serving as a gateway record to the ambient genre for some. “Replica,” “Nassau,” “Up”

8. James Blake – James Blake/”Fall Creek Boys Choir”/Love What Happened Here – It was a good year for prolific artists, and Blake in particular (spotty Enough Thunder EP aside).  On the heels of three excellent EPs in 2010, Blake took a turn into R & B singer-songwriter-dom, collabo’d with Bon Iver, and released a pair of EPs on which he batted .500.  “Wilhelms Scream,” “Limit To Your Love,” “To Care (Like You),” “I Mind,” “Fall Creek Boys Choir (with Bon Iver)”

9. Kurt Vile – Smoke Ring for My Halo/So Outta Reach EP – Vile’s LP this year proved to be his finest work to date, and spent at least two months in exclusive rotation in my car.  It holds up quite well to repeat listens and finishes right on the heels of that Real Estate album as the 2nd best 1990s album released this year.  This may sound like a back-handed compliment, but it’s the highest one I know how to give.  “Jesus Fever,” “On Tour,” “Society Is My Friend,” “Runner Ups,” “The Creature”

10. Cass McCombs – Wit’s End/Humor Risk – Wit’s End opened with possibly the best song of the year, period, in “County Line.” All the rest of his output this year could hope to do in the face of such a flawlessly constructed song was stick the landing, and it did more than that.  Humor Risk may have been a cut below its predecessor, but the fact that we received two albums from such a stubbornly-enigmatic individual in one year strikes me as something of a small miracle.  “County Line,” “The Lonely Doll,” “Memory’s Stain,” “To Every Man His Chimera”

11. Fleet Foxes – Helplessness Blues – The ridiculously-anticipated follow-up to their excellent self-titled debut album in 2008 somehow managed to top its predecessor in the course of its at-times disjointed collection of rustic, wintry tracks.  I don’t have a lot to say about this album other than that it is a beautiful listen and never more so than in the dead of winter Nashville seems to be stubbornly refusing to embrace.  “Helplessness Blues,” “Someone You’d Admire,” “The Shrine/An Argument,” “Grown Ocean” *Also:  Album Cover of the Year

12. Danny Brown – XXX – The album that’s risen on the list the most in the 2nd half of this year.  Danny Brown is, first and foremost, one of the most entertaining rappers out there.  Frequently veering into sexually explicit subject matter that’s downright cartoonish, Brown is never having less than the time of his fucking life on these songs.  He’s rapping his heart out and having a ball.  Every second of this album you suspect that he’s giving you everything he has, and on the unexpectedly emotional final track he confirms your suspicions.  “Pac Blood,” “Bruiser Brigade,” “Detroit 187,” “Monopoly,” “30″

13. Girls – Father, Son, Holy Ghost  - Their strongest album to date, it manages to overcome the obnoxious laziness of their band name by going for broke at every turn and delivering a handful of songs that already feel like classics.  “Alex,” “Vomit,” “Forgiveness”

14. St. Vincent – Strange Mercy - The first St. Vincent album to truly blow my mind, cover to cover.  Where her two previous records both had standout moments, this album feels like a single unified whole more than anything else, and the focus on her uniquely erratic guitar squall this time out pairs nicely with the strongest songs she’s written to date.  “Cruel,” “Surgeon,” “Champagne Year”

15. M83 – Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming – A double-LP that is an embarrassment of riches not just for fans of M83, but for fans of music in general.  Featuring a handful of their strongest singles ever, this album manages the nigh-impossible task of living up to every preceding album in the M83 catalog.  You know this has been a ridiculous year for music when an album this good can’t even crack my top 10.  “Intro,” “Midnight City,” “New Map,” “OK Pal,” “Steven McQueen”

16. PJ Harvey – Let England Shake – The best album I listened to the least this year.  Couldn’t tell you why.

17. The Fresh & Onlys – Secret Walls EP – A worthy follow-up to 2009′s Play It Strange that throws down the gauntlet for what is poised to be a truly incredible follow-up.

18. Tim Hecker – Ravedeath 1972/Dropped Pianos – Possibly Tim Hecker’s finest work to-date, and a truly haunting series of compositions.

19. Panda Bear - Tomboy – A darker, murkier sound for what was – for me – a dark, murky year.

20. Araabmuzik – Electronic Dream – Exquisitely atmospheric music that I just couldn’t get enough of this year.

21. Kanye West & Jay-Z – Watch the Throne – This shit cra-

22. Washed Out – Within and Without – Beautiful and leaps and bounds more accomplished than his debut EP.

23. The Smith Westerns – Dye It Blonde – An out-of-left-field T. Rex-esque pop-rock record that, in a just world (AKA the 1970s) would have had this band packing stadiums to the rafters.

24. Iceage – New Brigade – The best album Wire released in 2011 (although the actual Wire album, Red Barked Tree, is not too shabby).  Angry young 19-year-olds from Eastern Europe making dark, almost gothic punk music.

25. Atlas Sound – Parallax – A great album, stem to stern, featuring at least one of the highlights of Bradford Cox’s Bedroom Databank series.

26. Frank Ocean – Nostalgia/Ultra – The real reason you should give a shit about Odd Future.

27. Cut Copy – Zonoscope – Dance music for the beginning of summer and soundtrack to that one video you probably watched where Terence Malick directed Christian Bale at Austin City Limits.

28. Nicolas Jaar – Space Is Only Noise – A fascinating record featuring at least one song “Too Many Kids Finding Rain in the Dust” that I haven’t been able to get out of my head (nor do I particularly care to).

29. Yuck – Yuck – The 3rd best 1990s album released this year, and handily more accomplished than my somewhat reductive assessment of it.

30. A$AP Rocky – LiveLoveA$AP Mixtape – Featuring that Clams Casino production I can’t get enough of (see ‘Albums I Didn’t Hear’ below), he could be rapping about calculus and I would still love it.

31. The Caretaker – An Empty Bliss Beyond This World – Eerie ambient album along the lines of William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops.  Takes an existing recording and distorts it until the ghosts start showing up.

32. The War on Drugs – Slave Ambient – The kind of album where every time you return to it, it feels brand new.  A murky, atmospheric swath of a record.

33. Kendrick Lamar – Section.80 – The other rapper touring with Drake in the upcoming months, it’s only a matter of time before his work deteriorates and he becomes a superstar.

34. Ty Segall – Goodbye Bread – At his show in September, a friend of mine turned to me and said, “This is just like seeing Nirvana, man.”  And then Ty Segall crowdsurfed his way to the no stage-diving sign and tried to pull it off the wall.  Did I mention that this was the best show I saw all year?

35. Thurston Moore – Demolished Thoughts – Atmospheric songs that throb with a sense of loss, nimbly produced by good old Beck Hansen.

36. Thee Oh Sees – Castlemania, Carrion Crawler/The Dream – Two albums, one hyphenated, that highlight two sides of one of the most fascinating bands out there right now.

37. Cymbals Eat Guitars – Lenses Alien – A unique, idiosyncratic, Built to Spill-indebted follow-up to their excellent debut.

38. The Lonely Island – Turtleneck & Chain – A cut above their first record as far as replay value goes, with a handful of half-assed sketches that are easily skippable.

39. Toro y Moi – Underneath the Pine – A very good album from a fellow South Carolinian doing my home state proud.  Also, here’s another show I was bummed about missing.

40. Mark McGuire – Get Lost – A great year for ambient music rounds out my list with this, McGuire’s follow-up to the every-bit-as-good Living With Yourself.

____________________

Honorable Mentions:  Big K.R.I.T., Terius Nash, Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks, The Mountain Goats, Jeff the Brotherhood, Natural Child, Idiot Glee, The Decemberists, and about 30 or 40 more, most likely.

Albums I Didn’t Hear:  I officially heard 146 albums this year.  These two didn’t make the cut, and maybe they should have because one sounds interesting and one in point of fact is interesting enough to make this list but is being arbitrarily deemed ineligible by yours truly.

1. Sandro Perri – Impossible Spaces (unheard yet but I hope to spend part of my Christmas vacation spending some time with this one)

2. Clams Casino – Instrumentals Mixtape (I have heard this since ‘finalizing’ my list and it is incredible)

Expect my Five Worst Films of 2011 list coming soon, but I wouldn’t expect my best of the year list to drop for a while.  Largely because…well, there’s a chance it could be out before the New Year.  We’ll see.

Recently, Stephen Daldry – while doing press for his new film, an adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close – floated the possibility that he could be involved in the process of turning Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel into an HBO miniseries.

In the past, he and author Chabon had been hard at work putting together a script for a feature-film adaptation that never quite materialized.  It was so well-known and highly-anticipated that Entertainment Weekly even ran a feature in 2002 called ‘the It List’ (I don’t know if this is still a thing they do) that included an excerpt from the script, and Michael Chabon discussing the difficulties of adapting his own story:

“The story takes place over this huge span of time. There’s an 11-year gap in the middle when we don’t see the characters at all. Then there’s the whole comic-book thing…. I wrote the first draft of the screenplay from memory, as if there were no novel at all and I were just remembering a story that I had heard…. Much less time passes in the movie than in the book. It’s really just the period of the war…. “

So already, even with Chabon having free reign to translate the story he wanted from his novel, there was going to be something lost in translation.  What fans of the novel (such as myself after this article inspired me to read it for the first time) would have dreamed of as an ideal situation – successful and world-renowned director (Sydney Pollack at the time) pairs with the author to make the film he wants to make – wasn’t quite going to be anything like ideal, it turned out.

And eventually, the casting proved difficult – Jamie Bell, Jude Law, and Natalie Portman were all floated as possibilities for certain roles (Law and Bell both for Joe Kavalier, somehow).  Tobey Maguire was possibly attached to play Sam Clay, but ultimately Chabon himself declared the project dead in 2004.

Subsequently, Stephen Daldry became interested, and the project was re-invigorated in 2006.  Chabon even offered up a list of scenes from the book that would be excised from the film version:

In June 2006, Chabon maintained that Portman was still “a strong likelihood for the part of Rosa”, and listed a number of important plot points present in the book that would be left out of the movie. The list included the scene between Clay and Tracy Bacon in the ruins of the 1939 World’s Fair (though the film will still feature a gay love story), the Long Island scene, and the appearances of Orson Welles and Stan Lee.

And then, in January 2007, Chabon declared the project dead again as a result of studio politics and whatnot.

_____________

Meanwhile…

I spent the summer of 2007 at home, working at a pulp mill, and not doing much of a whole lot.  I was home from school and I started reading the novel again, for the third time.  And I just couldn’t take it anymore.  I knew that Chabon himself had adapted the novel already, but I also knew he’d cut a fair amount of scenes and sequences and ultimately shifted the focus from this whimsical, adventurous, kaleidoscopically-imagined world he’d created in the novel of New York City in the late 30s/early 40s to what was beginning to sound like a comparatively dull exercise in period romance and pretty people pouting about problems.

I wrote 25 pages (what I’d later learn could be termed a ‘first act’ of sorts), and then set it aside.  Ultimately, I was discouraged.  I was just some college kid (now I’m just ‘some guy’), and this was a book everybody loved.  This was a movie that would eventually get made with a script written by its author, and this latest setback was just a minor hiccup in the process, etcetera.

I’d come up with a framing device, and even had conversations with some friends of mine about it (one of whom had even gone so far as to cast the three main characters in his head, where I preferred to imagine some un- or lesser-knowns in the parts), but I couldn’t force myself to sit down and do it.  For a while, adapting novels into films seemed like the only responsible thing to do.  I’d have ideas and not think they were good enough, or I’d tell them to a good friend and hear them immediately come up with a stronger, more interesting approach to whatever notion I’d floated.

It’s hard to feel like your ideas have value sometimes, particularly in a world where alcohol is bottled and sold.  And even so – even in the darkest depths of my collegiate angst (in which I packed on a good 40 or 50 pounds in water-weight and Buffalo Wild Wings appetizer samplers) – I couldn’t focus enough to adapt something.

And then it just kind of fell to the side.  My adviser once told me never to adapt something you don’t have the rights to, but then I listened to an interview with Up in the Air screenwriter Sheldon Turner in which he said he’d done just that.  I took his advice anyway, and in spite of such novel concepts as my framing device (which I won’t share here even though I’m sure I’ve shared it with some of you reading this before), I gave up on it.

Perhaps this remains the best path to take.  I still listen to songs and think of the trailer for this film in my head.  I still look at the novel over there on the shelf and imagine its spine condensed to the width of a particularly-well-stocked Criterion Blu-Ray of a film version that I brought to life.

And, until now, that was what I’d reduced my dream of this film down to.

_____________

But, I’ve had it.  That’s it.  Stephen Daldry, I’m sure you’re a nice guy and you’ve made 3 films I have absolutely no interest in seeing but that I’ve been told are quite wonderful in their respective ways (Billy Elliott, The Hours, The Reader).  But you are just wrong for this material.  This is a story that requires a truly impassioned, possibly insane filmmaker to bring it to the screen and I can tell from your choice of subject matter that even if you are insane, your taste in subject matter for your projects makes you come off like a 10th-grade English teacher, sour and prone to scold.

The big screen is where this needs to be.  So, aside from your coma-inducing track record, your most egregious misstep was stating out loud, to someone documenting your statements, that you were interested in pursuing this project as a miniseries.

This is a film.  This is a movie, it is a motion picture, it is a ‘show’ if you’re working on it and you want to lord your lingo over the kids on set picking up college credit.

Some of you may wonder, “why can’t it be a miniseries?” – and my only answer is a terribly selfish one.  It’s simply that I can’t quantify its achievements as a miniseries.  As a film, I can compare it to the history of cinema.  I can put it on my best of the year list.  It can sweep the Academy Awards, etcetera.  As a miniseries, no matter how good it is, it gets a comparatively meaningless Golden Globe or Emmy win for its troubles.

The scale of the achievement, though the work would be extended to fill an 8 or 10 hour run-time, would be drastically diminished from the pop-cultural effect a truly spectacular 3+ hour feature-film could have.

This brings to mind an example, of Terry Gilliam’s proposed Watchmen miniseries that turned into Zack Snyder’s Watchmen movie.  Yes, Terry Gilliam’s miniseries would have been better, but Snyder’s film did something Gilliam’s miniseries couldn’t have done – it reclaimed the weirdness of the original novel from the mainstream that had finally embraced it as a true work of art.  It turned what had become an indisputably cool thing back into something to be mildly ashamed of loving, and that’s something a group of people as self-aware as comic book fans should be roundly celebrating.

Additionally, it would have been better because it’s TERRY GILLIAM, and Gilliam would have also made it weird and uncomfortable to sit through, but it still wouldn’t have had the cultural impact that Snyder’s Watchmen film had.  It wouldn’t have been a film most of the people you talked to had an opinion on.  It would have been a miniseries along the lines of The Singing Detective (the original British serial) or something.  It would have catered to an absurdly niche market, and only gradually expanded over the years, but all of this while never defining any kind of cultural moment.

Only as a film can The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay truly live up to the gauntlet thrown down by the incredible novel Michael Chabon wrote.  As a miniseries, it gives too many people room to ignore it.  As a film, it reaches a much larger audience and becomes something forever celebrated by film fans everywhere.

The only miniseries that comes close to being a cultural event that everyone has seen is Band of Brothers, but that’s just Steven Spielberg for you.  He’s not perfect every time out, but he’s one of the only filmmakers out there who can make absolute miracles happen.

You know what?  On second thought, I want no part of this.  You hand it over to Steven Spielberg?  I’ll be able to sleep at night.

Only Replace 'Most' With Any Other Word

The year is wrapping up, and I’m gradually catching up with a plethora of limited-releases (Rampart, Tyrannosaur) and overlooked sleepers from earlier in the year (Warrior, Bellflower, Road to Nowhere).

But there are some films that I just don’t care about.  Films with a fair amount of praise or Oscar buzz (or Razzie buzz) or what have you.  Films I’m going out of my way to deem un-noteworthy.

Like Crazy – two pretty people can’t make a long distance relationship work.  Starring Anton Yelchin and newcomer Felicity Jones.  Considering the subject matter, this isn’t a movie I’m going to see by myself.  Also not a movie I’d really care to subject anyone to, since the crazy hype it was met with at Sundance (or Toronto or whatever) has tempered considerably over the intervening months.  A screener copy is available online through illicit means, but I can’t even be bothered with that.  Just doesn’t interest me.

Another Earth – woman feels guilty over drunk driving accident.  Another Earth shows up in the sky and she begins to wonder about the possibility of a 2nd version of herself taking a different path.  Also, William Mapother is in it.  I sat through the uneven-but-gorgeous Melancholia, which is a take on similar subject matter helmed by a real, and vital, filmmaker.  This looks like the kind of indie film that tends to bore me, like last year’s Monsters.  High concept, muddled execution.  I can’t bring myself to spend 90 minutes on this thing, even though it’s now available on DVD, Blu Ray, and probably Netflix Streaming but I can’t even be bothered to look.  (Okay, I can be bothered.  And it isn’t.)

Our Idiot Brother – Paul Rudd stars as the title idiot brother.  Rashida Jones, Elizabeth Banks, Zooey Deschanel, Emily Mortimer, Adam Scott, TJ Miller and Steve Coogan all play supporting roles.  I’ve heard mixed things on this, and typically the prospect of Steve Coogan is enough to get me to watch any movie (looking at you, Percy Jackson), but I just…don’t care.  This is the weirdest one on this list, to me.  As weird as this list already is (I typically watch everything I can get my hands on from any given year), this one seems like it could at least cater to the part of my brain that desires nothing more than an hour an a half of mild stimulation.  Only it doesn’t quite.

The Iron Lady – this Oscar blah blah thing Meryl-Streep-hasn’t-won-an-Oscar-in-a-very-long-time, yeah – don’t care, never cared, won’t get a chance to see it before the end of the year and I’m really okay with that.

11-11-11 – Directed by Daryn Lyn Bousman, the man who brought you Saw II-III-IV and Repo! The Genetic Opera, here’s a film that’s all about biblical prophecies and Nostradamus’s foretellings and whatnot all leading up to the end of the world on 11-11-11.  A few elements of this film interest me.  For starters, it chronicles the continued descent into the indie-film ghetto of the director who inflicted nightmarish tortures upon my brain by having Donnie Wahlberg wobble around on a broken ankle in Saw III, and from this descent I derive a perverse sense of justice.  Additionally, it could be terrible in an incredible way, but it could also be as dull as a certain other film that’s currently headlining my Worst of the Year list.  And finally, the fact that it was held back from release on DVD (and never released theatrically in the US as far as I can tell) until after November 11th is just the icing on the cake.  But ultimately, I just don’t have the time, energy, or inclination to spend 90 minutes in the hands of a filmmaker who has provided ample evidence that I don’t have to and likely will never have to give a shit about him.  Also, I watched all 5 Omen films earlier this year, and I’ve had my fill of prophecy-based horror.

We Bought A Zoo – Matt Damon buys a zoo, falls for Scarlett Johannsen, Cameron Crowe directs and Jonsi from Sigur Ros provides the score.  One would think this tale of whimsy and holiday cheer would at the very least be worthy of a cursory viewing from yours truly, at least for Matt Damon’s performance (he’s basically the best actor working right now in case nobody’s noticed).  And yes, it is worth that cursory viewing.  When it hits Netflix Streaming in about 5 or 6 months, then I’ll get around to it, sure.

The Devil’s Double – Dominic Cooper plays Uday Hussein and his body double, and the film has been described as something like Scarface in Iraq.  World-famous cross-dresser Lee Tamahori directs, and his track record is spotty-at-best (somehow the same man who made The Edge most recently directed one of the few Nicolas Cage movies with zero redeeming features, 2007′s Next – a film I’m doubly-disappointed in as yet another botched Philip K. Dick adaptation).  So, a great premise that is – by most accounts – executed with minimal success just isn’t enough.  Like We Bought A Zoo, I may very well watch this eventually, but I doubt it would end up anywhere in the Top 50 films on my list.

______________

Movies I am catching up with: The Future, Rampart, Tyrannosaur, Warrior, Submarine, Wake Wood, The Texas Killing Fields, Bellflower, Certified Copy, Road to Nowhere, The Ides of March, and of course the theatrical releases this month, which are kind of staggering:  Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, War Horse, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Artist, Young Adult, Shame, A Dangerous Method, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Carnage, and The Darkest Hour.

Movies I don’t know when I’ll get a chance to see:  A Separation.

Movies I haven’t decided about:  J. Edgar.

So yeah, there’s the list.  Woo-har.